Beholding ‘the Other’: The Legacy of Phenomenology

In the first instance in this chapter, we need to set out our stall to acquaint ourselves with the work of a range of philosophers who, in their different ways, came to concentrate on the idea of dignity and, in particular, on the way in which it is disclosed. What Hume and Smith meant by sympathy in the eighteenth century quite closely approximates what Theodor Lipps (1903) and others would construe as empathy (Einfühlung – ‘a feeling into’). Lipps uses empathy to account for the source of our knowledge of other persons (which also brings to mind the work of Tichener), and Dilthey (1979) emphasizes the means by which we infer from external signs certain internal states. If empathy is an imaginative transposition, then it is a property of what Dilthey calls ‘the acquired mental structure’ (Dilthey 1979, 244). In close proximity to his interpretation of empathy, Dilthey raises the question of value, with the value attributed to objects reflecting a personal relationship to them as we colour the panorama of life with attitudes both positive and negative. A value has a special relationship to the person affected and is distinguishable from qualities making up the object's reality. He contends that ‘contemplating, experiencing and understanding oneself as well as others and thus gaining knowledge of human nature, produces generalizations which give new expression to value, meaning and the purpose of life’ (241). While making the point that meaning and values do not coincide, he makes clear how understanding makes its own contribution in developing the concept of value, inferring that