Dan Zahavi, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame

Abstract

Dan Zahavi’s Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame is an elaboration of the author’s phenomenological account of selfhood, the latest longer work in a series of publications on the topic. e focus of this monograph is on the relation between the self and the other. Zahavi defends the multidimensional model of the self and argues that the minimal self, the most basic form of self that all subjective creatures share, is presocial. However, there are also other dimensions of the self that are formed through social means. Self and Other is an exploration of the interconnection between the social and the presocial aspects of selfhood via an extended investigation of the phenomenon of empathy. It addresses the question whether understanding the self to be a presocial and rst-personal phenomenon at themost basic level allows for a proper account of both intersubjectivity and the social nature of humans. Drawing upon insights provided by the phenomenological accounts of Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, and Alfred Schutz, Zahavi defends the notion of a minimal self from the critique that it is overly Cartesian. He argues that since the basic form of empathy, which is necessary for developing any social dimension of selfhood, entails the preservation of self-other dišerentiation, the rst-personal experiential self must rather be regarded as a prerequisite for a satisfactory account of intersubjectivity and sociability. e monograph includes a critical assessment of a wide range of contemporary works on the self, empathy, and shame, and it engages with relevant recent discoveries in