This special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews grew out of a conference held in Leipzig, Germany, in October 2016, entitled ‘Fascination with the Unknown: The Other.’ At this conference, we as researchers in musicology, biology, psychology/neuroscience, and literary studies wanted to identify synergies between the disciplines’ approaches to ‘the other’ and to understanding and empathizing with one another. Not only did we want to generate a dialogue between psychology, neuroscience, cultural studies, and philosophy, we also set out to combine artistic and scientific, practical and theoretical approaches. In this sense, our conference, with around 80 participants from Europe, Israel, and North America, reflected the diversity of the German Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, which funded and helped organize the event. The Young Academy consists of 50 academics and artists (including ourselves) from all disciplines who address scientific questions from an interdisciplinary perspective.Footnote1
For this special issue, we asked those who gave presentations at our conference to weave the other threads of the conference into their contribution to give it an interdisciplinary scope. In his article ‘The Practical Other: Teleology and its Development,’ psychologist and neuroscientist Josef Perner and colleagues argue for teleology as a description of the way in which we ordinarily understand the other’s intentional actions. They elaborate their argument by comparing teleology to other dominant theoretical approaches – theory theory, simulation theory, and rationality theory – and drawing on data from developmental psychology.
Philipp Kanske’s contribution, ‘The Social Mind: Disentangling Affective and Cognitive Routes to Understanding Others,’ describes two neural routes to how we represent others’ inner states: an affective route that enables the direct sharing of others’ emotions (empathy) and a cognitive route that allows representing and reasoning about others’ states (mentalizing or Theory of Mind). This distinction is relevant for understanding impaired social interaction and informs research endeavours to foster interpersonal cooperation through training and therapy.
In ‘Can We Share an Us-Feeling with a Digital Machine? Emotional Sharing and the Recognition of One as AnOther,’ Eva-Maria Engelen considers the so-called Turing Test, in which an interrogator has to determine whether it is a machine or a human being in the next room that is providing the answers. Her thesis is that there are emotional preconditions for successful communication and even more so for recognizing or accepting the other as another being. These preconditions have to be fulfilled if the other is not just to be regarded as an alien but as another. One must suppose that the other has a similar awareness of you as a sensitive being as you have of him/her, and that these awarenesses coalesce into a sense of us as possible or actual ‘mutually feeling creatures.’
In her article ‘Self and Others,’ Kristina Musholt keeps the focus on the question of self-consciousness by examining the relation between self-awareness and awareness of others from a psychological and a philosophical point of view. Together with the development of self-knowledge and self- and other-understanding in early childhood, this provides the basis for Musholt’s observations on the role of the second-person perspective, which she links back to social interactions.
Emmanuel Levinas is considered to be one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers of the phenomenological tradition. Central to his work is the concept of responsibility, which he interprets as a preconscious commitment to respond to the other and as constituting subjectivity. In ‘Thinking the Other, Thinking Otherwise: Levinas’ Conception of Responsibility,’ Eva Buddeberg argues that this radical reinterpretation of the concept is the result of his critique of the occidental tradition of thought. She explains Levinas’ central philosophical propositions by placing them in their theoretical context. She then turns to possible points of connection with contemporary theories, particularly with a view to the foundation for moral action.
In ‘Postcolonial Theory and Globalised Empathy: From Development to Difference,’ Jens Elze shows how postcolonial theory, while centrally concerned with otherness and difference, has risked culturalizing poverty as difference and severing the spectacularity of suffering and otherness from the causalities of globalization and the temporalities of struggle. At best, Elze argues, suffering can be imagined as mitigated by humanitarianism and aid, while larger political projects are seen to unduly homogenize a culturally complex situation that cannot be easily understood in isotropy to Western modernization.
In the provocative concluding article, Fritz Breithaupt addresses ‘The Bad Things We Do Because of Empathy.’ While empathy may be the basis of moral behaviour, Breithaupt argues that the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes also enables various forms of cruelty, degradation, and sadism. Even well-intended pity or compassion may lead to the suppression of others or to self-loss. Breithaupt investigates to what degree empathy is part of a dynamic that leads to a ‘black and white painting’ of moral behaviour that radicalizes moral evaluations and undermines social cohesion.
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Notes
1 For information on the German Young Academy, see www.diejungeakademie.de/en/home/. For information on the conference, see http://theother2016.diejungeakademie.de.