Empathy in the Context of Philosophy (Renewing Philosophy)

Renewing Philosophy General Editor: Gary Banham Titles include: Lou Agosta EMPATHY IN THE CONTEXT OF PHILOSOPHY Kyriaki Goudeli CHALLENGES TO GERMAN IDEALISM Schelling, Fichte and Kant Keekok Lee PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTIONS IN GENETICS Deep Science and Deep Technology Vincent W. Lloyd LAW AND TRANSCENDENCE On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose Jill Marsden AFTER NIETZSCHE Jean-Paul Martinon ON FUTURITY Malabou, Nancy & Derrida Simon O’Sullivan ART ENCOUNTERS DELEUZE AND GUATTARI Thought Beyond Representation Peg Rawes SPACE, GEOMETRY AND AESTHETICS Through Kant and Towards Deleuze Celine Surprenant FREUD’S MASS PSYCHOLOGY Alberto Toscano THE THEATRE OF PRODUCTION Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze Vasiliki Tsakiri KIERKEGAARD Anxiety, Repetition and Contemporaneity Philip Walsh SKEPTICISM, MODERNITY AND CRITICAL THEORY Martin Weatherston HEIDEGGER’S INTERPRETATION OF KANT Categories, Imagination and Temporality

Forthcoming titles Karin de Boer ON HEGEL The Sway of the Negative Beth Lord MATTER AND MATERIALITY BETWEEN KANT AND DELEUZE

Renewing Philosophy Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–91928–6 (hardback) 978–0–230–20086–9 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Empathy in the Context of Philosophy Lou Agosta

© Lou Agosta 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–24183–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Agosta, Louis Empathy in the context of philosophy / Lou Agosta. p. cm. — (Renewing philosophy) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978–0–230–24183–1 (alk. paper) 1. Empathy. 2. Phenomenology. 3. Analysis (Philosophy) I. Title. BJ1533.S9A38 2010 2009048420 177 .7—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

This book is dedicated to my wife and to my daughter, Alex and Michelle, who lovingly schooled me in the practice of empathy.

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Contents

List of Figures

x

Series Editor’s Preface

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Preface

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction Three key distinctions defined Historical limits constraining the word ‘empathy’ The trajectory of a special hermeneutic of empathy From the hermeneutic of empathy to its intentionality The neurology of empathy Empathy and ethics

1 1 4 7 8 12 14

1 A Heideggerian Interpretation of Empathy Authentic being with others is neglected in Being and Time Empathy – the ontological bridge between selves? The historical matrix by which ‘empathy’ was constrained ‘Empathy’ – the name of a problem A feeling that something is missing The possibility of authentic human interrelations A detour through ontology Distinctions for a design for being human Set up Honing in on the neglected interpretation

16 16 17

2 Delivering Heidegger’s Hermeneutic of Empathy Human beings are designed to be affected by each other’s feelings Navigating the ‘inner–outer’ divide: mineness and displaced perception The example of vicarious feeling The other shows up in the paradigm of respect

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18 20 21 22 22 24 25 27

30 32 35 36

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Contents

A design for empathic understanding: the other as possibility Ontic and ontological possibilities of empathy A design for empathy as interpretation implemented in the hermeneutic circle The fore structure of interpretation applied to empathy The other as structure of interpretation applied to empathy A design for different perspectives: taking a walk in the other’s shoes Empathic interpretation as perspective taking: social referencing The rich silence of empathic listening by design The paradox of empathic speech – quiescing the idle chatter The authentic, committed listening of empathy

39 41 43 43 44 46 47 50 52 54

3 Empathy between Death and the Other Empathy: the third alternative to the inauthentic crowd and authentic aloneness Empathy as becoming the conscience of the other Between the other and death: humanization and individualization Empathy as foundational being with Empathy as taking a stand for the other Empathy and trauma Empathy and altruism Empathy can be used for good or harm Empathy: brought to language as narrative Example of the act of empathic receptivity between Thomas and Hanno Buddenbrooks The hermeneutic of empathy: a bridge over troubled waters

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4 The Roundtrip from Hermeneutics to Intentionality Empathy and intentionality A single statement about the positive structure of consciousness Language as a method of access to intentionality ‘Mineness’ and navigating the inner–outer distinction (continued) Intentional acts of empathy target expressions of life

84 84

56 57 58 61 63 65 69 70 77 77 82

85 86 86 87

Contents

Constitutive acts of empathy Situating empathy in Searle’s account of intentionality: preliminary distinctions Searle’s account of intentionality: access through speech acts The limits of access to empathy through language

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5 Empathy from Periphery to Foundation Husserl’s account of empathic intentionality: pre-predicative synthesis Husserl’s noema not a Fregian sense (Sinn) The example of sight restored after a lifetime of blindness: access through breakdown Radicalization of the other in Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation The explosion of inter-subjectivity in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation Empathic intentionality aims at communalization Example of the constitutive act of empathy in the human face The case of acquired face blindness (prosopagnosia)

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6 Empathy as Vicarious Introspection in Psychoanalysis Vicarious introspection and the constitution of a psychoanalytic fact Without empathy, the inner life of man is unthinkable Example of the act of empathic receptivity in psychoanalysis Example of the act of empathic understanding in psychoanalysis (continued) Empathy, the self and selfobject Conclusion: empathy and translation

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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112 115 116 120 123 126 127 128

132 136 143 148 150 155

List of Figures

1.1 The Possibility of Heidegger’s Special Hermeneutic of Empathy 2.1 The Hermeneutic Circle of Empathy 4.1 Access to Intentionality

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Series Editor’s Preface

Renewing Philosophy is a series designed to show that philosophy has both self-reflexive potential for renewal and also that such reflexivity is part of its ability, as a subject, to relate to questions of contemporary significance. In presenting this work on empathy as part of the series I want to indicate ways in which it matches this general mission. To attempt a specifically philosophical inquiry into empathy is to undertake an unusual task. It is not at all odd to find ‘empathy’ being discussed since it is often a watch-word for indications of ways we could and/or should engage with others, including the ‘culture’ of others. Similarly, a sense of empathy with those who have, in various ways, been ill-treated or marginalized, is something commonly urged to be important. In addition to these more or less political invocations of empathy, the general rise of psychology as a means of addressing broad social questions has ensured the popularization of terms taken from its repertoire. However, the general sense that is hence given to ‘empathy’ may well not be fundamental. It is in order to show that there is something derivative about such general psychological talk of ‘empathy’ that this work by Lou Agosta makes a turn to philosophy. Eschewing the easy identification of ‘empathy’ with psychological states and conditions, Agosta follows the tendency of philosophers since Husserl to undertake a critique of psychologism. The break from ‘psychologism’ in the sense of an articulation of enquiry into conditions of subjectivity in a way that does not take subjectivity to be an effect of either physical states or descriptions only of contingent cognitive conditions is part of the way in which philosophy in the twentieth century reconstituted its own specificity as an inquiry. In some respects, though, it is particularly surprising to find such a break being reprised with regard to such phenomena as would be classified under the heading of ‘empathy’ due to the exclusively psychological way such phenomena are presently understood. In making this break, Agosta understandably seeks a ground for his inquiry in the practice of phenomenology. Turning to the works and inquiries of Heidegger and Husserl has its own difficulties, given the attempt of the latter to avoid philosophical anthropology in any form and the argument of the former for a radical return to ontology above xi

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all. However, what Agosta shows in some detail, is that despite the appearance of resistance to anything like an analytic of empathy in the major works of the two founders of phenomenology in the twentieth century, there is much that points in the direction of enabling this analytic of empathy to be undertaken. There is, for example, the attention to hermeneutics and to intentionality, the relationship between which is subjected to subtle and sophisticated investigation from Agosta. It is not only phenomenologists who are pressed into service in the work, however, as recourse is also made to the works of John Searle to suggest a relationship between Searle and Husserl that will surprise and confound many. Finally, whilst the work here being introduced marks a decisive turn away from exclusively psychological ways of presenting ‘empathy’ this does not involve such a decisive shift from psychoanalysis. Since the status of psychoanalysis is less specifically clear than the ‘science’ which has come to be known as ‘psychology’, the fact that a recovery of a sense of empathy that is specifically connected to psychoanalysis is given is less surprising than it might initially seem. Once again, however, and this is in a manner that is signally novel, psychoanalysis itself is here subjected to a philosophical interpretation. The work here given thus demonstrates both a keenly self-reflexive sense of the contemporary reshaping philosophy has undergone and yet also manages to give such reshaping a further twist. It will not be news to philosophers that questions of cognition are central but it may still surprise them to discover the ways in which philosophical investigation remains both self-transformative and capable, by means of this selftransformation, of relating itself anew to the contemporary world. This book, in showing this dual possibility of philosophy, partakes itself in a decisive way in demonstrating a specific type of renewal of philosophy. Gary Banham Series Editor Renewing Philosophy

Preface

Empathy puts the ‘human’ in ‘human being’ This book is an inquiry into empathy. It begins at the point of a radical Socratic ignorance concerning our personal and philosophical understanding of empathy. Although empathy has been neglected and is under-theorized, especially in philosophy, that is changing. We are seeing the start of a proliferation of psychological, neurological and philosophical research on empathy. Soon countless researchers, scholars, journalists and new-age wizards will be pontificating on empathy over unnumbered periodicals, websites and books. Media pundits will glorify and lionize empathic idols from Doctors without Borders and Amnesty International (both eminently worthy of esteem) to the anonymous local soup kitchen, from Gandhi to the Blues Brothers. Nominees to the United States Supreme Court will be (are) vetted according to whether the individual has too much or too little empathy (Wall Street Journal 2009a, 2009b, 2009c). Every voice in our culture will celebrate empathy, whether liquefied into the sentimental tears we shed for Bambi or rarefied into the airless epistemological abstraction of scientific research using a functional magnetic resonance imaging apparatus (fMRI) as a philosopher’s cerebroscope (Decety and Chaminade 2003; Decety and Jackson 2004; Decety and Lamm 2006; de Waal 2006, 2009). This is not bad or wrong. Still, the inconvenient truth remains: We do not know what empathy is. This book is an attempt to find out. It starts from the position that we live with an understanding of what empathy is, and appreciate that empathy is central to our relations with other human beings. We live in an understanding of empathy; however, we cannot quite pinpoint what empathy is. Despite the extensive research that has already occurred on empathy, tradition has made empathy inaccessible. The goal here is to unblock our access to empathy by implementing the possibilities of an empathic inquiry. Of course, this is a bootstrap operation that has many interpretive (that is, hermeneutic) overtones. Historically, thanks to the work of scholars such as Lauren Wispé (1987), we already know who said what about the word ‘empathy’ and when and where they said it. However, what is less clear is what the xiii

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works of these great thinkers show about empathy in the context of the diverse interpretive traditions of human relations, phenomenology and psychoanalysis, all of which are implicated. The temptation is to say, well, this-or-that isn’t really empathy. How would we even know? The proposed answer is that in order to get started we recognize our Socratic ignorance. This will enrich both the concept of empathy and its concrete application in terms of human inter-relations. The puzzling thing about empathy – indeed what might even be called its mystery – is that the empathic individual gets her or his own humanness (being human) from the one with whom the empathy is occurring. For example, the parent gets his or her own being human from the infant, and, in turn, returns it to the infant as what is properly taken to be parent–child empathy. The therapist gets her or his from the patient only to give it back as part of the treatment milieu where empathy is on the critical path to a restored sense of integrity, wholeness and well-being. The story-teller gets her or his being human from the listener, calling the individual not just to the role of an entertainer putting on a good show (although that too occurs), but to the possibility of a human being giving the listener an emotional experience – laughter, fear, pity – in relation to another human being as represented in the narrated drama. The Good Samaritan gets his being human from the traveller who has been waylaid by robbers and whose suffering – disclosed empathically – inspires altruism (which is different than empathy). The friend gets her or his being human from the person whom she or he befriends only to give it back to them as an empathic relationship in which the being human (humanness) is disclosed, enhanced and sustained in its very existence by being shared. In every one of these examples the individual is humanized by the other and this humanization is the basis for the empathic relationship. The goal of this book is to make the mystery of how the one gets her or his being human from the other significantly less mysterious, though perhaps no less inspiring of wonder and awe.

Folk wisdom: the lack of empathy is the loss of being human The loss of empathy is equivalent to the loss of the individual’s being human. This is documented in the folk wisdom of the ages in a narrative where empathy is conspicuous by its absence. A wonderful example of empathy and its absence is documented in one of the fairy tales (Märchen) of the collection edited by the Grimm Brothers. ‘The Story

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of the Youth Who Set Out to Learn Fear’ is about a youth – the classic simpleton of the folktale – who tries to learn what shuddering is (that is, fear in the sense of ‘goose flesh’).1 The hero-simpleton tries so hard to feel fear that he is effectively defended against all feelings. He has no feelings, not even fear. He is insensitive to others’ feelings in the everyday sense. Thus, he lacks empathy and the corresponding aspects of his being human (humanness). He is also ontologically cut off from the community of fellow travellers who share feelings empathically and on the basis of which life matters to them (and him). This deficiency occasions a misunderstanding in the narrative with the sacristan at the local church, and the youth throws the latter down the stairs, resulting in the youth’s disgrace and banishment. As in all classic folktales, the hero goes forth on a journey of exploration of both the world and of himself. He becomes a traveller on the road of life, which is the beginning of his ontological adventures to recover his feelings and become a complete human being. The point is that empathy is not an obscure capability that requires elaborate technology to make it visible, as when researchers deploy a functional magnetic resonance imaging apparatus (fMRI) to correlate mirror neurons between individuals (though we can learn from the latter too). Rather empathy hides in plain view. This folktale, this Märchen, is in fact a ghost story, to be told on dark, windy autumn nights. The empathy of the audience is aroused by constellating fearful images of the living dead. This makes for a series of humorous encounters with ghouls and haunted castles as the youth sets about trying to learn shuddering – compulsively saying ‘I wish I could shudder’, having no idea what it means. The hero performs many brave deeds instead – as he is literally not sensible enough to grasp the distinction ‘fear’ and recognize when he should be afraid. The ghost story provides a framework for images of the disintegration and fragmentation of the self, including literal ghoulish images of bowling with detached heads and a corpse that rises from the dead because the youth gets into bed with it to warm it up – a scenario quite creepy – against which the youth is firmly defended by his complete lack of feeling. None of these images and events matter to him in the way they would matter to an affectively, emotionally whole person. He is surrounded by ghouls and living corpses but, ontologically speaking, he is the one who is an affective zombie, emotionally dead. Without empathy, the individual is emotionally cut-off, that is, dead. The subtext of the story is that the individual cannot recover his humanity on his own. He requires the participation of another – and

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a relationship with the other – to restore the being human (humanness) of his feelings – and to teach him how to shudder. Having raised the curse on the haunted castle and won the hand of the fair princess, the hero finally stops trying to shudder. Only then is he overcome by shuddering at the first opportune occasion. On the morning after his wedding – his wife’s maid teaches him shuddering – no, this is not going where you think – she teaches him shuddering in a pun that cleverly masks the physical and sexual innuendo – she throws a bowl of cold water filled with gold fish on him with the flipping gold fish included – he wakes up exclaiming that ‘Ach, yah, now finally I know shuddering!’ Now he is finally a whole, enriched and complete human being. One reason we intuitively know that the empathizer gets his being human from the empathasand (the target of empathy) is a process of elimination. There is no where else for one to obtain humanness than from another human being. Yes, it is true that the empathizer must have been treated empathically by his own care-takers for him to be able to empathize with others. And, absent such empathy, the wouldbe empathizer would have nothing to contribute and indeed his own survival as a human being would be at stake. Empathy has a personal history in which it develops, and this development trails behind it. However, even though the evidence of human development is significant to this study, it is philosophically less relevant here. We are not referring to historical, developmental or (as Heidegger would say) ‘ontical’ considerations. No amount of human development in growing up and building a personality, character or an identity can add up to a necessary conceptual distinction between the individual and the other. We want to grasp what about the empathic relationship is such that the one with whom empathy is occurring gives the empathizer her or his being human (humanness) independently of particular experiences – as a matter of a necessary and general philosophical distinction – in order to get it back experientially as a particular benefit. If this inquiry can grasp how the individual gets her or his being human (humanness) from the other in and through empathy, then it will have gone a long way towards showing how empathy is the foundation of human community where ‘community’ means ‘being with one another in human interrelation’. To paraphrase a celebrated maxim about knowledge from Kant, while our cognitions of other individuals begin with experience and without experience one individual would have no knowledge of the other, it does not follow that the foundation and access to others depends exclusively on experience. We can get a clue from Heidegger’s call for an interpretation of empathy, which he calls a ‘special hermeneutic of empathy’, as

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a way out of the impasse of disconnecting the subject from the object only to have to reconnect them in a cognitive operation that is ultimately unsatisfactory. Such an inquiry is the theoretic foundation of this work, and it will be engaged with considerable rigor in spite of the initial casual approach.

Acknowledgements

This work began many years ago with a small research grant from the Center for Psychosocial Research in Chicago. I do not believe that the Center exists anymore as a distinct entity. However, remembering the names of some of the individuals who got me started is eminently worth doing. Thanks go to Bernie Weissbourd and Ben Lee. I joined the study group at the Center focusing on language, empathy and intersecting issues. It included Michael Basch, MD, Arnold Goldberg, MD and Bonnie Litowitz, PhD. Ernest Wolf, MD, also provided initial guidance. In particular, Dr Goldberg has been an indefatigable supporter of this work, especially in so far as it is inspired by and carries forward the insights of Heinz Kohut, MD, the psychoanalytic founder of self psychology. Kohut articulated the importance of empathy while most other researchers and thinkers did not even believe in its existence. An early edition of this work was read by Professors Stephen Toulmin, Paul Ricoeur and Bill Wimsatt, all of whom I owe a heartfelt debt of gratitude for so many reasons. They acknowledged the merit of a very early version of this work by confirming a PhD degree in philosophy. This book is a complete reworking from the ground up. The entire manuscript was read more than once by Arnold Goldberg, MD, who provided useful guidance in crucial places in the text. I cannot think of a more enthusiastic supporter of this project than you, Arnold. Years ago, I first read Heidegger’s Being and Time as an undergraduate with Eugene T. Gendlin at the University of Chicago. I honour the man in everyway for his commitment and his listening (and his focusing). All I can say is that his class changed my life. At the other end of the time spectrum, I first encountered the work of Bob Stolorow, PhD, PhD – yes, he has two – in preparation for a Heidegger Circle Conference in May 2008; and if we have productive disagreements, it is within the context of wide agreement about the importance of Mitsein for empathy. Several colleagues and friends met with me in person or provided encouraging words and guidance from near and afar at times when the world seemed to be saying that this book would never see the light of day, including Jonathan Brent, T. David Brent, Ray Ciacci, David Finkelstein, Larry Hatab, John Haugeland, Marion Ledwig, Jerry xviii

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McGann, Richard Polt, William J. Richardson, Tom Stone, Karsten Stueber and David Terman. I am humbled by your generosity and graciousness. Joel Levin, whose friendship I renewed at a college reunion, was generous in performing extensive minor word-smithing on the manuscript, a task requiring quite a lot of work. Ron Mark similarly engaged with the Preface and Introduction. Gary Banham, Reader in Transcendental Philosophy, in addition to having one of the greatest professional titles ever conferred, was an inspirational and practical force behind this project from the start. At Palgrave Macmillan, Melanie Blair was helpful tying up the loose ends; Cherline Daniel was impeccable in attention to production details; and Priyanka Pathak Gibbons was as supportive and available an editor as any author could wish. I hasten to add that my interpretation of the good advice I received is itself open to interpretation; and so I alone am responsible for the remaining short comings of this work. Those readers who wish to follow the on-going development of this project on empathy in the context of philosophy are invited to visit the website of the same name where as yet unpublished articles not in this book are available at www.EmpathyInTheContextOfPhilosophy.com. Please let me hear from you.

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Introduction

Three key distinctions defined This approach takes its inspiration from Heidegger’s ontological destruction of the history of being, since it aims to clear away a prior forgetfulness in which we live – in this case regarding empathy – before a fundamentally new engagement. Yet it is distinct in approach in one particular regard. It aims to recreate the meaning of empathy (Einfühlung) based on fundamental distinctions drawn from the thinkers and applied back to them. The point of invoking our Socratic ignorance is to avoid the presumption that we have the answer in advance as to the scope and limits of empathic interrelations. Naturally, this requires a delicate balancing act between unpacking the rich applications of empathy to diverse expressive phenomena – basic feelings and emotions, social roles and pretences, irruptive motivations, pains and moods – the phenomena themselves, not the word – and what empathy explicitly promises in diverse applications in philosophy, literature, social science and related disciplines. However, such an approach is not for the faint of heart. Heidegger’s language and philosophizing have a reputation, justly deserved, of being among the most challenging – and arguably most significant – of the twentieth century. Even native speakers of German, the language of his writings, who have a significant command of philosophical distinctions, find him alternatingly obscure and provocative. Therefore, let us begin by defining and clarifying several keys terms that are at first off-putting, but can readily be translated into plain English. The terms at the top of the list include ‘hermeneutics’, ‘ontological’ (and ‘ontic’) and ‘mineness’. Hopefully this will sustain those committed readers motivated to engage further by the importance 1

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of understanding empathy to continue despite the steepness of the initial path. In general, hermeneutics is a method of interpretation and the word ‘interpretation’ may be substituted with only a modest loss of meaning. Aristotle’s little treatise Peri Herm¯eneias (Π ερι Hερωενειασ ´ ), usually translated as ‘On Interpretation,’ is a work on the expressiveness of language. ‘Herm¯eneias’ means ‘to express’, ‘to say’, ‘to assert’ (Palmer 1969: 12).1 This approach inspired the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder and, in turn, Friedrich Schleiermacher in the latter’s translations of both Plato and the Bible from Greek to German. Hermeneutics became a model for human understanding and interpretation writ large. If ‘interpretation’ and ‘hermeneutics’ are treated as theories of translation and meaning that have been generalized to methods of human understanding at large, differences nevertheless remain. Hermeneutics takes its start from and emphasizes clarifying misunderstandings, distortions and miscommunications. Understanding emerges from misunderstanding. Understanding occurs because the normal, standard situations in which people live their lives are disentangled by a hermeneutic method that progresses bottom up from everyday life. The ‘hermeneutic situation’ includes an inquiry into the understanding and related interpretations in which people already live about what is possible, whether or not they know it. The occurring way of being – behaviours, beliefs, moods and so on – is only a small subset of what is possible for them and their lives when the constraints of the given, occurring interpretation are lifted. Thus, hermeneutics, starting from the bottom up, points in the direction of what gives meaning to the way humans are being, or, more formally expressed, ontology. In contrast, interpretation progresses top down from a formal approach that maps a source to a target, a domain to a range, by means of a function that connects the two different sets of phenomena, things or conceptual distinctions. For the early Heidegger, ‘hermeneutics’ is defined as the self-interpretation of human existence (also called ‘facticity’) – that is, we humans interpret our own ways of being based on the limitations as well as possibilities we face (Heidegger 1923: 14).2 We humans are defined by a self-reflexive inquiry into what it means to be human. This is the place to engage a related hermeneutical (terminological) distinction. This inquiry into empathy is a humanizing one and what gets constituted is humanness. The argument turns on the bestowing of humanness by engaging in an inquiry (among other key constitutive activities) into what it means to be human, in which the individual and the other are essential to the inquiry. As will be analysed in detail,

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one of the key paradigms is the loss of empathy of the other – the loss of the other’s empathy is at the same time the loss of an individual’s humanness, the loss of one’s being human. This might also have been expressed by saying the loss of the other – which is the loss of the other’s empathy – is also the loss of one’s ‘humanity’. However, the term ‘humanity’ is too freighted with tradition and status as a presupposition. In particular, the latter presupposition – humanity as given – is not what is aimed at. What is aimed at is the generation of the individual’s humanness in undertaking an inquiry with the other into what it means to be human, in which inquiry both the one and the other are indispensable. In short, while the argument might be reworked to substitute ‘humanity’ for ‘being human’ and ‘humanness’, the choice was made not to do so. Instead of ‘humanity’, the term ‘humanness’ is included in parenthesis alongside ‘being human’ and ‘human being’ where it is useful to do so. In turn, the mutual inquiry of the one with the other forms a humanizing community whose scope and limits are determined by empathy. A further terminological point is usefully made about the distinctions among preontological, ontic and ontological. ‘Preontological’ refers to the everyday context in which human beings live their lives. For example, the folktale discussed above is preontological. ‘Ontic’ is the factual and empirical approach taken by the positive sciences – whether physical or historical – to objects and regions that are the defined targets of empirical inquiry. ‘Ontological’ is the approach to the study of being as being. Ontology inquires into being as distinct from particular domains of things (beings). As Heidegger interprets it, ontology inquires into the conditions of possibility of the human being in its relationship to being and the presuppositions of regional sciences. ‘Conditions of possibility’ is a key phrase from Kant invoked by Heidegger in defining ontology (Heidegger 1927: H11; H124).3 ‘Conditions of possibility’ point to the way the individual contributes to the formation of the experience that makes possible the very experience being interpreted and into which the inquiry is occurring. For example, without hearing, no sounds are possible. Hearing is the condition of the possibility of the experience of sound. The famous tree that falls in the forest without anyone being present does indeed disturb the molecules in the air, but no sound occurs to make a difference in terms of human hearing. Hearing makes possible the sounds that are the basis for auditory experience as such. Obviously much more can be said about each of these distinctions; but these will suffice, to get us started, as our working definitions.

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An additional point about terminology relates to Heidegger’s position that Dasein – human existence or human being – is the kind of entity that is always mine. This ‘mineness’ is not a term familiar in ordinary usage, but is easily translated into it. Heidegger is not primarily interested in the redness of the apple as a public property of a thing present at hand for theoretic inspection. He is initially more interested in the apple as a crisp and satisfying food on which to chew while taking a break from building a house or filling jugs to wash the dishes. The property of redness is derivative. It comes later as a consequence of abstracting from the instrumental context of relations, in this case, involving food, nourishment, health. The property of redness comes later due to a de-worlding of the apple by treating it as a theoretic thing and mere present at hand entity. However, Heidegger does not reject theory as such, though it is not fundamental. The point is that ‘mineness’ contains the clue to tracing a path between the basic way of being in the world of the human being and the abstract and derivative constructs of theory. What is more, it is a way of doing so that avoids the difficulties of the Cartesian point of view that creates independent subject and object distinctions that cannot readily be reconnected. No difference exists between ‘my own inner experience’ and ‘my own experience’, between ‘the inner experience that is mine’ and ‘the experience that is mine’. The ‘inner’ drops out or becomes a harmless manner of speaking. However, the language of inwardness is so fundamental a way of carving up experience that I cannot think of eliminating it altogether in favour of ‘mineness’. Mineness is a powerful reminder that individuals are open to the world, access the world as a background of experience to which the world is not reducible without remainder and usefully distinguish a boundary between the individual and the world and vice versa. This will be further engaged in the section on ‘Navigating the Inner-Outer Divide: Mineness and Displaced Perception’.

Historical limits constraining the word ‘empathy’ This is a good place to note an important point about the overall method employed in this work. Throughout this book, the work we are doing takes its orientation from empathy, not from Heidegger; from empathy, not from Husserl; from empathy, not from Searle; from empathy, not from Kohut (following Freud) and so on. The pattern is similar in each instance. While committing to respect the integrity and completeness of a thinker’s published statements and position on empathy, this work on empathy aims to recover what the thinker has to contribute to

Introduction

5

empathy, even if the interpretation of the contribution requires going beyond what the thinker explicitly says. Even more, in some instances, it is useful to apply a lesson learned from Heidegger, and interpret a thinker against himself in the interest of a full, rich unpacking of the power of empathy in providing a foundation for human community. Heidegger writes in his first Kant book (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929)) that interpretation is an audacious undertaking to get through to the ‘secret élan of a work’ and articulate the ‘unsaid’ (Heidegger 1929: 207). In that spirit, I wish to distinguish what others say about empathy from what they have to contribute to an analysis and recovery of empathy – from what a thinker shows to be the case about empathy in applying the thinker’s relevant distinctions about human relations to the phenomena. In short, what these thinkers say about empathy in contrast to what they show about empathy is the focus of much of the inquiry. For example, Freud mentions empathy in passing only some 15 times in 24 volumes (Trosman et al. 1972; Wolf 1976); and yet it would be hard to find a discipline where empathy is more central to producing results than psychoanalysis. For a variety of reasons, Freud encountered empathy as an aesthetic phenomenon in the writing of Theodor Lipps. Most of these mentions occur as Freud discussed empathy in his own quasi-aesthetic work, usually translated as Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1909); and used a completely different vocabulary to grasp aspects of empathy in the human relations essential to his work. Freud’s unpacking of the dialogical aspects of therapy in ‘free association’, ‘evenly hovering attention’, the analyst’s use of his own unconscious like the ‘receiver of a telephone’ towards the unconscious of the patient, are all contributions to empathy. In our own time, the work of the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut is largely, though not exclusively, responsible for arousing psychoanalysis to an awareness of the significance of empathy (Kohut 1959, 1971, 1977) as both a method and the foundation of the discipline itself. From a historical perspective, Heidegger chose to dismiss the term ‘empathy’ (Einfühlung) for at least three reasons. First, his analytic of human existence aimed to undercut the work of one of his rival philosophical colleagues, Max Scheler, whose approach to metaphysics was considered a significant rival in its time. Second, the term was still dominated by the application of Theodor Lipps’ projective approach to empathy in the context of natural beauty and aesthetics, though ultimately the work of Scheler contributed to discrediting Lipps’ approach. Third, the work of Edith Stein on empathy (1917) was squarely in the phenomenological camp of Husserl of the period of Ideas II and, thus,

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according to Heidegger, not hermeneutically or ontologically informed. Nevertheless, as will be demonstrated (Chapter 1), Heidegger has a significant contribution to make in clearing the way for implementing a rich and powerful employment of empathy as the foundation of authentic human interrelations. There are those who will say that it is just too hard to distinguish what was explicitly said about empathy from what was unsaid but still historically effective. No one promised that it would be easy. Controversies are probable. Strong convictions and feelings are likely to be aroused and provoked as favourite interpretations – for example, that Heidegger, Husserl and so on, have little to contribute to empathy – are challenged. Let me acknowledge at the start that I may be in error in matters of local or global significance. The guiding principle here is the contribution of empathy to human understanding and community, not the comfort, convenience or reputation of a particular thinker, school of thought or intellectual tradition. Even with the likelihood of a resort to the ‘violence’ of interpretation in the sense of interpreting an author against himself (Heidegger 1929: 207), the work of a given thinker should be left whole and complete. When the thinker says that empathy is unimportant, that empathy is derivative, that empathy comes too late and so on, such assertions should be acknowledged as his published opinion, and then reasons given why, in spite of such a statement, the author has a contribution to make to human relations in the context of empathy. As indicated, one significant reason can be given up front which bedevils work on empathy and has caused many to despair of attaining timely, consistent results. Of course, this refers to the circumstance that between roughly 1890 and 1920 work on Einfühlung – translated into English as ‘empathy’ by E. B. Titchner, the Cornell University psychologist and associate of Wilhelm Wundt – was dominated by Theodor Lipps’ psychology of beauty and art. One of the accidents of historical contingency, Lipps’ popularity arguably reached well beyond the depth of his analyses, although he is enjoying something of an ex post facto revival thanks to his anticipation of mirror neurons. Lipps may have been the Antonio Salieri to an entire group of would-be Mozarts, who, in any case, are better remembered today while Lipps is nearly forgotten and unread. This means that thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, (Edith) Stein and Freud could not use the word empathy (Einfühlung) without invoking an approach that was highly original in its time but is today regarded as idiosyncratic in its understanding of empathy. If my recurring reference to this fact sometimes sounds repetitious, I must nevertheless insist on repeating the refrain since it is a variable to which we,

Introduction

7

as modern researchers, no longer have visibility. The reader overlooks and forgets it at the risk of fragmenting the phenomenon of empathy even more so than usual by ignoring that against which everyone was arguing. What is unfortunate is that the genuine contributions to empathy of many thinkers have been obscured. If I am correct, these contributions, when freed from the historical and conceptual tangle that surrounds empathy, can be restated and assembled into a useful and persuasive approach to the foundation of human relations and community. In what follows, the merits of this approach are advanced and show how empathy can be extracted from the conceptual and historical tangle in which it emerged. This work does not pretend this is what Heidegger, Husserl, Searle and so on really meant. Regarding empathy, it is what is inspired by what they said and yet left unsaid.

The trajectory of a special hermeneutic of empathy The trajectory through Heidegger’s special interpretation (hermeneutic) of empathy maps closely to his design distinctions for human being (Dasein). In this interpretation, the key distinctions from his Being and Time (1927) of affectedness, understanding, interpretation and speech are applied to empathy. The result is an account of empathy that defines authentic being with other human beings in the rich detail it deserves. No longer is the human being that appears in Heidegger’s Being and Time authentic only in the face of its own-most possibility of not being, death. No longer is human being individualized and brought to encounter with her or his self as taking a stand on its being only in the face of death. Human being is also authentic in the face of the other, coming to authenticity in engaging with the other in an inquiry into what it means to be human, to be a neighbour, to be there for and with the other in a hundred diverse ways. Under this interpretation, the presence of the other as an affectively available source of animate life gives the human being her or his humanness (being human). Likewise, the loss of the other is a kind of death, which, however, is not physical. It is ontological death or, if you prefer, spiritual death, especially the loss of the affectedness that makes life matter. The other is the one who humanizes the individual by giving her or him a rich understanding of possible ways of being in the world authentically with the others in a community. The loss of the other does not refer to an everyday, ontic going away of one or another significant other, although such a loss can be traumatic. The loss of

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Empathy in the Context of Philosophy

the other means the loss of the other as the ontological source of the human being’s humanness (being human). This is initially ambiguous, but later resolved at several levels. It means the community into which an individual is thrown. But it means more. It means the other who engages the individual’s humanness and thus provides a fulcrum for bringing that humanness into being. It means the other who provides equilibrium and balance in an empathic receptivity in which the dyad becomes a dialogue between individuals in engaged interrelation. This is not the being with one another of the inauthentic ‘the one’ – the ‘they self’ – which receives the majority of Heidegger’s attention, and properly so, since it is such a pervasive phenomenon that must be cleared away. Only after this clearing away has occurred is it possible to glimpse and grasp authentic being with one another individually in empathic interrelatedness, in community. Thus, the argument will initially advance in proper Heideggerian fashion from the application of affectedness to empathy through a progressive ascent in the sense of an unpacking, making explicit and abstraction of empathic receptivity into empathic understanding, interpretation, and speech of authentic being with one another. In a sense, this analysis is whole and complete in itself. But it has many engaging consequences: the affectedness in which empathy is disclosed is the feeling of respect. Respect discloses the otherness of the other. The understanding that is grasped is that of the other’s possibility. The interpretation of the possibility as being in the world with one another is what allows the other freedom, self-expression and effectiveness in interrelationships in being known for who she or he really is. The speech in which empathy is articulated is as a gracious, generous listening.

From the hermeneutic of empathy to its intentionality The ascent is from Heidegger’s design distinctions for human existence – affectedness, understanding, interpretation, speech – to a turning point in Searle’s analysis of speech acts as a point of access to intentionality in the narrower sense and then a descent back to pre-predicative intentionality that would be recognized in its main outlines in the later writings of Husserl. Initially the way forward is up the middle between social role playing and the isolated ego as proposed in Heidegger’s special hermeneutic of empathy. Next the role of introspection as a source of input to empathic acts moves into the foreground. But, of course, Heidegger is at great

Introduction

9

pains to avoid the language of introspection, which, under the Cartesian interpretation, is one of reification and hypostization of consciousness into a thinking thing. It does not have to be so. The introspection of a single sensation evokes William Blake on finding the entire universe in a grain of sand – only in this case, it is a mechanism for resolving a philosophical puzzle that arguably resisted even Heidegger: how an experience, such as a mood that is mine, gets encoded as internal instead of external and what that means (see ‘Navigating the Inner-Outer Divide: Mineness and Displaced Perception’). Having critiqued the subject–object relationship and subjectivity, Heidegger cannot suddenly launch into a discussion of introspection, meditation, listening to oneself, in completing his analysis of beingin as care. In general, Heidegger is not interested in introspection and consciousness (as distinct from subjectivity), and, as noted above, does not even mention it until the last page of Being and Time where he does, however, allow the possibility of a positive, not reified, account of consciousness (H437). Thus, the transition from an approach to empathy in the spirit of Heidegger to one that exposes empathy as a set of diverse acts of intentionality of an individual that distinguishes mineness from otherness is to be found in a single line on the previously mentioned page of Being and Time (1927: H437). This possibility of a positive account of consciousness licenses a further inquiry into empathy as a form of intentionality. If Heidegger were to start on an account of introspection, it would be ‘positively structured’ (as Heidegger puts it) by a listening for the silent call of conscience (1927: H296). Such a listening has to quiesce the idle chatter of the inauthentic relations with others as well as the idle chatter that is owned as ‘mine’ by human existence (Dasein) and loosely described in everyday speech as an internal monologue streaming off within one’s head, commenting on everyone and everything that goes by. Quiescing the idle chatter is what Heidegger is doing in his discussion of conscience by presenting paradoxes. Heidegger does not say exactly how one causes such a quiescing. The suggestion is that quiescing occurs as follows: by reflecting on the paradoxes that Heidegger offers about authentic speech expressing itself as listening, calling silently; conscience saying what it has to express in stillness as if they were Zen Koans or other spiritual disciplines and meditation; or marshalling Gelassenheit (to use a term from the later Heidegger) that evokes relaxation, release from distraction in the busy world, and an attentive centring upon

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the one point. Instead of asserting something in his most paradoxical statements about authentic talk as listening and the silent call of care, Heidegger is doing something. That something is designed to quiet the idle chatter within one’s own thoughts. Once the quiescing is implemented, however transiently, then the individual is ready to listen – ready to empathize. This goes beyond what Heidegger explicitly says; but, from the perspective of recovering empathy as the form and foundation for authentic human interrelatedness, community, it is arguably what he should have said. This opens the way for a turn from being in the world to individual intentionality (and mineness), which, while not necessarily Heideggerian in character, are nevertheless not starkly at odds with his approach. The amazing thing is that despite numerous analyses of intentionality and empathy, it has been overlooked that what empathy brings to experience is fundamentally the other and the individual in community. The person implementing empathy does not have to build an epistemological connection from the individual to the other because empathy is precisely that which provides the other and the individual in community as an essential aspect of its functioning. The intending of the other in empathy is part of the meaning of empathy without which empathy would not make sense. But this is not what in another context would be called a simple analytic proposition. The intending of the other in empathy is the intending of the other and the individual as part of a community. Empathy does not fall back into a mere analytic definition because the otherness intended is that of the individual and other in community on the basis of an experience of being human. The common humanness of the individual and the other is the basis in experience that extends the empathic intentionality of the individual to the other. Without the other, the individual loses his own humanness. The one can only intend the humanness of the other in empathy if he has his own humanness from the other. But how? Light dawns gradually over the whole. The individual and the other are distinct; and their mutual humanness is acknowledged and recognized in paradigm encounters in limiting experiences and extreme situations as documented in folktales, literature, historical narrative and storytelling.4 Yet, in the end, one of the most powerful arguments on behalf of the irreducibility of empathy is indirect, the reduction to absurdity. If we assume that there is no such thing as empathy, then individuals are reduced to emotional zombies in a broad sense of the word ‘emotional’. The affective, sensory, feeling-oriented expressions of animate life that give humans (and indeed some of the higher mammals)

Introduction

11

access to one another in relationship are no longer available. Without empathy, individual human beings would not be able to grasp emotions as emotions; and life would be devoid of the personal fulfilment – the interpersonal meanings – that make it worth living. Since the assumption that empathy does not exist results in a counter-example based on our rich grasp of the animate expressions of life (affective, sensory, emotional) of other individuals – our experience of the human world – the initial assumption was inaccurate. Nor is it always necessary to perform a thought experiment. Surgical intervention at the neurological level is a rather blunt instrument, but provides an example that has been recruited by experimental philosophy. R. Joseph describes the loss of receptivity to the emotional expressions of others – what this work, not necessarily Joseph, grasps as ‘empathic receptivity’ – in the case of an individual who had surgery to the amygdale to control severe seizures (Joseph 1993). Though the surgery succeeded without negatively impacting basic cognitive skills such as arithmetic and language, interaction with people lost its emotional weight and the individual no longer had interest in other people as sources of spontaneous emotional response. He was indifferent to others as sources of emotional reaction and feedback. He ‘knew’ his friends in the sense that he would have been able to identify them in a police line up, but he no longer recognized them as friends. He did not welcome them. He was neither glad nor distressed to see them. In that sense, his friends said he acted as if he did not know them. Without empathy, they were strangers, which reduced them from being human friends to being thing-like entities in the environment. As noted, surgery is a blunt instrument; and it is not clear whether the loss of affectedness took down the related empathic functionality or vice versa. However, the point is that without the enabling capabilities of empathy, even though one’s cognitions are intact, life becomes empty and does not matter any longer in the way that it matters to human beings engaged in ordinary human living. Empathy is a form of receptivity that provides input to further processing which results in (empathic) knowledge of another individual. An individual comes to know what another is feeling because she or he feels it too. The other’s feeling is the cause of a feeling that is mine and is sufficiently similar to that which the other is experiencing so as to provide a common set of conditions of satisfaction, not the same token feeling. This is already fraught with metaphysical implications since it may seem to imply that there is one affect

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Empathy in the Context of Philosophy

(sensation or emotion) shared by two individuals. However, that need not be the case, nor is it. The affect is qualitatively similar, isomorphic, between two individuals, but numerically (and ontologically) there are two affects. There is a whole realm of vicarious experiences including not only sensations, where pain is a key paradigm, but moods, emotions of various kinds, and other forms of affectedness, real and imaginary, in which we are passive, that are also relevant. It is these affections (pathe) of the soul, as Aristotle called them, which make us human. However, if, at the start, the argument on behalf of the central role of empathy in enabling the relationship with the other individual as a human is indirect, it does not remain so for long. Empathy is what makes us human. Empathy is a special form of receptivity to the expressions of animate life of other individuals, although it is not only a form of receptivity. A comparison may be useful. Empathy relates to the expressions of feelings by living beings the way that vision relates to things that reflect visible light in the direction of our eyes or the way hearing relates to the audition of things that reflect sound waves in the direction of the inner ear. Receptivity – data capture – occurs and there is also additional upstream processing and interpretation of the data. Of course, empathy is not one of the five senses. It builds on them and even survives the loss of one or another of them. My position in this work is completely neutral as to whether empathy as a form of receptivity is modular (Fodor 1983; Baron-Cohn 1995) and physiologically isolable such as echo location or the ultraviolet light navigation of bees (Nagel 1974; Wehner 1976).

The neurology of empathy If a phenomenon such as empathy lacks a plausible implementation mechanism and cannot plausibly be related to the physical and biological basis of being human (humanness), then it remains a mere idea or concept without existence. In spite of the testimony of phenomenology, hermeneutics and the analysis of language, substantial doubts remain in both the scientific and everyday worlds about whether such a thing as empathy really exists. From the perspective of the philosophical significance of neurology for empathy, the suggestion is that mirror neurons come into their own as an implementation mechanism for empathy. Those undertaking an inquiry into empathy prior to the identification of mirror neurons had to collect reminders from obscure

Introduction

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corners of the literature that something = x provides the basis for emotional contagion, gut reactions, vicarious experience, non-human forms of receptivity such as echolocation (bat) and perception of ultraviolet light rays (some insects). Then the misunderstandings – mostly innocent but occasionally devious – begin. Does that mean empathy is emotional contagion? Reducible to emotional contagion? In reply, it is explanatorily elegant to be able to trace back different phenomena to an underlying neurological mechanism. The latter then gets handled by a variety of different causal, representational and phenomenal processes that, depending on context, result in a variety of distinct things – emotional contagion, empathy and so on. Further debates about which, if any, is fundamental are then better able to be adjudicated. Once again, from the perspective of neurology, what is surprising is that the neurological mechanism sub-serving empathy has turned out to be so simple. Researchers were expecting something as intricate and multi-faceted as empathy itself – a neural network of amazing complexity and depth, lacking in semantic transparency. Instead a one-to-one correlation is shown to occur between the respective discharging of a set of neurons in one individual performing an action or experiencing a pain and the corresponding discharge of neurons in the observing other. As one individual, A, performs a simple action or experiences a sensation, an isomorphic set of neurons is discharged in the other individual, B, who is observing individual A. In simplest terms, this is how one organism can possibly come to have an experience qualitatively similar to what another organism is experiencing – the same set of neurons discharge in the two related organisms. That’s it. Everything else is theory building. Yet significant theorizing has occurred. The inquiry transgresses levels of analysis from the well-defined domains of neurology and social psychology with its distinctions of human social interrelations at the level of folk (social) psychology into that of the shared manifold. Vitorio Gallese’s ‘shared manifold hypothesis’ is a dense, interactive ‘causal thicket’ of several interrelated domains.5 Combined in this construct are social interrelations, our phenomenal experience of the other, the emergent properties of being human, vicarious experience, intentionality and the meaning, including linguistic meaning, with which we humans give an account of our experience. The translation is indeterminate. The neurological research on mirror neurons is well documented and is not further explored here (Decety et al. 2003, 2004, 2006).

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Empathy and ethics From another perspective and tradition, empathy has a core that is essentially ethical. Empathy is an important way in which the sufferings and joys of another individual are disclosed to one. Yet empathy in and of itself alone does not imply that one should do anything about the suffering. Nothing necessarily follows morally from empathy itself for action; any required or morally meritorious actions follow from morality, not empathy. Theoretically torturers can use empathy to be even more diabolical in devising the suffering and pain inflicted on the victims. Practically speaking, examples can be found of Nazis in a leadership role using empathy to rally murderers to do a better job of murdering. Being better Nazis did not increase moral worth and make these individuals better human beings. Empathy does not save the perpetrators from violating the moral law or being bad apples. The moral opportunity as well as the requirement to take action to alleviate the suffering of a fellow human being, including altruistic behaviour, follows primarily from morality, not from empathy. By all means, ‘Act so as to reduce the pain in the world’. Yes, one should so act. Still, how does one know the other is in pain? In any particular situation, altruism without empathy is like a concept without intuition. Empathy provides an implementation of the possibility of altruism. How does one know the other is in pain on this particular, ontic occasion? The answer is empathy. This is separate from the approach in which empathy is proposed as a basis for an ethics of caring, whether as part of a new moral paradigm or consistent with the existing one (Slote 2007). From another perspective, both empathy and altruism emerge simultaneously in the question ‘How would you feel if this [hurt] happened to you?’ (for example, Nagel 1970: 106). If one is making a moral argument, this question invites an altruistic response to act so as to reduce the physical pain or suffering of the other individual. This gives altruism priority. If one is making an ontological (or epistemological) argument, even if such arguments are rare today, then the invitation is to identify a vicarious experience that discloses the other individual and becomes the basis for knowing how the other feels because one has a qualitatively similar experience. This gives empathy priority. Yet these two responses are never far apart. Many applications of empathy pure-and-simple invite an elaboration of concern for the other. This elaboration stops short of direct intervention for the other’s physical well-being and yet targets the integrity and well being of the other in an emotional form. In turn,

Introduction

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this points to a rule of thumb that altruism has traditionally addressed the physical danger and suffering of the other; whereas empathy has been noncommittal about the physical, preferring to target the affective dimension (including emotion and sensation). (See also ‘Empathy and Altruism’.)

1 A Heideggerian Interpretation of Empathy

Abstract In Heidegger’s Being and Time, the alternative of being with other individuals inauthentically is contrasted with authentically being alone in the face of death, one’s own individualizing and inevitable demise. The third choice of authentically being with other human beings is neglected, relegated to a few parenthetical remarks that dismiss empathy (Einfühlung). The possibility of authentic being human with others is delimited but, for the most part, not developed. This chapter gathers together and develops those remarks, applying the basic Heideggerian distinctions of affectedness, understanding, interpretation, assertion and speech to an interpretation and implementation of empathy.

Authentic being with others is neglected in Being and Time The challenge is this: Heidegger has much to contribute to our understanding of empathy, freeing it from entanglements in philosophical puzzles, cognitive disputes, existentialism and the penumbra of spiritual fog. That said, he would not necessarily have felt the undertaking to be justified. For Heidegger, empathy was derivative and not foundational for human interrelations. It was empirical not ontological, a superficial and inauthentic way of being – even worse, a module in faculty psychology, at best, philosophical anthropology. The argument of this chapter is that, when properly engaged and cleared in the spirit of key Heideggerian distinctions, empathy moves from a footnote to a foundation of human relations. This argument 16

A Heideggerian Interpretation of Empathy 17

takes distinctions in Heidegger’s design of a human being (Dasein) that articulate the structure of human being in the world with other human beings. It shows how these distinctions provide a clearing for empathy as the foundation of human interrelations. This results in a rehabilitation of empathy and an authentic definition and implementation of empathy in the spirit of Heidegger’s approach. However, this definition must be wrested from what Heidegger explicitly says. It must also amplify what is understood in the everyday meaning of empathy as coming to appreciate what another individual feels because one feels it too. This chapter will thus revise Heidegger’s dismissal of empathy; and provide what is, in effect, a description of a human being with another that was arguably missing from Being and Time. Since it was Heidegger that dismissed empathy as not worthy of being the ‘ontological bridge’ between individual human beings, we shall begin with a reinterpretation of Heidegger’s explicit statement, thus retrieving empathy as the foundation of human relatedness.

Empathy – the ontological bridge between selves? Naturally much turns on what is meant by the ordinary, everyday ‘human being with one another’ (Mitdasein) and the closely related ontological distinction, being-with (Mitsein). But then the logic is direct enough. If empathy is really the foundation of human being with one another, then the syllogism is simple. Being with one another is the foundation of the ontological bridge between selves; empathy is authentic being with one another; therefore, empathy is the foundation of the ontological bridge between selves. Of course, Heidegger uses ‘bridge’ as a metaphor to be dismissed; however, it points to empathy as the possibility of authentic being with the other. The matter is complicated in that Mitdasein is a structure that is called out as significant but arguably incompletely developed in Being and Time. After the famous Heideggerian Turn (Kehre) from human being to the event of being occurs, issues relevant to individual human beings are off the critical path (Richardson 1963). The result is that authentic human being with one another is not fully developed. This work proposes to fill the gap. A fundamental analysis of human being with one another as empathy is provided by this chapter (and the next two). Arguably this restores the balance between ‘human being’ and ‘being’ (as that which is ultimately worthy of thinking, as Heidegger phrases it); so that both the early and the late Heidegger are able to make a contribution to the foundation of human interrelations.

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This turn away from human being to being as such is not just another lost opportunity nor is it an exclusive choice. An intrinsic motivation for such an inquiry into empathy is the way in which the concept of empathy itself has failed to live up to its full potential and is a function of the distortions to which the term has been subjected.1 The argument here is that a fundamental analysis of empathy is capable of freeing it for its full potential as the foundation of human relations. By way of introduction, a pre-ontological document that bears witness to this is the science fiction novella of Philip K. Dick (‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ (1969); see also the movie Blade Runner) – totally different yet parallel to the folktale about Grüseln in which humanness is delimited by empathy. Without empathy, individual human being (Dasein) is reduced to the status of robotic automata as in some negative fantasy of the future, as depicted in the movie Blade Runner where the humans have lost their empathy, the clones are sufficiently advanced to acquire it and (almost) everyone behaves violently. This is far from being proof; however, a pattern is starting to emerge. Nor is this to say that yet another scholarly treatise will reduce the suffering in the world; but cleared and undistorted, empathy does (Kaj Björkqvist 2007). Meanwhile, we are left to wrest the phenomena of empathy from the historical matrix in which it was embedded and to which Heidegger himself was limited. The historical matrix by which ‘empathy’ was constrained Heidegger is on target when he asserts that ‘the theoretic problematic of understanding other minds’ looms large, even if ‘other minds’ are not the issue. For Heidegger, the ‘other mind’ is readily accessible as being in the world.2 For Heidegger, the philosophical puzzle of other minds does not arise at all as an issue in theory of knowledge or even theory of being (‘ontology’). A human being’s participation in the public group is complemented by the public’s participation in the constitution of the individual – in the community of Mitsein (ontological) and Mitdasein (ontic). If the other is a constituent of the individual, then the problem of transcendental solipsism does not have anything like the same problematic meaning for Heidegger as for his teacher or philosophical adversaries. Edmund Husserl’s solution is significantly different than Heidegger’s. In the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, Husserl constitutes the sense ‘other’ within the system ‘own’. Husserl’s ‘system of ownness’ was the latter’s take on Heidegger’s statement that ‘Dasein is always mine’, where ‘mineness’ is translated back into phenomenology. Heidegger disclosed a world of human beings in interrelations (Mitsein) already open and receptive to one another (H127). This was the point at which

A Heideggerian Interpretation of Empathy 19

Husserl suggested that Heidegger was no longer doing phenomenology in Husserl’s sense of the word; and, in fact, Husserl was right on this point. In particular, what Heidegger was doing was engaging in a dialogue with the philosopher Max Scheler. The following are evidence of the proximity of Heidegger to Scheler (except that Heidegger discards the vocabulary of ‘consciousness’ in favour of his own radically innovative idiom). Both Heidegger and Scheler begin with an undifferentiated community of engaged practice, and then distinguish the individual and other within this inter-human context: By ‘others’ we do not mean everyone else but me – those over against whom the ‘I’ stands out. They are rather those from whom for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself – those among whom one is too. (Heidegger 1927b: H118) And from Scheler (1913/1922: 247): A man tends, in the first instance, to live more in others than in himself; more in the community than in his own individuality.3 The first access to the self of the individual human being is through others. The individual is one among many of the anonymous ‘others’. The individual does not distinguish him- or herself from them. Individuals are content to follow the authority of these anonymous others. We do what ‘they say’. We do what ‘one does’, conforming to implicit norms of behaviour. ‘Don’t let them see you sweat’. ‘Don’t rock the boat’. ‘The nail that sticks out gets pounded down’. Heidegger is not proposing any revisions in the structure of the everyday ‘they’ self (also designated as ‘the one’ (das Man)), although he has often been read as engaging in social criticism and protesting against the decline to mass man. One might think of Marcuse’s ‘one dimensional man’, Riesman’s ‘lonely crowd’ and Nietzsche’s ‘herd instinct’. It is worth noting that the German language and Scheler distinguish Mitgefühl – variously rendered as ‘feeling with’, ‘sharing feeling’ or ‘sympathy’ – and Nachgefühl and Nachfühlen – ‘feeling like’, ‘feeling after’, an ‘after-image-like-feeling’ or, most precisely, ‘vicarious feeling’. Both are distinct from pity or compassion (Mitleid). The role of vicarious feeling and experience will loom large as an input to empathic processing as will emerge in the course of this analysis. In another sense

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and at so many levels, empathy, though mentioned, is what is missing from Heidegger’s approach. Yet there is a place for it in Heidegger’s analysis.

‘Empathy’ – the name of a problem Once a human being is deprived of – de-worlded from – his human world and abstracted into the subject – and is disconnected from the environment of communal engagements and attachments, then even empathy cannot undo the fragmentation. Empathy, when narrowly defined as a form of cognition, cannot provide the ‘first ontological bridge from one’s own subject . . . to the other subject, who is initially quite inaccessible’ unless these individuals are open and receptive towards one another (Heidegger 1927b: H124). But if one only grants that human beings live in an interrelational world of affective, conversational, practical understanding, then empathy can be a way of overcoming the contingent breakdowns in sociability (‘lack of intimacy’) even if social relations are distorted, inauthentic misunderstandings: ‘Empathy’ does not first constitute being-with: only on the basis of being-with does ‘empathy’ become possible: it gets its motivation from the lack of intimacy of the dominant modes of being-with. (Heidegger 1927b: H125) Here ‘empathy’ is more the title of a problem than the answer to one. Once human beings are treated scientifically as things present at hand to be observed and described in abstraction from their habitat (‘habitus’) in the inter-human world, our puzzlement about the understandability of their behaviour begins to grow. Once the world is reduced to a sphere of ownness in which it is reflected in transcendental consciousness, the world becomes a lonely place for the self itself and very alone (‘solus ipse’). ‘The theoretic problematic of understanding other minds’ gets a foothold; and an alternating egocentrism and behaviourism are variations on a theme of ‘other minds’ (Heidegger 1927b: H124). Heidegger writes: But the fact that ‘empathy’ is not a primordial existential phenomenon . . . does not mean that there is nothing problematic about it. The special hermeneutic of empathy will have to show how beingwith-one-another [Miteinandersein] and human being’s knowing of himself are led astray and obstructed by the various possibilities

A Heideggerian Interpretation of Empathy 21

of being which human being himself possesses, so that genuine ‘understanding’ gets suppressed, and human being takes refuge in substitutes; the possibility of understanding the other correctly presupposes such a hermeneutic. (Heidegger 1927b: H125) The establishment of the possibility of authentic human interrelations with the other turns on the success of a ‘hermeneutic of empathy’. In turn, the hermeneutic of empathy has to disentangle everyday forms of being-with-one-another from the authentic being-with-one-another of human beings. A feeling that something is missing As indicated, ‘being-with-one-another [Miteinandersein]’ can be led astray into mere role playing or into egocentrism. Such role playing is not normatively critiqued by Heidegger in this context. Nor should it be. It is just what human beings do; however, it is not authentic being with one another. Given Heidegger’s explicit position, the reader cannot help but feel that something is missing. Where is authentic being with one another? The hermeneutic of empathy is supposed to provide the presupposition for understanding the other, but, according to Heidegger, empathy itself is not ‘primordial’. ‘Being-with-one-another’ falls into busy distractions of the everyday ‘rat race’, role playing, or keeping up with the Joneses. This is what human beings do. It is a part of the way humans were designed. It is normal. It is not ‘bad’ or ‘pathological’. It is one of the possibilities that human beings already possess. But it is a refuge and a substitute. A substitute for what? For authentic human interrelations! If empathy is not a fundamental and authentic way of being with one another as human beings, then what is? This is not just a rhetorical question; it is an assignment. The question for any reader who is inspired by Heidegger’s account of human existence, but is not necessarily constrained by its undeveloped possibilities, is: can an account of interrelations be provided in which the mask of inauthenticity drops away and human being in the full sense (not just atomized ego poles) are able to meet one another in empathic interaction? The point here is not so much an objection to what Heidegger has written, especially given his conditions and qualifications, as a call for amplification. We are seeking the possibility of authentic human interrelations. With the exception of the way in which ‘empathy’ is dismissed by Heidegger, to which this approach takes strong exception, all of what

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Heidegger says is relevant to the amplification of a positive and foundational sense of empathy. This ‘hermeneutic of empathy’ constitutes an unwritten chapter of Being and Time. This is an incompleteness at a different level and prior to the unwritten third part of the first half and the entirety of Part II of Being and Time. In a sense, this is a much more modest incompleteness, relating to the possibility of creating a place for authentic human inter-relations within the scope and limits of the first half. The possibility of authentic human interrelations Heidegger has much to contribute to authentic being with one another. A first clue is available as Heidegger acknowledges the possibility of authentic human being-with-others in the discussion of caring for – Fürsorge – translated as ‘solicitude’, ‘concern’ or literally as ‘caring for’. The argument of this section is to develop this clue further. There is the possibility of a concern [Fürsorge] which does not so much leap in for the other as leap ahead of him, not in order to take ‘care’ [Sorge] away from him, but to first give it back to him as such. This concern [Fürsorge] which essentially pertains to authentic care [die eigentlich Sorge]; that is, the existence of the other, and not to a what which it takes care of, helps the other to become transparent to himself in his care and free for it. (Heidegger 1927b: 115/H122) If this is not an explicit description of – or better, re-description of – empathy, then it still comes very close. Occurring just prior to the analysis of care as the fundamental structure and process of human being, Heidegger knows very well that these are powerful terms that have not yet been made the target of an explicit inquiry. But, as indicated, ‘caring for’ is less developed in Heidegger than the individuation of the human being in the face of the inevitable and unavoidable anticipation of death. A detour through ontology At this point, a detour through ontology is required since the analysis invites a conversation about ‘being with human being’ and ontology is the access to ‘being’. It is as simple as that, although being simple does not mean easy. Heidegger recommends abandoning discourse about the subject, subjectivity, the cognitive self, empathy as a form of cognition of the other. All these are not ontologically fundamental. These are not

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nothing – but they are derivative. As noted, ‘consciousness’ is mentioned on the very last page of Being and Time (1927: H437) as having a positive structure above and beyond the ‘thinking thing’ into which it has been reified. This will be significant when we engage the intentional structure of empathy in detail (see Chapter 4). But prior to such engagement Heidegger grasps the other pole of the dilemma – the tendency of human existence to fall into conformity with what ‘one does’ in order to ‘look good’ to the anonymous norms of what ‘they all do’. Well and good. For the most part the way human beings show they are succeeding or just surviving is by coping with everyday busyness and breakdowns – struggling to make a living, winning at having ‘meaningful relationships’ with others, ‘making it’ professionally and personally, however one may define the details of success. But then a new challenge occurs – the self. A fine point of terminology is required to appreciate it. For Heidegger to be ‘authentic’ means to ‘be oneself’. ‘Authenticity’ is a terminological disguise for the human being’s (Dasein’s) self. The first principle of existentialism, that human being is always mine, lies behind the authentic or inauthentic dichotomy. It is hard to imagine what it would mean that a human being did not own its experience; and yet that is precisely the way individuals live their lives – speaking in the first person for clarity – someone else is responsible for what is happening to me – the boss, wife or the economy – not me. I do not ‘own’ the situation into which I am thrown and on the basis of which I have to survive and prosper. In everyday busyness, coping and distractedness, the individual is not her- or himself, not her or his authentic self. The individual is carried along by conforming to what ‘one does’. The way in which human being is always mine – and never more than when human being is fleeing from its own existence – is the powerful way that Heidegger has of both appropriating and transforming much of the tradition around meditation, introspection, reflection and experiences that matter to the individual with aspirations and goals, without carrying forward the baggage of subjectivity. (The second principle of existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that human beings get to apply the existential distinctions into which they are originally thrown to themselves in a further parlaying forward of what matters to them and what possibilities they are committed to creating from the perspective of being human.) If one is inauthentic towards others in an account of role playing in everyday humanness, then one will be inauthentic towards oneself (Heidegger 1927a: H42f.). The self slips away again. It is not an isolated

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subject. Is it now a diffused bundle of social roles? How do we get access to the humanness of individual human beings, the self as a centre of spontaneous possibilities, the individual self as the ‘authentic’ centre of its own choices, possibilities and commitments – without succumbing to a superficial existentialism or humanism? Access to the authentic self will emerge in the course of the analysis in taking a stand – taking a stand in the face of death and taking a stand for the other in empathic human interrelations. However, before being able to understand how this is so, it will be useful to take a step back. Distinctions for a design for being human According to Heidegger, the way human beings work – ‘work’ in the sense of operate – is obviously different than either the scientific accounts of humans as parts of physical and biological nature or the pragmatic account of tools and instrumentality. Heidegger is clear that it is improper to apply distinctions such as categories of physical objects to human beings. Nor does it make sense to regard the human way of being as like that of tools and technology, although a pragmatic approach to worldly involvement does open up useful avenues for engagement. Human beings just have a different way of being – a different way of existing. The proposal here is to work with Heidegger’s different way of being by describing his ‘existentials’ as design distinctions for a human being. The design distinctions by which a human operates are ways of being for human being. These ways of being – summarized by Heidegger as the structures of human being of affectedness (including thrownness), understanding, interpretation, and speech – are named ‘existentialia’ (Heidegger 1927b: 70; H44) – for the way humans operate in existence, and the way human lives work or do not work. Again ‘work’ means succeeding in breakthroughs in what matters to human beings or failing in breakdowns. These design distinctions extend back into our contingent being in the world and the way humans are thrown into challenging situations not of the individuals’ own devising and are affectively open to them. Furthermore, we humans are designed such that we can make implicit decisions of which we are not necessarily aware and on that basis create new possibilities and commitments. Alternatively, we continue to live in the constraints of our everyday interpretation of existing, on-going possibilities. Humans implement these new or existing possibilities as particular interpretations; all the while making explicit declarations and commitments in language, also used to sustain and elaborate science, knowledge, social institutions.

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The point is that design distinctions are different than categories. This makes it clear that the distinctions by which human beings operate are different from those suitable for physical objects or tools. Note that ‘design distinctions’ is not a term used by Heidegger, but is an interpretation, and, most importantly, takes no position as to the source of what is really a function of this inquiry into empathy. There might be a single source, a designer (God) who unleashed these distinctions; a pragmatic projection of an intentional stance; an impersonal designer such as nature. ‘Design distinctions’ are a way of accessing and making sense of the phenomenon of human being in the world whose way of being Heidegger elaborates as ‘existentials’. It gives us a lever with which to open the intricate infrastructure of Heidegger’s text in such a way that both preserves its integrity and empowers us to exploit the significance of its undeveloped possibilities. The language of ‘design distinctions’ is in principle dispensable. Its merit lies in facilitating the conversation and getting us to listen anew to what we have heard so many times in the same form that it has become common and perhaps even a tad stale. Set up Some set up is required. This analysis will be applying the distinctions for designing a human being to authentic being with one another – that is, to empathic interrelatedness. In what follows, the account is Heidegger’s and based on a plausible reading of him unless otherwise noted. Where alternative ‘readings’ are possible that is noted. Remember, we are driving towards an interpretation that opens up empathy as the possibility of authentic being with the other. We now proceed to it. Each of the design distinctions has an authentic or inauthentic way of being. ‘Authentic’ means making a commitment and decision that opens and implements possibilities for humans that enrich the quality of life, promote human flourishing and deepen our shared humanness; and ‘inauthentic’ means succumbing to – falling into – the ‘rat race’ of looking good, controlling and manipulating others, pursuing selfish ends, gossiping, pseudo-intellectualism and busyness. Life is not a sequential process, and humans are constantly distracted, even spaced out, by the involvement with everyday concerns about making a living, avoiding the boss, pleasing the spouse and looking good in front of peers, friends and opponents, especially the latter. Likewise, each of these distinctions is schematized – applied and implemented – in its relationship to time as a whole with thrownness coming at us humans out of the past, understanding and interpretation projecting possibilities into the future and the present being grasped in the way humans bring

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to language the declarations of commitments in authenticity or lack of it. The unity of these time dimensions is consummated in the structure of care – the self of human being is caring about being human, an expression that, provocatively, does not distinguish one from the other. ‘Care’ starts out with an everyday meaning as in ‘caring about the details of life in all their trivialness and depth’, but is taken over and enriched with a multiplicity of distinctions that answer the question ‘Who is (a) human being?’ The definition is that caring is the spontaneous capability to choose commitments even in the face of death, living into the future, anxiously free from the grip of the past and creating possibility. What gives a measure of constancy to this self amidst the temporal flux and multidimensional caring will emerge in the encounter with the human being’s individualizing and inevitable possibility of death – and, under this interpretation, in the empathic encounter with the other. Dasein (the human being) is individualized by death out of its distractedness of the conformity to the crowd; and Dasein is humanized by its encounter with the other, who gives Dasein its humanness. Without the other, the human being (Dasein) dies a kind of affective, spiritual death similar to being an emotional zombie to whom nothing matters. The introduction of the other is an interpretation of Heidegger based on the interpretation of a hermeneutic of empathy into which further inquiry is required. In everyday being with one another, designated as ‘human beingwith’ (Mitdasein) – a human being is for the most part entangled in everyday coping and getting by. The involvement with others leads in the direction of the seemingly inevitable routines of everyday life in which humans have a tendency to live out of the possibilities already predefined by conformity and staying out of trouble – gossip (‘idle talk’), not asking too many questions (‘superficial curiosity’), conforming to ‘the letter of the law’ and ‘gaming the system’ (‘ambiguity’), and avoiding responsibility for the contingent circumstances into which people are thrown (‘thrownness’). Taking over these predefined possibilities, especially in an indecisive, automatic pilot way, defines ‘inauthenticity’. No possibility, or, at best, limited possibilities that exist as dictated by the past and by what ‘one does’. But a tendency is not inevitability. Humans can recover their authentic selves. Human beings are led into authenticity when the individual confronts finitude in the necessity of death, which individualizes each and every one down to his or her own possibility of not being. This encounter with death acts as a wake up call to individual humans to get engaged with what authentically matters and makes a difference.

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Thus, the equation which receives the greater part of the analysis in Heidegger: the individual (Dasein) confronts his or her death authentically and alone – since no one else can die the individual’s death for him; or the individual is with others inauthentically for the most part, distractedly keeping busy with ‘making it’ in the world of everyday concerns. This is not an absolute choice – inauthentically with others or authentic in the face of death, alone – and it would be a false choice in reading Heidegger, but one must read ‘between the lines’ to get the full impact.

Honing in on the neglected interpretation This is the way human beings are designed – inauthentically with others and, more rarely, authentically alone and individualized (self-aware) in the face of death. Given the distractedness in the everyday, neither this dichotomy nor the alternatives are generally acknowledged. Furthermore, no one – least of all Heidegger – is proposing a redesign. However, the result is that two other readings (‘interpretations’) are neglected. Two additional interpretations (‘possibilities’) are available – that (1) an individual may relate to death inauthentically and that (2) an individual may be with others authentically. These readings receive some attention in Heidegger, but significantly less so. The first leads to a kind of ‘analysis paralysis’ where preoccupation with death becomes an obstacle to deciding a course of action. It results in a stereotype of the existential hero, or anti-hero, who is so overwhelmed by possibility that he ends up like Buridian’s donkey, unable to choose. This leads to the existentialist fallacy – and stereotype – hanging out in dimly lit coffee houses, wearing one’s Che Guevara t-shirt, smoking Camel cigarettes, journaling about the meaninglessness of life, savouring the possibility of action. This alternative, although significant, shall not further engage us here. The second interpretation leads straight into the discussion of empathy and where empathy should be located – the unwritten chapter – in an analysis that draws towards the foundation of human being with one another. But since it is not in the surface structure of Being and Time, or at least not more than parenthetical remarks that are equivalent to a footnote, it requires further discussion and motivation. (See Figure 1.1 where ‘X’ marks the standard reading.) Look at the violent interpretations to which Heidegger subjects the writings of Kant, the pre-Socrates and other thinkers and poets. One has to grant a powerful originality in this rethinking. What about applying

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Individual human being Being together with other X

Authentic

Ownmost possibility commitment: being toward death

Special hermeneutic of empathy

X

Inauthentic

Caricature of existentialism

Das man (the one) the ‘They self’

Figure 1.1 The Possibility of Heidegger’s Special Hermeneutic of Empathy

some of Heidegger’s method to his own work? To interpret beingwith (Mitsein), being with human being (Mitdasein) and being with one another (Miteinandersein) as variations of a form of empathic relatedness is an act of interpretation, and, given Heidegger’s dismissal of empathy, a violent reinterpretation. It requires reading against the obvious and initial meaning of the two above-cited passages about empathy. The need for violent interpretation is due to our tendency to cover things up and to be distracted by everyday concerns, which, in this case, extends to empathy: [T]his being’s own tendency [is] to cover things up. Thus the existential analytic constantly has the character of doing violence, whether for the claim of the everyday interpretation or for its complacency and its tranquillized obviousness . . . And if being human [Dasein] mostly interprets itself in terms of its lostness in taking care of the ‘world,’ isn’t the determination of the ontic and existentiell possibilities and the existential analysis based upon them (in opposition to that lostness) the mode of its disclosure appropriate to this being? Does not then the violence of this project amount to freeing the undisguised phenomenal content of human being [Dasein]? (Heidegger 1927a: 288f./H311; H312f)

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The violence in question is rather like the violence that occurs in an archaeological dig when shovel and pick have to be used to excavate a dwelling buried under layers of sediment. What this inquiry is suggesting is that the use of empathy – the phenomenon, not the word – is both so pervasive and so well buried and forgotten by everyday automatic behaviour and its reactive responses – especially, but not exclusively, in Heidegger – that empathy will be disinterred only by a careful analysis of the details of the experience of the other as grasped in the key distinctions of affectedness, understanding, interpretation and speech (discourse). Heidegger’s call for a special hermeneutic of empathy applies his fundamental distinctions of human being in the world – affectedness, understanding, interpretation, assertion and speech – to human being with one another.4 One point of the all-too-brief summary of existentialia (Heidegger 1927b: 70; H44) as design distinctions is that each of the ontological principles about the way in which human beings be – that is, exist – will feed into the definition of empathy in its interpretation and amplification, and create a clearing for it in the next chapter. This opens an alternative approach to a special hermeneutic of empathy. It finds an alternative way between a human being who is alone and authentic in the face of death and one who is distracted and lost in the busyness of inauthentic being with others. In turn, this opens a reading, a third choice, that highlights an authentic being with others. This interpretation leads straight into an analysis of empathy – the unwritten chapter – as the foundation of human being with one another. But it is not in the surface structure of Being and Time, at least not more than parenthetical remarks, the equivalent to a footnote. It is to that task of expressing what has remained unsaid in Heidegger about a special hermeneutic of empathy to which we now turn.

2 Delivering Heidegger’s Hermeneutic of Empathy

Abstract This chapter amplifies and develops the scattered remarks on empathy with an analysis of human being with other human beings. The basic Heideggerian distinctions of affectedness, understanding, interpretation, assertion and speech are used to interpret and implement empathy. This is the delivery of the hermeneutic of empathy – applying these distinctions to empathy. Insight from the later Heidegger is integrated. A definition of empathy is produced in the spirit of Heidegger’s distinctions. This results in clearing the way for an implementation of empathy as the foundation of human interrelatedness and the implementation of Heidegger’s ‘Special Hermeneutic of Empathy’.

Human beings are designed to be affected by each other’s feelings The sharing of feelings, affections, emotions and moods is so pervasive and extensive that we live and breathe in an atmosphere of mutual affectivity. The individual ‘wakes up’ – that is, becomes aware – that she or he is at the effect of the affects of those she or he is engaging in being with. We say, ‘His displeasure could be felt.’ This extends to sensations, too, as when we wince at the sight of someone taking a nasty fall or are literally moved to tears at the sight of another’s tearful distress. The affectedness of empathy is formally the way in which an individual human being is disclosed to another in his affectivity. Affectedness is the way in which one individual is open to the emotional life of the other and the other’s expression of affects, sensations and passions, pleasures and pains, and moods. Make no mistake. Empathy is not reducible 30

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to affectedness; but affectedness is a significant distinction upon which empathic understanding, interpretation and speech will go to work. Heidegger gives priority to mood (Stimmung), which, as a word, says too much and too little. It captures aspects of tuning an instrument, being in agreement with other people and being disposed to have a specific feeling (Gefühlsanlage). The root ‘Stimme’ means ‘voice’, so the aural metaphor appears in the background. This includes the way humans wake up in a good or bad mood and so are thrown into a mood by reacting to a situation as it concerns the entire human being. Heidegger explicitly acknowledges the spectrum of affects such as joy, hope, enthusiasm, cheerfulness, boredom, sadness, melancholy, despair. He states that the most fundamental available analysis of the emotions, such as anger and happiness, is found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric (H138). Significantly Heidegger describes the way in which feelings are infectious (as we say), but objects to that way of speaking, while asserting that moods are not transferred. They are already there. [A] well-disposed person brings a good mood to a group. In this case does he produce in himself a psychic experience, in order then to transfer it to the others, like the way infectious germs wander from one organism to others? . . . Or another person is in a group that in its manner of being dampens and depresses everything; no one is outgoing. What do we learn from this? Moods are not accompanying phenomena; rather, they are the sort of thing that determines beingwith-one-another in advance. It seems as if, so to speak, a mood is in each case already there, like an atmosphere, in which we are steeped and by which we are thoroughly determined. It not only seems as if this were so, it is so; and in light of these facts, it is necessary to dispense with the psychology of feelings and experiences and consciousness. (Heidegger 1929/30: 100; see also Dreyfus 1985: 171) Heidegger dismisses the metaphor of feelings being ‘infectious’. Here, one suspects that his disparaging remarks about psychology refer to Lipps ‘inner imitation’ or Scheler’s perception of the other (Fremdwahrnehmung) or Husserl’s use of transcendental subjectivity. The mood moves across an articulation point – a boundary between the individual and its milieu. Heidegger’s analysis of moods remains at the level of phenomenological description, albeit a penetrating and incisive one. Given the occurrences of misunderstanding, breakdowns and failed communications between humans, further analysis of what happens at the

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articulation point will be useful. Heidegger is on target in identifying the communicability of affect as given in advance. In order for feelings to be communicable, individuals must be open to the experiences human beings have together with others. How and where the boundary between the context and what belongs to the ‘mineness’ of the individual human being (Dasein) makes a difference. It is to that difference that we now turn.

Navigating the ‘inner–outer’ divide: mineness and displaced perception If you want to find out about your mood, do not look inward, look at the situation you are in, look at the ‘there’, look at the context. The mood is a displaced sensory-affective experience about how and why the situation matters to you. The gaiety or fear that sweeps through the individuals at a party or in a crowd is a sensory-affective complex that would be individually available for direction and control of behaviour and may even be available for transient attentional awareness (introspection); but the panic or gaiety is not a source of cognition as it functions in causing the mass behaviour of the crowd. That is why the behaviour is ‘mass behaviour’, ‘crowd behaviour’, rather than the coordinated team of a group of individuals trying to follow a plan. The individual in the crowd who is gripped by it does not have a functioning concept of a process of emotional contagion. One contemporary philosopher who succeeds in navigating the divide between inner and outer is Fred Dretske (1981, 1995). Dretske provides an account of what neither Heidegger nor anyone has been able to explain completely, why a mood (Stimmung) that is part of a milieu at a party gets experienced as mine (Heidegger 1927b: H136). Heidegger defines a mood as the way in which the world is disclosed to human existence (Dasein), even though existence turns away from what is disclosed by appropriating it – one might say ‘encoding’ it or describing it – as internal. But the mystery remains – the individual is in a good or a bad mood, but that mood is captured and described (‘encoded’) as inner, as mine, and the inner is distinct from the environment. The answer lies in a way of being that parallels Dretske’s displaced perception, what can be described as ‘displaced affectivity’. Consider the following. In a mood, the individual experiences happiness, gaiety (‘fun’), panic or rage as being internal; but they are functionally caused by being part of a crowd or group in which the communicability of affect is transmitted by means of a process shared at the level of the organism, for

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example, hypothesized to be mirror neurons (the underlying mechanism is not critical for the argument at this point). Of course, emotional contagion is not empathy, but rather relies on a mechanism that also provides input to the empathic process – in which affects are subsymbolically transmitted through a crowd or from one individual to another without awareness that it is not an individual emotion but an occurring communicability of affect. Dretske develops the notion of ‘displaced perception’, which is independent of Heidegger’s analysis of moods and so on, but functions analogously. A system gets information about itself by perceptively attending to, not itself but, what it perceives in the environment (‘externally’) plus a conceptualization about it such as belief (Dretske 1995: 53). This becomes the source of the limited, deflated first-person authority that we do have, especially about the content of our external experiences as these are reflected by perception that is displaced across the boundary between the individual and the environment. This is also why introspection, according to Dretske, has no phenomenology of its own. Translated into a Heideggerian idiom, the phenomenology of introspection is derivative on a form of mineness. This point deserves further inquiry. For example, mineness is not about how the experience of blue of the sky is able to be corrected against future experiences (it is); or, as philosophers like to put it, is ‘incorrigible’ (it is not); is derivative (it is); comes later (it does); is captured in a concept and is re-identifiable (it is in this case); is an arbitrary abstraction from and partitioning of experience in which the sky is ‘de-worlded’ (seems likely); or any other consideration. The blueness of the sky belongs to the sky and is experienced as being a public, shareable, objective property of the atmosphere on a clear day ‘out there’ until the individual examines the experience of blueness in its own right. Then the experience of blue becomes mine. This may happen as a check on the accuracy of the experience in the pragmatic process of evaluating the weather to determine if a rain coat is required or as part of training in colour perception or in painting a picture of a landscape or as part of a theoretic study of the sky or for a host of arbitrary other reasons. The distinction is made between the blue and the experience of blue as mine. Only the latter, the experience, is mine. A further crucial partitioning of experience occurs. The experience of blue is mine and gets described and, in effect, encoded as ‘inner’ in so far as it is ‘mine’. This implies nothing about the blue being a sense datum, being re-identifiable (or not), being misleading or being shareable with others. It does imply that a boundary exists between an individual and

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what is non-individual, that is, a world of other things and their relationships (instrumental, theoretic, affective and so on), including other individuals, that are not mine. It does imply that the individual is able to bring to her or his experience, or discover in her or his experience, a distinction that gets encoded as the distinction ‘inner versus outer’. The individuality and the ‘innerness’ of the inner is able to be translated without remainder into ‘my awareness’, ‘my experience’ or simply ‘mineness’. The ‘inner’ drops out in proper Heideggerian fashion. Although Dretske does not invoke ‘mineness’, this distinction would have been useful to him. The phenomenology of introspection is the qualitative mineness that accompanies the experience of blue of the sky. Introspectively, the blue is mine – my experience of blue – not the sky’s. But one learns about the experience by looking outward at the sky. Note that ‘looking outward at the sky’ is identical to ‘looking at the sky’. The ‘outward’ drops out. Still, ‘looking at the sky’ is distinct from ‘being aware of my experience of blue’. The blue of the sky is not mine, not inward, but the experience of blue is mine. The point? Likewise with moods. The phenomenology of my good mood is the qualitative mineness that accompanies the experience of the party. Introspectively, the fun is mine – my experience of fun – not the party’s. But one articulates, conceptualizes and expresses the fun by considering events at the party, not by looking inward at the experience of fun as an experience. In parallel with the example of the sky, the fun occurring at the party – the fun party – is not mine, not inward, but the experience of fun is mine. Introspectively, the fun is mine – my experience of fun – not the party’s. But one articulates the experience by looking outward at the party and the entertaining, fun events occurring at it. The process of displaced perception recruits a distinction between the individual’s experience and the context of experience. This enables the properties – the blue of the sky or the fun of the party – that are made distinct in the experience to be re-identified. In parallel, a process of displaced affectivity results in the world and things in it mattering to the individual. This corresponds to a vicarious experience, which likewise is not a complete empathic experience, but has reference to the other as the candidate cause of the vicariousness of the experience. A vicarious feeling is an affect caused by another that gets described, encoded as internal, as mine. Once again, saying the experience is ‘inner’ is a misleading way of saying it is ‘mine’. We now turn to vicarious feeling, which, like moods (but distinct from moods) are my experiences as a function of displaced experiences, including perceptions, that are mine.

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The example of vicarious feeling In order for feelings to be communicable, affects to be ‘infectious’ or an individual to experience a ‘gut reaction’, individuals must be open to experiences together with others and have the capacity to receive these feelings. For example, individuals spontaneously join in the merriment, and share a laugh with a friend. Children of all ages have experienced uncontrollable laughing or crying in playing with friends or being punished for some transgression. One gets a picture of a dam bursting, and a flood gushing forth – that is, a picture of a catharsis. The picture of the scared skin of an injured person makes one’s own skin tingle and itch. The observer also clenches her or his teeth. Whether or not the individual likes it, the other’s feelings – the healing burn or the nausea – are incarnated in her or his own flesh. This is as close as one individual can come to having an after-image of another’s sensations. My skin resonates with that in the picture, and itches and tingles like a scar tends to do. Just because we are human beings, we are open to various feelings, sensations and affects. This openness is not empathy; it is the basis on which a particular empathic receptivity is developed in this or that particular situation. This capacity for being affected by our inter-human milieu – our being with one another – is a form of receptivity on which a wide variety of empathic phenomena build. In particular, ordinary language continues to offer clues. We say, ‘His displeasure could be felt.’ A special, counterpart feeling is acknowledged (for example, Austin 1946) that one experiences in the presence of a really strong outburst of anger, provided, however, it is not directed at one, in which case one would likely experience fear. Likewise, it is quite sensible to say, ‘I can feel for you vicariously, but I have no sympathy for you’ (where ‘sympathy’ means ‘pity’). Such vicarious feelings are not cognitively relevant, for they are a result of openness to the other from which one does not draw any further cognitive or ethical conclusion. The novelist, the playwright and the historian all deploy the capacity for vicarious feeling – and many other talents too – in producing their accounts of human relations, which, in turn, arouse similar responses in the reader’s own openness. This leads to an important distinction. Vicarious experience is different from shared feeling. In vicarious feeling, one does experience, in a qualitatively similar and numerically different feeling, what the other is feeling. One does not just know the answer to the question, ‘What is the other feeling?’ or assert that the other has a feeling (although these latter may be true). Nor is a vicarious feeling the same as having the experience itself. There is no way for the novelist or historian to share the feelings of the people about

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whom he is writing in the sense of being there with them. In the case of Tolstoy, who presents a hybrid case of a novelist-historian, he would have had to live during the Napoleonic Wars to experience the Battle of Borodino set forth so compellingly in War and Peace. He does not share the experience of the participants in this battle, although he employs and conveys and expresses in his narrative a sense of the confusion, chaos, heroism and fear that unfolded at the front line as Prince Andre directed unhitching the artillery, sitting high in the saddle, under direct enemy fire. The reader also gets Andre’s sense of calmness under fire – it is a vicarious sense. Vicarious experience leads an individual to experience aspects of the situation in a disinterested way in comparison with sharing the feelings, in which the individual is a participant. Vicarious feeling does not affect one’s actions directly. The person is open to the feeling, and repeats it in a fundamental sense of retrieving it as a possibility. There is a reproduction of the feeling, a representation of the feeling, which is prior to any cognitive significance and does not influence the individual to act, to become involved, to participate. On the other hand, in shared feelings, one recognizes that the situation requires more than mere receptivity. One participates, becomes involved. For example, the peasant who goes to the theatre for the first time, seeing Brutus and the assassins readying to slay Julius Caesar in the play, and jumps up onto the stage. His fear and excitement become motives to engagement instead of vicarious experiences of detached theatrical drama. The other shows up in the paradigm of respect At this point, the special hermeneutic of empathy continues its amplification of Heidegger. It proposes a paradigm of affectivity for empathy which Heidegger did not envision, although he explicitly calls out ‘respect’ (Achtung) in his Kant book as authentic being-as-self (1929: 165; §30). Yet, for Heidegger, human interrelations have an irreducible dimension of integrity as wholeness, not in the narrow sense of judging and evaluating the other’s behaviour in its minute moral idiosyncrasies and ethical peculiarities, but in the sense of a practice disclosed as the experience of respect towards others that leaves the other whole and in integrity, abstracting from all the contingent circumstances, the conflicts of interest and self-interests that shape and bias a person’s perceptions, inclinations and judgments. The phenomenology is that every vicarious experience of the other has at its kernel a nucleus of respect for the other, a (dis)interested openness to what is occurring that leaves the other complete and whole

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in the other person’s own experience. The other is left with the awareness that he or she is not alone but free to create and express possibilities and make commitments no matter how limiting one’s facticity (thrownness) may seem to be in the moment. The mood of respect is a paradigm here, which does not mean an awareness of the moral law (as it would in Kant or even Scheler); rather it means a clearing for the other to create possibilities. It means a clearing for care, in the strict Heideggerian sense, in which care includes the other in empathic being with. (An ethics of Mitdasein has subsequently been derived.)1 Finally, at this point, the assertion that respect is the paradigm of affectedness (Befindlichkeit) of empathic receptivity to the other – for example, analogous to the disclosure of death in the paradigm affectedness of anxiety – is just that, a bare assertion. It will have to be confirmed by the further analysis as the interpretation (hermeneutic) of empathic receptivity unfolds. The openness of human beings to one another as affectedness in respect is precisely the kind of design distinction that is required by a full, rich way of being with human being that is empathy. In short, it is respect in which empathic receptivity is initially disclosed as affectedness. In the spirit of a Heideggerian approach, one should not try to explain a vicarious experience as a form of cognition. If anything, the cognition is indeed a valid construct but not a fundamental one from the perspective of being in the world. As noted, emotional contagion is not empathy but is founded on a phenomenon on which empathy also builds, namely, vicarious experience. Only in emotional contagion one does not make explicit or interpret the source of the affect. The person just lives it and in it. If science reveals there is a biological basis for shared moods, then so much the better for science (for example, see Gallese 2007). If you look at the world, you find openness – Kant would say ‘receptivity’ – to the other, disclosing the presence of the care of the other in the experience of respect. When we delve beneath all the empirical details of the situation, what is present is a nucleus of respect present in our experience of the other as other. The affectedness of respect presents definite limits to my actions vis a vis the other. Kant, an astute phenomenologist, makes the point that respect is an intellectualization of fear and a refined form of it. Of course, Kant also says that respect is the effect of encountering the moral law as exemplified by the other person. The moral law exemplified by the other precedes respect, which flows from the other towards oneself, and is the cause of respect, not

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the effect of it. (The direction of causality stops the slide into moral sentimentality.) In contrast to Kant, the approach here is ontological, not ethical. (The ethical dimension is engaged in the section ‘Empathy and Altruism’.) The realization and experience of the inevitable possibility of death gives the human being her or his individuality in the paradigm affectedness of anxiety (Angst). But that is an anxiety that is powerful precisely because each human being must face it alone – without the other. The prospect of the loss of the other in the face of death sends the human being fleeing into the distractedness of the ‘the one’ – the ‘they self’ that parties to forget finitude. Human beings (Dasein) are thrown into a world in which the other gives the human being his being human (humanness) in the sense that, without the other, affectedness would not be available at all. Anxiety in the face of the (negative) loss of the other and a positive respect for the presence of the other are two sides of the same coin and are opportunistically transformed into one another. The facticity of affectedness as an approach to empathy requires ‘readiness for empathy’. It requires ‘letting things be’. Here the Heidegger of Being and Time (1927b) meets up with the later Heidegger (and his invocation of Meister Eckhart) on a country path in a short essay entitled ‘Gelassenheit’ (1944/45). The word evokes a constellation of meanings about ‘relaxation, calmness, composure, self-possession, being released into the calm’ (1944/45: 58–59). In Iphegenia, Goethe writes: ‘du sprichst ein grosses wort gelassen aus’, that is, ‘you express a great word in a calm manner’. Heidegger echoes Goethe’s comment 1944/45: 60: ‘. . . You state an exciting demand in a calm [gelassen] manner.’ This (Gelassenheit) is relevant because much about the mobilization of empathic receptivity has the characteristic of a ‘passive overcoming’. It might simply be called ‘relaxation’, not in the sense of being sedated (‘drugged’) but rather in the sense of evenly-hovering attention – listening as a ‘letting it be’. For the later Heidegger – the thinker of being – that meant listening for the call of being; for the early Heidegger – the thinker of human being – ‘letting it be’ means listening for the call of the other in respect and listening to recognize and hear the other’s authentic self-expression of possibilities and commitments. This ‘letting go’ of the everyday world and loss of interest in it is not mere passivity, for something is accomplished – listening, appropriation of inchoate possibility, empathic receptivity. But the phenomenon of insomnia is evidence – ontically – that it is possible to try too hard. The passive overcoming of ‘letting go’ in falling asleep in calmness or trying

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too hard in insomnia can actually be counter-productive; likewise, in the activation of empathy.

A design for empathic understanding: the other as possibility Understanding is the next design distinction that gives structure to the way human beings operate, including operate empathically. Keep in mind that, according to Heidegger, understanding as human beings live understanding is not primarily a form of cognition. Understanding is defined as a form of projecting possibilities of significance upon a totality of involvements with the world. Understanding is characterized as pressing forward into possibilities. Instrumentally, understanding is rather more like a Swiss Army knife for managing how to get things done in the practical world of instrumental relationships. It is practical understanding in the manner of Aristotle’s phronesis. It is ‘know how’ in the sense of being competent in the kitchen in making a satisfying omelette, starting the car on a cold winter day or balancing a chequebook. Here ‘know’ has nothing to do with ‘epistemology’. We all are acquainted with people who are regarded as ‘highly competent’ at the job, on the sports field, in the army, in the family, in school. When a tough challenge faces the team, those in authority give the job to that individual. Such an individual is adept at finding an opening where no one else saw one. Such an individual deploys understanding in the Heideggerian sense to create possibilities where others believed none available, doing so on the basis of the situation into which all are thrown, but not being stopped by it. This individual projects a possibility where previously there were only defeatism and cynicism, not necessarily by means of a particular project documented in a spreadsheet, but by means of the capability that is the foundation for intentional undertakings of all kinds. Such individuals are credited with the invention of possibilities, but the possibilities were present all along for anyone to see, paradoxically, hidden in plain view; and this individual made a difference by providing a clearing for possibility – as in the movie Apollo 13 when all scientific calculations prove there was insufficient oxygen to return to earth. The collective ‘know how’ of Yankee ingenuity cobbles together an oxygen purification system out of duct tape and old filters. Retrospectively totally obvious. Pre-ontologically speaking, there are also individuals who are highly competent in dealing with other individuals. This extends from relationships such as psychotherapy, counselling, life coaching, executive

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coaching, platoon leadership in the armed forces, all the way to sales and marketing, public relations, community building and action – think of Saul Alinsky or Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) – as well as an MD’s ‘bedside manner’, a teacher’s didactic approach and a car mechanic’s respectful explanation of a clogged fuel injector to an uninformed client.2 How is this possibility possible? In short, understanding is the source of possibility, the possibility of possibilities: As long as it is, human being [Dasein] always has understood itself and will understand itself in terms of possibilities . . . As projecting, understanding is the mode of being of human being [Dasein] in which it is its possibilities as possibilities. (Heidegger 1927a: 136; H145) Now the task is to use understanding to implement – one might say ‘schematize’ – empathy. That is, take empathy and apply it to human interrelatedness in context using the distinction ‘understanding’. In and through human understanding, empathy creates an opening for the possibilities of the other. It creates specific possibilities of commitment by the other, authentic decision making by the other, acknowledging the humanness of the other, as brought forth in the interrelatedness of self and other. It creates the possibility of working through the blind spots that are stopping the other from realizing his or her possibility. Obviously this does not mean directly telling the other of a blind spot. You can try doing that – but it does not make a difference. This form of understanding as grasping a possibility is not primarily cognitive, although cognitions can be derived ‘downstream’. Thus, the examples of cognitive impenetrability can be put into context. Examples such as fear of flying or being afraid of snakes – when the fearful person knows full well that flying is the safest form of transportation and the snake is safely behind the glass in the zoo – belong here. Knowing the statistics about the safety of flying fails to make a difference when a person has an unacknowledged commitment to a possibility of being in control of one’s space at all times and one is suddenly confronted with not being in control in the back of an aeroplane in a narrow seat in economy class. Knowing that the snake is safely behind plate glass does not make a difference when a person has an unacknowledged commitment to the possibility of snakes as primal, uninhibited desire and the disintegration of oneself. The commitment is to the possibility of control, survival or a specific form of life, not to a conceptual distinction.

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Likewise, the example belongs here of the soldier’s wife whose husband is lost in battle and yet she does not accept it at a visceral level as the years go by. She knows it conceptually, yet she cannot accept it, because of the unacknowledged commitment to the possibility of the return of the man she loves.3 To put it literally, cognition cannot penetrate the fear because the possibility of fear in this context is a way of being, not a way of knowing. Freud makes a similar point. Freud’s point is the crucial one that the possibility is not even visible. It does not make a difference to the patient’s illness if the analyst tells the patient that (for example) he really wants to kill his father.4 It does not make a difference when a proposition is communicated as a piece of information. Informing a young boy, Hans, that he does not want to go outdoors because he is afraid of meeting draft horses, whose large and visible sex organs (in the case of the stallion) remind him of his father’s dominating masculinity, does not make a difference. He does not even ‘get’ the possibility. Telling Dora that her neurotic symptoms are a compromise formation expressing her conflicted feelings about the seductive Herr K. and her legitimate sense of a premature sexual relationship, for which she is not ready, does not make a difference. The possibility is not visible to her. Such a possibility would not even be recognized by one whose undeclared commitment is to a pattern as given, the relevant form indicated. The possibility is simply not imaginable. In the final analysis, from the perspective of understanding, empathy is the possibility of authentic being with (the other) where the other shows up as a possibility. However, this must be further motivated or it will form too tight a circle – not the hermeneutic circle. We now turn to such a motivation. Ontic and ontological possibilities of empathy In empathy, one individual relates to the other as the possibility of the other’s possibility. According to Heidegger, understanding presses forward into possibilities as the structure of projection. Understanding schematizes empathy as authentic being with the possibility of the other’s possibility. Ontically, the other is the one who has his possibility. Ontologically, the empathizer gains the possibility of being human (humanness) acquired in being there for the other in empathic openness. The empathizer gains the possibility of being human in engaging in an inquiry with the other into the possibility of being human. For example, ontically, the therapist uses empathy to understand the experiences of the patient in the latter’s isolation, loneliness and distress; ontologically, the patient creates the condition of possibility

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of empathic receptivity and understanding on the part of the therapist by the patient’s being ready for a generous and gracious empathic listening that contributes to and recovers the patient’s being human. The therapist treats the patient ontically using empathy as an indispensable tool and technique; the patient humanizes the therapist, calling her, not just to her role as empathic therapist (although he does that too) but, to her ontological possibility as a human being in empathic relation to another all-too-human being. Therapy often takes the form of a joint inquiry into how we humans take the past – whether as relations of power, sexuality, or narcissism – and put those possibilities into the future, continually re-enacting instead of recalling and transforming them. The patient, by his very being, gives the therapist her being human – making the therapist a fellow inquirer into being human – so that the therapist can give it (being human) back to the patient in a hundred-and-one contingent circumstances requiring empathy. Empathy provides a clearing for the possibility of breaking through – engaging and resolving – the obstacles confronted by the individual in thrown contingency, the past, standing in the way of possibility as such. The possibility of possibility (H145) becomes the clearing. The one who is empathizing takes a stand for the other so, for example, the other’s blind spot is recognized, identified and becomes visible (to the other). In a blind spot, distractedness in the superficiality of the everyday prevents the other’s seeing without the one who is empathizing being able explicitly to show him. This is so since to tell another about his blind spot does not make it visible – the blind spot is cognitively impenetrable. The blind spot is kept in place by hidden and undeclared commitments. This is where, as an empathizer, one can provide examples from one’s own on-going interaction and re-enactment with the other, using analogies and simulations from experiences to plant a seed that grows into an ‘Ah ha’ experience by the other. A pattern switch occurs, a new possibility emerges, and what seemed inevitable – the patient’s father doesn’t love her – gets distinguished from what actually happened – he moved out of the house and she made it up – invented an interpretation about the depth and direction of his affection, an interpretation about what was possible and what the possibility meant. What was cognitively impenetrable is penetrated and broken up by empathy. The empathy provides the ontological possibility of the pattern switch, in this case, from ‘love is not possible with this person’ to ‘grant the behaviour was an issue, on that occasion, he had a different way of showing his love’.

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A design for empathy as interpretation implemented in the hermeneutic circle Empathic understanding is implemented as the interpretation of possibility. Interpretation is a derivative mode of understanding and makes explicit what is understood as what it is and does not add anything to it. This characterization of empathic interpretation is consistent with what Heidegger asserts; any divergence is only that this interpretation of empathy – or special hermeneutic – shows the possibility of authentic human interrelatedness as fundamental to human existence. Heidegger left this possibility undeveloped. As human beings, we already live in a given totality of interpretations about what life means, what possibilities are available and what is taken for granted. The conformity, peer group pressure and ‘automatic pilot’ that get people through the work-a-day are so pervasive and in need of clearing away that Heidegger once again gives an account of human interrelations as distractedness in the everyday instead of empathic relatedness: In accordance with the train of these preparatory analyses of everyday human being [Dasein], we shall pursue the phenomenon of interpretation in the understanding of the world, that is, in inauthentic understanding. (Heidegger 1927a: 139; H148) The short definition of interpretation for Heidegger is the grounding of meaning based on foresight, fore-having (a synonym for ‘plan’) and fore-grasping by which what is being interpreted is understood. This ‘fore-’ structure is that of prejudice – not necessarily in a pejorative sense – but in the sense of surfacing pre-judgements, assumptions and a point of view about someone, something or a set of circumstances. This fore-structure cannot be eliminated, but it can be made explicit, negotiated about and replaced with assumptions that are more effective, workable or optimal for a given situation. The fore structure of interpretation applied to empathy The relevance of the fore-structure of interpretation to empathy can be exemplified as follows – making explicit pre-existing assumptions (‘prejudices’) – at the level of everyday relatedness between individuals. No matter how open-minded, gracious and friendly a person may be in engaging other humans, if one is really honest with oneself, then

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one finds that opinions, evaluations and assessments, frequently negative and unflattering, are brought to the relationship and get in the way. If one really listens to the submerged and unexpressed idle chatter in the background of one’s thinking as one is being bored by one’s colleague’s prize winning lecture presentation, then one hears the ‘voice over’ commenting, assessing and criticizing (or praising) the other’s choice of wardrobe, hairdo, latest book read, choice of words and opinion on the latest philosophical position.5 It gets worse. The evaluations extend to ethnic and social grouping or political affiliation – profiling others as to who is on one’s own personal, emotional ‘terrorist’ watch list. From the everyday perspective, the other is a bundle of opinions, most of which are ‘broken’ or need to be fixed – as does the other himself – morally, emotionally and spiritually. Of course, most polite and caring individuals are educated to quarantine, minimize and dismiss these judgments before they become a source of questionable actions. Indeed, we are often extra gracious towards those about whom we have our most serious doubts – only your true friends will tell you that your deodorant and toothpaste have failed you – or that the middle term of your syllogism is undistributed. Nothing will derail empathic receptivity and empathic understanding more quickly than pre-existing assumptions. Making these pre-judgements explicit and rendering them inert is an important function of empathic interpretation. The other as structure of interpretation applied to empathy Next, in explicitly taking the design distinctions already exposed as part of Heidegger’s analysis of the human’s (Dasein’s) ‘being in’ and applying them to empathy, an ‘as structure’ emerges: The other is disclosed as being an instance of human being in no need of fixing and lacking nothing in order to be a partner in our shared humanness. This may sound paradoxical given the uses of empathy as the source of a cure in many therapeutic contexts.6 Surely something is broken – over there – with the other, or so runs the idle chatter streaming off as a ‘voice over’ commentary on whatever is occurring. Such is the interpretation of the presenting symptoms, that something is broken, nor is it an arbitrary one or easily able to be dismissed. However, empathy does not try to fix the other because such a fixing cannot be directly intended, cognized (‘known’) or willed. From an ontological perspective, empathy ‘lets it be’ where ‘it’ is the affectedness of the other that discloses how and why the situation matters to the individual. Empathy takes a step back and lets it be so in order to give possibility to the other as something to consider as a possible way

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of being or not being. ‘I love you; you’re perfect; now change’ is funny and a caricature of empathy, in a cynical and degraded way, because we recognize that yesterday’s insight easily becomes today’s manipulation. You cannot go directly to the transformation when the love – here closely related to empathy – that is supposed to be so transformational is an empty set of words, another manipulation. It is worth recalling that Wittgenstein went in search of an example of pure visual receptivity, unalloyed by any interpretation. He didn’t find pure seeing. Instead he found ‘seeing as . . .’ (1945: §200). He always found the ‘echo of thought in sight’ (1945: §212). The connective ‘as’ is an index of interpretation here. Taking Wittgenstein’s remarks as a clue, we can say that the receptivity to another’s affectedness (Befindlichkeit), as the announcing of her presence, constitutes the echo of interpretation in receptivity. Interpretation is what unfolds receptivity into an articulate response. In interpretation, the other’s affectedness is recognized as bound to a particular contingent form of animate expression – laughing, crying, the fine-grained raised eyebrow of contempt – in a context of engagements with a specific triggering event and for a particular purpose. Without interpretation, empathic receptivity is mute. A motive for laying out one’s receptivity through the exercise of interpretation takes off from this latter point. Once the various phenomena of affectedness are returned to their inter-human context, it becomes apparent that the empathic experiences par excellance – vicarious feelings – are no exception to the vicissitude of expression. That is, an uninterpreted vicarious feeling has the characteristic of an undifferentiated, unindividuated something = x.7 It is closed off, inaccessible without the practice of interpretation. At the most, it is a source of emotional contagion. At the least, it is Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box, which moves no part of the interpretive mechanism and drops out. Without interpretation, one’s empathic receptivity remains mute and inarticulate even to oneself. Interpretation is one available form of expression through which a person comes to realize what her or his feelings are and by expressing them, completes the feeling. The task is not to avoid the reciprocity between the interpretation and the interpreted affectedness, but rather to enter into it in the right way. The various phenomena of affectedness represent a point of articulation in being oneself with another, and point in two directions – towards receptivity and towards interpretation. Both are needed to make a whole. Without interpretation, one’s empathic receptivity is inarticulate, but without receptivity interpretation is empty.

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Empathic understanding

Possibilities

Vicarious experience

Empathic interpretation

Empathic listening Empathic receptivity Point of view Experiential context of distinctions

Figure 2.1 The Hermeneutic Circle of Empathy

If one begins in an inter-human context constituted by both the other’s expression and one’s own receptivity, the difference between receptivity and interpretation can be deployed and put to good use. In a sense, entering into the empathic reciprocity ‘in the right way’ consists in realizing that one is in an on-going inquiry with the other about what it means to be a human being. We can begin with empathic receptivity, in which case the need for interpretation will be evoked by the otherwise mute receptive manifold of affectedness. Or we can begin with interpretation, in which case the need for receptivity will be evoked by an otherwise unfulfilled interpretation. In either case, the process comes full circle. So we can summarize the interpretive-as by exposing this distinction as a version of the reciprocity in the ‘hermeneutic circle’. (See Figure 2.1.)

A design for different perspectives: taking a walk in the other’s shoes The hermeneutic circle of empathy resonates between regarding oneself (first-person) as another (third-person) and vice versa – colloquially expressed as putting oneself in the other’s shoes – and experiencing

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the other’s affectedness. The third-person starts with the general concept of the other and works towards the particular affectedness; the first-person works from the particular affectedness towards the otherness of the other. In either case, a full deployment of empathy must traverse the ways of being in the world – affectedness, understanding, interpretation and speech. ‘Putting oneself in the other’s shoes’, as generally interpreted, is a function of role reversal, either with or without accompanying character traits. But it is more than a logical function of changing perspectives – at least as long as the ‘shoes’ are taken literally. One point of walking in another’s shoes is to find out where they pinch – where they hurt. Wearing the shoes gives us a vicarious experience of who the other is and is not. It works even if the shoes are too big or small. So as much as some want to reduce empathy merely to empathic understanding – granted that it is that too – as long as the interpreters are wearing shoes, a trail of affectedness inevitably accompanies the understanding. It trails behind, like the bloody footprints tracked by George Washington’s shoddily-shoed soldiers at Valley Forge in the American Revolution. Or it may be finding out that oneself and the other are not alike after all. Distortion and misunderstanding are also possibilities to be encountered, engaged and cleared away by empathy. Far from being an infinite regress, what we have is a positive indication that both receptivity and interpretation are needed to constitute the whole denoted by ‘empathy’. As a form of inter-human relatedness, ‘empathy’ is a mongrel among concepts. It has one ancestral heritage going back to receptivity and another in interpretation, the latter being a derivative mode of understanding. The resistance of affectedness and its expression to being open to understanding is a function of the finite condition of human beings. It can be combated, but not completely undone, by the exercise of interpretation, which pushes back the edge of the inarticulate.

Empathic interpretation as perspective taking: social referencing Empathy implements interpretation as a set of perspectives, first-person, second-person, third-person as well as the operation of cycling through them. Assertion is a form of interpretation in which a human being says ‘I’ – the first-person pronoun. The second-person is the one who talks back to me – calls me ‘you’ – and to whom one says ‘you’ in

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return – familiarly ‘thou’ in many languages. Together we try to construct a consensus point of view, ‘They say . . .’, that supports public inquiry and objectivity when pursued in the third-person with the proper checks and balances. Nevertheless, the asymmetry between these perspectives is where many paradoxes and philosophic puzzles have been created by collapsing points of view, dropping out the secondperson point of view altogether, or demanding of one perspective what that perspective is not designed to deliver. The ‘as structure’ of interpretation gets traction in unpacking affectedness in possibilities of understanding as we address one another as ‘you’ and exchange perspectives. This is precisely the kind of design distinction required by a full, rich way of being with other humans that is empathy. For example, behaviourism merges, that is, collapses, the first- and third-person points of view. Speaking in the first person for clarity, behaviourism asserts that I come to be aware of myself in the same way as I come to awareness of others, through observing my own behaviour and comparing it with that of the other. The result is that knowing myself is too hard in the easy cases and too easy in the hard cases. This makes it too hard to know myself – ‘know’ in the ordinary sense of ‘self-awareness’ – in most easy, everyday circumstances. I do not have to collect examples of my behaviour, for example, in order to infer that I prefer chocolate to vanilla. Chocolate just tastes better to me, and I am aware of what I mean when I say to you, ‘I prefer chocolate, thank you.’ I am aware of what I mean in a way you aren’t, at least not directly. You have a disposition to order chocolate; I just prefer it, and so order it. The first person is obviously the best and most authoritative person to ask in the vast majority of standard situations about the meaning, intensity, duration and so on of the person’s own experiences.8 Behaviourism has trouble acknowledging such a position. Granted that in instances of mixed feelings and complex decision making, I can seem like a stranger to myself too. I have blind spots, things about myself of which I am unaware; and, even worse, I am unaware that I am unaware of them – I don’t know that I don’t know them. This is echoed by Jesus’ unmasking of hypocrisy: ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but consider not the beam that is in thine own eye?’ (Matthew 7: 3). In nontrivial cases, it is much more difficult for me to interpret my own behaviour than that of another. Meanwhile, under this disambiguation, introspectionism isolates the first- and third-person points of view from each other, generating the need to build the ontological bridge. The introspectionist makes the easy case too easy and under-estimates the difficulty of self-awareness

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in an obvious way with its thesis of incorrigibility. The introspectionist will likewise make the hard case too hard and over-estimate the difficulties in coming to an awareness of the experiences of others. Again speaking in the first person for clarity, I should be a tad more suspicious about whether I always know that I am in pain; and less suspicious about whether others are in pain. In particular, pain is the paradigm case of a sensation about which I am allegedly unable to be mistaken (although one can always tell a lie or misname it – substitute ‘pawn’ for ‘pain’ – neither of which concern us here). It is as if pains always identify themselves, announce themselves clearly and truly. But the introspectionist must forget about all the borderline cases in order to maintain this position undisturbed. One must forget about the morning backache – a bit of stiffness from lying too long on one side or actual pain? The identification of social referencing (Baron-Cohen 1995; Hobson 2002, 2005) provides a stern warning to those who regard the experience of pain as the paradigm of incorrigibility – an experience of something = x about which the first person cannot be mistaken and corrected by the future course of experience. One must overlook the child who has fallen down and looks at her father (or care-taker) to see if he has a worried expression on his face prior to breaking out (sincerely) in tears. Her experience is processed as a pain by her if he does indeed have a worried look. It is processed as fun that is part of the game if he looks happy and laughs. The child is looking for guidance in identifying, understanding and articulating what she is experiencing – if the caretaker looks worried, then her experience is identified as ‘pain’; if not, then it is just excitement or even what fun feels like. The care-taker’s empathic receptivity immediately expresses on his face the severity of the fall – in an implicit interpretation – and the child’s own receptivity resonates with it. This is a crisp example of the child’s referencing the other to check how serious her father considers the fall prior to expressing completely any affect in the matter. The child is checking with the care-taker to see how she should feel. The latter’s feeling is evidently still an unexpressed something = x where the care-taker has a critical role in deciding whether to bind the ‘x’ to fear (‘pain’) or bind the ‘x’ to happiness (‘having fun’) and crying or laughing, respectively. In a marvellous example of emergent empathy, the empathic care-taker expresses the affect on behalf of the child, which affect is then taken up and further processed and expressed by the child in reciprocal affectivity and attunement with the care-taker’s response, completing the circle (and the expression of emotion).

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We spoke above of Dretske’s displaced perception and its use to explicate Heidegger’s distinction of mineness (see ‘Navigating the innerouter divide: mineness and displaced perception’). In this example, the child has not yet processed his or her experience of the fall to the point where it is describable as ‘mine’. There is the possibility of pain in the world, as it were, but is it placed here or displaced over there? The child then looks to the care-taker to displace the experience into the individual’s own system, within the boundary ‘mine’. At the risk of a gross yet telling example, it is like the mother bird regurgitating its half digested meal into the maw of the hungry chicks waiting in the nest. Two are nourished from the same content. An analogous process occurs between adults when, after giving an account of some dramatic vignette, the one person turns to the other with a significant pause in order for the other to respond with a demonstration of having understood what the first one went through. We turn to the other to find out whether what we experienced was fun or fearful, a source of hope or despair and so on, a joke or an insult, and use the spontaneous response of the other to guide how we really feel about what occurred. This does not rule out that one person is often looking in advance for a particular reaction and to ‘get a rise’ out of the other; the adult scenario is more complex than that of a toddler; and the ‘get a rise’ is not necessarily what empathic understanding based on a gracious receptivity is going to provide. In social referencing, one individual provides crucial guidance as to what is the quality of the other’s experience. The cogency of the example with the child who has fallen down is that the child uninhibitedly looks to the care-taker in order to determine what she or he (the child) is experiencing – affectively, emotionally, sensorily. In adults, this social referencing is much more subtle – has gone underground, so to speak, and is unexpressed – as individuals constantly check with others about whether to feel pride or embarrassment, whether one is ‘looking good’ or ‘avoiding looking bad’ (Scheff (1990) includes a nice inquiry into pride and shame).

The rich silence of empathic listening by design Understanding begins with the possibility of possibility (H145) for the other, further interpreted in perspectives, and works towards the particular affectedness; receptivity works from the particular affectedness towards the otherness of the other. A full deployment of empathy traverses the hermeneutic circle as the totality of ways of being in

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the world – human affectedness, understanding, interpretation and speech. The second-person – ‘you’ or in some contexts ‘thou’ – is the human being who talks back. This leads directly to how empathy is revealed in speech (Rede) and communication (Mitteilung). This hermeneutic of empathy reads ‘speech’ as applying to empathy as a form of articulating being-with others. Here Heidegger is explicitly referring to the existentialia (‘design distinction’) of speech and how human beings operate with it. We rejoin the text: It [communication (Mitteilung)] brings about the ‘sharing’ [‘Teilung’] of co-affectedness [Mitbefindlichkeit] and of the understanding of being-with. Communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences, for example, opinion and wishes, from the inside of one subject to the inside of another. Human being with [Mitdasein] is essentially already manifest in co-attunement and understanding with. Being-with is ‘explicitly’ shared [geteilt] in discourse . . . . In talking, human being expresses itself not because it has been initially cut off as ‘something internal’ from something outside, but because as being-in-the-world it is already being outside . . . . Being-in and its attunement are made known in discourse and indicated in language by intonation, modulation, in the tempo of talk, ‘in the way of speaking’. (Heidegger 1927a: 152; H162; translation modified) Co-affectedness – Mitbefindlichkeit – is precisely the way in which two humans find one another attuned to each other in the course of a conversation – see the previous section on social referencing. The openness extends beyond the initial, pre-ordained meaning of the words to intonation, modulation and tempo of presentation. In telling a joke, comic timing, the pauses both before and after the punch line, are instrumental in triggering the laugh. This quotation emphasizes speech but also relevant are the individual’s capacity to be reassured by a friend’s putting an arm around the shoulder wordlessly, which speaks volumes, and the experience of the one granting being (gelassen) to the other for what she or he is and what she or he is not – recognition and acceptance of shared humanness. The form of speech in which empathy is made explicit is keeping silent and listening. Listening is a form of receptivity and openness. If by ‘openness’ we understand the manner in which one person is receptive to the way the other gives her- or himself, then the following text

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is a direct contribution to such a ‘hermeneutic of empathic receptivity’. Where Heidegger writes ‘understands’, add ‘and is receptive’. One of the forms of empathic receptivity is listening: ‘Listening to’ is the human being’s existential way of being open as being with others. Indeed, hearing constitutes the primary and authentic way in which human being is open for its own capacity for being – as in hearing the voice of the friend whom every human being carries with him. The human being hears because he understands . . . Keeping silent [das Schweigen] is another essential possibility of speech [Rede], and it has the same existential foundation. In talking with one another, the person who keeps silent can ‘make one understand’ (that is, he can develop an understanding), and he can do so more authentically than the person who is never short of words . . . . As a mode of discourse, falling silent [Verschweigenheit] articulates the intelligibility of human being in so basic a manner that it gives rise to a being-able-to-be which is genuine, and to a being-with-one-another which is transparent. (Heidegger 1927b: 206, 208; H163, H164) The mention of ‘the voice of the friend whom every human being carries with him’ suggests that different aspects of the self are being mobilized. There are two related traditional ways of dealing with this voice. Heidegger develops an extensive analysis of conscience. He distinguishes conscience as a ‘voice over’ facility, which praises and blames, rewards and punishes (which is not what Heidegger has in mind), from the conscience that functions in transforming the inauthentic theyself (‘the one’) into an authentic individual who chooses commitments autonomously. Second, a dialogical model is presented, reminiscent of Socrates discussion in the Theatetus (189e–190a), which is yet another way of dealing with the internal dialogue. The different constituents of the human being’s self represent the caller and the one to whom the call is made. It is no accident that an account of being receptive to oneself is embedded in the context of being open to others. The paradox of empathic speech – quiescing the idle chatter Paradoxically, the optimal form of speech in which empathy is articulated is empathic listening. Listening gives way to that for which one listens. As indicated in the following text, the call of conscience that

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occurs is a call to be one’s authentic possibilities. This is a strikingly innovative interpretation of conscience. Here conscience is completely transformed in its meaning and used opportunistically by Heidegger. Conscience is not a function of praising or blaming. The message is not an explicit exclamation such as ‘Bad!’ or ‘Wrong!’ However, if you listen to conscience, the result quiets the idle talk and silences the ‘voice over’. Those who do not believe in a ‘voice over’ may want to listen to whatever it is that is telling them, ‘There is no such thing’. This quiescing of the on-going idle chatter (Gerede) – both between individuals and within the individual’s own thinking – is such as to occasion and reinforce empathy. In order to listen, human beings must fall silent: We characterized silence [Schweigen] as an essential possibility of speech [Rede]. Whoever wants to give something to understand in silence must ‘have something to say.’ In the ‘call to’ [Anruf], being human gives itself to understand its own ability-to-be. Thus this calling [Ruf ] is a falling silent. The speech of conscience never rings out loudly. Conscience only calls silently, that is, the call [der Ruf ] . . . calls [ruft] being human thus called back to the stillness of itself, and calls it to become still . . . . [C]onscience thus understands this silent discourse appropriately only in falling silent [Verschweigenheit]. It takes the words away from the commonsense idle chatter of the one [das Man]. (Heidegger 1927a: 273; H296; translation modified) Heidegger’s text is rich with paradoxes about calling silently, authentic speech expressing itself as listening and conscience having something to say but expressing itself in stillness – all of which are ways humans are called back from distractedness in the world of gossip and idle chatter by the uncanny, silent call of care. What is the point? Heidegger is doing something in this text – doing something other than asserting, arguing, describing or telling. The point engaging Heidegger (and the reader) is the need to still the idle chatter running in one’s head by invoking the equivalent of a Zen Koan. The latter is, of course, a paradoxical statement that opens an inquiry into what one does not even know that one does not know – one’s blind spot(s). The expression ‘in one’s head’ is fraught with overtones, even if it is figurative, and is descriptively captured phenomenologically as a faint echo in one’s awareness and listening as a discourse that is contingently only mine. Once again, what’s the point?

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Having critiqued the subject-object relationship and subjectivity, Heidegger cannot suddenly launch into a discussion of introspection, meditation, listening to oneself, in completing his analysis of being-in as care. In general, Heidegger is not interested in introspection and consciousness (as distinct from subjectivity) and does not even mention consciousness until the last page of Being and Time (H437). Thus, if Heidegger were to start on an account of introspection, it would be positively structured (as he puts it) by a listening for the silent call of conscience. Such a listening has to quiesce the idle chatter of the inauthentic relations with others as well as the idle chatter that is owned as ‘mine’ by us humans and loosely described in everyday speech as streaming within one’s head, commenting on everyone and everything that goes by. Quiescing the idle chatter is what Heidegger is doing here by presenting paradoxes. Without exactly saying how one causes such a quiescing, once the quiescing is implemented, however transiently, the individual is ready to listen, to empathize. Obviously this goes beyond what Heidegger explicitly states; but, from the perspective of recovering empathy as the form and foundation for authentic human interrelatedness and community, it is arguably what he left unsaid and should have said. The amplification is that the quiescing occurs for the reader of Heidegger by being open to the paradoxes by reflection. Of course, a similar result can be obtained by reflecting on the paradoxes as if they were Zen Koans, by engaging in other rigorous spiritual disciplines such as meditation, certain forms of physical exercise, psychotherapy and related practices. The authentic, committed listening of empathy Thus, the above-cited text also fits perfectly the way the other becomes the conscience of a human being in offering an authentic, committed listening in empathy – empathically aligned with the ‘voice of the friend whom every human being carries with’ (H206). A clearing is created for a committed listening that itself clears the way for possibilities – making decisions, resolutions, commitments. And while a human being can theoretically declare a commitment in isolation, the implementation of such a commitment inevitably requires being with others. Commitments, decisions, resolutions are never undertaken in a vacuum; rather they require the other to witness the commitment and to whom it is made: As authentic being a self, commitment does not detach human being from its world, nor does it isolate it as free floating ego. How could it,

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if commitment as authentic disclosedness is, after all, nothing other than authentically being-in-the-world? Commitment brings the self right into its being together with things at hand, actually taking care of them, and pushes it toward concerned being-with others. (Heidegger, 1927a: 274; H298; ‘commitment’ translates ‘Entschlossenheit’, also translatable as ‘decision’ or ‘resoluteness’; translation modified) The above-cited passage clears the way to re-interpreting authentic human being with one another as empathy. To that re-interpretation we now turn.

3 Empathy between Death and the Other

Abstract The special hermeneutic of empathy now moves decisively beyond Heidegger’s Being and Time, although the interpretation also circles back to inform our reading of the role of conscience, the self, death and trauma (the latter not a Heideggerian term). The critical path lies through distinguishing everyday, ontic empathy from empathy as ontologically creating the possibility of being human – and what that means. The loss of the other is equally fundamental with the inevitable possibility of death; and, in the final analysis, it does not make sense to try to say which is more basic. From the perspective of individualization, death has priority; from the perspective of humanization, the other (individual) has priority. According to this approach, empathy is not merely a cognitive function of knowing what is going on with other (although it is that too); it is a foundational way of being in the world with the other. Empathy is ontological, and its withdrawal or absence is an ontological crisis (‘who am I?’) that renders individuals (and communities) vulnerable to breakdowns – traumas – that are dreaded as much (and sometimes more) than death itself.

Empathy: the third alternative to the inauthentic crowd and authentic aloneness Now, after much textual exegesis, we finally arrive at an alternative to being alone in the face of death or being inauthentic with others (as ‘the one’). Here, for the first time, individual human beings are with others and authentic. It has not been easy to get here, and this chapter might have been entitled ‘Empathy: Between a Rock and Hard 56

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Place’. Even so, Heidegger mixes in a good measure of ‘being together with things at hand’, which is his terminology for the way of being of tools and instruments. He almost gets distracted by hammers, jugs and shoes again, but then recovers and acknowledges ‘concerned being with others’. We are now engaged authentically with the other. This releases authentic being with others with the emphasis on freeing others for their own possibilities. Here our interpretation and amplification of Heidegger reaches a culmination as ‘becoming the conscience of others’, a close paraphrase for ‘listening empathically’: The commitment toward itself first brings human beings to the possibility of letting the others who are with it ‘be’ in their own ability-to-be, and also discloses that ability in concern which leaps ahead and frees. The committed [entschlossene] human being can become the ‘conscience’ of others. It is from the authentic being a self of commitment that authentic being-with-one-another first arises, not from ambiguous and jealous stipulations and talkative partying with the boys [Verbrüderungen] in the they and in what ‘they want to do’. (Heidegger 1927a: 274; H298; translation modified) Note that a subtle shift has occurred from conscience being a way of relating to oneself – calling an individual back from the flight into distractedness in conforming to ‘what they do’ – to conscience being a way of relating to others. Heidegger’s use of conscience shifts. Conscience is not something represented as ‘inner’ and the everyday capacity for blaming and laying on a ‘guilt trip’ intra-personally, but displaced interpersonally as relating to the other authentically, clearing the way for a ‘concerned being with others,’, not in the sense of scolding or blaming, but in the sense of a committed listening to the other. Empathy as becoming the conscience of the other Conscience works both ways – for the self and for the other. In empathy one can become the conscience of the other. Now imagine that the one individual is the beneficiary of empathy and that the other is listening empathically. The (empathizing) other provides a clearing for one to listen to oneself, by the other’s listening empathically. The other takes a stand for one – is literally being there for one – by listening. One experiences oneself as other to the second person, in reciprocal relation as the target of the other’s generous and gracious empathy. In turn, this furthers recovering the authentic possibilities of the one’s own self. For

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the self is defined by commitment and, as in the next passage, the self is something to be ‘won’. This is an account of the self engaged in the world with others as a projected possibility to be attained, not as the metaphysical permanent in inner perception.1 Heidegger’s individualization of the self as the individual’s ownmost possibility in the face of death is good as far as it goes, but misses the possibility of authentic being with others. Human beings are predictably inauthentic when conforming to the everyday norms of ‘the one’, the ‘they self’ (das Man), a feature and manner of human behaviour not expected to change under any interpretation. Heidegger held open the possibility of a logical space of authentic being with others, but it remained undeveloped. Humans are usually distracted and just follow the crowd. Heidegger’s explicit argument in Being and Time is that humans are called back from lostness in ‘the one’ by the confrontation with death. Heidegger’s position is here developed and amplified to allow that humans are also called back from the distraction in everyday busyness in and by authentic being with the other – other individuals who remind us of our finitude and humanness in fundamental ways, different than but related to death. The argument is that authentic Mitsein – being with others – is precisely the place in which the missing section on authentic being with others through empathy ought to be located in Being and Time. Without specifying the nature of this encounter between the one and the other, a logical space is created for authentic being with the other and indeed created as empathy. Into this space one can insert different possibilities extending from a radicalization of ontic Mitdasein in the direction of ontological otherness of the ecstatic kind of which (for example) Levinas (1961) writes or simply an openness to the other in the affect of respect that was highlighted above. Between the other and death: humanization and individualization Now the parallel and comparison between the individualization of being human through death and humanization through the other’s granting of being human is in place. This ‘granting of being human’ is precisely empathy. First, consider individualization through the encounter with death. For Heidegger, the self of the human being is individualized in its ownmost possibility of death (no more Dasein). The anxiety that results discloses the human being’s existence as a whole ontologically. This calls back human being from its distractedness in the superficial persona

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that it presents in conforming to the roles of the anonymous others – das Man, the one – that forms the everyday fallen ‘they self’. Ontically, death is an advisor, counselling human being to choose wisely and to choose as if its being is at stake. Ontologically, death is a structure of the human being, which is always a moment-by-moment possibility until the individual’s physical demise. In parallel with this individualization through death is the humanization through empathy. The process of humanization is radicalized in the extreme situation of the loss of the other, for example, in physical death. The encounter with the death of the other is a model for the humanization of the individual self against the other in empathic interrelatedness. The death of the other – whether as physical demise or simply an affective withdrawal – is completely different than the human being’s (Dasein’s) own death. The loss of empathy in the withdrawal of the other is the loss of one’s humanness, a kind of death in life, in a sense, worse than one’s own death itself. After all, one’s own death is a demise that is by definition and actuality never completely experienced by the living. Though the suffering of illness or injury leading up to the individual’s demise is a fearful thing, death as a physical demise of human being (Dasein) is never completely experienced by the living. The possibility of the latter as a structure of human being is revealed in an ontological anxiety, which, when worked through, discloses the possibility of commitment and engagement with the projects and possibilities in one’s life. In that sense, death as a structure of human being (Dasein) is not traumatic the way the loss of a loved one in her or his physical death is traumatic.2 Death as a structure of human being surely presents challenges, but then opens out and onto renewed engagement with life. Possibilities are surfaced, identified, created. In contrast, the loss of the other occasions the closing down of possibilities. The loss of the other invokes the dynamics of mourning. A process is engaged of laying to rest – quiescing – the possibilities understood in the other’s being in the world. Thus, the loss of the other is a trauma in the way that my own death as a structure of human being will never be traumatic. Traumatic loss of the other is a distinct phenomenon in and of itself, not to be confused with one’s own death as an existential structure or even one’s own demise. In the everyday (ontic) encounter of one individual with another and in the ontological relationship between self and other, in which a reciprocal inquiry into being human is engaged in empathy, the loss of empathy provided by the other is dreaded as much as death itself.

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Yes, death is formidable and not to be avoided; and, yet, what is also overwhelming is that the other is lost along with oneself. The loss of the other is so devastating as it is the loss of one’s own humanness (being human), the loss of emotional vitality, the loss of the advantages and disadvantages of human interrelatedness with the other. If one is still alive physically, then one is a mere shell of oneself. Empty. Nothing happens anymore. From that perspective, the loss of the other is equiprimordial (‘gleich ursprunglich’ as Heidegger says) with the inevitable possibility of death; and it does not make sense to try to say which is more basic. From the perspective of individualization, death has priority; from the perspective of humanization, the other does. According to this approach, empathy is not merely a cognitive function of knowing what is going on with the other (although it is that too); it is a foundational way of being in the world with the other. This is worth repeating – empathy is ontological, and its withdrawal or absence is an ontological crisis (‘who am I?’) that renders individuals (and communities) vulnerable to breakdowns that are dreaded as much (and sometimes more) than death itself. Let’s look at examples of how the individual is humanized – granted being human in empathy – by the other. In the analysis, the critical path lies in distinguishing everyday, ontic empathy from empathy as ontologically creating the possibility of being human – and what that means. In addition to the limit situation of one’s ownmost possibility of death, the extreme situation of the loss of the other in the other’s death radicalizes the process of humanization, but these are not the only paradigm cases. Such humanization also occurs in the examples of engaging the ‘chronic emergency’ of ministering to a new born; in rescuing or being rescued in a Good Samaritan scenario; or in the uncommon struggle of engaging with an authentic friend about the meaning of friendship. For example, ontically, the care-taker (parent) uses empathy to satisfy the needs of the infant, gaining access to what the infant feels because the care-taker feels it too in the form of a trace (vicarious) affect, thus, deploying the care-taker’s being human to bring into being another human being as a member of the community (family). Ontologically, the infant creates the condition of possibly of empathic parenting by the infant’s readiness for becoming human, which may indeed appear as a lack of socialization. The care-taker socializes the infant; the infant humanizes the care-taker, calling it not just to its role as parent (although it does that too), but also to its possibility as a human

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being in committed relationship through thick and thin to another emerging human being. The infant by its very being gives the parent his humanness – as it were, making the parent an inquirer, if not an expert, in adulthood, in being a human – so that the parent can give it (becoming human) back to the infant in a hundred-and-one contingent circumstances requiring empathy. Ontically, the Good Samaritan uses empathy to grasp who is his neighbour prior to taking altruistic action as he experiences the distress of the injured traveller. Ontologically, the traveller who had fallen among thieves and was left for dead creates the possibility of empathic community by his loss of being human in the sense of being reduced to a suffering lump of broken flesh. The Samaritan rescues the traveller; the traveller humanizes the Samaritan, calling him not just to the role of an altruist performing a good deed (although that too occurs), but to his possibility as a human being in relation to another finite, fragile, dependent human being. The stricken Jewish traveller by his very being gives the Samaritan his humanness – precisely making the Samaritan a fellow inquirer in saying who is the neighbour – so that the Samaritan can give it (humanness) back to the distressed traveller in an act of rescue that defines them as part of the same community of fellow travellers – neighbours – on the road of life. Ontically, the friend wordlessly embraces the other in his empathically felt joy and sorrow with the friend’s joy and sorrow. Ontologically, the other creates the possibility of friendship by his shared humanness. The other by his very being gives the friend his humanness – making the friend an inquirer into what it means for friends to share human experiences empathically as friends – so that the friend can give it (humanness) back to the friend in an act of friendship that makes them a part of the same community of friends. Empathy as foundational being with The next step to complete the hermeneutic of empathy requires linking the analysis of the self as care with empathy as foundational being with. As noted previously, taking a stand on one’s being in the face of death is what gives individuality, constancy and continuity to the self. Heidegger does not distinguish taking a stand for oneself versus taking a stand for another, as in empathic listening, since Heidegger’s interest is to undercut the discussions of the ‘I’ as the persisting subject, the permanent in inner perception or continuous ‘I think’ that accompanies all one’s representations (especially in Kant). However, Heidegger would usefully have made such a distinction (between taking a stand for oneself and

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the other) from the perspective of founding authentic interrelations; and it is readily available based on the work he has already done. The self is solidified through care as ‘taking a stand’ (Ständigkeit): In terms of care, the ‘taking a stand’ [Ständigkeit] of the self, as the supposed persistence of the subject, gets its clarification. The phenomenon of this authentic ability-to-be, however, also opens our eyes to the constancy of the self in the sense of its having gained a stand [Standgewonnenhaben]. The constancy of the self in the double sense of constancy and steadfastness is the authentic counter-possibility to the lack of constancy [Unselbst-ständigkeit] of irresolute falling . . . Its ontological structure reveals the existentiality of the selfhood of the self. (Heidegger 1927a: 296–297; H322; translation modified) Taking a stand is what gives the self constancy and continuity; and taking a stand is understood as taking a stand for something or someone who requires or merits standing for. A simple, although not necessarily obvious, next step is to amplify ‘taking a stand’ into an empathic taking a stand for another, that is, literally being there for the other. This is precisely taking a stand for the other – in empathy as an individual human being takes a stand for the other human being. The missing special hermeneutic of empathy, for which Heidegger called but ‘forgot’ to provide – was outlined as the argument of the previous chapter worked through the fundamental design distinctions of affectivity, understanding, and speech, applying these to a Heideggerian account of authentic being-with, that is, empathy. This result slides nicely into the structure of the self as it maps precisely to that of care. Human beings are designed such that ‘who am I?’ is an issue for us. Care is the requirement that humans have to answer this question based on being thrown into a situation with others not of our own choosing, living with others into a future that we have the power to choose and implement (although only imperfectly), on the basis of entanglements with others in everyday distractions such as conforming to implicit norms and conventions. In this context, the unavoidable inevitability of death shows up like a cold shower – and leaves one shivering, too, though with anxiety (like the youth in the folktale who wanted to shudder), not physical cold. The unavoidable inevitability of the other also shows up in a confronting and sometimes surprising way – the loss of the other is also a kind of death – not physical but of one’s being human.

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In a play on words that parallels Heidegger’s ‘unavoidable inevitability of death’ that we might call the ‘unavoidable inevitability of the other’, the other shows up in empathy in both positive and privative modes – in attachment and separation, in relatedness and detachment, in understanding and misunderstanding. In all these instances, empathy arrives like a bestowal of life giving humanness and its loss a descent into emptiness and lack of vitality. It goes beyond what Heidegger explicitly says, to ask about the extreme situation of the loss of the other, but in the context of authentic being with others, it makes sense to do so. The loss of the other is different than the anxiety occasioned by fear of death. The loss of the other is the loss of one’s being human – ontological, not physical, death – the loss of one’s human self. Without others to whom to relate in and through empathy, one is reduced to the level of an emotionless zombie. Life becomes empty and meaningless in the face of which even negative emotions – hostility, anger, hatred – can seem better than the hollow lethargy and apathy of emptiness – a kind of spiritual death – that is, depression. Nothing happens. Yes, the sun rises and sets; yet nothing matters. All is empty. Ultimately, the loss of the other is the loss of the other’s empathy for one, expressed in the first person, for me. One’s empathy for the other renders him accessible; the other’s empathy for the one (for example, me) makes one human and fills one with satisfaction and life itself. Of course, as with the individualizing experience of anxiety in the face of death, the experience of the other seems to focus on the extreme situations of loss and trauma. The poet John Donne says, ‘Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls’. We already know the answer – the loss of every other diminishes one’s own humanness by the loss of the other’s empathy. The other makes possible the mutual inquiry in empathy into being human, what it means to be a human being and be inter-humanly related. The other is as crucial in humanizing individuals, calling them back from lostness in the ‘they self’ (‘the one’) to the being human of authentic selfhood, as is the experience of anticipating death in individualizing selfhood. Empathy as taking a stand for the other The other individual shows up in empathy in diverse ways and according to a common pattern. The other appears as the parent taking care of the infant, ministering to the chronic emergency of early infancy, and then creating the possibility of an empathic inquiry into what it means to be human in the process of growing up, maturing, becoming an adult human being. The other individual shows up as an unavoidable

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inevitability of demands of the other to be responsible (for example, according to Levinas, 1961). The other shows up as another mind that one finds endlessly perplexing (as in John Wisdom or Edmund Husserl in certain phases). The other shows up as suffering that requires a response and support, according to the parable of the Good Samaritan where, for the unfortunate traveller, who was attacked by thieves and left for dead, the other is precisely the life-giving Samaritan, whose empathy grasps the stricken traveller as his neighbour (not his Jewish adversary) and compels him to acts of altruism (however, the altruism is not reducible to empathy or vice versa). The other shows up as the friend in the empathic relationship of friendship as the two individuals, by their conversation and interactions, undertake an inquiry into what it means to be friends. The other shows up the moral law exemplified by the other (as in Kant). The other shows up as a gracious and generous (empathic) listening in so many situations, including formal therapy. All of these, according to pattern, amplify the ‘taking a stand’ (Heidegger 1927a: 296–297; H322) into an empathic taking a stand for another, that is, literally being there for the other – in empathy as an individual human being takes a stand for the other. In empathy, an individual human being takes a stand for the other. Such a stand can look like ‘tough love’, as in intervening with an addict. Or the stand may well be to let the other struggle to come to grips with her or his possibilities rather than leaping in and taking them away from the other. Or it may be that the other is reminded in a calm (gelassen) but resolute way about living up to what is possible for her or him, but of which the individual is temporarily unaware. All these possibilities – and more – occur. The ‘taking a stand’ by which the issue is engaged is informed by the respect for the other. It is informed by empathic receptivity, the interpreted possibilities of empathic understanding, and the committed falling silent and rich stillness of empathic listening. Only if one listens, can one hear the call of the self, including the other’s self calling the other one back to its own authentic possibilities. If one listens, then one can release the other into hearing his own call to himself. In unpacking affectedness in possibilities of understanding as an interpretation that articulates possibilities of the other, taking a stand as listening is precisely the kind of distinction that is required by a full, rich way of being with human being that is empathy. Human beings are the beings for whom their being is at issue. The structure of that issue is designated by ‘care’. Dasein – both the word and the phenomenon of human being – does not distinguish between

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one human being or many human beings. This is a fine point. Here it is crucial, and one of the reasons that Heidegger chose it. Here it might be best to translate Dasein as ‘human existence’, since the latter does not distinguish the individual and the other. Dasein is a form of life – a way that a human being engages in being human.3 ‘Care’ indicates that humans are the kind of beings for whom their own being is an issue. This includes the distinction between oneself and the other. Therefore, the structure of care maps directly to empathy as being an entity for whom being is an issue for oneself and for the other. Empathy and trauma The relation between one’s own death and the death of the other invites further inquiry. One’s own death must be distinguished as a structure of being human (Dasein) that is a moment-by-moment possibility and one’s physical demise as one’s body wears out or is otherwise physically destroyed. Unless otherwise noted, ‘one’s own death’ refers to death as a moment-by-moment possibility for humans. The loss of the other ruptures the structure of authentic care in a way completely different than fleeing into the inauthentic distractions and diversions of the busy conformity of ‘the they self’, ‘the one’. The death of the other – the other’s demise – is an event that leaves me bereft of the authentic ministering, solicitude and humanization of the other – in short, results in a loss of empathy. In contrast, the possibility of my own death (as a structure of being human) is an authentic wakeup call, individualizing me in the face of emerging possibilities to be positively implemented in my life. The former closes off the other as possibility; the latter opens up possibility for oneself. These two results are significantly different. Yet some researchers have tended to conflate these two events as parallel – even interchangeable – kinds of trauma. For example, Robert Stolorow draws a powerful parallel between the experience of the traumatic loss of a loved one as other and the experience of anxiety in the encounter with one’s own death as an existential structure (1992; 2007).4 As narrated in the just cited references, after the sudden and traumatic loss of Stolorow’s wife and professional collaborator, Dede, to cancer, his experience was that nothing mattered; the world of the everyday was shattered and empty. At the time, Stolorow had not yet read Heidegger and was literally at a loss for words to describe his experience of loss. He then engaged Heidegger’s account of the way anxiety discloses death to human existence, precisely as a shattering experience of the everyday, in which nothing matters any longer to

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the individual. It is not just that Stolorow’s inquiry enabled him to express his loss and, thus, work through the processing of mourning; but it also put him in touch with a dimension of Heidegger’s thinking that Stolorow and others (for example, Olafson 1998; Hatab 2000 and Agosta 1977) assert was not fully developed, Mitsein. While there is a large body of research engaging with Mitsein – either with or without empathy – introducing the distinction trauma raises an additional point that is usefully engaged. As we shall see, several areas open up for a productive conversation. First, Dr Stolorow’s courage in using his own searing personal experience as a source for his reflections and research on trauma should be acknowledged (Stolorow 2002, 2007). It cannot have been easy to expose such personal material to the not always empathic inquiries and speculations of others. It is worth respecting the integrity and completeness of his experience – he gets to say what counts as working through, soothing and healing for him in these matters. At the same time, terms such as ‘trauma’, ‘neurosis’, ‘Mitsein’ and ‘authentic beingwith’ have to be respected in reading Heidegger and, as applicable, Freud (and Kohut). The analysis of trauma is a critical path; and a concise summary of Freud’s position will be useful. The trauma of the emotional loss of a loved individual is distinct from the physical trauma encoded in post traumatic stress disorder or the double trauma that leads to neurotic symptoms. For Freud and for students of the modern name for it – ‘post traumatic stress disorder’ – in Freud’s time ‘shell shock’ was named ‘current’ (aktuell) neurosis – the experience of physical traumas such as occur in repeated physical abuse or in the experiences of soldiers in constant danger at war is burned into the neural circuitry – encoded there – such that the experience is spontaneously repeated by the organism in dreams and symptoms in order to master the experience. In order to have the development of a neurotic symptom in classical psychoanalysis – where there is somatic compliance but not a somatic lesion – something more than physical traumatic experience of the kind at issue must occur. Thus, in Freud’s famous case history on Dora (1905), Dora did not fall sick with hysterical symptoms the first time that Herr K. – her father’s paedophilic friend – made sexual advances towards her when she was eight years old. However, the second time this occurred, when she was 14, the result was a hysterical episode as a result of which the good doctor (Freud) was called in to see if he could help keep the lid on this highly dysfunctional, even

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‘abusive’, family situation (to use a term not available to Freud (1905; Hacking 1999)). How does this map to Heidegger formally? Though no obvious analogue to ‘trauma’ is available in Heidegger, implicitly ‘breakdown’ is a superset of traumas of various kinds. Likewise, no obvious analogue of ‘neurosis’ is available. The human being lives into the future on the basis of its thrownness and facticity. But in ontical (‘everyday’) breakdown, what happens is that the individual keeps putting a pattern from the past into its future, arguably in an inauthentic (‘pseudo-neurotic’) attempt to master it. When that pattern includes hidden and unacknowledged commitments, deeply entangled in forgetfulness, then it starts to resemble neurotic behaviour in its grosser aspects. (Those readers who would like a further translation of psychotherapeutic terms into Heideggerian ones, see Letteri 2009 and Goldberg 2004.)5 Here is the objection to Dr Stolorow’s position from a Heideggerian perspective: the loss of a loved one is a trauma different in kind from the ‘trauma’ of the loss of one’s own Dasein in death, whether as actual demise or an existential possibility. The loss of a loved one – whether sudden or agonizingly slowly – is traumatic. In contrast, one’s own death is an existential possibility and disruptive without being traumatic. In short, the ‘trauma of death’ in a Heideggerian perspective is a misnomer. The ‘trauma of death’ within a Heideggerian paradigm – where ‘death’ refers to one’s own (not the other’s) – is refuted by two counter-examples. (1) As an existential possibility, one’s own death in bed after a fulfilling life, surrounded by family and friends, is a meaningful completion. It is not traumatic to the individual, though, from the perspective of the other, the loss to friends and relatives is a traumatic loss. To be sure, the disease and stress leading up to physical death are a source of trauma (assuming one does not die in one’s sleep). Yet, such physical sufferings and pain are distinct from the death itself as an event ending one’s life. As Wittgenstein says, ‘Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death’ (1921: §6.4311). It sounds at least a tad paradoxical to say that death is not traumatic. Yet it is not. The trauma accrues to those who survive and suffer due to the loss of the deceased’s empathy (and affinity of diverse kinds). (2) As an ontic breakdown, being in an aeroplane crash is traumatic even if one survives it. This is especially obvious to those who survive a crash and experience nightmares, reliving the event in dreams, and triggering events that cause flashbacks, interfering with the person’s everyday functioning. However, once again the trauma is in the pain and suffering leading up to one’s

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death, assuming that one does not survive the crash. In short, death is not inherently traumatic, although certain kinds of trauma can cause the individual’s demise (that is, physical death). Physical pain is (or can be) traumatic. Loss of the other (and the other’s humanizing empathy) is traumatic. However, death is not traumatic, either as an end point of life or as a moment-by-moment possibility that humans carry with them at all times.6 Thus, there is a positive sense in Heidegger in which ontological anxiety – disclosing the possibility of no possibility – no human being (Dasein) as a whole – calls one back from one’s lostness in inauthenticity, providing a clearing for authentic commitments and engagements. Such anxiety is allegedly ‘traumatic’ in that it is an upset. Yet once again not every upset is a trauma. Here trauma goes into quotes – ‘trauma’. Such Heideggerian anxiety in the face of death is ‘traumatic’, but in a positive (‘healthy’) sense of a breakdown that creates a clearing for new possibilities – and, thus, in quotations – in that it (anxiety) breaks up and shatters conformity. It disrupts the everyday without sending the individual into the closed loop of a pure traumatic stress disorder where the events of the trauma are repeated in dreams, fantasies, triggering flashbacks as the organism tries to master the stress. In a positive sense, the encounter with the ownmost possibility of no possibility causes the collapse of inauthentic lostness in the lonely crowd. In turn, this results in the collapse and clearing away of inauthentic distractedness, leading to the possibility of possibilities that call humans powerfully into engagement with meaningful projects of their own formulation. If this be trauma, we need more of it! The relationship with the other and loss of the other is a central issue. What is the paradigm affect in which the other is disclosed? In short, the ownmost possibility of death is disclosed in the paradigm of anxiety just as Heidegger suggests; but the loss of the other does not so much result in anxiety as in apathy, lethargy, melancholy, depression. This also echoes remarks of Heinz Kohut about the loss of empathy that is functionally equivalent to – the loss of the other (see Kohut 1971, 1977, 1984 on selfobject in the section ‘Empathy, the Self and the Selfobject’). While anxiety is a fundamental affect through which many other affects are transformed even in Freud (see 1926), still the phenomenologies of anxiety and melancholy (depression) are distinct. It is a minor oversight that Stolorow has side-stepped this. Stolorow’s invocation of ‘being towards loss’ – a phrase based in Heidegger but not used by Heidegger – captures much of this traumatic loss of the other (and in that we are in agreement).

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However, without trying to second-guess Stolorow’s own interpretation of his own painful loss, there is a fundamental distinction between anxiety and depression. A basic distinction exists between the disclosing of the individuality of human beings through anxiety and the depressive, lethargic disclosing of the loss of the other and, closely related, the other’s humanity bestowing vitality and feeling of being alive. Granted, anxiety and depression have many diverse forms. The relevant forms here include both global, free floating anxiety and melancholy that inspires apathy, lethargy, felt lack of energy, emptiness. Both of these forms disclose and correlate to an everyday world that has become meaningless and in which nothing matters. The analogy between the loss of meaning in the encounter with existential death and the loss of meaning in the death of the other is perfect; yet the significance and quality of the experience(s) are divergent. As usual, what is phenomenologically the same symptom has two different significations. In the one case, the human being is individualized in his or her authentic aloneness, in the other, the individual is humanized in his or her authentic being with the other, albeit in a privative mode of the other (loss). When the traumatic experience is engaged and provided with a gathering context in which it is held as a parent might hold and comfort a baby (to invoke Stolorow’s analysis), then the repetitive grip of the trauma slackens. When the traumatic experience is recreated in a conversation with the other and the other’s gracious and generous listening (to use a Heideggerian idiom) and is then integrated with the self through an empathic immersion in the life of the other (to invoke Heinz Kohut’s approach (1977)), then the grip which the trauma has on the experience of the individual is broken and the experience begins to fade, even if it never completely disappears. It is hardly a ‘show stopper’ that some readers of Heidegger object to Stolorow’s using the term ‘intersubjectivity’ as implying relations between consciousnesses that recruits the subject-object distinction, which, of course, is the bad, Cartesian paradigm of Being. For Stolorow, ‘intersubjectivity’ refers to the context of inter-human relations, human inter-relations, in short, Mitsein. Still, a less charitable reading of ‘intersubjectivity’ could find ammunition for controversy since ‘subjectivity’ is a major target of Heidegger’s debunking.

Empathy and altruism The process of humanization is radicalized in the extreme situation of the loss of the other and the loss of the other’s empathy. However, this

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is not the only paradigm in which the individual and other undertake an empathic inquiry into being human in which humanness emerges and blossoms forth. In the above section, we considered how the Good Samaritan and the rescued individual undertake an inquiry into what it means to be a neighbour as the one individual humanizes the other through empathy and, in turn, becomes the target of empathic receptivity. Empathic receptivity discloses the affects and experiences of the other as vicarious experiences of mine. Empathic understanding discloses the other in an interpretation of her or his possibilities that are prior to any particular moral or immoral pattern of behaviour on the part of the other or of oneself. Empathy indicates what the other is experiencing; morality, what the individual ought to do about it. Thus, as a way of disclosing possibilities, empathy can be used for good or for harm. Empathy tells me vicariously what the other is experiencing, what is possible for the other, and how that all can be articulated in listening and speaking with the other. Once again, empathy tells me what the other is experiencing; morality tells me what one must (or may) do about it. Note that the following examples of the atrocities of Nazis and other torturers are not morally permissible according to any intuition or standard of which I am aware. In addition, such uses of empathy point in the direction of multiple empathic phenomena such as emotional contagion, gut reactions and primal pity that are not empathy yet overlap with and rely on some of the same somatic and semantic functions. Loss of the other through the transformation of the other into someone who says ‘you should not be’ – an actively hostile force – results in ‘world collapse’ and a kind of death in life – zombie behaviour. Events still occur in space and time as physical changes; but nothing matters emotionally and affectively. If one survives the immediate shock, the path to a new possibility is a steep one, lying through what is sometimes called radical hope (Lear 2008), and arguably requires the creation of possibility in the face of no possibility (hopelessness). There is no hope, where ‘hope’ means ‘possibility’, until hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.7 Empathy can be used for good or harm Like any powerful method and interpersonal technology, empathy can be used for good as well as harm. During the invasions of Poland and the Netherlands in 1939 and 1940, the Nazis attached sirens to the Stuka dive bombers creating an uncanny noise that seemed to get inside the heads and hearts of the civilian population causing empathic distress.

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Although it may sound strange, even diabolical, to say it, this was based on Nazi empathy with the intended victims. Likewise, the web of lies with which the intended victims of the gas chambers were deported, greeted and executed were based on a sensitivity and access to the experience of the intended victims that makes the deeds all the more chilling and execrable. Second only to this web of lies were the self-deceptions, linguistic contortions, euphemisms and bureaucratic distantiation with which the Nazis had to surround the entire process, which in no way excuses the atrocities and crimes. First, the victims were told they were being relocated to live. Then they were told they were being relocated to work. Then they were greeted with slogans. Then they were told it was time to take a shower. Then they were gassed. The brevity of this account is in no way intended to dishonour the many who suffered innocently and whose memory should always be cherished. The brevity is intended to highlight the exquisite empathy with which the barbarians prepared for the demise of the victims. Likewise, the attendance of doctors at sessions in which subjects are being interrogated using torture, not restricted to Nazi atrocities, is done out of ontic empathy, although not out of ontological empathy for the individual being interrogated, thus indicating the latent contradiction. ‘If the subject dies, you are doing it wrong’ is said of the methods of interrogation, which are clearly not caring. On the contrary, they are violent, humiliating and designed to cause the person to insert the pain and humiliation into the realm of ‘mineness’ – to make the pain ‘mine’ – owned – in such a way that she or he cannot live with her- or himself even after the physical pain ends. The empathic torturer, who embodies a combination of words outrageous, tragic and diabolical, creates agony in such a way that even after the agony and the screams of agony are finished, the victims cannot put themselves back together. The victims are made complicitious in their own dishonouring so that the fragmentation seems irreversible; the dishonour takes on the air of ‘mineness’, even if one escapes from the dungeon. Thus, for example, in the climatic torture scene in George Orwell’s 1984, Winston is credibly threatened with an awful fate – having rats eat his face – shades of Freud’s Ratman are here displaced upwards – and Winston spontaneously invents the possibility that he should be spared and O’Brien (the torturer) should do that to the woman Winston loves, Julia, rather than to him. In his mental and automatic flight into survival, Winston invents this idea spontaneously. The confession is accepted and he eventually returns to life in the negative fantasy of the future. Whereas before Winston (and the reader) enjoyed an island

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of emotional wholeness amidst the desolation of life where Big Brother was always watching, the alien other invaded the island and has broke it up. Big Brother got inside his sphere of mineness (ownness) and dishonoured his love for Julia. The integrity is gone. Even though the betrayal occurred under the most extreme duress – and it should never be represented any other way nor should those who confess be blamed in any way – something dear was lost and something alien substituted for it. Even after much therapy and many reconstitutive experiences and emotionally corrective interactions – something that cannot happen to Winston or Julia but could occur for a victim of a Russian, North Korean or Iranian dictatorship who escapes – something like the integrity of oneself will still have been damaged. Empathy discloses an ontological kernel of otherness in the other that is eminently worthy of respect – and, in that sense, has a core of integrity that points towards morality. However, such a kernel of empathic respect does not prevent an individual ontically misusing the empathy to control, dominate, manipulate, the other as victim. A long recovery is contemplated (and should be undertaken). The (mis)use of empathy in such ontic context challenges the ontological stand that relations with others are an inquiry into humanization. The fact that human interactions can be turned towards domination and control does not diminish the possibility of choosing inclusion, fellowship, and expanding horizons of empathic neighbourliness. However, this is a task, not a given. The evidence gathered by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem support the conclusion that Himmler used empathy in order to take good care of his men, Nazi soldiers. Arendt does not use the word ‘empathy’, although she describes a mechanism that provides input to empathy – emotional contagion and ‘animal pity’. The parallel with empathy is striking, though, once again, empathy is not reducible to it. Grasping these ideas requires putting one’s thoughts and sensibility in a place where they usually do not venture. In the early days of World War II and prior to the automation of killing in the death factories such as Auschwitz, it was difficult for soldiers and paramilitaries to kill people for eight hours a day by shooting them. However, continuous killing is what was required of the Nazis soldiers when there are so many people to kill. That was what the so-called special intervention groups (Einsatzgruppen) had to do. In addition, it is difficult to watch people suffering over so long a period of time, especially if you have insufficient bullets to shoot or gas them all immediately. This is a challenge for any approach to genocide, even after the intended victims have been marked with a yellow star or otherwise ‘branded’, equated with vermin,

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insects, and dehumanized. On the street, people still look like humans when we confront them face-to-face or even face-to-back. The misuse of the Nazi concept of duty, which only superficially resembles a deontological one, has been often noted. It occurs again here and should never be mentioned without being challenged. Briefly, the fallacy consists in making an exception for a subset of humans, thus contradicting one’s own humanness. Even formally, the good Nazi morally contradicts himself – a consistency in shooting only one or a few types of persons (in addition to Jews – gypsies, communists, Catholic converts, gays, mentally retarded, physically disabled – the list grows tellingly) – is inconsistency pure-and-simple. Arendt is worth quoting at length: The murders were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. The troops of the Einsatzgruppen [responsible for shooting] had been drafted from the Armed S.S., a military unit with hardly more crimes in its record than any ordinary unit of the German Army, and their commanders had been chosen by [Chief Commander] Heydrich from the S.S. elite with academic degrees. Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler – who apparently was rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reasons himself – was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people! the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders. (Arendt 1971: 105–106)8 While life is filled with moral ambiguities and difficult ethical choices, this is hardly one of them. What was done was wrong and to be condemned in the strongest terms. Nor is lack of empathy what represents the moral problem. It is the killing. Arendt’s use of ‘self’ is not intended by her in any technical sense, but is simply the soldier himself. What made it easier for the soldiers to do their ‘duty’ – commit genocide – was the manipulation by the leaders to deflect the individual soldier’s natural empathy for the prisoner and to increase the soldier’s empathy for himself, deflecting the natural trajectory towards the other. The ‘animal pity’ and ‘instinctive

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reasons’ against killing creatures that look like oneself are an incomplete form of empathy, based in a mechanism like emotional contagion. In Emile, Rousseau refers to a pre-reflective sentiment of pity. ‘I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am more interested in him for love of myself, and the reason for the precept is in nature itself, which inspires in me the desire of my well-being in whatever place I feel my existence’ (cited in Birmingham 2006: 42). Himmler was afflicted with what Martin L. Hoffman (2000) describes as ‘empathic distress’. This condition is not limited to killers. Recall the dentist in Buddenbrooks, Dr Brecht, who, after a difficult tooth extraction, had to sit down, wipe the sweat from his brow and take a drink of water to relieve the stress. Dr Brecht experienced the pain and suffering of his patients to a nearly debilitating degree.9 Yet if developed with a robust concept of the other, taking the point of view of others, such emotional contagion or instinctive pity towards suffering becomes the basis of vicarious experiences, which, in turn, are essential input to the capability of full blown, adult, mature empathy. Of course, let’s not be dismissive about the challenge that existed in a high degree for those soldiers ordered to do the shooting. They often came down with psychiatric symptoms such as insomnia, loss of appetite, apathy, impotence and disinterest in returning home to the family on leave or furlough. Obviously in comparison with a bullet in the back of the head, such symptoms pale. Yet they were not trivial and provide evidence that much was amiss and, most tellingly, show that people knew things were amiss from the inside. Soldiers and guards lived with much that was amiss and unsaid. That is the point – the assertion of ignorance on the part of the participants is (was) a sham. This is reported extensively by Bruno Bettelheim in his essay ‘Individual and mass behavior in extreme situations’ (1943) anthologized in The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (1960). These symptoms seem like a triviality in comparison with mass murder, yet, again, the telling point is that these individuals’ symptoms were common, which, of course, in no way excuses the conduct. Those who refused or found excuses were told to pack up and were sent into combat on the Eastern Front against Russia. So choices existed, albeit tough ones. I will not be so presumptuous to say what I would have done – no one can – although I hope it would have been the right thing, packing extra wool socks. One more point is worth noting about Arendt’s quotation, namely, that a systematic effort was made to screen out sadists and those who gave evidence of deriving pleasure from killing. Presumably these

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individuals did not make efficient or effective killers over the long term; whereas those who performed their acts out of mechanical obedience (‘duty’) did, which is what the Nazis valued most. In contrast with the soldiers experiencing empathic distress, who Himmler was ‘counselling’, the sadist is so isolated and deadened against all affect that the infliction of pain becomes a way of recovering affect. In a truly awful scenario, the sadist becomes caught up in watching the victim writhe in agony, feeling enlivened and, literally in a perverse way, ‘humanized’, and does not follow orders efficiently. This position has a name – ‘isolism’ – and attempts to re-establish an empathic connection with the other individual through the arousal of an entire spectrum of feelings extending from play-acting to excruciating forms of pain (Goldberg 1995: 139, 144).10 One might try to turn these examples in the direction of an ethics of caring based on empathy by saying in effect, ‘Look at how fundamental empathy is’. Empathy is indeed fundamental. Yet what is missing from such a turning is a use of empathy that always supplies its own ethically informed application. Empathy does not supply its own ethical application. Empathy does indeed supply the otherness of the other – simply stated, the other. It is a separate step to minister to the other, say altruistically, or not minister to the other. The empathy provides access to the suffering of the other. It is a further step to take action to reduce that suffering in line with other ethical conditions and qualifications or run away in empathic distress. The idea is not that this is a pathological instance of empathy which is otherwise a solid foundation for an ethics of caring. Rather this is a pathological, distorted, immoral use of empathy. The morality is separate from the empathy and neither necessarily grounds the other, although arguably both point to a common root in human beings as the source of possibility. It will not be practical to argue at this late point whether humans are intrinsically good or evil. Human beings are intrinsically human. This means intrinsic possibility. Human possibilities include both good and evil, as well as empathy. The evidence provided by the history of the 20th century is not encouraging, yet it is not too late to turn it around. Humans are also capable of great good works as demonstrated in the agricultural revolution of high yield grains that ended hunger for decades and medical ‘miracles’ such as the eradication of small pox and other diseases, which saved many, many millions of lives. The election of Barack Obama as President resulted in Michelle Obama, the great-great-granddaughter of a slave, becoming the First Lady of the United States (The Washington Post 2008). The latter was not possible even 50 years ago, given ‘legal’ segregation. No doubt,

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cynics will find a flaw in every accomplishment and assure that no good deed goes unquestioned. Indeed the consequences of our actions often escape us; and the propagation of forgiveness is an innovation and recommendation well counselled (Arendt 1926/65, 1971; Tutu 1999). Likewise, it is a part of the possibility of empathy to be so used and abused, although humans with integrity and character will choose the positive possibility of empathy so that the misuse does not occur or is made less likely. The upshot is that the core of empathy that discloses the other as the target of respect occurs in a context in which human beings are capable of committing radically immoral actions such as the planning, implementation and denial of genocide. As an everyday, ontic tool for understanding others, empathy is easily used for good or evil. As an ontological capability that positions the other as granting humanization to the one individual, empathy is no better (or worse) than the possibilities of humanness bestowed in the inter-human granting by the other. Empathy can both humanize and victimize without pain of contradiction because being human includes the possibility of victimization. Without in any way blaming the victims of crimes, the other as victim rarely succeeds in humanizing the perpetrator. Rarely, but not never: civil disobedience of the kind advocated by Martin Luther King in his celebrated ‘Letter from a Birmingham jail’ (1963) documents the appeal to the conscience of the other – the racist sheriff as well as the local African American business people – in paying the fine or serving the jail time (two weeks for disturbing the peace). The opponents were not behaving like neighbours. King’s appeal to their consciences through civil disobedience created the possibility of neighbourliness for the first time, literally out of indifference and animosity. There is no guarantee of humanization. Empathy comes down ontologically on the side of human flourishing and well-being as exemplified in the liberal tradition. Yet empathy is weak. Humanization is and remains a task. One has to be aroused out of one’s cynicism, pessimism and resignation upon looking at human history to engage the task of creating a community that works and inspires the possibility of empathy for all humans, expanding the boundary of neighbourliness, as did the Good Samaritan, to encompass someone who might have been an enemy, the radically other. This is not a given, but a point on the horizon towards which we lurch forward empathically, and all-too-often backward, in a dynamic movement. At times it seems we are going in a circle. At other times, we go forward on hands and knees, face in the dust, but advancing nonetheless.

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Empathy: brought to language as narrative A full, rich silence in which listening is in the foreground, is not the only way empathy is brought into language. As Heidegger notes, assertion (statement) is a derivative mode of interpretation. Our affectedness is storied and empathy is required and useful to distinguish the narrative with which human beings surround their affectedness from what actually happened. A wealth of narrative is constellated around affectedness – or emotions, moods, sensation, affects, feelings – and it will exhaust all the narrative that we humans bring to affectedness and take as a source for narrative elaboration and still have more to say (as in the above quotation about the one who ‘is never short for words’). People bring meaning to the reactive (‘imperative’) emotions such as fear, anger, happiness, sadness as well as the ‘narrativized’ emotions such as pride, love, envy, shame, guilt, hate, jealousy, humility. In the latter case, complete assertions, including subjects and predicates, enter into the matter, although not in a reductive way. These assertions are in effect narratives – very short ones in some cases – that we bring to our emotions as we elaborate them (our emotions) into narratives. These narratives extend all the way from confabulation – pure invention about the meaning of what happened – through rationalization – spinning motives in a favourable way, although distorted by self-interest – to nuanced articulation of the ‘reasons of the heart’ of which reason is ignorant as expressed in poetry, literature and authentic conversation. This does not necessarily mean that the emotions are assertions (or judgements) or should be expressed as such. In short, that ‘the emotions are like narratives’ means that a wealth of narrative surrounds them. The emotions will exhaust all the narrative we bring to them and continue to motivate story-telling. As interpretation, empathy is openness to affectedness ‘from below’ and a search for empathic redescriptions ‘from above’. In turn, this empathy opens up innovative interpretations, disclosing possibilities, exposing blind spots and calling the other back to authentic human relations. Let’s look further at how the key distinctions of a special hermeneutic of empathy are exemplified in narrative. Example of the act of empathic receptivity between Thomas and Hanno Buddenbrooks The following narrative exemplifies vicarious experience as an input to empathy. Let’s look at an example from literature that stimulates the reader’s empathic receptivity and provides a segue to empathic

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understanding. In Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, the head of the family, also named Thomas, has ignored, even denied, his artistic sensibilities in order to take over and operate the family business upon his father’s untimely death. As a substitute fulfilment of his artistic tendencies, Thomas has married the beautiful and musically talented Gerda Arnoldsen, who plays fantastic virtuoso duets with her father. Their son, Hanno (short for Johann), seems to have inherited all the artistic genes from both parents and none of the business acumen from his father’s side. Though musically gifted, Hanno is sickly, has an irregular heartbeat and teeth prone to cavities. He is bullied at school by the blonde, strapping Nordic types and tends to draw a mental blank, bursting into tears, as his father (Thomas) asks him to recite his fourth grade school lessons. The relations between father and son are strained. Thomas is loving enough but maintains a stern, north German exterior (appropriate to 1901 when the book was published) in order to toughen his son up and prepare him for the rigors of business. Hanno is fearful and hostile, in turn, just wanting to be left alone to enjoy his rich fantasy life: thus the setting. Meanwhile, a complication occurs for Thomas. In the absence of her father, Gerda has started playing musical duets with Lieutenant Herr von Throta. ‘Musical duets’ have the same resonant ambiguity then and now. The Lieutenant has declined invitations from Thomas to come to dinner. In one scene, Gerda and the Lieutenant are in the music salon directly above Thomas’s office (the latter located in the back of the grand house in grand 19th century fashion). This is not necessarily going where the modern reader might expect. Mann is masterful in describing the hour long silences between music makings, creating in the reader the agonizing sense of uncertainty from which the husband was also suffering. In the context of north German social mores, circa 1900, what crosses the line of social propriety is the passion in the music making, not necessarily any physical dalliance. Yet like an ambiguous visual illusion, the duck-rabbit or the Necker cube, neither the readers nor the town gossips can be certain. Mann’s empathy with the reader enables him to communicate powerfully the angst that Thomas, his character, is feeling, which the reader, in turn, directly experiences through empathic identification with Thomas. However, in addition to Mann’s use of his language to invoke empathy in the reader, Mann also describes empathic receptivity in the characters in the text itself. It is a two-inone example, in which empathy is wrapped in empathy. We join the text as Thomas encounters his son Hanno outside the music salon and questions him in his friendly, exaggeratedly manly and ‘hail fellow, well

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met’ way about Hanno’s lessons. Hanno gives his usual, halting, slightly fearful, clumsy answers, wishing to himself he had done better: But his father did not seem to be listening. He held Hanno’s free hand and played with it absently, unconsciously fingering the slim fingers. And then Hanno heard something that had nothing to do with the lesson at all: his father’s voice, in a tone he had never heard before, low, distressed, almost imploring; ‘Hanno – the lieutenant has been more than two hours with Mamma.’ Little Hanno opened wide his gold-brown eyes at the sound; and they looked, as never before, clear large, and loving, straight into his father’s face, with its reddened eyelids under the light brows, its white puffy cheeks and long stiff moustaches. God knows how much he understood. But one thing they both felt: in the long second when their eyes met, all constraint, coldness, and misunderstanding melted away. Hanno might fail his father in all that demanded vitality, energy and strength. But where fear and suffering were in question, there Thomas Buddenbrooks could count on the intimacy and devotion [des Vertrauen und Hingabe] of his son. On that common ground they met as one. (Buddenbrooks 1901: 507; modified to include Vertrauen (intimacy based on trust), which was omitted from the translation) This nicely integrates the two forms of empathic receptivity, voice and face, with a gesture in the direction of touch, since Thomas holds his son’s hand. A fine-grained change in the tone of voice – a low and distressed tone that Hanno had never heard from his exaggeratedly manly and strong father before – causes Hanno to turn and look at his father’s face, which he had otherwise been avoiding due to the cross examination about the school lessons. As a boy, Hanno does not conceptually understand that his mother, Gerda, has crossed the line of social propriety (at least in her husband’s opinion), that the neighbours are gossiping that Thomas’s young wife is making a fool of him; that if he summarily throws the lieutenant out of his house, that will make the brewing scandal even worse – then he (Thomas) will be a laughing stock in the town, since the lieutenant will gossip, and, worse again, then Thomas will look foolish to his wife – the very caricature of a jealous husband. The empathic receptivity is Hanno’s. He senses that his father’s strength masks fear. His father’s cheerfulness is superficial, masking

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suffering. He senses that his father’s stern exterior, energy, dynamism and businesslike busyness conceals a sense that matters are not what they seem, not in order as they should be in a good, German, burgher household. Initially Hanno has access to the suffering because he too has suffered. He does not attribute his own misery over his lessons, being bullied or his sense of failing to live up to his much idealized father’s expectations. Hanno does not put himself in the place (shoes) of his father ‘as if’, neither consciously or unconsciously. As an only child, he has spent his entire life thinking that this is just the way things are – ‘Bullied at school, cannot seem to please my father, who is strong and wonderful, my teeth get drilled and extracted by the dentist’ (and remember this is 1901 so we are talking extreme physical pain). Life really is a veil of nine year old tears. Hanno does not need to draw any inferences. But he uses his experiences, which are sufficiently broad and deep, to constitute a certain level of expertise in mental anguish and spiritual pain, in order to recognize suffering when he sees it. And this is it: his father’s tone of voice is the trigger, and his father’s puffy, stressed face, which looks like it has been crying, but actually is just overwork and misery, is further confirming experience. For a brief moment, Hanno is in the same position as the psychoanalyst who finds playfulness concealed behind sadness (mourning). Hanno finds weakness behind strength; suffering behind superficial ‘hail fellow, well met’ cheerfulness. In that moment, something became possible that was not present previously and Hanno saw an aspect of his father’s humanness undisclosed before. His father was vulnerable and could be trusted as a fellow traveller in finitude. Without empathy, trust (Vertrauen) becomes a dicey, unreliable and fragile attitude. Trust is indeed an attitude, an expectation that the other is reliable and will perform as expected, as promised. Prior to this encounter, such a feature was missing from the relationship between father and son. Once it is established, trust is self-sustaining, like the excellence of the virtuous man in Aristotle for whom the practice of the good has become habitual. One might argue that, ‘under the hood’, Hanno’s human biocomputer and its mirror neurons are simulating the distress in the voice and face of his father, enabling Hanno to ‘get it’. And, no doubt, mechanistic processes are being discharged. If Hanno and his father were able to plug miniature functional magnetic resonance imaging machines (say) into their ears and the read outs were captured, then the moment at which their eyes touched would indeed show a spike in the discharge of mirror neurons. Something happened, and it is represented in this

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gigabyte of data. What it would not show is the human meaning as ‘all constraint, coldness, and misunderstanding melted away.’ What it would not show is empathic understanding of the possibility that this big, strong guy suffers too. What it would not show is the possibility of a human relationship between father and son as vulnerable individuals that trust one another intimately. There are many reasons for this. One is that the f MRI has the temporal constraint character of a tool being used right now; whereas Hanno and Thomas are open to time across all three temporal dimensions. These temporal dimensions, in turn, enable them to put the past back into the past and create a new possibility, living into the future, a loving, intimate and affectionate relationship instead of a hostile and fearful one. This document is also a rich witness to empathic understanding. Hanno may not be a top scholar or good at sports, but he is an expert in suffering. His entire life is one conflict between his artistic talent, his rich fantasy life (not depicted in the selected quote) and a Hansetic League, mercantile trading milieu in northern Germany (Lübeck) and parallel family milieu. In particular the latter, that defines what is possible for males in his social class, a career in business, politics, law or drinking and gambling. Hanno’s Uncle Christian, who has artistic talent, an ability to mimic people in a genuinely funny way and a rich sense of irony that might have made him a stellar theatrical actor, pursued the latter – drinking and gambling, because it was simply not imaginable that he would pursue the theatre as a career. The reader may object that Hanno does not really have empathy with his father. For example, the statement that ‘God knows how much he understood’ could be read as ‘only God knows’ and neither Hanno nor his father know. Hanno and his father just share suffering by being immersed in suffering (due to unrelated causes). Such a reading cannot be ruled out totally. However, I would rather give Hanno the benefit of the doubt. The ‘God knows’ provides emphasis to the assertion that Hanno knows all-too-well. Hanno’s experiences are brought to bear on his relationship with his father in a way that, although painful, is basically a breakthrough in understanding the possibility of his father’s humanness. That is what makes this episode a positive one for both the participants. The constraints of the past evaporate. This makes possible a new level of intimacy. This contrasts with (say) the over-stimulating flood of affect that creates empathic distress, as when Hanno is crossexamined about his studies by his father in a misguided attempt to relate. We also see an example of the latter in the character of the dentist, Herr Dr Brecht, whose would-be empathy for his patients is such

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that he breaks out in a cold sweat and has to sit down exhausted after each dental procedure. In short, Dr Brecht has available the vicarious experiences that would make him a good empathizer if he were able to control them; but, having an especially sensitive delicacy of empathy, instead he falls prey to empathic distress.

The hermeneutic of empathy: a bridge over troubled waters The bridge is one over troubled waters. Human suffering is vast and deep. The motivation for another analysis of empathy is the intention of relieving suffering. For all the limitations of Heidegger’s analysis of human being – and of its all-too-human author – the possibilities are unmistakable. Granted that, according to Heidegger, the modern understanding of being and of being human, that is, history, wandered from the way of truth of Parmenides at about the time that Plato tried to write down the teachings of Socrates and develop a theory of ideas with presence at its core; granted that everyone who touches metaphysics, including Heidegger, seems to be ensnared by it; is there any point in pursing the possibility of relieving suffering? Life is tough and then one dies; get over it. Is that the only consolation of philosophy? Is this back sliding into humanism? These are all ‘big ideas’ and invite an equally grand scale response; yet none is available here. Instead the invitation is to a special hermeneutic of empathy – ‘special’ because, as an inquiry, it is an example of itself. Humans inquire into what it means to be human, and the inquiry itself humanizes. Thus, a special hermeneutic of empathy in the spirit of Heidegger is not humanism, it is a clearing for the possibility of being human; it is not existentialism, it is the clearing for the possibility of human possibility; it is not morals, it is a clearing for respect, integrity, altruism and a recognition of who is one’s neighbour that expands one’s humanness; it is not psychotherapy, it is a clearing for human interrelatedness in the context of an inquiry into being human that unmasks inauthentic behaviour and relieves emotional distress; it is not aesthetics, it is a clearing for the communicability of affect; it is not rhetoric, it is a clearing for being effective through language; it is not parenting, teaching or leadership, it is a clearing for a commitment to community, making a difference and improving the quality of life. Meanwhile, this hermeneutic of empathy is an attempt to light a single candle in the form of empathy against the darkness of human suffering. This does not require a regression into pity or fear or even an idealization into a sentimental utopia. What it does require is an appreciation of the challenges

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of the human condition – often called ‘difficulty’ – in the face of which empathy is more than a method and an ontic tool to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps, not like a treadmill of infinite progress, but rather like generating a possibility that was not visible before and as a concrete way of being with one another as a particular possibility to be implemented, a challenge to be engaged. Thus, the result of this hermeneutic of empathy is a complete reworking of empathy based on a fundamental analysis of human being as being in the world. Let us summarize. Empathy is the silent listening to the possibilities of the self and other in affectedness as respect, as an understanding giving the other its own possibilities as an interpretive choosing of authentic selfhood in the face of commitment. Each of the design distinctions of humanness as being in the world is implemented as being with human being (i) in its affectedness in respect – as empathic receptivity, (ii) in understanding and its interpretive fore-structure – as empathic understanding, (iii) as first-, secondand third-person perspectives as empathic perspective taking and (iv) in silent speech where the one becomes the conscience of the other in taking a stand – as empathic listening. Empathy is where being with human being and being human are authentically disclosed as an authentic form of human relatedness. We live in a forgetfulness of the very possibility, of which this hermeneutic serves as a reminder. Empathy is the foundation of authentic inter-human relations. Thus, if, as Heidegger asserts, authentic being with one another (Mitsein) is the foundation of the ontological bridge between selves, and empathy is authentic being with one another, then empathy is indeed the ontological foundation of the bridge between selves.

4 The Roundtrip from Hermeneutics to Intentionality

Abstract The path from a special hermeneutic of empathy to an intentional analysis of empathy is facilitated by three considerations: a single statement in Being and Time about a positive structure of consciousness; an account of ‘mineness’ that opens the way to capturing the individual’s experience as mine versus not mine; access to intentionality through language (in Searle) and through the breakdown of normal constitutive functions of synthesis in the spirit of the famous precursor to experimental philosophy expounded by John Locke of an individual, blind from birth, whose sight was restored. Empathic intentionality has the other on its critical path to the founding of human interrelatedness; but it is characterized by the intending of a communal relationship – community – within which the individual and the other are related on the basis of their shared, common humanness.

Empathy and intentionality The path from Heidegger’s analysis of human existence and special hermeneutic of empathy to the intentionality of empathy is a winding one. As noted, Heidegger does not even mention the possibility of a positive account of consciousness until the last page of Being and Time (1927b H437), so it remains a conjecture, though a probable one, that he would regard the intentionality of a mental act as derivative, that is, not fundamental. However, the fact that it is derivative does not mean that it is irrelevant once the necessary foundation is in place. 84

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What then to do about the fact that a completely different analysis of the intentionality of the act of empathy – including different explicit statements and different distinctions about the other – is available in Husserl and, by implication, the thinker with whom the latter is often contrasted, John Searle (Searle 2000)?1 Granted, the word ‘empathy’ does not occur in the work of Searle. However, his method of accessing intentionality via speech acts will be extended in the direction of empathy. A candidate speech act corresponding to empathy – story-telling – will be proposed and the result for empathy engaged and analysed. However, first we must make the transition from a Heideggerian approach to an explicitly intentional one. After ascending by way of a special hermeneutic of empathy from affectedness through understanding of possibilities, interpretation, and articulation of empathy as a generous, gracious mode of listening, on the one hand, and some examples of narrative (not yet within a speech act framework), on the other, we arrive at a consideration of the requirement to engage with the intentionality of empathy. However, consciousness is not something that fits well with a Heideggerian approach at all. Granted that we take our orientation from empathy, not Heidegger, still a clarification is needed as to the articulation, link and transition – translation – from Heidegger to the idiom of individual intentionality. Three aids are at hand: a single statement about the positive structure of consciousness (in Being and Time (1927b: H437)); access to intentionality through language (initially inspired by Searle and moving in the direction of the later writings of Husserl); and, finally, the interpretation of the ‘mineness’ of human being (taken from Heidegger) as opening up the distinction between describing and for purposes of analysis, encoding experience as inner (mine) versus external (not mine).

A single statement about the positive structure of consciousness First, Heidegger debunks discourse about the subject, subjectivity, the cognitive self and empathy as a form of cognition of the other. These are all displaced as not ontologically fundamental. The subject and subjectivity are not nothing – but they are derivative and lead to misguided reifications of the self. As noted, ‘consciousness’ is actually mentioned on the very last page of Being and Time (1927b: H437) as having a positive structure above and beyond the ‘thinking thing’ into which it has been reified. This will be significant when we engage the intentional structure of empathy.

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Language as a method of access to intentionality Second, the ascent is through language and the descent back is also through language. Searle uses speech as performative acts to provide access to the structuring of the representation of intentionality. He does this in an amazing tour de force that can best be compared to Kant’s derivation of the table of categories from the table of judgements. Granted the latter may be accused of explaining the obscure by the more obscure, but what it means in simple terms is that language provides access to what is otherwise epistemically closed off. We are not consciously aware in phenomenal experience of the function of synthesis in intentionality (or in Kant’s categories), although we are well aware of the results, namely, that our experiences are coherent and meaningful. Language provided the clue to Kant in that each form of judgement (in language) has a form of synthesis of recognition in a concept through one of the corresponding categories. Likewise, for Searle, each form of the speech act (performative) has a function of intentionality in a mental state of belief, desire or one of the emotions. The speech act gives one access to what otherwise is not epistemically accessible, intentional states that represent the infrastructure of beliefs, desires, perception and other mental acts, including empathy. This is an extension of what Searle explicitly says about intentionality in the direction of the intentionality of empathy. Likewise, this represents a point of leverage and connection through language, consistent with Heidegger’s contribution, but orthogonal to it and implicit in it. Heidegger did not rule it out, but it has remained undeveloped – until now. The point is that delving into aspects of consciousness and its intentionality is not necessarily at odds with the first chapters of this work and, if handled judiciously, is indeed complimentary and a natural extension. ‘Mineness’ and navigating the inner–outer distinction (continued) Third, Heidegger provides a clue towards the rehabilitation of introspection as a positive structure of consciousness. The statement that human being (Dasein) is always mine sets up a positive and productive method of undercutting the distinction between inner and outer in favour of a dynamic differentiation across a system boundary – a boundary between a human and its context (including the other in context) – that is either open or closed. When a single sensation of the blue of the sky or the red of the apple or the vicarious feeling of pain in watching someone accidentally hammer his own thumb instead of a nail is experienced

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from the perspective of ‘mineness’, it is experienced as inner, not outer. It is experienced as mine (‘inner’). This one clue – that human being is always mine – provides the springboard for a separate engagement with empathy as ‘vicarious experience’. Various phenomena, including vicarious experience, function as transitional between mine and not mine. A hallucination is experienced – described and encoded – as external, yet is an experience generated in the context of mineness. A vicarious feeling is experienced – encoded – as internal, yet it is an experience caused by the communicability of affect of the other individual. In every case, ‘my inner experience’ is equivalent merely to ‘my experience’ pureand-simple. While the child says of the teddy bear ‘Mine!’ this is not a mere statement of property, it is an extension of her or his individuality. A child’s teddy bear is evidentially experienced as external, yet try and take it away at bedtime and the tenacity with which it is defended (and the loss expressed) indicates it is encoded as mine – not just an external and indifferent possession but a part of the individual on a par with what makes life matter.

Intentional acts of empathy target expressions of life Why it should be so that another source of intentionality – one might say ‘spontaneity’ – exists in the world besides oneself is itself a wonder. The intentional act of empathy has the other as its intended target. It aims at the other. The intentional act of empathy anticipates the other and a response by the other. Without the other, even if only in imagination, the act of empathy collapses into a tight autistic gesture and does not rise to the level of a coherent definition, much less experience, of humans in a relationship. In general, empathy is an awareness of and response to the other as other. As a first cut that will have to be refined: empathy is a consciousness of the other as a source of . . . what? The other as the source of feelings, affects, emotions, intentions, beliefs, desires, purposes, in short, a diverse array of animate expressions of life. An intentional analysis of empathy introduces a distinction between the other as other and the other as a source of access to otherness. The first is part of the definition of empathy – without the other, empathy is mere projection – and tautologically true: the other is always other. However, the other is also a source of otherness and that already is starting to sound less tautological. The other is the source of access to its otherness by means of the other’s animate expressions of life – expressions of affect, emotion, sensations. The other would like to be

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known for what it is, which, it will turn out, is not always other but extends to the distinction ‘human’. Another way of describing this is to say that empathy intends a social reference to the other. Empathy intends a community, communalization, communality. Here ‘communalization’ means the process of generating a community. Intuitively and pre-ontologically, the other individual – this other source of intentionality – demonstrates its effectiveness – its empirical, everyday (‘ontical’) existence – by spontaneously coming at me. The other deceives me, giving me misleading information. As in the folk story, the radical other – the wolf – pretends to be friendly, speaking in kind and soothing words, gesturing with his pale hands that he has nothing up his sleeve, requesting to enter the house. But when he gets inside, he turns out to be untrustworthy and creates mischief. The deception falls away. All at once, the other is the enemy and he eats the children whole. The other deceives me, therefore, the other exists. The other causes me pain. It steps on my toe. The other gets born, giving its mother a paradigm of physical pain and more. It fills my email inbox with spam and other irrelevant messages. It is out there and coming at me. Making sense of the other is an accomplishment and a task worth undertaking for an approach to empathy. This requires advancing from the ontic to the ontological. This occurs within an ontological relatedness in which the one individual gets her or his being human from the other so that the humanness can be returned to the other in a hundred-and-one ontical ways. It sounds paradoxical that in an act of empathic intentionality my intentionality encompasses another’s intentionality, gets back behind it and recreates it as separate from mine, even as the other is reciprocally recreating mine as I recreate its. One gets dizzy imagining the possibilities. The lack of computational resources on the part of the human imagination, which are exhausted at about three iterations, and the tendency to hypostasize the act into a thing-self (which, of course, is illusory) save empathy from an infinite regress. The way out of the loop is direct. Empathy includes the other as part of its constitutive activity and, without acts of empathy, the other escapes. However, pitfalls and fallacies abound. What is more, the illusions are often a function of the systematic and standard operation of normal human relations. A comparison may be useful. A visual perception expects distant objects to maintain size constancy; so too empathy has its expectation of the other. The consistent application of the mechanism of size constancy can create illusions, such as when the moon

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appears larger at the horizon than at its zenith because it seems nearer when at the horizon; but for the most part it functions as designed. Likewise, the expectation of a relationship with the other may create illusions of meaning, like when an individual employs a default egocentricity, attributing to the other what is really encoded as one’s own. Arguably the intentional acts of others, especially in competitive situations, are less reliable than physical perceptions. In terms of the comparison, while size constancy works most of the time to assure normal distance perception and fails in exceptional or marginal cases, default egocentricity is just the reverse. It regularly leads one astray, attributing properties of oneself to the other, but works from time-to-time when one’s own situation corresponds remarkably well (and rarely) with that of the other. We can clarify and dispel the illusion of egocentricity; but, as in the case of the moon, we must do so again-and-again. The intentional act of empathy expects to be fulfilled by a range of large-scale and micro expressions of emotion, feeling, sensation and corresponding behaviour. The other may fail to fulfil the intention, not live up to the expectation and disappoint. However, even in disappointing, deceiving and misbehaving, the other fulfils the expectation of otherness on the part of empathy, albeit in a privative mode. In those instances in which the response of the other and the environment is so at odds with the expectation of an expression graspable by empathy, the result is the breakdown of the act of empathy and a profound dehumanization similar to psychotic disturbance (for example, Farrow and Woodruff 2007). For example, profound isolation and loss of human contact, extending for months or years, predictably leads to the breakdown of human identity and the loss of the ability to relate coherently to others and the environment. The Associated Press reporter, Terry Anderson, who spent seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon, much of it locked in a closet, reported symptoms similar to psychosis and personality breakdown (Gawande 2009). Without the sustaining humanization of the other, individual identity and the self, through time, are dissolved into fragments. Empirically, solipsism is unsustainable, although it may still have its uses as a philosophical stalking horse. Empathy has to pull itself up by its own bootstraps as something that has intentional directedness, as a form of consciousness, awareness of something = x. This something is an animate expression of life of the other individual living being. Expressions of life extend to expressions of feelings, affects, emotions, sensations, desires, beliefs, as

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well as movements and behaviour. This already may be controversial for some, since it says that individuals empathize with other living creatures such as higher mammals (dogs and cats and apes) and possibly with all creatures capable of experiencing pain and suffering. However, this does not imply that such creatures in return have empathy for us humans, at least not fully; still, they can be acutely sensitive to the communicability of affect, for example, when a dog senses a person’s fear and uses it to dominate by barking. This account of intentionality is inclined to the position that intentionality is a function of advanced biological organisms with big brains, predominately, but not exclusively, humans.2 In brief, intentionality is drenched with language, is accessible through language and linguistic performances. Inspired by Searle, evidence will be marshalled that intentionality is itself the source of the intentional performances accomplished through language. Yet even if intentionality is drenched in language and accessible through language, it is nevertheless not reducible to language, linguistic performances or semantics in the narrow sense. Furthermore, the results of this analysis of empathy would not be significantly altered if intentionality turns out to be only in the eye of the beholder, or, alternatively, intentionality is an emergent property of the biological brain such that intentionality ‘supervenes’ on neurological process the way nutrition emerges from the digestive system. Of course, the latter is the position advocated by John Searle (Searle 2002: 28) to whose contribution we now turn. At an appropriate point, the contribution of Husserl’s later writings will also be invoked as deepening Searle’s approach in an area where the latter’s resources, though vast, are arguably over-extended.

Constitutive acts of empathy Empathy is a form of receptivity. As a form of receptivity, empathy is like perception and particular visual experiences such as seeing. Of course, there is a distinction between perceiving a yellow station wagon and perceiving the pained expression on the face of a friend accidentally injured by slamming the car door on her or his thumb. In the first case, I succeed in having a visual experience of a yellow station wagon; in the second, I succeed in having an experience, including both visual and auditory components (Ouch!), of a pained expression on the face of a friend, accidentally injured by the car door. Receptivity to the other’s experience has conditions of satisfaction that can be specified just as well as perceiving a yellow station wagon.

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One candidate method of access to intentionality is through language, in particular, speech acts. Speech act analysis is a powerful method of inquiry. In so far as we are interested in undertaking a raid on the inarticulate and pushing back behind propositions and predications into affectivity and empathic interrelations, language will get us started and we will always return to language, but language will not turn out to be the whole story. Now in the interest of a straight-ahead account of the intentionality of acts of empathy, this inquiry will draw on two sources of distinctions about intentionality – John Searle’s Intentionality (1983) and a judicious selection of Edmund Husserl’s later writings to be further specified. Granted that the positions of both of these thinkers evolved, their consistency (or inconsistency) with one another cannot be demonstrated formally, and my intuition is that they are more orthogonal to one another than in conflict. Thus, in contrast to Hubert Dreyfus’ philosophical joke – that Searle ‘channels’ Husserl – the approach to intentionality of these two thinkers diverges significantly in many details but can be read as being complementary.3 As noted, a single model that encompasses them both will not be built here, especially as regards the role of language. Therefore, a clarification is in order. First, Searle will be more useful in analysing those aspects of the intentionality of empathy that require an engagement with propositional attitudes and content. Second, as Searle allows that the intentionality of belief and desire are states, not mental acts (except in the instance of ‘acts in intention’, for example, physical movements), and the latter states are the paradigm against which intentional activity (for example, seeing) is explained, further distinctions are required to capture what is special about the act character of empathy. In particular, the role of mental activity in constituting things (objects) in the first place as coherent, unified sources of causal influence on human awareness and experience is required and needs to be specified. This is done in such a way that the coherence of the object of experience makes sense at a pre-predicative, yet meaningful, level and points in the direction of the later writings of Husserl. Intentional acts of empathy are constitutive of the meaningful coherence of the other individual, in particular as animate expressions of life. The reason that this opportunistic conjoining of Searle at one level and Husserl at another works is that empathy includes both propositional and pre-predicative intentions. Searle handles the former; Husserl, the latter. The integrity of both positions can be sustained if one takes Searle as performing his analysis from that of the natural, naïve realist

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position and Husserl as having invoked a phenomenological epoche to disclose the mental acts that confer pre-predicative meaning on die Sachen selbst. This single sentence will serve here as a place-holder for Husserl’s progression from his many propositional and predicative analyses to the pre-predicative in his work on passive synthesis and the life-world (see Chapter 5).

Situating empathy in Searle’s account of intentionality: preliminary distinctions Searle makes the point that the intentional components of fear and love are able to be analysed in terms of belief and desire. This is not the complete analysis of these emotions, but, according to Searle, it is the complete account of the intentionality of the emotions – there is more left over, but it is not intentional as exemplified by belief or desire. ‘Joy and sorrow, for example, are feelings that don’t reduce to Belief and Desire but as far as their Intentionality is concerned, they have no Intentionality in addition to Belief and Desire . . .’ (Searle 1983: 35; the upper case in ‘Belief’ indicates Searle’s use of a technical term). Of course, Searle does not apply his analysis of intentionality to empathy. However, the suggestion is that his distinctions are useful for pointing in the direction our inquiry needs to go. For Searle, the intentional structure of empathy may be approached by comparing it to other propositional attitudes such as belief, desire and feeling. ‘I believe that he is angry.’ ‘I fear that he is angry.’ ‘I hope that he is angry.’ ‘I conjecture that he is angry.’ ‘I imagine that he is angry.’ ‘I feel that he is angry.’ The latter could also mean that ‘I guess or conjecture that he is angry.’ But suppose it does not. Suppose it is meant exactly as stated. Speaking in the first person for clarity, I feel that he is angry – not the assertion, the actual feeling – because I experience a vicarious experience of his anger too. In the latter case, we would have an example of a feeling directed towards the other empathically. This can be made clearer by redescribing the experience as ‘I feel empathically that he is angry.’ In the latter case, the psychological mode is an adverbial modifier of the affective intentionality. The surface structure of ‘I feel that he is angry’ translates into ‘I feel that he is angry in that his feeling of anger is the cause of the feeling of anger that is now mine.’ ‘I empathize with the feeling of anger that he is experiencing’ or more concisely ‘I empathize with his feeling of anger.’ Note that this would work just as well by substituting ‘pain’ for ‘anger’ in the examples given. This point is required because one often

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empathizes with the physical pain of another. It is a further discussion that the application of empathy reduces suffering, including pain, by restoring homeostatic equilibrium to the organism. Scientific experiments have occurred in which subjects, lying back in a functional magnetic resonance imaging apparatus, are shown pictures of people in painful situations, for example, accidentally closing the car door on their hand (Ouch!). So without going into the neurophenomenology, which is treated elsewhere, pain must be included in the discussion (Decety and Jackson 2004; Jackson, Meltzoff, and Decety 2005). Pain neurons go off in the observer as mirror neurons and in correlation with those that discharged in the victim, albeit at a lower level of intensity. Searle objects that ‘He has an experience of pain’ does not describe an intentional state or act. The objection is that the surface structure of the statement is misleading. Searle makes this assertion (Searle 1983: 39ftnt.), perhaps because he does not want to fight again the weary battles about the incorrigibility of pain. For better or worse, the intentionality of empathy must engage directly with pain and its many manifestations. According to the objection, the experience of pain is just being in pain. The experience of pain is pain, pure-and-simple, a brute fact. In comparison, ‘He has an experience of yellow’ or ‘He has an experience of anger’ does describe an instance of intentionality. The anger is about something, say, an insult. The yellow is about something, for example, a slice of lemon. Yet this is a tougher case than one might at first think. The reply to the objection is direct: pain is about as many different things, shades and aspects of experience as the experience of colour. Pain is a representation of the chemical and endochrinological milieu of the organism that powerfully and immediately focuses attention and awareness (‘consciousness’) on the site of an injury, on a source of disequilibrium or on something = x that requires further inquiry because the organism is threatened or because inquiry is warranted for any arbitrary reason. Pain in its myriad forms can be redescribed as an information processing system parallel to but at a physiologically more primitive level than cognitive processing or emotional signalling. Pain is a representation of damage to the organism and, in unrelated situations, a deviation from a norm of equilibrium in one’s inner physiological (biological) milieu. The experience of pain allows wide quantitative and qualitative variations. Intense and abundant pain is contingently unmistakable, faint and minimal pain is easy to misidentify and readily becomes a source of error. In general, it is risky for ordinary language philosophers to correct ordinary language as misleading; and a case can be made that pain is

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as intentional as any other mental experience. Part of the challenge is that a random hallucination of yellow is less attention focusing and more sensible than a random hallucination of pain. People do not generally have hallucinations of pain – except for pains experienced in phantom limbs of amputees as well as those born without limbs. A hallucination of pain is still painful – but there is no organic damage to a local site. A hallucination is defined as an experience for which there is no ordinary causal account, requiring an explanation in terms of the exceptional processing of the sensory (perceptual) system itself. It is the self-stimulation of the nervous, visual, auditory, tactile system in the absence of the ordinary artefacts of experience. Thus, a perceptual mechanism of object constancy causes various optical illusions – hallucinations – such as rail road-tracks converging at the horizon. The phantom limb is the self-stimulation of the body image used to navigate and manage the organism’s trajectory through the environment. (See R. Melzack (1973) The Puzzle of Pain.) Phantom limb pain is a type of hallucination. If not, it is hard to say what would count as one. There is damage in abundance, too, as a limb is missing, although the trauma may or may not be remembered. So even if the individual with the pain in his phantom limb is not having an intentional experience, one can empathize with his pain and the act of empathy with his pain is indeed an intentional act. The pains and paralysis of classic hysteria were also arguably hallucinatory, at least in the sense that there was no organic lesion. However, in order to get to the issues crucial to empathy and intentionality, the line of least resistance is to allow the objection tentatively and for the sake of discussion. Even if one allows that ‘he is in pain’ is not intentional, such is not the case with the empathically based assertion ‘I feel that he is in pain.’ ‘I feel that he is in pain’ is an entirely different assertion and one indeed intentional. Why? The introduction of the other in addition to oneself and this other being in pain is sufficient to activate the vicarious representation of pain in the empathizing subject. Another immediate question is whether there is a useful (or meaningful) distinction between ‘I feel that he is in pain’ and ‘I feel his pain.’ Remember President Clinton’s ‘empathic’ address to the victims of the hurricane: ‘I feel your pain’? The latter became the target of satirical parody (‘jokes’) on late night television. This was not because it was bad grammar. Rather, because it rang hollow. While grammatically impeccable, it seemed an instance of excessive sensibility, perhaps because it was a politician not a clergyman who said it. Both statements could

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be unpacked by ‘I empathize with his feeling of pain’; but another reading would allow ‘I share his pain’, because (for example) I went through the experience of the hurricane with him. If the candidate statement intends a vicarious experience (feeling) of pain, then the empathic reading will be the best one. If the experience is painful because the hurricane that blew away your house also blew away mine, then the shared suffering will win out. In the latter, I am feeling sorry about my situation and you are feeling sorry about yours; but, in any case, we are both miserable, although for different (but isomorphic) reasons.4 But, contra Searle, the left-over aspect of emotions are intentional even if they are not wholly propositional. The intentionality of empathy is required too. It is precisely empathy that focuses on the informational but non cognitive remainder of the emotions that is left over after cognition and volitional are accounted for in Searle’s logical analysis. The issue of meaning looms large as a point of contention between Searle and Husserl, with Searle maintaining that it does not really work to ask for the meaning of intentional states such as belief, desire and intentional acts like seeing. This is precisely because, for Searle, the distinction between content and intentional act of expression is missing. In contrast, Husserl – especially but not exclusively the later Husserl – allows that there are constitutive acts of meaning that make sense of – bestow meaning on – experience by synthesizing the sense of experience as coherent, unified phenomena in the first place even prior to semantics as a narrow linguistic distinction. Granted that many of Husserl’s inquiries target propositional and predicate analyses, the distinction between intentional act and intended content is enough to support a realm of correlative syntheses, in which phenomenologically reduced experience is meaningful, makes sense, even though this sense is pre-predicative. This work argues that we must decline the choice between meaning as a function of language and meaning as a function of the pre-predicative synthesis of objects. We must reject an either-or that would deny meaning to experience or import semantic distinctions where they do not belong. Even if the early Husserl was generalizing a linguistic account of meaning to phenomenologically reduced experience as a whole (for example, McIntyre and Smith 1982), the latter still is logically detachable from the former and takes on a life of its own as a target of inquiry. The point is that the intentional analysis of empathy draws on both propositional and pre-predicative intentions. In the following section, we will explore the analysis of intentionality in the approach of ordinary language as guided by Searle. Then,

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in the following chapter, we will delve behind language to constitutive acts of synthesis in seeing and in empathy and follow the guidance of Husserl. We will take as our clue in the analysis of constitutive acts of vision (and empathy) a real world implementation of John Locke’s thought experiment – experimental philosophy – that a man blind from birth would not be able to distinguish a circle from a square by mere visual inspection if his vision were miraculously restored. Modern science delivers the miraculous. Once again, this analysis takes its orientation from empathy, not from the position of either Searle or Husserl; but, in every instance, the commitment is to read these thinkers accurately and charitably, even while noting those selective points at which their thinking is amplified and used as a springboard for further inquiry into empathy. Two examples of experimental philosophy (blindness and prosopagnosia) will be engaged, including one directly applied to the human face. First, we shall turn to the medium of language and the performative aspect of language in a raid on the inarticulate that bears witness to the creation and enactment of an empathic milieu in story-telling. Then in a thought experiment similar to Locke’s, but using the human face, we shall pursue the constitutive act of unification of the facial manifold and the significance for empathy of the breakdown of this synthesis. First, let us take a step back and seek to understand what language can do in order to map its scope and limits from the inside of language. The point of this excursus into Searle’s approach to intentionality is threefold. First, to grasp what is ‘left over’ after speech acts are used to explore intentionality and to capture the intentional contribution. Searle makes the point that ‘linguistic meaning is a derived form of intentionality’ (Searle, 1983: 161), although all the examples he provides use language to express the intention as a propositional attitude. Yet, as indicated, language is not the whole story and paradigm examples, not contradicting but orthogonal to what Searle says, are available in the application of intentionality at a sub-linguistic or pre-predicative level as acts of signification in the spirit of Husserl. Second, to apply this ‘left over’ to open a phenomenological realm of meaning, making sense of experience, in a strict sense, that is pre-predicative yet informational. Third, to apply this ‘left over’ to an intentional analysis of empathy. Searle’s account of intentionality: access through speech acts Speech acts express an intention and give us access to intentionality. Since this work is interested in grasping the intentionality of empathy, it prima facia makes sense to ask what is the speech act corresponding

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to the intentionality of empathy. Note that such an approach obviously goes beyond anything that Searle explicitly said, yet if such a speech act could be identified and analysed, then it would express useful distinctions about empathy. At the risk of creating suspense in the reader, after some necessary set up, this will be delivered in the section on ‘The Speech Act of Story-telling’. There are four points of connection, according to Searle, between speech acts and intentionality. None of these require interpreting Searle against himself, though the devil is in the details. The devilish details will come up once we get to mental acts and meaning. According to Searle: (1) Speech acts distinguish between propositional content and illocutionary force. ‘That you will leave the room’ is an example of proposition content. In a speech act, ordering you to leave, requesting that you leave or suggesting that you leave have different illocutionary forces, but the same propositional content. Thus, illocutionary force is what the speaker intends to bring about by the utterance. In parallel, the same propositional content can have different intentional modes – variously called ‘qualities’ (by Husserl) or ‘propositional attitudes’ (by Dretske) – such as I hope that you will leave the room, I believe that you will leave the room, I imagine that you will leave the room, I fear that you will leave the room, I wish that you will (would) leave the room, I doubt that you will leave the room. (2) Both speech acts and intentions have a direction of fit. Assertions and beliefs have a word-to-world (mind-to-world) direction of fit. The speaker asserts that the world looks like his statement ‘It’s raining’, which is true or false depending on the weather. Beliefs have a similar direction of fit and truth value depending on the state of affairs of the world. Promises and desires have a world-to-word (world-to-mind) direction of fit. In a promise, one tries to bring it about that the world conforms to one’s word. In implementing one’s desires, one tries to make the world conform to one’s desires. While not true or false, one does succeed or fail to fulfil the promise or desire. Finally, some speech acts have a null direction of fit. Saying one is sorry does not require that the world match one’s word or vice versa. According to Searle, the same is the case with feeling sorry. One has a belief that one insulted another about which one is sorry. And the belief (that one has insulated you) has a direction of fit (and perhaps it is not so); but, given one’s belief, one’s feeling sorry does not have a direction of fit. It just is.

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(3) Speech acts express an intention. This does a great deal of work for Searle (and us); and it is on the critical path to using speech acts to access intentionality. The intention is the sincerity condition of the speech act, and the propositional content of the intention is represented in the speech act. The speech act is the expression of an intentional state and the latter is the sincerity condition of the (success of) the speech act. ‘I order you to stop smoking but I do not want, hope or intend that you stop smoking’ is logically odd (although not contradictory) because the speech act is made without a sincerity condition. Searle’s innovation is to argue that the representational structure of the intention is the structure of the speech act itself. The sense of representation is entirely exhausted by the analogy with speech acts. A representation is defined by its content and its mode, not its formal structure (Searle 1983: 12). In fact, ‘formal structure’ of representation does not have a clear sense and is avoided by Searle. This innovation avoids the requirement to traverse the mine field of the mind as a phenomenon with structure, which, in turn, invites spatial descriptions and metaphors. No theatre of the mind here. Such conversation is terminated before it gets started. Searle’s argument gets traction where, in order to ascend to a logical analysis of representation as such, speech acts function to freeze the flux of the experience of awareness (consciousness). As transient as an utterance may be physically, speech acts live on in the listening and memories of the conversational attendees. People hold one another accountable for what was said, even while debating the details of what exactly was said and what was meant. An utterance does just that – it freezes the flux of experience – producing a static island in the flux of experience corresponding to the linguistic performance. Once uttered sincerely, an assertion becomes a commitment to the truth or falsity of the position represented in the linguistic expression. People can come back to it, quote it back to the speaker, use it for or against him. Even in being disowned by the speaker, ‘I never meant that!’ the original assertion continues to echo in one’s listening. (4) The conditions of satisfaction of the speech act and of the expressed psychological state are identical (according to Searle). The propositional content determines its conditions of satisfaction under certain aspects and its mode determines a direction of fit of the propositional content as explained by the theory of speech acts. Thus, both the statement ‘it is raining now’ and the corresponding belief that it is raining now have the direction of fit word to world or mental state (belief) to world and, in addition, are satisfied (true) if and only if it is actually raining. Thus,

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both the statement ‘Leave the room now, Sam!’ and the psychological state that one desires that Sam leave the room now have the direction of fit world to word or world to mental state (desire). That is, by the performance, the speaker tries to bring it about that Sam leaves the room and both the statement (directive) and the psychological state (desire) are satisfied if Sam actually does leave the room. Likewise, the statement that it is raining is true if and only if one’s belief that it is raining is true. Along the same line, the statement that one is having a visual experience of a yellow station wagon before one expresses a successful perception and is true if and only if there is a yellow station wagon before one. Finally, one’s command is obeyed if and only if one’s wish or desire is fulfilled. No ghost in the machine (homunculus) is required to use a belief since a belief is intrinsically a representation – that is, a propositional content and a psychological mode (attitude). Representation is entirely exhausted by the analogy with speech acts (Searle 1983: 12). The speaker (the one desiring) tries to make the world correspond to his word. ‘The notion of representation is conveniently vague’ (Searle 1983: 11). ‘Every Intentional state with a direction of fit is a representation of its conditions of satisfaction’ (Searle 1983: 13). Nothing is ambiguous; yet, it is a brilliant example of diplomatic vagueness. Finally, we get to empathy to which the latter applies directly. The conditions of satisfaction of empathy (of empathic receptivity) are that I have qualitatively the same feeling, usually with less intensity, as the other person and that the other person’s feeling is the cause of my feeling and that I am aware of this source through the other’s animate expression. Thus, expression is an essential part of the definition of empathy as the target intended by the act of empathy. There is no concise or logically fundamental version of this approach that eliminates the expression of the other as the method of access to the other and as the source of his or her expressive life. If individuals actually possessed telepathic powers (which, however, they do not), then expression could be logically deleted. But since we do not possess such a capability, animate expression – the ‘externalization’ of intentional content – operates as a forcing function, opening up the distinction between intention and communication. This puts us on the path to an analysis of meaning, which will loom large in engaging the way in which empathy is articulated in language. For example, the statement ‘I am in pain’ functions as an assertive that has a truth value. However, it also functions in context as an expressive

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that articulates the experience of pain. These two uses are consistent, can occur in a confounding mixture in context and are rarely distinguished except perhaps in Wittgenstein.5 Understanding the first use – the statement ‘I am in pain’ as an assertion – is a function of one’s mastery of language; understanding the second – ‘I am in pain’ as an animate expression of pain, independent of any truth value – requires empathy. This is as far as we get without surfacing a speech act corresponding to the intentional act of empathy itself. We now look at the candidate speech act of story-telling in diverse forms. This speech act is not on Searle’s list, although it is related to those that are. It is invoked as a method of disclosing empathic intentionality. After providing examples of what these candidate speech acts are and how they disclose empathic intentionality, we shall have to circle back and say how they relate to, amplify and extend Searle’s explicit statements. In both cases, the speech act delimits and makes accessible the underlying act of empathic intentionality. Since it fits into the flow of our work, we will also look at an example of empathizing with belief. In the absence of a specific mature, adult speech act that provides a method of access to an intentional state (or act) and itself provides the analysis, an alternative is available in getting access to acts of empathy through language. The alternative will be engaged in Chapter 5. The speech act of story-telling: the example of empathizing with desire The folktale as a story told to another (a listener) is itself a cultural performance and performative. It is an artefact of language, although it is more than that through its rich pre-predicative symbolism. It reaches back into the imaginary from the perspective of the adult story-teller and into a way of being that is prior to the firm distinction of fact and fiction. Yes, the story is fictional discourse using figurative language. Animals can talk and resemble members of one’s family or community. Yet the story does something in fact. It humanizes the participants and forms a community. In the folktale of ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids’, the mother goat leaves to find dinner for the seven kids, leaving instructions to open the door only for her, whom the kids will recognize by her voice.6 The mother goat is recognized primarily by her voice, not her face. The wolf knocks and claims to be the mother. But the kids recognize him as the wolf due to his rough, gravelly voice. He disguises his voice by swallowing chalk, a smoothing agent. While he sounds okay, the kids ask for an additional point of authentication. They ask him to put his hand (‘paw’) to the window, and then they see that it is dark and unlike their

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mother’s. Rejected. He then disguises his paw by dusting it with chalk (more chalk). This time the ruse works. He gets in and eats them up, alive and whole. Next, he falls asleep and in proper folktale fashion, the mother returns in a timely way, sizes up the situation, and – gets out her sewing kit! She cuts the wolf open, the children jump out of his gut (baulk), since he swallowed them whole. She sews stones back in, and all rejoice when the wolf wakes up, is thirsty (due to the stones), goes to the well and falls in and drowns. Note that the mother – and the other – are supposed to be recognized by the voice and the hand, which are the key encryption and authentication items. This story is a rich witness to empathy at three levels. First, it addresses the empathy of the narrator (teller) with the experience of the young infant who does not know whom to trust. The infant’s experience of the care-taker is of a soothing voice that, in the middle of the night, says ‘there, there – it’s alright, here is your bottle [breast]’ and of a friendly hand that provides solid food by day and gentle caressing of the physical organism in a daily bath. The face is conspicuous by its absence from this tale; and yet, as a story, it corresponds precisely to a phenomenon noted by parents and care-takers in many cultures. At eight months, infants become frightened by the face of strangers. Apparently, the face of the other is so alarming that it had to be deleted from the story itself by the work of telling and retelling. When in the grips of the eight month anxiety, even familiar faces are frightening when disguised – as when Dad shows up with his face covered by shaving lather. Spontaneous shrieks of distress issue forth from otherwise contented infants. Eight month anxiety; and poor Papa is wondering what he did wrong. Nothing – it’s part of a developmental program. Second, the story increases the empathy of the listener, who is typically a child of perhaps three to five years (being told a story at bedtime). The latter is dealing with the issue of basic trust – the other is emerging as the distinction between the trusted and untrusted, dangerous other. The other does not become other until it ceases to be a mere extension of oneself – the hand and voice of the ministering mother. One could say there is propositional content here ‘Do not talk to strangers (or let them in the house),’ but it is embedded in a pre-predicative milieu of soothing voices, gentle hands and, in absentia, friendly faces. Ontically, the story informs the empathy of the story-teller about what it feels like (vicariously) to be a hungry infant. The ‘big bad wolf’ is an externalization of a hunger so big and bad that it seems malevolent enough to swallow one whole (which, in the story, it does). The infant does not first experience the possibility of death; the infant experiences

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being left alone, abandoned by the other, sentenced to starvation, which is indistinguishable from death. From abandonment by the other, death emerges as the possibility of being swallowed whole by the radical other, the big bad wolf. From the point of view of the neonate, death is indistinguishable from abandonment to hunger – being left to stave. World collapse is not the issue in this story, just empathizing with the hungry infant.7 The remedy is proportionate to the threat – the mother gets out her sewing kit, presumably while warming up lunch. Third, the story opportunistically creates a series of vicarious feelings relating to desires – hunger, fear, relief, happiness, thirst – for the parent and the child to share in the process of telling the story, thus building empathy between them. But even then there is asymmetry in the communicability of affect, more is required of the story-teller (parent). She or he must be available to regulate the emotion aroused in the listener and through careful pacing of the telling of the story bring matters to an emotionally satisfying conclusion. That this particular story is intended for the very young is indicated by the ease with which the problem is magically solved. The mother goat gets out her sewing kit. The problem is no worse than a torn sock to be mended. In the example of the care-taker/neonate relationship, empathy is the care-taker’s primary tool, especially prior to the development of propositional, grammatical language. The care-taker empathizes with the feelings, affects, sensations, desires and beliefs of the neonate or, in this folktale, young, barely verbal child. Empathy and its various forms are the primary method for capturing and processing the myriad expressions and forms of life displayed by the neonate. During the eight month anxiety, the neonate is afraid of strangers. Even though the neonate cannot pass the false belief test and recognize the inappropriateness of its fear upon seeing the face of a dear uncle, who he has never before met, the care-taker attributes a false belief to the neonate, namely, the view that the other is a threat. Far from it. In empathy, the care-taker’s performances are providing the neonate a relationship and structure into which to grow as a participant in the community. In humanizing the neonate, the care-taker also humanizes her- or himself – as a parent, provider, teacher, caring individual and so on. This is not merely in the social role of care-taker, but more importantly as a lived, (pre)ontological inquiry into what it means to be human in which the being human of parent and child unfold in mutually becoming the individuals that they are.8 The intentionality of empathic receptivity as a vicarious experience of hunger is articulated in empathic understanding. The latter expresses

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the possibilities of trust and mistrust, devouring (dangerous) orality versus nourishing oral incorporation, the radical other and the ministering one. These are interpreted and articulated in images of abandonment and rescue in the entire narrative of the story itself. This progression from ravenous, inchoate, unarticulated hunger to explicit, expressed images of danger, rescue and satisfaction is itself an empathic one. We can regard the process in which empathy unfolds as an information supply chain that is richly informational about how the world is disclosed as a sensory-affective totality. By the time one is an adult, the belief-volitional components of intentionality have largely been assimilated to the linguistic exchange of propositional contents. However, the affective-sensory dimensions still evoke an individual’s empathy. The contribution to the conversation of the infant in the grips of the eight month anxiety largely consists of wildly flailing about with arms and legs in seemingly random motions and crying or cooing intermittently. The young child of three years old has more verbal resources, but, in the face of bedtime fears, they are limited to the verbal equivalent of the neonate’s flailing about randomly with arms and legs. As Searle points out, story-telling is its own language game. It requires a separate set of conventions subordinate to illocutionary language games at least in the sense that no fictional beings are posited, no subsisting ideal worlds are required. Searle would not necessarily agree with this analysis. For Searle, the statements in a novel or other fictional narrative are pretend illocutionary performances and pretend references involving a separate set of conventions suspending the normal operation of rules about commitments to the naively realistic world (Searle 1974: 66–67). Even three year olds know that goats and wolves do not talk, that wolves do not swallow their prey whole, that one’s brothers and sisters are not goats, or that Mom’s sewing kit cannot save the day if one does happen to be swallowed whole by a wolf. Or do they? The ‘once upon a time’, with which the story begins, is a performative, implying the suspension – the bracketing, as it were – in what follows of normal conventions of fact-based journalism and science. With this much, Searle is in agreement. Still, the story as a complete performance (and performative (they are different)) is not a pretend illocutionary statement, although it may include illocutions that are pretend on a statement-by-statement basis. My proposal is that the act of story-telling itself is a speech act at a higher level in that it creates a community between the story-teller and the child (audience), humanizing them in a community of two. The story does not pretend to create a community – it really does so.

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The intention to which it gives us access as an artefact of language and a performative is precisely empathy as vicarious feeling is articulated, implemented and communicated in the story-telling itself. Note that no one is saying that all stories have this structure or empathic consequences. Much fiction does create the possibility of vicarious experience. Folktales map closely to developmental issues. In general, story-telling as a performance – as distinct from a ‘performative’ narrowly defined – creates a community of shared affect like any theatrical performance. The result is similar but in an entirely different context to the creation of intimacy and a community of laughter by telling a joke (Cohen 1999). This goes significantly beyond Searle’s analysis of speech acts to consider story-telling as a speech act sui generis; yet the suggestion is this does not so much correct what Searle says as amplify it in an undeveloped direction – namely, the intentionality of empathy. According to Searle, the speech act delimits and makes accessible the intentional state. Likewise, the speech act of telling the folktale implements the intentional act of empathy. Both the performative and the intentional act have identical conditions of satisfaction. The representation is of a hunger as experienced by the infant that is so ‘big and bad’ that it could eat seven kids whole. The representation is of being made to wait to satisfy that desire. The representation is of having to make the cognitive distinction between trusted friend and untrustworthy enemy using specific rule-governed criteria – voice and hand print data – and of learning to survive one’s mistakes. The hunger is dealt with by being encoded as external – it looks like a ravenous wolf. It keeps coming back, again and again. The cognitive challenge is to distinguish a friendly hand and voice from hostile ones. Mom still has the power to make things better and defeat the wolf of hunger, which swallows one whole while waiting for dinner. Of course, these are precisely the kinds of would-be propositional contents where the cognition does not make a difference. One knows food is on the way, but it doesn’t help. One knows you shouldn’t be afraid of Uncle Phil; but he is a stranger and just looks scary. One must get in one’s gut who can be trusted, how to master the overwhelming feeling of hunger while waiting for the mashed potatoes. For the story-teller, the folktale itself is a representation and the telling corresponds to the intention of empathizing with the experience of the young child confronting the fear of strangers (‘stranger danger’), the requirement to process information about who to trust and wait for dinner without being overwhelmed and swallowed by the wolf of hunger.

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The issues are the same for the listener, albeit at a different level of competence. The basic emotions created in telling the story are fear at being left alone, surprise at being (finally) deceived by the wolf and relief (‘happiness’) at being rescued by the mother goat. The major desire is hunger. The major relational challenge is distinguishing who can be trusted by listening to the voice and looking at the hand. Indeed trust and its bearer loom large in the story; and there is a form of implied promise – the mother goat will be right back with lunch. But trust breaks down. The suspense builds as the wolf tries and is repulsed twice; but the third time the worst fear is realized. Disaster looms. However, momentary despair is transformed into relief and rescue is at hand. The sewing kit is out and the temporarily shattered trust literally gets a stitch in time, knitting up the torn fabric of the relationship. The dramatic events of the story are the source (‘cause’) of the vicarious fear, suspense, despair, relief and so on experienced by the narrator and listener. As usual, this work takes its commitment from empathy, not from Searle (or Heidegger and so on). While respecting the integrity and completeness of a thinker – in this case, Searle – as regards his published statements, this work on empathy aims to recover what the thinker has to contribute to empathy, even if it goes beyond what the thinker explicitly says. There inevitably comes a point at which a thinker has to be interpreted against her- or himself, usually in a matter of detail, in order to make a contribution to empathy. Yes, there are pretend assertives in the story (‘The wolf will eat you whole’), pretend commands (‘Don’t open the door for the wolf’), pretend commissives (‘I promise to return with dinner’), pretend expressives (‘Help!’) and so on. What is real – and this amplifies Searle – is the performative that creates a world to word fit between parent and child in enacting (‘telling’) the story. This enactment serves as a foundation for the emergence of empathy. This is established in building trust for the communication of feeling between the narrator and the listener. The distinction ‘other’ emerges as the difference between one who can be trusted and one who cannot be. This is not so much a propositional content (though, of course, it can be translated into a proposition) as it is a distinction in one’s approach to relating to other individuals. When the whole world can be trusted – the context of naïve well-being at the very start of the story – then there is no other. When there is someone whose hand and voice are not ministering to the young child’s desire but dangerous, then there is an other. At the level of the whole story as a speech act, the other as other gets constituted in an act of empathic constitution that distinguishes trustworthy from untrustworthy other.

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In any case, it is the voice of the mother goat, not her face, which is the linchpin of the story and the medium in which empathic connectivity is enacted. One marvels at the depth of the folktale and its inexhaustibility as a narrative with significance, not only for human development but, for the transformations of otherness, ontology, and empathy. The speech act of story-telling: the example of empathizing with belief If the folktale is a raid on the inarticulate, capturing in words and pictures the experiences of hunger, fear of starvation and lessons of trust, nevertheless, the acquisition of language changes everything. It puts at the disposal of oneself and others powerful methods of exploring and negotiating about desires and beliefs. If you want something, ask for it. If you are not sure what to believe, then discuss it and investigate the evidence. Of course, this extends to sensations, affects and emotional configurations too. However, in the case of grosser, noncognitive informational sources such as sensations and affects, the pre-propositional content persists and looms large in the interrelational dynamic. An example of empathizing with belief is now provided. In summary: towards the end of the Elective Affinities by Goethe (1809), Nanny is introduced as the naïve personal maid of Ottilie. Ottilie is plunged into a state of depression by her responsibility in the accidental drowning of Charlotte’s infant daughter, for whom she (Ottilie) was supposed to be caring. Ottilie commits suicide by starving herself to death – anorexia – and Nanny is complicitious in this suicide through self-neglect by taking and eating the meals offered to her by Ottilie. Nanny is a purely innocent country girl, who enjoys what is offered to her, clearly not appreciating the depth of her mistress’ distress. In any case, she does not tell anyone of it, and Ottilie literally wastes away until an opportunistic infection ends her life. Nanny blames herself for the death and she does bear some indirect responsibility, although greatly attenuated in that Nanny is naïve in the extreme. Nanny says, ‘The food looked so tasty.’ It is a further step in her naiveté that she blames herself. This is just the set up. At the funeral, Nanny believes Ottilie comes back to life momentarily and forgives her (Nanny). She believes that the lips of the mortal remains of Ottilie, lying in the open coffin, mouth the words, ‘I forgive you.’ This vignette is offered not only as an example but also as a challenge: now empathize with Nanny’s belief in context. Can we recruit empathy with another’s belief when that belief strains credibility? You believe what? How can you believe that? Nanny’s belief that the dead Ottilie, lying in view in her coffin, came back to life and said words of forgiveness. Actually, we may be able to empathize with

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the belief; what we do not do is believe it really happened; but we can empathize that Nanny wanted it to happen. While we empathize with beliefs and desires as well as emotions and sensation, the latter are commonly the main target for adult empathizers. Our communications of beliefs are heavily laden with language. This is not exclusively so. In this case, we recruit empathy to deal with anomalous beliefs. It is just that the empathic care-takers relation with the pre-linguistic neonate is eventually supplanted by verbal performances as the latter become available. ‘I am hungry’ can be an assertion with a truth value satisfied just in case the individual’s blood stream measure low blood sugar or a corresponding physical craving. Or ‘I am hungry’ can be an expressive that is functionally equivalent to a request for a hamburger or a raid on the refrigerator. If emotions always and exactly had the structure of a propositional attitude, then the operation of empathy on the emotions is easy to explain. In expressing anger, the target of empathy, the expressive individual, makes available the proposition to the one who is being empathic. The empathizer gets the propositional attitude, ‘Yes, he is angry that he was called “mud”.’ The propositional attitude is communicated through gesture, physiognomy and statements (language). The recipient uses the propositional content to evoke the associated constellation of affect, feeling or beliefs and desires that constitute empathizing with the other person. However, there is a lot more going on than an analogical inference between propositions. Searle proposes to analyse the complex intentionality of emotions into beliefs and desires, acknowledging that there is still something left over when the proposed reduction is complete. If I read Searle accurately, then that something left over is not a form of intentionality, but remains undeveloped and literally sinks into the ‘background’, the latter being Searle’s approach to the context, lived world, and common sense milieu of life. Contra Searle, the analysis here is that the ‘left over’ is indeed intentional, although the collision with Searle’s analysis is not inevitable or total. In particular, the ‘left over’ is a pre-predicative form of intentionality that is not accessible through speech acts or other complex predicative statements. The ‘left over’ pre-predicative form of intentionality requires a constitutive form of perception in the case of object constancy, for example, as presented by the yellow station wagon standing in front of the observer; and it requires a constitutive form of empathy, for example, in the case of the visual manifold of a human face of an individual who is smiling as the result of the playful interaction with the other. How do we get access to this pre-predicative form of intentionality if not through speech acts?

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The limits of access to empathy through language An approach through language can open up our understanding of empathy and its intentionality. Granted, Searle would not necessarily agree with the use being made of his framework and its extension to storytelling in folktales and literature as speech acts of a higher order. The intentional analysis of empathy will not be able to be completed based on speech acts and predicative language alone. The extent of linguistic analysis is wide and deep, yet even it has its limits, which empathy will plumb and test. Searle’s approach is limited by his asserting that believing, desiring, meaning are mental states, not mental acts. The latter is largely missing. In turn, this leads to meaning, believing, desiring, not having meaning. However, contra Searle, the meaning of believing, not the word (no quotations here), the intentional act as such, is quite straightforward. The meaning of believing – not the word, the intentional act or state (it does not matter at this point), is the possibility of one of a spectrum of doxic conditions on a continuum from doubt to certainty. Look at what’s there. A person believes that it is raining – not the sentence but the actual attitude towards the weather – means that the person has a level of assurance about the weather intermediate between doubt and certainty, namely, a middling belief. The meaning of meaning – not the word, the intention – is the possibility of a position in a field of possible distinctions, a logical distinction, re-identifiable coordinates and directions. Meaning is a field of distinctions and the meaning of meaning is the explicit articulation of that field of distinctions with respect to some particular distinction. I mean that it is raining – not the sentence but the mental act of the signification – yields a position in a field of distinctions that includes the explicit articulation of the distinction, raining as the falling of precipitation from the sky. Meaning, believing, desiring and related functions – not the words, but the acts themselves – have meaning as articulations, relations, transformations, in a field of possible distinctions. Let’s take a step back and see how it could have happened that, with the exception of an action in intentions such as raising one’s arm, Searle does not allow for mental acts. Searle’s analysis of intentionality through the speech act has consequences for an approach to meaning. ‘Language is derived from intentionality and not conversely’ (Searle 1983: 5). This implies that there is a remainder ‘left over’ after intentionality is done infusing language with meaning. ‘Meaning is one kind of Intentionality’ (Searle 1983: 161); ‘Meaning exists only where there is a distinction

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between Intentional content and the form of its externalization, and to ask for the meaning is to ask for an Intentional content that goes with the form of externalization . . . Es regnet . . .’ (Searle 1983: 28). It makes sense to ask for the meaning of a statement in a foreign language whose meaning one does not know. But it is redundant – and semantically odd – to ask for the meaning of an assertion when one already speaks (that is, understands) the language of the assertion. The distinction between intentional content and its externalization in an expression collapses. Searle says that it makes sense to ask for the meaning of ‘Es regnet’ and for related sentences and utterances, but not for the meaning of a belief or desire. There is no distinction between the belief and its intentional content. We cannot (according to Searle) sensibly ask for the meaning of ‘John believes that p’ where ‘p’ is ‘it is raining’. Unless you do not speak the English language or are deaf, for example, it does not make sense to ask the question ‘What does it mean that “John believes that it is raining”.’ The meaning of ‘John believes that it is raining’ is immediately available in the surface structure of the statement. Nothing is hidden; and the meaning is direct. In addition, ‘John means p’ cannot stand on its own. We cannot say ‘John means that p’ where ‘p’ is ‘it is raining’ in a standalone way without, for example, doing something such as answering a question about the weather. In contrast, ‘John believes that p’ is quite capable of standing alone. John couldn’t mean that p unless he was saying or doing something by way of which he meant that p, whereas John can simply believe that p without doing anything. Meaning that p isn’t an intentional state, which can stand on its own, in the way that believing that p is. In order to mean that p, there must be some overt action. When we come to ‘John stated that p’ the overt action is made explicit. Stating (asserting, declaring) is an illocutionary act – an utterance act (Searle 1983: 29). According to Searle, the issue is that meaning and believing are not acts whereas stating (uttering) is an act: ‘It is the performance of the utterance act with a certain set of intentions that converts the utterance act into an illocutionary act and thus imposes intentionality on the utterance’ (Searle 1983: 29). Though the meaning bestowing event goes by quickly, this is the point at which intentionality infuses speech with its power to be meaningful. Next, Searle allows that belief is a mental state, but not a mental act (event). Of course this glosses over the distinction between belief as an ongoing process of weighing the probability (to put an opaque example that avoids truth or falsity) that religion is the opiate of the masses

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and the accomplished state (‘fixation of belief’) – yes, it is. According to Searle, there are indeed mental events (acts) such as intentions in action, for example, when I raise my arm voluntarily. There are processes such that seeing really is a mental event. But the rich mental activity of all sorts of perceiving, remembering, imagining actions ‘popping off’ like so many fire crackers in the Husserlian consciousness do not make the cut (Searle 1983: 28–29). It is a further question for Searle whether beliefs (whether as states or acts) can be full blown beliefs while remaining unexpressed, although the use of speech acts to analyse the representational structure of belief applies to ‘expressed belief’ and perhaps warrants that beliefs are contingently always accessible. The representation of the belief is different than its communication, though, contingently, both may occur in a speech act: ‘Characteristically a man who makes a statement both intends to represent some fact or state of affairs and intends to communicate this representation to his hearers. But his representing intention is not the same as his communication intention’ (1983: 165). There are two aspects to meaning intentions: the intention to represent and the intention to communicate (1983: 165–166). What makes it hard to grasp seeing the yellow station wagon as an act of seeing and not merely a mental state such as belief or desire is the naïve realism of the way in which the causality is approached. A coherent object is presented – the yellow station wagon. In fact, an entire world of things is bound up in a network of causation and a context (background) in which the visual experience has an indexical relationship, a particular point of view on the individual station wagon. This is not wrong. Far from it. We do not infer things such as yellow station wagons and human smiles or frowns; we are in direct contact with them. Searle is spot on – no inference is required to get in contact. Still, the naïve realism is just not sufficiently penetrating to grasp the intentionality of the experience of seeing as an act constituting the object of seeing. We do not need an inference to get in touch with the world of things or the world of humans and human expressions. But inference may still be useful in analysing a complex process of causality as applied to seeing, especially if the causality is not immediately accessible in either speech or experience. In the parallel case of the pained expression on the face of the friend who has just closed the car door on his thumb, the causal account rapidly progresses in the direction of empathy. The painful expression is constituted as painful by an act of empathy on the part of the observer.

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How do we get access to either experience? A coherent object, an automobile, is presented in experience. The facial manifold of my friend is presented in experience. Language and its predicates help us describe the world of the auto and of the friend’s smiling face. Speech acts give us a method of accessing the representational content and conditions of satisfaction. But how about when this experience breaks down? Are we, as researchers, able to access the underlying intentional structure of the intentional acts constitutive of the experience? What are the conditions of the possibility of experience to be inferred, given the loss of the coherence of the experience itself? This is a typical method in neurophenomenology (Metzinger 2003) – to inquire into the case where the experience breaks down. In Husserlian terms, this enables us to get from the shareable noema to the noesis, from the meaning to the act of synthesizing the meaning. As Einstein reportedly said, it is when the crystal breaks that we learn about its structure. Another way of saying the same thing: when something is missing, it is conspicuous by its absence. We now turn to forms of the breakdown – misfunctioning – of standard forms of pre-predicative synthesis, including an example that answers a classic philosophical query posed to John Locke. The examples of accessing intentionality so far as well as those forthcoming are summarized in Figure 4.1. Access to intentionality

Through speech acts

Speech acts (Searle)

Belief

Speech act Story-telling

Desire Empathy

Figure 4.1

Access to Intentionality

Through breakdown

Seeing: Synthesis of visual manifold

Sensible experience of Things (yellow station wagon)

Seeing: Facial manifold prosopagnosia

Sensible experience of facial expression (empathy)

5 Empathy from Periphery to Foundation

Abstract Access to the intentionality of empathy shifts from using language (speech acts) to the use of examples of the breakdown of normal constitutive functions as a method such as perceiving physical objects or the human face. In particular, the famous case, presented to John Locke, of an individual, blind from birth, whose sight was restored is considered. The example of acquired face blindness (prosopagnosia) is also engaged. Husserl gives us powerful tools to analyse the pre-linguistic aspects of empathy, but he applied them to empathy only incompletely. He underestimated the richness of the concept of other; misplaced empathy in the superstructure rather than at the foundation of inter-human relations; and, like most others of his time, was distracted by the prevailing public definition of empathy due to Theodor Lipps. The radicalization of the other in Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian mediation is traced to the point at which inter-subjectivity explodes the limits of the sphere of ownness and a way out of the impasse is sought in Husserl’s Nachlass (posthumous publications). Tracing empathy from the periphery to the centre, from the superstructure to the foundation of inter-subjectivity (‘community’), the account of empathic intentionality is characterized by the intending of a communal relationship – community – within which the individual and the other are related vicariously.

Husserl’s account of empathic intentionality: pre-predicative synthesis Given that the contrast between Searle and Husserl is glossed in this work by a difference between propositional and pre-predicative 112

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methods, refinement and clarification are required. To be sure, Husserl’s engagement with the phenomena of nature and inter-subjectivity entails extensive propositional and predicative analysis. Indeed in his early work, Husserl comes close to articulating a distinction ‘speech act’, but the idea remains undeveloped, unlike in the Anglo-American tradition (for example, Husserl 1900/13: §7). Directly relevant here is the progression in Husserl towards the pre-predicative synthesis of experience in his Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis (1920/26) as well as in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1934/37), in which the life-world (Lebenswelt) functions as a background that, at least, is diplomatically ambiguous as to its explicit predicative status. This development occurs in three phases. First, from his own phenomenological perspective, Husserl engaged and considered Kant’s figurative synthesis to belong to the productive character of the synthesis of experience in genetic constitution. In Husserl’s still untranslated First Philosophy: Critical History of Ideas (Erste Philosophie: Erster Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte, Vol. I, 1923/24), he analyses Kant’s three forms of synthesis from the first A version of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87). From the natural standpoint, objects and their properties and descriptive predicates are transformed by the phenomenological reduction into coherent complexes of sense. This reduction provides access to the productive (generative) synthesis of the adumbrations (aspects) of the object as a meaningful and coherent experience, aligning intentional noetic acts with noematic correlates. A nice summary of this is to be found in the lecture notes from Husserl’s class in the Winter Semester 1920/21, bearing the title: ‘Synthesis as constitution and analysis of logical thinking. Kant’s synthesis = genetic constitution’ (cited in Kern 1964: 259; my translation; the ‘=’ is Husserl’s; see also Husserl 1920/26: 212 (164); 410 (275)). Second, active and passive are distinct forms of synthesis, even if everything we can say about any form of synthesis ends up being predicative. Husserl is aware that production through passive synthesis still requires a method of access, including after-the-event predication. Thus: A passive synthesis as fusion and coinciding is also carried out with the activity of mere reception and with the individual passing through special affective moments of the object that belong to this activity of mere reception: the object itself and its specially noticed moment. An active synthesis, which can later become a synthesis

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of predication, first if the thesis of the object and the thesis of the moment . . . are joined in the ‘synthesis of judgment’ . . . In passive synthesis, they [the moments] are merely passive in an order of succession, in a coinciding with the object that is being continually held onto. (Husserl 1920/26: 511(410)) Yet the passive synthesis functions, lives, and is operating ‘under the hood’ to constitute the object out of the succession of ‘moments’ – a gloss on ‘adumbrations’ or ‘aspects’. Strictly speaking, neither the active nor passive synthetic activity is directly accessible as noetic activity; but the active syntheses are accessible as they ‘come to expression linguistically in predicative propositions’ (1920/26: 490(395)). However, predication is not the only method and breakdowns also provide access. The role of the passive synthesis – and empathy as a candidate instance of it requires further analysis. Third, Husserl’s inquiring from one allegedly given phenomena back to the synthesis in which it, in turn, is constituted leads (again) through Kant to the life-world (Lebenswelt) as the background context. As soon as the life-world becomes the theme, Husserl encounters the problem that is the target of this inquiry: How the consciousness originates through which my living body nevertheless acquires the ontic validity of one physical body among others, and how, on the other hand, certain physical bodies in my perceptual field come to count as living bodies, living bodies of ‘other’ [‘fremden’ = alien] ‘I’s – these are now necessary questions. (Husserl 1934/37: 107) The progression from appropriating Kant’s early analysis of synthesis, through passive synthesis, to the life-world, parallels Husserl’s growing engagement with Einfühlung (empathy) but on a different trajectory as empathy migrates from the superstructure (or periphery) of his systematic thinking towards the foundation (as captured in the posthumous publications on inter-subjectivity (Nachlass) (Husserl 1905/20; 1921/28; 1929/35)).1 Husserl gives us powerful tools to analyse the pre-linguistic aspects of empathy, but misapplied them himself. He underestimated (misanalysed) the richness of the concept of other; misplaced empathy in the superstructure rather than at the foundation of inter-human relations; and, like most others of his time, was distracted by the prevailing public definition of empathy due to Lipps.

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Husserl’s noema not a Fregian sense (Sinn) Given that my argument is committed to using Husserl to penetrate beyond linguistic sense, Husserl’s definition of sense becomes an issue. The position here is that the noema is not reducible to a Fregian sense (Sinn), although in cases of linguistic expressions, there is significant overlap and convergence between Husserl and Frege (Banchetti 1993). However, the overlap does not extend beyond the level of explicit aphophantic statements. Husserl is generalizing linguistic sense (meaning) to the entire realm of phenomenology in which intentionality, in its many forms, makes sense out of experience (McIntyre and Smith 1982). But then, the sense of one’s experience and the sense bestowing functionality of active and passive synthesis take on a life of their own, independent of the predicative function of language. It is a contingent matter of fact that the phenomenological reduction (epoche) makes available the noema of constitutive acts of belief, desire, perception (seeing), empathy, etc., not the noesis. However, it is the noema that is directly accessible, not acts of constitutive noetic seeing (or empathy). In order to approach the latter (noetic seeing, empathy and so on), absent predicative language, an alternative method of access is needed. This will be found in individual examples of functional breakdown in the areas of perception of others and recognition of human faces. Even though whatever statements we make about such limit experiences (blindness and prosopagnosia) are well-formed, such examples constitute a raid on the inarticulate, pressing back the limits of what can be expressed, capturing en passant the function of synthesis that is pre-predicative. Husserl was driven in the direction of noematic analysis because the noetic act recedes into inaccessibility. The synthetic function – whether active or passive, predicative or not, reduced by the epoche or in the natural attitude – was inaccessible in its operative (act) form, presumably since it was precisely those acts constituting the coherent realm of experience being phenomenologically bracketed: ‘The intentionality of the noeses is reflected in these noematic relations, and we again feel driven to speak directly of a “noematic intentionality” as “parallel” to the noetic properly so called’ (Husserl 1913: 275). The noetic–noematic correlation to which Husserl devotes so much effort is designed to get us away from the subject–object distinction; and, as a surfacing of structures within brackets, the noetic–noematic analysis supersedes natural things with the sense of phenomena as constituted by the intentional activity of transcendental consciousness. The tree in the garden burns up; but we can still analyse the sense of the

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experience of the tree in imagination as an invariable noematic correlate of the experience. In a complementary way that is also why the individual experience and example of Mike May, whose case we are about to engage and whose sight was restored after being blind from the earliest age, as an example of the breakdown of noematic invariants, is so useful, indeed indispensable. We do not have access via speech acts or in awareness to this act of synthesis. Therefore, as noted, another method of access is required; and that is the use of the individual case vignettes in which the functional operation is surfaced en passant in its breakdown. The phenomenological attitude shifts the inquiry from the world of natural things to that of intended senses. In its most extreme form, this means that the public world is given as a phenomenal hallucination. It means that, absent an additional act of intentionality, a thetic act, a positing of an ontic being such as a tree, life is literally but a dream. Without an additional act of thetic positing of the existence of the world and the things in it, for all one knows, one could be the famous brain in a vat. However, this act of positing invites the reintroduction of all the representational features and functions that were just expelled from transcendental consciousness by the transcendental reduction. The act itself occurs within the reduced sphere of transcendental consciousness, which Husserl will eventually elaborate as ‘ownness’, experiences that get described and re-described and encoded noematically as mine. The perceived, imagined, remembered and so on are strict relational correlates of intentionality. The distinction between content and overt action on content is incorporated, included, contained within the distinction act–content. This reverses the operation of expressing content, for example, linguistically, and expresses content intentionally. This form of intending (vermeinen) is the act of signification. Signification becomes a form of intentionality, and it is why intentionality can create sense in language and other systems such as emotions, preferences and pragmatic instrumentality. The example of sight restored after a lifetime of blindness: access through breakdown The experience of Mike May as documented by Robert Kurson (2007) provides a candidate example of access to intentionality – in this case, the function of synthesis of the sense of experience – through breakdown. May’s vision was restored as an adult by a stem cell transplant after he was blinded at age three. While this example of experimental philosophy starts out slightly different than that addressed by Locke’s

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in answer to William Molyneux’s thought experiment, the case history will confirm that May’s experience fits the pattern nicely. Mike May had no recollection of the visual world, and his early visual experiences were swallowed up in the amnesia that encompasses most experiences prior to five years of age. In a daring experiment, which gives the subtitle to the book about him, The Man Who Dared to See, Mike May’s immune system was chemically ‘killed’ so that a stem cell transplant could be used to restore the nerves in his retina. As a result, May’s eyes and optics were restored to a state that was near perfect. This is in contrast to the experience of the visual world that he encountered after the bandages were removed following the last in a series of operations to restore his sight. Adapted from the account of what he experienced, this is what his automobile looked like after removing the bandages: Whoosh! Sheets of brilliant yellow and silver and black. Bam! Puzzle piece-shaped objects ablaze in sight and color, kaleidoscoped at arbitrary lengths, simultaneously miles away and at arms length. (Kurson 2007: 126) The operation was a success in that the optical apparatus was functioning as designed. But there was a ‘but . . .’. In short, the automobile did not make sense as a visual experience. More precisely, Mike’s visual experience of the automobile or other things did not make sense. His visual apparatus did not make sense out of the inputs that the experience of the would-be yellow automobile was providing. His visual apparatus did integrate the input caused by the automobile (which, of course, was available through other sensory modes). Given his visual experience, Mike was inferring that the auto was yellow; he was not in direct contact with the yellow station wagon. Note well that Mike May was inferring that the auto was yellow, which means he was not directly in touch with it – this was not normal. This must be underscored. May’s use of inference to get in touch visually with the automobile was significantly different than what everyone else does. In spite of all the operations, he did not have normal vision. The swirling constellation of colours and shapes did not have sense as a coherent, unified, objective thing with a spatial boundary. This counts towards Searle’s naïve realistic point that viewers do not infer things, they see them, relate to them, interact with them and so on. However, this also counts as evidence that sense and the sense of objects in the world is constituted by acts

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of intentionality that are pre-predicative, nonlinguistic, nonverbal – in this case, acts of intentional synthesis of the kind invoked by the later Husserl (and the early Kant). While speech acts are one powerful way of accessing intentionality, they are not the only one. The breakdown of organizational processes in disorders of the underlying visual infrastructure also provides clues as to how the underlying intentional system operates. The reason this example is needed by Husserl is that it provides access in a privative mode to the noetic function of synthesis constituting the sense of the experience of the object independent of predicative language.2 (See Figure 4.1 for a summary of these examples in relation to the previous ones.) The example of Mike May’s buzzing experience of the yellow station wagon is relevant as noematic misfiring. In contrast to the noetic acts corresponding to the many shades of yellow of the car, the noema is supposed to provide one consistent object. The noema show the way to unity, consistency, objectivity, invariability amidst flux and, thus, to abiding perceptual sense. The real object = synthesis of identification of many concrete yet ideal noemata. The ideal noemata = the unity, objectivity, car-ness of the car as an invariant objective unity of the object in the attainment of object constancy through synthesis. Of course, once an object is constituted, it is capable of bearing properties and being described by predicates that are available in language and occurring in experience. But that is precisely the point – ‘Mike believes that the station wagon is yellow’ fails even though the yellow station wagon causes Mike’s experience. Why? Because the yellow station wagon falls out of the statement. There is no enduring thing, station wagon, to anchor the position of the grammatical subject in the statement and, thus, the object falls out of the statement. Language is not a clue here. The constitution of the sense of the object through intentional activity is pre-predicative. The sense bestowing action is missing, and the breakdown of this function of synthesis as evidenced in May’s experience is the validation en passant of its usual functioning. It is conspicuous by its absence. Obviously this is a problem for the individual (Mike in this case) not for the world. But the individual becomes the entry point to an imaginative variation on the case history, provided by the individual in question. This is highly relevant phenomenologically. If one wants to substitute ‘transcendental consciousness’ for the ‘individual’ here, then well and good. It indicates that the breakdown witnessed by the individual is the access point to the transcendental sense of experience of the world or, privatively speaking, lack of sense of it.

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There is a gap – corresponding to Mike’s passive synthesis – with the subject position of the candidate statement, not the predicate. For our purposes here it is sufficient to say that what Husserl calls ‘noetic acts’ are the mental act side of the intentional process of synthesizing experience as sense-bearing things. Noetic acts are operative as acts of perception, even to Mike, such as the many shades of yellow, depending on the play of the sun and shadow, as he walks around the car. Husserl is diplomatically vague about whether sensuous hyle (content) has intentional functionality and if intentional morphe (form) has sensuousness without concreteness (for example, Banchetti 1993: 82). But Husserl is not vague that the noema provides the invariants in perception. Here it is useful to engage further with the Husserlian idiom. In Husserlian terms, the hyletic content of the noetic act is operative in the individual’s experience – the intention is present as an act of thought, recollection, imagination, evaluation or, in the case of Mike May, perception. There are slices of experience – yellow, circular form, rectangular form. Little or no depth perception. No object constancy, presumably because there is no object. Phenomenologically, what Mike May is missing is the invariable, concrete but ideal, sense of object coherence and rule-governed constancy, which is terminologically referred to as the ‘noema’. Note this example is not about the linguistic sense or predicate. As a successful, wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Mike May knew both what the word ‘auto’ meant as well as how to use the technology to get around, granted that his wife or chauffer had to do the driving. For those interested, May gradually gained elements of standard, normal vision, but never sufficient functionality to rejoin the sighted community completely and (for example) drive a car. Some depth perception returned, but only when the object was in motion. What are simple things for sighted people such as navigating a curb on a side walk continued to be visually unintelligible – different shades of shadow on two dimensional cement-coloured surfaces – and a serious hazard to navigation without the visually impaired person’s white cane with which to tap out a kind of echolocation to make sense of the sidewalk–street interface.3 One possible conclusion from the case history of Mike May’s daring venture is that what was missing was the intentional correlate of the act of seeing. Seeing as a successful intentional performance was lacking its invariant noema. It is a further empirical hypothesis that the underlying ‘hardware’ – the visual cortex – had not received the necessary training, had atrophied or had missed a critical period during which the necessary visual activity was enabled. Some of the functionality required for

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interpreting things as coherent totalities, including depth perception, eventually returned, although under constrained circumstances; some of it did not. This is a nice example of the intentional function of synthesis provided by the intentional act pure-and-simple. When something is missing, it becomes conspicuous by its absence. That is the case here with the sense of seeing visual objects. This pushes sense (Sinn) back to a pre-predicative level of intentional activity that is responsible for constituting the object in the first place. Here we have gained access to a level of experience, for want of a better term, beneath that captured in ordinary language. Now let us move the discussion back in the direction of empathy. Having put Husserl to good use to penetrate behind the statement to the pre-predicative constitution of sense, are we not also loaded down with the negative results of phenomenology? Radicalization of the other in Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation For Husserl, the intentionality activated by empathy was not a primary given content: ‘No nonsense lies in the possibility that all alien [other] consciousness which I posit in the experience of empathy [Einfühlung] does not exist. But my empathy and my consciousness in general is given as a primordial and absolute sense, not only essentially but existentially’ (Ideas 1913: §46). After invoking the phenomenological epoche, the world is reduced to its phenomenal display in consciousness. After having neutralized the existence of the world globally, within the realm of phenomenologically reduced consciousness, the existence of specific ontic entities in the world is re-established through thetic acts of consciousness. ‘Thetic’ acts posit the existence of objects of experience. There are at least three issues that cause Husserl fundamentally to misconstrue the intentional analysis of empathy from his own perspective. First, he lacks an account of the inter-human sense of the expression of the other that connects the expressed and unexpressed with empathy. In parallel with the work of Edith Stein (1917), Husserl tries to construct the other based on animate experiences of the lived body, which is indeed the correct approach. But he just gets off the track. He treats the body as present at hand, as the object of his scientific attitude, all the while claiming that he is attending to the lived dimension. The lived escapes. Even at the level of the appresentation of the other’s body and one’s own kinaesthetic experiences of motion, at least in his published

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writings, Husserl seems to lack a robust account of vicarious experience in which the other’s experience is presented in the sphere of ownness. Second, Husserl fails or forgets to include the sense ‘other’ as the target of the intentional act of empathy. Even if the intending of the other remains unfulfilled, without evidence, the other is a basic component of the intentionality of empathy. It is unfortunate that Husserl overlooks this. Yet it is really not Husserl’s fault. He is at the effect of his historical context. In particular, third, because of the domination of Theodor Lipps’ psychology of beauty and art – in spite of the pending counterattacks of Edith Stein, Max Scheler, and Martin Heidegger – Husserl was unable to use the term ‘empathy’ (Einfühlung) in the full breathe of its disclosure of the other as the source of animate lived expressions. Husserl acknowledges Scheler’s attempts (Husserl 1929/31: 147 (173); Scheler 1913/22), but faults him for failing to see that the otherness extends to the whole world. Empathy is mentioned five times in the Cartesian Meditations (Husserl 1929/31: 64n, 92, 104, 120, 146–147 (124, 134, 149, 173, 238–239)) and dozens, indeed hundreds, of times in the Nachlass; but it is not really available to do the hard work of relating to the other, and, in this sense, it is missing. The original experience of the other becomes non-original in running the gauntlet into the sphere of ownness. In Husserl’s published works, in no case is empathy a primitive function at the foundation of the sense ‘the other’. In his published works, it is only after the reproach that phenomenology entails solipsism has been answered that empathy is reintroduced. Husserl calls his constitutional analysis of inter-subjectivity a ‘transcendental aesthetics’ in the Kantian sense. This is the foundation for ‘empathy,’ which, however, is promoted above and beyond the first level of inter-subjectivity: The theory of experiencing someone else, the theory of so-called ‘empathy,’ belongs in the first story above our ‘transcendental aesthetics’ (Husserl 1929/31: 146 (173)) Husserl displaces empathy upward. It is not a part of the Husserlian version of the Kantian transcendental aesthetic used by Husserl ‘in a very much broadened sense . . . Broadened to comprise the concrete Apriori of (primordial) nature, as given in purely sensuous intuition . . .’ (1929/31: 146 (173)). What is missing from Husserl’s use of Kant’s term ‘understanding’ is a form of receptivity – empathic receptivity – corresponding to one’s experience of the other. Arguably what lies above

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the transcendental aesthetic is understanding – empathic understanding, in this case. Yet without receptivity, understanding is empty. So, too, for Husserl’s published engagement with empathy. Still, it is amazing that in this one isolated passage, which is all the more controversial and inaccessible for using an idiom borrowed from Kant, Husserl ‘gets it’ that empathy is about experiencing someone else – the other – and that the accusation of solipsism amounts to the loss of the other – but that he does not grasp empathy as having a dimension of empathic receptivity in which a vicarious experience of the other’s original experience occurs as a way of recovering and accessing the other. In this passage Husserl interprets his own Kantian ‘Copernican revolution’ – that is, phenomenological reduction – as the way of transforming psychology into transcendental phenomenology. The Fifth Meditation is a transcendental aesthetics in which ‘otherness’ is extended to the whole world before objectivity is constituted. While this amounts to a self-interpretation on the part of Husserl in a Kantian idiom, it also marks the point at which constitutional analysis intersects with empathy, even if empathy gets ‘kicked upstairs’. Empathy is now out of the picture as far as Husserl is concerned – at least until it returns in his Nachlass in a decisive role. In the meantime, it is not fundamental. It is derivative. What then is the foundation? The sphere of ownness describes the reduced world of consciousness. The sphere of ownness works well for things that are the target of theoretic inquiry such as nature; but then the other appears with his own sphere of ownness. The other is presented ‘non-originally in my sphere of ownness’ as otherwise it would not be a sphere of ownness at all. The reduction to ownness does not exclude the other, yet something of world-hood is missing, since the other has its own sphere of ownness. That something is the other’s original experience. The problem occurs as the other brings along with it an original experience not accessible to the one’s sphere of ownness. The other’s original experience will in effect burst asunder the sphere of ownness, notwithstanding Husserl’s belated invocation of the argument from consistency that the sense ‘other’ arises from the corresponding harmonious syntheses (1929/31: 148 (175)) of behaviour. Thus arises the paradox that the original experience of the other is presented non-originally in my sphere of ownness. Husserl’s issue is how can a description of the givenness of the other – the way the other announces itself as an individual – be reconciled

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with the equally fundamental task of showing how the sense ‘we’ can be constituted within the limits of ‘I’, how the sense ‘other’ survives one’s attempts to exclude it and emerges within the sphere of the world belonging to the owned ego (Husserl 1929/31: 98–99, 100 (129–130, 131)). The ‘givenness’ of the other comes at the end of a process of constitution, which hints at passive genesis, that the other is not naively given as such at the beginning.4 This issue marks the point at which receptivity is transformed into interpretation. The task of constitution, of making sense out of the phenomena of the other, is what accounts for the ironic Leibnizian turn that the meditations inspired by Descartes take towards the constitution of community – ‘the community of monads’ (Husserl 1929/31: 120 (149)). Without the other and a robust method of access to the other – witness the paradigm of vicarious feeling (Nachfühlen) repeatedly invoked by Scheler (for example, 1913/22: 13) – the act of empathy is relocated to the superstructure and goes missing altogether from this account as part of the foundation – in spite of being named explicitly. As a term, ‘empathy’ remains isolated from the distinctions that would enable it to address the issue. This leaves Husserl – and us – back in a Cartesian impasse. As is typical with Husserl, we must radicalize and intensify the dilemma prior to finding our way out of it. The explosion of inter-subjectivity in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation Husserl understands that the classic argument from analogy to the other (mind) is inadequate to capture the other in the full rich sense of his original experience. Even if analogy is interpreted as empathizing appresentation (not analogical inference) and thus has its uses, analogy comes too late. In turn, this leads to what is arguably the most problematic of Husserl’s published statements: Ego and alter ego are always and necessarily given in an original ‘pairing’ . . . On a more precise analysis we find essentially present here an intentional overreaching, coming about genetically . . . as soon as the data that undergo pairing have become prominent and simultaneously intended; we find, more particularly, a living mutual awakening and an overlaying of each with the objective sense of the other . . . As the result of this overlaying, there takes place in the paired data a mutual transfer of sense. (Husserl 1929/31: 112–113 (142–143))

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This is perhaps the most enigmatic statement in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. Paradoxically, as soon as I succeed in constituting the sense ‘other’ as an independent centre of intentionality, the other escapes from me and arrogantly proceeds to make me dependent on the activity of his own intentionality for my own sense. But in another way, this is the insight of the Fifth Meditation: alone one is not capable of unfolding the sense of inter-subjectivity solely from within the limits of one’s ownness. One requires the other for whom the one is an object, for whom the one is another, in order to achieve inter-subjectivity (‘the community of monads’). Husserl brings various operations to the constitution of intersubjectivity to try to get behind the other who is intentionally targeting the one from an alien (other) sphere of ownness – off the map so to speak – just as one is intentionally constituting the other in mutual pairing. The first of these is ‘as if I were there’ (Husserl 1929/31: 119 (148): see also Husserliana XIV: 503; XV: 435 ‘wie wenn ich dort w¨are’). My location is called the zero point or zero orientation. Space is a system of places in which one can displace oneself by moving physically. The reversal of one’s location with that of the other does indeed give one a view of what the world looks like from over there. Husserl’s thinking marches and counter-marches. In the Nachlass, Husserl states that every mirroring access (Spiegelauffassung) to the bodily movements of the other has empathy as its foundation (Husserliana XIV: 508). Yet, upon further reflection, the problem of the turning of an external body as mirrored by the kinaesthetic experience of the turning of my own body leads to an impasse. My kinaesthetic experience can indeed become the basis for my own self-reflection; but the other is not kinaesthetically accessible to me (XIV: 557). In the above-cited quotation, Husserl is reaching in the direction of empathy in order to make the constitution of inter-subjectivity intelligible by proposing ‘an intentional overreaching’. The text suggests that the ego and alter ego emerge simultaneously in ‘a living mutual awakening’ where an overlying of intentional layers is the foundation for ‘the objective sense of the other’. However, it remains a question whether the necessity of a ‘mutual transfer of sense’ between the paired egos does not explode the very structure of the entire Fifth Meditation, which explicitly promised to show how the ‘sense of every existent is in and arises from my own intentional life’ (Husserl 1929/31: 91 (123)). The transcendental ego can never get behind the spontaneous ‘sense giving’ of the other, who constitutes me even as I constitute the other individual. Indeed if I were to succeed in completely constituting the

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other, the result would be absurd, since I would have succeeded in creating a solipsistic world in which I was the only centre of spontaneous, sense-giving (Sinngebung) activity. Husserl explicitly says that if the other’s original experience was given to me, then it would become a moment of myself and the other would no longer be other (Husserliana XV: 12). The other ego’s sphere of ownness is by definition not originally given to me. The irreducible otherness of the other, the what it’s like to be the other as other and the way her or his perspective is given in his sphere of ownness, are not directly experienced by me. The other is given but not her or his perspective on things in so far as the synthetic unification of the other is a function of the constitution of the other’s original experience (Husserliana XV: 12). Is there then no form of experience weaker than original, direct perception in the sphere of ownness, yet stronger than non-original experience? Not in the published works. In his published works, Husserl never really gets beyond the distinction between original and non-original. Although the matter is controversial, the less charitable readings of Husserl are able to import all the paradoxes of other minds – looking through the window of the house representing the other, yet unlike the case of the house, being unable to get inside the door to inspect the other’s house (ownness) originally; being unable finally to get beyond the horizon that continues to recede before one like the otherness of the other; being unable to know what the future will bring, because when it arrives, the future is the present and no longer future (for example, Wisdom 1946). Is there a way of clarifying or transforming the distinction between original and non-original? In particular, is there a way of handling this distinction at the level of individual experience and without going ‘up and-over’ into the life-world of the Husserlian Crisis of European Sciences and its consideration of indigenous, homeoriented and alien cultures, societies and communities? (On ‘home’ see also Steinbock 1995.) We shall find a clue in transforming the distinction in the Nachlass corresponding to the period of the Cartesian Meditations. Husserl’s reliance on the distinction between original and nonoriginal experience is not adequate for the job. It is useful as far as it goes; but it does not go far enough. The experience of the other remains a hybrid in that it is not original for the one, yet original for the other. An intermediate form of experience such as a vicarious experience is required in which the one individual gets an ‘after image’ of the other’s experience. The German is nice in this regards speaking of a ‘Nacherlebnis’ or literally ‘after-experience’. For example, a vicarious

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feeling in the so-called original sphere is originally my experience, but non-originally the other is the source of this vicarious experience, where ‘source’ means ‘cause’. Without a form of vicarious experience to constrain and temper the original and non-original distinction, its introduction sets off a chain reaction that ‘blows up’ the sphere of ownness.5 Empathy returns to help pick up the pieces.

Empathic intentionality aims at communalization However, in his unpublished writings Husserl is moving towards the position that empathy is the foundation for inter-subjectivity (‘community of monads’), because empathy intends the other, not just in the sense of an individual intentionality, but rather in the sense of a community (Gemeinschaft). Empathy is moving from the periphery to the foundation of community. When the empathic intention has as its target (noematic content) the community, then it includes the intentionality of both the psyche (‘ego’) and the other. The distinction ego and other emerges simultaneously with that of communalization as light dawns gradually over the whole. This is a powerful manoeuvre. In the Nachlass, Husserl proposes an answer. The intentional analysis of empathy reveals intermediate forms of experience – vicarious experiences – between original and non-original: They [psyches] are also essentially, actually or potentially in community, in actual and potential connection, in commerce . . . Psyches are not only for themselves, but they access one another [geht . . . an] . . . The original form of this access is empathy [Der Urmodus des Angehens ist die Einfühlung]. In self-perception, in the original being present to myself, is the original presentational ego in my own life. The aspect of life of empathy belongs to this original being present to myself [dazu]. Through it [empathy] I relate to a second ego and its life; through it, the other ego is there for me immediately as other and interacts with me . . . living with, perceiving with, believing with, judging with – agreeing, denying, doubting, being joyful with, fearing with, etc. All the modes of this ‘with’ are modes of an original forming of a community (‘communalization’), in which I live primordially and originally and simultaneously with the other life that is co-existing with me empathically, a unity of life that is produced and an I-thou-oneness of the ego pole through the medium of empathy [durch das Medium der Einfühlung]. (XV: 342)6

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Through empathy, diverse forms of being with others occur – some cognitive, some affective. These are modes of forming a community – or communalization – Vergemeinschaftende. In subsequent and related texts, an entire field of quasi-perceptions (XV: 360 ‘quasi-Wahrnehmungsfeld’) opens up here. In German ‘quasi’ means gewissermassen, gleichsam – ‘to a certain extent’, ‘as it were’, ‘in a way’. It does not literally mean ‘as if’, which would be ‘als ob’. However, it comes close. In living empathically with the other, we live through an ‘as it were life’ and ‘as it were reflection’ in which the originality of the other is explicitly investigated (XV: 427; see also 434, 462, 464, 476; for example, quasi-Leben). In English, the way of expressing such a dimension of experience is as a ‘vicarious experience’. Arguably this matter is a work in progress in Husserl’s later writings. Two different idioms and levels of inquiry intersect here. The process of humanization in ‘I-thou-oneness’ encounters communalization. All the diversity of modes of ‘living with’ come together to form a community. The ‘mutual awakening’ and ‘over-reaching’ of intentionality are unpacked in the affective, volitional and cognitive modes of ‘intending with’ that are enumerated (XV: 342) as forms of communalization. Meanwhile, the I-thou-oneness indicates a form of humanization. Putting the two together, the empathizing individual then gets his own being human simultaneously with constellating it in the other in communality. At this point, an example will be useful. Example of the constitutive act of empathy in the human face A powerful paradigm is available with seeing the human face as a human face. The lived body means that one does not just see upturned edges of the other individual’s mouth, narrowed but open eyes, a trace of ‘crow’s feet’ at the edges of the eyes and relaxed eye brows; one sees a smile. One sees that the other person is happy to see him. What is it that makes a nose, two eyebrows, a mouth in a diverse variety of configurations, eyes, the visibility of teeth (or not), the size of pupils and so on into a human face and not a concatenation of arbitrary features? This is a different question, although related to the one, posed by Charles Darwin (1872) and Paul Ekman (1985; 2003), about whether or not the expression of emotions such as happy, sad, angry, fear, surprise, contempt and so on are ‘hard wired’ to facial expressions and facial displays. The latter will have relevance to empathy but less so to the analysis of the underlying intentionality. Rather the issue here is what the observer brings to the visual apprehension of the face. And in fact ‘observer’ is already the wrong term, implying an abstraction

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that is irrelevant to the encounter of one human being with another as mediated by the face, with specific reference to the face. The interest here is a sense giving act of empathic constitution that is pre-predicative. Most of our experience is so saturated with language that it is hard to imagine experience that is not already saturated with conceptual distinctions. The human face is a good candidate, though, once again, as adults our access is inevitably through language. Still, one need only look at the face of a preverbal infant as it studies with rapt fascination the faces of those around it to get that the face is something deeply meaningful to us as humans. From early childhood, people study faces. We are experts on faces. We are able to judge gender by looking at a face and do that regardless of absence of hair length and jewellery. In fact, a characteristic of prosopagnosia – a disorder that is characterized by an inability to recognize faces – face blindness as it were – is that the individual needs to look for extrinsic clues such as facial hair or ornamentation in order to identify the other. This extends to members of her or his own family. For the rest of us, a smile and frown are distinguished by a small change in the angle of the corner of the mouth. Looking at a person across a room, a one millimetre shift in the pupils indicates whether the individual is looking at me or just over my shoulder. The point is that the face is a rich source of information about the other person and whether she or he matters in one’s life that is immediately available to mere visual inspection. We bring a whole set of empathic intentions – expectations, recollections, recognitions, identifications – to the encounter with the other as a human face. The case of acquired face blindness (prosopagnosia) Since individuals do not have access in awareness – whether phenomenologically reduced or not – to the act of synthesis in which the human face is constituted as a sense-bearing whole, another method of access is required. We have previously engaged with Searle who uses the structure of speech acts to access the intentionality. If there is an appropriate speech act to capture the face, it would be a simple assertion such as ‘The face in the picture is happy’. However, in this statement ‘face’ is just a placeholder for a geometric coordinate in the picture such as the object protruding on top of the person’s neck. This is less workable than one might hope. A more useful possibility is a condition where the act of facial synthesis fails and a meaningful sense of a consistent, coherent facial manifold is lost. This latter is exemplified by the experience of Mike May, whose vision (as you may recall) was restored as an adult by a stem cell transplant after he was blinded at age three. May’s eyes

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and optics were restored to normal functioning. Dr Ione Fine, a vision specialist, takes up the thread, which is valuable enough to quote at length: ‘I’m going to show you a series of photographs of faces,’ she said. ‘Tell me whether they are male or female.’ The slides began. May studied each face. Again, he seemed to be laboring, to be consciously and deliberately assembling clues, building a theory, and thinking through his decisions. He scored only 70 percent in judging gender. Subjects with normal vision score 100 percent. Fine suspected that he was using clues like hair length and jewellery to judge a face’s gender, so she showed him another series of faces, this time with hair and jewellery removed. His scored dropped to near random. ‘I’m just guessing on these,’ he said. Next, she asked him to judge whether a person in a photograph looked happy, neutral, or sad. As before, May struggled to find clues, this time trying to determine if the corners of the mouth were positioned higher or lower than its centre – a clue to whether a mouth was smiling or frowning. He scored only about 60 percent on this test, not much above chance. Subjects with normal vision would get them all right. Finally, Fine showed May a series of photographs in which a person’s face had been scrambled or inverted – perhaps the eyes, nose, and/or mouth had been flipped upside down or put in the wrong place. Such images are almost always disturbing to normally sighted people. May studied the faces for several seconds . . . He had no emotional reaction to them . . . May cannot distinguish between the first (normal) face and the second face, in which the eyes and mouth have been inverted [not depicted]. The second image is typically disturbing to normally sighted people but is not for May. (Kurson 2007: 217–218) By hypothesis, an act of facial synthesis is what bestows sense on an otherwise arbitrary conglomeration of disconnected facial features, constituting the expressivity of the human face. For those who have wondered what is meant by a ‘sensory manifold’, the face is a nice

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example of a manifold. The aggregation of components has emergent properties, such as expressing an emotion, that are not available in the individual details. In fact, an inexpressive, apathetic face is still more sensible than a conglomeration of features. Prosopagnosia is the inability to make sense out of faces. In the case of May, one should say that he had acquired prosopagnosia in the two-step process of losing his vision in an explosion in the garage at an early age (three years old) and the restoration of the optic apparatus as a mature adult when a stem cell transplant (and related surgeries) repaired the mechanism of the eye. A further step of analysis is required: The intentional act of synthesizing the facial manifold simultaneously correlates to an intentional act of empathy. We can get a clue that this is so in the following way. In greeting a happy face, I experience a trace of happiness through empathy. When the used car salesman greets one with a warm, sincere smile – he is really happy to see you – then one should remind oneself that one is supposed to be suspicious and sceptical. This is because one spontaneously smiles in return and that smile itself feeds back into one’s sensory and affective milieu and arouses a trace of good feeling. Similarly, if one is greeting the attorney of a detested corporate rival in a trial at law, one must remind oneself of the situation. A friendly face arouses a friendly face in return, and one must remind oneself that one is supposed to be outraged at the opponent’s high-handed behaviour. In this case, the greeting is just an isolated pleasantry in a sea of bitterness formed by the legal battle. Similar considerations apply to greeting an angry face, a sad one, a surprised one. The synthesis of the manifold in a human face is an intentional act that discloses, constellates, mobilizes, bestows, organizes an emotional content and uses it to inform additional acts of empathic receptivity. In this case, the act of empathic data collection begins with the face and it is an act of empathic synthesis that constitutes the face as a source of expressivity of the other’s emotional life in the first place. If the reader wishes to increase her or his empathy with a person who has this condition, prosopagnosia, that is, get a sense of what faces look like to such an individual, then look at pictures of faces presented upside down. Now imagine all faces look that way to you. A person with normal vision might be able to recognize the famous photo of Abraham Lincoln on the US currency five dollar note even though it was upside down. But even pictures of colleagues, friends and family are unrecognizable. You find yourself looking for clues such as facial hair, jewellery or make up. Note that in the case of Mike May, the incoherence of the facial presentation is not a global function of (lack of) empathy. Mike’s empathic

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capabilities are fully functioning in other areas of his family and work life, which do not depend on his vision. Due to a hypothesized hardware problem, damage to the retina, corrected by a stem cell transplant, and 30 years of non-use of the visual cortex, the constitution of the face as a face is incomplete, due to the incomplete synthesis of the manifold. This hypothetical defect sets up a domino effect, preventing the components of facial affectivity from working together. Empathic intentionality cannot get a foothold, cannot get started, without a physical manifold. This denies Mike a useful empathic input available through the animate expressivity of the other’s face. In constituting the face of the other as a source of expressions of life, an entire realm of possibilities of human interrelations is brought forth. This is what Mike is missing. It is important to highlight, as indicated, that Mike’s other empathic capabilities are unimpaired; and he is a caring and effective father and husband and successful entrepreneur. However, other examples are available where the same symptom in other individuals, inability to make sense out of the sensory manifold of the face, has a different sense and different consequences. In the case of some forms of autism (Baron-Cohen 1995; Hobson 2005), affect blindness and prosopagnosia, the breakdown in grasping affects and beliefs is hypothesized to be a function (that is, misfunction) of empathy. The face is constituted as a coherent visual manifold, but it is not endowed with emotional value. It may turn out that such affect blindness has a different cause than the hardware impairment from which Mike suffered, even after the stem cell operation. However, the symptoms converge in that the face does not make sense, does not have meaning, as a human face. The failure of the visual system inhibits empathy in the particular channel. Mike May is such a high functioning blind person – a successful silicon valley entrepreneur, married to a beautiful wife with lovely children – that it is possible that the visual centres had been recruited for other purposes and were not available to synthesize facial invariants (noematics). May would have had to give up other essential functionality to get back what he had lost. He succeeded in integrating a richly empathic world without including the rich facial features of those about him. For this individual, who dared to see, seeing was a life experiment, another silicon valley venture, not a means to survival. The experiment greatly enriched his life, although not necessarily with the coherently experienced faces of friends and family.

6 Empathy as Vicarious Introspection in Psychoanalysis

Abstract The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut defines ‘empathy’ as ‘vicarious introspection’. An inquiry is undertaken into what ‘vicarious introspection’ really means. The implications of this statement for the constitution of a psychoanalytic fact are explored. Without empathy, the mental life of man is unthinkable, according to Kohut. This points in the direction of a transcendental argument that empathy is the foundation of community, implicated by Kohut’s position. This transcendental argument is explored and its limitations noted. An example of a specific, particular vicarious experience and its introspective processing is engaged. Implications for empathy, the self and, as the founder of self psychology, Kohut’s idea of the selfobject are engaged.

Vicarious introspection and the constitution of a psychoanalytic fact What Kohut says is primarily written from the perspective of clinical theory of transference, although the discussion sometimes goes over into metapsychology as well. One of Kohut’s major contributions to psychoanalysis is the discovery of two hitherto undifferentiated forms of transference. The opening of the field of narcissistic transferences reveals two polar styles of interrelating involving the activation of the grandiose self and the idealized, ‘omnipotent’ object in a mirror and idealizing transference. This discovery of forms of transference relating to the self has earned Kohut the distinction of being the founder of ‘self psychology’. Though it is an over-simplification, these correspond to a maternal, nurturing role and a fatherly, goal-oriented role. Kohut 132

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consistently maintains that introspection and empathy are necessary constituents of psychoanalytic facts (Kohut 1971: 37); and, having done so, stops arguing about the constitution of empathy and introspection and instead uses them to constitute something else (‘facts’). We shall follow his example, first engaging the approach of vicarious introspection, then looking at a paradigm case, a clinical vignette, of its use. In the follow text, the psychoanalyst, Heinz Kohut, uses ‘empathy’ synonymously with ‘vicarious introspection’. The importance of the question of the relation of empathy to introspection is considerable. Nothing less than the constitution of what is a ‘fact’ in psychoanalytic psychology turns on the interrelation of these two terms.1 A representative text in which all four term – ‘empathy’, ‘introspection’, ‘vicarious introspection’ and ‘fact’ – are connected occurs in Kohut’s essay on ‘Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis’: Let us consider a simple example. We see a person who is unusually tall. It is not to be disputed that this person’s unusual size is an important fact for our psychological assessment – without introspection and empathy, however, his size remains simply a physical attribute. Only when we think ourselves into his place, only when we, by vicarious introspection begin to feel his unusual size as if it were our own and thus revive inner experience in which we had been unusual or conspicuous, only then begins there for us an appreciation of the meaning that the unusual size may have for this person and only then have we observed a psychological fact (1959: 461). It is relatively easy to say what ‘vicarious introspection’ is not. It is no kind of Russellian knowledge by acquaintance with another’s sensation or intellectual intuition of the alter ego. No privileged access to another’s fantasy life is entailed, and the situation remains an inter-human one in which the animate expression of the emotional life of the other and receptivity to it mesh with one another. What the locution ‘vicarious introspection’ wants to call to our attention is how the emergence of an interpretation from empathic receptivity is mediated and facilitated by what we called ‘mineness’ in Heidegger – an awareness of one’s own experience of receptivity to the micro expressions of the other’s animate sensory-affective life. We have encountered the issue of the formulation of an interpretation based on one’s empathy before. Now we can make further progress with it. In vicarious introspection one is not introspecting the feelings, sensations or experiences of the other at all. Such an operation would be

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to misplace a displaced perception, using Dretske’s expression. Rather one is introspecting a vicarious feeling, sensation or experience aroused in oneself by the other’s animate expression of feeling and so on. One is directing attentional awareness to a feeling, sensation or experience aroused in oneself, determining that it is mine and, yet, acknowledging that it represents an experience caused by the experience of the other. In introspection one comes to realize that this feeling is not an endogenous feeling, arising from purely endogenous processes in oneself, but is a vicarious feeling that is part of being receptive towards another’s animate self-expression. Using the first person ‘I’ for clarity, it is myself, not the other, who is the target of introspection. The other is the target of my empathy; I am the target of my introspection. A misunderstanding occurs if the emphasis is accidentally misplaced – misplaced, not displaced – from the vicarious to the introspective aspect in defining ‘empathy’ as ‘vicarious introspection’. This makes it seem that empathy consists in introspecting another’s inner life. This goes too far. Empathy is not telepathy. Empathy consists in introspecting one’s own vicarious receptivity towards the other, and it is through the vicarious dimension of experience that one makes the distinction between the individual self and the other. The chief characteristic of vicarious introspection is that is requires a double representation. First, it requires a representation of the other’s feeling, sensation, affect and so on. This is what empathy shares with emotional contagion. Second, vicarious introspection requires a representation of the other as the source of the first representation. Of course, this latter is what is lacking in emotional contagion. Thus, what differentiates vicarious introspection from various other forms of affective communicability is the distinction between a representation of the other as the cause of what is being experienced and the vicarious experience. In short, ‘vicarious introspection’ is a way of elaborating the experience captured and made mine by means of empathic receptivity. This provides input to further processing of the inter-human experience by related acts of empathy, including empathic understanding. In the above-cited text from Kohut, the transformation of a ‘physical attribute’ into a ‘psychological fact’ (of psychoanalytic psychology) occurs in three steps. First, with regard to the other person, ‘we think ourselves into his place’. Next, the vicarious experience is determined to be mine. The introspective awareness of the vicarious experience occurs based on an emerging, transitory, partial identification with the other individual. The experiences that are thus aroused belong to me – they are mine – and are available to attentional identification and

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re-identification as the content of the introspection. Finally, an ‘appreciation of . . . meaning’ of the person’s size completes the institution of a ‘psychological fact’. What it means to ‘think ourselves into the other’s place’ is an issue. Am I imaging myself in the other’s situation as I am – or as she or he is? And if I already know how she or he is, then why is it necessary to imagine at all? I already know her or him. Suppose that I am of short stature and hate it. Given Kohut’s example, I would just love it being tall. I would be delighted no longer to talk to people while either staring at their middle chest or being constrained to look up at them if I want to make eye contact. However, that is not the question. The question is how this person – this other person – feels about being tall. If one knew that, then one wouldn’t have to imagine oneself in their position. So how does the process get started? Starting with the experience of meeting a tall individual that one has never encountered before and who walks into one’s office, one may fall back on something like an argument from analogy to bring what is experience-distant closer to what is familiar. But this is an argument that already supposes that the stranger and oneself belong to the same community of fellow travellers capable of arriving at an understanding. Feeling the other’s ‘unusual size as if it were one’s own’ entails an analogous kind of recollection of experiences in which one may have been unusual or conspicuous. However, the introspection that takes place is not of the other but of one’s own experiences. In this passage, the vicarious experience is driven by imaginatively thinking oneself into the other’s place. This revives experiences that are described as mine in which one has been ‘unusual or conspicuous’. In a coincidence of opposites, the quality of being conspicuous due to short stature would work almost as well as being too tall in capturing the quality of the experience of unusually sticking out in an uncomfortable way. The result is an ‘appreciation of meaning’ of what is implied by being personally conspicuous and unusual. In simplest terms, the point is that a physical fact – seven feet tall – is given meanings in terms of human interrelations – girls who are five feet tall won’t date him; can’t find a decent suit off the rack; height is not all that is required to be good at basketball, still a klutz; can’t fit in coach class on an aeroplane and can’t afford business class. The grass is greener on the other side of the hill, and that is also the case here. When you cross over the hill, the grass is not greener after all. Vicarious experience extends to a range of experiences that enable a bootstrap operation that ascends to an experience of the other. The

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tall individual knows all the disadvantages. He constantly bumps his head going down the stairway into the basement. He has to travel on aeroplanes on business, and does not remotely fit into the seat in coach class. Long trips get really painful. It is hard to find clothes that fit without expensive alterations. In short, it is misleading to put oneself in the place of the other without considering the particular character traits, personal preferences and historical patterns of experience that go along with ‘being oneself’. It is clear that Kohut appreciates this in that he starts collecting reminders about how being usually tall and conspicuous would be, having carefully built ‘unusual’ into the description. Still, one cannot help but get the impression that Kohut’s interest in observation is as much a gesture in the direction of the authority of a certain paradigm of what is science (E. Nagel 1959) as opposed to a genuine conviction that what is constituted by empathy and introspection are ‘observables’. The intention here is not to deny the analyst the use of his eyes and ears, or even to suggest that he merely uses his senses in a different way than the experimenter (although the latter is so); but rather the idea is to disclose the function of interpretation in the constitution of psychoanalytic facts. We return to the hybrid character of empathy and the way that aspects of two polar dimensions, receptivity and interpretation, are intertwined in it.

Without empathy, the inner life of man is unthinkable The following consideration shows that for Kohut a psychoanalytic fact is not principally an observable, but involves an aspect of the understanding of meaning. Only after vicarious introspection can experiences in which we have been unusual be revived, ‘only then begins there for us an appreciation of the meaning that the unusual size may have for this person’. Kohut recognizes that an ‘appreciation of meaning’ is involved in the constitution of a psychoanalytic fact. Empathy is not only tactical; it is strategic. It is not only empirical; it is constitutive of the psychological life of the human being. Thus Kohut explains: Empathy is not just a useful way by which we have access to the inner life of man – the idea itself of an inner life of man, and thus of a psychology of complex mental states, is unthinkable without our ability to know via vicarious introspection – my explanation of empathy . . . what the inner life of man is, what we ourselves and what others think and feel. (1977: 306)

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Coming toward the end of Kohut’s The Restoration of the Self (1977), this statement might mistakenly be taken as simply rhetorical or inspirational (although it may be these also). This statement, however, should be taken at face value. When it is taken in this way, it is astonishing. It is an assertion that the very idea of the mental life of the human being (man) – what we ourselves and others think and feel – is ‘unthinkable’ without the ability to access (and know) others by means of empathy. Empathy is constitutive of the mental life of human beings, what we ourselves and what others think and feel. An obvious first question is whether Kohut says both too much and too little. Does he say too much? What basis is there for asserting that empathy is the foundation for the complex psychology of mental states – thoughts (and beliefs?) as well as emotions, affects and sensation? Without making it too easy to skate through on a technicality, it is useful to recall that many beliefs do not arouse our empathy because they relate to what are prima facia physical facts, not psychological ones. Empathy is not constitutive of the physical world, but of the psychological one, understood in the sense of what makes us human. Kohut’s interest would be in empathizing with beliefs and related mental states, presumably including human actions, in so far as they are vehicles for meaningful human relations. Even the simplest imaginable belief takes on a wealth of human significance that makes the belief matter. The belief that it is raining matters in that the belief gets entangled with a whole world of background contexts that present or shut down possibilities. That it is raining means that the whole world seems to reflect one’s sadness; that one can’t go out and play baseball with the guys from work – no fun allowed; that one gets to stay home and read – which is an enjoyable possibility; that the person and one’s spouse get to stay home by the fire – the possibility of fun is allowed; that on the day of Mozart’s funeral in the movie Amadeus it was raining too – the heavens were crying. The list is without limit. What it does not mean is a mere report about the weather. The affects and emotions are what make beliefs and actions matter to human beliefs and actions, so empathy brings them along too. Kohut is explicit that the discussion extends to both oneself and the other – ‘what we ourselves and what others think and feel.’ Empathic understanding is elaborated as the further ‘up stream’ processing of the vicarious experiences disclosed in directing attentional awareness (‘introspecting’) to one’s openness in (empathic) receptivity to the other person. We can readily see why it is very useful to have another person – a committed and gracious listener – to mediate the accessing of one’s

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most intimate meditations. Thus, while it is in principle possible to empathize with oneself, all of the risks and hazards of confabulation and limitations of introspection loom large (Hurlburt and Heavey 2001). The techniques of journaling, analysis of the counter-transference and interpretations inspired by suspicion that things are not what they at first seem to be, are essential. Very few individuals have been able to get far with a self-analysis – Freud and Jung come to mind – and even then the results have inspired volumes on how incomplete the job was. Still, as an ideal point on the horizon towards which to work, empathizing with oneself remains a meaningful task. Does Kohut perhaps say too little? If the inner life of man is a ‘we’ that is not a mere, rhetorical editorial ‘we’ but an actual first person plural form, then it is an easy next step to conclude that empathy is constitutive of the community of human beings, starting with the self and other. In this particular passage, Kohut is primarily arguing for the constitution of a scientific community – including psychoanalysts who define the realm of their data gathering activities through empathy. For example, according to Kohut, the Kleinians are part of the community even if somewhat imprecise, while Alexander goes beyond the pale in rejecting empathic methods in favour of education and suggestion (Kohut 1977: 307). Of course, this is a caricature of both what Kohut says as well as his would-be Kleinian and Alexandrian colleagues; but the point is that empathy is used as the foundation for community, here understood as the ‘in group’ of self psychologists who ‘get it’ about the scientific use of empathy. While this latter statement goes beyond what Kohut explicitly asserts – that empathy is the constitutive basis of the human community writ large – it is consistent with his approach. It avoids the misinterpretations of empathy as compassion, on the one hand, and a sixth-sense perception (‘telepathy’), on the other (Kohut 1977: 304). The essential tools of psychoanalytic transference, and the interpretation of resistance themselves, become sense-bearing within the field of observations constituted by the analyst’s empathic and disciplined (‘scientific’) immersion in the experience of the other. If there were any doubt about Kohut’s commitment to the establishment of a community of fellow travellers on the path of empathy – the unity of observer and observed – then it is Kohut’s account of the first psychoanalytic cure through the application of empathy: The mutation that opened the door to the new field of introspectiveempathic depth-psychology (psychoanalysis) took place in 1881, in

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a country house near Vienna, in the encounter between Josef Breuer and Anna O. (Breuer and Freud 1893). The step that opened the path to a whole new aspect of reality – a step that established simultaneously both the novel mode of observation and the novel content of a revolutionary science – was made by the patient who insisted that she wanted to go on ‘chimney-sweeping’ (1893: 30). Yet it was Breuer’s joining her in this venture, his permission for her to go on with it, his ability to take her move seriously (i.e., to observe its results and to commit the observations to paper) that established that unity of observer and observed which forms the basis for an advance of the first magnitude in man’s exploration of the world. (1977: 301–302) This documents the paradigm of the establishment of the first psychoanalytic community of self and other in Breuer’s deployment of empathy to treat Anna O. The famous ‘talking cure’ was Breuer’s gift of empathy, which should not be underestimated given the stereotyped authoritarian approach to medicine characteristic of that time and place.2 Obviously this is not the first use of empathy as every parent, teacher and human being knows. Rather is the first disciplined, scientific use of empathy. Consider now an analogy to the constitution of a psychoanalytic fact through empathy. In order to know some phenomenon one must be capable of being affected by it. Musical sounds are a constituent of one’s experience and understanding because of a capacity for hearing. Even if on some occasion one’s hearing breaks down or is destroyed, the concept of ‘musical sound’ still makes sense. It is still thinkable, conceivable, so long as one admits the intelligibility of the capacity for hearing. One may debate the origin, quality or meaning of some configuration of sounds. One may marshal other empirical tests, authorities or perspectives to scrutinize some sounds. But we agree about the possibility of agreement, even if we never arrive at agreement in this particular case. However, in a universe without hearing as a general capacity, in a universe without organisms sensitive to – receptive to, capable of apprehending, able to be affected by – sounds, neither music nor even noise is thinkable. It would be a logical contradiction to assert ‘No sound is audible’ and ‘Some sound is audible’ (because there is no such thing as hearing). We are no longer capable of conceiving of sound, much less understanding or knowing them. A parallel consideration applies to empathy. Kohut’s position: without empathy, the very idea of the mental life of the human being is unthinkable. Note how this is immediately qualified in the direction of

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a community of individuals by invoking ‘what we ourselves and what others think and feel’. This is because empathy, as a general competence in human interrelations, makes this life intelligible and sense-bearing by constituting it as a field of study in the first place. Thus, Kohut writes: ‘Empathy does indeed in essence define the field of our observations’ (1977: 306). Here the phenomena (feelings, emotions, thought and, presumably, meaningful behaviour) are dependent on that function which makes possible our access to them. Empathy is that function on the basis of which the experiences studied by depth psychology are opened up and constituted as accessible and knowable. Because empathy is that without which the constitution of our psychological life does not make sense, it is the condition of possibility of that life. Now let’s explicitly shift this consideration in the direction of the community of human relations. Empathy is the function through which human relations makes sense, insofar as without empathy we would not even be able to conceive of human beings as capable of expressing and being receptive to the expressions of feelings. A communal field of experience in which feelings are expressed and receptively apprehended, but which is completely lacking in empathy would be unthinkable. Empathy is the organizing principle on the basis of which these experiences are made accessible. Granted that we do have these experiences of expressing and being affected by others’ feelings, of becoming aware that the feelings of another have an impact on our own, we ask: How is this possible? We find that it is necessary to posit some capacity or competence – let us call it ‘empathy’ – upon pain of contradiction if we refuse it. A world with expressed and receptively experienced emotions, including vicarious experiences, but without empathy, would be an absurdity in the strict sense. It would be a world of musicians without hearing – the frantic movement of bows across violin strings and fingers on ivory piano keys would be in vain for neither the musicians nor the listeners would in principle be capable of hearing the music. Similarly, without the capacity to empathize with the feelings of another, we would be just bodies located physically in space alongside one another – no interhuman connection would exist at all. Human beings would not matter to one another. We would be emotional zombies, physically alive but affectively dead. This line of reasoning, which is sometimes referred to as a ‘transcendental argument’ after Kant, provides a principle that answers a question of the form: granted that we have certain experiences, what must the constitution of our mental functions be like in order to account for the

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very possibility of such experiences? In fact, Kant never uses the term ‘transcendental argument’, an invention of Kant interpretation that is worthy of note. What Kant does refer to are ‘transcendental proofs’ and ‘procedures’ (1781/87: 624 (A788/B816); also 592 (A737/B765)); and, of course, there is the famous ‘transcendental deduction’, deduction being a form of argument.3 In any case, human experience in encountering other individuals indicates that we are affected by their feelings and that our feelings (in turn) affect them. What is being proposed is that there must be a functioning capacity for being receptive to the feelings of others in order for the recognition, identification and further understanding of feelings in another to be ‘thinkable’, conceivable in any sense. Empathy, then, is just such a condition of possibility for describing others (and by implication ourselves) as capable of being affected by feelings. Here the intimidating term ‘transcendental’ requires further clarification. It can be paraphrased as ‘not capable of being contradicted by experience, but nevertheless relating to experiencing and providing the framework or structure within which that experience becomes meaningful.’ Empathy is what makes possible the experience of affecting and being affected by the feelings of another person. This experience, in turn, is the basis on which we are subsequently justified in positing the existence of the capacity for empathy. But in this experience empathy is itself presupposed, for without empathy the experience itself could not occur. Thus, the argument has the force of logic. It is concerned with what is ‘thinkable’, ‘conceivable’, without contradiction. Yet it is more than mere logic, for it concerns the realm of experience. Empathy is that on the ground of which being affected by the feelings of others is constituted as a realm of accessible experiences in the first place. What Kohut has in fact given in the cited passage is an example of such a ‘transcendental argument’, although in an implicit and abbreviated form. Kohut traces a path from the experience of the individual (‘self’) and other in community to empathy. In this process empathy is the condition of possibility of community. Invoking empathy as an inter-human competence makes understandable the experiences that individuals do in fact have. It makes intelligible how we are able to be receptive to the feelings of others. But, at the risk of paradox, how do we explain this principle of understanding? Indeed that is the proper question since a show stopper objection occurs at this point. The sceptic might argue back that it is quite conceivable that we would all be emotional zombies – where is the logical contradiction in that? There is a wide spectrum of disfunctions of empathy – extending from autism to sociopathy – which, in greater

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or lesser degree, exemplify the loss of empathy without incurring anything formally illogical (Hobson 2002; Farrow and Woodroof 2007). It is true that the lives of such individuals are challenging and characterized by intermittent or frequent breakdowns in behaviour, understanding and communication. Yet the capacity for logical thinking seems unimpaired and, in some cases, is even enhanced, resulting in elaborations of consistent, systematic thinking. Still, the contradiction occurs practically and experientially. First, practically, if everyone behaved unempathically, zombie-like, always passing by the traveller at the side of the road in distress, the short term results would perhaps be undesirable yet not too bad. However, the loss of empathy for the other would diminish empathy for oneself entirely independently of utilitarian consequences. The individual would still experience distress – hunger, injury, loss – yet zombie-like would be unempathically indifferent to his or her own fate as implicitly as to that of the other. Apathy and lethargy would win out. People would stop asking for whom the bells tolls, not because of loss of engagement with others, but because of zombie-like loss of interest in themselves. Intuitively, in terms of this argument, empathy and altruism remain separate distinctions, but the argument is parallel. Just as it is a contradiction to commit to reducing one’s own suffering without also reducing the suffering in the world (including that of others), so too it is a contradiction to commit to being open to the empathy one receives without increasing the empathy in the world (including that of others). One is in the world and intending one’s own empathy intends the empathy in the world directly and necessarily. The contradiction occurs because oneself is also an example of another in the world – intending empathy for oneself without also intending it for an other does not stand. Experientially the answer is also direct. The statement ‘Empathy is constitutive of the mental states that make us humans in a human community’ does indeed lead to a contradiction by means of a counterexample from experience if the subject term (empathy) is deleted (withdrawn). If one withdraws the statement that there is empathy, then the contradiction emerges. If there is no empathy, ‘No mental states of the other individual are able to be experienced.’ This statement directly contradicts the assertion (and indeed the experience) that ‘Some mental states of the other individual are able to be experienced.’ This leads back to the further contradiction in terms of being human (humanness) which is the realm of experience under-girding the connection between empathy and mental states. Empathy gives us our humanness,

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of which mental states are a paradigm example. Withdraw the one, the other cannot stand. Of course, the sceptic is still able to question the premise, claiming, in effect, that the first transcendental argument requires another one in order to establish the conditional upon pain of not really attaining a principle that is both logically rigorous and applicable to experience.4 One answer to this sceptic is to backtrack on the universality and necessity of empathy. Empathy is indeed a form of receptivity to the animate expressions of the affective, volitional and intellectual life of the human being; but it is entirely accidental and contingent that we as humans are constituted that way. Empathy is a primitive capacity not further analysable in itself. Of course, one can analyse the neurological substrate, mirror neurons, although these are no less contingent than the empathic resonance which they ground. One can analyse the intentional structure of empathy, with its necessary correlation with the intending of the other in community, though, once again, the intentionality is no less contingent than the empathic understanding which it grounds. One can analyse the informational infrastructure of empathy, the communicability of affect and related propositional content. One can analyse the functional operation of empathy, with the mechanism of partial identification. None of these analyses, while enriching of our knowledge of empathy, are a backstop to the regress of the transcendental argument. All are ultimately contingent and a feature of the way we humans are thrown into the world. The contradictions that result from subtracting empathy from the equation are a function of human interrelatedness and limited to the sphere of human interrelations, not generalizable to all possible (logical) worlds. Thus, we arrive at the challenge of confirming or refusing a specific empathically formulated interpretation in the context of the hermeneutic circle formed by the individual self and the other, for example, the analyst and analysand.5 Let’s consider an example. Example of the act of empathic receptivity in psychoanalysis Now let’s look at an example in which empathic receptivity is more than a fleeting moment between Hanno and Thomas in Buddenbrooks where the son’s eyes meet the father’s. In the following vignette from psychoanalysis, empathy is laid out in sequence as receptivity and interpretation. An interpretation is explicitly provided in the context of the hermeneutic circle formed by the analyst–analysand interrelationship. Discussion is required to surface the empathic understanding on which the interpretation is based.

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In the following example, Dr Wolf gives an example where an analysand was mourning the death of her mother, a difficult individual with whom the patient had a tumultuous relationship. This is a complex instance and will itself require discussion to deliver the point about the relation between empathic receptivity and understanding. It is worth quoting at length: During the second year of her analysis, a young mother reported that her own mother, who had been comatose for several weeks, had died. As a child, this analysand’s relationship to her mother had been one of intense ambivalence, because the mother, in addition to being almost constantly critical of her daughter’s behavior, also said on repeated occasions that she really did not like her daughter and predicted she would come to a bad end. Fortunately, the daughter got along famously with her father – until the latter left the family, divorced and remarried. Mother and daughter, both left behind, patched up a fragile truce that was often punctured by hostile outbursts from either. The mother had had a similarly hostile relationship with her own mother, and she frequently accused the analysand of being a tramp like the girl’s grandmother. When the analysand arrived for her first session after her mother’s death, she talked about her mother’s prolonged illness and death with some sadness. Of course, she added matter-of-factly, she felt a sense of relief that her mother’s suffering had ended. She then reported a dream in which a man was staring at her bare legs. My own inner experience [writes Dr Wolf] while listening to her, however, was not in the resonance with her apparent sadness nor with the heavy mood that one might expect to emanate from a mourning person. Instead she had evoked in me an almost flirtatious impulse. I concluded . . . tuning into her inner state, that, indeed, she was not experiencing much mourning, sadness, or depression, but was in a playful frame of mind, although she gave no outward sign of the latter; my inner experience was the only clue. I then noticed that she was not wearing stockings that day, which was unusual for this usually well-dressed woman. . . . I felt from my reaction that she was feeling flirtatious rather than depressed. Her protestations of sadness, I concluded, were a pro forma conventional response. Her flirtatiousness was evident. . . . I interpreted her behavior as her attempt to show me that she was reacting properly to her mother’s death by telling me she was sad; but, I continued, the death had stirred up such intensely

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painful feelings of loss that she had to deny them by feeling playful and by evoking admiring attention to her self, much as she had obtained her father’s attention during childhood when her mother had spurned her. (1988: 20–21) As Dr Wolf listened to the analysand’s account unfold, he found himself aware of feelings of playfulness and flirtatiousness. By the way, there is no difference in saying ‘my own inner experience’ and ‘my own experience’; however, the former highlights that for Dr Wolf the experience had the quality of ‘mineness’. In spite of the surface structure of her story being about the loss of her mother, sadness and mourning, it aroused in the listener a sense of playfulness and flirtation. Though the available information is limited, Dr Wolf did not infer the playfulness, rather he perceived micro expressions of happiness in her voice, manner and appearance, as well as the tease of the missing stockings, which counts as behaviour but also may evoke desire and flirtation. All these fragmentary traces were integrated by Dr Wolf’s empathic receptivity and generated the vicarious sense(s) of playfulness and flirtation, available to his attentional monitoring via his own introspection. Absent additional data, the degree to which these fine-grained micro expressions were unconsciously transmitted is an open point; but they were likely pre-consciousness and available to attentional awareness (introspection), once Dr Wolf became aware of the usefulness of examining the analysand’s ambivalence, empathically attending to her expressed (and unexpressed) feelings. Simple experiences of empathic receptivity are useful in clarifying the basic interpretation – ‘I feel that he is feeling sad, because I feel it too.’ Still, the real world is more complex. That is what occurs here. It is not that Dr Wolf is openly sceptical that things are not what they seem to be. Rather the empathic listening that he deploys is pure and uncontaminated by his own past to allow for the possibility that things are not what they seem to be. This is completely consistent with the understanding of the man on the street that self-serving distortions and disguises are characteristic of everyday behaviour. He does not ask, ‘How would I feel if my mother passes away after a conflict-riddled life?’ He just feels playful while listening; then describes this as a vicarious experience; and, finally, uses the experience to relate to the other, basing an interpretation and communication on it. The conversation between Dr Wolf and the analysand is grounded in the primary rule of analysis, free association and an attempt to report sincerely about what one is thinking, experiencing, feeling. This rule is

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designed precisely to allow the distortion and disguises to be surfaced in the conversation, but they are still distortions and disguises. What is the difference between the analyst and the analysand’s listening? The short answer is that the difference is the listener’s experience, discipline and method. Dr Wolf brings to his listening (and introspection) a selfanalysis as a means of controlling variability along with the results of his own psychoanalysis with a training analyst. These point to specific methods and training in guarding against the loss of control of the counter-transference, the interference of unresolved issues in the analyst. For example, had the analyst become flirtatious with the analysand (an event that did not occur) or engaged in a mourning process as a participant, then a chance for the analysand to benefit from the analyst’s empathy for her would have been missed. By introspecting his own feelings and sensations, Dr Wolf ruled out the possibly that the feeling of playfulness was caused by his own endogenous (‘inner’) processes. He was able to control for (and, in this case, rule out) influences from his own past. The same applied to endogenous reasons occasioned or caused by his own chemistry (for example, if he was just feeling apathetic that day). When he says ‘my inner experience was the only clue’, we should not take this to mean that he used inference, intuition or a lucky guess, to conclude that his patient was relieved at her mother’s passing. Rather he paid heed, attended to, what was available to his awareness and formed a considered judgment that the feeling of playfulness that had gradually dawned over him was caused, in turn, by the analysand’s feeling playful. In other words, this experience was reinterpreted as – recoded as – ‘outer’, a function of the other’s feeling, which, strictly speaking, was the efficient case of his own feeling. The feeling of playfulness was first identified as mine (‘inner’) and then re-described as having its source as not mine (‘outer’) in the analysand’s own dynamics around the death of her mother, and indeed the less overt and explicitly expressed part of her expression. The analysand was relieved finally to be finished with this difficult mother and was feeling playful. It is likely that this sense of playfulness was communicated in micro expressions, trace affects, barely perceptible but real enough, and picked up by Dr Wolf’s empathic receptivity (on micro expressions see Ekman 1985; 2003). Of course, ‘finished’ does not mean the relationship was complete in the sense that working through had occurred. However, it is not unusual for additional possibilities and opportunities to become visible once the practical grip of the past has fallen away, in this case a demanding mother, even if the psychic reality has not yet caught up with the practical one.

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How did Dr Wolf (or how would anyone) distinguish between the situation in which he experiences a sense of playfulness that is caused by the other’s sense of playfulness and one in which the sense of playfulness that he experiences is endogenous, arising from within, or caused by other aspects of his experience, excluding the other, or even including the other? The short answer is self-knowledge and self-inquiry. One must matriculate in the school of suspicion of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, and delve behind the immediately given contents that are available to one’s attentional monitoring (see also Gazzaniga and Smylie (1984) and Nisbett and Wilson (1977)). If one is afraid of the other person, of the impulsiveness of his or her desires, of the impulsiveness of one’s own desire as aroused by his or her desires, then the possibility of a misunderstanding, misalliance and counter transference looms large. Meanwhile, Dr Wolf’s account should be taken literally. He was aware of an experience – a sense of flirtation/playfulness – that was available to his (Dr Wolf’s) attentional monitoring of his sensations, affects, feeling. This empathic receptivity and data gathering became the source of a further act of empathic understanding. It was unpacked in his interpretation based on his understanding of the situation and the relationship between analyst and analysand. Specific methods are available for validating (confirming or disconfirming) the accuracy of an explicit intervention (interpretation). This too is part of the hermeneutic circle that forms empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation and empathic articulation in language as a disciplined method of inter-human inquiry. The effectiveness of Dr Wolf’s act of empathic understanding evoked additional responses, including symptoms, from the analysand that provided evidence of its accuracy as well as limitations. What was particularly effective was the way the analyst made himself available to the patient, not as either flirtatious or as participating in the conventional process of mourning. Rather he was someone interested and concerned – offering a gracious and generous listening – about her without having to be flirtatious (and then withdrawing) like her father or confrontational (and then depressive) like her mother. Without using the term ‘blind spot’ for the patient’s flirtatious behaviour, it is precisely such an area to which the interpretation is addressed. Dr Wolf provided a glimpse of a new possibility – an individual who would relate in a way different than the existing pattern by acknowledging her for who she is without having to be flirtatious. A further step is required for the analysand to take on this possibility as a new one for her personally

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and thereby go beyond the constraints of an unworkable pattern from the past. It is worth offering a point of amplification of Dr Wolf’s clinical vignette. This is to be distinguished from his interpretation as such. Dr Wolf does not say – probably because he would reveal too personal a fact for a published case history – what was the cause of his ‘inner experience . . . the only clue’. The point is that what is missing from Dr Wolf’s account is any explanation of his fine-grained delicacy of empathy as he listened to the analysand. Long training, a deep commitment to being of service in relieving suffering and vast analytic experience were crucial. Did he pick up on a micro expression of flirtatiousness in her voice or on her face amidst the otherwise sad account of her mother’s passing? Presumably he was open to the other as a total integrated configuration or gestalt of voice, dress, behaviour in which some micro feature was not integrated, providing a clue to his available introspective attention that something was not in place. At this point it is sufficient to raise the question and understand the area from which the answer would be forthcoming to make the point. There is a whole area of research, indicated by Darwin (1872) and followed up by Ekman (1985, 2003), in which empathic receptivity to micro expressions of expressed and unexpressed emotions function to inform and provide input to further empathic understanding. Example of the act of empathic understanding in psychoanalysis (continued) Let’s follow the hermeneutic circle of empathy from empathic receptivity to empathic understanding and look at the case of Dr Wolf’s analysand again. This is a nice example that is free from metapsychological jargon. What is perhaps missing in Dr Wolf’s vignette by way of the literary finesse of a Thomas Mann, is made up in the high melodrama of a real world soap opera. In what follows, Dr Wolf’s vignette is used as a springboard for a paradigmatic analysis of empathic understanding that goes beyond anything Dr Wolf said and perhaps beyond what factually occurred. Explicit assumptions are called out for the sake of discussion where that is lacking in the vignette. What have we got to work with? A constantly critical mother, who states she does not really like her daughter, predicts she will end badly and calls her a ‘tramp’. A father with whom the relationship is positive – until he leaves the mother and daughter and starts another family. That must have hurt. One cannot help but think that this individual must have been incredibly strong to have gotten this far.

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The point is this analysand lives in an understanding of what is possible for her and her life; and this is likewise the case with us all, even if the details are less (or more) melodramatic. What about this experience defines the limits of what is possible coming from the past? Is love with such a mother possible? Well, yes, but it might look like a confrontation, a fight with name calling, leaving everyone exhausted and sad. Is love possible with a father such as this? Well, yes, but he leaves, causing a loss of closeness and affection. There is what happened – the father left – the historical occurrence – and then there is the narrative that is woven around it – ‘he left’ . . . that means . . . ‘he doesn’t love me’. He left; and the analysand made a decision about the direction and intensity of his affection. There are many unexpressed feelings, thwarted goals, disappointed aspirations here. All of them constrain the understanding of what is possible. Many of them have the status of an interrelational hallucination. They are invented meanings about what happened that have a grain of truth, but not more than that. Obviously the therapeutic process – not available to the reader here – will be responsible for working through and expressing (some of) those feelings, goals, aspirations so that the grip of the past can be given closure. Empathic understanding provides a clearing for possibility – in this case, the possibility of breaking through – engaging and resolving – the obstacles confronted by the individual in the past, blocking the way to possibility as such. Empathy provides the clearing for the possibility of possibility. This means precisely that the one who is empathizing does so in empathic understanding that implements the possibility of taking a stand for the other so, for example, the other’s blind spot is recognized, identified, distinguished and, thus, made visible to the other as a possibility. In a blind spot, distractedness in the superficiality of the everyday rises to the level of a commitment that prevents the other from seeing what is possible. The one who is empathizing is not able explicitly to show her or him explicitly, since to tell another about one’s blind spot does not make it visible. The blind spot is not cognitively penetrable. It is what an individual does not know that she or he does not know. The blind spot makes one blind to possibility. The blind spot is kept in place by hidden and unacknowledged commitments – for example, a commitment to being flirtatious in order to be noticed, a commitment to first having a fight and then being sad in order to get close to others.6 The empathic understanding provides the possibility of the pattern switch, in this case, from ‘love is not possible with this father’ to ‘granted the behavior was an issue, on that occasion, he had a different way of

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showing his love’. Working through all the details in therapy is precisely the work of creating the possibility of such a pattern switch, preferably invented by the analysand. A pattern switch occurs and what seemed inevitable – my father doesn’t love me – gets distinguished from what actually happened – he left an unhappy marriage and she (the analysand) invented (‘made up’) an interpretation about the depth and direction of his affection. This empathic interpretation aims at restoring the analysand’s functional integrity and wholeness. No single interpretation is going to do that; but a series of properly timed interventions can provide recognition – light dawns gradually over the whole – that is constitutive of the analysand’s sense of coherence, self and effectiveness as an agent engaged in spontaneously choosing, committing to projects, accomplishing things. In this particular case, new possibilities for self-expression show up – she takes off her stockings and goes bare-legged. While this act is still constrained by the possibilities of the past – being flirtatious – it points in the direction of new self-expression. The limits of the possible – not in the logical but in the imaginative sense – are being redefined. Dr Wolf’s interpretation is that such a response is a not entirely successful attempt at calling attention to herself in a fulfilling and mature way. It would be premature to say whether such new possibilities would occur to her in art or business or in raising healthy, happy children that enjoy the advantages of an available, loving, affectionate parent in a way she could not imagine as a girl. Empathy, the self and selfobject No conversation about Kohut is complete without acknowledging his contribution to the dynamics of the self and the key term ‘self object’. Another word for ‘self’ is ‘character’, though some conditions and qualifications need to be added. As with Aristotle, so with psychoanalysis, accomplishments in the direction of excellence produce character. The self as a function is a centre of spontaneity, possibly emergent in largebrained organisms. The self function is the spontaneous intentionality of generating possibilities, synthesizing the manifold of experience, constituting content as sense-bearing, integrating the on-going stream of lived temporal unfolding and laying down a network of experiences that provide a multilayered sediment of experience. This sedimentation – a context of associations of experience – provides the structure required to support and implement vicarious experience – enabling one individual (self) to experience emotions with, in and through the other individual. Character is what emerges and develops after experiences

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have been processed and left behind in an on-going living into the future by the eruption of spontaneity. In short, the self is to the function of integration of experiences as the coral reef is to the micro organisms that live and die there. The self is the beautiful, multi-coloured graveyard of skeletal remains of processes that have produced results, sedimented and accreted in a boot strap operation of character formed in coping with the challenges of human interrelations. What then is the relationship between empathy and the self? The connection with the self is direct. Empathy builds structure in the self. At first, empathy provides symptom relief to the self. A gracious and generous listening, based on vicarious experience, restores the emotional equilibrium of an upset, stressed out person, like laying back in a warm bath. Of course, such relief does not last over the long run. Empathy comes into its own when, in an on-going empathic relationship, empathy breaks down and fails in a phase-appropriate, non-traumatic way. These non-traumatic failures of empathy occur within a context of successful empathy that builds structure in the self. This structure enables the individual to deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as setbacks, breakdowns, defeats as well as accomplishments inevitably arise in the course of life. How does it build structure? Let us return to the clinical vignette from Dr Wolf. In the interaction the analyst is ‘the other’ in a special way. He is a witting – and sometimes unwitting – participant in the high drama of conflict with parental authority, abandonment and survival – only he has to work in uncovering the details of the script, incompletely available to him, along with his analysand. The way Dr Wolf cycles through the various roles – all the while striving to interpret and interrupt the pattern of re-traumatization, disappointment and abandonment – means that he is a special kind of intermediate and transitional other for the patient. He is invested by the analysand with interest, energy and significance beyond his personal participation. He is an other as a self. This kind of intermediate and transitional phenomenon is called a ‘selfobject’ by self psychology after Kohut (1971; 1977; 1984) or a ‘transitional object’ by Winnicott (1971), who working independently came up with the same notion. Introducing striking terminological innovations, Kohut chose ‘selfobject’ because ‘selfother’ would be too paradoxical; however, the object in question is a self. Many of the features of the other in the dynamic of individuation and humanization explored in the paradigm cases of death, loss of the other, the Good Samaritan and the friend can be translated into the language of

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the selfobject. It is no accident that the therapist–patient duo is also on this list. The connection between ontology and psychoanalysis comes directly to the surface in the paradigm case of loss. The dynamics of the lost other are further worked out in the process of mourning. In mourning, a lost other is preserved in one aspect of the individual ‘I’ through identification with the other.7 The lost other becomes a selfobject that is substituted for an aspect of the individual that lives and performs ‘I’. The other is lost as an object in reality, and one (‘I’) can no longer have it as a possession; so one becomes the object in fantasy, in being the object. Freud writes: Identification with an object that is renounced or lost, as a substitute for that object – introjection of it into the ego [Ich] – is no longer a novelty to us. A process of this kind may sometimes be observed in small children . . . A child who was unhappy over the loss of a kitten declared straight out that now he himself was the kitten, and accordingly crawled about on all fours, would not eat at table, etc. (Freud 1921: 109) Let’s be clear about this. Here the child is not asking ‘How should I act “as if” I were a kitten?’ The operation is not cognitive; it is ontological. The child does not care in the sense of being worried; he cares in the sense of an identification in which the missing kitten is straightaway implemented by the child’s being the kitten. Here the process of identification has been isolated before it has gone underground, so to speak, and been closed from shared access. The identification process is directly visible to mere inspection. The matter has gone beyond the stage of a game of pretending when the child no longer wants to eat at the table and insists on crawling on all fours instead of walking upright. Freud’s ‘etc.’ also speaks volumes here since it implies that the child is regressing in other ways such as ‘forgetting’ how to use the toilet, an area in which the kitten also had no competence. While it is a mere speculation who the patient was, the loss of toilet skills on the part of the child of a family friend may perhaps have occasioned a visit to have a chat with ‘Uncle Freud’, thus disclosing this little vignette. Here the child has himself become the transitional selfobject. As the work of mourning progresses, the child’s self will become further differentiated, strengthened, humanized by the inclusion of aspects of others lost and won. He or she will be able to possess the beloved kitten in imagination, so it may be able to be relinquished in reality. As the child grows up,

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this ontological capacity for identification will be further elaborated as the talent for role playing, leadership and metaphor.8 Play acting will become an explicit ‘as if’ performance that retrospectively evokes earlier vicarious experiences. Likewise through empathy, a substitutive identification – a partial identification – is mobilized at an appropriately mature level using a vicarious experience. The child lives vicariously in being the kitten; in contrast, the adult has a vicarious experience. Note the way speech captures an important aspect of experience in that ‘vicarious’ has ‘vicar’ (a ‘substitute’ or ‘deputy’) embedded within it. This dimension of substitutability is unambiguously preserved in the locution ‘vice versa’, often used at the end of a statement that can be reversed. It indicates that the reciprocal substitution of terms may be made by switching views. Ontically, the one individual is substituted in a role in which he represents the other. Thus, the patient in therapy does not recall rebelling against the authority of his parents; but constantly finds himself questioning the authority of the analyst. The child who has lost a kitten, crawls on the ground on all fours and so on. Ontologically, the one individual becomes the other by assimilating the other to his way of being in relation to himself and the involvement with the world of locomotion, meals, chores and so on. Vicarious experience can be characterized as a transitional phenomenon – activating the same features of leadership, love, hypnosis and mourning where the other is substituted for an aspect of oneself. However, it is important to note that vicarious experience serves a different purpose than all of these. When objectified, vicarious experience functions as a selfobject. Its purpose is to establish contact with the other in a way that preserves the integrity of each individual. Vicarious experience is not as strong as the global merger witnessed in the case of the child who lost his kitten (where the ego was submerged in and sacrificed to the other in living vicariously). It is intermediate between the former and the isolation of the adult in mourning (where the other individual (object) is eventually recognized as irretrievably lost). In contrast with the latter, vicarious experience has more chance of success in establishing contact with an inter-human reality, in which facts and fantasies can be shared and tested. For example, if one is living into (‘re-enacting’) a pattern of rejection experienced by an admired, idealized person of great power and influence in one’s life in a hidden and unacknowledged commitment to mastering this no longer occurring breakdown, then one may continue selecting father-like authority figures, who inevitably disappoint

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and ‘let you down’ after an initial ‘honey moon’ period. The self is directly engaged as a repository for such a pattern of experience, guiding the decision to engage with the other, admired individual as if it were a choice whereas it is a repetition of a pattern laid down in an undeclared commitment by the self. The unacknowledged commitment to ideals and values in the realm of the other is driving the process. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the pattern gets re-enacted in the idealizing transference in psychoanalysis where the analyst becomes a character in the drama – a selfobject – that evokes the historical situation. The examination, exploration and interpretation of the transference create the possibility of interrupting the pattern. This occurs by a process whereby the analyst, who is after all an imperfect human, functioning as a selfobject, is idealized and then seemingly inevitably fails. But the difference is there too. These ways of failure are non-traumatic or at least can be so managed by a skilful and caring analyst. Instead of being globally unavailable by divorcing his wife and leaving the family, as occurred in the analysand’s relation with her father (in the above-cited vignette), the analyst (say) goes on a two week vacation during a period when the analysand is experiencing vulnerability (which is almost always). The absence invokes the original trauma, but is milder, better able to be surfaced, called out, interpreted, integrated and transformed in a positive, productive way that creates possibilities of self-expression, creativity and humour for the analysand herself. By interpreting the repetition of the historical pattern in an empathic relation with the analyst, the analysand works through the initial trauma. In the process, she acquires additional structure as part of her self that re-enacts the development of the self and enables her to delay gratification, to wait, to endure the separation. We know that the structure of the self is enhanced because (if) the individual is able to endure the frustration and delay that could not previously be handled without breakdown. During the separation, the analysand (say) engages in creative activities – using the extra time to pursue excellence in her profession, hobby or recreation – rather than lethargic, empty apathetic moping or watching TV, characterizing the loss of contact with the life enhancing, empathic selfobject (the analyst). The self as the power of making and keeping commitments is strengthened in its being, not in what it knows; and, thus, strengthened, the self becomes capable of dealing at an enhanced level of effectiveness with the challenges of life, integrating setbacks, transforming breakdowns into positive possibilities, even dealing with traumas in a productive way.

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Conclusion: empathy and translation Philosophers are concerned about translation. We have alternative accounts of empathy only a few of which are the target of a complete inquiry in this work. We have a hermeneutic account of empathy that, mirroring the intentional account at the level of human being in the human world, articulates the paradigm affectedness of empathic receptivity as understanding of the possibility of taking a stand for the other as a gracious and generous empathic listening. We have an intentional account of empathy that in effect traces a hermeneutic circle from empathic data capture of the other’s vicarious experience through ‘up stream’ cognitive processing in empathic understanding to the articulation of empathic receptivity in an empathic communication that creates a community of vicarious affect. We have a psychoanalytic account of empathy as vicarious introspection that grounds what a psychoanalytic fact is. In addition, although not considered in this book, we have a neurological analysis of empathy in which mirror neurons discharge and the proper areas of the brain are demonstrably activated – lit up in bright colours on the f MRI read out. We have a causal account of empathy, based on a neurological layer that hypothesizes a shared manifold of experience subtending phenomenal sensations of vicarious feelings and shared affects. We have a functional account whereby fine-grained distinctions of experience – operating analogously to aesthetic taste – implement the human uptake of the expression of emotions and feelings in empathy. We have the moral relevance of those emotions such as shame, pride and guilt that we can only experience in interaction with others – made available to one individual’s experience that otherwise would fall beneath the threshold of awareness of the other. In a world where error and failure are common, multiple paths to a result are a significant way of checking and providing support as to the robustness of the phenomenon in question (Wimsatt 1994: 199). How are we to translate between these different levels, perspectives and methods? There is no magic bullet or secret algorithm for doing so automatically. However, this work has called out the links and connections and transitions between different perspectives where such are available. This is likely to be taken as implying a position about the translatability of these different perspectives between one another. However, there is no new position here. Empathy confronts the same challenges as all other methods of human receptivity, understanding, interrelation and communication. All the concerns about the translatability between different paradigms are applicable here. As Donald Davidson

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famously noted, if you cannot tell whether the conceptual scheme is different, then you can’t tell if it is the same either. So, is there then a conceptual scheme at all: or just language, fuzzy and vague at the edges, by which we humans try to bootstrap ourselves into a stable conceptual frame of the canonical state of human understanding of one another as a community of fellow-travellers? A bootstrap operation, by which we reach a dynamic equilibrium in our relations with significant others – wives, husbands, parents, children, friends, colleagues, competitors, story-tellers and total strangers? In short, we are mapping the scope and limits of our understanding and experience of empathy from within the boundaries. Yes, there are different intellectual traditions – hermeneutics, ordinary language analysis, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, neurology, aesthetics, theory of the moral sentiments (sympathy) – that intersect, converge and diverge, and overlap without necessarily being reducible to a smaller conceptual footprint. The power comes from being able to deploy different methods to produce the same result; or, in the cases where the results diverge, to grasp the interdependency of method and result. In some cases, translation seems to work smoothly. Thus, the design distinctions for authentic human being – deployed in the spirit of Heidegger – unpack empathy as a paradigm case of affectedness (respect), understanding (the possibility of possibility; projecting a stand for the other), interpretation (implementation of possibility; commitment), speech (listening). This nicely maps to the intentional structure of empathy in the spirit of Husserl as acts of empathic receptivity, understanding, interpretation and speech. At a higher level, this meshes with empathy as vicarious introspection in psychoanalysis. In other instances translation breaks down as the inquiry transgresses the boundaries between mirror neurons (hypothesized to sub-serve empathy as a folk (social) psychological concept), the conceptual mechanism of a shared manifold linking the experiences of two individuals vicariously and the occurring human interrelation in a human context of being with one another. Neurologists and social psychologists, parents and ontologists, moralists and therapists, are having different conversations about empathy, which enrich one another in turn and are neither mutually exclusive or eliminable. Empathy is indeed a form of receptivity to the expressions of the affective, volitional and intellectual life of the human being; but it is seemingly accidental and contingent that we are constituted that way. Of course, one can apply basic distinctions of being human to an analysis of empathy and distinguish empathy’s affectedness, understanding,

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interpretation, and articulation in speech (listening). One can analyse the intentional structure of empathy, with its necessary correlation with the intending of the other in community, though, once again, the intentionality is no less contingent than the empathic understanding which it grounds. One can analyse the informational infrastructure of empathy, the communicability of affect and related propositional content. One can analyse the functional operation of empathy, with the mechanism of partial identification. One can analyse the neurological substrate, mirror neurons, although these are no less contingent biologically than the empathic resonance which they ground. None of these analyses, each one of which enriches of our knowledge of empathy, is a complete explanation of empathy in the context of human relations. In the final analysis, few readers are intimately familiar with all the nuances of the writings of Heidegger, Husserl, Searle, Kohut and Freud. Yet everyone has firsthand experience of empathy, even if it is not called out explicitly, if the individual was ever a child, parent, teacher, friend, Good Samaritan, story-teller or related to another person. The coverage is complete, even if this list is not. The task engaged in this work is to make explicit that of which we already live in an understanding. Make it explicit and use it to inform and enrich our relations with others – and our empathy.

Notes

Preface 1. Märchen von Einem der auzog das Fürchten zu lernen, translated as ‘The story of the youth who went forth to learn what fear was’ in The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tale (1814/17), ed. W. Grimm and J. Grimm, tr. M. Hunt and J. Stern, (1972: 29–30). ‘Grüseln’ means literally ‘to shudder’ or ‘get the creeps’, ‘goose bumps’, a classic physical expression of fear. In the Anthropology (1797: §16; 33; 154), Kant calls out ‘The thrill that comes over us at the mere idea of the sublime and the gooseflesh [grüseln] with which fairy tales put children to bed late at night are vital sensations; they permeate the body so far as there is life in it.’ The point is, anyone lacking such an experience, as depicted in the Märchen, is hardly alive, is an emotional zombie. Bruno Bettelheim does not call out the link with empathy in his treatment of this folktale in his The Uses of Enchantment (1975: 280–282); though, as I recall, Professor Bettelheim did make the connection in a classroom discussion that I attended at the University of Chicago in the Spring of 1975. On the relevance of folktales to philosophy see, L. Agosta (1978), ‘Kant’s treasure hard-to-attain,’ Kant-Studien, 422–443; and also L. Agosta (1980). ‘The recovery of feelings in a folktale’, Journal of Religion and Health, 287–297.

Introduction 1. As I learned after writing the better part of this material and thanks to the researches of Professor Michael N. Forster on the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder, many of the important ideas in hermeneutics were anticipated and in some instances explicitly stated by Herder. See Johann Gottfried von Herder (1772/1792). Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. M. N. Forster (2002). I do not believe that the priority of Herder’s contribution materially changes the results of my work; however, credit is due and hereby delivered. 2. For a concise, incisive introduction to hermeneutics see Paul Ricoeur (1973). Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976). Also, useful on the role of Schleiermacher see R. W. Palmer (1969). Hermeneutics. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, but do not forget Herder (1772/1792). 3. Though thought-provoking and innovative, Heidegger’s language is notoriously difficult, even for native German readers. The translations cited in this book draw on Stambaugh’s (1927/1996) as well as Macquarrie’s, M. Heidegger (1927/1962). The ‘H’ is used to refer to the standard pagination in the German edition of Sein und Zeit, Martin Heidegger (1927), which is cited in the margins of the translations. In general, translations are my own and are loosely based on the indicated translator, Macquarrie and Robinson, Stambaugh, or a judicious pastiche of both. 158

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4. In his monumental work The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1993), Ted Kisiel points out that Heidegger was inspired by Karl Jasper’s concept of limit situations (Grenzsituationen), including death, war, accident and guilt (Jaspers 1919/1954: 256–279). Further inquiry is warranted in what sense such a structure is the superset for both one’s own death and trauma. Arguably, one flees one’s own death into busyness and fallen distractedness, not because death is so traumatic but, because one is reminded of freedom, responsibility and choices that one does not want to make – the classic existential escape from freedom. The term ‘extreme situation’ is Bettelheim’s (1940). 5. ‘Causal thicket’ is a term by W. Wimsatt (1994), ‘The Ontology of Complex Systems’ in Reengineering Philosophy for Limited Beings (2007: 200). See also V. Gallese (2007). ‘The shared manifold hypothesis: Embodied simulation and its role in empathy and social cognition’ in Empathy in Mental Illness, ed. T. Farrow and P. Woodruff. Indeterminacy of translation looms large.

1

A Heideggerian Interpretation of Empathy

1. Granted, the explosion of interest in empathy over the past 30 years in neuroscience, the human sciences and psychoanalysis (where it had always been an intermittent priority) is an external motive for revisiting the issue of empathy. For a sample see all the articles in Empathy in Mental Illness, ed. T. Farrow and P. Woodruff (2007: 448–449); B. F. Malle and S. D. Hodges, eds. (2005), Other Minds: How Humans Bridge the Divide Between Self and Others; A. I. Goldman (2006), Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. 2. ‘Of other minds’ translates ‘fremden Seelenlebens’. Throughout, ‘human being’ will translate ‘Dasein’ except where the concise use of Dasein as a technical term is required. ‘Human being’ is read collectively as the ‘way of being of many individual human beings’. However, the plural ‘human beings’ will also be used where context, normal English usage, and actions by the copy editor, require it. For a nice, chatty, short introduction to Heidegger’s basic terms, see George Steiner (1978), Martin Heidegger. H. Dreyfus complains that Steiner attributes Leibniz’s definition of metaphysics to Heidegger – why is there something rather than nothing – and this gaffe by Steiner is indeed a singular shortcoming; otherwise Steiner is a good bet. For a more detailed reading of Part I of Being and Time, see H. L. Dreyfus (1985), Being-in-theWorld. In general, Heidegger does not think about something, he thinks something – directly transitive. For those who want to think Heidegger directly in this way, the recommendation is to get, explore and relish Professor Wiliam J. Richardson, S. J.’s work, still definitive after all these years (1963) Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (1967), to which Heidegger provided a preface. As noted in the Introduction, for Heidegger, ‘hermeneutics’ is defined as the self-interpretation of human finitude (also called ‘facticity’) – that is, we humans interpret our own ways of being based on the limitations as well as possibilities we face. M. Heidegger (1923) Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität) in Gesamtausgabe II. Abteilung: Vorlesungen, Vol. 63: 14. 3. Available in English as The Nature of Sympathy (1913/1922) by Max Scheler, tr. Peter Heath (1913/1922: 247). This is the second edition (1922). The first

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edition (1913) was entitled Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle. See also M. Scheler, Späte Schriften in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Maria Scheler and Manfred Frings,. Vol. 9: 305ff. 4. ‘Affectedness’ is the translation of Befindlichkeit – ‘how I find myself situated as a feeling’ – recommended by H. L. Dreyfus (1985) Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. ‘Affectedness’ is consistently substituted by me in the translations loosely based on and cited from Stambaugh, Macquarrie/Robinson, or both.

2

Delivering Heidegger’s Hermeneutic of Empathy

1. See Frederick A. Olafson (1998), Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein; Lawrence J. Hatab (2000), Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian Contributions to Moral Philosophy. This work is not a psychobiography of Martin Heidegger such as Erik Erickson produced on Luther, Gandhi and the Sioux (Dakota) Native Americans. Yet the fact that Heidegger calls for a special hermeneutic of empathy but does not deliver one does give pause, especially in the light of his well documented political and personal failings. Empathy is missing. Still, the key distinctions for such an analysis and contribution are readily available at or near the surface structure of Being and Time (1927b). Without making any excuses, one has to wonder what might have been – a fateful near miss? 2. See also ‘how to’ works extending from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), through Eric Berne’s Games People Play (1964) and even to Jung’s Psychological Types (1921), providing the equivalent of a Heideggerian workshop of hammers and jugs for otherness – instrumental relations with others – in which people team up with people to get things done. From a totally different perspective, an engaging implementation of Heidegger’s philosophy of possibility combined with language as speech acts is to be found in Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan’s The Three Laws of Performance (2009), also available commercially as an extended weekend seminar (see www.landmarkeducation.com). But a word of caution: this Forum is not a lecture – Heidegger, Searle and so on are barely mentioned – the training is a fundamental ontological inquiry and conversation about the participants’ possibilities, raising as many questions as it answers. Many people find that it tests the limits of their comfort zones, an eminently useful thing to do. 3. The example of the missing soldier is taken from David Finkelstein (2003), Expression and the Inner: 166 fn. 13. This rich text also undertakes a detailed inquiry into Wittgenstein’s statement about the unexpressed ‘sensation not being a something, but not a nothing either’ (for example, 2003: 136). 4. S. Freud (1915/17), Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, tr. J. Strachey. See also S. Freud (1913), ‘Further recommendations in the technique of psychoanalysis: On Beginning the treatment,’ tr. J. Riviere in Therapy and Technique, intr. P. Rieff: 135–156 where Freud makes a similar point. 5. The ‘voice over’ and its role in verbal thinking deserves further description and study. 6. For example, Heinz Kohut (1984), How Does Analysis Cure? ed. Arnold Goldberg and Paul Sepansky.

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7. This statement and those like it throughout this work echo Wittgenstein’s remark, made when distinguishing pain behaviour from an unexpressed pain: ‘It is not a something, but not a nothing either!’ (see Philosophical Investigations (1945), tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, 1945: (Paragraph) §304. 8. From the perspective of analytic philosophy, powerful arguments to that effect are marshalled by David Finkelstein (2003), Expression and the Inner, which, however, I did not read until after my own work was basically complete. The one thought I would add is that the unexpressed feeling, emotion, mood is incomplete, and its animate expression in binding it to a form of behaviour such as smiling or crying is required for the completion of the emotion and so on (see Agosta 1977).

3 Empathy between Death and the Other 1. Heidegger echoes the self of S. Kierkegaard (1843), Either/Or. For additional background on Heidegger’s use of Kierkegaard, see the sparkling, passionate exposition in John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics (1987: 29). 2. The work of Robert Stolorow (1992, 2007) emphasizes the role of trauma and is hereby acknowledged. A further inquiry into the role of trauma – as well as a productive disagreement with Bob’s position – is engaged in the section entitled ‘Empathy and Trauma’. 3. According to a footnote in Lear (2008: 162), John Haugeland develops this interpretation in his forthcoming Disclosing Heidegger, which, however, I have not yet been fortunate enough to see. Yes, according to Heidegger, Dasein is in each case mine (H43); and one must say ‘I’ or ‘you’ when addressing Dasein (H42). Yes, forms of life, including whole communities, will ‘die’; but it is a ‘die’ in quotation marks. It is not death as such but the loss of the other that remains ontologically determinative at the communal level. 4. This section is loosely based on the exchange Robert Stolorow and I had at the Heidegger Circle Conference, Cincinnati, Ohio, May 2009. 5. Goldberg conceptualizes the dialogue between the analyst and analysand as unfolding within the context of the hermeneutic circle. Goldberg offers tantalizing ideas about the relationship between Heidegger and Heinz Kohut, the analyst who invented self psychology. However, I was not fortunate enough to obtain Goldberg’s insightful and rewarding study until I had already written this book. 6. Lucretius came to a similar result by a different path. 7. Percy Shelley (1820), Prometheus Unbound. 8. This is a famous quotation also picked up by Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, (1985: 58), where Arendt is cited. 9. Thomas Mann (1901), Buddenbrooks, tr. H. T. Lowe-Porter (1961). If someone would help me find the exact page, I would be most grateful. 10. I am grateful to Arnold Goldberg, MD, for pointing me towards this material. Notes Goldberg: ‘Maurice Lever . . . in his biography of the Marquis de Sade, writes that Sade’s pessimistic view of nature is embodied in what he called ‘isolism’, meaning the inability of the individual to communicate with any other individual. Lever says that we are thus, according to Sade, unable either to rejoice in another’s happiness or sympathize with those in pain. For Sade,

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Notes isolism is equivalent to deadness and sadism is the way to connect.’ Goldberg continues: ‘These connections within the human sphere must always be part of some element of empathy, since there is no meaning or significance outside the realm of empathy’ (Arnold Goldberg, The Problem of Perversion: The View from Self Psychology (1995: 139)).

4

The Roundtrip from Hermeneutics to Intentionality

1. See H. Dreyfus, Philosophy 185: Heidegger, Fall 2007, iTunes, free MP3 download. This is a recording of Dreyfus’ class at the University of California, Berkeley. What Dreyfus says is that Searle ‘channels Husserl.’ I learned much from this material and acknowledge Dreyfus for ‘putting it out there’ in all its rough and ready, bottom up, commitment to educating the planet about the importance of Heidegger’s work. Searle makes it clear that the logical analysis in which he is engaged contrasts dramatically with Dreyfus’ version of phenomenology, see John Searle (2000), ‘The Limits of Phenomenology’ in Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 2. Contra Dreyfus, Searle does not channel Husserl, and their accounts of intentionality are orthogonal to one another and, arguably, sometimes diverging, sometimes complementary. 2. As this book goes into production, I have just received a copy of Frans de Waal’s The Age of Empathy (2009), which opens an entirely new conversation. Without pretending to do justice to the debate, I refer the reader to the subtle ambiguity of Christine Korsgaard’s reply to de Waal’s Tanner Lectures in Primates and Philosophers (2006): ‘. . . Human beings seem psychologically damaged in a way that suggests a break with nature. But none of this is a way of saying that morality is a thin veneer on our animal nature. It’s the exact contrary: the distinctive character of human action gives us a whole different way of being in the world’ (Korsgaard 2006, in de Waal 2006). 3. See Footnote 1, above. 4. This distinction between vicarious and shared is based on a detailed inquiry into Max Scheler’s contribution to the discussion (Scheler 1913/22). 5. David Finkelstein does make the distinction. David Finkelstein (2003), Expression and the Inner. I acknowledge David’s contribution; however, this book – actually a superset of it – was complete prior to my reading of David’s excellent book, so his insights are only partially integrated with mine. I am working to develop his distinctions for my own work on empathy, an enterprise with which he may or may not agree. This provocative idea – a pain and its expression are related in the context of expressive, animate life – remains undeveloped in the literature. Further work will usefully develop the relationship between the unexpressed and its expression in several paradigm cases of the expression of emotion. In particular, generalizing from the sensation of pain, I argue by way of a series of paradigm cases of unexpressed emotions that the unexpressed something = x requires an expression in order to be complete. The unexpressed something – whether it is a sensation, an affect or an emotion – needs to be bound to an expression in order to be complete. 6. ‘The wolf and the seven little kids’ in W. Grimm and J. Grimm, eds. (1814/17), The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, tr. M. Hunt and J. Stern (1972: 39–42).

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‘Der Wolf und der sieben jungen geisslein’ in W. Grimm and J. Grimm, eds. (1814/17), Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm (1980: 32–34). 7. See Jonathan Lear (2008), Radical Hope. 8. A ritual-like behaviour is available in the ‘baby talk’ used by adults in greeting and interacting with babies. Strictly speaking, such talk is its own speech act sui generis, which has been the target of scientific research in a discussion entitled ‘Pretty Words that Make No sense’ (Kaye 1982).

5

Empathy from Periphery to Foundation

1. E. Husserl (1921/28), Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjectivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass: Zweiter Teil, ed. I. Kern. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Husserliana XIV. E. Husserl (1929/35), Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjectivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass: Dritter Teil, ed. I. Kern (1973). Husserliana XV. 2. There is an entire field of research, neurophenomenology, devoted to such an approach (for example, Metzinger 2003). 3. A serious caution to all those – such as Thomas Nagel – who assert that we do not know what it is like to be a bat (Nagel 1974: 391–392). 4. At the risk of using an idiom from a different philosophical tradition, no myth of the given is to be found in Husserl here. Still, the given and its myth are so pervasive and persisting that we start to suspect something like an optical illusion – Kant would say ‘dialectical illusion’ – that inevitably returns and has to be dispelled again and again. 5. ‘Eigenheit’ or ‘ownness’ is Husserl’s terminological gloss on Heidegger’s mineness (Jemeinigkeit). 6. Sie sind auch, und wesensmässig, in aktueller oder potentieller Gemeinschaft, in aktuellem und potentiellem Konnex, wovon das Kommerzium . . . Der Urmodus des Angehens ist die Einfühlung. In der Selbstwahnehmung, im original für mich selbst Gegenwärtigsein, ist das original Gegenwärtige Ich in meinem eigenen Leben. Dazu gehört auch das Lebensmoment der Einfühlung . . . mitlebe, mitwahrnehmend, mitglaubend, miturteilend – zustimmend, ablehnend, zweifelnd, mich mitfreuend, mitfürchtend usw. Alle Modi dieses Mit sind Modi einer Urvergemeinschaftung, in der ich in meinem (primordialen, uroriginalen) Leben lebend zugleich doch mitlebe mit dem für mich einfühlungsmässig mitdaseienden anderen Leben, eine Lebenseinheit also hergestellt und eine Ich-Du-Einigkeit der Ichpole durch das Medium der Einfühlung hindurch.

6

Empathy as Vicarious Introspection in Psychoanalysis

1. In this section, the self is generated for Kohut by the difference between one’s grandiose ambitions and one’s ideal goals. Ultimately, in my opinion, the self is the power to engage and sustain commitments in relationships and life. 2. In a video on the website of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, Kohut refers to Breuer’s (and Freud’s) invention of the ‘talking cure’ and explicitly calls out Breuer’s ‘gift’ of empathy. See http://www.chicagoanalysis. org/video.htm (site accessed on 11 November 2008). This is perhaps the place to call out another footnote in the history of empathy. Bruno Bettelheim wrote a philosophy PhD dissertation in aesthetics in 1937 at the University

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Notes

of Vienna, in which Einfühlung (empathy) played a role. He did not change careers. Fast forward to 1973: The Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, of which he was then the retiring Director, had been progressively appointed over the years by him with original works of art – large murals, sculptures, ceramics, tapestries – on the well-grounded principle that if you are a abused or emotionally disturbed child trying to survive and recover, a soothing physical milieu conveys a calming message over and above whatever the adults say or do, adults who, in spite of their best intentions, have so often disappointed and may not be believed (Bettelheim 1974: 142, 154). He took the ultimate anti-aesthetic – the dehumanizing experiences in the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau (Bettelheim 1943, 1960) – and used it to inform his empathy with seriously emotionally disturbed children. The aesthetic dimension of empathy, to which Bettelheim is one of many witnesses, requires further research. My thanks to Gary Banham for calling my attention to this – and many other engaging contributions. His penetrating and incisive comments on Husserl have been exceedingly useful. Michael Forster argues this is a risk and failing of transcendental arguments in general. The technical vocabulary of mathematical and metaphysical synthetic a priori principles invoked by Forster in his engaging study does not fit in this work on Kohut. If Kant has a backstop that halts the infinite regress, then it is Kant’s ‘Highest Principle of All Synthetic Judgment’ (A158/B197), which delves into the transcendental understanding of the synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition as the ‘to which’ all further questioning is referred. Even if this is a complete answer for Kant, it is not necessarily so for Kohut (or me). See Michael N. Forster, Kant and Skepticism (2008: 64–65). See Arnold Goldberg (2004), Misunderstanding Freud. New York: The Other Press. Goldberg conceptualizes the dialogue between the analyst and analysand as unfolding within the context of the hermeneutic circle. I was not fortunate enough to obtain Goldberg’s insightful and rewarding study (which needs to be back in print) until I had already written this book, though I have benefited from conversations with him over the years. I make a parallel point in my 1977 dissertation (Agosta 1977), though not informed by his wealth of clinical practice. Goldberg also offers tantalizing ideas in an Appendix to his Freud book about the relationship between Heidegger and Heinz Kohut, the analyst who invented self psychology. From the Anglo-American tradition a matter for future research is how the ‘I’ expresses the self via the spontaneous power of the speech act to bind the self as in a commitment, promise, imperative (command), assertion of truth and so on. So far as I know, the constitutive intersection of speech acts with the self is unexplored territory. This is so notwithstanding the engaging contributions of Marya Schechtman that first came across my desk as this book goes to press (Schechtman 1996, 2001). These hidden and unacknowledged commitments are a translation of the dynamic unconscious into terms workable by a Heideggerian, especially when the commitment is held in place by forgetfulness of a long covered over, fatal decision. On the eliminability of the ‘inner’ see pp. 32, 145. ‘One resorts to empathy . . . when one wants to regain contact with a lost object [that is, the other]. To not understand is a form of losing or rejecting an object’ (Ralph R. Greenson 1960: 423–424). A point for further research:

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philosophical engagements with the other – especially in Levinas (1961) and perhaps in other phenomenologists – attribute aspects of the selfobject to the other without necessarily intending to do so. 8. Or vice versa. Ted Cohen concisely argues that the talent for metaphor, a capacity that is not further analysable according to Aristotle, lies at the basis of our understanding of other persons, narratives (and related artistic forms such as role playing) and even empathy. This eloquent and entertaining gem of a book carefully issues a disclaimer that empathy is not necessarily always involved in the enlarged sense of metaphor implicated (by Cohen) in partial identification. ‘. . . I have absolutely no wish to claim that such efforts of empathy are always involved.’ See T. Cohen, Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor (2008: 16). Avoiding the word ‘always’ is prudent, yet I believe such ‘empathy’ is commonly and pervasively functioning without effort to keep us in touch with one another as humans.

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Index

affectedness, 7, 8, 11, 12, 24, 29, 30, 37, 38, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 64, 77, 83, 85, 155, 156 and narrative, 77 exhauting the narrative brought to it, 77 affectivity displaced, 34 after-image of another’s sensations, 35 ambiguity, 26 anxiety disclosing the human being as a whole, 58 distinct from depression, 69 Arendt, Hannah analysis of animal pity, 73 Aristotle, 2, 12, 39, 80 Assertion, 47 “as structure” of interpretation, 48 authentic alone in the face of death, 27 as being with others, 58 defined, 23 defined by example, 25 authentic being with one another, 22 authentic being with others as authentic Mitsein, 58 logical space held open, 58 authentic being with the other logical space created for, 58 authentic human being-with-others, 22 authenticity, 26 Bambi, xiii behaviorism, 48 Being and Time, 7, 27, 54, 58, 85 missing a chapter on empathy, 22 missing chapter on authentic being with one another, 17

being human through loss of the other, loss of, 63 being-with-one-another led astray into role playing, 21 belief a state, not an act in Searle, 109 believing defined, 108 Bettelheim, Bruno documents Behavior in Extreme Situations, 74 Blade Runner, 18 Blake, William, 9 blind spot and possibility, 149 and understanding, 40 as cognitively impenetrable, 42 as distractedness, 42 kept in place by hidden commitments, 42 blind spots, 48 Buddenbrooks example of vicarious experience in, 78 Caputo, John D. referenced, 161 care, 37, 64 caring defined, 26 Cartesian reification of the subject as thinking thing, 9 cognitive impenetrability, 40 cognitively impenetrable penetrated by empathy, 42 commitment as requiring being with others, 54 communalization and empathy, 127 176

Index 177 community and empathy in Husserl, 127 living with, perceiving with, etc., 127 complete vs finished, 146 concerned being with others, 57 conscience, 57 and authenticity, 52 as a way of relating to others, 57 as calling silently, 53 defined, 52 conscience, of others as listening empathically, 57 consciousness positive structure of, 23 structure of in Being and Time, 85 Crashing Through A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See, 117 crowd behavior not cognitive, 32 curiosity, 26 Dasein as always mine, 86 defined as human being (existence), 4 one human being, many human beings, 64 Davidson, Donald, 155, 167 death alone in the face of, 56 and individualization, 58 as a moment-by-moment possibility, 59 as a structure of being human, 59 as a structure of Dasein, 59 as calling humans back from lostness, 58 as not traumatic, 59 as pointing the way to possibilities, 59 inauthentic preoccupation with, 27 Decety, Jean works in neuroscience, 167 depression distinct from anxiety, 69

design distinctions as an interpretation of “existentials”, 25 as authentic and inauthentic, 25 displaced perception, 32–34 distinctions schematized, 25 Dretske, Fred, 32–34 notion of displaced perception, 33 Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt, 72 eight month anxiety as fear of the other (stranger), 101 Einfühlung as empathy, 16 example in Husserl’s Nachlass, 126 Elective Affinities by Goethe, novel, 106 emotion and narrative, 77 emotional contagion, 32, 33, 37 constrasted with empathy, 74 related to vicarious experience, 37 empathic interpretation, 43, 44, 150 empathic listening, 42, 52, 61, 64, 83, 155 empathic receptivity, 8, 11, 35, 37, 38, 42, 44, 45, 49, 52, 64, 77–79, 83, 145, 155, 156 disclosed as respect, 37 empathic understanding and a pattern switch, 149 and taking a stand, 64 as clearing for possibility, 149 example of, 148 in narrative, 81 empathy, 5, 87 act character of, 91 an organizing principle, 140 analysis needed, 18 and a community of fellow travelers, 138 and belief, 107 and cognitive impenetrability, 42 and conditions of satisfaction (Searle), 99 and empathic distress, 82 and fixing the other, 44

178

Index

empathy – continued and intentionality, 86 and narrative, 77 and perception, 90 and possibility, 44 and speech, 51 and the hermeneutic circle, 50 and the other as possibility, 41 articulated as listening, 52 as a commited listening, 54 as a form of receptivity, 11 as a form of receptivity to expressions of life, 12 as a single candle in the darkness, 82 as an information supply chain, 103 as authentic human being with one another, 55 as conceptual tangle, 7 as condition of possibility of community, 141 as consciousness of the other, 87 as constituting being affected, 141 as constitutive of community, 138 as contingent, 143 as defining authentic being with other human beings, 7 as defining psychoanalytic observations, 140 as foundation of community, xvi as foundational way of being in the world with the other, 56, 60 as good or bad as humans, 76 as guide, 4 as guiding this inquiry, 6 as humanizing the care-taker and baby, 102 as intending a community, 88 as name of a problem, 20 as ontological bridge, 17, 20, 48, 83 as positing the other (in Husserl), 120 as primary tool in caring for a neonate, 102 as propositional, 91 as the “as structure”, 44 as the condition of possibility of being affected by feelings, 141 as the conscience of the other, 57

as the foundation of community, 7, 10 as the foundation of community (Husserl), 126 as the foundation of human being with one another, 27 as the possibility of authentic being with the other, 25 as the possibility of the other’s possibility, 41 as transcendental aesthetic, 121 as vicarious introspection, 133 brought to language, 77 brought to language as narrative, 77 characaturized, 45 compared with propositional attitudes, 92 constitutive of the mental life of man, 136 definition fed by design distinctions, 29 delicacy of, 148 disorders (diseases) of, 141 example of friendship, 61 example of impairment of, 131 example of in psychoanalysis, 143 example of loss of, 11 example of the Good Samaritan, 61 example of the parent and infant, 60 expression part of the definition, 99 from footnote to foundation, 16 full deployment, 47 gives us our humanness, 142 hidden in plain view, xv historical constraints on the use of the word, 5 implementation mechanism, 12 implemented in story telling, 104 in narrative, 78, 81 intends a social reference, 88 intentional act of, 87 intersects constitutional analysis, 122 loss of, xiv, 63 loss of the other as loss of empathy, 59 not reducible to affectedness, 30 of the story teller, 101

Index 179 personal history, xvi requires receptivity and interpretation, 47 used by Himmler, H., 72 used for good or harm, 70 used for good or ill, 70 with belief, anomalous, 106 with prosopagnosia, 130 withdrawal of, 56, 60 without it, emotional zombies, 10 epoche reduces the world, 120 existential hero, the as inauthentic, 27 existentialia, 29, 51 as distinctions not categories, 24 existentialist fallacy, 27 existentials, 25 as design distinctions for human being, 24 experimental philosophy example of vision restored, 116 face, human, 127, 128 as a meaningful whole, 128 synethesis of the manifold of, 130 facial manifold synthesis of, 130 fear of flying, 40 fear of snakes, 40 feelings as infectious, 31 fiction as pretend illocutionaries, 103 Fifth Cartesian Meditation most problematic statement in, 124 mutual transfer of sense, 124 pairing of egos in, 123 finitude as the necessity of death, 26 first-person, the, 47 folktale about empathy, xv folktale, the as performance and performative, 100 as providing access to empathy, 100 “fore structure” of interpretation and empathy, 43

Forster. Michael and transcendental arguments, 164 Frans de Waal, 162 Frege, Gottlob overlap with Husserl, not reduction, 115 Freud, S. example of Dora, 66 Freud, Sigmund empathy mentioned in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 5 Frings, Manfred editor of Scheler, named, 160 Fürsorge translated as solicitude, caring for, 22 Gefühlsanlage as being disposed to a feeling, 31 Gelassenheit, 9, 38, 170 Gerede as idle chatter, 53 Goethe, Johann von example of narrative, 106 quoted, 38 Goldberg, Arnold Misunderstanding Freud, book, 169 referenced, 67 Good Samaritan, xiv Greenspan, Pat article on mixed feelings, 170 Hacking, Ian referenced on child abuse, 67 Hatab, Lawrence J., 160 Heidegger, 86 abandons the subject, subjectivity, 22 amplification of, 21 dismissal of empathy revised, 17 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5 not proposing to revise the “they” self, “the one”, 19 positive account of consciousness, 84 regarded empathy as derivative, 16

180

Index

Heidegger – continued uses key phrase from Kant, 3 violence of interpretation, 6 Heidegger, Martin abandons the subject, 85 acknowledges all emotions, 31 and affect, 32 and conscience, 52 and Dretske, 32 and Gelassenheit, 38 and mineness, 50, 86 and quiescing (Zen Koan), 53 on conscience, 57 self individualized by (possibility of) death, 58 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 2, 158, 170 hermeneutic circle, 46, 147 and empathy, 50 and interpretation, 46 and receptivity, 46 hermeneutic of empathy, 61 and speech, 51 as authentic being with others, 62 as unwritten chapter, 22 introduction of the other, 26 on the path to authentic human interrelations, 21 hermeneutics defined, 2 human being as having structures of affectedness, understanding, speech, 24 authentic in the face of the other, 7 individualized in the face of death, 22 human beings and distinctions, 25 as a different way of being than things or tools, 24 as coping with busyness, 23 individualized by death, 27 live in an interpretation of the possible, 43 with each other and authentic, 56 human interrelations as distractedness in the everyday, 43

humanization, xiv humanness, xv, 7, 10, 26, 51, 61 Husserl, Edmund, 8, 19, 31, 64, 85, 121, 122, 124, 156, 162, 166 and empathy, 120 and prelinguistic empathy, 112, 114 Cartesian impasse, 123 Fifth Cartesian Meditation, 18, 124 five mentions of empathy in Cartesian Meditations, 121 in contrast to Searle, 91 misconstrues empathy, 120 on meaning, 95 idle chatter, 44, 54 quiescing it, 9 idle talk, 26 inauthentically way of being with others, 27 individualization through death, 59 inner a misleading way of saying “mine”, 34 intentionality access through language, 91 and speech acts, 97 as accessible through language, 90 as prepredicative, 96 infuses speech with meaning, 109 interpretation, 2, 6–8, 12, 24, 25, 28–30, 37, 42, 45, 47, 51, 64, 77, 85, 156, 157, 160, 161 a derivative mode of understanding, 43 and empathy, 43, 45 and the edge of the inarticulate, 47 and understanding, 64 as “violent”, 28 as a set of perspectives, 47 as reading against the meaning, 28 defined, 43 Interpretation and receptivity, 45 intersubjectivity as Mitsein, 69 constitution of (Husserl), 124 constitutional analysis of, 121

Index 181 misunderstanding of, 69 synonymous with community, 69 introspection, 8, 9, 23, 32–34, 54, 86, 169, 173 introspectionism, 48 Iphegenia citing gelassen, 38 Jesus, 48 Kant, Immanuel, 37 derivation of the categories, 86 judgments disclosing synthesis, 86 Kantian “Copernican revolution”— as phenomenological reduction, 122 Kierkegaard, S. referenced, 161 Kisiel, Ted, 159 Kohut, Heinz major contribution, 132 gives a transcendental argument, 141 Korsgaard, 162 Letteri, Mark referenced, 67 letting things be as Gelassenheit, 38 Levinas, Emmanuel, 58 linguistic meaning derived intentionality (Searle), 96 Lipps, Theodor, 5, 6, 31, 112, 114, 121, 172 listening as a form of receptivity, 51 as empathic speech, 51 Litowitz, Bonnie article, The Second Person, 172 Locke, John thought experiment about blindness, 116 thought experiment re blindness, 96 loss of the other, 59 manipulation, 45 Mann, Thomas example of vicarious experience, 78 Märchen, xiv

mask of inauthenticity, the as falling away, revealing empathic interaction, 21 mass behavior, 32 May, Mike example of the man who dared to see, 130 seeing as an experiment, 131 meaning as prepredicative, 120 defined, 108 intentional content vs externalization, Searle, 108 prepredicative constitution of, 120 meaning that p contrasted with believing p, 109 mine a fundamental distinction, 33 replaces inner/outer distinction, 33 mineness, 32, 34 as Husserlian system of ownness, 18 avoids Cartesian dualism, 4 introduced, 4 introspection derivative on, 33 mirror neurons, xv, 6, 12, 13, 33, 80, 155–157, 169 misplaced affectivity, 34 Mitbefindlichkeit as co-affectedness, 51 Mitdasein, 17, 26, 28, 37, 51, 58 Miteinandersein as being with one another, 20, 21, 28 Mitgefühl, 19 Mitleid, 19 Mitsein, 17, 28, 58, 66, 69, 160, 173 Mitteilung as communication, 51 mood, 31 world disclosed as, 32 Nachfühlen as an after-image (vicarious feeling), 19 naïve realism, 110 causality of, 110 narcissistic transferences defined by Kohut, 132

182

Index

narrative and emotion, 77 neurophenomenology, 111 noema as the invariants in perception, 119 noetic act, 119 noetic acts acts of synthesis, 119 Olafson, Frederick A., 160 once upon a time as illocutionary device, 103 Ontic defined, 3 ontological defined, 3 original experience, 125 other minds, 18, 20, 159 other, the, 26 abandonment by, 102 and community of monads, 123 and trust as storied, 105 as anonymous others, 19 as causing me pain, 88 as hostile force, 70 as the source of being human, 7 become the conscience of, 57 becomes the conscience, in empathy, 54 being there for as empathy, 62 closing of possibility through death, 59 death of, 59 empathy extends the individual to the other, 10 engaged authentically with, 57 exemplifying Kant’s moral law, 37 experience of, disclosed in respect, 36 face of, deleted, 101 giveness of, 123 loss of, 7, 63 mutual constitution of intentions, 124 open for possibility in understanding, 40 receptivity to, 37 sense-giving of, 124 takes a stand for me, 57

target of empathy, 87 traumatic loss of, 59 trusted vs untrusted, 101 other, the, loss of, 38 otherness workshop of hammers and jugs for, 160 pain as an information processing system, 93 as non-intentional, 93 pain, I feel yours as an example, 94 paradox calling silently, 53 expressing in stillness, 53 speech as listening, 53 pattern switch seeing a new possibility, 42 philosophy experimental, 96 possibility of not being as death, 26 post traumatic stress disorder modern name for trauma, 66 Preontological defined, 3 Pretty Words that Make No sense as speech act (Kaye), 163 prosopagnosia as “face blindness”, 112, 128 example of Mike May, 130 Putting oneself in the other’s shoes, 47 quasi-perceptions as vicarious perceptions, 127 quiescing and empathy, 54 and idle chatter, 54 and listening, 54 reasons of the heart named, 77 receptivity and interpretation, 45 empathic, 35

Index 183 Rede as speech, 51 respect and listening, 38 as a clearing for the other as possibility, 37 disclosing empathic receptivity, 37 openness to one another in, 37 Rhetoric of Aristotle, 31 Richardson, William J. work on Heidegger, 173 role playing as normal, yet a refuge, 8, 21, 23 Scheler, Max, 5, 6, 19, 31, 37, 121, 160 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 2, 158 Schweigen as silence, 53 Searle, 107, 109 on meaning, 95 Searle, John, 98, 103, 104, 107, 108, 110 and propositional attitudes, 91 speech acts disclosing intentionality, 86 second-person, 47 self and commitment, 58 as authentic, 26 as caring, 26 as individualized by death, 58 as taking a stand, 62 as to be “won”, 58 Dasein not itself in inauthenticity, 23 engaged with others, 58 linked with empathy as being with, 61 other as constituent of, 19 question of access to, 24 structure maps to care, 62 shared manifold, 13, 155, 156, 159, 169 silence as an essential possibility of speech, 53 social referencing, 49, 50 Socratic ignorance, xiii, xiv, 1

solipsism, 121 special hermeneutic of empathy, xvi, 8, 20, 29, 77, 82, 85 speech, 7–9, 24, 29, 30, 47, 51–54, 62, 83, 86, 96, 156 speech act as method of access to intentionality, 128 speech acts access to intentions, 96 and conditions of satisfaction, 98 and direction of fit, 97 and illocutionary force, 97 connected with intentions, 97 exhaust representation, 99 express an intention, 98 freeze the flux, 98 spiritual death, 7, 26 Ständigkeit as taking a stand, 62 Stein, Edith, 5, 121 Stolorow, Robert analysis of death and trauma, 65 story telling as a separate language game, Searle, 103 as higher level speech act, 103 sympathy distinct from vicariously, 35 taking a stand, 62 and empathy, 64 as giving constancy to the self, 62 informed by respect for the other, 64 taking a stand for the other in empathy, 62 talking cure, the as the gift of empathy, 139 the community of monads in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, 123 The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids as witness to the other”, 100 folktale as witness to empathy, 101 therapist humanized by the patient, 42

184

Index

therapist, empathic as inquiry into being human, 42 therapy and the other as possibility, 41 third-person, the, 48 thrownness, 26, 67 Titchner, E.B. coined ‘empathy’, 6 tough love as taking a stand for the other, 64 Toulmin, Stephen book, Human Understanding, 175 transcendental defined, 141 transcendental argument as applied to empathy, 140 trauma, 66 “burned” into neural circuitry, 66 and neurosis, 66 distinguished from mere upset, 68 unconscious as unacknowledged commitment to a possibility, 40 understanding, 8, 85 defined, 39 as a distinction structuring human beings, 39 as the source of possibility, 40 not primarily a form of cognition, 39 of possibilities, 41 of possibility, 149 schematizes empathy as possibility, 41

Vergemeinschaftende as communalization, 127 vicarious experience, 13, 34, 36, 37, 47, 87, 104, 155 described/encoded as mine, 135 distinct from shared experience, 35 vicarious feeling, 19, 34, 35, 45, 86 in the telling of the folk story, 102 vicarious introspection and empathic receptivity, 134 as a double representation, 134 not Russellian knowledge by acquaintance, 133 vicarious perception as quasi-perception, 127 voice over, 44 walking in another’s shoes, 47 War and Peace, 36 Washington, George, 47 Wimsatt, William, 155, 159 Wisdom, John, 64 Wispé, Lauren, xiii Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 45 Wolf, Ernest book, Treating the Self, 175 working through and a pattern switch, 150 Zen Koan, 53, 54 zombie (emotional), xv, 26, 63 affectively dead, 140 us without empathy, 141