Today, I'll be talking about Edith Stein's theory of empathy.
Stein was a 20th century phenomenologist who wrote her 1917
dissertation, which developed into a book on the theory of empathy.
A lot of contemporary debates about empathy in philosophy and psychology have
to do with what happens when we empathize.
Now, some say that when we empathize, what we do is simulate that situation
that the other person is in, with whom we want to empathize and imagine
how we would feel in that situation.
Kind of a putting yourself in another's shoes type of empathy.
Another view, sometimes known as mind reading is that I infer from
analogy what another person is feeling based on how they appear to me.
I can kind of reason my way into their situation.
Stein does not agree with either side of this debate.
In fact, for her, empathy is just the basic feeling of
foreign consciousness in general.
When I experience another consciousness, I am empathizing.
That doesn't mean that I have to have the same content, the same feelings,
the same thoughts, the same fantasies that the other person has in the
moment that I am empathizing with them.
All it means is that I experience them as a locus of their own subjectivity.
The word empathy that she's using is Einfühlung in German.
The word empathy is actually pretty new in both English and in German.
Um, it entered the English language actually by way of the German in the early
20th century, when psychologist Edward Titchener used it to translate the German
word Einfühlung, which means feeling into.
And that German word Einfühlung had only been coined a couple decades
earlier, actually, to describe the way that we experience a work
of art as a sort of whole entity
unto itself.
Back to Stein's theory of empathy here, um, in light of that background.
For Stein, empathy is the basis for intersubjective experience.
It's how we come to see that other people are not to be
treated as things, but as persons.
And she says that empathy is actually an act of perceiving.
So it's not a matter of imagining or reasoning.
It's a direct perception that is not generated by the person empathizing,
but rather has its origin elsewhere in the one empathized with.
So it's almost as if in empathizing with another person I am receiving
their subjectivity for Stein.
Empathy is just, as we said, a very basic idea for her.
It's how we experience any being other than ourselves.
And this experience depends on a felt sense of difference
between one self and another.
It's not a matter of really putting one self in the other's shoes.
It's just a matter of the felt sense of friction between
my subjectivity and theirs.
And that then provides the basis for more sophisticated forms
of interacting with others.
So even if I feel the other's pain and empathy, I feel it as theirs, not as mine.
And then the question might arise.
Well, how do I feel another's pain without feeling it as my own.
And Stein says, well, there's a difference between primordial content of an
experience and non- primordial content.
Everything that we experience is experienced primordially, but not every
experience has primordial content.
So for instance, take the act of memory.
When I remember something from my past, perhaps a beautiful
beach day, I experience that memory primordially, right.
It's present in my consciousness while I'm remembering it.
But the content of my memory is not primordial.
That is, I'm not experiencing the beach day itself in the present.
I'm rather representing it right.
Representing it to myself in the present as something that happened in the past.
Therefore, we can say that the act of remembering is a primordial experience
with non- primordial content.
And this is quite different from experiencing the beach day in the
present as I did on the day that I went to the beach that I'm now remembering.
On that beach day, my experience at the beach both was primordial, right?
And it had primordial content, but it's non- primordial content
now that I'm remembering it.
And memory's not the only kind of experience that has
non-primordial content for Stein.
She includes fantasy and expectation, right?
So fantasy, or imagining, and expectation or, um, prospectively envisioning
what's gonna happen in the future, as examples of primordial experiences
with non- primordial content as well.
She uses this account of primordial experiences with non- primordial content
as the basis for her account of empathy.
Because empathy also is a primordial experience with non-- primordial content.
When I experience another person's feelings, their feelings are non-
primordially represented to me, and this experience is empathy.
And yet, of course there are key differences between memory,
fantasy, expectation, on the one hand, and empathy on the other.
And the key difference is that, in fantasy, expectation, and memory, The
content is originating within myself.
So these experiences all have their ultimate foundation in my
primordial experience, but this is not the case for empathy.
In empathy,
I am faced with something that has its foundation in the primordial
experience of another person.
And so she writes in On the Problem of Empathy, this other subject
is primordial, although I do not experience it as primordial.
The feelings of the other, we might say are something that I cannot
directly access in principle.
And this is fundamentally distinct from imagination, memory, expectation.
And the fact that empathy has its origin in something outside myself is
what makes it a kind of perceiving.
Stein says that the subject of empathized experience is not the subject empathizing,
but another- the person empathized WITH.
And this is what is fundamentally different with memory, expectation,
and fantasy of our own experiences.
And I really like this one quote from her in the text where she says,
"while I am living in the other's joy, I do not feel primordial joy.
It does not issue live from my I."
so we don't need to feel primordial joy in order to empathize with
the person who is feeling joy.
Enjoy their, uh, joy.
Right?
so if I'm at a concert with a friend and they're loving it and I'm sort of like meh
about it , but I really love that person,
I can be happy for them.
Right.
But I'm not gonna imagine that it's me who's the one enjoying the concert.
I'm still gonna be like, okay, when is this gonna be over?
And one of the things that makes Stein's phenomenology of empathy Different
from some of the contemporary debates about empathy is that, for her, empathy
doesn't bridge the gap between self and other such that we would have a
kind of blurred line between the two.
It's actually what discloses the gap between self and other, because it gives
us this felt sense of a subjectivity
outside of myself.
I directly experience the other in my perceptual field
as an embodied consciousness.
And this also intersects with the phenomenological view of
the body where there's not a dualism between body and mind.
So I'm not seeing the body of the other person.
And then inferring that they must be a subject like me.
Rather, I experience their subjectivity directly as something that I am receiving
by virtue of being in the presence of.
To put it simply, for Stein, I think we can see empathy as the
experience of radical otherness.
Hope you enjoyed this video today.
If you are curious, we actually have an episode of my
podcast overthink on empathy.
So you can listen to that.
I've linked the website for our podcast below.
And check out our other videos.