Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl: A Collection of Essays 9783110325942, 9783110325188

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Christel Fricke | Dagfinn Føllesdal (Eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl A Collection of Essays

Philosophische Forschung Philosophical Research Herausgegeben von / Edited by Johannes Brandl • Andreas Kemmerling Wolfgang Künne • Mark Textor Band 8 / Volume 8

Christel Fricke | Dagfinn Føllesdal (Eds.)

Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl A Collection of Essays

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de

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2012 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm www.ontosverlag.com ISBN: 978-3-86838-145-0 2012 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work Printed on acid-free paper ISO-Norm 970-6 FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) This hardcover binding meets the International Library standard Printed in Germany by CPI buch bücher.de GmbH

Contents

Preface Introduction

1

A Phenomenological Approach to Intersubjectivity in the Sciences Frode Kjosavik

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Husserl’s Approaches to Volitional Consciousness Henning Peucker

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“We-Subjectivity”: Husserl on Community and Communal Constitution Ronald McIntyre

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17 45

61

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Husserl on Understanding Persons Christian Beyer

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Imagination and Appresentation, Sympathy and Empathy in Smith and Husserl John J. Drummond

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Mengzi (Mencius), Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl on Sympathy and Conscience Iso Kern

139

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Overcoming Disagreement – Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl on Strategies of Justifying Descriptive and Evaluative Judgments Christel Fricke

93

171

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Intersubjectivity and Moral Judgment in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments Vivienne Brown

243

Sympathy in Hume and Smith: A Contrast, Critique, and Reconstruction Samuel Fleischacker

273

Contributors

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Preface The idea of reading Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments side by side with Husserl’s phenomenology and his theory of intersubjectivity in particular was first explored in two workshops, hosted by the Oslo based Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature in 2007 and 2008. The editors of the present volume jointly hosted these workshops. We would like to thank the Center for the Study of Mind in Nature for providing the funding as well as for generous administrative support. Many thanks are due to the contributors to this volume who found the idea of a joint reading of Husserl and Smith inspiring. Dagfinn Føllesdal commented on previous versions of some of the essays in this volume and suggested improvements. Kjell Sindre Schmidt did most of the editorial work, and we would like to thank him most cordially for his immense patience, enthusiasm and attention to detail.

Introduction Christel Fricke and Dagfinn Føllesdal Adam Smith (1723 – 1790) and Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938) are not often read side by side. Smith was a central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, after 1776 increasingly known for his work in economics, who had a successful career both as an academic teacher and researcher and as a civil servant. Husserl was a Czech-German phenomenologist, a Jewish scholar who, towards the end of his academic career at the University of Freiburg, was exposed to the anti-Semitic repressions of the Nazi regime and its local representatives, one of them a former assistant of his, namely Martin Heidegger. Smith’s philosophical work is focused on topics belonging to the realm of practical philosophy. Apart from a few essays on rhetorics, aesthetics, and the history of science, he mainly wrote and lectured about moral theory, economics and the philosophy of law. Husserl’s focus is on topics of theoretical philosophy, he wrote about epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of mathematics with only a borderline interest in matters of normative ethics. And while he makes claims to a Humean and a Kantian heritage, he hardly ever mentions Smith in his writings. There is no evidence for Husserl having been very familiar with Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments or any other part of his work. In the lectures entitled Introduction into Ethics (from 1920 and 1924), Husserl mentions Adam Smith, together with Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, as a philosopher of the moral sense theory (see Hua XXXVII, p.148); but whereas he dedicates long passages to his reading of Shaftesbury, Hume, and then of Kant, Smith does not get any particular attention.1 And in the earlier Lectures on Ethics and Theory of Value (from 1908 – 1914), Husserl refers to Adam Smith as a philosopher who believed that, for justifying our emotionally grounded moral judgments, we have to refer to God as the source of our moral sense (see Hua

1

Husserl, Edmund (1950ff.) Husserliana – Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, The Hague: Dordrecht, (quoted as “Hua” with reference to volume and page number).

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Introduction

XXVIII, p. 390). These claims can only arise from a merely superficial reading of Smith, since they are both erroneous: Smith explicitly denies that people are provided with a moral sense and he does not attribute to God any essential role in his account of human morality.2 Thus, bringing together both Smith-scholars and Husserl-scholars and editing a volume with contributions from both camps is not an evident thing to do. Indeed, this volume owes its existence to the contingent encounter of two philosophers at the University of Oslo in Norway: Dagfinn Føllesdal and Christel Fricke. It was Dagfinn Føllesdal who, back in 2004, when talking to Christel Fricke about her interest in Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, claimed that similar thoughts could be found in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In 2007 and 2008, the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature provided the editors of this volume with the means for inviting both Smith-scholars and Husserl-scholars to workshops in Oslo where they presented papers on their respective fields of specialization. We found the idea confirmed that it would be fruitful to look at Smith’s moral theory against the background of Husserl’s phenomenology and to make comparisons under different aspects. The present volume, however, does not simply assemble the proceedings of these two workshops. Rather, the editors have invited some of the workshop participants and some other scholars to contribute essays on topics which are most fruitful for the purpose of reading Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl side by side. There are, however, certain obstacles to be overcome for pursuing this twofold reading, mainly for the scholars of Adam Smith: So far, the publication of Husserl’s collected works fills 40 large volumes, and the publication has still not been completed. Apart from the frightening quantity of Husserl’s writings, there is a further obstacle to overcome. Much of Husserl’s published work is not available in English; in particular, the three volumes on intersubjectivity and the lectures on ethics are

2

Adam Smith (1976) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press; Liberty Press imprint 1982, (quoted as “TMS” with reference to parts, chapters, paragraphs and page numbers). Here, see TMS III.4.5, p. 158. The latter part of this claim is controversial in the critical literature. For its defense see Christel Fricke (2011) “Adam Smith and “the most sacred rules of justice”” in The Adam Smith Review 6, pp. 46-74.

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available only in German. Whereas it was possible for some of the Husserl scholars to incorporate their reading of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in their essay, thus providing a comparative interpretation of Smith and Husserl from the perspective of Husserl scholarship (see essays by McIntyre, Beyer, Drummond and Kern), insufficient access to Husserl’s work for the Smith scholars has resulted in only one comparative essay on Smith and Husserl from the perspective of a Smith scholar (see essay by Fricke). The present volume is addressing an audience not only of Smith- and Husserl scholars, but also anybody interested in understanding the nature of human knowledge and morality. The tentative hypothesis of the editors underlying the design of this volume is that Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (first published in 1759) and Edmund Husserl in his extensive writings on phenomenology were not only dealing with related questions but were looking for answers to these questions along similar lines. In a sense, this similarity is not entirely surprising. Both held Hume in high regard and were inspired by him in their commitment to empirical plausibility and accuracy. But neither of them endorsed Hume’s normative skepticism and his refusal to believe that humans could ever make justified claims about how the world is in itself or about what proper morality consists in. Neither Smith nor Husserl was willing to give up the project of reaching beyond the sphere of appearances and make judgments which could make justified claims to objectivity. Both took up Humean topics of inquiry, including in particular the nature and function of human empathy and sympathy, the role of the imagination in processes of intersubjective understanding, and intersubjectivity and objectivity. Furthermore, both thought that evidence on which to rely for justifying claims of objective knowledge of the world or judgments about what was morally right or wrong could be found in human sentiments. Both Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl inquire into the possibility of objective judgments informed by sentiments (perceptual or emotional) and the constitution of the respective conceptual tools. Underlying this is the observation that we commonsensically claim objectivity for certain judgments, including descriptive judgments about the way the world factually is and evaluative judgments about what is right and wrong for people to do under certain circumstances. The evidence on which we can

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Introduction

rely for these judgments seems to be limited to the perceptual and emotional responses triggered by what affects our senses. How can judgments based on something as subjective as such responses rightly claim to be objective, to be true in virtue of the way the world actually is? This question challenges us to enter the sphere of intersubjectivity – one of the central topics of the essays in this volume. Smith and Husserl realize that, in our commonsensical way of judging, we are naïve realists. We make judgments about the objects which trigger our perceptual systems, trusting our perceptual information about them. Once we raise questions about the processing of this information and the reliability of its results, once we become aware of the possible discrepancies between appearance and reality, we have already left the sphere of naïve realism and entered the sphere of philosophical theory. We tend to spontaneously project what we perceive and feel on the things we believe to perceive and feel, ignoring – at least to some extent – the constraints of individual perspective or the possibility of our being misled by malfunctions of our perceptual systems or passions, by hallucination, or by contingent personal tastes and prejudices. As far as visual perception is concerned, we are in fact not very often misled by the distortions of perspective which make distant objects appear smaller in comparison to those nearby even if in reality they are much bigger than the latter – we have learned to adjust for that. But in the realm of evaluative judgment based on emotions, these spontaneous projections often mislead us. One question then is whether we can avoid being misled in the evaluative realm by relying on strategies similar to those on which we rely in the epistemic realm. For a scholar of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology who reads Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments for the first time, the analogy of their philosophical projects may not be evident: Not only is Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, exclusively concerned with the challenge of the objectivity or “propriety” claimed by our evaluative ethical or moral judgments. He explicitly denies that there is a similar problem of distinguishing between appearance and reality concerning either the judgments of our common and scientific knowledge or those of our aesthetic

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experiences. 3 Husserl is mainly concerned with the objectivity of the descriptive judgments of our common and scientific knowledge.4 Evaluative judgments, both ethical and aesthetic, were not often the focus of his interest. And where he deals with evaluative judgments explicitly he claims (or at least implies) that his phenomenological method allows him to meet the challenges of objectivity raised by the claims of our descriptive, aesthetic and evaluative, moral judgments in the same way. But let us not be misled by first appearances. The idea shared by the editors and contributors to the present volume is that it can be philosophically fruitful to read Smith’s moral theory and Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology side by side: Husserl provides a conceptual means for making Smith’s methodology more explicit than Smith did himself. A phenomenological reconstruction of Smith’s analysis of the intersubjective process by which people reach an agreement on impartial and thereby “proper” concepts of right and wrong feelings and actions will provide an opportunity to explore whether and to what extent Husserl was right with his analogy assumption: According to this assumption, his phenomenological method allows the philosopher to meet the challenges posed by the claims to objectivity of our moral judgments about right and wrong along the same lines as the challenges posed by the objectivity claims of our judgments of common and scientific knowledge. Most of the essays collected in this volume focus either on Husserl’s or on Smith’s work. Some of them bring in Hume’s views and compare them to those of Husserl or Smith (see the essays by Beyer, Drummond, Kern, Brown and Fleischacker). After all, both these authors were responding to Hume. These essays, read as explorations of a joint project, allow the reader to get an idea of the similarities and differences between 3

See TMS I.i.4.1-10, pp. 19-23. This knowledge includes both knowledge based on research in the natural sciences and knowledge acquired within the humanities. The latter typically is about human beings and their works: “What distinguishes the naturalistic from the anthropological (the humanistic) attitude? The natural scientist studies nature as it is in itself, he does not study humans, neither humans as such nor humans as subjects of natural scientific knowledge.” (HUA XV, p. 482, translation Christel Fricke) [“Was unterscheidet nun die naturalistische Einstellung von der anthropologischen (geisteswissenschaftlichen)? Der Naturwissenschaftler hat die Natur, und rein sie selbst, zum Thema und nicht den Menschen, weder den Menschen überhaupt, noch den Natur erkennenden Menschen.”] 4

10

Introduction

Husserl’s phenomenology and Smith’s empirically-informed moral theory. The reader will also realize that the phenomenological accounts of empathy and sympathy as well as the role of the imagination in intersubjective communication remain controversial. But seeing the similarities and differences between Husserl’s and Smith’s accounts of objective judgment against a common, namely Humean background has turned out to be particularly helpful. There are three philosophical questions which Husserl and Smith raised in their different ways and which are a constant concern in the essays collected in this volume: How do we construct a secure path from perception to objective knowledge? How can we build a secure path from feelings and emotions to proper moral judgments? Can these paths be seen as parallel, so that the pathfinders, while focusing on one of these paths, can keep in touch and learn from each other? Smith and Husserl share the conviction, high up on the philosophical agenda today, that answers to these questions should be empirically informed. Frode Kjosavik explores Husserl’s Phenomenological Approach to Intersubjectivity in the Sciences, focussing on a particular aspect of Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity, namely the notion of a “particular world” [“Sonderwelt”] and its role in Husserl’s conception of scientific theories. These particular worlds inform the intersubjectively shared view of the world. All particular worlds are part of the all encompassing lifeworld. But what distinguishes a particular world is that its members share a specialized practice which cannot be found throughout the whole of the life-world community. The problem arising from Husserl’s distinction between the life-world and any particular scientific world is how there can be a flow of insights from a particular scientific world to the life-world. Kjosavik names this “the in-flow problem”. What is specific about a particular world of science is that the scientific theory it develops and holds to be true may be incompatible with the view of the world previously held in the life-world. Husserl’s account of objectivity as constituted by intersubjectively shared views of the world represents a particular challenge for the encounter of scientific theories with the commonsensical view of the world. Kjosavik proposes a solution to the in-flow problem which is based on a suggestion originally made by Dagfinn Føllesdal. According to this suggestion, any particular world-horizon belonging to a

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particular world has to be brought into coherence with the general world horizon of the life-world, and the scientific world-horizons are no exception. Such a coherence can only be brought about at the price of a revision of certain beliefs. Henning Peucker, in his essay on Husserl’s Approaches to Volitional Consciouness, looks at Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of acts of willing. He distinguishes between two models of the will that can be found in Husserl’s writings. According to the first, the “foundational” account, any act of willing depends on two more fundamental, though equally conscious acts, one of presenting an intentional object and the other of evaluating it. According to the second, the “genetic” account, acts of volition are motivated by instincts and desires that originate in our consciousness. Peucker’s claim is that Husserl never gave preference to the genetic account of volition exclusively. Rather, Husserl held on to both accounts. In the last part of his essay, Peucker explores how the two models for understanding acts of willing can be correlated phenomenologically. Under the title of “We-Subjectivity”: Husserl on Community and Communal Constitution, Ronald McIntyre looks at Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity. Husserl’s claim is that intersubjectivity plays a crucial role in our experience of the world as objectively there for everyone. The subjects of this experience are members of social communities who conceive of themselves as such. Furthermore, McIntyre argues that, for Husserl, the subjectivity that constitutes the world is a “we-subjectivity”. McIntyre’s claim is that, according to a thought-experiment Husserl explores in the Cartesian Meditations, even the self-conception of a person as not being a merely solipsistic subject but rather a social being depends on this person’s awareness of and communication with others, that is on intersubjectivity. He then explores the additional experiential resources that come into play through the intersubjective dimension even of our selfconsciousness. In particular, he looks at empathic apperception and its role in the constitution of personhood. The social world includes different kinds of groups, the most encompassing being the whole of mankind. But there are also smaller communities constituted by we-subjects. Their members typically share a surrounding world and they have certain aims and interests in common; they are interrelated through empathy, trust each other, and coordinate their activities.

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Introduction

Christian Beyer, in his essay entitled Husserl on Understanding Persons, focuses on Husserl’s Ideas II and the notion of the “life-world”, its role in Husserl’s account of what it means to understand a person, and the role of empathy in processes of intersubjective understanding. Against this background, he briefly looks at Adam Smith’s notion of sympathy and compares it to Husserl’s notion of empathy. Beyer stresses the importance of personal motivation in Husserl’s account of the life-world: Whatever is the object of our attention, our interest is not only cognitive but also practical. The motivational, practical aspect of personhood also plays a key role in Husserl’s account of empathy-driven intersubjective communication, aiming at understanding both ourselves and others as persons. In his comparison between Husserl’s phenomenological exploration of empathy and Smith’s notion of sympathy, Beyer points out analogies and differences. Furthermore, he distinguishes between two different senses in which Husserl uses the notion of empathy and gives an account of Husserl’s notion of “rational values” and their role in accommodating personal habits and the freedom of action. John Drummond, in Imagination and Appresentation, Sympathy and Empathy in Smith and Husserl, places Husserl’s phenomenological account of objective knowledge in relation to both the empirical account of Hume and the transcendental account of Kant. His claim is that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is characterized by “a descriptive methodology that seeks to identify the essential structures – both subjective and objective – in the disclosure of objects in their significance for experiencing subjects”. What, according to Drummond, Husserl takes over from Hume is the insight into the role the imagination plays in processes of intersubjective communication and of constituting objects of experience as persisting in time and looking differently from different points of view. He then compares Hume’s, Smith’s, and Husserl’s account of the imagination in both the cognitive and the moral domains, looking at whether the role attributed to the imagination is merely reproductive or also creative and whether it is limited to the solipsistic subject or enters the sphere of intersubjectivity. As far as Husserl’s phenomenology is concerned, Drummond’s discussions of intersubjectivity focus on the establishment of cognitive and linguistic normality. Drummond points out various similarities and differences between the three authors: Hume and Smith understand

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objectivity as some kind of imaginative projection on to the world whereas, for Husserl, objectivity is disclosed through processes of intersubjective communication. Hume and Smith differ in their respective accounts of emotional sympathy and the role the imagination plays in bringing it forth. On this topic, Husserl is closer to Smith than to Hume. Finally, Drummond mentions certain differences between Smith’s account of the impartial spectator and Husserl’s account of objectivity in the realm of cognition. His claim is that the deficiencies in Smith’s account of intersubjectivity in comparison to Husserl’s are a consequence of Smith’s empiristic, mainly Humean, heritage. In the next essay, entitled Mengzi (Mencius), Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl on Sympathy and Conscience, Iso Kern begins his inquiry into sympathy and conscience from the perspective of the Chinese philosopher Mengzi (4th – 3rd century B.C.). In the context of the present volume this may come as a surprise. But Kern informs us that Mengzi had developed a notion of spontaneous sympathy long before Edmund Husserl and even David Hume and Adam Smith thought about the phenomenon. Kern explores whether Mengzi’s notion of “sympathy”, Husserl’s notion of “empathy” [“Einfühlung”] and Smith’s notion of “sympathy” may all be necessary ingredients for understanding the nature and origin of the “virtue of benevolence or humanheartedness” as it is manifest in our concern for others and their health and happiness. As Kern informs us, Mengzi refers to phenomena like childrens’ spontaneous love for their parents and people’s spontaneously being affected by the sight of the suffering of another creature (which could also be an animal). Kern finds further sources of humanheartedness in the spontaneous feelings of pity, compassion and gratitude with which we respond to the sight of others’ situations and actions. These feelings “intentionally refer to situations as they are for other people or for other living beings”. Furthermore, Kern attributes to these feelings a motivational function. He traces accounts of such feelings in the writings of David Hume and Adam Smith and in their use of the notion of sympathy in particular. But he argues that our concern for other people is not explicable in terms of our sharing their actual feelings. He then looks at Hume’s and Smith’s notions of sympathy in more detail. In particular, he inquires into the function Adam Smith attributes to sympathy in his theory of moral judgment, including moral self-judgment and

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Introduction

the moral judgment about other people’s attitudes and actions. In her own contribution to this volume, entitled Overcoming Disagreement – Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl on Strategies of Justifying Descriptive and Evaluative Judgments, Christel Fricke looks at strategies for overcoming disagreements and justifying judgments as they have been developed by Edmund Husserl (in his Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity – mainly for descriptive judgments) and Adam Smith (in his Theory of Moral Sentiments – mainly for moral judgments) respectively. She first gives an account of Husserl’s reconstruction of the way we justify judgments of descriptive knowledge. The main function of this account is to provide a background for her comparison between Husserl and Smith. Her focus is on Husserl’s theories of “empathy”, “sympathy”, and “normality”. She then provides an overview of the main characteristic features of Adam Smith’s reconstruction of the way we justify moral judgments, that is judgments about the propriety or impropriety of emotional and behavioral responses of people to certain circumstances. She argues that these ways or strategies of justification are analogous in important respects: Both Husserl and Smith take their starting point from subjective sentiments (from perceptual and emotional data respectively) and reconstruct the process in which people can use these sentiments, or at least some of them, as an evidential basis for making justified claims in descriptive and moral judgments. Both authors understand this process as intrinsically intersubjective, aiming at overcoming the partiality of subjective sentiments. Both attribute an important role to an imaginative change of standpoint that allows a person to try and understand how things look from another’s point of view. Despite these analogies, she confirms Adam Smith’s claim according to which, in order to overcome moral disagreement and to justify moral judgments, more challenges have to be met than to justify descriptive judgments. This difference is ultimately explicable in metaphysical terms: Whereas in the cognitive realm there are objects and their properties to be discovered, in the moral realm what is at stake are human emotional attitudes and the resulting actions which, while being judged morally, undergo a constant process of normative improvement. In her Intersubjectivity and Moral Judgment in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Vivienne Brown raises the question whether a moral theory needs to be informed by a theory of mind. Her claim is that Adam

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Smith’s reliance on intersubjective understanding for moral judgment suggests that this question should be answered in the affir-mative for The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The problem that she notes, however, is that it is not clear how such intersubjective understanding re-lates to Smith’s account of moral judgment and his notion of “sympathy”. Brown’s starting point is what she terms Smith’s “tripartite model of moral judgment”, according to which a moral judgment involves a spectator in making a comparison between his own sympathetic emotions in looking upon another’s case and (what the spectator takes to be) the emotions of that other. This model requires that the spectator’s sympathetic emotions are distinct from what he takes to be the emotions of the other. Brown surveys how Smith scholars have struggled to understand this distinction in the TMS, either in terms of the psychological processes involved or in terms of an appropriate conceptual distinction between the two kinds of emotion. Many scholars take the view that Smith fails to explain psycho-logically how spectators can access what others feel or that he even denies that such is possible; and they do not see that Smith has any coherent conceptual distinction between the two different kinds of emotion. Brown’s claim is that TMS is stronger on both counts than scholars have realised. She argues that in the opening chapter Smith presents a psycho-logical account of “empathy” that is distinct from “sympathy”, one that has much in common with current simulationist theories of mind and so perhaps receives some support from recent research in empirical psycho-logy and neuroscience. She also argues that there is a robust conceptual distinction in the TMS between a spectator’s imagining what X feels in X’s situation (empathy) and a spectator’s imagining what he would feel if he were X in X’s situation (sympathy), a distinction that clarifies the different imaginative processes involved and answers to the requirements of Smith’s account of moral judgment and the impartial spectator. Brown concludes that the intersubjectivity of Smith’s moral theory is both conceptually viable and grounded in a theory of mind that is currently relevant for scientific research. In the last essay of this volume, Samuel Fleischacker provides a comparison between Hume’s and Smith’s accounts of “sympathy”. His philologically careful comparison of the two accounts, under the title Sympathy in Hume and Smith: A Contrast, Critique, and Reconstruction, is

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Introduction

informed both by the historical audience Hume and Smith were addressing and by the contemporary debates about theory of mind. According to Fleischacker, it is important to keep in mind that both Hume and Smith were less concerned by questions of mind and intersubjectivity than by their wish to respond to Hobbes’ and Mandeville’s exclusively egocentric accounts of human motivation. Still, Hume’s and Smith’s accounts of sympathy differ, and Fleischacker claims that Smith, in introducing his account in the first chapters of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, was implicitly and critically responding to the account Hume had proposed. Whereas Hume has a mainly biological, a contagion account of sympathy, Smith suggests a more intellectual, a socialized account which Fleischacker suggests to describe as a “projective account”. Sympathy, according to Smith, depends on our actively imagining ourselves in the position of others. Furthermore, people naturally have, according to Smith, not only a faculty of sympathy, they also have a desire for sympathy. And this desire requires them in some cases to make a special effort to sympathize with another’s feelings. But Fleischacker sees a problem in both Hume’s and Smith’s account of sympathy: Both rely on the unquestioned assumption that all feelings are essentially private, accessible only to the people whose feelings they are. Fleischacker considers this assumption as untenable.

Oslo, January 2012

1 A Phenomenological Approach to Intersubjectivity in the Sciences Frode Kjosavik 1. Introduction – The “In-Flow Problem” The notion of a “Sonderwelt” or particular world is to be found in a short supplementary text to Krisis, in a “Forschungsmanuskript” contained in Beilage XVII of Hua VI (pp. 459-462).1 It is not widely discussed among Husserl interpreters, though, perhaps because it is so rudimentary.2 The relation between the life-world and specialized activities is also considered to be most intriguing in the case of the sciences, and these may seem to be sufficiently marked off without bringing in the notion of a “Sonderwelt”. Still, when the conception of a particular world is worked out in more detail, I think it has the potential to enrich Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity both within and outside the sciences. It is characteristic of a particular world that its specialized practices are not shared throughout the life-world community.3 But even particular 1

This text constitutes Appendix VII in David Carr’s translation (Husserl 1970). Note that all references to the Krisis-manuscripts are to Carr’s translation unless stated otherwise. 2 Werner Marx has taken it most seriously as a general notion, and not simply in its limited application to the world of science. He has devoted an entire chapter to it in Marx (1987), entitled “Lebenswelt und Sonderwelten”, pp. 124ff. It is also implicit in his lengthy discussion of the unity of the world vs. a plurality of worlds in Marx (1986). Other distinguished Husserl interpreters who put some emphasis on the general idea of a particular world include David Carr and Donn Welton. Cf. Carr (1974), pp. 164-167 and Welton (2000), pp. 342ff. 3 Arguably, no practice is universally shared within the life-world of everyday activities, even within a typology of practices that permits the sharing of practices at a high level of generality, say, the practice of eating or of dressing, as opposed to that of eating or dressing in a specific way. There is still a difference, though, between the lack of participation in specialized practices because they are specialized and the lack of participation in non-specialized practices for other reasons, including medical ones.

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A Phenomenological Approach to Intersubjectivity in the Sciences

worlds belong to the life-world in so far as the latter is “the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon” (Krisis, p. 142). There is an apparent ambiguity, then, with regard to whether or not a particular world is comprised by the life-world. In the case of the sciences, output is supposed to flow from the world of science and into the life-world (Cf. Krisis, p. 113), where it is sedimented. However, Husserl also states in the Appendix that the world of science is part of the life-world: …every practical world, every science, presupposes the life-world; as purposeful structures they are contrasted with the life-world, which was always and continues to be “of its own accord.” Yet, on the other hand, everything developing and developed by mankind (individually and in community) is itself a piece of the life-world: thus the contrast is suspended. (Krisis, pp. 382f.)

But if a particular world is part of the life-world, how can there be a flow from the former into the latter? This is what I shall call the “in-flow problem,” and I think a distinction between intersubjective constitution within specialized communities and within the life-world can help us in solving it. A particular world is directed towards a determinate human end that is shared within that world, and it is therefore also called a “Zweckwelt” or “Werkwelt,” i.e., a purposeful world and a work-world. The life-world itself, on the other hand, has no determinate end towards which it is directed but rather contains all ends. This is one sense, then, in which even the world of science is contained within the life-world: Do not all goals, whether they are “practical” in some other, extrascientific sense or are practical under the title of “theory,” belong eo ipso to the unity of the life-world, if only we take the latter in its complete and full concreteness? …The concrete life-world, then, is the grounding soil [der gründende Boden] of the “scientifically true” world and at the same time encompasses it in its own universal concreteness. (Krisis, p. 131)

Within the realm of community practices, be they scientific or not, the distinction between focal and marginal intentionality that Husserl applies to acts of perception translates into a distinction between activities with a specific purpose and the background or context that enables these ac-

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tivities.4 If the practical activities belong to a particular world, the background or context of these ultimately extends into the entire life-world. Husserl comes pretty close to asserting this in a section from the Nachlass on “The life-world as personal praxis-world and world of finite cognitive interests limited by practical goals”:5 This specific practical horizon again itself has a horizon, in so far as it has the wide world as its background, which “practically,” for the praxis at work, is not actualized… If we call what is practical in a particular sense “what is thematized at present,” we have a thematic horizon and an extra-thematic horizon. (Hua XXXIX, p. 369, my translation) Dieses spezifisch praktischen Horizont hat dann selbst wieder seinen Horizont, insofern als er den Hintergrund der weiten Welt hat, die “praktisch,” für die in Werk seiende Praxis, nicht in Frage kommt… Nennen wir das im besonderen Sinne Praktische ”das jeweils Thematische,” so haben wir also einen thematischen Horizont und einen auerthematischen Horizont.

In the Appendix, a particular world is said to have a “self-enclosed “World”-horizon” (“ein in sich geschlossener “Welt”-Horizont”) (Krisis, p. 379). While it would be absurd to conceive of, say, the world of mathematical physics as closed to non-physicists in any sense whatsoever, it still makes sense to speak of a closure that is determined by the professional attitude of the physicist – a closure in the horizon of interest that derives from the aim of, say, explaining material phenomena by way of universal laws, and the relevance structure that goes together with that aim. This closure contrasts with the closure of another particular world, which has its own specific aim and relevance structure. Indeed, it may even be impossible to enter the latter for the specialist who is at home in the present particular world – partly because of the high degree of “technization” there. Forgetfulness with regard to the roots in the life-world, or a certain “trained incapacity” on the part of the expert, to borrow a phrase from Thorstein Veblen, makes it difficult to step into other particular worlds through the general life-world.

4

On this distinction, see Ideen I (Hua III), § 35. My translation. In German it reads as follows: “Die Lebenswelt als personale Welt der Praxis und Welt der von praktischen Zielen begrenzten endlichen Erkenntnisinteressen”. 5

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The closure thereby also contrasts with the openness of the lifeworld itself, which is not determined by technization or specialized training but is rather constituted by horizon-intentionality (Krisis, p. 237), i.e., unthematized anticipations of the courses of our everyday lives. The anticipations involved in such intentionality must include practical or embodied ones, and not merely those that are cognitive. Thus, in Heidegger the horizon-intentionality is taken to spring out of the most general background of shared practices, which cannot be thematized in the same way as more specific practices.6 Husserl does not have much to say on the practical nature of the relation between a closed and narrow horizon of a specific interest and the open and wide horizon of life-world interests, though. But in § 35 of Krisis, he maintains that any vocation or life-interest amounts to an epoché towards other lifeinterests, i.e., these have to be bracketed. II. From World-Horizons of Individuals to Social Praxis-Worlds The way the life-world horizon extends from that of a particular world and into an all-inclusive one would seem to follow from the mere givenness of an object of perception within such a particular world – even if this object is a piece of specialized equipment adapted to the latter. After all, there is no cut-off point at which our unthematized anticipations could not in principle leave a mark on how the object is given to us, and the field of the object itself with its inner and outer horizons cannot be isolated from the rest of the life-world.7 Still, according to Husserl, there is co-constitution in a stronger sense at play, in that the very objectivity of the object is constituted intersubjectively, i.e., it consists in its being given “for everyone.” Any object that belongs to the life-world is co-constituted by its co-subjects: “Thus in general the world exists not only for isolated men but for the community of men; and this is due to the fact that even what is straightforwardly perceptual is communalized” (Krisis, p. 163). To account for the communalization or “social schematization” of perceptual experience, we need not bring in the overall struc6

Cf. Dreyfus (1991), p. 6. See also Føllesdal (1979) for a comparison of Husserl with Heidegger. 7 On outer and inner horizon, see EU, § 8, pp. 28f.

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ture of the life-world, though. It suffices that there is an intersubjective constitution of the “transcendence” of the object, i.e., of its manysidedness. If I perceive an object from one perspective, I can imagine its other sides as well, and through empathy I can even take the perspective of others who are facing the same object from one of these sides. Furthermore, it also belongs to the objectivity of the object that it fits into a style of normality by way of intersubjective constitution.8 There is an equivocation with regard to horizons of perception in Husserl, though, in that these may either be conceived of as subjective, in the sense that they are fields of anticipations, or objective, i.e., correlates of these. By way of communalization of perception, the equivocation carries over to the horizon of the life-world and those of particular worlds, in that world-horizons may either be intersubjective fields of anticipations – or prereflective acceptances – or objects correlated to these. Arguably, the terms “life-world” and “particular world” are used in Husserl in both senses as well. Indeed, “life-world” in the most fundamental sense may be taken to be an all-inclusive and completely non-specific perspective that determines “smaller perspectives,” and only secondarily does it apply to what is perspectivally given through it. Similarly, a “particular world” is fundamentally a specific perspective that specifies a further subclass of even more specific perspectives. Neither the “life-world” nor a “particular world” is just a class of perspectives, though, since that would rob them of their intrinsic unity. Rather, there are wider perspectives that determine narrower perspectives, including very specific situational perspectives. What is given perspectivally through world-horizons are what I shall call praxis-worlds. From the distinction between particular world and life-world, it follows that the praxis-world intended as shared may be either that of a specialized community in the case of a particular world, or it may be the nonspecialized life-world background.9 8

On the relation between subjectivity and intersubjectivity in Husserl, see Zahavi (1996). 9 It is at least shared as a “homeworld”. Cf. Hua XV, pp. 214-218, on the very distinction between “homeworld” and “alienworld” (“Heimwelt” and “fremde Welt”). Even culture-relative alienworlds do belong to the universal life-world as coconstituted with a culture-relative homeworld, though, and thereby as instantiating

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Each one of us has his or her own world-horizon, then, through which a praxis-world is constituted as shared, and Husserl emphasizes this in a passage in the Nachlass that deals with the particular situatedness of individuals: Each has in one’s present situation “the world” in one’s horizon, which for each (…) has the meaning: This is the world for everyone. However, in its specific content the world is in no way the same for everyone, though the type “surrounding life-world” is shared. (Hua XXXIX, p. 202, my translation) Jeder hat in seiner jeweiligen Situation horizonthaft “die Welt,” die für ihn (…) den Sinn hat: das sei die Welt für alle. Doch in dem bestimmten Inhalt ist sie keineswegs für alle dieselbe, doch der Typus “Lebensumwelt” is gemeinsam.

Of course, the field of co-constituents of the life-world extends vastly beyond those that I have access to through empathy, and contains also those of which I have only an indirect experience. On the basis of differences in modes of givenness with regard to other persons, Alfred Schütz introduced the distinction between consociates on the one hand and contemporaries, predecessors and successors on the other.10 Such a distinction does seem to be called for with regard to our experience of others, but whether we are consociates or not we do live in the same life-world in so far as we take part in what we have constituted together. III. Constitution of Specialized Communities – The Vocational Epoché Husserl does not elaborate on boundaries between particular worlds, but he does say that other vocations than one’s own are intended “in the horizon” (Cf. Hua XXXIX, p. 393). If we take the horizon to be the closed horizon of a particular world, it seems that through its very closure – against the open life-world horizon – other particular worlds are bound to be co-intended. I cannot even state that I am now in this particular world without implying that there are other particular worlds a common life-world structure. On the other hand, it would seem that particular worlds, like that of science, may be shared across homeworlds of particular communities. 10 Schütz (1970), pp. 163ff.

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which I am not in, or which are at least not thematic to me now. External relations are thereby co-established together with an internal web of references, and to Werner Marx the openness of the life-world simply consists in the way it enables cross-references between particular worlds.11 I think there is more to the closure-openness distinction than this, though, since I take the life-world to consist of a general field of more or less specialized practices together with specialized scientific practices – it is not simply identical with a plurality of particular worlds. Rather, the way each particular world is reflectively or thematically closed sets it apart from a broader background of pre-reflective or unthematized acceptances. I take it, then, that just as the horizon of an object given in perception contains anticipations of the further course of everyday experience, the horizon of a particular world contains anticipations of the further course of experience in terms of problem solving that is closed under a common vocational interest. In the Appendix on particular worlds, that of scientists is just one instance of particular worlds that are determined by vocational ends: “…the scientists, like all who live communalized under a vocational end (“life-purpose”), have eyes for nothing but their ends and horizons of work” (ibid. p. 383). Still, even if Husserl here addresses practical worlds that are determined by vocational ends,12 the notion of a particular world in Husserl can perhaps be equated with any social or cultural context that is organized around a specific purpose. After all, Husserl does suggest that a particular world may be one that we have merely “drifted into through our upbringing” (p. 379), rather than one that we have actively chosen. Furthermore, it is also stated in § 35 of Krisis that vocation or life-interest can be taken in a very broad sense: In a special sense, of course, we call science, art, military service, etc., our “vocation,” but as normal human beings we are constantly (in a broadened 11

See Marx (1987), pp. 129-131, on how the “Jeweiligkeit,” or actual presence, within a particular world indicates other particular worlds by way of the open lifeworld horizon. 12 Cf. also Hua XXIX, pp. 364-66, on “Berufe als Aufgaben von habituell verharrenden Willenszielen” as well as Hua XXXIX, pp. 392-394, on “Berufe im normalen Volk und ihre Geschichtlichkeit. Zur Phänomenologie der Berufe”.

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A Phenomenological Approach to Intersubjectivity in the Sciences sense) involved in many “vocations” (interested attitudes) at the same time: we are at once fathers, citizens, etc. Every such vocation has its time of actualizing activities. (Krisis p. 136)

He also claims that interests that are not vocational may determine what would seem to be equivalent to a particular world.13 This may lead us to a very broad notion of a particular world, then. Indeed, in Marx, a particular world is taken to comprise worlds created through systems of technology, like the world of communication or the traffic world, as well as worlds of social roles, including those of family members, political citizens, religious humans or even fellow humans in general.14 Welton, another Husserl interpreter who is sensitive to the distinction between a particular world and the life-world, speaks not only of particular worlds of financial exchange and furniture making, but even of that of Frisbee.15 The notion of a particular world that emerges from all this may seem a bit too vague, but Husserl does emphasize that each one of us partake in many vocations, even if each has its “vocational time” or “time of actualization”. Also, the very notion of “closure” is a relative one in Husserl, as is that of horizon itself. After all, he also uses it of a so-called “Sondersituation”, or particular situation, in the Nachlass (cf. XXXIX, p. 195), even if particular situations themselves go together to make up higher order particular situations, with closed horizons of their own.16 Particular situations span all kinds of everyday situations, then, like dressing oneself, and also include everyday situations that are to be found within particular worlds, like lunch breaks, as well as special situations that characterize particular worlds as such. Only in this way can particular situations make up the entire life-world. Here I shall use “particular world” only in the narrow sense of a praxis-world of highly skilled activities or of the world-horizon through which such a world is given. Now, if the life-world outside its non13

Cf. Krisis, note, p. 138. Marx (1986), pp. 73ff.; Marx (1987), p. 129. 15 Cf. Welton (2000), p. 342. 16 On the notion of “Sondersituation”, cf. Hua XXXIX, pp. 189-205. The world itself is said to be the “total situation” (“Allsituation”) of all particular situations (p. 200). 14

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specialized field is merely a plurality of particular worlds of specialization – though intended in unity – it would seem that all particular worlds are constituted on a par with each other. But even if the activities of scientists are limited to a particular world, the validity of their theories is not. Particular worlds of science are therefore special because of the status of their validity claims, which may even lead to a revision of very basic beliefs. It is the possibility of this radical clash with common sense that makes the notion of “in-flow” so pertinent in the case of the sciences. I shall return to this issue below. Marx is not concerned with the validity claims of science, however, but with those of religion and ethics, which he takes to apply across all particular worlds.17 The idea seems to be that the life-world has normative moral content that is not specialized in the same way as the content of a particular world inside it. The moral core content of the life-world horizon might partly derive from acts of sentiment, which would seem to play a privileged part with regard to justification within ethics according to Husserl – analogous to that of acts of perceptions.18 The world of fellow human beings should therefore not be regarded as a particular world of its own – as in Marx – but is rather the general lifeworld, and it contains norms to which all members of particular praxisworlds are answerable. Whereas Marx himself touches upon the general life-world through his distinction between “alltägliche” and “nichtalltägliche”, or “everyday” and “non-everyday”, particular worlds, he speaks only of an ethical force that keeps these particular worlds together, namely, “das Mit-Leiden-Können”, or the capacity for compassion,19 and not of a non-specialized life-world as a field of sedimentations from particular worlds of specialization. He does recognize, though, that if there is such an integrative force beyond that of horizonintentionality itself, it cannot come from within a particular world. Also, the question of how life itself is given meaning cannot arise within a particular world, since the vocational epoché that goes together with it has already determined the meaning of that world, and the meaning may even be “frozen” through scientific idealizations. 17

Cf. Marx (1986), p. 89. Cf. Føllesdal (1988), pp. 124-125, p. 128. 19 Cf. Marx (1986), p. 70. 18

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IV. From Praxis-Worlds to Ideal Worlds – From Intersubjectivity to Objectivity This brings us to a third sense of “world” which is operative in Husserl’s Krisis, in addition to that of world-horizon and correlated praxis-world, which is necessary to account for the relation between intersubjectivity and objectivity within the sciences. The praxis-worlds are themselves weakly objectified, since social practices are transcendent objects and the praxis-worlds are subsets of the domain of all social practices. But there are also strongly objectified worlds that are constituted through particular praxis-worlds. In § 9, Husserl deals with the natural sciences, which by way of scientific methods, in particular idealization, give rise to objectified worlds like that of ideal limit-shapes on the basis of the life-world itself.20 I shall call these ideal worlds, in that they are not particular praxis-worlds but mere pseudo-worlds of scientific theories,21 – what Husserl considers to be “closed regions” of the universe that spring from specialized practices.22 What Galileo did according to Husserl was to turn the vague world of everyday experience into an instance of the “law of exact lawfulness,” by way of mathematization (Krisis, p. 53), and thereby even the world that is made by us for us, i.e., the cultural world with its “Zuhandensein,” to use Heidegger’s phrase, is turned into a world of mere physical objects. Husserl warns against this “Sinnentleerung,” or loss of assigned meaning. He is thus concerned with how the particular world of science

20

For a critical assessment of Husserl’s view of idealization within the natural sciences, see Kjosavik (2003a). 21 Cf. Krisis, p. 69, where the world of science as an “objectively true” world is considered to be a higher level structure built on the prescientific world. Cf. also Krisis, p. 90, where the “scientific world” is said to be the cogitatum of scientific cogitationes.” Since Husserl has the natural sciences in mind, it is clear that the world that is thematized within the sciences is not simply the social world of the practicing scientists, i.e., a particular scientific world, nor the sciences as “cultural facts” (Krisis, p. 104) within the life-world. Only within the human sciences can the world of the practicing natural scientists themselves be thematized, e.g., within the sociology or history of science. 22 Cf. Krisis, p. 62.

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is itself rooted in the life-world on the one hand, but also with how the life-world contains sedimented scientific meaning on the other.23 Still, Husserl speaks repeatedly of the prescientific and extrascientific life-world. This cannot be taken to mean that the life-world of everyday experience is without content from the sciences. After all, the life-world is no longer prescientific when scientific output has been sedimented in it but is rather highly theory-laden. However, the scientific content of the general life-world need not be updated, unlike that of the scientific community itself, since the process of sedimentation takes time.24 Scientific theories are therefore only prereflectively accepted within the general life-world, and may be entirely out of step with those of the scientific community itself. This would seem to tie in with Putnam’s idea of a “division of linguistic labour,” according to which experts have an authority in the usage of certain terms that non-experts lack.25 The criteria for the use of terms by the non-experts are very superficial compared to those of the experts, since they are not subject to methodological reflection. To be sure, there is a lot of reflection within the non-specialized life-world as well, but such reflection is always secondary to what is prereflectively accepted, and does not amount to the differential thematization that goes together with a strong vocational epoché, nor, a fortiori, does it approach the systematic reflection that belongs to the theoretical attitude of scientific vocations in particular. On the other hand, particular worlds, like that of mathematical physics, itself relies on sedimentations 23

On the notion of “sedimentation” in Husserl, see, e.g., Krisis, pp. 52, 72 and p. 362. 24 This point is also made in Drummond (1990), p. 228, as a way of reconciling the fact that the life-world is prescientific in Husserl with the fact that it is also the world that we take for granted in our everyday lives, which is bound to have a lot of scientific content. Drummond does not make a distinction between the general, more or less specialized life-world and particular scientific worlds, though, and thereby fails to distinguish between the world of specialized scientific practices on the one hand, i.e., the social facts that make up the scientific community, and the ideal world that is constituted by way of such a world on the other. How new scientific meanings and idealizations can eventually be sedimented in a life-world field of which they are not already a part is thereby left unaccounted for. 25 Cf. Putnam (1975) on this. I am grateful to Christian Beyer for suggesting that there is a similarity here.

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(Cf. Krisis, p. 27). Hence, Galileo’s mathematical physics built on the idealizations of pure and applied geometry, and these were not themselves questioned. The vocational attitude of Galileo was still that of theoretical reflection, though, whereas the natural attitude in the form of a general life-world attitude is not, and is thus prescientific or extrascientific. Accordingly, the epochés to which Husserl devotes most attention in Krisis are that of the objective sciences and the transcendental lifeworld epoché (Cf. §§35, 39 of Krisis), which both have to be performed by the philosopher. The former comprises the bracketing of the lifeinterests or worlds of the natural scientists as well as the scientific ideal worlds that are correlated with these, and should of course not be confused with the vocational epoché that the natural scientists themselves must perform to place themselves within their particular worlds, which is an epoché in the opposite direction. The transcendental life-world epoché brings us from general traits of the life-world, like its space, time, causality, historicity, etc. to the intersubjective constitution of these. It is clear, then, that the vocational epoches of the scientists and philosophers run much deeper than other vocational epoches, or “closures,” which spring from interested attitudes in general. Husserl deals with the crisis of the special sciences that arises when they do not heed their own vocational epoché, in so far as they are inclined to extend their methods beyond their legitimate fields of application. This tends to go together with a confusion of methodology with ontology, in that scientific idealities are somehow considered to be “more real” than the objects of the life-world. In this way, there could be an implicit philosophy in the special sciences themselves, namely, a scientistic one, as in naturalism, be it in its physical version or in its mental version, i.e., in the form of psychologism. 26 This calls for further analysis of the idealiza26

Husserl rejects reductionism as a unification strategy, in so far as it transforms the life-world into ideal worlds without “Geist.” There is another approach, however, that merely bridges particular worlds, and thus respects the unitary life-world as “grounding soil.” Within the philosophy of science, it is known as that of interfield integration; Cf. Darden and Maull (1977). Any integration of scientific disciplines is not merely theoretical, and thus restricted to mappings between ideal

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tions within particular scientific worlds,27 which – through vocational epoches – are hypostasized into mere ideal worlds. In doing so, it is crucial to look at the difference between the natural or naturalized sciences on the one hand, and the human sciences on the other, since it is only idealization within the former that is taken by Husserl to deal with such pseudo-worlds in Krisis. The latter deal with the life-world itself, in which natural objects can be without cultural meaning – or “Geist” – only at the limit, so to speak. V. The Scope of the Life-World – A Solution to the “In-Flow” Problem As we have now looked into the relations between world-horizons, praxis-worlds and correlated ideal worlds, I shall present a possible solution to the in-flow problem that emerges, and thereby a suggestion as to how to think of the relation between intersubjective constitution within a specialized community and within the life-world as a whole. In the case of the sciences, the problem, it will be recalled, was that output is supposed to stream – or at least seep – into the life-world as if the sciences themselves do not belong to the life-world, but at the same time the sciences are also part of the life-world, i.e., all intersubjective constitution must take place within the most comprehensive social or cultural framework worlds, but it has to take into account the social practices of a particular world of science, its horizon of interest, with its anticipations of future lines of research, as well as how its specialized concepts, theories and techniques rely on common reference points in the general life-world. Husserl himself of course realized that the living body, or “Leib,” should be studied within interdisciplines, like that of biophysics (Cf. Krisis, p. 63), rather than within mere physics, as a “Körper,” but other interdisciplines may even cut across the very “Natur-Geist” divide, as in neurolinguistics. This is a good illustration, then, of the growing potential for reperspectivations within the sciences themselves, which must ultimately be rooted in the openness of the life-world horizon. 27 When Husserl tends to speak of the world of science in singular, what he has in mind is the particular world of Galileo’s mathematical physics – or its correlated ideal world, rather than a higher order particular world of the sciences. Philosophy was later to branch into special sciences, by, as Husserl puts it, specializing “the idea of a rational philosophy motivated by the new natural science” (Krisis, p. 62). Hence, we must also speak of the particular worlds of the sciences in plural, as these are determined by their domain-specific vocational interests, rather than simply by an overarching theoretical interest or aim.

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there is. An abstract scientific world is not part of a world-horizon or praxis-world as such, but it is clear that there cannot be any output directly from such a world and into a praxis-world, as that would rob it of its causal inertness, and thereby of its very abstractness or ideality. The notion of “flow” in Husserl is also not limited to scientific output but would seem to apply to new cultural accomplishments of any sort, even if these do not relate to any ideal world of their own.28 I take that “flow” in the latter case, i.e., from non-scientific particular worlds, simply to be the continuous integration of new perspectives derived from a more or less specialized praxis-world into the worldhorizon of the life-world. The flow thus consists in “thetic” transformations from an expert mode of givenness within the particular world to a mode of familiarity within the life-world itself. Only in this way can the “suspension of the contrast,” as Husserl puts it, between a particular world and the life-world be accounted for. Such limited thetic shifts are not possible with regard to scientific output as such, though, since scientific theories offer radical and comprehensive re-interpretations of lifeworld phenomena – by way of idealizations – that cannot be integrated into general culture without its being radically revised. Hence, while even particular scientific worlds are contained within the universal life-world, they do not belong to the general field of more or less straightforward interaction between non-specialized and more or less specialized activities. All this lends strong support, then, to Barry Smith’s identification of the life-world in its original sense with the “world of common sense” rather than to any identification of the life-world with a mere perceptual world or with a world that comprises the total output from all cultural activities. Smith takes the world of common sense to comprise both a sphere of “normal intuitive spatio-temporal nature”, “people and animals, moving and behaving in determinate ways”, “artefacts, goods, implements, cultural objects…”, “values and goals” as well as “morals and customs, languages, various social units and socially constituted en-

28

Cf. Krisis, p. 138, note, where Husserl speaks of the “universal framework of the life-world into which all accomplishments flow”.

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tities with their particular norms and conventions” (Smith & Smith 1995, p. 415). Smith later points out that the world of common sense is extended by specialized communities, like those of scientists (ibid. p. 426), but without accounting for the details of this. It would seem to force upon us precisely a distinction between a general life-world and a specialized community, as well as a distinction between scientific particular worlds, which lie outside the world of common sense, and non-scientific particular worlds, which do not. It is precisely the sciences – qua being external – that may lead to revisions of the world of common sense, then, in the sense that even common sense beliefs about nature are remoulded while still remaining common sense – the way general life-world anticipations or “prereflective acceptances” in Husserl take up sedimentations from the sciences. In other words, common sense views cannot in this case be instinctive or natural beliefs that are practically immune to revision. Thus, the belief in Newtonian gravity soon became part of the “new common sense” within the general life-world, due to in-flow and sedimentations from mathematical physics. The distinction between more and less general fields of the universal life-world is not without its own problems, though. Ulrich Claesges (1972) has argued that there is an ambiguity in Husserl’s conception of the life-world, and that however it is taken the grounding function (“Boden-Funktion”) ascribed to it by Husserl cannot be accounted for.29 He distinguishes between (1) life-world in the narrow sense, (2) a particular world and (3) life-world in the wide sense (Claesges 1972, p. 89). Claesges identifies the first one with a mere perceptual world (“bloe Wahrnehmungswelt”) (ibid., p. 91). Such a world must of course include human artefacts, like furniture and computers, and it is therefore not simply pregiven nature, but the artefacts are given on a par with mere objects of nature, and not together with their assigned cultural meanings. Claesges cannot see how the life-world in this narrow sense can have any critical function and thus be a source of evidence even with regard to the sciences. After all, what is given through mere perception is not a proper life-world at all, and if this were to be the foundation of the natu29

I am grateful to Saulius Geniusas for this reference.

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ral sciences, the “subject-relative evidences of the life-world” would become irrelevant (ibid., p. 92). On the other hand, if the life-world is taken in the wide sense, science would be relativized to the particular world it belongs too – the scientific world would be just one among many particular worlds (pp. 92f.). To meet the objection against the founding role of the life-world in the narrow sense, the general life-world must comprise more than what is given through mere perception, then, and I have argued that that is indeed the case, in so far as it is to be identified with the world of common sense. Indeed, the life-world in the narrow sense must be that into which there is a flow from the sciences, and there can be no flow directly into a merely perceptual world, since there is no pregiven world that is not already covered with cultural sediments. To meet the objection against the relativitiy of the life-world in the wide sense, it suffices to point out that Claesges confuses the “world of science” in the sense of a specialized praxis-world with the ideal worlds that are constituted by a scientific community. The validity of scientific theories and idealizations that underlie a scientific ideal world is not limited to a scientific praxis-world but extends to the entire life-world. Furthermore, even the scientific praxis-world belongs to the all-inclusive life-world, from which there is sedimentation of scientific achievements, and by way of these sediments, even scientific theories and idealizations are co-intended in the general life-world horizon, if only marginally. In line with Putnam’s view of experts and his idea of a division of linguistic labour, we may say that there are references to these within the general life-world horizon, even if these references are by no means fixed by the sedimented meanings in this horizon. The distinction between a narrow and a wide notion of a particular world is also found in Donn Welton, who takes Husserl to be a Cartesian foundationalist – at least in his static phenomenology, if not in the genetic one. He claims that the life-world in the narrow sense must comprise only the horizon of pregiven nature. In this way, originary perception may yield the foundation for all scientific theorizing. Otherwise, we would be caught up with a mere triviality, he seems to think, in that the

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grounding of science in the life-world would simply mean that scientific practices produce scientific theories.30 Welton’s triviality objection can be met, however, if the distinction between the narrow and the wide notion of life-world is determined by the peculiar status of the sciences, in that the life-world in the narrow sense is precisely that general, more or less specialized domain of the life-world that remains when we bracket all the particular worlds of scientific specialization. The general praxis-world must not be confused, then, with what Husserl himself calls the “world-nucleus to be distilled by abstraction, namely, the world of straightforward intersubjective experiences”31 (Krisis, p. 133). The life-world in this sense comes closer to Husserl’s notion in the 1920s of a life-world that is given “prepredicatively,” i.e., prior to all judgments, through mere perception. 32 It is in this sense that Claesges and Welton take Husserl’s narrow notion of lifeworld in Krisis. But as a field of passive constitution that exceeds any particular praxis-world, the general praxis-world must rather be given through interplay between closed and open world-horizons. The particular worlds are “rooted in” an open horizon that transcends what is thematized or even marginally given within any particular world, in its closed horizon. Still, the general life-world is not simply a foundation of a particular world of science. Rather, there is interdependence between the two, since there is a flow of scientific achievements from the particular world and into the general life-world where they are sedimented. As Dagfinn Føllesdal has argued, it seems more reasonable, then, to attribute a coherentist rather than foundationalist view of justification to Husserl, at least in Krisis, in that scientific beliefs of a particular worldhorizon have to be brought into coherence with prereflective acceptances 30

Cf. Welton (2000), p. 343. Welton also thinks that we run the risk that the lifeworld will be fragmented into a multitude of worlds in the form of different sets of practices. We shall see below that the life-world is still constituted with unity. 31 In German this reads as follows: “…abstract herauszupräparierenden Weltkern: die Welt der schlichten intersubjektiven Erfahrungen” (Hua VI, p. 136). 32 The term “natürlicher Weltbegriff”, which occurs in the lecture “Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie” from 1910/11 (Hua XIII), would seem to be a precursor to life-world in this sense, and at earlier stages Husserl uses the term “Lebenswelt” interchangeably with “natürliche Erfahrungswelt” and “schlichte Erfahrungswelt” (Cf. Bernet et al. 1996, p. 199).

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of a general world horizon.33 This would be an expansion of what I have labelled “sequentialist coherentism” in Husserl’s theory of perception,34 then, in line with the expansion of horizons of perception into worldhorizons, even if perceptions would still have a privileged role to play with regard to justification. Furthermore, a demand for local coherence within a particular world-horizon is itself bound to extend into a demand for global coherence within the entire life-world horizon. Hence, validities cannot be confined to the particular worlds where they are claimed. I also think it is clear from the following quotation in the very Appendix on particular worlds that the life-world comprises much more than pregiven nature or “naturalized” artefacts: Pregiven nature – the domain of the life-world – corporeal nature, [is that] which is familiar to the ordinary man in everyday life and which he can get to know “in more detail” but which he simply has no reason to single out and consider in a coherent way in its abstract unitary character, as natural science proposes to do. (Krisis, p. 381)

To be sure, Husserl may first seem to be suggesting that it is precisely pregiven nature that makes up the domain of the life-world. That this is not the case, though, is clear when he goes on to emphasize that “ordinary man in everyday life …has no reason to single out” this pregiven nature. In other words, nature is only pregiven cum culture. Nature as it is experienced in everyday life – the nature of the natural attitude in Krisis – is part of the general life-world, in which natural objects cannot be isolated from the potential uses to which they can be put.35 In another Forschungsmanuskript, Husserl emphasizes that even objective nature is constituted intersubjectively as nature “for everyone”, (Hua XXIX, pp.

33

Cf. Føllesdal (1988) and Føllesdal (1990), where the method of reflective equilibrium is ascribed to Husserl. He thereby assimilates Husserl’s view of justification to that of reaching agreement within ethics according to Rawls, and to the related view of justification within logic in Goodman. 34 See Kjosavik (2003b). 35 Note that in Ideen I (Hua III) the natural attitude comprises both that of everyday life as well as that of the empirical sciences. In Krisis, on the other hand, the very relation between these two attitudes is discussed extensively, so they cannot simply be fused into one.

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650f.) and should not be confused with idealized or “constructed” nature.36 There is also a further ambiguity with regard to Husserl’s notion of life-world, however, pertaining to its unity. This can be taken as that of a horizon, i.e., of a field of meanings, beliefs or pre-reflective acceptances, but it can also be taken as that of content of a universe of nature cum culture. This is particularly relevant to a transcendental constitution analysis of the life-world, as we shall see. In the first sense, it follows analytically from the notion of a world-horizon that it has unity. In the second sense, on the other hand, the general life-world together with all the particular worlds are parts of one and the same whole, or they make up the content of a life-world universe independently of whether or not they are correlated with the world-horizon of a single individual. In Werner Marx, who does not explicitly identify any life-world nucleus in the sense of a perceptual world, nor any more comprehensive general life-world background, as I have done, the life-world becomes a mere plurality of particular worlds, and therefore cannot possess any unity in terms of coherence. Rather, according to Marx, it belongs to our “facticity” as humans to be “thrown into” a multitude of particular worlds.37 Still, Husserl states that: The world (…) does not exist as an entity, as an object, but exists with such uniqueness that the plural makes no sense when applied to it. Every plural, and every singular drawn from it, presupposes the world-horizon. (Krisis § 37, p. 143)

The life-world as praxis-world is intended in a different way from a mere plurality. Its unity resides solely in the “thetic character” of the way it is posited,38 as a correlate of a world-horizon, and not in any overall coherence in content. According to Claesges, who also discusses the unity issue, it is what he takes to be the life-world in the narrow sense – the perceptual world – that has unity in this thetic sense – what he calls “horizon in the strict sense” – in terms of its pregivenness to the subject. In other words, the life-world in this narrow sense is predetermined through its originary 36

See also the Intersubjectivity lectures (Hua XIV, pp. 86f). Cf. Marx (1986). 38 Marx (1987), p. 131. 37

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accessibility to the subject. If, on the other hand, the unity of the lifeworld horizon in the narrow sense is also considered to amount to the coherence of correlates, we would seem to end up with turning the lifeworld itself into some sort of “container” for general life-world objects, or, as Claesges puts it, the life-world is “wieder zum Inbegriff lebensweltlicher “Onta” verfälscht” (Claesges 1972, p. 96). On the other hand, Claesges argues that the life-world in the wide sense cannot be unitary in terms of a horizon, since it does not belong to a single subject. The unity of the life-world in the wide sense would seem to be that of a universe of nature cum culture, then, only a small part of which is correlated with the subject-relative life-world horizon of a particular individual. Still, since the realm of intersubjective constitution includes the particular worlds, the horizon of the life-world in the narrow sense must be expanded by a certain “relativism,” he claims. In my view, the horizon of the non-specialized domain of the life-world is rather expanded in subjects in general by perspectivations that derive from sediments, and which are therefore more loosely correlated with particular worlds – or the ideal worlds they give rise to – than the horizons of these particular worlds themselves.39 Even a praxis-world that is correlated with an expanded horizon in this way can be predetermined through its pregivenness, and there is therefore no relativization to those particular worlds of which the subject happens to be a member. We just have to take “pregiven” to mean given prior to any reflections in a theoretical attitude on the part of the subject whose horizon it is, but not prior to any such reflections in the past within specialized communities that belong to its life-world. If, instead of identifying the life-world in the narrow sense with the perceptual world, as does Claesges, we take it to be a general lifeworld background to particular scientific worlds, it becomes more transparent how the closure of a particular world may lead to perspectival shifts within the life-world horizon itself. Such shifts can take place either directly through sedimentations of scientific output, like that of Euclidean geometry or Newtonian physics, or it can occur indirectly 39

According to Claesges (1972), p. 101, the objective sciences imply the extreme position of a complete “deperspectivation” which is itself a perspectivation in accordance with a method.

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through the application of new technology. For instance, participation in measurement practices that originated in the particular world of mathematical physics may lead to a reperspectivation of the material objects of the general life-world. In this fashion, application of technology based on new scientific theories contributes to the shaping of the life-world horizon, and the life-world members are subjected to the validity of the theories even prior to the sedimentation in the general life-world of the meanings from a particular scientific world. The life-world horizon becomes the “horizon of all horizons” in an extended sense, then, i.e., not just as the open horizon that underlies closed world-horizons of particular worlds but as a general field of perspectival shifts. VI. In-flow and Projections from the Social Sciences The human sciences, or “Geisteswissenschaften,” study intersubjective constitution itself, unlike the natural sciences, and a strong objectification, like that of mathematical physics, through which the roots in intersubjective constitution are lost, is therefore ruled out. Still, there are several problems with Husserl’s view if we take exacting idealization leading to ideal worlds as characteristic of the very distinction between natural and human sciences. Firstly, biology is widely different from physics, and this is certainly acknowledged by Husserl himself, in that subjectivity and life ultimately turn out to be equivalent.40 He thus ascribes intentionality even to lower organisms, like a jellyfish, not, to be sure, in terms of self-interpretation, but rather in terms of their self-organizing experience (Cf. Hua XIV, pp. 112-119).41 Through an

40

Husserl does not rule out that even plants could have sensitivities (“Empfindsamkeiten”), and that interpretational experience (“interpretatorische Erfahrung”) might play a part within botany as well, even if there does not seem to be any empathy with plants. Cf. Ideen III (Hua V), pp. 9f. See also Krisis, pp. 66f. on the problem of transforming biology into physics. 41 Cf. Orth (1999), pp. 157ff., who distinguishes between five different concepts of life in Husserl. Now, whether we go along with such a construal of intentionality or not, we know that biology contains functionalist explanations in terms of natural selection, for which there is no room in physics or chemistry. There have even been attempts to naturalize intentionality on that basis; cf. Millikan (1984).

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assimilation of organic life to cultural life by way of intentionality, biology is thereby brought closer to the human sciences. Secondly, even if “nature” is taken in the narrow sense in which it excludes living bodies, and deals exclusively with physical bodies without soul,42 one cannot even fuse physics and chemistry into one and the same science. Chemistry tends to deal with specific kinds of molecules and their properties rather than with general laws of matter. Indeed, because of the messiness of chemistry, Jon Elster has claimed that “social science (…) is closer to chemistry than to physics” (Elster 1989, p. 250). Arguably, biology is even messier, and exact lawfulness would seem to be the proper subject matter of mathematical physics only, whereas other natural sciences are brought closer to the human sciences in so far as there is very limited room for exacting idealization in these. However, while the idealization that Husserl deals with in his account of a scientific ideal world is of the exacting kind that can only be captured axiomatically or through strict causal laws, it does not imply that there is not also room for idealization within the human sciences. To be sure, the human sciences are morphological or inexact sciences,43 and Husserl did not work out a sufficiently broad concept of idealization that would fit these sciences as well. This must partly be because he was not so much concerned with the life-world and the social practices it contains as such, but rather with how the life-world with all its invariant features is constituted by us and for us. In Husserl’s terminology, this means that he was concerned not so much with mundane as with transcendental intersubjectivity, and not so much with the ontology of the life-world, as with how it is constituted, and thereby how its general traits, or “a priori” structure, would serve as transcendental clues to this constitution. This is of course precisely what the transcendental lifeworld epoché mentioned earlier is to bring out.

42

On this distinction between “Körper” and “Leib,” cf. § 62 of Ideen II (Hua IV) and Krisis §§ 28, 62. 43 Cf. Ideen I (Hua III), § 74, on the distinction between morphological and exact sciences.

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On this point, Husserl was criticized by Schütz, who would rather substitute mundane for transcendental intersubjectivity. 44 Still, there are reflections on mundane intersubjectivity within the particular world of mathematical physics even in Krisis, as we have seen, but parallel reflections would seem to be lacking with regard to the human sciences. Since such reflections will contribute to an analysis of intersubjective constitution in general, we shall, like Schütz in his phenomenology of the social world – make use of the ideal type in Weber. Such an ideal type is an abstract construct that contains the main features of a phenomenon in the social world. As ideal types may even apply to concrete phenomena that do not match the features of the type completely, it is clear that there may also be idealization involved. Such idealization is not exacting, though, since the ideal social type itself is bound to be morphological. Still, there may be exacting idealization within the human sciences as well, in so far as features of the ideal type are considered to be quantifiable. Thus, an ideal situation in economics, like that of zero transaction costs, may seem to parallel an ideal situation in physics, like that of zero friction in Galileo’s law of free fall. It is only through exacting idealization applied to ideal types, like that of an ideal market, that pseudoworlds can be constituted through the human sciences. 45 Idealization can thus be used as a general tool through which phenomena that are studied within special scientific worlds – be it, e.g., that of a physicist or that of an economist – are isolated from the life-world and turned into ideal worlds of their own. However, idealization within the human sciences is more complicated than this. Since the exact “laws” that can be obtained within the human sciences are not sensitive to the concrete intentions of the subjects that partake in social actions – say, in economic transactions – they presuppose that subjective meaning is considered to be repeatable across 44

Cf. Schütz (1970, p. 82): “It is to be surmised that intersubjectivity is not a problem of constitution which can be solved within the transcendental sphere, but is rather a datum (Gegebenheit) within the life-world.” Schütz (1967) is an elaborate attempt to develop a phenomenology of the social world in terms of mundane intersubjectivity. 45 For a discussion of the inexactness of economics in terms of approximations, probabilities, counterfactuals and vague qualifications, see Hausman (1992), pp. 123-151.

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individuals, and the creator of meaning thereby becomes “anonymous,” as Schütz puts it (Cf. Schütz 1967, p. 37). In this way, subjective meaning is turned into “ideal” or objective meaning. This would seem to amount to a new kind of idealization, a kind of sweeping generalization which we might call “anonymizing” idealization, and there is nothing analogous to this within mathematical physics. Rather, the latter study life-world objects at the limit where there is no subjective perspective whatsoever. To be sure, there may be anonymizing in the extended sense of cutting across the individualities of even mere physical things (Cf. Smith & Smith 1995, p. 421), but that just derives from morphological richness rather than from the richness of individual subjects. As Schütz points out, human actors themselves engage in commonsensical ideal type construction in their everyday lives, and the ideal types that are ascribed to concrete persons or courses-of-actions need not coincide with those they actually participate in. Indeed, as it is arguably impossible to know anything in its full concreteness – including persons and their motives – there is no escape from idealization even with regard to empathy in Husserl or the direct experience of “consociates” in Schütz. Just as Husserl traces exacting idealization to its life-world origins in measurement practices, we can trace anonymizing idealization back to life-world typologies of persons and courses-of-actions. Additionally, higher-level scientific idealizations from the human sciences, like ‘class’ in sociology or ‘the unconscious mind’ in psychoanalytic psychology, may flow out of their particular worlds and be sedimented into the general life-world. Moreover, as in the natural sciences, idealization, be it exacting or anonymizing, may contribute to the constitution of scientific ideal worlds within the human sciences – which are essentially theoretical models of social behaviour – like the special ideal worlds of utilitymaximizers in ideal markets within neo-classical economics. Thus, not only is there in-flow and sedimentation of certain economic notions, like that of the law of demand and supply, but there are also scientific idealizations which – even if they are not sedimented in the general life-world as such – are still projected back onto the general life-world through shaping of social practices in accordance with their validity claims. Such idealizations, which arise from the particular world of economics, must

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of course be rooted in ideal types of the world of common sense if they are to be generally applicable, like that of the instrumentally rational and self-interested actor. Still, they may lie at different levels of remoteness from the general life-world, ranging, from, say, the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith as a mechanism of intersubjective constitution to the equilibrium projections of neo-classical economics.46

Bibliography Bernet, Rudolf, Iso Kern and Eduard Marbach (1996) Edmund Husserl. Darstellung seines Denkens, Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Carr, David (1974) Phenomenology and the Problem of History. A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Claesges, Ulrich (1972) “Zweideutigkeiten in Husserls LebensweltBegriff”, in Claesges, U. and K. Held (eds.): Perspektiven transzendentalphänomenologischer Forschung. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 85-101. Darden, Lindley and Nancy Maull (1977) “Interfield Theories”, Philosophy of Science 44, pp. 43-64. Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1991) Being-in-the-World. A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press. Drummond, John J. (1990) Husserlian Intentionality and NonFoundational Realism. Noema and Object, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Elster, Jon (1989) The Cement of Society: A Study of Social Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Føllesdal, Dagfinn (1979) “Husserl and Heidegger on the Role of Actions in the Constitution of the World”, in E. Saarinen et al. (eds.),

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I am grateful to Dagfinn Føllesdal for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Essays in Honour of Jaakko Hintikka, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, pp. 365-378. Føllesdal, Dagfinn (1988) “Husserl on Evidence and Justification”, in Sokolowski, Robert, Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. Føllesdal, Dagfinn (1990) “The Lebenswelt in Husserl”, in Leila Haaparanta et al. (eds.), Language, Knowledge, and Intentionality. Perspectives on the Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka. Acta Philosophica Fennica, Vol. 49, Helsinki, pp. 123-143. Hausman, Daniel M. (1992) The inexact and separate science of economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, Edmund (1973) Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, Hua I. S. Strasser, ed., The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1976) Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, Hua III, W. Biemel, ed. 1950, revised edition in two parts by K. Schuhmann, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1952) Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, Hua IV, M. Biemel, ed., The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1952) Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, Hua V, M. Biemel, ed., The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1954) Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, Hua VI, W. Biemel, ed., The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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Husserl, Edmund (1959) Erste Philosophie (1923/4). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, Hua VIII, R. Boehm, ed., The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1973) Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Erster Teil: 1905-1920, Hua XIII, I. Kern, ed., The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1973) Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921-1928, Hua XIV, I. Kern, ed., The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1973) Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929-1935, Hua XV, I. Kern, ed., The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1993) Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1934-1937), Hua XXIX, R. N. Smid, ed., Dordrecht: Kluwer. Husserl, Edmund (2008) Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt under ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916-1937), Hua XXXIX, R. Sowa, ed., Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, Edmund (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. and transl. by David Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, Edmund (1954) Erfahrung und Urteil, L. Landgrebe, ed., Hamburg: Claassen Verlag. Kjosavik, Frode (2003a) “Husserl’s View of the Life-World and the World of Science.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 2, pp. 193-202. Kjosavik, Frode (2003b), “Perceptual Intimacy and Conceptual Inadequacy – A Husserlian Critique of McDowell’s Internalism”, in Zahavi et al. (eds.) Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation, Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 49-71.

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Marx, Werner (1986) Ethos und Lebenswelt. Mitleidenkönnen als Ma , Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Marx, Werner (1987) Die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls, München: Wilhelm Fink. Millikan, Ruth G. (1984) Language, Thought and Other Biological Objects, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Orth, Ernst Wolfgang (1999) Edmund Husserls “Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie”, Darmstadt: WBG. Putnam, Hilary (1975) “The meaning of “meaning””, in Hilary Putnam (ed.), Philosophical Papers: Volume 2. Mind, language and reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 215-27. Schütz, Alfred (1967) The Phenomenology of the Social World, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Schütz, Alfred (1970) “The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl”, in Schütz, I. (ed.), Collected Papers III. Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 51-84. Smith, Barry (1995) “Common sense”, in Smith, B. and D. W. Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 394-437. Welton, Donn (2000) The Other Husserl. The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Zahavi, Dan (1996) “Husserl’s Intersubjective Transformation of Transcendental Philosophy”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 27/3, pp. 228-245.

2 Husserl’s Approaches to Volitional Consciousness Henning Peucker Acts1 of willing and the volitional consciousness are among the most fascinating phenomena in our life. The volitional consciousness is of particular importance in our lives because it structures all of our practical activities and our whole biographies. Without volitional activity human agency would be impossible and our life would neither be shaped by ourselves nor could it be directed toward certain ends. As important as volitional activities are, analyzing them is challenging. From the very beginning of the phenomenological tradition there have been several attempts to get a better understanding of the volitional consciousness. 2 Because of its descriptive and reflective-analytical approach, phenomenology seems to be more suitable than other philosophical methods for investigating acts of willing and their structure. Phenomenology in general aims to clarify the structure of all types of our experience and the modes of consciousness in which something is given to us. Objects of willing, such as the aims we are striving for or the ends we are trying to realize, are given to us in a peculiar manner that differs markedly from that of, e.g., the usual objects in nature. Revealing the most striking features of volitional acts belongs to the genuine tasks of phenomenology since it aims to investigate the very nature of our experienced objects and the correlative modes of consciousness respectively. In this article I will give an introduction to Husserl’s attempts at 1

I am grateful to Moira Hill, Mirja Hartimo, Martin Pickavé, and Ronald McIntyre who improved this paper in many respects; many thanks also to Thane Naberhaus for his support in translating Husserl’s texts. 2 Some of the most influential phenomenological analyses of the will are from Pfänder (1900); Schwarz (1900); Pfänder (1911); Scheler (1913/1916); von Hildebrand (1919); Stein (1922); Ricoeur (1949).

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gaining a better understanding of volitional acts.3 Husserl was motivated to analyze our volitional consciousness for at least three different reasons. Firstly its clarification is part of the general aims of his phenomenology for gaining a better understanding of all kinds of our experience. Phenomenological analysis is a universal method for investigating our intentional activities which must also be applied to our volitional consciousness. It is, secondly, of particular importance to scrutinize the accomplishments of our volitional consciousness in order to gain a better understanding of our practical life and its ethical dimension; actions in general and ethical activities in particular are only made possible through volitional acts. Finally, Husserl’s mature phenomenology owes its own existence to a very special cognitive attitude – the transcendental reduction – that can only be performed volitionally. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology proceeds in an attitude that brackets or expels all our seemingly valid meanings about the reality of the world in order to elucidate the subjective conditions that enable us to have just such meanings. Since transcendental phenomenology depends on the volitional operation of the reduction as its methodological tool, it must be interested in scrutinizing the volitional consciousness that enables us to do phenomenology.4 In what follows I will introduce two models or theories of the will that can be found in Husserl’s writings. I will distinguish these seeming3

Husserl’s most important text on the phenomenology of will can be found in Husserliana XXVIII, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908-1914. Ed. by U. Melle, Dordrecht 1988 (Hua XXVIII), pp. 102-125. Other texts on that topic are scattered throughout several other volumes of Husserl’s writings. Some insightful studies on Husserl’s theory of willing are: Ricoeur (1967), pp. 213-233; Nenon (1990), pp. 301-9; Hart (1992), pp. 85-115; Melle, in Hart and Embree (1997), pp. 169-192; Mertens, in Depraz and Zahavi (eds.) (1998), pp. 121-138; Bernet, in Fonfara und Lohmar (2006), pp. 38-53; Vargas Bejarano (2006). 4 Cf. E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion. Ed. by R. Boehm, Den Haag 1959 (Hua VIII), 6f.; E. Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911-1921). Ed. by T. Nenon, H. R. Sepp, Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster 1987 (Hua XXV), p. 347ff. I refer to Husserl’s writings by listing the Roman Husserliana volume number and the page number in Arabic numerals. All translations from Husserl’s writings in this article are my own, but I quote the German text in the footnotes as well.

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ly opposite approaches and will examine whether they can be combined into a single consistent account. The two Husserlian approaches to willing are roughly the following. According to the first one, Husserl claims that the volitional consciousness is a doubly founded phenomenon that is based on the more fundamental mental accomplishments of both presenting and evaluating something. In the second approach Husserl proposes an even more complex, so-called “genetic”, theory of acts of volition as acts that are motivated by instincts and desires that occur within our pre-egoic personal life. Contrary to what many interpreters hold, I will argue that the later, genetic phenomenology of willing has never replaced Husserl’s first theory. I. The foundational model of willing in the static analyses At the beginning of his career Husserl conceived of volitional acts as acts that are founded in two respects. According to this approach volitional consciousness and acts of willing are based on objectivations or presentations performed by our purely theoretical consciousness and on evaluations carried out by the affective or emotive consciousness. Husserl distinguishes between the theoretical, the affective, and the volitional functions of consciousnesses, and he claims that the last necessarily presupposes the other two for the following reason. The constitution of an act of willing depends on a theoretical act which provides us with a presentation of the willed object, i.e. that which the volitional act strives to realize. Moreover, there can be no act of volition without a positive evaluation of what is previously presented as that which is willed, since every willing is directed toward something that we regard as valuable or positive and which, therefore, can motivate an act of volition. According to Husserl, these evaluations are carried out by means of feelings or by functions of our affective consciousness. Thus, volitional acts are based on the presentations of theoretical or intellectual acts, and on the evaluations of emotive acts; both together are the necessary founding moments in the constitution of willing. According to Husserl, this foundation of volitional acts is a foundation of their meaning or sense; acts of willing include the meaning of a presented object of willing and its positive evaluation. To put it differently, one could also say that the noema of an

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act of willing is more complex than that of an act of perceiving. This founding structure of volitional acts should not be understood as necessarily a temporal process such that we first must have a presentation of something before we can develop a volitive attitude toward it, but rather as a necessary foundational structure of the meaning of volitional acts and their objects. Rephrased in the language of Husserl’s Logical Investigation III, we can also say that a volitional act as a whole necessarily includes as its parts the meaning of a presented object and an evaluation. Husserl clearly maintains this theory in his Logical Investigations (1901), his Ideas I (1913)5, and in his Göttingen lecture courses on ethics from 1908-19146, but I believe that he continued to hold this view even later. There is, however, an important difference between his position in the Logical Investigations and his position in the Ideas I. In the Logical Investigations he distinguishes between so-called objectifying and nonobjectifying acts. Objectifying acts are those intentional acts that originally give us some intentional object or matter, e.g., presentations. According to the Logical Investigations, volitional acts are non-objectifying acts that acquire their intentional matter only through some founding objectifying acts. Husserl holds this view because he thinks that volitional acts do not give us something that is not already presented in their founding theoretical acts. Volitional acts owe their intentional directedness only to the founding objectifying acts, such as presentations. In the Logical Investigations it almost seems that willing is just a distinct intentional quality added to an object that is already given by the more basic objectifying acts. In the Ideas I Husserl changes this view and conceives of acts of willing as objectifying, or so-called positional, acts that refer to their particular intentional objects.7 They are directed at genuine objects of will, which are not merely pure theoretical objects that stand in combination with the intentional quality of willing. The motivation for this shift has to do with the development of Husserl’s theory of reason. In the years following the Logical Investigations he develops an encompassing theory of reason that includes not 5

Cf. Hua III/1, pp. 221f., 266f. Cf. Hua XXVIII, p. 127; see also Hua XXX pp. 298-9. 7 Cf. Hua III/1, pp. 268f., 272. 6

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just theoretical reason, but also evaluative (or axiological) and practical reason.8 These three realms of reason correspond to the three classes of acts that Husserl distinguishes, namely theoretical, emotive, and volitional acts. According to Husserl, acts of all types have certain parallel features; most importantly, all of them can be either right or wrong, correct or incorrect. This is because they stand in relation to their particular objects, which are theoretical objects, values, or that which is willed. Consequently, as objectifying or positional acts, acts of willing stand under certain norms, and all these norms in their totality make up the realm of genuine practical reason. Because of the multilayered constitution of volitional acts, the correctness of these acts depends on the correctness of their founding acts. It is, e. g., a necessary condition of a good will that it be based on a correct evaluation of that which is willed. Since evaluations are in turn founded on representations provided by theoretical acts, the whole constitution of acts of volition is ultimately based on theoretical reason. Consequently, this theory of willing implies a certain priority of representations and regards the will as a more complex higher order phenomenon. This foundational model of willing is not affected by the phenomenological differentiation that Husserl makes between different types of willing. In his Göttingen lectures on ethics he distinguishes between at least two types of volitional acts.9 The first are the positings of the will that are directed toward a future willing and acting. When I, for example, plan to fly to Oslo for the first time, it is at that moment a completely unfulfilled volitional intention that is directed toward a future action. Then I am just planning something or resolving to do so without yet actually doing anything to realize it. In comparison, the other type of willing is one that supports an action during the whole course of its ongoing execution. Husserl calls this type of volition “acting-will” (“Handlungswille”). It is the will that realizes an actually performed action and keeps it going during every phase of the action.10 Both types of willing, 8

Cf. Hua XXIV, pp. 442, 445; Hua XXX, § 65. Cf. Hua XXVIII, pp. 106-12; Melle (1997); Vargas (2006), pp. 124-7. 10 In the current discussions in action theory we find a similar distinction between so called “prior intentions” that we have before we perform an action, and the “intention in action” that is part of every performed action. This new terminology for a 9

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the pure resolution and the acting-will, imply a positive evaluation of their aims and a presentation. Thus, according to this model practical intentions ultimately depend on some founding theoretical acts. This distinction between the two types of willing is indeed more complicated, but I will not spend any more time on it because it does not have any consequence for Husserl’s general foundational model of volitional acts. Husserl’s first foundational model of willing is open to some serious objections that make it questionable whether it can provide an appropriate theory of willing. One can object that it is too static to explain the complexity and dynamic of our volitional consciousness, because this is driven much more by instincts and feelings than by the theoretical representations of what we will. Ullrich Melle calls it a “staticgeological” model11, because it claims that consciousness is built up on the three layers of theoretical, affective, and volitional functions. Husserl’s commentators criticize this exact image of consciousness as resting on an artificial abstraction that does not do justice to our concrete life-world experience. In our everyday experience we can never find pure theoretical acts, since the distinguished moments of acts are always much more intertwined than the foundational model of willing maintains. Critics maintain that, from the point of view of a phenomenological investigation in particular, we are not entitled to separate different layers of consciousness, because an accurate description of consciousness does not give us any evidence for the proposed distinctions. Instead, it seems to be the case that even the most basic functions of our consciousness are unconsciously always already penetrated by instincts, desires, and strivings that influence all of our theoretical activities much more than the founding model of the will could ever admit. Thus, the founding layer of a purely theoretical act, as assumed in the foundational model of volitional acts, exists only in an all too abstract model of consciousness and cannot be proved phenomenologically. Given all this, it seems necessary to introduce another theory of willing, and Husserl did so within the framework of his genetic phenomenology. distinction that Husserl already mentions was introduced by John Searle (1983), pp. 84-108. 11 Melle (1997), p. 192.

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II. The genetic phenomenological theory of volitional acts Genetic phenomenology radicalizes Husserl’s former static analyses of the accomplishments of our consciousness by going back to the passive and pre-egoic origin of our experience. Husserl shows with this method that our experience is based on a very low level (“Unterstufe”12) of the subjective life that usually remains hidden. Genetic phenomenology, which Husserl begins to develop at the end of the 1910s, reveals this sphere as the most basic level in the whole process of intentional constitution. In the genetic phenomenology Husserl generally distinguishes the pre-egoic and passive from the active subjective life. The latter stands under the influence of the ego and is composed of its positing acts. It is the realm of the ego or I and the ego’s explicit acts, which take place in the form of the ego-cogito-cogitatum – which means, roughly speaking, that the ego is in certain intentional stances always directed toward certain intentional objects. Husserl maintains that these acts are based upon something that is already passively pregiven and predelineated. Thus the genuine acts of the I are motivated by affective tendencies that can arouse the attention of the I so that it turns toward the affection which already arose within the sphere of the passive subjective life. 13 Within this sphere basic associations structure what is given in the different sensory fields (“Sinnesfelder”). All this happens in the “antechamber”14 of the I but can arouse its interest. This general insight of genetic phenomenology into the preconstitutional accomplishments of the pre-egoic and passive sphere of consciousness has significant consequences for Husserl’s understanding of willing because volitional acts are here understood as arising from this passive subjective sphere. 12

Hua XXXI, p. 3ff., cf. Hua XI, p. 64. Husserl IX, p. 209: “[…] jedes […] ego cogito ist an die Voraussetzung gebunden, daß vorher das Ich affiziert wurde, das sagt, daß vorher eine passive Intentionalität, in der das Ich noch nicht waltet, einen Gegenstand schon in sich konstituiert hat, von dem aus der Ichpol affiziert und zum actus bestimmt worden ist”. [… every ... ego cogito is tied to the precondition according to which the ego has been affected previously; this means, that a previous passive intentionality, in which the ego does not yet take part, has constituted an object from which the ego-pole has been affected and motivated to a certain act”.] 14 Hua XI, p. 166: “Vorzimmer”. 13

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The passive sphere is a dynamic complex of feelings, instincts, drives, and subjective tendencies that together play an essential role in the genesis of intentional acts. In spite of the complexity of all these interwoven moments, Husserl tries to elucidate how intentional acts such as willing, e.g., emerge from this basis. Volitional acts are, like all acts of the ego, motivated by dynamic processes that have already happened in the sphere of passivity. Here, the ego is not just affected by a variety of different perceptual data but is rather moved by obscure drives or pressure toward unrepresented goals. In the passive sphere instincts and strivings are already at work and exhibit a certain direction toward something that is not yet clearly determined. Such strivings and drives execute themselves as involuntary innersubjective tendencies. If these blind drives work themselves out, they neither involve the activity of a genuine act of will nor the ego. Husserl describes these subjective occurrences as the intentionality of drives (“Triebintentionalität”) and calls them even a very “low form of the will” or “passivity of will”. 15 Although these drives are not explicit acts of willing they can motivate such acts if the I approves the passive tendencies and follows them. The transition from the passive predelineations of acts of willing to these acts as such is an intricate problem. In order to tackle it one has to look closer at the nature of the affection the I undergoes when it is affected or motivated by something from the passive sphere. These affections are directed toward the I and motivate it to an active turning toward to or turning away from what affects it. If one wants to understand why the I follows one particular affection and not some of the others, one has to keep in mind that the affections are not just neutral theoretical data. Instead, they are carrying some evaluative features that are located in the feelings and strivings that accompany the affection.16 Affections are linked with a positive or negative feeling that passively privileges one affection over others.17 In his Analyses of the Passive Synthesis Husserl speaks about the “affective relief”18 that characterizes the pre-egoic 15

“eine niedere Form des Willens”, “Willenspassivität” – Ms. M III 3 III I II 102f. – cited according to Vargas (2006), p. 235. 16 Cf. Lotz (2007), p. 42. 17 Cf. Lotz (2007), p. 50. 18 Hua XI, p. 168: “affektives Relief”.

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sphere of the passive foundation of the intentional acts. Affections are always combined with certain evaluative features that are given in feelings, and only these qualitative differences inside the passive sphere of affection can explain why the ego turns toward one affection but not toward others. Thus, the act-motivating passive sphere does not only consist of merely neutral presentations, but is rather penetrated by elementary strivings and feelings which carry evaluative features. Consequently, the founding of the volitional acts has to be understood against the background of this passive sphere in which several aspects, like theoretical, emotional, instinctive, and drive-related tendencies are always already mutually intertwined. According to the genetic phenomenology, acts of willing are not based on mere presentations and some higher ordered feelings, but rather on the dynamic processes of the passive subjective life in which a separation of independent spheres of acts would make no sense. Husserl’s foundational model of volitional acts described above is clearly challenged by the results of his later genetic phenomenological approach. Moreover, the results of this new approach have some consequences for our understanding of the relation between theoretical and practical acts in general. If the passive sphere with all its instincts, strivings, and drives is the motivational ground for explicit acts, it seems that we cannot any longer maintain that volitional or practical acts are based upon purely theoretical acts. Husserl claims that all active egoic accomplishments have their origin in the elementary passive subjective life which is penetrated by instincts and drives. The passive subjective life has its own dynamic character and works itself out in drive-actions (“Triebhandlungen”) and deeds as well as in the provoked intentional acts. If we allow for a wider concept of praxis or practical activity that includes these passive subjective accomplishments, we must admit that genuine theoretical acts are inseparably intertwined with such general practical activities. In the beginning of the 1920s Husserl draws these conclusions by maintaining that strivings and volitional tendencies run through every theoretical act.19 He explicitly writes that “the theoretical 19

Cf. Hua VIII, p. 193: “A striving and volitional tendency runs through every theoretical act of judgement, and indeed an evaluation as well […]”.

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life is a branch of the general practical life”20 or even that “cognitive reason is a function of practical reason, the intellect is a servant of the will”.21 We can find those statements in the enclosures to the lecture course on First Philosophy and in Experience and Judgment.22 Consequently, a general priority of the practice results from this genetic phenomenology. Moreover, interpreters of the genetic phenomenology who connect the elementary levels of our personal life with our kinaesthesis and bodily experience see in this approach the overcoming of an allegedly one-sided theoretical and consciousness-centered phenomenology. III. Discussion of the two approaches In the final part of this paper I would like to make some suggestions as to how the two conceptions of volitional acts can be correlated. Given the differences between the approaches, one wonders if and how they can be combined at all. Is it not more likely that the genetic theory of volitional acts replaces the previous static analysis? Is it possible that the theories from both approaches can be accurate and valid together? Is it perhaps just necessary to distinguish a wider from a narrower concept of will, whereby the genetic phenomenology deals with the wider and the static phenomenology with the narrower concept of will? But if this should be the case, how do we conceive the relation of the passive innersubjective tendencies to the active and genuine volitional acts? This question finally regards the general relation in which the passive predelineations stand to the genuine acts of the ego. In order to answer at least some of these questions it is helpful to look into Husserl’s texts from the 1920s onwards. Here we find clear evidence for the fact that Husserl did not give up his original foundational model of willing until the 1930s. In his lecture course on ethics from the 1920s he explicitly says that “evaluative and volitional acts are founded on acts of knowledge […]. I can not evaluate something that I 20

Hua VIII, p. 203: “So ist das theoretische Leben ein Zweig des allgemeinen praktischen Lebens.” 21 Hua VIII, p. 201: “Erkenntnisvernunft ist Funktion der praktischen Vernunft, der Intellekt ist Diener des Willens”, cf. p. 352. 22 Husserl (1985), pp. 235-9.

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have not at least presented”23, and again: “the feeling consciousness presupposes the cognitive, while the volitional consciousness in turn presupposes the feeling, includes it in itself as a foundation”.24 Husserl clearly kept holding his original founding model of volitional acts in these lectures. Especially in the context of his ethical writings, he also maintains that there can never be a strict determination of our will from the sphere of our pre-egoic and passive subjective life. Instead, we are able to shape our life voluntarily according to certain ideas that we first evaluate as most important and worthwhile for our life. Husserl’s whole ethics of renewal from his Kaizo articles (1922/23)25 would be inconceivable if our acts and our personal life were completely predelineated in passivity. There are, of course, motivating tendencies in the passive sphere but Husserl stresses that acts of willing can be directed against such motivations: “I hurl my eternal No against everything that is drive-related, everything that motivates me or tends to motivate me affectively. I strike out the will-determining force of all passive motives. [...] I only permit drives to motivate me when I have them on the leash, when I predelineate their function and the scope of their function.”26 Here, Husserl obvi23

Hua XXXVII, p. 274: “Wertende Akte und Willensakte sind in Erkenntnisakten […] fundiert, ihr Sinn schließt dann schon einen Sinn der Erkenntnissphäre ein, und durch ihn sind vermeinte Gegenstände für das Willens- und Wertbewusstsein da und in dasselbe aufgenommen. Was ich nicht mindestens vorstelle, kann ich nie werten.” 24 Hua XXXVII, 277: “Wir hatten die Titel des Erkenntnis- (Urteils-)bewusstseins, Gefühls-, Willensbewusstseins [behandelt]; das fühlende setzt das erkennende, das wollende wieder das fühlende voraus, schließt es als Unterlage in sich.” Cf. Hua XXXVII, 291f. 25 Cf. Hua XXVII, pp. 3-94. 26 Hua XXXVII, pp. 339f.: “Allem Triebmäßigen, mich affektiv Motivierenden oder zu motivieren Tendierenden schleudere ich mein ewiges Nein entgegen. Die willensbestimmende Kraft aller passiven Motive durchstreiche ich. [...] Triebe dürfen mich nur motivieren, wenn ich sie an der Leine habe, nur wenn ich ihnen ihre Funktion und den Rahmen ihrer Funktion vorzeichne.” As quoted in the third section of Christian Beyer’s article in this volume, Husserl stresses our ability to direct our will according to rational insights and our power to conquer some of our individual temptations and drives also in § 59 of his Ideas II.

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ously speaks about volitional acts as higher order phenomena whose origin cannot be found in any passive motivation but is found, rather, in the activity of the ego. Such genuine acts of the cogito stand under certain norms of reason and can be evaluated as correct or incorrect. Husserl does not only maintain that we are able to perform such higher order volitional acts. Up to the Crisis-work at the end of his life, he aims to show that we can shape our personal life and even our culture according to rational insights and values. To master such a task we have to follow volitional acts that are based on theoretical considerations and complex processes of evaluation. Much in our everyday life, as well as in the course of our whole life, is guided by such rational acts of willing that are based on evaluations and theoretical reasoning. If one compares such higher order volitional acts with the passive tendencies and strivings of the pre-egoic sphere, it becomes necessary to introduce an important conceptual distinction between, on the one side, genuine acts of willing as activities of the ego and, on the other side, the innersubjective instincts and drives that might influence our behavior, as Husserl also does.27 Acts of willing are explicit acts for which we are accountable, whereas passive drives and strivings are not. Although Husserl does not always strictly follow this terminological distinction, it would be an equivocation to call blind strivings modes of volition. They might be motivational elements for volitional acts but they are not genuine, i.e., not active and egoic, intentional acts. The latter are necessarily founded in presentations and evaluations, as Husserl claimed in his original understanding of volitional acts. 27

Hua XXXI, pp. 9f.: “The will is not just mere desiring: it belongs to the more general sphere of pure activity. Should one say that there is no originally latent will? [...] The concept ‘will’ is sometimes taken so widely that every activity of the ego, and thus every active presenting, feeling etc. falls under it, and consequently even attention has been conceived of as an activity of will. But the precise and genuine concept of the will designates only a particular kind of activity, one which spreads over all other forms of consciousness, insofar as every activity can manifest itself in the form of voluntarily activity. More and more it seems to me that the will is not a distinct mode of consciousness but rather a peculiar and higher form of activity, one that – under certain essential conditions lying in the presupposed objectivations and feelings – can be found everywhere.” Cf. Melle (1997), pp. 188-92.

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But is this important distinction a sufficient tool to solve the systematic questions regarding the origin of our volitional consciousness? One could conclude from this distinction that the explicit volitional acts are higher-order phenomena that can be well analyzed with the foundational model of willing, whereas the genetic phenomenology provides us with the suitable method to understand the driverelated passive phenomena. In other words, different phenomenological methods would be related to different phenomena. One reason for this is that the genetic phenomenology does not give us sufficient means to understand the normative aspects that belong to the sphere of the genuine egoic act-activity, e.g., to speak about a good or a bad will. However, I am afraid such a suggestion is insufficient, as the genetic phenomenology seeks to clarify the origin of our entire intentional life and not just our passive strivings. Moreover, genetic phenomenology wants to elucidate even the entire genesis of the I that executes all genuine, i.e., active, intentions. If we accept this general claim of genetic phenomenology, there remains the open question about the relation between the passive tendencies and the genuine act-activities of the ego or, put differently, between the sphere of the pre-egoic phenomena and the sphere of reason that depends on the activity of the I.

Bibliography Bernet, Rudolf (2006) “Zur Phänomenologie von Trieb und Lust”, in D. Fonfara und D. Lohmar (eds.), Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven der Phänomenologie, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 38-53. Hart, James (1992) The Person and the Common Life. Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Hildebrand, Detlev von (1919) “Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung”, in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung III, Halle: Niemeyer, pp. 126-251.

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Husserl, Edmund (1959) Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion (Hua VIII), ed. by R. Boehm, Dordrecht: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1966) Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918-1926 (Hua XI), ed. by M. Fleischer, Dordrecht: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1969) Phänomenologische Psychologie, Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925 (Hua IX), ed. by W. Biemel, Dordrecht: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1976) Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (Hua III/1), ed. by K. Schuhmann, Den Haag: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1984) Einleitung in die Logik und Erkentnistheorie, Vorlesungen 1906/07 (Hua XXIV), ed. by U. Melle, Dordrecht: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1985) Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. by L. Landgrebe, Hamburg: Meiner. Husserl, Edmund (1987) Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911-1921) (Hua XXV), ed. by T. Nenon, H. R. Sepp, Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1988) Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 19081914 (Hua XXVIII), ed. by U. Melle, Dordrecht, Boston: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1989) Vorträge und Aufsätze (1922-1937) (Hua XXVII), ed. by Th. Nenon, H. R. Sepp, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1996) Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie. Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1917/18. Mit ergänzenden Texten aus der ersten Fassung 1910/11 (Hua XXX), ed. by U. Panzer. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (2000) Aktive Synthesen, Aus der Vorlesung “Transzendentale Logik” 1920/21 (Hua XXXI), ed. by R. Breeur, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer.

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Husserl, Edmund (2004) Einleitung in die Ethik, Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924 (Hua XXXVII), ed. by H. Peucker, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer. Lotz, Christian (2007) From Affectivity to Subjectivity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Melle, Ullrich (1997) “Husserl’s Phenomenology of Willing”, in J. G. Hart and L. Embree (eds.), Phenomenology of Values and Valuing, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 169-192. Mertens, Karl (1998) “Husserl’s Phenomenology of Will in his Reflections on Ethics”, in N. Depraz and D. Zahavi (eds.), Alterity and Facticity. New Perspectives on Husserl, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 121-138. Nenon, Tom (1990) “Willing and Acting in Husserl’s Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory”, in Man and World 24, 1990, 301-9. Pfänder, Alexander (1900) Phänomenologie des Wollens. Eine psychologische Analyse, Leipzig: Barth. Pfänder, Alexander (1911) Motive und Motivation, Leipzig: Barth. Ricoeur, Paul (1949) Philosophie de la Volonté. Le Volontaire et l’involontaire, Paris: Points [Freedom and Nature. The Voluntary and the Involuntary, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1966]. Ricoeur, Paul (1967) “Methods and Tasks of a Phenomenology of the Will”, in: P. Ricoeur, Husserl. An Analysis of his Phenomenology, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 213-233. Scheler, Max (1913/1916) Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, Halle: Niemeyer. Schwarz, Hermann (1900) Psychologie des Willens, zur Grundlegung der Ethik, Leipzig: Barth. Searle, John (1983) Intentionality. An essay in the philosophy of mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stein, Edith (1922) “Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften, I. Psychische Kausalität,

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II. Individuum und Gemeinschaft”, in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung V. Vargas Bejarano, Julio C. (2006) Phänomenologie des Willens, Frankfurt a. M.: Lang.

3 “We-Subjectivity”: Husserl on Community and Communal Constitution Ronald McIntyre I. Introduction In Cartesian Meditations Husserl famously offers an account of how an individual subject can experience others as being centers of consciousness radically independent of its own and, subsequently, how the individual subject then constitutes the experienced world as objectively there for everyone. But Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity includes many further dimensions. A sense of others is a necessary component of almost all of our experiences. Even my experience of myself, whether as a psychophysical natural organism or as a full-fledged person functioning in society, depends on my having a sense of others and on my entering into actual relationships with them. Furthermore, I experience the world as including, not just other individuals like me, but communities of individuals and I experience myself as a member of various of these communities. As a member of a community, I conceive of myself and others as having a mutual or communal “take” on the world and on ourselves. Communities function, not merely as multiple subjects with similar experiences and common interests, but as a “we” that – together – has a common experience and understanding of how things are or ought to be. Even the natural world is intersubjective, not merely because it is experienced by a plurality of individual subjects whose experiences happen to have a common object, but because the experience that constitutes it is itself intersubjective or communal. The subjectivity that constitutes

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the world is, Husserl says, “we-subjectivity”.1 In this essay, I shall explore some of these communal dimensions of intersubjectivity. II. Some Methodological and Terminological Preliminaries It’s not too difficult, and I think not too much of a stretch, to see a certain similarity between Husserlian phenomenology and so-called “analytic” philosophy: both focus on the analysis of meanings or concepts. The difference (if I may indulge a huge oversimplification) is that phenomenology is primarily concerned, not with linguistic analysis, but with the analysis of meanings as they play a role in experience. And this concern gives phenomenology a particular kind of entre into the analysis of meaning by considering and comparing various experiences. I see that figure in the store window as a mannequin, but then a moment later I take it to be a real person. What’s the difference? This question is a phenomenological question because it is about how I see the figure, not about what the figure is. And it is thereby also a question about meanings (senses) or concepts. How I see the figure is largely a matter of what concept or sense I have of it as it appears to me: my first sense of the figure – the concept under which I subsumed it – was “mannequin”; then, a moment later, my sense of the figure changed and I saw it as a person. This difference in sense may be investigated phenomenologically by comparing the two experiences. When I do so, I discover certain elements of sense that are common to the two experiences and some that are different. E.g., in both cases I see the figure as a three-dimensional object of a certain human-like shape; but only in the latter do I see it as alive and apt to turn around and walk away. The sense “person” includes the sense “capable of self movement”. The Husserlian term ‘constitution’ will be used frequently in this essay. To “constitute” an object, in this usage of the term, roughly means to experience it “as” a particular object of a certain sort. Thus, referring 1

Husserl (1970), §28, p. 109. Subsequent references to Crisis are to this work.

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to the example above, we’ll say that I first “constituted” the figure as a mannequin and then a moment later “constituted” it as a person. Importantly, the same object can be constituted differently even by the same subject: I constitute my department Chair as a good administrator when she convinces the Dean to increase the travel budget; I constitute her as a friend when she offers to teach my class so that I can attend a philosophical workshop. The constitution of an object – what the object is experienced “as” – depends on the subject’s sense or conception of what the object is (and, as the examples we’ve given illustrate, these senses may or may not be compatible with each other). Thus, I shall frequently interchange questions about the “constitution” of such-and-such with questions about the experiencing subject’s “sense” of such-andsuch. I’ve just given an intuitive characterization of some central and far more complex Husserlian phenomenological concepts, and it would be nice if things could be left there. We will have to be somewhat more precise, though, and I think we can without becoming overly technical. For one thing, of course, there is no one sense or concept that can capture how I experience any complex object, so we need to be clearer about the sense or meaning of an experience. According to Husserl, every experience includes an organized complex of senses that determines the intentionality of the experience. This organized meaningcomplex, which Husserl calls the “noema” of the experience, gives structure to the experience, making it is as if it is of or about a particular object with particular properties and relations to other objects. It is the noema, then, that determines the constitution of the object for the subject: In having an experience with a particular noema, a subject takes herself to be experiencing a certain object with such-and-such characteristics. As we will discuss later, the noema also predelineates for the subject an open-ended pattern of expectations concerning further possible ways of experiencing the same object. These expectations will change with changes in the noema, with changes in how she constitutes the object (e.g., as mannequin or person). These further possible ways of

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experiencing the object, compatible with the current experience, make up a significant part of what Husserl calls the “horizon” of the experience. The full constitution of the object is determined not only by the noema of the current experience but the noemata of these and other horizonal experiences as well. (We will later see that, and how, the noemata of other persons’ experiences also contribute to my constitution of the object.) Importantly, the constitution of an object does not create such an object: The noema of the experience tells us only what the subject takes herself to be experiencing and what characteristics she takes it as having. (That’s why we said above that the noema makes the experience “as if” it is of or about an object.) For this reason, Husserl’s phenomenological reduction begins with an epoché of the object of an experience – a suspension of judgment concerning its existence and actual characteristics – in order to investigate the noemata through which it is constituted.2 III. The “Solitary Subject”: A Thought-Experiment Prominently in Cartesian Meditations, but in other works as well, Husserl appeals to a thought-experiment that, among other things, reveals the pervasiveness throughout experience of our concept of others. He invites us to imagine what our experience would be like if we had no sense of others as conscious beings like ourselves and to compare that experience with experience as we actually have it. Husserl calls the thought-experiment a “reduction” to the subject’s “sphere of ownness”.3 The phenomenological reduction requires that I abstain from positing the existence of the objects I experience, including other persons; with this further reduction, I am to suppose that I do not even possess the concept of others. Importantly, the thought-experiment not only elimi2

For fuller discussions of these notions as I understand them, see Føllesdal (1998), and Smith and McIntyre (1982), Chapters III-V. 3 Husserl (1970b), §§44ff. Subsequent references to CM are to this work.

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nates the sense “other person” from every noema; it also eliminates all components of sense that depend in any way on that sense. Clearly, then, if I were such a solitary subject within my own sphere of ownness, I could not constitute objects as having social or cultural properties or functions: I could not experience things as being books, memorials, or subway tokens. Perhaps more strikingly, as a solitary subject I could have no sense of my own personhood. I could not conceive of myself as funny or dull, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, or in terms of social roles such as teacher, husband, or friend – the very sort of properties and roles that normally define who we are as persons, Husserl says. Furthermore, having no sense that the things I experience are perceivable by others, I could not constitute perceptible things as belonging to a world of nature independent of myself. Accordingly, as a solitary subject, I could not even experience my own embodied self as a natural human being. Clearly, then, if I were a solitary subject, stripped of all sense of others and so reduced to my sphere of ownness, I could have at best an extremely impoverished or watered-down sense of myself and of the other things I experience. But I would experience my own body as a special one of these watered-down things, Husserl says.4 Touching other bodies produces sensations felt in my own body, giving me a sense of my body as the locus of sensation-fields and a sense of myself as located where my body is. As a solitary subject I would also be aware of having desires, feelings, emotions, etc., although, Husserl says, I would not always experience them as integrated with my body in the way my sensations are. Importantly, I would also be aware of my ability to initiate actions and of my body as the only object that I can spontaneously move by will. My body would appear to me, in all these respects, as unique among all the things I experience: not simply as one body (Körper) among others but as the only living, animated, body (Leib). And I would identify myself as being this animated body.5 My experience of my body 4

Husserl goes into considerable detail about how this is so in Husserl (1989), §§3542. Subsequent references to Ideas II are to this work. 5

See CM, §44, p. 97.

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as something that I can freely move about in space would be of particular significance. If I were to keep my fix on an object as my location and my experience changed, I could gain the conception of objects as experienceable from multiple perspectives: the sense that the object I am now experiencing in this way from here is the same one that I earlier experienced in a different way from there. My experience would have what Husserl calls an experience-“horizon”. This means that I would experience things as “transcending” what appears from any one perspective: as having not just those characteristics that I am perceiving now but as also having other characteristics that other experiences would reveal if I occupied the appropriate positions. Thus, Husserl says, “... this peculiar abstractive sense-exclusion of what is alien leaves us a kind of “world” still, a Nature reduced to what is included in our ownness”. But, he immediately adds, “none of this is worldly in the natural sense (therefore ... the quotation marks)” (CM, §44, p. 98). Importantly, the notion of “transcendence” available to the solitary subject is not the transcendence required for constituting physical objects in the world of nature: That requires a sense of an object as having not just the temporal sequences of profiles available to oneself but as possessing multiple profiles simultaneously perceivable from perspectives other than one’s own. As soon as we exclude from consideration the intentional effects produced by “empathy”, by our experience of others, we have a Nature (including an animate organism) that is constituted, to be sure, as a unity of spatial objects “transcending” the stream of subjective processes, yet constituted as merely a multiplicity of objects of possible experience – this experience being purely my own life.... (CM, §47, p. 104)6 6

There seems to be some tension here between my account and that of John Drummond (2012, this volume), pp. 121-123. Drummond argues that the solipsistic subject, prior to constituting any actual others, must possess a sense of “openintersubjectivity”: a sense that objects are experienceable by indefinite possible others. I, on the other hand, have presented the solipsistic subject as having no sense of intersubjectivity at all. Drummond’s argument is that, without at least a sense of open-intersubjectivity, the solipsistic subject cannot constitute anything as trans-

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Given this, the solitary subject could not even have the sense of itself as an animated physical thing, much less a socially characterized “person”. “... I have lost my natural sense as Ego [Ich], since every sense-relation to a possible Us or We remains excluded, and have lost likewise all my worldliness, in the natural sense,” Husserl says (CM, §44, p. 98).7 Furthermore, as I read Husserl’s thought-experiment, the solitary subject’s sense of self is a sense that applies only to itself. What is missing for the solitary subject is a sense of itself, not as a unique entity, but as an entity of a special kind that includes actual or possible others – a general concept of embodied selfhood.8 The task now is to discover the additional experiential resources that come into play in our ordinary full-bodied constitution of ourselves, others, and the world of nature. It must now be made understandable how, at the founded higher level, the sense-bestowal pertaining to transcendency proper, to ... Objective cendent: “Husserl ... characterizes all experiences, to the extent that they are experiences of transcendent objects, as intersubjective,” he says (p. 122). The puzzling thing here is that Drummond and I are in complete agreement about the relation of transcendence to intersubjectivity. So, where do we differ? I read Husserl’s reduction to the “sphere of ownness” as a reduction to complete subjectivity and I understand the “transcendence” of objects in that sphere as falling far short of intersubjective transcendence. My argument has been that such a solipsistic subject would not have any sense of others and so could not experience objects as transcendent of its own actual and possible experiences. Drummond’s seems to be that a solipsistic subject would experience objects as so transcendent and so must possess at least a sense of open-intersubjectivity. (We seem to have provided a classic case of “one person’s ponens is another’s tollens.”) I believe my account fits better with the words from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations that I have quoted, but little in the rest of my essay (or Drummond’s) turns on this issue. Drummond’s position accords with Dan Zahavi’s treatment of intersubjectivity in Zahavi (2001), pp. 50-59. 7 Cf. Ideas II, §42, p. 169 8 Peter Strawson has argued that one cannot have a concept of oneself unless one can also ascribe that concept to others. See his Strawson (1959), pp. 94-100. I believe my account of the solitary subject’s sense of self is compatible with Strawson, but to show that I would have to say more than I have here. Interestingly, Strawson’s further account of how we experience persons is remarkably similar to Husserl’s, which we’ll discuss in section 4 below.

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“We-Subjectivity”: Husserl on Community and Communal Constitution transcendency, comes about – and does so as an experience. Here it is not a matter of uncovering a genesis going on in time, but a matter of “static analysis”. The Objective world is constantly there before me as already finished, a datum of my livingly continuous Objective experience and, even in respect of what is no longer experienced, something I go on accepting habitually. It is a matter of examining this experience itself and uncovering intentionally the manner in which it bestows sense, the manner in which it can occur as experience and become verified as evidence relating to an actual existent with an explicatable essence of its own, which is not my own essence and has no place as a constituent part thereof, though it nevertheless can acquire sense and verification only in my essence. (CM, §48, p. 106)

As Husserl says here, the account he gives is not genetic: It does not propose to explain how higher or more complicated forms of constitution develop out of earlier less complicated forms. Rather, we are trying to understand the various layers of sense that are involved in our constitution of the natural world and of ourselves and others as natural organisms and as social creatures. The solitary subject is a fiction of the thought-experiment. The question is: What do we have that this fictional solipsistic subject does not – what elements of sense and what further kinds of experience that “bestow” this sense? Having found the logically lowest level, Husserl tries to add the others in order of their logical priority. IV. Constitution of the “Other” and Enrichment of My Sense of Self What first comes into play in the constitution of others like myself is a type of experience that Husserl calls “analogical apperception” (or, more generally, “analogical appresentation”). This is a mode of experience that Husserl sees as pervasive in everyday life, and so I’ll discuss it briefly without worrying about the thought-experiment. In the most common case of apperception, I see something whose like I have seen before. Because I see the present object as similar to these others, I am involuntarily prompted or “motivated” to apply to it the same sense or concept that I applied to them. Presented with the “heads” side of a pen-

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ny, for example, and seeing its similarity to the “heads” side of other pennies I’ve seen, I involuntarily and without further thought (“passively,” Husserl says) ascribe the sense “penny” to this object and so see it as a penny, too. I thereby see this object as having not only a “heads” side but a “tails” side as well. In Husserl’s terminology, the “heads” side is perceived, or presented; the “tails” side is apperceived, or appresented; and I experience the object as including both. All ordinary perception involves apperception, for it is by its means that we experience things as having more to them than meets the eye. Husserl sees the same associative principle at work when one conscious subject experiences another. So, let’s return for a moment to the thought-experiment and imagine the fictional solitary subject’s first encounter with another, again supposing that I am that subject. I experience this first other as being like me in its perceivable bodily characteristics and I see it moving itself, behaving, in ways that resemble the movements of no other body but my own. Perceptually presented with a body like mine that behaves as I do in similar circumstances, I attribute to that body the sense that I have of myself. Thus, by appresentation, I experience it as not simply another body but as an animated body (Leib) like me. Just as I apperceptively experience the hidden side of the penny when one of its sides is presented, so I apperceptively experience the animating life of the other when her physical body and behavior are presented. But let’s take care to avoid a misunderstanding here. It’s not that I first experience the other’s physical body and its behavior and subsequently infer the existence of an inner life. Rather, there’s just one intentional act: The act of constituting the body that I’m encountering as an animated organism and, in virtue of that, as expressing in its behavior a subjective psychological life. Edith Stein, Husserl’s doctoral student and assistant when he was writing the manuscripts that became Ideas II, calls this form of experiencing another the “essence of acts of empathy,” which she characterizes as “the experience of foreign consciousness in

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general”.9 Accordingly, I’ll call it “empathic apperception”. With empathic apperception, involuntarily and without further thought, I see the other’s body as another “me”, i.e., not merely as a body but as a body animated by sensations and feelings and productive of its own movement, as am I. Of course, experiencing the other as another “me” cannot mean that I now experience two instances of myself! For one thing, I cannot directly experience the sensations and feelings of the other as I experience my own; I can only empathically apperceive them as present in the other. As Husserl emphasizes, it is this that makes the other truly “other” to me and, in recognition of it, I constitute the other as radically “other” – as another subject, whose experiences are distinct from my own. Furthermore, to return to an earlier point, the solitary subject’s sense of self seems to apply only to itself. As a solitary subject I will not have a general sense of my animated body as an entity of a certain kind. But with my experience of the other, I see that there is another “I” (or, better, an “other I”). Now I experience myself as an instance of a kind, and as I interact with more and more new-found others I learn more and more about just what that kind is. My individualistic sense of myself is thereby replaced with a general concept that enables me to reflect on myself as a being of the same kind as others. Through empathic experience, accordingly, I gain much more than a sense of others and what they are like; I also enrich my sense of what I myself am like. “It is only with empathy and ... empirical reflection onto the psychic life which is appresented along with the other’s Body and which is continually taken ... together with the Body, that the closed unity, man, is constituted, and I transfer this unity subsequently to myself” (Ideas II, §46, p. 175, my emphasis). But, of course, I do not see myself and others as mere duplicates or clones of one another. While we share many similarities, I also recognize many differences – including, most significantly, that there is a psychological life that belongs exclusively to me, the only one that is 9

Stein (1989), p. 11.

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directly intuitable by me and by me alone, and that the apperceptively experienced inner lives of others similarly belong to them alone. Thus, my sense of the “mineness” of my self is yet another byproduct of my sense of others. The other is experienced as a ““modification” of myself”, Husserl says, “which, for its part, gets this character of being ‘my’ self by virtue of the contrastive pairing that necessarily takes place” (CM, §52, p. 115). (The notion of “pairing” will be discussed shortly.) My sense of others also gives me a sense of things as genuinely transcending what I can experience of them. I experience the other “as having spatial modes of appearance like those I should have if I should go over there and be where he is” (CM, §53, p. 117). Thus, I experience the things in my purview, including my body and the other’s, as having not only the profile that appears to me from my current perspective but also, simultaneously, a profile that presents itself to him from his perspective but not to me from mine. “... The Other’s animate bodily organism ... is, so to speak, the intrinsically first Object”, Husserl says, “just as the other man is constitutionally the intrinsically first Objective man” (CM, §55, p. 124). I now constitute the things that I experience as belonging to the same world that others experience, each of us from her or his own unique perspective. And I experience myself and others as coconstitutors of that intersubjective world of objects. V. The Person as a Socialized, “Spiritual”, Being We have now seen how very little of our ordinary experience can be accounted for on the basis of individualistic, or solipsistic, concepts alone. But with a sense of others, we can experience ourselves and others as psycho-physical natural organisms existing within an objective world of intersubjectively experienceable physical things, and each of us can have a sense of itself as distinctively its own self. Nonetheless, Husserl emphasizes, there is more to being a person than this. Husserl distinguishes persons as “natural” organisms from persons in the full-bodied sense of “spiritual” social beings: the person or “the

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Ego [Ich] ... as member of a social world” (Ideas II, §49, p. 184). The world is not just the world of nature, Husserl says, but is also a social world, a world in which a person ... pursues natural science, psychology, history, etc., or again, works as a man active in the practical life, utilizes the things of his environment [Umwelt], transforming them according to his purposes, and evaluates them from aesthetic, ethical, and utilitarian points of view.... Here ... he places himself in communicative relation toward his fellow men, speaks with them, writes them, reads about them in the papers, associates with them in communal activities, makes promises to them, etc.... This surrounding world [Umwelt] is comprised not of mere things but of use-Objects (clothes, utensils, guns, tools), works of art, literary products, instruments for religious and judicial activities (seals, official ornaments, coronation insignia, ecclesiastical symbols, etc.). And it is comprised not only of individual persons, but the persons are instead members of communities, members of personal unities of a higher order, which, as totalities, have their own lives, preserve themselves by lasting through time despite the joining or leaving of individuals, have their qualities as communities, their moral and judicial regulations, their modes of functioning in collaboration with other communities and with individual persons.... The members of the community, of marriage and of the family, of the social class, of the union, of the borough, of the state, of the church, etc., “know” themselves as their members, consciously realize that they are dependent on them, and perhaps consciously react back on them. (Ideas II, §49(e), pp. 191-92)

“To live as a person”, Husserl says, “is to posit oneself as a person, to find oneself in, and to bring oneself into, conscious relations with a “surrounding world”” (Ideas II, §49(e), p. 193). So, persons are known, and know themselves, in terms of their relationships with others within the social world.10 As Adam Smith eloquently writes: Were it possible that some human creature could grow to manhood in some solitary place, without any communication with his own species, he could no more think of his own character, or the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind, than of the 10

For a fuller discussion, see Beyer (2012, this volume), pp. 93-116.

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beauty or deformity of his own face. All these are objects which he cannot easily see, which naturally he does not look at.... Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with a mirror which he wanted before. It is placed in the countenance and behaviour of those he lives with... . (Smith 1976, III.i.3.3, p. 110)

Among the many aspects of the social world that invite and merit extensive discussion, my focus will be on its comprising, not only individual persons, but “personal unities of a higher order” – communities. The main question here is: What is a “community”? My answer, stated most generally, will be that a community is an association of persons who together, communally, constitute a domain of common interests and concerns (what Husserl calls their “surrounding world”, their “Umwelt”). But this answer just provokes another: How can a community, as opposed to its individual members, constitute anything? I shall try to answer these questions in a way that will apply to more and less encompassing communities: to cliques, clubs, teams, neighborhoods, states, nations, and in a certain way to humanity itself. Since a society can comprise many different communities, and individuals can belong to the same society without belonging to the same communities, I’ll not equate communities with societies.11 (Consider also: The American Philosophical Association is an organized society that anyone can join by paying the dues; the community of American philosophers – supposing there is one – is something else entirely.) However, I shall not jump immediately into these matters of higher-level constitution. I will return instead to where we left off in Husserl’s thought-experiment. There we will find some additional phenomenological resources that we can apply to these more complicated matters.

11

See Drummond (1996), p. 238.

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VI. Foundations of Community: Empathic Pairing In developing his thought-experiment in Cartesian Meditations Husserl describes an encounter of one subject with another not only as an instance of appresentation but also as a case of “pairing”. I believe this feature of experience is more important than is usually acknowledged, and I shall perhaps make more of it than Husserl himself intended. In Husserl’s thought experiment it makes itself evident even at the level of the imagined solitary subject’s original contact with another, but I see it as then playing a foundational role both in the constitution of community and in communal constitution. So, let’s consider pairing, which Husserl characterizes as another type of experience by association. I see two similar things as alike and forming a pair, e.g., a pair of gloves. They’re not identical but they’re similar in appearance and bear an interesting left-right reciprocal relationship to each other. I typically experience them, not as simply this glove and that glove, but as a pair of gloves. Indeed, when I experience just one glove in the absence of the other, I often still experience it as one “of a pair”. Experiencing two things as a pair is not the same as merely seeing them as things of the same kind. (I can see any number of items as gloves without seeing any two of them as a pair.) The members of a pair are experienced as “belonging” together. The difference is important and difficult to articulate but fortunately easy to illustrate. Seeing two people walking down the street or sitting on a park bench is quite different from seeing a “couple” there. Seeing one love bird fly past and then another love bird fly past, or even seeing two love birds fly past together, is not the same as seeing a “pair” of love birds. In experiencing two objects as “a pair”, the two are given simultaneously in one experience, “given to consciousness in the unity of ... one intuition”, Husserl says.12 The members of the pair retain their identity as individuals, and are so constituted, but because of their similari12

Husserl (1973), §43(a), p. 182. Subsequent references to EJ will be to this work.

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ties and their apparent relations to each other, there is an “overlaying” of each object with the sense of the other, Husserl says. The result is a new enriched sense applying to the two together and constituting them as a pair.13 In Experience and Judgment he writes: “The two features [or the two objects] are blended in a community [Gemeinsamkeit]; yet there also remains a duality of material separation, which is the separation and coincidence of what is “akin” [“Verwandtem”]. They do not go together to form a “like” [Gleichen] but to form a pair [Paar], where the one is certainly “like” the other but “stands off” from it” (EJ, §44, p. 191, my emphasis). In pairing, we experience the kinship of one thing with another. And pairing is but the minimal case of the constitution of kinship relations among groups or collections or (as intimated in the just-quoted passage) communities; for lack of a better term, I’ll call the generalized notion “grouping”. Because of their obvious similarities, reinforced by the way they join together at their stems, I “group” the bananas in the bowl and constitute them as forming a “bunch”. There are some crows in my neighborhood. They don’t associate with any other birds, and you almost never see one of them by itself; they always fly in together and all occupy the same tree where they screech at each other until they suddenly all fly out together. I constitute them as belonging to a “family” or a “flock”. 14 13

See CM, § 51. The pairing, or grouping, being described here – a type of passive synthesis by association – is not to be confused with what Husserl calls the “active” synthesis of collecting. In CM, §38, Husserl characterizes collecting as a form of active synthesis in which a new object – a collection – is constituted, as the number is constituted in counting. But that’s not what I mean by “pairing” or “grouping”, in which a pair or group is constituted. In collecting, counting, etc. the items involved need have nothing significant in common. What I mean is a passive synthesis wherein two or more items are experienced as associated on the basis of their experienced similarities. Importantly, what results is not our experience of the pair as a new object (or not just that); rather we experience each of the paired objects as “paired” with the other. I slide from the “pairing” of two objects in this sense to the constitution of a “pair” in exactly the way Husserl seems to when he says in CM, §51: “In a pairing 14

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The uniquely important feature of pairing (and grouping) as applied to my experience of another is this: In a pairing encounter with another person I constitute two objects as forming a pair, where the constituted pair includes myself as a member. By empathic apperception I experience another as an image of myself – my “alter ego,” Husserl says (e.g., CM, §44, p. 94; §50, p. 110). And I argued above that, with empathic apperception, the solitary subject in the thought-experiment constitutes itself and the other as instances of the same kind, thus ending its solitude and enriching its sense of itself. Husserl is now making a further, and I think a stronger, claim: “Ego and alter ego are always and necessarily given in an original “pairing”” (CM, §51, p. 112). Husserl gives a reason for his saying “always and necessarily”. While in every other case of pairing, it is possible for me to experience either member of the pair in the absence of the other, that is not the case with my experience of another. That’s because I am always present in any such experience, and the perceived similarities between the other and myself are at the heart of the experience. But Husserl’s “always and necessarily” needs some modification. Because you and I are both human beings, we will have enough features in common to motivate a possible pairing on some of those features. But this motivation can be stronger or weaker depending on circumstances and on which features of myself and the other are prominent and of interest. If I see you as engaging in an act of cruelty, I’ll withhold constituting us as a pair, our other similarities notwithstanding: I’ll constitute you – not us – as cruel. Even in ordinary cases of pairing I’m free to experience each member of the pair as an individual on its own, whether both are present or not, and I often do. (Parents of twins are well aware of this difference.)

association ... two data are given intuitionally, and with prominence, in the unity of a consciousness and ... as data appearing with mutual distinctness, they found phenomenologically a unity of similarity and thus are always constituted precisely as a pair” (p. 122).

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Nonetheless, Husserl’s point is important. If he’s right, every encounter with another motivates a pairing with that other even if the motivation is not necessarily acted upon. My spontaneous impulse – which may be overridden – is to constitute you and me as not merely individuals of the same kind, but as “us” or “we”. Let’s call this form of pairing, wherein I constitute myself as one of the pair, empathic pairing. And when I constitute larger groups that include myself, let’s call it an empathic grouping. Thus, I may constitute you as talking to me (two individuals), or you and others as a group of people who are conversing (with each other but not with me). But in empathic experience, I experience us as conversing or having a discussion. The distinction between empathic and non-empathic grouping is crucial to the notion of community as I understand it. When I constitute a bunch of bananas, I certainly do not include myself among the bananas. And when I encounter other persons, I sometimes constitute them as a group of much the same sort: e.g., as prisoners on death row or bums in the street. If I’m a really cold person, I may see these groups as just as foreign to me as a bunch of bananas. But constituting that kind of group requires only perception and is marked by the absence of empathy (hence, above, “if I’m really cold”). Husserl is keenly observant of this distinction: ... We can be for others, and they for us, mere objects; rather than being together in the unity of immediate, driving, common ... interest, we can get to know one another observingly, taking note of others’ acts of thought, acts of experiencing, ... as objective facts, but “disinterestedly,” without joining in performing these acts, without critically assenting to them or taking exception to them. (Crisis, §28, p. 110) An important role ... is played by the following distinction ...: [on the one hand] persons ... are thematic as objects ... which one finds existing in the surrounding world, which one sees but has nothing to do with, nothing in common with: they are here and over there like mere things.... On the other hand, [there are] the other subjects as cosubjects, with whom one forms a community in experiencing, in thinking, in acting, with whom one has com-

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Husserl continues this last passage by distinguishing a weaker and a stronger form of community. First the weaker: We already have a certain “community” in being mutually “there” for one another in the surrounding world.... We experience one another as seeing the same objects – or in part the same – in the same world, which is a world for us. For the most part, as regards this common seeing, this is inauthentic experience, the empty understanding of the others and their experiential situation. (Crisis, p. 328)

And now the stronger: But the community of persons, as a community of personal life and possibly as a lasting personal interrelation, is something special. A first step is explicitly to be vitally at one with the other person in the intuitive understanding of his experiencing, his life-situation, his activity, etc... . Every sort of communication naturally presupposes the commonality of the surrounding world, which is established as soon as we are persons for one another at all... . But it is something else to have them as fellows in communal life, to talk with them, to share their concerns and strivings, to be bound to them in friendship and enmity, love and hate. It is only here that we enter the sphere of the “social-historical” world. (Crisis, p. 328-29)

We will discuss each of these in turn. VII. Communal Constitution and “We-Subjectivity”: The Role of Credibility “The first thing constituted in the form of community, and the foundation for all other intersubjectively common things, is the commonness of Nature...,” Husserl says (CM, §55, p. 120). So, before trying to understand the stronger notion of community and communal constitution, let’s consider more fully the somewhat simpler constitution of the natural world as a communal achievement. It contains an idea that will carry over to the higher-order case.

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The world of nature becomes intersubjective for me, Husserl says, as soon as I recognize others as subjects who, like me, perceive the world from their own distinct perspectives. We communicate with each other, if not always through language then through gestures and natural bodily expressions, and we discover that our perceptions for the most part agree with and supplement each other. Thus, we come to experience each other as more than co-perceivers; we recognize each other as credible sources of information about what the world is like. We take seriously each other’s reports about the world and our reactions to it, so much so that when disagreements occur either of us may – sometimes after further investigation, and sometimes immediately – declare oneself mistaken and the other’s experience authoritative. By giving each other status as credible co-perceivers, we become not just a co-constituting group but a communally constituting group. Let’s take an example. I see that object over there as an apple. I can directly perceive its color and shape from this perspective and, given my past experience, I constitute it as being an apple; I thus “apperceive” it as having numerous additional properties that I do not currently perceive but that – if I am correctly constituting the object – I would perceive if I were appropriately situated. The noema of this experience, my sense of what it is that I am experiencing, Husserl says, “predelineates” a horizon of other experiences that could confirm, correct, or disconfirm my constitution of it as being an apple: I could pick it up, check its weight, feel its skin, look at its other side, bite into it, and so on. I will say that such experiences belong to the “evidential horizon” of the apple. The point is this: In constituting others as credible co-constitutors, I make their experiences of the apple and their communications about the apple parts of my horizon of evidence concerning the apple. And if they experience me in the same way, then my experiences and my communications become part of their horizon of evidence. The horizons of our experiences thus overlap and intertwine. “My” objects are constituted by my horizons and “theirs” by theirs, but these horizons are no longer distinct. There is just one apple that we see, and

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what is true or false about it is revealed – for them and for me – in their confirmations as well as mine. Thus, says Husserl, “... This common “reality” ... is such only as an interpersonally emerging unity of ... verification to be constated in communal life” (Crisis, Appendix III, p. 321, my emphasis.) “The things posited by others are also mine: in empathy I participate in the other’s positing” (Ideas II, §46, p. 177). In this way, the stream of individual consciousness overflows its banks, so to say, to join with other streams in the work of constituting the objects of experience. Husserl says: The total intentional accomplishment ... of the subjectivity in question ... is not that of the isolated subject. We are dealing, rather, with the entire intersubjectivity which is brought together in the accomplishment – and here the concepts of “what is”, ... etc., are repeatedly relativized.... All the levels and strata through which the syntheses are interwoven, intentionally overlapping as they are from subject to subject, form a universal unity of synthesis.... In this regard we speak of the “intersubjective constitution” of the world ...; through this constitution, if we systematically uncover it, the world as it is for us becomes understandable as a structure of meaning formed out of elementary intentionalities. The being of these intentionalities themselves is nothing but one meaning-formation operating together with another, “constituting” new meaning through synthesis. (Crisis, §49, pp. 167-68, translation modified, my emphasis)

In the following quotation from the Crisis, note this especially: “In reciprocal understanding, my experiences ... enter into contact with those of others, similar to the contact between individual series of experiences within my (one’s own) experiential life... .”: In living with one another each one can take part in the life of the others. Thus in general the world exists not only for isolated men but for the community of men; and this is due to the fact that even what is straightforwardly perceptual is communalized. In this communalization, too, there constantly occurs an alteration of validity through reciprocal correction. In reciprocal understanding, my experiences and experiential acquisitions enter into contact with those of others, similar to the contact between individual series of experiences within my (one’s own) experiential life; and here again, intersubjective harmony of validity occurs, establishing what is “normal” and thus an

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intersubjective unity also comes about... . Intersubjective discrepancies show themselves often enough; but then, whether it is unspoken and even unnoticed, or is expressed through discussion and criticism, a unification is brought about or at least is certain in advance as possibly attainable by everyone. All this takes place in such a way that in the consciousness of each individual, and in the overarching community consciousness which has grown up through [social] contact, one and the same world achieves and continuously maintains constant validity... . “The” thing itself is ... always, and for everyone, a unity for consciousness of the openly endless multiplicity of changing experiences and experienced things, one’s own and those of others. (Crisis, §47, pp. 163-64, my emphasis)

Dagfinn Føllesdal has argued that Husserl’s account of justification is a form of what John Rawls and Nelson Goodman have characterized as a search for “reflective equilibrium”, wherein – among other considerations – no views are considered incorrigible and disparate views are weighed and assessed with the goal of maximizing overall coherence.15 The just quoted passage from the Crisis supports this characterization of how intersubjective agreement is reached (if not yet “justification”), and it explicitly includes considering the experiences of others as well as one’s own in searching for this “equilibrium”. Here is another passage: In an amazing fashion [each one’s] intentionality reaches into that of the other and vice versa; ... thereby one’s own and others’ ontic validities combine in modes of agreement and discrepancy; and ... through reciprocal correction, agreeing consciousness of the same common world with the same things finally achieves validity – the same things that are viewed in one way by one and another way by the other. (Crisis, §71, p. 254)

The kind of communal constitution that we have described, where coconstitutors give credence to each other and take the truth about the things they constitute to be determined by others as well as themselves – where their horizons of evidence merge and mutually support or correct each other –, is not achieved by a plurality of subjects acting independently. Rather, says Husserl, it is the product of “we-subjectivity”: 15

Føllesdal (1988).

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“We-Subjectivity”: Husserl on Community and Communal Constitution We, in living together, have the world pregiven in this “together,” as the world valid as existing for us and to which we, together, belong, the world as world for all…. Constantly functioning in wakeful life, we also function together, in the manifold ways of considering, together, objects pregiven to us in common, thinking together, valuing, planning, acting together. Here we find … we-subjectivity… . (Crisis, §28, p. 109, my emphasis)

VIII. Communities of “Persons”: Feeling, Valuing, Willing We now understand what it means to see others as experiencing the world from their perspectives as we do from ours, to “pair” or “group” ourselves with them, to grant credibility to their experiences as well as to our own, and to join with them as a “we-subject” communally constituting the common world of objective nature. We may thereby see the whole of humanity as collectively forming a “community” in the weaker sense Husserl characterized for us at the end of section VI above. But it is not yet a community in the stronger sense, not a social community of “persons”. In fact, Husserl’s characterization of “we-subjectivity” in the passage just quoted mentions something we have yet to address: “valuing, planning, acting together”. Let us briefly explore these dimensions of personhood and community. True communities are interest-oriented. But the global community that constitutes intersubjective nature (and nothing else) is too general in its interests, and thus too inclusive, to be a true community of persons. Within that global community, the only communal interests are the objective, perceivable, characteristics of things. Thus, credible coconstitutors of nature include everyone considered “normal” in sensory abilities (including the ability to empathically apperceive others as fellow human beings).16 In communities geared toward more special interests, normality and credibility do not always coincide: The most credible scientists and philosophers, e.g., frequently fall outside the “norm” – if 16

Credible community members need not even be “normal” in all their sensory abilities: consider a blind person’s reports about what she has heard.

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the notion of “normal” scientists or philosophers makes sense at all.17 Furthermore, Husserl insists, it is generally not the naturalistic properties of things that interest us in ordinary life: Concepts such as the valuable, the beautiful, the amiable, the attractive, the perfect, the good, the useful, act, work, etc., as well as ... concepts like state, church, right, religion, and other concepts, that is, objectivities to whose constitution valuing or practical acts have essentially contributed – all these ... are not concepts pertaining to nature.... (Ideas II, §11, p. 27, my emphasis)18

While all of our experiences presuppose the world as a whole as their horizonal background, our interests and goals delineate a narrower sphere of things with which we are actually concerned and around which our activities revolve – what Husserl calls our “surrounding world” (“Umwelt”). And the more particular these interests and goals are, the more specialized will be the community that shares them and the more particular the domain of interest they define.19 In the natural attitude, the human being’s subject matter ... is everything that momentarily affects him or that concerns him enduringly, possibly becoming a fixed habituality (as in a vocation): in “seriousness” or in play, in effecting or creating things of value or things without value, temporary or lasting things, accomplishing things in egoistic or in the communal interest, as an individual or as a functionary of the community in communal work. ... (Crisis, Appendix III, p. 321)

17

Zahavi (2001), pp. 90-91, sees normality as playing a role in communal constitution much like that of my notion of credibility. But I see normality, at best, as a condition for being considered credible. (Husserl’s idea of normality is highly nuanced, though: see Fricke (2012, this volume), pp. 200-15. 18

19

Cf. Krisis, Appendix III, p. 318.

See Frode Kjosavik’s discussion of Husserl’s notion of a “particular world” (Sonderwelt) in Kjosavik (2012, this volume). “A particular world is directed towards a determinate human end that is shared within that world”, he says, “and it is therefore also called a “Zweckwelt” or “Werkwelt”, i.e., a purposeful world and a work-world” (p. 18).

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“We-Subjectivity”: Husserl on Community and Communal Constitution Conscious of the world as a horizon, we live for our particular ends, whether as momentary and changing ones or as an enduring goal that guides us.… In this case a self-enclosed “world”-horizon is constituted. Thus as men with a vocation we may permit ourselves to be indifferent to everything else, ... i.e., we have an eye only to what is “reality” here (what is correct, true in relation to this goal) or “unreality” (the incorrect, the mistaken, the false).... It may be, here, that this ruling end is ultimately a communal end, i.e., a personal life-task which is a partial task ... within a communal task, so that the individual personal undertaking of work functions concurrently, and consciously so for each of the “participants,” in a communal undertaking. (Crisis, Appendix VII, “The Life-World and the World of Science,” pp. 379-80) In a special sense, of course, we call science, art, military service, etc., our “vocation”, but as normal human beings we are constantly (in a broadened sense) involved in many “vocations” (interested attitudes) at the same time: We are at once fathers, citizens, etc. (Crisis, §35, p. 136)

Members of a community have common aims and interests, and as Husserl says above, some of these are communal interests and ends that engage the members in communal undertakings. Members of the local bird-watchers club, for example, will all have an interest in birds and bird-watching and share such individual goals as having fun and spotting rare avian species. They will also have community goals: I want the club to have fun birding, and I’ll be disappointed if I have fun but others do not; cataloging all species of birds in a certain region is a club goal, one that I share and do my part to accomplish. Sharing the aims and interests of a community and its members may be seen as one of the conditions for the credibility requisite to belonging to the community and coconstituting its domain of interest. Birders will scarcely consider people who have no interest in birds or bird-watching to be credible sources of information about birds or birding activity. Nonetheless, because the sharing of aims and interests is critical, I shall treat it as an additional, if not completely distinct, criterion for we-subjectivity and the constitution of community. Shared interests imply shared values. Birders are interested in bird-watching because they find birds “pretty”, or “delightful”, or “fas-

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cinating” and because they find observing birds to be a “fun”, “worthwhile”, or “good” thing to do. While redness is an objective property, the birder does not simply see a red cardinal but (perhaps because of its color) a beautiful cardinal. Birds and bird-watching are thus experienced as having value properties. Shared values imply shared feelings or sentiments and emotions. “... Each consciousness which originally constitutes a value-Object as such,” Husserl says, “necessarily has in itself a component belonging to the sphere of feelings” (Ideas II, §4, p. 11, emphasis modified). Birders get pleasure or satisfaction from their interactions with birds and other birders, and these feelings ground their experience of birds and birdwatching as “good” or “worthwhile”. Thus, pleasure and displeasure reveal things to us as themselves being pleasant or unpleasant, beautiful or ugly, valuable or worthless, etc. Furthermore, because we have needs and desires, things can reveal themselves as filling these needs or satisfying these desires. We then constitute them as having practical value – as being good or bad for these or those purposes – for the community as well as ourselves. Experience teaches me ... that an object ... is “combustible” material (at first without any practical bearing). Henceforth I can use it as fuel; it has value for me as a possible source of heat. That is, it has value for me with reference to the fact that with it I can produce the heating of a room and thereby pleasant sensations of warmth for myself and others. I apprehend it from this point of view: ... it is useful to me for that. Others apprehend it in the same way, and it acquires an intersubjective use-value and in a social context is appreciated and is valuable as serving such and such a purpose, as useful to man, etc... . Subsequently it is further seen as a “commodity” sold for that purpose, etc. (Ideas II, §50, pp. 197-98)

Like shared aims and interests, shared values and feelings may be seen as a condition for the credibility requisite to belonging to a community. Persons who do not share its feelings about birds and bird-watching are not credible constitutors within the community of birders. Thus, while a member of the club who does share its positive feelings and valuings may credibly declare a particular bird to be not worth further pursuit,

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and perhaps persuade her companions to break off the chase, a guest participant who is only bored by watching birds and who finds the whole enterprise worthless will not. Again, however, because of its central role in the notion of community that I am trying to articulate, I shall treat the sharing of values and sentiments as an additional, if not completely distinct, criterion for we-subjectivity and community. While each member of a community has her or his own sentiments and acts of valuing, the community’s values are communally constituted – a product of “we-subjectivity” in much the same way as the constitution of objective nature. Indeed, Husserl says, feelings play a role in the constitution of values analogous to the role of sensations in the constitution of physical objects. He contrasts “the sensations which exercise a constitutive function as regards ... sense-things” with ... sensations belonging to totally different groups, e.g., the “sensuous” feelings, the sensations of pleasure and pain, the sense of well-being that permeates and fills the whole Body, the general malaise of “corporeal indisposition,” etc. Thus here belong groups of sensations which, for the acts of valuing – intentional experiences in the sphere of feelings – or for the constitution of values as intentional correlates of them, play a role ... analogous to that played by the primary sensations ... for the constitution of Objects as spatial things.” (Ideas II, §39, p. 160, translation modified)

This means, among other things, that feelings provide evidence that the thing or event that evokes them actually has the value property constituted on their basis. But, as is the case with perception, this evidence is not incorrigible and can be overthrown by counter-evidence. The wine tastes unpleasantly sour to me and I constitute it as having gone bad. But when I try it a bit later it tastes fine, and by the time the meal is over I even decide that it’s actually quite good. Here we see that valuings grounded in feelings, like perceptions grounded in sensations, constitute their objects incompletely – perspectivally, if you please. In initially declaring the wine “bad” I did not mean merely that my first taste of it was unpleasant; also implied or “predelineated” by the noema of my experience were anticipations about how the wine should appear in further possible experiences if it actually has gone bad. My valuing experience

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included a horizon of evidence concerning the value I constituted the wine as having, and the evidence provided by my actual further experiences proved incompatible with my initial constitution. We frequently recognize some of our feelings as idiosyncratic and we do not take them as evidence for the objective value of things. I don’t like tuna fish, it tastes and smells awful to me, but I draw from that a judgment about me rather than about tuna fish. In the wine-with-dinner example just given, I experienced the value of the wine as transcendent of my immediate experience, as having more to it than was evidenced in that initial experience. But, especially if I were dining alone, I might not think of this transcendence as extending beyond what my own experiences could reveal. Our interest here, however, is not with individual or personal values, but with values that are communally constituted as objective. Consider our example again, and now suppose I’m dining with friends. Again I taste the wine, it displeases me, and I proclaim it to have “gone bad”. We decide to pass it around for others to taste, they all find it pleasing, and they say it’s a perfectly good wine; but when I try it again later it still tastes unpleasantly sour to me. If I consider the others to be credible wine-tasters, then their feelings about the wine and their value judgments based on those feelings will count along with mine as evidence about what the objective value of the wine actually is. Thus, as with the intersubjective constitution of nature (see section VII above), my horizon of evidence concerning the value of the wine will include not only my possible experiences of the wine but theirs as well. We communally constitute the wine as “good” and I, as a member of this dinner party of friends, allow my initial constitution to be overruled or corrected by others whom I trust. I agree that there’s nothing wrong with the wine; I just don’t like it. We have now seen that community members are communal constitutors of the natural and the value characteristics of the things in their domain of interest. But a community and its members do not merely experience their world; they act on and within it. They have common in-

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terests and aims, they recognize the value of achieving their aims, but action also requires acts of will. Husserl recognizes that consciousness is not only cognitive and affective, it is also volitional20 – and in communities, volitional consciousness, too, is communalized. We’ve seen that credible community members influence or motivate one another’s constitution of facts and values; they also motivate one another’s willing and doing.21 I communicate to you either something that I want our community to do or something that I myself want to do, and I let you know what I want you to do toward that end. You communicate back to me your willingness or unwillingness to do it, and your answer influences whether and how the project proceeds. If, through reciprocal feedback, it becomes one that you and the others will help me achieve, then we have a communal aim and our individual activities dovetail in service of a communal activity driven by a communal will. Husserl says: Within the multiplicity of wills divided among the individual persons it [the community] has one will identically constituted for them all, a will which has no other place, no other substrate than the communicative multiplicity... . Each ego is a subject of action, but each in a function, and in this way the connected unity of all is a full subject. 22

John Drummond puts the point nicely: Each person freely assumes his or her own role and function in the larger community, recognizing the fulfillment of that role as his or her contribution to the striving of the community as a whole, a striving which involves an activity irreducible to the activity of the individual members of the community.23

IX. What is a “We-Subject”? What is a Community? To draw together the various aspects of this account of community and communal constitution, I propose a thesis and three corollaries: 20

See Peucker (2012, this volume), pp. 45-60. See Ideas II, §51, pp. 202-204. 22 Husserl (1973), pp. 200-201. Quoted by Drummond (1996), p. 251. 23 Drummond (1996), p. 251. 21

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Thesis. A “we-subject” is a collection of persons whose members are joined by relations of empathy and empathic grouping; share common interests, feelings, and values; grant credibility to one another in co-constituting their domain of interests and its values; and engage in communal activities coordinated and driven by a communal will. Corollary 1. A community is a “we-subject”. Corollary 2. Communal constitution is constitution accomplished by a “we-subject”. Corollary 3. A communal world is a domain of common concerns communally constituted by a “we-subject”. Note that this characterization of community singles out the following features:24  the members of a community are “persons”,  they are joined by empathic relations, i.e., they experience each other as persons and as “kinsmen”,  they are united by common interests and feelings concerning a particular domain of activity,  they have shared values,  they are co-constitutors of their domain of interests and activity, including its values,  they grant credibility to one another in constituting that domain, i.e., they trust one another, 24

I do not claim that each of these features is necessary for being a community (though I think most are) nor that all of them together are sufficient. And I grant that there are different notions of community, some of which may put heavy emphasis on features I’ve not mentioned (e.g., history and tradition). But I hope my characterization captures some important features of communities of a certain kind, and that other notions of community may be interestingly and fruitfully explored in comparison.

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 their activities are coordinated and driven by a communal will to achieve communal aims. It should be clear that I take it to be important that the members of a community treat their fellows as credible co-constitutors of their particular “world” or community – they must trust one another’s constitutions of their surroundings. That’s because I think trust or credibility is crucial to turning co-constitution (a plurality of subjects, perhaps coincidentally, constituting the same object in the same way) into communal constitution and turning a plurality of subjects into a “we-subject”: for creating, as Husserl says, “... possibilities not only for a parallel and mutually understood comportment to objects as the ones of the community’s surrounding world but also for a joint-unitary comportment ... in which they participate communally as members of a whole that binds them together” (Ideas II, §51, pp. 201-202). And I believe this to be true generally, not only for lofty communities, such as the community of scientists, but also for such mundane communities as a bird-watching club, a clique of pre-teen girls or boys, or even a street gang. Of course, credibility and trust have different meanings in these different communities, varying in accord with their different interests, feelings, values, and wills. Note, finally, that this account of community does not characterize a community primarily in terms of how it is constituted or experienced by others or even by its own members. A community is characterized as a we-subject and thus by how and what it constitutes. In this regard, a community achieves its character in just the same way Husserl says a transcendental ego achieves its: not by how it is experienced but by how it experiences.25 And this is just as it should be if a community is a personality of a higher order: a subject, first and foremost.

25

See CM, §§31-33.

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Bibliography Beyer, Christian (2012) “Husserl on Understanding Persons”, in Fricke and Føllesdal (eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 93-116. Drummond, John J. (1996) “The ‘Spiritual’ World: The Personal, the Social, and the Communal”, in Thomas Nenon and Lester Embree (eds.), Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, pp. 237-54. Drummond, John J. (2012) “Imagination and Appresentation, Sympathy and Empathy in Smith and Husserl”, in Fricke and Føllesdal (eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 117-137. Fricke, Christel (2012) “Overcoming Disagreement – Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl on Strategies of Justifying Descriptive and Evaluative Judgments”, in Fricke and Føllesdal (eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 171-241. Føllesdal, Dagfinn (1988) “Husserl on Evidence and Justification,” in Robert Sokolowski (ed.), Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition: Essays in Phenomenology, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, pp. 107-29. Føllesdal, Dagfinn (1998) “Husserl, Edmund (1859-1938)”, in Edward Craig, (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge, Vol. 4, pp. 574-588. Husserl, Edmund (1970a) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, Edmund (1970b) Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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Husserl, Edmund (1973a) Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, revised and ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, Edmund (1973b) Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, II, ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana XIV, The Hague: Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1989) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer. Kjosavik, Frode (2012) “A Phenomenological Approach to Intersubjectivity in the Sciences”, in Fricke and Føllesdal (eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 17-44. Peucker, Henning (2012) “Husserl’s Approaches to Volitional Consciousness”, in Fricke and Føllesdal (eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 45-60. Smith, David Woodruff and McIntyre, Ronald (1982) Husserl and Intentionality: A Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language, Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Smith, Adam (1976) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Liberty Fund imprint, 1982. Stein, Edith (1989) On the Problem of Empathy, 3rd revised edition, trans. Waltraut Stein, Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications. Strawson, Peter (1959) Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday; Anchor Books. Zahavi, Dan (2001) Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity, trans. Elizabeth Behnke, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.

4 Husserl on Understanding Persons Christian Beyer In the mid 1920’s, Edmund Husserl attempted to revise the second volume of his Ideas (Ideas II, posthumously published in Hua IV) for publication. The notion of understanding a person is introduced in the third section of that volume. Its significance partly owes to the fact that it sheds light on Husserl’s conception of individual and communicative environment, respectively (which influenced Heidegger, among others, and constitutes a version of what is commonly referred to as his conception of the lifeworld). Furthermore, and indeed connectedly, it plays an important role in Husserl’s ethics, as manifested particularly in his 1920/24 lectures Einleitung in die Ethik, recently edited by Henning Peucker. As Peucker points out in his introduction, these lectures stand in a close systematic relationship to Ideas II.1 I begin by briefly (and rather uncritically) sketching the basic idea of these lectures (section 1). Following this, I consider the connection between the respective notions of environment and understanding a person in Husserl (section 2). Finally, I highlight some important features of Husserl’s empathy-based account of understanding a person, partly by comparing it to an alternative approach based on the conception of sympathy described, particularly, at the beginning of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) (section 3). I. Husserl’s ethics Husserl praises Kant for rejecting the sensualistic view of moral persons as driven by passive emotional affections and for rather conceiving of them as free, self-responsible agents.2 However, he criticizes Kant’s ethics as “formalistic” (Hua XXXVII, §47, p. 243), on the ground that it neglects the motivating role of “active” emotions with respect to evalua1 2

Cf. Hua XXXVII, p. XIV. Hua XXXVII, §46, pp. 232f.

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tive judgements and the will. For Husserl, Kant shares the sensualistic prejudice according to which emotions basically are arational passive affections (ibid. §45, p. 228). On Husserl’s view, every will is bound to be motivated by an emotional valuing (ibid. §44, p. 215), which valuing stands to a passive emotional affection as a full-fledged perceptual act stands to an underlying sensual impression. Emotional valuings can be looked upon as nonveridical or veridical, and, in the latter case, more or less adequate perceptions of (instances of) values (ibid. §45, pp. 227f). Thus, they provide an intuitive “source of evidence” against which we can “try ethical theories” (cf. Føllesdal 2008, p. 61). For, here as elsewhere original intuition is “prior to all theory”, according to Husserl (Hua XXXVII, §40, p. 199). Valuings can be veridical, and thus suitable for motivating objectively valid evaluative judgements, because their correlates, i.e. values, are part of the ideal (but still intersubjectively constituted) spiritual world (Hua XXXVII, §44, pp. 217 ff). These values stand in hierarchical relations to each other, governed by laws to be studied in what Husserl calls formal axiology (ibid. §45, pp. 226-232). Value-perception in the form of emotional valuing thus allows for a priori insights, pace Kant. (Husserl mentions that he is influenced by Brentano in this regard.) It is such insights that determine the good will, in that the latter orients itself by the highest values the subject in question, on reflection, including a priori reflection, based on emotion, recognizes himself to be able to realize in his life, given his abilities and environment. Roughly speaking, Husserl’s (also Brentano-inspired) “categorical imperative” runs as follows: Always act in such a way that your action contributes as well as possible to the best (the most valuable) you recognize yourself to be able to achieve in your life, given your individual abilities and environment. (Hua XXXVII §49, pp. 251 ff)

This principle is supposed to represent the ultimate standard for moral and, more generally, rational evaluation. Given the rest of Husserl’s ethical views, it follows that (besides ideal formal-axiological laws)

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moral evaluation must take into account the individual motivational system, including the emotional motives, of the subject to be evaluated, and consider it in the light of his (or her) individual environment and background of abilities. This requires that the evaluator be able to do two things: first, he (or she) must find access to both the environment and background in question and the personal motives, particularly the emotional valuings, of the relevant subject. Secondly, he must be able to evaluate these motives in accordance with the categorical imperative, i.e. in the light of the idea of the most valuable life the subject in question is in a position to recognize himself to be able to lead, given his environment and background. In Ideas II the first step is referred to as understanding a person. A detailed investigation into Husserl’s account of understanding persons is thus of vital importance both for a close analysis of his ethics and for a comparison with different approaches, such as that of Adam Smith. In this contribution, I shall focus on the former account. II. The notions of environment and understanding persons The concept of understanding persons is introduced in the third main section of Ideas II, titled “The Constitution of the Spiritual World”. Husserl there analyses the world as we are conscious of it from what he calls “the personalistic attitude”: … the attitude we are always in when we live with one another, talk to one another, shake hands with one another in greeting, or are related to one another in love and aversion, in disposition [Gesinnung] and action, in discourse and discussion. Likewise we are in this attitude when we consider the things surrounding us precisely as our surroundings and not as “[o]bjective” nature, the way it is for natural science. (Hua IV, §49, p. 183; Husserl 1989, p. 192)

Husserl refers to the latter attitude as the “naturalistic attitude”. In the final analysis, he regards the personalistic attitude, which we also take in our consciousness of values, as more comprehensive and basic (Hua IV, §49, pp. 183f; Husserl 1989, pp. 192ff.), a position he is also to take in his famous last work, the Crisis. On this view, objective nature refers

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back, by its very sense (as constituted in intentional consciousness), to the “personalistic world”, also referred to as our “environment (Umwelt)” or “surrounding (Umgebung)” by Husserl (see the end of the last quotation). It is only due to an “abstraction”, going along with “a kind of self-forgetfulness of the personal Ego”, that it (falsely) appears to us as if the objectively determinable nature were completely independent of this personal environment (cf. Hua IV, § 49, pp. 183ff.). In the personalistic attitude, we look upon things under “motivational” and “essentially occasional”, egocentric aspects, which aspects depend on our individual first-person perspective. The world is thus seen precisely as a personalistic (or “spiritual”) world, a world of entities that are meaningful to us in that they exercise motivational forces on us and present themselves to us under egocentric aspects. Any subject taking the personalistic attitude builds the center of an environment or Umwelt containing such objects (with “Umwelt” also being translated as “surrounding world”). The central notion of Husserl’s Umweltanalyse is the concept of motivation, whose application he explains as follows: … how did I hit upon that, what brought me to it? [wie komme ich darauf, was hat mich dazu gebracht?] That questions like these can be raised characterizes all motivation in general. (Hua IV, §56, p. 222; Husserl 1989, p. 234, with translation change)

The entities exercising motivating force on us owe their corresponding significance or “sense” to certain forms of intentional consciousness. The following example by Kristana Arp neatly illustrates this point: I am walking on a ... path in the woods and up ahead of me is a fairly large rock that is embedded in the dirt. Most likely I will walk up, step over the rock and continue on my way without thinking about it at all ... To apply Husserl’s concept of motivation in this context, the presence of the rock in the path, instead of motivating a specific explicit interest in it, simply motivates me to step over it ... [T]he motivation exercised on me by the rock is related to the motivation exercised on me by the path. The rock has the meaning for me of something to be stepped over because it is in the middle of the path. It would not have this significance in the middle of a field or meadow. (Arp 1996, pp. 162-166)

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The subject’s motivation to step over the rock ultimately derives from its will to walk the path in question in order to reach some destination, or, alternatively, say, to practise sports, an intentional activity that is in turn likely to serve as a means directed towards an end determined by the subject’s will. As Husserl observes in his above-quoted lectures on ethics, the will of a free agent, on a given occasion, is always embedded in a holistic “volitional context” (Willenszusammenhang) predelineating the open “future horizon” of a “full individual life” that the agent is currently able to lead (Hua XXXVII, §49, p. 252).3 So, on closer inspection, even the motivational “stimulus” (to use Husserl’s terminology from Ideas II) that a stone exercises on an agent, as in the described situation, can be traced back to the individual life of that agent. And as Husserl’s use of the technical term “future horizon” indicates, this life is ultimately constituted by a transtemporal structure of intentional consciousness. Indeed, in Ideas II Husserl stresses that whenever an object exercices a motivating stimulus on a subject “comporting itself” (sich verhaltend) “toward the [o]bject”, then an intentional content of consciousness, a “noema”, is in play; the object is “immanently constituted” in the subject’s consciousness as, say, an obstacle lying on the path it is walking on (Hua IV, §55, p. 219; Husserl 1989, p. 231). In the present example, the stone is seen as an obstacle, thus evoking negative emotions on the part of the agent. However, in a different context, it could be regarded as a useful tool, as a beautiful object or as a subject of theoretical interest. In these kind of cases, the stone will evoke positive emotions; it partly depends on what the agent’s will consists in and whether he looks upon the stone as a means enabling him to fulfill that will. On Husserl’s view, these emotions thus stand in rational relations to the agent’s will. It is for this reason that they can motivate, i.e. justify, value judgements of his. We are dealing, in other words, with emotional valuings. On Husserl’s view, these valuings help constitute the subject’s surrounding world, its personal environment: 3

For a presentation of Husserl's view(s) of the will and the phenomenon of willing see Peucker (2012, this volume), pp. 45-60.

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To begin with, the world is, in its core, a world appearing to the senses and characterized as “on hand” ... The Ego then finds itself related to this empirical world in new acts, e.g., in acts of valuing or in acts of pleasure and displeasure. In these acts, the object is brought to consciousness as valuable, pleasant, beautiful, etc. ... [In the case of desiring and practical acts,] [t]he experienced objects, as objects of this empirical sense, excite my desire or perhaps fill needs in relation to certain circumstances constituted in consciousness, e.g., in relation to the need for food ... Afterwards, the objects become apprehendable as in the service of the satisfaction of such needs ..., and in that case they offer themselves to the apprehension as a means for nutrition, or as use-[o]bjects of various sorts: heating material, choppers, hammers, etc. For instance, I see coal as heating material; I recognize it and recognize it as useful and as used for heating, as approriate for and as destined to produce warmth ... I can use [a “combustible” object] as fuel; it has value for me as a possible source of heat. That is, it has value for me with respect to the fact that with it I can produce the heating of a room and thereby pleasant sensations of warmth for myself and others ... Others also apprehend it in the same way, and it acquires an intersubjective use-value and in a social context is appreciated and is valuable as serving such and such a purpose, as useful to man, etc. (Hua IV, §50, pp. 186f; Husserl 1989, pp. 196f)

Notice that near the end of this passage from §50 Husserl observes how intersubjective agreement in the form of shared emotional valuings, and according evaluations, add a social dimension to the constitution of the surrounding world. In this way, the personal environment of a single subject acquires the significance of a social surrounding world equipped with common objects possessing intersubjectively shared values – in the case at hand: shared use-values. In the following section, §51, titled “The person in personal associations”, Husserl generalizes these observations. He claims that the social surrounding world is relative to persons who are able to “communicate” with one another, i.e. to “determine one another” by performing actions in the intention to motivate the other to display “certain personal modes of behavior” on the basis of his grasping that very communicative

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intention.4 If an attempted piece of communication such as this, also called a “social act” (Hua IV, §51, p. 194; Husserl 1989, p. 204; the terminology goes back to Husserl’s pupil Reinach), is successful, then certain “relations of mutual understanding” (Beziehungen des Einverständnisses) are formed (Hua IV, §51, p. 193; Husserl 1989, p. 202): … speaking elicits response; the theoretical, valuing, or practical appeal, addressed by one to the other, elicits, as it were, a response coming back, assent (agreement) or refusal (disagreement) and perhaps a counterproposal, etc. In these relations of mutual understanding, there is produced ... a unitary relation of [persons] to a common surrounding world. (Hua IV, §51, pp. 192f; Husserl 1989, pp. 203f)

A few lines later, Husserl even claims that relations of mutual understanding help determine the common surrounding world for a group of persons; the world as constituted this way is called a “communicative surrounding world”. In later writings, notably the Kaizo articles and the Crisis work, Husserl would speak of aspects of culture and lifeworld (of a communicative community), respectively, in this regard. On his view, a world such as this is partly structured by the outcomes of communicative acts. I am inclined to regard such outcomes as, implicit or explicit, conventions of a certain kind; but this view needs further explanation and defense. What has understanding persons got to do with all this? The answer is simple: Without such understanding, mutual understanding and hence spiritual unity in society would be impossible; understanding persons is necessary, though not sufficient, for successful communicative acts. Husserl writes: The acts of mutual relation in society are ... especially pre-eminent amid the acts of one-sided empathetic understanding of the life of the other Ego. It is not sufficient that the others are understood as persons ...; mutality of understanding would not be needed for that. (Hua IV, §51, p. 194; Husserl 1989, p. 204) 4

Hua IV, §51, p. 192; Husserl (1989), p. 202.

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This quotation makes it explicit that Husserl regards understanding a person as such as an act of empathy. Although he does not consider mutuality to be necessary for such understanding, he seems to me to regard membership to some “communicative society” (which, as we heard, is in turn constituted by acts of mutal understanding) as indispensible for being able to undergo certain experiences of empathy: In the communicative society ... [w]e experience the same things and events, we experience the animals and people there facing us, and we see in them the same inner life, etc. Yet each has appearances which are exclusively his own ... Only he experiences these in their very flesh, utterly originally. In a certain way, I also experience ... the other’s lived experiences; i.e., to the extend that the empathy (comprehensio) accomplished as one with the originary experience of the [b]ody is indeed a kind of presentification [Vergegenwärtigung], one that nevertheless serves to ground the character of co-existence in the flesh. To that extent, what we have here is thus experience [Erfahrung], perception. But this co-existence (“appresence” ...) does not, in principle, allow itself to be transformed into immediate originary existence (primary presence). It is characteristic of empathy that it refers to an originary [b]ody-spiritconsciousness but as one I cannot myself accomplish originarily, I who am not the other and who only function, in regard to him, as a comprehensionenabling [verständigendes] analogon. (Hua IV, §51, p. 198; Husserl 1989, p. 208; with translation changes, 1st emphasis mine)

This passage in nuce contains Husserl’s account of empathy. On this account, empathy is an “empirical experience (empirische Erfahrung)” sui generis (cf. Hua XIII, p. 187). Like its relative, perception, it involves “appresence” or, noematically speaking, “co-existence”: Just as we always already expect, say, a house that we are consciously perceiving from the front to display a co-existing back side and an interior, so we automatically conceive of a subject we are empathetic experiencing as undergoing a lived experience as originally experiencing it “from the inside”, in its “primary presence”. But unlike ordinary perception, empathy does not allow for an intuitive fulfillment of what is thus “appresented”; the empathetic experience is not an original presentation, but merely a “presentification” of the other’s lived experience (cf. Hua XIII, p. 188). In this respect, it is rather analogous to acts of memory or

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(mere) phantasy. For, unlike the back wall and the interior of the perceived house, the other’s consciousness is in principle unperceivable for the empathizing subject.5 The fact that in empathy we ascribe lived experiences to others “appresentatively” implies that in these cases we do not draw inferences, say, by analogy with our own case. In this respect, empathy is just as immediate an experience of its object as full-fledged perception. In the case of empathetic experience of someone’s perception, this immediacy is due to an underlying horizon of implicit expectations, or anticipations, on our part, to the effect that a being that looks and behaves more or less like ourselves, i.e., displays traits more or less familiar from our own case, will generally perceive things from an egocentric viewpoint similar to our own (“here”, “over there”, “to my left”, “in front of me”, etc.), in the sense that we would roughly look upon things the way he does if we were in his shoes and perceived them from his perspective. These anticipations automatically result from the empathetic experience’s noema. In this sense, we use ourselves as an analogon, as Husserl puts it in the foregoing quotation. In the terminology of his Cartesian Meditations, an instantaneous “pairing” occurs between the empathizing subject and the other (between their living bodies, to be more precise). 6 This renders the search for features common to ourselves and the empathized subject by means of analogical and other inferences superfluous.7 As we shall see later, there are other kinds of “analogizing”, too, which are in play, at times, in acts of empathy, according to Husserl. At any event, we have to use ourselves as an analogon precisely because empathy is bound to remain a mere presentification and the only case where lived experience presents itself to us in its full originality is our own one. Just like memory and phantasy, empathy involves an intuitive 5

Cf. Hua XIII, pp. 224ff. For a discussion of this notion, see McIntyre (2012, this volume), pp. 61-92, sec. VI. 7 Holmer Steinfath urged me to make this point explicit. See also sec. II of Drummond (2012, this volume), pp. 117-137. 6

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reproduction of its object, i.e. the other’s lived experience. This reproduction can be characterized as a kind of adapted self-projection: without actually giving up its own egocentric and motivational perspective on its surrounding world, the empathizing subject uses that perspective to put itself into the other one’s shoes to figure out what it would experience itself if it were in the other’s position. At this point a comparison with the conception of sympathy formulated particularly at the beginning of The Theory of Moral Sentiments suggests itself. Note that I refer to this conception merely as an object of comparison by contrast to which some distinctive features of Husserl’s account can be brought out more clearly. It is not claimed that it represents Smith’s full-fledged approach to understanding a person. III. Understanding a person According to Smith, “we have no immediate experience of what other men feel” (TMS I.i.1.1, p. 9). Here Husserl would agree, quite obviously. Smith continues that “we can form no idea of the manner in which they [others] are affected but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation” (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9 ), thus bringing the case “home to ourselves” (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9). Again, Husserl would agree. However, he would not subscribe to Smith’s characterization of how this “conceiving” actually works. According to Smith, we conceive “what we ourselves should feel” by means of imaginative identification with the other (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9). On this view (which has more recently been taken by Robert Gordon, too) we identify ourselves with the other in these kind of cases very much in the way a good actor, who “becomes one” with his role, identifies himself with the enacted character. Thus, Smith writes: By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation ..., we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, ... and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them, sharing some degree of the same emotion. (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9)

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When it comes to empathy in general, Husserl clearly rejects this characterization. In a lecture from 1910/11 he contends: ... wenn ich dem Du einen Zorn einfühle, bin ich nicht selber zornig, nicht im mindesten. (Hua XIII, pp. 187ff.)

That is: when I empathetically ascribe anger to you, I am not thereby angry myself, not in the least.8 Similarly, he criticizes “Hume’s doctrine of sympathy” for confusing “suggestive emotional infection (die suggestive Gefühlsübertragung)” with “true sympathy (dem wahren Mitgefühl)” (Hua XXXVII, §39, p. 193): Just as Hume is blind for the Ego as Ego, he fails to see that parallel and codirected feelings among communicating persons, as evident with mass suggestion, are far from qualifying as cases of sympathy [Mitgefühl]. Feeling compassion [Mitleiden] is not tantamount to suffering from the same thing as someone else but rather amounts to feeling with his sorrow [ihn bemitleiden], i.e. suffering from the fact that he suffers and because he suffers. Our sorrow is directed at the same object as that of the other person only indirectly. (Hua XXXVII. pp. 193f; my translation)

To illustrate this point, Husserl’s gives the example of the compassion he has on someone who lost his father, which involves sorrow about the fact that the other person laments the loss of his father, rather than simply sorrow about the death of the father (Hua XXXVII, §39, p. 194). 9 Husserl concludes that Hume’s “impartial spectator”, who is supposed to decide questions of objective value on the basis of pure, unselfish sympathy (à la Hume), is unable to feel those sentiments that really count with regard to ethics: notably sentiments, like true compassion (à la Husserl), “that refer to Ego-subjects (die auf Ichsubjekte bezogen sind)” and their personal traits and virtues (Hua XXXVII. pp. 193f.). It seems to me that this critique, if successful, applies to Smith as 8

I should add that Husserl does concede the imagination, in the form of pictorial representation in phantasy, an important role in many, but not all, empathetic phenomena; cf. Hua XIII, p. 188. 9 For a more detailed analysis of Husserl's description of this example see Kern (2012, this volume). Contrast TMS I.i.1.10, p. 12: “Sympathy ... does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it”.

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well, who not only takes up the idea of the impartial spectator, but also shares Hume’s view, attacked by Husserl, that sympathy involves parallel feelings – although he adds: Every man feels his own pleasures and his own pain more sensibly than those of other people. The former are the original sensations – the latter the reflected or sympathetic images of those sensations. (TMS VI.ii.1.1, p. 219) 10

For Husserl, by contrast, there are not even sympathetic images in play in cases like compassion; the intentional structure of the latter is essentially different from that of the feelings of the other which give rise to the sympathetic experience (see above). We are not simply dealing with a parallel feeling of lower intensity as compared to the “original” one. 11 Notice that in the foregoing passage Husserl speaks of “communicating persons” in connection with the phenomenon of “parallel and similarly directed feelings”. This almost sounds like an allusion to Smith, who states, in his discussion of the “rules of veracity” invoked by the casuists: The great pleasure of conversation and society ... arises from a certain correspondence of sentiments and opinions ... But this most delightful harmony cannot be obtained unless there is a free communication of sentiments and opinions. (TMS VII.4.28, p. 337)

Husserl could well agree, but still holds that a perfect “harmony of minds” (ibid.) such as this, whether delightful or not, is not to be confused with sympathy, let alone with empathy in general. 10

“Sympathetic image” must not be read as a success term (unlike “photographic image”). Cf. TMS I.i.1.10, p. 12: “We sympathize even with the dead”. 11 To be sure, Smith stresses that “our sympathy with sorrow" does not "amount to ... that perfect harmony and correspondence of sentiments which constitutes approbiation” (TMS I.iii.1.3. p. 44). However, this does not disprove the claim that on his view we are dealing with a case of paralell feelings here. Quite to the contrary: Smith refers to approbation as “perfect sympathy”, precisely because it constitutes a perfect “correspondence of sentiments” (TMS I.iii.1.3, p. 44; also cf. TMS II.i.5.8, pp. 76-7, where approbation regarding somone's resentment is equated with “adoption” of that resentment). Compassion is less perfect in this respect, but this is only a gradual difference.

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Nevertheless, the problem, raised by Smith, of how to bring “home to ourselves” the case of someone whose emotion, say his furiousness, we find ourselves unable to share in a given situation, arises for Husserl as well. He owes us an account of how we manage to empathize with someone when confronted by an interpretation problem like this. I will come back to his corresponding approach when I turn to a closely related antinomy raised by Husserl in §60 of Ideas II. Meanwhile, I continue my presentation of his general conception of empathy as developed in this work. Husserl draws a distinction between empathy as employed in the naturalistic attitude, call this empathy1, for short, and empathy as employed in the personalistic attitude, empathy2 (Hua IV, §§ 45ff, pp. 163-172; §56, pp. 228f; Husserl; also see Makreel 1996, p. 202); where he regards empathy2 as more basic, in terms of constitution, than empathy1 (Hua IV, §56, pp. 244ff; Husserl 1989, pp. 256ff). In empathy1, as I understand this notion, we conceive of the other’s consciousness along the lines of psychophysical dualism and assume causal relations to obtain between the physical behaviour we observe his human lived body to display and the lived experiences we ascribe to his soul on that basis; where on Husserl’s view even here we do not draw inferences (say, by induction or analogy) but proceed in a more direct manner. In empathy2, by contrast, we conceive of the other’s lived experiences as part of an inseparable body-spirit unity. This unity presents itself to us similiarly as, to cite Husserl’s example, the sentences or sentential sequencies of a text we are reading with understanding (cf. Hua IV, §56, pp. 236 ff, 244f; Husserl 1989, pp. 248ff, 255f). As Edith Stein puts it in her excellent 1917 dissertation On the Problem of Empathy, which was supervised by Husserl around the time he wrote Ideas II: We look upon the other’s physical behaviour as “the outside” of a “natural unity” also comprising a lived experience (Stein 1989, p. 77; cf. Hua IV, §56, p. 240). In empathy2, we do not understand the behaviour as caused by the inner experience, in the way we regard smoke as caused by fire (Stein’s example). To the extent that causation is a concept having its home in the naturalistic attitude, we do not

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employ causal notions at all when thinking of others on the basis of empathy2. Rather, we conceive of them in terms of what Husserl calls motivation, even in cases where empathy2 does not work like immediate sentence-understanding, as we are confronted with an interpretation problem: No causal research, no matter how far-reaching, can improve the understanding which is ours when we have understood the motivation of a person. (Hua IV, §56, p. 229; Husserl 1989, p. 241)

However, when empathy2 has served us to the determine the motives of a person’s behaviour, we can according to Husserl switch to the naturalistic attitude and turn our personal-level interpretation into a causal thesis about the sub-personal (i.e., physiological) processes underlying these motives, whatever those processes may consist in: ... the subject may, as indeed he normally does ..., posit the empathized subject, the fellow man and his lived experiences, as actualities and as natural realities ... and in that case ... the relation of motivation can be transformed into a real-causal relation, and the motivational ‘because’ into a real ‘because’. (Hua IV, §56, p. 233; Husserl 1989, p. 245)

It is important to keep in mind, though, that understanding the empathized subject’s motivation comes first, on Husserl’s view; without it, there would be no understanding of its behaviour; no causal hypothesis regarding the sub-personal level could per se yield such understanding, for the following reason: … the physiological processes in the sense-organs, in the nerve cells and in the ganglia, do not motivate me even if they condition, in my consciousness, psychophysically, the appearance of ... psychic lived experiences. What I do not “know” ... does not “determine” me as a spirit. And what is not intentionally included in my lived experience, even if unattended or implicit, does not motivate me, not even unconsciously. (Hua IV, §56, p. 231; Husserl 1989, p. 243)

Notice, however, that this argument does not show that understanding on the basis of empathy2, i.e. understanding achieved from the personalistic attitude, cannot be partly based upon causal hypotheses, formulated in personal-level vocabulary. Here motivation and causation, in particular

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mental causation, seem to coincide to a large extent. Thus, the present argument cannot be turned into an objection to Smith, who claims that we can sympathize, to a certain degree, with a passion quite alien to us when we have been “informed of its cause” (TMS I.i.1.6, p. 11). At some places Husserl does seem to acknowledge that the notion of real causation can be applied at the personal level, too; or rather that there are mixed according contexts where we partly take the personalistic and partly take the naturalistic attitude. Thus, he points out that we usually “apprehend” the lived body “as expression of spiritual live” and at the same time conceive of it as “conditioned ... by natural processes and to be apperceived as something of nature” (Hua IV, §57, p. 232; Husserl 1989, p. 244). But then, he also argues that motivation has to be kept apart in principle from what he calls real causation, for the following reason: ... it makes no essential difference whether or not the [sc. noematic; CB] correlates of the acts [sc. motivating us; CB] correspond to actualities. I am afraid of the ghost, perhaps it makes me quiver, although I know that what is seen is nothing actual. The dramatic action in the theater moves me deeply, although it is not something real, as I very well know. (Hua IV, §56, p. 232; Husserl 1989, p. 244; also cf. Hua IV, §55, p. 215)

I am not convinced by this argument. You might just as well argue: intentional objects have to be strictly kept apart from real (or actual) objects; for even in fictional thoughts we are intentionally related to objects, although these objects are not real, as we very well know. Anyhow, Husserl’s argument at least makes it plausible to assume that the notion of being motivated by an (actual or merely intentional) environmental object is more comprehensive than the notion of being caused by an environmental object, as employed in personal-level talk. Husserl therefore seems to be justified in regarding the former, rather than the latter, notion as central to his conception of empathy2, regarding which he writes: ... others are apprehended in analogy with one’s own Ego as subjects of a surrounding world of persons and things to which they comport themselves in their acts. They are “determined” by this surrounding world, or by the spi-

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ritual world that surrounds them and encompasses them, and, in turn, they exercise “determination” on it: they are subject to the laws of motivation. (Hua IV, §56, p. 229; Husserl 1989, p. 240)

Again, Husserl here stresses the element of analogical apprehension that is involved in empathy2 (which in what follows I shall refer to as ‘empathy’, for short). Now if this element is to be distinguished from analogical inference, as Husserl’s conception of empathy has it (see above), then how else ought it to be characterized? And how is it supposed to enable us to understand another person’s motivation, including its emotional motivation? Husserl starts from the observation that in the course of our individual development as persons we each of us gradually get to know ourselves better, especially when we step back at times and reflect on how we “comport” ourselves “under different subjective circumstances”, how we are “wont to be motivated” (“motiviert zu sein pflege[n]”) by our “patent and latent intentionalities of motivation” (Hua IV, §57, p. 248; Husserl 1989, p. 260). Such reflective self-experience teaches me “what sort of personal subject I am” (Hua IV, §57, p. 249; Husserl 1989, p. 261), what “personal features or properties of character” (ibid.) I possess. Husserl claims that these features become manifest primarily with respect to the personal environment, including the “goods” or “value things (Wertsachen)”, that I have constituted in the course of my individual development (Hua IV, §58, p. 252; Husserl 1989, p. 264). I suppose that he has a sophisticated, non-naive version of externalism about personal self-knowledge in mind here; but this supposition would lead us too far away from the current topic. In any case, he takes reflective, experiential self-knowledge regarding myself as a personal subject to concern “my peculiarities”, such as “my individual evaluations, my own way of preferring, my temptations, and my power of conquering certain kinds of temptations, against which I am invulnerable”, my “ethical goals”, etc., all of which distinguish me from others as a personal subject, but “within the bound of the normal, specifically within what is normal for youth, for age, etc.”, as Husserl puts it in §59 of Ideas II (Hua

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IV, §59, p. 254; Husserl 1989, p. 261). It is no coincidence that Husserl mentions individual temptations and the power to conquer such temptations in connection with the reflective experience of oneself as a personal subject or Ego in §59, which is titled “The Ego as subject of faculties”. For, the personal faculties (Vermögen) he means not least concern what distinguishes oneself as someone capable of resisting a temptation or “drive” from a being exclusively driven passively by its instincts: ... the personal Ego constitutes itself not only as a person determined by drives ... but also as a higher, autonomous, freely acting Ego, in particular one guided by rational motives ... Habits are necessarily formed, just as much with regard to originally instinctive behavior ... as with regard to free behavior. To yield to a drive establishes the drive to yield: habitually. Likewise, to let oneself be determined by a value-motive and to resist a drive establishes a tendency (a ‘drive’) to let oneself be determined once again by such a value-motive ... and to resist these drives. (Hua IV, §59, p. 255; Husserl 1989, p. 267; with translation change)

Thus, on Husserl’s view, habit and freedom, exercised on the basis of rational value-motives, do not per se stand in opposition to each other.12 There are habits with reference to which one can get to know oneself as a free, self-responsible subject displaying an individual style of exercising one’s freedom, e.g. by suspending one’s desires or temptations conditioned by drive or instinct, or in such a way that one ““consents”, says “yes” to the invitation of the stimulus ... and gives [one’s] “fiat in practice”” (Hua IV, §60, p. 257; Husserl 1989, p. 269). In this way, a self-image, or individual notion, of oneself as a self-responsible subject is formed, or rather brought to explicit self-consciousness. It is such personal self-notions (to borrow a term by John Perry; cf. Perry 1990) that are then made use of in understanding other persons, as we will see soon. As the foregoing passage from §59 makes clear, it is the ability to direct one’s will on the basis of rational reflection regarding one’s moti12

Quite to the contrary; cf. Hua XXVII, p. 63; headword: freedom as a habit of critical position-taking.

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ves, particularly one’s value-motives, that distinguishes a personal subject from an instinct-driven animal, according to Husserl (also cf. Hua IV, §60, pp. 267f; §61 p. 276; Husserl 1989, pp. 279f, 289). In §60, Husserl adds that the corresponding rational decisions of a personal subject are in turn evaluable, among other things, in terms of “laws of the power of motivation and of personal values”. He explains: The highest value is represented by the person who habitually bestows the highest motivational power on the genuine, true, valid and free decisions. (Hua IV, §60, p. 268; Husserl 1989, p. 280)

Of course, this conception of rational persons fits in well with Husserl’s ethics, as sketched at the beginning of this paper; in fact, it seems to directly reach into that ethics, and vice versa. Now on Husserl’s view, what distinguishes an individual personal subject from other such subjects is a “total” personal “style and habitus”, including “a certain pervasive unitary style in the way [the subject] decides by judgement and will” (Hua IV, §61 p. 277; Husserl 1989, p. 290; also cf. Hua IV, §59, p. 256). This latter style depends on the subject’s habits to let itself be determined by value-motives, that is, to return once again to what Husserl says in his ethics, by emotional valuings and, sometimes, also by accordingly motivated explicit value judgements, which are, arguably, higher-order evaluations: they concern the subject’s volitional motives, regarding which the free subject says “yes” or “no”. In the former case (“yes”) the respective motive becomes “a position-taking that issues from [the subject’s] own Ego”, as opposed to a mere stimulus coming from outside; the subject “annexes” it on his “own accord” (“eignet es sich selbsttätig an”), i.e. it internalizes the corresponding value (Hua IV, §60, p. 269; Husserl 1989, p. 281). By reflective self-experience the subject can become aware of the relevant habits of, partly emotional, self-motivation and the total personal style they condition, and thus form an explicit personal self-notion. Of course, it can also deliberately change this notion, and thus itself as a personal subject, by changing its personal values and habits of motivation, upon reflection.

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Personal self-notions are a special case of what Husserl elsewhere refers to, with regard to the use of proper names in personal idiolects, as individual notions;13 these are, so to speak, “mental files” (Perry 1990), opened when the subject starts experiencing, i.e. empirically constituting, a particular object; new entries enter as the course of experience proceeds, old entries are revised if necessary. The present version of an individual notion predelineates an intentional horizon of possible future experiences that are to be more or less expected, given the notion’s current entries (cf. Beyer 2008, pp. 175ff.). In the case of a personal selfnotion, this intentional horizon concerns “how such and such motives ... would affect me, how I, as the one that I am, would act and could act, how I could, and how I could not, judge, value and will” (Hua IV, §60, p. 265f.; Husserl 1989, p. 278). Now back to understanding persons. Since it is personal selfnotions, and the corresponding motivational systems, that distinguish individual personal subjects, where each subject has its own exclusive notion, there must be a way in which the empathizing subject reproductively presentifies (the relevant aspects of) another subject’s personal self-notion. Otherwise, empathy could not enable us to solve interpretation problems like the one manifesting itself in the second proposition of the following “antinomy” (Husserl): I can represent to myself that I would commit a murder, a theft, etc., and yet I cannot represent to myself that I would do so. (Hua IV, §60, p. 265; Husserl 1989, p. 277)

To resolve this antinomy, Husserl brings in the notion of a quasimotive. Quasi-motives are “neutrality modifications” of actual intentional motives (Hua IV, §60, pp. 261ff.). For instance, the intuitive imagination of a winged horse is a quasi-motive for a quasi-perceptual judgement, to the effect that one is confronted by a winged horse. The neutrality modification of a perception does not actually posit an existing object it is intentionally related to; but it throws light on an existential pos13

Cf. Hua XX/2, p. 358.

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sibility, here the possibility that there are winged horses. Similiarly, the neutrality modification of a practical motive, or of a deliberate action, throws light on a practical possibility, something the subject having the quasi-motive “could do”, or could be moved by (Hua IV, §60, pp. 263ff.), given its personal self-notion and the intentional horizon its current entries predelineate. It is in this sense that the second proposition of the above antinomy states that Husserl, as the personal subject he actually is, could not commit a murder or theft. What about the first proposition, though, stating that he could very well represent himself as if he committed the murder or theft? Husserl’s own paraphrase of this proposition14 is unsatisfactory: he reformulates it in terms of practical possibility, while his original point was that committing the murder or theft fails to be a practical possibility for him, given his personal self-notion. The key to solving this problem can be found in Husserl’s conception of analogizing, in conjunction with his idea of a quasi-motive. He contends that the “motivations and motivational powers” of others, considered as “subject[s] of acts of reasons”, i.e. self-responsible personal subjects, are accessible to us by means of what he refers to by the term “nachverstehendes Erleben”. The translators of Ideas II render this term as “empathy”; but it may be better translated as “understanding [comprehending] on the model of one’s own lived experience” (Hua IV, §60, p. 269; Husserl 1989, p. 282). This more literal translation brings out the analogy-character of understanding other persons emphasized by Husserl. For, while there are bound to be “universally human” features of the other person’s motivational system that are “typical in general with regard to the Ego in affection and in action”, other features will be “typical in particular and for the individual” (Hua IV, §60, p. 270; Husserl 1989, p. 282), so that they cannot be understood by experiencing quasi-motives that simply represent neutrality modifications of motives yielded by the empathizing subject’s personal self-notion: 14

Hua IV, §60, p. 265.

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I can comprehend in a particular case how this Ego is motivated: e.g., this man is now reaching for a cup because he wants to drink, and he wants to drink because he is thirsty. But in its generality, this has nothing to do with his person: it is something universally human. On the other hand, that he, for example, suddenly lowers the cup, without drinking, because he notices a poor child nearby who is hungry and thirsty, and that he hands the cup to the child, this manifests his “good heart” and does pertain to his personality. (Hua IV, §60, p. 270; Husserl 1989, p. 282; with translation change)

Personal motives deriving from individual personality or character call for a special mode of understanding: [A man’s] character, his personality, is a unity constituted in his course of life, as a subject of position-takings ... And insofar as one knows from experience analogous traits in different people, one can grasp “intuitively” ... the unity constituted, and therein one can have a guiding line for fulfilling the intentions in insightful intuition, by means of an analysis of the actual nexuses ... I put myself in the place of the other subject, and by empathy I grasp what motivates him and how strongly it does so, with what power. And ... I grasp what he is capable of and what is beyond him ... I secure these motivations by placing myself in his situation, his level of education, his development as a youth, etc., and to do so I must needs share in that situation [muß ich sie mitmachen]; I not only empathize with his thinking, his feeling, and his action, but I must also follow him in them, his motives become my quasi-motives, ones which, however, motivate with insight in the mode of intuitively fulfilling empathy. I co-share in his temptations, I coparticipate in his fallacies; in the “co-” there lies an inner co-living of motivating factors, ones which carry their necessity in them. Admittedly, there are still unsolved and unsolvable remainders here: e.g., the original dispositions of character, which, however, I can indeed also, by analogy, make clear to myself and understandable. I am phlegmatic for the most part, but occasionally I am incited to vivacity and mirth; they spring up after indulging in stimulants, for example ... Analogously, someone else is constantly and predominantly disposed toward mirth: he is habitually, and from the first, similar to me after I have had a glass of wine. (Hua IV, §60, p. 275; Husserl 1989, pp. 287f; with translation changes)

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In the first paragraph of this passage Husserl describes the more or less obscure “premonotion” (Vorauserfassen) (Hua IV, §60, p. 274; Husserl 1989, p. 286) of someone’s personality that occurs when we immediately read off a person’s character from the behaviour he displays in a relevant situation, like, for instance, in Husserl’s example about the poor, thirsty child. Such a premonotion does not yet qualify as proper, insightful understanding. To achieve such understanding, one has to consciously put oneself “into the place of the other subject” and intuitively reproduce its motivation. The initial premonition generates a horizon of relevant expectations. These expectations can be intuitively fulfilled, or dissatisfied, by consciously simulating the other’s motivation in the pretense-mode or off-line, to use a more recent terminology, i.e. in the mode of neutrality modification. This recourse to off-line simulation may be looked upon as a more precise characterization of what Smith describes as “put[tting] ourselves” in the “case” of someone else by means of “imagination”, on the basis of our knowledge about “the situation which excites” the relevant lived experience in the other person (TMS I.i.1.12, p. 12). Husserl describes this phase of the understanding process in the third paragraph, where, like Smith, he stresses the significance of the relevant “situation” but also explicitly makes recourse to quasi-motives, a notion we do not find in Smith. As we have already seen, quasi-motives usually derive from the intentional horizon predelineated by the empathizing subject’s current personal self-notion. Near the end of the foregoing quotation, however, Husserl draws attention to a difficulty that arises in this connection, stemming from the fact that the motivational systems of different persons diverge: he points out that even in conscious empathy there are “unsolved and unsolvable remainders”, on the ground that the empathized subject has a different “original disposition of character”. This is basically Smith’s problem of bringing home to ourselves the case of someone whose, e.g., furious behaviour we do not understand. To solve this difficulty, the empathizing subject can use its own personal self-notion to reproductively presentify, to itself, the relevant aspects of what would be the other’s personal self-notion, notably by intuitively drawing ap-

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propriate analogies with its own case. Husserl’s wine-drinking example is well-suited to illustrate this point. By means of “quantitative augmentation” (Hua IV, §60, p. 275; Husserl 1989, p. 288) of the happy mood familiar to Husserl from what he uses to experience when drinking a glass of Badischer Wein, he can bring home to himself the other person’s permanent disposition toward mirth and thus form, by analogy, the quasi-motives enabling him to understand the motivation of such a person. The same goes for understanding the emotional motivations, and the associated personal values, of another personal subject, or so I would argue. By means of analogizing, the emphasizing subject may simulate, off-line, the emotional valuings the other person would experience in a relevant situation, although, given its on-line motivational system and personal self-notion, the subject does not share those values and is therefore incapable of sympathizing with the other, at least if we conveive of sympathy along Smithian lines. Conscious off-line simulation by analogy with our own case still allows us to understand the motives of a person that is in this sense alien to us.15 Bibliography Arp, Kristana (1996) “Husserlian intentionality and everyday coping”, in T. Nenon and L. Embree, (eds.), Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 161-171. Beyer, Christian (2006) Subjektivität, Intersubjektivität, Personalität – Ein Beitrag zur Philosophie der Person, Berlin/New York: Verlag Walter de Gruyter. Beyer, Christian (2008) “Noematic Sinn - General meaning-function or propositional content?” , in F. Mattens, (ed.), Meaning and Language in Phenomenological Perspective, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 169-182. 15

I am indebted to Henning Peucker for his helpful comments on the penultimate version of this contribution.

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Drummond, John J. (2012) “Imagination and Appresentation, Sympathy and Empathy in Smith and Husserl”, in Fricke and Føllesdal (eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 117-137. Føllesdal, Dagfinn (2008) “The emergence of justification in ethics”, in Michael Frauchiger and Wilhelm Essler (eds.), Representation, Evidence, and Justification: Themes from Suppes, pp. 51-65. Husserl, Edmund (Hua) Husserliana - Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, The Hague/Dordrecht: 1950. Husserl, Edmund (1989) Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy – Second Book , transl. by R. Rojewicz and A. Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Makreel, Rudolf (1996) “How is empathy related to understanding?”, in T. Nenon and L. Embree, (eds.), Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 199-212. McIntyre, Ronald (2012) “ “We-Subjectivity” – Husserl on Community and Communal Constitution”, in Christel Fricke and Dagfinn Føllesdal (eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 61-92. Perry, John (1990) “Self-notions”, in Logos, 1990, pp. 1-17. Peucker, Henning (2012) “Husserl’s Approaches to Volitional Consciousness”, in Fricke and Føllesdal (eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 45-60. Smith, Adam (1976) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, D.D. Raphael and A.L Macfie (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press; Liberty Press imprint 1982. Stein, Edith (1989) On the Problem of Empathy, Washington: ICS Publications.

5 Imagination and Appresentation, Sympathy and Empathy in Smith and Husserl John J. Drummond I. Introduction Smith’s discussions of the imagination and of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments immediately evoke not only Husserl’s notions of appresentation and of empathy but also Hume’s discussions of the role of the imagination. This last point is not unimportant, since Husserl held Hume’s work in high regard. He greatly appreciated the radicality of Hume’s questioning spirit. The extent of Husserl’s positive appraisal is reflected in his claim that …[i]n truth this Humean psychology is the first systematic attempt at a science of pure conscious givenness; it is, I would say, an attempt at a pure egology even though Hume had described the ego as a mere fiction. It is a psychology of the tabula rasa that, in a radical abstinence, seeks to utilize nothing but what is discovered immanent to the tabula rasa, that is, to utilize only the immediately evident inventory of consciousness… We can also say, Humean psychology is the first systematic and universal outline of the concrete constitutive problematic, the first concrete and purely immanent theory of knowledge. At best we can also say that Hume’s Treatise is the first sketch of a pure phenomenology, but in the form of a purely sensualistic and empirical phenomenology. (Husserl 1956, pp. 156-57, my translation)

We can understand what Husserl means when he speaks of the “concrete constitutive problematic” when he says of the Kantian appropriation of Hume: Kant speaks of the “Humean problem”. What is the actual problem, the one which drives Hume himself?… If we proceed this way, we find nothing less than this universal problem: How is the naïve obviousness (Selbstverständlichkeit) of the certainty of the world, the certainty in which we live – and, what is more, the certainty of the everyday world as well as that of the sophisticated theoretical constructions

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built upon this everyday world – to be made comprehensible (zu einer Verständlichkeit zu bringen)? (Husserl 1970, p. 96, translation modified)

Of course, Husserl ultimately rejects anything like a Humean empiricism and the skepticism that trails in its wake, not to mention the “fictionalism” of Hume’s account of objects and of the ego. For Husserl a “comprehensible” account of the “naïve obviousness” of the world, of the ingrained “realism” of our natural experience – both everyday and theoretical experience – requires not a psychological account but a transcendental one. For Husserl, transcendental philosophy is an attempt to respond to the question about the transcendence of mind. How is it that a subject’s experience transcends itself and apprehends a transcendent object? A transcendental philosopher might answer this question in two ways: the first, Kantian way is to assume the existence and validity of certain kinds of knowledge of the world (the synthetic a priori propositions of physics, for example) and to ask what are the conditions that make such experience possible. But this approach avoids Hume’s radical question about the very possibility of the experience of objects at all, much less theoretical experience. A second, phenomenological approach is to ask what subjective performances and achievements are essentially involved in grasping an object and, even more importantly, grasping it in evidences that truthfully disclose the object. On this understanding of phenomenology, Hume is more a phenomenologist than Kant. In contrast to Kant, then, for whom transcendental philosophy involved regressive and reconstructive arguments identifying the prior conditions that must be satisfied for the validity and objectivity of the knowledge we take for granted as existing, Husserl adopted a descriptive approach to philosophy. Husserl’s task was to identify the essential structures that, when instantiated, account for our experience of objects. The phenomenological reduction turned the question from the objective validity of knowledge or, more precisely, the objective validity of the application of the categories to a sensible manifold, to the question of the significance objects have for us and how that significance is disclosed or realized in our experience. The questions about the transcendence of mind became questions about the significance of objects, the subjective achievements in which that significance is disclosed, and the evidence by means of which we establish the truthfulness

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of that significance for an intersubjective community. In brief, transcendental philosophy for Husserl is characterized by a descriptive methodology that seeks to identify the essential structures – both subjective and objective – in the disclosure of objects in their significance for experiencing subjects. What, then, in Hume’s account of the imagination and Smith’s successor account would a transcendental philosopher of this sort admire, and why? What in Hume’s philosophy is anticipatory of transcendental philosophy? The answer is the imagination. The imagination for Hume is both reproductive and creative. We see the imagination at work in these two roles in Hume’s account of the causal inference and his account of the idea of a distinctly and continuously existing object. In inferring an effect from a cause, the previous experience of the constant conjunction of A with B leads us, upon the impressional experience of A, to the idea of B. Since, however, B has not yet occurred, it is the imagination that supplies the idea of B in completing the causal inference. But this is a merely reproductive role; the imagination supplies what has been previously and regularly experienced over time, that is, the idea of B. In the case of the idea of a continuously and distinctly existing object, however, the imagination goes beyond the merely reproductive function. The imagination fills in the gaps in the interrupted lived course of experiences of A and its variations, experiences that cohere with one another over time.1 In filling in the gaps, the imagination supplies ideas that go beyond what is actually experienced in sensation and what can be supplied by memory. The experienced impressions and ideas are discontinuous; the object as experienced is continuous. Because we have no proper impression of continuity, that feature of the object as experienced can arise for us only to the extent that the imagination provides ideas that fill in the gaps in the discontinuous stream of experience and, by virtue of the constancy and coherence of the sensory and memorial experiences of A, enlivens the force and vivacity of those ideas. Since the object is given as continuous when our experience is not, the imagination further projects the object as distinctly existent. 1

Hume (1978), pp. 187-218. Henceforth: T.

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In describing how the imagination produces this idea of the continuously and distinctly existing object, Hume appeals regularly to what he calls “propensities” of the imagination, for example, the propensity to fashion a “fiction of the imagination” that takes constant perceptions to be identical (T, pp. 200-1) and the propensity to unite separated appearances by the “fiction of a continu’d existence” (T, p. 205), that is, to supply ideas where impressions are lacking. In exercising these propensities the imagination becomes productive and creative, and it accounts, at least in part, for the very sense of the object as continuously and distinctly existing. The imagination fulfills a transcendental function insofar as it discloses the object as having a particular sense for us prior to any active reflection on the object by us. This Humean notion of a productive and creative imagination is inherited by Smith, and it plays a crucial role in his discussions of both theoretical and practical objectivity, although for Smith the imagination functions differently in the theoretical and practical domains. I shall note three contrasts between Smith and Husserl that revolve around points Smith makes regarding the imagination. These contrasts will be fruitful in sharpening our understanding of the interplay between the notions of intersubjectivity and objectivity and how this interplay manifests itself in both the theoretical and practical domains. These contrasts not only illuminate the differences between the two thinkers but also highlight the differences between the empiricist and phenomenological traditions. II. Objectivity The first contrast is this: As productive and creative the imagination for Smith in the theoretical domain organizes experience into a unified and coherent account. It does so, in an account very reminiscent of Hume’s, by seeking out constancies and coherence and by filling in the gaps in what is experienced. Smith goes beyond Hume, however, in at least two respects: (1) Whereas Hume appealed to the imagination in explaining our common beliefs in causality and the existence of body, Smith more importantly appeals to the imagination in the explanation of scientific and theoretical accounts of the universe, and (2) Smith stresses the fact that the imagination undertakes these activities in order to produce order

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and harmony – and, with this, a kind of beauty or elegance – in our theoretical understandings. There is a kind of teleological direction in Smith’s account of the theoretical understanding. However, and here is the point I wish to stress, Smith’s account of the imagination in the cognitive domain is comparable to Hume’s in so far as there is no necessary reference to intersubjectivity in fashioning our common or theoretical conceptions of objects and the world. In the practical order, on the other hand, the imagination is for Smith supplemented by sympathy. Our experience of another as a person requires the exercise of the sympathetic imagination, and this sympathetic imagination underlies sociability, our communal life, and morality itself. Smith’s notion of sympathy is very broad. As he puts it, “[p]ity and compassion are words appropriated to signify our fellow-feeling with the sorrow of others. Sympathy, though its meaning was, perhaps, originally the same, may now, however, without much impropriety, be made use of to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatsoever” (Smith 1976, I.i.1.5, p. 10).2 In the technical, Smithian sense, sympathy is a notion having epistemic significance as well as affective and axiological significance. It is that by means of which the feelings of others are conveyed to us and understood by us and that by means of which we evaluate other agents.3 The sympathetic imagination and the fellowfeeling appropriate to it necessarily involve both a spectator and the person with whom the spectator sympathizes. This apparently entails – and this is the other side of our first point—that any objectivity achieved by the sympathetic imagination in the practical domain necessarily involves an intersubjective community of moral beings. For Husserl, on the other hand, all forms of objectivity – whether that of everyday or theoretical experience – necessarily involve an appeal to intersubjectivity and do not appeal to imagination as a constructive faculty.4 There are three senses in which Husserl speaks of the inter2

Henceforth: TMS. Cf. Charles Griswold (2006). 4 This last claim requires some qualification. The imagination is at work for Husserl in achieving the knowledge typical of both scientific and a priori disciplines. But this work of the imagination is, I would argue, very different from the kind of work that the imagination does in Hume and, while Smith’s account is perhaps closer to 3

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subjectivity of consciousness: (1) what he calls “open intersubjectivity” (Husserl 1973, p. 289),5 (2) the concrete and fulfilled experience of other subjects,6 and (3) the intersubjectivity which establishes a linguistic, cognitive, and practical normality.7 Most of the attention devoted to Husserl’s discussions of intersubjectivity has been directed to the second kind of intersubjectivity, my experience of the factually existent other as animate body and ego like me. It is important, however, that we recognize explicitly the constitutive role played by the first kind of intersubjectivity. Husserl, we have said, characterizes all experiences, to the extent that they are experiences of transcendent objects, as intersubjective. The first sense of intersubjectivity as “open intersubjectivity” is sufficient for the constitution of an object, although the richer and more complete senses of intersubjectivity and objectivity are not yet fulfilled. Experiences involving only the first sense of intersubjectivity, we might say, are not intersubjective in fact but intersubjective in intention. To say that the experience of a transcendent object always involves at least an open intersubjectivity is to say that the sense of an object as transcendent always includes the sense that it is an object for us and not merely for me, that it is accessible to others. As Husserl puts it: “The existence-sense (Seinssinn) of the world and of Nature in particular, as Objective Nature, includes after all…thereness-for-everyone” (CM, p. 92/124). It is part of my sense of the object that other subjects (can) simultaneously experience the object from different perspectives or under different aspects. To put it yet another way, the other with whom I intersubjectively intend the world is always and from the first co-intended,8 even if not always concretely experienced as part of my encounter of the world.

Husserl’s, the imagination for Husserl is not constructive but disclosive when it works within the theoretical sciences, and it demands fulfilling experiences of a sort that the Smithian imagination does not. 5 Cf. Zahavi (2001), pp. 50ff. 6 Husserl (1963), pp. 137ff. / (1970), pp. 106ff. Henceforth: CM, followed by English/German page number. 7 Zahavi (2001), pp. 86ff. 8 CM, p. 107/137.

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This sense of “open intersubjectivity” is fulfilled both in our concrete experience of other persons and in our experience of the intersubjectivity of historical communities shaped by living traditions. The concrete experience of other persons – the second level of intersubjectivity – is, of course, enormously complicated. At the risk of oversimplification, I shall concentrate briefly on the apperceptive and appresentational dimension in our experience of another person as experiencing sensory states and undertaking bodily movements, for it is here that we find a central difference from Smith. Husserl does not appeal to the imagination to account for the experience of the objectivity of transcendent objects, and he does not, by extension, appeal to the imagination for his account of other subjects. Husserl characterizes our concrete experience of the other – at least its basic stratum – as empathic and as involving an “analogizing apperception” (CM, §§49–54). This apperception occurs immediately with – that is, as a part of – the perceptual experience of the other’s body; it is not an inference that is the result of an analogical argument. As perceptual, the analogizing apperception does not involve the imagination. The experience of other persons focuses on experiencing another body as a living organism capable of bodily motility and having sensuous feelings and kinaesthetic sensations of the sort involved in perception. Here, then, is the oversimplification: The (perceptual) experience of another includes as moments (1) the perceptive recognition that presents the other’s body and its bodily activities and (2) the apperceptive awareness that appresents as the source of these bodily activities another free, conscious agency like mine. In a fuller account of intersubjective encounters, we can point to bodily activities of various sorts: the other’s (uncaused) stretching or her moving from place to place or her moving so as to perceive better some object in our shared world, or her gestures, or her use of language. But Husserl’s focus is originally on the movements of the body involved in perception. By virtue of the similarity of another perceived body with my own body and of the perceived movements of that body with my own movements, I appresent in the perceptual presentation of the other’s bodily motility another conscious agency – in particular, the sensory and kinaesthetic experiences involved in her

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perceptual motility – even though I can have no direct presentation of the other conscious life that animates this motility. I neither imagine nor infer the presence of this conscious agency; I experience the other person in (not through) the perceptual presentation of the other’s bodily activities.9 The activities of the other’s body in relation to the things in its field of activity – movements caused neither by other physical objects nor by me – are similar to my own activities when I freely act in relation to objects in my field of activity. Given the relation between such activities and the course of my own conscious life, the experience of the other’s activities is such that I experience empathy (Einfühlung). I experience a “feeling-in” (Einfühlung) the other and recognize the other as having the kind of visual and tactile sensations, kinaesthetic sensations, and somatic experiences of the sort I have. More simply put, in perceiving the other’s bodily activities I empathically recognize another conscious life. A cognitive transaction begins in this empathic experience, for I can understand the other’s claims about the world only to the extent that I can empathize the other’s perceiving life, thereby recognizing other possibilities for experiencing the world from different perspectives and with different interests. In the act of empathy itself, however, these other perspectives do not become mine (although I might in other acts appropriate them for myself). The similarity of my bodily states and activities and those of the other body do not lead to a synthesis of identification; the other’s movements and perceiving are not experienced as mine because the other’s bodily motility has a source independent of my own somatic capabilities. Our bodies are instead “paired,” and I recognize another person, irreducibly different from me but like me, who shares a world with me insofar as our bodily and perceiving activities are directed to the same objects.10 In brief, in Husserl’s account – an account, it is worth recalling, developed within his account of the objectivity of theoretical knowledge – the other person is a perceiving, cognitive agent who is like me but irreducibly different from me and who co-constitutes the world with me. 9

CM, §§50ff. CM, §§50ff.

10

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In this light we can understand the first levels of objectivity and intersubjectivity. Why is it that I have said that open intersubjectivity is sufficient for constituting an object? It is because the pairing involved in the analogizing appresentation of the factually existent other is impossible apart from, first, my pre-reflective awareness of my own animate body as having its own space and my awareness of another body like mine and to be paired with it. This other animate body, as body, is experienced “prior” to pairing, as it were, as a spatially enclosed object with its own position in space. The awareness of a perceived body having a space and position of its own requires, however, that the body be presented in a manifold of appearances, a manifold of sides or aspects. I can individually experience these other sides or aspects in a temporally extended and continuous experience. But the sense of a body presented as having many sides and aspects includes the sense that the different sides of the spatial body temporally coexist; it is not simply the case that they exist in succession. This sense of temporal coexistence can in any single moment be experienced only by a multiplicity of subjects, since my own view is always confined to one side or aspect at a time. It is, consequently, part of the sense of an object having its own space and position that it is at any single moment jointly and simultaneously experienceable from different sides or aspects, i.e., that it is experienceable by an intersubjective community. In other words, part of the sense of any spatially enclosed object with its own position in space, including the body of another, is that while I am looking at the front of the object, other perceiving subjects could simultaneously be viewing other sides and aspects of the object from different perspectives. It is in this sense that any experience of a spatially enclosed object with its own position in space presupposes an open and indefinite intersubjectivity community; it is in this sense that any experience of a spatial body necessarily co-intends other subjects as potential perceivers of this same body at the same time from different perspectives. While the experience of the animate body on which the concrete experience of the other is grounded emptily intends this open intersubjectivity, the concrete experience of the other evidentially fulfills this intention. The intention is fulfilled only when actual others are concretely experienced – as described above – as belonging to

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and experiencing the same world as I do. At this level, the sense of objectivity is more completely realized. If Husserl is correct in this account, then objectivity is not the achievement of a kind of imaginative projection, as Smith, following Hume, would have it. More important, while it is true for Smith that theoretical achievements typically involve a community of researchers whose imaginative insights into the world are confirmed and reconfirmed by multiple subjects, it is also true that the reference to the community of inquirers does not appear to be a requirement of Smith’s theory of theoretical objectivity. For Husserl, on the other hand, the very sense of objectivity, even at the lowest levels of its formation in a single subject and even in the purely cognitive domain, requires a reference to intersubjectivity, at least in intention. And this reference is realized in the concrete apperception of the appresented other and augmented in the informing of our individual view of the object by the views and opinions of others as well as by the cultural inheritances handed down in the traditions into which we are born. III. Sympathy The second contrast I shall explore departs from the fact that for Smith the experience of sympathy is grounded in our understanding of the situation of the person with whom we sympathize and involves the imaginative insertion of ourselves into that situation. Smith describes both the problem to which the notion of sympathetic imagination is a response and the response itself: As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this in any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation,

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we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception. (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9)

Once again Smith, no matter how indebted to Hume for his account of the imagination, departs from Hume. Sympathy in Hume is grounded in the resemblance among humans and augmented by considerations of contiguity and causation.11 Recognizing the signs and manifestations of an emotion in another and the resemblance of these to our own behaviors when experiencing an emotion, we imaginatively produce the idea of the emotion in ourselves. When the person in whom we experience the emotion is like us in character or manner and is closely related to us, either by proximity or blood, the idea is enlivened in such a way that we experience the same emotion within ourselves. For Hume, sympathy means that the spectator comes to have an emotion that he believes the person with whom he sympathizes has, and the spectator comes to have this emotion precisely because he believes the other has it.12 Smith, on the other hand, because he bases sympathy in our imaginative projection of ourselves into the other’s circumstance, allows – rightly, I believe – for the possibility of sympathizing with another without sharing the other’s emotion.13 The quotation above reveals a certain tension in Smith’s thought. He suggests that by the imagination we not only put ourselves in the other’s situation but we become “in some measure the same person with him”. But it is, I think, the point about inserting ourselves in the other’s situation that carries the day for Smith. He makes this point repeatedly in his discussions of the sympathetic imagination. For example, he says, “that this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that 11

T, pp. 316-20. Broadie (2006), pp. 162-63. 13 TMS, I.i.1.10, p. 12. 12

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it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels” (TMS I.i.1.3, p. 10), and again, “the compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation, and, what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with his present reason and judgment” (TMS I.i.1.11, p. 12). In the last quotation, Smith suggests that, indeed, far from “becoming in some measure the same person” with the other, we do not even fancy ourselves the other at all but that it is our own emotional reaction to the other’s situation that we imagine. We put ourselves in the other’s shoes, but we do not identify ourselves with the other. Smith’s view of sympathetic imagination means, then, that practical experience necessarily involves a reference to intersubjectivity – in particular, to spectatorship – and that sympathy works by a kind of imaginative insertion of the self into the situation of the other rather than through identification with the other. I think Smith’s view that we do not identify ourselves with the other is an advance over Hume’s view, and on this point, Smith and Husserl are much closer, although important differences still remain. Nevertheless, the notion of “putting oneself in another’s shoes” is itself somewhat problematic. Husserl’s account of our affective encounter with other persons extends the same basic line as his account of the empathic encounter of the other in the co-constitution of objects. Evaluative and moral objectivity follow the same pattern. Let us look at this in more detail. The account of empathy, while providing a model and a foundation for describing the experience of another person having affective and moral experiences and having moral worth, cannot alone suffice for that description, for the person experienced in empathic appresentation need be no more that a cognitive agent. We must also account for our experience of another as an agent having not merely sensory states and kinaesthetic sensations but the kinds of object-directed feelings, emotions, and desires that move that agent to act in certain ways for the attainment of certain ends. For this reason, we must consider more closely those aspects of the experienced body like mine, which aspects underlie the appresentation of another person as a moral as well as a cognitive agent. In

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particular, we must consider the other’s body as a bearer of emotions and moods and as expressive of those emotions and moods as well as of choice. We often experience our own bodily motility as infused with particular or general feelings.14 In what follows, I shall emphasize these general feeling-characteristics simply by way of example. We can appresentationally empathize such general feeling-characteristics in the life of others in experiencing, say, the vigor or sluggishness of their walk, their posture and bearing while standing or sitting, or their facial features. Our concern here is not with particulars feelings, say, of anger or embarrassment or delight; we can “see” how the other feels in general. We feel ourselves into the other by analogically appresenting the feelings we have given the same sort of bodily comportment in ourselves. Once again, there is no synthesis of identification; it is the other’s general condition that we appresent without, however, our becoming the other or the other becoming us and without (necessarily) experiencing ourselves the other’s feelings or moods. The other’s irreducible distinctness, preserved as it is in empathic experiences, remains intact throughout. Moreover, in experiencing these general feeling-characteristics, we can also recognize the other as having morally significant needs and wants. This recognition apprehends the other as a moral agent, but it is not yet a moral response to the other. It is only when I take the satisfaction of the other’s need or want as, in some sense, my own good that I respond morally in my encounter with the other. It is insufficient to appresent the felt need or want of the other; I must take the satisfaction of this need or want of the other as my own good even if I do not experience the same feeling as that experienced by the appresented other. Just as empathy underlies a cognitive transaction, so sympathy, this “feelingwith” that grasps the other’s need or want as mine, underlies a moral transaction. In recognizing, for example, the needs for food, warmth, and shelter, we recognize fundamental needs whose satisfaction is necessary for life and for the material security without which we cannot pursue other human goods, e.g., the goods of the workplace or of the intellect. 14

Stein (1989), pp. 68-71.

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The perceptually present bodily characteristics appresent to us the other as one having needs and wants of the sort that, in us, motivate actions ordered to the attainment of human goods. The emaciated face and body of the hungry person, his or her stooped shoulders, and the vacant look in the eyes appresent to us the other’s felt needs for food, shelter, and warmth. Recognizing the necessity of these fundamental goods in themselves and feeling along with the other the lack of these goods in the other’s life, I might also feel compassion. I might, as it were, suffer along with the other, and this compassion moves me to act for the other’s sake. This is just one example of a moral response to the other. What I want to claim, however, is that it reveals a pattern common to our moral responses to others. My empathic experience of the other as having morally significant emotions, needs, and wants engenders other affective responses that move us beyond recognition to action. The empathic experience of the other is the foundation for more complex experiences of the other. For example, I sympathize with another and “share” her object-directed feelings or emotions, not necessarily by reproducing them in myself, but by sharing them in a way that enables me to recognize the sources of and reasons for the other’s feelings or emotions.15 A moral response to another person, in other words, moves beyond empathy (Einfühlung) to sympathy (Mitfühlung) and compassion (Mitleid), where these terms are understood in broad senses comparable to the breadth of Smith’s understanding of sympathy. In feeling-with the other person (rather than merely empathically recognizing feeling-in the other), we empathically recognize object-directed feelings and emotions of the other and recognize as well the other’s reasons for feeling as he or she does. In this feeling-with we are motivated to other responses, both affective and actional; we experience motives – and perhaps even felt

15

I have explored the relation between feelings and (moral) evaluations and the rationality of the emotions in several papers. See Drummond (1995); Drummond (1996); Drummond (2001); Drummond (2002); Drummond (2004); Drummond (2006a); Drummond (2006b); Drummond (2008); Drummond (2009); and Drummond (2010).

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necessities – to act in a manner that seeks as our own good the other’s good.16 There is an additional aspect to the objectivity we find in the practical sphere, and it has an analogue in the cognitive sphere. Our valuings of objects involve common knowledge, viz., our empirical and scientific knowledge of the things of the world as well as our cultural understandings of their purposes and functions and of evaluative and moral concepts. Our culture embodies a sense of how we ought to react affectively to various situations and actions, both our own actions and those of others. These intersubjective understandings are forged in our discussions of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of our affective responses and of the correctness or incorrectness of our judgments, including our value-judgments, as well as in our common elucidation of the goods to be pursued in a flourishing life. It is in this context of a common and public elucidation that the value-judgments we make – as well as our interests – must withstand critical appraisal by others and not merely sympathetic identification. Finally, this common knowledge, including our collective determinations of choiceworthy goods and praiseworthy actions, is not only broadly accepted by persons making contemporaneous judgments, but transmitted to subsequent generations as a set of traditional beliefs, customs, and practices. We are born into societies that have fashioned for themselves a set of beliefs regarding the value of various things, practices, institutions, and so forth. These beliefs are transmitted to new generations by means of the stories we tell young people, the songs we sing, and even the games we play. These stories, songs, and games position youth to identify the value-relevant properties of things, persons, and actions and to have the appropriate affective response – the moral response – to them. These stories, songs, and games provide the young with the series of particulars in which they can see the similarities underlying our understanding of value as such. In this transmission, however, the critical moment does not cease; there is a continuing internal criticism of the norms adopted by the community. 16

Husserl (1973), pp. 172-75; cf. Robert Sokolowski (1985), pp. 54-55.

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Just insofar as these societies comprise persons concerned with action aimed at the realization of the good of their members, they are moral communities wherein one person takes another’s good (or, in the case of the immoral agent, another’s bad) as his or her own good. Such moral communities, then, embody an understanding of the goods to which the community and its members are directed as well as an understanding of the variety of virtues conducive to these goods. We can see here why compassion is a – if not the – fundamental social emotion and why justice is the fundamental social virtue. Continued, reciprocal acts of justice, grounded in a compassionate valuing of the other’s good, confirm and refine the community’s sense of justice and not only benefit individual persons targeted by just actions, but produce a just order in the community as a whole. It is, therefore, not enough to say that we exercise our individual choices in the communities in which we live and subject our judgments and actions to intersubjective criticism; our moral understandings themselves, our valuings, and our choices are passively shaped by the traditional moral understandings we inherit by virtue of being born into particular communities. These understandings are then actively appropriated (or rejected) by the responsible agent in his or her co-constitution of a moral order. We can still further deepen this account of our moral experience of the other. Cultivated sympathy and compassion incline us toward the recognition of the other as a moral agent worthy of our own moral attention, but sympathy and compassion can run the risk of motivating paternalistic or even oppressive actions. Hence, it is important to re-emphasize a central feature of empathy and, by extension, a correct understanding of sympathy and compassion. On the basis of a perceived bodily similarity, we have said, I recognize a more fundamental conscious similarity without, however, annihilating the difference and independence of the other. I do not identify myself with the other; I do not, as it were, “stand in the other’s shoes” or “become in some measure” the other. The other’s activities are not, and cannot be, experienced as mine, because the other’s bodily motility and expressive activity has a source independent of my own somatic capabilities, and it is shaped by different attitudes, different interests, a different background, and, perhaps, a different history. I empathically recognize another person, different from

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me but like me, who shares a world with me insofar as our bodily and perceiving activities are directed to the same field of objects. Similarly, in experiencing the other’s feelings, moods, emotions, and desires, I do not identify myself with the other or become the other or live in the other’s feelings and moods. The other is always irreducibly other, and the recognition of the irreducibility of the other – a conscious, free being in her own right – creates the moral space in which we can locate respect. 17 The account of empathy and of the sympathy and compassion that can rest upon it, then, falls short of, but is a necessary part of, an account of moral respect. It is a necessary part because this basic form of empathy is required for any experience of the other as other. It is insufficient because in order for respect to arise as a moral emotion we must also experience the other as one fit for moral attention and appraisal, as one who has the kinds of feelings, emotions, and desires that both move that agent to act freely in certain ways for the attainment of certain ends and that require a moral response from us, and as one who, as an irreducibly other source of conscious willing, has an autonomy that my own actions, however well motivated, should not cancel. In this entire range of experiences of the other, however, the focus is always on the other whom I experience and the goods that are at stake in the notion of a flourishing human life. In grasping the similar, yet irreducibly different other who is a being with moral worth and himself or herself a moral agent, I necessarily also apprehend the situation in which the other moves, perceives, believes, is affected, acts, and so forth. But my focus is on the person in the situation, not, as for Smith, primarily the situation into which I then imaginatively insert myself in order to understand how I might feel in that situation. I believe that this focus on the other as morally worthy and as a moral agent provides a better foundation for understanding our moral transactions than sympathetically imagining the other’s situation and determining whether my response to that situation accords with that of the other.

17

See Drummond (2006a).

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IV. Impartiality Finally and very briefly, our third contrast involves Smith’s extension of the notion of imaginative sympathy. We have seen that sympathy is tied to being a spectator, and Smith develops this notion into that of an “impartial spectator”.18 Smith says, for example: …as nature teaches the spectators to assume the circumstances of the person principally concerned, so she teaches this last in some measure to assume those of the spectators. As they are continually placing themselves in his situation, and thence conceiving emotions similar to what he feels; so he is as constantly placing himself in theirs, and thence conceiving some degree of that coolness about his own fortune, with which he is sensible that they will view it. As they are constantly considering what they themselves would feel, if they actually were the sufferers, so he is as constantly led to imagine in what manner he would be affected if he was only one of the spectators of his own situation. As their sympathy makes them look at it, in some measure, with his eyes, so his sympathy makes him look at it, in some measure, with theirs, especially when in their presence and acting under their observation. (TMS I.i.4.8, p. 22)

When I as agent sympathize with the situation of the spectators witnessing my reaction to a situation and witnessing my actions, I gain reflective distance from my original emotion. When I generalize this operation, I gain multiple perspectives on my actions and my dispositions to act in certain ways. Our generalized view of the judgments of sympathetically imagined sympathetic spectators, because the imagined spectators do not identify with us and our partial interests, is the viewpoint of an “impartial” spectator, albeit not an ideal spectator. I cannot explore this interesting notion in more detailed ways. I think, however, that what I would want to say about it is already to some extent clear. Smith’s impartial observer is, in a very important sense, self-centered. I mean this not in the sense of an egoism, but in the sense that my sympathetic imagining of sympathetic spectators always puts me in the situation wherein I am sympathetically imagining myself insofar as I sympathetically imagine not only others but how those others might experience me. This is rather different from Husserl’s view of moral objectivity, which, as we have seen, is built upon the varying perspectives 18

Broadie (2006), p. 158.

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of irreducibly different conscious agents. It is the disclosure of moral truths by multiple agents that grounds the objectivity of our moral judgments. In conclusion, please allow me to say that I think that what I have suggested are the deficiencies in Smith’s view relative to Husserl’s are the consequence of his empiricistic inheritance. Smith must appeal to the imagination for the very reasons stated at the beginning of the long quotation at the beginning of this paper. In that theoretical framework, the other cannot be directly brought into his theory; it can only be imaginatively imported and that only in such a way that is really a matter of imagining myself in the other’s situation. In Husserl’s case, on the other hand, the other, precisely as other, is built into the very fabric of intentionality and our experience of the world. Intersubjectivity and objectivity, hard to seamlessly incorporate in Smith, are from the beginning co-implicated in Husserl.

Bibliography Broadie, Alexander (2006) “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator”, in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, (ed.) Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 158-188. Drummond, John J. (1995) “Moral Objectivity: Husserl’s Sentiments of the Understanding”, in Husserl Studies, pp. 165-183. Drummond, John J. (1996) “Agency, Agents, and (Sometimes) Patients”, in The Truthful and the Good: Essays in Honor of Robert Sokolowski, (ed.) J. Drummond and J. Hart, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 145-157. Drummond, John J. (2001) “Moral Encounters”, in Recherches husserliennes 16, pp. 39-60. Drummond, John J. (2002) “Aristotelianism and Phenomenology”, in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy, (ed.) J. Drummond and L. Embree, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 15-45.

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Drummond, John J. (2004) ““Cognitive Impenetrability” and the Complex Intentionality of the Emotions”, in Journal of Consciousness Studies 11, No. 10-11, pp. 109-26. Drummond, John J. (2006a) “Respect as a Moral Emotion: A Phenomenological Approach”, in Husserl Studies 22: 1-27. Drummond, John J. (2006b) “The Good and Negative Obligation, the Tolerable and the Intolerable”, in Tolerancia / Toleration / Tolerância: Interpretando la experiencia de la tolerancia / Interpreting the Experience of Tolerance, (ed.) Rosemary Rizo-Patrón de Lerner, Lima, Peru: Fondo Editorial, pp. 27-40. Drummond, John J. (2008) “Moral Self-Identity and Identifying with Others”, in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 8, pp. 1-15. Drummond, John J. (2009) “Feelings, Emotions, and Truly Perceiving the Valuable”, in The Modern Schoolman 86, pp. 363-79. Drummond, John J. (2010) “Self-Responsibility and Eudaimonia”, in Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl, (ed.) C. Ierna, H. Jacobs, F. Mattens, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 411-30. Griswold, Charles (2006) “Imagination: Morals, Science, and Arts”, in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, (ed.) Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 22-56. Hume, David (1978) A Treatise of Human Nature, (ed.) L.A. SelbyBigge and P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Husserl, Edmund (1956) Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Erster Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte, (ed.) R. Boehm, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1962) Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, (ed.) W. Biemel, 2nd ed., The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl , Edmund (1963) Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, (ed.) S. Strasser, 2nd ed., The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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Husserl, Edmund (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. D. Carr, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, Edmund (1970) Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. D. Cairns .The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1973) Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921-1928, ed. I. Kern, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Smith, Adam (1976) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, D.D. Raphael and A.L Macfie (eds), Oxford: Clarendon Press; Liberty Press imprint 1982. Sokolowski, Robert (1985) Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stein, Edith (1989) On the Problem of Empathy, trans. W. Stein, Washington, DC: ICS Publications. Zahavi, Dan (2001) Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-Pragmatic Critique, trans E. Behnke, Athens: Ohio University Press.

6 Mengzi (Mencius), Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl on Sympathy and Conscience Iso Kern Because during the last 20 years I have been mostly dealing with questions in Chinese philosophy, I shall start in this paper from the perspective of the Chinese philosopher Mengzi. More precisely, I start from his conception of a feeling of spontaneous sympathy as origin or seed of the virtue of benevolence or humanheartedness (ren 仁), which is for him, and even more for his successors in later centuries, the first and most important human virtue. First I shall try to understand this concept of sympathy phenomenologically and ask the question if sympathy in this sense is by itself sufficient to provide the principles of the virtue of benevolence or humanheartedness. From this point of view I shall then examine whether Husserl’s idea of empathy (Einfühlung), i.e. of putting oneself imaginatively in the perspective or situation of the Other in order to understand the Other, and Adam Smith’s somewhat similar idea of sympathy, as taking in fancy the place of the impartial or indifferent spectator in order to judge of one’s own passions, affections and conduct, could be further necessary ingredients of that virtue of benevolence or humanheartedness. In this context, I shall finally be led to the concept of conscience. I. Compassion, suggestive infusion of feelings and re-presentation of the point of view of another sentient being Mengzi, who lived in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC and whose name was Latinised in the 17th century by the Jesuit missionaries as ‘Mencius’, distinguished four human virtues. Besides benevolence or humanheartedness he conceived of three other virtues, which one can approximately translate as “social correctness” or “justice”, as “courtesy” and as “wis-

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dom”. He thought that all these virtues must not be, and could not be, merely artificially imposed on the human being from outside through social influence and pressure, but that they are disposed as spontaneous feelings in the human heart or mind. The dispositions of the virtues in the human heart or mind are not yet the virtues, but their origins or seeds. Mengzi offers the love that children have for their parents as an origin of humanheartedness or benevolence. For the origin of this virtue he also gives two other very intuitive examples which I would like to comprehend phenomenologically. For him these examples provide the arguments that a human being whose nature or heart is not corrupted “cannot bear” the sight of the suffering of another human being or any other sentient being. We can say that these examples are examples of the feeling of sympathy in the literal sense of compassion. In one place he says: Every man has a heart that cannot bear to see the suffering of others. Here is why: Suppose that all of a sudden a man were to see a young child on the verge of falling into a well. He would certainly be alarmed and moved with compassion (chu ti ci yin zhi xin 怵惕恻隱之心). This is not because he wanted to get into the good graces of the child’s parents, nor because he wished to win the praise of his fellow villagers or friends, not even because he disliked the child’s crying. From this [example] it can be seen that whoever is devoid of the heart of compassion is not human. (II A)1

The other example is the following. A king asked Mengzi if he, as the king, was capable of protecting and bringing peace to the people of his kingdom. Mengzi answered by saying that the king was capable in those regards, basing his answer on the following story he had heard about him: The king was sitting in the upper part of the hall when a man led an ox through the lower part. The king noticed this and asked: “Where is the ox going?” The man answered: “The blood of the ox is to be used for consecrating the new bell.” The king said: “Spare it. I cannot bear to see it trembling with fear, like an innocent man going to the site of execution.” The man asked: “In that case should the ceremony be abandoned?” The king answered: “That is out of the question. Use a lamb instead.” From this behaviour of the king Mengzi drew the conclusion 1

The Book of Mencius, Book II, first part, chapter 6.

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that the king had a heart which made him capable of becoming a good king. He told the king: “The people all thought that you grudged the expense, but for my part, I have no doubt that you could not bear [to see the suffering].” The king agreed and said: “How could there be such people? My country may be a small state, but I am not quite so stingy as to grudge the use of an ox. It was simply because I could not bear to see it tremble with fear … that I used a lamb instead.” Mengzi answered that he must not be surprised by the people’s wrong opinion, since he used a small animal instead of a big one. “If you were disturbed by the animal’s going innocently to its death, what was there to choose between an ox and a lamb?” The king was confused about what was going on in his heart. On the one hand he allowed replacing the ox with the lamb, not out of stinginess, but because he could not bear the trembling of the ox; on the other hand he still allowed killing another innocent animal. Mengzi enlightened him about his feelings and seemingly contradictory behaviour by saying: “You saw the ox but you did not see the lamb. The attitude of a gentleman towards animals is as follows: Once he has seen them alive, he cannot bear to see them die, and once he has heard their cry, he cannot bear to eat their flesh” (I A 7). Mengzi’s explanation of the king’s behaviour towards the ox and the lamb reminds us of a general phenomenon: When we, for instance, merely read about a natural disaster or some other suffering of other human beings in a newspaper, without imagining intuitively the disastrous situation, or when we merely hear about them verbally on the radio, we do not usually respond spontaneously and strongly to the call for help for these sorely afflicted people. The best method of getting us to sympathize and thereby to help consists of showing the images of the misery of other human beings on TV. When we see these images, we are usually struck by the misery on display and swayed towards helping these suffering people. Spontaneous sympathy is not linked to mere sensory perception. The motivating images on TV are not mere sensory perceptions, but they are re-presentations (or presentifications, Vergegenwärtigungen) through images, and they are based on phantasy. Intuitive memories or any intuitive phantasy of a verbally depicted distressful situation of other human beings can also arouse spontaneous sympathy.

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For many Confucianists in the history of Chinese philosophy, these examples of the origin of the virtue of humanheartedness or benevolence were arguments for the seeds in the human heart that can yield moral perfection through proper nurture. They were probably therefore the most important arguments, since for these Confucian philosophers the virtue of humanheartedness was not only the most important virtue that eventually contained all the other virtues in itself, but also because in Mengzi’s account, the seeds or origins of the other virtues are much more difficult to grasp. In one place2 Mengzi identifies a feeling of respect (jing 敬) towards other human beings as the origin of the virtue of justice or social correctness, and in another place he identifies the origin of this virtue as a feeling of shame and a feeling of loathing. One can make sense of these two characterizations in situations where one feels spontaneously ashamed when one treats other human beings disrespectfully, and where one loathes being treated disrespectfully by other people. Mengzi gives an example for the second case in a special context:3 A beggar can refuse the food that is vital for him when it is tossed to him with a kick and words of abuse; thus, he loathes such a disrespectful treatment. In this context Mengzi does not want to show that there is a seed for the virtue of justice in the human heart. Instead, he wants to show that sometimes man loves justice more than his own life. Mengzi doesn’t give any examples for the feeling of shame we have when we treat other human beings disrespectfully or unjustly, but we can come up with one by ourselves: When someone performs a task for us which we asked him to do, and we then compensate him unreasonably and disrespectfully, we will be ashamed of ourselves. As the seed of the virtue of courtesy, Mengzi sees a feeling of reverence (gong jing 恭敬) towards other human beings (VI A 6), or a spontaneous regard or giving of precedence (ci rang 辭讓) towards other human beings in certain circumstances (II A 6). However he gives no examples which could make what he means clearer. In Mengzi’s account, the virtue of wisdom is even more difficult to comprehend; he calls this seed a “heart that affirms or denies” or “that approves or disapproves” (II A 6; VI A 6). 2 3

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It is amazing that after more than 2000 years and in a completely different culture, Mengzi’s above quoted examples of sympathy are immediately intelligible for us as well and they still make sense. Mengzi appears to be bringing up something universally human. How can such a sympathy be more clearly comprehended phenomenologically? For the time being I shall try to find other examples for such sympathy which can provide the “origins or seeds of human virtues”. We also know the experience in which, when a human being cries over his painful situation before us, we become affected in such a way that we have a spontaneous tendency to help him in his predicament somehow. Is such spontaneous sympathy always a kind of pity or compassion for another human being or another sensitive being which finds himself or itself in a situation that is bad for him or it? There may well also be a kind of spontaneous joy in other people’s successful behaviour and action, e.g. when we see a small child taking its first steps or when we read a good paper by a student, and a sympathetic tendency to give them something helpful or in other ways to promote them in their actions. This spontaneous tendency to do something good for them can become the virtue of generosity. Another joyful spontaneous sympathy is perhaps the gratitude we feel naturally towards other human beings who give us something good or help us out of the goodness of their hearts. In this feeling of gratitude there is a tendency to reciprocate the kindness of the other people through an appropriate action. This spontaneous feeling can also become an important virtue. In the gratitude towards God, Thomas Aquinas saw the root of the virtue of devoutness or religion.4 Perhaps, among such emotional “seeds” of virtues, one should also count the spontaneous behaviour of human beings, especially children, to point at something in the surroundings and thereby make it noticeable to other people or communicate what or how something is, their spontaneous aversion to saying something wrong or their tendency to negate that which is wrong; for the virtue of truthfulness could originate from this. The tendency to tell the others the truth is more original than the tendency to deceive others: Children tell the truth before they are able to deceive. Several such spontaneous emotional tendencies of the human heart appear to be inti4

S. theol. II/II, q. 106. a. 1.

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mately connected, such that they can be developed into genuine virtues only in their unity. For example, a truly compassionate human being is necessarily also a grateful, considerate, respectful, just, truthful human being. These feelings and tendencies are not different human capabilities that can be realized separately as, for example, a mathematical and a musical skill can be developed separately from one another. My first question is the following: How can one phenomenologically characterize such spontaneous sympathetic feelings and tendencies as intentional lived-experiences? One can start by highlighting the following two points. First, it is characteristic for these feelings intentionally to refer not merely to one’s own situation, as can be the case for the feelings of joy, sorrow, pleasure, anger and fear. Instead, these sympathetic feelings and tendencies intentionally refer to situations as they are for other people or for other living beings. One sympathizes in a situation which involves, for instance, an incident distressful or dangerous for another human being. Or one is ashamed that one’s own behaviour towards another human being is disrespectful or insulting to him. Or one searches for a gift which is pleasant for another human being. Or one is grateful that one received something pleasant out of the generosity of another human being. Thus, such sympathetic feelings have an intentionality not merely towards something in one’s own situation, but also towards the situation as it is for other people or other living beings. Second, these feelings, which are intentionally directed towards the situation of other people, motivate actions for the sake of other people or other living beings in their situation, and they find their fulfilment only in these actions. A sympathy with a human being which does not effect a corresponding action for him turns out to be fake or it dies off. Thus, there are feelings which contain tendencies to act for other living beings: For example, the sympathy in the case of seeing the child falling into the well contains the tendency to keep him from falling in or to get him out if he has already fallen in. The feelings which intentionally refer merely to one’s own situation do indeed contain in themselves tendencies to move; these however are not tendencies to act for other people. Instead, they are expressive movements or emotional gestures, such as jumping or cheering out of joy, crying or shrieking in sorrow,

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shouting or fighting in anger, or retreating in fear. These expressive movements are in unity with the feelings which they “express”, and they are not actions for others; these feelings are expressed in movements, but they are not carried out in actions. Such feelings cannot become virtues either. The mere joy felt from receiving a gift is not yet the feeling of gratitude. Thus, those sympathetic feelings are not merely feelings, but at the same time also tendencies to act for the other. However, these two qualifications provide only a very rough initial characterization of those social feelings. How can we have a clearer understanding of, for example, the sympathy with the child falling into the well, or with the trembling ox being taken to the place of sacrifice? Is it a kind of “infusion of the others’ affections” into ourselves, as Hume explains it?5 In doing so, Hume takes his point of departure from the experience of a good-natured man who finds himself in an instant with the same humour as his company. He explains this by saying that the countenance and conversation of our companions convey to us first an idea of their affections. “This idea is presently converted into an impression, and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity as to become the very passion itself” (T, p. 317). Here Hume takes sympathy to be a kind of suggestive infusion of feeling or of sympathetic resonance. Another way of understanding the sympathy with the child falling into the well, or the ox being taken to the place of sacrifice, would be through the account provided by Adam Smith: He conceived the fundament of sympathy as “changing places in fancy with the sufferer”. 6 Such an account of sympathy would thus consist in imaginatively putting oneself into the situation of another human being or another living being, and imaginatively feeling his or its situation from his or its standpoint. Both of these descriptions, however, do not seem to take into account the examples provided by Mengzi. When we are dismayed by the sight of the child on the verge of falling into a well and strive to hold him back from the danger, we do not adopt the child’s feeling. This becomes explicit if we take a similar example: I remember a winter walk with my older sister many years ago. We suddenly saw her son, who was 5

Hume (1978) Treatise, Bk. II, section XI, Selby-Bigge, p. 317. Henceforth: T. Smith, Adam (1976/79) The Theory of Moral Sentiments I.i.1.3, p. 10. Henceforth: TMS. 6

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about five at the time, lying facing down on a sled as he was whizzing down a steep slope with enormous speed. We were both alarmed, to the extent that I and certainly also my sister had the tendency to hold him back from such dangerous ventures. My sister told me she could not watch her son riding down so fast; as Mengzi put it, she could “not bear” to see her son in this dangerous situation. However, she did not hold him back from it. Instead, she looked away to avoid the sight that was unbearable for her. She explained to me that she already had to forbid her children so many things that she did not want also to forbid her son these racy sled rides; until now nothing had happened, and that has to be why she believed it would continue to be okay. This example shows two things. First, we were alarmed to see the little rascal in that dangerous situation, but this feeling of being frightened could not have been infused into us from him, since he himself was not alarmed by riding fast but found it to be a lot of fun and very amusing. Second, my sister then refrained from intervening at the alarming sight of this sled ride that was dangerous for her son because in her imagination she put herself in her son’s position, she understood that riding fast was very desirable and enjoyable for her son, and she did not want to disrupt this gratification. Thus, rather than explaining her scare in seeing the ride as possibly becoming distressful for the little rascal, and her tendency to hold him back from it, putting herself imaginatively in his place just accounts for overcoming this primary and spontaneous tendency. To take another example: When we suddenly see an adult who deliberately wants to throw himself into a well or jump off a high building, we are alarmed, and we also have quite spontaneously a tendency to somehow prevent such a thing from happening; but in seeing this alarming situation, we do not adopt from the other person the feeling of being tired of life, i.e. we do not sympathize with him in this sense. Or consider still another example of this most elementary and immediate sympathy. Thirty years ago after my father died we could, in those good old times, still keep him at home for five days until bringing him directly from our home to the church for the requiem and then to the cemetery. He was lying during these five days on his habitual bed in his bedroom. It was in a rather cold month of March, and the windows had to be kept

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open to assure a low temperature in his room. When I saw him lying on his bed, wearing only a thin white shirt and covered by his blanket only up to his chest, at first sight I “could not bear” to see him lying so unprotected in the very cold room and I felt spontaneously the tendency to draw his blanket up to his throat. Only after putting myself at his “point of view” as dead, I understood that he no longer had sensations of cold or warmth and I could overcome my first spontaneous feelings and tendencies for him. In the case of seeing a child falling into a well, how are we to account for the scare and “not-being-able-to-bear” it, if this can neither be understood as an infusion of the feelings of this child nor as an imagination of the situation as it is perceived and emotionally experienced by this child? We must stick to the following facts: We are thus alarmed, not because the situation is experienced as dangerous for us, but because it is experienced as dangerous for another human being; we are alarmed for an Other, and we have the tendency to do something, not for ourselves, but against the situation which is dangerous for the other human being. In his lectures on ethics from 1920,7 Husserl reproaches Hume’s theory of sympathy for confusing genuine sympathy with the suggestive infusion of feeling. In this context he writes: “Pity does not mean suffering from the same thing as the Other [does], but [it means] pitying him, suffering from the fact that he is suffering and because he is suffering”.8 However, Husserl’s characterization of pity as suffering from the fact that the Other is suffering and because he is suffering also doesn’t seem to work for Mengzi’s examples we have cited. Anyone who suddenly sees a child on the verge of falling into a well is not alarmed at or does not suffer from the fact that the child is alarmed or that he has fear or pain as he is on the verge of falling in. However, immediately after the sentence we’ve quoted, Husserl continues, as if he wanted to account for the same state of affairs: “Our pity is only indirectly directed towards the same object as the suffering of the Other. When I pity the Other due to the death of his father, I do not directly suffer from the death of his fa7 8

Hua XXXVII. Ibid., p. 194.

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ther, but from the fact that he has lost his father”.9 It seems to me that in this second characterization of pity, Husserl is saying something different than the first one: He is no longer saying that in pity we suffer from the suffering of the Other, and suffer because he is suffering. Instead, he is saying that “we suffer from the fact that he has lost his father”. In this pity we suffer from a situation that is distressful for an Other and not from the fact that he is suffering and because he is suffering. We can of course also “suffer from the fact that the other is suffering and because he is suffering”. But this is not the same thing as “suffering from the fact that the Other has lost his father”, and not the same thing as the sympathy Mengzi brings up in his examples. “Suffering that the Other is suffering and because he is suffering” is something more complex than the suffering from the situation that is distressful for the Other, and may well be something secondary compared to this suffering. It seems to me that the “suffering from the fact that the Other is suffering and because he is suffering” contains a reflective re-presentation (presentification, Vergegenwärtigung) of the Other’s feelings and sensations, whereas the suffering from the situation that is distressful for the Other is phenomenologically more spontaneous, more original and in its structure of consciousness more straightforward. It corresponds precisely to our previous description of sympathy in Mengzi’s examples: We suffer from the fact that an external situation is mournful for another human being; we mourn for him. The death of the Other’s father is not directly mournful for ourselves (perhaps we had never known the Other’s father personally), his death is not a loss for us. However we are thereby affected and unsettled as this situation is for the Other. We mourn for him. And this pity is also not merely a feeling, but it contains a tendency to do something: Namely, the tendency to console the other human being, to somehow assist him in his suffering, to do anything that can take also the conventional form of condoling. Also, this sympathy with the misfortune of another human being as well as its tendency to comfort the Other is a feeling and a tendency which we already find in children of about two, whereas the capacity to reflect the feelings of other people, which presupposes imaginatively 9

Ibid., p. 194.

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changing places with other people, appears one or two years later in the child’s development. Reflection on the feeling of the Other – for example, on how he feels about the death of his father and why he feels that way, why he mourns so much about it and is not capable of getting over his mourning, and our mournfulness about the fact that he is so mournful – is something different than the spontaneous mournfulness about the situation that is distressful for the Other. Although he does not do so in this lecture on ethics from 1920, in a research manuscript which is probably linked with this lecture and is published as Appendix XXIV in Husserliana XIV on the phenomenology of inter-subjectivity, Husserl himself brings forth this distinction. Here he writes: The Other is saddened that his mother has died, that his fortune is lost etc. I am also saddened about it, but I am also saddened that he is saddened. Which one is primary here? Is his mourning … the object of my mourning, or is what is saddening for him primarily something saddening for me? (Hua XIV, p. 189)

Within the same text Husserl also tries to establish a rudimentary parallel between sympathizing with another human being and remembering one’s own past perceptions, feelings and volitions. However, this rudimentary attempt leads into an aporia. He begins with the proposition: “One can say: Normal remembering is something like sympathy.”10 For in normal remembering we actually co-perform the belief of our own remembered perception: We not only remember believing in the reality of what was then perceived in the past perception, but we also believe in the reality of what was then perceived: “There is co-belief in the normal memory. One could say that it is the belief-sympathy.” 11 This beliefsympathy ceases when we in the present remembering realize that we were perceptually deceived at the time of our perception which is remembered now, or that our past perception was an illusion. And analogously we can “sympathize” with the remembered feelings, desires, volitions and actions, but we also cannot do so when we change in our feelings, volitions etc.12 However, Husserl then argues against this attempt to find a parallel between sympathy with the feelings of other 10

Hua XIV, p. 185. Ibid., p. 185. 12 Ibid., p. 185. 11

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people on the one side, and the “sympathy” with the remembered perceptions, feelings and volitions of one’s own on the other side: “But is the situation the same on both sides? In remembering, the present position-taking [doxa] is the continuous positing, continuous extension of my own old position-taking that remains habitually in me; this is out of the question for empathy (Einfühlung).”13 In these considerations, when Husserl attempts to conceive of the sympathy with other people as being in parallel with the current co-performance of one’s own past beliefs, feelings, volitions in memory, he alludes to a kind of sympathy with other people that is not only phenomenologically distinct from the suffering about the fact that an Other finds himself in a situation which is distressful for him, but also distinct from the suffering from the fact that the other is suffering and because he is suffering. The sympathy with the Other, with which Husserl attempts to bring in line the “sympathy” with the remembered perception and feeling of one’s own, is neither a sympathetic feeling for the Other nor a feeling about the Other’s feeling. Instead, it is a kind of accord with the Other’s feeling. It is a kind of what Max Scheler calls “fellow feeling (miteinander fühlen)” in his The Nature of Sympathy: This is the case, for example, when parents rejoice together in the birth of their baby, and they are aware of themselves as united in this joy. Now my main question is: Does this scare about a situation dangerous for an Other, the mourning over a situation distressful for an Other, or generally speaking, the spontaneous feeling for an Other in his situation already contain in itself a re-presentation (presentification, Vergegenwärtigung) of the subjective lived-experience of the Other, does it include an imaginative re-presentation of his subjective perception, feeling and volition of something as experienced from his own point of view? Or is the most original manner in which we experience a situation as a situation for another living being a mere feeling for this other living being, without our at the same time re-presenting cognitively the experience of this other being in its own perspective? Is the most original manner in which we are conscious of another being for whom something is there, i.e. as another subject, a mere emotional participation 13

Hua XIV, p. 186.

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in his situation and a tendency to act for him in his situation? The elementary feelings for Others certainly contain presentations, namely perceptions of the situation in which the Other is involved, and perceptions of his behaviour in this situation. However, these presentations are not re-presentations of the Other’s subjective lived-experiences, which are not at all sensuously perceivable as such. Does the emotion for the Other as the subject of his situation have a priority over the re-presentational understanding of the Other as a subject of his lived-experiences, such as his feelings, perceptions, volitions? Is it true that, without having to represent the experiences of another subject, we can already feel for him as a living subject of his situation? As Husserl stresses time and again in his phenomenology of empathy, understanding another experiencing subject means re-presenting this subject imaginatively from his own point of view. This means re-presenting imaginatively how he perceives, feels, wills or doesn’t will things from his own perspective. It means, as Husserl says, imaginatively putting oneself in the perspective of the Other. In my opinion this is right. Yet it still seems to me that those elementary feelings for the Other as described by Mengzi do not yet necessarily contain such cognitive re-presentations, as obtained by putting oneself imaginatively at his standpoint (“into his shoes”). I was amazed and felt confirmed in this view when I read again recently in the Greek language another well known example of immediate compassion from a completely different cultural tradition. It was the story of the good Samaritan told by Jesus in the 10 th chapter of Saint Luke in answering the question of the Lawyer, who was the person next to him. In this story Jesus says that when the Samaritan saw the person lying there half dead, stripped and beaten by the robbers, he “was moved with compassion” (“seized by compassion”) and helped him. The Greek expression which struck me, and which I rendered by “was moved with compassion” or “seized by compassion”, is esplangchnisthe from the passive verb splangchnizomai. The corresponding substantive (nomen), ta splangchna, means first the bowels, entrails, intestines, specially the more noble intestines like the heart, the lungs, the liver; in a figurative sense it also means the interior of one’s heart or soul. The verb splangchnizomai is not widespread in the ancient Greek literature but appears only in Greek texts with a Jewish background, as in the Septua-

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ginta (for instance, the Book of the Maccabeans) and in the Synoptics of the New Testament. As a Hebrew scholar kindly informed me, behind this Greek word stands a Hebraic expression which as nomen also means the entrails and as verb also to be moved with compassion. The interesting aspect of these Greek and Hebraic expressions in the context of compassion and sympathy is the passive form and the origin as a designation of the entrails of a living body. This indicates that the Samaritan’s compassion described by this passive verb is meant to be a passive feeling of “going through the stomach”, i.e. affected with bodily sensations, rather than an active imaginative re-presentation or understanding of the feelings and perceptions of the Other from his point of view. In three chapters of his Gospel, Saint Luke uses the passive verb splangchnizomai, which I translate by “to be moved with compassion”, and he uses it always in connection with the verb ‘to see’ (ideîn) and always in the meaning of an immediate feeling of compassion leading to an action of helping.14 Perhaps, as Mengzi thought, the elementary feelings for others such as compassion, shame, respect are the original impetus of virtues. However, as Mengzi also says, they themselves aren’t virtues yet. Instead, they need to be cultivated for the purpose of becoming virtues. Now I presume that the reflective consciousness, in which one imaginatively puts oneself in the perceptual, emotive and volitional point of view of another living being and imaginatively re-presents how “the world feels” from its point of view, is necessary in order to change emotional sympathetic drives into virtues. Let us again take the example of my sister, who was alarmed for her little son when she saw him on his 14

Besides the passage just quoted from Ch. 10, splangchnizomai (“to be moved with compassion”) also appears in the same Gospel by Saint Luke in Ch. 7 when Jesus, near to the gate of the city of Nain, saw a widow with her only son dead: “he was moved by compassion” and raised her son from death; and again in Ch. 15, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, this passive verb appears when the father saw from afar his returning suffering son: “he was moved with compassion and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him”. Splangchnizomai is also used with the same meaning in the Gospels of Saint Mark and Saint Matthew, when Jesus saw the people “without shepherd” and “was moved with compassion” and taught them (Mk, 6.34; Mt 14.14); when Jesus saw the hungry people, he “was moved with compassion” and gave them bread (Mk 8.2; Mt 15.32); and when Jesus saw the two blind men outside Jericho, he “was moved with compassion” and healed them (Mt 20.34).

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sled ride that was dangerous for him but nevertheless did not hold him back from it. She understood, i.e. she was re-presentationally conscious of the fact that this sled ride was extremely enjoyable from her son’s point of view, and thus she did not want to take this joy away from him. If we conducted ourselves towards the Others only on the basis of our immediate sympathetic feelings for them, we often wouldn’t act for their good. An immediate reaction within the emotional affect for the Other in his situation can hurt him. A re-presentational understanding of how a human being perceives and experiences his situation is necessary for a good ethical relation with this human being. Also the good Samaritan, when he was, in the words in the Gospel of Luke, “doing his compassion (poiein to eleos )”, had to put himself imaginatively in the point of view of the man deprived and wounded by the robbers in order to do appropriately all the things necessary for his salvation and wellbeing. He had to understand him in his feelings, perceptions and wishes from his point of view. However, such a re-presentational imagination of how the situation for another living being looks from his point of view still in itself does not yet contain any moral impetus to relate to him in an ethically proper manner. For we can also imaginatively re-present the world from the point of view of another human being in order to deceive or cheat him better, to rob him or even to kill him. Such a re-presentational understanding of other human beings can also serve the purpose of successfully achieving selfish interests and of stifling every immediate sympathetic feeling for the Others. When I wish to steal successfully the money from another person’s pocket, I have to understand by imaginative representation this other person’s perceptions and the direction of his attention. Husserl speaks in his phenomenology of “empathy” (Einfühlung), of the re-presentational understanding of the Other’s point of view, without attributing any moral character to this understanding in itself. This “empathy” can be performed without immediate sympathy (in the sense of Mengzi), just as this immediate sympathy is possible without that representational empathy. The proper impetus of a good ethical relation with the other living being would then still be the “seeds of virtues” in Mengzi’s sense of a sympathetic participation in the situation

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of the Other, although by themselves these immediate emotions and tendencies to act for the Other do not suffice to become virtues; to become virtues they have to be supplemented by an empathic (representational) understanding of the lived-experiences of the Other. II. Adam Smith’s theory of moral self-evaluation through “sympathy” I have not yet raised the problem of moral evaluation of our acting out of compassion or out of sympathy. How do I know that I am acting morally when I am acting out of sympathy? It is time to turn to Adam Smith, who considered sympathy to be the principle “by which men naturally judge concerning the conduct and character, first of their neighbours, and afterwards of themselves”.15 What is this “sympathy” phenomenologically, which according to Smith is the principle of moral approbation and disapprobation? When, in view of this workshop, I read again the chapter “Of Sympathy”, which is the first one in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I was perplexed by the multiplicity of meanings with which Smith uses the word ‘sympathy’ without explicitly distinguishing them. These different uses reach from – at the lower end – the immediate and mostly unconscious sympathetic resonance in behaviour, as when (as Smith writes) “[t]he mob, ... gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist their own bodies” (TMS I.i.1.3, p. 10) or the immediate “transfusion” of affection that may “arise merely from the view of a certain emotion in another person” expressed in his “look and gestures” (TMS I.i.1.6, p. 11) to – at the upper end – the very sophisticated sympathy with the impartial, indifferent and well-informed spectator judging of one’s own passions, affections and conduct. I shall not try to analyse the seven or more different meanings of the word ‘sympathy’ appearing in Smith’s Theory. It seems to me even difficult to find a common denominator in these different uses. At first sight “changing places in fancy with another person” could be such a common denominator, but already the above cited two examples – unconscious sympathetic resonance with a perceived behaviour and immediate “transfusion” of affection by the mere view 15

Subtitle since the forth edition (1774) of Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS).

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of a joyous or grieved face – can hardly, after closer consideration, be subordinated under this characterisation. Neither is “our fellow-feeling with any passion whatsoever” (TMS I.i.1.5, p. 10), i.e. the “correspondence of sentiments” between the sympathizing spectator and the primarily concerned person, nor even the arising of “not altogether unlike” feelings in the sympathizing person, a universal character of Smith’s concept of “sympathy” since he also remarks very perspicaciously: Sympathy … does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it. We sometimes feel for another, a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable; because, when we put ourselves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his from the reality. (TMS I.i.1.10, p. 12, my emphasis)

Smith gives as examples of sympathy raised by the view of another’s situation without correspondence or similarity of feelings “our blushing for the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his own behaviour” (TMS I.i.1.10, p. 12), the compassion of a mother with her small weeping child, and our commiseration with a laughing and singing imbecile or with the dead. And even an emotional relation to other persons and their sentiments and conduct can’t serve as a general feature of Smith’s “sympathy” since “sympathy” as “changing places with the primarily concerned person in fancy” is not an intentional act of emotion but of imagination. But let us not be delayed by problems of equivocity in Smith’s use of the word ‘sympathy’ but rather turn ourselves directly to the central problem of his Theory of Moral Sentiments. As the reader of this book sees very quickly, Smith’s aim consists mainly in replacing his teacher Francis Hutcheson’s idea of a particular inner moral sense with the sentiment of sympathy as the principle of moral approbation and disapprobation. He agrees with his teacher that moral approbation and disapprobation cannot ultimately be founded on (deductive or inductive) reason but must be founded on “immediate sense and feeling” (TMS VII.iii.2.9, p. 320). But he writes against Hutcheson:

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Let us thus study Smith’s idea of sympathy in its function as moral evaluation (approbation and disapprobation). As Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments claims that moral evaluation is necessarily first moral approbation and disapprobation of the passions, affects and conduct of other persons, and that self-approbation and self-disapprobation consists in one’s imagining how other persons would morally evaluate oneself as another person for them, let us first consider how “sympathy” functions in morally judging other persons. In this function “sympathy” appears in Smith’s explanations in three different steps and with three different meanings. I shall mark these three meanings as “sympathy (1)”, “sympathy (2)” and “sympathy (3)”. First, “sympathy (1)” makes the observer look in imagination at the situation of the observed person with the eyes of this person, i.e. from the point of view of this person, and makes him consider what he himself would feel if he actually were this observed person.16 Very often Smith describes this step of sympathy as “bring[ing] the case of the observed person home to ourselves”17. However, this is not yet moral approbation or disapprobation but an endeavour to understand through imagination the other person, what Husserl would not call “sympathy” but” empathy” (Einfühlung). Moral approbation presupposes “sympathy (2)” with the “sympathetically (1)” “imagined” feelings or emotions of the observed person, i.e. it presupposes “coincidence”, “concord” or “correspondence” between the observer’s own actual feelings and emotions and the feelings and emotions of the observed person as “sympathetically (1)” imagined 16 17

Cf. for instance TMS I.i.4.5, p. 20f. Cf. for instance TMS I.i.3.1, p. 16.

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by this observer; moral disapprobation presupposes “opposite sympathy (2)” 18 or “antipathy” 19 with the feelings or emotions of the observed person as “imagined” by the observer, i.e. it presupposes “opposition”, “discord” or “dissonance” between the actual feelings of the observer and the “imagined” feelings and emotions of the observed person. Only “sympathy (2)” has the contrary concept of “opposite sympathy” or “antipathy”. Smith writes: When the original passions of the person principally concerned are in perfect concord with the sympathetic emotions of the spectator, they necessarily appear to this last just and proper, and suitable to their objects; and, on the contrary, when, upon bringing the case home to himself [i.e. placing himself by the imagination in the situation of the principally concerned], he finds that they [the original passions of the principally concerned] do not coincide with what he feels, they necessarily appear to him unjust and improper … (TMS I.i.3.1, p. 16, my emphasis)

Smith says that we “enter into the sentiments and motives of the observed person” or that we “go along with them”, when we “sympathize (2)” with them, and that we “cannot enter into his sentiments” or that “we cannot go along with them”, when we are in antipathy with them (TMS I.i.2.2, p. 14ff.; TMS I.i.5.1, p. 23; TMS I.ii.4.1, p. 38; TMS II.i.5.1, p. 74; TMS III.i.1.1, p. 109). However, this “sympathy (2)” and “antipathy” are by themselves not yet “sympathy (3)” or antipathy in the sense of moral approbation and disapprobation of the feelings with which we “sympathize (2)” or “antipathize”. We approve of them when we find ourselves “sympathizing (2)” with them, and we disapprove of them when we find ourselves “antipathizing” with them: “If, upon bringing the case home to our own breast, we find that the sentiments which it gives occasion to, coincide and tally with our own, we necessarily approve of them …; otherwise, we necessarily disapprove of them…” (TMS I.i.3.2, p. 17). “It is upon our consciousness of this conditional sympathy, that our approbation of his sorrow is founded” (TMS I.i.3.4, p. 17). The editors of the Oxford edition of 1976 (University of Glasgow) write in their Introduction to The Theory of Moral Sentiments that Smith stated this distinction be18 19

TMS I.ii.5.1, p. 40. TMS VII.iii.3.3, p.327.

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tween “sympathy (2)” and moral approbation more clearly in an answer to a objection put to him by Hume in a letter, dated 28 July 1759. Hume found an inconsistency between Smith’s affirmation (in part I, section I, ch. 2, p. 15) that we are always pleased when we can sympathize and Smith’s idea of sympathizing with grief, which is a sharing of a painful feeling. In his reply Smith makes clearer the relation between sympathetic feeling and the feeling of approval. Sympathetic feeling can be either pleasurable or painful. When a spectator does sympathize, in either [a pleasurable or a painful] way, he can also note the correspondence between his own feeling and that of the person observed and this perception of correspondence is always pleasurable. The sentiment of approval is the second, necessarily pleasurable, feeling, not the first. (Introduction in Smith 1976, Oxford Edition, p. 17)

“Sympathy” in the sense of approbation (“sympathy (3)”) is thus, according to this explanation, the notice or the perception of “sympathy (2)”; and “antipathy” in the sense of disapprobation is the notice or the perception of “antipathy (opposite sympathy)” in the sense of “discord” or “dissonance” between one’s own feelings and those of the observed person. Although Smith sometimes designates all three steps – i.e., our “imaginary change of situation with the person principally concerned”, our “concord with the feelings of another people”, and our “approbation” of these feelings – as “sympathy”, he also considers them in a more differentiated manner. Our “imaginary change of situation” he considers as that “on which sympathy is founded”20, or as that “from which sympathy arises”21; our “correspondence with the feeling of the principally concerned person“ (= “sympathy (2)”) he considers as sympathy proper; and the “approbation of his feeling” he considers as our “finding”, “consciousness”, “noting”, or “perception“ of this “sympathy (2)”. The question is, whether the “imaginary change of situation” is not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition for the “correspondence” or the “opposition” (antipathy) of feelings, and whether this “correspondence” or this “opposition” is not only the necessary but also the sufficient condition of approbation or of disapprobation. When we change in imagina20 21

TMS I.i.4.6, p. 21. TMS I.i.4.2, p. 19.

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tion the situation with the principally concerned person, do we then ipso facto also “coincide” or “feel in discord” with his feelings, and do we, when we “coincide” or “feel in discord” with his feelings, eo ipso also approve or disapprove of his feelings? In other words, can we understand (“empathize” with) other people without necessarily at the same time also “sympathizing” (“coinciding”) with their feelings or “antipathizing” (“sympathizing in opposition”) with their feelings, and can we “coincide” with or “oppose” their feelings without at the same time also approving or disapproving of them? If the first step necessarily involves the second, and if the second necessarily involves the third, they would only be three different abstract moments (aspects) of one and the same concrete psychological act; whereas if the first could be performed separately from the second, and the second performed separately from the third, they would be three different concrete psychological acts. I don’t know how Smith would answer this question. I would prefer it if he answered in the sense of three different psychological acts. This is the core of Smith’s theory of moral approbation and disapprobation. Nevertheless, the above described moral approbation and disapprobation of other persons is not our last moral judgment about them, because our sympathetic (2) emotions “coinciding” with their feelings, which our approbation “finds” or “notes”, and our antipathetic emotions against their feelings, which our disapprobation “finds” or “notes”, may be vicious and unjust and are submitted to moral self-approbation and self-disapprobation. But this happens according to the same principles as does the moral approbation or disapprobation of others. We have to put ourselves by imaginative “sympathy (1)” at the viewpoint of an observer of our own approbation and disapprobation – in the last instance at the viewpoint of an indifferent (cold), impartial (fair) spectator – and either to “sympathize (2)” with his “sympathy (2)” and to “sympathize (3) with his approbation (“sympathy (3)”) of our approbation and disapprobation or to “sympathize (2 and 3)” with his antipathy (“opposite sympathy (2)” ) and with his disapprobation of our own approbation and disapprobation. This corresponds to Smith’s general mechanism of every selfapprobation and self-disapprobation: “We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgement concerning them, unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural sta-

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tion and endeavour to view them in a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people or as other people are likely to view them. …We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it. If, upon placing ourselves [by imaginative “sympathy (1)”] in his situation, we thoroughly enter [by “sympathy (2)”] into all the passions and motives which influenced it [scil. influenced our own conduct], we [co-]approve of it, by sympathy [(3)] with the approbation [“sympathy (3)”] of this supposed equitable judge. If otherwise, we enter [by “sympathy (2)” and “sympathy (3)”] into his disapprobation and condemn it [scil. our own conduct].”22 As we suggested already by inserted words and numbers between pointed brackets, Smith introduces in these quoted sentences the idea of a “sympathy (2)” with the (imagined) “sympathy (2)” or antipathy of the spectator and the idea of a “sympathy (3)” with the (imagined) approbation (“sympathy (3)”) and disapprobation of the spectator. This is not absurd since we can emotionally “sympathize (2)” with “sympathetic (2)” or antipathetic emotions and we can co-approve of an approbation or of a disapprobation of other persons. III. Moral self-evaluation of my intentions by re-presentation of a spectator and by immediate moral conscience Let us finally consider the main thesis of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, namely that the moral self-approbation and self-disapprobation of one’s own sentiments, motives, and intentions as the source of one’s actions is founded on the moral approbation and disapprobation of other people’s sentiments and motives through the mechanism of sympathy. By this examination we shall be led back to the starting point of this paper, to a Chinese philosopher in the tradition of Mengzi. Smith says that in “sympathy (2)” we “enter into the sentiments and motives” of others or “go along with” these sentiments and motives and “coincide” with them, and that in the “consciousness” (“perception”) of this coincidence or accord we approve of them; whereas in “antipa22

TMS III.i.3.3, p. 110.

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thy” (“opposite sympathy (2)”) we “cannot enter into the sentiments and motives” of others, “cannot go along with these sentiments and motives”, or “reject all fellow feeling” with these sentiments.23 What is the reason why, in the case of approbation, we “can enter into”, “go along with”, “coincide” with, other people’s sentiments while, in the case of disapprobation, we “cannot enter into” them, “cannot go along with” them, but rather “reject our fellow feeling” with other people’s sentiments? Do we not in the case of approbation “coincide” imaginatively with the sentiments and motives of others, because we approve of such sentiments as our own sentiments and motives, and do we not in the case of disapprobation refuse to “coincide” imaginatively with the sentiments and motives of others because we disapprove of such sentiments as our own sentiments and motives? Do we approve of the sentiments of others because we can “enter into them” and “go along with them” and “coincide” with them; and “can we enter into them” and “go along with them” and “coincide” with them because we approve of such sentiments and motives as ones of our own? Do we disapprove of the sentiments of others because we “cannot enter into them” and “cannot go along with them”; and “can we not enter into them” and “can we not go along with them” because we disapprove of them as ones of our own? Similarly we “can enter into” and “go along with” certain styles of music because we accept the type of emotions of our own heart expressed in this music, whereas we “cannot enter into” and “cannot go along with” other styles of music, whose emotions we reject in our own heart. Does Smith’s theory of moral self-approbation and selfdisapprobation through the detour of sympathy and antipathy with the sentiments of others presuppose Hutcheson’s theory of moral selfapprobation and self-disapprobation by an “inner moral reflective sense”? I would not give an affirmative answer to this question but an answer that claims in principle the priority of moral self-approbation and disapprobation over moral approbation and disapprobation of other people. If genuine moral approbation and disapprobation concerned the mere external behaviour of a human being, perceivable by our external 23

TMS II.ii.1.1, p. 78.

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senses, then indeed the first moral judgment would be in principle about other people’s behaviour. As Husserl stressed many times, in the subjective constitution of our experience the first perceived external human behaviour is that of other people, and we experience our own conduct as an external human behaviour only by imaginatively adopting the viewpoint or perspective of others in perceiving our own behaviour. But according to Smith, moral approbation and disapprobation doesn’t concern the mere external behaviour of an actor, but rather it concerns his sentiments, passions, feelings, motives as sources of his conduct: As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. … it is by the imagination only than we can form any conception of what are his sensations. … It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9)

For instance, “the compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation” (TMS I.i.1.10, p. 12). Under these presuppositions, our moral willingness to “enter into” the sentiments and motives of others and “to go along with” them, or our aversion and repugnance to do so and our rejection of our fellow-feeling with them would depend, it seems to me, on our moral acceptance or rejection of our own sentiments and motives. For instance, somebody is very angry and behaves intemperately because his computer was stolen. I can, by empathy, understand his emotions, but I “cannot enter into” them and “go along with” them because, in the case of my own feelings and conduct, I disapprove of such emotional responses and of such conduct in this kind of situation. Or when somebody grows angry about the unjust treatment his colleague is suffering and fights against this unjust treatment, I can “enter into” his emotions and “go along with” them because I approve of similar feelings and actions of my own. As far as I can see, Smith presents three arguments against Hutcheson’s inner moral sense as source of moral self-approbation and selfdisapprobation:

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1. His first argument we mentioned already: “In order to account for the principle of approbation, there is no occasion for supposing any new power of perception which had never been heard of before.” (TMS VII.iii.3.3, p.321) Against every account of the principle of approbation, which makes it depend upon a peculiar sentiment, distinct from every other, I would object; that it is strange that this sentiment, which Providence undoubtedly intended to be the governing principle of human nature, should hitherto have been so little taken notice of, as not to have got a name in any language. The word moral sense is of very late formation, and cannot yet be considered as making part of the English tongue. (TMS VII.iii.3.15, p. 326)

2. Smith’s second argument against Hutcheson’s moral sense is the fact of self-deceit and the fact that morally we judge of others more accurately than we judge of ourselves. If we had a special inner moral sense, we would judge concerning our sentiments and motives better than concerning those of others, because our own sentiments and motives would then be more immediately given to us than those of other people: …if it was by a peculiar faculty, such as the moral sense is supposed to be, that they judged of their own conduct, if they were endued with a particular power of perception, which distinguished the beauty or deformity of passions and affections; as their own passions would be more immediately exposed to the view of this faculty, it would judge with more accuracy concerning them, than concerning those of other men, of which it had only a more distant prospect. (TMS III.4.5, p. 158, my emphasis)

3. In his third argument against Hutcheson’s moral sense, Smith argues that, if moral approbation and disapprobation were functions of a particular faculty, as the moral sense is supposed to be, then they would be emotions of a particular kind. But in fact it happens quite otherwise. If we attend to what we really feel when upon different occasions we either approve or disapprove, we shall find that our emotion in one case is often totally different from that in the other, and that no common features can possibly be discovered between them. Thus the approbation with which we view a tender, delicate, and humane sentiment, is quite different from the approbation with which we are struck by one [scil. a sentiment] that appears great, daring, and magnanimous. … [W]e are softened by the one, and we are elevated by the other, and there is no sort of resemblance between the emotions which they excite in us. … But this could

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I think none of these three arguments against Hutcheson’s inner moral sense is pertinent. The third one would be justified only if “sympathy (2)” and approbation, and “antipathy” and disapprobation respectively, were the same thing. In fact, our emotion of “sympathy (2)” with “a tender delicate and humane sentiment” is not the same as our emotion of “sympathy (2)” with a ”great, daring, and magnanimous one”, and our emotion of antipathy against “cruelty” is not the same as our emotion of antipathy against a mean spiritedness. But even when approbation and disapprobation arise from “sympathy (2)” and antipathy respectively, they are not the same thing as “sympathy (2)” and antipathy in their endless variety. They are rather, as Smith declares, the “consciousness” or “perception” of the “coincidence” between one’s own and other people’s sentiments in the case of “sympathy (2)”, and the “consciousness” or “perception” of “discord” or of “opposition” between one’s own and other people’s sentiments in the case of antipathy; and this “consciousness” or “perception” seems to have in principle only these two forms and is not of an endless multiplicity of “different species”. Smith’s second argument against Hutcheson’s inner moral sense mistakes self-deceit for ignorance. We may deceive ourselves about the moral quality of our sentiments and motives because we aim by self-love at a good image of ourselves and because we are not willing to recognise the true moral quality of our sentiments and intentions. But this does not mean that we, at the bottom of our heart, ignore the true character of our sentiments and motives; this true knowledge may be obscured and concealed by our egoistic tendencies because we prefer to realise these tendencies and because we aim at a nice but deceitful image of our sentiments and motives against our better knowledge of them.

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Smith’s first argument seems to be correct. An inner moral sense as a special faculty of perception, parallel to the faculties of the outer senses and of other inner senses, such as the kinesthetic sense and the senses of inner bodily sensations, is not only an “unheard of” but also, in my view, a false invention. But what would happen if we were to replace this linguistic novelty by the old word ‘conscience’, well-established since classic Greek and Latin philosophy? Smith uses the word ‘conscience’ in two different meanings. First, he uses it for the imaginatively and sympathically constructed “ideal man within the breast”,24 the ideal “third person”,25 the “indifferent, impartial and well informed spectator and judge of our own sentiments, feelings and conduct”.26 On the other hand, he writes: The word conscience does not immediately denote any moral faculty by which we approve or disapprove. Conscience supposes, indeed, the existence of some such faculty, and properly signifies our consciousness of having acted agreeably or contrary to its directions. (TMS VII.iii.3.15, p. 326)

I suppose this means that the word ‘conscience’ means our consciousness of having acted agreeably or contrary to the directions of the ideal spectator and judge within our breast. As Smith suggests here, conscience is best to be thought of as “a kind” of consciousness, already for the simple reason that ‘conscience’ and ‘consciousness’ are in their origins the same word: The Greek syneidesis and its Latin correspondent conscientia. In its translations in Germanic languages this word has been differentiated into ‘Bewusstsein’ and ‘Gewissen’, into ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscience’, in Dutch into ‘bewustsijn’ and ‘geweten’, in Norwegian into ‘bevissthet’ and ‘samvittighet’, whereas the conceptual unity persists in the Roman languages. In the ancient texts, the Greek ‘syneidesis’ and the Latin ‘conscientia’ are mostly used in a moral context. And I also think, as Smith writes, that conscience is a consciousness of agreement or of contrariety between sentiments or intentions in our “breast”. But do we only have, as Smith also writes, a consciousness of agreement or contrariety concerning how we “have acted”, and not also a consciousness of our emo24

TMS III.3.26, p. 147. TMS III.3.3, p. 135. 26 TMS III.3.3, p. 135. 25

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tions and practical intentions as actual motives of our actual and future action, just as we have also an immediate consciousness of our present intentional acts of seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, willing? This immediate consciousness Husserl calls “primary consciousness” (“Urbewusstsein”), and Sartre calls it “conscience préréflexive”; it is not a second intentional act reflecting on a first one, but an immanent character of every attentively performed intentional act. Speaking in a classical language, I think we have not only a conscientia consequens actum intentionalem and a conscientia antecedens actum intentionalem, but also a conscientia simultanea immanens in actu intentionali. Husserl’s phenomenology of inner time-consciousness could also be applied, mutatis mutandis, to moral time-consciousness (= conscience) of our intentional acts. Moreover, does genuine moral consciousness not concern the consciousness of agreement or contrariety in the most genuine and reliable conscience, in other words, the consciousness of the agreement or of the contrariety between our practical intentions and motives on the one side and our own original feelings (in the sense of Mengzi) of compassion, of justice, of right and wrong on the other side, rather than, as Smith would have it, the consciousness of any agreement or of any contrariety between our practical intentions and the directions of a real or imagined third person who observes them? We arrive, I think, at very different ideas of morality if we conceive of it from the point of view of an internalized third person as the observer of our conduct or if we conceive of it through immediate consciousness (conscience) of the agreement or contrariety between our own sympathetic feelings or aspirations and our actual intentions in our conduct. When we look at it through the above mentioned story of the good Samaritan in the Gospel of Saint Luke, we could probably say that the priest and the Levite who, after seeing the man stripped and beaten by the robbers, passed by on the other side, were justified from the point of view of their impartial inner spectator. They were not bad but very lawful men, who perhaps thought: “Unfortunately it is too dangerous to stop here and take care of the wounded man; the robbers could also strip and wound me. That would be of no help for this wounded man, and I would not be able to preside at the important religious assembly fixed for this evening in Jericho”, and so on. They surely could find enough

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good reasons to justify their conduct from the point of view of the indifferent (cold) and impartial spectator. The good Samaritan, on the other hand, did not indulge in such self-justifying reflections but simply followed the compassion of his heart. This is the difference between a lawful morality directed to general social order and a morality aspiring after individual perfection, a difference Henri Bergson analysed in his Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932). I shall not try to solve these problems here. But I would like to quote a Chinese philosopher, Wang Yangming (1472-1529), who stands in the tradition of Mengzi. He was confronted with the problem of how we are able to distinguish between our own good natural tendencies and our bad, egoistic ones. He answers that in an original consciousness, which he calls “solitary knowledge” or “knowledge by oneself alone” (du zhi 獨知), i.e. a knowledge that is independent from the information obtained via other persons, the human being is immediately aware, in different degrees of clarity, of the ethical goodness or badness of his own intentions. Wang Yangming calls this knowledge by oneself alone also “original knowledge” (“original consciousness”, liang zhi 良知). In a letter from 1527 he writes: “Intentions and original knowledge (original consciousness) must be clearly distinguished. Wherever thoughts emerge in response to practical concerns, one speaks of “intentions”. There is [ethical] good and bad in the intentions. That which is capable of knowing the goodness and badness of the intentions is called “original knowledge” (“original consciousness”). When one is capable of relying on the original knowledge (original consciousness), there is no falsehood”.27 In his interpretation of a text from the Confucian canon he says: From itself, the original knowledge (original consciousness) of my heart (mind) knows about every occurrence of an intention. If the intention is good, the original knowledge (original consciousness) of my heart knows this only from itself; if it is not good, the original knowledge (original consciousness) of my heart also knows this only from itself. In this regard there is no implication of other human beings. (Quanji, juan 26, Shanghai, 1992, p. 971)

27

Letter to Wei Shiyue, Quanji (Collected texts), juan (Book) 6, Shanghai, 1992, p. 217.

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He explicitly identifies this “solitary knowledge” (or “knowledge by oneself alone”) with “original knowledge” (“original consciousness”): “What one designates as that which the Others do not know, but one knows by himself alone, exactly that is the place of the original knowledge (original consciousness) of my heart”. 28 Wang Yangming taught also that this immediate consciousness of the moral quality of our intentions is usually obscured by our selfish desires and by internalized public moral opinions and has to be clarified through the effort of different ways of ethical self-cultivation. A pedagogical consequence of this idea is that true moral education, fundamentally, can’t consist in social infusion and pressure but has to be performed in a Socratic, maieutic manner, which helps the learning human being to “remember” his own genuine moral consciousness.29 If the core of genuine moral self-approbation and selfdisapprobation is conscience, in the sense of an immediate consciousness of the agreement or of the contrariety between our own practical intentions and their motivating emotions on the one side and our own compassionate and other sympathetic tendencies on the other side, this would not mean that “changing places in imagination with others” doesn’t play a necessary role in ethical considerations. I already mentioned the importance, for the constitution of virtue, of taking the point of view of the persons we address in our practical intentions and actions (the “second person” view). It is not only important to re-present imaginatively how these persons see and feel their world and what they wish but also to re-present, specifically, how they would appreciate our intended conduct towards them. Here is also the place of the Golden Rule, which is formulated by Confucius in a negative and in a positive manner: We should not do to others what we don’t wish them to do to us, and we should concede to others what we wish for ourselves.30 But without a sympathetic feeling and attitude towards other people, all these reflections are in want of motivating power for action. Also the point of view of the “third person”, the point of view of the spectators of our conduct, 28

Chuanxi lu (1963), Part III, no. 318, Quanji, juan 6, Shanghai, 1992, p. 119; ibid. no. 330, Quanji, juan 3, Shanghai, 1992, p. 123. 29 Cf. Kern (2010), Teil I, Kap. 2. 30 Lunyu (“Analects of Confucius”), Book 4, ch. 4; Book 12, ch. 2.

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has sometimes to be counted on imaginatively in moral deliberations, as when we think about the pleasing or not pleasing character, the decency, the public acceptance or non-acceptance, of our conduct and appearance. But these reflections, too, cannot be the genuine foundation of our selfapprobation and self-disapprobation in these cases but finally depend in their moral judgement on our own genuine conscience and on our own moral decision not to shock but to respect and to please the spectators of our conduct.

Bibliography Bergson, Henri (1932) Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, Paris: PUF. The Analects of Confucius (1938), translated and annotated by Arthur Waley, London: George Allen and Unwin. Hume, David (1978) A Treatise of Human Nature, (ed.) L.A. SelbyBigge and P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Husserl, Edmund (1973) Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Zweiter Teil: 1921-1928 (Husserliana vol. XIV), herausgegeben von Iso Kern, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (2004) Einleitung in die Ethik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920/1924 (Husserliana vol. XXXVII), herausgegeben von Henning Peucker, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kern, Iso (2010) Das Wichtigste im Leben. Wang Yangming (14721529) und seine Nachfolger über die „Verwirklichung des ursprünglichen Wissens“, Basel: Schwabe. Mencius (1970) translated with an introductionm by D.C. Lau, Penguin Books. Smith, Adam (1976/79) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Smith, Adam (1982) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Wang Yangming (1992) Quanji („Complete Works“), Shanghai: Guji chubanshe. Wang Yangming (1963) Instructions for Practical Living and other Neo-confucian Writings, translated with notes, by Wing-tsit Chan, New York: Columbia University Press.

7 Overcoming Disagreement – Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl on Strategies of Justifying Descriptive and Evaluative Judgments Christel Fricke I. Introduction Commonsensically speaking, we make truth claims for both our descriptive and our moral judgments. But the metaphysical implications of truth claims for moral judgments are a mystery. When we make such claims, our concern is more pragmatic than metaphysical: Living in the company of people with whom we share neither a view of the world nor an understanding of what is allowed and forbidden to do is challenging, if not impossible. Without such agreement, other people’s behavior would just be entirely unreliable and unpredictable. Thus, not only in matters of descriptive knowledge but also in moral matters, we cannot leave disagreements unsettled, we want and need to overcome them. There are many ways for overcoming disagreements. A shared interest in getting matters right (which can be more or less conscious or explicit), an interest in understanding how the world really is and what morality really consists in, is only one of them, even though it may be the most promising in terms of achieving stable results. It is also the most egalitarian, since the exercise of coercion or force to make opponents stop raising questions and objections is contrary to the idea that, as subjects of descriptive knowledge and moral rights and duties, we are all the same. Philosophers however have questioned whether moral judgments can be true in the same way that descriptive judgments are. Descriptive judgments are true or false in virtue of the facts in the world. But whether there are facts for making moral judgments true or false is a matter of controversy. Could it be the case that our moral judgments express nothing but historically and culturally contingent conventions

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about right and wrong that have hardly any foundation in the way the natural world factually is? And, if so, are our claims for universal truth or rightness of our moral judgments nothing but an expression of cultural hubris, the idea that we are right and that anyone who disagrees with us is just wrong? One way to meet these challenges is to look at our processes of communication and at the strategies we use for reaching agreement in cases of controversy – those strategies in particular that are intrinsically egalitarian and refrain from the exercise of any force or coercion. What evidence can we rely on for making descriptive and moral claims? Can this evidence be shared? And what stands in the way of our reaching an agreement on either descriptive or moral matters? What are the sources of error that we should try to avoid or eliminate? Both Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl have tried to answer these questions, Husserl with a particular focus on descriptive judgments and Smith with an almost exclusive focus on moral judgments. Even though Husserl developed an ethical theory himself, especially in his Lectures,1 the main focus of his interest was on epistemology. What I am interested in, in this chapter, is not in the first place Husserl’s own ethics but Husserl’s phenomenology of cognitive intersubjectivity and objectivity in so far as it provides a fruitful background against which one can develop a phenomenological reading of Adam Smith’s theory of moral judgment. Historically speaking, Adam Smith comes first, but I shall take my starting point from Husserl’s posthumously published papers On the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity (Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, written over a period of 30 years, namely between 1905 and 1935). 2 I shall focus on how, according to Husserl, people can reach 1

See in particular Hua XXVIII and XXXVII. These papers fill volumes XIII, XIV and XV of the Husserliana. In my decision to focus on this part of Husserl’s writings for the present study I followed the advice of Dagfinn Føllesdal. I am aware that this limitation of my reading of Husserl leaves out parts of his writings which are relevant for the topic. There are no translations of Husserl’s writings on the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity into English. All translations from these texts in this chapter are my own. I used Dorion Cairns’ (1973) Guide for Translating Husserl. This said, I would like to thank Michael Morreau who, while visiting the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature here in Oslo, was so kind as to help me with some of the most difficult passages. Further thanks

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objective knowledge and agree on the truth of descriptive judgments, even though they have nothing to rely on, as a source of information about the way the world is, other than perceptual states of individual perceivers. Husserl’s basic claim reads as follows: Characteristically, the world not only presents itself systematically thus and so within my original constitutive system, depending on the corporal conditions, but presents itself to all others in other ways as well, and is the unity of all such actual and possible presentations. (Hua XIV, p.122) Zur Welt gehört, dass sie sich nicht nur in meinem ursprünglichen konstitutiven System so und so systematisch darstellt, mit Beziehung auf die leiblichen Bedingungen, sondern sich für jedermann auch in anderen Weisen darstellt, und sie ist Einheit aller solchen wirklichen und möglichen Darstellungen.

According to Husserl, people can rely on analogous strategies for justifying both their descriptive and their evaluative and, in particular, their moral judgments. But in the papers On the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity he does not go into any details as far as moral judgments and their justification are concerned. What would a strategy of justifying moral judgments look like which was analogous to the strategy Husserl suggests for descriptive judgments? And how far does this analogy reach? My claim is that answers to these questions can be found in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, first published in 1759. At first sight, this claim may seem far fetched. Not only does Husserl make no claim to a Smithian heritage. Smith himself explicitly denies that moral judgments can be justified in a way similar to that in which we justify descriptive judgments. According to him, the justification of moral judgments faces a challenge for which there is no counterpart on the side of descriptive knowledge: … the various appearances which the great machine of the universe is perpetually exhibiting, with the secret wheels and springs which produce them; all the general subjects of science and taste, are what we and our companion regard as having no peculiar relation to either of us. We both look at them from the same point of view, and we have no occasion for sympathy, or for that imaginary change of situations from which it arises, in order to produce, are due to Maria A. Carrasco and Mariano Crespo, the former a Smith scholar and the latter a Husserl scholar, for their very helpful comments to an earlier version of this paper. All remaining errors, linguistic and other, are of course mine.

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Had Smith had the opportunity of reading Husserl’s papers On the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity, he might have revised this claim. Or rather, he might have modified it. He might have admitted that there are certain analogies between the strategies of justification on which we rely for both our descriptive and moral judgments. But then he would have insisted that there still are particular challenges to be met in the moral realm. Since moral matters concern our individual interests, having a “peculiar relation either to ourselves or to the person whose sentiments we judge of” (TMS I.i.4.2, p. 19), there is more that stands in the way of reaching an agreement on moral matters than the plurality of points of view in space and time occupied by different perceivers equally provided with well functioning perceptual systems and data processing minds. How can this additional challenge be met? The aim of my project of looking at Smith’s theory of moral judgment against a background of Husserl’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity is to throw light on the analogies and differences between the strategies we rely on for justifying claims to truth or rightness made by both descriptive and moral judgments. In the following part, focusing on Husserl, I shall only make a few references to Smith; thus, I have to ask readers mainly interested in ethical questions for some patience. II. Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology a. The phenomenological method We commonsensically believe that the world is in space and time, that it contains various objects including our own bodies, the bodies of other living people and the bodies of non-human animals, that people and higher developed animals have minds and perceive objects in the world 3

In this passage, Smith also mentions aesthetic judgments and claims that, epistemically speaking, they can be treated just as descriptive, scientific judgments. He seems to imply a position of aesthetic realism according to which things are beautiful (or not) in very much the same sense in which they are red or square (or not). In the following, I shall leave the specific matter of aesthetic judgments aside and focus on descriptive and moral judgments exclusively.

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and respond emotionally to them. People live in this world over limited periods of time. Other objects exist on a more or less permanent basis. A material object has a certain stability of existence; it does not constantly go in and out of existence. Nor do material objects undergo spontaneous, uncaused changes. Furthermore, individual people conceive of other people as being similar to them: We assume that others to a large extent share our physical needs, perceptual capacities, and emotional dispositions.4 Non human animals may be more or less similar to us, but they are not quite as similar to us as other humans are5 Our perceptual and emotional sentiments play a key role in our acquisition of knowledge of the world. After all, we have no other sources of information on which to rely for this purpose: The phenomena are phenomena of actual things, of things considered actual by me, and have their relationship to my experiencing organism, which is situated in actual space, and thus I soon acquire empirical connections, by which the manifold of the subjective relates to my human organism as a part of the natural world and again stands through this organism in a regular experiential relationship to those things, to which these phenomena “refer”. Pure phenomena we arrive at only through phenomenological reduction. (Hua XIII, p. 433-434)6 Die Phänomene sind Phänomene von wirklichen, von mir als wirklich gemeinten Dingen und haben ihre Beziehung zu meinem erfahrenen Leib, der in den wirklichen Raum eingeordnet ist, und so komme ich alsbald in empirische Zusammenhänge, wonach das mannigfaltige Subjektive Zuordnung hat zu meinem Leib als Ding in der Natur und durch Vermittlung des Leibes wieder eine geregelte Erfahrungsbeziehung zu den Dingen, auf die sich diese Phänomene “beziehen”. Reine Phänomene gewinnen wir erst durch phänomenologische Reduktion. 4

On Husserl’s account of the commonsensical attitude see also Luft (1998) and Mulligan (1995), p. 169. 5 For Husserl’s account of animals and their way of experiencing the world see for example Hua XIV, pp. 125-136. For Husserl’s account of the commonsensical world view and its implicitly realistic assumptions see Hua XV, p. 289: “The world exists all the time, a universe of being there, being there for me, and first of all being there perceptually.” [“Immerzu ist die Welt da, ein Universum des Da, für mich da, und zunächst wahrnehmungsmässig da.”] See also Hua XIII, pp. 113-114, 426, 434, 450 and Hua XV, pp. 22, 133-134, 533. 6 See also Hua XIV, p. 129.

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With his phenomenology, Husserl attempts to provide a rational reconstruction of the process which allows us to acquire objective knowledge of the world from perceptual and emotional information about it. The aim of this rational reconstruction is to justify our present world view and its claims to objectivity: Can we rightly claim objectivity for our judgments about this world and all the objects and people and nonhuman animals in it? And, if so, with which degree of certainty? For Husserl, in order to solve “the problem of the objectivity of knowledge” [“das Problem der Objektivität der Erkenntnis”], we have to answer the following question: How can a human being as a subject of knowledge in the immanence of his knowledge transcend himself, how can he ever be aware of any transcendent existence? (Hua XV, p. 553) Wie kann der erkennende Mensch in seiner Erkenntnisimmanenz sich selbst transzendieren, eines transzendenten Seins je innewerden?

Husserl develops the method of “phenomenological reduction” which allows us to explore the relationship between the world and our experience of it.7 Our perceptual states and their content as it is here and now play a crucial part. Perceptual states are “intentional” states, they represent something as something.8 We can, for example, see something as a ball and as being red. But it is not this perceptual experience and its content alone on which we rely when we conceptualize what we have in our visual field, project this content onto the world, and say: ‘This is a red ball.’ After all, our perceptual experience could mislead us; it could turn out that what we believe to be a red ball really is just a red spotlight on the ground which remains in the same place even if we step on it or try to kick it away. Thus, before we attempt such a projection, we – automatically and often unconsciously – inquire whether the projection on to the world which our actual perceptual experience motivates us to make fits with our overall view of the world as it presently is. Since we have no other access to the world than through our perceptual and emotional 7

On Husserl’s “phenomenological reduction” see Bernet, Kern, Marbach (1996), pp. 56-74. 8 For Husserl, the intentional nature of our mental states is part of a human beings’s “primitive equipment with psycho-physical conditionality” [“Urbestand an psychophysischer Konditionalität”] (Hua XIII, p. 363).

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experience of it, the only material on which we can rely for this inquiry is the material provided by our previous experiences as we remember them and our future experiences as we anticipate them hypothetically – or by other peoples’ experiences indirectly (if at all) accessible to us. If what I see in my visual field really relates to a ball in the outside world, then I should be able to kick it away, and other people should be able to kick it back to me. If it is just a red spotlight, my attempt at kicking it will not meet with any physical resistance. But should it turn out to be a ball-shaped piece of hot iron, I can hit it and if I do so I will burn my foot. It is in particular for his reconstruction of the emergence of our world view from the manifold of our and other peoples’ perceptual states that Husserl follows the model of Copernicus: The way objects visually appear to us systematically varies with the point of view in space and time from which we look at them. Once we understand the content of our perceptual experiences as being determined not only by the objects we actually perceive but also by the point of view from which we perceive them we can, when we perceive a particular object, try to recollect what it looked like when we perceived it before from other angles and to anticipate what it will look like from other points of view and then make assumptions about its actual or objective shape and color. These assumptions can then be tested by actually looking at the object in question from other points of view. Whenever we find our expectations confirmed, we can conclude that there is an object there with certain perceptible properties, an object which fits into the world as we commonsensically and scientifically conceive of it. Accordingly, we are justified in claiming that there is such an object there which satisfies our description. A person, in order to acquire objective knowledge, has imaginatively to move back and forth between past and present, as well as between present and imagined future perceptual experiences; she also has to move in space – really or imaginatively – in order to look at the object to be known from different points of view. 9 Furthermore, she has to communicate with other people who perceive the same objects in the same world from their respective points of view and try to achieve objective 9

See for example Hua XIII, pp. 116, 317-319.

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knowledge of them in the same way as she does. In order to ensure that it is one and the same world that we all perceive and have knowledge of, we have to agree on which judgments about this world are objectively true. Bringing forth such an agreement is, however, not a matter of a majority vote. Whether or not our judgments about the objects in the world are true depends on processes of respectful intra-subjective and inter-subjective communication, adaptation and the constitution of coherent systems of belief, both descriptive and normative. b. The Role of “Empathy” That there are other people in the world and that these people are typically and to a large extent similar to one another is not only part of our commonsensical view of the world. According to Husserl, it is “a basic fact of our consciousness” [“eine Grundtatsache des Bewusstseins”].10 The “similarity” [“Ähnlichkeit”] is a condition for our having access to another person’s past, present, and future perceptual states and can for this reason not be induced from interactive experience. 11 However, our access to the perceptual states of another person can never be direct; we have to rely on what Husserl calls “empathy” [“Einfühlung”].12 Every I finds in its surroundings … things which it sees as bodies, but sharply distinguishes them from its “own” body; it sees them as foreign bodies of 10

Hua XIII, p. 345. See also Hua XIV, p. 257, “… the stranger’s I is like myself.” [“ … das fremde Ich ist meinesgleichen.”] and Hua XV, p. 527, “ “normally” we are all embodied in the same way” [“ “normalerweise” haben wir alle gleiche Leiblichkeit”]. 11 See Hua XIII, pp. 49, 55, 57. 12 “Empathy” is the standard translation for Husserl’s notion of “Einfühlung”. Steinbock suggests another translation, namely “intropathy”, which might in the present context be less misleading since it would prevent overlooking the difference between Husserlian “Einfühlung” and a particular aspect of Smithian “sympathy” which could be described as “empathy” (see Steinbock (1995), p. 209, and below, footnote 93; see also Lindgren (1973), pp. 21-22 and Fleischacker (2012, in this volume), pp. 273-311, and Brown (2012, in this volume), pp. 243-272. Nevertheless, I follow the standard translation of Husserl’s “Einfühlung” as “empathy”. This translation, misleading as it may be at present, is however historically correct, since ‘empathy’ entered the English language as the translation of the German ‘Einfühlung’. (See on the conceptual history of ‘empathy’ Brown (2012, in this volume, p. 252, footnote 14.)

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such a sort, that to each such body again an I, but another one, a foreign I belongs (it sees those bodies as bearers of I-subjects, but it does not “see” the foreign I’s in the sense in which it sees itself, finds itself experiencing. It establishes them by means of “empathy”, also foreign experience, foreign character traits are “found”; but they are not in the same sense given, had in the same way as our own) … (Hua XIII, p. 115) Jedes Ich findet in seiner Umgebung … Dinge, die es als Leiber ansieht, aber scharf dem “eigenen” Leib gegenüberstellt als fremde Leiber derart, dass zu jedem solchen Leib wieder ein Ich, aber ein anderes, fremdes Ich gehört (es sieht die Leiber als “Träger” von Ichsubjekten, es “sieht” aber nicht die fremden Ich in dem Sinn, wie es sich selbst sieht, erfahrend vorfindet. Es setzt sie in der Weise der “Einfühlung”, also auch fremdes Erleben, fremde Charakteranlagen werden “vorgefunden”; sie sind aber nicht in dem Sinne gegebene, gehabte wie eigene) …

As the editor informs us in a footnote to this passage, Husserl later describes an act of “empathy” [“Einfühlung”] as “the perception of a different other, a stranger” [“Fremdwahrnehmung”] and as “the experience of a different other, a stranger” [“Fremderfahung”]. Furthermore, Husserl explains the otherness of the respective other, the object of our empathy, in terms of this person’s occupying a point in space and time different from the one we occupy ourselves: All I’s conceive of themselves as relative centrepoints of one and the same spatiotemporal world, which in its indefinite infinity forms the total surroundings of every I. For every I the respective other I’s are not centrepoints, but rather peripheral points, having as indicated by their bodies a different spatial position and temporal position in the one and only common space and in the one and only worldtime. (Hua XIII, p. 116) Alle Ich fassen sich als relative Mittelpunkte der einen und selben raumzeitlichen Welt, die in ihrer unbestimmten Unendlichkeit die Gesamtumgebung jedes Ich ist. Für jedes Ich sind die anderen Ich nicht Mittelpunkte, sondern Umgebungspunkte, sie haben nach Massgabe ihrer Leiber eine verschiedene räumliche Stellung und zeitliche Stellung in dem einen und selben Allraum bzw. in der einen und selben Weltzeit.

The standpoint of an individual in space and time is like the “origin of the co-ordinate system” [“Nullpunkt des Koordinatensystems”]: Individuals differ from each other because they occupy different standpoints in

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space and time as the origins of their respective co-ordinate systems.13 The awareness of there being other persons at other places in space and time is a precondition for our understanding our own standpoint as relative, as only one among many others which are different but equally relative: Each I finds itself to be the centrepoint, as it were the origin of the coordinate system from which it … observes, orders and understands all things in the world. Each conceives of this centrepoint though as something relative, for example it changes the position of its body in the space, and while it continuously says “here”, it knows that each successive “here” is a spatially different one. (Hua XIII, p. 116)14 Jedes Ich findet sich als Mittelpunkt, sozusagen als Nullpunkt des Koordinatensystems vor, von dem aus es alle Dinge der Welt … betrachtet und ordnet und erkennt. Jedes fasst aber diesen Mittelpunkt als etwas Relatives, es ändert z.B. leiblich seinen Ort im Raum, und während es immerfort “hier” sagt, weiss es, dass das “Hier” ein jeweilig örtlich anderes ist.

In order to gain empathic access to the perceptual states of another person, we imaginatively place ourselves at the standpoint of this person, we imaginatively move the origin of our coordinate system from where it presently is to the origin of the coordinate system of this other person and imagine how the world looks from that point of view, how it looks to this person.15 By imagining how the world looks to this person whom we assume to be a perceiver like us, we can empathically represent the perceptual states this person has from his or her particular point of view. But this access is not direct; it is based on a reconstruction: It is in the nature of empathy that I attribute to the Other the same phenomenal system that is freely available to me myself. … The Other’s experiences are not my experiences, but in his experiences there are the same appearances that also belong to my phenomenal system, and in them the same things ap-

13

Hua XIII, p. 116. As we shall see, Smith makes a similar claim, and he stresses much more than Husserl does the psychological and sociological fact that the awareness of the relativity of one’s standpoint or point of view is a matter of learning. See on Smith’s account of moral learning Carrasco (2004) and Fricke (2011). 15 See also Hua XIII, pp. 53-55, 117-118, 277. 14

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pear; each of us has free access to the same things and to the same appearances. (Hua XIV, p. 254)16 Im Sinn der Einfühlung liegt es, dass ich dem Anderen dasselbe Erscheinungssystem einlege, das ich selbst in freier Verfügung habe. … Die Erfahrungen des Anderen sind nicht meine Erfahrungen, aber in seinen Erfahrungen hat der Andere dieselben Erscheinungen, die auch meinem Erscheinungssystem angehören, und in ihnen dieselben Dinge erscheinend; jeder von uns hat zu denselben Dingen und zu denselben Erscheinungen Zugang in seiner Freiheit.

Empathy in Husserl’s sense of the term has nothing to do with a quasi mechanically induced awareness of the emotional states of other persons; it is not a case of emotional contagion. It is “a particular kind of empirical experience” [“eine besondere Form der empirischen Erfahrung”].17 This particular kind of experience is, however, not visual or auditive in kind. It depends on a more or less conscious, imaginary change of the standpoint in space and time, undertaken in order to imagine what the world looks like from that standpoint. 18 Another person who actually occupies this standpoint has perceptual experiences that correspond to the perceptual experiences we imagine. This correspondence allows us to ascribe the perceptual experiences we imagine to this other person. Underlying this ascription is the assumption that, as a person provided with perceptual systems and a brain that can properly process perceptual data, the other person is relatively similar to us. In addition to such processes of empathy, we have indirect access to other persons’ perceptual states by verbally communicating with them. Every healthy person can make judgments about objects in the world on the basis of her perceptual experience and can communicate these judgments: We are constantly involved in processes of communication, exchanging our judgments with those of others.19 16

See also Hua XIV, pp. 258-259 and Hua XV, pp. 240 and 655. Hua XIII, p. 187. 18 See Hua XIV, p. 186: “… the “act of putting oneself in the shoes of the other”, which belongs to every act of empathy; an act of empathy is itself an act of putting oneself in the shoes of the other.” [“… das “Hineinversetzen”, das aber zu jeder Einfühlung gehört; sie selbst ist Hineinversetzen. ”] (My italics.) 19 See Hua XIII, p. 118: “Everyone makes his own experiences in relation to the things which appear to him sometimes thus and sometimes so, and he judges these 17

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The need to rely on empathy, however, is not exclusively characteristic of our access to the perceptual states of other people. According to Husserl, access to our own past and future perceptions (to our memories and anticipations) also depends on empathy. Thus, we have to distinguish between self-empathy and other-empathy – as I suggest labeling these different functions of empathy. In order to empathically access our own past perceptual states, in order to remember them, we have notionally to move our present point of view back to the one we occupied in the past, the one from which we made the perceptual experience which we now want to remember. And we then have to imagine how the world looked to us when we actually occupied that point in (past) time and space. In acts of self-empathy, we represent previous and anticipate future perceptions as our own, as part of our previous and expected future “stream of consciousness” [“Erlebnisstrom”],20 as part of what constitutes the unity of ourselves as individual persons over time. Therefore, acts of self-empathy always have a self-referring or reflexive dimension. In acts of other-empathy, however, we represent perceptions of other people as theirs. The perceptions of other people are not part of the stream of consciousness of the person who empathically represents these perceptions; only this person’s empathic representations of these perceptions belong to her or his stream of consciousness as constitutive parts of this person’s personal unity.21 Even though empathy allows us to reconstruct what kind of perceptual states other people are in while occupying a particular point in time and space different from our own, we have to be aware of the inevitable limitations imposed on our understanding of other people; and similar limitations exist for our self-understanding in so far as it depends on empathy:

things on the basis of these experiences and exchanges these judgments with Others in communication.” [“Jeder macht in Beziehung auf die Dinge, die ihm bald so, bald so erscheinen, seine Erfahrungen und urteilt auf Grund dieser Erfahrungen und tauscht diese Urteile in der Wechselverständigung mit Anderen aus.”] 20 Hua XIII, p. 317; see also Hua XIII, p. 319. 21 See in particular Hua XIII, p. 277. See also Hua XIII, pp. 189, 319-320, 339-346, 400 -408, 457-458.

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There is in principle no perfect knowledge of the Other … After all, I cannot even reveal my own [historicity], recreate through memory my own transcendental constitution … even natural memory is not a matter of mere arbitrariness. (Hua XV, pp. 631-632) Eine vollkommene Kenntnis des Anderen gibt es prinzipiell nicht ... Ich kann ja nicht einmal meine eigene [Historizität] enthüllen, meine eigene transzendentale Konstitution erinnerungsmässig wiederherstellen ... schon die natürliche Erinnerung ist nicht eine Sache blosser Willkür.

In order to appreciate the role of empathy within Husserl’s phenomenology in full, one has to remember that the phenomenological reduction takes us from the manifold of our commonsensical view of the world to the content of our perceptual state here and now. It is only to this content that a subject of perception and experience has direct access. A single perceptual experience as we have it here and now does not provide us with enough evidence for making any judgments about the world, nor does it provide evidence for objective judgments in particular. Suppose Copernicus had looked at the starry sky only once, from one point of view in space and time! Would that have provided him with enough evidence on which to rely for developing his cosmology? The problem with the content of such a singular perceptual experience is not only that it would be too thin, that we need more information before we can attempt making any judgment. The experience could be misleading: What we take to be perception proper, triggered by an external object, might turn out to be caused by our own minds, in a dream or in a state of hallucination. But not only that: Even an experience of veridical perception, taken by itself, would not allow us to figure out which elements of the perceptual content can be explained in terms of the perceived object, its visible properties and its position in space, and which can only be explained with reference to the standpoint of the perceiving subject or the particular conditions under which this subject perceives the object in question. In order to understand the particular content of a perceptual experience and its objective and subjective elements, and in order to make judgments about the way the world is which can rightly claim to be objective, we need a much broader evidential basis than a single perceptual experience can provide.

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This is why we have to rely on empathy. Empathy allows us to broaden the evidential basis on which to base our view of the world. It is through empathy that we have access to a manifold of perceptual data, including both data we collected ourselves in the past, ‘data’ we expect to collect, and data that have been and presently are collected by other persons. All these data have the status of “aspects” of objects in the world, and we have to base our knowledge of objects of experience on the manifold of these aspects. Accordingly, Husserl describes “objects of our empirical knowledge” as “unities of manifolds of aspects” [“Sinnendinge als Einheiten von Aspektmannigfaltigkeiten”]22 or as a “system of perceptibilities” [ein “System von Erfahrbarkeiten”].23 The manifold of these aspects is not at the exclusive disposal of a singular person; it is “the common property of all subjects, so to say” [“gewissermassen Gemeingut aller Subjekte”].24 c. You and I and the Conditions of Empathy The I as an embodied subject is an object of knowledge, very much as other organisms and non-living things are objects of knowledge. Therefore, self-knowledge is not a solipsistic undertaking. Our knowledge of our own bodies as things in space depends on the experience of and interaction with other people: My body in its physical truth is the unity of possible perceptions which every other could have of my body. (Hua XIV, p. 64) Mein Leib in seiner physischen Wahrheit ist die Einheit möglicher Wahrnehmungen, die jeder andere von meinem Leib haben könnte. Self-perception, in so far as it is objective perception, is not more primary than the perception of a stranger. (Hua XIV, p. 290) Als objektive Wahrnehmung ist die Selbstwahrnehmung nicht mehr originär als die Fremdwahrnehmung.

22

Hua XIII, p. 337 Hua XIII, p. 45 24 Hua XIII, p. 377. See also Hua XV, p. 33 23

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Every human being conceives of his body as also a corporal thing, to the extent that he conceives of it as a corporal thing that can be conceived as such by everyone else. (Hua XIV, p. 414)25 Jeder Mensch fasst nun seinen Leib zugleich als körperliches Ding auf, sofern er ihn als von jedem Anderen als körperliches Ding auffassbaren auffasst.

The same holds for our knowledge of ourselves as creatures with minds. Self-knowledge is not just introspection of a solipsistic subject, explicable in terms of an I addressing itself from the first-person point of view. Rather, self-knowledge, knowledge of oneself as a self, has to be both first-personal and second-personal and therefore depends on interaction with other people whom we address as you’s. It is only by perceiving others as similar to us that we can become aware of ourselves as similar to those others. We can then make ourselves the objects of our perception.26 But we have to ascribe at the same time the property of being a self to the respective other, because we perceive and address him or her as similar to us.27 Husserl speaks of this move in terms of a “doubling of the I” [“Verdopplung des Ich”] by which we become aware of the possibility of there being more than one I in the world, of “the possibility of two subjects with two bodies” [“die Möglichkeit zweier Subjekte mit zwei Körpern”].28 This doubling of the I is a precondition both for otherempathy and for self-consciousness. Furthermore, it reveals that selfconsciousness involves an act of self-empathy: I cannot other-empathically ascribe perceptual states of a certain kind to another person unless I recognize this person as a conscious self similar to myself; and I cannot recognize myself as a self unless I recognize the other person as a similar self, as a self, however, which is distinct from my own self. In order to recognize myself as a self, distinct from another self, I have to look at myself not only from a first-person point of view, but al25

See also Hua XV, p. 39. It seems to me that the passages from Husserl’s work on the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity I quote here speak in favor of Ronald McIntyre’s account of the intrinsically intersubjective nature of Husserl’s account of self-knowledge. See McIntyre (2012, in this volume), pp. 66-67, footnote 6. 27 See Hua XIV, p. 257: “The foreign I is similar to me.” [“Das fremde Ich ist meinesgleichen.”] See also Hua XIV, p. 400. 28 Hua XIII, p. 268. 26

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so from a second-person point of view, I have to look at myself not only as a ‘she’ but also as a ‘you’.29 Thus, I have to look at myself not only from the point of view of the respective other as an Other; I also have to recognize this Other as being similar to me, as someone who requests my recognition of him as a self – as similar to me. It is only from the other’s point of view that I can represent the other’s perceptual experience of myself as a self and understand it as a perception of the same self that I am here and now, the self to which I have direct access from a first-person point of view. Other selves can represent this self which is my self in acts of other-empathy; but in order to do so, they have to take a second-person point of view, addressing me as a ‘you’, as a self, as someone similar to them.30 Husserl himself anticipates the suspicion that the idea of a self as both one and more than one, namely two (the subject and object of self-consciousness), does at first sight seem to be inconsistent. But he insists that there is indeed no inconsistency: This inconsistent idea becomes consistent, when I understand this very doubling as doubling. I cannot be at the same moment both here and there. But it is possible that what is here and there is similar. (Hua XIII, p. 268) Diese widerspruchsvolle Vorstellung wird einstimmig, wenn ich eben die Verdoppelung als Verdoppelung nehme. Ich kann nicht zugleich hier und dort sein. Aber hier und dort kann ein Gleiches sein.31

Thus, the constitution of myself as an I, as a self, in contrast to another self and another I, depends on taking a second-person point of view toward this other, not only a third-person point of view: Rather than just perceiving the other as I perceive any inanimate object in the world, I address the other as a ‘you’ and invite and expect this other to do the same with me: 29

See on the nature and importance of the second-person standpoint Darwall (2006), and on its particular function in the constitution of self-awareness and selfconscience also Carrasco (under review). 30 See Hua XIII, p. 269: “Thereby the foreign I has been posited as being over there, an analogon to the I … .” [“Damit ist das fremde Ich als Analogon des Ich im Dort gesetzt … . ”] 31 In his account of moral self-conscience, Smith anticipates this point, making explicit the need of a person who is his own moral judge to notionally “divide … into two persons” (see TMS III.1.6, p. 113). See on Smith’s account of moral conscience Fricke (forthcoming).

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And the I can only constitute itself in contrast to a You, which is an I for itself and in contrast to a You, which it posits itself, finds itself as an I. (Hua XIII, p. 247)32 Und das Ich konstituiert sich erst im Kontrast zum Du, das für sich selbst Ich ist und im Kontrast zu einem Du, das es selbst setzt, sich als Ich findet.

Accordingly, Husserl describes humans as being “inseparable ... for each other” [“untrennbares Füreinandersein”] and continues in the following terms: … neither am I for myself, in the way I am, separable from the Other, nor is the Other separable from me. Each is for himself and yet for the Other. … It is no powerless mirror image, but, if we call an ego something absolutely actual, then it belongs to something actual such that its being is inseparable from every other’s being and intentionally encompasses it … (Hua XV, p. 191)33 … weder ich bin für mich, und so wie ich bin, trennbar vom Anderen, noch ist er es von mir. Jeder ist für sich und ist doch für den Anderen. … Es ist nicht kraftlose Spiegelung, sondern, wenn wir ein ego ein absolut Reales nennen, so gehört es zu einem solchen Realen, dass sein Sein untrennbar ist von jedes anderen Sein und jedes jedes andere intentional umgreift …

Intersubjective communication depends on empathy, and any act of empathy takes the second-person point of view, expecting to find the respective other (or our previous or future selves), the you, to be intrinsically similar to the I, the individual person I am here and now. Of course, no single person ever communicates with all others, not even with all those who are her or his contemporaries. The social worlds of humans are relatively small; how small they actually are depends on whether one defines them in terms of the “home of the family” [“Heim der Familie”], or of the “home town” [“Heimatort”], or of the “home country”

32

See also Hua XV, p. 497. Husserl is anticipating claims about the I – You relationship that have more recently been put forward again by Stephen Darwall. It is through the work of Stephen Darwall that these claims have, in recent years, attracted some wider attention. As we shall see, it is not only Husserl who was anticipating Darwall; Adam Smith did so as well. But whereas Darwall does himself claim a Smithian heritage, he leaves Husserl unmentioned. See Darwall (2006), parts I and II. 33 See also Hua XIII, p. 247 and Hua XV, pp. 497-498.

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[“Heimatland”].34 And some peoples’ circles of intersubjective communication include people from different countries. But we can and naturally do address all people as a you, as selves as we are ourselves, in virtue of the basic assumption of similarity of all human beings. Actual communication is a necessary condition for the establishment of an “I – You – connection” [“Ich – Du – Konnex”], a connection that requires mutual empathy (which can only be mutual otherempathy).35 But such mutual empathy is not sufficient for establishing communication. Communication further depends on acts of ‘communication of the self’ which alone can constitute the community of communicating persons: … the specific act of communication (of communicating oneself) which, as the of act creating a community, is called in Latin communicatio. (Hua XV, pp. 472-473) … der spezifische Akt der Mitteilung (des Sich-mitteilens), der als Gemeinschaft schaffender lateinisch geradezu communicatio heisst.

The communicating person addresses the other I as a ‘you’, where the ‘you’ is the other I – not merely a ‘he’ or ‘she’. And by addressing the other in this second-personal way, the I invites the respective other to do the same, implying that, as I’s, he and the other are similar (but certainly not numerically identical). 36 Any communication between individuals and, in particular, any state of mutual understanding, depends on these persons accepting this invitation and responding accordingly. Successful communication presupposes mutual empathy, the self-conception of each partner of communication as an I in relation to another I as a ‘you’, and mutual recognition as subjects of experience equally equipped with empathy, perceptual systems and brains to process perceptual data. Objective knowledge is knowledge shared by people who recognize each other as selves.37 34

See Hua XV, p. 133. Hua XV, p. 472. 36 Hua XV, p. 473. See also Hua XV, p. 476. 37 Given that communication is one of the natural phenomena which are shaped by evolution, these Husserlian conditions for successful communication seem to be too demanding. But one has to keep in mind that Husserl, with his phenomenological analysis of the conditions of objective knowledge, does not aim at reconstructing an 35

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No single I can claim to have a special role to play in the constitution of knowledge of a common world. As an ‘I’, every individual person is always related to others, to other individual ‘Non-I’s’, who are themselves I’s relating to all others as ‘Non-I’s’. All I’s and all respective other Non-I’s or Yous have the same epistemic authority and hold each other accountable: … every personal I “comprehends” in its intentionality and in its capacities and through its phenomenal world every other I and its phenomenal world, and in the intermingling communalization every I finds the Other as an I distinct from itself and as another I with other intentionalities and capacities, but intentional in itself and “directed” to the same world … (Hua XV, p. 366) … jedes personale Ich “umspannt” in seiner Intentionalität und seinen Vermögen und durch sein Weltphänomen jedes andere Ich und sein Weltphänomen, und in der Vergemeinschaftung des Ineinander findet jedes den Anderen als Ich geschieden von sich und als anderes Ich mit anderen Intentionalitäten und Vermögen, aber intentional in sich und „bezogen“ auf dieselbe Welt …

The accountability in question is epistemic in kind, it is the accountability of an informant, a reliable subject of knowledge of the way the world is.38 d. The Method of Reflective Equilibrium Constituting an intersubjectively sharable view of the world and of the objects in this world with their properties from a manifold of aspects, a view furthermore which can rightly claim to be “objective”, that is true of the world at least to a sufficiently high degree is, according to Husserl, a collective enterprise. As Dagfinn Føllesdal has pointed out, Husserl’s method to justify the objectivity of judgments of common and scientific

evolutionary process. Husserl’s neglect of evolutionary processes as well as processes of individual and social learning distinguishes his phenomenological analysis from Smith’s analysis of the conditions of understanding what real moral propriety consists in. Smith tries to provide an analysis which is historically, psychologically and sociologically well informed and realistic. 38 On the topics of accountability and its relation to authority see Darwall (2006), pp. 65-118.

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knowledge is holistic in kind; it is not foundational.39 No singular perceptual experience either past or present is considered as authentic and reliable beyond doubt. Therefore, no singular perceptual experience can play a foundational epistemic role. Before we consider any particular perceptual experience as a reliable source of information, as evidence for an object in the world having certain perceptual properties, we have to test whether it can be made consistent with the view of the world which we share with the people around us. Reliable evidence has to be accessible to others. And whenever we experience something that seems to be inconsistent with our shared view of the world, we try to explain it in terms of some kind of deficiency on the side of the other perceiver: … in general everyone assumes an appropriate correspondence between the appearances of things to him and to Others and sees discrepancies as exceptions due to illness and such like. (Hua XIII, p. 117-118)40 … im allgemeinen nimmt jeder eine ungefähre Korrespondenz seiner Erscheinungen mit denen Anderer an und findet Abweichungen unter dem Titel Krankheit und dergleichen als Ausnahme vor.

Føllesdal has described the intersubjective constitution and revision of a shared view of the world as Husserl reconstructs it in terms of the application of a method of “reflective equilibrium”. This method has a twofold function, namely that of building up consensus and of justifying this consensus at the same time. Indeed, the interactive and worldconstitutional process of communication between selves as Husserl reconstructs it has the same twofold function.41 The notion of “reflective equilibrium” was introduced by John Rawls.42 Rawls uses it in a framework that is predetermined by certain “principles of justice”. These principles define just political institutions for a national state. According to Rawls, it is within this framework that members of a society apply the method of reflective equilibrium to define the standards of fairness on which to rely in their judgments about right and wrong actions and institutions. It is certainly very plausible to 39

See Føllesdal (1988). See on this topic also McIntyre (2012, in this volume), p. 80-81. 40 See on this topic also below, pp. 205-208. 41 Føllesdal (1988), p. 116ff. 42 Rawls (1973), pp. 48 and others.

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conceive of the constitution of an objective, shared view of the world as reconstructed by Husserl in terms of a method of “reflective equilibrium”. However, one should not overlook that there is in Husserl’s reconstruction of this worldview no counterpart to Rawl’s “principles of justice”. Furthermore, Husserl does not restrict the “validity” [“Geltung”] of this worldview to a limited number of people, such as the citizens of a national state. He makes it explicit that our view of the world has grown over time and that all our predecessors have made their contribution to its constitution.43 Participation in the collective constitution of a view of the world is unlimited, both in temporal and in geographical terms. Any restriction of people who are allowed to participate in this process would be incompatible with the basic assumption according to which all people are similar to each other: The “apperception of the Other as being my equal” [“meinesgleichen”] has no limits. 44 Standards of objectivity of judgments do indeed have to make claims to universality. It does not make sense to claim objectivity of a judgment for a restricted number of people: … what makes up the intersubjective character of the objective sciences, of the natural sciences? A piece of knowledge is intersubjective, if it is accessible in principally the same way to any number of subjects who have knowledge of the same. (Hua XIII, p. 217)45 … was macht den intersubjektiven Charakter der objektiven Wissenschaften, der Naturwissenschaften, aus? Intersubjektiv ist eine Erkenntnis, die prinzipiell in gleicher Weise, dasselbe erkennend, vielen und beliebig vielen Subjekten zugänglich ist.

Within the present project of providing the background for a phenomenological reading of Adam Smith’s theory of moral judgment and of the 43

See Hua XIII, p. 218: “The conditions for the possibility of identifying experienes of different individuals have to be fulfilled and thereby the principal conditions for the possibility of mutual understanding. Ideally, the experiences of people from a hundred thousand years ago have the same intersubjective validity … .” [“Die Bedingungen der Möglichkeit der Identifikation von Erfahrungen verschiedener Individuen müssen erfüllt sein und damit die prinzipiellen Bedingungen der Möglichkeit wechselseitigen Verständnisses. Ideal betrachtet haben die Erfahrungen von Menschen vor hunderttausenden Jahren intersubjektive Geltung … . ”] 44 See Hua XV, p. 135. 45 See also Hua XIV, p. 216.

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‘sympathetic process’ 46 in particular, there are two elements of Husserl’s reconstruction of the intersubjective constitution of a shared view of the world that deserve particular attention, namely his theory of “sympathy” and his theory of “normality”. e. Husserl’s Theory of “Sympathy” [“Sympathie”, “Mitfühlen”] and “Antipathy” [“Antipathie”]: Approval or Disapproval of the Empathically Re-presented Perceptual or Emotional Experience In the framework of the overall topic of this chapter, Husserl’s theory of sympathy and antipathy is of particular interest.47 However, one should be aware that this topic does not come up often in the papers On the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity. In Husserliana XIV, there is one short text dedicated to the topic which, according to the editor, dates from the summer of 1920. And in Husserliana XV, there are a few short passages where Husserl mentions the topic. Apparently, it was not of central concern to him. The text on sympathy in Husserliana XIV (Beilage XXIV, pp. 185-191) opens with the claim that Hume’s theory of sympathy is erroneous.48 With respect to the project of providing a phenomenological reading of Adam Smith’s theory of the sympathetic process and of his theory of “sympathy” in particular, this claim is not discouraging since Hume’s and Smith’s theories of sympathy are not the same.49 Husserl introduces the notion of “sympathy” for describing an appreciative act of 46

The notion is not Smith’s; I am not sure who actually coined it. Carrasco uses the notion of a “sympathetic exchange” which comes close; see Carrasco (2004), p. 101. In the same paper, Carrasco already suggests a “phenomenological” reading of Adam Smith’s moral theory (see p. 94); but rather than to any phenomenologist philosopher, she relates Adam Smith’s moral theory to Aristotelian ethical thought and attributes to him an “ethics of practical reasoning” (p. 94). 47 For “sympathy”, Husserl uses both the Greek “Sympathie” and the German “Mitfühlen” (see Hua XIV, pp. 185-191, Hua XV, pp. 509, 513) and later also the notion of “adoption” [“Übernahme”] (see Hua XV, p. 487). 48 Hua XIV, p. 185: “The Humean theory of sympathy is of course false.” [“Die Humesche Theorie der Sympathie ist natürlich falsch.”] See on Husserl’s criticism of Hume’s account of sympathy also Kern (2012, in this volume), p. 147. 49 See Darwall (2005), Carrasco (under review) and Fleischacker (2012, in this volume).

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second-order “empathy”, an act of empathy which has a first-order act of empathy as its object and approves of it. According to Husserl, evaluative second-order empathy is typically involved in acts of remembering: One must see that sympathy, as compassion with empathic feeling (actual pain or pleasure) is of a kind with acts of compassion in the reproductive act of consciousness. I can also “sympathize” with my own past. One could say: Normal memory is itself something like sympathy; the memory, things were such and so, is a reproductively modified perception. In this we have not only a merely imagined modification, a mere reproduction of the doxa, but also and simultaneously an actual doxa. The reproductively modified doxa is not simply “revived”; that is apparent from the possibility of misremembering. I believed and I still believe, or I do not now believe. Normal memory involves shared belief. One could say that this is the sympathy of believing. (Hua XIV, p. 185) Man muss sehen, dass die Sympathie als Mitfühlen mit dem eingefühlten Fühlen (aktuelles Mitleid, Mitfreude) wesensverwandt ist mit dem Mitfühlen im reproduktiven Bewusstseinsakt. Ich kann auch mit der eigenen Vergangenheit „sympathisieren“. Man könnte sagen: Normale Erinnerung ist selbst so etwas wie Sympathie; die Erinnerung, es war so etc., ist eine reproduktiv modifizierte Wahrnehmung. Wir haben dabei nicht nur eine blosse Phantasiemodifikation, eine blosse Reproduktion der Doxa, sondern zugleich eine aktuelle Doxa. Die reproduktiv modifizierte Doxa ist nicht bloss die „wiederaufgelebte“; das zeigt sich in der eventuellen Erinnerungstäuschung. Ich glaubte und glaube noch, oder ich glaube jetzt nicht. In der normalen Erinnerung liegt der Mitglaube. Man könnte sagen, dass ist die Glaubenssympathie.

According to Husserl, acts of “empathy” [“Einfühlen”] which allow access to our previous perceptual states and the beliefs about the perceived objects to which they gave rise are inevitably made objects of evaluation. Any empathically re-presented perceptual states and the corresponding past beliefs are subject to reconsideration. 50 We cannot, of course, change past experiences or the attitudes we had to them when they were actual. But we can revise our epistemic or emotional attitude to the content of this experience: Past belief based on past perceptual experience is compatible with present disbelief based on the memory of the past perceptual experience and the corresponding past belief. Husserl’s claim is 50

Husserl uses both the German term “Vergegenwärtigung” and the Latin term “Appräsentation” for our empathically re-acutalizing and pre-actualizing past and future perceptual experiences. See for example Hua XIII, pp. 52, 375-376.

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that, when we take the attitude of remembering something, we inevitably ask ourselves whether the beliefs we previously formed in response to what we then experienced and which were then compatible with the view of the world we then had are still compatible with the view of the world we presently have. If the past beliefs and underlying perceptual states we empathically re-present are still compatible with our present view of the world, the acts of self-empathically re-presenting them will, when made objects of second-order empathy, give rise to “sympathy”. Otherwise, they will give rise to “antipathy”.51 Ordinary memory considered as a reliable source of information is second-order self-empathy with past perceptions and the corresponding beliefs which, when made objects of second-order empathy, will give rise to sympathy. Sympathy is a kind of positive or approving act of second-order empathy, the objects of which are acts of first-order empathy. Everyone who remembers past perceptions and beliefs inevitably asks himself or herself: Can I now approve of my former approval of this perceptual experience as reliable? If a person can answer this question in the positive, she will sympathize with her former approval of this experience, and this sympathy is a condition for re-endorsing the former experience as a reliable source of information; memory of experience as reliable information is more than pure self-empathy of past perceptions, it includes a second-order sympathetic act the object of which is a firstorder act of self-empathy.52 As for an example, I can remember entering a shop which, at first sight, seemed to me to be quite spacious. When trying to walk into the back of the shop, I realize that there is a large mirror covering the back wall which creates the optical illusion of the shop being much larger than it actually is. I then become a regular client. And every time I enter the shop I remember how large I first thought it was. But now I have evidence to the contrary. Thus, my memory of my first visual impression of the shop and the corresponding belief about its size takes the shape of second-order antipathy. I remember my previous belief but it is not any 51

For Husserl’s use of the term “antipathy” [“Antipathie”] see Hua XIV, p. 186 and Hua XV, p. 509. 52 On Husserl’s account of “sympathy” in his Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity see also Kern (2012, in this volume), p.154ff .

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more compatible with my actual view of the world and of this shop in particular. In a basically similar way, I can remember my first encounter with a new colleague whom I found at the time not particularly charming. But, since this first encounter, I may have changed my mind about her. I may have got to know her better. Thus, I can empathically represent my first encounter with her, but this act of self-empathy will then become an object of antipathy: The impression I then had does not fit any more into my actual view of the world and of my present trust in the reliability and charm of this colleague in particular. Husserl himself makes explicit that what he says about the role of sympathy and antipathy in acts of remembering past perceptions and beliefs as trustworthy or not applies to the memory of other kinds of mental states and their underlying perceptual or emotional experiences as well: Any attitude of past “liking” [“Gefallen”], “desiring” [“Begehren”] or “willing” [“Wollen”] is subject to further revision, and even “past actions” [“das vergangene Handeln”] can, after having been re-presented empathically, be objects of second-order sympathy or antipathy. Memory is never neutral, it always takes the shape of sympathy or antipathy: In remembering earlier judgments, I also evaluate and will, and have in this, as present I, actual opinions. … there is a collaboration, a community in observating, thinking, feeling, making up one’s mind. (Hua XIV, p. 188) In der Erinnerung an Vergangenes urteile, werte und will ich mit und habe darin als aktuelles Ich wirkliche Stellungnahme. … es liegt darin ein Mittun, Mitleben im Wahrnehmen, Denken, Fühlen, Sich-entscheiden.

It is, however, not only self-empathically re-presented previous perceptual and emotional states and the various attitudes to them that are subject to present re-evaluation and give rise to second-order sympathy or antipathy. The same applies to the perceptual states and attitudes of other people which we re-present in acts of other-empathy: In the same way I sympathize with Others; after all, empathy is a modification of memory. (Hua XIV, p. 185) Ebenso sympathisiere ich mit Anderen, wie ja die Einfühlung eine Erinnerungsmodifikation ist.

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Overcoming Disagreement – Smith and Husserl With respect to the Other I try the following approach: Empathy is something like remembering-oneself-into-the-Other; and, accordingly, there would be an act of sympathy, just as in memory in the ordinary sense of the term. (Hua XIV, p. 186) Hinsichtlich des Anderen versuche ich den Ansatz: Das Einfühlen ist so etwas wie Sich-in-den-Anderen-hineinerinnern, und demgemäss fände ein Sympathisieren statt ganz so wie in der Erinnerung im gewöhnlichen Sinn.

If our empathy with the perceptual and emotional states and corresponding epistemic or evaluative attitudes of another person can be an object of second-order sympathy, if we can ourselves endorse the attitude the respective other has to his perceptual states, then the other and we stand on “common ground”: But it is essential to the state of empathy that, while I posit the Other in accordance with the evidence as seeing and feeling etc. thus and so, I myself, while bringing about those presentiating acts of “I perceive”, “I value”, am in coincidence with the other I, and, as present, I have a jointly given basis. … … From his point of view he sees these and those facets, from that point of view I would see the same ones. This provides the common “basis”, namely for the act-life of the Other and for me. (Hua XIV, p. 188) Aber es liegt doch im Wesen der Einfühlungslage, dass, während ich den Anderen setze gemäß den Anzeigen als so und so wahrnehmend, fühlend etc., ich selbst, indem ich vergegenwärtigend jenes „ich nehme wahr“, „ich werte“ vollziehe, eben in Deckung mit dem anderen Ich bin und als aktuelles Ich einen gemeinsam gegebenen Boden habe. … … Er sieht von dort aus und hat die und die Aspekte, ich würde von dort aus eben dieselben haben. Das gibt den gemeinsamen „Boden“, nämlich für das Aktleben des Anderen und für mich.

Thus, in acts of other-empathy, if the empathic act can be an object of sympathy, we are in agreement with the other person: We do not only reconstruct how he sees the world from his point of view by imaginatively taking it ourselves, we implicitly approve of the other’s attitude to what he sees. Such approval is a precondition for our jointly constituting a common world. Sympathy (or antipathy) represents the normative dimension of our holding each other accountable as reliable informants about the way the world is. But no one can ever achieve the status of a reliable informant forever. By holding each other epistemically accountable in acts of second-order sympathy or antipathy, we constantly sub-

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ject each other to the test of mutual sympathy. As we shall see, Husserl’s analysis of sympathy and antipathy as second-order acts of empathy which have as their objects first-order acts of empathy has a predecessor in Adam Smith’s theory of both first-order and second-order sympathy. In the passage on sympathy and antipathy, Husserl does not talk exclusively about epistemic attitudes to our perceptual states and their propositional content, such as the attitude of belief. States of belief are not the only possible objects of self-empathy or other-empathy. He explicitly addresses those acts of empathy (and in particular those acts of other-empathy) the objects of which are evaluative attitudes, attitudes which can take the shape of feeling or any other kind of evaluation. In cases where we empathically re-present another person’s state of pleasure or sadness and the perceptual content to which the other responds by having these emotions and in which we make these states objects of second-order sympathy or antipathy, our sympathy (or antipathy) is not a matter of epistemic second-order re-presentation exclusively: When representiating another’s sadness, we do not simply think or believe that the other is sad because for example of the loss of a parent. Rather, our sympathy takes itself the shape of an emotion: We share the other’s sadness, we suffer with the other. The same holds for sympathy with the pleasure of another: I share the pleasure of the Other, that does not mean that I would be glad if I were the Other or if I imaginatively put myself in his shoes (nor would I, in the opposite case, act completely differently, sadly), rather I really am glad. (Hua XIV, p. 187-188)53 Ich habe Mitfreude mit dem Anderen, das ist nicht, ich würde mich freuen, wenn ich der Andere wäre oder wenn ich mich an seine Stelle versetzt denke (und nicht würde ich, wie es der Gegenfall ist, ganz anders mich verhalten, trauern), sondern ich freue mich wirklich.

But emotional sympathetic second-order empathy is not emotional contagion. Sympathy takes the form of “joining in” [“Mittun”], “community in perception” [“Mitleben im Wahrnehmen”] and analogously for cases of “thinking” [“Denken”], “feeling” [“Fühlen”] and “making up one’s 53

See on this topic also Kern (2012, this volume), pp. 154ff. and John Drummond (2012, in this volume), pp. 126-134.

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mind” [“Sich-entscheiden”].54 According to Husserl, we have to understand acts of sympathy with other persons’ emotions in analogy to acts of sympathy with their judgments: When we imaginatively put ourselves into the position of another and empathically re-present his perceptual states and corresponding beliefs, and when these acts of re-presentation are then objects of second-order sympathy, we endorse these beliefs ourselves. This means that we consider the other as a reliable informant about the way the world is. Analogously, when we empathically represent the perceptual states and emotional responses to these states of another, and when these acts of re-presentation are then objects of second-order sympathy, we endorse his emotional responses, and this endorsement takes the shape of an emotion of the same kind as the endorsed one. The point is not only that the other’s pleasure is my pleasure and the other’s pain is my pain. Sympathetically re-presenting another’s mental states implies some kind of identification with the other: Not only do the other and I stand on “common ground”, we “overlap”.55 However, Husserl restricts the cases where acts of sympathy with another’s emotional or evaluative states take the form of these very emotions and evaluations to those where the objects of these emotions or evaluations are such that they can be evaluated objectively. There are many things to which we respond emotionally or which we evaluate where these responses cannot be shared by others because they reveal a particular personal concern or a particular taste: Similar as in judging something it is in valuing something that allows for being objectively valued and that has been valued thus. But there is also what is of value just for me, what is not without further ado of value for the Other, something pleasant, happy for me, which it is not for the Other … The sadness at the loss of the mother is not the same for the Other … If I, on the basis of empathy with the sadness of the Other at the death of his mother, myself find it sad that she is dead, this sadness of mine is intentionally and essentially related to the sadness of the Other, and I participate in it, that is to say, I am sad that he is sad and that he has suffered this loss, and this is why I too am sad about the death of his mother. (Hua XIV, p. 190)

54 55

Hua XIV, p. 188. In that context, Husserl uses the notion of “Deckung”. See also Hua XV, p. 513.

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Ähnlich wie im Urteilen steht es im Werten eines objektiven Wertbaren und Gewerteten. Aber es gibt auch ein für mich Wert, was nicht ohne weiteres für den Anderen wert ist, ein mir Angenehm, Erfreulich, was es für den Anderen nicht ist. … Die Trauer über den Tod der Mutter ist nicht für den Anderen dasselbe … Wenn ich auf Grund der Einfühlung in die Trauer des Anderen über den Tod seiner Mutter es nun selbst traurig finde, dass sie tot sei, so hat diese meine Trauer die intentionale und wesentliche Beziehung auf das Trauern des Anderen, und ich nehme daran teil, das sagt, ich bin traurig, dass er trauert und dass er den Verlust erlitten hat, und darum trauere ich auch über den Tod seiner Mutter.

Which objects are possible objects of objective evaluation and emotional response and which are not is, however, not naturally determined. Objective evaluation and objective emotional responses have to be intersubjectively constituted, just as objective descriptions of the world have to be. The case of empathically re-presenting another’s volition and making it an object of sympathy is different from sympathetically endorsing another’s objective emotional and evaluative responses: Things cannot be exactly the same with volition. I cannot turn the choice of the Other into my own choice, no matter how far I want to go along with it in empathy. Granted, what he takes as his goal, that same can be my goal as well, and similarly the empathized “that should be” and “I want to do it” can become at the same time my own. But once he has got what he wants, that will in most cases exclude my getting a hold of it, and that gives rise to a discord about who gets what that has nothing to do with any disapproval. (Hua XIV, p. 190) Ganz ähnlich kann es sich nicht verhalten im Willen. Den Entschluss des Anderen kann ich nicht in einen eigenen verwandeln, wie sehr ich in der Einfühlung mitmachen mag. Zwar, was ihm als praktisch gewollt vor Augen steht, dasselbe kann nun auch mir so vor Augen stehen, und in ähnlicher Umwendung kann aus dem eingefühlten ein für mich aktuelles „das soll sein“ und „ich will es tun“ werden. Aber hat er zugegriffen, so schliesst das ja im allgemeinen mein Zugreifen aus, und das gibt eine eigentümliche Unstimmigkeit, die nichts mit einer Missbilligung zu tun hat.

What Husserl here has in mind is the case where two persons want the same and are aware of each other as wanting the same, while the object of their desire is such that only one can have it. Kant expresses such a

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conflictuous harmony of wishes in a wonderfully ironic verse, referring to the examples of “a married couple bent on going to ruin” and “the pledge of King Francis I to the Emperor Charles V”: O marvelous harmony, what she wants he wants too. (Mary Gregor’s translation, AA V: 28) O wunderbare Harmonie. was er will, will auch sie.

f. Constituting Standards of Normality Every perceiver can misinterpret the perceptual data he or she has at his or her disposal and make erroneous judgments about the way the world is. But misinterpretation of data is not the only possible source of error. The data themselves can already be misleading. It is an important part of Husserl’s phenomenological reconstruction of the intra- and intersubjective constitution of a coherent, rich, differentiated and shareable view of the world which can rightly claim to be objective to identify the most reliable kinds of perceptual data. According to Husserl, those perceptual data are most reliable which are collected by normal perceivers under normal perceptual conditions. In the context of a joint phenomenological reading of Husserl and Smith, Husserl’s notion of normality deserves a prominent place. This is because, in order to identify normal perceivers and external perceptual conditions which are normal for them, we have to focus on ourselves and the people around us as the subjects of perception, belief and knowledge and the way our perceptual systems function – rather than only on the respective points in space and time we occupy. According to Husserl – and this is the point that Smith may have overlooked in his Theory of Moral Sentiments – even scientific knowledge of the world cannot ignore the nature and embodiment of the human subjects of this knowledge: It is clear that the descriptive sciences refer to a certain normality, thus, that they do not develop an objectivity in itself. (Hua XIII, p. 384) Klar ist, dass die deskriptiven Wissenschaften auf eine gewisse Normalität bezogen sind, dass sie also keine Objektivität an sich herausarbeiten.

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Ideally objective scientific knowledge aims at transcending the natural limitations of human perception and capacities of processing data; but this challenge can only be met if the impact of these limitations on our perception of the world and formation of belief has been properly understood and reduced to an unavoidable minimum. Furthermore, scientific knowledge depends on evidence, and the relevant evidence has to be accessible to human beings as they naturally are, or at least to all those considered as normal. The “view from nowhere” cannot and should not be the aim of scientific research.56 Humans are not the only animals in the world whose bodies include perceptual systems and a brain for processing perceptual data and then directing the adaptation of the whole organism to its environment. The identification of standards of normality for perception and perceptual circumstances has to be informed by what the perceptual systems of organisms of a certain species naturally are. And since different animal species are provided with different perceptual systems, standards of normality are species specific. 57 The difference between humans and other animals as far as their perceptual systems are concerned is a matter of degree. Husserl thinks that we can imaginatively take the point of view of a “higher animal” [von “einem höheren Tier”]; but there are limits to our empathic access to the perceptual states even of higher animals since these are not quite as similar to us as other human beings are.58 Husserl does not spend much time speculating about how to determine standards of normality for non-human animals. Only in the framework of an explicitly epistemic concern for an objective and sharable view of the world and the awareness of the subjective nature of perception does the determination of standards of normality become an issue. And there is the question whether and to what extent any non-human animals share the human concern for objectively understanding the world.59 Above, I quoted from passages where Husserl explains the other56

This well known metaphor was coined by Thomas Nagel (1986). See for example Hua XIV, p. 123, and Steinbock (1995), p. 164. 58 See Hua XIV, p. 117. 59 See for example Hua XIX, pp. 113-114 where Husserl raises the question whether I would have an “experience of nature” in the full sense of the term, “if I were a gelly fish” [“Wäre ich eine Qualle, hätte ich schon eine Naturerfahrung?”]. He leaves the question open. 57

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ness of perceivers whom we address as a ‘you’ in acts of other-empathy in terms of the different points in space and time which they occupy and from which they look at the world.60 These passages seem to imply that the only phenomenologically relevant difference between subjects of perception is their position in space and time. But phenomenology has to take more differences between people into account. Only ideally normal persons, who interact exclusively with ideally normal others and who never perceive anything under other than ideally normal perceptual conditions, will differ in nothing but the point in space and time they occupy. Of course, no individual person can ever claim to be ideally normal in this sense: Whenever two bodies switch their objective positions in space, the appearances of the things that the corresponding I’s experience will change continously, and they will do so in such a way that these appearances will, in an ideal case, after the switching of the positions of the bodies, also have switched. What we have here is a certain ideal possibility under the title of a, but merely ideal, normality; accordingly, of any two ideally normal individuals, who switch places or imagine their places switched and bodily are in an ideally normal position, each will find exactly the same appearances of things in his consciousness as previously were realized in the consciousness of the other. If I and an Other have “normal” eyes, then we see the same, when the same unchanged things present themselves to us at the same objective point in space which we can occupy one after the other. And to each one of us things would always have had the same appearance, had he seen them from the same position as the Other, and had, furthermore, not only all spatial relations of the position of the eyes been the same, but had also the eyes and the whole body been in the same “normal condition”. These are ideal ways of speaking. (Hua XIII, p. 117) Wenn ein Leib seine objektive Raumstelle mit einem anderen vertauscht, so ändern sich kontinuierlich die Erscheinungen, die die zugehörigen Ich von ihren erfahrenen Dingen haben, und zwar so, dass die Erscheinungen sich nach der Vertauschung der Leibesstellen in einem idealen Fall vertauscht haben. Es herrscht hier eine gewisse ideale Möglichkeit unter dem Titel einer, aber nur idealen, Normalität, wonach von zwei normalen Individuen, im Fall sie ihre Orte vertauschen oder vertauscht denken und leiblich in einem ideal-normalen Zustand sind, jedes genau dieselben Erscheinungen in seinem Bewusstsein findet, die früher im Bewusstsein des anderen realisiert gewesen waren. Haben 60

See above, pp. 179-180.

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ich und ein Anderer „normale“ Augen, so sehen wir dasselbe, wenn dieselben unveränderten Dinge sich uns an derselben objektiven Raumstelle darbieten, die wir nacheinander einnehmen können. Und jeder von uns würde immer dieselben Erscheinungen gehabt haben, wenn er an derselben Stelle wie der Andere gesehen hätte, und weiter, wenn nicht nur alle räumlichen Beziehungen der Augenstellung dieselben wären, sondern auch die Augen und der ganze Leib in gleicher „normaler Verfassung“ wären. Das sind ideale Reden.

As Husserl makes explicit in this passage, the ideally normal subject who enjoys ideally normal conditions of experience can make judgments to which every other ideally normal subject would always agree. Such a subject would still not need to take a “view from nowhere”.61 The ideally normal person would still be a human being in space and time, having to deal with all the perceptual limitations explicable in terms of the temporal and spatial constraints of perspective and in terms of what normal humans with their perceptual systems have access to. But nothing beyond these constraints would affect the content of such a person’s experience, there would be no malfunctioning of perceptual systems or of the brain processing perceptual data, nor any prejudices nor deficiencies in the exercise of memory and anticipation. But real human beings are not like that, they can never completely annihilate the impact of such abnormal factors on the content of their perceptual states and the way they interpret it: Every normal subject occasionally suffers from abnormal deviations from its normal experience and has thus abnormal data. … The same intersubjectively. (Hua XV, p. 155)62 61

See also Hua XIII, p. 364: “What then is “normal experience” other than that which is correct, which murges harmoniously into the coherent whole, experience which sustains the identity of the experienced thingishness?” [“Was ist denn “normale Erfahrung” anderes als die rechtmässige, die einstimmig in den Zusammenhang sich einfügende, die Identität der erfahrenen Dinglichkeit durchhaltende Erfahrung?”) This passage confirms Dagfinn Føllesdal’s view that Husserl’s phenomenological account of our perceptual experience and objective knowledge is essentially holistic. 62 In my translation of Husserl’s notions of ‘anomal’ and ‘Anomalie’ as ‘abnormal’ and as ‘abnormality’ (as in the passages quoted here), I follow Anthony Steinbock. Steinbock reminds us of the etymologies of ‘normal’, ‘abnormal’ and ‘anomal’: Whereas ‘normal’ and its opposite ‘abnormal’ derive from Greek ‘nomos’ and Latin ‘norma’, ‘anomal’ derives from Greek ‘anomalos’. ‘Abnormal’ clearly bears a

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Overcoming Disagreement – Smith and Husserl Jedes normale Subjekt hat selbst gelegentlich anomale Abweichungen von seiner normalen Erfahrung und so anomal Gegebenes. … Ebenso intersubjektiv. There are abnormalities of memory, abnormalities of intelligence, of evaluative behavior, of volition, of emotional life, of instinctive drives and needs … . (Hua XV, p. 159) Es gibt Anomalien des Gedächtnisses, Anomalien der Intelligenz, des wertenden Verhaltens, des Willens, des Gefühlslebens, der instinktiven Triebe und Bedürfnisse … .

According to Husserl, identifying normally functioning human perceptual systems and perceptual conditions normal for human perceivers can only be a collective enterprise, and the phenomenologist has to reconstruct it as such: The phenomenologist who addresses the question how standards of normality are constituted has to “pass from the solipsistic subject to the communicating subject”; [er muss “vom solipsistischen Subjekt übergehen zum kommunizierenden Subjekt”].63 How does Husserl reconstruct the process of constituting the standards of normality? The main question to ask is ‘Who is normal?’. And the spontaneous and unreflected answer to this question is: ‘I am.’ I, with my entire habitual structure and the world which is already valid for me, and already intersubjectivly valid for me, function … through my being in the form of being-for-myself and being-in-connection-with-Others, as grounder of the apperception of the Other as being similar to me. (Hua XV, p. 135)64 Ich, mit meiner gesamten habituellen Struktur und der mir schon geltenden Welt, und mir als schon intersubjektiv geltenden, fungiere … vermöge meines Seins in der Form des Für-mich-selbst-seins und In-Konnex-mit-

negative connotation, ‘anomal’ is a descriptive term and does not imply the negation of the ‘normal’. See Steinbock (1995), p. 132. See also below, p. 211. 63 Hua XIII, p. 371. 64 In the directly following passage Husserl makes explicit that the standards I implicitly impose by understanding the Other as being similar to me include my “habitual and present interests” [meine “habituellen und aktuellen Interessen”], “my instinctive needs and instinctive satisfactions”, [meine “Instinktbedürfnisse und Instinktbefriedigungen”], “my other needs” [meine “sonstigen Bedürfnisse”], my “concerns” [meine “Sorgen”] , and my “efforts” [ meine “Mühen”] (see Hua XV, p. 136).

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Anderen-seins als urstiftend für die Apperzeption des Anderen als meinesgleichen.

Given that it is “a basic fact of our consciousness”65 to assume that other people are similar to us, we are naturally inclined to set the standards of normality ourselves. This is not presumptive. Rather, it is an expression of our natural disposition to see other people as our equals and to respect them accordingly. Guided by the similarity assumption, we anticipate when we imaginatively take the standpoint of another person in order to look at something from this person’s point of view, to find perceptual experiences that are consistent with our own and thereby find confirmed what we anticipated on the basis of what we perceived ourselves: But in general everyone assumes an approximate correspondence between the appearances of things to him and to Others and sees discrepancies as exceptions due to illness and such like. And on all this the I’s agree or, lets say, the people. Everyone makes his own experiences of the things which appear to him thus and so, and he exchanges these judgments in communication with Others. If he does not have a reason for questioning the appearances, if he is turned in an attitude of experiencing to an object, he does not make a judgment about the appearances, but about the objects; if he describes a thing, this thing is one and the same to him, something that remains unchanged, which has constant properties, and he verbally refers to it as such, even though he constantly has changing appearances while he is moving his head and eyes and his whole body in space, at one moment an appearance from the distance, at the next an appearance from nearby, at one moment an appearance from the front, at the next from the back and so forth. (Hua XIII, p. 117-118) Aber im allgemeinen nimmt jeder eine ungefähre Korrespondenz seiner Erscheinungen mit denen Anderer an und findet Abweichungen unter dem Titel Krankheit und dergleichen als Ausnahme vor und jedenfalls als Möglichkeit vor. Und über all das verständigen sich die Ich oder, sagen wir, die Menschen untereinander. Jeder macht in Beziehung auf die Dinge, die ihm bald so, bald so erscheinen, seine Erfahrungen und tauscht diese Urteile in der Wechselverständigung mit Anderen aus. Wenn er keinen Anlass hat, auf die Erscheinungen zu reflektieren, wenn er geradehin erfahrend dem Gegenstand zugewendet ist, so urteilt er dabei nicht über Erscheinungen, sondern über die Dinge; beschreibt er ein Ding, so ist das Ding ihm das eine und selbe, etwa das un65

See above, footnote 10, p. 178.

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As long as we find our anticipation of consistency between our own perceptual experiences and those of the other person confirmed, we have no reason to revise our silent assumption that we are indeed normal perceivers; we feel confirmed in trusting that we are as normal as the respective other. We agree in our judgments about the way the objects of our perceptions are and thus have reason to believe that these judgments are objectively true. It is only in cases where we find our expectation of consistency disappointed that we have to ask: ‘Who of the two of us is normal? Is it myself or him?’ And in order to answer this question, we have to communicate with the respective other and try to compare our own assumptions about what the things in the world are like with the present experiences, memories and expectations of the other. The definition of standards for normal perception is, of course, not just a matter to be settled between two people. It is a matter of all people: …“normally” we all have [the] same corporal nature … (Hua XV, p. 527, my italics ) …“normalerweise” haben wir alle gleiche Leiblichkeit …

People are normally provided with the same kinds of bodies, including the same perceptual systems and brain capacities for processing perceptual data. But this should not lead to misunderstanding standards of normality as naturally determined. 66 Husserl does claim that we can conceive of “a population of color blind people …, in which the children constitute the visible “colorless” world as normal for them”. [“Ein Volk von Farbenblinden ist denkbar, in dem die Kinder die farbenblind sichtige Welt als normale sich konstituieren.”]67 But he does not mean to imply that normality for the members of a community is merely a matter of what the majority of them happens to be like, how their perceptual systems presently function. 66 67

See on this point Steinbock (1995), p. 144. Hua XIV, p. 133.

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In our distinction between normal and abnormal perceivers and perceptual conditions we are committed to our epistemic goal of understanding the world as far as possible not only as coherent, but also in its phenomenal richness and differentiation.68 Distinctions of color to which only a few people have perceptual access cannot for this reason be ignored. Colorblind people can adhere to a colorless view of the world as objective only as long as this view of the world has not been challenged by anybody who can presently see colors and distinguish between them. But as soon as such a person challenges their view of the normal world and provides evidence for his view, they will have to revise their worldview and endorse a revised standard of normality, accepting that their colorless way of seeing the world is not optimal: For anyone who is colorblind the one who sees colors normally provides the norm … (Hua XIV, p. 132) Für den Farbenblinden ist der normal Farben Sehende die Norm …

Husserl’s understanding of the standards of normality is not relativistic.69 Rather, it is pluralistic: There may be different standards of normality constituted within different communities. But all these standards are committed to the same optimum: Whoever counts as a normal perceiver has to be considered as best equipped for the purpose of perceiving and objectively knowing the world in all its richness and differentiation.70 The respective richness and differentiation is to be found in the world. And where groups of people adhering to different and mutually incompatible standards of normality meet, there is the question whose standards are better, or more truthful.71 In any such case, a great deal of other-empathy and communication is needed before people can eventually agree on a view of the world they all can share.72 What motivates

68

See for example Hua XIV, p. 70 and Steinbock (1995), pp. 139 and 202. For Husserl’s rejection of relativism see for example Hua XIII, p. 369 and Hua XIV, pp. 133-136. 70 See Hua XIV, pp. 121, 128 and Steinbock (1995), pp. 139-141. See also Steinbock (1995a). On Husserl’s notion of optimal normality see also Wehrle (2010) and Mulligan (1995), pp. 204-206. 71 Husserl speaks of “steps of normality” [“Stufen der Normalität”] (H XV, p. 210). 72 See Hua XIV, p. 134. 69

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this communication is the shared belief in the uniqueness of the actual world: There can be only one world, only one time, only one space with one nature and one manifold of animal organisms. (Hua XIV, p. 102 )73 Es kann nur eine Welt geben, nur eine Zeit, nur einen Raum mit einer Natur und einer Mannigfaltigkeit animalischer Wesen.

Every human being shares with all other human beings the possibility of an “infinite world of experience” [die “Möglichkeit einer unendlichen Erfahrungswelt”].74 There is “an open plurality of others” [eine “offene Vielheit von Anderen”].75 Accordingly, the past, present and future perceptual states of all people provide the data for constituting the one world in which all people live. Husserl speaks of “the constant process of a progressing world constitution” [“der beständige Prozess einer fortschreitenden Weltkonstitution”], 76 underlining that this constitution is an ongoing task in which all human beings are invited to participate: Indeed, the world itself is determinate, but it is openly indeterminate nevertheless, and every human being entering into my experience is not only some being in the world, but it is there with me as a transcendental I, not only as finding itself there as a corporal I in its premordial world, but as an Other, whose experiences are valid for me as well, thus as someone who shares a unity of experience with me, and vise versa also as an Other, who knows himself to be in agreement with me. Everything worldly has been constituted intersubjectively. (Hua XV, pp. 44-45) Die Welt ist ja selbst eine bestimmte und doch offen unbestimmte, und jeder evtl. in meine Erfahrung tretende Mensch ist nicht nur Daseinedes der Welt, sondern mit da als transzendentales Ich, als nicht nur sich als leibliches Ich in seiner primordinalen Welt vorfindend, sondern als Anderer, dessen Erfahrungen für mich mitgelten, also als mit mir in eins Erfahrender, und umgekehrt als Anderer, der sich ebenso mit mir einig weiss. Alles Weltliche ist intersubjektiv konstituiert.

Standards of normality typically aim at universality: Any such standards are taken to be universal. But since universality is an ideal that may never be reached by humans, any particular judgment for which we claim 73

See also Hua VIII, p. 384 and Hua XIV, p. 135. Hua XV, p. 196; see also Hua XV, pp. 214-215. 75 Hua XV, p. 44. 76 Hua XV, p. 209. 74

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universality can be subject to revision. Our universality claims do not make us immune to error. In Husserl’s account of the conditions for objective knowledge as based on data collected by normal people under normal perceptual conditions, there is room for a plurality of standards of normality. However, normatively speaking, he is a universalist: What counts as objective knowledge must in principle be accessible for all people and compatible with the world view of all people, and that is compatible with its being subject to revision at any time.77 Any standard of normality of perceivers or perceptual conditions implies a distinction between what is normal and what is abnormal: “Everything normal has its horizon of abnormalities.” [“Alles Normale … hat seinen Horizont möglicher Anomalitäten.”]78 Since the normal is committed to the optimal, standards of normality have a normative function: They set standards for optimal perceivers and perceptual conditions in the light of which whoever and whatever is abnormal is sub-optimal. 79 And it is the commitment to optimality that makes the normal the typical and familiar for the members of a community: “… a human being lives within the norm …” [“... der Mensch lebt in der Norm …”].80 Steinbock puts this point in the following terms: “Something is not normal because it is frequent; it is frequent because it is normal”.81 Before we conclude that some people are just not normal, we try to exclude any external factors that might cause an intersubjective inconsistency of perceptual experiences. After all, such a conclusion is not in accordance with the “basic fact of our consciousness”82 which makes us assume that all people are similar to each other. Husserl’s own examples for people who are not normal and therefore not to be seen as reliable informants include colorblind people, children, mentally handicapped people and people who suffer from an illness that affects their perceptual

77

See also Hua XV, p. 391. Hua XIV, p. 120. 79 See Hua XIV, p. 131. 80 Hua XV, p. 143. 81 Steinbock (1995), p. 164. 82 See above, footnote 10, p. 178. 78

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and mental capacities.83 Normal conditions for visual perception for human beings include, for example, direct visual access to the objects to be perceived under either daylight or light which is sufficiently similar to daylight, perception of these objects from a proper distance (what counts as a proper distance depends on the size of the object and on the capacity of the respective perceptual system) as well as the possibility of seeing the object from more than one angle. That we consider daylight as a normal condition for visual perception and a certain distance as proper for seeing an object of a certain size is conditional on the kinds of eyes and brains the best human perceivers have, on the particular design of their eyes and brains.84 Owls are better equipped than normal human beings for seeing under poor lighting conditions and falcons are better equipped for seeing small things from a great distance. For adapting to their level of perceptual richness and differentiation under conditions normal for them humans have to use perceptual tools like infra red cameras or telescopes. But “no one, no animal species can claim a priori to be within its system of experience in possession of optimal experience in which all properties of things are represented”. [“A priori kann niemand, keine Spezies sagen, sie habe in ihrem Erfahrungssystem die optimale Erfahrung, in der alle Dingeigenschaften sich darstellen.”] 85 Accordingly, any standard of normality allows not only for negative deviation (the abnormal), but also for positive deviation (the “anomal”, as Steinbock suggests to call it). As for an example, a person who can perceive colors is anomal among colorblind members of a community whose standards of normal perception have not yet been optimalized.86 If a perceiver makes a claim for a positive deviation from the generally accepted standards of normality and if he can provide evidence for his claim that is generally accessible, he successfully challenges the accepted standards and motivates their revision. 83

Hua XV, p. 141. Husserl speaks of the “psychophysical dependency of perceptual appearances from the respective body”, [“psychophysische Abhängigkeit der Wahrnehmungserscheinungen von der Leiblichkeit”] (Hua XIII, p. 369). 85 Hua XIV, p. 135. 86 See on this topic Steinbock (1995), pp. 132, 140, 145. 84

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The process of constituting the standards of normality as Husserl conceives of it is intrinsically conservative. People who are generally recognized as normal perceivers share a certain view of the world, and they try to interpret every new experience as a confirmation of this view of the world (including the assumption of their normality). Still, normal perceivers can agree to account for certain findings which cannot be made coherent with their current view of the world: They can see a need to revise this view instead of either trying to explain these findings in terms of abnormal perceptual conditions or trying to ignore them. They will agree on revising the present standard of normality if the respective evidence becomes overwhelming. Any standards of normality which enjoy present authority have been constituted by a particular group of people living under historically and geographically specified conditions. They bear the traits of the particular “horizon” [“Horizont”] of these people, a horizon of shared experience, shaped by the tradition and present state of the culture and environment in which they live, by their “Lebenswelt” [“life world”]: Everybody is a normal human being who concretely refers to himself by using the word “everyone”, who belongs to an open human community of people who share the same historical life-world, determined by the same formal structure which is common to all, even though not explicitly. The normal being is normal within and through the normal community. (Hua XV, p. 142)87 Als Mensch normal ist, wer mit dem Wort „jedermann“ sich konkret versteht, wer einer offenen Menschengemeinschaft von Mitmenschen angehört, die dieselbe historische Lebenswelt haben, bestimmt durch dieselbe, allen vertraute, aber nicht ausgelegte Formstruktur. Der Normale ist normal in und vermöge der normalen Gemeinschaft.

But the historicity and contingency of any present standards of normality do not stand in the way of making claims of universality and objectivity for the judgments made in accordance with these standards. The universality and objectivity claims are justified as long as no present group of people sharing a standard of normality explicitly excludes somebody from participating in the constitution and further shaping of this standard. 87

For Husserl’s use of the notion of “horizon” see Hua XV, pp. 19-20, for his use of the notion of “Lebenswelt” see Hua XV, p. 141; see also in this context Hua XV, pp. 136, 142-147.

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And the acknowledgement of a pluralism of normality standards reminds us of the fact that no standards of normality people endorse at any present moment in time will ever be ideal, however justified their claim to universality and objectivity may be. None of the claims to universality made at a present time can ever be ideal. g. Objectivity and Equality At first sight, Husserl’s account of normality and his distinction between normal and abnormal people may sound frighteningly discriminatory, especially in the ears of people who are likely to be considered abnormal: the blind, the deaf, those who have lost the normal capacity of smell and taste and touch, the mentally handicapped and, more generally speaking, people who are seen as abnormal. The distinction evokes practices of racism, phenomena of social exclusion, disrespect, even crimes against humanity. Telling someone that he is not normal, that he is abnormal, is, in many contexts, an expression of despise. But none of these intuitive responses to the distinction between normal and abnormal people is in any way justified. Husserl’s account of normality is not supposed to provide any reasons for social discrimination. The standards of normality as Husserl conceives of them refer first and foremost to an epistemic optimum the conception of which is informed by what qualifies a human being to be considered as a reliable source of perceptual evidence. These standards are supposed to be immune to distinctions of race or gender, as well as to any social or economic distinctions. Their constitution is committed to epistemic egalitarianism. Through processes of empathy, people try to understand each others’ way of perceptually experiencing the world. The constitution of standards of normality is a collective enterprise from which nobody is excluded. This procedure is compatible with an outcome according to which only a few people are considered as normal perceivers. Still, one might object that it would be very naïve to believe that any process of communication between people which aims more or less explicitly at the definition of standards of normality in Husserl’s sense of the term could ever be kept free from the impact of the social power of certain individuals or classes of people. The history of civilization and

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the history of class discrimination in particular provide ample evidence for the contrary. However, as far as knowledge of the factual world is concerned, social power cannot, in the long run, overrule factual evidence. The history of astronomy represents an excellent example: The death of Nicolaus Copernicus did not prevent the heliocentric view of the cosmos from becoming the generally accepted view in cosmology. The concern that the definition of standards of normality might be subject to contingent factors, arbitrary choices, and the preferences of powerful social classes in particular is certainly well justified. But one should not overlook what Husserl tries to achieve with his phenomenological epistemology. He tries to provide an account of the way in which knowledge acquired by human beings can rightly claim to be objective or true. This project is normative in kind, its aim is epistemic justification. Even though not blind to social practices of discrimination, its aim is not to provide a sociological account of how standards of normality which people endorse at present have come into being and in what respects their particular shape bears the impact of contingent factors. In order to understand Husserl’s epistemic project as normative, one has to bear in mind his claim that all people are originally the same, they are the same potential subjects of perception and knowledge. It is through processes of socialization within a particular social group that they become different from each other: Every empirical I starts as a primitive I, thus every I as completely the same as every other, with the exception of the hule given to it and the way this hule is distributed in immanent time. Afterwards, every primitive I develops in its own specific way, different from every other. (Hua XIII, p. 407) Jedes empirische Ich fängt als Ur-Ich an, also jedes völlig identisch bis auf die ihm vorgegebene Hyle und die Art ihrer Verteilung in der immanenten Zeit. Danach entwickelt sich jedes Ur-Ich anders als jedes andere.

This primitive sameness of all I’s underlies the basic assumption of all people being naturally similar. It means that there are no naturally given reasons for excluding anyone from participating in the interactive process of defining the standards of normality. Furthermore, normality and abnormality with respect to perceptual and intellectual powers can come in degrees. People who are abnormal in one respect can, at least to some extent, participate in the process of constituting standards of normality.

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And even after standards of normality have been constituted, not all those then considered as abnormal in one respect or another will be excluded from being reliable sources of information. After all, blind people may hear normally and deaf people may see normally. And sometimes it needs a child in all its innocence and ignorance of social power structures to see that the emperor is actually naked. Most people have access to perceptual data of some kind. But they cannot be subjects of objective knowledge unless they endorse the collectively constituted standards of normality and the corresponding commitment to optimality. A slope is objectively more or less slippery even for someone who is not himself capable of walking down it. Any constitution of standards of normality through an interactive process is justified in virtue of respecting the basic sameness of all people, of letting all people participate. This basic sameness of all people is all inclusive; it should not be misunderstood as the sameness of all those people who are normal in every respect, who do not suffer from a deficiency of any of their perceptual systems and who can properly process the respective data. In every real society, people considered normal, the most reliable sources of perceptual information about the objects’ perceptual properties, live in “community with people who are abnormal” [in “Gemeinschaft mit Anomalen”],88 and the normality of the former does not provide them with any reason for discriminating the latter. h. The Epistemic and the Ethical As I mentioned above, Husserl claims in his papers On the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity that the challenges one has to meet for justifying claims of objectivity in the realm of common and scientific descriptive judgments on the one hand and on the other in the realm of evaluative and in particular moral judgments are similar. This is consistent with admitting that there may be additional challenges to be met in the constitution of ethical knowledge. How can “evaluative objects” [“Wertobjekt[e]”] be known? 89 Husserl seems to imply that the justification of judgments about evaluative object depends on processes of empathy and 88 89

Hua XV, p. 19. See also Hua XV, p. 499. Hua XV, p. 405. See also Hua XIII, p. 427.

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communication and the constitution of standards of normality similar to those on which we rely in order to justify descriptive judgments: … we also co-constitute the world of values and the practical world, which is there for all of us; we are eventually together, for one another, acting together for achieving the same ends, on the sense of which we agree … (Hua XV, p. 162) … wir sind auch Mitträger der Wertewelt und praktischen Welt, die für uns alle da ist; wir sind eventuell zusammen, füreinander, miteinander handelnd an denselben Zwecken, in deren Sinn wir übereinstimmen ... Every human being and even the whole of humanity is constantly on the move – craving for a world of values for him, for a world of values for all, a world which could provide possibilities of happiness for all at the same time, for everyone the face of a world of values, which everyone could enjoy. (Hua XV, p. 406)90 Der Mensch und dann die Menschheit ist in unaufhörlicher Bewegung – im Streben nach einer Werte-Welt für ihn, einer Werte-Welt für alle, die allen zugleich Möglichkeiten der Glückseligkeit geben könnte, für jedermann das Gesicht einer Werte-Welt, für ihn geniessbar.

Humanity is not only the community of all people who make descriptive judgments about objects belonging to one and the same world. It is also the community of all people united in the desire to survive and live peacefully within communities. And as in the case of standards of epistemic normativity in common knowledge and the natural sciences, the constitution of proper social norms and of ethical norms in particular takes its starting points within limited communities and then proceeds to a stepwise unification of particular systems of norms, the ultimate and ideal goal of which being a system of norms that is universal: The development of transcendental intersubjectivity as a community of personalities is thus the process of constantly constituting new steps of systems of norms such that every successive step is higher than the former and more unified. (Hua XV, p. 421) Die Entwicklung der transzendentalen Intersubjektivität als Gemeinschaft von Personalitäten ist also eine Entwicklung in der Ausbildung immer neuer und immer höheren Stufen sich vereinheitlichender Normsysteme.

90

See also Hua XV, p. 405.

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Overcoming Disagreement – Smith and Husserl Humanity – a more or less unified manifold of relative or particular humanities, which themselves consist of particular humanities, – is as such a community shaped for the purpose of self-preservation, and self-preservation includes self-responsibility and the autonomous endorsement of norms; every form and step of unification has its own unified responsibility, such that the self-responsibilities are themselves unified in the communities. (Hua XV, p.421) Die Menschheit – eine mehr oder minder vergemeinschaftete Mannigfaltigkeit von relativen oder Sondermenschheiten, die selbst wieder aus Sondermenschheiten gebaut sind, – ist als solche eine Vergemeinschaftung der Selbsterhaltung, und zur Selbsterhaltung gehört Selbstverantwortung und Selbstnormierung, zur Vergemeinschaftung jeder Form und Stufe vergemeinschaftete Verantwortung, wobei die Selbstverantwortungen selbst vergemeinschaftete sind in den Gemeinschaftlichkeiten.

Husserl wrote this down on November 22nd, 1931. And he then continued: This still requires careful analysis, there are complications. (Hua XV, p. 421) Das erfordert noch sorgsame Auslegungen, es gibt da Verwicklungen.

It is evident from this passage that Husserl considered the phenomenological analysis of the way people interact in order to constitute social norms as something that remained to be developed in detail. What we find in his papers On the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity is nothing but a minimal sketch of what this analysis might look like. One assumption is quite clear: The data on which we rely for making evaluative and in particular moral judgments are not only perceptual but include emotional responses to what is being perceived and considered as being in the world: Everything that already exists has an impact on the emotions, all that exists is apperceived in an evaluative way, and for this reason it triggers attitudes of desire which may be satisfied or not; it also motivates action, aiming at the preservation of values, at making them available, at forming higher values from lower ones etc. (Hua XV, pp. 404-405) Alles, was schon ist, berührt das Gefühl, alles Seiende wird in Wertapperzeptionen apperzipiert und weckt damit begehrende Stellungnahmen, unerfüllte oder erfüllte; in eins damit geweckt Handlungen, darauf gerichtet, Werte zu erhalten, bereitzustellen, höhere Werte zu gestalten aus niederen Werten etc.

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In a footnote to this passage Husserl underlines that not all values are hedonistic in kind. One question that deserves particular attention is the question concerning the optimality constraints for the constitution of standards of normality in the moral realm. In the passages I quoted, Husserl underlines the importance of normative coherence and unity within communities. However, in the moral realm, what counts as optimal is not as easily agreed upon as in the realm of descriptive knowledge where the world in its complexity sets the standards. Epistemic complexity is to be discovered, but it is an open question whether there is anything in the world to be discovered that is morally relevant.91 Husserl did not live to develop a phenomenological account of objective values, the objects of justified evaluative and moral judgments.92 But looking at Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments will allow us to inquire whether and to what extent moral judgments and their claim to be true can be justified in a way analogous to Husserl’s suggestion of how to justify the truth claims of descriptive judgments. In the second part of this essay I shall try to provide a phenomenological reading of Smith’s moral theory – following the lines of Husserl’s phenomenology of the objectivity of descriptive judgments. III. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Propriety a. The challenge of justifying moral judgments Smith might have agreed with the basic line of argument of Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology without giving up his claim that a theory of moral judgment represents an additional challenge. This is because there are two phenomena standing in the way of people easily agreeing on what is morally proper and improper: Moral judgments are 91

For a more detailed account of Husserl’s ethics and its Kantian heritage see Beyer (2012, in this volume), pp. 93-116 and Føllesdal (2008). 92 A sketch of Husserl’s idea of what his ethics should look like can be found in the articles he wrote in the early 1920s for the Japanese journal The Kaizo. See Hua XXVII, pp. 3-59. In these texts, Husserl stresses reason, self-consciousness, responsibility and ethical conscience as the guiding forces for ethical action. His focus is more on the individual agent and his exercise of self-control and practical reasoning than on the interaction between people or the role of empathy.

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judgments about “objects of practical consequence”93; because of this, the different ways in which different people – even if they were ideally “normal” in Husserl’s specific sense of the term – respond to such an object cannot be explained merely in terms of the different positions in space and time from which they perceive this object. Whereas ideally normal people do not differ with respect to their perceptual systems, whereas they all see exactly the same if they look at objects from the same point of view under the same normal perceptual conditions, these people may still differ with respect to their other than merely perceptual bodily conditions and to their personal situations and acquired habits. They have different needs, they are vulnerable in different ways and in different degrees. And even when they are similar in their needs and desires, when they want the same, the object of their desires may not be sharable.94 Whereas in the epistemic realm all are equally interested in acquiring the best knowledge possible (knowledge as detailed and differentiated as possible) and willing to admit that some are better equipped to access the relevant data than others, in the moral realm it is quite unclear who should set the standards for what is morally proper, even if all are equally interested in living together in communities peacefully and to each other’s advantage. There is no prospect of naturalizing standards of moral normality analogous to Husserl’s naturalization of standards of epistemic normality. Moral propriety is not merely a matter of optimally functioning human perceptual systems and data processing brains. For this reason, the constitution of something like the moral counterparts to Husserl’s standards of epistemic normality is more difficult; and even if such standards have been constituted, their application has to be handled with great care since, in the moral realm, we cannot ignore differences between the needs and interests different people have, differences for which there is no counterpart on the epistemic side. It is quite the opposite: Other than in epistemic matters, where the best perceivers are those who have access to richer and more differentiated data due to the well 93

This is a formula Lindgren uses, one of the first scholars who paid particular attention to Smith’s distinction between judgments of science and taste on the one hand and moral judgments on the other. See Lindgren (1973), p. 23. 94 See above, p. 200.

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functioning of their perceptual systems and brains, in moral matters the challenge is to take the special needs and interests different people have into account. Still, Smith himself uses the epistemic challenge of how to extract true and justified beliefs about visually perceived objects from the data we have in our visual fields when we perceive these objects as a model for describing the challenge of acquiring justified moral beliefs about what kind of behavior is morally proper and what is not from our spontaneous emotional responses to this behavior: As to the eye of the body, objects appear great or small, not so much according to their real dimensions, as according to the nearness or distance of their situation; so do they likewise to what may be called the natural eye of the mind: and we remedy the defects of both these organs pretty much in the same manner. In my present situation, an immense landscape of lawns, and woods, and distant mountains, seems to do no more than cover the little window which I write by, and to be out of all proportion less than the chamber in which I am sitting. I can form a just comparison between those great objects and the little objects around me, in no other way, than by transporting myself, at least in fancy, to a different station, from whence I can survey both at nearly equal distances, and thereby form some judgment for their real proportions. Habit and experience have taught me to do this so easily and so readily, that I am scarce sensible that I do it; and a man must be, in some measure, acquainted with the philosophy of vision, before he can be thoroughly convinced, how little those distant objects would appear to the eye, if the imagination, from a knowledge of their real magnitudes, did not swell and dilate them. In the same manner, to the selfish and original passions of human nature, the loss or gain of a very small interest of our own, appears to be of vastly more importance, excites a much more passionate joy or sorrow, a much more ardent desire or aversion, than the greatest concern of another with whom we have no particular connection. His interests, as long as they are surveyed from this station, can never be put into the balance with our own, can never restrain us from doing whatever may tend to promote our own, how ruinous soever to him. Before we can make any proper comparison of these opposite interests, we must change our position. We must view them, neither from our own place nor yet from his, neither with our own eyes nor yet with his, but from the place and with the eyes of a third person, who has no particular connection with either, and who judges with impartiality between us. Here, too, habit and experience have taught us to do this so easily and so readily, that we are scarce sensible that we do it; and it requires, in this case too, some degree of reflection, and even of philosophy, to convince us, how little interest

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As I shall argue in the following, Smith’s main point concerning the analogy between the strategy that takes us from subjective perceptual data to objective descriptive knowledge and the strategy that takes us from subjective emotional data to the moral counterpart of objective descriptive knowledge, namely justified normative beliefs about what is morally good and what is not is that, in both cases, the challenge is to overcome the distortions and limitations of perspective. Whereas visual perception is perception from a particular point in space and time from which we see only a small part of the world and the things in it in perspectival distortion, our spontaneous emotional responses to the circumstances to which we are exposed and to other people’s actions and their consequences in particular are distorted because of the strong influence of the passions arising in our natural self-love. Given the additional challenges that have to be met in the constitution and application of standards of moral propriety, the focus of comparison between the strategies of justifying descriptive and those of justifying moral judgments has to lie on the intersubjective procedures for reaching an agreement about who counts as a reliable source of evidence for making a moral judgment that can rightly claim to be justified – rather than on the standards of moral propriety themselves. Indeed, the way we have to proceed in order to achieve objective common or scientific judgments as Husserl reconstructs it bears important similarities to its moral counterpart in Smith’s moral theory, namely the ‘sympathetic process’.95 This is an interactive process in the course of which people communicate and correct each others’ emotional responses and the evaluative beliefs based on them in order to achieve shared views of what is 95

The notion is not Smith’s; I am not sure who originally coined it. Carrasco uses the notion of “sympathetic exchange” which comes close; see Carrasco (2004), p. 101. In the same paper, Carrasco already suggests a “phenomenological” reading of Adam Smith’s moral theory (see p. 94); but rather than to any phenomenologist philosopher, she relates Adam Smith’s moral theory to Aristotelian ethical thought and attributes to him an “ethics of practical reasoning” (p. 94).

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morally good and what ought to be done under circumstances of a particular kind. b. First-order sympathy with a person concerned For Smith, “sympathy” is an emotional faculty which is constitutive of our moral sensitivity. But it is not a moral sense as it was attributed to human beings by Smith’s academic teacher, Francis Hutcheson.96 Nor is it what is, in the social sciences, sometimes called “empathy”, an emotional disposition to care about others and to help them without any expectation of personal reward.97 Smith’s notion of “sympathy” covers a range of emotional phenomena that have something in common: Rather than being triggered by an external stimulation of the body directly, sympathetic feelings are responses to partly cognitive and, in particular, imaginative states of mind.98 As I shall argue, Smith’s notion of sympathy and the different kinds of sympathy he – even though not terminologically – distinguishes anticipate Husserl’s theory of “empathy” and “sympathy”. “Sympathy” is, according to Smith, not the only emotional faculty humans naturally have. Humans are also provided with the faculty of self-love. Emotions arising from self-love are self-directed, they concern the individual’s own survival, health and well-being. Sympathetic emotions are first and foremost other-directed, they represent an essential part of what makes us intrinsically social beings. Sympathy makes us take an interest “in the fortune of others” (TMS I.i.1.1, p. 9). It allows us to share not only “the sorrow of others” but also “any passion whatsoev96

For Smith’s rejection of Hutcheson’s assumption of a moral sense see TMS III.4.5, p. 158. See also Kern (2012, in this volume), p. 155-156. 97 Psychologists and neuroscientists do not all use the notion of “empathy” in the same way; but much of the research about empathy aims at understanding what makes humans care not only about themselves and their own life and well-being, but also about other people. See Decety and Ickes (2011). 98 Carrasco distinguishes between four kinds of sympathy in Smith, two of them “one-way” and two of them “two-way or mutual sympathies”. According to her, sympathy triggered by emotional contagion is one kind. See Carrasco (2011). Smith does indeed use the notion of “sympathy” for this phenomenon as well, but this is not the kind of sympathy that is relevant for understanding human morality. It is this phenomenon that comes closest to some kind of empathy (a notion that Smith does not use himself).

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er” another person may have who is concerned by certain circumstances and emotionally responds to them (TMS I.i.1.5, p. 10). This sharing of an emotion is not explicable in terms of emotional contagion, even though Smith does not deny the phenomenon of a “transfusion” of passions, as he calls it.99 Nor is sympathy with the emotions of a person concerned a matter of mere curiosity. First and foremost, our sympathy both allows and motivates us to put ourselves imaginatively into the position of another person in order to conceive “what we ourselves should feel in the like situation”; after all, “it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations” (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9). Smith is aware of the fact that we have no direct access to how other people feel, to the way they emotionally respond to the circumstances in which they are. If we, by relying on our imagination, try to imagine ourselves in the position of another person, exposed to the very same circumstances, if we try to imagine how we would feel if we were in his position, and if we then expect that what we imagine we would feel was indeed the same as what he presently feels, we silently assume that he is similar to us, just as sensitive and vulnerable as we are. In so far as Smithian sympathy allows and motivates us to imagine how we would feel under certain circumstances as a means for understanding how another person feels who is exposed to these circumstances, this emotional faculty functionally resembles the faculty of empathy as Husserl described it. Furthermore, this Smithian first-order sympathy has to be distinguished from second-order sympathy. And, as I shall argue, Smithian second-order sympathy functionally resembles the faculty of sympathy as Husserl described it.100

99

See TMS I.i.1.6, p. 11 and footnote above. For the distinction between Smithian sympathy understood as a “first-order desire” and Smithian sympathy understood as a “second-order passion” see Carrasco (2011), pp. 16-17. I prefer making the distinction in terms of ‘first-order’ and ‘second-order sympathy’; the former is an emotional state triggered by an act of the imagination, and the latter an emotional response to such an emotional state.

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c. The normative constraints of second-order sympathy and the challenge of mutual sympathy If the emotional response of the other person to certain circumstances is of exactly the same nature as the emotion we imagine we would feel under the same circumstances, and if the expectation of such a unanimity of feelings is confirmed, we do indeed share the feeling of the person who is the object of our attention. And this sharing of the feelings of the other gives rise to a second-order feeling of sympathy, the “pleasure of mutual sympathy” (TMS I.i.2.title, p. 13). Since we can sympathetically imagine any passion whatsoever, whether agreeable or disagreeable, and will, if we do so, emotionally experience the respective passion, our first-order sympathy can take the shape of an agreeable or a disagreeable feeling. Any second-order feeling of sympathy is, however, intrinsically agreeable, since we are naturally disposed to enjoy emotional unanimity with others.101 Generally speaking, Smith’s idea is that our emotions motivate us to make evaluative judgments, judgments about what is good and bad. Whatever we find agreeable we judge as good, and whatever we find disagreeable we judge as bad. Were we to care only about ourselves, had we only emotions arising from self-love, the only evaluative judgments we could make would be judgments of personal taste. Any case of evaluative agreement with others would be nothing but a lucky coincidence, a case of accidentally shared tastes. There could not really be anything like evaluative disagreement, and there certainly would not be any reliable procedure for overcoming it. Both proper disagreement with another person on how to evaluate certain circumstances or the emotional and behavioral responses of people to them and the prospect of overcoming this disagreement in a rational way depend on there being some kind of evidence accessible to the conflicting parties which speaks in favor of 101

See Smith’s response to Hume at TMS I.iii.1.9.footnote, p. 46. Hume, in a letter to Smith from July 28, 1759, had wondered how sympathy could be both agreeable and disagreeable at the same time, overlooking that Smith – even though not explicitly – distinguishes between first-order and second-order sympathy. Smith added the footnote in the second edition of the TMS. In his contribution to this volume, Iso Kern also refers to this passage (see p. 158), and so do Vivienne Brown (p. 247, footnote 9), and Samuel Fleischacker (p. 300).

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one or the other evaluation. If there were no such evidence, the only way to overcome disagreement would be by exercising coercion or power. What Smith implies with his claim that our sympathy allows us to imagine how we would feel under the circumstances of another person is that we are disposed to consider the other as an equal, similar to ourselves, and therefore as sensitive and vulnerable as we are. Furthermore, due to our faculty of sympathy, we feel the need of emotional and evaluative agreement with others. An experience of second-order sympathy is based on emotional unanimity and indicates agreement on matters of evaluation. Our general interest in being in a state of second-order sympathy indicates our need and general interest in agreeing with others on matters of evaluating behavior, of what is good or bad, not only for ourselves, but for others as well. For the purpose of analyzing the phenomena of first- and secondorder sympathy and their function in communication, Smith makes a distinction between two roles people can have when involved in a sympathetic process. There is on the one hand the person directly concerned by certain circumstances. Smithian examples for persons in this role include among others “a brother upon the rack” (TMS I:i.1.2, p. 9) and the “stranger” who “has just received the news of the death of his father” (TMS I.i.3.4, p. 17). On the other hand, there is the person in the role of a “spectator” who pays attention to the person concerned and imagines how he would feel if he was concerned in the same way, by the same circumstances (TMS I.i.1.4, p. 10). What qualifies a person to take the role of such a spectator is that he witnesses the person concerned and his emotional reaction to the respective circumstances and that he is himself not directly concerned by these circumstances. Since the spectator assumes that the person concerned is similar to him, he expects to share the feelings of this person and to enjoy a state of second-order sympathy. But it may be the case that he finds his expectation disappointed. Evidence for whether or not the spectator finds his expectation disappointment can come from the facial expression and the body language of the person concerned or from any other verbal or nonverbal communication from his side.102 In cases of such disappointment, 102

See TMS I.i.1.6, p. 11.

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the spectator will not feel second-order sympathy; rather, he will feel second-order “antipathy” (TMS II.i.5.4 and 5, p. 75), and such antipathy would take the shape of a disagreeable feeling, a feeling of displeasure. Indeed, the spectator makes his second-order sympathy with the person concerned dependent on this person’s feeling those emotions the spectator imagines he would feel under these circumstances: When the original passions of the person principally concerned are in perfect concord with the sympathetic emotions of the spectator, they necessarily appear to this last just and proper, and suitable to their objects; and, on the contrary, when, upon bringing the case home to himself, he finds that they do not coincide with what he feels, they necessarily appear to him unjust and improper, and unsuitable to the causes which excite them. (TMS I.i.3.1, p. 16)

As Smith makes explicit in this passage, the spectator’s spontaneous response to evaluative disagreement with the person concerned is to judge this person’s emotional response to the respective circumstances as “unjust” and “improper”. Underlying is the spectator’s surprise of not finding the other similar to himself. And his spontaneous response, explicit in his second-order antipathy, reveals a twofold implication: Not only is the other person’s response “unjust” or “improper”; the spectator’s own imagined response is “just” and “proper”.103 Put in Husserlian terms, the spectator of a person concerned by certain circumstances who imagines how he would feel under such circumstances implies, when responding with second-order antipathy to the person concerned, that he himself is normal in his (imagined) emotional response whereas the person concerned is not. The distinction between himself as normal and the person concerned as abnormal is, however, not in accordance with his underlying assumption that the person concerned is similar to him – and without this assumption, the whole idea of first-order sympathy would not make sense: We cannot assume to adequately imagine how organisms respond to certain circumstances which are not similar to us. Now, anybody can find himself or herself in the role of a person concerned or in that of a spectator at almost any time. And, according to Smith, all people are naturally provided both with self-love and with 103

See on the normative role of the Smithian spectator also Brown (2012, in this volume), p. 261.

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sympathy, including the capacity of imagining emotional responses to certain circumstances (first-order sympathy) and the desire of emotional concordance with others, that is the desire of second-order sympathy. Thus, when a spectator finds himself in emotional discordance with a person concerned and feels second-order antipathy, the lack of emotional concordance represents a problem not only for the spectator who finds his equality assumption not confirmed; it is also a problem for the person concerned who naturally pays attention to his spectator and desires his sympathy. According to Smith, “nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast; nor are we ever so much shocked as by the appearance of the contrary” (TMS I.i.2.1, p. 13). In sympathetic processes, the desire for secondorder sympathy is mutual, the person concerned shares it with his spectator. But the person concerned and his spectator also share the underlying assumption that they are equals, that they are both similar, normal people, and that they have therefore reason to expect emotional concordance and mutual second-order sympathy. If the spectator and the person concerned find themselves in a state of mutual antipathy and if they do not want to leave things there and just conclude that they are not similar to each other and that the respective other is abnormal, there is the question how they can eventually overcome their emotional discordance, a discordance which gives rise to a disagreement in evaluative judgments. According to Smith, the option of leaving things there is not very attractive since people are naturally social and desire to live in emotional harmony with others, in a state of mutual second-order sympathy. According to Smith, a person concerned and his spectator will consider their emotional discordance and lack of mutual sympathy as a case of disagreement that needs to be overcome. d. The rational strategy to overcome disagreement and achieve mutual second-order sympathy Smith is not naïve. He is perfectly aware of the fact that in real social scenarios when a person concerned and his spectator have not achieved a state of mutual sympathy, their efforts for overcoming their disagreement are not merely driven by their respective trust in their being normal,

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in deserving the merit of a person commited to justice, and by the desire to achieve a shared understanding of what is the proper emotional response to certain circumstances – a desire to understand what is indeed morally good or bad. Smith knows how common it is that people in such circumstances of disagreement can be “uncertain… concerning their own merit” (TMS III.2.24, p. 126). In such cases, they might not request a normal person’s standing. Persons concerned might also use financial means and bribe the spectators or rely on other kinds of manipulation for getting their approval. 104 Still, according to Smith, there is a rational strategy for the person concerned and his spectator to address their disagreement and to try and overcome it. In order to overcome their disagreement in a rational way, without exercising unfair means of manipulation or coercion, the person concerned and his spectator switch roles: The person concerned by certain circumstances tries to look at these circumstances from the point of view of his unconcerned spectator. Since the spectator sees the person concerned emotionally responding to these circumstances, the person concerned, by taking the point of view of his spectator, does not only become the spectator of the spectator, he also becomes his own spectator. This means that he acquires the faculty of conscience. 105 What he sees from the spectatorial point of view may well displease him and motivate him to “lower… his passion to that pitch, in which the spectators are capable of going along with him” (TMS I.i.4.7, p. 22). This is because the spectatorial point of view is the point of view of a cool-minded, unconcerned observer whose personal interests are not at stake under the respective circumstances and who, for this reason, is not under the grip of the passions arising in self-love which make an emotional response partial. What a cool, unconcerned person like a spectator imagines to be a proper (his own) emotional response to certain circumstances may well differ from the response a person directly concerned by these circumstances has, by someone who is in the grip of his passions of self-love. 104

See TMS III.2.24, p. 126. In this passage, Smith also mentions the strategies of “intrigue” and “cabal”. 105 See TMS I.i.4.7-10, pp. 21-23. On Smith’s account of moral conscience, see Fricke (forthcoming).

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The person concerned, by taking the role and point of view of his own spectator, may become aware of his having been in the grip of his selflove and of having given way to his natural partiality for himself, to the natural disposition to consider himself and his own well-being much more important than that of anybody else: My companion does not naturally look upon the misfortune that has befallen me, or the injury that has been done me, from the same point of view in which I consider them. They affect me much more nearly. We do not view them from the same station … (TMS I.i.4.5, p. 20-21)

Still, the person concerned, even after having become his own spectator and after having tried to adapt his emotional response to the circumstan-ces to that pitch he expects an unconcerned spectator can sympathize with and approve of, may well not succeed in gaining his spectator’s sympathy and approval. Emotional discordance between them may still prevail. According to Smith, it is then the spectator’s turn to make an effort and check whether his original imaginative account of how he would respond to the respective circumstances was proper. Thus, the spectator will “endeavour, as much as he can, to put himself into the situation of the other, and to bring home to himself every little circumstance of distress which can possibly occur to the sufferer”. Furthermore, “he must adopt the whole case of his companion with all its minutest incidents … and strive to render as perfect as possible, that imaginary change of situation upon which his sympathy is founded” (TMS I.i.4.7, p. 21). But the spectator, in order to avoid any impropriety in his imaginative emotional response to the circumstances, should not only pay as much attention as possible to the details of these circumstances by which the other person is concerned. He should also make an effort and try to “become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them” (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9). Thus, the spectator also has to pay attention to what kind of person the other is, to his specific needs, interests and vulnerabilities which allow to explain – at least to some extent – his particular emotional response to the circumstances. Smith describes the respective efforts the person concerned and his

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spectator make in order to reach a state of emotional concordance and mutual sympathy in terms of “two different sets of virtues”: The soft, the gentle, the amiable virtues, the virtues of candid condescension and indulgent humanity, are founded upon the one [that is, the spectator’s effort]: the great, the awful and respectable, the virtues of self-denial, or selfgovernment, of that command of the passions which subjects all the movements of nature to what our own dignity and honour, and the propriety of our own conduct require, take their origin from the other [that is, the effort of the person concerned]. (TMS I.i.5.1, p. 23)

What the spectator’s efforts and the efforts of the person concerned for becoming virtuous have in common is the attempt to exercise selfcontrol over their passions based on self-love and to adapt them to the circumstances; for the latter purpose, they have to be well informed, sensitive not only to the facts but also to other people in the specificity of their needs and vulnerabilities. Making these efforts will allow them – at least to some degree – to overcome their natural partiality for themselves and look at themselves and their performance as either persons concerned or as actual spectators from the point of view of an impartial spectator. Smith’s “impartial spectator” (TMS I.i.5.4, p. 24) is the moral counterpart to a normal perceiver as conceived by Husserl. There is, however, one essential difference between the role ascribed to the impartial spectator and that ascribed to the normal perceiver: Whereas the normal perceiver will be considered as the most reliable source of information about the world so that other people who are abnormal perceivers will rely on him for making up their minds about the way the world is, Smith’s impartial spectator does not make any moral judgments about proper responses to certain circumstances which others will then endorse and respect. The point of view of impartiality is essentially that of a spectator. But the impartial spectator as conceived by Smith does not look at persons concerned and judge their emotional responses to certain circumstances from a third-person, external point of view. Rather, he gets involved with the person concerned in a sympathetic process; both address each other as a ‘you’ and thereby learn to conceive of themselves as I’s,

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very much along the lines Husserl later described it.106 They switch roles in order to try and find a common point of view from which they can look at particular circumstances and achieve agreement about what the proper emotional response to them should be, an agreement in their evaluative judgments. Such a shared point of view is a potentially impartial point of view. Of course, the impartial spectator will have a substantive input in the shaping of the impartial point of view. But he cannot simply impose it – and the corresponding moral judgment – on the person concerned. Rather, his intention must be to encourage the person concerned to actually share it, to lower his passions and agree with the spectator on how to morally judge his spontaneous response to the circumstances. But it takes more than two people to interact in a sympathetic process for determining a properly impartial point of view. Furthermore, impartiality comes in degrees: The more people have been involved in the respective sympathetic process the more impartial will their common point of view be. Sympathetic processes are processes of social interaction. They typically take place within limited social communities. And the impartial standards of propriety on which different communities agree may differ. Thus, there is room for a pluralism of understandings of moral propriety in Smith’s moral theory, just as there is room for pluralism in Husserl’s account of normality. But, where members of different communities who have endorsed different standards of moral propriety meet, they will conceive of their moral discordance in terms of a disagreement that needs to be overcome in a rational way. Thus, they will engage in sympathetic processes, aiming at constituting new standards of moral propriety that an impartial spectator and, with him, all of them can share. e. The concern for praiseworthiness Underlying this attitude is not only a psychological need to achieve a state of mutual second-order sympathy and social harmony, but also a normative concern for getting matters right in the realm of moral evalua106

See in particular TMS III.1.3, 110 and IV.2.12, 192. This point has been particularly stressed by Carrasco (under review).

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tion and judgment. Due to this ambition of proper moral understanding, the members of a community are justified in making claims for universal authority for those standards of moral propriety which they jointly agreed on through sympathetic processes in which they all participated and from which nobody within direct or indirect reach was excluded. Just as Husserlian standards of normality, Smith’s impartial standards of moral propriety make claims to universal authority. But since no community of people can ever be sure of having reached an ultimate, ideal level of impartiality, all standards of moral propriety shared at a particular time will be subject to future revision. The universalistic understanding of moral propriety implies that the impartial spectator, the one who has a normal understanding of moral propriety, is committed to an optimum. Smith speaks of this optimum in terms of “praiseworthiness”: Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blameworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be blamed by nobody, is however, the natural and proper object of blame. (TMS III.2.1, pp. 113114)

An agreement between certain people on what is the proper emotional and behavioral response to certain circumstances for a person concerned by them is not as such indicative of these people having successfully identified which response is really praiseworthy and which is not. This is because such an agreement can have been achieved in different ways. Only those agreements are indicative of real propriety or praiseworthiness of the emotional and behavioral response of a person concerned by certain circumstances that have been achieved through sympathetic processes where all parties involved made as much as an effort as possible to be virtuous and avoid all kinds of errors. The errors to be avoided are twofold: For the person concerned, errors can arise from a lack of selfcontrol and the false belief of being more important than everybody

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else.107 And for the spectator, errors can arise from distraction, a lack of attention, a lack of information or a lack of sensitivity to the specific conditions of the person concerned. Since, in the course of a sympathetic process, the person concerned and his spectator switch roles, they both have to try and avoid both kinds of errors. The more they succeed avoiding these errors the more virtuous they will be and the more impartial the agreement they achieve will be. And the more impartial their agreement will be, the more justified their judgment of the propriety or impropriety of the emotional and behavioral response of the person concerned will be. f. Ideal impartiality and the “wise and virtuous” Impartiality, virtue, and the justification of evaluative judgments, judgments about which emotional responses, volitions and actions are properly moral and which are not, come in degrees. 108 All people are supposed to make an effort and become virtuous, but only few of them will achieve a high degree of virtue, namely the “wise and virtuous”. What stands in the way for many people to achieve a high degree of virtue is their disposition “to admire, and almost worship, the rich and the powerful” (TMS I.iii.1, p. 61) rather than caring exclusively about real praiseworthiness. But what is it, that the “wise and virtuous” have achieved that most people blinded by wealth and power do not achieve? The wise and virtuous direct their attention to “the idea of exact propriety and perfection” (TMS VI.iii.23, p. 247). However, in order to do so, they can only rely on the strategies that drive the sympathetic process as Smith describes it. They can only try to avoid the errors that would hinder them from achieving properly impartial judgments about proper or improper emotional and behavioral responses to given circumstances. Wise and virtuous people always enjoy a state of mutual sympathy and agree in their judgments of propriety: Men of virtue only can feel that entire confidence in the conduct and behaviour of one another, which can, at all times, assure them that they can never either offend or be offended by one another. (TMS VI.ii.1.18, p. 225) 107 108

See in particular TMS II.ii.2.1, p. 83. See for example TMS VI.iii.25, p. 247.

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Still, their virtue will not be perfect, nor will the impartiality of their judgment be ideal. No human being can ever be immune to error. There may always be details even a wise and virtuous person has overlooked, or a prejudice underlying his judgment of which he is not aware. Smith states this with a certain pathos: He [the wise and virtuous man] endeavours as well as he can, to assimilate his own character to this archetype of perfection. But he imitates the work of a divine artist, which can never be equalled. He feels the imperfect success of all his best endeavours, and sees, with grief and affliction, in how many different features the mortal copy falls short of the immortal original. He remembers, with concern and humiliation, how often, from want of attention, from want of judgment, from want of temper, he has, both in words and actions, both in conduct and conversation, violated the exact rules of perfect propriety; and has so far departed from that model, according to which he wished to fashion his own character and conduct. (TMS VI.iii. 25, pp. 247248)

The “wise and virtuous”, more reliable in their performance as impartial spectators than most other people and therefore more likely to understand what real praiseworthiness consists in, are the moral counterparts to Husserl’s normal perceivers committed to optimal perception. Similar to the latter, the wise and virtuous are as close as possible at a given time and level of moral understanding to the ideal standard or impartiality or normality, even though, human as they are, they are not capable of actually reaching that standard. IV. Conclusion As I have tried to make explicit in this essay, there are important analogies between Husserl’s account of our joint strategy to extract evidence from perceptual data for justifying descriptive judgments about the way the world is and Smith’s account of our joint strategy to extract evidence from emotional data for justifying moral judgments about emotional and behavioral responses to given circumstances. In both cases, the strategy is to engage in an intersubjective process of communication which aims first at accumulatating data from different perspectives, collected by different people, second at detecting unreliable data and the errors made while collecting them, and finally at descriptive or moral judgments for

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the truth or propriety of which the collected data provide reliable evidence. The respective processes can both be described as aiming at overcoming the constraints of perspective of our subjective responses, perceptual or emotional, to given circumstances. Husserl’s notions of “empathy” and “sympathy” have their counterparts in Smith’s notion of “sympathy” which takes the shape of either first-order or second-order sympathy. Part of both strategies is to identify people whose contributions to understanding what is descriptively true or morally proper are more reliable than others: normal perceivers and impartial spectators respectively. However, the differences between Husserl’s and Smith’s accounts of our strategies for overcoming disagreement in the epistemic and the moral realm should not be overlooked, differences that are explicable in terms of differences between the respective subject matters. I would like to finish this essay by mentioning three of them, those concerning the accounts of normality and impartiality, those concerning the similarity of people, and those concerning the accounts of optimality and praiseworthiness. Husserl’s accounts of a normal perceiver and of normal perceptual conditions are clearly naturalistic. Even though the determination of the conditions for perceptual normality is a result of an interactive process between people, what they finally achieve is a naturalistic distinction between nomal and abnormal perceivers and perceptual conditions: Normal human perceivers have optimally functioning perceptual systems (optimal for the human species) and healthy and well-trained brains for processing perceptual data.109 Normal perceptual conditions for normal human perceivers can be defined in descriptive terms (of distance between perceiver and perceived object, of direct visual access and of lighting conditions). Abnormal people lack optimally functioning perceptual systems. Where these dysfunctions cannot be minimized with the help of, for example, spectacles and hearing aids, they have to accept that there is evidence to which they cannot have any direct perceptual access. 109

Note that the normative notions of ‘optimal function’, of ‘health’ and ‘good training’ can be translated into descriptive standards of the kind on which medical doctors, including medical experts for the perceptual systems and neurologists, as well as designers of spectacles and hearing aids rely.

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As far as the normality of perceptual systems is concerned, not all human beings are similar to each other. Still, all those not severely mentally handicapped and therefore excluded from the subjects of knowledge are equally committed to truth and richness and differentiation of knowledge. The normal perceivers will have to find a way of sharing their evidence with the abnormal perceivers; otherwise, the aim of sharing a view of the world, a view of which judgments are objectively true and which are not, could not be achieved. But even if normal and abnormal perceivers will find a way to share the evidence for true descriptive judgments, the distinction between perceivers as either normal or abnormal will remain. Smith’s account of an impartial spectator in terms of someone being wise and virtuous is not quite as naturalistic as Husserl’s account of normality, and it certainly does not imply anybody’s disqualification as morally abnormal. The (inevitably approximate) determination of the point of view of impartiality is a result of an interactive process the participants of which respect each other as equals and share a commitment to understanding what is morally proper or praiseworthy and what is not and to acting accordingly. But what they finally achieve is nothing more than a joint recognition of particular cases of praiseworthy behavior, an account of possible sources of errors which can have a negative impact on moral judgment and decision making, and finally an account of strategies how to avoid such errors. Some people score higher than others in their efforts to avoid these errors, and some may do so more often, both in judgment and in action, namely the wise and virtuous. But the many who are not or hardly ever wise and virtuous, who tend to make erroneous moral judgments and fail as moral agents, do so for reasons that are not naturally unavoidable for them. Nobody has a natural disposition to be virtuous, nor has anybody a natural disposition not to be. Nor can anybody claim to be wise and virtuous once and forever. Everybody can and should make an effort to achieve both wisdom and virtue. Only those severely mentally handicapped who do not have any capacity of performing as responsible agents can be considered as morally abnormal. But this abnormality does not deprive them of any moral significance: They still have to be considered as having moral value and moral rights. In the epistemic realm things are different: It does not make any

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sense to expect from a blind person to make an effort and acquire the capacity of seeing. A natural state of his system of vision stands in the way. Nevertheless, a blind person can be a subject of objective knowledge. In the epistemic realm, normal perceivers take the lead in shaping the most accurate view of the world and abnormal perceivers follow them. However, in the moral realm, the wise and virtuous impartial spectators cannot simply take the lead and determine what is morally proper and improper without remaining engaged in sympathetic processes of communication with everybody else. Whereas their main ambition is to become even more wise and virtuous in their judgments and actions, they cannot ignore those whose moral development is not as advanced as their own. It has to be one of their aims to help those who have not yet acquired wisdom and virtue to make an effort and try to approach this goal. Furthermore, the wise and virtuous should be aware of the possibility of there being something they can learn about proper morality even from those who have not achieved a high level of wisdom and virtue. The second difference between Husserl’s and Smith’s accounts of the strategies on which we can rely for justifying descriptive and moral judgments and the normative commitments underlying them concerns natural similarities and differences between people who are considered as most reliable sources of evidence. With the exclusion of the severely mentally handicapped, all people are (or at least should be) equal in their commitment to descriptive truth and moral propriety – quite independently of their being generally considered as particularly reliable sources of (epistemic or moral) evidence or not. In the epistemic realm, those considered as normal perceivers, as most reliable sources of perceptual data, are similar to each other as as far as their perceptual systems are concerned. According to Husserl, ideally normal people would, when observing the same objects from the same point of view under the same perceptually normal conditions, have the same visual field, they would collect exactly the same visual data.110 This natural similarity of normal perceivers does not have a counterpart in the moral realm. According to Smith, every mentally healthy 110

See above, pp. 202-204.

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person is equally expected to make an effort to become wise and virtuous and to play the part of a spectator in sympathetic processes with as much impartiality as possible. Some people achieve a less high degree of wisdom and virtue and spectatorial competence than others, but it is basically their own fault. And even those who are generally recognized as the most impartial spectators, as the most reliable sources of moral evidence, that is the wise and virtuous, are not expected to be similar to each other in naturalistic terms, that is in their performance as persons concerned: They are not expected to emotionally respond to the same circumstances in exactly the same way. That they have achieved a high degree of moral self-command, that they can exercise control over their selfish passions and tend to respond to certain circumstances in the morally proper way does by no means imply that their responses to the same circumstances will be similar. This is because, in their natural condition as human beings, they may be very different from each other: They may have acquired different preferences and tastes and different kultural habits that deserve to be respected, they may be more or less sensitive to physical pain, more or less energetic, more or less psychically robust or vulnerable; some may suffer from physical disabilities and therefore have special needs which have to be taken into account when judging the moral propriety of their behavior. The circumstances to which persons concerned by them respond may be the same; and the persons concerned may be equally wise and virtuous; their responses may be equally morally proper. But this does not mean that their responses will be the same. This is because, in the moral realm, the circumstances do not alone determine what the morally right response to them would be. What the morally right response to particular circumstances is also depends on whose response it is. This does not imply that the moral judgment of the impartial spectator is a judgment ad hominem or ad feminam. Rather, a properly moral judgment has to take natural differences between people into account. And for these differences, there is no counterpart in the epistemic realm. Finally, there is a third disanalogy between Husserl’s and Smith’s accounts that is connected to the two mentioned previously. Even though both the standards of normality and those of impartiality are committed to an optimum of accuracy, namely a richness and differentiation of data

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on the side of descriptive knowledge and the distinction between mere praise and real praiseworthiness on the side of morality, one should not overlook that the accounts given of these optima are not analogous. The richness and differentiation of perceptual data reveals the richness and differentiation there is to be found in the world. But we cannot give any account of praiseworthiness in any other terms than in those of impartiality, wisdom and virtue, in terms of attitudes of impartial spectators. Smith does not and cannot give any general account of praiseworthiness in naturalistic terms. Whereas epistemic optimality is explicable in terms of an awareness of the richness and differentiation that can be found in the world, moral optimality, namely praiseworthiness, is not explicable in any other terms than in terms of the procedure for understanding what it consists in in particular cases, that is sympathetic processes. Thus, I find Smith’s claim confirmed according to which, in the realm of moral judgment and its justification, there are more problems to be solved than in the realm of descriptive knowledge and its justification. As far as descriptive knowledge is concerned, we can rely on the normal perceivers as the best sources of information about the way the world is. But we cannot delegate our concern for moral propriety to the “wise and virtuous”. Rather, we have to constantly make an effort to become wise and virtuous ourselves. This effort has to be twofold: helping to better understand what moral praiseworthiness is by detecting particular cases of it and multiplying cases of praiseworthiness in our emotions, volitions, and actions. Such an effort represents a constant challenge since, in the realm of morality, our personal interests are always at stake and we cannot hope to successfully exercise control over our passions of self-love once and for all. Morality is not merely a matter of theoretical understanding, it is also a matter of practice. And moral understanding shapes moral practice as much as moral practice shapes moral understanding.

Bibliography Bernet, Rudolf, Kern, Iso, and Marbach, Eduard (1996) Edmund Husserl. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.

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Beyer, Christian (2012) “Husserl on Undestanding Persons”, in Christel Fricke and Dagfinn Føllesdal (eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 93-116. Brown, Vivienne (2012) “Intersubjectivity and Moral Judgment in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments”, in Christel Fricke and Dagfinn Føllesdal (eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 243-272. Cairns, Dorion (1973) Guide for Translating Husserl. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Carrasco, Maria Alejandra (2004) “Adam Smith’s Reconstruction of Practical Reason”, in The Review of Metaphysics 58/1, pp. 81-116. Carrasco, Maria Alejandra (2011) “From Psychology to Moral Normativity”, in The Adam Smith Review 6, pp. 9-29. Carrasco, Maria Alejandra (2012) “Self-command, Practical Reason and Deontological Insights”, in British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20, pp. 389-412. Carrasco, Maria Alejandra (under review) “Varieties of Spectatorial Ethics”. Darwall, Stephen (2005) “Smith über die Gleichheit der Würde und den Standpunkt der 2. Person”, in Christel Fricke and Hans-Peter Schütt (eds.) Adam Smith als Moralphilosoph. Berlin: DeGruyter, pp. 178189. Darwall, Stephen (2006) The Second-Person Standpoint. Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge/Massachusetts and London/ England: Harvard University Press. Decety, Jean and Ickes, William (eds) The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge/Massachusetts and London/England: The MIT Press.

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Drummond, John (2012) “Immagination and Appresentation, Sympathy and Empathy in Smith and Husserl”, in Christel Fricke and Dagfinn Føllesdal (eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 117-137. Fleischacker, Sam (2012) “Sympathy in Hume and Smith: A Contrast, Critique, and Reconstruction”, in Christel Fricke and Dagfinn Føllesdal (eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 273-311. Fricke, Christel (2012) “The Sympathetic Process and the Origin and Function of Conscience”, in Christopher Berry, Craig Smith, Maria Pia Paganelli (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (forthcoming) Føllesdal, Dagfinn (1988) “Husserl on evidence and justification”, in Robert Sokolowski (ed.) Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition. Essays in Phenomenology. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, pp. 107-129. Føllesdal, Dagfinn (2008): “The Emergence of Justification in Ethics”, in Michael Frauchiger and Wilhelm K. Essler (eds.), Representation, Evidence, and Justification: Themes from Suppes. The Lauener Symposium in honor of Patrick Suppes, Bern, September 9 – 10, 2004. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 51-65. Husserl, Edmund (1950 ff.) Husserliana - Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, The Hague: Dordrecht, (quoted as “Hua”). Kant, Immanuel (1788/1974/1997) Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Ed. Karl Vorländer. Hamburg: Philosophische Bibliothek. Translation: Critique of Practical Reason, translated and edited by Mary Gregor, with an introduction by Andrews Reath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (References to the pagination of the Akademieausgabe (“AA”), vol. V.) Kern, Iso (2011) “Mengzi (Mencius), Smith, and Husserl on sympathy and conscience”, in Christel Fricke and Dagfinn Føllesdal (eds.) In-

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tersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 139-170. Lindgren, Ralph (1973) The Social Philosophy of Adam Smith. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Luft, Sebastian (1998) “Husserl’s phenomenological discovery of the natural attitude”, in Continental Philosophical Review 31, pp. 153170. McIntyre, Ronald (2012) “ “We-Subjectivity” – Husserl on Community and Communal Constitution”, in Christel Fricke and Dagfinn Føllesdal (eds.) Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 61-92. Mulligan, Kevin (1995) “Perception”, in Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 168-238. Nagel, Thomas (1986) The View From Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, John (1973) A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Adam (1982) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, (quoted as “TMS”). Steinbock, Anthony (1995) Home and Beyond. Generative Phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston/Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Steinbock, Anthony (1995a) “Phenomenological Concepts of Normality and Abnormality”, in Man and World 28, pp. 241-260. Wehrle, Maren (2010) “Die Normativität der Erfahrung – Überlegungen zur Beziehung von Normalität und Aufmerksamkeit bei E. Husserl”, in Husserl Studien 26, pp. 167-187.

8 Intersubjectivity and Moral Judgment in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments1 Vivienne Brown I. Intersubjectivity and moral judgment? Does a moral theory need to be informed by a theory of mind? In the case of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, the answer to this might seem to be in the affirmative. If moral judgments are based on spectators’ sympathetic responses to others’ feelings, as Adam Smith argued, this seems to suggest that a theory of moral judgment presupposes a theory as to how spectators know, or take themselves to know, what others are feeling, as well as a theory as to how sympathetic responses are morally constituted. Smith’s account of moral judgment thus seems to presuppose an account of intersubjectivity. Yet, Smith apparently had relatively little to say concerning theory of mind. Consequently, scholars are not agreed as to what Smith’s theory of mind might have been and this has resulted in substantial differences in their interpretations of his moral theory and the role of sympathy. In this paper I argue that there is a consistent and intelligible theory of mind in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, one which receives some support from recent research in psychology and neuroscience, and which also helps to unravel some interpretative puzzles concerning intersubjectivity and moral judgment.

1

This paper has gone through a number of versions, including those presented at the Smith–Husserl workshops, CSMN, 2007 and 2008; I am grateful for discussion at both those occasions. I am particularly grateful to Christel Fricke for comments and discussion of earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Maria Alejandra Carrasco for discussion of an earlier draft. Brown (2011) originates, in part, from an interest in intersubjectivity that was stimulated by the Smith-Husserl workshops.

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II. Intersubjectivity and moral judgment in TMS: The issues In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) moral judgment involves a spectator in making a comparison between (what he takes to be) the emotions of another person (the person principally concerned) and his own emotions in looking upon that other person’s situation.2 Moral judgment is thus a complex process. Understanding this complex process is made more difficult for the reader, however, by Smith’s terminological conventions which can obscure the technical innovations that are crucial for his argument. Teasing out Smith’s account of moral judgment thus requires some terminological as well as conceptual clarifications. A key notion for TMS is that of “sympathy”. Smith both expands the everyday sense of sympathy and introduces his own technical conception of sympathy which in turn has a number of related senses. 3 Smith also uses a number of affective or emotive terms such as “passion”, “sentiment” and “emotion”. In contrast with the different senses of sympathy, however, Smith treats these affective or emotive terms synonymously in these contexts. The core of the process of moral judgment is a spectator’s comparison of (what he takes to be) the emotions of another with his own emotions in observing the other’s case: When the original passions of the person principally concerned are in perfect concord with the sympathetic emotions of the spectator, they necessarily appear to this last just and proper, and suitable to their objects; and, on the contrary, when, upon bringing the case home to himself, he finds that they do not coincide with what he feels, they necessarily appear to him unjust and improper, and unsuitable to the causes which excite them. To approve of the passions of another, therefore, as suitable to their objects, is the same thing as to observe that we entirely sympathize with them; and not to approve of them as such, is the same thing as to observe that we do not entirely sympathize with them. (TMS I.i.3.1, p. 16; see also I.iii.1.9 note, p. 46; II.i.5.11, p. 78)

A spectator’s moral approval or disapproval involves comparing the passions of the person principally concerned with his [the spectator’s] own 2

In this paper I follow TMS in using the male pronoun. It was an early criticism of TMS that Smith used the term “sympathy” in a variety of ways: “I observe that the word Sympathy seems not to have always the same fixed and determinate meaning in this System, nor to be so accurately defined as is necessary to make it the foundation of a distinct Theory of Morals” (Reid 1984, p. 313; Ms. 2131/3/I/28). 3

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“sympathetic emotions” when looking upon the other’s case.4 Moral approval depends on a comparison of these feelings. In this passage the other’s feelings are “passions” and the spectator’s feelings are “emotions”, but elsewhere Smith writes of the spectator’s “sympathetic passion” (I.iii.1.9 note, p. 46), and of the “sentiments”, also the “emotions”, that are experienced by both spectator and the other person (II.i.5.11, p. 78), showing that “passion”, “emotion” and “sentiment” are synonymous terms in these contexts denoting “what is felt” or a person’s “feelings”. The point of the passage is thus not to differentiate between “passions” and “emotions” but to argue that the degree of concord or coincidence between the feelings of the other person and the spectator, as observed by the spectator, is what explains the spectator’s approval / disapproval of the other’s feelings as “suitable to their objects”. There are thus three distinct items involved in the process of moral approval and disapproval: First, there are (what the spectator takes to be) the other’s feelings; second, there are the spectator’s feelings – his “sympathetic emotions” – in looking upon the other’s case; and third, there is the spectator’s comparison of – that is, the spectator’s observing the relation between – (what he takes to be) the other’s feelings and his own sympathetic emotions. The “sympathetic emotions” of the spectator constitute the core technical sense of sympathy in TMS. This will be clarified in the course of this paper; for the moment, though, the sympathetic emotions need to be differentiated from other senses of sympathy in TMS. First, the sympathetic emotions need to be differentiated from what is perhaps closer to the everyday sense of sympathy as an emotional response to others’ sorrows. Sympathy in this everyday sense includes pity or compassion for the misery of another.5 In TMS this everyday sense of sympathy is expanded to include responses to any feelings of others, and so includes joyful responses to (what is taken to be) others’ happiness or success as well as compassion for (what is taken to be) their sorrow.6 I term this 4

At this stage in the argument, the other’s passions are given as his “original passions”. Later on this is qualified when it is explained how the person principally concerned modulates his original passions in an attempt to achieve concordance with the spectator’s sympathetic emotions (TMS I.i.4.8, p. 22); I discuss this further below. For this reason I omit “original” when discussing the tripartite model of moral judgment. 5 See TMS I.i.1.1, p. 9. 6 See TMS I.i.1.4-5, pp. 10-11.

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expanded version of the everyday sense of sympathy, “affective sympathy”. The difference between sympathetic emotions and affective sympathy, both of which are sometimes called “fellow-feeling”, is that sympathetic emotions are an emotional response to the case or situation of the other and so involve an element of judgment concerning what a person’s feelings ought to be in such a situation; whereas affective sympathy is an emotional response to (what are taken to be) the feelings of the other – compassion for their sorrow, joy for their happiness. Thus, it is the sympathetic emotions, not affective sympathy, which are centrally important for Smith’s account of moral judgment. Second, the sympathetic emotions of the spectator involve possibly two cognate uses, also technical. One involves the verb “sympathize”, as in the passage above, where a spectator “sympathizes” with another insofar as his sympathetic emotions correspond to or coincide with (what are taken to be) the other’s feelings; it is the verbal form of the noun “sympathy”. The other, possible, cognate use denotes not an emotion of any sort, but the correspondence, harmony, coincidence or concordance, between the spectator’s sympathetic emotions and (what the spectator takes to be) the other’s feelings.7 Thus, in addition to the notion of affective sympathy, Smith’s complex of technical uses involving sympathy comprises: The spectator’s sympathetic emotions – the core notion of sympathy; the spectator’s sympathizing with the other to the extent that his sympathetic emotions correspond with (what he takes to be) the other’s feelings; and, possibly, sympathy as correspondence between the spectator’s sympa7

See TMS I.i.3.3, p. 17; I.iii.1.2, pp. 43-44. I say “possible” here because it seems to me that the text is ambiguous on this. Smith writes of the “sympathy or correspondence of sentiments” (I.i.3.3, p. 17) and “… to that complete sympathy, to that perfect harmony and correspondence sentiments” (I.iii.1.2, p. 44). The “or” might be construed as implying equivalence of the expressions on either side such that “sympathy” = “correspondence/harmony”; but it could also be construed in the sense that the presence of the sympathetic emotions implies a correspondence / harmony of sentiments between the spectator and the other person. As far as I am aware these are the only two passages which support the interpretation that “sympathy” denotes the correspondence, not any kind of sympathetic emotion. Whichever construal is made of such passages, however, and even if there are some further passages, this is a relatively infrequent and incidental usage. The primary technical sense of “sympathy” is as a “sympathetic emotion”.

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thetic emotions and (what he takes to be) the other’s feelings.8 There is a further emotion of the spectator involved in moral judgment, beyond the sympathetic emotions, and that is the “sentiment of approbation”. A note added to the second edition of TMS provides a clarification of the relation between the second and third items in the tripartite model of moral judgment, as follows: [I]n the sentiment of approbation there are two things to be taken notice of; first, the sympathetic passion of the spectator; and, secondly, the emotion which arises from his observing the perfect coincidence between this sympathetic passion in himself, and the original passion in the person principally concerned. This last emotion, in which the sentiment of approbation properly consists, is always agreeable and delightful. The other may either be agreeable or disagreeable, according to the nature of the original passion, whose features it must always, in some measure, retain. (TMS I.iii.1.9 note, p. 46)

The sentiment of approbation is, properly speaking, the emotion that arises from the spectator’s observing the perfect coincidence between the other’s feelings and his own sympathetic emotions. The third item in the process of moral judgment thus includes the emotion that accompanies approbation. This sentiment of approbation is always pleasurable, even if the sympathetic emotions are unpleasant. By this means Smith responded to the charge that his system could not explain the pleasure of approbation in cases where the other’s feelings, and hence the spectator’s sympathetic emotions, are painful.9 This tripartite model suggests a developed account of intersubjectivity and raises two questions which, although related, involve distinct issues in the philosophy of mind. The first question involves the empiri8

Otteson (2002), p. 18, argues that Smith’s technical concept of sympathy denotes only the correspondence element, thus excluding sympathetic emotions from Smith’s technical apparatus of sympathy. There has been extensive debate in connection with the so-called “Adam Smith problem” as to whether sympathy is a motive for action, an emotion of any kind, or solely an element of moral judgment, see eg Raphael and Macfie (1967), pp. 21-22; Montes (2004), pp. 45-55; Raphael (2007), pp. 116-7; Brown (2009). 9 This note was added to the 2nd edition of TMS in response to David Hume’s criticism (in Letter of 28 July 1759; Smith (1987), p. 43) that Smith had failed to show that all kinds of sympathy are necessarily pleasurable. Smith’s clarification is that it is the sentiment of approbation that is always pleasurable, even though the sympathetic emotion, being of the same kind as the other’s passion, might not be pleasurable.

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cal issue of the neurophysiological processes involved. In particular, there is the question of how spectators form a view about others’ feelings. If the tripartite model assumes that spectators have access to, or take themselves to have access to, others’ feelings, how is this actually achieved? This is the question of how we have access to, or take ourselves to have access to, other minds. It is an important question for TMS as without some account of how spectators form a view of what others feel, Smith’s account of moral judgment can hardly get off the ground. Discussion of this question has recently been re-invigorated by recent research in neuroscience and psychology. The second question is a conceptual one concerning the nature of the conceptual distinction between a spectator’s access to another’s feelings and the spectator’s sympathetic emotions. Some philosophers have doubted whether Smith had such a distinction, or even whether such a distinction can coherently be drawn, thus raising questions over the conceptual as well as the empirical viability of Smith’s account. On the question whether we have access to other minds, recent philosophical debate has been focussed mainly between proponents of the theory-theory of mind and the simulation theory of mind, although there now seems to be an acceptance that the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. According to the theory-theory, access to other minds is based on a theory we have about the workings of other minds. There is some dispute about the details of the developmental process in babies and young children, and the extent to which the evidence suggests that this theory is innate, being hardwired in the human brain, or whether it is learned as part of the social acculturation of the young; but, howsoever the origins of such a theory are explained, it is the possession of such a theory of how other minds work that is held to explain the human ability to understand others’ mental states. According to simulation theory, access to other minds is achieved by simulating or imagining how it is for others. Again, there are differences in the details of different accounts but the common idea is that we understand others’ mental states by simulating or imagining what it is like for them in their situation. What is particular to the human species in knowing other human minds is thus not so much a cognitive understanding of others’ mental states, as a facility of the human imagination to step outside ourselves and participate in or re-enact the mental lives of others. In spite of the importance of the question of access to others’ feelings for Smith’s account of moral judgment, some scholars have argued

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that Smith was sceptical as to whether access to others’ minds is possible at all. According to these scholars, Smith accepted that there is an absolute, unbridgeable, privacy of individual experience. They therefore doubt whether there is anything much in the way of a theory of mind in TMS. For example, T.D. Campbell argues that TMS asserts the “essential privacy of individual experience” (Campbell 1971, p. 97). Campbell cites the passage at I.i.1.2 as illustration of the imaginary change of places that enables us to “build up a picture of what we should feel were we in another’s place”, thus taking the passage as an account of “imaginative sympathy” which is the process that produces sympathetic feelings. Campbell recognises the importance for TMS of comparing these sympathetic feelings with the actual feelings of the other person, but he argues that TMS provides no explanation of how spectators can form an awareness of others’ feelings: The activity of comparing sympathetic and real sentiments does presuppose that we can have some awareness of the sentiments of others, for, if this were not the case, we could never know the actual feelings of others and so we could not compare them with our own feelings. Smith says little about how we can discover the real feelings of others, but we must simply assume that it is possible to get some idea of the sentiments of others by drawing inferences from their overt behaviour and verbal reports without imagining ourselves in their position. (Campbell 1971, p. 97)

Campbell thinks we should “simply assume” that we get an idea of others’ feelings by drawing inferences from their overt behaviour and verbal reports without imagining ourselves in their situation. As there is no explanation of this in TMS, Campbell proposes that the deficit might be filled by passages in Smith’s unpublished Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (LRBL) on the literary description of passions. Campbell takes these passages to suggest that internal states are known by their effects, with the implication that the spectator infers the passions and affections of others from their observed behaviour (Campbell 1971, p. 97; LRBL 1963, pp. 59, 71). On this reading Campbell seems to attribute Smith with something of a default theory-theory of mind in LRBL. A problem with this interpretation, however, is that the passage at LRBL (1963 p. 71; 1983 i.181-3, p. 75) differentiates between external and internal effects for describing the internal facts of passions and affections: It recommends description of vehement passions in terms of their external effects and description of less violent passions in terms of their internal effects. Introducing internal effects for describing gentler passions undercuts the argument that spectators rely on observable behaviour to

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infer others’ passions. Furthermore, LRBL is here concerned with literary descriptions of feelings by a narrator who aims to make these feelings vivid and touching for the reader, not with how we know what others feel in ordinary life, so there seems little justification for trying to interpret it as indicative of Smith’s theory of mind. James Otteson also claims that Smith believes there is an absolute privacy of personal experience such that there thus remains an “ineluctable gap” between the actual experience of the other and our imagined experience (Otteson 2002, p. 20). Otteson takes the view that “we are unable to overcome this gap as a matter of fact” and he remarks on the “lack” that “Smith develops no significant theory of mind at all” (Otteson 2002, p. 21). According to Otteson, therefore, all we can do is “judge what another’s sentiments are on the basis of his actions”, since “the actions of others are the sole evidence we have regarding the inner feelings of others; we simply have nothing else to go on” (Otteson 2002, p. 21). As with Campbell, however, Otteson does not leave it at that. He suggests that Smith calls on the reader to fill the gap for him: “I think Smith is willing to rely on the personal experience of his reader to prove that this gap is routinely bridged” (Otteson 2002, p. 21). Otteson thus seems to suggest that Smith assumes that the ineluctable gap is somehow or other bridged in practice, perhaps according to the theory-theory view of inference from observed behaviour, even though TMS lacks an account of this. Other scholars, however, reject the view of an unbridgeable privacy of individual experience in TMS. Their interpretations tend to see similarities between Smith’s argument and simulation theory, thus casting Smith’s approach as an anticipation of recent developments in simulation theory. Robert Gordon presents10 an influential interpretation of TMS in terms of simulation theory, according to which Smith’s account of moral judgment requires two distinct kinds of simulation, viz. psyching out what the other feels, which Gordon terms “empathy”, and having an independent response to what causes the other’s feeling, which Gordon terms “sympathy”. Gordon argues, however, that Smith fails to differentiate between these two psychological processes and so “misses the distinction” between the two kinds of simulation in giving the impression that the same method is used both for psyching out the other’s feelings and for having one’s own response to what caused the other’s feelings (Gordon 1995, p. 741). In support of this claim Gordon quotes 10

See Gordon (1995).

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two passages to illustrate these two processes. As illustration of the psyching-out process or empathy, he adduces: “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation” (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9);11 and as illustration of the sympathy process involving the spectator’s independent response, he adduces: “We either approve or disapprove of the conduct of another man according as we feel that, when we bring his case home to ourselves, we either can or cannot entirely sympathize with the sentiments and motives which directed it” (TMS III.1.2, p. 109). Gordon argues that these passages miss the distinction between: “[I]magining being X in X’s situation” (psyching out the other’s feelings; empathy); and “imagining being in X’s situation”, also expressed as “imagining myself being in X’s situation”,12 (responding independently to what caused the other’s feelings; sympathy) (Gordon 1995, pp. 740-1). This distinction is important for Gordon because it is the element of independence, in not imagining being X, which he pinpoints as essential for moral judgment, whereas imagining being X is essential for psyching out the other or empathy. Thus, although Gordon takes a simulationist reading of TMS, he agrees with Campbell and Otteson that Smith fails to provide an account of the psychological process of empathy, in the sense of psyching out what the other feels, distinct from the process of sympathy. Stephen Darwall13 cites Gordon (also the simulation theorist Alvin Goldman) in support of a simulationist interpretation of Smith’s sympathy as “projective empathy”. Darwall does not follow Gordon’s distinction between empathy and sympathy as two kinds of simulation, but argues that Smith’s empathy “already involves sympathy” (Darwall 1998, p. 267; TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9). Noting that the term “empathy” was not available to Smith because it entered the English language only in 1909 as a translation of “Einfühlung”, Darwall argues that Smith’s “sympathy”

11

Gordon mistakenly cites this as TMS, p. 109 (i.e. III.1.2). Cf. Gordon’s description of sympathy, where the spectator holds back from identifying with the other when engaged in moral assessment: “We imagine ourselves being in the other’s situation, ourselves faced with whatever is causing the other’s emotion. Then, in imagination, we respond independently, in our own way, to the imagined cause” (Gordon 1995, p. 741). 13 Darwall (1998), p. 267. 12

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actually refers to “empathy” (Darwall 1998, p. 262).14 Hence, Darwall interprets Smith’s sympathy in terms of what he terms “projective empathy”15: We place ourselves in their situation and work out what we would think, want, and do, if we were they. The idea is not that our thought is explicitly self-conscious: “If I were she, I would feel thus and so, so she probably feels thus and so.” Rather, we unselfconsciously project into the other’s standpoint, respond imaginatively from that perspective, and attribute the result to the other. (Darwall 1998, pp. 267-8)

Darwall’s conception of Smith’s sympathy as projective empathy is that the spectator unselfconsciously projects himself into X’s situation, responds imaginatively as from X’s perspective, and then attributes this response of his to X. Darwall’s projective empathy is thus equivalent to “imagining myself being X in X’s situation”, such that what I imagine of myself being X in X’s situation is what I ascribe to X in X’s situation. Darwall’s projective empathy is thus something of a hybrid of Gordon’s “imagining being X in X’s situation” and “imagining myself being in X’s situation”. As Darwall’s spectator attributes to the other what the spectator imagines he would feel if he were that other in his situation, Darwall’s projective empathy is normative: It is important that projective empathy is not simply copying others’ feelings or thought processes as we imagine them. Rather, we place ourselves in the other’s situation and work out what to feel, as though we were they. This puts us into a position to second the other’s feeling or dissent from it. (Darwall 1998, p. 268; original emphasis) 14

“Indeed, “empathy” only entered English when Edward Titchener coined it in 1909 to translate Theodor Lipps’s “Einfühlung”, which he in turn had appropriated for psychology from German aesthetics in 1905 and which derives from a verb meaning “to feel one’s way into”. Both Hume and Smith had used “sympathy” to refer to the distinctive forms of empathy they described.” (Darwall 1998, p. 262). It appears, however, that Vernon Lee translated “Einfühlung” as “aesthetic empathy” in her Gallery Diary of 20 February 1904, also referring to it as “aesthetic sympathy” (Lee and Anstruther-Thomson 1912, p. 337). Noting Titchener’s translation of it as “empathy”, Lee elsewhere remarks that “Einfühlung” is analogous to “moral sympathy”; the example she provides is sympathy with the grief of neighbours (Lee and Anstruther-Thomson 1912, p. 20). Although her explication of these terms does not correspond with the interpretation I offer in this paper, her example of moral sympathy with grief raises a question whether she might have been familiar with TMS VII.iii.1.4, p. 317. On “Einfühlung” see also note 36 below. 15 Darwall reserves the term “sympathy” for compassion (Darwall 1998, p. 261).

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Darwall’s projective empathy is concerned not simply with feeling what the other feels, but with working out what to feel if we were that other person in their situation, thereby ascertaining whether to second or dissent from the other’s feeling. Darwall thus reads the passage at I.i.1.2 as a statement, not of empathy with another in the sense of psyching out what the other feels, but of projective empathy in the sense of ascertaining whether to second what the other feels.16 Thus for Darwall, knowledge of other minds is normatively constituted. If a spectator does not think the other’s feelings are warranted, it is difficult for him to share them through projective empathy: “[O]ne’s relative inability to empathize will itself be an expression of thinking the other’s feelings to be unwarranted” (Darwall 1998, p. 269). Projective empathy is thus central for Darwall’s notion of “normative communities” where understanding others’ feelings implies seconding those feelings (Darwall 1998, p. 270). Furthermore, this seconding of others’ feelings is as from their, firstperson, standpoint, that is, from the standpoint of those having the emotion, not from the third-person standpoint of the spectator (Darwall 1998, pp. 268-9). Projective empathy is therefore first-personal, not third-personal, with the third-person standpoint reserved exclusively for compassion for another, as from the perspective of one-caring, for which Darwall reserves the term “sympathy”. Darwall’s proposal of a composite normative notion of sympathy (= projective empathy), according to which understanding and endorsing others’ feelings constitutes a single or unitary response, might be thought to provide a solution for Gordon’s missed distinction and Campbell’s and Otteson’s lacuna, but only by denying the significance of the distinction between empathy and sympathy for TMS’s account of moral judgment. In spite of their differences, this puts the interpretations of Gordon, Campbell and Otteson against that of Darwall. Yet one point of similarity in what are otherwise the different interpretations of Darwall on the one hand and Campbell and Otteson on the other, is rooted in their shared view that the key passage at TMS I.i.1.2 is about sympathy (i.e. projective empathy for Darwall). In contrast, Gordon interprets TMS I.i.1.2 as about empathy in the sense of psyching out another’s feelings, even though, he argues, the passage fails to differentiate the psychological process from that involved in sympathy. 16

“When we do share others’ feelings through projective empathy, consequently, we second their feelings and thereby confirm them” (Darwall 1998, p. 269).

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In a recent contribution to the debate, Bence Nanay17 takes Darwall’s approach one step further by questioning whether Gordon’s distinction between the two kinds of simulation, between “imagining being in X’s situation” and “imagining being X in X’s situation”, is conceptually viable.18 Nanay construes “imagining being in X’s situation” as interchangeable with “imagining myself being in X’s situation” (Nanay 2010, pp. 88, 101 n. 2; emphasis added), for which there is some support from Gordon as noted above. But Nanay then goes on to construe “imagining being X in X’s situation” as interchangeable with “imagining myself being X in X’s situation” (Nanay 2010, p. 90; original emphasis), which has the effect of importing the spectator himself into the empathetic process of trying to psyche out the other’s feelings. Nanay’s construal of Gordon’s empathy is thus similar to Darwall’s notion of projective empathy which, I argued above, is equivalent to “imagining myself being X in X’s situation”. This gives Nanay a new construal of Gordon’s distinction, as between “imagining myself being in X’s situation” and “imagining myself being X in X’s situation”; but it has the effect of blunting the point of Gordon’s distinction that the spectator retains something of himself in the former (sympathetic) process although not in the latter (empathetic) process. This leads Nanay to question whether the distinction is viable: As imagining being X in X’s situation is imagining myself being X in X’s situation … , there is a sense in which I indeed imagine myself in such a way that I cannot be unaware that it is myself about whom I imagine. So imagining being X in X’s situation may turn out to be as genuine a form of imagining de se as imagining being in X’s situation. But then what is the difference between the two? (Nanay 2010, p. 90; original emphasis)

Irrespective of whether Nanay’s distinction here is viable, it is a different question from whether Gordon’s distinction is viable. This is further illustrated by Nanay’s argument that “the crucial question” is whether there is a difference between “imagining being X” and “imagining being in X’s situation” (Nanay 2010, p. 90). Again, this misses the distinction that Gordon draws, since “imagining being in X’s situation” involves an element of independence for the spectator that “imagining being X” does not. The difference lies in the conception of the role of the spectator’s subjectivity in the imagining process, together with any implications this 17

Nanay (2010). Nanay also agrees with Darwall that if the term “empathy” had been available, Smith would have used “empathy” not “sympathy” (Nanay 2010, p. 87).

18

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has for the construal of the relevant situation, not in the individuation of situation per se as Nanay argues (Nanay 2010, pp. 90-3). Nanay’s reliance upon individuation of situation without a conceptual distinction such as Gordon’s leads him to conclude that, as sympathy in TMS may apparently be characterised by either an absence or a presence of correspondence between the mental states of the spectator and the other, it must be the case that sympathy implies nothing about such correspondence (Nanay 2010, pp. 93-8). Nanay is thus led to reject what has been a common assumption amongst Smith scholars that sympathy constitutes some kind of intersubjectivity even if its precise delineation has proved problematic. He argues instead that sympathy is a visceral reaction: “[S]ympathy can only be a visceral, quasi-automatic reaction of imagining ourselves in a certain situation – the situation we perceive or believe someone else to be in” (Nanay 2010, p. 97). Nanay thus posits a new response to the question regarding Smith’s theory of mind in TMS: According to Nanay, the question itself is misconceived as Smith’s sympathy is not a kind of intersubjectivity at all, requiring a theory of mind for its explanation, but a visceral reaction. In spite of the clarity of Smith’s description of the tripartite model of moral judgment, scholars have thus struggled to explain it in terms of Smith’s theory of mind. And with these struggles, we also see quite different interpretations of the relation between Smith’s sympathy and moral judgment. As we have seen, Nanay takes sympathy to be merely a visceral reaction. Darwall takes sympathy (= projective empathy) to be normative in character so that knowledge of other minds is normatively constituted. Sympathy without approval is thus impossible for Darwall. Charles Griswold, however, comes to the opposite conclusion that it is possible to sympathize irrespective of whether one approves: “Because one can sympathize with almost any passion, it must be possible to “sympathize” with someone and not approve of them. … In sum, sympathy is not to be equated with approval …” (Griswold 1999, p. 85; original emphasis). But Griswold construes sympathy in terms of “our fundamental understanding of others as “beings like us”” – which in Gordon’s terms is empathy, not sympathy. This explains how Griswold can conclude that equating sympathy with approval is wrong because it would “entail that disapproval amounts to no more than the inability of a spectator to empathize with an actor” (Griswold 1999, p. 85). In moving almost imperceptibly from “sympathy” to “empathy”, Griswold does not consider whether there might be distinctive roles for “sympathy” and

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“empathy” in understanding TMS, in that if it is “empathy” that accounts for “our fundamental understanding of others as “beings like us””, the role of sympathy is explained in relation to approval. Thus, rephrasing Griswold to differentiate between empathy and sympathy, we might say that “Because one can empathize with almost any passion, it must be possible to “empathize” with someone and not approve of them. … In sum, empathy is not to be equated with approval – since approval is the role of sympathy”. Although Darwall and Griswold thus come to opposite conclusions as to whether Smith’s sympathy implies approval, they share an interpretative stance based on a composite notion of “sympathy”, based on TMS I.i.1.2, that is not differentiated from Gordon’s sense of “empathy” as psyching out what the other feels. Do we conclude from this that TMS is irremediably confused on the relation between empathy and sympathy? In the remainder of this paper I argue that there is an intelligible theory of mind in TMS that supports the tripartite model of moral judgment and hence clarifies the distinctive role of intersubjectivity for moral judgment. III. Empathy and sympathy in TMS: Conceptual distinctions My starting point is Smith’s tripartite model of moral judgment. Smith’s model of moral judgment requires that spectators approve of (what they take to be) another’s feeling to the extent that there is a concordance between it and their own sympathetic emotion. This model requires that spectators take themselves to have an understanding or conception of what others feel, and that this is distinct from their own sympathetic emotions. This raises the two questions, broached above, of the conceptual distinction between these mental operations by the spectator, and the psychological or neurophysiological characterisation of these two distinct imaginative processes. This section addresses the question of the conceptual distinction between the two mental processes and the subsequent section briefly addresses some psychological and neurophysiological issues. I concur with Gordon (also Campbell and Otteson) that TMS needs a distinction between empathy, in the sense of psyching out what others feel,19 and sympathy, in Smith’s distinct sense of sympathetic emotion. 19

There are different construals of “empathy” in the psychological and philosophical literature, but for the purposes of this paper I accept Gordon’s characterisation

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But I depart from Gordon’s proposal that the core distinction that informs the argument of TMS should be thought of in terms of what the spectator “imagines being”. Instead I propose that the distinction that is important for TMS involves what the spectator “imagines feeling”. The core distinction for TMS is thus between a spectator’s “imagining what X feels in X’s situation” (empathy) and a spectator’s “imagining what he would feel if he were X in X’s situation” (sympathetic emotion). The former, “imagining what X feels in X’s situation”, captures the essential characteristic of empathy in that the aim of the spectator’s imagining is to feel what X feels in X’s situation. Here the spectator aims to feel what the other feels. The latter, “imagining what he (the spectator) would feel if he were X in X’s situation”, captures the essential characteristic of sympathy in that the aim of the spectator’s imagining is to feel what he (the spectator) would feel if he were X in X’s situation. Here the spectator aims not to feel what the other feels but to feel what he would feel if he were that other in the other’s situation. An important difference between the two is that, in the case of sympathy, the spectator reserves something of his independence in the process – by imagining what he would feel if he were the other in the other’s situation. This satisfies Gordon’s stipulation that what differentiates sympathy from empathy is the element of independence that the spectator maintains in his sympathetic emotion, since it is this independence that is necessary for marking approval or disapproval. Precisely what might be involved in this element of spectatorial independence is something that requires further consideration; for the moment, I just lay it out as conforming to Gordon’s stipulation that it registers the point that sympathy brings to bear an element of appraisal that is independent of (what are taken to be) the feelings of the other person. The difference between empathy and sympathy in TMS thus lies in whose feelings are being experienced in the spectator’s imaginative episode. In the case of empathy, it is the other’s feelings that are experienced in the spectator’s imaginative episode; whereas, in the case of sympathy, it is the spectator’s feelings that are experienced in the spectator’s imaginative episode. The difference between them lies in the role of the spectator as independent moral agent; he is absent from empathy but present in sympathy. In both cases, however, the imaginative episode is the result of the spectator’s imagining himself into the person and as “psyching out what the other feels”. This notion of empathy involves nothing in the way of emotional, altruistic or compassionate responses to what the other feels.

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situation of the other. What is the evidence for this distinction in TMS? One part of the evidence is to be found in the second paragraph (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9). The subject matter of the paragraph is how we can form an idea or conception of “what other men feel” (“what he suffers”; “what are his sensations”) and how we are then ourselves affected by having this idea or conception of what others feel. Gordon considers only the opening sentence of this paragraph, that “we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation” (Gordon 1995, p. 741),20 but reading further into the paragraph provides a different emphasis. In order to conceive what others feel, we aim to become “the same person” as the other: “[W]e enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them” (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9). The objective of placing ourselves in the other’s situation by means of the imagination is thus to experience what he feels as if we were him. Smith recognises that this process is approximate: We only form “some idea of his sensations”, and what we feel is “weaker in degree” than what he feels. Yet, in spite of this, what we feel in the imagination is “not altogether unlike” the feelings experienced by the other. And, in any case, it is all we have. Smith does not claim that we have perfect access to what others feel, only that there is no other way in which we can have any access to what others feel. Furthermore, in practice, we do take it that this imaginative process does give us access to what others feel. This constitutes Smith’s explanation of empathy. The passage goes on to argue that, having this access (or taking ourselves to have this access) to what others feel, approximate though it may be, in turn affects us: “His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.” (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9). Having thus imagined what the other feels, we are then affected by what we imagine are his feelings. This provides an explanation of affective sympathy: We are affected by others’ feelings (here sorrow and pain) only because we can imagine what they feel. 20

Gordon (1995), p. 741, n. 19 incorrectly cites this passage as TMS p. 109 (i.e. III.1.2) – his “ibid”.

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This account in paragraph two follows seamlessly from the opening paragraph’s argument that pity and compassion are emotional responses to “the misery of others”. Pity and compassion are here examples of affective sympathy. We respond affectively to the misery of others; we “often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others”. What paragraph two thus provides is a psychological explanation of this affective sympathy by way of an account of the role of the imagination in placing ourselves in the situation of others, since without this imaginative process we would have no basis for taking ourselves to have access to what others feel and hence no basis for responding to their feelings. Paragraph two thus provides a psychological account of empathy in the context of explaining the affective sympathy introduced in the opening paragraph. Paragraph two is thus an account of empathy, and how empathy results in affective sympathy; it is not about the technical sense of sympathy as sympathetic emotions.21 Paragraph three is introduced as follows: “That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated …” (TMS I.i.1.3, p. 10), where “this source” of our fellow-feeling refers back to paragraph two. As “our fellow-feeling for the misery of others”, illustrated in the first two paragraphs, is what I term “affective sympathy” for the misery of others, this shows that paragraph two explains the source of our affective sympathy for the misery of others in our ability to empathize with them. According to paragraph three, therefore, paragraph two explains the source of affective sympathy in terms of our ability to change places in fancy with the sufferer and thereby imagine what he feels. The word “sympathy” is not introduced until paragraph five, and there it is explained as “our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever”. In contrast with “pity and compassion”, again referencing back to the opening paragraph, “sympathy” here is a fellow-feeling with any passion, including others’ happiness as well as their sorrows (paragraph four). This is an elaboration of affective sympathy. The first mention of the word “sympathy” in TMS (at I.i.1.5) thus refers to affective sympa21

Most scholars take TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9, to be about sympathy, see Broadie (2006), Campbell (1971), Carrasco (2011), Darwall (1998), Forman-Barzilai (2010), Griswold (1999), Macfie (1967), Nanay (2010), Otteson (2002), Reid (in StewartRobinson and Norton, 1984), Sugden (2005). A dissenting voice is Raphael (2007), p. 14, n. 1.

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thy, not the technical sense of sympathy as sympathetic emotion. After paragraph five there is some discussion as to how this sympathy (= affective sympathy) can arise merely from a view of another’s passion (i.e. emotional contagion), which seems to be “transfused” from one to another without any process of changing places in the imagination. Further discussion of affective sympathy continues, including considerations about anger. An introduction of the notion of the “cause” of another’s feelings appears in paragraphs eight and nine, preceding a decisive switch in paragraph ten from “sympathy” as a response to others’ feelings to “sympathy” as a response to the situation that excites others’ feelings: “Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it” (TMS I.i.1.10, p. 12). This switch from affective sympathy introduces Smith’s technical sense of sympathetic emotion in the tenth paragraph. In contrast with empathy, a spectator’s sympathetic emotions involve imagining what he would feel if he were the other in the other’s situation. The aim of sympathy is not to experience the other’s passions as the other has them – that is empathy. It is generally agreed amongst scholars that the most developed statement of sympathy in TMS occurs at VII.iii.1.4, p. 317. The question then is what fundamentally differentiates the passage at VII.iii.1.4, p. 317, from the account of empathy at I.i.1.2, p. 9. The passage is as follows: But though sympathy is very properly said to arise from an imaginary change of situations with the person principally concerned, yet this imaginary change is not supposed to happen to me in my own person and character, but in that of the person with whom I sympathize. When I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order to enter into your grief I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die: but I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters. My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your account, and not in the least upon my own. (TMS VII.iii.1.4, p. 317)

The context for this passage is an account of those systems that “deduce the principle of approbation from self-love”. Hobbes is directly named (TMS VII.iii.1.1, p. 315) and scholars generally accept that Mandeville is also a primary target. Smith is thus contrasting the self-love systems with his own, and in this specific context he argues that his own system is not liable to the charge of selfishness. The point of the passage is thus to argue that sympathy is not selfish: When I condole with another for the loss of an only son, my grief is upon the other’s account, not upon

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my own. A selfish response, where I grieve upon my own account, would be to imagine what I would feel if I were to lose my only son. Selfishly grieving upon my own account would involve “imagining what I would feel if I were in the same kind of situation as X’s situation”. According to Smith’s nonselfish account, however, when I condole with X on the loss of his son, my grief is felt on account of his loss in his situation, not any imagined loss of mine in a similar situation to X’s. My grief is thus felt entirely upon his account, in view of his circumstances, person and character. Yet, this grief is “my grief”: “My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your account”. My grief at the loss of X’s son thus involves “imagining what I would feel if I were X in X’s situation”.22 The contrast the passage at VII.iii.1.4, p. 317, draws is thus between the selfish principle of “imagining what I would feel if I were in the same kind of situation as X’s situation”, and the sympathetic response of “imagining what I would feel if I were X in X’s situation”. The contrast between empathy and sympathy that we are searching for is thus the contrast between a spectator’s “imagining what X feels in X’s situation” (empathy) and “imagining what I would feel if I were X in X’s situation” (sympathy). This formulation of the distinction between empathy and sympathy preserves the independence of the spectator’s sympathy. This is important because it is in being my grief that is imagined, even though upon the other’s account, that the sympathetic emotion is normative. The rationale for this is that in TMS a spectator’s sympathetic emotions provide a “standard” or “measure” for normative appraisal. Sympathetic emotions / sentiments constitute the spectator’s “standard” or “measure”, “rule” or “canon”, of what is right (TMS I.i.3.1,9, pp. 17,18). As Smith puts it with reference to how another judges me: “[U]pon all occasions his own sentiments are the standards and measures by which he judges of mine” (TMS I.i.3.1, p. 17). Later on, the spectator’s sympathetic emotion is described as “the natural and original measure” of the proper degree of the affections (TMS VII.ii.3.21, p. 306f.). This comprises an important difference between sympathetic emotions and what is described at TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9: Sympathetic emotions constitute the spectator’s 22

The passage goes on to argue that as we (i.e. the male ‘we’) can feel sympathy for a woman in childbirth, this is evidence that the sympathetic emotion is not selfish since it is impossible for a man to imagine himself as giving birth. This illustrates the point that the sympathetic emotion is not imagined upon our own account but on account of the other.

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standard of what is “just and proper”, whereas imagining what (we take it that) the other feels is not normative but represents our best attempt to feel what the other feels. Smith’s technical notion of sympathetic emotion is thus normative in providing the spectator with a standard or canon of what is right. It follows that sympathetic emotions are technically impossible without this normative element. It also follows that normative appraisal is essentially thirdpersonal, as from the spectator’s standpoint.23 The spectator’s imagining of what he would feel if he were X in X’s situation constitutes his standard or measure of what is right in X’s circumstances. For sure, the spectator’s grief is imagined as if he were X in X’s situation, but it is still the spectator’s imagined grief – not the other’s imagined grief – that provides the benchmark. Very often in descriptions of sympathetic emotions in TMS it is taken for granted that the spectator does have a conception of the other’s feelings, because this empathetic conception of the other’s feelings is necessary for moral judgment which requires a comparison of the sympathetic emotions with the other’s feelings. But an empathetic conception of the other’s feelings is distinct from the sympathetic emotions. This is not to suggest that sympathy is identical with moral judgment. According to Smith’s tripartite model, moral judgment requires the spectator’s observation or perception of the correspondence, concordance or coincidence between (what the spectator takes to be) the other’s feelings and the spectator’s sympathetic emotions. The spectator’s sympathetic emotions are the standard by which the other’s feelings are judged: If (what the spectator takes to be) the other’s feelings correspond to this standard, the spectator judges favourably, but if they do not correspond to this standard, the spectator judges unfavourably. Although the standard and the judgment are not the self-same thing, it is not possible to exercise favourable judgment without there being corresponding sympathetic emotions, just as it is not possible to judge unfa23

This suggests that Darwall’s argument, that “the perspective of moral judgment, according to Smith, is not strictly a spectator’s standpoint at all … to judge whether a motive or feeling is warranted or proper, we must take up, not some external perspective, but that of the person who has the motive or feeling” (Darwall 1999, p. 141, original emphasis; also Darwall 2004, pp. 131-2), derives from not differentiating between empathy, which is first-personal, and sympathy, which is thirdpersonal.

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vourably without there being a lack of correspondence between the sympathetic emotions and the other’s feelings. It should be noted, however, that normative appraisal does not necessarily imply that the standard of appraisal is a moral standard. The structure of Smith’s argument in TMS is first to present judgments relating to propriety and then merit in Parts I and II.24 Spectators make judgments about others based on the degree of concordance between their own sympathetic emotions and (what they take to be) the feelings of the other person (whether the person principally concerned in the case of judgments of propriety, or the patient in the case of judgments of merit). Such sympathetic emotions are the standard or measure for spectators of what is right in the circumstances, but in Parts I and II Smith does not elaborate on the normative credentials of these sympathetic emotions. Part III, however, provides a model of the impartial spectator which grounds moral appraisal in impartiality by showing how sympathetic emotions can be impartially generated. The impartial spectator model is introduced by means of an analogy between judgments about others and judgments about oneself. Just as judgments about others are made by changing places in the imagination, with the spectator’s ensuing observation of the degree of correspondence between his sympathetic emotions and (what he takes to be) the feelings of the other person, so judgments about himself are made by his imagining how another would see him, and then considering whether that spectator would observe a correspondence between his (that spectator’s) sympathetic emotions and (what are taken to be) his own feelings. The innovation at this point is that the spectator to ourselves – the one whose imagined sympathetic emotions are taken as determinant for our judgment about ourselves – is specified as “a fair and impartial spectator” (TMS III.1.2, p. 110). We thus judge ourselves as we imagine an impartial spectator would judge us; and, in order to secure the approval of this impartial spectator, we lower our feelings to the pitch that we imagine the impartial spectator can go along with. Herein lies the virtue of self-command, one of the most important virtues in the TMS, and the one in whose light other virtues derive their principal lustre.25 We exert ourselves in exercising selfcommand in order to elicit the approval of the impartial spectator, just as the other person exercises self-command by lowering his feelings in or24 25

TMS I.i.3-4, pp. 16-23 and TMS II.i, pp. 67-78. TMS VI.iii.11, p. 241.

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der to elicit the spectator’s approval.26 Moral judgment thus involves applying the measure or standard, not of actual spectators, but of the impartial spectator: “That precise and distinct measure can be found nowhere but in the sympathetic feelings [i.e. sympathetic emotions] of the impartial and well-informed spectator” (VII.ii.1.49, p. 294). This model of the impartial spectator provides the crucial distinction between “social” judgments and “moral” judgments: The former kind of judgment is made by spectators in applying merely conventional standards, whereas the latter kind of judgment is made according to the standard of the impartial spectator. Fundamental to TMS is thus a distinction between the “social gaze” and the “moral gaze”, such that the former reflects conventional mores, frequently treated with disdain by the didactic voice of TMS, whereas the latter is given by the eye of the impartial spectator.27 In so far as the measure or standard of the impartial spectator is internalised by moral agents,28 this “precise and distinct measure” is applied by them as spectators in making judgments about others, as well as in judging themselves. Or, rather, given that the spectator as moral agent makes judgments about himself based on impartial sentiments as standards of what is right, those same impartial standards are applied in his own sympathetic emotions when judging others too. The process of attunement between a spectator as moral agent and the person principally concerned thus converges on the standard of the impartial spectator: The spectator applies his internalised version of the impartial spectator’s standard, and the person principally concerned lowers the pitch of his (original) feelings to harmonise with the sympathetic emotion of the spectator (TMS I.i.4.6-8, pp. 21-22). The sympathetic emotions of the spectator as moral agent are, therefore, not just any subjective or conventional emotions that the spectator happens to take as normative for judging; they are the sympathetic emotions which the impartial spectator would have were he involved in the judging. In adjusting to the sympathetic emotions of spectators who are moral agents, we thus adjust our feelings to the standard of the impartial spectator.29 26

TMS I.i.4.6-8, pp. 21-22. Brown (1997). 28 I here leave aside issues of how problematic it might be to “identify” with the impartial spectator, see Brown (1994), e.g. pp. 69-75. 29 Whether this measure or standard of the impartial spectator is sufficient to establish that TMS is not liable to the charge of moral relativism, is a question that lies 27

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In this section I have argued that the conceptual distinctions between empathy and the various senses of sympathy are crucial for the argument of TMS. This can also help to make sense of some of the examples in the first chapter which some commentators have found puzzling. For example, Nanay points out that some of the examples in the first chapter show that sympathy does not necessarily guarantee a correspondence between the feelings of the spectator and the other person. This inclines him to reject the premise that sympathy implies a correspondence between the mental states of the sympathizer and the other, and to see it simply as a visceral reaction.30 But the tripartite model of moral judgment shows that favourable moral judgment depends on the extent to which the spectator’s sympathetic emotions correspond with the feelings of the other. There is thus no presumption that the presence of sympathetic emotions implies a correspondence with the actual feelings of the other, or even that the other has any particular feelings in the circumstances; only that the presence of a correspondence explains positive judgments of appraisal (whether conventional or moral). Hence, the case where we “blush” for the bad behaviour of another is an example of where the spectator’s sympathetic emotions do not correspond with the other’s feelings; here the spectator’s blushes accompany a negative judgment on the other (TMS I.i.1.10, p. 12). Lack of correspondence between the spectator’s sympathetic emotions and the feelings of the other is thus indicative of spectatorial disapproval. In cases of “illusion of the imagination”, however, the other person could not in principle have the feelings that are attributed to him (whether empathetically or sympathetically). The examples of illusive sympathy in Chapter 1 relate to affective sympathy where we feel compassion for others on account of misery or distress that they cannot in principle feel; the lunatic, the baby and the deceased cannot in principle feel the imagined wretchedness that prompts our compassion.31 IV. Empathy and sympathy in TMS: Psychological processes The argument of TMS thus requires two kinds of imaginative processes – one that makes empathy possible and another that makes sympathetic outside the scope of this paper. For contrasting treatments of this question, see Forman-Barzilai (2010) and Carrasco (2011). 30 Nanay (2010), pp. 93-97. 31 TMS I.i.1.11-13, pp. 12-13; cf. TMS II.i.2.5, pp. 70-71; TMS II.i.5.11, p. 78.

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emotion possible. Either empathy or sympathy might be accompanied by affective sympathy. Empathy might result in affective sympathy as the spectator responds affectively to the original feelings of the other, with compassion in response to the other’s distress or joy in response to the other’s happiness. Sympathetic emotions might be accompanied by affective sympathy: As well as experiencing sympathetic grief, the spectator might feel compassion in response to the other’s grief. What is common to empathy and sympathy, however, is the power of the human imagination in experiencing emotions as a result of changing places in fancy with another: We imagine what the other feels, and we imagine what we should feel if we were the other in his situation. In explaining empathy and sympathetic emotion as two kinds of imagined feelings, this economy of explanation is in accordance with the view expressed elsewhere by Smith concerning the attraction of explaining events and processes in terms of a few connecting principles.32 Such economy of explanation would have been compromised had TMS resorted to a theory-theory of mind to explain empathy whilst using the imagination to explain sympathetic emotions. Such a bifurcated approach would also have failed to deliver the necessary commonality of the two items being compared according to Smith’s tripartite model of moral judgment. It is because empathy and sympathetic emotions are both imagined feelings – different kinds of a single genus – that direct comparison of them is possible. If the other’s feelings were known to the spectator only as the result of the application of a theory about the other’s feelings, the spectator’s knowledge of the other’s feelings would be propositional, viz. that the other is sorrowful, for example; and this would imply that moral judgments involve the spectator in comparing his sympathetic emotions with a propositional understanding of the other’s feelings. It is thus not only for reasons of economy of explanation that empathy and sympathetic emotions are of the same genus; the model of moral judgment also requires such commonality.33 There are other shared features in these imagined emotions. One is that both are weaker than the emotions they are tracking. In the case of imagining what the other feels, as noted above, the sensations we imagine the other to have are “weaker in degree” than the other’s actual sen32

E.g. Smith (1980) II.12, IV.19. My interpretation thus differs from those who think that the (imagined) sympathetic emotion is compared with the actual emotion of the other (cf. Raphael 1985, p. 30) or the observed emotion of the other (cf. Raphael 1985, p. 86). 33

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sations (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9). This divergence results from the fact that an imagined feeling is likely to be felt less acutely than an actual feeling. Moreover, we become only “in some measure” the same person as the other; the imagination does not allow us to “identify” fully with the other.34 In the case of sympathetic emotions, our emotions are also weakened by being only what we imagine we should feel, and this affects moral judgments. The imaginary change of situation for the spectator is “but momentary” and there is “the secret consciousness that the change of situations, from which the sympathetic sentiment arises, is but imaginary”, with the result that the sympathetic emotions are lower in degree and perhaps not even of exactly the same kind as the feelings of the other person (TMS I.i.4.7-8, pp. 21-22). In view of this, the person principally concerned attempts to moderate his original feelings in order to gain the (moral) approval of the spectator.35 In positing imagined feelings, TMS is positing feelings that are neither known propositionally nor experienced in actuality. Imagined feelings thus constitute a third category. This is suggestive of some recent research in psychology and neuroscience. Given that neuroscientific research is still a developing area with a complexity beyond the technical competence of philosophical scholars, caution is required in suggesting that TMS has support from contemporary scientific research. Nonetheless, some neuroscientists have linked their results to what they see as an account of empathy in the opening paragraphs of TMS. For example, Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero argue that mirror neurons explain empathy and they link this to the account of empathy in the early paragraphs of TMS. They argue that observation of actions and emotions in others activates the same parts of the brain as if the observer were engaged in those actions and emotions, and that it is this neural facility that gives observers “a first-person experience” of others’ actions and emotions (Rizzolatti and Craighero 2005, pp. 117, 119). The neural basis of empathy is thus identified in terms of providing a first-person perspective of what it means to experience an emotion: Not merely to 34

Although some commentators think that sympathy involves “identification” with the other, as far as I can tell the word “identify” is not used in respect of others in TMS. It is used only in connection with the impartial spectator, and in that context such identification is never complete at the moment of the event; it only becomes possible afterwards (cf. TMS III.3.25, pp. 146-147; III.3.28-29, pp. 148-149; III.4.4, pp. 157-158). 35 See TMS I.i.4.8, pp. 22. Cf. note 4 above.

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know that another is in pain, but to know what it means to be in pain. Vittorio Gallese goes further in proposing the “shared manifold of intersubjectivity” (Gallese 2003) hypothesis that mirror neurons could be the neurological underpinning for an enlarged empathy which makes possible the intersubjective relations within which social life is mutually intelligible to its participants and where emotions are shared with others. Gallese here cites Smith’s TMS and Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and Ideas II.36 These authors’ notions of “empathy” in TMS are not the same, however, as the one I presented above: Rizzolati and Craighero infer an enlarged notion of empathy which includes altruism as well as voluntary and automatic processes (TMS I.i.1.1-3, p. 9-10; Rizzolati and Craighero 2005, pp. 107-8, 119-20); and Gallese interprets Smith’s empathy in terms of “our capacity to interpret the feelings of others in terms of sympathy” (Gallese 2003, p. 175). Alvin Goldman, a prominent simulation theorist, notes the presence of motor mimicry and affective simulation / hedonic contagion in TMS37, as well as morality’s requirement that we project “ourselves into the shoes of an impartial judge” (Goldman 2006, pp. 17, 280, 294); and he sees these as illustrative of some of the general ideas behind simulation theory. Goldman’s project goes beyond mirror neurons, however, in developing a two-level account of simulation as mind-reading or mentalizing, a form of empathy that excludes emotive or caring connotations and is closer to the notion of empathy in TMS developed above. The imagination is central to Goldman’s notion of simulation which involves “enactment imagination”, or “E-imagination”, as producing “pretend” or imagined mental states. Although Goldman sees mirror neurons as central for low-level mental simulation, such as emotional contagion, he argues that high-level simulation-based mindreading goes beyond mirror neurons in involving perspective taking and enactment imagination (E-imagination) (esp. chs 2, 6-7). Crucially this involves attributing mental states to others by putting ourselves in their shoes, that is, by taking their perspective and hence E-imagining what they feel or what it is like to have their feelings. This high-level simulation might be similar to what I have characterised as empathy in TMS. This is a highly technical area of experimentation and debate. Whether or not further advances in neuroscience and psychology support 36

Gallese (2003), pp. 175-6. For Gallese’s comments on the history of “Einfühlung”, see Gallese (2003), pp. 175-6. 37 See TMS I.i.1.3, p. 10; I.i.2.2, p. 14.

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simulation theory as an explanation of empathy in TMS, some researchers in these areas suggest that TMS has an intelligible account of empathy and one that might possibly receive further support. V. Conclusion: Intersubjectivity and moral judgment in TMS Differentiating between Smith’s empathy and sympathy as forms of intersubjectivity has a number of advantages, apart from the interpretative clarity and consistency that it provides. One advantage is that it clarifies the question whether Smith’s account in TMS has empirical support. Given the current neuroscientific and psychological research interest, on the one hand, and new developments in experimental philosophy, on the other, this is a considerable gain. Another advantage is that it allows us to differentiate between issues of empathy / mentalizing and normative / moral issues. According to TMS, our ability to empathize makes morality possible, but this is not to be conflated with morality: Empathy is not normative whereas sympathetic emotions are normative. Furthermore, the normativity of sympathetic emotions can be constituted either by social mores (the social gaze) or by impartiality (the moral gaze). Intersubjectivity is therefore not per se moral; it is not even per se normative. Yet Smith’s moral theory is informed by a theory of mind that is still relevant to current philosophical and scientific debates about intersubjectivity. Bibliography Broadie, Alexander (2006) “Sympathy and the impartial spectator”, in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, K. Haakonssen (ed.), Cambridge University Press, pp. 158-88. Brown, Vivienne (1994) Adam Smith’s Discourse: Canonicity, Commerce and Conscience, Routledge. —— (1997) “Dialogism, the gaze, and the emergence of economic discourse”, New Literary History, 28: 697-710. —— (2009) “Agency and discourse: revisiting the Adam Smith problem”, in Elgar Companion to Adam Smith, J.T. Young (ed.), Edward Elgar, pp. 52-72.

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—— (2011) “Intersubjectivity, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Prisoners’ Dilemma”, The Adam Smith Review, 6: 172-190, F. Forman-Barzilai (ed.), Routledge. Campbell, T.D. (1971) Adam Smith’s Science of Morals, George Allen & Unwin. Carrasco, Maria Alejandra (2011) “From psychology to moral normativity”, The Adam Smith Review, 6: 9-29, F. Forman-Barzilai (ed.), Routledge. Darwall, Stephen (1998) “Empathy, sympathy, care”, Philosophical Studies, 89: 261-82. —— (1999) “Sympathetic liberalism: recent work on Adam Smith”, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 28: 139-64. —— (2004) “Equal dignity in Adam Smith”, The Adam Smith Review, 1: 129-34, V. Brown (ed.), Routledge. Forman-Barzilai, Fonna (2010) Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory, Cambridge University Press. Gallese, Vittorio (2003) “The roots of empathy: the shared manifold hypothesis and the neural basis of intersubjectivity”, Psychopathology, 36: 171-80. Goldman, Alvin I. (2006) Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading, Oxford University Press. Gordon, Robert M. (1995) “Sympathy, simulation, and the impartial spectator”, Ethics, 105: 727-42. Griswold, Charles L. (1999) Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press. Lee, Vernon and C. Anstruther-Thomson (1912) Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics, John Lane: London and New York. Macfie, A.L. (1967) The Individual in Society: Papers on Adam Smith, London: George Allen & Unwin. Montes, Leonidas (2004) Adam Smith in Context: A Critical Reassessment of some Central Components of His Thought, Palgrave Macmillan.

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Nanay, Bence (2010) “Adam Smith’s concept of sympathy and its contemporary interpretations”, The Philosophy of Adam Smith: The Adam Smith Review, vol. 5. Essays to Commemorate the 250th Anniversary of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, V. Brown and S. Fleischacker (eds.), Routledge, pp. 85-105. Norton, David Fate and Stewart-Robertson, J.C. (1980) “Thomas Reid on Adam Smith’s Theory of Morals”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 41: 381-98. Otteson, James R. (2002) Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life, Cambridge University Press. Raphael, D.D. (1985) Adam Smith, Oxford University Press. —— (2007) The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Raphael, D.D. and Macfie, Alec (1967) Introduction to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, D.D. Raphael and A.L Macfie (eds), Oxford: Clarendon Press; Liberty Press imprint 1982. Reid, Thomas (1984) “Thomas Reid on Adam Smith’s Theory of Morals”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 45: 309-21, J.C. StewartRobertson and D.F. Norton; Reid’s mss. reprinted as “A Sketch of Dr Smith’s Theory of Morals”, in On Moral Sentiments: Contemporary Responses to Adam Smith, 1997, J. Reeder (ed.), Bristol: Thoemmes Press, pp. 69-88. Rizzolatti, Giacomo and Craighero, Laila (2005) “Mirror neuron: a neurological approach to empathy”, Neurobiology of Human Values, J-P. P. Changeux, A. Damasio and W. Singer (eds), SpringerVerlag, pp.107-23. Smith, Adam (1963) Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, J.M. Lothian (ed.), London: Nelson. —— (1976) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, D.D. Raphael and A.L Macfie (eds), Oxford: Clarendon Press; Liberty Press imprint 1982. —— (1980) “The History of Astronomy”, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, W.P.D. Wightman and J.C. Bryce (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press: Liberty Press imprint 1982.

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—— (1983 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, J.C. Bryce (ed.), A.S. Skinner (general ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press; Liberty Press imprint 1985. —— (1987) Correspondence of Adam Smith, E.C. Mossner and I.S. Simpson (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press; Liberty Press imprint 1987. Sugden, Robert (2005) “Mirror systems and Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy”, in Imitation, Human Development and Culture, vol. 2 of Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science, S. Hurley and N. Chater (eds.), MIT, pp. 388-91.

9 Sympathy in Hume and Smith: A Contrast, Critique, and Reconstruction Sam Fleischacker I. Introduction I’d like to explore the differences between the accounts that Hume and Smith offer of sympathy, with an eye to the continuing value of both. I’ll take up some textual points first, then turn to a series of broader issues. To begin, however, a bit of terminological housekeeping. For Hume and Smith, sympathy is not compassion. Rather, they use the word for any case in which one person participates in another’s feelings: I sympathize with you when I share your vindictive anger or your delight in a good meal, not just when I share your pain. Scholars of eighteenthcentury philosophy are well aware of this, but it is worth highlighting since, even in the eighteenth century, the word “sympathy” seems more commonly to have been used for feelings of a broadly pitying or compassionate hue. Smith tells us that the meaning of sympathy “was, perhaps originally the same” as the meaning of pity, but that there is not “much impropriety” in using it “to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever”.1 Smith is of course following Hume here, who had already distiguished sympathy from pity, and used the former term to explain, for instance, the vicarious pleasure we take in the goods and status of the wealthy.2 We might identify Humean and Smithian sympathy with what to1

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. DD Raphael and AL Macfie, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), I.i.1.5; p. 10. [Henceforth: TMS.] See also TMS I.iii.1.1, p. 43. 2 David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. LA Selby-Bigge and PH Nidditch, second edition, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), pp. 269, 357-65. Henceforth: T.

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day we call “empathy,” except that that word is generally employed for a thinking of oneself into other people’s shoes that fits Smith’s but not Hume’s account of shared feelings. It’s not easy to map what Hume and Smith are talking about on to current discussions, even for the purposes of figuring out how exactly we should define what they call “sympathy”. We need to bear in mind that they take themselves to be responding, not to questions about how we know what others are thinking – the questions that most interest modern philosophers of mind – but to Hobbes’ and Mandeville’s egocentric account of human motivation: They are concerned to develop what Smith, in the opening sentence of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), calls the “principles in [man’s] nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it”. Which is to say that they care far more about the fact that your feelings interest me than whether or not I properly know what you feel. At the same time, unlike their predecessor Frances Hutcheson, they avoid identifying the principles that “interest us in the fortune of others” with benevolence alone. They want to begin further back from such an obviously moral feeling, to develop a view that enables us to see the range of ways in which human beings share feelings, and the range of roles – some moral, some emphatically not so – that these shared feelings can play. What they call “sympathy” is therefore meant to be a catch-all term for the various kinds of emotional glue that hold social relationships together. One other introductory remark. Precisely because Hume and Smith are trying to delineate both moral and non-moral uses of sympathy, they allow for a complex, indirect relationship between sympathy and moral judgment or approval. Sometimes Smith writes as if approval arose immediately from an awareness of our sympathy with another person: “To approve of the passions of another ... as suitable to their object is the same thing as to observe that we entirely sympathize with them; and not to approve of them as such, is the same thing as to observe that we do not entirely sympathize with them” (TMS I.i.3.1, p. 16). At other times,

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more consistently with his overall view, he identifies moral judgment, not with mere sympathy, but with the sympathy of the impartial spectator: “[Gratitude and resentment], as well as all the other passions of human nature, seem proper and are approved of, when the heart of every impartial spectator entirely sympathizes with them, when every indifferent by-stander entirely enters into, and goes along with them” (TMS II.i.2.2; p. 69, my emphasis). Hume more rigorously keeps sympathy and moral judgment apart. Moral judgment consists in our recognizing that a person’s qualities tend to his own happiness or the happiness of those around him. Sympathy is simply what leads us to take an interest in such judgments, to feel pleasure as a result of them: “When any quality, or character, has a tendency to the good of mankind, we are pleas’d with it, and approve of it; because it presents the lively idea of pleasure; which idea affects us by sympathy, and is itself a kind of pleasure” (T, p. 580). Sympathy puts us in a position from which we can feel moral approval, for Hume, but it does not constitute that approval.3 Hume’s clarity and Smith’s unclarity on this point are connected, I think, with the fact that Smith wants to draw his moral theory directly out of the way our emotions work, while Hume has a non-moral account of the emotions onto which he tries to graft morality: By appeal to a special kind of approving feeling, to the idea of utility, and to an argument about what we need if we are, as a society, to converse about one another’s emotions.4 Morality comes in as an external corrective to our firstorder emotional life, for Hume, while the drive towards morality is immanent in our first-order emotional life, for Smith. Our feelings themselves normally seek to take a form of which other people can approve, 3

Compare Debes (2007), which argues that sympathy is a condition for the activation of benevolence (humanity). 4 Hume defines judgments of virtue by way of “a particular kind” of pleasure in the view of a character trait at T, p. 471. He appeals to utility, as one of the most significant determinants of this feeling, at T, pp. 578-80. And he brings in the importance of a common language about the emotions, to moral judgment, at T, p. 582.

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for Smith; our feelings themselves normally seek nothing of the sort, for Hume, but we nonetheless construct a shared language about feelings, as a society, for moral purposes. II. Does Smith disagree with Hume? Let’s turn now to an apparently simple textual point: That Smith and Hume have different accounts of sympathy. To use shorthand, Hume has a “contagion” account of sympathy, while Smith has a “projection” account of it. We’ll see later that we need to be careful about aligning these terms with their contemporary equivalents: Today, a “contagion” theorist sees sympathy as a transfer of feelings that by-passes our cognitive faculties. That’s not exactly Hume’s view, not the one he presents as his official analysis of sympathy, at any rate: He’s closer, instead, to what today we would call a “theory theorist,” for whom we work out what others are feeling by a causal inference from the way they behave. Nevertheless, Hume certainly uses the language of contagion to characterize the sympathetic process; he indeed revels in that language, talking frequently as if we simply “catch” emotions from one another. “No quality of human nature is more remarkable,” he says, “… than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from ... our own. … A chearful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and serenity into my mind; as an angry or sorrowful one throws a sudden damp upon me” (T, p. 317). Again: “As in strings equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature” (T, p. 576). Other people’s emotions “infuse” themselves into my mind; they “communicate” themselves to me; I “find myself” of the same humor as my neighbors, or have their feelings “thrown ... upon me”. The language throughout these passages is passive, describing people among whom emotions travel whether they want those emotions or not, in the way diseases pass from one person to an-

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other: “contagiously,” as Hume expressly says at one point.5 Smith, by contrast, insists that mere contagion cannot induce sympathy. In order to sympathize with others, he maintains, we must actively imagine ourselves in their positions, not passively take in the way they appear to feel. Smith writes that “we can form no idea of the manner in which [other people] are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation”. Alluding directly, perhaps, to an example of Hume’s6, he denies – what Hume had expressly affirmed – that “our senses could inform us” of what even “our brother ... upon the rack” feels: “It is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of ... his sensations” (TMS I.i.1.2; p. 9).7 We need to imagine ourselves into the other person’s situation, to project ourselves into his or her shoes, in order to experience any sort of sympathy. This is a “projection” account of sympathy, meant to oppose the contagion account. The contrast may seem obvious – it did to Smith’s initial readers,

5

T, p. 605. Hume also twice describes other people’s emotions as “diffus[ing their] influence over” us (T, pp. 386, 592), and in the first of these passages goes on to compare the workings of sympathetic emotions to a system of “pipes” in which no more can flow than what is put in from “the fountain”. All through the Treatise, Hume’s imagery for sympathetic emotions presents us as passive in the face of the sentiments of others, as unable to help but be affected by them, or to consciously shape the direction or strength of that influence. His general, famous summation of this account, when he says that “the minds of men are mirrors to one another” (T, p. 365), is of a piece with this imagery: We stand there, passively reflecting one another’s feelings, for Hume, rather than actively putting ourselves into their situations. The contrast with Smith could not be more pronounced, in this respect. 6 T, p. 388. 7 Hume mentions “one, who is present at the cruel execution of the rack” as an example of a case in which the impressions we derive from our immediate observations will overwhelm us, preventing us from a more imagination-based sympathy (T, p. 388). So Smith’s claim that even here we need to imagine ourselves in the place of the sufferer in order to share his feelings appears to be a direct rejection of Hume’s view.

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such as Lord Kames and Dugald Stewart 8 – but it is often ignored. Stephen Darwall has laid out the differences between the two beautifully in a 1998 essay,9 but others deny that there are any differences. In one of the first major modern studies of Smith, Joseph Cropsey presented him as holding exactly the “contagion” view of sympathy that I have attributed to Hume. He writes, in explication of Smith: “The man who observes the joy of another will himself experience joy, and the spectator of grief or of fear will himself feel ... grief or fear” (Cropsey 2001, p.14).10 Going in the other direction, Alvin Goldman, in a 2006 book, treats the contagion Hume talks about as if it were just a special case of projecting oneself into the feelings of others. 11 Even such a careful scholar as David Raynor sees the two philosophers as holding much the same view of sympathy: Smith[’s] ... target is not Hume, but naive readers who implicitly, but mistakenly, think that sympathy is like telepathy. ... When Smith concludes that sympathy “does not arise so much from the view of the passion as from that of the situation which excites it,” he is not denying that we often experience, as if by contagion, a cheerful emotion simply from observing a cheerful face. ... Nor does Hume deny that we sometimes sympathize with another’s feel8

Kames, who knew both men personally very well and had read their work closely, identified the projection view with Smith, in a critique of it that he added to the third edition (1779) of his Essays, and defended, against it, a more Humean account of sympathy: Lord Kames (2005), I.ii.ix, pp. 70-72. Dugald Stewart distinguished between the two in a similar way (and again defended Hume against Smith); see the discussion of Stewart in Ian Duncan’s “The Fate of Sympathy: Hume, Smith, Scott, Hogg,” delivered at Re-claiming Adam Smith, Columbia University, Sept., 2006. 9 Darwall (1997). See also Darwall (2006), pp. 44-46 and footnote 12 to p. 45. 10 Cf., pp. 17-19. 11 Goldman (2006), p. 17. On p. 299, Goldman also calls Smith a contagion theorist: “Recall Adam Smith’s description of a companion’s amusement enlivening one’s own. This is hedonic contagion.” But Smith’s point, in the passage Goldman cites (TMS I.i.2.2; p. 14), is precisely that our companion’s amusement enhances our own if and only if we can imagine the source of the amusement from the companion’s point of view. That, for Smith, is emphatically not contagion.

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ings only by way of its usual causes, as when “we blush for the conduct of those, who behave themselves foolishly before us; and that tho’ they show no sense of shame....” (T p. 370). Smith himself echoes this when he writes that “We blush for the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his own behaviour....” It is probable that Smith saw himself as abridging Hume's account of sympathy, and adapting it for the subversive use of constructing a moral system different from Hume’s. (Raynor 2006, p. 240)

This is incorrect, I think. Smith is addressing Hume, not a “naive reader”, throughout the opening chapter of TMS, and he is setting up an alternative account of sympathy, not an “abridgement” or “adaptation” of Hume’s account. Almost immediately, in the second paragraph of the chapter, Smith uses technical terms borrowed from Hume to make an anti-Humean point. “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel,” he writes,” we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected”. And he restates this point with the words, “It is the impressions of our senses only, not those of [the other person’s], which our imaginations copy”. But Hume had coined the use of the word “impression” for our immediate experience; he half apologizes for, half boasts about this coinage in the opening of his first Enquiry.12 Hume had also used the word “idea” for the “copies” our imaginations make of our impressions, the contents of our mind that stand at a remove from immediate experience. So we have every reason to take the language in this paragraph as referring to Hume. And we have every reason to take Smith’s denial that we can get so much as an “idea” of what other people feel from our observation of them as a slap at Hume, a rejection of Hume’s 12

“Here therefore we may divide all the perceptions of the mind into two classes or species ... the less forcible and lively are commonly denominated Thoughts or Ideas. The other species want a name in our language, and in most others; I suppose, because it was not requisite for any, but philosophical purposes, to rank them under a general term or appellation. Let us, therefore, use a little freedom, and call them Impressions; employing that word in a sense somewhat different from the usual.” (E, p.18)

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claim that other people’s behavior “convey an idea” to us of what they are feeling (T, p. 317). Hume regularly attacks philosophical constructions by invoking the copy principle – by asking, “from what impression does this supposed idea (necessary connection, the self) derive?” Smith asks exactly that of Hume’s presumption that we get an idea of other people’s feelings from our observation of them. If feelings are essentially private, as both Hume and Smith believe, how can anything we sense about other people give us an idea of their feelings? Within the methods prescribed by Humean philosophy, this would seem to be a “gotcha” moment. Smith is telling Hume that he himself has overlooked the sort of thing that he usually accuses other philosophers of overlooking. We cannot acquire “ideas” of other people’s feelings by way of our senses, if we have no impressions of their feelings from which to copy those ideas. Instead, says Smith, the imagination must do all the work of sympathy, must provide the original impression of other people’s feelings as well as the ideas we have of them. This use of Hume’s own language and methods to make an anti-Humean point makes no sense if directed against a “naïve reader,” as Raynor would have it; it makes sense only if Hume himself is the target. Moreover, Smith follows up the paragraph I’ve just been citing with an extended rebuttal of Hume’s contagion view of sympathy. He concedes that “[t]he passions, upon some occasions, may seem to be transfused from one man to another” – that “[a] smiling face is, to everybody that sees it, a cheerful object [and] a sorrowful countenance ... is a melancholy one” – but he insists that even here the appearances are best explained by the fact that such facial expressions “suggest to us the general idea of some good or bad fortune that has befallen the person” wearing them (TMS I.i.1.6, p. 8). Even when we see a smiling face, that is, we come to feel cheerful only because it suggests something to us about the situation of the smiling person. Smith adds that in the case of many passions other than grief and joy – anger is his example – we don’t experience contagion at all, and that we aren’t likely to sympathize much even with grief and joy unless we learn more detail about why the person

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in question seems happy or sad.13 And Smith closes this chapter with four cases that a projection theory handles better than a contagion theory. The first is the one about the rude person that, as Raynor points out, Smith lifts virtually word for word from Hume: “We blush for the impudence and rudeness of others,” even when they seem wholly unashamed of themselves. But Hume had thought this was a strange case of sympathy – “a pretty remarkable phaenomenon of this passion” (T, p. 370) – explicable only by the fact that a general rule that foolish behavior leads people to feel ashamed of themselves has influence over us even when we see no sign of shame in the particular case.14 This is a tortuous way of getting to a conclusion that, on Smith’s projection theory, is straight13

TMS I.i.1.7, p. 9. For Hume, sympathy produced by causal relations is an instance of the influence on our minds of “general rules” (see T, p. 371, especially). But a central teaching of the Treatise is that we need to be quite leery of such rules. They are an important source of distortion in our thinking (T, pp. 146-50, 293, 598), although they are also essential to it. For a nuanced account of Hume on rules, see Gill (2006), chapter 17. As regards sympathy, Hume treats rules as at best giving us an anomalous form of that phenomenon. We see a person playing the fool; we apply the general rule, “Most people who act this way will feel ashamed of themselves”; and that leads us to think that this person must feel ashamed of himself too, even though he clearly doesn’t. Hume says that such sympathy “views its objects only on one side, without considering the other”, as if it were in part mistaken. He doesn’t say that about the other cases in which we infer a person’s feelings from their likely causes (e.g., T, pp. 385, 450, 576, 585-6); but they are produced by the same, unreliable mechanism. We see familiar causes, infer that they will have their usual effect, and then have the feelings that we would have in the presence of those effects. In some cases, we are likely to be correct in our inferences – Hume talks of the sympathy we feel for a person about to be trod on by horses, for instance – but what leads us to the sympathy we then feel is a trick of the mind that can easily go wrong. So for Hume the paradigm case of sympathy is one in which we directly see the signs of another’s feelings; the sympathy we feel when we merely see the circumstances likely to cause a passion arises by extrapolation from such paradigm cases. For Smith, by contrast, we always arrive at sympathy by way of an imaginative projection into other people’s circumstances. This is not an anomalous case, or a trick of the mind that might go wrong, but the very essence of sympathy. 14

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forward: We blush for such a person “because we cannot help feeling with what confusion we ourselves should be covered, had we behaved in so absurd a manner”. So the allusion to Hume functions for Smith as part of a strategy for showing up Hume.15 And that Smith means to show up Hume is yet more obvious in the other three cases. Our sympathy for the mad, for infants who do not know how seriously they are sick, and for the dead are all cases that Hume’s contagion account cannot handle well. By contrast, says Smith, the projection theory makes ready sense of them: We feel pain for all these people, even though they can’t feel it for themselves, because we can imagine ourselves into their situations. III. How Smith reads Hume I think it is therefore clear that Smith is responding to Hume throughout the opening chapter of TMS, and trying to offer a very different account of sympathy, not an “abridged” version of Hume’s. Less clear is exactly what Smith thought had said, and why he disagreed with it. One reason for this unclarity may be the Hume himself seems to have been ambivalent about exactly what he wanted to say on this subject. He takes up the subject anew, after all, on at least four separate occasions in the Treatise (II.i.xi, II.ii.vii, II.ii.ix, and III.iii.i), and what he says in some of the discussions sits uneasily with what he says in others. In some places sympathy seems to consist by definition by our “receiv[ing] by communication” sentiments actually held by others (T 316), for instance, while 15

Raynor would in any case need to explain why there is an allusion to Hume here at all. If Smith’s target is the naive reader, why bother alluding to Hume? Surely the naive reader doesn’t need such allusions. Only if the target is Hume do the allusions make good sense. I think a great deal of Smith’s writing, especially but not only in TMS, can best be understood as beginning from Hume but then ringing a change on the Humean view. To fail to see Smith’s debt to Hume is to miss the sources of many of his major doctrines. But to fail to see Smith’s revisions of Hume – his incessant, almost obsessive refusal to accept anything Hume says as is – is to miss what is distinctive, and most interesting, in Smith.

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elsewhere Hume says we can feel sympathy for a feeling that the person with whom we are sympathizing does not have (T 370, 385). So it should be understandable if Smith had some trouble figuring out exactly what Hume was up to – and if we have some trouble figuring out exactly what Smith thought he was up to. I’d like to get at these issues by focusing in on just a few lines of text, in Smith’s TMS and Hume’s Treatise. Here, again, are the sentences from Smith that I take to be most clearly directed against Hume: As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9)

And here are the sentences in Hume that I think these lines are meant most sharply to contradict: When any affection is infus’d by sympathy, it is at first known only by its effects, and by those external signs in the countenance and conversation, which convey an idea of it. This idea is presently converted into an impression, and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself ... ‘Tis indeed evident, that when we sympathize with the passion and sentiments of others, these movements appear at first in our mind as mere ideas, and are conceiv’d to belong to another person, as we conceive any other matter of fact. ‘Tis also evident, that the ideas of the affections of others are converted into the very impressions they represent. (T, pp. 317, 319)

Now I made it look earlier as if the point Smith wants to make against Hume is quite straightforward. Hume says that various “external signs” in another person’s appearance and behavior (a smile, a frown) can “convey an idea” of what he or she is feeling, that we pick up this information through our senses as we do any other matter of fact, while Smith

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insists that our senses can’t possibly inform us about what other people feel, so even an “idea” of their feelings must be drawn from what we imagine we ourselves might feel in their case, and not from external signs in their countenance and conversation. What could it mean that another person’s countenance and conversation “conveys an idea” of their feelings to us, on the private access view of sensations that Hume and Smith take for granted? It’s certainly hard to see how the contagion language I’ve quoted from Hume could explain this conveyance: What Hume calls “ideas” can’t possibly be transferred from one person to another, let alone transferred in the direct way suggested by the language of communication and contagion. But this apparently clear contrast becomes murkier on a closer look. For all his talk of contagion, Hume need not be read as saying that other people’s expressions and behavior directly convey their feelings: He describes these external signs as “effects,” after all, which implies that we use them to arrive at the feelings of the other person by way of a causal inference. 16 And although Hume never quite says this, it is not unreasonable to assume that he believes, as Smith does, that we get the idea of what a feeling is from our own case alone. His point, in the passage we’ve been considering, would then be simply that we apply the ideas of these feelings to other people when we see them manifesting certain behavior. The external signs in another person’s behavior are effects from which we infer that he or she is happy or sad. This gives us an “idea” of their feelings. That alone is not enough for sympathy – sympathy, for both Hume and Smith, is a shared feeling, not a mere awareness of other people’s feelings – but Hume says we put the idea of the other person’s feelings, in our imaginations, together with “the idea, or rather impression of ourselves [that] is always intimately 16

Elsewhere he says this explicitly: “When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted into the passion itself. ... No passion of another discovers itself immediately to the mind. We are only sensible of its causes or effects. From these we infer the passion: And consequently these give rise to sympathy” (T, p. 576).

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present with us”, 17 and thus come to experience it as an impression: Come to feel what the other person feels. I feel what you do by imagining myself having the feeling that, from your behavior, I infer you have. If this is Hume’s point, however, then he agrees with Smith that we don’t derive our ideas of other people’s feelings from their immediate experiences; Smith will be wrong to try to undermine Hume by way of the copy principle. That leaves us with several possibilities: I may have misunderstood Smith, and he doesn’t disagree with Hume after all. Or Smith may have misunderstood Hume. Or we need a different way of reading Smith. I’m going to set the first possibility aside; the evidence that Smith does disagree with Hume seems to me overwhelming. I don’t want to dismiss the second possibility. Perhaps Smith over-emphasized Hume’s colorful language about other people’s feelings being “infused” into us, or passed from one person to another like the motion of strings equally wound up, and wrongly attributed to Hume the thought that some inkling of what other people feel can be known directly from their expressions and behavior.18 But there is also another way of reading Smith. What troubles Smith may be a problem about how we are supposed to treat the behavior and expressions of another person as “effects” of their feelings. How exactly is the causal inference between such bodily events and the other person’s feelings supposed to work – given, again, the “private access” view of our feelings that both Hume and Smith hold? If I never have impressions of other people’s feelings, I can’t associate them by constant conjunction with my impressions of their behavior. If I never directly experience what it is for you to feel happiness or anger, I will never experience even one conjunction between your feeling happy and your smiling, let alone a constant conjunction between them. So I can’t be conveyed from your smiles to your 17

An extraordinary remark from someone who had earlier denied that we have any such idea or impression! – But we’ll have to let that pass here. 18 As we’ll see in a moment, there are in fact reasons to stress Hume’s metaphors for sympathy over his explication of it.

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happiness by causal inference. Unless I have some direct access to your feelings, some “immediate experience” of them, I can’t possibly know that happiness is regularly conjoined with a smile for you, or sadness with a frown. It’s for this reason, I suggest, that Smith thinks he has a “gotcha” point against Hume, that he can tell Hume, in terms laid down by Hume’s own philosophical methods, that every idea we have of other people’s feelings – not just the general idea of what it is to be a feeling – must be copied from our own impressions, rather than inferred from what we observe in their expressions or behavior. For Hume to say that an idea of an affection can be “conveyed” by its effects, according to Smith, has got to be a mistake. When I see a brown ring on a tablecloth, that can legitimately lead me to suppose that a coffee cup has recently been sitting on that tablecloth, because I have seen both coffee cups and their effects on tablecloths before. I haven’t done that – can’t have done that, on the private access model of feelings – with other people’s passions. So I can’t infer anything from their behavior and countenance about their feelings; I must get even the “idea” I have of their feelings, as well as any impression I shape out of that idea, from the workings of my own imagination. We might say that Smith points out to Hume the difficulty, on his system, of accounting for the existence, let alone the nature, of other minds.19 IV. How Hume might respond What resources does Hume have to respond to this critique? Well, perhaps he could say that I learn the causal link between emotions and their external expressions from my own case, and then apply that link to other people. Several people who heard an earlier version of this paper have suggested to me that Hume’s view runs as follows: I come to notice a constant conjunction between my own feelings and certain of my facial 19

A difficulty a number of commentators have noted (noting, also, that Hume seems uncharacteristically oblivious to this difficulty): see, for instance, Kemp Smith (1941), pp. 550-1 and Wright (2009), pp. 212-4.

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expressions and behaviors. I presume that you work the same way that I do. So I infer that you feel the way I do when you wear an expression, or carry out a behavior, that is conjoined in my life with a particular feeling. 20 I learn the cause-effect relationship between feelings and their bodily expressions from my own case and then apply that relationship to you. But, in the first place, Hume never says this. And, in the second place, if he did, he would be relying on a pretty poor inference. Wittgenstein asks, “If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word ‘pain’ means – must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?” (Philosophical Investigations, §§ 293).21 Wittgenstein is of course mocking the entire picture of mental contents as essentially private, but if one did accept that picture, as Hume and Smith do, one would surely have to treat inductions to the way bodily expressions are tied to feelings in all human beings, from one’s own case alone, with great hesitation. It would be highly irresponsible to draw any conclusions about ducks in general from the observation of just one duck; inferences about how feelings are linked to behavior drawn from the observation of just one person are in no better shape. I can’t assume that happiness is conjoined with smiles, for everyone else, just because I notice that the two are always conjoined in my own case. Unless, of course, I can assume that others work in the same way that I do. This brings us to a different move that Hume could make. Given that human beings are alike in so many external ways, he could say, we may assume that our mental lives, and the connections between our 20

Note, by the way, that this is not what theory theorists say about how we learn to attribute feelings to others. The theory theorist says that we learn causal relationships between feelings and their expressions from a common stock of folk beliefs about such relationships, not from private observation of those relationships in our own case. 21 Cited from Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1963) Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell. Henceforth: PI.

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mental lives and our behavior, are also alike.22 The observable similarities among us give us reason to assume that our unobservable features are also similar. So we have background reason to trust our inductions from what goes on in our own case to what goes on in other people; they are not simply extrapolations from a single example. But this move doesn’t really help. For Smith could reasonably object that mental phenomena and physical phenomena are such radically different kinds of things that similarities merely among the latter need not tell us anything about similarities among the former. I suspect that Smith sees our minds as more sharply distinct from our bodies than Hume does,23 but both philosophers hold a private access view of feelings and that’s enough to give them reason to resist any easy inference 22

As a matter of fact, he does say something like this. In the middle of the chapter on sympathy on which we’ve been focusing, he writes: “Now `tis obvious that nature has preserv’d a great resemblance among all human creatures, and that we never remark any passion or principle in others, of which, in some degree or other, we may not find a parallel in ourselves. The case is the same with the fabric of the mind, as with that of the body” (T, p. 318). Hume’s point here is, however, to explain just how we transform the idea of another’s feelings into an impression (into “sympathy,” in Hume’s strict sense of that term), not how we get the idea in the first place. 23 As Louis Loeb has stressed to me, Hume suggests quite strongly that inferences from body to mind are exactly on par with all our other inferences in the “Liberty and Necessity” chapter of the first Enquiry. Presumably Smith would challenge that claim in precisely the same way that, I am suggesting, he would challenge the inferences from behavior to passion in the Treatise: by asking how Hume can possibly know that any of his inferences to what goes on in the mind of another are in good shape, given that he can never have an impression of another person’s mental contents. In any case, Smith ignores Hume’s argument for determinism in the “Liberty and Necessity” chapter – a striking omission, for one who otherwise wrestles so often with Hume – and seems just to assume, throughout his work, that we have free will of some sort. Smith also says nothing directly about the deconstruction of personal identity in Part I of the Treatise, and seems just to assume, throughout TMS, that we have a continuing self. Together, these points suggest that he saw the mind as sharply different from the body.

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from what goes on in our bodies to what goes on in our minds. Hume’s best answer to Smith, I think, can be found if we emphasize his colorful metaphors about contagion instead of any talk about inferences from external signs to feelings. When Hume says that a cheerful countenance “infuses a sensible complacency” into my mind and an angry one “throws a ... damp” on me,24 it sounds in the first instance as if he is describing a brute biological fact about human beings, which needs no further elaboration in terms of mental processing. And it is not at all implausible that we are hard-wired to react this way. The mere sight of another human being’s smile or frown, or the mere hearing of a pleasant or gloomy human voice, often makes us feel somewhat cheerful or upset, and there are good evolutionary reasons to suppose this is an instinctive reaction. In any case, the phenomenology of such reactions does not obviously involve any inference; we need not even quite realize that we have noticed the other person’s expression.25 And the fact that we take other people’s expressions, when we do notice them, to signify their feelings might be another brute fact about us.26 Experiencing sympathy 24

All on T, p. 317, but there’s similar language on p. 576 and p. 605, as noted above. 25 Then it may yet be true that in many cases, after I have experienced a reasonable amount of human interaction, I will take the very fact that I am put in such a mood as some evidence that the other feels the same way. Again, this is an inference that it would be difficult to account for on a private-access model of the emotions. But my having the relevant sympathetic feelings will not depend on my making any such inference. 26 One could read Hume as saying exactly this: “Now `tis obvious, that nature has preserv’d a great resemblance among human creatures, and that we never remark any passion or principle in others, of which, in some degree or other, we may not find a parallel in ourselves” (T, p. 318). But this line is embedded in a discussion in which our tendency to “remark” such things looks more like an instance of causal reasoning than a brute fact about us. Indeed, it is only if we merely infer how others feel that we need to regard our belief that they have such feelings as an “idea” rather than an impression. On the straight contagion view I am proposing, we really get an impression of other people’s feelings, upon seeing their expressions – we participate directly (if but weakly) in their feelings.

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would on this view be something that elides cognition, something so immediate that it doesn’t require any sort of inference. This is what gets called a “contagion” account of sympathy by contemporary theorists of the emotions, and it may be that the better part of Hume is the web of metaphors suggesting such an account, not the way he unpacks those metaphors in terms of causal inferences. Smith could still have several reasonable complaints against such a view of sympathy. He could say, for instance, that feelings I come to have in such an automatic, non-cognitive way will not be the conscious feelings on behalf of another we usually intend with the word “sympathy”, that his projective view captures better what we mean by that term.27 He could also repeat his objection that this account of sympathy makes it hard to explain why we blush for the unashamed rude person, and that his account does a neater job of showing how such cases belong together with our other sympathies. But he would be deprived of the Humean argument he launches against Hume’s official analysis of sympathy. There would be no problematic inferences to object to, on the straight contagion view; on that view, inferences don’t enter into the sympathetic transfer of feelings at all. As I’ve indicated, I don’t think Hume himself goes for the straight contagion view, but I do think his 27

Why, after all, should transfers of this sort count as sympathy with you? Yes, your cheerfulness may lead me to feel cheerful or your anger may throw a sudden damp on me, but that won’t be sympathy unless I regard the cheerfulness I come to have as a feeling I share with you. If I have no idea why I feel cheerful or angry in your presence, I am not yet sympathizing with you. Nor is this just a matter of semantics. Whether one allows the word “sympathy” to cover unwitting concords of feeling, or to refuses to do that, will have an impact on what one is trying to explain. Hume might say that unwitting concords of feeling explain a lot of social behavior, and explain why it can look a lot like behavior that results from conscious sympathy – we may unwittingly feel with the rich or powerful and therefore admire or emulate them, and our behavior here will be exactly as though we consciously sympathized with them – while Smith can insist that the sympathies that concern him for moral purposes, at least, are necessarily sympathies into which we willingly enter, and over which we have some conscious control.

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account of sympathy as a whole is best understood in a largely noncognitive way – that sympathy for him is an automatic feature of our biological makeup that is only taken up on some occasions into a feeling for others of which we are expressly aware. Hume explains many features of sympathy by way of factors that operate behind the scenes of our consciousness, as it were, that are beyond our control and even our awareness.28 Indeed, when he makes sympathy dependent on our imagination, he seems to mean by that that it is dependent on a mechanism hard-wired into us, not that we can actively shape how we sympathize. And this appeal to a mechanism, to a process beyond our control, would allow Hume, if he wanted to respond to Smith’s objections, to do without the inferences that Smith, rightly, found so problematic. V. The role of imagination Even if we set aside the dispute I’ve been considering thus far, Hume and Smith differ radically over the role of imagination in sympathy. Return, again, to the passage from TMS that I’ve been discussing. Smith says there that our imagination cannot “help us to [an idea of another person’s feelings] any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own [feelings], if we were in his case”. I think we can safely take it that the “any other way” he has in mind is Hume’s account of how the imagination associates the idea of ourselves with the idea of the other person’s feelings, thereby converting the latter into an impression. For Hume, the imagination helps us sympathize by enabling us to picture what it would be like to have the feelings of the other person. Smith 28

As he acknowledges: “However instantaneous [the] change of [an] idea into an impression [in sympathy] may be, it proceeds from certain views and reflections, which will not escape the strict scrutiny of a philosopher, tho’ they may the person himself, who makes them” (T, p. 317). He also remarks at various points on how “extraordinary” his system of sympathy is likely to look to “vulgar apprehensions” (T, p. 323): He clearly does not think people are ordinarily aware of the “views and reflections” he is attributing to them here.

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says, against this, that the imagination can only help us sympathize by enabling us to picture what it would be like to inhabit the other person’s situation. For Hume, then, sympathy leads us to have only a version of the other person’s actual feelings – in ordinary cases, at least – while for Smith sympathy gives us feelings that the other person would have if she experienced her situation in the way we think we would. It is this difference that gives rise to Hume’s difficulties in accounting for cases in which we have feelings for people other than the ones they seem to have themselves – when we blush for the rude person, for instance – and that allows Smith to think he has a neater, more unified account of sympathy. There is, for Smith, a spectrum of concord between our sympathetic feelings and the feelings that the people with whom we sympathize actually have; the rude person for whom we blush just occupies a position at one end of this spectrum. Smith thus gives the imagination a far more active role to play, in shaping our sympathies, than Hume does: It leads us, not merely to approximate feelings we’ve already discerned in another person, but to create feelings in ourselves, on that person’s behalf, from the ground up. We might call Hume’s a microwave theory of the imagination’s role in sympathy – the imagination heats up some ready-to-go ideas – while for Smith the imagination is a gourmet chef, preparing our sympathies from scratch. This is not quite fair, since Hume’s microwave is at least a highly complex instrument: Warming up our ideas of another person’s feelings far more when that person resembles us, or lives near us, than when he or she is quite different from us, and lives far away. And this feature of Hume’s story enables him to give brilliant, simple explanations of why we feel greater sympathy for family members, fellow townsmen and fellow countrymen than we do for other human beings in general (T, pp. 318, 322-3).29 But the microwave/chef imagery captures the fact that 29

Smith makes the same claim (TMS VI.ii.1, pp. 219-27), but does not have the theoretical apparatus to explain these differences nearly as well. If we get to sympathy by way of imaginative projection, our sympathy requires us to erase many differences between ourselves and the other person (a point Smith makes much of), so

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for Smith sympathy is a process we can enhance in quite conscious ways, while for Hume it takes place mostly behind the scene of our conscious life, and is largely beyond our control. This difference in the role played by imagination, for Smith and Hume, is closely tied to the one over how we get the idea of other people’s feelings. For it is only because we cannot infer the idea of other people’s feelings from their expressions and behavior that our imaginations need to work so hard to shape that idea, for Smith; the imagination can play a less active role for Hume because it can make use of materials gathered from our observations of the external world. VI. Advantages and disadvantages of the two accounts There are reasons to be drawn to the Humean account of sympathy, and reasons to be drawn to the Smithian account. Especially if we stress the contagion language in Hume’s account, Hume does a rather better job than Smith of describing what we might call “biological sympathy” – the kind of automatic sympathy with others in which all human beings, and other animals, engage. Smith does better with what we might call “socialized sympathy”. Hume doesn’t get the phenomenology of our socialized sympathies quite right, doesn’t, in particular, recognize how much our judgment of one another’s feelings affects our ability to sympathize with them. If I think you are over-dramatizing your pain, or are pained about something you shouldn’t be pained about (you made an insulting remark, say, and are upset that you were rebuked for it), then I am unwhy shouldn’t we be able to sympathize – equally – with anyone? We can do that on occasion, actually, and it is an advantage of Smith’s account that he shows why we can, but often don’t. Why not? If the imagination works the way Hume says it does, connecting us by habit to those we are most “contiguous” with, or most resemble, the answer to that is obvious. If it works the way Smith says it does, creatively projecting us into ever new, unexperienced situations, the fact that we generally don’t sympathize much with people very different from ourselves is a bit of a puzzle.

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likely to sympathize with you, no matter how sorrowful a countenance you wear. And if I approve of your feelings, I am more likely to enter into them. I may indeed block myself from feeling a sympathy to which I was otherwise inclined if I disapprove of your feelings, and encourage it in myself if I approve. Smith’s account gets all these matters exactly right. Smith’s account also, because it gets these things right, helps us see how an impulse to moral judgment may be built into the natural workings of our emotions, rather than being generated from an external point-of-view, as it is for Hume.30 In addition, there is something very attractive about Smith’s idea that imagination produces our sympathies from the ground up, that the deepest source of human bonds is not a mechanism like the motion passed among “strings equally wound up,” but our conscious efforts to see ourselves in each other’s shoes. If true, this would give us far more control over how we sympathize, and with whom, than we get on the Humean picture; it would give imaginative literature a central role in our ability to expand our sympathies, and in the development of our capacity for moral judgment;31 and it would fit with the fact that much moral insensitivity to other people, both when it comes from greed or selfishness, 30

Abramson (2000), note 5 and pp. 53-54, summarizes the ways in which sympathy must be transformed in order to function as a source of moral judgments. See also Debes (2007), pp. 317-18 and note 18 to p. 318. Smith’s suggestion that morality and the emotions are intimately interwoven is plausible, I think, and helps Smith explain, more convincingly than Hume, why it is so hard for us to throw off the call of morality. Smith supplements or clarifies Hume’s response to the “sensible knave” (EPM IX.ii, pp. 282-3): He tells us why we will lose “inward peace of mind,” etc. and why “these are circumstances very requisite to happiness”. We say to the knave: Your own emotions are so constituted that you cannot help but make moral judgments, on yourself and on others, and consequently will not even feel much (long-lasting) pleasure if you are conscious all the while of having come by that pleasure in a way of which other people disapprove. 31 And indeed Smith is the philosopher who more than any other praises fiction writers as moralists, and cites examples from their work to illustrate elements of his own theory: See Fleischacker (2004), pp. 12-13.

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and when it comes from the obstinate pursuit of foolish or bigoted causes, is the result of a lack of imagination. And I think Smith’s view is true, up to a point: We do come most deeply to share another’s feelings only after we make the effort to imagine ourselves in his or her situation, and we expand the range of people with whom we can sympathize only when we picture ourselves in their shoes. But Smith is right only up to a point. His account begins with what I’ve called our “socialized” sympathies; it takes no cognizance of a capacity for sympathy that we may share with other animals. Sympathy does seem to have some roots in our biology, however, independently of what, as socialized adults, we do with our imaginations. The feelings of other people around them affect even babies, and even our pets can be affected by our moods. Yet we don’t suppose that babies or dogs can project themselves into our shoes. Hume is right: A “chearful countenance” does almost automatically “infuse” cheer into us, and an “angry or sorrowful” one does “throw a sudden damp” on us, even if we don’t want to have these feelings, or don’t approve of them. I said earlier that we may try to block unwanted or inappropriate sympathies, but even then there must be something to block. Sometimes we share other people’s feelings even while wishing we didn’t. Moreover, Smith needs this point for his larger picture to work. What Smith does with his account of sympathy in the rest of TMS is show how our desire to sympathize requires us, as spectators, to make efforts to raise the pitch of our sympathetic feelings so that they approximate those of the people we observe, and, as the people thus observed, to moderate the expression of our own joy and grief to the point at which a spectator can share our feelings. This mutual need to adjust feelings then leads to the rise of social norms for what people should feel, which in turn sets off the process by which we develop the impartial spectator within ourselves. So Smith’s moral theory depends on a comparison between two different views of other people’s feelings: The view we get by imagining ourselves in their situations, and the view we get by observing their expressions. But how is this latter view possible for Smith? He has

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told us to reject the notion that we can get so much as an “idea” of another’s feelings from observation. It doesn’t matter what people do or how they look, according to the second paragraph of TMS: Unless we enter into their situation with our own imaginations, we can’t get any idea of how they feel. If so, however, we can’t make a comparison between our sympathy for them and what they actually feel, and the whole structure of Smith’s normative views falls apart. Smith may thus have to smuggle in more of the Humean account than he admits. VII. The two accounts and some modern debates We might try to couch this last point in terms of the contemporary simulation vs. theory theory debate. Roughly speaking, simulation theorists hold that we figure out what others are feeling by simulating what it would be like to be in their situations, while theory theorists maintain that we use a folk theory about the causal links between behavior and feelings to infer what others are feeling. Smith’s official account of sympathy thus looks like a simulation theory, while Hume’s looks like a theory theory.32 I’ve argued, however, that Hume may in fact also con32

Indeed, using this framework may help clarify what seems misleading about Raynor’s claim that for Hume, as for Smith, “we sometimes sympathize with another's feelings only by way of its usual causes”. Hume does sound a lot like Smith when he says that when I perceive the preparations for one of “the more terrible operations of surgery”, I begin to feel the likely effects of the procedure on the patient even before the patient does himself (T, p. 576; compare also p. 385). But Hume calls this a case of being “convey’d” to an emotion by its “causes”, while Smith does not treat our putting ourselves into another’s situation as an instance of a causal inference. For Smith, we do not attempt to fit the circumstances giving rise to other people’s passions into nomological structures by which we might infer their effects, but rather project ourselves into them, so that we feel directly what the other person might feel. Smith, that is, treats the causes of emotions as a simulationist would, while Hume treats them like a theory theorist. Thus to talk, as Raynor does, of sympathy as arising from an inference from causes to effects is already to move the discussion into a Humean frame, from which the distinctiveness of Smith’s position becomes invisible.

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tain elements of what would today be called a contagion view of sympathy, and Smith, it now appears, may be relying on a theory theory to explain how we ascribe feelings to others. Smith, we might say, uses a theory theory to explain how we know what others feel while using a simulation theory to explain how we sympathize with them.33 This fits the text of TMS quite well. Smith doesn’t tell us much about how we determine what others actually feel, but what he does say fits a theory theory. When talking about what others actually feel, he generally says simply that a person doesn’t “seem” to be entertained (TMS I.i.2.2, p.14), or that we “observe” that others share, or do not share, our own passions (TMS I.i.2.1, p. 13). He doesn’t tell us how we observe this, but since he can’t use his projection model here, and what we observe seems to be something about the countenance and behavior of the other person, it’s not unreasonable to understand him as employing a theory theory of sentimental attribution.34 33

He is presumably saying something like the following: The impressions behind all ideas of other people’s feelings must ultimately come from our imaginative projections into their situations, else the latter would not be ideas of feelings. But over time, we learn to correlate feelings with external gestures and behavior: from our own gestures and behavior when we have various feelings, and from the similar gestures and behaviors that other people manifest when they seem to have the feelings we project that they should have. Given these correlations, we can eventually infer what people are actually feeling from their gestures and behavior even when it does not match our projections. The “idea” we have of their feelings will then still trace back ultimately to an impression we get from our internal experience – it gets its meaning from that impression – but we can use external experience to apply that idea. 34 Consider also: “A stranger passes us in the street with all the marks of the deepest affliction,” says Smith, “and we are ... told that he has just received the news of the death of his father” (TMS I.i.3.4, p. 17). We will then approve of his grief even if our own mood is such that we don’t feel like projecting ourselves into his situation. Whence the approval, then? Well, we infer the fact that he is in grief from “the marks of his ... affliction” and then we use past experience of our projective sympathies, and perhaps also what we have heard about the death of parents, to suppose that we would share his grief – would sympathize with him – if we projected our-

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But all this is highly speculative; what Smith says about how we observe other people’s sentiments is far too thin to amount to a theory, properly speaking, of any sort. In a nice recent paper, Bence Nanay has argued that Smith’s view of sympathy doesn’t map well onto either simulation theory or theory theory. 35 Nanay suggests that Smith instead identifies a sort of “proto-sympathetic” state, a visceral reaction that precedes any real sympathy or empathy. I like Nanay’s diagnosis of the problems with interpreting Smith in contemporary terms, but am less convinced by his solution to that problem. 36 The moral we should draw from the lack of fit between Smith’s account of sympathy and the ones we find in the contemporary literature is I think something quite different: That Smith is not all that interested in how we predict and explain what other people feel.37 And in this respect Smith and Hume are closer

selves into his situation: “We have learned ... from experience,” Smith says, “that such a misfortune naturally excites such a degree of sorrow” (TMS I.i.3.4, p. 18). This sounds quite like a theory theory. 35 Nanay (2010). 36 “Visceral reaction” fits Hume’s contagion far better than the process Smith describes. We feel sympathy only if we take certain deliberate actions, for Smith: When we are told that a stranger has just heard about the death of his father, for instance, Smith says that “we should scarce conceive the first movements of concern upon his account” unless “we ... take time to picture out in our imagination the different circumstances of distress which must occur to him” (TMS I.i.3.4; pp. 17-18). 37 Alvin Goldman sees Hume and Smith as having ideas that anticipated simulation theory, but notes that they did not necessarily apply these ideas to the understanding of other minds (2006) p. 17; he himself as interested almost exclusively in that issue. Martin Davies, Jane Heal, Tony Stone, and other contributors to the debate over simulation theory vs. theory theory are also focused almost entirely on what it takes for us accurately “to predict and explain each other’s actions” (see, for instance, Davies and Heal in C. Peacocke (ed.) (1994), pp. 103, 104, 141-2 or Stone and Davies in P. Carruthers and P.K. Smith (eds.) (1996), pp. 19-20). Even Peter Goldie, who gives us an extremely rich and wide-ranging account of the phenomenology of sympathy, empathy, contagion, and other ways of sharing feelings – and who stresses that only some of these kinds of fellow-feeling lead to the prediction

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to each other than either is to contemporary psychological theory. Both Smith and Hume are primarily interested, not in how we know what others feel, but in what it does to society, what impact it has on our relations with other people, that we experience fellow-feeling. Of course, our knowledge of others’ feelings is not irrelevant to this impact. For Smith, especially, the match or mismatch between the sympathetic feelings we have for others and the feelings they themselves seem to have is crucial to what we think of them morally. But the sympathetic feelings themselves are not a form of or means to cognition. For both Hume and Smith, I may feel a pity or joy or anger on your behalf that you do not feel yourself, and may be quite wrong about whether you feel it, without that making any difference to the social importance of my sympathy. My sympathetic feeling of pleasure in other people’s wealth, for instance, is quite likely not to track the feelings that wealthy people actually have – Smith makes this point emphatically in TMS IV.1 – but nevertheless lead me to seek wealth. Recall here that Hume and Smith develop their accounts of sympathy in response to Hobbes and Mandeville: They seek bonds between people that cannot be reduced to the feelings each of us has on our own individual behalf. And they use the feelings they thereby uncover to explain patriotism, pride and humility, the desire for wealth and the shame in poverty,38 and the foundations of aesthetics and morality. It makes little difference to most of these explanations whether we are correct or incorrect in the feelings we attribute to others. Which means that Hume’s and Smith’s accounts of how we know what others are feeling may well be underdeveloped, even confused. What we get in return for that is a comprehensive account of how sympathy in their sense pervades the way human beings live together – enables us to mourn together, laugh together, feel annoyed or lonely when we cannot mourn or and explanation of others’ behavior – is oriented throughout by what it takes “to predict another’s emotional response”; see Goldie (2000), pp. 194-213. 38 At, respectively, T, p. 317-18 and TMS VI.ii; T, p. 319-20, 595-6 and TMS VI.iii; T, pp. 357-65, pp. 385-7 and TMS I.iii, IV.i.

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laugh together, as well as help each other, vie with each other, and seek each other’s approval. The vast social and moral role of sympathy is their topic, with their different accounts of it leading to somewhat different views of society and moral judgment. VIII. Moral uses of the Smithean account And it is in the light of Smith’s moral theory, I think, that we can best understand his differences with Hume over sympathy – the reason he prefers what I’ve called a “socialized” to a “biological” view of how we come to share feelings with one another. Consider the one explicit disagreement we know of between Smith and Hume over sympathy. Smith’s moral theory is driven by the notion that we always want to have feelings which others can share; that is what leads us, ultimately, to seek to have just the feelings that we think an impartial spectator would have in our situation. In a letter to Smith, Hume pointed out that this theory is plausible only if we assume that “all kinds of Sympathy are ... agreeable”. And Hume doubted whether that assumption was true. If all sympathy is agreeable, he said, a “Hospital wou[l]d be a more entertaining place than a Ball”.39 Smith responded to this criticism in a footnote to the second edition of TMS. He distinguished there between “the sympathetic passion of the spectator” and “the emotion which arises from his observing the ... coincidence between this sympathetic passion ... and the original passion in the person principally concerned,” and said that it is only the latter feeling, not the former, that “is always agreeable and delightful” (TMS, p. 46n). To some extent, this concedes Hume’s point: Sympathy itself need not be pleasurable, only the consciousness of sympathy is. But the concession is a minor one and requires but a minor revision of Smith’s larger view: He just needs to say, now, that the pleasure we take in the consciousness of sympathy is great enough to lead us to aspire to have the feelings that an impartial spectator would approve of, and to approve of those feelings in others. 39

Letter of 07/28/1759, in Smith (1987), p. 43.

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Is this revised claim true? David Raynor says no. “It is untrue to experience”, he maintains: “In cases where both the communicated passion and its prototype are disagreeable it is implausible that the observation of their correspondence, in and of itself, must always be agreeable. Yet the sentiment of approbation is agreeable and it remains entirely mysterious how something of its ilk can emerge simply from observing that one's disagreeable feeling corresponds with another's disagreeable feeling” (Raynor 2006, p. 242). 40 Once again, I disagree with Raynor. We quite often feel sad or angry or disgusted along with another person, yet are simultaneously pleased to find that we have achieved this harmony of sentiments. This explains the comfort we get from people who visit us when we are mourning, and from people who share our outrage when we are aggrieved, as well as the self-satisfaction that the visitors or comrades in outrage may feel. As people principally concerned, we are relieved to find that others share our feelings; as spectators, we are pleased to find ourselves capable of sharing other people’s feelings. In both cases – in any achievement of sympathy – we enjoy the awareness of belonging to a community. Smith admittedly forgets at times to describe this pleasure as one that comes of observing that we are in sympathy with others, rather than just being in sympathy with them.41 He does, however, tell us explicitly that the pleasure to which sympathy leads is a feeling quite different from the feelings that give rise to it: “Sympathy … enlivens joy by presenting another source of satisfaction”, he says, “and it alleviates grief by insinuating into the heart almost the only agreeable sensation which it is at that time capable of receiving”.42 There is no reason to regard this sensation as composed of the feelings it brings together – it is not a mixture of the two feelings, as jam is a mixture of fruit and sugar, 40

Cf. Raynor (1984). I’m grateful to Jesse Prinz for pressing me to clarify this point. 42 TMS I.i.2.2, p. 14; my emphasis. See also: I.i.3.3, p. 17, where Smith marks a relationship between the “sentiment of approbation” and the “perception of ... [a] coincidence” of feelings (my emphasis). 41

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but a second-order feeling about the two first-order feelings. But then it should not be mysterious why this second-order feeling might be pleasurable even when the first-order feelings on which it reflects are not. The Smithian awareness of sympathy is a sui generis feeling of human solidarity. As such, it is always agreeable.43 Smith also wants to say, and rightly so it seems to me, that this agreeable sensation is precisely a sensation of approval, a pleasure in having what one regards as the right emotional response to the situation at hand. The pleasure of approval may be fairly weak, overwhelmed, often, by the sadness or anger or disgust it accompanies, but even then we feel it as a sort of pedal note beneath our other sensations. We feel this pleasure, to some extent, whenever we find ourselves sharing other people’s feelings, no matter how painful the shared feelings themselves may be. In this sense it is in fact true, contra Hume, that a hospital can be an agreeable place – even that it may be more agreeable than a ball. Imagine walking through a hospital and feeling very much in synch with the suffering of the patients. Now imagine being at a ball while feeling very out of synch with the delight that the other people seem to be having. Worse, imagine being at a ball where you disapprove of the pleasure people are having: Perhaps it is being held right after a catastrophe, and you think people should not be celebrating. Where would you rather be? Experiencing a 43

Kames, writing eight years before Smith, says almost exactly this: “[W]hen we reflect upon the pain which the misfortune of a friend gave us, the reflection is accompanied with an eminent degree of satisfaction. We approve ourselves for suffering with our friend, value ourselves the more for that suffering, and are ready to undergo chearfully the like distress upon the like occasion. ... [Passions of this sort] are all of the social kind, arising from that eminent principle of sympathy, which is the cement of human society.” (Kames 2005, I.i, p. 19). Whether Kames is a source for Smith’s account of sympathy (despite their disagreements over projection: see note 8 above), or whether Kames, even here, is drawing on lectures of Smith that he had heard in 1748-50, is unclear. Ian Ross, a biographer of both men, writes that the importance of Smith’s Edinburgh lectures to Kames “cannot be overestimated”: Ross (1972), pp. 94, 193.

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ball as an outsider to the fun others are having can be sharply painful, and not a few of us will leave a ball like that for a place where people are suffering. Sometimes, we all agree with Ecclesiastes: “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting” (7:2). IX. The “private access” assumption I’d like to conclude by addressing what seems to me a deep problem with both Hume’s and Smith’s accounts of sympathy. As I’ve indicated several times, both Smith and Hume rely on the unquestioned assumption that our feelings are essentially private, accessible only to the person experiencing them. Smith’s response to Hume is indeed based on this private access view: We must construct our ideas of other people’s feelings within our own imaginations, he says, because we have “no immediate experience” of what they feel, and we have no immediate experience of what they feel because people’s feelings are essentially private. But this is an untenable view. We do have “immediate experience of what other people feel”, if one wants to talk that way – Wittgenstein is right that “in one way it is wrong and in another nonsense” to say that “only I can know whether I am really in pain”44 – but perhaps it would be better to say that the whole idea of “immediate experience” on which Smith relies is highly problematic, and on the picture we get from Wittgenstein, in which even “immediate” experience is made available to us by way of socially shared conditions, we can unproblematically regard other people’s emotions as part of our experience. Nevertheless, the heart of Smith’s view of sympathy can remain 44

PI 246: “In what sense are my sensations private? Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it. – In one way this is wrong, and in another nonsense. If we are using the word “to know” as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know when I am in pain.” PI 303: “… Just try – in a real case – to doubt someone else’s fear or pain.”

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intact even after we replace his picture of experience with the richer one we find in Wittgenstein. In the remainder of this paper, I’d like to review the reasons for undertaking such a replacement and sketch what the results might look like. X. Wittgenstein vs. the “private access” assumption The reasons Wittgenstein gives for rejecting the privacy view of feelings are well known. Above all, we couldn’t possibly learn feeling-language unless our feelings were openly available to one another. Only when we learn to identify other people’s feelings do we learn to identify our own. Indeed we learn to identify both in the same way. My sister’s delight and anger are on the same level with mine, when I first learn how to label them: And I learn this from others, from their reactions to my and my sister’s feelings. Of course we can on occasion hide or disguise our feelings. But for us even to be able to do this, our language for emotions must first and foremost label something visible to the whole language community, not something essentially hidden. If I am to use the word “pain” at all, what I mean by “my pain” can be no more specially accessible to me than what I mean by “your pain,” nor can “your pain” be essentially inaccessible to me. In a quite literal sense, then, unless I can have “immediate experience of what other men feel” I cannot know what I myself feel.45 I can certainly not describe myself as “in pain” unless I 45

Some readers have been inclined to think that my conclusion here should be that the experience of my own feelings is “just as mediated” as the experience of other people’s feelings. But this misses the point about “immediate experience”. Wittgenstein might say that it is in one way wrong and in another nonsense to call my sensations “mediated,” just as it is to call them “private”. If we use “mediated” in its normal sense (and, again, as Wittgenstein asks, how else are we to use it?), my experience of my own feelings is most often not mediated – but in that sense my experience of your feelings is also often not mediated: I see immediately that you are in pain, I don’t learn it from someone else or need to deduce it from a nervous twitch you have, etc. And if we try to come up with some other meaning for “mediated,” by which all talk about feelings or knowledge of them is mediated,

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can, literally, see your pain. As Wittgenstein says, “[I] learned the concept ‘pain’ when [I] learned language” (PI 384); I cannot use that concept to understand even my own experience unless I can use it to understand yours. XI. Re-constructing Smith by way of Wittgenstein This move to an analysis of the way we use and learn our language for feelings tells against the way Smith argues for his account of sympathy,46 but it can be used to support the content of that account. For the workings of our feeling-language tend to involve judgments of other people’s feelings from the get-go, in a way that Smith captures better than Hume does. We learn to judge our own emotions even as we learn to name them. We say, to the child about his or her own emotions: “Big children don’t get upset about little scratches.”

then we run headlong into nonsense. If everything is mediated, then nothing is mediated; unless something is immediate, we can make no sense of mediation, can have no rules by which to apply the word “mediated”. The Wittgensteinian point is thus exactly the at first counter-intuitive one it seems to be, and that is how it gets its strength in dealing with the problems Hume and Smith encountered (and how it advances over what one might find in, say, Hegel or Durkheim): language brings our feelings into our immediate experience, and allows us thereby to share them in a straightforward way. 46 It is compatible with Hume if we stress his contagion metaphors over his official account of sympathy (and Hume’s account of the language of emotions at T, p. 582 looks very Wittgensteinian). But the official account embraces the private-language view just as much as Smith’s does: “The sentiments of others can never affect us, but by becoming, in some measure, our own ... While they remain conceal’d in the minds of others, they can never have any influence upon us” (T, p. 593). And: “No passion of another discovers itself immediately to the mind. We are only sensible of its causes or effects” (T, p. 576).

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“You really hurt your sister’s feelings when you shouted at her: She has a right to be angry.” Or: “I’m glad you’re so pleased with your new video game; I just wish you were half so pleased when we go out together as a family.” Or we describe other people’s emotions to the child, and explain, and sometimes judge, them as we do so: “Grandma is sad because her sister is sick.” “Uncle Jack is acting like a big baby over not getting that promotion. It’s not as though he worked so hard for it.” The child thus learns the why and the how of feelings: Why one is supposed to feel happy and sad, or happy or sad to a certain degree, as well as how to express one’s feelings, and when and to what degree other people’s feelings deserve sympathy. We learn what response we should have to each situation even as we learn how to label our responses, and then we start to see our own responses, and their appropriateness, by way of these labels. Some psychological experiments have suggested that this process actually comes to constitute our emotions:47 That the emotions we experience are a product of a biochemical state together with a label we place on that state.48 If so, then the socialized human be47

The classic study is S. Schachter and J.E. Singer (1962), pp. 379-99, but its methodology has since been called into question. There have, however, been many other experiments, in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, showing the dependency of emotions on how physiological states get labeled. J. David Velleman discusses this literature helpfully in Velleman (2006), pp. 215, 241-3. For critical discussions of Schachter and Singer, see Griffiths (1998), and Prinz (2006), pp. 69-72. 48 Steven Lukes has rightly pointed out to me that we need to take care to avoid thinking of the label and the physiological state as “parts” of the emotion as a whole. We certainly won’t arrive at a Wittgensteinian account of the emotions if we think of them as somehow a “mixture” of a feeling and a label, nor would such an account make much sense: Labels and feelings are hardly homogeneous enough

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ing will have different emotions from an otherwise similar human being “in the wild”. And the labels that help to constitute the emotions of a socialized human being will have moral judgments built into them. Under normal conditions, no-one will be willing to use the label “cheerful” for the feelings he has when a loved one suffers great tragedy, and consequently will not feel “cheerful” at such an event. Nor will a normally socialized adult be willing to say she is in “agony” if she receives a minor scratch or is disappointed in the quality of a meal, and so she won’t be in agony at such an event.49 In this sense, Smith is quite right: We see our own emotions through the prism of an imagined impartial spectator, we aim to have the emotions that such a spectator would have, and to some to submit to a stirring spoon. Rather, we need to see emotions in human beings as re-constituted by being labeled. What might count as an emotion in a non-linguistic animal becomes just something like an emotion – a proto-emotion, if you will – once it takes place in a linguistic animal; a proper emotion isn’t in place until the animal can describe its own state. Language transforms what it is to be an emotion, as it transforms what it is to have a perception, to have reasons, or to act (John McDowell (1994) and Christine Korsgaard (2009) describe this sort of transformation wonderfully). Our words for our emotions are not one “element” of them alongside others, but a structure without which emotional experience, as we know it, would be impossible. 49 This is, as I have indicated, just a sketch of a position that deserves much fuller development. The child will, for instance, grasp properly how to judge another’s feelings only when it becomes capable of putting itself in the other person’s situation, but it will also become more capable of putting itself in the other’s situation only as it grasps more fully how emotions are normally judged. So there will a cycle of emotional and moral development here, moving from projection to judgment to projection to judgment, and the cycle as a whole may be possible only if it begins from some wholly unsocialized kinds of feelings and fellow feelings, of the sort I have attributed to Hume. (I am grateful to conversations with Jesse Prinz, Peter Railton, and Steve Engel for drawing my attention to these points.) Whether the latter should be called “sympathy,” or only a “proto-sympathy,” is a matter Humeans and Smithians might continue to debate. But a full picture of how we come to share feelings with other human beings will probably include elements of both the Humean and the Smithian positions.

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extent we succeed. But all this takes place not because emotions are hidden within each breast and imagined feelings are therefore the closest we can come to what others are experiencing, but precisely because emotions – ours and everyone else’s – are on the surface, find their way into language only by our interaction with others and are constituted, even within our individual experience, by the language we use for them. With this in mind, we can return to the hospital and the ball. A dog and a baby might simply find the gloom of the hospital and the cheer of the ball infectious. A mature, normally socialized human being, by contrast, is capable of having the Ecclesiastes experience described earlier: Feeling a complex mixture of gloom and comfort at the hospital, or cheer and discomfort at the ball. But this kind of sympathy is not something one could achieve without language, and without making judgments about the sorts of feelings that are appropriate in various situations. Smith does a very good job of explaining this kind of sympathy, while it is hard to see how Hume could begin to capture it. Smith’s account of this kind of sympathy will only work for a linguistic being, however, although he himself never recognizes the role of language in making sympathy possible. XII. Conclusion In conclusion: Hume does a better job than Smith in describing the sort of sympathy that we share with non-linguistic animals, and that is sometimes in tension with our socialized sympathies. He also recognizes the degree to which moral judgment is a feature of the way we speak rather than just the way we feel. But he doesn’t see how deeply the language of feelings affects those feelings themselves; he seriously under-estimates the extent to which moral judgment is interwoven with our socialized sympathies. Smith grasps the latter point, and is therefore able to derive morality directly out of our emotions. But we make best sense of Smith’s view once we understand it as based on the way emotional language works rather than facts about our nature that we can access by in-

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trospection. If we do make that Wittgensteinian move, we can find in Smith an astute picture of socialized sympathy, and of its deep ties to moral judgment.50

Bibliography Abramson, Kate (2000) “Sympathy and the Project of Hume’s Second Enquiry”, in Archiv für die Geschichte der Philosophie, 83. Cropsey, Joseph (2001) Polity and Economy, South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press. Davies and Heal (1994) in C. Peacocke (ed.), Objectivity, Simulation, and the Unity of Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Darwall, Stephen (1997) “Empathy, Sympathy, Care”, in Philosophical Studies 89, pp. 261-282. Darwall, Stephen (2006) The Second-Person Standpoint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Debes, Remy (2007) “Humanity, Sympathy, and the Puzzle of Hume’s Second Enquiry”, in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 15. Debes, Remy (2007) “Has Anything Changed? Hume’s Theory of Association and Sympathy after the Treatise”, in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 15. Fleischacker, Samuel (2004) On Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”: A Philosophical Companion, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 50

I’m greatly indebted to audiences at George Mason University, Columbia University, McGill University, the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the University of Michigan, where I have given versions of this paper over the years, and in particular to extremely helpful comments from Kate Abramson, Tim Costelloe, Stephen Darwall, Remy Debes, Anne Eaton, Michael Gill, James Harris, Aryeh Kosman, Louis Loeb, Stephen Lukes, Jesse Prinz, Peter Railton, and Ruth Weintraub.

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Gill, Michael (2006) The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldie, Peter (2000) The Emotions. A Philosophical Exploration, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goldman, Alvin (2006) Simulating Minds, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griffiths, Paul (1998) What Emotions Really Are, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hume, David (1978) Treatise of Human Nature, ed. LA Selby-Bigge and PH Nidditch, second edition, Oxford: Clarendon. Kames, Lord (2005) Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, ed. M. Moran, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Kemp Smith, Norman (1941) The Philosophy of David Hume, London: Macmillan. Korsgaard, Christine (2009) Self-Constitution, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, John (1994) Mind and World, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nanay, Bence (2010) “Adam Smith’s Concept of Sympathy and its Contemporary Interpretations”, in Fleischacker and Brown (eds.), Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy, London: Routledge. Peacocke, Christopher (1994) (ed.) Objectivity, simulation and the unity of consciousness: Current issues in the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prinz, Jesse (2006) Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raynor, David (1984) “Hume’s Abstract of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments”, Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 22.

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Raynor, David (2006) “Adam Smith and the virtues”, in Adam Smith Review, volume II. Ross, Ian (1972) Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schachter, S. and Singer, J.E. (1962), “Cognitive, Social and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State”, in Psychological Review 69. Smith, Adam (1982) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. DD Raphael and AL Macfie, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Smith, Adam (1987) Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. EC Mossner, Ian Simpson Ross, New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd. ed. Stone, T. and Davies, M. (1996) “The Mental Simulation Debate: A Progress Report”, in P. Carruthers and P.K. Smith (eds.), Theories of Theories of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Velleman, J. David (2006) Self to Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1963) Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell. Wright, John P. (2009) Hume’s ‘A Treatise of Human Nature’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Contributors Christian Beyer studied philosophy, linguistics and the history of science in Bielefeld and Hamburg, where he also took his PhD (1999). He was a visiting scholar at Stanford University (1994-5), served as Temporary Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield (2000) and as Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the University of Erfurt (2000-5), where he earned his habilitation. In 2005 he was awarded a Heisenberg Scholarship of the German Research Foundation. Since 2007, he is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Georg-August University in Göttingen. He is the author of Von Bolzano zu Husserl (1996), Intentionalität und Referenz (2000), Subjektivität, Intersubjektivität, Personalität (2006) and a co-editor of Philosophical Knowledge (2007) and Edmund Husserl 1859-2009 (2011). Vivienne Brown is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Intellectual History at The Open University, UK. She is the founding editor of The Adam Smith Review (vols 1 to 5) and the author of Adam Smith's Discourse: Canonicity, Commerce and Conscience (1994) as well as of a number of articles on Adam Smith. She is currently working towards a collection of essays on Adam Smith with the provisional title, Adam Smith: Agency, Ethics and Economics. She is also interested in issues connected with rights, freedom, moral responsibility, rationality and game theory. John J. Drummond is Robert Southwell, S.J. Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. He received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University and is the author of Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism: Noema and Object as well as Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy. He has edited or co-edited five collections of articles on themes in phenomenology, and he has published numerous articles on phenomenology in collections and in journals such as Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Husserl Studies, New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

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Christel Fricke is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, Norway. From 2007 till 2010, she was the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN). She has published extensively on aesthetics and moral theory and on the history of philosophy. Her present research focuses on social interaction and moral psychology. She has co-edited (with Hans-Peter Schütt) Adam Smith als Moralphilosoph, (Berlin: deGruyter, 2005) and (with Raino Malnes, Karl Ove Moene, and Ragnvald Kalleberg) Adam Smith and the Conditions of a Moral Society (2011, in The Adam Smith Review VI). Dagfinn Føllesdal studied science and mathematics in Oslo (advisor: Skolem) and Göttingen (advisors: Siegel, Reidemeister, von Weizsäcker) from 1950 to 1957 before going to Harvard to study with Quine. After his Ph.D. in 1961, he taught first at Harvard and then in Oslo (1967-1999) and at Stanford (since 1968). In 1976, he has been appointed as the C.I. Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford. He wrote or edited 20 books, including Husserl und Frege (1958), Referential Opacity and Modal Logic, (1961, 2003), Quine, Confessions (ed. 2008), Quine in Dialogue (ed. 2008), as well as articles on philosophy of language, phenomenology, philosophy of humanities and social sciences. From 1970 – 82, he was the editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Sam Fleischacker is Professor of Philosophy at the University of IllinoisChicago.He is the author of On Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”: A Philosophical Companion, (Princeton, 2004), and A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith, (Princeton, 1999), in addition to articles on Smith and cultural relativism, Smith and self-deception, and Smith's reception in Germany and the United States. From 2006 to 2010, he was President of the International Adam Smith Society. Frode Kjosavik is Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Economics and Resource Management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University (2008-9) and Harvard University (2009). His PhD thesis was on intuition in Kant and Husserl. His research interests include general metaphysics and epistemology, Kant’s theoretical philosophy, Husserl’s phenomenology, general philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of biology. His publications include articles on Kantian intuition and non-conceptual content, Kant’s transcendental idealism,

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Husserl on the life-world and the natural sciences, the role of intuition in mathematics, and genetic information in biology. Iso Kern got his PhD in Leuven in 1961 and then edited three volumes with Husserl’s previously unpublished papers on The Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity (Husserliana XIII, XIV, and XV). He taught at the University of Heidelberg (1974 – 1979) and then moved to Taipeh in Taiwan for studying Chinese philosophy. He continued these studies at the Universities of Nanking and Peking and at Columbia University in New York. From 1984 until 2006, he taught at the Universities of Bern, Freiburg and Zürich. His publications include Husserl und Kant (The Hague 1964, 19842nd), Idee und Methode der Philosophie. Leitgedanken für eine Theorie der Vernunft (Berlin 1974), Edmund Husserl. Darstellung seines Denkens (co-authored with Rudolf Bernet and Eduard Marbach, Hamburg 1996), Das Wichtigste im Leben. Wang Yangming (1472-1529) und seine Nachfolger über die “Verwirklichung des ursprünglichen Wissens” (Basel 2010). Ronald McIntyre is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge, where he taught from 1977 to 2010. He studied physics at Wake Forest and philosophy at Florida State and Stanford (Ph.D., Stanford, 1970). He is co-author of Husserl and Intentionality: A Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language (with David W. Smith, D. Reidel, 1982), and he edited the special edition of Synthese on “The Intentionality of Mind” (1984). He has authored various articles on Husserlian phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language, especially as issues in these disciplines bear on one another. Henning Peucker is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paderborn, Germany. Before coming to Paderborn he had extended stays in Boston and Finland as a visiting scholar. Much of his research focuses on the history of philosophy and in particular on Husserl’s phenomenology. He has worked at the Husserl Archive in Cologne, editing Husserl’s lectures on ethics from 1920 and 1924 for the series of Husserl’s collected works, Husserliana. His dissertation examined the origin of Husserl's early phenomenology.