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Access to the intentionality of empathy shifts from using language (speech acts) to the use of examples of the breakdown of normal constitutive functions as a method such as perceiving physical objects or the human face. In particular, the famous case, presented to John Locke, of an individual, blind from birth, whose sight was restored is considered. The example of acquired face blindness (prosopagnosia) is also engaged. Husserl gives us powerful tools to analyse the pre-linguistic aspects of empathy, but he applied them to empathy only incompletely. He underestimated the richness of the concept of other; misplaced empathy in the superstructure rather than at the foundation of inter-human relations; and, like most others of his time, was distracted by the prevailing public definition of empathy due to Theodor Lipps. The radicalization of the other in Husserl's Fifth Cartesian mediation is traced to the point at which inter-subjectivity explodes the limits of the sphere of ownness and a way out of the impasse is sought in Husserl's Nachlass (posthumous publications). Tracing empathy from the periphery to the centre, from the superstructure to the foundation of inter-subjectivity ("community'), the account of empathic intentionality is characterized by the intending of a communal relationship — community — within which the individual and the other are related vicariously.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230275249_6

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