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Empathy and intersubjectivity

In phenomenology, empathy refers to the experience of one's own body as another. While people often identify others with their physical bodies, this type of phenomenology requires that they focus on the subjectivity of the other, as well as the intersubjective engagement with them. In Husserl's original account, this was done by a sort of apperception built on the experiences of one's own lived body. The lived body is one's own body as experienced by oneself, as oneself. One's own body manifests itself mainly as one's possibilities of acting in the world. It is what lets oneself reach out and grab something, for instance, but it also, and more importantly, allows for the possibility of changing one's point of view. This helps to differentiate one thing from another by the experience of moving around it, seeing new aspects of it (often referred to as making the absent present and the present absent), and still retaining the notion that this is the same thing that one saw other aspects of just a moment ago (it is identical). One's body is also experienced as a duality, both as object (one's ability to touch one's own hand) and as one's own subjectivity (one's experience of being touched).

The experience of one's own body as one's own subjectivity is then applied to the experience of another's body, which, through apperception, is constituted as another subjectivity. One can thus recognise the Other's intentions, emotions, etc. This experience of empathy is important in the phenomenological account of intersubjectivity. In phenomenology, intersubjectivity constitutes objectivity (i.e., what one experiences as objective is experienced as being intersubjectively available – available to all other subjects. This does not imply that objectivity is reduced to subjectivity nor does it imply a relativist position, cf. for instance intersubjective verifiability).

In the experience of intersubjectivity, one also experiences oneself as being a subject among other subjects, and one experiences oneself as existing objectively for these Others; one experiences oneself as the noema of Others' noeses, or as a subject in another's empathic experience. As such, one experiences oneself as objectively existing subjectivity. Intersubjectivity is also a part in the constitution of one's lifeworld, especially as "homeworld."