Empathy, Sympathy, and Compassion

Forthcoming in:
Thomas Szanto / Hilge Landweer (eds.),
Thiemo Breyer Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of
Emotions. London/New York 2019.

Introduction

In everyday language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “people often confuse the
words empathy and sympathy.” As is clarified promptly, “empathy means ‘the ability to
understand and share the feelings of another’ (as in both authors have the skill to make you feel
empathy with their heroines), whereas sympathy means ‘feelings of pity and sorrow for
someone else’s misfortune’ (as in they had great sympathy for the flood victims).” In the case
of “compassion”, the usage is presented as rather straightforward. Compassion is understood
as “sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others: the victims should
be treated with compassion.” The formulation “should be treated” already implies an other-
directed awareness that is aimed at a helping behaviour––even if no action proper is taken,
compassion demands one to adopt a certain respectful attitude toward the suffering person.
These definitions demonstrate that the three terms pick out different aspects of
intersubjective experience. Whereas empathy and sympathy seem to refer mainly to the
experience of the empathiser, compassion seems to be more geared towards the target. Having
empathy, according to the linguistic approach, means being able to cognitively make sense of
another subject’s psychological life, or to share an affective state with them. However, these
seem like entirely different capacities with different degrees of interpersonal involvement.
Having sympathy, on the other hand, moves the focus of attention towards the target, for whom
we feel pity, i.e. it is not so much a matter of what we understand or what we feel; rather, it is
more about being concerned for the other. Having compassion goes even further in the direction
of the other, since we not only witness somebody’s suffering and feel concerned, but also wish
to do something about it.
Interestingly, to conclude this introductory glimpse at the OED, unlike “empathy” and
“compassion”, which are approximated swiftly with singular definitions, the lexeme
“sympathy” displays many facets. Its meanings range from having sympathies as an “agreement
with or approval of an opinion or aim”, to one’s sympathies as a “formal expression of pity or
sorrow for someone else’s misfortune”, to common feeling as a special kind of “understanding

1
between people”, and to being in sympathy as “relating harmoniously to something else”. The
latter two connotations are especially revealing because they point to the deep semantic and
philosophical history of the concept, namely to the anthropologically founded fellow-feeling,
postulated by thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith in the 18th century, and further to
the notion of a cosmological harmony in ancient natural philosophy. In the following, I will
briefly sketch the historical roots of each key concept and then describe how they have been
elaborated in the phenomenological tradition.

Empathy

Empathy is clearly the youngest of our three concepts (for a philosophical history, cf. Pinotti
2011). Even though the word, “empathy,” is rooted in ancient Greek, was not really used as
term in philosophy at that time. Composed of the prefix em- (which can have the spatial
meaning “(with)in”, the temporal meaning “during”, and the figurative meaning “(together)
with” and the root path- (as in the noun pathos, meaning “suffering” or “passion”), empathy
denotes a pathos that is experienced with another. (Side note: in modern Greek, empatheia has
curiously taken a very different meaning, namely spite.)
To better understand what such an intersubjective pathos might mean, it is helpful to
elucidate the different meanings of “pathos” in Greek. As Bernhard Waldenfels (2006, 3)
explains, pathos means first of all an experience (in the sense of the German Widerfahrnis),
something that happens to us––not without our doing, but going beyond it. Secondly, pathos
means something adversarial, which is connected with suffering or enduring, but which also
allows for a certain kind of learning through it (pathei mathos). Thirdly, pathos is a passion
that pulls us out of the ordinary and makes us transcend what we are commonly immersed in.
These semantic dimensions are interpreted by Waldenfels in such a way that they bring out the
aspect of being challenged by experience and afforded certain options to react that is key to his
responsive phenomenology (cf., e.g., Waldenfels 1994). Pathos, in this sense, is something that
always precedes my subjective intentions and that calls for my response. Empathy would then
be something that I experience as a response to another, whose appearance, expressions, and
actions catch my attention or impose themselves upon me. It is something that has a unique
intersubjective quality insofar as the other is the source and reference point of my experience,
but also in a second sense that it can be a shared suffering the other and I endure together, and
in a third sense, that the other provokes a passionate reaction in me.

2
 After this short interpretation of the important element of pathos, which is of course also
relevant for the second key concept, “sympathy,” let us return to the history of the notion of
“empathy.” As mentioned before, it is of recent origin: for academic purposes, it was introduced
as a technical term only at the beginning of the 20th century. Edward Titchener (1909) used it
as a translation of the German Einfühlung (literally meaning “feeling into”), which had been
common in aesthetics (Vischer 1872) and hermeneutics (Dilthey 1910). In this tradition,
empathy was not conceived as an intersubjective process unfolding in the concrete interaction
between persons, but as a mode of relating to artefacts or expressive displays––e.g. inspecting
a work of art or interpreting a historical source in order to grasp their meaning. In psychology,
especially in the work of Theodor Lipps (1907), empathy was determined as the primary source
of understanding other minds, which functions on the basis of motorically co-performing a
movement of expression observed in another. This simultaneous imitation leads to a
recollection of one’s own prior emotions that are associated with the perceived expression. The
emotion thus experienced is then attributed projectively to the other as their supposed internal
state. This mechanism is, however, not restricted to the observation of other people, but extends
to objects, e.g. geometrical figures with anthropomorphic qualities.
In early phenomenology, contemporary theories of empathy were much discussed and
criticised. Being generally interested in the “experience of the minded life of others” (Zahavi
and Overgaard 2011, 5) – the most general definition of empathy as intersubjective awareness–
phenomenologists tried to work out the fundamental structures of empathy and to differentiate
various forms of alterity. As the mind expresses itself in many ways, the experience of empathy
also takes many forms– from the bodily, to the affective-emotional, to the cognitive dimension.
In the following, I briefly sketch some ideas by classic thinkers in the phenomenological
tradition (for an overview, cf. also Jardine and Szanto 2017), to then point to some ongoing
debates about social cognition and the interventions made by current phenomenological
authors.
Edmund Husserl (1990) and his pupil Edith Stein (1989) agree with Lipps’s account by
emphasizing that empathy is an experience sui generis which allows direct access to another
person’s subjectivity. However, they disagree that this access is accomplished by perceptive,
mnemonic, and projective sub-processes taken together. They rather believe that empathy is a
sui generis mode of intentional directedness. Given as the noematic correlate of the empathic
noesis, the other appears as a minded being with all kinds of expressive qualities. As an
experience and understanding of the other mind (Fremderfahrung, Fremdverstehen), empathy
consists in expression-perception (Ausdruckswahrnehmung). When seeing another person’s

3
bodily display of anger or sadness, for instance, one does not need to first remember how one
has experienced those emotions, but grasps their meaning in the expression itself. The
phenomenological criticism rests on the observation that one’s own feeling in the face of
another’s expression is not usually the same feeling the other has. For example, one perceives
the other as angry, but this does not in itself make one angry, since that would amount to
emotional contagion, which is not considered by Husserl and Stein as a form of empathy.
Furthermore, one needs to understand the other’s emotion at least in type before one can recall
from memory how it felt like for oneself to have such an emotion. This goes against Lipps’s
claim that the recourse to one’s own previous emotional experiences allows the access to the
other’s emotions in the first place. What is generally opposed by phenomenologists at this point
is the dualism of mind and body, which underlies not only much of traditional Western ontology
and epistemology, but also Lipps’s psychological approach. According to Max Scheler (1923),
as will be discussed below under the rubric of sympathy, bodily expressions are the locus where
understanding of other minds in the form of direct social perception finds its anchor.
Expressions are neutral to the differentiation between physical outer appearance and
psychological inner experience. In them the emotions find their proper articulation and display.
Not only in the perception of expressions does the body play a central role for a
phenomenological understanding of empathy, but also in interbodily encounter. According to
the approach taken by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, empathy is possible on the basis of a
transcendental structure of embodied subjectivity, namely the double-aspectivity of body-as-
subject (Leib, to use the original German term) and body-as-object (Körper). This ambivalence
that is inherent in bodily self-experience also allows for an immediate grasp of another’s body,
which operates “neither [by] comparison, nor analogy, nor projection or ‘introjection’”
(Merleau-Ponty 1964, 168). Rather, the structure of “compresence” of both aspects within
oneself and of the other and the self in intersubjective space grants an understanding of the
other as co-constituting what empathy can then refer to in various ways. As Merleau-Ponty
explains: “The reason why I have evidence of the other man’s being-there when I shake his
hand is that his hand is substituted for my left hand, and my body annexes the body of another
person in that ‘sort of reflection’ it is paradoxically the seat of. My two hands ‘coexist’ or are
‘compresent’ because they are one single body’s hands. The other person appears through an
extension of that compresence; he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeality” (ibid.).
In contemporary phenomenology, the concept of empathy is also widely discussed and
used in the context of embodied (Gallagher 2005) and social cognition research (Zahavi 2014),
psychopathology (Henriksen 2018), social ontology and collective intentionality (Salice and

4
Taipale 2015; Szanto 2015; Szanto and Moran 2015; Szanto and Krueger 2019), virtuality
(Fuchs 2014), and aesthetics (Hagener and Vendrell Ferran 2017), as well as in interdisciplinary
cooperation with psychology and anthropology (Breyer 2015, 2018).
Concerning a broader theory of intersubjective experience, phenomenological
approaches intervene in mainstream definitions of empathy in elucidating ways as can be
exemplified by the confrontation with theory theory and simulation theory approaches to social
cognition. Theory theory claims that our understanding of other minds is based on knowledge
that has the form of a theory and on computational mechanisms that run as algorithms.
Nativistic varieties postulate evolutionarily developed modules in the brain, which are selected
for processing socially relevant information (Baron-Cohen 1995; Carruthers 1996). Acquisitive
theories, on the other hand, propose that the theory of mind according to which individuals
make sense of other’s actions and psychological states results from continuous learning and
experimentation (Gopnik 1993; Wellman et al. 2001). Understanding the other empathically,
then, means that either neural algorithms run subconsciously and produce an attributable result,
or that folk psychological knowledge and general intuitive rules are consciously applied to a
situation. Simulation theory, on the other hand, takes empathy to be a simulation process that
happens in one’s mind when observing another person. Neuroscientific approaches commonly
refer to the activity of mirror neurons, which are supposed to enable empathy. Research has
revealed that similar activity patterns in this part of the brain occur when a subject performs a
specific movement and when it observes another subject do the same (Gallese and Goldman
1998; Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008). This subpersonal mimetic mechanism is believed to be
the root of empathy. Other accounts understand simulation as the conscious mental activity of
imaginative perspective-taking. Empathy, according to this view, is the process by which
somebody tries to put herself in the position of somebody else to figure out what they are
experiencing (Goldman 2006; Heal 1998).
Phenomenological accounts criticise these approaches for taking the dualism of self and
other for granted and for viewing empathy as a process that goes on in the detached observer’s
mind alone, thereby radicalising the third-person-perspective. Contrary to this, they insist on
the interactional negotiation (Gallagher 2001) of the contents of the empathic relation and the
“participatory sense-making” (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007) in an empathiser-target-situation,
as well as the intertwinement of self and other in embodied intersubjectivity. The constitutive
role of the body for empathy can be emphasised in two ways (see above). Firstly, the body is
regarded as the primary medium of our contact with the world and with others; therefore,
empathy is taken to unfold as an interactive process in the sphere of intercorporeality (Fuchs

5
2013; Tanaka 2015). Secondly, the body also displays all kinds of expressions (mimic and
gestural) which provide information about the experience of the expressing subject. Empathic
understanding, then, consists primarily in the perceptual grasp of another’s bodily expression
(Gallagher 2008), an idea taken from early phenomenology and developed further under the
rubric of “direct social perception” (Zahavi 2011).

Sympathy

Sympathy (from Greek sym-, meaning “(together) with”, and again path-) can literally mean the
same as empathy, namely experiencing a pathos with another (for philosophical differentiations
cf. Chismar 1988 and Darwall 1998). If there is a semantic difference, it is perhaps that the
prefix sym- accentuates the togetherness even stronger than the prefix em-. The concept of
sympathy has been widely used in the philosophical tradition since antiquity in various
domains, from natural philosophy and cosmology to moral philosophy and ethics. In ancient
philosophy, sympathy served as an explanatory concept for the most diverse phenomena, which
are based on the observation that the same thing happens to two entities in an overarching whole
without any visible direct influence. What this connection in each case is based on was
interpreted differently, for example physically by Aristotle, atomistic by Epicurus,
cosmologically by the Stoics or by a world-soul as by the Neoplatonists.
In Plato and Aristotle, sympathy is construed as a physiological process, exemplified by
the bodily resonance that is experienced when yawning because somebody else is yawning
(Plato, Critias [1989]) or shuddering when hearing an unpleasant sound (Aristotle, Problems
[2011]). Sympathy in this understanding always has an involuntary or compulsive element.
There is a transfer of energy that is physically mediated and that contagiously overwhelms one.
The Stoics understood sympathy as a principle that permeated and regulated the entire universe.
It was not primarily a process of interpersonal encounter and communication, but a
characteristic of the world. Nevertheless, there were also reflections that led from cosmic
sympathy to interpersonal sympathy as a sense of community, not unlike how the concept is
used in modern times. In particular, the postulate of a feeling of community through rationality
stands out. When their anthropologically founded rationality is perfected to a certain degree, a
person will experience their belonging to a humanity of likewise rational beings, and this is
called sympathy.

6
 Though the word, sympathy, is not originally used for interpersonal affection but
primarily describes the “coaffectibility” (Schliesser 2015, 9) of different entities––physical,
biological, or psychological––it is increasingly applied to social, moral, and socio-political
relations from the 16th century onwards. It then denotes the attraction between people or the
correspondence of their feelings. In the 18 th century, the term sympathy, and especially the
adjective sympathetic, was progressively used in literature in which it meant having a direct
affinity for something or an affection for someone, i.e. a resonance that could stand for
friendship and human love. In philosophy, this meaning then became relevant in moral sense
philosophy in England, which is based on the assumption that morality is rooted in natural
human tendencies, for example virtues stemming from an inherent altruism (e.g. Shaftesbury,
Characteristics [2001]; Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy [2006]). Two prominent
positions developing these ideas shall be briefly mentioned since they elaborate important
motifs that inform the later debates on sympathy and empathy up to the present: David Hume
and Adam Smith.
For Hume (in his Treastise on Human Nature [2007]), sympathy means the social
practice of exchanging feelings and opinions on the basis of a universal principle of human
nature. The mechanism behind it is based on the similarity and contiguity between self and
other. When one sees the expressions of another, one tries to infer their causes and realises a
certain affection or passion. This will then activate an idea of that passion in one’s own mind.
Everybody has a vivid impression of their own feelings and other psychological states. Through
sympathy, the idea of another person’s affections is associated with the impressions of one’s
own affections, so that one can eventually experience the same passion as the other.
For Smith (in his Theory of Moral Sentiments [2002]), the basic process by which
sympathy works is not inference and association, but imaginatively putting oneself into the
other’s position to figure out what it would be like for oneself to be in that situation. This can
result in the matching of one’s own psychological state with that of the other, but there are also
limitations. For instance, it is difficult to imagine what it is like to experience something the
other is going through if one has never made an experience of the same kind. Today, this would
usually be called perspective-taking or simulation (see above).
What Hume and Smith in their different approaches have in mind when they speak of
sympathy, namely sharing or understanding what another experiences and feels, is usually
called empathy today. In phenomenology, it is Max Scheler––in his ground-breaking work
Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (“Nature and Forms of Sympathy”) from 1923––who
elaborates the various forms of intersubjective affectivity most extensively under the label of

7
sympathy (see also Krebs in this volume, and Schloßberger in this volume). Also for his
approach it is true that most people today would subsume some of the phenomena he discusses
in terms of sympathy under the concept of empathy. It should be noted, however, that Scheler
uses the term feeling-after (Nachfühlen) instead of empathy (Einfühlung), because he opposes
basic assumptions of the theories of Einfühlung of his time. The most fundamental critique
concerns the idea that to share emotions and understand other minds, one has to “feel oneself
into” the other. This would imply that what is to be grasped empathically (the psychological
experiences of the other) is not directly accessible and that the attempt to access it amounts to
an active conscious procedure. For Scheler, this is a misconception. He emphasises that feelings
are directly perceivable and understandable in the embodied expressions of a subject.
Moreover, what the other is experiencing is often co-experienced by us involuntarily, as a
passive co-affection, not as an imaginative or otherwise cognitive effort to understand the other.
Among the many ways intersubjective affectivity manifests itself in experience, the following
basic types of sympathy should be distinguished: (1) feeling-together (Mit-einander-fühlen),
(2) feeling-after (Nachfühlen), (3) feeling-with (Mitgefühl), emotional contagion
(Gefühlsansteckung), and (5) feeling-one or emotional unification (Einsfühlung).
(1) The first form consists in feeling the same feeling as another subject by way of
participating in it. The famous case Scheler evokes is that of two parents mourning over their
deceased child. Each of them has their individual feelings of pain and sadness, but when
standing next to the dead body of the child, they experience the suffering together as one and
the same feeling. In this case, the sadness of the mother is not objectified in the consciousness
of the father and vice versa. Rather, they co-subjectively experience the same. (2) Feeling-after
is a mode of intentional relatedness to the other by which an understanding of their feelings
emerges that does not involve sharing the same feeling. One retains a certain emotional distance
and grasps what the other is experiencing without having analogous affective qualities in one’s
own experience to the same extent as in feeling-together. Scheler nonetheless points out that
the understanding of the other through feeling-after is not purely cognitive and affectively
neutral. It is best understood as an understanding-by-feeling, in which we realise the type of the
other’s feeling without it being transferred and made into a concrete vivid feeling of our own.
It is this form of sympathy that today would regularly be conceptualised as empathy. (3) In
feeling-with, on the other hand, one develops the same feeling in oneself on the basis of a
previous feeling-after. One can share in the other’s joy in co-joy (Mitfreude) or in their suffering
in co-suffering (Mitleid) with the corresponding affective characteristics. Hereby, one not only
understands what the other is going through, but feels with them and potentially for them (as in

8
the case of compassion or pity discussed below). (4) Emotional contagion is different from
feeling-with because one is not intentionally directed toward the other but rather overtakes an
emotion passively and involuntarily from them up to the point where one seems to loose oneself
in the emotion of the other. Essentially, through contagion one is compelled to perform the
same expressive movement as the other. It can happen in a dyadic form, as for instance when
one feels the urge to giggle standing next to somebody who is giggling, but also in more
collective forms, as when entering a party and catching the joyful atmosphere in the room (for
a contemporary social-psychological account, see Hatfield et al. 1993). (5) Feeling-one can be
conceived as a limit case of contagion because here the ego perspective gets lost and the subject
merges with the other. For this mode of sympathy, Scheler gives a number of examples: the
identification of a child with a toy or figure; the identification of spiritual practitioners with a
totem animal in certain cultures, or with gods in ancient mystical traditions; the adopting of the
will and contents of consciousness of the hypnotist when undergoing hypnosis; the reciprocal
merging of partners during sexual intercourse; the mass-dynamic phenomenon of identification
with a charismatic leader and with the other members of the collective; or the love of a mother
for her child, where the impulses and drives of the child are experienced by the mother as if
they were her own.

Compassion

Compassion (from Latin compassio) is a literal translation of Greek sympatheia, which makes
it difficult on a linguistic level to differentiate between compassion and sympathy; thus, we
have to look for the historical developments of their respective usages as well as the
philosophical meanings that have been bestowed upon them. Throughout history, there have
been diverging opinions not so much on the basic psychological process of compassion, but
concerning the ethical and moral value of compassion as an instinct, drive, motivation, feeling,
or attitude. Plato and the Stoics commonly regarded compassion as a human tendency working
against the application of rational principles, hindering appropriate moral evaluations and the
capacity to adequately help the other.
In the Christian tradition, compassion is then considered as a positive virtue. Apart from
the term compassio, there are also the terms misericordia and commiseratio, expressing aspects
of sympathy with varying connotations (Fischl 2017). It is impossible to trace the semantic
history of these concepts here, yet it suffices to allude to a general tendency towards altruistic

9
action in the context of theology. Here, misericordia was used as a translation of eleos, which
in Greek means compassion in the sense of pity, as famously defined by Aristotle: “a feeling of
pain that arises on the occasion of any evil, or suffering, manifest, evident (apparent, to the eye
or ear), deadly or (…) painful, when unmerited; and also of such a kind as we may expect to
happen either to ourselves or to those near and dear to us, and that when it seems to be near at
hand” (Aristotle 2009, 2.8.2). Misericordia is then spelled out in different ways, but an
important articulation is given by Augustine, who defines it as “a kind of compassion in our
hearts for the misery of others which compels us to help them if we can” (Augustine 2018, 9.5).
The shift from Aristotle’s conception consists in the idea that the emotional process of
misericordia as a kind of compassion goes beyond eleos and is not so much about relating the
perceived suffering to oneself, but about feeling the urge to help the other and eventually doing
it. This of course is at the heart of the Christian virtue of charity.
The positive value of compassion is also later embraced by thinkers such as Jean-
Jacques Rousseau and moral sense philosophers. For Rousseau, it is not practical reason but
compassion as a natural feeling before any reflection that is considered to be a moral principle.
Compassion is the revulsion to see one’s kind suffer, which allows one to identify with a
suffering person and thereby grasp the fundamental connectedness of humankind, including the
anthropologically founded pains and sorrows of life. For Hume and Smith, compassion is a
universal feeling that is explained by sympathy (see above). According to Smith, it is “the
emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive
it in a very lively manner”, a “fellow-feeling with the sorrow of others” (Smith 2002, 4ff.).
Among the more critical voices concerning the ethical impact of compassion is
Immanuel Kant, who characterises it as a weak and blind affect. Therefore, “it must never rule,
but must be subordinated to the capacity and reasonable desire to do good.” (Kant 2011, 103)
However, Kant also acknowledges that compassion can have a subsidiary motivating force
precisely to do what is good. Taking this into account, he demands that it be an “indirect duty
to cultivate the compassionate natural […] feelings in us” (Kant 1991, 251) because they help
realise the moral principles that reason alone perhaps could not apply. Schopenhauer in his
ethics of compassion then famously radicalised the idea of an anthropological foundation of a
feeling of humanity by claiming that compassion alone is the only true source of moral action,
which again provoked efficacious criticism by thinkers such as Nietzsche (1986). Similarly,
Arendt (1963) voiced staunched criticism of compassion’s role for genuine political action (see
Mohrmann in this volume). But here is not the place to review the ramified history of moral
philosophy; let us thus turn to phenomenology.

10
 In phenomenology, the interest is first and foremost not in evaluating the moral
significance of compassion, but in descriptively capturing it and comparing it with other types
of affective states and emotional acts. In his lectures on ethics, Husserl briefly treats compassion
when discussing Hume’s moral philosophy. Compassion, for Husserl, “does not mean suffering
from the same pain as another, but to feel sorry for him, pitying him, suffering from the fact
that he is suffering and because he is suffering.” (Husserl 2012, 194, own translation).
Concerning the affective quality, such suffering on the part of the compassionate subject is
“genuine suffering,” as Husserl (1973b, 188) emphasises. Concerning the intentional object of
an act of compassion, Husserl makes clear that one is only directed to the cause of the other’s
suffering in a mediate way. The primary object of compassion is the other and the fact that they
are suffering. In other places, Husserl identifies compassion as a genuinely intersubjective act,
in that we regard the other as an ego, and acknowledge their subjectivity, their embodied being
with all respective sensations and their having a world (the same world) as oneself (Husserl
1973a, 92).
For Scheler, as we have seen, compassion as co-suffering (Mitleid) is a subtype of
feeling-with (Mitgefühl). Compassion in this sense is a suffering on the basis of the other’s
suffering, while it is clear to the compassionate subject that the original suffering is on the side
of the other, i.e., the feeling of co-suffering has its origin there, not in one’s own subjectivity.
In compassion, one experiences the other “as the other” (Scheler 1923, 40). The other’s alterity
is thematic in consciousness, which excludes any form of identification or contagion. The
intentional reference point of compassion is the other as a personal subject with their unique
individual pain and sorrow. In emphasising the heteropathic element of compassion, Scheler
criticises the theories of French Enlightenment thinkers who would attest an egoistic tendency
to compassion, as they would suppose that it operates as a mode of self-protection on the basis
of an analogical comparison of the sufferer with oneself, aiming at identifying and avoiding
potential harm. In contrast, authentic compassion, according to Scheler, acknowledges the
other’s suffering as their suffering. In the context of the question regarding the egoistic and
altruistic tendencies of intersubjective emotions, Scheler also discusses the possibility of
“inauthentic compassion” (Scheler 1923, 45), which arises when one feels distressed by
witnessing the suffering of another and as a consequence helps them in order to alleviate one’s
own discomfort. This feeling is affected by the feeling of the other, but is ultimately self-
directed and egoistic.
In Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological approach to an asymmetrical ethics, which
is based on the idea of the primacy of the other who appears as a vulnerable being, suffering is

11
conceived as irreducible. Thus, a responsibility for the other arises from the impossibility of
looking away or attending to their suffering. This responsibility is manifest first and foremost
in compassion, i.e., the compassionate co-suffering in which one also experiences oneself as an
essentially vulnerable and exposed being and which constitutes the “nexus of human
subjectivity” and as such a “supreme ethical principle” (Levinas 1998, 94). For Levinas,
suffering is in principle endured as pure passivity. It is meaningless because it cannot be
embedded in a rational whole, and therefore it is essentially evil. As such, it can also never be
justified–– be it as a mild form of suffering for a greater good or on the basis of utilitarian
principles, or universal ethical principles à la Kant. One recognises the ethical command
coming from the face of the other in suffering calls for a compassionate response in which the
most fundamental responsibility for the other is rendered visible. Furthermore, according to
Levinas, it is only via suffering that one can build up a relationship with the other (Levinas
1987, 92). In suffering as a limit case of consciousness, one experiences radical alterity––one
is overwhelmed by the merciless world and by violent others. Precisely because of this
heteronomous experience one can attain access to the other’s subjectivity through witnessing
their suffering. Conversely, Levinas sees the justification of the suffering of others or its neglect
as the source of all cruelty and immorality (Edelglass 2006, 45). Compassion is the remedy in
that it not only acknowledges the other as being exposed to suffering, but also renders oneself
exposed and vulnerable to the other. In being a “suffering for the suffering (…) of someone
else” (Levinas 1998, 94), compassion is a genuinely ethical response, a mode of being-for-the-
other that goes beyond––or lies ontologically before––any understanding of compassion as a
psychological process or feeling.
Working in the French tradition of combining phenomenological and theological
thought (with key figures such as Paul Ricœur or Jean-Luc Nancy), Emmanuel Housset, in his
book L’intelligence de la pitié (“The Intelligence of Pity”), has recently developed a wide-
ranging account of compassion. In this investigation, he proposes that compassion is the only
place from which the other can be attended to, recognised as a moral person, and understood in
an ethically relevant sense. The author opposes views suspecting compassion to be an irrational
drive leading to blurred moral judgments and requiring the correction through universal rational
principles. In favouring compassion as a fundamental or existential dimension of the human
being, Housset emphasises the quality of a responsive opening-up to the other, while letting
them be, as well as the possibility of developing an intelligence for love, which also comprises
a duty to realise justice made possible by compassion.

12
Conclusion

As this chapter has shown, the terms “empathy”, “sympathy”, and “compassion” each have
their remarkable semantic and philosophical history– sometimes reaching far into the past and
into domains like theology and literature, sometimes signalling a specific discursive
constellation where philosophy and the sciences construe new guiding concepts. In the context
of a handbook on emotions, we should finally ask: Are all three concepts referring to emotions
proper? As there is great variability in definitions, one will easily find theories that would
clearly answer the question affirmatively. However, especially when it comes to empathy, it is
not so clear whether it is a purely emotional capacity, or even whether the main component of
the empathic process is emotional in nature. Phenomenologists have devoted a lot of descriptive
work to capturing the essential structures of empathy. Being conceived as a perception-like
process of understanding the expressions of others, empathy does not in and of itself imply a
necessary emotional component. Also, the basic embodied kind of empathy that ranges from
intercorporeality to synchronisations and bodily resonances does not yield specific emotional
qualities, but rather precedes and enables them. Furthermore, the imaginative engagement with
the other in terms of putting oneself in their position and approximating their experience need
not occur while feeling in a similar way as the other. In the case of sympathy, Scheler developed
the most thorough account, wherein he subsumes various forms of affective forms of
intersubjective engagement under the label. However, what Scheler refers to as “sympathy”
would today frequently be construed as “empathy”, namely as affective or emotional empathy,
which itself would be regarded as one among several forms of empathy (including bodily and
cognitive empathy). Depending on the theoretical approach, emotional sharing is taken to be or
not to be an integral part of empathy. In the first case, empathy would amount to what Scheler
calls Mitfühlen, in the second case, it would come close to Nachfühlen. Compassion is quite
unanimously regarded as an emotional matter, combined with a motivational and volitional
component that drives us to help the other who is suffering and thereby causes our co-suffering.
However, we should be aware that there are also other conceptions of compassion that regard
the emotional dimension of the complex process leading from passive affection to active
helping as morally problematic and would rather cut it out altogether. Such proponents of a
“rational compassion” (from the Stoics to contemporary psychologists, cf. Bloom 2017) would
reserve the term, compassion, for a purely cognitive procedure of figuring out the best ways to
support the ones in need without any emotional involvement.

13
 To conclude, one should note that in phenomenology, but also in philosophy in general,
in psychology, anthropology, and neighbouring disciplines, empathy has become the most
widely used term. It has become an umbrella term for phenomena that have traditionally been
designated with “sympathy” or “compassion.” These concepts are in themselves complex and
cover many different aspects of our conscious experience (cf. also Michael 2014). Therefore,
when using the broader term, “empathy,” one needs to be particularly clear about which aspect
of intersubjectivity one is referring to. I have suggested elsewhere (Breyer 2015) that a
multidimensional theory of empathy––covering processes on the level of embodiment,
affectivity, perception, and cognition––can help locate the various intersubjective phenomena
in a conceptual matrix and prevent hasty reductions of the term, “empathy,” to narrow
definitions, which isolate phenomena that are best understood in their interconnectedness.

References

Arendt, Hannah (1963). On Revolution. London: Faber and Faber.

Aristotle (2009). Rhetoric. Vol II. Edited by Edward M. Cope, & John E. Sandys. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Aristotle (2011). Problems. Edited and translated by Robert Mayhew. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Augustine (2018). De Civitate Dei – The City of God. Edited by Patrick G. Walsh, Isabella
Image, & Christopher Collard. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Baron-Cohen, Simon (1995). Mindblindness. An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bloom, Paul (2017). Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. New York:
Random House.
Breyer, Thiemo (2015). Verkörperte Intersubjektivität und Empathie: Philosophisch-
Anthropologische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
–––– (Ed.) (2018). Visibility, Embodiment, and Empathy. Special Issue of Human Studies.
Carruthers, Peter (1996). Language, Thoughts, and Consciousness: An Essay in Philosophical
Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chismar, Douglas (1988). Empathy and Sympathy: The Important Difference. The Journal of
Value Inquiry 22(4), 257–266.
Darwall, Stephen (1998). Empathy, Sympathy, Care. Philosophical Studies 89 (2/3): 261–82.

14
De Jaegher, Hanne & Ezequiel Di Paolo (2007). Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive
Approach to Social Cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6, 485–507.
Dilthey, Wilhelm (1910). Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften.
Abhandlungen der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-
Historische Klasse 1910, 1–123.
Edelglass, William (2006). Levinas on Suffering and Compassion. Sophia 45(2), 43–59.
Fischl, Thomas (2017). Mitgefühl – Mitleid – Barmherzigkeit: Ansätze von Empathie im 12.
Jahrhundert. München: Utz.
Fuchs, Thomas (2013). Depression, Intercorporeality, and Interaffectivity. Journal of
Consciousness Studies 20(7/8), 219–238.
—— (2014). The Virtual Other: Empathy in the Age of Virtuality. Journal of Consciousness
Studies 21(5/6), 152–173.
Gallagher, Shaun (2001). The Practice of Mind: Theory, Simulation, or Interaction? Journal of
Consciousness Studies 5–7, 83–108.
——— (2005). How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— (2008). Direct Perception in the Interactive Context. Consciousness & Cognition 17(2),
535–543.
Gallese, Vittorio & Goldman, Alvin (1998). Mirror Neurons and the Simulation Theory of
Mind-Reading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2, 493–501.
Goldman, Alvin (2006). Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of
Mindreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gopnik, Alison (1993). How We Know Our Minds: The Illusion of Frst-Person Knowledge of
Intentionality. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, 1–14.
Hagener, Malte & Vendrell Ferran, Ingrid (Eds.) (2017). Empathie im Film: Perspektiven der
Ästhetischen Theorie, Phänomenologie und Analytischen Philosophie. Bielefeld:
Transcript.
Hatfield, Elaine, Cacioppo, John T., & Rapson, Richard L. (1993). Emotional contagion.
Current Directions in Psychological Science 2(3), 96–100.
Heal, Jane (1998). Co-Cognition and Off-Line Simulation: Two Ways of Understanding the
Simulation Approach. Mind and Language 13(4), 477–498.
Henriksen, Mads Gram (2018). Schizophrenia, Psychosis, and Empathy. In: Magnus Englander
(Ed.). Phenomenology and the Social Context of Psychiatry: Social Relations,
Psychopathology, and Husserl’s Philosophy. New York: Bloomsbury, 27–48.
Housset, Emmanuel (2003). L’intelligence de la pitié. Paris: Cerf.

15
Hume, David (2007). A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by David F. Norton & Mary J.
Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Husserl, Edmund (1973a) [= Hua XIII]. Zur Phänomenologie Der Intersubjektivität I. Edited
by Iso Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
——— (1973b) [= Hua XV]. Zur Phänomenologie Der Intersubjektivität III. Edited by Iso
Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
——— (1990) [= Hua IV]. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Constitution. Edited by Marly Biemel. Dordrecht: Springer.
——— (2012) [= Hua XXXVII]. Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester
1920/1924. Edited by Henning Peucker. Dordrecht: Springer.
Hutcheson, Francis (2006). A System of Moral Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury.
Jardine, James & Szanto, Thomas (2017). Empathy in the Phenomenological Tradition. In:
Heidi Maibom (Ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. London:
Routledge, 86–97.
Kant, Immanuel (1991). The Metaphysics of Morals. Edited by Mary Gregor. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
——— (2011). Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Edited by Patrick
Frierson and Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Krebs, Angelika (in this volume). Love. In: Thomas Szanto & Hilge Landweer (eds.). The
Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotions. London: Routledge.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1987). Time and the Other. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
——— (1998). Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lipps, Theodor (1907). Das Wissen von fremden Ichen. In: Theodor Lipps. Psychogologische
Untersuchungen, Vol. 4. Leipzig: Engelmann.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964). Signs. Translated by Richard C McCleary. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Michael, John (2014). Towards a Consensus about the Role of Empathy in Interpersonal
Understanding. Topoi 33(1), 157–172.
Mohrmann, Judith (in this volume). Hannah Arendt. In: Thomas Szanto & Hilge Landweer
(Eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotions. London: Routledge.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1986). Human, All Too Human. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

16
Pinotti, Andrea (2011). Empatia: Storia di un’idea da Platone al postumano. Roma: Editori
Laterza.
Plato (1989). Timaeus. Critias. Cleitophon. Menexenus. Epistles. Translated by R. G. Bury.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Salice, Alessandro & Taipale, Joona (2015). Group-Directed Empathy: A Phenomenological
Account. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 46(2), 163–184.
Scheler, Max (1923). Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. Bonn: Cohen. [English translation:
The Nature of Sympathy. London: Routledge.]
Schliesser, Eric (Ed.) (2015). Sympathy: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schloßberger, Mathias (in this volume). Max Scheler. In: Thomas Szanto & Hilge Landweer
(Eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotions. London: Routledge.
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of (2001). Characteristicks of Men, Manners,
Opinions, Times. Edited by Douglas den Uyl. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Smith, Adam (2002). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by Knud Haakonsson.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stein, Edith (1989) [= Collected Works III]. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by
Waltraud Stein. Dordrecht: Springer.
Szanto, Thomas (2015). Collective Emotions, Normativity, and Empathy: A Steinian Account.
Human Studies 38(4), 503–527.
Szanto, Thomas & Moran, Dermot (Eds.) (2015). Empathy and Collective Intentionality: The
Social Philosophy of Edith Stein. Special Issue of Human Studies 38(4).
Szanto, Thomas & Krueger, Joel (Eds.) (2019). Empathy, Shared Emotions, and Social Identity.
Special Issue of TOPOI.
Tanaka, Shogo (2015). Intercorporeality as a Theory of Social Cognition. Theory & Psychology
25(4), 455–472.
Vischer, Robert (1872). Über das optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik. Diss.
Tübingen.
Waldenfels, Bernhard (1994). Antwortregister. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
——— (2006). Das Fremde im Eigenen. Der Ursprung der Gefühle. E-Journal Philosophie der
Psychologie 6, 1–6.
Wellman, Henry M., Cross, David, & Watson, Julanne (2001). Meta-Analysis of Theory-of-
Mind Development: The Truth about False Belief. Child Development 72(3), 655–684.
Zahavi, Dan (2011). Empathy and Direct Social Perception: A Phenomenological Proposal.
Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2(3), 541–558.

17
——— (2014). Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Zahavi, Dan & Overgaard, Søren (2011). Empathy without Isomorphism: A Phenomenological
Account. In: Jean Decety (Ed.). Empathy: From Bench to Bedside. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 3–20.

18