Empathizing with the stranger: Rereading Heidegger.

Abstract

The notion of empathy as feeling one's way into the other is criticized in the works of Heidegger for its Cartesian assumption of the ontological gulf between self and other. The anti-Cartesian counterposition of a self, embedded in a world prereflectively shared with familiar others, however, raises questions regarding understanding the stranger, as the self is absorbed in her prejudgments. Yet, the self in the works of Heidegger is more originarily constituted by unhomeliness. As essentially a stranger to itself, the self already signals hospitality to the stranger and questioning of its own familiar categories. Reconceived from this perspective, this article argues, originary empathy is the inherent power of human existence to affectively bring near the stranger concealed in familiar and unfamiliar others. Thus, the ethical meaning of modernity, the age of radical unhomeliness or homelessness, could be rethought as openness to the stranger, brought to our doorsteps by unjust modern systems themselves.