Understanding Empathy: Beyond Sympathy and Contagion

Edith Stein presents empathy as a unique, intentional act of consciousness through which we directly apprehend another’s inner life. Unlike sympathy or emotional contagion, empathy preserves the distinctness of the other’s experience while allowing us to grasp it meaningfully. It is the foundation for understanding human intersubjectivity.

Empathy Is Not Merging with the Other

Empathy, or Einfühlung, does not imply “becoming one” with another person. Although we may co-experience joy, grief, or other emotions, these remain the experiences of the other. Edith Stein defines empathy as an intentional, cognitive-affective act in which one apprehends the other’s inner life as theirs, not as one’s own.

Waltraut Stein emphasises that this act is non-appropriative: the empathiser recognises the other as a distinct conscious subject while maintaining selfhood. By contrast, sympathy (Mitgefühl) involves being emotionally affected by another’s state, and emotional contagion occurs when moods spread without reflective awareness. Empathy is unique in that it allows engagement with the other’s consciousness directly and immediately, without merging or confusion of identities (Stein 1917/1989; Moran 2000).

Non-Primordial Awareness

Stein situates empathy as a non-primordial experience, meaning we do not feel another’s emotion as our own. Instead, the experience is apprehended as foreign yet present, appearing within our consciousness as belonging to another subject. This distinction underlines empathy’s phenomenological structure: it is neither mere imagination nor simple perception but a sui generis mode of consciousness that discloses the other’s lived experience while preserving the observer’s self-awareness (Stein 1917/1989; Moran 2000; Zahavi 2001).

The “foreign yet present” quality of empathy enables ethical engagement and intersubjective understanding, forming a bridge between selfhood and relational responsibility.

Shared Experience and the Emergence of “We”

Even in situations of collective emotion, such as shared joy or grief, individuals maintain their distinct consciousness. Empathy allows for the formation of a higher-order intersubjective unity, a “we” that emerges from multiple distinct “I”s without erasing personal identity.

Stein’s analysis demonstrates that this intersubjective awareness underpins ethical life, communal bonds, and social cohesion, showing that empathy is foundational for moral relations as well as ethical and social development (Stein 1917/1989; Moran 2000). Through empathy, we can participate in another’s world while remaining fully ourselves, making it a practice that is both ethically and socially constitutive.

Empathy is a sui generis mode of consciousness; a unique way of being aware that lets us directly perceive another’s experience.  empathy is its own kind of conscious act, different from thinking, feeling, or imagining. It enables us to engage with other minds directly while respecting their individuality. Understanding empathy in this sense is essential for ethical interaction and genuine human connection.