Philip Walsh
University of California, Irvine
Empathy, Embodiment, and Expression
The most contentious issue in the contemporary collective intentionality debate centers on the ontology of collective intentionality tokens. Individualists, namely John Searle, maintain that the bearers of collective intentionality are the individual minds of humans (and perhaps some animals). Holists, namely Margaret Gilbert, claim that when we ascribe we-intentionality there is a single referent that our ascription designates. Thus, for an account like Gilbert’s to work, we must posit a “plural subject” as the bearer of collective intentionality tokens. On her account, the constituent members of a plural subject “constitute as a body” a single instance of a given intentional token. Searle dismisses such an account on the grounds that there can be no such thing as a “plural subject,” in the intrinsic sense of “subject,” since there is no conscious entity that exists in addition to the individuals constituting the group.
This paper draws on the resources provided by Merleau-Ponty’s account of intentionality in order to clarify what, precisely, each of these authors is describing. For Merleau-Ponty, intentionality has an “anonymous core” which is characterized in terms of a unique form of unity—the body schema. Husserl was aware of this form of unity in his discussion of empathy in Ideas II, where he defines empathy as an act-type which apprehends embodied unities of sense-expression. Empathy serves as a phenomenological basis for collective intentionality ascriptions, as well as a necessary background condition for plural-subject constitution; however, the phenomenology of plural-subjectivity is something different from empathy. Merleau-Ponty’s account of “operant,” as opposed to “thetic,” intentionality describes the phenomenology of intersubjectivity in terms of interlocking motives that exist prior to any explicit attention. In this way, Merleau-Ponty helps us see how a plural-subject—an embodied expressive unity—can be constituted through interaction.