Problem of Empathy: Aim. Method. Meaning.

Edith Stein investigates how humans truly understand one another. She begins by clarifying past confusion in empathy theory, distinguishing aesthetic, cognitive, ethical, and psychological approaches. Using phenomenology, she examines consciousness and how experiences are presented or given to us. Stein identifies empathy as a unique, direct access to another person’s feelings, distinct from perception, memory, or imagination. Her work establishes a foundation for understanding all forms of empathy and highlights the interplay between individual consciousness, intersubjective experience, and the profound human capacity to connect with others.

AIM

Clarifying Confusion in Empathy Theory

Stein observed that earlier writers often mixed different kinds of empathy such as aesthetic, cognitive, ethical, and psychological, without clearly distinguishing them. This lack of meaning made it difficult to fully understand empathy.

Stein's Goal

Stein aimed to identify the core issue of understanding empathy as the experience of another person’s lived reality. She investigated this through phenomenology, describing its essential structure in detail.

Purpose of Stein's Empathy Study

Her work provides a foundation for understanding and evaluating all other forms of empathy, from ethical to aesthetic, in a coherent way.

Acknowledgment of Husserl’s influence

Stein credits her mentor, Edmund Husserl, for inspiring her methodological approach, while making it clear that her analyses and insights are entirely her own.

Edith Stein observed that earlier writers often conflated different types of empathy—such as aesthetic, cognitive, ethical, and psychological—without clearly distinguishing their structures or functions. This conceptual ambiguity, she argued, hindered a rigorous understanding of empathy and its role in human experience. Stein emphasised that recognising the distinct forms and intentions of empathy is essential for both philosophical clarity and ethical reflection (Stein 1917/1989; Moran 2000; Waltraut Stein 1971).

METHOD

The Phenomenological Reduction

Bracketing the natural world. Stein explains that phenomenology suspends all assumptions about the existence of the external world, including one’s own physical body, to focus on how things appear in consciousness. For instance, Imagine looking at a cup of coffee. Instead of assuming it exists outside your mind, you focus on how it appears to you, its colour, shape, warmth and your experience of it.

Focus on “given-ness”. Rather than asking whether other people exist, she examines how their experiences are presented or “given” to us in consciousness. For example, when a friend laughs at a joke, you do not question their existence. You focus on how their joy is presented to you, their tone, expression and energy and experience it empathetically.

What remains after the reduction. Even when all external assumptions are set aside, what is undeniable is the experience itself and the self who experiences it. Consciousness and its intentional acts, such as perceiving, remembering, and empathising cannot be doubted.

MEANING.

The Central Problem: How Do We Experience Other Minds?

Empathy as a unique experience. Empathy, or Einfühlung, is the way we directly engage with another person’s consciousness. We understand their feelings and experiences as their own, not as our own or as imagined ideas.

Not outer perception. If a friend shows signs of pain, we do not perceive their pain the same way we see their face. Yet we grasp it as real and present. Empathy is therefore not a form of perception of physical objects.

Not imagination or inference. Empathy is neither a fantasy nor an intellectual guess about another person’s feelings. It is a direct and genuine access to the lived experience of someone else.

Primordiality and Non-Primordiality

Primordial experience. My own immediate feelings such as pain, joy or sadness are primordially given. I experience them directly as they occur.

Non-primordial experience. When I empathise with someone else’s pain, I experience their feeling as real and present, but it is not my own. It is given to me, yet belongs to them.

Analogy with memory and imagination. Memory allows me to re-experience a past joy, but it is non-primordial because it is not happening now. Fantasy lets me imagine something that never happened. Empathy allows me to experience another person’s present feeling non-primordially. It is genuinely there, yet it belongs to someone else.

Empathy is sui generis, meaning a truly unique experience. It is not perception, memory or imagination, but a direct and immediate way of experiencing another person’s feelings as their own.