Beyond Empathy as Projection

Listening, Otherness, and Relational Restraint

In many traditions of listening, including communication studies, clinical psychology, counselling, leadership development, and organisational practice, empathy is treated as a core competence. To listen well is often understood as the capacity to empathise. To empathise, in turn, is commonly taken to mean that one can understand the other from within. Once such understanding is achieved, one is assumed to be better able to help, connect, guide, or respond appropriately.

This logic appears self-evident. Yet empathy carries multiple meanings, often used interchangeably though they do not share the same ethical weight. It may refer to emotional resonance, compassion, perspective-taking, sensitivity to another person’s situation, or the attempt to imaginatively enter another’s experience. These meanings are often treated as if they belonged to one and the same phenomenon, while their ethical implications diverge.

The concern of this essay lies elsewhere than empathy as such. Empathy may indeed interrupt indifference and open a person to the reality of another. The question is more precise: what happens when empathy is understood as imaginative identification, as the assumption that I can feel what the other feels, think what the other thinks, or stand where the other stands?

This assumption is captured in the familiar metaphor of “standing in someone else’s shoes.” The metaphor itself reveals the difficulty. When I stand in the other’s shoes, it is still I who stand there. I bring my own history, my own horizon of meaning, my own emotional and cognitive filters. What I experience is my response to my projection of the other’s situation, shaped by my own filters.

That distinction is crucial. The assumption that these two coincide risks misunderstanding the other. It may also obstruct listening itself.

Perception is never neutral

To understand why empathy as identification remains structurally insufficient, it is useful to begin with perception. The brain functions as an active, predictive system that continuously constructs models of reality on the basis of prior experience and tests new information against those models.[1] What fits is integrated. What does not fit is adjusted, overlooked, or explained away.

This mechanism is necessary for orientation in the world. Yet it has a significant consequence for listening: we rarely hear the other simply as the other is. We hear the other through what our perceptual and interpretive systems already expect.

Henri Bergson identified a related problem at the philosophical level. In his view, the intellect tends to immobilise reality. It fixes what is fluid, places movement into categories, and reduces the unique to what is already known.[2] Bergson also suggested that the brain may be understood less as a producer of consciousness than as a filtering organ: a mechanism that allows certain signals to pass while excluding others.[3]

These two claims belong to different registers. Clark and Friston offer a contemporary computational hypothesis about how the predictive brain constructs perception. Bergson advances a metaphysical intuition about the relation between mind and matter. They cannot be merged into one coherent argument. They converge, however, on something recognisable in the practice of listening: when one is fully absorbed in one’s own frame of reference, one mostly hears oneself.

Understanding begins from a horizon

Hans-Georg Gadamer developed this insight hermeneutically. Understanding always begins from a prior horizon: a field of assumptions, expectations, experiences, and meanings that is already operative before any encounter begins.[4] We cannot step outside our own horizon as if we could occupy a neutral position.

What we can do is allow our horizon to be questioned, stretched, and transformed through an encounter with what is genuinely other. Gadamer’s notion of the “fusion of horizons” allows for understanding through openness to what exceeds one’s initial perspective, while preserving difference rather than collapsing it.[5]

Levinas, by contrast, would remain wary of any vocabulary of fusion. For him, the absolute alterity of the face resists being absorbed into a shared horizon of meaning, however broad that horizon may become. Both thinkers help me think the encounter, and they pull in slightly different directions: Gadamer toward dialogical transformation in which the I is corrected and enlarged, Levinas toward an alterity that the I can never domesticate. In the layered architecture I am trying to describe, both movements have a place. The horizon shifts; the alterity remains.

The condition for such understanding lies in awareness of one’s own non-neutrality.

Levinas: responsibility before understanding

It is Emmanuel Levinas who formulates the ethical consequences of this most radically. For Levinas, the other is never fully graspable. The face of the other, le visage, resists reduction to what I know, recognise, expect, diagnose, or interpret.[6] The other is always more than my image of them.

It is precisely in this excess, in this resistance to comprehension, that the ethical demand arises. Responsibility precedes understanding.[7]

This reverses the usual order. We often assume that we must first understand the other in order to become responsible toward them. Levinas suggests otherwise. Responsibility is already there, prior to comprehension, prior even to adequate knowledge. The face of the other addresses me before I have interpreted it. The ethical appeal comes before explanation.

Listening as ethical availability

What does this mean for listening?

At its deepest level, listening becomes an ethical disposition of availability. The familiar cognitive operations, empathic identification or interpretive mastery, sit at a different layer of the same encounter. Where the impulse moves toward entering your experience in order to understand you, this disposition moves the other way: I step back sufficiently for you to appear, including in what I do not yet understand, cannot assimilate, or may never fully grasp.

This shift is subtle and decisive. Listening grounds itself first in the willingness to suspend the impulse to reduce the other to what already makes sense, before any ability to feel with the other comes into play.

The Architecture of Listening

In my phenomenological framework, The Architecture of Listening, I have sought to describe this disposition in terms that remain meaningful for practice. Listening operates as a layered process. Its deepest layer reaches the existential, beneath the technical: the willingness to be present without annexing the other into one’s own framework.

This layer requires what I would call permeability: an inner mobility through which the other can genuinely make an impression. Permeability is a disciplined suspension of one’s own interpretive reflexes, close to what Husserl called epochè: the bracketing of one’s judgements and expectations.[8] The vague sense of receptivity to everything sits at a different register.

These judgements remain present. They are held lightly enough for something else to become possible.

Listening skills and their limits

This is where The Architecture of Listening differs from approaches that treat listening primarily as a skill set. Techniques such as active listening, paraphrasing, summarising, reflecting, or asking open questions may have practical value. They can help create structure, clarify meaning, and support relational exchange.

They operate, however, at another level. They are movements toward the other from within one’s own framework. Without a deeper ethical disposition, they can become instruments of apparent connection: the other may seem to be heard while in fact being fitted into an already existing interpretive order.

Technique itself remains useful. The problem arises when technique substitutes for ethical availability.

Proximity without appropriation

Empathy survives this critique in a reconfigured form. If empathy means the appropriation of the other’s experience into my own recognisable categories, then it remains ethically insufficient. Empathy, however, can be understood differently.

There is another possibility: empathy as proximity without appropriation. Empathy in this sense names the willingness to remain close to the other without possessing their experience. The claim to know what the other feels falls away. What remains is a movement of restraint.

Empathy as identification translates the other’s experience into something I can feel, compare, recognise, or understand. Empathy as proximity allows the other’s experience to remain partly opaque. I remain present to the other without claiming that their suffering, joy, fear, confusion, or silence has become mine.

Such restraint is active. It requires a high degree of self-awareness: the ability to notice one’s own filters while they are active. It also requires tolerance for incomprehensibility: the willingness to remain with the other even when the other cannot be fully understood, even when language fails, even when the encounter unsettles one’s own categories.

Carrying the self lightly

The listener can never fully step outside the self. We always perceive through the very instrument that we are. We can, however, learn to carry the self more lightly.

This lightness functions as an ethical discipline. It opens the space in which the other may appear as someone who exceeds what I can understand.

Listening, in this sense, becomes the practice of relational restraint. The aspiration to perfect empathy steps back from the centre.

Notes

[1] Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Karl Friston, “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?”, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, no. 2 (2010): 127–138.

[2] Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), originally published as L’Évolution créatrice (1907).

[3] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1911), originally published as Matière et mémoire (1896).

[4] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London/New York: Continuum, 2004), originally published as Wahrheit und Methode (1960).

[5] Gadamer, Truth and Method, especially the sections on historically effected consciousness and the fusion of horizons.

[6] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), originally published as Totalité et Infini (1961).

[7] Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), originally published as Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974).

[8] Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983), originally published as Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913).