ABSTRACT
This chapter represents an attempt at defining, in the form of a ten-thesis manifesto, what empathy might and might not be and its role in experiencing others, including “radical alterity”. In particular, the manifesto focuses on the limits of knowing others and one’s self which empathy discloses. Drawing on the phenomenological insights of Husserl, Stein, Schutz, the manifesto examines how there is a necessary asymmetry between the experiencing subject and the subject who is experienced by them. Within such a view, empathy is an experience of the limits of accessing another’s first-person experience directly. The manifesto is also premised on the ways that empathic experience discloses the necessary and ongoing limits of the own self-understanding. Not only does the other exceed people, but, as humans, they continually exceed ourselves.
