Thinking With the Heart: From the Responsiveness of the Flesh to the Ethics of Responsibility
Résumé
By analyzing more specifically the notion of the heart and how it may offer a dynamic and open conception of interiority, this chapter aims to offer a phenomenological description of empathy based on responsiveness and ethical sensitivity that may design a response ethics of vulnerability. The chapter starts with examining the notion of Gemüt (heart) in Kant’s anthropology and Husserl’s phenomenology of affective life to underline the specific kind of intentionality associated with the heart and its ethical implications. Then, I turn to Stein’s anthropology and analyze her conception of Gemüt. This notion helps her recast the metaphysical conception of interiority within the phenomenological framework of empathy and intersubjective experience. Stein’s later writings point to an ethical sensitivity to the world and others important in our political, social, and personal relations. Such ethical sensitivity paves the way for a renewed understanding of the relation between love and suffering. The heart becomes the synecdoche that symbolizes the whole person and its commitment to the world and others—anchored to compassion and responsibility. Finally, contemporary phenomenological accounts of embodied cognition (Fuchs 2018) and affective intentionality (Steinbock 2021) back up this analysis by stressing the relationship between the affective disposition involved in extended empathy and the dynamics of resonance and resilience that allow for responsibility and mutual recognition. The last section explains how dialogical phenomenology sketches out a response ethics of vulnerability grounded in a conception of empathy based on the heart’s disposition rather than on the sole cognitive or affective level of experience.