St Edith Stein’s Phenomenology of the Body: Empathy and the

Problem of Other Minds

Andrew Turner

Presupposing the argument that empathy is the most genuine affect of human
beings, that it is exemplified through fides et ratio, I argue that Stein adequately
answers the preceding questions, including the most significant one of
metaphysical necessity, and that empathy as such, is not merely an evolutionary
survival requirement of human cooperative efforts, but an intrinsic and irreducible
quality of humanity-qua-humanity

Introduction

What is empathy? What does it mean to say that one feels empathy for another—and

should we say for another or with another? Is it possible to feel empathy for an idea, or a

photograph, or even a memory? If we say that we are empathetic in this way, surely it must be

with the individual represented by the idea, pictured in the photograph, remembered with

affection—but how is this possible if empathetic responses cue off of real-time movement? In

the same way, if we imagine we are empathetic with an organization or a group because we

might identify with the body of the group, the totality of all its members, in the same way we

identify with a single person, is our sense of empathy for their struggle or for their cause; and

what distinguishes this from mere sympathy?

The problem of empathy is not any confusion with its sister term sympathy or any other

lower sentiments, rather it is the nature of empathy itself, the authentic and genuine affect of

empathy, both how it is recognized between individuals, and how any given individual

personally experiences it. This struggle between the subjective experience of empathy and the
intersubjectivity of empathetic persons is central to the study of phenomenology, and the two are

so interrelated, that we may not truly speak in any depth without addressing them as coequals. 1

Presupposing the argument that empathy is the most genuine affect of human beings, that

it is exemplified through fides et ratio, I argue that Stein adequately answers the preceding

questions, including the most significant one of metaphysical necessity, and that empathy as

such, is not merely an evolutionary survival requirement of human cooperative efforts, but an

intrinsic and irreducible quality of humanity-qua-humanity.

St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, OCD, née Edith Stein

St Edith Stein, the student of Edmund Husserl, famed for his work as the father of

phenomenology, 2 completed her dissertation in 1916 at the University of Freiburg. 3 Originally

from a prominent and wealthy Jewish family, Stein conducted the bulk of her doctoral research

during her “agnostic phase”;4 and despite graduating summa cum laude and with a letter of

recommendation from Husserl himself, she was unable to secure a professorship anywhere in

Germany. It is unclear which feature of her character ultimately presented the greater obstacle,

her Jewish heritage or her womanhood; there were no women professors in Germany at the time,

and German antisemitism was already on the rise. It should be noted that Husserl, himself

Jewish, declined to recommend her Habilitation Thesis, a sort of second dissertation common at

German universities of the time, and a prerequisite to teaching. Yet, in his letter of

1 In much the same way that it is difficult speaking of ens without also speaking of esse, or of a hand while ignoring
the fingers.
2Sawicki, Marianne. Body, Text, and Science: the Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of
Edith Stein. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. (1-2; 49)

3 Ibid. (90-91)

4Stein, Edith. Self Portrait in Letters 1916-1942, trans. Josephine Koeppel. Washington, DC: ICS Publications,
1993. (337-338)
recommendation he wrote, “Should academic careers be opened up to ladies, then I can

recommend her whole-heartedly and as my first choice for admission to a professorship.” 5

Prior to her focus on empathy as phenomenological practice, Stein served as a volunteer

nurse with the Red Cross. Her work at the Infectious Diseases Hospital at Mährisch-

Weisskirchen, caring for both soldiers and civilians at the height of WWI, significantly informed

her views on empathy,6 and with no callous intent, acted as a real-time laboratory providing the

heft of her research. Like many veterans of the horror of the Great War, she found herself

unforgiving in her pursuit of existential truth, and this naturally led to doubts of faith.

Nonetheless, her analysis of empathy is decidedly Thomistic, and investigating the phenomenon

in terms of the whole person, the psycho-spititual-physical individual, Stein formalized her study

of Einfühlung after hearing one of Husserl’s lectures on the topic.

Husserl in his course on Nature and Spirit had maintained that an objective external

world can only be experienced intersubjectively (i.e. by a plurality of individual knowing

subjects) who are in a position to exchange information with each other; which means

that such an experience presupposes other individuals. Husserl, following Theodor Lipps,

named this experience “empathy”, but did not explain what it consisted of. Here was a

gap which was worthwhile filling; I wanted to discover what empathy meant.7

5“Teresa Benedict of the Cross Edith Stein (1891-1942): Nun, Discalced Carmelite, Martyr.” Vatican News Service,
11 Oct. 1998, http://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints.

6MacIntyre, Alasdair. Edith Stein: a Philosophical Prologue 1913-1922. Alexandria: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2006. (71)

7Sawicki, Marianne. Body, Text, and Science: the Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of
Edith Stein. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. (49)
The Problem of Other Minds

Stein’s phenomenology finds its origin in the problem of other minds, and before we can

attempt to tackle intersubjective shared emotional states, we must first address this issue.

Assuming the existence of other persons, most individuals have little trouble acknowledging and

accepting that these other people enjoy a variety of mental states quite similar to ours, that they

experience events and react to stimuli, and moreover that they are themselves aware of the same

facility of mental life in the people with whom they interact; but how do we know this?8

In the first quarter of the 20th century the accepted answer to this problem was found in

the theory of inference,9 an epistemological method with ontological roots that begins from

within the considering individual and works outward in an ever widening field of observance.

Aware of one’s own corporal self, one’s own psyche, and the interaction of mind and body, one

is subsequently perceptive of the movement of others. This movement is assumed to have a

cause; and since such movement is not dissimilar to one’s own, and that movement is willful,

then the observed movements of these others must also be willful. Quite famously, Stein

disagrees;10 and the content of her argument is housed in her theory of empathy.

Stein’s Theory of Empathy

Stein takes a unique stance with regard to the experience of recognizing and sharing the

emotional state of others, such that empathy, strictly speaking, is given from one person over to

another. In this way unaffected individuals become affected not by mere observation of

8 Brentano, Franz. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. NY: Routledge, 1995. This is a generalization of the
traditional description of “other minds.” Stein asks the pivotal question, “How do we know this is true?”
9 Kim, Jaegwon. “Ontological Behaviorism.” Essays in the Philosophy of Mind. Boulder: Westview Press, 2011.
(78-80)
10 Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989. (26-27)
movement or voiced and articulated sentiment, but rather through the holistic presentation of

genuine and authentic feeling. In the traditional sense, one might be said to approach

externalized sensuous joy or sorrow almost algorithmically, viewing the expression of feeling by

another as mere motion, the aping of feeling as though it were simply automatic, utterly

predictable, and ultimately quite impersonal.

Stein’s methodology takes advantage of all the modalities of affection and movement,

and presents these simultaneously as a person, and thus that person’s knowable mental state. Her

attempt to distance phenomenologically-explained empathy from the scientism of 19th and early

20th century psychology and epistemology is no easy task. Not only must Stein contend with the

institutionalization of physicalism, the material nature of pre-analytic philosophy in the closing

years of the First World War, she must also account for the common-sense reality of mensurable

and empirical arguments that point toward the physiological causes of mental states, and deny

metaphysically contingent explanations that may or may not be true.

In answer to her mentor, Husserl, and his notion of ideation,11 the direct insight into

another’s intentional mental state, Stein must show how her theory is substantially different from

mere descriptive psychology. If phenomenologically explained empathy is merely the essential

conflation of various complicated mental states as expressed through bodily motion, gesture,

facial articulation, and so forth, then it is simpliciter descriptive psychology, and observers who

experience the sensation of empathy with another are only recognizing their own past and

potential emotional states, and, quite selfishly, transferring second- and third-party apparent

mental states upon their own psyches.

11Kockelmans, Joseph. Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation. NY: Doubleday
& Company, 1967. (91)
 So, Stein endeavors to establish in her method the most correct rationale to support the

notion that personal internalized perception of an external presentation—the giving12 of another’s

considered mental state—comports a justified true belief in the authenticity of the shared

experience. But what kind of experience is this? Stein labels the objectively unknowable and

non-presented (ungiven) mental states of others as foreign experiences (Fremdverständnis)13. The

most obvious and natural objection to this notion of Fremdverständnis is decidedly quite realist

(and we should recall that Stein thought of herself as a phenomenological realist)—how is an

experience acknowledged as foreign, as other, shared between individuals?

In various authors, such as Lipps, we have found the interpretation that this is not an

individual I but first becomes individual in contrast with you and he. What does this

individuality mean? First of all, it means only that it is itself and no other. This selfness is

experienced and is the basis of all that is mine. Naturally it is first brought into relief in

contrast with another when another is given. This other is at first not qualitatively

distinguished from it, since both are qualityless, but only distinguished simply as an

other. This otherness is apparent in the type of givenness; it is other than I because it is

given to me in another way than I. Therefore it is you. But since it experiences itself as I

experience myself, the you is another I. Thus the I does not become individualised

because another faces it, but its individuality, or as we should rather say (because we

12 Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein. Washington, DC: ICS, 1989. (91)

13 Ibid. (33)
 must reserve the term individuality for something else), its selfness is brought into relief

in contrast with the otherness of the other.14

Thus, the issue of Fremdverständnis as inherently both incomprehensible and physically

impossible (there is the tone of a kind of mystical mind-to-mind or spooky action at a distance to

the whole concept) is really an error of contextual comprehension, and so we might be better put

translating a subtle difference between Fremdverständnis as other and as alien; it is clear that

Stein intends the term as in the English other and not alien, and so it is something which may be

apprehended. So, if Fremdverständnis are given as living bodies,15 they must be accessible (and

mentally processable) as eigenbild. 16

In this way, we might defend Stein’s position by redesignating other living bodies as

mirrors showing our own image. This should not be confused with the problem from

psychological anthropology, which argues from Husserl’s ideation concept; since this is not to

say that experiencing empathy is merely the redirection of another’s joy or sorrow into self-pity

and ego-ideal or narcissistic coenaesthetic expansion. Rather, what we see here is the

transformation of Fremdverständnis into eigenbild. Other minds, then, are not mere object-

representations of discernible foreign understanding, but extensions of a larger global organism,

a genuine shared state of consciousness, albeit pre-verbal if nonetheless rationally sensuous.

14 Ibid. (33)

15 Ibid. (53-55)

16 Stein never identifies her concept of the coherent zero-point as an eigenbild; this is my own interpretation.
Conclusion

Steinian empathy is constitutional in the Husserlian sense, and the core of empathy seems

likely to be found at the bridge between experience as such, and experiencing. If there are

subjective qualities to an experience with another mind (another living body), the answer to how

those qualities are correctly apprehended is found in the way they are constituted with adjacent

qualities that cannot themselves be constituted unless empathy is a real act. So, if the psycho-

spiritual-physical Husserlian space, the Thomistic whole-human, is to cohere for any individual,

it is only through the actualization of the Steinian zero-point of experience-and-experiencing;

itself a process that cannot culminate without an adjacent entity with whom one shares some

aspect of consciousness, namely empathy.

An interesting closing question might be to ask if there is any empirical evidence for this

claim to the metaphysical necessity of empathy in humans—is Stein’s argument merely some

very well-written but ultimately unprovable philosophy, or is there some physical, concrete non-

psychological and non-interpretative material evidence to support it? Astoundingly, there is:

mirror neurons.

Discovered in the early 1980s by neurophysiologists Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila

Craighero at the University of Parma, 17 mirror neurons (of the brain region known as F5) were

largely disregarded as “uninteresting” for nearly 15 years until researchers at the Centers for

Disease Control, in 2006, independently discovered the cells while investigating the cause and

treatment of Alzheimers.18 In short, mirror neurons are responsible for processing sense

17Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero. “The Mirror-Neuron System.” The Annual Review of Neuroscience,
27:169-92.
18Lee Cossell, et al. “Functional Organization of Excitatory Signals in Mirror Neurons of Region F5.” Nature, 518:
399-403.
experience and activating action-imitation processes in humans and lower primates. When we

see someone smile and automatically smile in return, or laugh when others laugh—even when

we are otherwise unsure why everyone is laughing— , this is the action of mirror neurons.

Psychology and selective advantage aside, there is evidence that mirror neurons are also

responsible for our sense of self-awareness, a quality proven in countless studies to be directly

related to our ability to recognize others.

Astonishingly, fMRI research has shown that strong experiences of empathy are largely

demonstrated by the action of mirror neurons upon higher brain functions, especially as

associated with reasoning and memory, such that when we experience an empathetic event we do

not merely recognize distress or joy in another, but through F5 signaling, literally copy and

activate the experience within ourselves. In controlled laboratory settings, color deep-image

scans of multiple individuals apparently sharing empathetic experiences very clearly

demonstrates that the mental state of the emotive individual is objectively identical to the mental

state of the observing individual. 19

Empathy, though shared across the animal kingdom, is arguably the defining feature of

the human race as such. Our ability to care for and about another person, to reason through and

share in their joy and sorrow, is the truest gift of our intellection. Ultimately, not only has Stein

written the definitive treatment of empathy as practical phenomenology, as solid philosophy and

worthy of considered inquiry, but her remarkable insights into the true nature of the phenomenon

have stood the test of time and science.

19Mackin, Simon. “Show Me Where it Hurts: Functional Magnetic Imaging and Shared Experiences.” Nature, 535:
S8-9
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