WorkEdith Stein

On the Problem of Empathy

A doctoral thesis written under Husserl in wartime, arguing that we see another person's feeling directly and never live it as our own.

by Edith Stein238 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Zum Problem der Einfühlung
First published: 1917(aged 26)
Original language: German

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Overview

Watch an acrobat, said the Munich psychologist Theodor Lipps, and for a moment you are one with him: his movements become yours, and only afterwards do you sort out which self was which. Edith Stein, twenty-four and writing her doctoral thesis under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, answered that the description is false. The spectator stands beside the acrobat, she wrote, and does not become him. Her claim is that we grasp another person's joy or pain directly, in the face and the gesture, as something present here and now, and yet always as theirs: we never live it at first hand. That sets the book against the explanations then on offer. One held that we infer other minds by analogy with our own, a view Stein traces to John Stuart Mill. Another held that we imitate an expression and read off the feeling it stirs in us. Max Scheler, a fellow phenomenologist, held that we perceive other people's experiences inwardly, just as we perceive our own, and Stein gives him a section of careful dissent. From there the book argues that a person needs others even to know herself. Only by taking up the way someone else sees me do I learn to treat my own body as one body among many, and meeting people unlike me shows me values I lack. Stein passed her examination at Freiburg on 3 August 1916 with the highest grade, summa cum laude. Only part of the thesis went to the printer in 1917; the historical survey that opened it was left out and has since been lost. By then she was Husserl's assistant, transcribing and editing his manuscripts for the second volume of his Ideas, which covers much of the same ground and was not published until 1952. Her grandniece Waltraut Stein translated the dissertation into English in 1964. The book is increasingly discussed today, and its account of empathy is ranked with Husserl's and Scheler's.

Key concepts

What does empathy mean in this book?

Empathy is the act in which another person's experience is given to us at all. It is neither kindness nor sharing a feeling. Grief seen in a face is present here and now, yet it is lived at first hand only by the one who grieves. Stein calls such an experience non-primordial: like a remembered joy it stands before the mind without being lived, except that its owner is someone else.

What is wrong with the imitation theory of empathy?

It explains how a feeling of my own arises, never how I come to know yours. Theodor Lipps held that a seen gesture stirs an urge to copy it inwardly, and the copy brings its feeling along. Stein replies that only gestures already understood as expressions work this way. The same movement of a face, taken for a nervous twitch, may be copied and stirs no feeling at all.

What is the living body, as opposed to a physical body?

The living body is the body as its owner has it, and for Stein it differs from every other thing in space. It carries fields of sensation, it stands at the point from which everything else is near or far, it moves freely, it shows feelings in expression and it serves the will. A physical body is merely located somewhere. My own body is always here.

How does feeling-at-one differ from empathy?

Feeling-at-one is a shared feeling whose subject is a “we”, and it presupposes empathy without being it. When several people rejoice over the same event and each grasps the others' joy, a common joy arises that none has alone. Yet “I” and “you” stay distinct inside the “we”. Lipps, Stein argues, mistook this for empathy itself. We learn of others through empathy, and only then can we feel as one.

Why is understanding a person different from explaining one?

Because a person's experiences hang together by meaning, and meaning is followed where a cause is only registered. Shame gives rise to a blush differently from the way exertion does. The first is motivation: the blush belongs to the shame and makes sense from it. The second is causality, a bare “if this, then that”. To understand someone, for Stein, is to follow the first kind of connection.

What does Stein mean by a person?

A person, for Stein, is a subject who feels values, and each kind of value answers to a layer of who that person is. Circumstances shape character, yet within limits set by an unchanging personal structure. Caesar in a village, or in the twentieth century, would be altered and would still be Caesar. Someone whose feelings were all caught from others would have no personality, only the semblance of one.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Another's feeling, seen and never lived

How does one person know what another feels? If the answer is guessing or copying, nobody ever meets anyone else's mind, only their own.

Stein's answer is that grief is seen in a face as directly as its colour, present here and now, and still never lived at first hand by the one who sees it. Against Theodor Lipps she denies that the spectator becomes one with the acrobat. Against Mill's school she denies that other minds are inferred by analogy, and against Scheler that they are perceived inwardly like one's own. Empathy becomes a kind of experience in its own right, fallible, and corrected only by more empathy.

empathy
other minds
perception
emotion
expression
consciousness
intersubjectivity
phenomenology
intentionality

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A body and a self learned from others

Can a person know herself alone? The book's second half argues that even one's own body, and one's own worth, come into view only through other people.

Each of us lives at the centre of a private space, the one point never seen from outside. Only by taking up another's viewpoint, Stein argues, do I see my body as one thing among others and learn how I appear. The same holds for character. Understanding people like me wakes what sleeps in me, and understanding people unlike me shows what I am not. An unbeliever can grasp a believer's sacrifice without ever sharing the value that moves it.

embodiment
selfhood
self-knowledge
personhood
value theory
personal identity
understanding
motivation
reflection

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Within this work

passages held: 238
distinct concepts: 189
by passages held, corpus-wide: #312

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “empathy” and “phenomenology”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 77 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
empathy	phenomenology	33
empathy	other minds	29
embodiment	empathy	22
empathy	perception	18
embodiment	phenomenology	17
perception	phenomenology	17
consciousness	empathy	16
embodiment	perception	16
other minds	phenomenology	16
consciousness	phenomenology	15
emotion	empathy	13
phenomenology	selfhood	13
emotion	phenomenology	11
embodiment	other minds	10
embodiment	emotion	9
embodiment	selfhood	8
consciousness	selfhood	7
empathy	selfhood	7
other minds	perception	6
other minds	selfhood	5
emotion	other minds	4
consciousness	emotion	3
consciousness	other minds	3
emotion	selfhood	3
consciousness	embodiment	2
consciousness	perception	2
emotion	perception	1
perception	selfhood	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1917 On the Problem of Empathy (Zum Problem der Einfühlung) you are here DE
1922 Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities (Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften)
It extends the dissertation's study of the individual in two directions — inward, to the forces that drive a mind, and outward, to groups — and supplies the social categories her treatise on the state takes over.
DE
1925 An Investigation Concerning the State (Eine Untersuchung über den Staat)
Political theory from a phenomenologist: it takes the crowd, the association and the community distinguished in the 1922 treatises and asks which of them a state is.
DE
1929 Husserl and Aquinas: A Comparison (Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des hl. Thomas v. Aquino)
Short, and the hinge of her career: the earlier books work inside Husserl's method, and from here on her philosophy measures that method against Aquinas.
DE

— or open another of their works