Edith Stein Empathy

Most people come across an instance in life where they’ve been told to “put themselves in some other person’s shoes”. Of course they do not literally mean what they are saying but rather are trying to get an “empathetic” reaction from this person. In her contributions to the field of phenomenology and inter-subjectivity, Edith Stein undertakes the task of investigating the essences of empathy and the givness of the other. My goal in this paper is to first explain and evaluate Stein’s claim that empathy allows us to experience the person as an embodied psycho-spiritual unity and further I will side with Stein based on the inference that one cannot empathize without having an experience of sensations, feelings, a will and values in themselves.

The difference, as Stein states is “The subject of the empathized experience, however, is not the subject empathizing, but another” (Stein, 10). In other words, with memory, expectations and imagination we are mainly concerned with our own “I” including the future and past “I” and thus this is what differs from an act of empathy where the main concern is the “I” of a different person which we will attempt to tap into. Moreover, Stein claims that there are three levels of accomplishments that can help achieve empathy; “(1) the emergence of the experience, (2) the fulfilling explication, and (3) the comprehensive objectification of the explained experience” (Stein, 10). These three modalities are essential in separating acts of empathy from other pure conscious acts. Interestingly enough with the guide of phenomenology, Stein also believes to have answered the epistemological question of “how can the existence of other people be known to us?” In a nutshell, an act of empathy deals with the perceiving or comprehension of foreign subjects and their conscious experience, also it deals with grasping what is “here and now” and must be acquired via our

In other words, by recognizing the “I” of the foreign living body as the zero point of orientation of the spatial world, we have consequently categorized the foreign living body as an “object-constituting consciousness and have made it relative to the outer world (Stein, 92). It then follows that the “I” of a foreign living body has already been interpreted as a spiritual subject. Therefore, we have already entered the realm of the spirit when we undertake every literal act of empathy. Moreover, feelings and expressions have further constituted the “world of values” just like the physical nature is constituted in perceptual acts (Stein, 92). So what this basically means is that moods and feelings have their objective correlates, for example in joy the subject has something joyous facing him and “all this co-given with acts of feeling as belonging to them” (Stein, 92). Given this, the expression of feeling gives us self-knowledge and also knowledge of the foreign living body. It is the senses that all knowledge is received through and even the knowledge of the other minds. Further Stein claims that as experiences produce expressions, the spirit “becomes visible” in the living body and reaches out into the physical world. And she states that this is possible via “psychic-reality of acts as