ONLINE FIRST
published on September 3, 2025
Zeynep Direk

https://doi.org/10.5840/ecoethica202582275
Entangled Empathy
Sartre¡¯s Contribution and Merleau-Ponty¡¯s Responses to Husserl¡¯s Discussion of the Other in Cartesian Medications
To what extent can another self be at the origin of its givenness to me? If I am the one who presents the Other, I would still be the only origin of the meaning of the world. In the Cartesian Meditations we find, on the one hand, the claim that all presence, including that of the Other, is possible as a constitution of the transcendental ego, and on the other hand, the idea that we are in bodily entanglement in our existential spatiality. Such an entanglement permits thinking that the Other can be the source of its own manifestation to me, giving the Other also a constituting rather than solely a constituted role. My essay offers a reading of Husserl¡¯s Fifth Meditation, highlights Sartre¡¯s brilliant contribution to the solution of this problem inherited from Husserl in Being and Nothingness, and explains Merleau-Ponty¡¯s two responses to it in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and The Visible and the Invisible (1961).