Cont Philos Rev (2015) 48:161–178

DOI 10.1007/s11007-015-9327-3

Beyond Cartesianism: Body-perception

and the immediacy of empathy

Joona Taipale1,2

Published online: 19 May 2015

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract The current debates dealing with empathy, social cognition, and the
problem of other minds widely accept the assumption that, whereas we can directly
perceive the other’s body, certain additional mental operations are needed in order
to access the contents of the other’s mind. Body-perception has, in other words,
been understood as something that merely mediates our experience of other minds
and requires no philosophical analysis in itself. The available accounts have ac-
cordingly seen their main task as pinpointing the operations and mechanisms that
enable us to move beyond body-perception—and here acts such as inference,
simulation, and projection have usually been the main candidates. This whole set-
ting, however, seems to rely on a somewhat Cartesian assumption, according to
which body-perception fundamentally amounts to the perception of a material thing,
res extensa, starting from which we then strive to grasp the other as a res cogitans.
Insofar as one begins with the question of how we can discover and understand
mindedness in things that cannot be directly perceived as minded, the Cartesian
setting is already taken for granted—and this is, in fact, exactly what most of the
available proposals seem to be doing. From a phenomenological point of view, the
Cartesian setting is untenable and seriously misleads the whole debate. The present
article reassesses the role and status of body-perception in empathy. Making use of
the Husserlian theory of expressivity in particular, the article engages a phe-
nomenological framework of analysis, challenges the above-mentioned assumption
concerning the nature of body-perception, and argues for the immediate nature of
empathy.

& Joona Taipale

joona.h.taipale@jyu.fi
1
Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland
2
Kinaporinkatu 2 B 19, 00500 Helsinki, Finland

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Keywords Empathy
Social cognition
Mindreading
Expression
Mind
Body

Cartesianism
Mediacy
Immediacy
Husserl

1 Introduction: Empathy and body-perception

Explicitly or implicitly, assumptions concerning the role and status of body-

perception lie at the core of any account dealing with our experience of other
people. The whole problem of other minds is built on the basic insight that other
people are physically separate entities whose mental states and lived experiences we
could not grasp without external perception. Indeed, there are obvious phenomeno-
logical reasons for granting perception such a status—although when we ourselves
are angry or sad, for instance, we might be well aware of this without seeing our
own face or our own posture, without hearing ourselves saying this aloud, and so on,
in the case of the anger or sadness of other people, by contrast, our ability to track
these emotional states is conditioned by the fact that we can perceive their
expressions. In short, unlike self-awareness, other-awareness requires external
perception.
However, this standpoint, which is also endorsed in this paper, is commonly
associated with another assumption that, by contrast, I want to challenge here. This
is the assumption that the mental life of others can only be given to us in a mediated
fashion. There is a strong tendency to either confuse the two following assumptions
or to conclude the latter from the former:

1. Our current experience of other people is conditioned by body-perception

2. Our current experience of other people is mediated by body-perception

As already indicated, the first claim I take to be rather obvious: our grasp of
someone else’s current state of mind somehow involves body-perception. Instead, I
will here problematize the assumption that the second claim can be deduced from
the first one.
The assumption of mediacy is widespread in the current social cognition debate,
which sets out with the following Cartesian presupposition: we can only directly
perceive other bodies, not other minds. It is assumed, accordingly, that recognizing
the emotions, thoughts, and intentions of others requires certain mental operations,
and the discussion firmly revolves around the question of how we get from body-
perception to mind-perception. Symptomatically—regardless of whether it is
reasoning, inference, theory-building, simulation, projection, introjection, or
something else that is supposed to do the trick—body-perception is treated as a
medium for grasping the experiential life of others. A devoted defender of any such
theory might want to specify here that, surely, when grasping happiness in a smile or
recognizing an intention in a hand-movement, for instance, it might look as if we
were accessing the other’s mental contents rather immediately but, if examined
more closely, the mediated character of the situation would become obvious—in
other words, if there is a sense of immediacy to our awareness of the other’s mental

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states, this subjective feeling is just a matter of ignorance: if we were to examine the
issue more closely, we would know better.
In the last two decades, phenomenologists have established a firm foothold in this
on-going debate and formulated a proposal that nowadays runs under the title of the
direct perception account.1 As the term suggests, the idea promoted is that we often
perceive the emotions, desires, and intentions of others without the media of
theorizing, simulation, or projection. Thus far, phenomenologists stand rather
united: the other’s body is experienced as a lived-body (Leib), not as a mere material
thing (Körper). Yet, when pressed for details, an underlying lack of consensus
quickly rears its head. The basic disagreement or undecidedness concerns the
relationship between Körper-perception and Leib-perception: admitting that it
would be counterintuitive, and even outright mystifying, to argue that Körper-
perception has no role in empathy, commentators risk concluding that Körper-
perception implicitly has a fundamental role in empathy, whereas Leib-perception is
considered to be established only by way of particular mental operations—such as
‘‘pairing,’’ ‘‘analogizing apperception,’’ and so on. In this light, the phenomeno-
logical account might seem to be merely translating the question of other minds into
a question of other lived-bodies, while the problem remains practically the same:
how can the perceived Körper be experienced as a Leib?
The question of mediation thus re-emerges in the phenomenological discussion,
and it might seem that we are led back to square one. On this reading, much like the
standard proposals in the social cognition debate, which are haunted by the
Cartesian assumption that it is bodies, rather than minds, that are the direct objects
of perception, phenomenology seems to be only re-assessing the manner in which
body-perception mediates our experience of other minded beings—and not the
claim of mediation per se. Consequently, phenomenologists do not seem to offer a
genuine alternative to the standard proposals.2 In this vein, Matthias Schlossberger
(2005) has recently argued that the classical Husserlian account of empathy simply
‘‘fails’’ because it introduces the perceived body as a mediating element that enables
‘‘pairing,’’ ‘‘apperceptive transfer,’’ and ultimately Fremderfahrung. Schlossberg-
er’s judgment is rather straightforward:
[In Husserl’s account] the constitution of the psycho-physical body precedes
the constitution of the other. […] [Husserl] presupposes that all perception,
except for self-perception, must be perception of things. Our perception of
others is consequently bound to be mediated.3
Helena De Preester’s (2008) reading favors a similar interpretation of Husserl:
first comes Körper-perception, then a tacit associative ‘‘pairing’’ of my own body
with the perceived body, and this motivates an ‘‘apperceptive transfer,’’ whereby the
body that I perceive comes to be seen as another Leib, another lived-body, namely

1
See, e.g., Overgaard (2007), Ratcliffe (2007), Gallagher (2008), Zahavi (2008, 2011).
2
Husserl, for instance, has sometimes been situated in the simulationist camp—such parallels have been
drawn by Gallese and others (see Gallese 2003, 2005; Gallese et al. 2004; Petit 1999; Ratcliffe 2006;
Thompson 2001).
3
Schlossberger (2005, p. 140).

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as the body of someone else. Like Schlossberger, De Preester too concludes that the
Husserlian account falls short, because a ‘‘mediating term’’ is postulated between
the self and the other: the other’s perceived body must first be grasped as being
similar to my body if there is to be any empathy.4
I will here challenge Schlossberger’s and De Preester’s interpretations, and argue
that the Husserlian account of body-perception in fact poses a strong challenge to
the mediation accounts. I will demonstrate that, contrary to Schlossberger’s and De
Preester’s respective claims, in Husserl’s analysis, body-perception serves not as the
medium but as the core of empathy. In particular, I will illustrate that, while
discussing the other in terms of an expressive whole, Husserl formulates a view
according to which the experiential life of others can be said to be present to us in an
immediate manner. As I will explain, the immediacy in question does not threaten
the self/other distinction, but rather points to the fact that empathy is fundamentally
a pre-Cartesian experience that does not differentiate between the body and the
mind of the other.
The article is organized as follows. In Sect.1, I will briefly clarify the manner in
which I will be employing the concepts of mediacy and immediacy, and present
some preliminary remarks concerning the problem of empathy vis-à-vis the problem
of mediation. In Sect.2, I will distinguish a variety of expressive unities and
examine the relationship between the expression and the expressed. In Sect.3, I will
introduce the other person as an expressive whole, distinguish between ‘‘expressive
others’’ and ‘‘psycho-physical others,’’ and argue that experiencing the latter already
presupposes, but does not necessarily follow from, experiencing the former.

2 Preliminary considerations on mediacy and immediacy

According to the standard dictionary definition, a medium is something that

establishes an indirect relation: it occupies a middle position between X and Y, thus
enabling a link between them that wouldn’t otherwise currently exist. The news
media is a good example of this: while reading about event Y in the newspaper, I do
not witness Y directly, but only through a medium, the newspaper, which (unlike
event Y) is present in front of me here and now. For my purposes here, the example
of reading a newspaper is particularly illuminating, both because Husserl himself
employs this example when dealing with the topic of expressivity, and because it
enables one to challenge the metaphor, ‘‘mind-reading,’’ popular in the ongoing
social cognition debate. I will hence use reading as a contrastive example
throughout this article.
Given the ambiguity of the term, ‘‘mediation,’’ some explicit restrictions are in
order. I will not be dealing with questions of historicity, culture, language, or the
perceptual medium. That is to say, while arguing for the immediate presence of the
other, I do not wish to dispute that we always perceive others, as well as other
things, in a certain lighting—be it concretely in daylight or twilight, in the ‘‘light’’
of our personal and communal history, in the ‘‘light’’ of our current situation, in the

4
De Preester (2008, pp. 136, 141–142); cf. Costello (2012, p. 38).

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‘‘light’’ of our interests, and so on.5 In this sense, acts of perception are undoubtedly
mediated, and so is empathic perception. My interest, by contrast, lies in the
‘‘noematic side,’’ as it were: what I have in mind are cases in which the alleged
mediating term is something concretely perceived.
This distinguishes my use of the term ‘‘mediation’’ and its derivatives from these
lastly mentioned cases. Surely, my perception of trees, animals, and humans, for
instance, is outlined by the culture in which I have grown up, but it is not that my
concrete perceptual object in these cases is literally either a cultural determination,
linguistic category, or historical process, whereby I would be perceiving trees and
other human beings only in an indirect fashion. Likewise, with respect to the
concrete ‘‘perceptual medium,’’ my gaze traverses ‘‘through’’ air, or ‘‘through’’ the
window glass, for instance, and, in this sense, my perception is ‘‘mediated’’ by the
latter but, insofar as the perceptual medium serves its function well, I do not
perceive the perceptual medium, but the object. In my phenomenological
vocabulary, I would say that—regardless of the role of mediation in these
senses—the objects in question are then given to me in a direct and immediate
manner.
The case is quite different when it comes to reading a newspaper: here an actually
perceivable object guides my conscious intention toward something that I do not
directly perceive at the moment. The question, now, is whether and to what extent it
makes sense to compare this case with empathy. Surely, the other is present here
and now—he or she is not actually located elsewhere, or in the past, like the
reported event. Why not say, therefore, that others are immediately present to us
when we perceive them?
As I see it, the general reluctance to accept the possibility of immediate access to
the other’s mental life is largely owing to two related confusions that ought to be
clarified before proceeding with the main argument. These are the assumptions that
to immediately grasp the subjectivity of the other is to experience the other’s
subjectivity from the other’s point of view, and that the immediacy of the other
therefore implies full transparency of the other. What is at stake here is a conceptual
ambiguity that can be clarified by taking a look at Husserl’s twofold remarks on
empathy and immediacy.
Husserl famously claims that if I could immediately live through someone else’s
subjective experiences they would no longer count as someone else’s experiences
but as my own instead.6 In this sense, we are unable to experience their mental life
immediately, as Husserl repeatedly points out:
If that which pertains to the other’s ownness were to be accessible [to me] in a
direct manner, it would merely be a moment in my ownness, whereby
ultimately the other and I myself would be one and the same.7

5
In this connection, I will accordingly not be discussing the problems of ‘‘mediated immediacy,’’
developed especially by Plessner and others (see Plessner 1982). For an account dealing with one point of
intersection between these topics, see Breyer (2012).
6
Hua XV, 12.
7
Hua I, 139.

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One subject cannot cognize another subject in an originary manner […]; one
subject can [originarily] cognize only himself, his own lived experiences.8
In a peculiar manner, empathy refers to an originary body-spirit-conscious-
ness, but to one that I myself – since I am not the other – cannot originarily
perform.9
Building on such passages, many commentators have argued that Husserl
considers the immediate presence of the other’s mental life to be an impossibility.
However, the situation is not that simple. We should in fact distinguish two
different claims here. It is one thing to (1) deny our immediate experience of
‘‘someone else’s mental life as it is lived through by the other,’’ and it is another
thing to (2) deny our immediate experience of ‘‘someone else’s mental life as
someone else’s mental life.’’ What is at stake in the former claim is the mental life of
the other in its first-personal givenness, whereas the latter claim rather concerns its
second- or third-personal givenness. These claims should be kept apart, and it would
be too hasty to conclude one from the other. Moreover, in the passages just quoted
(and others like them), Husserl should be interpreted as arguing for inaccessibility
exclusively in the first sense, and not in the second sense.
This distinction clarifies the apparent wavering in Husserl’s remarks on empathy
vis-à-vis the question of immediacy. For example, in the second book of Ideas,
Husserl at one point emphasizes that the lived-experiences of others are grasped
‘‘only through empathic mediation’’10 whereas, in an appendix to the same section,
he states that, instead of mediation, empathy rather amounts to ‘‘an immediate
experience of others’’ (eine unmittelbare Erfahrung vom Anderen): ‘‘we ‘see’ the
other and not only the lived-body of the other; the other is present to us, not merely
in a bodily manner, but also mentally, ‘in person’.’’11 To provide another example,
in the intersubjectivity manuscripts, Husserl writes that ‘‘in empathic presentation,
others are [in one sense] experienced ‘immediately’, although in another sense
mediately.’’12 This vacillation—which, at first sight, appears to be a sheer
contradiction—can be resolved by distinguishing, as just done, between ‘‘someone
else’s mental life as it is lived-through by the other,’’ on the one hand, and
‘‘someone else’s mental life as someone else’s mental life,’’ on the other. The
primary object of empathy lies in the latter, not in the former, and to deny our
immediate access to the former by no means forces us to deny our immediate access
to the latter.
Making this distinction of course doesn’t eliminate the fact that Husserl himself
was not clear enough in this respect, but it clarifies the ambiguity in question: what
is at stake is a conflation of two different claims that can, however, be reconciled.
Even if the other’s mental life cannot, like my own, be immediately accessible to me
in the first person, it can still be immediately present to me in the second or third

8
Hua XIII, 373.
9
Hua IV, 198.
10
Hua IV, 200.
11
Hua IV, 375.
12
Hua XV, 41.

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person. This is what Husserl had in mind when claiming that our experience of
others amounts to an ‘‘accessibility into something which is originarily inacces-
sible.’’13 In the sense that we cannot live the other’s life, it remains ‘‘inaccessible to
direct perception [direkter Wahrnehmung unzugänglich],’’14 and yet we can speak
of ‘‘an immediate awareness of others’’ or ‘‘immediate empathy,’’15 and insist that
empathy ‘‘brings an other ego, other egoic consciousness, and thereby a second
course of life, into immediate validity.’’16
Moreover, this distinction also resolves the related misunderstanding concerning
the other’s transparency. Even if the mental life of others can be immediately
present to us, it by no means follows that the other’s mental life must then also be
thoroughly disclosed to us. On the contrary, as Husserl emphasizes:
For the most part, [mentality] is concealed interiority […], not co-given along
with bodily intentions. There always is an indeterminate horizon of interiority
that is not ‘expressed.’17
The problems of empathy, other minds, and social cognition should not be
understood as endeavors of clarifying how we can reach the other’s subjectivity as it
is lived through by the other in the first-personal mode, but rather as efforts to
clarify how another subjectivity, another first-person perspective, can be appear to
us ‘‘from the outside’’ so to speak, from a second- or third-person perspective.
Accordingly, if it makes sense to speak of the immediate presence of the other, we
ought to be looking in this direction.

3 Expressive transparency and material opacity

Up to now, I have mainly been highlighting what empathy and the alleged
immediate presence of others do not amount to; it is now time to offer a more
positive account. I emphasized above that empathy presupposes body-perception.18
As stated, motivated by this claim, one tends to accept another claim: that our
awareness of the other’s mind is mediated by our perception of the other’s body.
This claim—as well as any endeavor built on it—makes sense only insofar as the
perceived body can be identified with a mindless thing, a res extensa. I will now put
into question this Cartesian assumption concerning the nature of body-perception.
This enables me to argue that, although external perception is a necessary
constituent of empathy, the latter is not a mediated experience in the sense clarified
above.
While dealing with the problem of empathy, Husserl asserts that we can
immediately grasp the other’s body not only as a material thing, but also as an
13
Hua I, 144; Hua XV, 631.
14
Hua XI, 240.
15
Hua XV, 471.
16
Hua XXXIX, 93.
17
Hua XXII, 70.
18
See Hua XIV, 336.

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expression.19 In the Logical Investigations (1900–1901), he distinguishes between

expression (Ausdruck) and indication (Anzeichen). With the latter, Husserl refers to
contingent and inessential relations between objects that are independent of one
another.20 For instance, a screaming fire alarm may indicate fire, visible traces on
the surface of Mars may indicate an ancient location of a river, and a red sock
wrapped around a branch of a tree may indicate a hiking route. In all of these cases,
the indicating sign and what is indicated by it stand external to, and independent
from, one another, so that what the indicator is taken to indicate can change or even
altogether disappear without altering the meaning of the indicator. If I realize, for
instance, that the fire alarm went off because of a malfunction after all, and not
because of fire, the beeping fire alarm is still experienced precisely as a beeping fire
alarm. In this sense, it is an independent whole. By contrast, Husserl uses the term
‘‘expression’’ when referring to relations between non-independent parts of a whole.
For instance, if the words ‘‘fire alarm’’ are considered in isolation from the meaning
they express, they are not actually considered to be words any longer. That is to say,
words and sentences cannot stand on their own; taken apart from their meaning,
they are mere sound patterns or figures on paper, and not words.
While he asserts later on that the other’s body is present not merely as an
indication but as an expression of subjectivity,21 Husserl is accordingly making a
rather radical claim. He is not only suggesting that body-perception comes closer to
sign-perception than to signal-perception, but he is at once challenging what I have
called above the Cartesian assumption. Namely, to suggest that the subjectivity of
the other is expressed in the body is to render the latter a non-independent part of a
whole. Just as words would not be words if considered apart from their meaning,
gestures and countenances would not actually be gestures and countenances, but
meaningless movements, if taken apart from the subjectivity they express.
Before cashing out how the perception of a non-independent part of a whole
serves as an experience of the whole, we should discuss the degrees of transparency
of expressions. Here I will develop the language example a bit further, both in order
to illustrate my case, and in order to pick up differences between empathy and
language-perception (and hence also the idea of empathy as ‘‘mind-reading’’). The
question concerns the sense in which sensuously perceivable expressions—words
and sentences—are present to me when I am listening to a speech or reading a
newspaper. Along with Husserl, one can distinguish three different attitudes:

19
Hua XV, 641.
20
Hua XIX/1, 32ff.
21
Husserl initially introduces the concept of expression exclusively in connection to verbal language, but
he later on extends it to also cover bodily gestures (see Bernet 1988; Zahavi 2007; Heinämaa 2010). At
least from 1913 onwards, Husserl thinks that considering a body as an indication of another subjectivity
already presupposes grasping the body as an expression of the other—this is already clear at least in the
supplementary volume to the Logical Investigations, where Husserl clearly associates embodiment with
expressivity, formulating his ideas in ways that anticipate Merleau-Ponty’s later reflections: ‘‘[I]n a
peculiar manner, bodiliness generally speaking is ‘expression’’’ (Hua XXII, 69) and, so, when ‘‘I see
another human being, I ‘understand’ his countenances in a certain manner, as the ‘expression’ of anger,
etc. In his countenances I ‘look at’ the anger’’ (Hua XXII, 188; my emphasis).

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1. First of all, I can focus on the expression in its materiality, thus considering
words in terms of ‘‘sound-patterns’’ or ‘‘dark figures against a light
background.’’22 As stated, in this case, I am no longer considering the words
as words: ‘‘a word ceases to be a word when our interest stops at its sensory
contour.’’23 Although the expressive signs can in principle always be
thematized in this manner,24 their materiality only reveals itself when one’s
reading or listening is somehow interrupted. In such cases, the expression is
fully opaque: the expressed meaning is not present to me at all and, in this
sense, the expression is not actually considered to be an expression.
2. Secondly, I can grasp an expression as a meaningful sign, as an object ensouled by
meaning—thus perceiving words as words and texts as texts. In this attitude, the
expression is present in my perceptual field: I grasp it as meaningful, but I am not
absorbed by or immersed in the expressed meaning. This naturally happens when
we do not properly sensuously hear or see the expression (like when looking at a
time table at the train station from too great a distance), or when the system of
expressions is unfamiliar to us (like when listening to people speaking in a language
unknown to us). Here, expressions are present as expressions, and are not altogether
opaque and, yet, they are not transparent either: we grasp the expression as
meaningful, while nevertheless failing to properly grasp the meaning.
3. Thirdly, when the circumstances are optimal and we are immersed in what is
expressed in the expression, we might altogether ‘‘lose sight’’ of the materiality of
the expression. The ‘‘disappearance’’ of the latter refers not only to the material pen
marks or strings of sounds of the expression, but also to its meaningful symbols,
which is another way of saying that our intentional object lies exclusively in what is
expressed, in the reported or narrated events, in the characters described ‘‘in’’ the
text: we become horrified or excited by a story only insofar as we, in a way, neglect
the fact that it is just a story that we read here and now. To be sure, a literary critic, for
example, will have to oscillate between the second and the third attitudes—i.e., she
must let herself be absorbed by the narrative, on the one hand, and take a
contemplative stance on how the expression unfolds as expression, on the other. Yet,
the fact remains that she must precisely vacillate between these: insofar as she is
absorbed or immersed in what she reads (which she also has to do), the expression
remains materially transparent to her, and she is not in the attitude of a literary critic.

That is to say, when expressions are grasped as existing here and now, I am no
longer immersed in them; and, vice versa, while I am immersed, the material
expressions are ‘‘present to me neither as existing nor as not existing.’’25 Merleau-
Ponty phrases this nicely:
The wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion: my
eyes follow the lines on the paper, and from the moment I am caught up in

22
Hua IV, 236.
23
Hua XIX/1, 41–42.
24
See Hua IV, 239.
25
Cf. Hua III/1, Sect. 111.

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their meaning, I lose sight of them. The paper, the letters on it, my eyes and
body are there only as the minimum setting of some invisible operation.
Expression fades out before what is expressed, and this is why its mediating
rôle may pass unnoticed.26
Further distinctions should of course be made here in order to offer a more
comprehensive account of linguistic expressivity—there are obvious differences
between spoken and written language, between different kinds of literary works, and
so on27—but this is not my task here. However, the last sentence of the preceding
quotation necessitates highlighting some crucial differences between language-
perception and empathy. Merleau-Ponty here suggests that, in the case of language,
the expression has a ‘‘mediating role’’ that only passes unnoticed while we are
immersed in what we read. Now, insofar as the role of body-perception in the
phenomenological account of empathy is similar to the role of sign-perception in
reading, the phenomenological account does not seem to differ fundamentally from
the other available theories of social cognition—as argued earlier, a proponent of
such theories could grant that it might look as if the other was given to us without
mediation but, upon closer scrutiny, this turns out not to be the case.
Without going into this complex discussion in great detail, let me briefly draw out
one obvious difference between language-perception and empathy that enables me
to further my argument concerning the immediate nature of empathy. When reading
about someone’s enjoyment, for example, the expressed state of joy is not, or at
least might not be, experienced as actually occurring here and now. I can grasp the
expressed state of joy over and over again by rereading the text in question; as
written down, it is always ideally available. The expressed state of joy is neither
bound to the location of the book that I am currently facing—it is not that I discover
the state of joy in front of me when reading about it—nor is the expressed joy
necessarily experienced as being located elsewhere (consider, e.g., the case of
fiction). Regardless of the precise ‘location’ of such joy, however, the crucial thing
is that the joy is not located here and now. By contrast, when perceiving someone
smiling in front of me, I grasp a joy that is actually experienced here and now: the
expressed state is something actual and singular, something exhaustively present at
the moment and not repeatable later on. Therefore, regardless of whether it makes
sense to ascribe a ‘‘mediating role’’ to linguistic expressions, this way of speaking
might not be suitable in the case of empathy, where the relationship between
expression and what is expressed is more intimate. In Husserl’s words, ‘‘in symbolic
presentation, the meaning regard is pointed away from the symbol’’28—i.e., ‘‘the
26
Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 466).
27
Such characterizations would also enable a possibly rewarding comparison between empathy and art-
perception. Instead of engaging with this broad topic in this connection, I will present a quotation from
Merleau-Ponty that motivates the comparison: ‘‘I would be at great pains to say where the painting is I am
looking at. For I do not look at it as I look at things; I do not fix its place. My gaze wanders in it as in the
halos of being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, rather than ‘I see
it’‘‘(Merleau-Ponty 1964, 164).
28
Again, this is another feature that motivates comparing empathy with art-perception, since Husserl
goes on to say that (as in empathy) ‘‘in pictorial presentation, [the meaning regard] is pointed toward the
image’’ (Hua XXII, 34).

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[linguistic] expression seems to direct interest away from itself towards its
sense’’29—whereas the expressed joy of the other is discovered here and now.
In the present context, going into this comparison in greater detail would only
needlessly complicate the picture that I am presenting. For my purposes, it suffices
to say that, while grasping expressions, we always more or less bypass, overlook, or
‘‘neglect’’ the expression in favor of what is expressed ‘‘in’’ it:
It is a question everywhere of a fundamental mode of apperception, a
particular experiential attitude, in which what appears (is pregiven) to the
senses does not become sense datum, perception, experience, but helps to
constitute, in its ‘psychic fluidum’, in the very unity of the different kind of
apprehension, an objectivity of a proper sort.30

4 The Cartesian other and beyond: The psycho-physical

and the expressive

The distinction between degrees of transparency in the perception of linguistic signs

can now be applied to empathy. Namely, we can also distinguish three attitudes vis-
à-vis perceiving the other’s body.

1. To be sure, we can thematize the other’s perceived body as a physical thing, as

a physiological entity. This attitude is what surgeons, for example, must adopt
while performing an operation on their anesthetized patients. In this attitude, the
perceived body is not considered in its expressive function, as a lived-body, but
as an opaque material entity.
2. We can also thematize the other’s body as a physical entity with psychological
properties: namely, as a sensing, living thing. As in the case of language, this is
something we do when looking at others from afar: they might stand out as
sensing and feeling beings, and yet we might not have the slightest idea of what
they are sensing or feeling. This attitude somewhat resembles that of a biologist
marveling at an unknown life form: the body stands out as expressive, and yet—
like children who cannot yet read properly—we are stuck with the expressions
without knowing what exactly they express.
3. Neither of the above-mentioned attitudes captures that which we have when
immersed in social interaction with others. In everyday cases, Husserl argues,
our experience does not normally ‘‘stop at the body, its dart is not aimed at
it.’’31 To be sure, like the literary critic in the language example, we often
oscillate between the second and third attitudes when striving to understand
others: at one moment, we are immersed in interaction, while at another, the

29
Hua XIX/1, 42.
30
Hua IV, 238.
31
Hua IV, 240.

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172 J. Taipale

other’s gestures, tone of voice, or choice of words either fleetingly attract our
attention as such, or give rise to puzzlement about their intentions and mental
states, thus luring our regard increasingly towards their bodily behavior as such.
But—again—this is a matter of oscillation. When we are immersed in what is
expressed in the other’s bodily movements, we do not thematize the other’s
body as an expressive vehicle—and, vice versa, when we do thematize it as
such, we are no longer immersed in interaction. It would hardly be convincing
to claim that our normal everyday interaction with other people is primarily
built on the second attitude—as if others were most of the time to be presented
to us like strange life forms or unfamiliar languages that we first need to
decipher. Rather, we seize upon the expressive body as such only when our
interaction is somehow disturbed or interrupted but, when things go smoothly,
the other’s body is not thematic per se.

In dealing with this issue, Husserl is quick to note that, although in empathy we
do not primarily seize upon the other’s body, this does not mean that we primarily
seize upon a disembodied mind. Rather than being directed away from the body, we
are directed at the other human being as a whole32:
In a certain sense, I am attending the facial expression, yet this is neither in the
sense of having it as my thematic object, nor in the sense of departing from it
[into the purely mental], but I rather grasp the mental ‘in’ the facial
expressions and in their peculiar features.33
Unlike in the case of immersed reading, wherein one is led beyond the signs—so
that the existence or the non-existence of the signs actually makes no difference34—
in empathy, by contrast, our focus lies on the bodily subject, insofar as the other
stands there ‘‘in person’’ as a whole. Here, we are not led beyond what is perceived
here and now, but caught up in it. This is something that makes ‘‘mindreading’’ a
problematic metaphor for our experience of other people: on the one hand, it is not
primarily the mind that we are targeting and, on the other hand, despite undeniable
similarities, there are also remarkable differences between experiences of empathy
and experiences of reading.
Moreover, Husserl not only denies that other minds are discovered beyond
perceived bodies, but he also claims that the other’s mind and the other’s body are
originally not even differentiated from one another. Instead of assuming the
Cartesian point of departure and trying to explain how we experience a res cogitans
by perceiving a res extensa, Husserl questions the experiential originality of the
psycho-physical division. According to him, we can consider others as psycho-
physical entities—as ‘‘Cartesian others,’’ we might also say—only insofar as we
already experience them in another way:

32
Hua IV, 240.
33
Hua XXII, 190; cf. Hua IV, 244.
34
See Hua XIX/1, 42.

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Beyond Cartesianism: Body-perception and the immediacy of… 173

In empathy I am directed to the other ego and ego-life and not to psycho-
physical reality, which is a double reality with physical reality as the founding
layer.35
When we converse with other people, for instance […], we do not find there
two things, entwined with one another in an external way; lived-bodies and
persons. We find unitary human being.36
By changing our attitude, and only by changing our attitude, we can
experience the other human being as a psycho-physical totality, thereby
already taking a stance in respect to causality between body and mind – but
this is not original, and it already presupposes that the other is perceived as an
other, which is to say that the other is already introduced as the unity of
expression and expressed.37
In the Husserlian picture, empathy is fundamentally a pre-Cartesian experience that
does not distinguish between mind and body, intention and gesture, emotion and
expression; it is only subsequently that the other may be ‘‘split’’ into a psycho-
physical entity.
Any theory that begins with the Cartesian assumption, thus introducing our
experience of others as an experience of psychophysical entities, is phenomeno-
logically wrong-headed, since it already presupposes what it seeks to explain.
Husserl makes this point clearly in the following passage from Ideas II:
It must be noticed, however, that the expressive unity [Ausdruckseinheit] is a
presupposition for the constitution of the founded reality as one which
encloses levels [i.e., bodiliness, mindedness], but that it is not already in itself
this reality. We could formulate it in this way: it is only by means of
expression that the person of the other is there at all for the experiencing
subject.38
Merleau-Ponty, too, emphasizes this:
Every theory of ‘projection’, be it empiricist or intellectualist, presupposes
what it tries to explain, since we could not project our feelings into the visible
behavior of an animal if something in this behavior itself did not suggest the
inference to us. But it is not the resemblance of our own gestures to the
gestures of other persons which can give to these latter their expressive value:
a child understands the joyful meaning of a smile long before having seen his
own smile, that of menacing or melancholy mimicry which he has never
executed and to which his own experience therefore can furnish no content.39
What Husserl and Merleau-Ponty both emphasize is that the other must be present
as an expressive whole before being present as a psycho-physical whole. Instead of

35
Hua IV, 347.
36
Hua IV, 234.
37
Hua IV, 246–7; cf. 245.
38
Hua IV, 245.
39
Merleau-Ponty (1963, p. 156).

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primarily perceiving an expression and only secondarily grasping what is expressed

in it (thus proceeding from the above-mentioned second attitude to the third
attitude), our experience of others unfolds in the contrary order. Other people do not
originally stand out in our experiences as divided into an expressive body, on the
one hand, and expressed subjectivity, on the other; this way of considering others
rather presupposes a peculiar analytic attitude in which the originally given
expressive unity is dissected into two components. And what is easily neglected
here is that these components have their meaning only in relation to the whole of
which they are parts: we can grasp the expression as expression, and be motivated in
pondering what is expressed in it, only if we already experience the unity of
expression and expressed.
In this sense, the constitution of ‘‘Cartesian others’’ (i.e., others as psycho-
physical entities) already presupposes a pre-Cartesian experience of others: it is only
subsequently that we can pull apart expressed subjectivity, on the one hand, and
expressive body, on the other—and we could even have a successful social life
without ever making this Cartesian division.
As I hope to have shown by now, the assumption that our experience of others
sets off with a perception of the other’s body as a material thing is not only
phenomenologically wrong-headed, it not only presupposes what it seeks to explain,
but it also sits rather poorly with the Husserlian account of bodily expressivity. On
this account, unlike those founded on the above-mentioned Cartesian assumption,
the perceived body is not understood as an independent whole, but as a non-
independent part of a whole. However, here one might still insist on the following
objection: granted that the other’s body is posited as a non-independent part of a
whole, and granted that we can immediately perceive that, it is not clear whether we
can conclude from this that the other parts of the whole are immediately present. Is
it not so, rather, that we are only justified in claiming that this part of the whole,
namely the body, is immediately present to us?
Husserl deals with this objection by distinguishing the expressive other from the
psycho-physical other and introducing the concept of ‘‘fusion.’’ Instead of perceiving
two distinct objectivities comprised in a complex objectivity, Husserl asks:
Is not rather that upon which I am focused a unity that is fused together
throughout and not something that just stands there next to [neben] the
physical? Surely, what is at stake is not a connection in which the parts are
‘outside one another’ [aussen einander], a connection in which each part could
also exist for itself in abstraction from the form which binds them.40
The words highlighted by Husserl in this brief quote from Ideas II make sense in
light of his Logical Investigations.41 Discussing wholes and parts in the third
Investigation, Husserl defines non-independent parts as parts where ‘‘the content is
by its essence bound to other contents; it cannot be, if the other contents are not
there together with it.’’42 This is another way of saying that non-independent parts
40
Hua IV, 237; cf. Hua IV, 340; Hua XIV, 491.
41
See Hua XIX/1, 282 and 284ff.
42
Hua XIX/1, 239.

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Beyond Cartesianism: Body-perception and the immediacy of… 175

are ‘‘parts that only exist as parts, that cannot be thought of as existing by
themselves.’’43 To repeat the examples Husserl himself gives, I can imagine the
head of a horse without imagining the rest of the horse, but I cannot imagine a color
without also imagining extension. In this connection Husserl introduces the concept
of ‘‘fusion’’ (Verschmelzung) and defines it as ‘‘relative dependency of non-
independent moments.’’ Importantly, color-perception and extension-perception (for
instance) are essentially ‘‘fused’’ together, not only in the sense that one is
unthinkable without the other, but also in the sense that to think of one at once also
amounts to thinking of the other.44
When Husserl then later on claims that the expressive body and the expressed
subjectivity are not only next to one another, but fused together, he is suggesting
that to experience the expressive body is already to experience the expressed. As
stated earlier, we cannot think of words without considering them as words that
stand in for something, and Husserl suggests that the situation is rather similar when
it comes to body-perception: we cannot perceive gestures as such without at once
considering them as embodying intentions. To perceive gestures as such is already
to perceive the intentions of others. No additional mental operations are needed for
this: ‘‘Where it makes nonsense to speak of isolation, the problem of overcoming
such isolation is likewise nonsensical.’’45 The perceived body movements are, from
the start, ‘‘soaked with’’46 meaning:
The lived-body is filled with soul through and through. […] Each movement of
the body is full of soul, the coming and going, the standing and sitting, the
walking and dancing, etc. Likewise, so is every human performance, every
human production.47
The expressive other is, in other words, a ‘‘thoroughly intuitive unity’’48 that can be
divided into expression and expressed only ‘‘after the fact.’’49 What we primarily
and fundamentally experience in empathy is not a twofold complex comprised of
body and mind, a psycho-physical totality,50 or ‘‘Cartesian other,’’ as I have called it
here; in this sense, empathy is fundamentally a pre-Cartesian experience.

43
Hua XIX/1, 244.
44
Husserl clarifies: ‘‘This fusion is not a matter of fading into one another, neither in the sense of
continuity nor in the sense of removing all separateness; but it is nonetheless a sort of peculiarly intimate
mutual interconnection which necessarily and with one stroke sets the whole complex of interpenetrating
moments into relief, as soon as even one single discontinuous moment has provided the right conditions’’
(Hua XIX/1, 251).
45
Hua XIX/1, 185–186.
46
Zahavi (2007, p. 32).
47
Hua IV, 240.
48
Hua IV, 236.
49
Hua IV, 244.
50
Hua IV, 246.

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5 Conclusion

Assuming that the analyses presented here are on the right track, there are some
major consequences. First, if the other person is not first and foremost constituted as
a unity of two distinct elements, whereby we would first have to find a way to reach
one through the other—from the physical to the psychological—the phenomeno-
logical account ought to be recognized as operating on a level of description that is
already taken for granted in the standard accounts of the social cognition debate.
Second, this reading also partly undermines the dominant interpretation of Husserl,
exemplified by Schlossberger and De Preester among others. If it is true, namely,
that we primarily and fundamentally perceive the other as an expressive whole (not
yet divided into a body, on the one hand, and a mind, on the other), it seems clear
that what is primarily and fundamentally ‘‘paired’’ in the Husserlian Paarung cannot
be the physical or psychophysical body, but the expressive whole instead. I agree
with De Preester that what we need is a view where primacy is given not to a
perception of a body per se, but to a perception of meaningful behavior instead, but
I disagree with her assessment that the latter view is not found in Husserl.51
Likewise, I disagree with Schlossberger, who claims that, in Husserl, ‘‘the
constitution of the psychophysical body precedes the constitution of the other,’’ and
I hope to have provided sufficient textual and philosophical backing for my
criticism. As I see it, in light of Husserl’s theory of expressivity, it is hopelessly
misleading to claim that according to him we begin with body-perception, which
transforms into other-perception by way of special operations.
There is no denying that Husserl spends a lot of time discussing ‘‘analogizing
apperception’’ and ‘‘sense transfer,’’ and here I have not said much about these
concepts.52 According to the picture presented here, the perception of an expressive
whole precedes analogical apperception and sense transfer, and functions as the
latter’s motivational basis. After all, instead of assuming that our bodily outlook
somehow outlines what kind of bodies stand out in our perceptual field in the first
place, I find it more convincing to think, on the contrary, that the similarity relation
between self and other can be established only when the other already stands out in
our perceptual environment—and, as I have argued here, it is as an expressive whole
that the other stands out from inanimate objects in the first place.
Insofar as body-perception is necessarily involved in all forms and accounts of
empathy, explicitly or implicitly, a lot depends, obviously, on how one interprets the
former, and hence the topic is of central relevance. What I hope to have shown here,
all in all, is that one cannot infer that empathy is mediated by external perception
from the fact that external perception is required for empathy. The other is not a res
cogitans, to be discovered by perceiving the res extensa but, rather, more originally
presents itself as an expressive unity and, in this initial, pre-Cartesian phase, the
mind/body division does not make any sense. This view coincides with the intuition
that perceiving others is not normally difficult for us. In our everyday experience,

51
For places where Husserl himself says this rather explicitly, see Hua XIV, 283; Hua XV, 271.
52
I have examined these notions in Taipale (2012, 2014, 2015).

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Beyond Cartesianism: Body-perception and the immediacy of… 177

we do not normally ponder whether the perceived body has a mind or not, no more
than we ever wonder whether others can see only our body or us as well.

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