Exploring Enactive Empathy

Abstract

This paper argues that empathy comes in different forms: it isn’t all of a piece. It seeks to cast light on that variety of forms by focusing on the characteristic features of different forms of empathy, which we take to exist along a continuum. Section 1 highlights the special advantages of thinking of empathy as enactive and exploratory, drawing on phenomenologically inspired analyses of empathy offered by and Zahavi (2017) and Ratcliffe (2017) . We propose modest adjustments to those treatments, augmenting them and drawing them together. Section 2 clarifies and defends the idea that when empathizing we understand others by exploring their narratives. Finally, Section 3 provides a fresh defence of our narrativist account of the more sophisticated forms of enactive empathy, showing that understanding others by narrative means need not involve mental simulation. In particular, we explain how it is possible to account for the imaginative resistance that may occur during empathizing and also how it possible to co-cognize with others without leaning on the idea that we mentally simulate other minds. We defend the view that empathy, understood by our lights, does not reduce to or depend on any kind of mindreading.