Abstract
Recent enactive approach to social cognition stresses the indispensability of social affordance with regard to social understanding and contends that it is affordance that primarily solicits one’s reaction to the other, such that one becomes affected by the other and attends to the other’s situated appearance in the first place. What remains to be explored, however, is the sense in which social affordance is delineated by an affective sphere and the extent to which the affective sphere serves as a meaning constraint for social sense-making. In this paper, we analyze Husserl’s genetic theory of affection, so as to better understand the nature of the social affective sphere. And we argue that social understanding takes places at different levels and it is at the passive and pre-reflective level that the social surroundings are pre-delineated by a sort of affective ambience where the empathizer and the empathizee come into contact. Once this is appreciated, we can better articulate the affective structure of social affordance and its meaning constituents. And we show that, at the passive level, social coupling is in nature an affective intertwinement between oneself and the other and it consists of a particular kind of corporeal intentionality with which one adverts to the other’s presence and responds to the other’s appeal.
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Notes
For a fuller overview of Husserl’s theory of empathy, see Zahavi (2012). As Luo (2018) demonstrates, although empathy is a quasi-perceptual experience, it is essentially different from perception of physical objects, not only because other human bodies are expressive but also because empathy is fundamentally characterized by a twofold intentionality directed at the other.
Dings (2018) recently proposed a non-Husserlian account of how affordances solicit action, and he suggested that there are three factors that we need to take in account when we conceptualize the solicitation in question: valence, force and mineness. It might seem strange that he didn’t ever mention Husserl’s theory, even though some of his characterizations are fundamentally akin to Husserl’s. Nonetheless, in this paper, I focus more on the pre-reflective character of affect and the meaningfulness of the affective sphere, rather than engaging with the question of, say, “what determines whether a particular affordance solicits to act or not” (Dings 2018, p. 682), for the latter, see also Mühlhoff (2015).
Zahavi (2012) distinguishes two related yet essentially different questions with regard to social cognition. It is one thing to ask whether we correctly understand another person’s mental states, and it is quite another to ask whether another person is minded at all.
In this regard, Husserl is suspicious about whether sheer sensuous data, something completely isolated from the Gestalt whole, could register in perceptual experience at all (Husserl, 1970, p. 85). And he further holds that mere sensuous objects–objects deprived of any meaning and value are the results of abstraction and, thus, they can hardly touch emotion (see Lotz, 2007, p. 40; Hart, 1992, pp. 88–89; Fuchs & Koch, 2014, p. 2).
To be sure, this sort of dyadic inter-relation should not be confused with a proper sort of “reciprocal” engagement where both the empathizer and the empathizee need to be aware of each other, because the former denotes a particular correlation between the other’s affective pull and the empathizer’s bodily advertence, wherein there is no need for the other to be aware of the empathizer. In this regard, “reciprocal” is a too much strong term to describe what is at stake. For a further discussion of inter-affectivity, see Behnke (2008).
Colombetti seems to have noticed the passive aspect of affectivity, as she maintains that the surrounding world has a sort of “demand character” by which the surrounding world by itself solicits enactors to take further actions upon it. Fur a further analysis of the demand character, see Mühlhoff (2015).
To be noted, Husserl makes a similar differentiation between “genuine empathy” and “ungenuine empathy.” As he writes, “ungenuine empathy is the passive associative indicating of a foreign subjectivity, whereas genuine empathy is actively co-doing and co-suffering, letting oneself be motivated egoically, but also, with respect to the underlying ground, pursuing the inner motivation instead of association” (Husserl, 1973a, p. 455). To paraphrase, genuine empathy is an active form of empathizing with others by actively making use of one’s own experiences, knowledge and intellectual capacity, so as to achieve a better understanding of others in a certain circumstance. By contrast, ungenuine empathy is a prior and passive experience of the other, without “subsequent reflection” [nachkommenden Reflexion] upon such a passive encounter.
As a reviewer pointed out, Husserl’s theory of feeling or feeling intentionality, as it is elaborated in Logical Investigations and Ideas I, is the view that feeling intentionality is founded upon perceptual presentation [For a further analysis of the founding relationship between feeling and perception, see, e.g., Lee (1998), Drummond (2006), Jardine (2015, 2017)]. It might follow that the sort of bodily feeling at the affective level when encountering another person depends upon perceptual presentation of the other, i.e., empathic perception (Fremdwahrnehnung), such that it is on the basis of a prior form of empathic experience of the other that social coupling can be instituted. However, we also think that Husserl’s theory of feeling or feeling intentionality in light of his genetic analysis proves to be substantially different from his earlier view, and he thinks that affective feeling is passive and pre-thematic in kind and that it genetically precedes perceptual presentation of a specific object [see, e.g., Steinbock (2004)]. Luo (2019) has explained to what extent Husserl develops his view of feeling intentionality in contrast with his earlier one in the fifth Logical Investigation.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is supported by Guangdong Provincial Fund of Social Sciences and Humanities (No. GD18YZX01). We’d like to sincerely thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions, and in particular to reviewer No. 2, whose linguistic advices and continuous insistence on further revisions have immensely helped to improve the paper.
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Luo, Z., Gui, X. Inter-affectivity and social coupling: on contextualized empathy. Phenom Cogn Sci 21, 377–393 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09778-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09778-3