vicarious
/vɪˈkɛːrɪəs
/ /vʌɪˈkɛːrɪəs/adjective
1Experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person: this catalogue brings vicarious pleasure in luxury living...
- Yet, curiously, it is a secondary, indirect, and vicarious experience.
- Empathy and familiarity with someone gives rise to a vicarious capacity to experience his responses, a kind of second nature.
- But you can give your mates a good time they could not possibly have had before, and that gives you vicarious pleasure.
Synonyms
indirect, second-hand, secondary, derivative, derived, at one remove, surrogate, substitute, substituted, by proxy;
empathetic, empathic
2Acting or done for another: a vicarious atonement...
- Christians believe that to be saved you have to embrace Jesus as the Messiah, you have to believe in vicarious atonement, you have to believe that Jesus died for your sins, you have to believe that Jesus is the Incarnation.
- Most Christians, although they may be suspicious of vicarious confession, do believe in vicarious atonement: the idea that someone's virtue or suffering can benefit someone else.
- Jews, I had read and heard (including from many Jews), simply do not believe in vicarious atonement, whereas Christians obviously do.
Derivatives
vicariousness
- I think it is, I think the passion for justice is very strong in me but the greatest challenge for me in that is where so readily you can get disembodied from the people who are suffering and it can be turned into a cause, vicariousness.
- Yet, I would prefer to locate the difference between suffering and compassion, not in the intensity of the agony endured, but in the fact that the latter contains an element of intentionality and vicariousness that the former lacks.
- More subtly perhaps, the incamational model of the atonement undercuts the sense of vicariousness that underlies the satisfaction and penal models.
Origin
Mid 17th century: from Latin vicarius 'substitute' (see vicar) + -ous.