Empathy and Otherness

Abstract

this is the secret that keeps the stars apart i carry your heart with me i carry it my heart -e. e. cummings All poetry reveals more than we could have expected; these lines from cummings more than most. The secret that accounts for our subjective experience of spatiality is the dual location of the beloved. Space opens up along the lines of access to a beloved other, who is my heart, though perhaps far away space or historical time. Space is the room for the distance between the other within my own consciousness and the real other who may be far away. We have all had the experience of empathy, which is the process and the fruit that the poet describes, but for the transcendental philosopher the interesting question concerns the conditions of its possibility. If we are each single, solitary selves, how can a stream of consciousness other than our own really have a place within our psychic inventory? Wouldn't all that the I is conscious of be absorbed into the I? Nevertheless, we have all had the experience of a friend who behaves a fashion unlike himself, causing us concern about him. Yet, how else can the other really live for me except in as an intentional aspect of my own consciousness? But, how is this possible, if we are really each distinct selves? The poet implies that the constitution of the cosmos and its spatiality are functions of the empathetic awareness of otherness. Phenomenologists, such as Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein, wholeheartedly concur. If pressed, they would add that the everyday experience of the ordinary world is shot through with empathy. This reflection brings Husserl and Stein to bear on a description of the transcendental conditions of the poet's insight, i.e., how is it possible that I, a single sphere of consciousness more or less mysterious even to myself, can include another consciousness so that my experience is that I carry his heart with me, my own heart? Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and Ideas II and Stein's On the Problem of Empathy provide phenomenological analyses of the experience of otherness within an I's own consciousness. The platform for this reflection on these texts is the pairing of two subjects. I leave it to my readers to expand this structure to include the third, the alien other, and groups of others such as communities and states. I. The Experience Although much of our time is spent superficial contact with others, as empirical persons, mundane others, sometimes we feel that we touch each other. We may even dwell each other, participating each other's lives either directly or through intentional regard or both. This phenomenon occurs on the basis of the empathy which makes awareness of the other as another person possible. Empathy, which develops out of the intersubjective constitution of others, roots us the world which becomes ours by means of mutual recognition. As I have argued elsewhere, (1) empathy requires a prior moment of identification at the doxic level of constitution. First, the I constitutes the other as another person, emptily intended--that he is and second, the I turns towards an other to recognize him empathically as the individual who he is. Without an empathetic grasp of the other, my service to him or appreciation of him is only a mirror of whom I am and what I want. Rational sympathy is grounded empathy. Moreover, empathy includes us the world which otherwise would remain alien to us or worst still, mine alone, undifferentiated from myself. When we empathetically dwell with others, we have a home the world. Sometimes we can express our primordial life, our deepest, most original, most private and authentic experience. An easy flow between the depths of ourselves and others validates this, our real life. The others who connect with us such streams moor us the uncertain sea into which we have been cast. Long-term reciprocal empathic relationships result an anchor for each the other. …