We all move through our lives, a lot of the time, wrapped in a fog of our own selfish aims and desires, seeing other people as mere instruments of those desires. Kant thought, plausibly, that we need good principles to address this ubiquitous failing. But we need something else as well, the habitual cultivation of a displacement of mind, a curious, questioning, and receptive demeanor that says, in effect, "Here is another human being. I wonder what he (or she) is seeing and feeling right now."

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... his curiosity needs to be fed by facts: for without correct historical and empirical information we can't possibly answer such a question. But it needs something more, a willingness to move out of the self and to enter another world. 1