Dialogue between agnosticism and the universe of faiths : the case of empathy

The article discusses the possibility of dialogue between two worldviews considered as antithetical and mutually exclusive, but that can be seen as separate and complementary: Agnosticism and religion. Therefore, it introduces the concept of empathy, a condition considered necessary for dialogue between subjectivities that want to relate and understood as intellectual and emotional competence to understand others and their experience, regardless the fact that I really cannot relive an experience experienced by another person. The empathic dialogue, whose meaning and history we try to draw from the conceptual analysis and its contextualization within the Humanities, also seems to be the condition of possibility for the construction of a complex meta-perspective, able to overcome arguably an alleged antithesis between religion and agnosticism, which must be dialectically overcome for the sake of survival of the actors dialogue. Keyword: Secularism. Empathy. Religion.

Dialogue between agnosticism and the universe of faiths: the case of empathy http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1983-80422014223022 How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others.The most hardned violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.Adam Smith 1 The discursive phenomenon, known as "dialogue", may be seen as having at least two aspects: one theoretical and one practical, which should be considered as distinct and interconnected, or as we would say today, as constituents of a complex relationship .According to philology, "dialogue" originates from the Greek διάλογος, or "share the logos", and is herein referred to a possible empathetic relationship between "agnosticism" (from the Greek α -prefix private + γνῶσις, "knowledge" in the meanings of "unknown" or "not knowable") and "religion" (from the Latin religio, from [a] religare, which has the meanings of "bond" and "obligation" towards certain practices or between humans and between them and the gods, and [b] relegere, with the sense of "re-read" and "carefully review" or "collect" and "gather") 2 .
Historically, it is customary to distinguish, from the "Metaphysics" of Aristotle, the theoretical knowledge referred to things deemed necessary, and the practical knowledge related to contingencies, being that, together, the two types of knowledge would guide the political and ethical actions; that is, it is two different types of knowledge, which can be understood as the opposite, but not as separated, by referring to a sort of reason that excludes such a separation, named practical reason.
The distinction between theory and practice (or between theoretical and practical reason) will be retaken and reformulated by Kant, who distinguished the theoretical rationality (which would answer the question What can I know?) and practical rationality, (referred to What should I do?) and therefore, both aspects related to the common denominator "reason" (logos, ratio).And considering that (a) the theoretical use of reason [is concerned] with objects of the simple faculty of knowing, but that easily loses itself, above its limits, between unreachable objects or between mutually conflicting concepts and, in case of its "practical use", (b) the reason occupies itself with determining fundaments of the will [and,]  to the extent that it is only the will, has always an objective reality 3 .In its third criticism -criticism of judgment -Kant reiterates the distinction between these two perspectives of reason, but affirms that there would be a passage between them, represented by the judgment faculty, that regarding our faculties of knowledge constitutes a medium term or an intermediate link between understanding and reason, that is, the judgment faculty would be the ability to adjust the faculty of imagination to the understanding 4 .
We will discuss in the present work this complex relationship between theory and practice, but only from the theoretical aspect of the question of a possible dialogue between religion and agnosticism, leaving the practical aspect for further reflection and focusing primarily on the approach known as "conceptual analysis" understood as a process [of] explaining a concept, a belief, a theory [...], drawing attention to its constituents, its assumptions, its implications [and that] can serve as a basis for critical evaluation 5 .In this sense, although being the focus, the theoretical aspect, when contextualized, finds its practical reason, when it is dealing with the fact, widely observable in the field of practical ethics, communication difficulties in cases of specific conflicts between social agents, which are due, in turn, to the different use of concepts in the argumentation seeking to justify the practices of a moral agent when faced with a conflict of values and interests underlying a particular dispute to be resolved.
In the specific case under consideration in this work, the theoretical side of the question about "dialogue" refers to the conditions of possibility of its existence between two types of excluding prima facie beliefs: (a) the one which believes that the reason must "suspend its sense" or "to bracket" the metaphysical and religious problems -indicated by the term agnosticism; and (b) the one which deals with the relationship that man establishes with the sacred and the divinity (ies) -indicated by the term religion.In short, the question is whether it is possible a dialogue between positions logically antagonistic at first, represented by the agnosticism (s) and the religion (s).
Apparently, the answer to this question can only be negative, because the dialogue between an agnostic and a religious person seems to be impossible due to the lack of a common denominator "shareable" between their antagonistic "world views".The lack of clear intersection between the agnostic (for whom it is impossible to know whether God exists and can be represented in the statement we can not even know what questions to ask in relation to certain matters 6 ) and the religious, whose scrupulous attention paid to signs [...], external manifestations to the individual or, on the contrary, changes in psychological level [and that] does not exclusively apply to the realm of the gods 7 , refers to the same rela-

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Dialogue between agnosticism and the universe of faiths: the case of empathy http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1983-80422014223022tionship that, a fortiori, is established between the atheist (which simply denies the existence of any divine being, considering it therefore a non-pertinent question) and the fundamentalist religious person (which denies any different belief and refuses any version of a secularized world and society).
The justification often used to try to support with real facts such negative response is that it would be enough to simply look at the conflicts, both the past and present ones, between religious fundamentalism and secular democracy to realize that we are far from a situation where we can say, with property, that humanity is effectively "sharing the logos" for that "believers" and "unbelievers" comprehend themselves and live together without getting hurt, accepting and sharing their mutual differences to "compensate" the existential and experiential incompleteness that characterizes us as finite (and deadly) beings.The thesis advocates, therefore, that dialogue would not exist if we consider the current conflicts and characteristics, as with fundamentalism, which explicitly confuses politics and religion and, purposely, Church and State, which makes impossible a dialogic relation, since there is no common denominator between the conflicting parties, neither they express intention of leaving it.
However, this apparent practical impossibility can be circumvented by adopting, for example -according to the proposal of unconditional hospitality and Derrida's forgiveness -a logic of hyperbolic ethics, which would grant forgiveness where it is neither requested nor deserved, and even to the worst of radical evil, since forgiveness only acquires its meaning [and] only finds its possibility of forgiveness where is required to make the impossible and to forgive the unforgivable 8 .This practical "unconditional" solution proposed by Derrida is, however, only indirectly addressed here, because we will not go into the intricacies of the possibilities/impossibilities of thinking about the metaphysical question of the relationship with the other in general, "relationship" understood as this fiduciary "bondig" [that] would precede all given community, all positive religion, all onto-anthropo-theological horizon and that would relink pure singularities before any social or political determination, before all intersubjectivity, and even before the opposition between the sacred (and the holy) and the profane, which can be interpreted as a desertification which makes it possible, open, digs or infinitizes the other, including in making possible even if that it seems to threaten 9 .In other words, in here we will try to go another way, more modest: looking for what could, at least conceptually, relate the two seemingly antithetical fields, reformulating the question and trying to see if there are characteristics of the dialogue which would put in touch systems and worldviews at least logically opposite.
Here we leave the hypothesis that one of the conditions of possibility is that the dialogue between such Weltanschauungen be seen as a relationship between differences, that is, as empathic dialogue, understanding by empathy (from the Greek εμπάθεια) an open discursive form or logos sharing with another; as a non-directive attitude of understanding the other able to understand the experience of another without, however, truly experiencing it concretely 10 .
We will defend, in particular, the idea that the intersubjective relationship said "empathic" is considered a necessary condition (though perhaps not the only one) in order to speak with property, in a dialogue, once the words (and concepts) "dialogue" and "empathy" imply in one another, whereas empathy is to try to put yourself in the place of the other, but knowing that this project requires accepting, ultimately, the absolute transcendence of the other, which would make the relationship I-other no of identity, but of differences (represented here by the cases of agnosticism and religion).
Next, we will try to show this idea from the conceptual analysis of the terms "dialogue", "empathy", "agnosticism" and "religion", involved in the issue of dialogue between parties.

Dialogue
According to the science of language, dialogue can be defined as the discursive form (also called dialogue) that (a) puts the accent on who listens, that is, focus the recipient of a linguistic act; wherein (b) refers thoroughly to the situation; and (c) acting in various situations of reference simultaneously 11 .In this regard, when related to several situations of reference, a dialogue would only happen in the presence of a "difference" between the actors involved, their arguments and their references.Such difference is what keeps that dialogue be confused with monologue, that is, speaks without dialogue itself, which excludes the difference.
In other terms, a condition of possibility for the existence of discursive form named dialogue is that certain assumptions are met, starting, as example, for tolerance, understood as the attitude to refrain

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Dialogue between agnosticism and the universe of faiths: the case of empathy Moreover, tolerance is a condition that we call minimum so that there is dialogue, being its maximum condition -which might also be called full -the unconditional acceptance of the absolutely other, which is, in our point of view, the specific characteristic of the type of dialogue differences between, we call empathic.
Assuming the unconditional necessity of the other so that the I exists in the structure formed by the sharing of logos, represented by dialogue, we could understand why empathic dialogue a speech based on communicative rationality, considered to be at the same time analytical, critical and normative , according to the proposal of communicative action Habermas 13, which implies a discursive ethics founded on the necessary recognition of the other, without which there would be no proper dialogue.
However, this recognition can be thought of in two different ways: (a) as a reciprocal recognition between self and other, that allows people to be conversational and supportive agents of a society 14 in which people, adopting the fundamental ethical principle of dialogue, become morally competent agents, capable of expressing the moral will to understand others and to make himself understandable to others, but given that there is no rule to think, but only rules for other aspects of our behavior 15 or ; (b) as radical recognition of the other, which, according to Levinas, implies in accepting that the intersubjective space is not symmetrical because the other is not, in any way, other me-myself even though participates in a common existence.Therefore, the relationship with others should not be seen as an idyllic and harmonious relationship of communion, nor as a sympathy through which, putting ourselves in their place, we recognize it as similar, being even said that the relationship with the other is the relationship with a Mystery 16 and that the intersubjective relationship would only take place as a relation from one to another and in the transcendence of 'for-the-other' espousing the 'ethical subject', espousing the between-us 17 .
Of the two proposals, the more demanding evidently is the proposition of Levinas, which seems to require the concept of empathy proposed here, while the proposal of Habermas seems to be based on the traditional concept of sympathy, which implies some form of prior reciprocity between me and the other so that there is in fact dialogue as well, so the attitude of mere tolerance towards otherness.Then follow the proposition Levinas, which seems more appropriate to address the issue of empathy and demanding dialogue type that it presupposes.
In this sense, the "conditions of possibility" for the existence of dialogue may arise from observations of Levinas   18 .
In short, according to Levinas, the rejection of another's otherness may require, ultimately, its disposal, which is just the opposite of the expected outcome of the dialogue; that is, may entail the abolition of any condition of possibility of empathic dialogue between I and other.

The relationship between dialogue and dialectic
The word "dialogue" has in fact semantic proximity with the word "dialectic" (διαλεκτέον), or art of dialogue, which can be explained by several interpretative lines that are not isolated from each other and among which exchanges are established, interlacements , contaminations, which make the overall picture quite moved and variegated 19 .
In short, the dialectic was historically understood in the following ways: as a method to refute opinions (Zeno of Elea); as a dialogic model in which questions and answers are discussed (Socrates); as a method for rational knowledge (Plato); as a form of argument to address opinions (Aristotle); as critical discussion of antinomical positions (Kant); as a synthesis of opposites, in which the dialectic incorpo-

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Dialogue between agnosticism and the universe of faiths: the case of empathy http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1983-80422014223022rates in its logical contradiction (Hegel); as a method to understand the existing reality and to criticize it and deny it (Marx); as an expression of the experience of the interrelationships between subjects in the ordinary course of life and open to relationships and contrasts of freedoms in history (Merleau-Ponty); as a living logic of action in process (Sartre); as dialectic negative form, wherein the category of totality should be replaced by that of contradiction (Adorno); or as dialectical theology in which God is considered as totally other against which man should be considered a nothing (Barth) etc. 19 Just as "logos", the concept of dialectics has a dense and complex semantic field, where concurrent senses passes through the Greek to different European languages, acquiring its contradictory identity and a complexity of use 20 , being that characterization in regard to dialogue.In short, dialogue can be seen as the original place of language mode, as a relationship that occurs between at least two human beings that are others, in a strict sense, to one another and having a fully opened future in that, by the realization of the man in his being in the world, may become real something new, impossible to predict 21 .
In this context, one can say that the conditions of possibility for the existence of dialogue between agnosticism and religions can be given by adopting the open agnostic attitude to the other, represented by religious, and not necessarily requiring, in turn, the same type of attitude on the part of the other, once he is considered -according to the suggestions of Levinas -object of my absolute responsibility, which refers to the category of empathy, adopted here just to indicate the possibility of dialogue between agnostics and religious.

Empathy
According to its etymology, the term empathy (from the Greek εμπάθεια) indicates, in general, the union or emotional fusion with other beings or objects (considered animated) 22 or, more specifically, the ability to understand the feelings of anothers, regardless of sharing their experience and beliefs.The term should therefore be distinguished from the term sympathy (from the Greek συμπάθεια), which denotes the ability to (supposedly) experience the same emotions of the other, possibility excluded by the term "empathy." In fact, we can only experience empathy with someone other than us, not assimilable to us; with someone who is transcendent to us, but with whom we want to establish some form of dialogue, something seemingly impossible outside of a dialectical logic, able to integrate the contradiction to try to overcome it.Empathy would be therefore based on the inability to take the place of another and would derive from the ability to so only we can experience our own experience with other subjectivities, with other communities and society as a whole.
According to the history of ideas, the term appears specifically in German culture, particularly in the field of aesthetics, which appears at the end of the eighteenth century, the term "Einfühlung", based on the knowledge of other minds.Will be translated into English in the twentieth century, for "empathy", which becomes common, especially in psychology to designate altruistic behavior and, in the emerging field of neuroscience, a new paradigm to describe a neural correlation that would be the biological basis of sociality, and therefore a term widely discussed due to the charge of positivist reductionism, especially made by philosophers and social scientists 23 .
In particular, "Einfühlung" was adopted by the phenomenologist Husserl who, concerned with the establishment of objective knowledge and of practical life settings, used it to indicate the fact that we can not know the thoughts and feelings of others, which remain opaque, once I have in me [...] the experience of the 'world' and 'other' [...] not as a work of my synthetic activity of some privately, but as a strange world to me 24 .Husserl -which will be rediscussed by Levinas -maintains strong the distinction between the empathizing subject and his intentional reference, that is, the psychic experience of others 25 .
Currently, we can say that the term refers to a constellation of experiments, often quite different between each other and that can hardly be all referable to a common ground 26 , although it is possible to say -according to the concerns of the practical reason (and, therefore, ethics and politics) -that empathy presupposes human vulnerability, which implies recognition of the fragility of human existence and the appeal for the consequent liability to the other.In other words, it is understood the universal human characteristic of vulnerability as the bridge linking those who H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. named foreigners in moral plane in a pluralistic society 27 .
In short, empathy seems to be an umbrella word, once it refers to a ductile concept, situated in a protean constellation and a network of categorical kinships that involve terms only partly overlapping, such as projection, transfer, association, expression, animation [and] merger, which implies different attitudes as

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Dialogue between agnosticism and the universe of faiths: the case of empathy http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1983-80422014223022being self-absorbed, revive, compassionate, consenting, imitate inwardly, sympathize, and it would show on the one hand the great ductility of this notion, but also, on the other, the risk of misunderstanding demanded by the indistinctions of its contours 28 .Therefore, the term has been the subject of severe criticism by challenging their relevance and usefulness for understanding our experience of the other and things, and even denying that the word correspond, ultimately, to something verifiable and limitative 28 .
However, in recent decades, the use of the term was back again strongly used in the expressions "empathic civilization", "global empathy" and "Homo empathicus" (replacing the Hobbesian "homo homini lupus"), which, according to the economist and environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin, would aim a new interpretation of the history of civilization, from a radical new view of human nature, based on an empathic evolution of the human race, who can decide our fate as species 29 .
Also for the primatologist Frans de Waal, empathy would belong to the very human evolutionary history, and currently it is a trend [and] is major issue of our time, in the case of behavioral characteristic shared with other primates and other mammals, which possess -according to studies by anthropologists, psychologists, biologists and neuroscientistsan emotional convergence and that would show that we are highly cooperative and sensitive to injustice.Our species has a social side and a selfish side, and our bodies and our minds are made for social life, and we desperately become depressed in its absence 30 .
Against those who deny the relevance and the legitimacy of the use of the term, the author counter-argues that: whoever wants to use the atrocities of war as an argument against human empathy must think twice, because the war and the feeling of empathy are not mutually exclusive, and we must consider the difficulties that most men feel to pull the trigger.To reinforce it, ends with a question: Why this difficulty [to "pull the trigger"] would exist if it were not for empathy between human beings and their fellows? 31.Indeed, for the author, empathy promotes links between individuals and gives each of them a 'participation' in the well-being of others, shortening the distance between the direct benefits [and] the collective benefits 32 , once the feeling of not being indifferent to each other if we want to build a community worthy of this name is the other force that sustains our interactions 33 .
In other words, empathy would be a form of emotional contagion, and the bond is essential to our species, since we do not feel anything that hap-pens outside of us, but as we unconsciously merge with each other, his experiences resonate with our inner 34 .
In short, there would be a multifaceted constellation of empathic phenomena, which would lead us to try to re-hear an echo of the ancient Greek term εμπάθεια, that was to mean a condition of the body, the flesh 35 .
With these conceptual considerations on dialogue and empathy, we can approach more directly to the issue of the type of dialogue between agnosticism and religion also from the conceptual analysis of the two terms, which will be addressed together, that is, making them talking to each other empathetically.

Agnosticism and Religion
The term "agnosticism" essentially refers to the issue of not knowing, that is, ignorance and, at least since Socrates, to be aware of it and admitting not knowing."Religion" can refer either to the cult practices as the beliefs that legitimize it, at least since the rise of Christianity, whose original contribution consists of [giving] a doctrinal content to the term 36 .
From the doctrinal point of view, agnosticism can be seen as the idea that the existence of God is impossible to be known and proven; unlike atheism, which supports the idea of non-existence of God, idea that can not be demonstrated, proved or disproved empirically for an agnostic.Thus, the dialogue between religion and agnosticism seems only possible as a polemic about assigning different meanings to words, as: • Agnosticism can be seen as a school of thought (or belief) which maintains that what can not be scientifically verified is unknowable, implying therefore the suspension (έποχή) of judgment against religious problems, that is, the belief that said the inability of the human mind to go "beyond" the realm of reality consisted of phenomena and to solve the metaphysical and religious problems; • The universe of religions is concerned precisely of what agnosticism considers suspension of judgment object, at least if we understand religion as a device that presupposes a relation of dependency of man [of] one or more superior beings, of which man knows to depend on and to whom provides a particular cult, that is, if we understand it as a phenomenon that involves two elements: a goal, that is, the complex relationships between divinity and man,

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Dialogue between agnosticism and the universe of faiths: the case of empathy http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1983-80422014223022and the other subjective, which is the consciousness of dependence and the resulting disposition in man to return to the deity worship belonging to it 37 .
Historically, the term agnosticism has recent origin: the English zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) introduced the adjectived English term "agnostic" in 1869 to indicate the attitude of one who considers "unsolved" the metaphysical and religious problems because exceed the world phenomenal and therefore could not be objects of valid knowledge, which could only be obtained through the scientific method.In this sense, for Huxley agnosticism would not be a belief, but a rigorous rational method, consistent in the application of the principle of not pretending conclusions to be certain without being demonstrated or demonstrable 38 .
Then, the term appears in several philosophical systems, beginning with positivism, one of the conditions of possibility of their use in the thought of Kant, for whom the human understanding (and its product represented by the knowledge and theory) is made of representations rather than intuitions: the knowledge of God is mere intuition, product of the will, and not theoretical knowledge or theory of supersensible beings, because we are not fully capable of founding a speculative knowledge, but only to limit its use to the practice of moral law.That is, if we abstract from all anthropomorphism from it [word agnosticism], the simple word is left, unable to bind to it the minimum concept by which it was allowed to expect an extension of theoretical knowledge; in short, the concept of God belongs neither to the physic nor metaphysics, but moral, once even by the metaphysics and through reliable inferences is impossible to reach, from the knowledge of this world, to the concept of God and the proof of its existence 39 .

Final considerations
According to the impact between agnostics and religious, that was now outlined, the dialogue seems to be close to impossible.However, our task was to investigate the conditions of possibility for the existence, at least in theory, of this dialogue, what we try to show introducing the category of empathy, motivated by the desire to communicate and to relate to others, in particular with his otherness unassimilable to the self.
But, as seen, the very word "dialogue" has semantic proximity (a "family resemblance," as Wittgenstein would say 40 ), with the word "dialectic", which, in turn, has several interpretative lines that are not isolated among each other, and between which are established exchanges, interlacements, contaminations, which make the overall picture quite moved and variegated 19 .One must not forget that, since Hegel, the dialectical logic includes the contradiction, the conflict.
In this approach of the empathic dialogue, it was highlighted the ethical position of Levinas, who opposes as ethical ego-centered conception (which he refuses) and an altero-centered conception (which he accepts) based on the irreducible transcendence of the Other, due to its unknowable.This concept implies on the one hand, an unconditional responsibility of the Self with respect to the Other and, on the other, the transcendent solution [which]  consists in introducing the Other, before any practice that is, as a referent of subjectivity and in relation to which the actor of practice should be defined and located, perspective in which, after all, are the initiatives of the Other that modify the horizon of possibilities [of Me], and that, for example, thanks to forgiveness, open the possibilities of hope 41 .
However, we must remember that Levinas is not the first to make the Other key ethical subjectivity, because besides Husserl (quickly remembered here), is already in Kant a very explicit definition [of] subjective person when [the "Fundamentals the metaphysics of morals", states that] a person is the subject whose actions are likely to imputation 41 .
Finally, you may want to also remember the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who, in a text on the relationship between ethics and politics, considered to be the type of relationship established with the otherness that would depend on the very survival of the human species and that we should therefore expect [that] humanity, at least the edge of the cliff, stops and reflects, and perhaps realizes that even the well-being of those who we hate would not have a too high a price to pay in exchange for our survival 42 .
In summary, the empathic dialogue, that in here we tried to outline, seems to be the condition of possibility for the construction of a sort of a complex meta-point of view, able to overcome, at least argumentatively, the differences seen as antithetical.But to do so, one must be able to distinguish without separating and to relate differences without confusing their specific traits, as we believe this to be a possible dialectical path to the dynamic management of the disorder more than the stable production and artificial order 43 .

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12ting against what reproach, against what is politically contrary or against what is different from us, being considered in religious matters one of the bastions of the modern democratic state, although remains a problematic concept because it impliescomprehending how a tolerance principle may coexist with the genuine moral and religious conviction12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1983-80422014223022from on "otherness" and transcendence of the other, considering that: a) the other is a being and counts as such, that is, the other is basically inassimilable to I; b) the understanding that I can have about the other as a possible threat may involve a partial denial, which is violence, [because] denies the independence of the being [and the fact that] he depends on me; c) despite [of] my domination over him [...] I do not own him; d) he does not enter entirely [in] the field of my freedom, and one should understand it from his history, his environment, his habits; e) and this may also indicate that someone else is the only entity whose denial can not advertise himself as such, [once] the other is the only being who can [inclusevely] want to kill