Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity (original) (raw)
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From Empathy to Intersubjectivity: The Phenomenological Approach
Empathy, Intersubjectivity and the Social World: The Continuing Relevance of Phenomenology, 2022
In this paper I explicate the classical phenomenological approach to empathy (an umbrella term for a number of distinct interpersonal experiences of understanding others) to highlight some original and significant aspects of this approach that still have relevance for contemporary debates in the cognitive sciences and in analytical philosophy of mind and action. The focus is on Edmund Husserl, with some discussion of Max Scheler, Edith Stein, and Martin Heidegger. I briefly sketch the history of empathy and then focus on the classical phenomenological treatment of empathy as a direct quasi-perception and not an imaginative projection of simulation. Empathy, for Husserl and Stein, names this experiential sense of grasping another subject and immersing oneself in the other’s subjectivity, leading to an ‘intertwining’ (Verflechtung, Ineinandersein) of subjects (intersubjectivity) and to the constitution of the world as objective ‘world-for-all’. Empathy functions only within an entire social, historical and cultural world.
Introduction: intersubjectivity and empathy
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2012
This phenomenon was later termed Einfühlung by the German philosopherpsychologist Theodor Lipps (Lipps 1905; Moran 2004). Under this term 'Einfühlung', it entered into the phenomenological tradition, originally via the works of Husserl, Scheler, Stein and Schutz, and later it was discussed by amongst others Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. In fact, the term 'empathy'first appeared as a translation of Lipps' notion of Einfühlung, which is also sometimes rendered as 'intropathy'. As Lipps, Scheler, Husserl and others all quickly ...
The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 2020
The phenomenological discussion on intersubjectivity, lasting for over a century, can be retrospectively structured along several lines. One of them is the distinction between the theories of intersubjectivity based on experiences oriented towards individual others and the theories based on being-with others (on co-existence). While the former theories (Husserl, Scheler, Stein, Levinas, Sartre) claim that intersubjectivity (in a more restricted I-thou meaning) is a precondition of sociality, the latter (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Fink) affirm the opposite: our concrete encounters are possible only because we already live in a shared (social) world, which implies that we understand another not primarily as a concrete “thou”, but as “anyone”. The exposition in this entry takes this distinction as its guiding line. As we show in the concluding part, this distinction does not exhaust possible modalities of the relation of I and the Other. A concept of renewed importance, the group or plural subject, enters the discussion, casting new light on classic phenomenologists and opening new perspectives on intersubjectivity.
Avoiding Circularities on the Empathic Path to Transcendental Intersubjectivity
Topoi, 2014
The foundational status that Edmund Husserl envisages for phenomenology in relation to the sciences would seem to suggest that the successful unfolding of contemporary debates in the field of social cognition will be conditioned by progress in resolving certain central controversies in the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, notably in long-standing questions pertaining to the priority of subjectivity in relation to intersubjectivity, and the priority of empathy in relation to other forms of intersubjectivity. That such controversies are long-standing is in no small part attributable to the fact that the debate surrounding Husserl’s seminal attempts to elucidate these problems has placed his account, and certainly his published position, under a certain amount of pressure, pressure which stems from the suspicion that intentionality toward others may be more deeply embedded in subjectivity than the Husserl of Cartesian Meditations seems prepared to admit. Is the primordinally reduced solipsistic subject of the Fifth Meditation really capable of discovering intersubjectivity in the way that Husserl describes, or is such putative discovery (indeed, subjective transformation) already conditioned by a more primitive form of intersubjectivity? This paper investigates two ways in which this kind of “circularity” objection might arise. Firstly, it might be argued that Husserl presupposes an external perspective on one’s own body, a perspective which rationally would have to be correlated with an indeterminate foreign subjectivity. Secondly, the view has been advanced (Zahavi 2001b) that horizonal perceptual awareness of another spatio-temporal entity turns out to be essentially intersubjective, on the grounds that awareness of some of an object’s averted aspects commits one to positing the possibility in principle of those averted aspects being available to an indeterminate foreign subjectivity. Objections such as these seem to place the phenomenological enquiry into the encounter with another person at something of a crossroads. On the one hand, they have led some to argue that basic empathy, as Husserl conceives it, must indeed be conditioned by the anonymous constituting influence of a more primitive form of intersubjectivity. On the other hand, the option remains open to seek to defend Husserl’s published position against the charges of circularity. This paper pursues the latter alternative, and argues that, with appropriate clarification, the objections from circularity can be convincingly answered. It will be argued that the key to understanding why the standard Husserlian position can be sustained lies in recognising the centrality of the activity of the imagination as a condition for the possibility of intersubjectivity.
Towards Intentional Nature of Intersubjectivity
HORIZON / Fenomenologicheskie issledovanija/ STUDIEN ZUR PHÄNOMENOLOGIE / STUDIES IN PHENOMENOLOGY / ÉTUDES PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIQUES, 2014
The problem addressed in this paper is the genesis of the empathetic, intersubjective intentionality which underlies secondperson interactions. This theme is one of the most intriguing in contemporary philosophy and interdisciplinary research. The article seeks to elucidate the foundations of the phenomenon of the оther which we always already have in our daily embodied practices. First, we present a critical analysis of some aspects of the theory of intersubjectivity, such as analogical inference, anonymity of intersubjective being, inaccessibility of immediate experience of the Other. Then, based on such topics, as corporeity, the enactive nature of subjectivity, historical and social aspects of subjectivity, we elaborate the concept of empathy as lying at the very foundation of any encounter with the Other. As a result, we demonstrate the closeness of Husserlian idea of non-objectifying intentionality to the empathetic approach in contemporary philosophy. As precursors of the latter we mention M. Buber, L. Wittgenstein, M. Sheler, who advocate the dialogical (second-person) structure of consciousness and its em/ sympathetic nature. We also present an interpretation of empathy as an exclusive and unique form of intentional relation (E. Thompson) which permits to experience the Other in а direct, immediate way from second-person percpective (Sh. Gallagher). The analysis of empathy is also promising for contemporary interdisciplinary studies of affective consciousness, which are also mentioned. The article stresses the necessity of further studying «being-with» in both phenomenological and interdisciplinary dimensions to the extent that intersubjectivity constitutes the sense of the self on both transcendental and experiential levels.
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2008
I outline in this paper a pragmatical approach to meaning. Meaning is defined as a phenomenologically experienced construal. As such, it is a dynamic object whose first evidence comes from the first person rather than the third one. At the same time, the approach assumes that meaning is not an individual creation, but rather an intersubjective one. Origins of meaning are also to be founded not ‘in the head’ of a cognitive system or subject, but in the intersubjective space contingently formed between a subject (S), an other (O) and a common object (R), which they talk about. Approaching this minimal communicative situation therefore requires realizing that the phenomenological dimension is always implied in any intersubjective encounter. The observed synchronized co-feeling among subjects, upon which language comprehension takes place, I call ‘co-phenomenology’. When analyzed in this way, intersubjectivity shows at the same time its social, phenomenological and biological dimensions.
Human Studies
Zahavi and Gallagher’s contemporary direct perception model of intersubjectivity has its roots in the phenomenological project of Edmund Husserl. Some authors (Smith 2010; Krueger, 2012; Bohl and Gangopadhyay, 2014) have utilised, and criticised, Husserl’s model of direct empathic perception. This essay seeks to correct certain misunderstandings of Husserl notion of direct empathic perception and thus, by proxy, clarify the contemporary direct perception model, through an exegesis of Husserlian texts. In the first half of this essay I clarify the analogy between the directness of regular material object perception and the directness of empathic perception via a clarification of Husserl’s notion of co-presence. I argue that contemporary renditions of Husserl’s account which stress the dis-analogy between these two types of perception (Smith 2010; Krueger 2012) are based on a superficial and incorrect rendering of Husserl’s notion of co-presence. In the second half of this essay I clarify the notion of verification. I argue that, for Husserl, behaviour does not verify mental life. Instead, empathic verification occurs via the relation between concepts and intuitions. In my conclusions I show how contemporary authors misunderstand the fundamental nature of Husserl’s account of empathy because of the downgraded status of psychic life within contemporary cognitive science.