Empathetic Timing and Existential Landscapes—An Investigation of the Significance of Empathy in Educational Practices

Abstract Empathy is said to be central to the lifeworld of professional practices, especially to educational-didactical practice. Most standard accounts of empathy are based on face-to-face encounters between two people: one in need of help and one providing help. In those descriptions, the emphasis is often on the helper's capacity to understand the verbal or bodily expressions of the other person rather than on the more tacit dimensions such as the co-embodied situation as a whole, including its spatial and habitualized embeddedness. This article develops a different account of empathy. Instead of proceeding from the dual model of the helper–helped, we view empathy as emerging in aesthetically and existentially significant situations that are shaped by limited time and space, where what we call “empathetic timing” is needed. Empathetic timing describes a practice of musical interplay in relation to the specific existential landscape of an ongoing event. Starting from a concrete example from early childhood education in which a group of children and teachers are gathering in a hallway to get ready for an outdoor visit, the notion of empathetic timing is developed in dialogue with concepts based on analogies to dance, Edith Stein's phenomenological-existential theory on empathy, and Tim Ingold's concept of landscapes. The sensuous, moving everyday life at the preschool is understood as a challenge where ethical and aesthetical dimensions are intertwined.