Edith Stein’s Feast Day and On the Problem of Empathy

On the Feast of Edith Stein, August 9. A shorter, more devotional companion to this post appeared this morning at Carolina Ecology.

The church keeps a martyr’s feast on the day of her death… the dies natalis, the birthday into the life that doesn’t end. August 9 belongs to Edith Stein, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau on this day in 1942. I’ve written here before about the late Stein, the Carmelite metaphysician of Finite and Eternal Being and The Science of the Cross. Today I want to go back to the doctoral dissertation she defended at Freiburg on August 3, 1916, six days short of twenty-six years before her death, published the following year as Zum Problem der Einfühlung. It’s the text where my own project (Ecology of the Cross) starts, and on her feast day, it seems right to give it the same reading I’ve given the later works, because the line from this dissertation to the gas chamber is not an interruption of a philosophical career. It’s the completion of an argument.

The Question in 1916

Some historical grounding is important here. Stein came to Göttingen in 1913 to study with Edmund Husserl because the Logical Investigations had convinced her that consciousness opens onto things themselves, and she followed him to Freiburg when he took the chair there. Husserl had been gesturing at the problem of Einfühlung, of how another consciousness is given to me, since at least 1905, and he’d promised repeatedly to treat it properly. He never quite did, at least not in print or to satisfaction, and he handed the problem to his doctoral student Edith. She defended the dissertation summa cum laude and then spent the next two years as his first assistant, organizing and substantially editing the manuscripts that would eventually become Ideas II… which means that the analyses of the lived body that generations of readers have absorbed as Husserlian bear her fingerprints throughout (in my opinion). When Merleau-Ponty built the Phenomenology of Perception on the Ideas II material he consulted at Louvain, he was, at least in part, also building on Stein. I take a certain satisfaction in that genealogy, since my own framework of ecological intentionality runs through both Stein and Merleau-Ponty.

Stein’s published treatise has three main movements: the essence of acts of empathy, the constitution of the psycho-physical individual, and empathy as the understanding of spiritual persons. Stein’s first move is to clear the field. Empathy, she argues, is a sui generis form of intentionality. It isn’t inference by analogy (I don’t reason my way from your grimace to your pain), it isn’t imitation, and, against Theodor Lipps, it isn’t Einsfühlung, a feeling-into that merges me with you.

In empathy, the foreign experience is given to me non-primordially: your grief announces itself in my field with genuine givenness, and yet it remains irreducibly yours. I’m pulled into it, I can follow its sense, but I never occupy it. The act preserves the distance it crosses. This is also what distinguishes empathy from sympathy or fellow-feeling (Mitfühlen), where I have my own primordial feeling about your state. Empathy is prior to all of that. It’s the act by which there is an other there for me at all.

That structural insistence on distance-preserved-in-givenness has become, for me, the philosophical spine of any ecological perception that is both oriented rightly and practical. The alternative on one side is projection, where I dress the world in my own states and call it kinship. The alternative on the other side is objectification, where the world is Körper all the way down. Stein’s empathy threads between them, and she does it with an analytic patience that the nature-mysticism shelf almost never manages.

The Constitution of the Living Body

The center of the treatise, and the part I was annotating yet again under the black walnut this morning, is the constitution of the psycho-physical individual. Stein asks the question directly:

“How is my body [Leib] constituted within consciousness?” (Stein, 2016)

German gives her the distinction English conflates without an adjective to help: Körper, the physical body, one object among objects, and Leib, the living body, the body I don’t observe so much as inhabit. Her claim is that these are two givennesses of one reality, and the difference between them is the difference between a world of things and a world with someone home in it:

“A living body [Leib] only perceived outwardly would always be only a particularly disposed, actually unique, physical body, but never ‘my living body.'” (Stein, 2016)

How, then, is the Leib given? Through sensation, and here Stein’s analysis gets genuinely strange in the way good phenomenology is strange. Sensation is always localized somewhere, in a hand, behind the eyes, near the “I” but never in it:

“Since sensation is always spatially localized ‘somewhere’ at a distance from the ‘I’ (perhaps very near to it but never in it), I can never find the ‘I’ in it by reflection. And this ‘somewhere’ is not an empty point in space, but something filling up space. All these entities from which my sensations arise are amalgamated into a unity, the unity of my living body, and they are themselves places in the living body.” (Stein, 2016)

And the unity of those places arranges itself around what she calls the zero point of orientation:

“To speak of distance from ‘me’ is inexact because I cannot really establish an interval from the ‘I,’ for it is non-spatial and cannot be localized. But I relate the parts of my living body, together with everything spatial outside of it, to a ‘zero point of orientation’ which my living body surrounds. This zero point is not to be geometrically localized at one point in my physical body; nor is it the same for all data. It is localized in the head for visual data and in mid-body for tactile data. Thus, whatever refers to the ‘I’ has no distance from the zero point, and all that is given at a distance from the zero point is also given at a distance from the ‘I.'” (Stein, 2016)

Every spatial thing is given from the zero point, and the zero point itself can’t be found on any map of the body, because it’s where the maps are drawn from.

Readers of Raymond Ruyer will hear something familiar here, and the echo isn’t accidental to my project. Ruyer’s survol absolu, the absolute survey by which a form possesses itself without standing at a distance from itself, is doing later and more metaphysically ambitious work on the same datum Stein isolates in 1916: that self-presence isn’t one more spatial relation among the others. In my dissertation, I’m arguing that this convergence… Stein’s non-localizable zero point, Ruyer’s survey without distance, Merleau-Ponty’s body schema… marks out the phenomenon that any account of the organism as a center of its own life has to save.

Stein then adds the fold that makes intersubjectivity, and I’d argue ecology, possible at all:

“But the living body is constituted in a two-fold manner as a sensed (bodily perceived) living body and as an outwardly perceived physical body of the outer world.” (Stein, 2016)

I’m given to myself doubly: from inside as Leib, from outside as Körper. And it’s this doubleness in my own case that lets empathy do its work in the foreign case. When I perceive another living body, I don’t see Körper and then add soul by hypothesis. The other’s body is given as the outer face of a Leib, surrounding a zero point of orientation I can orient toward but never occupy. There’s another here over there. Stein is careful about how far this reaches. The fullness of empathic givenness varies with type: another human body fulfills the empathic intention most completely, and as she moves through the animal kindom, the fulfillment thins by degrees without simply switching off. She’s cautious. Her caution is part of why I trust her.

One more annotation from this morning, because it points forward to so much she wrote later:

“Our uniform, isolated stream of consciousness is not our soul. But, as we already saw in examining inner perception, among our experiences there is one basic experience given to us which, together with its persistent attributes, becomes apparent in our experiences as the identical ‘bearer’ of them. This is the substantial soul.” (Stein, 2016)

In 1916 this is a phenomenological claim: the soul shows up in experience as the persistent bearer of experience, and it can’t be dissolved into the stream. But it’s also the seed of the whole later metaphysics. The Potency and Act habilitation material, the ascent of Finite and Eternal Being, the anthropology of person and spirit… all of it grows from this early refusal to let the soul be an inference or a construction. She found it given. She spent the rest of her life asking what kind of reality could be given like that, and what kind of ground such a reality requires.

Ecological Intentionality, or Stretching the Act

My dissertation asks a question Stein didn’t ask, using instruments she built. If empathy is the act in which another zero point of orientation announces itself in my field, how far does the act stretch, and under what discipline? The black walnut in my backyard is the test case I keep returning to, here and at Carolina Ecology, because it resists both easy answers. On a strict reading of the treatise, the walnut gives me Körper only: bark, ragged August leaves, green hulls hardening toward fall. It has no face, no expressive field of the kind Stein analyzes. And yet the tree is unmistakably a center of its own life… drawing water on its own schedule, timing its year to light I don’t perceive, defending its ground chemically through juglone against competitors it will never see. It maintains itself as a unity from within, which is exactly what a merely physical body doesn’t do.

What I’m calling ecological intentionality is the disciplined extension of the empathic act toward such centers: chastened by Stein’s own warnings about fading fulfillment, trained by long observation in a particular place, and refusing at every step the projection she ruled out in her critique of Lipps. The claim isn’t that the walnut has experiences like mine and I can feel them. The claim is that the walnut is given to disciplined perception as self-organizing, as an ἐντελέχεια in the Aristotelian sense (being-at-work-staying-itself), a form in act that is the source of its own norms… what counts as flourishing for it, what counts as injury. This is where the dissertation’s Aristotelian thread meets its phenomenological one: the organism grounds ecological normativity only as form-in-act, and Stein and Ruyer are my route from Aristotle to a method that can actually perceive such forms rather than positing them.

And this is why I keep insisting, in the Thomas Berry and Lanham form of the public writing, that perception precedes ethics. We can’t be argued into caring for what we’ve never actually perceived as living. Environmental ethics that skips the phenomenology of perception builds on sand, issuing obligations toward entities it has given us no way to encounter. Stein supplies what that literature is missing: a rigorous account of the act in which another center of life becomes present to me at all. She gives the phenomenology of the thing that ecotheologians urge through practice.

From Empathy to the Cross

Her feast asks us to hold the whole life together, and the whole life runs from Freiburg to Auschwitz. She read Teresa of Ávila’s autobiography through a single night in the summer of 1921 and closed it, saying she’d found the truth. Baptism took place on January 1, 1922, in Cologne, at the Cologne Carmel. In 1933, the same year the race laws ended her teaching, her sister Rosa followed her into the church in 1936. The manuscript of Kreuzeswissenschaft was unfinished on her desk when the SS came to the Echt convent on August 2, 1942, in reprisal for the Dutch bishops’ public protest of the deportations. She and Rosa died a week later. The church calls her a martyr, μάρτυς, which is simply the Koine word for witness (lexical form μάρτυς, μάρτυρος): one whose perception of the truth was so complete that her body was conscripted into the testimony.

I don’t read the conversion as a break with the dissertation. Empathy, remember, is the givenness of what remains irreducibly other, presence across a distance that isn’t abolished. That’s already a proto-theology of revelation, and I suspect she knew it. In The Science of the Cross she writes that a science becomes a science of the cross when the mystery of the cross becomes its inner form, a living energy shaping the soul by what it receives. The Ecology of the Cross borrows that architecture deliberately: knowledge of the living world whose inner form is kenosis (κένωσις, from κενόω, to empty; the textual form ἐκένωσεν at Philippians 2:7), knowledge shaped by what it receives rather than by what it seizes. And the one place Paul lets creation itself speak, it speaks in empathy’s grammar. Romans 8:22: πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις συστενάζει καὶ συνωδίνει ἄχρι τοῦ νῦν… all creation groans together and labors together until now (the textual forms συστενάζει and συνωδίνει, from the lexical συστενάζω and συνωδίνω). The prefix σύν carries the argument. Paul is claiming that creation has an inner life that can be suffered alongside, and Stein, decades before her conversion, was building the philosophical instrument that makes such a claim more than poetry.

Why This Book Matters to Me

Finite and Eternal Being gives my project its metaphysical scaffolding, and The Science of the Cross gives it its spiritual form, but On the Problem of Empathy gives it its method. Everything I’m attempting depends on the possibility this dissertation establishes: that another center of life can be genuinely given to me without being reduced to me, that the distance between us is crossed without being erased, that perception can be trained toward such givenness. A twenty-five-year-old doctoral student worked that out in Freiburg in 1916, and then spent twenty-six years living into its furthest implication… that to perceive the truth fully is to be claimed by it, all the way to the end. The end was this day. The church is right to call it a birth.

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Quotes from Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Book 3). Translated by Waltraut Stein. ICS Publications, 2016. See also Finite and Eternal Being (CWES 9, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt) and The Science of the Cross (CWES 6, trans. Josephine Koeppel), both ICS Publications.