Empathy Beyond the Human. The Social Construction of a Multispecies World

Abstract

In Namibia, Damara pastoralists share the environment with many beings including elephants, tricksters, and winds. While the importance of other-than-human subjectivity is well established, its methodological, epistemological, and ontological challenges are less settled. To address them, we combine expertise from anthropology and philosophy to ask how this world becomes what it is, using Edith Steins’s notion of empathy (Einfühlung) as a theoretical guide. This allows us to show how Damara people use empathy to understand how different ‘others’ experience the world. We identify the basis for this in a ‘pre-reflective other-awareness’, which amounts to the implicit bodily awareness of the other’s presence, and its influence on the situation and on oneself. At the same time, empathy differs, and only those other-than-humans with whom people fully empathise add perspectives that build an intersubjective reality that is different from any world in which those other-perspectives would not exist.