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Introduction

Three key distinctions defined

This approach takes its inspiration from Heidegger’s ontological

destruction of the history of being, since it aims to clear away a prior
forgetfulness in which we live – in this case regarding empathy – before
a fundamentally new engagement. Yet it is distinct in approach in
one particular regard. It aims to recreate the meaning of empathy
(Einfühlung) based on fundamental distinctions drawn from the thinkers
and applied back to them. The point of invoking our Socratic ignorance
is to avoid the presumption that we have the answer in advance as to
the scope and limits of empathic interrelations. Naturally, this requires a
delicate balancing act between unpacking the rich applications of empa-
thy to diverse expressive phenomena – basic feelings and emotions,
social roles and pretences, irruptive motivations, pains and moods – the
phenomena themselves, not the word – and what empathy explicitly
promises in diverse applications in philosophy, literature, social science
and related disciplines.
However, such an approach is not for the faint of heart. Heidegger’s
language and philosophizing have a reputation, justly deserved, of being
among the most challenging – and arguably most significant – of the
twentieth century. Even native speakers of German, the language of his
writings, who have a significant command of philosophical distinctions,
find him alternatingly obscure and provocative.
Therefore, let us begin by defining and clarifying several keys terms
that are at first off-putting, but can readily be translated into plain
English. The terms at the top of the list include ‘hermeneutics’, ‘onto-
logical’ (and ‘ontic’) and ‘mineness’. Hopefully this will sustain those
committed readers motivated to engage further by the importance

1
2 Empathy in the Context of Philosophy

of understanding empathy to continue despite the steepness of the

initial path.
In general, hermeneutics is a method of interpretation and the word
‘interpretation’ may be substituted with only a modest loss of meaning.
Aristotle’s little treatise Peri Hermēneias (Π ερι Hερωενειάσ ), usually trans-
lated as ‘On Interpretation,’ is a work on the expressiveness of language.
‘Hermēneias’ means ‘to express’, ‘to say’, ‘to assert’ (Palmer 1969: 12).1
This approach inspired the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder and,
in turn, Friedrich Schleiermacher in the latter’s translations of both
Plato and the Bible from Greek to German. Hermeneutics became a
model for human understanding and interpretation writ large. If ‘inter-
pretation’ and ‘hermeneutics’ are treated as theories of translation and
meaning that have been generalized to methods of human understand-
ing at large, differences nevertheless remain. Hermeneutics takes its
start from and emphasizes clarifying misunderstandings, distortions and
miscommunications. Understanding emerges from misunderstanding.
Understanding occurs because the normal, standard situations in which
people live their lives are disentangled by a hermeneutic method that
progresses bottom up from everyday life. The ‘hermeneutic situation’
includes an inquiry into the understanding and related interpretations
in which people already live about what is possible, whether or not they
know it. The occurring way of being – behaviours, beliefs, moods and
so on – is only a small subset of what is possible for them and their
lives when the constraints of the given, occurring interpretation are
lifted. Thus, hermeneutics, starting from the bottom up, points in the
direction of what gives meaning to the way humans are being, or, more
formally expressed, ontology. In contrast, interpretation progresses top
down from a formal approach that maps a source to a target, a domain
to a range, by means of a function that connects the two different sets of
phenomena, things or conceptual distinctions. For the early Heidegger,
‘hermeneutics’ is defined as the self-interpretation of human existence
(also called ‘facticity’) – that is, we humans interpret our own ways of
being based on the limitations as well as possibilities we face (Heidegger
1923: 14).2 We humans are defined by a self-reflexive inquiry into what
it means to be human.
This is the place to engage a related hermeneutical (terminological)
distinction. This inquiry into empathy is a humanizing one and what
gets constituted is humanness. The argument turns on the bestowing
of humanness by engaging in an inquiry (among other key constitu-
tive activities) into what it means to be human, in which the individual
and the other are essential to the inquiry. As will be analysed in detail,
 Introduction 3

one of the key paradigms is the loss of empathy of the other – the
loss of the other’s empathy is at the same time the loss of an individ-
ual’s humanness, the loss of one’s being human. This might also have
been expressed by saying the loss of the other – which is the loss of the
other’s empathy – is also the loss of one’s ‘humanity’. However, the term
‘humanity’ is too freighted with tradition and status as a presupposition.
In particular, the latter presupposition – humanity as given – is not
what is aimed at. What is aimed at is the generation of the individ-
ual’s humanness in undertaking an inquiry with the other into what
it means to be human, in which inquiry both the one and the other
are indispensable. In short, while the argument might be reworked to
substitute ‘humanity’ for ‘being human’ and ‘humanness’, the choice
was made not to do so. Instead of ‘humanity’, the term ‘humanness’
is included in parenthesis alongside ‘being human’ and ‘human being’
where it is useful to do so. In turn, the mutual inquiry of the one with
the other forms a humanizing community whose scope and limits are
determined by empathy.
A further terminological point is usefully made about the distinctions
among preontological, ontic and ontological. ‘Preontological’ refers to
the everyday context in which human beings live their lives. For exam-
ple, the folktale discussed above is preontological. ‘Ontic’ is the factual
and empirical approach taken by the positive sciences – whether phys-
ical or historical – to objects and regions that are the defined targets of
empirical inquiry. ‘Ontological’ is the approach to the study of being as
being. Ontology inquires into being as distinct from particular domains
of things (beings). As Heidegger interprets it, ontology inquires into
the conditions of possibility of the human being in its relationship
to being and the presuppositions of regional sciences. ‘Conditions of
possibility’ is a key phrase from Kant invoked by Heidegger in defin-
ing ontology (Heidegger 1927: H11; H124).3 ‘Conditions of possibility’
point to the way the individual contributes to the formation of the
experience that makes possible the very experience being interpreted
and into which the inquiry is occurring. For example, without hearing,
no sounds are possible. Hearing is the condition of the possibility of
the experience of sound. The famous tree that falls in the forest with-
out anyone being present does indeed disturb the molecules in the air,
but no sound occurs to make a difference in terms of human hearing.
Hearing makes possible the sounds that are the basis for auditory expe-
rience as such. Obviously much more can be said about each of these
distinctions; but these will suffice, to get us started, as our working
definitions.
4 Empathy in the Context of Philosophy

An additional point about terminology relates to Heidegger’s position

that Dasein – human existence or human being – is the kind of entity
that is always mine. This ‘mineness’ is not a term familiar in ordinary
usage, but is easily translated into it. Heidegger is not primarily inter-
ested in the redness of the apple as a public property of a thing present at
hand for theoretic inspection. He is initially more interested in the apple
as a crisp and satisfying food on which to chew while taking a break
from building a house or filling jugs to wash the dishes. The property
of redness is derivative. It comes later as a consequence of abstract-
ing from the instrumental context of relations, in this case, involving
food, nourishment, health. The property of redness comes later due to
a de-worlding of the apple by treating it as a theoretic thing and mere
present at hand entity. However, Heidegger does not reject theory as
such, though it is not fundamental. The point is that ‘mineness’ con-
tains the clue to tracing a path between the basic way of being in the
world of the human being and the abstract and derivative constructs of
theory. What is more, it is a way of doing so that avoids the difficul-
ties of the Cartesian point of view that creates independent subject and
object distinctions that cannot readily be reconnected.
No difference exists between ‘my own inner experience’ and ‘my own
experience’, between ‘the inner experience that is mine’ and ‘the experi-
ence that is mine’. The ‘inner’ drops out or becomes a harmless manner
of speaking. However, the language of inwardness is so fundamental a
way of carving up experience that I cannot think of eliminating it alto-
gether in favour of ‘mineness’. Mineness is a powerful reminder that
individuals are open to the world, access the world as a background of
experience to which the world is not reducible without remainder and
usefully distinguish a boundary between the individual and the world
and vice versa. This will be further engaged in the section on ‘Navigating
the Inner-Outer Divide: Mineness and Displaced Perception’.

Historical limits constraining the word ‘empathy’

This is a good place to note an important point about the overall method
employed in this work. Throughout this book, the work we are doing
takes its orientation from empathy, not from Heidegger; from empa-
thy, not from Husserl; from empathy, not from Searle; from empathy,
not from Kohut (following Freud) and so on. The pattern is similar in
each instance. While committing to respect the integrity and complete-
ness of a thinker’s published statements and position on empathy, this
work on empathy aims to recover what the thinker has to contribute to
 Introduction 5

empathy, even if the interpretation of the contribution requires going

beyond what the thinker explicitly says. Even more, in some instances,
it is useful to apply a lesson learned from Heidegger, and interpret a
thinker against himself in the interest of a full, rich unpacking of the
power of empathy in providing a foundation for human community.
Heidegger writes in his first Kant book (Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics (1929)) that interpretation is an audacious undertaking to
get through to the ‘secret élan of a work’ and articulate the ‘unsaid’
(Heidegger 1929: 207). In that spirit, I wish to distinguish what others
say about empathy from what they have to contribute to an analysis and
recovery of empathy – from what a thinker shows to be the case about
empathy in applying the thinker’s relevant distinctions about human
relations to the phenomena. In short, what these thinkers say about
empathy in contrast to what they show about empathy is the focus of
much of the inquiry. For example, Freud mentions empathy in passing
only some 15 times in 24 volumes (Trosman et al. 1972; Wolf 1976);
and yet it would be hard to find a discipline where empathy is more
central to producing results than psychoanalysis. For a variety of rea-
sons, Freud encountered empathy as an aesthetic phenomenon in the
writing of Theodor Lipps. Most of these mentions occur as Freud dis-
cussed empathy in his own quasi-aesthetic work, usually translated as
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1909); and used a completely
different vocabulary to grasp aspects of empathy in the human rela-
tions essential to his work. Freud’s unpacking of the dialogical aspects
of therapy in ‘free association’, ‘evenly hovering attention’, the analyst’s
use of his own unconscious like the ‘receiver of a telephone’ towards the
unconscious of the patient, are all contributions to empathy. In our own
time, the work of the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut is largely, though not
exclusively, responsible for arousing psychoanalysis to an awareness of
the significance of empathy (Kohut 1959, 1971, 1977) as both a method
and the foundation of the discipline itself.
From a historical perspective, Heidegger chose to dismiss the term
‘empathy’ (Einfühlung) for at least three reasons. First, his analytic of
human existence aimed to undercut the work of one of his rival philo-
sophical colleagues, Max Scheler, whose approach to metaphysics was
considered a significant rival in its time. Second, the term was still
dominated by the application of Theodor Lipps’ projective approach to
empathy in the context of natural beauty and aesthetics, though ulti-
mately the work of Scheler contributed to discrediting Lipps’ approach.
Third, the work of Edith Stein on empathy (1917) was squarely in the
phenomenological camp of Husserl of the period of Ideas II and, thus,
6 Empathy in the Context of Philosophy

according to Heidegger, not hermeneutically or ontologically informed.

Nevertheless, as will be demonstrated (Chapter 1), Heidegger has a sig-
nificant contribution to make in clearing the way for implementing
a rich and powerful employment of empathy as the foundation of
authentic human interrelations.
There are those who will say that it is just too hard to distinguish what
was explicitly said about empathy from what was unsaid but still histor-
ically effective. No one promised that it would be easy. Controversies
are probable. Strong convictions and feelings are likely to be aroused
and provoked as favourite interpretations – for example, that Heidegger,
Husserl and so on, have little to contribute to empathy – are challenged.
Let me acknowledge at the start that I may be in error in matters of local
or global significance. The guiding principle here is the contribution of
empathy to human understanding and community, not the comfort,
convenience or reputation of a particular thinker, school of thought
or intellectual tradition. Even with the likelihood of a resort to the
‘violence’ of interpretation in the sense of interpreting an author against
himself (Heidegger 1929: 207), the work of a given thinker should be left
whole and complete. When the thinker says that empathy is unimpor-
tant, that empathy is derivative, that empathy comes too late and so on,
such assertions should be acknowledged as his published opinion, and
then reasons given why, in spite of such a statement, the author has a
contribution to make to human relations in the context of empathy.
As indicated, one significant reason can be given up front which
bedevils work on empathy and has caused many to despair of attaining
timely, consistent results. Of course, this refers to the circumstance that
between roughly 1890 and 1920 work on Einfühlung – translated into
English as ‘empathy’ by E. B. Titchner, the Cornell University psycholo-
gist and associate of Wilhelm Wundt – was dominated by Theodor Lipps’
psychology of beauty and art. One of the accidents of historical contin-
gency, Lipps’ popularity arguably reached well beyond the depth of his
analyses, although he is enjoying something of an ex post facto revival
thanks to his anticipation of mirror neurons. Lipps may have been the
Antonio Salieri to an entire group of would-be Mozarts, who, in any
case, are better remembered today while Lipps is nearly forgotten and
unread. This means that thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler,
(Edith) Stein and Freud could not use the word empathy (Einfühlung)
without invoking an approach that was highly original in its time but is
today regarded as idiosyncratic in its understanding of empathy. If my
recurring reference to this fact sometimes sounds repetitious, I must nev-
ertheless insist on repeating the refrain since it is a variable to which we,
 Introduction 7

as modern researchers, no longer have visibility. The reader overlooks

and forgets it at the risk of fragmenting the phenomenon of empathy
even more so than usual by ignoring that against which everyone was
arguing.
What is unfortunate is that the genuine contributions to empathy of
many thinkers have been obscured. If I am correct, these contributions,
when freed from the historical and conceptual tangle that surrounds
empathy, can be restated and assembled into a useful and persuasive
approach to the foundation of human relations and community. In
what follows, the merits of this approach are advanced and show how
empathy can be extracted from the conceptual and historical tangle in
which it emerged. This work does not pretend this is what Heidegger,
Husserl, Searle and so on really meant. Regarding empathy, it is what is
inspired by what they said and yet left unsaid.

The trajectory of a special hermeneutic of empathy

The trajectory through Heidegger’s special interpretation (hermeneutic)

of empathy maps closely to his design distinctions for human being
(Dasein). In this interpretation, the key distinctions from his Being and
Time (1927) of affectedness, understanding, interpretation and speech
are applied to empathy. The result is an account of empathy that defines
authentic being with other human beings in the rich detail it deserves.
No longer is the human being that appears in Heidegger’s Being and
Time authentic only in the face of its own-most possibility of not
being, death. No longer is human being individualized and brought to
encounter with her or his self as taking a stand on its being only in the
face of death. Human being is also authentic in the face of the other,
coming to authenticity in engaging with the other in an inquiry into
what it means to be human, to be a neighbour, to be there for and with
the other in a hundred diverse ways.
Under this interpretation, the presence of the other as an affectively
available source of animate life gives the human being her or his human-
ness (being human). Likewise, the loss of the other is a kind of death,
which, however, is not physical. It is ontological death or, if you pre-
fer, spiritual death, especially the loss of the affectedness that makes
life matter. The other is the one who humanizes the individual by giv-
ing her or him a rich understanding of possible ways of being in the
world authentically with the others in a community. The loss of the
other does not refer to an everyday, ontic going away of one or another
significant other, although such a loss can be traumatic. The loss of
8 Empathy in the Context of Philosophy

the other means the loss of the other as the ontological source of the
human being’s humanness (being human). This is initially ambiguous,
but later resolved at several levels. It means the community into which
an individual is thrown. But it means more. It means the other who
engages the individual’s humanness and thus provides a fulcrum for
bringing that humanness into being. It means the other who provides
equilibrium and balance in an empathic receptivity in which the dyad
becomes a dialogue between individuals in engaged interrelation. This is
not the being with one another of the inauthentic ‘the one’ – the ‘they
self’ – which receives the majority of Heidegger’s attention, and prop-
erly so, since it is such a pervasive phenomenon that must be cleared
away. Only after this clearing away has occurred is it possible to glimpse
and grasp authentic being with one another individually in empathic
interrelatedness, in community.
Thus, the argument will initially advance in proper Heideggerian
fashion from the application of affectedness to empathy through a
progressive ascent in the sense of an unpacking, making explicit and
abstraction of empathic receptivity into empathic understanding, inter-
pretation, and speech of authentic being with one another. In a sense,
this analysis is whole and complete in itself. But it has many engag-
ing consequences: the affectedness in which empathy is disclosed is
the feeling of respect. Respect discloses the otherness of the other.
The understanding that is grasped is that of the other’s possibility.
The interpretation of the possibility as being in the world with one
another is what allows the other freedom, self-expression and effective-
ness in interrelationships in being known for who she or he really is.
The speech in which empathy is articulated is as a gracious, generous
listening.

From the hermeneutic of empathy to its intentionality

The ascent is from Heidegger’s design distinctions for human existence –

affectedness, understanding, interpretation, speech – to a turning point
in Searle’s analysis of speech acts as a point of access to intentionality in
the narrower sense and then a descent back to pre-predicative intention-
ality that would be recognized in its main outlines in the later writings
of Husserl.
Initially the way forward is up the middle between social role playing
and the isolated ego as proposed in Heidegger’s special hermeneutic of
empathy. Next the role of introspection as a source of input to empathic
acts moves into the foreground. But, of course, Heidegger is at great
 Introduction 9

pains to avoid the language of introspection, which, under the Cartesian

interpretation, is one of reification and hypostization of consciousness
into a thinking thing. It does not have to be so. The introspection
of a single sensation evokes William Blake on finding the entire uni-
verse in a grain of sand – only in this case, it is a mechanism for
resolving a philosophical puzzle that arguably resisted even Heidegger:
how an experience, such as a mood that is mine, gets encoded as
internal instead of external and what that means (see ‘Navigating the
Inner-Outer Divide: Mineness and Displaced Perception’).
Having critiqued the subject–object relationship and subjectivity,
Heidegger cannot suddenly launch into a discussion of introspection,
meditation, listening to oneself, in completing his analysis of being-
in as care. In general, Heidegger is not interested in introspection and
consciousness (as distinct from subjectivity), and, as noted above, does
not even mention it until the last page of Being and Time where he
does, however, allow the possibility of a positive, not reified, account
of consciousness (H437).
Thus, the transition from an approach to empathy in the spirit of
Heidegger to one that exposes empathy as a set of diverse acts of
intentionality of an individual that distinguishes mineness from oth-
erness is to be found in a single line on the previously mentioned page
of Being and Time (1927: H437). This possibility of a positive account
of consciousness licenses a further inquiry into empathy as a form of
intentionality.
If Heidegger were to start on an account of introspection, it would
be ‘positively structured’ (as Heidegger puts it) by a listening for the
silent call of conscience (1927: H296). Such a listening has to quiesce
the idle chatter of the inauthentic relations with others as well as the
idle chatter that is owned as ‘mine’ by human existence (Dasein) and
loosely described in everyday speech as an internal monologue stream-
ing off within one’s head, commenting on everyone and everything that
goes by.
Quiescing the idle chatter is what Heidegger is doing in his discussion
of conscience by presenting paradoxes. Heidegger does not say exactly
how one causes such a quiescing. The suggestion is that quiescing occurs
as follows: by reflecting on the paradoxes that Heidegger offers about
authentic speech expressing itself as listening, calling silently; con-
science saying what it has to express in stillness as if they were Zen Koans
or other spiritual disciplines and meditation; or marshalling Gelassenheit
(to use a term from the later Heidegger) that evokes relaxation, release
from distraction in the busy world, and an attentive centring upon