Walter Wink on Christ's Humanity

"And this is the revelation: God is HUMAN... It is the great error of humanity to believe that it is human. We are only fragmentarily human, fleetingly human, brokenly human. We see glimpses of our humanness, we can on;y dream of what a more human existence and political order would be like, but we have not yet arrived at true humanness. Only God is human, and we are made in God's image and likeness - which is to say, we are capable of becoming human."

Walter Wink, Just Jesus, p. 102.

To put it another way, Jesus alone is Human Being. We are, together, Human Becoming more than Human Being.

Empathy as a Component of a Larger Paradox within Traditional Psychology

"Is it not paradoxical that no traditional psychology up to the present day has been able to give even a true exposition of perception, or even the special type, the perception of bodies, or of memory, of expectation, of 'empathy,' or of any other manner of presentification; or an intentional, essential description of judgment, or of any other class-type of acts, or an intentional clarification of the synthesis of agreement and discrepancy (in their different modalities)?"

Husserl, Crisis, p. 249.

Husserl and Empathy in Crisis

"Through the empathy of his original sphere of consciousness, through what arises out of it, as a component which is never lacking, he also already has a universal intersubjective horizon, even though he may not notice it at first."

Husserl, Crisis, 243.

"What remains now, is not a multiplicity of separated souls, each reduced to its pure interiority, but rather" just as there is a sole universal nature as a self-enclosed framework of unity, so there is a sole psychic framework, a total framework of all souls, which are united not externally but internally, namely, through the intentional interpenetration which is the communalization of their lives. Each soul, reduced to its pure interiority, has its being-for-itself and its being-in-itself, has its life which is originally its own. And yet it belongs to each soul that it have its particular world-consciousness in a way which is originally its own, namely, through the fact that it has empathy experiences, experiencing consciousness of others as [also] having a world, the same world, that is, each apperceiving it in his own apperceptions."

Husserl, Crisis, 255.

"During the time in which I am a transcendental or pure phenomenologist, I am exclusively within transcendental self-consciousness, and I am my own subject matter... Here there is no objectivity at all; here there are objectivity, things, world, and world-science (including, then, all positive sciences and philosophies), only as my - the transcendental ego's - phenomena. All the ontic validities that I may perform and wish to perform as a transcendental investigator are related to myself; but this also includes the actual and possible 'empathies,' perceptions of others, that appear among my original intentions. Through the reduction [others] are transformed from human beings existing for me into alter egos existing for me, having the ontic meaning of implicata of my original intentional life. And the reverse also holds: I, with my whole original life, am implied in them; and they are all likewise implied in one another."

Husserl, Crisis, p. 258.

"We are thereby conscious of the men on our external horizon in each case as 'others'; in each case 'I' am conscious of them as 'my' others, as those with whom I can enter into actual and potential, immediate and mediate relations of empathy; [this involves] a reciprocal 'getting along' with others; and on the basis of these relations I can deal with them, enter into particular modes of community with them, and then know, in a habitual way, of my being so related."

Husserl, "The Origin of Geometry" in Crisis, p. 358.

The three-course development of Empathy

"Appresentation as such presupposes a core of presentation. it is a presentification combined by association with presentation, with perception proper, but a presentification that is fused with the latter in the particular function of 'co-perception'. In other words, the two are so fused that they stand within the functional community of one perception, which simultaneously presents and appresents, and yet furnishes for the total a consciousness of its being itself there."

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 150.

Husserl, Empathy, and Objectivity

"As we know, the ultimate effect of empathy is that universal superaddition of sense whereby my primordial 'world' becomes a truly objective world that transcends my sphere of ownness."

A.D. Smith, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 226.

"Yet, even with this, we still have not gone beyond the subject and his subjective, evident capacities; that is, we still have no 'objectivity' given. It does arise, however - in a preliminary stage - in understandable fashion as soon as we take into consideration the function of empathy and fellow mankind as a community of empathy and language. In the contact of reciprocal linguistic understanding, the original production and the product of one subject can be actively understood by others."

Husserl, "The Origin of Geometry" in Crisis, p. 360.

Empathy, Husserl, and the 5th Meditation

"So our initial concern will be with his account of how another self is even thinkable. Or rather, since all thought is a high-level, founded, cognitive accomplishment, which implicitly refers to first-hand experience, the real question is how another self can be at least putatively experienced. How can an object of my experience even so much as appear as another subject, whether veridically or not? Husserl commonly employs the term 'empathy' for this (putative) experiential awareness of another subject... he is not trying to explain our awareness of others by appeal to empathy: the term is but a label for the accomplishment. So, a substantial part of the present meditation is concerned to explain how empathy is possible as an intentional achievement."


A.D. Smith, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (New York: Routledge, 2010), p.213.

Husserl, Leibniz, and Empathy

"The enormous agreement between the two is only underlined by Husserl's one insistent departure from Leibniz: monads 'have windows' (e.g., Int. II, 260), the windows being those of 'empathy'... monads communicate with each another."

A.D. Smith, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 201.

Husserl on the Recollected Self

"Self-temporalization through depresentation, so to speak (through recollection), has its analogue in my self-alienation (empathy as a depresentation of a higher of a higher level - depresentation of my primal presence into merely presentified primal presence). Thus, in me, 'another I' achieves ontic validity as co-present with his own ways of being self-evidently verified, which are obviously quite different from those of a 'sense'-perception."

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 185.

"This idea is that the self in recollection has to unify itself with the earlier recollected self... two main implications. On the one hand, it is, for Husserl, the primal ego which in its self-temporalizing constitutes the full, transcendental ego. Secondly, this self-temporalization of the ego allows the ego to posit variations of itself, and this plays a role in the constitution of other egos."

Dermot Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 255.

Husserl and Intersubjectivity

"For Husserl, intersubjectivity is not some relation, within the world, that is to be observed from the outside; it is not something transcendent to consciousness, or some sort of system or structure in which consciousness would be found... The very opposite is the case: intersubjectivity is a relation between me and the other or others, and correspondingly, its treatment and analysis must necessarily take the I's relation to others as its point of departure."

Dan Zahavi, Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity, trans. Elizabeth A. Behnke (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001) p. 79.

"intersubjectivity has to be understood transcendentally in terms of the ego having its other, its 'you', its 'we'. There can be no 'you' or 'we' except from the standpoint of an ego, and this gives the ego a certain primacy... There is an egoic core to the self which is essential to it at a level prior to intersubjective engagement."

Dermot Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 253-254.

Husserl's Epochē and the 'Split Ego'

"According to this splitting, the mediating self leads a double life. On the one hand, the ego continues to live naturally, absorbed in the temporal course of everyday life with its ontological commitments and positings, and yet, at the same time, the ego becomes aware of itself as the functioning of world-constituting subjectivity within the natural life and adopts the position of a disinterested onlooker of its own life with inevitable change in the manner in which it lives temporality. As Husserl puts it elsewhere: 'First the transcendental epochē and reduction release transcendental subjectivity from its self-concealment and raise it up to a new position, that of transcendental self-consciousness' (Hua XXXIV 399, my translation). The inevitable result is that natural worldly life is lived in a new register, aware of the transcendental operations that make it possible. The natural ego is, as it were, enlightened by the transcendental onlooker."

Dermot Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 241.

"Husserl, however, sees this disinterested theoretical stance as a first-person attitude that has arrived at final 'clarity' about its own nature. Furthermore, for Husserl, the initiation of the reduction from within the natural attitude is a matter of complete freedom of the will (akin to his understanding of the initiation of Cartesian doubt). Transcendental reduction requires an 'act of will' (Trans. Phen., p. 247; Hua IX 341)."

Dermot Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 242.

"An attitude is arrived at which is above the pregiveness of the validity of the world, above the infinite complex whereby, in concealment, the world's validities are always founded on other validites, above the whole manifold but synthetically unified flow in which the world has and forever attains anew its content of meaning and its validity of being. In other words, we have an attitude above the universal conscious life (both individual subjective and intersubjective) through which the world is 'there' for those naïvely absorbed in ongoing life, as unquestionably present, as the universe of what there is".

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 150.

"conscious life is through and through an intentionally accomplishing life"

Husserl, Crisis, p. 204.

Husserl and Transcendental Philosophy

"Natural human understanding and the objectivism rooted in it will view every transcendental philosophy as a flighty eccentricity, its wisdom as useless foolishness; or it will interpret it as a psychology which seeks to convince itself that it is not a psychology." (Husserl, C 200)

"Husserl considers the domain of transcendental subjectivity not just to be a set of formal conditions for knowledge (as in Kant), categorical frameworks and formal rules for organizing experience, but to be a domain of life, of living, of genuine experience, a domain that has never before been examined in philosophy... The transcendental domain is a domain of conscious experiences, albeit a domain of experience which cannot be entered from the natural attitude." (Moran, p. 219)

"The life-world in which we live 'naively' will be, under the transcendental epoche, transformed into a 'transcendental phenomenon' (C 174)"

Dermont Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 221.

"it is not the being of the world as unquestioned, taken for granted, which is primary in itself... rather what is primary in itself is subjectivity, understood as that which naively pregives the being of the world and then rationalizes or (what is the same thing) objectifies it" (Husserl, C 69).

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

Empathy and the Lifeworld

"But when we are thrown into an alien social sphere, that of the Negroes in the Congo, Chinese peasants, etc., we discover that their truths, the facts that for them are fixed, generally verified and verifiable, are not the same as ours"

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 139.

"In order to truly understand them we need to put ourselves in their place. Ideally, we need to grow up in their world (see Hua XXXIX 158). Alternatively, we can imagine ourselves in their worlds and grasp what is typical for us (trees, buildings, animals and so on), even thought their typification is not available to us. Husserl writes in one manuscript:

'The individual type is not completely known to me: a plant, but a strange sort, a field, but full of plants that are familiar to me. The work on the field: I do not figure out their typical way to cultivate the land. A house is built in alien ways. Is it a temple, or is it a building of the government? I am in China, in the market trade and traffic, but in an alien way. I do know that they have their own typification, but I have no knowledge of them, somehow there are people there in the market. (Hua XXXIX, 159, my translation)'

Something typical in one world is unfamiliar in another."

Dermont Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 212-213.