The first phenomenon is the type of mixed givenness that occurs for the perceptual and empathic givenness of the object of attention that is another person. Husserl noted this as a double object , here called P1 and P2. And in order to explain the empathy of the other in total, P2, it is broken into its constituent moments. The motivating similarity between human bodies is the first place to consider the phenomena of the outward expressiveness of consciousness. Kern clarifies the central topics that Husserl concluded on (1993, 1997, 358). The constant and most central aspects of Husserl’s argument are portrayed in Fig. 9.2.

P2a—The physical body of the other indicates the basic nonverbal leibkörper expressiveness of the other who has a bodily orientation with respect to mutual cultural objects and self (I, 140).

P2b—The visual perception of the other’s body indicates their expression of living bodiliness because all bodily otherness is empathised as connected with self (I, 144).

P2c—The visual perception of the other’s body indicates the phenomenon of the identical other and their givenness . Although the other is at a distance from self empathy forms a basic mutuality between them, for both parties see and empathise from their own positions (I, 145–6).

P2d—The visual perception of the other’s body reawakens previously learned empathising of self into the physical place, consciousness and body of the other to experience vicariously, in quasi-fashion, what objects and the world would look like from the position of the other (I, 146).

P2e—The auditorily-communicated meaning of the other’s speech , as they meant it, is based on grasping words as “cultural predicates” as these too lie in webs of sense for a linguistic group (VI, 371, XI, 435).

Figure 9.2 seeks to explain how empathy and intersubjectivity operate to de-centre the self and make it social. Although there is a three-way connection between self, other and object (I, 141–3), if this triangle is accepted as true and universal, it too operates for all others according to the ideal and universal type of assumptions made about homogeneity and reciprocity that form the conclusions. To be explicit, other consciousness also empathises selves and their views of the same cultural objects. This is not a two-person configuration but implies a third term: That of the presence of the shared knowledge of what various cultural objects are like in their manifold of senses (I, 146). The ideal universal form is triangular though. Thus to extend the image of the triangular relationship above, intersubjectivity is an overlapping of triangles where others empathise selves also.

The first observable difference is between the current moment of visual perceptual givenness of the other’s körper , P1; as opposed to the presentiated addition of empathised understanding (the first constitution of the whole, P2). The other has a living body, P2a, that expresses emotions and participation at a nonverbal level. The other is a specific meaningful someone who expresses some shared interest in the world. Specifically, the other living body responds to the same objects that self sees and the contributions that self makes in any encounter. P2a is the basic empathic sensual expressiveness of the physical human body. Vision (meaningful phenomenon P1, the visual gestalt) is empathised with the nonverbal expressiveness of the other (P2a, I, 122, cf 136). For instance, a facial expression and bodily orientation shows co-interest with self with respect to the mutual world. Accordingly, the first aspect of empathy is that the “body [Körper] over there is nevertheless apprehended as an animate organism [Leib]”, (I, 140). However, P2a is only the first aspect of empathy that gets added to the visual perception of the physical body. The “motivational basis”, (I, 140), between human bodies as seen and empathised wholes, promotes a series of additions of empathised senses from retained past experience with others, with respect to the meaning of what they do, say and express. One pair of objects that appear universally across intersubjectivity is the vision of the self’s körper (filled with its leiblichkeit) in relation to the visual perception of the körperen of others, similarly filled with an empathy of their leiblichkeit (I, 142). Husserl’s way of describing empathic presentiation was to say that it has a double object . For in the natural attitude , perceptual vision and audition present what is happening now; whilst empathic presentiation is frequently clear, giving an accurate meaning that an empathiser gives to the persons they empathically read.

Connected to P2a is P2b, a second aspect of what is created about the consciousness of others. The perception of the other’s body indicates not only their nonverbal expression of living, bodily otherness. The nonverbal visual sense is empathised as another living body , the ego and consciousness of another person: “the other’s animate body [Leibkörper] and his governing Ego are given in the manner that characterises a unitary transcending experience” of otherness (I, 144). Husserl argued that this sense was first constituted in infancy. There is a temporal throwing forward of the own world that has been learned. Part of intersubjectivity in the here and now moment is an anticipation of what will happen next, one that can be frustrated, disappointed or fulfilled.

Connected to P2a and P2b is P2c, the next addition of sense. The perception of the other’s body also indicates that the other has givenness in space “There,” (I, 146), as a continually separate person to self who experiences cultural objects from There. What this means is that in face-to-face meetings between two persons, there is a specific constancy of difference between self and other. If the difference between self and other was variable, there would be a fundamental confusion and other people would be felt to be aspects only of one ‘self’. In connection to these empathised senses, there is a linking of sense between self and the empathised senses donated to the other, as an immediately grasped other with their empathised sense of their perspective.

The fourth aspect of the base experience of empathy , P2d, exists because of the total set of conditions P1 to P8. P2d is the view of the world that other people have. We empathise their views of cultural objects and quasi-experience the overall relationship of the other’s views in our empathies of them. The visual perception of other’s bodies connect with empathic understanding as a socially learned co-constitution of the ‘second-hand’, empathised appearances of the other’s intentional object for them from their perspective, “those I should have if I should go over there and be where he is”, (I, 146). So empathy delivers the senses or profiles on the common cultural objects and world that are apparent to all. One effect is that “I experience the world (including others) … as other than mine alone”, (I, 123). This is why objects are cultural objects. This is how cultural senses get into culture because since birth there has been an informed process of teaching children what things mean. Cultural senses belong to the culture, the reference group to which the objects are a part of commonsense . Because of idealization, it is assumed that intersubjective worlds of what is shared, all have the same “triangular” shape. They obey the same principles of the inter-relatedness of all contents within a surrounding horizon of sense, thus producing “an intersubjective world, actually there for everyone, accessible in respect of its objects [Objekten] to everyone”, (I, 123). Yet the triangular transcendental categories, self, other, cultural sense and the cultural object, theoretically and universally remain the same. In a different wording, what this means is that the cultural objects that we see appear differently for others. This fourth part of empathy P2d is what makes the world capable of being shared because empathy is the case of mentally representing another’s point of view, for instance, “a perception that someone else has of the x that I see or that I imagine to be able to see”, (Marbach 1993, 91). The terminology is general and means that higher and more complex forms of differing understanding between selves and others are founded on this ideal transcendental analysis of the conditions for sharing implied and communicable meaning. This is also how speech has meaning, because the speech of the other, P2e, can indicate what actually their view is. When it comes to understanding the other, one phenomenon that is not in the analysis of 1929, is grasping the other as a speaking whole person who says something meaningful, as well as being one who looks and behaves purposefully in accord with what is said. Their verbal presence is only one part of the whole, for what also usually concurs with the spoken aspect, is the ‘speech of the body’ in that there are nonverbal conformities and rules throughout the public sphere. If these connections of congruent signification were not obeyed, then what would occur would be a failure to share a single meaning. Rather, two meanings would be sent, for instance, one nonverbally and the other verbally, which would be confusing for the successful receipt of what was intended to be said.

The statements above are conditioned by a variety of other phenomena and intersubjective processes that maintain the intersubjective accessibility of objects for all, across time and history . The inter-relation between self and other is always of the sort where the senses of objects become shared as do the manners of intentionality towards them. If this were not the case, persons would be solipsists and there would be no possibility of communication or culture . One clear account of intersubjective intentionality was made in 1915. “The things posited by others are also mine: in empathy I participate in the other’s positing . E.G., I identify the thing I have over and against me in the mode of appearance α with the thing posited by the other in the mode of appearance β. To this belongs the possibility of substitution by means of trading places. Each person has, at the same place in space, “the same” appearances of the same things—if, as we might suppose, all have the same sensibility. And on this account, even the “view” of a thing is Objectified… Only in the manner of appresence can I have co-given with his leib, his appearances and his “here” to which they are related… Man as object is thus a transcendent external object, an object of an external intuition, that is, we have here an experience of two strata… empathy… which realises the entire psychic life and psychic being in a certain sort of unity of appearance, namely that of an identity of manifold appearances and states localised therein which are united in the form of dispositions”, (IV, 168–9, also I, 142, 147, V, 65–6, 109–110, IX, 227). Although the manners of expression were different in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Cartesian Meditations and Crisis, the sense is the same. What is at stake is that through empathy , or better co-empathy between any two consciousnesses, it becomes possible for all to share meaning and potentially understand each other’s perspective on the same cultural object (IV, 198–200). The manner of appearance of the manifold of meanings is that cultural objects co-imply sense for the other, so it is possible to lay their use side by side with one’s own view, and “alpha” and “beta” overlap. It is this type of overlapping co-implication that produces the manifold of possible meanings of the same cultural object and the sense of there being one structure of the worldliness of the world. Husserl also argued for the higher possibility of egoic empathic imaginative transposals into the perspective of others, so it becomes practically possible to interact with others and join with them. Intersubjectivity implies that we can potentially understand any other person and potentially take up any perspective (IV, 169, cf V, 109). The noesis of empathy in relation to the noemata of the bodies of human beings is a “connexion constituted through the medium of presentiation”, a number of which get added together in the way concluded upon above to create an “identifying synthesis [that] connects them in the evident consciousness of “the Same”—which implies the same, never repeated temporal form, filled with the same content”, (I, 155).

In this light, the argument is that the first clue is attending to the outer expressiveness of the living body that shows other consciousness at work: “it is clear from the very beginning that only a similarity connecting, within my primordial sphere, that body over there with my body can serve as the motivational basis for the “analogising” apprehension of that body as another animate organism [Leib]”, (I, 140). What Husserl meant is that the human body indicates other subjectivity through empathy . The meanings concerning others’ bodies are the starting point for the conditions of the possibility of there being a common nonverbal communicational medium, for the commonality of being an instance of embodied consciousness where nonverbal communication is a condition of possibility of there being a shared cultural world , so consciousness is visibly and empathically expressed in the world (I, 149, 156–8).