Why care about cognitive empathy? It is not intrinsically truth directed. The state I am talking about as "occurrent grasping," elicited when thinking together, is non-factive apparent knowing. The end of thinking together is "cognitive alignment," evidenced by agents coming to share a language, to function within the same discourse. Cognitive alignment is not intrinsically truth directed. However, it is a desirable goal because it does entail the conservation of cognitive resources. Conserving cognitive resources is obviously desirable. Were we to question ourselves at every turn, show concern for the paradigm we are operating within, questioning our methods, our terms thrown in to doubt at every opportunity, always questioning the validity of the research program rather than simply pursuing the research program, in short, we wouldn't get anywhere. However, we must be mindful that preservation of cognitive resources is not the ultimate value, truth is. Thus, the virtue of cognitive alignment and preservation of cognitive resources is tempered by the virtue of critique.
The more ambitious claim: cognitive alignment gets us something more than just preservation of cognitive resources. Thinking together is valuable for reasons besides efficiency. Still working on this...
Showing posts with label empathy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label empathy. Show all posts
8/6/12
8/22/11
Empathy and Method
The mind is thoroughly embodied. Or, an even better way of making the point would be to say that the mind is bodily. Philosophers seem to get that now. Books and articles on the "embodied mind," "embodied cognition," and the "bodily self," are too numerous to count. John Haugeland articulates this line of thought with particular skill in his article "Mind Embodied and Embedded" (1995). To sum it up quickly and generally: the mind, as we know it in our own conscious experience, wouldn't be what it is without the innate morphology of the body (embodied) and the environmental context that constitutes a causal/developmental history (embedded). So to answer Thomas Nagel's famous question, "What is it like to be a bat?" we'd have to say, "Well Tom, in order to know that, we'd have to occupy bat bodies, do all the stuff that bats do for several years, and, well, pretty much live the life of a bat."
Unfortunately, while some philosophers are "getting it," others are taking it too far. Mark Johnson's book The Meaning of the Body is one such case. Johnson offers lengthy critiques of contemporary analytic philosophy, but his basic message is clear: abstract analyses of things like "propositional content" and "reliable teleoinformatic processes" are moments in a general forgetting of the bodily roots of meaning. But I think Johnson misses the mark here. I agree with him that we must be mindful our essentially embodied sense-making capacities, but I refuse to follow him down his grumpy path: "Damn kids today have forgotten about what's important!"
For me, high-level conceptual work is just as much a matter of inter-personal understanding as winking at someone across the subway car. Both are embodied forms of sense-making. Cognitive phenomenology refers to the phenomenal aspect of understanding an argument, or doing a proof and finally getting it. David Foster Wallace called it "that click" of understanding. Even in working alone with the curtains drawn and the fire reduced to a low smolder, one doesn't really get something until one has gotten to the point of being able to communicate just what it is one has grasped. Likewise, a typical part of understanding something is having it explained to you, usually by a skilled teacher. The skilled teacher doesn't just spit the facts at you and leave the rest for you to sort out. The skilled teacher circles back on points made earlier, connecting them to what was just said. He draws diagrams, uses examples, provides illustrations, uses different words. He paints a picture of something such that not only does the student see what he means, but also comes to see how it could all make sense in the first place. In order to share some propositional content, it is usually a pretty good idea to get the other to represent it in the same manner. It's not necessary, but it tends to work.
This reveals that empathizing with others--seeing the world from their points of view--is our default means of understanding. Empathy is more than a special object of philosophical inquiry. It is important for both content and method. Empathy may very well reveal valuable insight into the phenomenology of understanding. If empathy turns out to be the phenomenal aspect (what it feels like) of understanding, then this entails the (practical) importance of collaborative work in philosophy and other modes of inquiry. So, unlike what Mark Johnson thinks, analytic philosophers who practice conceptual analysis do “plumb the depths of the qualitative feeling dimensions of experience and meaning.” They do so precisely through the capacity for which he faults them: “develop[ing] elaborate conceptual schemes for identifying the so-called cognitive, structural, and formal aspects of experience, thought, and language”. Such high level intense thought elicits the most high level and intense empathy. A strong feeling of power emerges from moments of intense understanding. In essence, these are moments of intense connection—the feeling of communion through shared meaning. There is something that it is like to get it. And it is a human goal to elicit the sort of feeling that causes one to proclaim, “Holy shit! Now I see what you mean!”
Forgive these philosopher’s, Johnson, for they know not what they do. They are skillful craftsmen, absorbed in their latest fabrication. You need not remind them that before they became such proficient runners they could barely walk. Calling for a return to the “deep” bodily roots of meaning and understanding could be easily interpreted as a call to return to childhood. True, we must be mindful of our roots, but were we always trying to return to our roots, our moral and technical understanding of the world would remain infantile. And if Freud has taught us anything, the conscious life of the infant is far from rosy.
5/25/11
Don't Mind the Plurality
[edited 6/7/11]
When it comes to talking about plural subjects, or collective intentionality, or the philosophy of social phenomena in general, the toughest issue pertains to whether we should posit some unique ontological entity that is the bearer of these supra-individual states. Many philosophers, such as Michael Bratman, contend that in order to properly account for social phenomena we must work within the parameters established by an ontology of subjectivity that is limited to individual mental states, their contents, and properties. Thus, on this line of thought, social phenomena are accounted for in the “singularist” paradigm that reduces phenomena such as shared intentions and collective beliefs to the individual mental states of the constituent group members. However, other philosophers, such as Margaret Gilbert and John Searle, have persuasively argued against the singularist account—arguing that there are good grounds for committing to the existence of shared intentions and collective beliefs that are not reducible to the mental states or behaviors of individuals. And yet, Gilbert, Searle, and those sympathetic to their holistic view adamantly resist the idea that they are positing some unique “hive mind” or “group thought.” Thus, the question becomes: how can we account for social phenomena in a way that does justice to the (relative) autonomy of such phenomena (i.e. that they are non-reducible), but also without over-inflating our ontology of subjectivity?
I contend that this debate over the ontology of social phenomena would greatly benefit from some phenomenological considerations, which are largely absent from most discussions of the topic. The phenomenal character of experience (i.e., what it is like) extends beyond merely sensuous experience, and is an irreducible aspect of the content of “cognitive” experiences such as intention and belief. Thus, we may speak of the properties and features of a plural subject with psychological predicates, but we must be mindful that these are analogies. Theses analogies are possible insofar as we are all intimately acquainted with what it is like to intend or what it is like to believe in virtue of the unique phenomenal character of these mental states. We must not mind the plural subject in that we must not en-mind whatever entity ‘plural subject’ designates. On this line of argument, phenomenal character is the mark of the mental.
Accounting for plural subjects thus becomes twofold: we must understand the conceptual limitations of reduction and describe the social phenomena constituted by plural subjects as if they were an autonomous form of agency (i.e., we use psychological predicates: we talk of collective beliefs, joint commitments, and shared trauma); simultaneously, we must describe the phenomenology of being a member of a plural subject in individualist terms (for only these terms pick out the primordial phenomenon of subjectivity) that maintain the sui generis character of this unique form of experience. This twofold task can be achieved by paying specific attention to the classic phenomenological notion of empathy, which is treated as a phenomenon sui generis and is meant to account for the lived reality of social interaction.
7/24/10
Absorption & Reflection (part 2: or, On the prospects for moral phenomenology)
Perhaps my previous post (see below) was too hasty. There I characterized 'absorption' as an experiential modality. This means that absorption is a property of experiences rather than a property of the objects of experience. Thus, when I see this black cheese grater here on my desk, I do not say that my experience is black--rather, the cheese grater is black. My experience is visual, and thus an experiential property rather than a worldly property. So, to use Heidegger's familiar example, hammering a nail does not "have" the property of absorption. Rather, absorption is a property of the experience of hammering a nail. In this case I am not reflecting on my activity, I am simply absorbed by it. (Experiential properties presuppose a subject of experience).
I also characterized absorption as dangerous. Of course, I did not intend for this to be a blanket characterization--that is, there's certainly nothing wrong with being absorbed in hammering, or playing music for that matter; in fact, absorption may be a better experiential modality for these sorts of things. When I said that absorption could be dangerous, I meant that experience which rules out reflection is prone to violating other subjects. While driving to the hoop in a game of pick-up basketball, absorbed in my activity, the bodies and limbs of my opponents are merely things inhibiting my purposeful activity. (The reflective attitude of basketball is thus embodied by the referee, whose task it is to not become absorbed in the game and to remain detached from it). One can see how venerating an experiential modality that rules out reflection could have dehumanizing consequences. The subjectivity of others is not acknowledged. Persons become bodies. Lives become means to the telos guiding my absorbed activity. (Yes, this is all very loose, but its a blog--ah, I'm reflecting!)
But what I may have overlooked in my last post was the possibility of a modality of experience that could be called absorption, but with the modification of being an absorption-like modality specifically oriented to the subjectivity of others. This would mean a direct, intuitive, noninferential awareness of foreign subjectivities that would be more than just empathy (for that is what empathy is) in that it would include an additional experiential-property-aspect that we might describe as 'moral attunement'. I believe Levinas approaches ethics in a manner along these lines. For him, the experience of the other--the experience and not the other himself--grounds the first and foremost ethical principle not to violate the other. In Levinas' colorful prose, the "face" of the other "calls out" to me, demanding moral recognition.
If there is to be such a thing as moral phenomenology it would undoubtedly have to address this issue of a moral experiential modality. Regardless, the difficulty still remains as to whether this would be moral philosophy proper and not merely a descriptive treatment of moral experience.
I also characterized absorption as dangerous. Of course, I did not intend for this to be a blanket characterization--that is, there's certainly nothing wrong with being absorbed in hammering, or playing music for that matter; in fact, absorption may be a better experiential modality for these sorts of things. When I said that absorption could be dangerous, I meant that experience which rules out reflection is prone to violating other subjects. While driving to the hoop in a game of pick-up basketball, absorbed in my activity, the bodies and limbs of my opponents are merely things inhibiting my purposeful activity. (The reflective attitude of basketball is thus embodied by the referee, whose task it is to not become absorbed in the game and to remain detached from it). One can see how venerating an experiential modality that rules out reflection could have dehumanizing consequences. The subjectivity of others is not acknowledged. Persons become bodies. Lives become means to the telos guiding my absorbed activity. (Yes, this is all very loose, but its a blog--ah, I'm reflecting!)
But what I may have overlooked in my last post was the possibility of a modality of experience that could be called absorption, but with the modification of being an absorption-like modality specifically oriented to the subjectivity of others. This would mean a direct, intuitive, noninferential awareness of foreign subjectivities that would be more than just empathy (for that is what empathy is) in that it would include an additional experiential-property-aspect that we might describe as 'moral attunement'. I believe Levinas approaches ethics in a manner along these lines. For him, the experience of the other--the experience and not the other himself--grounds the first and foremost ethical principle not to violate the other. In Levinas' colorful prose, the "face" of the other "calls out" to me, demanding moral recognition.
If there is to be such a thing as moral phenomenology it would undoubtedly have to address this issue of a moral experiential modality. Regardless, the difficulty still remains as to whether this would be moral philosophy proper and not merely a descriptive treatment of moral experience.
4/27/10
Fragments on Empathy
Recent conversations with strong individuals have prompted me to post some fragments from a paper that I started writing last year but never completed, nor refined. The original structure of the paper was meant to a. lay out the problem, b. provide a historical context, c. map the historical context onto the contemporary debate, d. show how the relevant connections provide insight. I only made it through an abbreviated laying out of the problem and a rough historical overview. Comments would be most welcome:
The Problem
The fundamental issue at hand is the need to reconcile two strongly contrasting intuitions regarding social perception. The first is that an essential property of mental states is that they are not accessible. Prima facie, the way I know about your mental state is fundamentally different from the way I perceive medium sized objects. The second is that the mental states of others, in some basic sense, are directly perceivable, and that understanding the expressive behavior of others is neither a matter of theorizing about it nor sequential processes of simulation and projection. The first intuition evokes Cartesian conceptions of the mental, while the second echoes Wittgenstein’s anti-Cartesian challenge: “Do you look within yourself, in order to recognize the fury in his face?” (Wittgenstein 1980, sect. 927).
Phenomenologists are quick to invoke Wittgenstein’s blunt common sense approach, but their discussions of social perception can result in puzzling conceptual formulations. Gallagher and Zahavi, for instance, claim “that the expressive relation between mental phenomena and behavior is stronger than that of a mere contingent causal connection, though weaker than that of identity” (Gallagher & Zahavi 2008, 185). What could this mean? How are we to conceive of such a relation? I appreciate this attempt to balance the aforementioned contrasting intuitions, but in order for phenomenological considerations to be significant, further conceptual clarification is needed.
In order to provide the necessary clarification, first we need to identify the concepts that are causing the confusion. Clearly, the concept ‘expression’ is crucial to the debate, as it provides the link between observable behavior and private mental states. But if we begin to explore this concept, we find that our ability to discern our own mental states becomes caught up in any debate about how to discern the mental states of others. As Davidson has pointed out, “If the mental states of other are known only through their behavioral…manifestation, while this is not true of our own mental states, why should we think our own mental states are anything like those of others?” (Davidson 2001, 207). Thus, if phenomenology is dedicated to studying consciousness from the first person perspective, it may appear that it has nothing to contribute to an account of social perception.
History
The problem of social perception is nothing new in philosophy. Indeed, “the problem of other minds” is at least as old as Descartes. However, the contemporary debate between phenomenology and ‘analytic’ theories of mind can be made clearer by examining a very similar debate that was ongoing around the turn of the 20th century.
The concept of ‘expressivity’ did much of the heavy lifting in early explanations of how phenomena with both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ reality are adequately grasped. At the turn of the century, philosophers, psychologists, and historians all saw empathy (einfühlung) and understanding (Verstehen) as intimately related concepts, both of which dealt with how we are able to grasp the ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ reality of something based on its ‘outer’ manifestation. Theodore Lipps, saw empathy as an especially important concept for explaining how aesthetic experience is constituted as meaningful. In Lipps (1903), our ability to understand and appreciate the beauty of external objects is directly linked to our ability to recognize other subjects as having minds. Lipps drew this connection “since for him the paradigm of beauty for human is the form, movement, and expressivity of the human body itself” (Steuber 2006, 7). This led Lipps to infer the existence of an underlying sub-personal mechanism that allows for the noninferential and quasi-perceptual character of aesthetic experience (ibid). Lipps characterized this sub-personal mechanism as ‘inner imitation’, and his primary intention was to causally explain why it is that we “move our legs when we see dancing” and “…” [citation needed].
While Lipps was interested in explaining the causal genesis of empathy through the function of basic sub-personal processes, other thinkers described empathy as a higher-level cognitive process. The early theorists in the hermeneutic tradition, namely Schleiermacher and Dilthey, also linked einfühlung and Verstehen, but had aims different from Lipps’. Schleiermacher saw empathy as the ability to understand other minds by imagining ourselves in various contexts [cite Scheleiermacher 1998, p. 92]. Dilthey expanded on this description, but opted for the term ‘reexperiencing’ (Nacherleben) to capture the methodological procedure of understanding others, guided by a variety of historical sources and by our knowledge of the general political, economic, social, and psychological state of affairs relevant for an adequate grasp of a particular historical time [cite Dilthey 1981, 172, 175-176]. As Steuber points out, “It was Dilthey’s…complete ‘psychologization’ of the interpretive process that made possible the common identification of the concept of understanding and empathy that we find at the beginning of the twentieth century” (2006, 11).
Stepping back for a moment, before examining Stein/Husserl’s phenomenological critique of the then prevailing views of empathy/understanding, we can see that at the turn of the century a similar twofold distinction within the concept of empathy was already taking shape. Taking Lipps as paradigmatic, one side of this distinction developed the concept of empathy as part of a psychological-causal-genetic account of what processes must take place within an individual when social perception occurs. The other side of this distinction, as exemplified by the hermeneutic tradition inaugurated by Schleiermacher and Dilthey, conceived of empathy as a highly cognitive process involved in interpreting the meaning of the signs, marks, and artifacts created by others. Lipps was interested understanding what sub-personal processes could cause social perception. Schleiermacher and Dilthey were interested in the personal processes that could allow for understanding others from disparate places and times. Before even considering what phenomenology might add to this characterization, it is noteworthy that contemporary empathy theorists have already mapped this framework onto the contemporary TT/ST debate. Steuber (2006) sees recent neurobiology as supporting Lipps’ conception of empathy, referring to this sub-personal, underlying causal mechanism as ‘basic empathy’—which he distinguishes from ‘reenactive empathy’, which allows us to “conceive of another person’s more complex social behavior as the behavior of a rational agent who acts for a reason,” which corresponds to the more robust concept of empathy developed in the hermeneutic tradition (20-21).
Edith Stein’s 1916 doctoral dissertation under Edmund Husserl, Zum Problem der Einfühlung (On The Problem of Empathy, trans. 1989) explores empathy as a phenomenon sui generis. On Stein’s account, Lipps’ theory of ‘inner imitation’ confuses social perception, or perception of ‘foreign experience’, with self-experience, or that which is ‘primordially given’. Her basic claim is that Lipps’ theory characterizes empathy as ‘convergence’ or ‘an experience of oneness’ between observer and what is observed. One way to understand this is by highlighting the difference between a memory and a flashback. When one has a memory, one perceives an experience that is no longer present. When one has a flashback, one experiences an experience as if it were literally present. In Stein’s terms, memory (along with fantasy) is an example of non-primordial experience—the subject has an experience of an experience that is not ‘fully given’ in the way that my present experience of my direct surroundings are given to me. A flashback, on the other hand, differs from a memory precisely because this line between non-primoridal and primordial experience is blurred. Empathy, in Stein’s sense, “can only be the non-primordial experience which announces a primordial one” (Stein 1989, 13-14). The potentially traumatic effects of a flashback are possible insofar as one is having an experience which is indistinguishable from the present, fully given experience typical of everyday perception. Thus, empathy shares the structure of memory and fantasy, whereas Lipps’ characterization of ‘inner imitation’ too easily leads to a conception of empathy having the same structure as flashback.
Lipps may also be understood as having confused the concepts of empathy and sympathy. Stein is careful to note that sympathy is a primordial experience whereas empathy is not, however this does not preclude the possibility of the two experiences coinciding. For example, there is a difference between my perceiving the grief in your facial expression and my feeling that grief. My empathetic perception of your grief may lead me to attribute a mental state to you, and it may serve as the basis for my theorizing about the larger context of your grief; but at no point is it necessary to this experience that I myself feel grief. If you are my friend or loved one, and I perceive that you are grieving, I myself, as someone who cares for your well-being, may also feel grief. But this primordial feeling of grief that I now have is better characterized as sympathy, or feeling with the other, and not empathy. Thus it is common for therapists to speak of the importance being empathetic while remaining unsympathetic. The job of the therapist is to understand the mental states of the other without being affected by them.
Lipps’ talk of ‘oneness’ and ‘convergence’ are especially problematic if carried out to its logical conclusion—telepathy. For if I truly was to ‘feel your pain’, the distinction between us as separate egos would be entirely erased. If I feel your pain as you feel it, then does it even make sense to call this empathy? The phenomenon we set out to explain, under the name ‘empathy’, was the phenomena whereby I am somehow aware of your mental states. If I am experiencing your mental states qua you and not qua I, this is not empathy.
The Problem
The fundamental issue at hand is the need to reconcile two strongly contrasting intuitions regarding social perception. The first is that an essential property of mental states is that they are not accessible. Prima facie, the way I know about your mental state is fundamentally different from the way I perceive medium sized objects. The second is that the mental states of others, in some basic sense, are directly perceivable, and that understanding the expressive behavior of others is neither a matter of theorizing about it nor sequential processes of simulation and projection. The first intuition evokes Cartesian conceptions of the mental, while the second echoes Wittgenstein’s anti-Cartesian challenge: “Do you look within yourself, in order to recognize the fury in his face?” (Wittgenstein 1980, sect. 927).
Phenomenologists are quick to invoke Wittgenstein’s blunt common sense approach, but their discussions of social perception can result in puzzling conceptual formulations. Gallagher and Zahavi, for instance, claim “that the expressive relation between mental phenomena and behavior is stronger than that of a mere contingent causal connection, though weaker than that of identity” (Gallagher & Zahavi 2008, 185). What could this mean? How are we to conceive of such a relation? I appreciate this attempt to balance the aforementioned contrasting intuitions, but in order for phenomenological considerations to be significant, further conceptual clarification is needed.
In order to provide the necessary clarification, first we need to identify the concepts that are causing the confusion. Clearly, the concept ‘expression’ is crucial to the debate, as it provides the link between observable behavior and private mental states. But if we begin to explore this concept, we find that our ability to discern our own mental states becomes caught up in any debate about how to discern the mental states of others. As Davidson has pointed out, “If the mental states of other are known only through their behavioral…manifestation, while this is not true of our own mental states, why should we think our own mental states are anything like those of others?” (Davidson 2001, 207). Thus, if phenomenology is dedicated to studying consciousness from the first person perspective, it may appear that it has nothing to contribute to an account of social perception.
History
The problem of social perception is nothing new in philosophy. Indeed, “the problem of other minds” is at least as old as Descartes. However, the contemporary debate between phenomenology and ‘analytic’ theories of mind can be made clearer by examining a very similar debate that was ongoing around the turn of the 20th century.
The concept of ‘expressivity’ did much of the heavy lifting in early explanations of how phenomena with both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ reality are adequately grasped. At the turn of the century, philosophers, psychologists, and historians all saw empathy (einfühlung) and understanding (Verstehen) as intimately related concepts, both of which dealt with how we are able to grasp the ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ reality of something based on its ‘outer’ manifestation. Theodore Lipps, saw empathy as an especially important concept for explaining how aesthetic experience is constituted as meaningful. In Lipps (1903), our ability to understand and appreciate the beauty of external objects is directly linked to our ability to recognize other subjects as having minds. Lipps drew this connection “since for him the paradigm of beauty for human is the form, movement, and expressivity of the human body itself” (Steuber 2006, 7). This led Lipps to infer the existence of an underlying sub-personal mechanism that allows for the noninferential and quasi-perceptual character of aesthetic experience (ibid). Lipps characterized this sub-personal mechanism as ‘inner imitation’, and his primary intention was to causally explain why it is that we “move our legs when we see dancing” and “…” [citation needed].
While Lipps was interested in explaining the causal genesis of empathy through the function of basic sub-personal processes, other thinkers described empathy as a higher-level cognitive process. The early theorists in the hermeneutic tradition, namely Schleiermacher and Dilthey, also linked einfühlung and Verstehen, but had aims different from Lipps’. Schleiermacher saw empathy as the ability to understand other minds by imagining ourselves in various contexts [cite Scheleiermacher 1998, p. 92]. Dilthey expanded on this description, but opted for the term ‘reexperiencing’ (Nacherleben) to capture the methodological procedure of understanding others, guided by a variety of historical sources and by our knowledge of the general political, economic, social, and psychological state of affairs relevant for an adequate grasp of a particular historical time [cite Dilthey 1981, 172, 175-176]. As Steuber points out, “It was Dilthey’s…complete ‘psychologization’ of the interpretive process that made possible the common identification of the concept of understanding and empathy that we find at the beginning of the twentieth century” (2006, 11).
Stepping back for a moment, before examining Stein/Husserl’s phenomenological critique of the then prevailing views of empathy/understanding, we can see that at the turn of the century a similar twofold distinction within the concept of empathy was already taking shape. Taking Lipps as paradigmatic, one side of this distinction developed the concept of empathy as part of a psychological-causal-genetic account of what processes must take place within an individual when social perception occurs. The other side of this distinction, as exemplified by the hermeneutic tradition inaugurated by Schleiermacher and Dilthey, conceived of empathy as a highly cognitive process involved in interpreting the meaning of the signs, marks, and artifacts created by others. Lipps was interested understanding what sub-personal processes could cause social perception. Schleiermacher and Dilthey were interested in the personal processes that could allow for understanding others from disparate places and times. Before even considering what phenomenology might add to this characterization, it is noteworthy that contemporary empathy theorists have already mapped this framework onto the contemporary TT/ST debate. Steuber (2006) sees recent neurobiology as supporting Lipps’ conception of empathy, referring to this sub-personal, underlying causal mechanism as ‘basic empathy’—which he distinguishes from ‘reenactive empathy’, which allows us to “conceive of another person’s more complex social behavior as the behavior of a rational agent who acts for a reason,” which corresponds to the more robust concept of empathy developed in the hermeneutic tradition (20-21).
Edith Stein’s 1916 doctoral dissertation under Edmund Husserl, Zum Problem der Einfühlung (On The Problem of Empathy, trans. 1989) explores empathy as a phenomenon sui generis. On Stein’s account, Lipps’ theory of ‘inner imitation’ confuses social perception, or perception of ‘foreign experience’, with self-experience, or that which is ‘primordially given’. Her basic claim is that Lipps’ theory characterizes empathy as ‘convergence’ or ‘an experience of oneness’ between observer and what is observed. One way to understand this is by highlighting the difference between a memory and a flashback. When one has a memory, one perceives an experience that is no longer present. When one has a flashback, one experiences an experience as if it were literally present. In Stein’s terms, memory (along with fantasy) is an example of non-primordial experience—the subject has an experience of an experience that is not ‘fully given’ in the way that my present experience of my direct surroundings are given to me. A flashback, on the other hand, differs from a memory precisely because this line between non-primoridal and primordial experience is blurred. Empathy, in Stein’s sense, “can only be the non-primordial experience which announces a primordial one” (Stein 1989, 13-14). The potentially traumatic effects of a flashback are possible insofar as one is having an experience which is indistinguishable from the present, fully given experience typical of everyday perception. Thus, empathy shares the structure of memory and fantasy, whereas Lipps’ characterization of ‘inner imitation’ too easily leads to a conception of empathy having the same structure as flashback.
Lipps may also be understood as having confused the concepts of empathy and sympathy. Stein is careful to note that sympathy is a primordial experience whereas empathy is not, however this does not preclude the possibility of the two experiences coinciding. For example, there is a difference between my perceiving the grief in your facial expression and my feeling that grief. My empathetic perception of your grief may lead me to attribute a mental state to you, and it may serve as the basis for my theorizing about the larger context of your grief; but at no point is it necessary to this experience that I myself feel grief. If you are my friend or loved one, and I perceive that you are grieving, I myself, as someone who cares for your well-being, may also feel grief. But this primordial feeling of grief that I now have is better characterized as sympathy, or feeling with the other, and not empathy. Thus it is common for therapists to speak of the importance being empathetic while remaining unsympathetic. The job of the therapist is to understand the mental states of the other without being affected by them.
Lipps’ talk of ‘oneness’ and ‘convergence’ are especially problematic if carried out to its logical conclusion—telepathy. For if I truly was to ‘feel your pain’, the distinction between us as separate egos would be entirely erased. If I feel your pain as you feel it, then does it even make sense to call this empathy? The phenomenon we set out to explain, under the name ‘empathy’, was the phenomena whereby I am somehow aware of your mental states. If I am experiencing your mental states qua you and not qua I, this is not empathy.
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