Abstract
A phenomenological insight in the debate on empathy is that it is possible to directly perceive other people’s emotions in their expressive bodily behaviour. Contrary to what is suggested by many phenomenologists, namely that this perceptual skill is immediately available if one has vision, this paper argues that the perceptual skill for empathy is acquired. Such a skill requires that we have undergone certain emotional experiences ourselves and that we have had the experience of seeing the world differently, which is a form of pretence. By investigating how we retain knowledge of what is real while pretending, that is, how we anchor the experience of pretence in something that is not pretended, the paper argues that we split our experiential perspective into a double perspective, which differs from the cognitive act of understanding what a perspective is. With this notion in hand, we can return to the debate on empathy. It is argued that in order to have the capacity for direct empathic perception, one must have undergone experiences involving a double perspective.
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Notes
Here it might help to think of the difference between pretending and mimicking: an actor can thus play a character without pretending to be him. To pretend to be Churchill comes with a voluntary act of decentring and with one’s own pretend kind of behaviour, whereas mimicking is guided by someone else’s actions or behaviour.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the questions and helpful comments made by two anonymous reviewers. Further, I am indebted to the following for their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the paper: Johan Gersel, Dorothée Legrand, Dylan Trigg, Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Kasper Lysemose, Rasmus Dyring and the research group for Philosophical Hermeneutics at Aarhus University. Finally, this research is funded by The Danish Council for Independent Research supporting the research project “Existential Anthropology: Inquiring Human Responsiveness” at Aarhus University.
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Ingerslev, L.R. Why the Capacity to Pretend Matters for Empathy. Topoi 33, 201–213 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9202-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9202-y