“Seeing-in” and twofold empathic intentionality: a Husserlian account

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.     

身体表达性及其格式塔——从现象学的观点看

主流的社会认知理论对他人身体持有一种观察性立场,并认为他人身体之于他人心灵乃是某种无意义的、因而是待解释的物理现象。本文认为这是一种过于简化的、并且是植根于对象化立场的解释;与之相对,我们需要对他人身体行为的被给予性模式作更精确的刻画。为此,本文重构了胡塞尔关于他人身体与心灵作为"表达之统一体"的格式塔理论,并进一步分析了梅洛-庞蒂有关身体表达的四个操作性概念,从而揭示出身体表达的生发性特征。     

Inter-affectivity and social coupling: on contextualized empathy

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Recent enactive approach to social cognition stresses the indispensability of social affordance with regard to social understanding and contends that it...     

Motivating Empathy: The Problem of Bodily Similarity in Husserl’s Theory of Empathy

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.     

社会认知与同感现象学

社会认知主要围绕"理论理论"与"模仿理论"两个经典模型来解释人际间的理解。这一主流框架既包含重要的洞见,也隐含着成问题的理论预设。同感现象学及其当代的代表"直接感知理论"对上述框架提出挑战,认为他人认知的起点不是认知者的理论推理或者心智模仿,应该回溯到认知者初始的感知经验,认为感知是通达关于他人心智生活的一种不可或缺的方式。