What if the most important thing about acting together is not that our individual intentions line up, but that it can genuinely change how the world shows up to us through a first-person plural perspective?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Dan Zahavi is professor of philosophy and the director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen and is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, with Shaun Gallagher. His work focuses on phenomenology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
Check out his book, "Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology"!
https://academic.oup.com/book/59446
https://www.amazon.com/dp/019289448X
2. Book Summary
Zahavi’s Being We argues that debates about ‘collective intentionality’ miss something central if they focus only on how individual intentions line up. The phenomenological tradition, he claims, forces us to take seriously the *qualitative* character of doing things together: feeling, thinking, and acting “as part of a we” can transform one’s sense of self, one’s relation to others, and one’s experience of the world. On this view, *we*-perspectives and *we*-experiences are not optional add-ons to an already complete theory of mind; they are genuine explananda that constrain what we can plausibly say about selfhood and social cognition.
In Part I (“We and I”), Zahavi tackles the “primacy” question: does the first-person plural precede the first-person singular, or vice versa? He argues that talk of a we requires plurality and differentiation, and that we-experiences presuppose (rather than erase) the self–other distinction; attempts to derive phenomenal consciousness or basic subjectivity from communal life don’t succeed. That doesn’t mean sociality is irrelevant to selfhood, but it does mean we need careful distinctions between cultural/conceptual accounts of the self and the minimal first-personal “for-me-ness” of experience—because an irreducible plurality of perspectives is exactly what makes distinctive forms of being-with possible in the first place.
Parts II and III then explain how we-ness is built up through concrete interpersonal relations and can take multiple forms. Zahavi emphasizes empathy and second-person engagement as ways of encountering another that preserve otherness while enabling coordination and mutual “contact,” and he distinguishes this from mere imaginative perspective-taking; this sets the stage for his analysis of shared emotions and why “affective sharing” needs clearer criteria than simple emotional contagion or matching feelings. Finally, he maps “varieties of we,” moving from intimate dyads and triads to thicker communal and national identifications: larger-scale wes are highly mediated, shaped by norms and institutions, and often sustained through “us–them” demarcation—sometimes actively orchestrated by political forces—so understanding we-formation also means understanding the risks of overly exclusive group identification.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:07 - Overview
04:12 - Phenomenology
10:29 - "I" and "we"
13:03 - Worry
17:12 - Individualist bias
25:33 - Semantic variance
27:13 - More empirical research
29:26 - Individual and social aspects
33:49 - Data
38:05 - Husserl
44:27 - Primacy
51:49 - Higher order theories of consciousness
59:40 - Vagueness
1:07:36 - Group membership
1:12:39 - Empathy
1:19:17 - Collective intentionality
1:23:00 - Technology
1:28:55 - Artificial intelligence
1:31:45 - Value of philosophy
1:35:05 - Conclusion
