128. Dan Zahavi | Being We

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. GuestDan 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/59446https://www.amazon.com/dp/019289448X2. Book SummaryZahavi’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 Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:07 - Overview04:12 - Phenomenology10:29 - "I" and "we"13:03 - Worry17:12 - Individualist bias25:33 - Semantic variance27:13 - More empirical research29:26 - Individual and social aspects33:49 - Data38:05 - Husserl44:27 - Primacy51:49 - Higher order theories of consciousness59:40 - Vagueness1:07:36 - Group membership1:12:39 - Empathy1:19:17 - Collective intentionality1:23:00 - Technology1:28:55 - Artificial intelligence1:31:45 - Value of philosophy1:35:05 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe