Empathy Before and After Husserl

Abstract

Husserl's definitive treatment of intersubjectivity and the consciousness of other people is contained the Cartesian Meditations, say commentators. On the transcendental ego and its constitution of objects consciousness, consult the first and especially the second book of the Ideas. But to search the Husserlian scriptures without considering their intellectual milieu or the practices of their production is to collude with those texts as they construct a dogma of the ego by suppressing vital contextual considerations. At the same stroke, it is to elevate those texts to the status of a disembodied voice that, resounding from nowhere, becomes itself the prime evidence for what it asserts about egoic function. I suggest, and will briefly demonstrate here, a different practice of reading Husserl. It adds two further steps to the customary methods of studying his texts. First, it places his evolving treatment of empathy its contemporary intellectual context, particularly Munich phenomenology; and secondly, it examines how other people figured Husserl's own professional practices of text production. Einfuhlung and Motivation Munich Phenomenology Einfhlung does not mean empathy. Motivation does not mean motivation, the sense of a psychological drive to do something. These two terms had a specialized technical meaning the German hermeneutical tradition of the nineteenth century. They are the keys to unlocking the logical and aesthetic theories of Theodor Lipps, whose work set the agenda for Munich phenomenology from the first years of the new century down through the suppression of empathy theory under National Socialism. Husserl read Lipps's books closely, and he wrestled with Lipps's developing account of egoic function while he was formulating his own transcendental phenomenology. Moreover, Husserl was sustained dialogue with Lipps's students and disciples.1 What, then, was Lipps saying about Einfuhlung? Lipps was interested the epistemological dimensions of psychology, aesthetics, and logic-all fields which he authored works taken as the standard of their day.2 He framed issues for which familiar Husserlian formulations provide solutions. In his 1903 Leitfaden der Psychologie, Lipps wrote that there are three fields of knowledge: things, myself, and other human individuals. Knowledge of the first two comes by sense and by reflective perception, respectively; while other people are known by Einfhlung. One should translate this term as inner or as awareness-within. The in of ein- can indicate either position within, or motion toward, or both. Thus Einfuhlung can occur oneself of into another. It is the way which one inhabits or coincides with one's own subjectivity, but it is also the way one overtakes and saturates someone else. Perhaps Lipps's most astute observation is this: one cannot tell which kind of inward awareness has been going on until it is brought to termination. A busy, engaged, ecstatic deployment of Ich-nondifferented - within activity is the prime instance of in-feeling, for Lipps. Only as in-felt activity concludes do individual i's emerge. I can then tell, reflectively, whether the i deployed the experience has been my own or someone else's. This lived coincidence is able to deliver knowledge of others as human individuals precisely because the inner reflective perception that lets me know myself also has that same character of saturating coincidence, Einfhlung. Although he has received very bad press on this score, Lipps carefully distinguished between logic and psychology. Psychology, he wrote, investigates how knowledge and error alike are to be made intelligible, but it neither accounts for their difference as logic does-nor claims that knowledge and error are the same. Logic, for its part, certifies knowledge by inspecting the forms of its genesis. Logic informs us that what we have is knowledge when the chains of inference delivering it exhibit the proper pattern. …