Edmund Husserl: Empathy and the Transcendental Constitution of the World

Abstract

A critical tension within Husserl’s thinking — that is, his attachment to the classical Greek Enlightenment and things apodictic on one hand, and his constantly returning to the world that is “constituted” and “in flux” on the other hand — saturates the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. Such ambivalence is manifest by Husserl’s controversial notion that empathy [Einfühlung] is a founding mode, a transcendental condition of the Objective world. Kathleen Haney notes that empathy is not only intrinsic to any life-world, but as well provides the unity of the sciences and the means for their proper ordering.1 Because empathy makes possible our objective knowledge of the natural [Naturwissenschaften] and social [Geisteswissenschaften] sciences, Husserl’s notion of empathy was met with derision by Martin Heidegger, who rejected outright any theory that assigned to empathy a founding mode. “This phenomenon,” Heidegger argues, “which is none too happily designated as ‘empathy,’ is then supposed, as it were, to provide the first ontological bridge from one’s own subject, which is given proximally as alone, to the other subject, which is proximally quite closed off.”2 If this were the case — that is, if empathy was a founding mode as Husserl proposed — then, Heidegger concludes, the Other would be reducible to a mere a duplicate of the Self, a non-differentiated reproduction cloned by “publicness” [die Offentlicheit], a mere Thing [Ding] in a world [Welt] in which “everyone is the other, and no one is himself.”3

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