Lou Agosta

A substantial amount of research has been devoted to the concept of empathy. However, empathy remains poorly understood, under-theorized, and subject to conflicting and opportunistic uses. Its systematic role in human experience has not been analyzed and interpreted from top to bottom. In my work in philosophy, I attempt to provide such an analysis in the philosophical traditions of hermeneutics, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of mind. I apply my interpretation of empathy to the philosophical issues of intentionality, the emotions, and the checkered transformations of empathy itself. In doing so I aim to rescue empathy from the margins of intelligibility and reveal its central role in our understanding of the emotions, the integrity of our relations with others, and human community (“intersubjectivity”).

My work draws on both the Anglo-American (“analytic”) tradition of ordinary language philosophy and the continental ones of phenomenology and hermeneutics. This work follows the movement of empathy from the periphery of ethics, aesthetics, and theory of mind to a key place in establishing and maintaining the integrity and emotional equilibrium of dynamic interrelations with other individuals. Beginning with the philosophical infrastructure of the hermeneutics of empathy, this proposed work thoroughly explains the complex architecture of empathy, tracing it downward through the levels of authentic human interrelations, empathy with unexpressed emotions, the empathic penetrability of cognitively impenetrable affect, the first-ever intentional analysis of both the empathizer and the “empathasand” in interrelation, and the neurological infrastructure. This work is psychoanalytically informed by the spirit found in Paul Ricoeur’s work Freud and Philosophy. The consequences of empathy are exposed through the argument from analogy, empathy and other minds, altruism, and the formation of the self. Drawing on the multi-method approach of hermeneutics, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and cognitive science, this work demonstrates that empathy forms the foundation for community in ways not clearly seen before.
The invocation of empathy in intertwined, yet distinct, intellectual traditions have obscured it, rendering it nearly inaccessible. After passing through the philosophical undergrowth of empathy and liberating it from the clutches of the canonical theories of mind and simulation, it is evident that we do know quite a lot about it. Empathy is a powerful method and conceptual tool that we use everyday. It is a hybrid category encompassing receptivity to the emotional expressions of the other as well as understanding of the other individual as both possibility and commitment. Our access to empathy is implemented in this work by creating a clearing for the possibility of an empathic inquiry. In a bootstrap operation that is guided by Heidegger’s call for a “special hermeneutic of empathy,” this work achieves a delicate balancing act of unpacking the rich intellectual traditions from which empathy - the phenomenon itself, not the concept - emerged historically. The ontological history is implemented in the spirit of a Foucault-like deconstruction of empathy. It is not the history of different answers to one and the same question, but the history of a complex thicket of overlapping and related problems, constantly changing, whose proposed solutions change with it. The result is an exposure of the deep structure of empathy as a fundamentally human capability for creating possibilities of community and human relations.

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