Interpersonal Empathy and Levels of Personal Self-constitution

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Whereas the sixth chapter was concerned with offering a solely first-personal account of personal selfhood, this (methodologically necessary) shortcoming is corrected in the seventh chapter, which considers together interpersonal empathy and the intersubjective dimensions of human personhood. Building upon the findings of the previous chapter, I begin by explicating the analyses of personal self-constitution found in Ideen II, arguing that Husserl allows us to distinguish between a range of levels of personal self-manifestation. While Husserl’s reflections, I contend, ultimately lead us towards the thought that narrative constitutes the most apt medium for personal self-understanding, he also argues that there are more primitive ways in which I am aware of myself as a subject of abiding personal character or style. I then develop Husserl’s claim that the person necessarily exists in a nexus of other persons, spelling out the roles of mutual recognition, the constitution of a common surrounding world, and the appropriation of others’ attitudes, in both pre-reflective personal agency and reflective, narrative-embedded, personal self-understanding. Later, I address the sense in which, as persons, we are empathetically acquainted with other personal selves, arguing that such interpersonal empathy both rests upon and transgresses the animate empathy discussed in the fifth chapter. In this regard, I first suggest that a minimal form of interpersonal empathy can be equated with what Axel Honneth has recently called ‘elementary recognition,’ where this designates a basic and perception-like recognition of another (embodied) personal self that grounds and is explicated by emotive and practical forms of interpersonal recognition. Revisiting the contrast of Husserl and Stein with Stueber, I then argue that interpersonal empathy can go beyond interpersonal recognition, and aim at an understanding of the ‘who’ of the other’s actions, emotions, and beliefs—of the personal self who ‘lives’ in them—an accomplishment which requires a sensitivity to (rather than a levelling over) the embeddedness of the person’s acts in her own personal history, and their intimate relation to her personal character.