Abstract
In this paper, I wish to explore the contribution of the phenomenological reduction to a distinct form of empathy, which has been identified and called by Ratcliffe (Inquiry 55(5):473–495, 2012) radical empathy. This form of empathy brings to light the sense of reality experienced by the subject rather than a mere mental state. However, I shall consider whether and how the phenomenological reduction allows different interpretations of the same experience, thereby impacting on our understanding of another’s sense of reality. Far from dismissing the role of the reduction, I propose a reconsideration of its relevance for radical empathy. In order to spell out my argument, I propose a case ex negativo that looks at Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s different analyses of the sense of reality experienced by obsessive patients. I argue that this interpretative difference ultimately depends on two opposite uses of the reduction itself, and that Merleau-Ponty’s account offers a promising perspective to reintegrate and contextualize the phenomenological reduction into radical empathy.
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Notes
It is important to notice that the suspension of the natural attitude is a choice of the subject that is willing to practice the phenomenological method, hence it has little to do with the loss of natural self-evidence that is found in psychiatric disorders as argued by Blankenburg and others. For a discussion of the difficulties surrounding the appraisal of Husserl’s epoché in psychopathology, see Ratcliffe (2008), p. 6 ff, and Summa (2012).
For a discussion and a clarification of Husserl’s Cartesianism, see Overgaard (2002).
“To be sure, I may deceive myself along the way, and not only with respect to perceived qualities but also with respect to existence itself. I may suffer from an illusion or hallucination. The perception is then not a ‘genuine’ perception. However, if it is, that is to say, if it can be ‘confirmed’ in current experiential contexts, perhaps with the aid of correct, experiential thinking, then the perceived thing is actual, i.e. actually given itself in the perception, and, to be sure, as bodily there in person” (Husserl 2014, §39, p. 69).
“They may be sensations, like sensations of sound, but the ego is not alert to them; physical objects or beings with a lived body may appear in the surrounding space as in transition or as in rest, but the ego does not carry out an “I perceive” or an “I take note” with regard to [them]; affects [Gefühle] may be intertwined with these background lived-experiences or with their objects, spilling over into a general atmosphere [Stimmung] of well-being or malcontentment; even tendencies, lived-experiences of drive, may be rooted in them […]. Belonging here are also flashes of insight, imaginings that arise, memories, theoretical insights that emerge or even stirrings of the will, decisions that are not however taken by the ego. Only when the ego carries them out do they get the shape of ‘ego cogito’” […]. (Husserl 2001, p. 19).
For a discussion of the unconscious in Husserl, see Bernet (2002), Lohmar and Brudzińska (2012), and Taipale (2015). In particular, according to Taipale, Husserl’s account of the typification of unconscious experience is anonymous and non-individualised (and in this respect it differs from Freud’s and the psychoanalytic tradition). On Taipale’s reading, for Husserl, drives and impulses are not rooted in consciousness according to personal or familiar nexuses. This entails that, “as a side-effect, Husserl seems to neglect the difference between objects that are of personal significance to me and objects that are not: in his account of typification, he does not distinguish between object (e.g. others) that have been of personal relevance to me and objects that I have only observed without any engagement, attachment or emotional stance” (Taipale 2015, p. 344).
“As far as I am concerned, I am quite happy to believe in the existence of a constitutive consciousness. I can go along with Husserl in each of the admirable descriptions in which he shows transcendental consciousness constituting the world by imprisoning itself in empirical consciousness; I am convinced, as he is, that our physical and psychophysical me is a transcendent object which must come under the scope of the epoché. But the question I would like to raise is the following: is this physical and psychophysical me not sufficient? Do we need to add to it a transcendental I, as a structure of absolute consciousness?” (Sartre 2004, p. 3).
Accordingly, Sartre distinguishes between two types of self-consciousness, which we may call—following Kriegel (2003)—transitive and intransitive. While the former involves being conscious of an object (p) by entertaining a conscious thought or representation about our state of thinking p (‘being self-conscious of my thought that p’), the latter reports the occurrence of thinking that p without self-consciously ascribing any state, for being conscious of such occurrence is only implicit. As Kriegel has pointed out, while transitive self-consciousness is rare, because we do not always take notice of our states, intransitive self-consciousness is predominant in our waking life.
“With different consciousnesses (pre-logical, infantile, schizophrenic, logical, etc.), the nuance of creation varies, but it always remains a poietic production. A most particular case, of the greatest interest, is that of the psychosis of influence. What does a patient mean by the words, ‘They are making me have wicked thoughts’? I will try to study this in another work” (Sartre 2004, p. 19).
Pierre Janet gained reputation in the psychiatric field by using hypnosis in his clinical work, which focused on a broad category of neuroses, including psychasthenia, an obsessive condition whose name comes from the ancient Greek “psyche” and “asthenia” (weakness or lack of force). Janet’s study on psychasthenia resulted in two volumes on Obsessions and Psychasthenia (Les Obsessions et la Psychasthénie) published in 1903. For Janet, obsessions and compulsions are ideas and impulses that dominate the patient’s mental life (e.g. the belief that one is fat when he is actually thin, or thoughts of violent and sexual nature). Janet rejects the explanation of obsessions in terms of emotional imbalance by providing a theory of psychological tension. More precisely, according to Janet, psychasthenia involves a lowering of psychological tension, which may be termed “psycholepsy,” in analogy with epilepsy. This is responsible for the difficulty of psychasthenic patients to adjust to social situations: “Psychasthenics encounter numerous difficulties in dealing with real situations. They are rendered impotent by their shyness and have difficulty expressing even gratitude or tenderness. They ‘find on the stairway the word that needed to be said in the parlor’” (Pitman 1987, p. 229). As Pitman notices, “Central to Janet's theoretical treatment of psychasthenia is the clinical observation that psychasthenics do not have equal difficulty with all psychological tasks, but rather have special difficulty with tasks involving adaptation to reality and personal relationships. […] All psychasthenic patients […] are understood as whole persons struggling with their failure to relate to the present and to people in it” (Pitman 1987, p. 229).
As Pitman has pointed out, Janet’s hierarchy of psychological phenomena is an excellent summary of the observed different impairments of his patients. Yet Janet fails to justify this hierarchy in psychological terms when he suggests that there must be some physiological quantity, viz, psychological tension, that regulates it: “Here Janet's argument becomes circular: reality operations must require higher psychological tension because psychasthenics more often fail at them; psychasthenics fail at these operations because they lack the requisite psychological tension” (Pitman 1987, pp. 229–230). In other words, Janet tends to favour a reductionist approach in that he argues that psychastenia is characterised by a loss of control or a failure to achieve a higher integration of psychic faculties. In this way, the world of the psychasthenic is observed and detailed according to the variety of its symptoms, but it is not grasped as a specific transformation of the sense of reality experienced by the subject. For the influence of Janet on Sartre’s understanding of obsessions see Stawarska (2005).
For Sartre, imaginative consciousness is “an undefinable quality that attaches itself to every consciousness” (Sartre 1972, p. 14).
See, for instance, for a discussion of the relevance of trust (as opposed to conscious thoughts and images) in OCD, de Haan et al. (2013).
This view can be further explicated in light of Merleau-Ponty’s critical appraisal of Freud and psychoanalysis. See Mooney (2017).
“Our body and our perception always solicit us to take as the center of the world that environment with which they present us. But this environment is not necessarily that of our own life. I can ‘be somewhere else’ while staying here, and if I am kept far away from what I love, I feel out of touch with real life. The Bovary mentality and certain forms of home-sickness are examples of life which has become decentered. The maniac, on the other hand, is centered wherever he is […]. Besides the physical and geometrical distance which stands between myself and all things, a ‘lived’ distance binds me to things which count and exist for me, and links them to each other. […] Sometimes between myself and the events there is a certain amount of play (Spielraum), which ensures that my freedom is preserved while the events do not cease to concern me. Sometimes, on the other hand, the lived distance is both too small and too great: the majority of the events cease to count for me, while the nearest ones obsess me” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, p. 299).
Merleau-Ponty’s interest in psychopathology is also testified by his terminological choices. I am grateful to Dermot Moran for pointing out to me that the term ‘intentional arc’, introduced by Merleau-Ponty to account for his theory of motor intentionality, was borrowed from the German psychiatrist Franz Fischer who studied temporal and spatial disruptions in schizophrenics (in his Raum-Zeit-Struktur und Denkstörung in der Schizophrenie II. Mitteilung, Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie published in 1930).
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Acknowledgements
A shorter version of this paper was presented at the Annual Conference of the British Society for Phenomenology held in Manchester in September 2016 and at the workshop New Directions in Phenomenology at University College Dublin in January 2017. I would like to thank all the participants in these events for their feedback and comments, and particularly Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney for their helpful suggestions. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees for their comments on the final version of this paper. The completion of this work was made possible by a research grant funded by the Irish Research Council for Social Sciences and Humanities.
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Magrì, E. An inquiry on radical empathy and the phenomenological reduction in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Cont Philos Rev 51, 323–341 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9445-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9445-9