EMPATHY AND COMPASSION
A Neurophenomenological
Approach
Evan Thompson
Core Idea:
Our individual human minds emerge from
an embodied and intersubjective space of
perception, action, emotion, and
imagination.
Human minds are embodied, emergent,
and intersubjective, and therefore can’t be
reductively identified simply with neural
processes inside the head.
Connection to empathy:
‘Empathy’ in its widest sense describes
sensorimotor and affective processes
that constitute this embodiedintersubjective space;
 and from which ‘self’ and ‘other’ coemerge
Neurophenomenology
Francisco Varela
1946-2001
Neurophenomenology:
Phenomenological accounts of
experience and their counterparts in
cognitive science relate to each other
through reciprocal constraints (Varela
1996).
Structure for the
Rest of this Talk
1. Dimensions of Embodiment
2. Typology of Empathy
3. Compassionate Empathy: A
Mahayana Buddhist
Perspective
Dimensions of Embodiment
Sensorimotor embodiment
Imaginative embodiment
Affective/emotional embodiment
Intersubjective embodiment
Sensorimotor Embodiment
Sensory and motor processes
aren’t separate input and output
systems, but interdependently
linked (e.g., sensorimotor coding of
space)
Imaginative Embodiment
Sensorimotor processes
underwrite mental imagery (e.g.,
many types of imagery involve
increased activity in cortical and
cerebellar structures concerned
with motor control)
Relationship between
Perception and Imagination?
Essentially the same process, the distinction
between them being a matter of the degree
to which sensory stimulation determines
one’s current experience.
Imagination = off-line sensorimotor activity
Perception = imagination constrained by online sensorimotor activity
Affective Embodiment
Emotion/affect is a paradigmatic wholeorganism event:
• Large-scale brain event
•Psychosomatic (immune, neural, endocrine)
•Motor/behavioural (facial expression,
approach/withdrawal)
•Cognitive (appraisal)
•Subjective (felt valence, personal meaning)
Sentience
• Feeling of being alive
•Not organized according to sensory
modality
•Grounded in homeodynamic processes of
life-regulation and emotion
•Inescapable affective backdrop, such that
sensorimotor & imaginative procesess are
always affectively saturated
Upshot: the conscious mind isn’t
exclusively in the brain, as
opposed to the rest of the body.
Consciousness is an emergent
and distributed process that
characterizes the whole
organism, not a property tucked
away inside the brain.
Intersubjective Embodiment
Embedding of the bodily subject in an
intersubjective space, out of which self/other
emerge.
Empathy as a study case, in which
sensorimotor, affective, imaginative aspects
intertwine in intersubjective embodiment
Structure
1. Dimensions of Embodiment
2. Typology of Empathy
3. Compassionate Empathy: A
Mahayana Buddhist
Perspective
What do I mean by ‘empathy’?
Empathy not as ‘mindreading’, but as embodied
mind-making
Phenomenology of Empathy
Edmund Husserl
Edith Stein
Empathy
1. Passive (involuntary) association
(coupling) of my lived body with your
lived body
2. Imaginative movement of myself to
your place
3. Understanding of you as an other to
me, and me as an other to you
4. Ethical/moral perception of you as a
person
Empathy
1. Passive (involuntary) association
(coupling) of my lived body with your
lived body
2. Imaginative movement of myself to
your place
3. Understanding of you as an other to
me, and me as an other to you
4. Ethical/moral perception of you as a
person
Mirror Neurons
Facial Imitation in Infants
Empathy as Bodily Coupling
Associative bonding of living bodies of
self and other at the level of body schema
& body image
Sensorimotor/affective aspect: infant
imitation & protoconversation (Trevarthyn,
Meltzoff), mirror neurons & intersubjective
sensori-neuronal-motor manifold (Gallese)
Imaginative aspect: indirect activation of
perceptuo-motor processes by off-line
imagery; phenomenology of
memory/emotion consolidation/imagery
sedimented in lived body = “habit body”
Empathy
1. Passive (involuntary) association
(coupling) of my lived body with your
lived body
2. Imaginative movement of myself to
your place
3. Understanding of you as an other to
me, and me as an other to you
4. Ethical/moral perception of you as a
person
Empathy as Imaginative
Transposition
Phenomenology: dynamic spatial
transposition of perspectives as vehicle of
exchange of mental perspectives (I move to
your place/you to mine)
Developmental psychology: builds on
emergence of joint attentional abilities
(Tomasello)
Ethology: consolation behaviour, tailored
helping behaviour (de Waal)
Empathy
1. Passive (involuntary) association
(coupling) of my lived body with your
lived body
2. Imaginative movement of myself to
your place
3. Understanding of you as an other to
me, and me as an other to you
4. Ethical/moral perception of you as a
person
I don’t simply imagine myself in your place,
but grasp myself as an other to you.
That is, I empathetically imagine your
empathetic experience of me, and you
empathetically imagine my empathetic
experience of you.
This involves a complicated exchange of
pespectives:
Reiterated Empathy
i.
I have my own first-person egocentric
perspective on myself.
ii. From this egocentric perspective, I see you
over there = adopting a third- person
allocentric perspective on you
iii. But I also imagine being in your place and
experiencing things from your first-person
egocentric perspective = adopting a thirdperson egocentric perspective on you
iv. In addition, I imagine myself as an other
seen from your first person egocentric
perspective = adopting a first-person
allocentric perspective on myself
Ambiguity of the Lived Body
 If one’s lived body were to appear only
from the first-person perspective, it
wouldn’t be possible to have a full
nonegocentric understanding of ‘I’ as an
embodied individual in a public world that
transcends the self
 Such understanding requires an alterego perspective on oneself; this happens
in joint-attentional scenes through
reiterated empathy
Empathy
1. Passive (involuntary) association
(coupling) of my lived body with your
lived body
2. Imaginative movement of myself to
your place
3. Understanding of you as an other to
me, and me as an other to you
4. Ethical/moral perception of you as a
person
Empathy as Moral Perception
 Capacity underlying moral sentiments
(sympathy, compassion, love)
Entry point into moral domain:
“Aid to others in need would never be
internalized as a duty without the fellowfeeling that drives people to take an interest
in one another. Moral sentiments came first;
moral principles second” (Frans de Waal,
1996, p. 87).
the Kantian imperative always to treat others
(and oneself) as ends-in-themselves has no
practical meaning independent of our
imaginatively taking up the place of the other.
Contrary, to Kant’s explicit claims, we cannot
know what it means to treat someone as an
end-in-himself, in any concrete way, unless
we can imagine his experience, feelings,
plans, goals, and hopes. We cannot know
what respect for others demands of us,
unless we participate imaginatively in their
experience of the world. --Mark Johnson 1993,
p. 200
Structure
1. Dimensions of Embodiment
2. Typology of Empathy
3. Compassionate Empathy: A
Mahayana Buddhist
Perspective
Shantideva, c. 8th century CE
Meditation on the equality of self and
other
Meditation on the exchange of self and
other
(Way of the Bodhisattva, Chapter 8)
Mahayana Buddhism (Madhyamaka)
Although they have no ultimate grounds for doing so, all
beings think in terms of “I” and “mine.” Because of this, they
conceive of “other,” fixing on it as something alien, although
this too is unfounded. Aside from being mental imputations,
“I” and “other” are totally unreal. They are both illusory.
Moreover, when the nonexistence of “I” is realized, the
notion of “other” also disappears, for the simple reason that
the two terms are posited only in relation to each other. Just
as it is impossible to cut the sky in two with a knife, likewise,
when the spacelike quality of egolessness is realized; it is no
longer possible to make a separation between “I” and
“other,” and there arises an attitude of wanting to protect
others as oneself, and to protect all that belongs to them
with the same care as if it were one’s own. As it is said,
“Whoever casts aside the ordinary, trivial view of ‘self’ will
discover the profound meaning of great ‘selfhood.’ [19th
century Tibetan commentary]
Meditation on
Equality of Self and Other
By applying the name “I” to the whole
collection of beings, and by entertaining and
habituating oneself to thought “They are
myself,” the thought of “I” will in fact arise with
regard to them; and one will come to care for
them as much as one now cares for onself...
Exchange of self and other = 1st person
method of reiterated empathy
Jealousy
Self
Rivalry
Pride
Superior
Equal
Inferior
Meditations combine disciplined
first-person practices of:
Attentional stability (shamatha)
Insightful awareness (vipashyana)
Visualization and mental imagery
Self-regulation of emotion
Buddhist Psychology and Husserlian
Phenomenology both disclose the
nonegocentric openness of
consciousness
Buddhism: self and other as
dependently originated
Phenomenology: dynamic self-othering
of empathy, recollection, reflection,
imagination, and bodily experience