To Feel Together. Gerda Walther’s Concept of Unification

Gerda Walther’s approach to sociality is unique in that it does not start with an act of apperceptionApperception, with some intellectualIntellectual form of recognition of the other, but with a very immediate feeling which even precedes thinking and reflection. The key concept here is unification, an emotional connection we involuntarily establish with others. My main goal is to elucidate this concept and its various modifications presented by Walther to account for different forms of communities. In the first part of the paper, I present important ideas of three of Walther’s phenomenologicalPhenomenological interlocutors, namely Edmund HusserlHusserl, Alexander PfänderPfänder and Edith SteinStein. In the second part, I show how Walther combines and modifies these ideas in her theory of the ontology of socialSocial communities. Finally, I discuss how the concept of unification is still relevant today in the context of “we-experiences” of social ontology. By contrast to some contemporary approaches, one can understand collective social phenomena with Walther as the plural within the self, instead of a pluralization of self-awarenessSelf-awareness.