Empathy

What Phenomenology Teaches Politics

Phenomenology – the philosophical method I practiced and contributed to – is sometimes described as abstract, technical, and disconnected from practical concerns. I would like to correct this misconception by demonstrating that phenomenology offers something that politics desperately needs and almost entirely lacks: a rigorous method for understanding experience before deciding what to do about it.

The political sphere operates, overwhelmingly, at the level of action. What policy should we implement? What legislation should we pass? What position should we take? These are questions about doing.

The Stranger and the Self

There is a moment in every genuine encounter with another person – another culture, another faith, another way of understanding the world – when the encounter ceases to be comfortable and becomes, instead, productive. This is the moment when the other stops being a curiosity to be examined from a safe distance and becomes, instead, a challenge to the categories I have been using to organize my own experience.

I call this the moment of unsettlement. And I believe it is the most important moment in any interaction across difference, because it is the moment when understanding – genuine understanding, not the polite recognition of difference that passes for understanding in most multicultural discourse – becomes possible.

The Phenomenology of Empathy

We speak of “putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes” as if empathy were a simple act of imaginative substitution. As if, by imagining what we would feel in their circumstances, we could access their experience.

This is not empathy. This is projection.

The phenomenological question is more precise: How do we access the lived experience of another consciousness without either collapsing the distance between us or rendering that experience inaccessible?

Empathy Is Not a Feeling

The word “empathy” has been so thoroughly degraded by popular usage that I must begin by reclaiming it from the territory of sentiment and returning it to the territory of philosophy, where it originated and where it does its most important work.

Empathy, in common usage, means “feeling what another person feels.” This definition is not merely imprecise. It is wrong in a way that obscures the most valuable thing about empathy and replaces it with something that is, at best, sympathetic projection and, at worst, a form of emotional colonialism in which I replace your experience with my imagined version of it and call the result “understanding.”