The shoe never fits: A phenomenological description of interpersonal experience

Berry, Hannah (2021) The shoe never fits: A phenomenological description of interpersonal experience. PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.

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Abstract

In considering how persons interact, the concept of ‘empathy’ is becoming increasingly deployed across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. However, there are still disputed descriptions of what empathy actually is, and of what happens within an interpersonal experience. The lay understanding of empathy is to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’, in order to experience how another person feels. This contemporary use of empathy has been adapted from aesthetics, psychology and neurobiology, as well as having been translated from various different languages and subject areas. It has resulted in a notion of understanding another person that is vague and ambiguous. Accordingly, I argue that a revision of how we understand interpersonal experience is necessary, in order better to understand human experience as a whole. I look at the historical connotations and meanings of empathy to see how specific terminology has been used in relation to interpersonal experience in various academic fields. Empathy was synonymous with sympathy in British aesthetics in the nineteenth century, and it is argued that a distinct concept of empathy did not enter the Anglophone world until Titchener’s translation of Lipps’ theory of Einfühlung in 1909. I argue that empathy is not an accurate translation of Einfühlung , and that in any case these cognate but distinct, concepts need to be considered in order further in order to identify what is essential to the intersubjective, interpersonal experience. To achieve this, I turn to classic phenomenology in the Husserlian tradition. The phenomenological movement of the twentieth century rejected Lipps’ theory of Einfühlung , as it does not ground experience within a description that returns to the Dinge an sich, but rather reverts to psychologism. I thus reconsider the treatment of interpersonal experience in the philosophy of Husserl and his contemporaries in order to understand what empathy is and how it works within human experience. Along the way, I examine Husserl’s transcendental method of describing primordial givenness within an experience, to see if there is a process within interpersonal experience similar to the lay notion of empathy. As a result of this examination I conclude that the lay understanding of empathy is not primordial. Rather, the interpersonal experience is characterised by an ebb and flow of passive and active Einfühlung . Although this does not allow for, or describe, the ‘passing of feelings’, it nevertheless both constitutes the understanding of interpersonal experience for the experiencing subject and brings us to a better philosophical understanding of the nature of interpersonal experience than has been achieved by the use of the lay concept of empathy over the past hundred years.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	09 Sep 2021 14:03
Last Modified:	18 Jan 2023 21:37
DOI:	10.17638/03128144
Supervisors:	Simms, Karl Schramme, Thomas
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3128144