Communalization (Vergemeinschaftung) through ethical love. A phenomenological account

Abstract

This chapter explores the essential features that Husserl assigns to the special type of monadic community that constitutes the telos of the Communalization (Vergemeinschaftung) process, namely the “Liebesgemeinschaft”, a form of ethical community in which each person lives for others and is in turn sustained by them. In this way, the author attempts to show that in order to explain what a “Liebesgemeinschaft” consists of, Husserl “enriches” his theory of empathy (Einfühlung) with a theory of sympathy as found in the work Gemeingeist I, a 1932 text that appears in Hua XV as Beilage XXI (“Personales Leben. Soziale Verbindung als willentlicher Stiftung – Aus Instinkt – Aus Sympathie. Das Teilnehmen (‘Sympathie’)”) and in some recently published texts in the Reflexionen zur Ethik aus den Freiburger Jahren (Hua XLII). He also connects these considerations with some recent work on so called “we-intentionality”.