#intersubjectivity

The philosophy of intersubjectivity is one of the most important and complex developments in 20th-century thought. It addresses a fundamental problem: How can separate, subjective consciousnesses share a common, objective world? It moves philosophy beyond the isolated Cartesian cogito ("I think") to the foundational recognition: "We are."

Intersubjectivity is not merely "communication" or "empathy." It is the structural condition of possibility for any shared reality, objective knowledge, or genuine social life.

Core Definition

Intersubjectivity is the philosophical term for the shared, reciprocal, and constitutive relationship between conscious subjects. It is the process by which:

I recognize you as a subject like myself (not just an object in my world).

I understand that you also experience a world from your perspective.

We mutually constitute a shared world that is neither yours alone nor mine alone, but ours.

It is the bridge between the subjective (private, first-person experience) and the objective (public, third-person fact).

The Problem Intersubjectivity Solves

Without intersubjectivity, philosophy faces two insurmountable problems:

Solipsism: The inability to prove that other minds exist at all.

Relativism: The fragmentation of reality into incommensurable private worlds.

Intersubjectivity argues that the shared world is not a lucky coincidence of separate minds, but is actively, collaboratively built into the very structure of consciousness and social life.

Major Philosophical Frameworks of Intersubjectivity

1. Edmund Husserl: The Foundational Phenomenology

Husserl, the father of phenomenology, made intersubjectivity a central problem in his later work (notably the Cartesian Meditations).

The Problem: Phenomenology begins with the first-person perspective ("the transcendental ego"). How can it escape this starting point to account for the objectivity of the world and the existence of others?

The Solution: Analogical Apperception. I perceive your body (Körper) as behaving like mine. By a transfer of sense, I apprehend it as a living body (Leib) inhabited by another ego—an "alter ego." I do not infer your subjectivity; I appresent it directly in perception.

The Shared World: The objective world is not my private representation, but an "intersubjective transcendental constitution." The world is "there for everyone" because it is co-constituted by a community of monads.

2. Alfred Schutz: The Lifeworld of Everyday Life

Schutz applied Husserl's insights to sociology, founding phenomenological sociology.

The Reciprocity of Perspectives: In everyday life, I assume that if we exchanged places, we would see the same world. This is a practical, taken-for-granted fiction that makes social life possible.

The "We-Relationship": The face-to-face encounter (Umwelt) is the primordial sphere of intersubjectivity, where we experience each other as "growing old together" in a shared present.

Social Reality: The entire social world—institutions, roles, knowledge—is built upon these sedimented, intersubjective typifications.

3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Intersubjectivity as Intercorporeality

Merleau-Ponty radicalized intersubjectivity by grounding it not in consciousness but in the body.

The Flesh of the World: My body and yours are not separate substances but different folds in the same flesh of the world. I understand your gesture not by analogy, but because I inhabit a similar body. Your smile is directly meaningful; I do not decode it.

Chiasm: The touching hand and the touched hand are reversible. This reversibility is the model for intersubjectivity: I am touched by your gaze even as I see you; we are intertwined.

Implication: Intersubjectivity is not a secondary achievement of isolated minds. It is co-primary with subjectivity itself. I am from the beginning a being-among-others.

4. Jürgen Habermas: Communicative Intersubjectivity

Habermas shifted intersubjectivity from consciousness to language and communication.

From Consciousness to Communication: The Cartesian "I think" is replaced by the We-speak of communicative action.

Universal Pragmatics: In any act of communication, speakers implicitly raise validity claims (truth, rightness, sincerity) that are addressed to an intersubjective community of hearers. Meaning is not in the speaker's head, but in the public, shared space of language.

Lifeworld and System: The intersubjectively shared lifeworld (background consensus, cultural knowledge) is the resource from which communicative action draws. Its colonization by impersonal systems (money, power) is the central pathology of modernity.

5. Emmanuel Levinas: The Ethical Primacy of the Other

Levinas offers a radical inversion: intersubjectivity is not symmetrical, and it is not primarily about knowledge or constitution. It is about ethics.

The Face of the Other: The Other (Autrui) is not an alter ego to be comprehended, but an absolute, transcendent alterity that commands me. "Thou shalt not kill."

Asymmetry: I am infinitely responsible for the Other before the Other is responsible for me. This responsibility is pre-original—it precedes my freedom, my choice, my being.

Critique of Husserl: Levinas accuses the entire phenomenological tradition of reducing the Other to a constituted phenomenon, thereby committing an act of epistemic violence. True intersubjectivity is not comprehension but proximity, substitution, and hostage.

6. Existential Intersubjectivity: Heidegger and Sartre

Heidegger: Dasein is fundamentally Being-with (Mitsein). The world is always already a with-world (Mitwelt). Others are not added to a pre-existing self; the self is constituted through its relations with others. (This is often inauthentic in the mode of das Man, but the structure is primordial.)

Sartre: Intersubjectivity is conflict. The Other's Look (le regard) objectifies me, steals my world, and reveals my vulnerability. "Hell is other people." Yet, this very struggle for recognition is constitutive of my self-consciousness.

Applications and Implications

Psychoanalysis (Intersubjective Turn): The mind is not a self-contained system but is formed and transformed within the intersubjective field of the analytic dyad (Stolorow, Atwood, Benjamin).

Social Theory: Social reality is not an aggregation of individual actions but is constituted and maintained through shared typifications, language, and mutual recognition.

Cognitive Science (Enactivism): Cognition is not a private computational process but is enacted through embodied interaction with others and the environment (Varela, Thompson, Di Paolo).

Political Philosophy: Recognition is not a psychological nicety but a fundamental human need and a condition for justice (Axel Honneth's theory of recognition).

AI and Posthumanism: Can non-biological agents participate in intersubjectivity? Or is it uniquely embodied and mortal?

Conclusion: The Primacy of the Between

The philosophy of intersubjectivity represents a paradigm shift from the philosophy of the solitary subject to the philosophy of the relation itself. It asserts that:

Subjectivity is not prior to intersubjectivity; they are co-emergent.

The world is not mine or yours, but ours.

Meaning, truth, and value are not private possessions but public, negotiated, shared accomplishments.

The self is not a substance but a node in a network of recognition.

Say you have people interacting, and they come to a disagreement. It is intersubjectively true that they seem to see the matter differently. That fact - that they appear to disagree - is important in and of itself, but often gets treated like a problem. In my experience, disagreements almost always turn out more productive if someone explicitly says, "Wow, we have very different perspectives, and that's great because it facilitates this conversation." The intersubjective fact that we're disagreeing is something that should be accepted and treated as an opportunity. We're going to continue living in a world where disagreements happen, yet we play whackamole with them instead of acknowledging and celebrating the ongoing intersubjective fact that different people just HAVE different perspectives.

Instead, we almost always adopt a "conflict resolution" mindset, where peace is defined as agreement on a consensus; instead of fighting for a freer society where differences can peacefully coexist, we fight for consensus-based rules that are more inclusive. We are culturally trained to reject intersubjectivity, value agreement, and adopt magical thinking about how useful consensus is at bringing about peace and justice.

Intersubjectivity is a social science, psychology and linguistic term...At its heart born of philosophy. It refers to a broad range of human interaction centered around shared agreement, understanding, perspectives and assumptions.

A whopper of a concept really. I've figured out the easiest way to understand it.

The tendrils of minds spilling over into the world.

Our shared agreement with others over the very words I'm typing up right now, the way your mind slithers out and engages with the world, the way you may attribute feelings or beliefs to me - the writer - based on your prior experiences or perspectives.

The more widely used (but less artistic and philosophical ) definition is to refer to people agreeing about something.

Eg.

"There is intersubjectivity between the christians and catholics on the question of..."

means

"There is agreement between the christians and catholics on the question of..."

"There is intersubjectivity between Amy and Joe's interpretation of the conflict in the middle east"

means

I know I've said this before, but since we're going to be hearing increasingly more about Elon Musk and his "Anti-Woke" "A.I." "Truth GPT" in the coming days and weeks, let's go ahead and get some things out on the table:

All technology is political. All created artifacts are rife with values.

I keep trying to tell you that the political right understands this when it suits them— when they can weaponize it; and they're very VERY good at weaponizing it— but people seem to keep not getting it. So let me say it again, in a somewhat different way:

There is no ground of pure objectivity. There is no god's-eye view.

There is no purely objective thing. Pretending there is only serves to create the conditions in which the worst people can play "gotcha" anytime they can clearly point to their enemies doing what we are literally all doing ALL THE TIME: Creating meaning and knowledge out of what we value, together.

...

We are in the time of monsters, mostly because monsters are embodiments of the magical between. Think of the classical Greek description of the Chimera according to Homer in his Iliad: “a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire.” Such hyphenated, perverse creatures were the stuff of ancient lore and an ethics of wholeness, especially in a time when it was trusted that things were complete, already made, and guarded at their boundaries by an immutable law. Aristotle asserted that a thing cannot be its negation or its contradiction. And yet, the closer we look, the more monstrous everything seems. We are hyphenated. There is no identity, there is only identity-to-come; there is no justice, only justice-in-the-making.

Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’