Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and the Social World

The Continued Relevance of Phenomenology. Essays in Honour of Dermot Moran

Anna Bortolan, Elisa Magrì, Anna Bortolan, Elisa Magrì

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110698886
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

The volume gathers together over twenty contributions that emerged from a conference held in in honour of Dermot Moran on the occasion of his retirement from University College Dublin. The book explores the contribution of phenomenology to empathy, intersubjectivity, affectivity, and the constitution of the cultural and social world, from both a historical and an applied philosophical perspective. Theoretical and methodological differences in approach notwithstanding, phenomenologists have converged in the recognition that self and others are fundamentally related, and have provided fine-grained accounts of the origin, forms, and implications of such relationship. The volume critically reconstructs and further develops central aspects of this body of research within a pluralistic framework. It offers a renewed investigation of the work of classical phenomenologists like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, as well as an original application of phenomenological concepts and theories to contemporary discussions on intentionality, culture, emotions, and morality. The book provides insights for scholars in phenomenological philosophy as well as in philosophy of mind and interpersonal and social experience.

The social world: empathy, morality, and metapolitics

Empathy, Sympathetic Respect, and the Foundations of Morality

John J. Drummond

Abstract

This contribution summarizes a well-known phenomenological view of empathy and argues that it underlies both the respect and the sympathy that are central to and required by well-ordered interpersonal and moral relationships. I summarize an amalgam of the views of several phenomenologists, including Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Max Scheler, and Dan Zahavi, an amalgam that I shall refer to simply as the phenomenological understanding, even though it is undoubtedly a phenomenological understanding. I then outline the way in which empathy underlies both respect and sympathy and give brief accounts of each. I shall further sketch ways in which respect and sympathy are the two affective attitudes that in their unity jointly ground our ethical lives.

This chapter summarizes a well-known phenomenological view of empathy and argues that it underlies both the respect and the sympathy that are central to and required by well-ordered interpersonal and moral relationships. In what follows, I shall summarize an amalgam of the views of several phenomenologists, including Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Max Scheler, and Dan Zahavi, an amalgam that I shall refer to simply as the phenomenological understanding, even though it is undoubtedly a phenomenological understanding.¹ I shall then outline the way in which empathy underlies both respect and sympathy and give brief accounts of each. I shall further sketch ways in which respect and sympathy are the two affective attitudes that in their unity jointly ground our ethical lives.

Empathy

Phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity are frequently somewhat abstract discussions of our awareness of another subject. They are concerned to account for our experience of other subjects from, as it were, the ground up rather than to account for our everyday encounters of other persons in our joint dealings with one another and the surrounding world. Those everyday encounters include experiences such as the following: Janet sees someone she does not recognize across the room; Steve sees Walter approaching; Joe loves Ellen but, experiencing jealousy, sees Matt as a rival and fears losing Ellen’s affection; Martha forms a business partnership with Janice; Beatrice joins a book group; Donald understands that Vladimir is a friend, but John sees a foe in Vladimir; and so forth. Nevertheless, the more abstract discussions are instructive, for they disclose a fundamental structure universally present in the concrete experiences of other persons. This structure is sameness-in-irreducible-difference. It underlies all interpersonal encounters, whether they be friendship, a business partnership, membership (in, say, a union or professional organization), citizenship, and so on.

Although our everyday, ordinary, and original encounter of others as friends or foes, acquaintances or strangers, co-workers, partners, fellow citizens, and so on are varied, complex, and multi-dimensional, they can be stripped down, as it were, to the basic and fundamental recognition of the other simply as a person. Just as mere perception is an abstraction from our everyday, ordinary, and original experiences with their affective and practical dimensions, this basic recognition—what phenomenologists call “empathy”—is an abstraction from our everyday, ordinary, and original encounter with others. In the mutual recognition of another subject as a person, we respond affectively to one another in a variety of ways that constitute fuller and richer levels of empathetic recognition. But the fundamental structure—the sense of sameness as persons in the irreducible difference among persons—underlies those affective responses as their cognitive basis.

We see this structure at work in Husserl’s discussion of what he calls “analogical apperception” (Husserl 1970, p. 108).² The other person, in brief, is experienced as like me insofar as the other is embodied and capable of initiating voluntary actions in the way that I can, but the other person is also experienced as irreducibly different from me, insofar as I experience the other’s bodily motility as expressive of conscious experiences and actions that I cannot experience in the way I experience my own. This pattern of the simultaneous “pairing” (Husserl 1970, pp. 112 – 113) and irreducible differentiation of persons is what is most important in Husserl’s notion of analogical apperception and is operative in varied ways in all our encounters of other persons.

Let us examine this in greater detail. In order to understand what is unique in this account, however, we must first note a linguistic difficulty. In folk psychology and in the psychological literature, the English term “empathy” generally refers to the activity of or capacity for imaginatively understanding, identifying with, vicariously experiencing, or sharing the feelings of another from the other’s perspective. The German terms used by the early phenomenologists (Einfühlung [by, for example, Husserl and Stein] and Nachfühlen [by Scheler]) similarly evoke the sense of entering into and vicariously sharing the same feeling as another. But this is not what the early phenomenologists mean by the term; indeed, Husserl, for one, gravitated toward the view that Fremderfahrung is the better term to denote the encounter of a “foreign” subject or to describe an “other-experience” (see Zahavi 2014, p. 114). Even this term, however, is not by itself fit to capture the special kind of other—another “subject” as the center and source of an experiencing life—that is the “object” of the encounter.

Empathy, on the phenomenological account and unlike the psychological account, is a cognitive rather than an affective experience. At the risk of oversimplifying, we can say that the basic face-to-face empathetic experience of another includes (1) the perceptive recognition of the other’s bodily states, changes, and activities and (2) the apperceptive recognition of another center and source of conscious experience as expressed in those bodily states, changes, and activities. The bodily states, changes, and activities might be of various sorts. I might recognize the other’s adjusting her position and squinting her eyes so as to perceive better some object in the world, or I might recognize certain physiological changes, facial configurations, and gestures as expressions of emotions, or certain bodily actions expressive of choices, or I might hear the other’s speech as expressive, say, of judgments or alarm. In experiencing another body in these ways, I do not experience a merely material thing, such as a stone, a tree, or a building, undergoing a change caused by some other material thing or physical event. I experience these bodily states, changes, and activities as expressive of a conscious being freely in control of the body I now encounter. I do not, for example, see mere changes in facial musculature; I see a smile. Empathy, then, is the perceptual recognition of an embodied, expressive center of conscious agency.

Four aspects of empathy reveal its uniqueness as a type of perception. First, in perceiving, say, a building from the front, I directly perceive the facade of the building and apperceive its other sides. Although only the facade is directly presented, the object of my perception is the building as a whole. I anticipate that undertaking certain bodily movements will bring other sides or aspects of the building to direct perception, and these bodily movements thereby contribute to the disclosure of the object. I can, at least theoretically, bring any of these apperceptive moments to direct perception through bodily movements. This is not, however, the case in empathy. I can bring apperceived dimensions of the other’s body to direct perception, but I cannot bring the other’s lived conscious experiences as expressed in her bodily activities to direct perception. The other as a center of conscious agency radically transcends my perceptual capacity in a way that the other sides of the building do not.

It is important to stress that I do not infer the presence of another conscious agency; I apperceive it (Husserl 1970, p. 108). I experience the other person in (and not through) the perceptual presentation of the other’s bodily changes and activities; I encounter the other’s anger in her facial expressions, her bodily motions, the volume of her voice, and so on. Nor, despite the connotations of the German terms Einfühlung and Nachfühlen, do I “feel myself into” the experience of the other or vicariously share her experience or stand in her shoes.³ I do not, for example, need to experience anger in order to recognize another person as angry (Zahavi 2014, p. 113).

The basic idea is this: my pre-reflective self-awareness has both proprioceptive and exteroceptive aspects. I am proprioceptively aware of my body in somaesthetic and kinaesthetic sensations that not only contribute to the disclosure of the object but underlie my sense of self as an interiority that, in experiencing objects in the world, expresses itself in bodily states and movements (Husserl 1973b, p. 491). My body is, however, also available to me (at least in part) for exteroception. I am exteroceptively aware of my bodily functioning as visually and tactually perceptible movements occurring in the world. This fusion or interplay between interiority and exteriority is a condition for the possibility of empathy (Husserl 1959, p. 62; 1973b, p. 457; Zahavi 2014, p. 137), and is a function of my living body’s both performing a constitutive function in the disclosure of the world and expressing my experiential life.

The analogical base of my apperception of the other as a center of experience is, properly speaking, the fusion of my interiority and exteriority in my experiencing the world and expressing my mental states and experiences. Insofar as I experience [erfahre] certain bodily states, changes, and activities of another body as similar to the kinds of bodily states, changes, and activities that I proprioceptively experience [erlebe] and exteroceptively experience [erfahre] in the course of my disclosing the world, I take the similar bodily states, changes, and activities of the other as the externalization and expression of another interiority that I cannot directly experience and that the other conscious agent does proprioceptively experience [erlebe]. I encounter the other as a transcendent center of expressed conscious experience.

Given, however, that the empathetic recognition of an other can extend to non-human animals, the similarity between subject-objects cannot be found merely in the similarity of physical states, changes, and movements alone. The notion of the body is insufficient to ground the similarity since the physical movements of, say, a dog fleeing from danger are different from the movements of a person fleeing the same danger, yet we recognize the dog as a conscious being whose consciousness is expressed in its actions (Stein 1989, p. 59). Crucial, then, to understanding the similarity between the living and lived-through body of the one experiencing empathy and the perceived animate, but not lived ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Editors’ Introduction
• From Empathy to Intersubjectivity: The Phenomenological Approach
• Methodological and metaphysical issues
• The experience of self and other
• Perception, emotion, and trust
• The social world: empathy, morality, and metapolitics
• Index
• Erratum  published in: Anna Bortolan and Elisa Magrì,Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and the Social World, ISBN: 978-3-11-069863-3