Marie Van Haaster: Experiential Sharing and the History of Consolation

Thank you for your comment and for rephrasing it in this way! I think it is interesting indeed to reflect on what it is that is being shared when we speak of shared experiences, and to make a distinction between (1) experiences that are shared in the sense that two or more persons are having a similar experience because they are in a similar situation and have a similar cultural background, without necessarily interacting with each other, being in the same space or even knowing each other, and (2) experiences that are shared in the sense that two or more persons are having experiences that are co-constituted by the experiences of the others they are consciously interacting with. I think an interesting question to reflect on when thinking about the difference between these two types of experiential sharing, is about the sameness or similarity of the experiences shared. It is important to emphasize that in both cases, the experiences are structured by common and situated emotion conventions, but it could be relevant to acknowledge that in the second type of experiential sharing – the experiential interdependence – in contrast with the first type, the experiences of the persons involved are not necessarily the same as or similar to those of the others. For instance, two persons in a fight can enter in a relation of experiential interdependence while experiencing the situation very differently, and when a person is consoling someone, they are not necessarily experiencing the same distress or relief as the person being consoled.
For more on this see Léon, Szanto and Zahavi (2019), who distinguish collective and shared emotions: León, F., Szanto, T., & Zahavi, D. (2019). Emotional sharing and the extended mind. Synthese, 196(12), 4847-4867.

Thank you for this very important question Stephanie, I would love to further discuss this on tuesday. My understanding at this point is that the concept of experiential sharing encompasses both the sharing of emotions and the sharing of perceptual experiences. It can be seen very broadly as the what it is likeness of interactions, or of shared action or shared directedness at something. I have been reading about an observation made, amongst others, by Gerda Walther (discussed by León and Zahavi 2016, p. 228.), namely that the integration of another person’s experiencing in my own experiencing, through interaction, makes my experience significantly different from similar individual experiences. Walther argues that there is a difference between the experience of admiring a view together with someone else and the experience of merely admiring a view while knowing that someone else with whom one is not interacting is admiring the view as well. Experiential interdependence might in this sense be one of the phenomena/structures that contributes to the shaping of specific situated experiences, such as certain shared emotions felt today or the forms of shared experience in the past. I hope this brief elaboration on my thoughts on the relation between shared emotion and shared experience can offer a starting point for further discussions; I am still figuring it out myself and I would be very curious to know your thoughts on these phenomena and on their possible use for historical research as well.

For Walther’s view I mentioned see: León, F., & Zahavi, D. (2016). Phenomenology of experiential sharing: The contribution of Schutz and Walther. In The phenomenological approach to social reality (pp. 219-234). Springer.

I am sorry for my belated reply, I had some technical issues and only recently realized that I had received comments. But in any case, thank you very much for this important question. My thoughts are not set in stone on this matter, but in short, following an enactive or ecological understanding of cognition, I see experience as constituted not by internal computations but by a looping between evironment and body. The effort of trying to fit experiences to the surrounding conventions, I believe, is constituted by efforts of adjustments to the concrete, material or verbal, surrounding environment. So for instance, if the embrace of a partner has grown to be consolatory to someone, then that person might seek such an embrace in order to attain a certain experience of feeling consoled. If that partner breaks up with them, moves away to a foreign country, or if physical touch is in their community seen as inappropriate for the relationship they have, this means of consolation is withdrawn. They will either have to seek other ways of reaching the same experience of being consoled or attain different experiences.

I am only at the beginning of my analysis of historical material on this subject, but I will give a few examples of sources I am studyig at the moment. The well known Parisian hospital of the Salptetrière was increasingly secularized at the end of the nineteenth century. An important figure in this secularization was the highly mediatized neurologist Jean Martin Charcot. After his death, several local newspapers wrote lengthy articles on his views and on his treatment of patients in the Salpetrière. In these articles, the concept of consolation seems to play an important role: for instance, whereas one author describes Charcot as the great consolator of his time, another author, in another newspaper, argues explicitely that Charcot’s materialism and his method of hypnotizing was above all else harmful to patients, and that only religious truth could offer consolation. A third journal I found, from a decade earlier, reports a visit to a few patients of the salpetrière and describes Catherine, who is blind and whose consolation comes from being with god through listening to someone reading the bible to her, but who suffers from isolation amongst her fellow patients who do not share her beliefs. I am here only giving a few examples of passages I found in sources, and I want to emphasize that this is still a work in progress and that I am not yet in the position or stage of research to form a full analysis of this material, but I think these passages point to the difficulty that changing conventions represent for interpersonal consolatory practices and the possibility of attaining a specific experience of being consoled. I hope at least that this brief example gives an impression of the direction of my thoughts on this. I would be happy to hear your thoughts on the matter of disruption and change as well, maybe in the discussion tomorrow!