Abstract
Current discussions on social cognition, empathy, and interpersonal understanding are largely built on the question of how we recognize and access particular mental states of others. Mental states have been treated as temporally individuated, momentary or temporally narrow unities that can be grasped at one go. Drawing on the phenomenological tradition—on Stein and Husserl in particular—I will problematize this approach, and argue that the other’s experiential states can appear meaningful to us only they are viewed in connection with further, non-simultaneous experiential states of the other. I will focus on the temporal structure of mental states which has received less attention in the available literature. Building a comparison between empathy and music perception, I will argue that approaching the problem of other minds from the point of view of particular mental states is like considering music from the point of view of particular notes.
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Notes
In metaphysics, understanding this interconnectedness has occasionally been acknowledged as necessary especially by proponents of holistic theories of the mind (see, e.g., Davidson 1984; Morton 1996), but the topic has not been properly integrated to the debate on empathy and social cognition (see Stueber 2006: 24; see also Moses 2005: 11; Wellman 2002).
On the problem of immediacy in empathy, see Taipale (2015a).
In James’ words: “Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life” (2007 [1890]: 239).
To give a more recent example of a defence of such a view, Matthew Soteriou argues that: “Mental states obtain for periods of time, but they do not go on, nor are they undergone, for periods of time. […] [M]ental states are not happenings. […] [T]he continuity of a mental state is […] non-processive” (2013: 34). Curiously, parallel characterizations can also be found within the phenomenological tradition. Adolf Reinach, for instance, writes the following: “Assertion essentially excludes any talk of a temporal extendedness; it has no temporal course, but rather exists as though it were something punctual” (1982 [1911]: 320).
This view is in line with that of Husserl, who writes that even if “the mathematical state of affairs […] is not something temporal, the judging consciousness of a mathematical state of affairs is nevertheless something impressional” (1966: 96).
In this passage Dainton claims: “Immediately adjacent specious presents are so close together that if they were any closer they would no longer seem to occur in succession. Just how close together would they need to be for this to happen? For human subjects, psychological research into time perception suggests an answer of around 30 ms. This is the extent of the so-called order threshold: it is only when stimuli are separated by more than this interval that subjects perceive them as occurring in a definite temporal order”. For a more extensive analysis, see Bayne (2010).
For a more detailed account of Husserl critique of Meinong and Brentano, see Rinofner-Kreidl (2000: 311ff).
See Husserl (1966: 167): “In the case of a given experience—in the case of familiar melodies, for example, or of melodies that are perhaps repeated—we frequently have intuitive expectations as well. Each new tone then fulfills this forwards directed intention. We have determinate expectations in these cases. But we are not and we cannot be entirely without apprehension directed forwards. The temporal fringe also has a future”.
Sartre develops further Stein’s ideas in this respect. In Being and Nothingness, he claims that an illness is something “transcending” and yet “penetrating”: its constituents are “melodic qualities” in the sense that the alteration of painful and non-painful phases of illness “constitutes the rhythm and the behavior of the illness” (1956: 335–337). In other words, within an illness, “each concrete pain is like a note in a melody: it is at once the whole melody and a ‘moment’ in the melody” (Sartre 1956: 336).
In her Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, Stein writes of motivation in the following manner: “Motivation, in our general sense, is the connection that acts get into with one another: not a mere blending like that of simultaneously or sequentially ebbing phases of experiences, or the associative tying together of experiences, but an emerging of the one out of the other, a self fulfilling or being fulfilled of the one on the basis of the other for the sake of the other (2000: 41).
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty develop further this idea. Husserl emphasizes the role of harmony or concordance in empathy. In his Cartesian Meditations, he writes for instance the following: “The experienced animate body of another continues to prove itself as actually an animate body, solely in its changing but incessantly harmonious ‘behavior’. Such harmonious behavior (as having a physical side that indicates something psychic appresentatively) must present itself fulfillingly in original experience, and do so throughout the continuous change in behavior from phase to phase. The animate body becomes experienced as a pseudo-animate body (Schein-Leib), precisely if there is something discordant about its behavior” (1950: 144). Merleau-Ponty makes the analogy even more explicitly. He argues that other bodily beings are not primarily present as combinations of parts, no more “than a melody (always transposable) is made of the particular notes which are its momentary expression” (1963: 137): rather, other bodies are, first and foremost, “melodic unities, significant wholes experienced in an indivisible manner as poles of action and nuclei of knowledge” (1963: 165f.).
I want to express my gratitude to the whole staff of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen and to the Subjectivity, Historicity, Communality network at the University of Helsinki for several discussions on earlier versions of this article. I also want to thank my anonymous reviewers at Human Studies whose comments and suggestions have enhanced clarity on various issues in this article.
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Taipale, J. Empathy and the Melodic Unity of the Other. Hum Stud 38, 463–479 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-015-9365-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-015-9365-1