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Collective Emotions, Normativity, and Empathy: A Steinian Account

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Abstract

Recently, an increasing body of work from sociology, social psychology, and social ontology has been devoted to collective emotions. Rather curiously, however, pressing epistemological and especially normative issues have received almost no attention. In particular, there has been a strange silence on whether one can share emotions with individuals or groups who are not aware of such sharing, or how one may identify this, and eventually identify specific norms of emotional sharing. In this paper, I shall address this set of issues head-on. I will do so by drawing on one of the most elaborate, but rather neglected phenomenological accounts of sociality, namely Edith Stein’s work on communal experiences and her theory of empathy. I wish to show that a suitably amended Steinian account affords us with an intriguing alternative to both phenomenalist and normativist construals of collective emotions. Moreover, I shall argue that it provides a more fine-grained account of the different types of emotional sharing than standard accounts, ranging from face-to-face, or shared, to more robust but less direct, or collective, emotions. Finally, I will propose a tentative answer to the above questions by pointing to non-dyadic or collective forms of empathy.

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Notes

  1. Here, and in the following, all translations of Stein’s work are my own; wherever possible, however, I refer to the respective passages of the English editions in square brackets.

  2. For detailed accounts of Stein’s multi-dimensional theory of emotions, see Vendrell Ferran (2008) and (2015).

  3. Beyond their affective components, communal experiences also have various other components, which I can only mention here in passing: intentional, rational, spiritual (geistig), doxastic, volitional and personal components, and their specific (noetic) we-mode and (noematic) sense-contents.

  4. For a congenial contemporary sociological theory of shared ‘emotional energy,’ see Collins (2004).

  5. Importantly, Stein also criticizes Scheler precisely for not having taken into account that, in emotional fusion or identification (Einsfühlung), not only is there “one and the same” (dasselbe) emotion with separate individual subjects partaking in it (one joy that we all share), but there is “higher order unity,” “constituted” by that set of subjects (a ‘we’) that is the proper subject of that shared emotion. The conception of higher-order social unities has a strong Husserlian undertone; on the latter, see Szanto (2015a) and, on Scheler’s conception, Szanto (2015b).

  6. For details, see Burns’ (2015) congenial interpretation and Caminada (2010) and, for a more critical reading, Caminada’s contribution to this issue.

  7. For another useful contemporary discussion of the notion of ‘supra-individual agency,’ see Schmitt (2003). Schmitt, similarly, holds that a supra-individual action should be analysed not as an extra-individual but rather as an action whose agent simply is “not an individual”.

  8. For a congenial and somewhat clearer statement of this, see Walther (1923, 84–86), see León and Zahavi (2015).

  9. I employ this term here in a relatively broad sense rather than in the technical one that Tuomela (esp. 2007) and, following him, Salmela (2012) use.

  10. Notice that the issue of whether shared emotions entail that all the subjects involved are aware of such sharing and of how such consciousness is then specified is orthogonal to the issue of whether shared or collective emotions as such entail that there is a collectively conscious subject (or distributed cognitive system) for whom it is like something to have such emotions; for an interesting (computationalist) alternative, according to which, because emotions are not, in the collective case, accompanied by first-personal phenomenal feelings, we should hence assume that there are phenomenally non-conscious collective emotions, which, nonetheless, share all relevant representational, agential and other cognitive features with individual and phenomenally conscious emotions, see Huebner (2011).

  11. For detailed analyses, see, again, Burns (2015) and Caminada (2015).

  12. For the most convincing philosophical alternatives, see Helm (2008, 2014), and Salmela (2012, 2014a) and, for a recent phenomenological alternative, Zahavi (2015); specifically, for critiques of Schmid’s conception of “phenomenological fusion” in collective emotions, see Salmela (2012), Guerrero (2014), and Zahavi (2015). I will come back to Helm’s and Gilbert’s account in “Three Prima Facie Problems, and the Normativity of Emotional Sharing” section.

  13. Apart from Schmid (see above), the only other author to my knowledge who employs this terminology with regard to shared emotions, and claims that two persons can share, or “co-own” “numerically identical” emotions, is Krueger (2013, 2015a, 2015b).

  14. Salmela (2012, 2014a) develops a very similar and useful taxonomy, suggesting that “the collectivity of emotions [is] a continuum rather than [an] on/off question” (Salmela 2014a: 169); see also Schützeichel (2014) for further useful classifications.

  15. This notion corresponds by and large to Scheler’s conception of ‘feeling-together’ (Miteinanderfühlen) and his infamous example—well known to Stein—of two parents sharing their grief over the loss of their child (Scheler 1912/1926: 23f.). See also my note 4 above.

  16. Regarding coherence, some psychologists claim that “emotion sharing” serves, inter alia, the function of “establishing the sense of coherence with others and the world” (Frijda 2007, 223).

  17. By ‘gradual transformation’ I do not want to imply that collective emotions would necessarily presuppose any (previously) shared emotions, though, again, this will typically indeed be the case. However, it might well be, as Stein also envisages, that I in a robust sense share collective appraisal patterns, with all their normative force, without ever having been in face-to-face or synchronous emotional contact with the others partaking in this pattern.

  18. These should read as alternatives—though not mutually exclusive ones—i.e., shared or collective, depending on whether we are dealing with SE or CE.

  19. For another classic psychological conception of emotions as ‘patterns,’ see Izard (1972), and for an interesting recent account Newen et al. (2015).

  20. For notable exceptions see again Helm (2008, 2014) and Gilbert (2002, 2014), and some suggestions in Slaby (2014), and most recently Salmela (2014b). Sociologists and social psychologists, to be sure, have elaborated on these issues in some detail recently; consider, for example, work on ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild 1979; von Scheve 2012), the social ‘validation and legitimization’ of emotions (Rimé 2009) or ‘emotional regimes’ (Reddy 2001).

  21. A very similar connection is observed by Caminada (2015), though his—indeed intriguing—reading of Stein is much more critical than mine in this respect.

  22. For more see Drummond (2006), and Vendrell Ferran (2015).

  23. For a congenial Husserlian inspired account of affective and emotional habits on the personal level, see Drummond (2006: esp. 13).

  24. For Stein, groups can not only be persons, even though she is somewhat ambivalent on that issue, cf. Stein (1922: 114 [135], 231f. [276f.]), and (1925a: 37ff. [46ff.], 52ff. [68ff]); moreover, communities, and even some societal associations, indeed may have a ‘character’ (Charakter) or a ‘personality’ (Persönlichkeit) (1925a: 214ff., 227ff.). I cannot go into that and the related problems of group personhood; see Szanto (2015b, c).

  25. Regarding this matter in Stein, I agree with Dullstein (2013); contrary to this, see Vendrell Ferran (2015), but also a passage in Stein, where she, in contrast to much more liberal and general characterizations at other places (1917: 19f. [10f.], 78 [61], 113 [95]), characterizes “empathy in the proper sense” as “the apprehension of an act of feeling” (Erfassen eines fühlenden Aktes) (1917: 108 [92]). For more detailed accounts, see Zahavi (2010, 2011, 2014), Meneses and Larkin (2012), Shum (2012); Jardine and Szanto (2016), Taipale (2015), and, critically of Dullstein (2013), Jardine (forthcoming).

  26. To be sure, the attribute ‘social’ here should in no way imply that I take ordinary forms of empathy not to be social, but simply indicates the difference in the relata of the empathic relation compared to interpersonal cases.

  27. Much more needs to be said here, especially in reply to a number of potential worries regarding such social and collective forms of empathy, such as the problem of embodiment, or empathy-deceptions on the collective level.

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Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at KU Leuven, University College Dublin, the University of Copenhagen, and the University of Vienna. I have especially profited from discussions with Olle Blomberg, Tim Burns, Emanuele Caminada, Nicolas de Warren, James Jardine, Mette Lebech, Felipe Léon, Dermot Moran, Hans Bernhard Schmid, Alessandro Salice, Glenda Satne, Joona Taipale, Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, and Dan Zahavi. I am also grateful for the insightful suggestions of two anonymous reviewers.

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    Thomas Szanto

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Szanto, T. Collective Emotions, Normativity, and Empathy: A Steinian Account. Hum Stud 38, 503–527 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-015-9350-8

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