Vol.:(0123456789) Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09778-3 1 3 Inter‑afectivity and social coupling: on contextualized empathy Zhida Luo 1  · Xiaowei Gui 2 Accepted: 13 September 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021 Abstract Recent enactive approach to social cognition stresses the indispensability of social afordance with regard to social understanding and contends that it is afordance that primarily solicits one’s reaction to the other, such that one becomes afected by the other and attends to the other’s situated appearance in the frst place. What remains to be explored, however, is the sense in which social afordance is delineated by an afective sphere and the extent to which the afective sphere serves as a meaning constraint for social sense-making. In this paper, we analyze Husserl’s genetic the- ory of afection, so as to better understand the nature of the social afective sphere. And we argue that social understanding takes places at diferent levels and it is at the passive and pre-refective level that the social surroundings are pre-delineated by a sort of afective ambience where the empathizer and the empathizee come into contact. Once this is appreciated, we can better articulate the afective structure of social afordance and its meaning constituents. And we show that, at the passive level, social coupling is in nature an afective intertwinement between oneself and the other and it consists of a particular kind of corporeal intentionality with which one adverts to the other’s presence and responds to the other’s appeal. Keywords Enactivism · Afordance · Afection · Situatedness · Bodily intentionality · Empathy Xiaowei Gui is co-frst author of the article * Zhida Luo lozida1@gmail.com Xiaowei Gui guixiaowei@whu.edu.cn 1 Department of Philosophy (Zhuhai), Sun Yat-Sen University, Ofce A552, Haiqinlou No.6, Zhuhai Campus, Zhuhai 519082, Guangdong, China 2 Department of Sociology, Wuhan University, Ofce 214, Bayi Road No. 299, Wuhan 430072, Hubei, China