Seeing Oneself from the Other’s Perspective

“For me, the ultimate agreement would be to try to put oneself in the other person's shoes. Even if just for a little while. And in doing so, manage to see oneself from the other’s perspective. I hope that I have been able to do so at least once.”

The quote belongs to Jorge Schussheim. He said it during an interview shared with his partner, theater director Lía Jelín, published in La Nación. It could be read as a gentle definition of empathy—which it is, in fact—and left at that, filed away among those quotes to which one nods without stopping to think too much. But there is a word in the middle that doesn't resolve so easily: manage [lograr].
He doesn't just say "put oneself in the other’s shoes" and leave it at that. He says that this gesture, if it works, produces something more: seeing oneself from a consciousness that is not one’s own. Here, we are no longer speaking merely of a virtue. We are talking about a rather strange operation.

The Mirror Effect

What is interesting about looking at oneself from the outside is not so much understanding the other—that is merely the preliminary step—but what that displacement does to oneself. At least three things happen simultaneously:
First, a decentering: stepping off one's own axis allows one to observe their own automatisms, biases, and rigidities with a distance that is impossible to achieve from the inside. Second, an amplification of perspective: it is not a matter of simply agreeing with the other person, but of understanding how the world is ordered within their scheme, even if that scheme feels foreign or even wrong to us. And third, something more uncomfortable: indirect self-knowledge. Discovering how others perceive us often reveals blind spots that we would have never detected by looking solely from within.
The deepest agreement, then, would not be reaching a full consensus in discourse—that is what two people argue about when negotiating—but achieving that mutual visibility. Seeing and being seen from another place. Which, put this way, starts to sound less like relationship advice and more like a philosophical problem with practical consequences.

From Morality to Mechanics

Now then: remaining in that reading—“empathy helps us know ourselves”—is correct, but it is also the point where most commentary on this type of quote stops. And that is where I prefer to change the question. I am not so interested in what Schussheim meant to say, but in what other things might be happening in that sentence without him having intended them. Not to invent hidden motives, but to use the text as a mechanism that sets other ideas in motion.
The exercise is simple to describe, though not so easy to perform: you take the key phrase—“seeing oneself from the other’s perspective”—ask it questions that are not moral (Who is the one seeing? What happens if the other person is mistaken? What happens if the other person is also looking at me? What happens if the other is not even a person?), choose a connection that seems distant, look for the structure they share, and write the sentence that bridges both things. In the end, you return to the original text and ask what changed in the way it is read. There is no need to prove that Schussheim was talking about something else. It is enough to discover that his sentence functions as a gateway to texts, ideas, and experiences that at first glance had nothing to do with a couple’s interview in a lifestyle supplement.
What follows are a few of those doors.

The Actor and the Partial Disappearance

There is an almost obligatory connection with Lía Jelín, who was present in the interview scene though not in the quote itself. What does an actor do when playing someone other than themselves? They do not become that person. Nor do they cease to be themselves. Empathy, taken to this domain, would not consist of abandoning one’s own shoes, but in discovering that one can walk for a while in someone else’s without ceasing to be the person wearing them. The character does not exist without the actor, and the actor does not disappear when entering the character.
From there arises a sharper question: can one understand someone without agreeing with them? An actor can masterfully play a character without sharing their values, decisions, or worldview. If that holds true in theater, there is no reason to assume it works differently outside of it.

Chess and the Perspective That Anticipates Itself

In chess, there are two ways to look at the board: from one’s own position (“What do I want to do?”) and from the opponent’s position (“What do they see? What is their threat? What do they think I am preparing?”). Up to this point, the analogy of “putting oneself in the other’s shoes” is direct, even predictable. What makes it interesting is the next step: what happens when one tries to think like the opponent and discovers that the opponent is also trying to think like them?
There emerges something akin to a mirror facing another mirror: I try to see myself from the other’s perspective, but the other is also trying to see themselves from mine. The lingering question—how far can a perspective go when it is always anticipating another perspective?—has less to do with empathy as a virtue and more with empathy as a recursive strategy. This is something Taleb would likely feel more comfortable discussing in terms of incentives rather than feelings: the outside gaze ceases to bring us closer to a common truth and begins to function as a chain of perspectives that correct and modify one another without ever reaching a fixed point.

Montaigne and the Distorting Mirror

This connection is, perhaps, the most fruitful. Montaigne returns time and again to the difficulty of knowing oneself: one believes they know who they are until an unfamiliar custom, a different society, or someone else reflects back an image that does not match the one they held of themselves. Placed alongside Schussheim’s quote, this poses an uncomfortable question: does the other person help us know ourselves because they understand us, or because they dismantle the image we had already constructed of ourselves? And even worse: what if the other person sees us better than we see ourselves? And what if they see us worse?
Here, the initial reading—empathy as a path to self-knowledge—gets complicated. The other person may show us something real that we had failed to notice, but they can also be wrong. We can discover ourselves in their gaze without necessarily being what that gaze discovers. The other’s view, then, is not a reliable mirror by definition: it can also be a distorting mirror. And this connects quite directly with a broader skeptical vein: if there is no reason to assume the other’s perspective is truer than our own, then “seeing oneself from the other’s perspective” does not grant us the truth about who we are, but merely another hypothesis—just as partial as ours—about who we are. Putting oneself in the other’s place, in that case, does not solve the problem of knowing oneself; it multiplies it.

The Character Who Is Also Looking at Us

There is a version of this exercise that can be done with any story or novel: pick a character who is unpleasant, incomprehensible, or morally questionable, and instead of asking “Why are they like this?”, ask “What would have to change in my own worldview for this character to stop seeming so strange to me?” Not to justify them—that is not the goal—but to understand how their world functions from the inside.
The inverse movement is even more productive: what would have to change in the character’s worldview for me to stop seeming strange to them? Reading shifts from “I am observing the character” to “I am observing the character, but I am also imagining how the character might be observing me.” It is, once again, the same structure as chess and the mirror: the perspective that knows it is being observed.

How Many “Selves” Emerge When One Looks from the Outside?

There remains one last problem, perhaps the most uncomfortable of all, and it has to do with the very grammar of the phrase. “Seeing oneself from the other’s perspective”: who is doing the seeing? Is it me? Is it the other? Is it a sort of intermediate self that appears only when I attempt to look at myself from the outside and exists at no other time?
If I carry out the experiment—I look at myself, then I try to look at myself as another person sees me, but that person also has their own view of me, and in trying to reconstruct it, I end up constructing yet another image of myself—the result is not a clearer picture, but a multiplication. How many “selves” emerge when one tries to view oneself from the outside is, at heart, the same question posed by the self-portrait, the autobiography, or the personal diary: whether knowing oneself means discovering who I am, or rather discovering how many versions of myself I can come to construct. There is no need to answer it. It is probably better to leave it open.

Return to the Text

None of these connections prove that Schussheim was thinking about chess, Montaigne, or the multiplication of selves when he gave that interview. It is quite unlikely, in fact. But the sentence withstands the passage through all those places without breaking, and that is what makes it interesting: not as a statement on love or romantic harmony, but as a structure that repeats itself—with variations—in theater, chess, literature, and philosophical skepticism.
Empathy, acting, reading, and strategic calculation might ultimately be different ways of practicing the exact same displacement: temporarily abandoning one’s own position to discover what cannot be seen when looking forever from the same spot. What each of these practices adds—chess with its recursiveness, Montaigne with his skepticism, the actor with their partial disappearance—is precisely what a purely moral reading of the phrase, the one that stops at “we ought to be empathetic,” never quite manages to show.

Content created with AI assistance.