Abstract

Between corporeality, space and imagination: forms of empathy in Husserl.The research is focused on the husserlian empathy, meant as a central moment in the constitution of the phenomenological subjectivity, as a genetic path, where the husserlian subject reveals itself as a being structurally bound with the others, from the Leib's level to the Geist's one. In particular, starting from the analysis of the Texts of HUA XIII-XIV-XV Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, the unpublished manuscripts on intersubjectivity (E groups) and, of course, Cartesian Meditations and Ideen II, we focus the attention on the primary levels of husserlian empathy, the ones bounded with physical and psycho-physical process. Therefore, if the aim is to understand which is the basic foundation for the access to the others, i.e. how the alter-ego could represent a real Mitsubjekt with a constitutive function in relation to the world, we must start from the most basically empathic dynamics, from the bodily origin of our relation with the others. The dissertation is composed of four chapters. The first one is titled Reduction and reductions: the function of the primordial abstraction and analyses in particular the problem of the primordial reduction, a moment of the husserlian phenomenology of intersubjectivity often misunderstood; on the contrary, it must be clarified as an essential methodological moment for the understanding of what joins and, at the same time, diversifies the egos. The primordial reduction is first of all detailed and differentiated from the other kinds of possible reductions and it's also analysed in relation to the still very discussed question of Ur-Ich. We also clarifies the meaning of "primordial empathy" and "primordial other" and, generally, we considere the "exit-modalities" from the primordial abstraction, that is the self-estrangement forms already owned by the subject in the primordial sphere. In this context we also pay attention to the difference between sich anders fingieren and sich Andere fingieren. The second chapter, titled Bodily analogy and empathy examines the central theme of the husserlian empathy, that is the analogy, with particular attention to the most original declination of the analogy: the bodily analogy. In the first part we define the nature of the husserlian analogy: first of all we show that the husserlian analogy is born in contrast with the Analogienschluss of T. Lipps and B. Erdmann and it's a kind of passive association, a pre-inferential one; secondly we propose an interpretation of the husserlian analogy in the sense of an analogy of participation. In the second part we examine the basic forms of analogical fulfilment, to show that the recognition of the others has not only a first activation in the passivity, but also various moments of fulfilment; these moments are examined through the differentiation between "proper empathy" and "improper empathy", to point out that empathy rises always in relation with bodily perception, meant not only as a Leibwahrnehmung, but also as a real Körperwahrnehmung. The third chapter is titled Analogy in movement: the exchange of positions and analyses the dynamic development of the husserlian analogy, to show that empathy must be founded on concrete possibilities of involvement in the other's point of view, meant not only in a metaphoric meaning, but first of all as a real space of the other. These possibilities are examined by Husserl through the different modulations that can be offered by the exchange of position and, in particular, through the consideration of the following representations: first of all the wie wenn ich dort wäre, that, thanks to an imaginative component, allows two subjects to have the same position at the same time; secondly the wenn ich dort bin, through which, on the fundament of the kinaesthetic Leib, two bodies can really have the same position, but in different times. In the second part of the chapter we examine the problem of the relationship between empathy and imagination and, generally, between empathy and the other possible forms of presentification, as memory, phantasy and Bildbewusst; in particular we underline how, in connection with empathy, we can find a specific form of imagination, determinable as a gebundene Phantasie. Finally the fourth chapter, Normality and deviations: how far can analogy go?, begins with a brief digression in another possible expression of the exchange of position: als ob ich er wäre, a formulation that refers to the constituted intersubjectivity and through which Husserl shows the involvement to the other's point of view; the other is now understood as a full personality, as a person with his peculiar relation with the surrounding world. After this brief digression, the analysis is focused on the fundamental problem of the normality-abnormality definition, which is a central pair for the empathy problem. Indeed Husserl himself has underlined how the whole phenomenology of intersubjectivity is based on the implicit presuppose of normality; however this presuppose must be explicitated and thematized. The normality shows then itself as an idealisation, because in the reality we can't find neither the average-man, nor the average-experience of the world. On these basis we distinguish two different concepts of abnormality: the first one is the "daily" abnormality, that remains in the normality sphere, and it's for example represented from the case of the colour blindness; the second one is the abnormality, that represents instead a real "break" with the normality sphere and that requires us to figure out if the exclusion of the real abnormal variations of subjectivity, such as animals or insane people, from the intersubjective constitution of reality is a really founded operation