Phenomenology of actor-character empathy: Uncovering a kind of empathy through Edith Stein’s degrees of empathy

• Main Author: Dayacap, Bryle Louis T.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Empathy; Phenomenology; Edith Stein, Saint, 1891-1942; Philosophy
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdb_philo/3; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=etdb_philo
• Institution: De La Salle University

With the motivation of revealing unique lived experiences, particularly in the field of performance phenomenology, this paper aims to establish a phenomenological account of a kind of empathy that occurs between an actor and their character of portrayal, henceforth referred to as Actor-Character Empathy. With the actor and their character being the empathizing subject and the empathized subject respectively, the paper preliminarily discusses how this phenomenon is rightfully a modification of empathy as well as how an actor’s character is one that is sufficient to be an empathized subject. This entails explicating their nature of relationship, and delineating their distinctiveness from each other – the character being an extension of the actor yet different altogether. Building from Edith Stein’s phenomenological account of empathy in its general sense, the paper will then establish the phenomenological difference between Empathy De Vivo (empathy with “real persons”) and Actor-Character Empathy. Moving forward, in order to arrive at a phenomenological description of it as a unique experience, the paper will proceed to the phenomenological analysis of how her renowned structure of an empathic experience, the degrees of empathy, applies to Actor-Character Empathy. Lastly, in constructing this phenomenological account, the three pertinent issues in an empathic experience, advanced by De Vecchi and Forlè, were given emphasis. These are discussing the quality of perception in the empathic experience, the motivational context and the life-world context of the empathized subject, and the ontological status of the empathized subject. All of which will lead us to describe Actor-Character Empathy as that which invokes the same if not more vivid and intense empathy, the accomplishment of which is dependent on the actor’s skills to deepen the character, and which the empathized subject being an extension of the empathizing subject is an infinite source of dynamic information.