Social ontology of Gustav Shpet and the problem of empathy in phenomenology

The problem of empathy (Einfuhlung) as a part of the question of experience of other minds was one of the most vividly discussed issues in phenomenology in 1910s. Max Scheler stated that other minds can be directly perceived in sympathy or Fremderfahrung. Edith Stein and later Edmund Husserl argued that other minds can be experienced only indirectly, though such experience is original and can not be reduced to any other sort of experience (such as animal life or psychic). Russian phe-nomenologist Gustav Shpet in his work Appearance and Sense (1914) also develops an original conception of social being. He states that this being as a special ontological region correlates with a specific intuition which he called "social" or "hermeneutical" one and which he differs from empiric and eidetic intuitions. This intuition as the hermeneutical one is the understanding of sense, and as the social one it is none other than empathy. This empathy is not just sympathy or emotional contagion -it is the direct experience of the other in his or her concrete being, or it is essentially the perception of the face. So, in this conception of social intuition Shpet appears to be closer to Scheler than to Husserl and Stein, but unlike Scheler he accepts Husserlian transcendental phenomenology, though moving towards a sort of social ontology without subject. Soon after 1910s a long-time decline of the category of empathy began in philosophy in whole. Nonetheless the problem of empathy stayed a "primal landscape" for the question of intersubjectivity in phenomenology. The refusal of empathy as of intermediate experience of the other coincided with the so called "ethical turn" in phenomenology that supposed the infinite inflation of the other becoming the Other from the capital letter and marking the rupture of phenomenality. In contrary, present-day modest renaissance of empathy concurs with the return of interest in the "mere" other. The problem of empathy as it arose in the beginning of the XX century already shapes these oscillations between two contradictory requirements forming a paradox: the experience of the other must not be intermediate, or there'll be no other; and at the same time it must be such, or there'll be no experience. And this paradox appears also in Shpet's conception of social or hermeneutical intuition that is not any given intuition at all and that gives that that slips off its givenness - the intimate sense that is radically outside.

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