IN EXPLORING EMOTION in the previous chapter, we began with abstract considerations about the structure of the flow of experience and then moved to the more tangible topic of emotional self-organization and the dynamics of affect. As we followed this path, the intersubjectivity of human experience gained increasing visibility, becoming especially prominent in the example of seeing an angry face and averting one’s gaze.
Yet so far in this book I have only alluded to intersubjectivity without giving it the attention it deserves. Intersubjectivity is a vast and important theme of phenomenological philosophy, with numerous ramifications. It is also a central concern for developmental psychology, social psychology, and clinical psychology, for psychoanalysis, and more recently for affective and cognitive neuroscience. To explore the relations among the many phenomenological, clinical, and scientific treatments of intersubjectivity in any comprehensive way would require another book. My aim in this final chapter is accordingly far more modest. It is to build a bridge between mind science and Husserl’s genetic and generative phenomenology of intersubjectivity. This bridge is meant as a preliminary step to future investigations that would draw from both other important phenomenological discussions of intersubjectivity and scientific and clinical research.
This chapter is organized around two ideas. The first idea is that self and other enact each other reciprocally through empathy.1 One’s consciousness of oneself as a bodily subject in the world presupposes a certain empathetic understanding of self and other. The second idea is that human subjectivity emerges from developmental processes of enculturation and is configured by the distributed cognitive web of symbolic culture. For these reasons, human subjectivity is from the outset intersubjectivity, and no mind is an island.
My first step is to introduce an important idea from Husserl’s later reflections on intersubjectivity—the idea that the intentionality of consciousness is “intersubjectively open” (Zahavi 1997, 2001a, 2001b). Consciousness is not solipsistically closed in upon itself; rather, it is structurally open to the other in advance of any actual encounter between self and other.
We have already seen (in Chapter 2) that intentionality in the broadest phenomenological sense is openness toward the world. What needs emphasis now is that this openness is also implicitly intersubjective, for the world is disclosed to us as intersubjectively accessible. On the one hand, the types of things we encounter in our dealings with the world are first and foremost cultural artifacts and equipment, not indifferent physical objects (Heidegger 1996, pp. 62–67). On the other hand, even objects, considered abstractly simply as objects of perception, appear to us as perceivable by other possible subjects. It is this latter thought I want to introduce here.2
When we perceive an object, it appears as having sides or profiles that are not currently in view. We see the side facing us, while the other sides are hidden. Although we do not directly see an object’s hidden profiles, we nonetheless have a distinctly perceptual sense of their presence. In Husserl’s language, perception automatically “appresents” the hidden profiles in and through its presentation of the visible ones. The term appresentation refers to one’s intending the presence of something not directly given on the basis of something that is directly given. In perception, we appresent or co-intend the backside of an object, which is not immediately visible, on the basis of the front side, which is directly visible. How to understand this relation between presence and absence in perceptual experience is a longstanding topic of phenomenological philosophy. The relevance of intersubjectivity to this topic can be brought out in the following way: can we account for this relation between presence and absence in perceptual experience without referring to another possible perceptual consciousness besides one’s own? Husserl’s answer is negative. In perception, or more precisely in its appresenting function, we implicitly understand the absent profiles to be also the objective correlates of the possible perceptions of another subject (see Zahavi 1997, 2001a).
The thought here is that the very meaning or sense “object” (namely, something standing over against oneself as a subject), which is implicit in the intentionality of the perceputal act, implies being simultaneously perceivable by a plurality of subjects. To retrace the main steps leading to this thought, consider that if there is no need to refer to other perceivers besides myself in characterizing the intentionality of my perception, then the absent or hidden profiles of an object must be appresented as correlates simply of my perception. The following two alternatives, therefore, suggest themselves. First, the absent profiles might be appresented as profiles given either in my past perceptions or my possible future perceptions of the object. Second, the hidden profiles might be appresented as the correlates of the perceptions I would have right now were I looking at the thing from vantage points different from my present one. Both accounts seem unsatisfactory. The first one makes the unity of the object for perception the result of a series of temporally separated profiles, only one of which (the visible one) is actual. But I do not experience the profile facing me as present with respect to a past or future absent profile; I experience it as present with respect to the other co-present but hidden profiles. According to the second account, however, I appresent the absent profiles as correlates of my co-present, but nonactual, perceptions. This account makes the unity of the object for my perception a composite of actual and nonactual profiles (the correlates of my nonactual perceptions), whereas it needs to be a unity of actual profiles, some visible and some hidden.
Thus the appresented and hidden profiles seem better understood not as correlates of one’s own possible perceptions, but as the correlates of the possible perceptions of other subjects, who could perceive the object simultaneously with oneself, though from a different vantage point.3 For one to be able to appresent the hidden profiles of an object, no other subjects need be actually present, nor need any other subjects be present in the world at all. (As Husserl says, I might be the last survivor of a universal plague.) Rather, the point is that the intentional structure of perception discloses objects as transcending one’s individual consciousness of them in such a way as to imply their presence to and perceptibility by other possible subjects. In this way, the intentionality of consciousness is intersubjectively open and incompatible with any solipsism that would deny the possibility in principle of a plurality of subjects who view the same world as I do.
In addition to the open intersubjectivity of intentionality, which is a structural feature of consciousness, two other kinds of intersubjectivity can be distinguished in Husserl’s analyses. The first is the experience of the bodily presence of the other, or the face-to-face experience of self and other. The second is the generative intersubjectivity of communally handed-down norms, conventions, and historical traditions. Both types of intersubjectivity will play a role in this chapter. To prepare the way, we need to examine the relation between the open intersubjectivity of consciousness and intersubjectivity as the face-to-face encounter of self and other.4
One might suppose that the intersubjective openness of consciousness depends on the perceptual experience of the other, that one’s perceptual experience of the other’s expressive bodily presence is the basis for the intersubjectivity of consciousness. One could argue, for example, that when I experience another person experiencing me, I tacitly realize that I am an other for the other, that I am disclosed to the other as the other is disclosed to me, and thus that I am only one among many in a context of others. In this way, my consciousness would become intersubjectively opened, as it were, from the outside.
This account, however, gets things backwards. For me to perceive the other—that is, for the other’s bodily presence to be perceptually disclosed to me—the open intersubjectivity of perceptual experience must already be in play. Thus one’s actual experience of another bodily subject is based on an a priori openness to the other. For the same reason, the intersubjective openness of consciousness cannot be reduced to any contingent and factual relation of self and other, for this openness belongs to the very structure of subjectivity in advance of any such encounter. Nevertheless, there is clearly much more to our experience of other subjects than the mere dependence of this experience on the open intersubjectivity of consciousness. Whereas open intersubjectivity is primarily a feature of the formal structure of intentionality, the concrete experience of self and other allows for dissension and thus an experience of the alterity of the other (Zahavi 1997, p. 317). What I propose to do now is to consider the structure of this concrete experience in more detail by examining the experience of empathy.
Psychologists use the term empathy to describe three distinguishable and interrelated affective and cognitive processes involving self and other (Levenson and Reuf 1992). The first is feeling what another person is feeling; the second is knowing what another person is feeling; and the third is responding compassionately to another person’s distress—a response better described as sympathy (Eisenberg 2000).
Phenomenologists approach empathy in a somewhat different way (Stein 1989). Empathy is a unique form of intentionality in which we are directed toward the other’s experience. Any intentional act that discloses or presents “foreign experience” counts as empathy. Although empathy, thus understood, is based on perception (of the other’s bodily presence) and can involve inference in difficult or problematic situations (when one has to work out how another person feels about something), it is not reducible to some additive combination of perception and inference. The phenomenological conception of empathy thus stands opposed to any theory according to which we understand others by first perceiving their bodily behavior and then inferring or hypothesizing that their behavior is caused by experiences or inner mental states similar to those that apparently cause similar behavior in us. Rather, in empathy we experience another human being directly as a person—that is, as an intentional being whose bodily gestures and actions are expressive of his or her experiences or states of mind. The task for phenomenology is to analyze the modes or ways in which the other is disclosed as another subjectivity, as well as the intentional structures of consciousness that make this disclosure possible.
Edith Stein, in her book On the Problem of Empathy, draws attention to a number of formal structural features of empathy, understood as the awareness of another’s experience (Stein 1989, pp. 6–11).5 We can begin with the relation between perception and empathy. In both perception and empathy, the intentional object is presented as there itself right now, but in different ways. Whereas perception presents an object as there in its concrete and individual being, empathy does not present the experience of another subject in this way. When one becomes aware of the sorrow of another person, the sorrow is not given as a concrete and individual being, standing right there before one, as when one sees or touches something. Rather, the sorrow is given in and through the sorrowful countenance or pained expression. There is thus “a close, yet very loose, parallel between empathic acts and the averted sides of what is seen” (Stein 1989, p. 6). In perception, the averted sides, though hidden, and thus in one sense unperceived, have a kind of perceptual presence, a perceptual presence-in-absence. Similarly, in empathy, the feeling of sorrow, though not present as it is originally for the subject who experiences the sorrow, has a perceptual presence in the sorrowful countenance. In phenomenological language, whereas an object’s averted sides are appresented on the basis of its perceived side, a person’s feeling is appresented on the basis of her empathetically grasped countenance and comportment. Similarly, whereas the visible side is there itself right now and grasped as such in perception, so the sorrowful countenance is there itself right now and grasped as such in empathy.
Yet this parallel only goes so far. In perception, the averted sides can in principle always be brought into view. In empathy, although hidden or concealed aspects of the sorrowful countenance can be brought into view, the sorrow itself as a subjective feeling cannot be made perceptually present in this way. In Stein’s words: “I can consider the expression of pain, more accurately, the change of face I empathically grasp as an expression of pain, from as many sides as I desire. Yet, in principle, I can never get an ‘orientation’ where the pain itself is primordially given” (1989, p. 7).
This “nonprimordiality” of empathy—the fact that an experience cannot be disclosed in its original first-person subjectivity from the second-person perspective of empathy—means there is also a parallel or an analogy between empathy and memory and imagination. When one remembers a joy, the joy is not “primordially and bodily there,” but rather is given in memory “as having once been alive” (Stein 1989, p. 8). The joy is absent, but it is not simply absent, for it has a kind of presence-in-absence for the remembering experience. It is, as we saw in Chapter 10, phenomenally absent. Yet once again the parallel or analogy only goes so far. In the case of memory, the subject who is remembering is the same as the subject remembered. In the case of empathy, however, the subject who is empathizing is not the same as the subject empathized.
And this is what is fundamentally new in contrast with the memory, expectation, or the fantasy of our own experiences. These two subjects are separate and not joined together, as previously, by a consciousness of sameness or a continuity of experience. And while I am living in the other’s joy, I do not feel primordial joy. It does not issue live from my “I.” Neither does it have the character of once having lived like remembered joy. But still much less is it merely fantasized without actual life. This other subject is primordial although I do not experience it as primordial [as I do myself]. In my non-primordial experience [of the other’s feeling] I feel, as it were, led by a primordial one not experienced by me but still there, manifesting itself in my non-primordial experience. (Stein 1989, p. 11)
Empathy, like perception, memory, imagination, and expectation, is thus a sui generis kind of intentional experience. Empathy shares certain structural features with perception and certain other structural features with memory, imagination, and expectation, but it cannot be reduced to these intentional acts or constructed out of them. Therefore, in addition to the foregoing comparisons, empathy needs to be analyzed on its own terms.
Stein describes empathy as the experience of feeling led by an experience that is not one’s own but that is given in one’s experience of another’s expressive bodily presence. She distinguishes “three levels or modalities of accomplishment” in empathy, “even if in a concrete case people do not always go through all levels but are often satisfied with one of the lower ones” (Stein 1989, p. 10). First, the experience of another emerges before me: “When it arises before me all at once, it faces me as an object (such as the sadness I ‘read in another’s face’)” (p. 10). Second, I can inquire into the content of the experience and “its implied tendencies,” in which case “the content, having pulled me into it, is no longer really an object” (ibid.). I am now directed toward the object of the empathized experience, that is, I mentally transpose myself to the other’s place to comprehend the object of the subject’s experience from his or her point of view. Third, once this clarification of the other’s experience has taken place, the experience faces me again, but now in a clarified or an explicated way. Stein refers to these three levels as “(1) the emergence of the experience, (2) the fulfilling explication, and (3) the comprehensive objectification of the explained experience” (ibid.).
These levels of empathy can also be reiterated back onto me, so that I have an empathetic experience of the other’s empathetic experience of me. In other words, “among the acts of another that I comprehend empathically there can be empathic acts in which the other comprehends another’s acts. This ‘other’ can be a third person or me myself. In the second case we have [what Theodor Lipps calls] ‘reflexive sympathy’ where my original experience returns to me as an empathized one” (Stein 1989, p. 18).
Throughout these levels, empathy is based on the experience of the other as a living bodily subject like oneself:
This individual is not given as a physical body, but as a sensitive, living body belonging to an “I,” an “I” that senses, thinks, feels, and wills. The living body of this “I” not only fits into my phenomenal world but is itself the center of orientation of such a phenomenal world. It faces this world and communicates with me. (Stein 1989, p. 5)
Following Stein, we can explicate in more detail this empathetic experience of the other as a living bodily subject. We experience the other’s bodily presence as (1) animated by its own fields of sensation; (2) animated by general feelings of life or vitality (growth, development, aging, health, sickness, vigor, sluggishness, and so on); (3) expressive of subjective experience; (4) another center of orientation in space; and (5) capable of voluntary action.
Stein calls the empathetic perception of the other’s bodily presence as animated by its own fields of sensation “sensual empathy” or “sensing-in.” To take her example: “The hand resting on the table does not lie there like the book beside it. It ‘presses’ against the table more or less strongly; it lies there limpid or stretched; and I ‘see’ the sensations of pressure and tension” (1989, p. 58). So far this example includes only the first level of accomplishment in empathy—the emergence of the experience of another. The second level involves delving into the content of the other’s experience. If this happens, then there is a movement from empathy as an involuntary sensorimotor and affective coupling of our two lived bodies to empathy as the imaginative movement of myself to the other’s place: “my hand is moved (not in reality but ‘as if’) to the place of the foreign one. It is moved into it and occupies its position and attitude, now feeling its sensations, though not primordially and not as being its own . . . the foreign hand is continually perceived as belonging to the foreign physical body so that the empathized sensations are continually brought into relief as foreign in contrast with our own sensations” (1989, p. 58).
For this kind of sensual empathy to happen, one’s own body and the other’s body must be of a similar type or have comparable body schemas. What the limits of this body type or schema are is an open and important question. Stein notes, “empathy is quite successful with men’s and children’s hands which are very different from mine” (p. 58). Then she raises the crucial point: “The type ‘human physical body’ does not define the limits of the range of my empathic objects, more exactly, of what can be given to me as a living body.” For example: “Should I perhaps consider a dog’s paw in comparison with my hand, I do not have a mere physical body, either, but a sensitive limb of a living body . . . I may sense-in pain when the animal is injured.” Nevertheless, Stein maintains, “the further I deviate from the type ‘man,’ the smaller does the number of possibilities of fulfillment become’ (1989, p. 59).
Interwoven with sensual empathy is the perception of the other’s bodily presence as expressive of subjective thoughts and feelings: “we ‘see’ shame ‘in’ blushing, irritation in the furrowed brow, anger in the clenched fist” (1989, p. 75). These examples of blushing and irritation show that the empathetic perception of facial expressions is paradigmatic of this aspect of empathy. As Jonathan Cole writes in an article on facial embodiment:
[T]he face involves an injunction not only to express, and to observe expressions, but to immerse oneself in what is expressed and to feel something of it oneself. Though complementary to body language, in this it may go beyond what is usually considered to be expressed through posture. Expressions actually help in constituting what is within. A face, therefore, is not only an expression of a self available for others to read, but to some extent the self is constituted in the face and developed, and experienced, in the interaction between faces. (Cole 1997, p. 482)
Another aspect of empathy is the perception of the other as being another center of orientation in a common spatial world. Our experience of space and our sense of bodily selfhood are intertwined: We perceive things to be arrayed around us, while we are “here,” at what Husserl calls the “zero-point” of spatial orientation. This differentiation between “here” and “there” does not belong to space considered as a medium independent of one’s body; it belongs to our egocentric bodily space. When we perceive another, we perceive her as “there” in relation to us “here,” and we grasp her as having her own egocentric space defined by her own body. Furthermore, we perceive her body as a locus of intentional agency and voluntary movement. We do not experience another’s movements as mechanical but as alive, spontaneous, and volitional. Neither sentience (having fields of sensation) nor spatial orientation (having an egocentric space) can be separated from voluntary movement in our empathetic perception of another. In empathetically perceiving another person as a sentient being capable of voluntary movement, we perceive her as occupying her own “here,” in relation to which we stand “there.”
Once again, this sort of empathetic experience can remain at the first level of accomplishment (empathetically perceiving the other over there), or it can proceed to the second level where it unfolds according to the imaginative movement of putting oneself in the other’s place. This imaginative self-transposition allows us to gain a new spatial perspective on the world, the perspective of the other. At the same time, we continue to have our own center of spatial orientation. Thus empathy enables us to grasp space as an intersubjective medium in which there is no single zero-point or bodily center of orientation. To put the point another way, empathy is a precondition for our experience of inhabiting a common and intersubjective spatial world. Empathy provides a viewpoint in which one’s center of orientation is one among others. Clearly, the space correlated to such a viewpoint cannot be one’s own egocentric space, for that space is defined by one’s own zero-point, whereas the new spatial perspective contains one’s zero-point as simply one spatial point among many others.
According to both Husserl and Stein, this experiential grasp of an intersubjective space is a condition of possibility for one’s ability to experience one’s own living body as a physical body like other bodies in the world. If one were confined to one’s own first-person singular point of view, such that one had absolutely no empathetic openness to others, including how one is an other for the other, one could not grasp that one’s own body is a physical object perceivable by a plurality of subjects. A physical object is something that can stand before one in perception and be examined from a multiplicity of points of view. One’s own living body, however, from one’s exclusively first-person singular point of view, cannot stand before one in this way. No matter how one turns, one’s body is always “here,” at the zero-point, never “there.” One cannot walk around it to behold it from all sides (Merleau-Ponty 1962, pp. 90–97). In general, one’s body, as that by which one perceives the world, cannot be perceptually disclosed to one as simply another object in the world. Thus, as long as we consider the living body simply from the first-person singular perspective, it is phenomenally unlike any other physical object. It is phenomenally “the strangest object” (Stein 1989, p. 41), something radically incomplete. In Husserl’s words: “The same Body [lived body] which serves me as means for all my perception obstructs me in the perception of it itself and is a remarkably imperfectly constituted thing” (1989, p. 167). Through empathy, specifically the experience of oneself as an other for the other, one gains a view of one’s own bodily being beyond one’s first-person singular perspective.
Stein elaborates this important point in terms of what she calls reiterated empathy. In reiterated empathy, I see myself from your perspective. Stated more precisely, I empathetically grasp your empathetic experience of me. In this way, I acquire a view of myself not merely as something perceivable by others but as something empathetically perceivable by others as a living bodily subject. In other words, I no longer merely experience sentience from within, but I also experience myself as recognizably sentient from without, from the perspective of the other. In this way, my sense of personal selfhood, even at a basic bodily level, is tied to recognition by another and to the ability to grasp that recognition empathetically.
Implicit in the foregoing account are three distinguishable empathetic processes or types of empathy, to which we can also add a fourth (Depraz 2001b; Thompson 2001, 2005):
1. The passive or involuntary coupling or pairing of my living body with your living body in perception and action.
2. The imaginary movement or transposition of myself into your place.
3. The understanding of you as an other to me, and of me as an other to you.
4. The moral perception of you as a person.
In the next sections, I use this phenomenological typology of empathetic experience as a way to organize and make sense of recent empirical studies of empathy and social cognition from developmental psychology, ethology, and cognitive and affective neuroscience. In this way, I sketch a neurophenomenological framework for the scientific study of empathy.6
The first type of empathy is the dynamic coupling or pairing of the living bodies of self and other. It is passive in the sense of not being initiated voluntarily or as a result of deliberation or reflection, and it serves as a support for the other aspects of empathy. “Coupling” or “pairing” means an associative bonding or linking of self and other on the basis of their bodily similarity. This similarity operates not so much at the level of visual appearance, which forms part of the body image as an intentional object present to consciousness, but at the level of gesture, posture, and movement—that is, at the level of the unconscious body schema (Gallagher 1986b). Thus bodily coupling or pairing allows empathy to be not simply the comprehension of another’s particular emotions (sadness, joy, and so on), but on a more fundamental level the experience of another as a living bodily subject like oneself.
This phenomenological conception of the bodily basis of empathy can be linked to mind science by referring to the growing body of psychological and neurophysiological evidence for coupling mechanisms linking self and other at sensorimotor and affective levels (Decety in press; Decety and Sommerville 2003; Gallese, Keysers, and Rizzolatti 2004; Preston and de Waal 2002). For example, according to the common-coding theory of perception and action, perceived events and planned actions share a common neural format (Prinz 1997). Thus perception of an action automatically activates not simply processes of perceptual recognition for that action, but also various aspects of the motor processes for generating it.
Evidence supporting this idea comes from the discovery of so-called mirror neurons in area F5 of the premotor cortex of monkeys (di Pellegrino et al. 1992). These neurons display the same pattern of activity both when the animal accomplishes certain goal-directed hand movements and when the animal observes another individual performing the same actions. The activity of the neurons is correlated with specific intentional motor acts (defined by the presence of a goal) and not with the execution of particular movements (defined by the contraction of particular muscle groups). The neurons can be classified according to the type of action, such as “grasp with the hand,” “grasp with the hand and mouth,” and “reach.” All the neurons of the same type correlate with actions that meet the same objective. On the basis of these properties, mirror neurons appear to form a cortical system that matches the observation of motor actions performed by another individual with performance of the same type of actions by oneself (Gallese, Keysers, and Rizzolatti 2004).
These findings at the level of single neurons have been complemented by brain-imaging studies in humans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). One study showed that activity in two different cortical areas—the right anterior parietal cortex, and Broca’s area in the left inferior frontal cortex (which is the motor area for speech and the human homologue of area F5 in the monkey)—became more intense when an individual simultaneously performed the same finger movements he observed being performed by another individual (Iacoboni et al. 1999). The authors of this study suggest that the left frontal area is concerned with the motor goal of the observed action, and hence with understanding the meaning of the action, whereas the right parietal area is concerned with the precise kinesthetic aspects of the movement, and hence with the details needed to memorize or repeat the exact movement. Another brain-imaging study showed that when one individual observes another execute actions with different body parts (mouth actions, hand actions, and foot actions), the neural patterns of activation in the observer’s brain correspond to those that would be active were the observer performing the same bodily actions (Buccino et al. 2001). Thus mirror systems comprise a rich repertoire of body actions besides hand actions.
Neural studies of these mirror systems provide evidence for the dynamic co-constitution of perception and action at the level of intentional agency (Hurley 1998, pp. 413–419). In the context of social cognition, this constitutive interdependency shapes the social domain on the basis of a sensorimotor resonance between self and other in the perception and execution of action. In Gallese’s words: “when we observe actions performed by other individuals our motor system ‘resonates’ along with that of the observed agent” (Gallese 2001, p. 38).
Such mirroring and resonance also occur in the case of pain and emotion. Neurons in the anterior cingulate cortex that respond when a patient receives an unpleasant stimulus to his hand also respond when the patient watches a pinprick applied to the examiner’s hand (Hutchinson et al. 1999). It has also been shown that perception of emotion activates neural mechanisms that play a key role in generating emotions (Adolphs 2003) and that many of the same brain areas are activated both when subjects imitate and when they observe facial expressions of various emotions (Carr et al. 2003).
In addition to sensorimotor coupling, emotive coupling and affective resonance also occur between self and other. In affective resonance, two or more individuals affect each other’s emotional states. A classic example is crying in newborn infants (which is usually labeled with the misleading term emotional contagion). Newborn babies cry in response to the sound of another baby’s cry, a reaction that is thought to provide some of the underpinnings for the later development of cognitive empathy (Eisenberg and Strayer 1987; de Waal 1996, p. 121). Affective resonance also occurs when two individuals engage in direct interaction and one actively seeks to affect the other, as when a rejected youngster throws a tantrum at its mother’s feet—a behavior seen not only in humans but also in apes (de Waal 2002).
The second type of empathy is the imaginary transposition of oneself to the other’s place. This process is more active and cognitive than sensorimotor and affective resonance. Instead of simply the involuntary, bodily pairing of self and other, cognitive perspective-taking processes enable one to imagine or mentally transpose oneself into the place of the other.
Comparative studies of empathy from cognitive ethology provide an important window on cognitive empathy. The presence and extent of empathy among nonhuman animals, especially primates, is a subject of much debate. According to an “all-or-none” view, cognitive empathy (the only kind of empathy, according to this view) requires the cognitive ability to attribute mental states to another individual and to understand the other’s behavior in light of them. This ability, usually called mind-reading, is taken by many theorists to require the possession of a “theory of mind,” a theoretical body of knowledge about mental states and their role in generating behavior. Advocates of this way of thinking have argued that chimpanzees fail certain mind-reading tests and therefore do not possess a theory of mind. Accordingly, they are said to be incapable of cognitive empathy (Povinelli 1998; Povinelli and Preuss 1995). Yet, as I have suggested here and as others have proposed, most notably Frans de Waal (1996), empathy should not be seen as an all-or-nothing phenomenon. In de Waal’s words: “Many forms of empathy exist intermediate between the extremes of mere agitation and distress of another and full understanding of their predicament. At one end of the spectrum, rhesus infants get upset and seek contact with one another as soon as one of them screams. At the other end, a chimpanzee recalls a wound he has inflicted, and returns to the victim to inspect it” (de Waal 1996, p. 69).
Other intermediate cases are consolation behavior and tailored-helping behavior. Consolation behavior is friendly contact by an uninvolved and less distressed bystander toward a victim of a previously aggressive encounter. For example, de Waal, in his book Good Natured, presents a photograph of a juvenile chimpanzee comforting a distressed adult. Consolation behavior has been extensively documented in great apes only (and has not been found in monkey species despite great efforts to find it). Tailored helping is coming to the aid of another (either a conspecific or a member of another species) with behaviors tailored to the other’s particular needs (as when one ape helps another out of a tree or tries to help an injured bird fly). Such behavior, in de Waal’s words, “probably requires a distinction between self and other that allows the other’s situation to be divorced from one’s own while maintaining the emotional link that motivates behavior” (de Waal 2002). There exists a large number of anecdotal reports of tailored helping in apes.
Cognitive empathy at its fullest, however, is achieved when one individual can mentally adopt the other’s perspective by exchanging places with the other in imagination. Described phenomenologically: I am here and I imagine going there and being at the place where you are right now. Conversely, you are here (the “there” where I imagine being) and you imagine you are going there, to the place where I am (my “here”). Through this imagined movement and spatial transposition, we are able to exchange our mental perspectives, our thoughts and feelings. Whether apes possess this kind of mental ability is unclear and a subject of debate (Gallup 1998; Povinelli 1998).
In human children, the mental ability to transpose self and other seems to be linked to the emergence, at around nine to twelve months of age, of a whole cluster of cognitive abilities known collectively as joint attention (Tomasello 1999, pp. 62–63). “Joint attention” refers to the triadic structure of a child, adult, and an object or event to which they share attention, and comprises the activities of gaze following (reliably following where adults are looking), joint engagement with shared objects or events, using adults as social reference points, and imitative learning (acting on objects as adults do). At around the same time, infants also begin to point to things and hold them up for someone to see, gestures that serve to direct adult attention actively and intentionally. As Michael Tomasello argues, “infants begin to engage in joint attentional interactions when they begin to understand other persons as intentional agents like the self” (1999, p. 68). He proposes that the infant uses her primal understanding of others as “like me” and her newly emerging understanding of her own intentional agency, as the basis on which to judge analogically and categorically that others are intentional agents “like me” as well.
According to this view, experience of the self comes first and serves as a basis for developing understanding of the other (Decety and Sommerville 2003; Meltzoff and Moore 1998). Contrary to this view is the view that self and other arise together. Thus, Baressi and Moore (1996) propose that self-understanding and other-understanding develop together out of a prior experience of intentional relations that does not differentiate between first-person and third-person sources of information. The differences between these views and their relation to comparable differences in phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity are beyond the scope of this chapter and stand out as an important topic for further research.
The third type of empathy involves not simply imagining myself in your place but understanding you as an other who accordingly sees me as an other to you. In other words, the imaginary transposition in this kind of empathy involves the possibility of seeing myself from your perspective, that is, as you empathetically perceive me. Empathy thus becomes reiterated, so that I empathetically imagine your empathetic experience of me and you empathetically imagine my empathetic experience of you. We also talk to each other about our experiences, and so linguistic communication and interpretation participate in and structure this exchange. As a result, each of us participates in an intersubjective viewpoint that transcends our own first-person singular perspectives.
We can turn again to developmental psychology for insight into the genesis of this third aspect of empathy and the role it plays in constituting an intersubjective perspective. Tomasello, in his book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, describes this genesis in the human infant:
As infants begin to follow into and direct the attention of others to outside entities at nine to twelve months of age, it happens on occasion that the other person whose attention an infant is monitoring focuses on the infant herself. The infant then monitors that person’s attention to her in a way that was not possible previously, that is, previous to the nine-month social-cognitive revolution. From this point on the infant’s face-to-face interactions with others—which appear on the surface to be continuous with her face-to-face interactions from early infancy—are radically transformed. She now knows she is interacting with an intentional agent who perceives her and intends things toward her. When the infant did not understand that others perceive and intend things toward an outside world, there could be no question of how they perceived and intended things toward me. After coming to this understanding, the infant can monitor the adult’s intentional relation to the world including herself . . . By something like this same process infants at this age also become able to monitor adults’ emotional attitudes toward them as well—a kind of social referencing of others’ attitudes to the self. This new understanding of how others feel about me opens up the possibility for the development of shyness, self-consciousness, and a sense of self-esteem . . . Evidence for this is the fact that within a few months after the social-cognitive revolution, at the first birthday, infants begin showing the first signs of shyness and coyness in front of other persons and mirrors. (Tomasello 1999, pp. 89–90)
As Tomasello goes on to discuss, once the infant understands other individuals as intentional beings and herself as one participant among others in a social interaction, then whole new cognitive dimensions arise. The child comes to be able to participate in joint attentional scenes—social interactions in which the child and the adult jointly attend to some third thing, and to one another’s attention to that third thing, for an extended period of time, and in which the child can conceptualize her own role from the same “outside” perspective as the other person. Joint attentional scenes in turn provide the framework for the acquisition of language, symbolic representation, and communicative conventions.
There are a number of parallels between Tomasello’s analysis of joint attentional scenes and the phenomenological analysis of empathy. Although he does not use the term empathy in this context, the cognitive achievement he describes of being able to conceptualize oneself from the perspective of another person corresponds to what Edith Stein calls “reiterated empathy.” In reiterated empathy, one sees oneself from the perspective of another and thereby grasps oneself as one individual participant in an intersubjective world. Similarly, the child’s participation in a joint attentional scene requires that she be able to monitor the intentional acts of another person, including those acts directed toward her own intentional acts, for she herself is often the object of joint attention. This ability on the part of the child corresponds to being able to engage in reiterated empathy, in which the child empathetically grasps not simply the other as an intentional agent like herself, but the other’s empathetic experience of herself as an intentional agent. Without this empathetic ability to understand oneself as an other for the other, it is hard to see how one could come to have a nonegocentric and intersubjective perspective on oneself as a participant in a social interaction:
[J]oint attention is sometimes characterized as the child coordinating attention between just two things: the object and the adult. But . . . as the child begins to monitor adults’ attention to outside entities, that outside entity sometimes turns out to be the child herself—and so she begins to monitor adults’ attention to her and thus to see herself from the outside, as it were. She also comprehends the role of the adult from this same outside vantage point, and so, overall, it is as if she were viewing the whole scene from above, with herself as just one player in it. This is as opposed to the way other primate species and six-month-old human infants view the social interaction from an “inside” perspective, in which the other participants appear in one format (third-person exteroception) and “I” appears in another different format (first-person proprioception . . . ). (Tomasello 1999, pp. 99–100)
Tomasello’s discussion of the child’s achievement of this intersubjective perspective emphasizes the developmental progression from the neonate’s understanding of the other as an animate being to the infant’s understanding of the other as an intentional agent with attention and goal-directed behavior, to the four-year-old child’s understanding of the other as a mental agent with thoughts and beliefs (which need not be expressed in behavior and can fail to match the world).
Phenomenologists, without neglecting the intentional and mental aspects of the self, draw attention to the first-person/third-person ambiguity of the lived body in reiterated empathy. My body is lived by me in the first person, but it also appears to you in the third person (or second person), and in empathetically grasping that experience of yours, I experience myself as an other to you. Here a connection can be made to the point about the difference between first-person (proprioceptive) and third-person (exteroceptive) cognitive formats in social interactions. If the “I” were to appear only in a first-person singular format, then it would not be possible to have any nonegocentric understanding of the “I” as a bodily individual in a public intentional world that transcends the self. My egocentric (proprioceptive and kinesthetic) experience of myself does not present my body to me as a perceptual thing equivalent to other perceptual things that stand before me—for my body does not stand before me in this way. Therefore, as we remarked earlier, if the lived body were disclosed only from a first-person singular perspective, it would seem unlike any other object and strangely incomplete. Through reiterated empathy in joint attentional scenes—the experience of oneself as an other for the other—one can gain a nonegocentric and intersubjective view of one’s own lived body as an individual intentional agent in a public world.
The fourth type of empathy is the perception of the other as a being who deserves concern and respect. This type of empathy is not the same as any particular feeling of concern for another, such as sympathy, love, or compassion. Rather, it is the underlying capacity to have such other-directed and other-regarding feelings of concern (Vetlesen 1994). We cultivate this capacity in each other—for instance, from parent to child—and thereby constitute each other as persons in a moral sense.
This type of empathy can also be introduced from a developmental perspective. As we have seen, there is a progression from the infant’s understanding of others as intentional agents (with attention, behavioral strategies, and goals) to the young child’s understanding of others as mental agents (with beliefs, desires, and plans). According to Piaget and Tomasello, moral understanding begins to emerge at around the same time as the child comes to understand others as mental agents. It derives not from the rules adults impose on behavior but from empathizing with other persons as mental agents and being able to see and feel things from their point of view (Tomasello 1999, pp. 179–181).
Within Western moral philosophy there is a long tradition going back to Kant that emphasizes reason over feeling. To act out of duties legislated by reason is thought to have greater moral worth than acting on the basis of feeling or sentiment. Yet as de Waal observes, echoing David Hume and Adam Smith: “Aid to others in need would never be internalized as a duty without the fellow-feeling that drives people to take an interest in one another. Moral sentiments came first; moral principles second” (1996, p. 87).
Empathy in the moral sense is a basic cognitive and emotional capacity underlying all the moral sentiments and emotions one can have for another. The point here is not that empathy exhausts moral experience, for it certainly does not, but that empathy provides the source of that kind of experience and the entry point into it. Without empathy, concern and respect for others as persons in the moral sense—as ends-in-themselves—would be greatly impoverished. As Mark Johnson has argued:
[T]he Kantian imperative always to treat others (and oneself) as ends-in-themselves has no practical meaning independent of our imaginatively taking up the place of the other. Contrary to Kant’s explicit claims, we cannot know what it means to treat someone as an end-in-himself, in any concrete way, unless we can imagine his experience, feelings, plans, goals, and hopes. We cannot know what respect for others demands of us, unless we participate imaginatively in their experience of the world. (Johnson 1993, p. 200)
The four types of empathy presented here occur together in face-to-face intersubjective experience. They intertwine through the lived body and through language. You imagine yourself in my place on the basis of the expressive similarity and spontaneous coupling of our lived bodies. This experience of yours contributes to the constitution of me for myself, for I experience myself as an intersubjective being by empathetically imagining your empathetic experience of me. Conversely, I imagine myself in your place, and this experience of mine contributes to the constitution of you for yourself. As we communicate in language and gesture, we interpret and understand each other dialogically. This dialogical dynamic is not a linear or additive combination of two preexisting, skull-bound minds. It emerges from and reciprocally shapes the nonlinear coupling of oneself and another in perception and action, emotion and imagination, and gesture and speech. In this way, self and other bring forth each other reciprocally through empathy.
In taking up empathy at the end of this book, our focus has shifted from individual cognition and subjectivity to social cognition and intersubjectivity. Empathy, however, is only one aspect of intersubjectivity, one that operates at the level of the face-to-face encounter between individuals in a social group. For a fuller perspective on intersubjectivity we need to take account of culture, history, and the life-world. We need to look not only at formal structures of empathetic experience and their embodied development, but also at the cultural and historical becoming of human experience within and across generations. In phenomenological terms, we need to move from static and genetic analyses to generative ones.
One of the most important reasons that human mentality cannot be reduced simply to what goes on inside the brain of an individual is that human mental activity is fundamentally social and cultural. Culture is no mere external addition or support to cognition; it is woven into the very fabric of each human mind from the beginning. Symbolic culture in particular shapes the “cognitive architecture” of the human mind. Stripped of culture, we simply would not have the cognitive capacities that make us human. In the words of the neuropsychologist Merlin Donald:
Our dependency on culture is very deep and extends to the very existence of certain kinds of symbolic representation and thought. Socially isolated humans do not develop language or any form of symbolic thought and have no true symbols of any kind. In fact, the isolated human brain does not act like a symbolizing organ, any more than an ape brain does. It is apparently unable to generate symbolic representations on its own. It does so only through intensive enculturation. (Donald 2001, p. 150)
We can adopt the developmental term enculturation to describe this constitutive power of culture. Human mentality emerges from developmental processes of enculturation and is configured by the distributed cognitive web of symbolic culture.
In recent years, a few cognitive scientists in different fields have drawn attention to the constitutive role that culture plays in human cognition (Donald 1991, 2001; Hendriks-Jansen 1996; Hutchins 1995; Tomasello 1999). Although their studies clearly imply that it makes no sense to think of culture and nature as separate developmental domains, there remains a persistent tendency in mind science to conceptualize human cognitive development in the dichotomous framework of “nature versus culture” or “nature versus nurture.” Hence right from the start we need to situate the enculturation thesis in a developmental framework that explicitly rejects these dichotomous categories.
Developmental systems theory, discussed in Chapter 7, gives us the framework we need. Developmental systems theory rejects accounts of evolution and development that are conceptually structured by the innate-versus-acquired, nature-versus-nurture, and nature-versus-culture dichotomies. The developmental system of an organism or life cycle is the matrix of resources necessary for its development. Any resource that reliably recurs in each generation and plays a role in reconstructing the life cycle counts as something inherited. Such resources include not simply genes, but many other elements of the organism and its niche, from cytoplasmic components within the cell, which must be passed on with the genes, to symbiont organisms, social structures, and cultural practices.
In addition, developmental systems theory rejects the “master molecule” conception of genes: genes are not distinctly informational causes of development different in kind from other developmental factors that do not qualify as informational. Rather than unfolding according to a transmitted genetic blueprint or program, the developmental process of a life cycle reconstructs itself from generation to generation by way of myriad interdependent causal pathways on multiple levels—genetic, cellular, social, and cultural. Evolution is not simply change in gene frequencies, but “change in the distribution and constitution of developmental (organism-environment) systems” (Oyama 2000b, p. 77). Nor is ontogeny the outcome of two mutually exclusive classes of inherited and acquired developmental factors. Phenotypic traits are as much acquired as inherited because they must be developmentally constructed anew in each generation and thus acquired in ontogeny; and environmental resources are as much inherited or transmitted as they are acquired, for they are passed on inseparably with the genes and thus enter into the formation of the organism from the very beginning. From a developmental systems perspective then, it makes no sense to divide the traits of the human organism into the separate categories of nature and culture. As Griffiths and Gray state:
Many species typical features of human psychology depend critically on stably replicated features of human culture. Many psychological features that are specific to certain human cultures may nevertheless have evolutionary explanations, since this variation may reflect differentiation among lineages of developmental systems. An obvious research program within developmental systems theory is an attempt to locate critical developmental resources in human culture(s), and to study their influence on development, and how they are themselves replicated. (Griffiths and Gray 1994, p. 302)
The critical developmental resources provided by human culture have long been of central concern to the field of cultural psychology (Bruner 1990; Tomasello 1999; Vygotsky 1978). A good example from this field—one that enables us to build on the discussion of empathy—is the study of joint attention and cultural learning. Donald describes joint attention as a “primary cultural guidance device” that “allows children to follow cultural signals that will become increasingly more abstract as they expand their horizons” (2001, p. 205). The nature of these expanding horizons has been thoroughly reviewed by Tomasello (1999), who describes how joint attentional scenes are the basis for the acquisition of language and symbolic representation. They are also the basis for a whole host of associated cognitive capacities and structures, such as the ability to examine one’s own thinking from the perspective of the other and thereby redescribe one’s own cognitive representations of the world. By drawing from his work, we can show how the genetic phenomenological analysis of empathy and the lived body can be placed within a more encompassing generative analysis of culture and the intersubjective life-world.
Let me begin by going back to the face-to-face coupling of infant and adult in joint attentional interaction. In this characteristically human form of structural coupling (but see Savage-Rumbaugh, Fields, and Taglialatela 2001 on apes), two (or more) individuals jointly attend to some shared thing, and to one another’s attention to that thing, through the reciprocal coupling of their lived bodies—eye contact, facial expressions, voice, touch, and gesture—and their capacities for temporally extended conscious awareness and the voluntary attentional control of action (Donald 2001, pp. 194–204).
We need to note two crucial features of the joint attentional scenes in which infants and young children come to participate with adults (Tomasello 1999, pp. 97–98). The first is that these scenes occupy a middle ground of shared social reality between the larger perceptual world and the smaller linguistic world: they include only a subset of things in the child’s perceptual world, but more things than those indicated in any set of linguistic symbols. The second is that the child’s understanding of this shared social reality includes not simply the adult and the object of their shared attention, but the child herself, “conceptualized from the same ‘outside’ perspective as the other person and the object so that they are all in a common representational format” (Tomasello 1999, pp. 97–98). We have seen how this external and nonegocentric representational format is related to empathy, in particular to the reiterated empathy whereby one comprehends another’s experience of oneself (for example, another’s attention to one’s own intentional and attentional acts in a joint attentional scene). What we need to examine now is how this nonegocentric format provides the intersubjective context for cultural learning and the acquisition of language and symbolic representation.
According to Tomasello, the acquisition of language and symbolic representation in joint attentional scenes proceeds on the basis of the child’s abilities to understand communicative acts and intentions, as well as to engage in a particular kind of imitative and cultural learning called role-reversal imitation (1999, pp. 100–107). Communicative intentions are intentions to direct the attention of another person to something in the joint attentional scene. For the child to understand communicative intentions, she has to be able to monitor the intentional states of others toward her own intentional/attentional states. To produce the communicative acts she understands, however, she has to learn to use communicative symbols toward the adult in the same way the adult uses them toward her. This kind of imitative and cultural learning requires not simply that the child substitute herself for the adult as actor, but that she substitute the adult for herself as the target of the intentional act (otherwise she would wind up directing the symbol toward herself). She is able to effect this substitution because she can understand the whole joint attentional scene from an external perspective, in which she and the adult are represented in the same nonegocentric format and hence are interchangeable. (This would not be the case were she represented in a first-person or egocentric format, and the adult in a third-person format.) This process of role-reversal imitation in communication, Tomasello believes, “actually creates the intersubjectively understood communicative convention or symbol” (1999, p. 107). Thus communicative conventions or symbols are enacted or generated for the infant by role-reversal imitation.
One feature that distinguishes the communicative symbols of language from other intersubjective and communicative symbols is that they are perspectival—they embody the variety of perspectives that human beings can take on things for communicative purposes. Consider one of Tomasello’s examples:
An individual language user looks at a tree and, before drawing the attention of her interlocuter to that tree, must decide, based on her assessment of the listener’s current knowledge and expectations, whether to use That tree over there, It, The oak, That hundred-year old oak, The tree, The bagswing tree, That thing in the front yard, The ornament, The embarrassment, or any number of other expressions. She must decide if the tree is in / is standing in / is growing in / was placed in / is flourishing in the front yard. And these decisions are not made on the basis of the speaker’s direct goal with respect to the object or activity involved, but rather on the basis of her goal with respect to the listener’s interest and attention to that object or activity. This means that the speaker knows that the listener shares with her these same choices for construal—again, all available simultaneously. Indeed, the fact that the speaker is, while she is speaking, monitoring the listener’s attentional status (and vice versa) means that both participants in a conversation are always aware that there are at least their two actual perspectives on a situation, as well as the many more that are symbolized in unused symbols and constructions. (Tomasello 1999, pp. 126–127; emphasis omitted)
Language acquisition involves the internalization of such multiple perspectives and communicative intentions. As one acquires a language, one internalizes, through imitative and cultural learning, the communicative intentions of others to get one to share their attention, as well as the perspectives they take on things in joint attentional scenes. In other words, language acquisition involves the internalization of joint attention into symbolic representation (Tomasello 1999, pp. 125–129).
The enculturation of the mind in language fundamentally transforms the nature of human cognition. Tomasello details three main interrelated ways in which language builds on basic human cognitive skills and fashions them into far more complex ones: (1) Linguistic communication is the vehicle for the “transmission” of most cultural knowledge: “Beyond fundamental primate skills of cognition . . . children’s domain-specific knowledge and expertise depend almost totally on the accumulated knowledge of their cultures and its ‘transmission’ to them via linguistic and other symbols, including both writing and pictures” (p. 165). (2) Linguistic communication influences children’s construction of cognitive categories, relations, analogies, and metaphors. In English, for instance, we can construe objects and properties as events or activities (He iced the puck; She colored the picture); activities and properties as objects (Skating is fun; Green is my favorite color); and objects and events as if they were other objects and events (Time is an arrow; Love is a journey) (p. 157; see also Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980). (3) Linguistic interaction with others or discourse induces children to take different conceptual perspectives, including the perspective of the other on their own discourse. The child’s internalization of the adult’s instructional “voice” and perspective on herself plays a key role in the development of dialogical representations (representations of the intersubjective dialogue itself) as well as self-reflective and metacognitive representations (pp. 170–200).
It is interesting to speculate about the relationship between the human mind’s enculturation into symbolic systems and the brain. One might think to apply the logic of emergence to this relationship. On the one hand, the properties of distributed symbolic systems cannot be predicted from what individual brains can do in isolation, for they emerge from the complex interactions of many individuals (Donald 2001, pp. 152–153). On the other hand, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the cultural environment of symbolic representation, which provides the scaffolding for the construction of complex cognitive representations and skills, can alter the neural architecture of the developing brain (Donald 2001, pp. 153, 212). Indeed, neuroscientific evidence is now accumulating that experience-dependent brain activity in particular environmental contexts plays a huge role in the development of the individual brain. Rather than being a collection of prespecified modules, the brain appears to be an organ that constructs itself in development through spontaneously generated and experience-dependent activity (Quartz 1999; Quartz and Sejnowski 1997), a developmental process made possible by robust and flexible developmental mechanisms conserved in animal evolution (see Chapter 7).
Given this “neural constructivist” viewpoint—and the consilient one of developmental systems theory—it seems reasonable to believe that, as Donald puts it, “symbolizing cultures own a direct path into our brains and affect the way major parts of the executive brain become wired up during development. This is the key idea of deep enculturation . . . Culture effectively wires up functional subsystems in the brain that would not otherwise exist” (2001, p. 212). In this way, “culture begins in the womb” (Savage-Rumbaugh, Fields, and Taglialatela 2001, p. 278).
In phenomenological terms, this power of culture and language to shape human subjectivity and experience belongs not simply to the genetic constitution of the individual, but to the generative constitution of the intersubjective community. Individual subjectivity is from the outset intersubjectivity, as a result of the communally handed down norms, conventions, symbolic artifacts, and cultural traditions in which the individual is always already embedded. Thus the internalization of joint attention into symbolic representations is not simply an ontogenetic phenomenon, but a historical and cultural one:
One of the most interesting things about the process of language acquisition is that the adults from whom the child is learning went through the same process earlier in their lives, and across generations the symbolic artifacts that comprise English, Turkish, or whatever language, accumulate modifications as new linguistic forms are created by grammaticization, syntacticization, and other processes of language change—so that today’s child is learning the whole historically derived conglomeration. Consequently, when the child learns the conventional use of these well-traveled symbols, what she is learning is the ways that her forebears in the culture have found it useful to manipulate the attention of others in the past. And because the people of a culture, as they move through historical time, evolve many and varied purposes for manipulating one another’s attention (and because they need to do this in many different types of discourse situations), today’s child is faced with a panoply of different linguistic symbols and constructions that embody many different attentional construals of any given situation. Consequently, as the child internalizes a linguistic symbol—as she learns the human perspectives embodied in a linguistic symbol—she cognitively represents not just the perceptual or motoric aspects of a situation but also one way, among other ways of which she is aware, that the current situation may be attentionally construed by “us,” the users of that symbol. The way that human beings use linguistic symbols thus creates a clear break with straightforward perceptual or sensory-motor representations, and it is due entirely to the social nature of linguistic symbols. (Tomasello 1999, pp. 125–126)
The intersubjective symbolic representations that configure the human mind are the product of generative and generational processes on three time scales—phylogeny, history, and ontogeny (Tomasello 1999, pp. 10, 202–203). Phylogenetic time is the time during which the human primate species evolved its distinctive form of social cognition, on the basis of identification with other members of the species as intentional and mental beings. This evolutionary process also included the evolution of a distinctive form of consciousness—an expanded “conscious capacity” for long-term awareness, cognitive and emotional self-regulation, and voluntary attentional control, on a time-scale of minutes and hours, not simply seconds (Donald 2001). These evolutionary expansions of the human mind were a precondition for imitative learning and innovation, and hence for the generation of culture. Historical time is the time of cumulative cultural evolution, which in turn requires ontogenetic time for its realization. Children learn things from their forebears and then modify them (in ontogenetic time), and these modifications accumulate over the generations (in historical time). Tomasello dubs this process the “ratchet effect” of cumulative cultural evolution: innovations accumulate over the generations thanks to imitative cultural learning. The ratchet effect has “radically changed the nature of the ontogenetic niche in which human children develop so that, in effect, modern children encounter and interact with their physical and social worlds almost totally through the mediating lenses of preexisting cultural artifacts” (Tomasello 1999, p. 202).
Tomasello and Donald both see phylogeny as equivalent to biological evolution, as opposed to cumulative cultural evolution, which happens over historical and ontogenetic time on the basis of the biological adaptations of the human primate species (intentional understanding and enlarged conscious capacity) as evolved in phylogenetic time. The trouble with this way of dividing things up is that it tends to fall back into the nature/culture and innate/acquired dichotomies. Underneath the cultural clothes acquired in history and ontogeny, there is the naked human primate of phylogeny (an image contrary to Tomasello’s and Donald’s intentions). To solve this problem we need to link cultural psychology to developmental systems theory. Evolution is the evolution of developmental systems; human evolution includes the evolution of a new stage of development, namely, childhood, which is linked to a new form of social cognition; and this new form of social cognition crucially depends on the generative and generational processes of human culture.
In this final section of this chapter, I have sketched only the barest beginnings of a generative perspective on human experience that aims to combine phenomenology and mind science. Much work remains to be done, but I hope to have shown how we can trace a path from life to consciousness to intersubjectivity and culture that can do justice to our existence as living bodily subjects. The individual human subject is the enculturated bodily subject. In this way, the knowing and feeling subject is not the brain in the head, or even the brain plus the body, but the socially and culturally situated person, the enculturated human being.