Abstract
This paper presents a phenomenological account of empathy inspired by the proposal put forward by Edith Stein in her book On the Problem of Empathy, published originally 1917. By way of explicating Stein’s views, the paper aims to present a characterization of empathy that is in some aspects similar to, but yet essentially different from contemporary simulationist theories of empathy. An attempt is made to show that Stein’s proposal articulates the essential ingredients and steps involved in empathy and that her proposal can be made even more comprehensive and elucidating by stressing the emotional aspect of the empathy process. Empathy, according to such a phenomenological proposal, is to be understood as a perceptual-imaginative feeling towards and with the other person’s experiences made possible by affective bodily schemas and being enhanced by a personal concern for her. To experience empathy does not necessarily or only mean to experience the same type of feeling as the target does; it means feeling alongside the feeling of the target in imagining and explicating a rich understanding of the experiences of the very person one is facing.
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Notes
The term “empathy” is a translation of the German word “Einfühlung”, literally meaning “feeling into”. It found its way into the English language via the translation of works in aesthetics and psychology in the beginning of the 20th century (Coplan and Goldie 2011).
A good introduction to the many aspects of and problems in the philosophy of emotion is provided in de Sousa (2014: see especially part six about “Perceptual theories” of emotion). See also footnote 3 below.
Goldie does make a few references to works of Jean-Paul Sartre (1962) and Max Scheler (2009), but their philosophies do not form any substantial part of his main arguments. A powerful phenomenological source for a philosophy of emotion (that Goldie neglects) is the work of Martin Heidegger (1996). Heidegger’s analysis of how feelings in the form of moods open up the world as a meaningful and significant place for us is in many ways parallel to Goldie’s ideas about “feeling towards” that I explore in what follows. As Goldie notes himself, the distinction between emotions and moods is not a sharp one; in both cases the important point is that they make things in the world appear to us with a meaning content (Goldie 2000: 143). Moods are in this regard less specific in targeting objects or states of the world than emotions are, but on the other hand they provide a meaningful horizon for more specific emotions to be formed in (Ratcliffe 2008: chapter 2). A number of valuable papers dealing with various aspects of the phenomenology of feelings are found in the collection edited by Slaby et al. (2011).
The most well-known example of this is Heidegger’s analysis of the meaning structure of the world in terms of what he calls “tools” (Heidegger 1996: 66 ff.); but similar reflections can be found in many phenomenologists stressing various aspects of the primordial “sharedness” of the everyday world (Zahavi 2001).
My choice of the term “schema” to talk about the more or less automated, bodily aspects of our emotional life obviously resonates all the way back to Kant and his transcendental philosophy. This is deliberate to the extent that affective schemas provide the necessary prerequisites for feelings to take on a cognitive and evaluative content and thus qualify as emotions. However, the extent to which the use of a concept such as “affective schema” will obligate a transcendental point of view and philosophy within the phenomenological perspective is a question on which I will not take stand in this paper.
A fascinating and complex example that Goldie discusses in the final chapter of his book is the emotion of jealousy (2000: chapter 8). Goldie’s introduction of the notion of disposition in his theory of emotion could be read as a behaviouristic move, but I prefer to view the dispositions of the person to having experiences and performing actions as a kind of tacit bodily intentionality underlying our understanding of the world. In any case, nothing in my argument about empathy as an emotional experience á la Stein hinges on the question if Goldie is ultimately a phenomenologist or not.
Using the language of affective schemas introduced above we could say that some perceived bodily expressions in addition to (or perhaps even instead of) making us feel something similar to what the other person is feeling also prepare us for taking action in order to deal with the feeling of the other through another type of feeling (e.g. feeling fear when witnessing anger or frustration when witnessing sadness).
Regarding the basic, automated brain processes serving as a material substrate for conscious experiences in empathy, Zahavi has pointed out how phenomenologists (his main source has been Husserl) have addressed this embodied “passive synthesis” in various ways and that an analysis of such sub-personal processes cannot replace the analysis of higher-level conscious processes (Zahavi 2012; see also Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009; Lotz 2007). On the basis of his critique of the metaphorical use of terms such as “simulating”, “mimicking”, “mirroring” and “projecting” (the brain is not an agent in the way a self or a person is), Zahavi argues that phenomenology and neuroscience can be fruitfully combined via more stringent conceptual work (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012). Also, importantly, empathy, according to Zahavi’s interpretation, is complemented by many other forms of interpersonal understanding (including attempts to imagine what it may be like to be in the situation of the other) and interaction (having a dialogue with and/or doing things together with the other) that need to be stressed and studied in a comprehensive phenomenological account of intersubjectivity supplementing analyses of empathy (Zahavi 2001, 2010, 2014).
Dullstein makes use of Stein’s analysis in On the Problem of Empathy (2010) in her argument and my analysis of empathy in this paper is in many ways parallel to her important reading.
This new German edition of the book contains additions to the text made by Stein in her personal copy, as well as a valuable introduction by the editor Maria Antonia Sondermann dealing with the genesis of the work (Stein 2010: xi–xxvi). Stein’s book is a shortened version of her doctoral dissertation, which she wrote under the supervision of Husserl and presented in Freiburg in 1916. During 1913–15 she studied philosophy in Göttingen and listened to the lectures not only of Husserl (whom she followed to Freiburg in 1916, when he was appointed professor there) but also of Scheler, whose influence is very visible in her text.
Although it is not the main topic of his phenomenological proposal for empathy, it should be mentioned that Zahavi does investigate the possibilities of a multi-layered approach to empathy à la Stein (and Husserl) in Zahavi (2014).
The terms Stein uses to get hold of this distinction is that something appears to consciousness in an “original” or “non-original” way (Stein 2010: 15). Regarding the substance—“Gehalt”—of an act being given in an original, as opposed to a non-original, way, the term Stein (and Husserl) often uses to stress the first form is “leibhaft gegenwärtig”, or “leibhaft gegeben”, that is: “given in bodily presence” (e.g. Stein 2010: 16, 31). Interestingly, in discussing the theme of the lived body (“Leib”) in her book, Stein uses a third term to bridge the gap between original and non-original givenness of an experience in empathy, namely “con-originality” (“Kon-originarität”), which is what is experienced when one living body encounters another (in contrast to encountering a non-living thing) (Stein 2010: 75).
Unfortunately, Waltraut Stein’s translation of this key passage in On the Problem of Empathy is far from ideal, constantly mixing up references to “Gehalt” and “Erlebnis” and using “explanation” instead of “explication” in the last sentence (Stein 1989: 10).
It should be pointed out that some phenomenologists, notably Husserl, use the term “empathy” in the broader sense of including encounters with other persons in which we do not take any special interest in the experiences they are having (Zahavi 2012). According to some philosophical traditions (often inspired by the work of Wittgenstein) everyday-language use is what we ultimately have to fall back on in doing conceptual analysis. From the phenomenological perspective, everyday-language use will provide some valuable starting points for conceptual analysis of lived experience (in contrast to a terminology that is more obviously theoretically infused), but it is not the case that everyday-language would form any kind of final guideline for the analysis. The phenomenological analysis will to a greater or lesser extent always lead to the introduction of a new terminology that may include redefinitions of terms that already have an established everyday meaning. In the case of empathy, however, I think the contemporary phenomenologist wanting to use the term empathy in a novel way would have to be careful in pointing out that he is using the term in a way that does not cover the cases many other empathy theorists view as paradigmatic for empathy and/or in a way that covers cases many other empathy theorists would not count as examples of empathy.
Stein’s analyses are Husserlian in flavour on this point, although she had not read or listened to most of the details found in the latter’s ideas of a “pairing between bodies” when she wrote her dissertation in 1916. See the introduction to Stein (2010) by Maria Antonia Sondermann. For an evaluation of Husserl’s theories of intersubjectivity in relation to contemporary researchers attempting to cash in neurological findings, such as the finding of mirror neurons, for empathy research, see Zahavi (2012).
Stein’s account of the perception of the expressive body of the other person is very similar to the often-referred-to position found in Scheler: I see the anger in the clenched fist, the joy in the smile, etc. (Scheler 2009: 260). Scheler even spread the rumour that Stein had simply stolen thoughts and arguments found in his unpublished lectures (that Stein had attended) without giving proper references. Stein, however, vehemently denied this in a letter sent to Scheler after she had encountered the rumours of plagiarism (Stein 2010: xx).
For my account of Lipps’s theory, see Stueber (2006: 7–9).
However, Stein’s interpretation of Lipps’s theory on this point may not be correct; Lipps is probably closer to her own account of empathy than she wants to admit (Stueber 2006: 8).
A reiterated dialectics of the steps should not be mixed up with what Stein calls “reiteration of empathy”, in which I empathize with somebody who is empathizing (possibly with me as a target) (Stein 2010: 30).
Many contemporary moral philosophers are sceptical towards the project of regarding sympathy and/or empathy “as the high road to an ethical outlook” (Goldie 2000: 180), since they tend to make us care about particular other people only and not about suffering or duties in general; see, for instance, Prinz (2011). For more positive accounts of what role empathy could play in ethics, see Slote (2007) and Svenaeus (2014, 2015).
Regarding the question of how psychiatric disorders may affect the ability to empathize on different levels, see Baron-Cohen (2011).
In a phenomenological critique of simulation theories of empathy Shaun Gallagher embarks upon a narrative version of empathy that is similar to Goldie’s (and to my own attempts in this paper) (Gallagher 2012).
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank two anonymous reviewers for sharp and detailed critiques, which have forced me to make my arguments and positions much clearer on multiple issues regarding the phenomenology of empathy.
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Svenaeus, F. The phenomenology of empathy: a Steinian emotional account. Phenom Cogn Sci 15, 227–245 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9411-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9411-x