The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind

7. Feeling Others

7.1 Introduction The discussion so far has centered on the individual. It is now time to rectify this solipsistic trend and turn our focus on our relationship to others. We are social beings and spend much of our existence interacting with other embodied agents, whose presence affects us in various ways, both experientially and physiologically. A lot has already been written in the philosophy and psychology of social cognition about the mechanisms that may enable us to understand others, in the sense of attributing to them specific mental states that explain and predict their behavior. This debate has been dominated until recently by two approaches, known as the “theory theory” (TT) and the “simulation theory” (ST). Roughly, according to TT, understanding others is achieved via a process of inference to the best explanation; mental states such as beliefs and desires are posited as theoretical entities that, to the best of one’s knowledge, explain and predict the other’s behavior. According to ST, understanding others involves simulating their mental states: I put myself in the other’s situation, decide what I would think or feel in that situation, and eventually ascribe that thought or feeling to the other. This characterization is admittedly coarse and does not do justice to the complexity of the debate. For example, various hybrid accounts exist that combine elements of TT and ST; also, both TT and ST come in different versions (for a more detailed overview and references, see, e.g., Goldman and Sripada 2005; Ratcliffe 2007, chap. 1; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, chap. 9). Yet as it has been pointed out (e.g., Zahavi 2011a), TT and ST share an important assumption, namely, that the mental states of others are private and hidden , and therefore understanding others requires “getting at” these hidden 7 Feeling Others 172 Chapter 7 mental states via an intermediate inferential process (such as a theory or a simulation). This is also known as the assumption that understanding others is essentially a matter of mind reading or mentalizing. Philosophers influenced by phenomenology, as well as explicitly enactive accounts of social cognition, have recently called this assumption into question. They have proposed that mentalizing is not the ordinary way in which we understand others, and that to reduce understanding others to mentalizing construes intersubjectivity too narrowly (e.g., Gallagher 2001, 2005; Ratcliffe 2007; De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007; Thompson 2001, 2007; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008; Zahavi 2008; Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher 2010). They draw attention in particular to what the developmental psychologist Colwyn Trevarthen (1979) originally dubbed primary intersubjectivity, namely, a set of nonconceptual skills present very early in development, or even at birth—such as imitation, a capacity to distinguish between inanimate objects and people, and a responsiveness to others’ facial expressions (see also Hobson 2002; Reddy 2008). These skills, it has been proposed, already manifest, or better embody or constitute, a pragmatic form of understanding others: “The understanding of the other person is primarily neither theoretical nor based on an internal simulation, but is a form of embodied practice” (Gallagher 2001, 85). Similarly, De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) see these skills as constituting a kind of understanding others that they call participatory sense making, which is enacted in the concrete interaction between two or more autonomous agents coupled via bodily reciprocity and coordination. The discussion of this chapter builds on these insights, developing them further to bring into relief and examine in more detail the affective dimension of intersubjectivity, construed as an embodied or jointly enacted practice . As Thompson (2001, 1) points out, “The concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy,” and importantly empathy is not only a cognitive capacity of “perspective taking” but also an affective phenomenon that involves emotional and feeling responses to the other (see also, e.g., Preston and de Waal 2002; Stueber 2008; Walter 2012). This idea converges with the phenomenological approach to empathy, which emphasizes the experiential character of “understanding others” versus a detached, merely “intellectual” form of understanding (more later). More specifically, in the first half of this chapter, I focus on the various ways in which we experience others when we face them. I distinguish Feeling Others 173 phenomena of what I call basic empathy from impressions, feeling close, feeling intimate, and sympathy. In the second half of the chapter, I turn to empirical evidence of how our bodies respond to the bodily...