Phenomenology as a Form of Empathy

Abstract

This paper proposes that adopting a “phenomenological stance” enables a distinctive kind of empathy, which is required in order to understand forms of experience that occur in psychiatric illness and elsewhere. For the most part, we interpret other people's experiences against the backdrop of a shared world. Hence our attempts to appreciate interpersonal differences do not call into question a deeper level of commonality. A phenomenological stance involves suspending our habitual acceptance of that world. It thus allows us to contemplate the possibility of structurally different ways of “finding oneself in the world”. Such a stance, I suggest, can be incorporated into an empathetic appreciation of others' experiences, amounting to what we might call “radical empathy”.

Notes

1. Other contexts where experiential changes of the kind that I address may occur include somatic illness, trauma, bereavement, childbirth, and mystical experience, amongst others. But I focus principally upon psychiatric illness here.

2. From a letter by a woman with melancholic depression, quoted by Whybrow (1997, p. 23).

3. The phenomenologist and psychiatrist J. H. van den Berg remarks—correctly, in my view—that “loneliness is the nucleus of psychiatry” (1972, p. 105).

4. Jaspers (1962, p. 98) famously declares that certain delusional experiences are simply “beyond our understanding”, meaning that we will never be able to empathise with them. In this paper, I do not discuss delusions. However, I would want to maintain that radical empathy has the potential to extend the reach of phenomenological understanding here too. See, for example, Sass (e.g., 1994) for an approach to delusions that complements my discussion.

5. I refer to this as “second-person” rather than “third-person” engagement because, as will become clear in Section VI, it is better characterised as an experience of a “you” than of a “she”, “he” or “it”. As I will further emphasise in the concluding section, it differs markedly from the kind of third-person phenomenological approach that Dennett (1991) calls “heterophenomenology”.

6. Non-conscious or “sub-personal” matching processes in the brain are, some claim, ubiquitous; they occur whenever we perceive another person's behaviour, and facilitate a quasi-perceptual appreciation of that behaviour as expressive of experience. The discovery of so-called “mirror neurons” is frequently cited as evidence. For further discussion of mirror neurons, see Ratcliffe (2007, Chapter 5).

7. I use the term “perception” in a fairly non-committal way here, to imply absence of conscious inference from observed behaviour to mental states. In so far as one experiences the behaviour, one experiences it as meaningful; there is no intervening step. Whether or not this is “perception” in the same sense as “sensory perception” depends, in part, on what we take perceptual content to consist of. Phenomenological claims to the effect that there is “direct perception” of experience in behaviour (e.g., Zahavi, 2010) would thus benefit from engagement with debates in the philosophy of mind concerning the nature of perception and the kinds of content that perceptual experience encompasses. See, for example, Hawley and MacPherson (2011) for some recent discussions of perceptual content.

8. We find much the same view in Scheler (1954, pp. 10–11).

9. Robert Gordon (e.g., 1995, p. 55) offers an account of what he calls “radical simulation”, which is fairly close to this. For Gordon, one not only imagines what one would do in someone else's situation; one also imagines what that person would do, something that requires an experienced “egocentric shift” to her perspective upon the world, rather than a process of inference. However, Gordon construes this egocentric shift as a relocation of the first-person perspective from oneself to the other person, whereas I focus upon something different: a second-person appreciation of their experience as theirs, which does not require resigning one's first-person perspective in the process. Even if the kinds of feat described by Gordon actually occur, they are not what I refer to as “empathy”.

10. In order to achieve an empathetic appreciation of someone from a very different background, we also need to build up a positive understanding of the norms and so forth that she does subscribe to. Gallagher (2012) argues that empathy is ordinarily facilitated by “shared narratives”, which play a similar role to what I have referred to as a context of norms, roles and artefact functions. When we try to empathise with someone who is not immersed in the same narrative context as ourselves, we need to get to know her narratives, which enable us to appreciate her history and her situation.

11. Of course, the theme of tool use and practical utility is also developed by Heidegger (1962, Division One, III).

12. Much the same themes are later developed by Merleau-Ponty, who similarly conceives of the world as the “horizon of all horizons”, and stresses that it is inextricable from the body, construed as an integrated system of habitual tendencies (1962, p. 330).

13. Radical empathy therefore serves to challenge Heidegger's claim in Being and Time that “only on the basis of Being-in-the-world does empathy become possible” (1962, p. 112). Radical empathy does not take for granted the structure that Heidegger calls “Being-in-the-world”; it involves grasping the possibility of variations in that structure.

14. Sheets-Johnstone (2007) suggests that schizophrenia can involve something like this.

15. As this might suggest, depression is often twinned with a form of anxiety. It is not simply that one anticipates however many specific events in the mode of “threat”. Instead, threat becomes the form of the future; it offers nothing else. For example, Minkowski (1970, p. 188) describes a predicament where the usual orientation towards the future is lost and “the whole of becoming seems to rush toward us, a hostile force which must bring suffering”. Such experiences cannot be understood unless we first acknowledge the aspect of experience that is affected. Hence a phenomenological stance is indispensable.

16. See Sass (1992; 1994; 2004; 2007) for a sophisticated phenomenological account of these changes.

17. A range of other experiential changes are equally amenable to interpretation in terms of an altered possibility space. For instance, there is depersonalisation, which occurs (perhaps in different forms) in depression and schizophrenia, but is also increasingly recognised as a disorder in its own right (Simeon and Abugel, 2006; Medford et al., 2005). It is characterised by anomalous bodily feelings and an altered or diminished experience of self. Closely associated is a sense of being disconnected from everything and of unreality. The perceived world “may appear somehow artificial”—as if “painted, not natural”, or “two-dimensional” or “as if everyone is acting out a role on stage, and I'm just a spectator” (Medford et al., 2005, p. 93). What is it for something to “look artificial”? One plausible interpretation, in my view, is that it is experienced as lacking the kinds of practical possibility ordinarily associated with an entity of that type. It thus looks somehow fake.

18. For example, C.S. Lewis, in an autobiographical account of profound grief following the death of his wife, writes of visiting places that they used to frequent: “it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. […] The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything” (1966, p. 12).

19. Regardless of whether or not one is able to characterise the relevant achievement, radical empathy can involve varying degrees of effort. One might set out to empathise with a person and draw upon various imaginative resources in order to do so. In contrast, it might simply “happen”, at least to some degree, without prior intention or effort.

20. An exchange between Sass (2003) and Read (2003) can be plausibly interpreted as a disagreement over whether or not radical empathy is possible. While Sass adopts a phenomenological approach that accepts the possibility of what I call “radical empathy”, Read's position, which is inspired by a reading of Wittgenstein, does not.

21. A loss of “openness” to others characterises many forms of psychiatric illness. For instance, people with depression may complain of being impervious to others, irrevocably isolated from them. A sense of inhabiting a shared world can be diminished or altered in other ways too. Jaspers (1962, pp. 63–64) draws attention to various “failures of empathy”, which involve changes in the structure of interpersonal experience and relations. One of the things that we can seek to recognise, through radical empathy, is alteration in the structure of empathy, impoverishment of interpersonal experience.

22. See Ratcliffe (2007, Chapters 1 and 8) for further discussion of this kind of view.

23. I would like to thank Béatrice Han-Pile, Louis Sass, Dan Zahavi, audiences in London and Copenhagen, and three anonymous referees for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. The paper was written as part of the project “Emotional experience in depression: a philosophical study”. I am very grateful to the AHRC and DFG for funding the project, and to my project colleagues in the UK and Germany for many helpful discussions.