Edith Stein’s Critique of Contemporary Theories of Empathy

Edith Stein critically examines contemporary theories of empathy, including those of Lipps, Scheler, Münsterberg and psychological approaches. She argues that genuine empathy is a distinct, intentional act of consciousness, preserving the distinction between self and other. Unlike emotional contagion, projection, or inference, empathy allows direct access to another’s lived experience, forming the foundation for ethical awareness, intersubjectivity, and authentic community life.

Edith Stein’s offers one of the earliest systematic phenomenological analyses of empathy. She situates her account against a range of contemporary psychological and philosophical theories, arguing that most misunderstand empathy’s unique intentional structure.

For Stein, empathy is neither emotional contagion, nor imaginative projection, nor logical inference. Instead, it is a distinct, non-primordial act of consciousness that gives access to another person’s lived experience while preserving the difference between self and other.

Agreement and Disagreement with Theodor Lipps

Theodor Lipps defined empathy as Einfühlung—an inner participation in another person’s experiences. Stein welcomes Lipps’ insight that empathy requires openness to another’s consciousness. However, she rejects his claim that empathy involves full emotional merging with the other.

Lipps’ model suggests a kind of “feeling-into” that blurs the boundary between the observer’s and the other’s experiences. Stein argues that this confusion undermines the very possibility of understanding another person as a separate subject.

Empathy, she insists, must remain intentional and non-appropriative, it is always directed toward the other’s interior life, but it never becomes identical with one’s own feelings. This distinction safeguards both ethical responsibility and the phenomenological integrity of consciousness (Stein 1917/1989; Moran 2000).

Critique of Max Scheler: Emotional Contagion vs. Intentional Empathy

Max Scheler claimed that we grasp another’s emotions through a direct, intuitive “feeling-with” that arises from expressive bodily cues. For him, emotions are immediately given, often through shared affective participation.

Stein challenges Scheler on two fronts:

1. Confusion of empathy with emotional contagion. Scheler’s account collapses empathy into shared affect. For Stein, emotional contagion does not disclose the other’s experience—it produces my own emotional state in response to them. This is not empathy but self-involved resonance.

   
   

2. Overstating immediacy. Scheler maintains that another’s grief or joy is given as directly as one’s own. Stein rejects this. Empathy is non-primordial:

   • My own sadness is experienced “from within,”

   • while your sadness is experienced “from without,” as your experience.

Scheler’s model makes empathy too immediate, failing to preserve the separation essential for genuine intersubjectivity.

Critique of Hugo Münsterberg: Projection as a False Account of Empathy

Hugo Münsterberg explains empathy through projection—the observer attributes their own feelings or memories to others based on associative cues. For him, empathy is essentially a creative psychological construction rather than an encounter with another subject.

Stein criticizes Münsterberg for two central reasons:

1. Projection does not reach the other’s consciousness. If empathy is merely the observer’s imaginative activity, then the other person remains inaccessible. This reduces empathy to self-interpretation rather than a directed act toward another’s lived experience.

   
   

2. Denial of intentionality. Münsterberg’s view eliminates empathy’s relational structure. Stein insists that empathy is an intentional act aimed at the other’s experience as other, not a reproduction of one’s own.

Thus Münsterberg’s theory collapses empathy into subjective association, failing to grasp the phenomenon Stein aims to describe.

Critique of Contemporary Psychological Theories

Stein also evaluates psychological accounts—imitation theory, association theory, and inference by analogy—and finds each inadequate:

• Imitation theory: observing another’s expression leads me to reproduce similar feelings in myself. Stein argues this reveals nothing about the other’s consciousness; it simply generates my own affect.

  
  

• Association theory: behaviour is linked to memories of similar situations. This still does not disclose the other’s inner life.

  
  

• Inference by analogy: I reason that the other must feel as I would. But empathy is not an intellectual deduction; it is a direct awareness of another’s experience.

These theories explain important mechanisms of social cognition but fail to identify what makes empathy sui generis—a distinctive act that cannot be reduced to imitation, inference, or association (Stein 1917/1989; Zahavi 2001).

Phenomenology as the Foundation of Empathy

Stein positions empathy within the wider phenomenological investigation of consciousness. She maintains that psychology can describe behavioural and cognitive processes but cannot account for the fundamental structures of experience that make empathy possible.

Empathy, she argues, is:

1. Intentional – directed toward the other’s lived experience

   
   

2. Non-primordial – not experienced as one’s own

   
   

3. Non-appropriative – preserves the distinction between subjects

   
   

4. Foundational for intersubjectivity – the basis of shared life, community, and ethics

Through empathy, we encounter others not as objects of observation but as subjects with their own interiority. This insight anchors ethics, moral responsibility, and communal existence in a mode of awareness irreducible to emotion or inference (Moran 2000; Zahavi 2001).

Edith Stein’s critique of contemporary theories demonstrates that genuine empathy cannot be reduced to emotional contagion (Scheler), imaginative projection (Münsterberg), or psychological mechanisms of imitation or association. Nor can it be equated with the emotional fusion proposed by Lipps.

For Stein, empathy is a distinct, intentional act of consciousness that grants access to another’s experience while preserving the essential difference between self and other. This phenomenological foundation becomes the starting point for her broader reflections on intersubjectivity, community, and ethical life.