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.