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

Luo, Zhida

doi:10.1007/s10743-016-9192-x

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Edmund Husserl tells us that establishing an intersubjective connection based on our own bodily experience is the starting point of gaining a perspective about what other persons might be experiencing in their own bodies. According to him, we grasp the other’s body as something similar to our own (Luo, 2017: 45). Unanticipated and unprescribed emotional connections that some minority Germans who have experienced discrimination established with the Jewish Holocaust victims demonstrate that our socially situated experience is central to our window on understanding others’ experiences.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking empathy: Emotions triggered by the Holocaust among the Muslim-minority in Germany

Özyürek

2018

Anthropological Theory

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In the last decade there has been widely shared discomfort about the way Muslim minority Germans engage with the Holocaust. They are accused of not showing empathy towards its Jewish victims and, as a result, of not being able to learn the necessary lessons from this massive crime. By focusing on instances in which the emotional reactions of Muslim minority Germans towards the Holocaust are judged as not empathetic enough and morally wrong, this article explores how Holocaust education and contemporary understandings of empathy, in teaching about the worst manifestation of racism in history, can also at times be a mechanism to exclude minorities from the German/European moral makeup and the fold of national belonging. Expanding from Edmund Husserl's embodied approach to empathy to a socially situated approach, via the process of paarung, allows us to reinterpret expressions of fear and envy, currently seen as failed empathy, as instances of intersubjective connections at work. In my reinterpretation of Husserl's ideas, the process of paarung that enables empathy to happen is not abstract, but pairs particular experiences happening at particular times and places under particular circumstances to individuals of certain social standing and cultural influences. An analogy can be made to shoes. Anyone has the capacity to imagine themselves in someone else's shoes. Nevertheless, the emotional reactions the experience triggers in each person will be shaped by individual past experiences and social positioning. Hence grandchildren of workers who arrived Germany after the World War II to rebuild the country resist an ethnicized Holocaust memory and engage with it keenly through their own subject positions.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking empathy: Emotions triggered by the Holocaust among the Muslim-minority in Germany

Özyürek

2018

Anthropological Theory

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“…'Posits' reinforces the spatial dimension of this empathic relation. The individual creates a correspondence between self and other by transferring their own experiences, knowledge or understandings onto the other through recognition of the bodily similarity between self and other (Luo 2017;Zahavi 2010). This enables a sense of connection and familiarity that, when mutual, helps to generate the assumed intersubjectivities that mediate the development of social organisation.…”

Section: Professional Empathy As Phenomenonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancing professional empathy to mitigate for marginalisation and the critical gaze in teacher development: a phenomenological framework

Campbell

2022

Journal of Education for Teaching

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Empathy is a form of perception in which individuals access the perspectives of others about the world in order to build knowledge about it. It is also a source of self-knowledge because, as a consequence of learning how others see us, we can regulate and refine how we see ourselves. Empathy is, therefore, an important capacity through which social cohesion is created. The aim of this paper is to consider the role of professional empathy between teachers when they engage in collective professional development activities, recognising that fear of the critical gaze and the potential for shame can inhibit participation. In order to do this, phenomenological ideas in relation to the formation of social bonds and empathy are explored. Ideas of professional visibility as a form of vulnerability are also examined. This paper explores the importance of professional empathy then posits the need for it to promote effective collective teacher development. A framework for enabling a culture of professional empathy in support of teacher professional growth is offered that highlights the need for three simultaneous forms of engagement; the collective, the interpersonal and the individual.

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“…For Husserl, it has been pointed out that we rarely perceive the other's body the same way as we do our own (Luo, 2016), and so it is difficult to account for how pairing and the analogising apperception get off the ground. Similarly, Csibra (2007) pointed out that, if direct understanding of observed motor acts were predicated on matching, then we could not really gain much understanding via the activity of mirror neurons, because so few of them match via strict congruency.…”

Section: Establishing the Similarities Between Usmentioning

confidence: 99%

Husserlian empathy and embodied simulation

Williams

2020

Theory & Psychology

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In this article, I show that Husserl’s account of empathy supports embodied simulation theory. Both Husserl and embodied simulation accounts of intersubjectivity face the difficulty of accounting for the relations of similarity and difference between self and other, but there is ample neurological data available to the simulationist to establish the relations of similarity and difference, and Husserlian concepts provide a useful interpretive framework for this data. I then respond to the criticism that the theory of embodied simulation involves imitation and is therefore indirect and nonperceptual. Yet, some extra process must distinguish perceptual intersubjectivity from nonsocial perception, and the most direct additional process possible is the interbodily resonances of the kinaesthetic system endorsed by both simulationists and Husserl. Husserl gives an account of kinaesthetic sensations amounting to a phenomenological description of embodied simulation. This article exemplifies phenomenological correlationism whereby cognitive science and phenomenology serve to enlighten one another.

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

Cited by 8 publications

References 12 publications

Rethinking empathy: Emotions triggered by the Holocaust among the Muslim-minority in Germany

Rethinking empathy: Emotions triggered by the Holocaust among the Muslim-minority in Germany

Enhancing professional empathy to mitigate for marginalisation and the critical gaze in teacher development: a phenomenological framework

Husserlian empathy and embodied simulation

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