Fritz Breithaupt's "Three-Person Model of Empathy" (2012) offers a brilliant approach to relate empathy to side-taking. By thereby grounding empathy in subjective observation though, it becomes difficult to focus on how empathy interferes with phenomena of shared and embedded activity. This comment therefore raises the question of how Breithaupt's theory of empathy can be related to phenomena of participatory sense-making and second-person interaction.Keywords empathy, participatory sense-making, second-person interaction, sympathyIn its literal and etymological meaning, the word empathy is not very clear about its object: Is empathy just about putting oneself into the shoes of others, or is it also about establishing a feeling relation with objects or the surrounding world? When Edward B. Titchener (1909) retranslated the German term "Einfühlung" as "empathy" (the Ancient Greek empatheia means "affection" or "passion"), it still held much of the Romantic implication of building up a felt relation with an aesthetic phenomenon (such as a work of art). Only in recent usage has the term been limited to questions of understanding other persons.The advantage of this limited usage of the term is clear: It allows for precise questions about how we emotionally understand others approached either in terms of "theory theory (TT)" (understanding others by building mental models of them) or "simulation theory (ST)" (understanding others by subliminally simulating them), not in terms of "interaction theory (IT)" (cf. Gallagher & Zahavi, 2007). This limitation makes for a highly convincing and neat definition of empathy. But three kinds of liminal phenomena also raise the question of how "feeling oneself into" other persons relates to other forms of "feeling oneself into" the surrounding world, and how important phenomena on the verge of empathy yet do not exactly converge with concepts of taking another person's perspective. These three liminal phenomena are: (a) transitional objects (e.g., a child feeling empathy for and interacting with a teddy bear-cf. Winnicott, 1971, pp. 1-25); (b) swarm phenomena (e.g., mass panic uniting a group of individuals in a shared emotion and action); and (c) cooperation with assigned roles (e.g., three people washing dishes together). If we consider the fact that emotions can be considered intrinsic evaluations or betterorientations of human activity, these liminal phenomena become extremely important. Accordingly, in the first case it is obvious that empathy with persons and empathy with objects can take place on very similar scales-empathy here seems to be a way of constructing the object as another "person," rather than being an effect of such a construction. The second case shows that empathy can be felt within a shared situation, and not only with a singular person. The third case indicates that feeling empathy in an interaction might have a shared focus instead of separating into personal perspectives: enactivist thinkers (cf. De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007) would argue that, to grasp the p...
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