Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person: Husserlian Investigations of Social Experience and the Self

303 Pages·2022·7.303 MB·English

by  James Jardine

Phaenomenologica 233
James Jardine
Empathy,
Embodiment,
and
the Person
Husserlian Investigations of Social
Experience and the Self
Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person
PHAENOMENOLOGICA
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233
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More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/6409
James Jardine
Empathy, Embodiment,
and the Person
Husserlian Investigations of Social
Experience and the Self
James Jardine
Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy
University of Jyväskylä
Jyväskylä, Finland
ISSN 0079-1350 ISSN 2215-0331 (electronic)
Phaenomenologica
ISBN 978-3-030-84462-2 ISBN 978-3-030-84463-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84463-9
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Contents
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2 The Pure Ego: Self-Consciousness, Attention, and Emotion . . . . . . . . 15
2.1 The Pure Ego and Transcendental Phenomenology . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.2 Self-Affection, Time-Consciousness, and Experiential
Subjectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.3 The Pure Ego as Pole of Engagement (I): Spontaneity
in Attention. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.4 The Pure Ego as Pole of Engagement (II): Spontaneity
in Emotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3 The Distinctive Phenomenology of Empathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.1 Empathy: A (Very) Brief Historical Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.2 Empathy in Husserl and Stein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
3.2.1 Empathy as Perceptual (or Perception-Like)
Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
3.2.2 Empathy as Explication of Foreign Intentionality . . . . . . . . 82
3.2.3 Theunissen on Empathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
3.3 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
4 Nature and Perception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
4.1 Regional Ontology and Constitutive Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
4.2 The Naturalistic and Personalistic Attitudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
4.3 Nature as a Perceptual, Theoretical, and Scientific Theme . . . . . . . 97
4.4 Nature as Motivational Ground for Emotion and Action . . . . . . . . . 104
4.5 Perception and the Material Thing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
4.6 Animate Empathy: A Preliminary Take . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
v
vi Contents
5 Animate Empathy and Intercorporeal Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
5.1 Animals and Things: Ontological Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
5.2 Intersubjective Nature and Living Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
5.2.1 Perception and Solipsism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
5.2.2 Common Nature and Intercorporeal Concordance . . . . . . . 127
5.2.3 Reciprocity and Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
5.3 Animate Empathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
5.3.1 Animate Empathy and the Animal of Intuition . . . . . . . . . . 137
5.3.2 Animate Abnormality and the Commonality of Nature . . . . 141
5.3.3 Animate Empathy and Natural-Scientific Thinking . . . . . . 143
5.4 The Animate Other and the Animate Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
5.4.1 The Institutive Experience of the Animate Other:
Bodily Similarity and Localisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
5.4.2 Reciprocal Animate Empathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
5.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
6 The Personal Self: A First-Personal Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
6.1 The Embodiment of the Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
6.1.1 Bodily Freedom and Perception. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
6.1.2 Voluntary Movement, Agentive Subjectivity,
and Affection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
6.1.3 Freedom as Bodily, Personal, and Pure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
6.2 From Personal Agency to Personal Selfhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
6.2.1 Freedom and Personal Selfhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
6.2.2 Person, Motivation, and Surrounding World . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
6.3 Position-Taking, Habituality, and Self-Acquaintance:
Husserl and Moran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
6.3.1 Convictions and Self-Awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
6.3.2 Detectivism, Deliberation, and Habituality . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
6.3.3 Personal Depth, Memory, and Self-Consciousness . . . . . . . 194
6.4 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
7 Interpersonal Empathy and Levels of Personal Self-constitution . . . . 205
7.1 Personal Self-constitution: Life, Style, and Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . 206
7.1.1 The Pure Ego, the Personal Ego,
and Self-apprehension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
7.1.2 Personal Style and Self-consciousness: Association,
Induction, and Envisaging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
7.1.3 Narrative Self-understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
7.1.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
7.2 The Person as Interpersonal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
7.2.1 Self-understanding and Interpersonal Relations . . . . . . . . . 224
7.2.2 Personal Agency and the Interpersonal Nexus . . . . . . . . . . . 232
7.2.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
Contents vii
7.3 Interpersonal Empathy as Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
7.3.1 Honneth on Social Visibility and Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . 242
7.3.2 Empathy as Elementary Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
7.3.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
7.4 Interpersonal Empathy as Personal Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
8 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
About the Author
James Jardine is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy at the University of

Jyväsyklä, Finland. His research focuses on issues of selfhood, intersubjectivity,
and emotion from a phenomenological perspective that also seeks to address themes
and questions from critical theory, social philosophy, and philosophy of mind. In
addition to authoring journal articles and book chapters on such topics, he is the co-
editor of Perception and the Inhuman Gaze (2020) with Anya Daly, Fred Cummins,
and Dermot Moran.
ix
Chapter 1
Introduction
It is an unfortunate irony that there still persists in some intellectual circles the
distant impression that phenomenological philosophy is exclusively grounded upon
introspective descriptions, restricted in their scope to an inner domain conceived of
as world-detached and asocial.1 For even a cursory glance at recent phenomenologi-
cal work should suffice to unsettle those who have fallen victim to the time-worn
prejudice that phenomenological research remains stubbornly focused on the sub-
jective interiority of the individual psyche. Admittedly, such an appraisal could have
been easily refuted even in the early years of the phenomenological movement. Not
only does it display a grave misunderstanding of the abiding philosophical aims and
methods of phenomenological philosophy. It is also entirely irreconcilable with the
searching investigations of sociality found in Scheler’s Zur Phänomenologie und
Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass (1913), Stein’s Zum Problem
der Einfühlung (1917), Walther’s Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften
(1923), Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927), Schütz’s Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozi-
alen Welt (1932), and Husserl’s Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die
transzendentale Phänomenologie (1936)—to mention just a few seminal contribu-
tions from German phenomenologists pre-dating the Second World War. This not-
withstanding, it would be fair to say that, in the phenomenological output from the
opening decades of the twenty-first century, a degree of interest and thematic cen-
trality has been devoted to questions of intersubjectivity, communality, and social
experience which is very likely unparalleled in the tradition’s history. Not only have
foundational questions concerning the transcendental function of intersubjectivity,
as well the issues of generativity and the constitutive depth of the life-world,
1 Cerbone (2012) offers an excellent response to the depiction of phenomenology as an introspec-
tive inquiry.
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J. Jardine, Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person, Phaenomenologica 233,
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