Husserl: Other-Awareness

Zahavi offers a model of ‘I’, You and We consciousness that is grounded in the transcendentality of a minimal pre-reflective self-awareness , which he calls ‘for-meness’. Zahavi’s formulation of transcendental self-belonging as ‘for me-ness’ relies on the notion of a felt non-changing self- identity accompanying all intentional experiences. Zahavi’s treatment of the subject and object poles of experience as, respectively, self-inhering internality and externality, makes of self-awareness an alienating opposition between a purely self-identical felt for-meness and an external object, a (...) fracture between self-identity and otherness.I argue that for Husserl the pure ego’s unchanging in-itself identity over time is merely an anonymous zero point of activity and is not felt or sensed, and thus there is no experienced for-meness to self-awareness. There is instead a relation of ownness between the ego and the object pole, consisting of a constant, that is, essential, underlying structural feature of the ego’s changing relation to objects of intentional acts. I believe that this essential structural intimacy of associative relationship between the noetic and noematic poles of intentional constitution is what Husserl is attempting to capture when he characterizes the constitution of the subject's stream of lived-experience in terms of ‘my ownness’. Zahavi thinks that what gives an intended object its ‘mineness’ is the fact that as foreign to me, it is intended by a ‘me’ that is familiar with itself. But this self-familiarity’ speaks only of my proximity to myself as pure self-identity, not of my proximity to my world. Husserl’s notion of ‘ownness’ understands the subject-object relation not as fracture between self-identity and otherness (“a ruptured structure which is completely foreign to its nature“) but as an intimate synthetic unification and belonging.Heidegger makes an even more radical break with Cartesianism by replacing the subject object structure of intentionality with the self-world temporal structure of Dasein. In different ways , Husserl’s concept of ‘ownness’ and Heidegger’s notion of ‘ownmost’ capture the profound intimacy of relation between self and world that reveals itself after Zahavi’s idealized internal-external binary has been deconstructed. (shrink)

This paper begins with a sketch of a few themes in the philosophy of property insofar as they relate to the concept of cultural appropriation. It then offers a survey of Edmund Husserl’s account of culture. These reflections put us in a better position to ask whether property ownership provides a suitable interpretative framework for acts of intercultural copying and influence. On the contrary, Husserl’s account of culture leads us away from the claim that members of a cultural group should (...) be understood to have property in cultural formations arising within their group. By putting meaning, rather than ownership, at the center of our understanding of culture, the paper offers an alternative account of what might be wrong, when there is something wrong, with events typically labeled culturally appropriative. The paper concludes by connecting concerns for cultural appropriation with conceptions of cultural authenticity, distinguishing between an autochthonal sense of authenticity, focused on internal origins and protection from outside forces, and a Husserlian sense of authenticity, connected to reason, responsibility, and truth. (shrink)

Other people figure in our experience of the world; they strike us as unique and gen- uinely other. This paper explores whether a Husserlian account of empathy as the way in which we constitute an intersubjective world can account for the uniqueness and otherness of other people in our experience. I contend that it can’t. I begin by explicating Husserl’s theory of empathy, paying particular attention to the reduction to a purely egoic sphere and the steps that ostensibly permit a (...) subject to re-inhabit a world of others from out of this sphere. In querying Husserl’s theory, I consider a series of problems, raised by Zhida Luo, concerning the apparent centrality of bod- ily similarity in empathy. I sketch Luo’s solution, which involves a shift to tactile similarity. While it makes for a better theory of empathy, this solution isn’t sufficient to make room for the givenness of another person not originally predicated on simi- larity. To clarify what’s at issue here, I turn to the Husserlian pictures of empathy presented by Heinz Kohut and Edith Stein. I conclude with a remark about what might be required, given the inability of Husserlian empathy to make room for the experience of others as singular and other, for a picture of our phenomenal life to have a shape that accounts for the coexistence of empathy to others who are like oneself and hospitality to others as genuine others. (shrink)

Husserlian phenomenology, as the study of conscious experience, has often been accused of solipsism. Husserl’s method, it is argued, does not have the resources to provide an account of consciousness of other minds. This chapter will address this issue by providing a brief overview of the multiple angles from which Husserl approached the theme of intersubjectivity, with specific focus on the details of his account of the concrete interpersonal encounter – “empathy.” Husserl understood empathy as a direct, quasi-perceptual form of (...) intentionality through which the sense of the Other is constituted. Furthermore, his account of empathy is holistically integrated with his overall theory of intersubjectivity, including his discussions of the objectivity of nature, and the social, historical, and communal aspects of subjectivity. Husserl’s theory of empathy continues to cast a long shadow, influencing both the analytic and continental approaches to the problem of other minds, as well as contemporary account of social cognition in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

This paper presents a new, third-personal account of empathy that characterizes empathy as being sensitive to others’ concerns as opposed to remaining stuck in one’s egocentric perspective on the world. The paper also demonstrates why this account is preferable to its two main rivals, namely the simulation theory of empathy, and the direct perception theory of empathy.

Previous work in Game Studies has centered on several loci of investigation in seeking to understand virtual gameworlds. First, researchers have scrutinized the concept of the virtual world itself and how it relates to the idea of “the magic circle”. Second, the field has outlined various forms of experienced “presence”. Third, scholarship has noted that the boundaries between the world of everyday life and virtual worlds are porous, and that this fosters a multiplicity of identities as players identify both with (...) themselves-offline and themselves-in-game. Despite widespread agreement that these topics are targets for research, so far those working on these topics do not have mutually agreed-upon framework. Here we draw upon the work of Alfred Schutz to take up this call. We provide a phenomenological framework which can be used to describe the phenomena of interest to Game Studies, as well as open new avenues of inquiry, in a way acceptable and useful to all. This helps to distinguish the core of the field from the supplemental theoretical and critical commitments which characterize diverse approaches within the field. (shrink)

This paper evaluates Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of pairing in light of a representative variety of findings and views in contemporary developmental psychology. This notion belongs to the direct social perception framework, which suggests that the fundamental access to other minds is intuitive, or perceptual. Pairing entails that the perception of other minds relies merely on first-person embodied experience and domain-general processes. For this reason, pairing is opposed to cognitive nativist views that assume specialized mechanisms for low-level mental state (...) attribution, while it is compatible with acknowledging innate affective tendencies. I criticize cognitive nativism for being based on ambiguous evidence. I argue that in early social interactions infants experience sufficient self–other similarities to ground the most primitive perception of others as minded beings. I show that pairing can account for the ontogenetically earliest perceptions of others’ actions and emotions, as well as for the earliest perception of others’ perceptions. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es presentar una aproximación fenomenológica a la experiencia intersubjetiva en contraste a las teorías de la mente y a como estas conciben dicho tipo de experiencia. Se identificará un supuesto esencial de estas teorías según el cual todo tipo de intersubjetividad supone una inferencia y, por lo tanto, elementos normativos. Se argumentará que las investigaciones de Husserl a propósito del concepto de “sentido noemático”, en relación con su concepción del horizonte experiencial, revelan un tipo de (...) experiencia constitutiva e intersubjetiva que es condición de posibilidad de la normatividad supuesta por los teóricos de la mente. Esto sugiere un camino a seguir para lograr encontrar soluciones a cuestiones escépticas tales como el solipsismo y la existencia del mundo exterior. -/- The purpose of this paper is to present a phenomenological approach to intersubjective experience contrasting it with the theories of mind and how them conceive such kind of experience. It will be identified an essential presupposition of these theories according to which all kind of intersubjectivity involve an inference, and therefore, normative elements. It will be argued that Husserl’s investigations regarding the notion of “noematic sense”, related with his concept of experiential horizon, disclose a kind of constitutive and intersubjective experiences which serves as a possibility condition of the normativity which is took for granted by the theories of mind. This suggests a road to follow when trying to find solutions to skeptical problems such as solipsism and the existence of the external world. (shrink)

The article deals with the question of the possibility of implementing phenomenological project, which is aimed at understanding of the whole content of experience constituted by consciousness. To achieve the goal of transcendental philosophy – a clear understanding of oneself as the subjectivity functioning as primarily source – E. Husserl moves from description of things of the intuited surrounding world to the analysis of successively lower layers of the sense accomplishments. In doing so, he faced the impossibility to describe how (...) the primal hyletic configurations that determine the unity of the absolute flow of consciousness form in the process of passive genesis. Husserl’s analyses of passive synthesis points to the openness of consciousness to alterity. The “alterity” of original unities means that they not only do not require the ego’s activity, and therefore seem to be alien to consciousness, but are really alien to it. Paradoxically, while being other to consciousness, primordial unities play a key role in its organization, making possible the structure of the “living present”. Husserl’s account of consciousness as receptive to what is alien to consciousness creates a basis for comparing his ideas with the ideas of S. L. Frank. The Russian philosopher argues that a foundation of “transcendental objects” is a “concrete super-temporal allencompassing unity” as absolute being, outside the relation, to which consciousness would be impossible. The article proves that the recognition of dependence of consciousness on the pre-conscious layer of subjectivity opens the way of solving the problem of the structureforming grounds of conscious. (shrink)

Husserl’s phenomenology of imagination embraces a cluster of different theories and approaches regarding the multi-faced phenomenon of imaginative experience. In this paper I consider one aspect that seems to be crucial to the understanding of a particular form of imagination that Husserl names pure phantasy. I argue that the phenomenon of Ego-splitting discloses the best way to elucidate the peculiarity of pure phantasy with respect to other forms of representative acts and to any simple form of act modification. First, I (...) unravel the phenomenological distinctions which, respectively, oppose phantasy to perception, on the one hand, and phantasy to other forms of the so-called “intuitive re-presentations”. Second, I introduce the difference between presentative and representative acts, arguing that this cannot help us to single out the defining feature of phantasy experiences. The third section draws again an important distinction between pure phantasy and neutrality modification, which allows me to finally determine an internal trait of phantasy experiences, which Husserl refers to as the “Ego-splitting”. In this way, I hope to contribute to a refined characterization of Husserl’s phenomenology of imagination. (shrink)

I start with an immanent critique of Husserls 5th Cartesian Meditation that reveals the weakness of the constitutional Analysis in this text, especially in the view of genetic phenomenology. First I argue for a methodically differentiation in concern to different privileged parts of our lived body. Hands and feet seems to be much more suitable for analogical apperception than facial expressions, because we do not know so much about our own mimics. My special interest is a specific genetic phenomenological analysis (...) of our access to the other that is oriented on the function of the type. The type somehow carries all our experiences with others in it and I will argue that the layers of this history are also functioning in every apperception of an other. (shrink)

Husserl’s theory of empathy plays a crucial role in his transcendental phenomenology and has ever since been critically examined. Among various critiques leveled at Husserl, the issue of bodily similarity between oneself and the other lies at the core, not only because Husserl conceives of it as the motivating factor of empathy but also because his account of it has been taken to be problematic. In this article, I review a main interpretation of the issue of bodily similarity in Husserl, (...) which takes the bodily similarity in question to be a visual resemblance between oneself and the other. By contrast, I give a new interpretation of bodily similarity by taking into account Husserl’s emphasis on tactual experience with regard to the constitution of one’s own lived body and the foreign body. I argue that the bodily similarity in question amounts to a similar manner of twofold bodily manifestation in oneself and the other, and I also suggest that this interpretation further enables a new understanding of interpersonal relation in Husserl. (shrink)

In recent years, the phenomenological approach to empathy becomes increasingly influential in explaining social perception of other people. Yet, it leaves untouched a related and pivotal question concerning the unique and irreducible intentionality of empathy that constitutes the peculiarity of social perception. In this article, I focus on this problem by drawing upon Husserl’s theory of image-consciousness, and I suggest that empathy is characterized by a “seeing-in” structure. I develop two theses so as to further explicate the seeing-in structure in (...) question: first, empathy as a phenomenologically sui generis act is an intentional fusion of both presentation and re-presentation; and second, empathic intentionality is in essence twofold in that it is at once directed at both the other’s sensuously given body and the other’s non-sensuously given mentality. In this light, I argue that empathy is better conceived as a quasi-perceptual act that is fundamentally different from external perception simpliciter and other complex acts such as signitive, recollective and imaginative intention. (shrink)

In this volume, volume 6, I will deal with insight and understanding, meaning and communication and intersubjectivity. (In an appendix I will include a number of –isms, cognitive biases and fallacies that might interfere in, with and distort these things.) The latter is pre-supposed by, present, necessary and operating in all four of these notions when they are employed as verbs. I hope and intend to employ these words and explore them without the need for ghost-in-the-machine like mysterious, mystical and (...) mythical ‘mental’ processes and organs such as ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ but by means of different meanings, dimensions, levels of t notions of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity enfolds (like a pregnant mother her foetus) insight, understanding, meaning and communication. Intersubjectivity is the beginning, the ground and reason for and the end of all meanings or sense that human beings could have. I am not interested in all the details of insight, experience, understanding, meaning, concepts and ideas, dialogue, discourse, interaction, communication (for example as speculated about by Habermas and his followers, Brandom et al). etc but merely the fact that these things require, assume, presuppose (different aspects, features, functions, processes, etc of) intersubjectivity. For those who are so inclined they could execute experiments (for example in the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, sociology, cognitive sciences, anthropology, etc) to establish that what I state here is a fact and not merely speculate. I will leave speculation - about the activities and nature of the first, second and third person (the public, etc) participants in the activities and process of communication, the question of second and third contingencies, or Habermas’s interactionist cum dialogical intersubjectivity and/or Brandom’s discursive intersubjectivity, the insufficiency of the former’s coordination and the need for synthesis, modes of structuration and the temporal dimensions of communication, threefold semiotic or twofold semiological structuralist theories of signs, theories of individualist or collective learning, action-directing models cultural models, pre-supposed structural features of the social relationships that are involved in communication, the structure parameters of for example the process of communication embedded in an intersubjective context (I would say all the following themselves are intersubjective), as discursive practice, including discourse, argumentation, communication, communication exchange, linguistic communication, everyday communication, interaction, etc - those, especially Continentals and those influenced by them, who suffer from the need for metaphysical speculation and to ontologize in complex terms about the most simple and obvious notions. (shrink)

Zahavi and Gallagher’s contemporary direct perception model of intersubjectivity has its roots in the phenomenological project of Edmund Husserl. Some authors :731–748, 2010; Krueger in Phenomenol Cogn Sci 11:149–173, 2012; Bohl and Gangopadhyay in Philos Explor 17:203–222, 2014) have utilised, and criticised, Husserl’s model of direct empathic perception. This essay seeks to correct certain misunderstandings of Husserl notion of direct empathic perception and thus, by proxy, clarify the contemporary direct perception model, through an exegesis of Husserlian texts. In the first (...) half of this essay I clarify the analogy between the directness of regular material object perception and the directness of empathic perception via a clarification of Husserl’s notion of co-presence. I argue that contemporary renditions of Husserl’s account which stress the dis-analogy between these two types of perception are based on a superficial and incorrect rendering of Husserl’s notion of co-presence. In the second half of this essay I clarify the notion of verification. I argue that, for Husserl, behaviour does not verify mental life. Instead, empathic verification occurs via the relation between concepts and intuitions. In my conclusions I show how contemporary authors misunderstand the fundamental nature of Husserl’s account of empathy because of the downgraded status of psychic life within contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

Husserl offers insight into the constituting of the self-aware ego through time-consciousness. Yet his account does not satisfactorily explain how this ego can experience itself as presently acting. Furthermore, although he acknowledges that the Now is not a knife-edge present, he does not show what determines its duration. These shortfalls and others are overcome through a change of starting point. Citing empirical evidence, I take it as a basic given that when a caregiver frontally engages an infant of two months (...) or so, the infant is aware of a person attending. The attending, I propose, is experienced by the infant as having an implicit target, a focal center. In the infant’s awareness, the carer’s focal center is the self. When a You is perceived as attending, a self is apperceived. I argue that such dependence on a You’s attending continues lifelong in derivative forms. I explore the idea that original time is a partial oscillation of awareness between the perceived You and the apperceived self. I then show how, from this oscillation, the ordinary experience of time is derived. (shrink)

Based on some reflections found on Husserl’s C-manuscripts, the article focuses on the methodical path toward the disclosure of what I call the “primal-intentional-tension” (PIT)—namely, the differential relation between the I and the Not-I, at the most fundamental level of the constitution of time. In order to reach this essential structure of experience, I address the method of the reduction and its radicalization. I argue: first, that intentionality is for Husserl not only act-intentionality, since there are also other intentional modes, (...) such as the stream-intentionality; second, that the reduction is the leading method to the discovery of the operating and unthematic transcendental dimension of experience as well as to the disclosure of the multiple phenomenological dimensions and, by means of a radicalization, of the living present as primal-mode of transcendental life; third, that the reduction to the most fundamental level is an analytic and abstractive “deconstruction” (Abbau) of the concrete transcendental life of the living present; fourth, that the primal-phenomenal dimension shows itself as a PIT between the I (primal-I) and the Not-I (the primal-temporalization of primal-hyle) as the most intimate strangeness in me; and, fifth, I finally show that this PIT might be understood as a primal-difference in the originality of my experience. (shrink)

The current debates dealing with empathy, social cognition, and the problem of other minds widely accept the assumption that, whereas we can directly perceive the other’s body, certain additional mental operations are needed in order to access the contents of the other’s mind. Body-perception has, in other words, been understood as something that merely mediates our experience of other minds and requires no philosophical analysis in itself. The available accounts have accordingly seen their main task as pinpointing the operations and (...) mechanisms that enable us to move beyond body-perception—and here acts such as inference, simulation, and projection have usually been the main candidates. This whole setting, however, seems to rely on a somewhat Cartesian assumption, according to which body-perception fundamentally amounts to the perception of a material thing, res extensa, starting from which we then strive to grasp the other as a res cogitans. Insofar as one begins with the question of how we can discover and understand mindedness in things that cannot be directly perceived as minded, the Cartesian setting is already taken for granted—and this is, in fact, exactly what most of the available proposals seem to be doing. From a phenomenological point of view, the Cartesian setting is untenable and seriously misleads the whole debate. The present article reassesses the role and status of body-perception in empathy. Making use of the Husserlian theory of expressivity in particular, the article engages a phenomenological framework of analysis, challenges the above-mentioned assumption concerning the nature of body-perception, and argues for the immediate nature of empathy. (shrink)

Current discussions on social cognition, empathy, and interpersonal understanding are largely built on the question of how we recognize and access particular mental states of others. Mental states have been treated as temporally individuated, momentary or temporally narrow unities that can be grasped at one go. Drawing on the phenomenological tradition—on Stein and Husserl in particular—I will problematize this approach, and argue that the other’s experiential states can appear meaningful to us only they are viewed in connection with further, non-simultaneous (...) experiential states of the other. I will focus on the temporal structure of mental states which has received less attention in the available literature. Building a comparison between empathy and music perception, I will argue that approaching the problem of other minds from the point of view of particular mental states is like considering music from the point of view of particular notes. (shrink)

Around the 1920s, Husserl increasingly began to integrate temporality into his phenomenological analyses. As a consequence, many topics that he had thus far considered in terms of a static structure were re-introduced as involving inner dialectics, a multi-layered depth-dimension to be unveiled by further studies. Establishing a novel, genetic-phenomenological approach motivated certain important shifts of focus in his account of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. For one, whereas Husserl had earlier discussed the experiencing subject as a self-identical pole, introducing temporality into the (...) heart of matters made him more sensitive to problems of alterity and non-coincidence. Yet, as many of Husserl’s analyses explicitly discussing this issue were published only posthumously after several decades, Husserl has long served as a straw man in phenomenological analyses of alterity. Before the publication of the relevant volumes of the Husserliana and before the systematic scholarly work o .. (shrink)

The arguments advanced in this paper are the following. Firstly, that just as Trevarthen’s three subjective/intersubjective levels, primary, secondary, and tertiary, mapped out different modes of access, so too response is similarly structured, from direct primordial responsiveness, to that informed by shared pragmatic concerns and narrative contexts, to that which demands the distantiation afforded by representation. Secondly, I propose that empathy is an essential mode of intentionality, integral to the primary level of subjectivity/intersubjectivity, which is crucial to our survival as (...) individuals and as a species. Further to this last point, I argue that empathy is not derived on the basis of intersubjectivity, nor does it merely disclose intersubjectivity, rather it is constitutive of intersubjectivity at the primary level. Empathy is a direct, irreducible intentionality separable in thought from the other primary intentional modes of perception, rationality, memory and imagination, but co-arising with these. In regard to the inter-personal level, the concrete relations with others, primary empathy is both the ground for the possibility of the secondary manifestations—pity, sympathy, perspective taking, etc., and motivates them. Thirdly, it is the movement in the core of subjectivity initially generated by shifting attention between the ‘I’ and ‘we’ perspectives and later ‘solidified’ through affect to become shifting identification, which opens up the intersubjective domain. So we can affirm that we are not only born into sociality but our sociality goes to the roots of our being as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have claimed. (shrink)

The paper discusses Husserl’s conception of empathy by contrasting it to the classical interpretation of empathy as a phantasy transposition. I start by sketching out a brief historical overview of the classical conception of empathy, which Husserl encountered through its formulation in the work of Theodor Lipps. Following Husserl’s often employed analogy between empathy and memory, I try to work out the distinction between intuitive and non-intuitive empathy. Through this distinction, I will show that, in his later notations, Husserl was (...) inclined to regard the fulfillment of empathy not as an actual reproductive intuition, but as a coherent succession of mere apperceptions. (shrink)

İnsan, kendi özvarlığını ancak toplumda gerçekleştirebilmektedir, bundan dolayı bütün gerçekliğini ancak başkalarıyla birlikte kazanan bir canlı varlıktır. Bu öz-nitelik birçok tartışmayı beraberinde getirmektedir. Tartışma konuları arasında en önemli problemlerden biri bir arada yaşama problemidir. Bu problemin felsefi açıdan soruşturulabilmesinin yollarından başlıca olanı başkasının ben’i meselesini ele almaktır. ‘Başkası’ sorunu temelde modern felsefe ile yükselen bir bilgi sorunudur. Bu sorun özellikle ‘başka zihinler’ ya da ‘başkasının beni’ sorunu olarak belirir: ‘Başkasının beni’ni nasıl bilebiliriz? Bu çerçevede yazının amacı, felsefi açıdan insanlar arası (...) ilişkilerin temelini, başka bir ifadeyle başkasının beni’nin bilgisinin nasıl mümkün olabileceğini incelemek ve söz konusu inceleme ekseninde bir arada yaşama problemi açısından önemli bir kavram olan ‘intersubjektivite’ kavramını açıklamaktır. Yapılacak olan bu araştırma, 20. yüzyılın en önemli filozoflarından Edmund Husserl’in fenomenolojik yaklaşımı çerçevesinde gerçekleştirilecektir.Human being can realize his/her self-existence only within society; hence it is a living entity which acquires all its reality together with others. This attribution brings along numerous discussions. Amongst these discussions one of the most important problems is the problem of co-existence. The main way, among others, of inquiring this problem in terms of philosophy is to examine the issue of the self of other. The problem of ‘other’ is fundamentally a problem of knowledge which rose with modern philosophy. This problem particularly appears as the problem of ‘other minds’ or ‘the self of other’: How can we know ‘the self of other’? Within this framework, the purpose of the article is to examine the basis of relations between humans, in other words how the knowledge of the self of other could be possible and to explain the concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ which is an important notion with regard to the problem of co-existence in the axis of this examination. The study will be carried out within the scope of phenomenological approach of Edmund Husserl, one of the most significant philosophers of 20th century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“An Equivocal Couple Overwhelmed by Life”A Phenomenological Analysis of PregnancySara HeinämaaTwo conceptions of human generativity prevail in contemporary feminist philosophy. First, several contributors argue that the experience of pregnancy, when analyzed by phenomenological tools, undermines several distinctions that are central to Western philosophy, most importantly the subject-object distinction and the self-other and own-alien distinctions. This line of argument was already outlined by Iris Marion Young in her influential essay (...) “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” (1984). The other dominant argument is related to the first one, and it states that organic birth is the event that establishes the first experiential separation between the self and the other. On this understanding, the mother-fetus relation would not involve any relations between two corporeal selves; all such relations would be postnatal. This notion has been defended, for example, by Christine Schües (1997; 2000) and Johanna Oksala (2003).1On the other hand, classical phenomenology is dominated by the idea that the rigorous first-person methodology that is essential to phenomenology dictates that the sense of birth must be studied primarily by reflection on the structures of our own recollection or memory. Consequently, the primary sense of human birth would be that of an unattainable limit. This is argued on the basis of the existential fact that we all are born but cannot recall our own birth, or else on the basis of the transcendental fact that the structure [End Page 31] of retention ties each living present to an earlier one and implies that the transcendental ego cannot be subject to generation.2 From this perspective, all analyses and reflections of the experiences of labor, gestation, and pregnancy would be secondary since the sense of birth that these experiences involve is the nativity of another human being and not the nativity of the reflecting self.This paper challenges both the feminist and the classical phenomenological approach. I maintain that careful phenomenological analyses of the experience of pregnancy undermine both notions. Such analyses show, on the one hand, that pregnancy does not imply a nondistinction or self-other fusion but on the contrary involves a specific self-other divide. At the same time, they demonstrate that the sense of birth is more complex than the classical recollection-paradigm suggests and that it includes more components than the signification of an unattainable limit. A proper phenomenology of birth must take into account not only the universal fact that we all are born, but also the equally universal fact that each of us is born from another human being, that is, some other human subject.3 This other human being who “gave” us birth or “from whose flesh we were born” provides us with a unique perspective on our own past, beyond the limits of our own recollection. Her perspective is incomparable to any other external perspective; rather than simply giving us an additional third-person viewpoint on our own organic birth, this one person is able to open a second-person perspective on our pre- and postnatal life and the transition between them—all of which is beyond our own recollection.My argument proceeds by the following steps:First, I develop a fresh discourse on the experience of pregnancy, by studying a set of remarks to be found in Julia Kristeva’s postphenomenological discourse on maternity, on the one hand, and in Simone de Beauvoir’s existential-phenomenological discourse on feminine embodiment, on the other hand. I use these remarks as leading clues for a novel phenomenological study of the experience of pregnancy.4 Contra Young’s influential account mentioned above, I argue that gestation, as experienced by women who live it in the first person, includes a separation between two sensory-motor beings in a nesting relation: the pregnant self and the embryonic other. The alternative account that I provide hinges on my analysis of the experience of fetal movements and the role of touch-sensations and kinesthetic sensations in such experiences. Ultimately, I argue that pregnancy does not erode the self-other boundary or the own-alien boundary but reestablishes both divisions.Second, I compare my account of the experience of pregnancy to Merleau... (shrink)

Husserl’s “Fifth Meditation” is an effort to establish intersubjectivity, the necessary passage to the Objective world. Two conflicting tendencies govern Husserl’s discourse here: 1) a privileged desire to maintain the primacy of the monadic Ego, which is 2) the origin of a desire to recognize the other and thus to secure intersubjectivity. By focusing on the conflict between these tendencies and on his abrupt introduction of the body into the text in an attempt to resolve them, I try to show (...) through “something like” a deconstruction that Husserl does not resolve the problem of the other but begins and ends this key chapter in an impasse. (shrink)

Between corporeality, space and imagination: forms of empathy in Husserl.The research is focused on the husserlian empathy, meant as a central moment in the constitution of the phenomenological subjectivity, as a genetic path, where the husserlian subject reveals itself as a being structurally bound with the others, from the Leib's level to the Geist's one. In particular, starting from the analysis of the Texts of HUA XIII-XIV-XV Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, the unpublished manuscripts on intersubjectivity (E groups) and, of course, (...) Cartesian Meditations and Ideen II, we focus the attention on the primary levels of husserlian empathy, the ones bounded with physical and psycho-physical process. Therefore, if the aim is to understand which is the basic foundation for the access to the others, i.e. how the alter-ego could represent a real Mitsubjekt with a constitutive function in relation to the world, we must start from the most basically empathic dynamics, from the bodily origin of our relation with the others. The dissertation is composed of four chapters. The first one is titled Reduction and reductions: the function of the primordial abstraction and analyses in particular the problem of the primordial reduction, a moment of the husserlian phenomenology of intersubjectivity often misunderstood; on the contrary, it must be clarified as an essential methodological moment for the understanding of what joins and, at the same time, diversifies the egos. The primordial reduction is first of all detailed and differentiated from the other kinds of possible reductions and it's also analysed in relation to the still very discussed question of Ur-Ich. We also clarifies the meaning of "primordial empathy" and "primordial other" and, generally, we considere the "exit-modalities" from the primordial abstraction, that is the self-estrangement forms already owned by the subject in the primordial sphere. In this context we also pay attention to the difference between sich anders fingieren and sich Andere fingieren. The second chapter, titled Bodily analogy and empathy examines the central theme of the husserlian empathy, that is the analogy, with particular attention to the most original declination of the analogy: the bodily analogy. In the first part we define the nature of the husserlian analogy: first of all we show that the husserlian analogy is born in contrast with the Analogienschluss of T. Lipps and B. Erdmann and it's a kind of passive association, a pre-inferential one; secondly we propose an interpretation of the husserlian analogy in the sense of an analogy of participation. In the second part we examine the basic forms of analogical fulfilment, to show that the recognition of the others has not only a first activation in the passivity, but also various moments of fulfilment; these moments are examined through the differentiation between "proper empathy" and "improper empathy", to point out that empathy rises always in relation with bodily perception, meant not only as a Leibwahrnehmung, but also as a real Körperwahrnehmung. The third chapter is titled Analogy in movement: the exchange of positions and analyses the dynamic development of the husserlian analogy, to show that empathy must be founded on concrete possibilities of involvement in the other's point of view, meant not only in a metaphoric meaning, but first of all as a real space of the other. These possibilities are examined by Husserl through the different modulations that can be offered by the exchange of position and, in particular, through the consideration of the following representations: first of all the wie wenn ich dort wäre, that, thanks to an imaginative component, allows two subjects to have the same position at the same time; secondly the wenn ich dort bin, through which, on the fundament of the kinaesthetic Leib, two bodies can really have the same position, but in different times. In the second part of the chapter we examine the problem of the relationship between empathy and imagination and, generally, between empathy and the other possible forms of presentification, as memory, phantasy and Bildbewusst; in particular we underline how, in connection with empathy, we can find a specific form of imagination, determinable as a gebundene Phantasie. Finally the fourth chapter, Normality and deviations: how far can analogy go?, begins with a brief digression in another possible expression of the exchange of position: als ob ich er wäre, a formulation that refers to the constituted intersubjectivity and through which Husserl shows the involvement to the other's point of view; the other is now understood as a full personality, as a person with his peculiar relation with the surrounding world. After this brief digression, the analysis is focused on the fundamental problem of the normality-abnormality definition, which is a central pair for the empathy problem. Indeed Husserl himself has underlined how the whole phenomenology of intersubjectivity is based on the implicit presuppose of normality; however this presuppose must be explicitated and thematized. The normality shows then itself as an idealisation, because in the reality we can't find neither the average-man, nor the average-experience of the world. On these basis we distinguish two different concepts of abnormality: the first one is the "daily" abnormality, that remains in the normality sphere, and it's for example represented from the case of the colour blindness; the second one is the abnormality, that represents instead a real "break" with the normality sphere and that requires us to figure out if the exclusion of the real abnormal variations of subjectivity, such as animals or insane people, from the intersubjective constitution of reality is a really founded operation. (shrink)

RESUMEN Considerando que los estudios sobre la intersubjetividad en Husserl deben ir más allá del camino cartesiano, D. Zahavi propone ir "más allá de la empatía" y profundizar en el concepto husserliano de "constitución". Para demostrar que la dimensión intersubjetiva no depende del encuentro con otro sujeto, sino que pertenece a priori a la subjetividad, este autor esclarece la dependencia de la intencionalidad de horizonte respecto de la intersubjetividad trascendental. Se analiza en qué sentido es posible establecer esta dependencia y (...) se evalúa la viabilidad general del intento de ir "más allá de la empatía" en el tratamiento fenomenológico de la alteridad. ABSTRACT Convinced that studies on intersubjectivity in Husserl should depart from the Cartesian path, D. Zahavi proposes going "beyond empathy" and focusing on the Husserlian concept of "constitution". In order to demonstrate that the intersubjective dimension does not depend on the encounter with another subject but is rather an a priori component of subjectivity, Zahavi clarifies the dependency of horizonintentionality on transcendental intersubjectivity. The paper analyzes how it is possible to establish such a dependency and evaluates the general viability of the attempt to go "beyond empathy" in the phenomenological study of alterity. (shrink)

Starting with the ego's consciousness and emphasizing on staying at this realm, Husserl is accused of ignoring the absolute alterity of the other and reducing it to the presence of consciousness. By reducing the other he misses ethics and so embeds the violence at the heart of phenomenological discourse. Here we discuss on this criticism and then we try to defend Husserl against it. By putting phenomenology in its eidetic realm, we will try to answer these criticisms.

Husserl introduces a phenomenological concept called “motivation” early in the First Investigation of his magnum opus, the Logical Investigations. The importance of this concept has been overlooked since Husserl passes over it rather quickly on his way to an analysis of the meaningful nature of expression. I argue, however, that motivation is essential to Husserl’s overall project, even if it is not essen- tial for defining expression in the First Investigation. For Husserl, motivation is a relation between mental acts whereby (...) the content of one act make some fur- ther meaningful content probable. I explicate the nature of this relation in terms of “evidentiary weight” and differentiate it from Husserl’s notion of Evidenz, often translated as “self-evidence”. I elucidate the importance of motivation in Husserl’s overall phenomenological project by focusing on his analyses of thing-perception and empathy. Through these examples, we can better understand the continuity between the Logical Investigations and Husserl’s later work. (shrink)

"El problema general que se propone desarrollar esta investigación muestra que las extrañas y complejas relaciones entre los seres humanos y sus conflictos en medio de la intersubjetividad, pueded ser comprendidos y descifrados partiendo de los propósitos fenomenológicos de Husserl."--Back cover.

Social Phenomenology offers an account of collective intentionality informed by the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology.

How the phenomenology of empathy in Husserl and beyond and the second-person approach of cognition are able to mutually enrich and constrain each other? Whereas the intersubjective empathy is limited to face-to-face inter-individual relational experiences or, when socially embedded, results a non-individualized understanding of others in general, the second person approach of cognition opens the way for a plural relational yet individualized understanding of the other. I would like to show in this paper how the integration of both phenomenological and (...) cognitive fields paves the way for the more encompassing description of intersubjective experience as a “relational multiplicity,” which I will ultimately describe through the empirical practice of an emergency psychiatric unit. (shrink)

I am looking at a bird flying above my head and I barely see it; in the meantime I am talking to a friend of mine about my job. All these things: the bird, my friend, my job, even the ground beneath my feet, are outside of me. Yet, while I am living these objects, they are here, in my head. How can one explain this relationship,where something that is completely different from my being becomes a part of me? If (...) something transcends my own nature, how can it be immanent, within my lived experience? How can I relate to something that is completely other than me? How can it ‘in-exist’ in my mind? Is there an original ‘me’ or am I always the result of my social life? Is the world in which I am living objective, or is it just mine? In this paper I would like to answer all these questions, focusing on the theory of intersubjectivity as it has been displayed by Husserl’s phenomenological method. In several instances, this method was defined by Husserl himself as a “‘sociological’ transcendental philosophy” (Husserl, 1968: 539), or even as a “transcendental sociology” (Husserl, 1966: 220), for it looks into the lived experience of the subject as if the subject were a transcendental intersubjective unit. The Husserliana volumes we refer to throughout this work are: the Fifth Cartesian Meditation (Husserl, 1982), which implicitly sends us to volume 8 (First Philosophy, second part & other important additions), and volumes 13 to 15 of the Husserliana (Husserl, 1973), which are dedicated especially to the issue of intersubjectivity. In what follows, I will focus firstly on the notion of intentionality, secondly on the constitution of the otherness and its objectivity, thirdly on the idea of ego and its life-world. (shrink)

Countless differences between Hegel and Husserl notwithstanding, there is a common element in both of their accounts of the genesis of otherness. According to both, only if one delves into the interiority of self-consciousness, can one account for the rudimentary appearance of the Other. Following the Hegelian and Husserlian variants of such a strategy, this paper argues that: at the primitive levels of self-consciousness, subjectivity is intersubjective through and through; an irreducible distance separates the Other from the self, due to (...) which plurality cannot be surpassed by totality. In contrast to the view which sees these claims as though they were irreconcilable with each other, this paper shows how each of them calls for its apparent opposite. While it is common to establish the unanimity of these claims in opposition to Hegel, or Husserl, or both, this paper shows how such a concordance itself emerges from an Auseinandersetzung between them. (shrink)

I discuss Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity in the fifth Cartesian Meditation. I focus on the problem of perceived similarity. I argue that recent work in developmental psychology and neuroscience, concerning intermodal representation and the mirror neuron system, fails to constitute a naturalistic solution to the problem. This can be seen via a comparison between the Husserlian project on the one hand and Molyneux’s Question on the other.

This paper asks whether we should still be haunted by scepticism about other minds. It draws on the writings of Cavell and Husserl to show that there is some truth in the Cartesian premise that has given rise to scepticism about other minds, namely, that our self-awareness is of a fundamentally different type from our awareness of objects and other subjects. While this leads Cavell to argue that there is a truth to scepticism, it proves the opposite to Husserl, viz. (...) that other minds scepticism is necessarily non-sensical. The paper shows why Husserl's position is more convincing than Cavell's. 1. (shrink)

Dorion Cairns correctly interprets the preconstituted stratum of Edmund Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation to be the primordial ego and not the social world, as was thought by Alfred Schutz, who considered Husserl to be insufficiently attentive to the social world’s hold upon us. Following Cairns’s interpretation, which involves recovering and reconstructing strata that may never exist independently, one better understands how the transfer of sense animate organism involves automatic association, or somatic apprehension. This sense-transfer extends to any animate organism, not (...) just humans, and draws on extensive unreflected-upon similarities despite the distinctive fact that the other’s body is never given to oneself as is one’s own. Following Cairns’s interpretation, one can also understand the second epoché as an imaginative, reconstructive abstraction rather than as an example of failed ascesis. Consequently, Husserl appears as less intellectualized in his approach to empathy than often thought to be and more confident in the phenomenologist’s capacity to imagine and attend selectively to experience. (shrink)

In this study, the author develops an original reading of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. This text, far from giving rise to a “transcendental solipsism”, as classical commentators claim, leads to a constitution of intersubjectivity on various levels . In its center, a “phenomenological construction” operates, i.e. a methodological piece that masters the genetic approach of intersubjectivity. Closely following the “almost mathematical” rigour of this crucial text of Husserl’s phenomenology, the author equally tackles the issue of the constitution of the experience (...) of the other and the truly intersubjective structure of transcendental subjectivity. The article concludes with the metaphysical results of the analysis of the experience of the other. (shrink)

I present a perceptual account of other minds that combines a Husserlian insight about perceptual experience with a functionalist account of mental properties.

The topic of the article is the way in which a human being can grasp its own body. The confrontation between Husserl's and Sartre's philosophy about meeting Another is my way of showing the radical change in our understanding of the problem of how we know our own body. According to Husserl both our psyche and body are given to us immediately. The body of Another is given to us by means of our own body. The psyche of Another is (...) made present through his body. This conception is inverted by Sartre. Both the psyche and the body are no longer able to grasp themselves. Yet this does not mean that Another is ungraspable. Knowledge of him does not require self-knowledge. The psyche of Another is given through his body, which is given immediately. Our own body needs the body of Another - it is contained in everything that is not itself. (shrink)

This reflection on the phenomenological analysis of empathy according to Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein suggests a basic structure for getting to know and retain other consciousness within a single unitary sphere of consciousness. Empathy provides the access to an other that does not absorb the other’s stream of consciousness. Rather, empathy is the possibility for the intersubjective intention of a shared world of space and time. Unless the I inculcates other consciousness within itself, the I cannot recognize itself as (...) one among others. (shrink)

This article discloses the question of the pre-giveness of the other and alterity by analyzing and comparing the temporality of consciousness and the role of affection and sensation in Husserl and Levinas. I argue that within the intentional flow of consciousness one can find non-intentional structures, i.e. affection and hyletic data which mark a passivity of consciousness, break intentional act and welcome the other. While discussing the temporal structure of consciousness the special attention is given to the discussion of pra-impression.Keywords: (...) Husserl, Levinas, temporality of consciousness, intentionality, affection, hyletic data, sensation. (shrink)

The recent discovery of a mirror neuron system sets a challenge for a philosophy of experience such as phenomenology, because in humans and monkeys the mirror system seems to transform seen actions into an inner representation of these actions. This paper tries to outline the guidelines of a transcendental-phenomenological analysis of alterity, different from empirical research. The transcendental research must provide a criterion for interpreting the results of empirical science. On this basis the paper compares the phenomenological analysis of alterity (...) with some results of neuroscientific research. It is argued that Edmund Husserl presents an analysis that enables us to avoid misinterpretations of the role and function of the mirror neuron system. (shrink)