Jul 13, 2020
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MBTI & Ideas
Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (Dan Zahavi, 2014)
“One perhaps initially slightly surprising claim of his is that empathy involves self-objectification. We shouldn’t forget, however, the aesthetic origin of the notion.
If I experience trees or mountains as animated or besouled, if I hear the wind and experience it as having a melancholy sound, or see a cloud and experience it as threatening, the source of such psychological content is in fact myself.
What is really happening is that I am projecting part of myself into these external objects, and this is for Lipps what empathy more generally is all about.
To feel empathy is to experience a part of one’s own psychological life as belonging to or in an external object; it is to penetrate and suffuse that object with one’s own life.”
(…)
“The fire is not present in the smoke in the way anger is present in the facial expression.
When we perceive the facial expressions of others, we immediately co-apprehend the expressed emotions, say, the joy or fear.
This does not, however, mean that we actually perceive the joy or fear. According to Lipps, joy and fear cannot be perceived, since they are not to be found in the external world.
We only know directly of these emotions through self-experience, or to put it differently, the only emotions we have experiential access to are our own.
So although we apprehend the joyful or fearful face as a unified phenomenon, analysis will show that the perceived gestalt and the co-apprehended emotion arise from two different sources.
The visual gestalt comes to me from the external world, whereas the felt emotion is drawn from myself.
The perceived face consequently comes to possess psychological meaning for me because I am projecting myself into it.”
MBTI & Ideas
Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (Dan Zahavi, 2014)
"When we reflectively try to discern the experiential difference between smelling cloves and tasting chocolate or between hearing a cowbell and seeing a sunrise,
we do not sever our intentional link with the world by turning some spectral gaze inwards.
No, we discover these differences, and we analyse them descriptively by paying attention to how worldly objects and states of affairs appear to us.”
(…)
“But we need to distinguish between the question of (1) what the object is like for the subject and (2) what the experience of the object is like for the subject.
After all, we are never conscious of an object simpliciter, but always of the object as appearing in a certain way, say, as judged, seen, hoped, feared, remembered, smelled, anticipated, or tasted.
The same object, with exactly the same worldly properties, can present itself in a variety of manners. It can be given as perceived, imagined, or recollected, etc.”
(…)
“Not only is what it is like to perceive a blue square different from what it is like to perceive an orange triangle, but what it is like to perceive a blue square is also different from what it is like to remember or imagine a blue square.
In short, there is a difference between asking about the property the object is experienced as having (how does the surface of a table feel differently from the surface of an ice cube?)
and asking about the property of the experience of the object (what is the experiential difference between perceiving and imagining an ice cube?).”
Othering is the process of casting a group, an individual or an object into the role of the ‘other’ and establishing one’s own iden...
Othering is the process of casting a group, an individual or an object into the role of the ‘other’ and establishing one’s own identity through opposition to and, frequently, vilification of this Other. The Greeks’ use of the word ‘barbarian’ to describe non-Greeks is a typical example of othering and an instance of nationalism avant la lèttre. The ease with which the adjective ‘other’ generated the verb ‘to other’ in the last twenty years or so is indicative of the usefulness, power and currency of a term that now occupies an important position in feminist, postcolonial, civil rights and sexual minority discourses.
Extreme beauty arouses no sympathy. It is not the prerogative of any one country.
Colette, The Last of Chéri, translated by Roger Senhouse, p. 250.