Kindness: The Capacity for Kindness

Abstract

Different viewpoints, understandings, and definitions of kindness are offered. One way of describing kindness is the ability to bear the vulnerability of the Other through imaginative participation in and sympathetic identification with the experience of the Other. Embodied kindness, which can be developmentally traced to the kindly care provided early by essential others, reveals itself in kindly gestures as forms of communication and communion. Kindness is a form of social sensitivity to the welfare of self and others that overlaps with and yet is more and other than sympathy, compassion, considerateness, generosity, gentleness, and warm-heartedness. Like other markers of psychosocial maturation, kindness comes in degrees. In its mature or discerning form it contributes to intrapersonal and interpersonal integration.