Collective Emotions, Normativity, and Empathy: A Steinian Account

Abstract

Recently, an increasing body of work from sociology, social psychology, and social ontology has been devoted to collective emotions. Rather curiously, however, pressing epistemological and especially normative issues have received almost no attention. In particular, there has been a strange silence on whether one can share emotions with individuals or groups who are not aware of such sharing, or how one may identify this, and eventually identify specific norms of emotional sharing. In this paper, I shall address this set of issues head-on. I will do so by drawing on one of the most elaborate, but rather neglected phenomenological accounts of sociality, namely Edith Stein's work on communal experiences and her theory of empathy. I wish to show that a suitably amended Steinian account affords us with an intriguing alternative to both phenomenalist and normativist construals of collective emotions. Moreover, I shall argue that it provides a more fine-grained account of the different types of emotional sharing than standard accounts, ranging from face-to-face, or shared, to more robust but less direct, or collective, emotions. Finally, I will propose a tentative answer to the above questions by pointing to non-dyadic or collective forms of empathy.

Shared emotions: a Steinian proposal

“…However, Stein adds a second source of normativity for an emotion, namely its appropriateness with respect to the value it discloses. As several commentators (Caminada 2015;Szanto 2015;19 Vendrell Ferran (2015), however, has shown that emotions play a crucial role in Stein's accounts of empathy and communal experience. 20 For a detailed discussion of Stein's work, see the contributions to the special issue of Human Studies edited by Szanto and Moran (2015a;Taipale 2015;Vendrell Ferran 2015;Szanto 2015;Burns 2015;Caminada 2015;Jardine 2015).…”

“…If we do not subscribe to value realism, we obviously need to drop the claim that an emotion will or will not be objectively appropriate vis-à-vis their formal object. Nevertheless, Stein's work might help us address the normative issues raised by shared emotions, many of which have yet to receive adequate attention in recent debates (Szanto 2015). I will not discuss this issue further here.…”

Edith Stein’s phenomenology of sensual and emotional empathy

“…And the empathic feeling alongside the experiences of the other person will be at work also in many Bempathy plus^forms of human interaction, which, in addition to feeling and understanding the experiences of the other person, also involve talking and acting together in the world. Indeed, empathy, at least in the step-one sense, needs to be at work in such cooperative experiences, since the first person must feel and know that the other person is doing the same thing he is doing, and, reciprocally, in order for the cooperation to be precisely a joint endeavour (Stein 2010: 156, 162, 202; on sociality in Stein, see Szanto 2015).…”

“…As a matter of fact, to deny the presence of empathy in telephone or Skype conversations would be to deny that such forms of human communication are shared, joint endeavours in the first place. As pointed out above, empathy, at least in the step-one sense, needs to be at work in all cooperative experiences, since the first person must feel and know that the other person is doing the same thing he is doing, and, reciprocally, in order for the cooperation to be precisely a joint endeavour (Szanto 2015). In addition to such presence of step-one empathy it would also be possible for an empathizer to join into step-two empathy if, for instance, the person she is speaking to and possibly also watching on the screen suddenly falls into tears for one reason or the other.…”

“…The significance of Edith Stein's theory of empathy has recently been brought to attention in cognitive science and neighbouring fields (Dullstein 2013;Jardine 2014Jardine , 2015Svenaeus 2016;Szanto 2015;Vendrell Ferran 2015;Zahavi 2014), but many important aspects of her work regarding the nature and role of empathy in social cognition remain to be spelled out. My goal in this paper is to present in some detail the theory of empathy found in Stein's early philosophy, notably in the book Zum Problem der Einfühlung (short: the empathy book) published in 1917 (2008), but also by proceeding from complementary thoughts on bodily intentionality and intersubjectivity that we find in Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften (short: Beiträge) published in 1922 (2010).…”