Forthcoming in Australasian Philosophical Review

Please quote from published version

I, You, and We:

Beyond Individualism and Collectivism

Dan Zahavi

True community is based upon equality,

mutuality, and reciprocity. It affirms the
richness of individual diversity as well as the
common human ties that bind us together.
Pauli Murray

Over the last few decades, the notion of collective intentionality has been discussed and explored in
various disciplines including social, cognitive and developmental psychology, economics, sociology,
political theory, anthropology, ethology, and the social neurosciences. Much of the empirical work in
these areas has drawn inspiration from the theoretical analyses of a few philosophers, notably Searle
(1990, 1995, 2010), Bratman (1999, 2014), Gilbert (1989, 2014), and Tuomela (2007, 2013), whose
work has centred on the question of whether and how collective intentions differ from aggregations
of individual intentions. A noteworthy feature of these diverse philosophical analyses has been their
focus on action. Collective action is inevitably taken as the example of collective intentionality, and
from the outset the ambition has been to explain how we can act together. Whereas Bratman and
Tuomela often pick the cooperative activity of painting a house (or carrying a piano) together as a
target for analysis (Bratman 1992, 2014: 12-13, 54, Tuomela 2007: 25, 130), and Searle frequently
discusses how two people can make Bearnaise sauce together (Searle 2010: 52), Gilbert’s recurrent
example is that of two people going for a walk together (Gilbert 2014: 24–25). Gilbert, in particular,
has been clear about the paradigmatic role she ascribes to action. By analysing joint action her aim is
to construe “an adequate account of shared intention as one that provides individually necessary and
jointly sufficient conditions” (Gilbert 2014: 105). She consequently takes her analysis of joint action
to be of pertinence for an understanding of other forms of collective intentionality as well.
Although joint action is of clear importance, and although the contributions of the figures just
mentioned have undeniably advanced the debate, the narrow focus on action must still give pause.
After all, collective intentionality consists of a wider set of phenomena than joint action. After
winning a match with a group of teammates, I might share feelings of joy at our victory, just as I
might regret that we, the Danes, lost Scania to the Swedes in 1658. But it is not obvious that an
analysis of joint action allows such cases to be understood, or that by extrapolating from the field of
action we can also reach an understanding of shared and group-based emotions.
Despite the huge amount of systematic and empirical work that has been conducted over the
past couple of decades, a thorough examination of collective intentionality must, in my view,
eventually adopt a richer and more comprehensive framework than the action oriented one that has
been so influential in recent years. Eventually an understanding of collective intentionality will have
to clarify the nature of the first-person plural, of the we, and therefore also engage with questions
concerning the relation between self and other, and between the individual and the community. Our
understanding of the nature of the mind, of selfhood, and of interpersonal understanding influence

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how we think of the we. Our conception of the latter will differ dramatically depending on whether
we think there is no self; that the self is bodily, experientially grounded and pre-reflectively present;
or socially constructed and extended. It will differ depending on whether we think the mind is private
and hidden or in some way intersubjectively shareable, and whether we think that intersubjectivity is
established via detached mindreading, through bodily and affective interaction, or crucially depends
on normative relations and shared values. The influence works both ways, however. If it is
acknowledged that we-perspectives, we-intentions, and we-experiences are genuine explananda, this
will put pressure on various traditional assumptions about the nature of selfhood and social cognition
and constrain the range of acceptable options.
To investigate collective intentionality in its full range and scope, a number of ontological and
epistemological issues therefore need to be further explored:

• We and I: What is the relation between collective identity and self-identity? How is the we related
to the I? Does a we presuppose a plurality of pre-existing selves or is individual subjectivity
something that necessarily requires a communal grounding? To what extent does the first-person
plural perspective presuppose, precede, preserve or abolish the first-person singular perspective?
To what extent is the former a condition of possibility for the latter? To what extent does the latter
have an impact on the nature and structure of the former? Can we even understand what it means
to feel, think, and act as part of a we, if we lack a proper grasp of what it means to be a self?
Correspondingly, does the fact that an individual can identify with a group and adopt a we-
perspective not tell us something important about the nature of selfhood and self-identity?

• We and you: How is collective intentionality and the we-perspective related to social cognition
and interpersonal understanding? Can we understand what it means to share a belief, an intention,
an emotional experience, or more generally, a perspective with others, if we do not have a proper
account of how we come to understand and relate to others in the first place? Is it enough simply
to be able to single out (and relate to) others as special kinds of objects (‘agents with intentions’)?
Or does we-intentionality require a particular kind of interpersonal relationship? How cognitively
sophisticated and normatively entrenched does it have to be? Are particular types of social
cognition (e.g., bodily resonance, second-person engagement, imaginative perspective-taking or
detached inferential mindreading) especially conducive for the emergence of a we-perspective?

• Varieties of we: By focusing rather narrowly on simpler forms of joint action, a good part of the
philosophical discussion of collective intentionality has tended to downplay the difference
between forms of collective intentionality that connect particular individuals who are known to
each other, and forms of collective intentionality that involve identification with a more
anonymous and impersonal group. Social reality, however, is both complex and multifaceted.
How are we to understand the relationship between transient dyads and enduring communities?
How is the coherence, unity, and persistency of different forms of we constituted? What forms of
collective intentionality do they each allow for, and what type of self-experience and interpersonal
understanding do they each require and involve?

The contemporary debate on collective intentionality in analytic philosophy has lasted a few
decades, but questions concerning the nature of we, and the relation between self, intersubjectivity,
and community are obviously far older. In his introduction to The Construction of Social Reality, a
book that has had a decisive impact on the contemporary debate on collective intentionality, Searle
remarks that the great philosopher-sociologists from the early twentieth century lacked adequate
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tools, especially a sufficiently developed theory of intentionality, to deal with the question of we-
intentionality (Searle 1995: xii). In reaching this verdict, Searle refers to the work of Weber, Simmel,
and Durkheim, but forgets Schutz, whose 1932 book Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, has
more in common with Searle’s project than merely the title. From the outset, Schutz’s
phenomenological sociology was an attempt to enrich and expand Weber’s sociology with ideas
drawn from Husserl’s phenomenology. On closer examination, what we find in Schutz, and in the
writings of other early phenomenologists such as Reinach, Scheler, Stein, Husserl, Walther, and
Gurwitsch are not only quite sophisticated analyses of intentionality, self- and other-awareness and
intersubjectivity, but also a targeted investigation of we-intentionality (emotional sharing, social
participation, communal experiences, we-identities, shared habits, etc.) and its role in the constitution
of social reality. Indeed, although they did start out with an interest in the individual mind,
phenomenologists began their exploration of dyadic forms of interpersonal relations shortly before
the start of World War I and were deeply engaged in extensive analyses of collective forms of
intentionality during the interwar period – at a time, when nationalism was on the rise.
Classical phenomenological writings on group formations and communal experiences have
been the subject of renewed interest over the last few years both in philosophy and beyond, with a
steadily increasing number of publications, special issues, and edited volumes (cf. Schmid 2009,
Chelstrom 2013, Szanto & Moran 2016, Salice & Schmid 2016, Dolezal & Petherbridge 2017). Part
of the reason for this development is a growing appreciation of the theoretical value of these historical
writings.
While maintaining that an exploration of social reality must acknowledge the role of
subjectivity, since the latter actively plays a role in the constitution of the former, phenomenologists
also readily acknowledge that subjectivity is shaped and transformed by social factors. The
phenomenologists do not prioritize and valorise the non-social individual and do not argue that we
only form interpersonal relations because we deem that to be conducive to the realization of our own
pre-social goals. They would all argue that our goals and preferences, what has significance and
meaning for us, are largely shaped by the communities we are part of, and that we only come to have
a robust view and voice of our own, that we only flourish as individuals, as a result of the social
relationships we engage in. At the same time, they would all have opposed the view that subjectivity
is a social construction, that the self is nothing but a bearer of culturally determined roles, and that
intersectionality can explain our individuation. By arguing that groups (and collective intentions)
cannot simply be understood as summations and aggregations of individuals and their intentions, and
that selfhood and self-identity cannot simply be reduced to or be based on group-identity and group-
memberships, the phenomenologists are arguably offering a theoretical approach that differs from
both individualism and collectivism (Zahavi 2021).
In what follows, I want to highlight a few of the analyses that can be found in these classical
texts; analyses I find insightful and whose main claims I endorse. Given limitations of space, I have
been forced to paint with fairly broad strokes and decided not to spend much time discussing
disagreements between the phenomenologists (of which there are plenty).

1. We and I

We can enjoy a symphony, solve a task, reach a decision, and make plans for the future together, just
as we can share responsibilities, traditions and customs. But who or what is this we, to whom
intentions, beliefs, emotions, and actions are attributed? What is the relation between we and I,
between the group and the self?

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 We can find an influential account in Mind, Self, and Society, where Mead operates with a
clear distinction between the organism and the self. Whereas there is an individual physical organism
from the start, the self is for Mead a particular developmental achievement, one that only “arises in
the process of social experience and activity” (1934: 135). Selves are consequently not antecedent to
the social process, but on the contrary a product of social interaction (1934: 50). How does Mead
arrive at this conclusion? His central argument bears on the relation between self-consciousness and
selfhood. For Mead, the self is not a substance, but a reflexive or self-relating process. As he writes,
it is self-consciousness, understood as a cognitive process, that “provides the core and primary
structure of the self” (1934: 173). What is distinctive, and indeed constitutive of the self, is that it can
relate to itself as an object (1934: 136). Thus, for Mead being a self is ultimately more a question of
becoming an object than of simply being a subject, and the decisive question is how this is possible.
How “can an individual get outside himself (experientially) in such a way as to become an object to
himself?” (1934: 138). For Mead, this can only happen in an indirect manner, namely by adopting
the attitude or perspective of others towards oneself (Mead 1934: 138): “Self-consciousness involves
the individual’s becoming an object to himself by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward
himself within an organized setting of social relationships” and unless the individual has “thus
become an object to himself he would not be self-conscious or have a self at all” (1934: 225). In the
end, selfhood is consequently regarded as the outcome of a socially enabled self-objectification.
Given Mead’s conception of self-consciousness, and the proposed link between self-
consciousness and selfhood, it is no wonder that he ends up claiming not only that we are selves in
virtue of our relation to one another rather than by individual right (1934: 182), but also that one “has
to be a member of a community to be a self” (1934: 162), and that the self “implies the preexistence
of the group” (1934: 164, cf. 189).
Most phenomenologists would disagree with this verdict,1 and would argue that the social
constructivism favoured by Mead not only fails as an account of experiential subjectivity, but also –
and in this context more importantly – doesn’t get to the heart of genuine communal life. Even if
members of a we must be bound together in some fashion, even if the togetherness distinctive of a
we requires some kind of integration, one shouldn’t forget that a we-perspective is both first-personal
and plural and consequently something that requires separation and difference. To put it differently,
a convincing account of communal experiences presupposes a proper appreciation of the first-person
singular perspective. As Arendt once put it, togetherness and co-operation require the preservation of
diversity and should ultimately be understood as a “paradoxical plurality of unique beings” (Arendt
1958: 176). Since heterogeneity is an essential part of communal life – which is precisely a distinctive
way of being-together-with-one-another –, the attempt to derive the I from the we, the suggestion that
the we precedes and enables individual differentiation – be it on the level of identity or on the level
of experience – must be rejected as incoherent. Underived plurality lies at the heart of communal life
– it is a “unity founded in multiplicities” (Husserl 1921-28: 201) – and individual minds must
therefore be considered a precondition for genuine we-phenomena.
Despite their disagreement with Mead’s social behaviorism, many phenomenologists would
actually endorse his central claim concerning the close link between self-consciousness and selfhood.
However, they would insist on the importance of the pre-reflective dimension. The most famous
proponent of the view that we should accept the existence of a primitive and pre-reflective form of
self-consciousness, one that is more basic than reflective self-consciousness, one that is inherent to
consciousness, and one which in marked contrast to reflective self-consciousness does not possess a
dyadic subject-object structure is Sartre (1943). However, many other phenomenologists, including
Husserl, Stein, Schutz, and Gurwitsch, have defended similar claims.

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But not all. For a dissenting view, see Heidegger 2009: 50, 130.
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 Let us consider the position of Husserl. According to Husserl, intentional experiences have a
threefold structure, ego-cogito-cogitatum. They are for somebody, are of a certain kind (a feeling,
judgement, perception, memory, fantasy, etc.), and are about a certain object. For present purposes,
the first point is central. The claim here is that experiences are never ownerless or anonymous, but
always require a subject, they necessarily involve a point of view, they come with perspectival
ownership. Feelings of anger, depression, or interest do not consist merely of experiential episodes
that are directed at various objects, say, being angry about being passed over for promotion, depressed
about the conflict in Afghanistan, or interested in a new series on Netflix. Rather, there is always also
a subject of experience: it is either me, or you or somebody else who is angry, depressed or interested.
Rather than talking about the subject of experience, one might also talk of how a minimal form of
selfhood is a built-in feature of experiential life (Zahavi 2014, Zahavi 2020). One reason Husserl
thought a proper description and analysis of experience would have to include a reference to such a
thin or pure self or ego – an ego with no “hidden inner richness” (1912-28: 110), with “no explicatable
content” (1913: 191) – was that only this would do justice to what he took to be the first-personal or
subjective character of experience.
Husserl’s argument that our experiential life is inherently individuated (1989: 315) and that
conscious experience, by its very nature, involves a self is, however, only the start of his investigation.
Husserl was well aware that there is a much more complicated story to be told. After all, I am not
merely a pure ego. I also have character traits, abilities, dispositions, interests, habits, and convictions.
And since these are all features that the pure ego lacks, the latter must not “be confused with the Ego
as the real person, with the real subject of the real human being” (Husserl 1912-28: 110), which for
Husserl is a unit of infinite development (Husserl 1921-28: 204), whose “being is forever becoming”
(Husserl 1936: 338). Our identity as persons, our personal character and individuality, is constituted
through development, as a result of our personal genesis and history. When intentional acts of
different kinds are lived through, these acts do not leave me untouched but create lasting tendencies
and patterns (Husserl 1931: 66-67; 1925: 161-162; 1912-28: 313). Passing through the stages of life
– infancy, youth, maturity, and old age – I continuously acquire various faculties, capacities and
habitualities (Husserl 1912-28: 265-266). This process of personalization does not take place in
isolation, however. On the contrary, it is very much a matter of a continuing socialization. As Husserl
writes, every child is “raised into the form of a tradition” (Husserl 1929-35: 144). By being socialized,
we also inherit and appropriate a tradition that is passed down over generations; a tradition that comes
to normatively regulate, orient, and organize our experiences and actions by serving as a guide for
how one ought to act and behave. Our constitution as persons is consequently also a matter of
partaking in an open “generative nexus, a concatenation and intersection of generations” (Husserl
1929-35: 178).
Although Husserl puts special emphasis on the importance of our convictions, commitments,
and decisions – it is by being committed and devoted to a certain set of central values and by leading
a life in the light of specific norms, that I come to have a view and voice of my own, that I come to
be a true individual in the robust sense of the term – he also recognizes that not all convictions held
by the ego are convictions generated by the ego itself. In many cases, I come to hold convictions
simply because as a community member I accept the beliefs and values of other members. Sometimes,
I am able to reconstruct the rational reasons behind others’ convictions and actively make them my
own, in other cases I am simply yielding passively to the influences and suggestions of others without
even realizing it.

The development of a person is determined by the influence of others, by the influence of

their thoughts, their feelings (as suggested to me), their commandments. This influence

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 determines personal development, whether or not the person himself subsequently realizes it,
remembers it, or is capable of determining the degree of the influence and its character
(Husserl 1912-28: 281).

It would lead too far off track to delve into the details of what has been called Husserl’s generative
phenomenology, i.e., his exploration of the constitutive role of tradition and history, of the way in
which the accomplishments of previous generations remain operative in our individual experiences
(for more extensive discussion, see e.g., Steinbock 1995, Zahavi 2001, Taipale 2014, Miettinen 2020).
But for Husserl we are not merely embedded in a historical context, we are also situated in what he
calls a “homeworld”, a world of intersubjective familiarity and normality.
Let me briefly compare Husserl’s analysis with that of another phenomenologist, Gerda
Walther. In her doctoral dissertation Ein Beitrag zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften, which
counts as one of the most comprehensive phenomenological investigations of group experiences and
communities ever written (cf. Caminada 2014, León & Zahavi 2016, Szanto 2018), Walther argues
that communal we-experiences [Gemeinschafts- und Wirerlebnisse] are distinguished by a peculiar
transformation of their sense of ownership. For actions, experiences or emotions to be truly shared,
they must no longer be felt by the participating individuals merely as yours and/or mine, but as ours,
as experiences or actions that we are undergoing or performing together (Walther 1923: 75).
Importantly, the we in question is not an experiencing subject in its own right. Rather, we-experiences
occur in and are realized through the participating individuals (Walther 1923: 70). To feel an
experience as ours does consequently not involve an eradication of the first-person singular
perspective, but a transformation and expansion of it. Walther further highlights the difference
between what she calls ‘we-experiences in the narrowest sense’, which involve an intentional
unification on the basis of spatio-temporal interaction, and a more broadly understood type of group-
based experience, a communal life, that individuals can partake in even when they are alone (1923:
84-85). As a result of my upbringing and socialization, I might, for instance, come to value, think,
and will like other members of my community. I might feel a deep sense of belonging to that
community and come to perform actions and have experiences that are not simply characterized or
experienced as an ‘I do’, but as a ‘this is how we feel about matters’, this is how we do things (Walther
1923: 70).
By appropriating communal norms regarding how ‘one’ behaves, regarding what is expected
of ‘one’, one might come to acquire a certain attitude towards topics, where, as Walther puts it,
“people, who also [think, feel or do the same]” are present in the intentional background of the
experience (1923: 70). As a result of incorporating or internalizing these (generalized) others, a social
stratum will consolidate in the psyche and the subject may then come to have experiences that no
longer originate from herself qua isolated individual, but precisely qua community member (1923:
71). Importantly, that this happens might remain quite opaque to the individual. Not only might I
consequently come to lead a life guided by norms dictating how one behaves, thinks, and feels – or
to rephrase it in the first-person plural, how we behave, think, and feel – but things might also come
to matter to me, they might be something I care deeply about, without me ever explicitly having
decided that this should happen.
The phenomenological idea that a proper elucidation of communal experiences and collective
identities requires a study of (transformed and expanded) self-experience resonates well with ideas
found in social psychology. In the work of Turner, for instance, we not only find an insistence on the
need for taking seriously “the subjective sense of togetherness, we-ness, or belongingness” (Turner
1982: 16), but also a highlighting of the important role played by the individual group members’
expanded and redefined sense of self. As Turner writes,

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 We need not posit any metaphysical entity such as a ‘group mind’ to argue that group
behaviour is more than a summation of individual actions. There is an important discontinuity
at the level of psychological processes between an individual acting as a differentiated, unique
person and an individual acting as a group member, as a relatively interchangeable
representative of a social category […]. The fundamental difference is that the individual’s
very conception of self changes to partake of the common attributes of an historically
originated, socially determined and culturally and situationally constructed social group
(Turner 1982: 33).

For phenomenologists, the we is not something that can be observed and adequately described from
the outside. It is something that is experienced from within, it is something that involves, rather than
bypasses, the self-identity and first-person perspective of the involved parties. This is not to suggest
that the identification with and participation in a given we-group always happens deliberately and/or
voluntarily. One is born into and brought up within a certain family and community, and these
memberships are typically quite beyond the domain of personal will and conscious decision. But even
in these cases, for the memberships in question to count as we-memberships, they have to be
subjectively appropriated through a process of identification, they have to involve a certain
internalization of the perspective of others, and thereby allow one to move from a purely individual
self-experience to an experience of oneself as ‘one of us’.
As should be clear from these brief remarks, an exploration of collective intentionality cannot
simply focus on the question of how the agentive intentions of individuals can interlock and mesh to
allow for cooperative activities. A narrow focus like this overlooks the extent to which our-being-
with-one-another affects the first-person singular perspective and shapes our sense of self. This point
would probably be welcomed by communitarians, who might then insist that any reference to a pure
subject of experience, to a minimal experiential self, not only fails to target and capture the full
richness of human selfhood, but is also of very little relevance for an elucidation of we-intentionality
and group-experiences. Why is this? Because any self that is pertinent for an understanding of the
we, any self that can partake in a collective identity, must be a thick normatively embedded self.
One way to reply to this criticism is by wholeheartedly accepting the latter claim. If we are to
understand how it is possible to share values and traditions with others and to identify with, say, a
community, one must indeed appeal to a very different self than the experiential one. Only a self that
is defined in terms of its normative commitments and whose self-understanding gravitates around
socially available roles and typifications will be able to identify with others who partake in similar
roles and share similar norms and values. But even if the minimal experiential self is insufficient, it
might still be necessary. This is precisely Husserl’s view. What we find in his account is the
suggestion that it is not only possible, but also necessary to combine and integrate different accounts
of self if we are to explain collective intentionality and communal experiences. While acknowledging
that close personal relationships are crucial for the development of selfhood, and that memberships
of more robust and enduring communities require an expanded self, one defined in terms of features
that are shareable, such as roles, narratives, commitments, and values, Husserl would at the same time
reject the claim that the most fundamental dimension of selfhood, the most basic individuation of
consciousness, is socially derived. Emphasizing the importance of plurality, Husserl would not only
argue that the radical and underived individuation of consciousness prohibits any fusion between
streams of consciousness, but also that this unbridgeable separation is a condition of possibility for a
communal being-together:

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 In a certain sense, the individuality of souls implies an unbridgeable separation, i.e., a being-
different-from-one-another and a being external-to-one-another (in the logical and not spatial
sense) that can never lead to a continuous connection, a connection that would be a continuous
flowing-into-one-another [..]. On the other hand, this separation does not prevent, but is rather
the condition of possibility for monads to be able to ‘coincide’ and thus be in community with
one another (Husserl 1929-35: 335).

2. We and you

Arguing that a we requires a plurality of antecedently individuated selves, and that membership of a
we will involve processes of group-identification that affect one’s self-identity and self-experience
is, however, only part of the story. Even if I cannot be a member of a we unless I identify with the
group in question, my identification is only necessary and not sufficient for membership. Why is that?
Because there is more to we than me. A we necessarily involves more than one member. To
understand the nature of we, it is consequently not enough to look just at the relation between I and
we. One also has to look closer at the relationship between the prospective members. To put it slightly
differently, if we wish to understand what it means to share a belief, an intention, an emotional
experience, or more generally, a perspective with others, we also need to look at how we relate to and
understand each other in the first place.
In so far as standard philosophical accounts of collective intentionality have addressed the
question of social cognition at all, they have tended to favour rather demanding and cognitively
sophisticated accounts and appealed not only to metarepresentations and inferential mindreading, but
also to explicit perspective taking and joint commitments (cf. Bratman 1992, Tuomela 2007, Gilbert
2014).
Early phenomenologists favoured a somewhat different account. Many of them insisted that
empathy, as well as second-personal engagement, and emotional sharing had particularly important
roles to play in the emergence of a we-perspective.
Let us start with empathy. A feature common to Husserl, Stein, Walther, and later Schutz, is that
they took empathy and dyadic interpersonal relations to play a foundational role in the constitution
of sociality and community and to be of central significance for we-intentionality. But what did they
mean by empathy? As Stein argues in her dissertation On the problem of empathy, empathy is a sui
generis form of intentionality directed at other experiencing subjects, one that more complex kinds
of social cognition rely on and presuppose (1917: 6, 60). It is a particular experiential engagement
with the other, one involving a perceptually-based acquaintance with the other’s experiential life.
When Stein speaks of empathy, she is therefore talking about an intentional act by means of which
the subject is directed towards the other’s mental states in an intuitive manner. For example, when
empathically grasping the other’s sadness, I don’t merely infer it from a certain pattern of behaviour,
nor do I project it onto the other, rather I am confronted with the presence of an experience that is not
my own (Stein 1917: 10-11). This is why phenomenologists have standardly rejected proposals
according to which empathy should entail that the other’s experience is literally transmitted to me, or
at least require me to undergo the same kind of experience that I observe in the other (say, being sad
because you are sad) (Zahavi 2010, 2017). To insist that the empathizer must be in the same kind of
experiential state as the target, is to miss what is distinctive about empathy, namely the fact that it is
a special form of other-directed intentionality, one that allows the other’s experiences to disclose
themselves as other rather than as own (Husserl 1923-24: 376). Empathy is precisely not about me
having the same experiential state, feeling, sensation, or embodied response as another. On the

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contrary, to empathically experience the sadness of another is quite different from how you would
experience the sadness if it were your own.
The phenomenological investigation of empathy is an exploration of how individuals are
experientially interrelated. It is, however, important to highlight the difference between unidirectional
and bidirectional (or reciprocal) empathy. As Husserl writes,

A special and very important case of the experience of empathy, in which another person is
given to me as one who in turn is directed at a second person, consists in the case that I myself
am coexperienced as this second person and that this mediate empathizing experience
coincides with my experience of myself; that is, I experience the person sitting opposite me
as one who is directed at myself in his experience. Hence, on the basis of this most originary
form of being-for-one-another-reciprocally the manifold I-you-acts and we-acts become
possible, acts which in turn can be empathized by others and by communicative pluralities as
unities. (Husserl 1923-24: 338)

There is an experiential difference between watching someone unobserved and realizing that
one’s attention is being noticed and reciprocated. There is a difference between targeting the other
unilaterally as a he or she from a third-person perspective, and adopting a second-person perspective
on the other, i.e., addressing the other as a you, that is, as a subject who is also addressing me as a
you. Buber once claimed that “Only men who are capable of truly saying Thou to one another can
truly say We with one another” (1938: 208). But the proposal that a you-relation, a relation with
another co-subject, is crucial for a we-formation can be found in the work of some phenomenologists
as well. Thus Husserl repeatedly insists that the I-thou relation is a communicative relation (Husserl
1921-28: 369, 1929-1935: 472), and that the foundation of sociality is constituted by “the community
of address and uptake of address, or more precisely, of addressing and listening” (Husserl 1929-1935:
475; see also Husserl 1912-28: 204), while Schutz emphasizes the importance of reciprocal
engagement:

I take up an Other-orientation toward my partner, who is in turn oriented toward me.

Immediately, and at the same time, I grasp the fact that he, on his part, is aware of my attention
to him. In such cases I, you, we, live in the social relationship itself, and that is true in virtue of
the intentionality of the living Acts directed toward the partner. I, you, we, are by this means
carried from one moment to the next in a particular attentional modification of the state of being
mutually oriented to each other (Schutz 1932: 156-157).

A crucial feature common to both Husserl and Schutz is their insistence on the we-perspective
involving (at least) two people having distinct relations to each other such that they come to have
experiences of the world they wouldn’t otherwise have had. Their experiential perspectives do
intertwine or intersect, but, as both Husserl and Schutz emphasize, standing in such a relation also
affects the self-experience of each participant. As Schutz writes:

In the we-relation our experiences are not only coordinated with one another, but are also
reciprocally determined and related to one another. I experience myself through my
consociate, and he experiences himself through me. The mirroring of self in the experience of
the stranger (more exactly, in my grasp of the Other’s experience of me) is a constitutive
element of the we-relation (Schutz & Luckmann 1973: 67).

9
In short, to adopt the second-person perspective is to engage in a subject-subject (you-me) relation
where I am aware of the other and, at the same time, implicitly aware of myself in the accusative, as
attended to or addressed by the other (Husserl 1921-28: 211). In a manner somewhat reminiscent of
ideas expressed by Mead, a guiding thought is consequently that the participation in a we-experience,
the ability to feel, think, and act as part of a we and to experience oneself as “one of us”, calls for a
socially mediated self-experience, one involving experiencing oneself through the eyes of the other
(Zahavi 2019).
What about emotional sharing? To start with, it is important not to conflate emotional sharing
with empathy, or emotional contagion, or sympathy. First, as Walther points out, to grasp
empathically the emotions of another is quite different from sharing his emotions. In empathy, I grasp
the other’s emotions insofar as they are expressed in intonations, gestures, bodily postures, facial
expressions, etc. Throughout, I am aware that it is not I who am living through these emotions, but
that they belong to the other, that they are the other’s emotions, and that they are only given to me
qua expressive phenomena (Walther 1923: 73). Even if, by coincidence, we were to have the same
kind of emotions, this would not amount to a case of shared emotions, to emotions we were
undergoing together. Despite the similarity of the two emotions, they would not be unified in the
requisite manner, but would simply stand side by side as belonging to distinct individuals (Walther
1923: 74). Secondly, we also need to distinguish experiential and emotional sharing from imitation
or contagion. In the latter case, I might take over the emotions of somebody else and come to
experience them as my own. But insofar as that happens, and insofar as I then no longer have any
awareness of the other’s involvement, it has nothing to do with shared emotions. Finally, to feel
sympathy for somebody, to be happy because he is happy, or sad because he is sad, also differs from
being happy or sad together with the other (1923: 76-77). What then is emotional sharing? On
Walther’s account, when emotions are shared, each partner is not only conscious of the other’s
emotions but identifies with and incorporates the other’s perspective (Walther 1923: 72). This is why
the sense of ownership accompanying such experiences undergoes a peculiar transformation. The joy,
admiration or anger is no longer merely experienced by me as yours and/or mine, but as ours, i.e., as
co-owned (Walther 1923: 75; cf. Spiegelberg 1975: 231). Or as Jessica and Peter Hobson have put it
more recently, emotional sharing must encompass “the other as participating, with me, in that
experience” (Hobson & Hobson 2014: 188).
Although Walther is very clear about empathy not amounting or being identical to emotional
sharing, she does consider it a precondition. Let us imagine three scientists living in different
countries, who are all working on the same mathematical problem (Walther 1923: 20). Imagine that
they are in the same kind of intentional state and are directed to the same kind of object. Let us further
suppose that they all simultaneously make a discovery that fills them with joy, that they all
intellectually know that the others are working on the same problem, have made the same discovery,
and are happy as a result. If these conditions were fulfilled, would the scientists then have we-
experiences, shared emotions that were felt by the scientists as ours? Walther’s reply is negative.
Shared emotions are not merely a case of similar individual experiences plus reciprocal knowledge
(see also Scheler 1916: 526). Rather it requires a distinct experiential connectedness, where, to
paraphrase Walther, it would be wrong to say that I stand by myself with my own private experience
closed off and separated from the other who is equally closed off (1923: 74). Emotional sharing
involves us feeling something together, where our respective experiences are constitutively
interdependent and co-regulated. For this to be possible, however, the participants must have a distinct
kind of access to each other’s emotional life and to their shared world. This is where the
phenomenological analysis of empathy shows its relevance. Recall how phenomenologists discussed
empathy. For them, to empathically grasp another person’s anger or sadness is to have a particularly

10
direct and immediate perceptually based acquaintance with the other’s experiential life. The point
now being made is that for emotional sharing to occur, precisely this type of access is required. In
successful cases of emotional sharing (and nobody is suggesting that mistakes are ruled out) I can be
said to have a particular kind of epistemic access to the other person’s experiential life.

3. Varieties of we

Social reality is both complex and multifaceted. As Schutz wrote, “Far from being homogeneous, the
social world is structured in a complex way, and the other subject is given to the social agent (and
each of them to an external observer) in different degrees of anonymity, experiential immediacy, and
fulfilment” (1932: 242). Consider, as illustrations, some cases discussed by the phenomenological
sociologist Alfred Vierkandt in his book Gesellschaftslehre: Hauptprobleme der philosophischen
Soziologie from 1923. The first example mentioned by Vierkandt concerns several pedestrians who
suddenly encounter an escaped lion. Each of them flees, but although we are dealing with individual
actions, the fear they feel is modulated and intensified by the presence of the others. Consider next
the same pedestrians, but this time – by pure coincidence – all armed. In order to better realize their
individual goal of killing the lion, they decide to cooperate. In contrast to the previous case, they now
form a group, but one with a narrow focus and limited duration. Consider finally, a platoon of soldiers
united by a strong esprit de corps that intends to hunt down an enemy. The soldiers very much feel
and identify as group-members, and the goal they pursue is a collective goal (1923: 364).
The two latter examples by Vierkandt point to a distinction between society (or association)
(Gesellschaft) and community (Gemeinschaft) that was originally introduced by Tönnies (1887) and
subsequently taken up by most of the early phenomenologists, including Scheler, Walther, and
Gurwitsch. They all (in slightly different ways) distinguished two very different types of group-
formation. On the one hand, we have cases where individuals voluntarily decide to join forces because
it serves and promotes their individual interests. The relation between the individuals is characterized
by detachment and indifference and based on instrumental and strategic interests. On the other hand,
we have situations where individuals are tied together by bonds of mutual concern and solidarity, and
where they understand themselves and the others as members of a we.
The platoon is an example of a closely knit group, one very much involving the experience of
being one of us. But there are other strongly cohesive we-formations that likewise involve
identification and unification, but which nevertheless differ in important ways from a platoon. Here
is what Husserl writes about a close friendship or love relation:

Two people, who form a unit of life, not two lives side by side, but two people, two persons,
each of whom lives his or her own life, and yet also shares in the life of the other, a co-life, a
life of its own, that connects with the other's own life, embraces it and is embraced by it. […]
The principle of this most intimate unity is to be determined, this most intimate unity of two-
ness is to be described in more detail (Husserl 1921-28: 219, cf. 1929-35: 598-99).

Whereas the we of the intimate couple would dissolve in the case of a partner change, the we of a
platoon can persist even if a number of its members are replaced. And whereas one can voluntarily
join a platoon, the situation is different with the family one is born into and brought up within. As
different as these formations are, they also have something in common. They all involve bodily
engagement and direct communication between the members. As important as such interaction might
be for the emergence of a shared we-perspective, it would be a mistake to think that this kind of we
is the only type. There are other forms which are not tied in the same way to reciprocal bodily

11
interaction in the here and now. A subject can experience herself as a member of a community (say,
a national or religious community), identify with other members of the same community, and have
group-based experiences even if she is alone. She might, for instance, feel pride when the national
team wins a championship or fear when members of her religious community are persecuted. Such
group-based emotions do not rely on direct bodily interaction, but will be mediated through
mechanisms of implicit or explicit group identification (including rituals, traditions, ceremonial
practices etc.). Far from being merely dyadic, a we can in short also be based on shared heritage and
culture, involving conventions, norms and institutions, where we do things in a certain way.2
In her dissertation, Walther discusses these and other relevant distinctions. On her account,
the direct awareness of and interaction with others allows for something she calls purely personal
communities or life communities (rein personale Gemeinschaften or Lebensgemeinschaften). In some
cases, these communities are organized around the pursuit of shared external goals. In other cases,
like friendships, families, and marriages, there is also a shared goal, but rather than being external,
the goal is the flourishing of the community itself. Walther calls this subgroup “reflexive
communities” (reflexive Gemeinschaften) (Walther 1923: 67). But communal life cannot be restricted
to such forms, since it cannot be a necessary feature of every community that all its members engage
in reciprocal interaction (Walther 1923: 66, 68). In fact, people can very much identify with other
members of the same community even though they have never met them in person and might have
group-based experiences even though they are not temporally and spatially together. In these cases,
shared objects, goals, rituals, conventions and norms will play a crucial role (Walther 1923: 49– 50).
Walther labels such (institutionalized) communities “objectual communities” (gegenständliche
Gemeinschaften) (Walther 1923: 50). The more the community is centered around external factors
(rather than being tied to the immediate interpersonal contact), the greater the spatiotemporal
separation of the members can be (Walther 1923: 82), and the more substitutable these members will
be. Consider, for instance, someone who acquires a new citizenship. Here one might identify with the
new community before one starts to identify with particular individuals, and one’s relation to such
individuals might at first be only qua representative (and substitutable) group-members rather than
qua unique individuals (Walther 1923: 99–100).
In a further step Walther explores the question of whether members of a community must
necessarily realize or recognize this membership. As she points out, there is a difference between
identifying with and being united with certain other people, and explicitly recognizing that one
belongs to a particular community. In fact, rather than being reflectively scrutinized, a we-relationship
is most often simply lived through pre-reflectively (Schutz 1932: 170). But this can change, for
instance, because of intergroup conflict. Thus, as Walther remarks, war can often make people
explicitly aware of themselves as members of a distinct community (1923: 96). Only when this
awareness is present is a community constituted as a community for itself in the full sense (1923: 97).
Finally, Walther also discusses the case where a group isn’t recognized as such simply by its own
members, but also by members belonging to another group. Such recognition by a third party might
further solidify one’s own group-formation and provide it with a new and more objective status
(Walther 1923: 121), which is why Sartre would later speak of the difference between the we-subject
and the us-object (1943: 451).

2
In more recent years, some of these phenomenological nuances have been captured by Tuomela
when he distinguished the I-mode and the we-mode (2005: 332), and by Tomasello when he
differentiated we-intentionality with a particular other from collective intentionality among more
anonymous groups of individuals (2014: 5-6).

12
 It is important to recognize the existence of several forms of we, but we also need to ask how
they are interrelated. A widespread view in classical phenomenology is that the most fundamental
form of we-relationship is the one that is established in and through dyadic interactions (Zahavi 2018).
As Schutz would argue, the living we-relationship of the face-to-face is a directly experienced social
reality that provides the basis for one’s familiarity with a much wider social world, including the
world of contemporaries whom I am not currently experiencing directly (Schutz 1932: 163, 165).
Socialization and enculturation dramatically expand and transform the types of we one can be part
of, but it all starts with an engagement with particular others. Despite the strong emphasis on dyadic
interaction, however, the claim is not that one can reach an understanding of community-wide
phenomena simply by scaling up the dyadic account. After all, a community is clearly more than a
multiplicity of dyads. The argument by many phenomenologists is rather that the dyadic encounter
modulates the cognitive and affective capacities of the experiencing subject such that more complex
types of group identification and group formations thereby become possible.
What we find in the work by phenomenologists are not only incisive distinctions and careful
analyses of various social units and group structures, with a particular eye on how they affect the
character of the self-experience and interpersonal relation involved, but also reflections on the
normative underpinnings of such formations. Consider, for instance, the following passage by
Husserl:

in some groups, but not in all, there is a community norm, which each social individual
recognizes as such. With regard to custom, it means ‘you behave like this, you have to do like
this’. This does not mean that everyone acts this way, nor does it mean that this is the way it
is for the most part, but it means that this is how it should be, this is what is demanded. Who
demands it? ‘The’ custom. This is not a subjective demand. Not only I feel that it is ‘right’ for
me to behave in this way […]: it is a question of how to behave towards others, and of what
kind of behavior they have the ‘right’ to demand of me, have a right to expect of me, as I have
a right to expect of them in a similar situation. And this does not refer to specific others, but
to rules of mutual behavior that apply to everyone and to situations of social interaction that
anyone can get into. One demands this, one behaves in this way, and one’s counterpart has
the right to demand such behavior. A unity of demands and counter-demands, which run
through the whole social community, indeed, which is what in the first place forms a
community; a system of duties and rights which makes up a unity in contrast to a mere
association of individuals that merely ‘consort’ with one another (Husserl 1905-20: 105).

As the phenomenologists fully recognized, we are not simply individuals who on occasion act with
others. We are also community members, shareholders in collective identities, and our being with
others is often supported by different communal practices, by different institutionalized, ritualized,
and linguistically mediated norms and conventions.

4. Conclusion

One can approach the issue of collective intentionality from various complementary angles and with
different research agendas in mind. Whereas I don’t think a satisfying analysis of collective
intentionality can afford to sidestep a proper analysis of the systematic relation between the first-
person singular, the second-personal singular, and the first-person plural perspective, I wouldn’t claim
that, say, empathy and emotional sharing are involved in every type of collective intentionality, nor
would I argue that one can piece together a comprehensive theory of collective intentionality simply

13
by going through the classical phenomenological texts. My point is rather that our understanding of
collective intentionality can profit from engaging with ideas, distinctions and analyses contained in
these historical resources.

• Whereas the influential contributions of Searle, Bratman, Gilbert, and Tuomela have tended to
focus rather narrowly on the question of how agentive intentions can be shared, classical
phenomenology substantially widens the scope of the investigation and also analyses collective
emotions, perceptions, and identities.

• A key feature of phenomenological social ontology is that it engages with the very issues that are
absent from much of the current debate on collective intentionality. Quite unlike mainstream
analytic philosophical work, phenomenologists have extensively explored the relation between
self-understanding, interpersonal understanding, and communal experiences, and have analysed
different types of social formations in their systematic relation to one another.

• In addition to offering careful analyses of dyadic interaction, virtually all phenomenologists have
also discussed the role that shared habits, norms, conventions, and values play in solidifying we-
identities beyond the here and now.

In the last few decades, a renewed study of classical phenomenological texts has had quite an impact
on theoretical discussions of self, self-consciousness and social cognition (e.g., Varela et al. 1991,
Gallagher 2005, Gallagher & Zahavi 2021, Zahavi 2014, Colombetti 2014, Ratcliffe 2014, Durt et al.
2017, Newen et al. 2018). I think a systematically informed engagement with phenomenological texts
on the we could have a similar impact on discussions of collective intentionality.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Jelle Bruineberg, Felipe León, Lucy Osler, Mikko Salmela, Marilyn Stendera and
especially Andrew Inkpin for helpful comments. This paper is based on project that has received
funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 832940) and from the Carlsberg
Foundation (Grant ID: CF18-1107).

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