Listening With Empathy

September 26, 2011

Empathy and Sympathy in the Context of Ethics

This work is now available thanks to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Empathy and Sympathy in Ethics.
URL: http://www.iep.utm.edu/emp-symp/
This work is in effect an unpublished chapter (now published)  from my book Empathy in the Context of Philosophy (Palgrave 2010) in the refereed on-line journal (iep).  Several typos and “wordos” in this essay from last April 2011 have now been corrected (with my thanks to all those who called them to my attention).

An excerpt from the article’s abstract: After discussing the early uses of “sympathy” in David Hume and Adam ASmith, this article is organized historically. Two traditions are distinguished. The first is the Anglo-American tradition, and it extends from Hume and Smith to the twenty-first century work of Michael Slote. Stephen Darwall’s contribution is applied in engaging Hume and Smith. Finally, the interrelation of empathy, sympathy and altruism is explored in the work of John Rawls and Thomas Nagel.  The second tradition is the Continental one. It extends from the spirituality of Johann Herder to the phenomenological movement of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, and Edith Stein. The intentional analysis of empathy is directly relevant to the constitution of the social community in a broad, normative relationship with the “Other.” Empathy (Einfühlung) is sui generis an intentional (mental) act that starts out in the superstructure of intersubjectivity in Husserl and steadily migrates towards the foundation of community under the influence of Heidegger, Scheler, and Stein. The choice of which philosophers and thinkers to include is also determined by the contingent facts that those chosen are most likely to be encountered in contemporary debates about empathy, sympathy, and ethics. Stein, Husserl, and Heidegger are primarily epistemological, ontological, and post-onto-theological, and are in the background of any contemporary, formal engagement with ethical theories, which is the focus of the present article. Scheler turns his phenomenological intuition of essence (wesenschau) towards the moral sentiments; and his analysis of the diversity of sympathetic forms is a lasting contribution to the topic. Contemporary Continental thinkers such as Larry Hatab and Frederick Olafson associate empathy with Heideggerian Mitsein and Mitdasein (being in the world with others) as the existential foundation of ethics). The roles of Friedrich Nietzsche, the Holocaust, and the “Other,” especially in Emmanuel Levinas, are distinguishing marks of the ethical approach on the Continent. The article ends with a discussion of how the discipline of psychoanalysis contributes to the role of empathy.  Please see the above-cited URL for the complete article.
Please give me the benefit of your feedback on this work. Let me hear from you.

May 4, 2010

Empathy in Context …

I am humbled by the comments of my colleagues, friends, and associates on Empathy in the Context of Philosophy.

“An insightful and provocative exploration of a topic that has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves and the conceptual clarity needed for a proper understanding. Agosta’s study is rich in historical context and thorough in covering the intersections of philosophy and psychology on the question of empathy. It is also accessible and stimulating for a host of applications to current concerns. Agosta rightly, in my view, finds in Heidegger a primary vehicle for advancing the discussion, yet he has his own voice and sense of how to think it through. An impressive achievement.”

Lawrence J. Hatab
Louis I. Jaffe Professor of Philosophy
Old Dominion University
*************************************************
That much used and routinely abused word, empathy, has enjoyed an uncomfortable popularity in fields as disparate as politics and psychoanalysis. At last a philosopher has arrived to bring clarity to the confusion. Lou Agosta has brought together the salient points about empathy as seen in neurology, psychoanalysis and literature into a happy home under Heidegger. Heidegger calls for ‘a special hermeneutic of empathy’ but does not give one. Agosta delivers it. The book is a must-read for anyone who chooses to use the word again.

Arnold Goldberg, M.D.

Author, Misunderstanding Freud

Professor of Psychiatry

Rush University Medical College

***************************************************************

Lou Agosta’s Empathy in the Context of Philosophy is a vivid, sweeping, thought-provoking and attitude changing treatment of one of the central, if often neglected, ideas of our culture, namely Empathy. It collects and scrutinizes ideas from a remarkable array of sources — from neuroscience to hermeneutics, from analytic philosophy to Freudian psychoanalysis, from Grimm Brothers stories to speech acts — all the while demonstrating Empathy’s seminal role in our understanding of mind, ethics, and ourselves. If morality stands apart from empathy, Dr. Agosta also shows how it is a pre-condition of it. He does this, and quite a bit more, through a lively tour of much of Twentieth Century thought, all the way correcting some of that thought’s myopia and self-righteousness, and allows us to regain a fine understanding, perhaps lost in the travails of modern life, of what it is that both makes us human and provides the possibility of joy with others.

Joel Levin

Author of Tort Wars and of Marrano Justice

Joel Levin, Esq.

Levin & Associates Co., L.P.A.

*************************************************************

Empathy in the Context of Philosophy is a masterpiece of philosophical-historical scholarship, presenting a rich and comprehensive account of the explicit and implicit conceptions of empathy that have appeared in the course of Western thinking from Hume through contemporary phenomenologists, both philosophical and psychoanalytic. Agosta’s Heideggerian interpretation of empathy is truly a tour de force. In Being and Time Heidegger criticized traditional Cartesian conceptions of empathy and called for a “special hermeneutic of empathy,” presumably grounded in his analysis of existence, but he failed to offer such a hermeneutic himself. It is this missing hermeneutic of empathy that Agosta supplies, masterfully applying Heidegger’s modes of Dasein’s disclosedness to elucidate the design structure of empathic engagement, which Agosta rightfully claims constitutes the foundation of authentic relationality. This book will be an invaluable resource not only for scholars in philosophy and the human sciences, but for practitioners of psychoanalytic and humanistic psychotherapy as well.

–Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D. [Psychology], Ph.D. [Philosophy]

Author, Trauma and Human Existence (Routledge, 2007)

http://robertdstolorow.googlepages.com for Empathy in the Context of Philosophy”]Cover Art for Empathy in the Context of Philosophy[/caption]

January 23, 2010

Empathy and Intersubjectivity – the Legacy

As noted on the first page of the attached article, “intersubjectivity” is understood in the article to mean our interrelated being together with one another in the interhuman world of regard for and sensitivity to the feelings of other individuals (persons). My contacts in the psychoanalytic community have told me that, since the mid-1980s when my article was first published, “intersujbectivity” has taken on a life of its own in the context of self psychology and relational theory, the latter reportedly alternatingly competing with and cooperating with self psychology is a (mostly) friedly rivalry. Without wishing to claim priority, I merely note that I was not familiar with this psychoanalytic literature on intersubjectivity at the time – though, of course, ‘object relations’ was a familiar literature – either because it [intersubjective approach] only existed in nascent form in scattered article or because I simply overlooked its significance. I would be please to be corrected on the dates and emergence of the literature (so please feel free to leave a comment below). However, with the publication of Robert Stolorow and G.E. Atwood’s (1994) Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life, among other works, the intersubjective approach comes into its own. At this point, my intention is to note the distinction in the development of the term “intersubjectivity” without pretending to give an account of the points of convergence or divergence. That remains a future task to be engaged. By the way, as far as I know, the attached PDF is not otherwise available in electronic form, and you will have to use the rotate feature on your PDF reader to rotate the pages 90 degrees or, failing that, print a hard copy to read. After having received numerous requests for it, I felt it better to make it available in some form, even if only as an imperfectly captured electronic image. See EmpathyIntersubjectivitybyAgosta

January 21, 2010

The Recovery of Empathy in a Folktale

A wonderful example of empathy and its absence is documented in one of the fairy tales (Märchen) of the collection edited by the Grimm Brothers. “The Story of the Youth Who Set Out to Learn Fear” is about a youth – the classic simpleton of the folktale – who tries to learn what shuddering is (i.e., fear in the sense of “goose flesh”). The hero-simpleton tries so hard to feel fear that he is effectively defended against all feelings. He has no feelings, not even fear. He is insensitive to others’ feelings in the everyday sense. Thus, he lacks empathy and the corresponding aspects of his being human (humanness). He is also ontologically cut off from the community of fellow travelers who share feelings empathically and on the basis of which life matters to them (and him). This deficiency occasions a misunderstanding in the narrative with the sacristan at the local church, and the youth throws the latter down the stairs, resulting in the youth’s disgrace and banishment. As in all classic folktales, the hero goes forth on a journey of exploration of both the world and of himself. He becomes a traveler on the road of life, which is the beginning of his ontological adventures to recover his feelings and become a complete human being.

For those interested, here is further detail on the story itself.  Märchen von Einem der auzog das Fürchten zu lernen,  translated as “The story of the youth who went forth to learn what fear was” in The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tale, (1814/17), ed. W. Grimm and J. Grimm, tr. M. Hunt and J. Stern. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972: 29f. “Grüseln” means literally “to shudder” or “get the creeps,” “goose bumps,” a classic physical expression of fear. In the Anthropology (1797: §16; 33; 154), Kant calls out “The thrill that comes over us at the mere idea of the sublime and the gooseflesh [grüseln] with which fairy tales put children to bed late at night are vital sensations; they permeate the body so far as there is life in it.” The point is, anyone lacking such an experience, as depicted in the Märchen, is hardly alive, is an emotional zombie.  Bruno Bettelheim does not call out the link with empathy in his treatment of this folktale in his The Uses of Enchantment ((1975) New York: Alfred Knopf: 280-82); though, as I recall, Professor Bettelheim did make the connection in classroom discussion that I attended at the University of Chicago in the Spring of 1975. On the relevance of folktales to philosophy see, L. Agosta. (1978). “Kant’s treasure hard-to-attain,” Kant-Studien, Vol. 69, No. 4, 1978: 422-443; and also L. Agosta. (1980). “The recovery of feelings in a folktale,” Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 19, No. 4, Winter 1980: 287-97. Meanwhile….

The point is that empathy is not an obscure capability that requires elaborate technology to make it visible, as when researchers deploy a functional magnetic resonance imaging apparatus (fMRI) to correlate mirror neurons (though we can learn from the latter too). Rather empathy hides in plain view. This folktale, this Märchen, is in fact a ghost story, to be told on dark, windy autumn nights. The empathy of the audience is aroused by constellating fearful images of the living dead. This makes for a series of humorous encounters with ghouls and haunted castles as the youth sets about trying to learn shuddering – compulsively saying “I wish I could shudder,” having no idea what it means. The hero performs many brave deeds instead – as he is literally not sensible enough to grasp the distinction “fear” and recognize when he should be afraid. The ghost story provides a framework for images of the disintegration and fragmentation of the self, including literal ghoulish images of bowling with detached heads and a corpse that rises from the dead because the youth gets into bed with it to warm it up – a scenario quite creepy – against which the youth is firmly defended by his complete lack of feeling. None of these images and events matter to him in the way they would matter to an affectively, emotionally whole person. He is surrounded by ghouls and living corpses but, ontologically speaking, he is the one who is an affective zombie, emotionally dead. Without empathy, the individual is emotionally cut-off, i.e., dead.

The subtext of the story is that the individual cannot recover his humanity on his own. He requires the participation of another – and a relationship with the other – to restore the being human (humanness) of his feelings – and to teach him how to shudder. Having raised the curse on the haunted castle and won the hand of the fair princess, the hero finally stops trying to shudder. Only then is he overcome by shuddering at the first opportune occasion. On the morning after his wedding night – his new wife teaches him shuddering – no, this is not going where you think – she teaches him shuddering in a pun that cleverly masks the physical and sexual innuendo – she throws bowl of cold water filled with gold fish on him with the flipping gold fish included – he wakes up exclaiming that “Ach, yah, now finally I know shuddering!” Now he is finally a whole, enriched, and complete human being. Here is the original essay – caution the word “emapthy” does not occur in this essay. However, I suggest that empathy is what immediately underlies the capacity for feeling that forms the pivotal challenge faced by the protagonist in the folktale. For more details see -

JRHRecoveryFeelingFolktaleAgosta


January 18, 2010

Intersecting Conversations in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

The therapeutic dimension of philosophy attempts to give the ultimate philosophic question – those of freedom, God, and immortality – a proper place in thinking. They lie at the limits of conceptual intelligibility. Borrowing a phrase from Karl Jaspers – who, according to Hannah Arendt, was the only true Kantian since Kant – these are boundary (limit) questions, in turn, pointing to limit conditions and experiences of human existence (Existenz). These questions inevitably transcend the limits of any language whose field of reference is sense perception. They are undecidable through the use of our finite sense. They show human beings at their most anxious and vulnerable moments, facing death, life, and the finitude of time in the world of man. In the archeological metaphor of the ancient city, Freud’s language intersects directly with that of Wittgenstein. Quoting the latter: ‘Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses [1945: p. 8; paragraph 18]. Of course, Freud’s use of the ancient analogy is different than Wittgenstein’s. Freud wants to suggest that in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish (1930, p. 69): ‘We ask ourselves how much a visitor, whom we will suppose to be equipped with the most complete historical and topographical knowledge, may still find left of these early stages in the Rome of today. Except for a few gaps, he will see the wall of Aurelian almost unchanged. In some places he will be able to find sections of the Servian wall where they have been excavated and brought to light. If he knows enough – more than present day archaeology does – he may perhaps be able to trace out in the plan of the city the whole course of that wall….’ [1930: p. 69]. Although primitive psychic structures and defenses have been replace by modern ones, still the foundations remain. Further details are attached.

Caution – the attached file is large (21MB)  – so if it does not load for you, please leave me a comment and i will break it up into parts, okay? For further details see – IJPPPsychoanalysisandPhilosophyAgosta and part two – IJPPPsychoanalysisandPhilosophyAgostaPart2

January 7, 2010

Engaging Heidegger’s Special Hermeneutic of Empathy for Self Psychology – the presentation

This is a presentation engaging Heidegger’s Special Hermeneutic of Empathy from the perspective of Heinz Kohut’s Self Pscyhology. A shortened version of this is scheduled to be delivered at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis on Wednesday Feb 24th at 1:30 PM (13th floor 122 S. Michigan Ave). Open to the public – though it is always advisable to call ahead to verify the logistics and if you want to get the service lerning unit – right now, the snow is coming down in big globs here in Chicago. This is a draft. If you have any questions/inquiries that you would like me to address in the talk, please post a comment and I will address the matter in the talk (or if the answer is too long or complex, I will communicate the details separately via an email (so provide one)). Makes sense? 

  • This work takes its start from

– One idea in Kohut: the loss of the selfobject’s empathy leaves one apathetic, lethargic, depressed, a sense of not being human (e.g., p. 200 (How Does Analysis Cure))  and from …

- One line in Heidegger’s Being and Time where he calls for “a special hermeneutic of empathy [Einfühlung]” but does not give one – this talk is NOT psycho-biography, but (if it were) one might say that empathy was what was missing from the biography (and the psyche)…Please see attached for the PDF of the ppt… LFCAgostaEmpathy20090212

January 6, 2010

Cover Art for Empathy in the Context of Philosophy, the book

Here is the cover art for Empathy in the Context of Philosopy. The picture is the top third of a weaving by Alex Zonis, my wife. The complete weaving, consisting of 250,000 teeny-tiny glass beads can be seen at www.mostlyglass.com under her name (Zonis). Check it out. My ‘friends’ are telling me ‘Well, at least there is some talent in the family!’ In order to get at the text on the back cover, you may need to see the separate post entitled Advanced Praise for Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. I am humbled by the comments of my colleagues and friends.

Cover Art by Alex Zonis for Empathy in the Context of Philosophy

Advance Praise for Empathy in the Context of Philosophy

I am humbled by the comments of my colleagues, friends, and associates.

“An insightful and provocative exploration of a topic that has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves and the conceptual clarity needed for a proper understanding. Agosta’s study is rich in historical context and thorough in covering the intersections of philosophy and psychology on the question of empathy. It is also accessible and stimulating for a host of applications to current concerns. Agosta rightly, in my view, finds in Heidegger a primary vehicle for advancing the discussion, yet he has his own voice and sense of how to think it through. An impressive achievement.”

Lawrence J. Hatab
Louis I. Jaffe Professor of Philosophy
Old Dominion University
*************************************************
That much used and routinely abused word, empathy, has enjoyed an uncomfortable popularity in fields as disparate as politics and psychoanalysis.  At last a philosopher has arrived to bring clarity to the confusion.  Lou Agosta has brought together the salient points about empathy as seen in neurology, psychoanalysis and literature into a happy home under Heidegger.  Heidegger calls for ‘a special hermeneutic of empathy’ but does not give one. Agosta delivers it. The book is a must-read for anyone who chooses to use the word again.

 Arnold Goldberg, M.D.

Author, Misunderstanding Freud

Professor of Psychiatry

Rush University Medical College

***************************************************************

Lou Agosta’s Empathy in the Context of Philosophy is a vivid, sweeping, thought-provoking and attitude changing treatment of one of the central, if often neglected, ideas of our culture, namely Empathy.  It collects and scrutinizes ideas from a remarkable array of sources — from neuroscience to hermeneutics, from analytic philosophy to Freudian psychoanalysis, from Grimm Brothers stories to speech acts — all the while demonstrating Empathy’s seminal role in our understanding of mind, ethics, and ourselves.  If morality stands apart from empathy, Dr. Agosta also shows how it is a pre-condition of it.  He does this, and quite a bit more, through a lively tour of much of Twentieth Century thought, all the way correcting some of that thought’s myopia and self-righteousness, and allows us to regain a fine understanding, perhaps lost in the travails of modern life, of what it is that both makes us human and provides the possibility of joy with others.

                                                                Joel Levin

                                                                Author of Tort Wars and of Marrano Justice

  Joel Levin, Esq.

Levin & Associates Co., L.P.A.

*************************************************************

Empathy in the Context of Philosophy is a masterpiece of philosophical-historical scholarship, presenting a rich and comprehensive account of the explicit and implicit conceptions of empathy that have appeared in the course of Western thinking from Hume through contemporary phenomenologists, both philosophical and psychoanalytic. Agosta’s Heideggerian interpretation of empathy is truly a tour de force. In Being and Time Heidegger criticized traditional Cartesian conceptions of empathy and called for a “special hermeneutic of empathy,” presumably grounded in his analysis of existence, but he failed to offer such a hermeneutic himself. It is this missing hermeneutic of empathy that Agosta supplies, masterfully applying Heidegger’s modes of Dasein’s disclosedness to elucidate the design structure of empathic engagement, which Agosta rightfully claims constitutes the foundation of authentic relationality. This book will be an invaluable resource not only for scholars in philosophy and the human sciences, but for practitioners of psychoanalytic and humanistic psychotherapy as well.

–Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D. [Psychology], Ph.D. [Philosophy]

   Author, Trauma and Human Existence (Routledge, 2007)  

http://robertdstolorow.googlepages.com

************************************************************

November 13, 2009

The Validation of Empathy in Psychoanalysis

The argument of this blog post is that empathy can adequately be validated by formulating one’s empathic receptivity in an interpretation, which, in turn, is subject to confirming or refuting experiences, responses, reactions, replies. The unpacking of the term “empathy” into receptive and interpretive phases of a hermeneutic circle contains the key to answering the question of how to validate empathy. Note that this approach to validation involves a flanking movement through which the possibilities of understanding and misunderstanding emerge simultaneously. 

The issue of the validation of empathy goes to the heart of what it means for an intellectual discipline to be a science. At the same time that Heinz Kohut was preparing his definitive paper (Kohut 1959) defining the scope and limits of psychoanalysis as a science based on empathy and introspection, Heinz Hartmann and Ernest Nagel (Hartmann 1959; Nagel 1959) were squaring off for a separate debate about the scientific status of psychoanalysis.[1] While some of the ideals of science as rigorous mathematical discipline to which all others should aspire have faded since then, the aura of respectability – and its contrary – lack of scientific respectability – continue to haunt psychoanalysis. In many ways, this debate was the original “trauma,” to which Kohut was a witness but in relation to which he was just a “voice crying in the wilderness.” His contribution was overlooked at least until his 1977 Restoration of the Self, on which a detailed drill down of the scientific position of psychoanalysis was performed in the context of empathy and introspection.[2] Consideration of the perspective of empathic data gathering would have made a difference in specific ways that can only and best be appreciated by laying out the terms of the debate as well as the response that occurred as Paul Ricoeur entered the fray in 1970.[3]  Please see the attachment for further discussion, argument, quotations, and details – CHEmpathyValidation

 


[1] H. Kohut. (1959). “Introspection, empathy, and psychoanalysis.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 7, No. 3: 459-83. Heinz Hartmann. (1959). “Psychoanalysis as a scientific theory.” Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and Philosophy: A Symposium, ed. S. Hook. New York: New York University Press, 1963: 3-37; E. Nagel. (1959). Methodological issues in psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and Philosophy: A Symposium, ed. S. Hook. New York: New York University Press, 1963: 38-56.

[2] See Chapter ___ on Empathy and Introspection. See also Heinz Kohut. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. When I say “the contribution was overlooked,” I mean “overlooked” as a contribution to the scientific foundation of psychoanalysis; obviously the appreciation of two new kinds of transference and related issues about the self were immediately appreciated if no less controversial for all that. Also Heinz Kohut. (1977). The Restoration of the Self. International Universities Press, 1977.

[3] P. Ricoeur. (1965). Freud and Philosophy, tr. D. Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

November 12, 2009

Empathy and Other Minds: Autism and Solipsism

The classical philosophical problem of other minds has been replaced with the cognitive tasks of mindreading, simulating worlds and minds, and, more particularly, accounting for false belief. More about these latter in the post on Empathy and Analogy devoted to these topics. Less attention has been paid to the contribution of empirical results and methods in addressing other minds, since it is supposed to be a conceptual issue. The philosopher forgets that empirical experience can point to conceptual distinctions that have been overlooked; that the conceptual joints at which experience is carved up by our ways of bringing into language (“languaging”) shared and vicarious experiences can sometimes highlight or hide particularly relevant conceptual distinctions; and even occasionally where yesterday’s science fiction becomes today’s empirical results, annoyingly impacting the boundary between the imaginable and the actual. For example, advances in biological cloning may present issues of personal identity and Philip K. Dick’s negative fantasy of the future posits that lack of empathy is one way of distinguishing artificial clones from real animate organisms.[1] With that in mind, to the best of my knowledge, little work has been done on empathizing with the skeptic who has doubts about other minds. Yes, that’s right, empathizing with the skeptic. That will be the goal and the argument of this essay.

The classical philosophical problem of other minds resonates between two absurdities. The first that the one individual is so much alike the other that the one is the other. This is the thesis of identity, the position that devolves into solipsism, the solus ipse, the alone self. No man is an island; but there is only one island, a mystical one. Individuals merge together in the mystical, identical proposition “I am you.” The second absurdity is that one individual is so different from the other that the two individuals have no access to interrelation with one another. Every man (person) is an island, one irretrievably disconnected and the abyssal depths between the two are an unbridgeable ontological distance too far. This is the thesis of difference: “I am I; and you are you” and never the twain shall meet. Ironically this position ends up being solipsistic, too, as no method of access to the other is adequate to the situation. If one frames the other individual as being so transparently revealed in its original kernel of self-existence that one experiences the world just the same way that the other experiences the world, then the distinction between oneself and the other collapses and the absurdity that the one is the other results. If the other is framed as being so inaccessible that one is separated from the other by the abyss of an absolute difference of unrelated distance, the one is condemned to an unintelligible isolation, which ultimately succeeds in annulling one’s own egoistic awareness – the one who says “I” – in so far as one cannot even be oneself unless another is with one. To this degree the problem of one’s relation to the other has the form of what Immanuel Kant called an antinomy – an unavoidable conflict of reason with itself that originates in the structure and application of reason to experience and our lack of experience. In this case, the antinomy is that of identity and difference. The persistence of the problem of other minds suggests that there is a dimension of dialectical illusion to it. The existence of so many solutions, ranging from introspective approaches to behaviorist ones, may be a symptom that the underlying problematic has ambiguities that remain unresolved.[2] Benefits are available in bringing the problem solving power of Kant’s transcendental dialectic to bear on one of the recalcitrant conundrums of modern philosophy. The truth of solipsism is that one remains different form the other even as a necessary condition of interacting with the other. One retains a kernel of distinctiveness – individual spontaneity and autonomy – that remains unshareable and conditions the possibility of meaningful exchange between individuals. On the other hand, the poverty of solipsism is to ignore the degree to which all individuals go through experiences that basically belong to the same common (“universal”) types in being born, struggling to grow up, working to survive and bring forth child in a family unit in a community, growing old, and dying. The enormous variety of ways in which these core experiences are storied and given meaning in the context of language communities, cultures, and social organizations is a significant area of study in its own right.

Of course, invoking Kant’s skeptical method – to be distinguished from skeptical results – points in the direction of Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy as a kind of therapy as well as Heidegger’s statement that the scandal is that such questions as the existence of the external world were raised in the first place.[3] In the spirit of such methods, three therapeutic approaches to engaging the skeptic’s doubts about other minds will be applied.

First, we will try empathizing with the skeptic in the interest of understanding what he really wants. Reiterated doubts will be treated as a symptom of an underlying conflict. If the desire turns out to be something that can be addressed, even if unreasonably, then progress will have been made in identifying the form of therapy required. If the desire turns out to be something that is impossible, then progress will also have been made in mapping the scope of the dis-ease – what makes us uneasy about other minds – from the inside. However, we will have established the hope in the skeptic that we can address his requirement. In other words, a transference – a reenactment in the psychoanalytic sense of the original breakdown – will have been established such that the skeptic’s desire can be represented as being fulfilled. The task will then be to interpret the meaning of the transference in such a way to transform the skeptic’s position from isolation to interrelation without thereby necessarily fulfilling an inherently unfulfillable desire.

The second response will be to tell a story that incorporates the unfulfilled desire and makes sense out of the skeptic’s experience as a fellow in a community of fellow travelers. This will address skeptical doubts that he is in pain and is alone and in pain.

Finally, if story telling does not create a state of calm quiescience, then the heroic alternative is to radicalize the problem. Notwithstanding the Kantian clue that other minds turns on ambiguities of reasoning about other minds, Edmund Husserl tried to solve the problem in the 5th book of his Cartesian Meditations. What has been little noted is that the step-by-step constitution of the other individual out of one’s sphere of ownness maps remarkably closely to the recovery of the mind of the autistic individual in milieu therapy. In short, the proposal is to join the skeptic in the extreme situation of his skeptical situation and to model a therapeutic process of recovery on the extreme situation of the autistic individual. The result is to join him in his skeptical hell (or at least so it seems to any normal philosopher if not the skeptic) and to persuade him to climb out together.

The logic is relatively simple though the details are not. The argument of this post is that autism as a so-called mental illness is an implementation of skepticism about other minds. Indeed autism radicalizes solipsism in a very specific way, so that the autistic individual becomes the ultimate solipsist to the point of a reduction to absurdity. But the absurdity is not the end, not the refutation. It is just the beginning. Autism stands skepticism on its head, and the solipsist is the ultimate autistic individual. We turn now to the details of the argument –>CHEmpathyAndOtherMinds20080901


[1] The movie Blade Runner is based on the novella “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (1968) in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick. New York: Ballantine Books, 1969.

[2] In the continental tradition, the classical statement of the problem is to be found in E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations(1931), tr. D. Cairns, the Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973; also E. Stein, On the Problem of Empathy (1917), tr. W. Stein, the Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970, (Zum Problem der Einfühlung, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Freiburg, 1917); M. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy (1922), tr. P. Heath, Hamden, CN: Archon Books, 1979, (Späte Schriften in Gesammelte Werke, ed. M. Scheler and M. Frings, Vol. 9, Bern: Franke Publishing, 1976); in the analytic tradition, the exchange between J. Wisdom (“Symposium: Other Minds” (1946) in Other Minds, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968: 206-229) and J.L. Austin (“Other Minds (1946)” in Classics in Analytic Philosophy, ed. R.R. Ammerman, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965: 353-78) defines the terms of the debate, but did not lay it to rest. For example, see D. Davidson, “The Irreducibility of the Concept of Self” (1998) in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001: 85-91;T. Nagel, The View From Nowhere (1986), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 and J. Searle Intentionality: an Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

[3] L. Wittgenstein, (1945), Philosophical Investigations, Tr. G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1953: ¶ (paragraph) 133; M. Heidegger, (1927), Being and Time, Tr. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962: 249, H205; (Section 43(a)).

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