In Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Gad Saad advances a forceful and, in some respects, understandable claim that empathy, when unbounded, becomes psychologically corrosive and socially destabilizing. It’s certainly had an impact on tech-bro podcasts such as Joe Rogan who constantly invokes the work.
In Saad’s telling, empathy is a trait that must be regulated lest it undermine individual flourishing and collective coherence. Excessive empathy, he argues, leads to self-erasure, moral confusion, and the collapse of healthy boundaries. What presents itself as compassion becomes, in this view, a kind of slow-motion self-destruction.
There is a surface plausibility to this argument, especially in a cultural moment saturated with moral urgency and emotional overload. Many people do experience burnout, resentment, and paralysis under the weight of constant exposure to others’ suffering. Saad’s critique speaks to a genuine phenomenon. But the deeper difficulty with Suicidal Empathy does not lie primarily in its social or political conclusions. It lies in its underlying assumptions about what empathy is, where it belongs, and what sort of beings we take ourselves to be.
Saad treats empathy as a psychological capacity possessed by fundamentally self-contained individuals. It is something one deploys, withholds, or mismanages. From this perspective, the self precedes relation. Empathy is an add-on, a discretionary feature of human interaction that must be carefully rationed to preserve autonomy. When empathy overwhelms the self, the solution is containment… pull back, reassert boundaries, and close the gates.
What this framework never seriously interrogates is the ontology it presupposes as a picture of human beings as sealed units whose primary task is self-maintenance, and for whom openness to others is always a potential threat. Empathy appears as dangerous precisely because the self is imagined as fragile and enclosed, always at risk of being breached.
But what if that understanding is wrong?
What if empathy is not best understood as a psychological excess, but as a clue to the basic structure of consciousness itself? What if the problem Saad diagnoses is not “too much empathy,” but a modern metaphysics that treats relational vulnerability as pathological?
To raise that question is not to dismiss the harms Saad names. It is to ask whether those harms arise from empathy itself, or from an incoherent attempt to practice empathy while clinging to an ontology of isolation.
Few thinkers allow us to ask this question with greater clarity than Edith Stein.
What follows is not a refutation of Suicidal Empathy by counterexample or moral exhortation (not that I could). It is a challenge to the deeper framework within which empathy is cast as suicidal in the first place. Stein’s life and thought do not offer a safer, moderated version of empathy. They offer something more unsettling with a vision in which empathy is not optional, not manageable, and not reducible to a personal trait.
Stein offers empathy as fate.
Empathy Without Exit: Edith Stein’s Life, Thought, and Death
Empathy is one of those words that risks becoming harmless through overuse. It circulates easily in moral exhortations and leadership manuals, often reduced to emotional sensitivity or interpersonal skill. But in the early phenomenological tradition, empathy named something far more demanding. It described a basic structure of experience…the way consciousness is already open to what is not itself.
Few thinkers lived that claim as fully, or as consequentially, as Edith Stein.
Stein began her intellectual life as a rigorous phenomenologist. A Jewish woman studying philosophy in early twentieth-century Germany, she worked closely with Edmund Husserl and belonged to the first generation of phenomenological thinkers who were attempting to describe consciousness without reducing it to psychology or metaphysics (not ironically as a colleague of Heidegger who would later have very problematic ties with the Nazi’s but became a much more well-known philosopher). Her doctoral dissertation, On the Problem of Empathy, remains one of the clearest and most restrained analyses of the topic.
For Stein, empathy is not emotional contagion, imaginative projection, or moral sympathy. It is the experience of foreign consciousness as foreign…the direct givenness of another’s interior life without collapsing it into one’s own. Empathy does not erase difference. It makes difference perceptible. It is not something consciousness adds after the fact. It is one of the ways consciousness is structured in the first place.
What is striking, reading Stein closely, is how little sentimentality there is in her account. Empathy is not comforting. It does not guarantee understanding or agreement. It is simply the way the presence of another addresses us, prior to judgment or response. Already here, empathy carries weight. It binds us to a world we did not choose.
Stein’s later life is sometimes narrated as a sharp turn away from philosophy toward religion. That story is too simple. Her conversion to Christianity did not abandon phenomenology. It deepened it.
When Stein encountered Christian theology, she did not set aside her careful attention to experience. Instead, she brought phenomenological clarity with her. The Incarnation, for Stein, was not an abstract doctrine but an event that made sense only if reality itself is relational at its core. The possibility that God could be encountered in a human life depended on the same openness that makes empathy possible at all.
Her philosophical account of empathy quietly widened into a theological vision of participation. To know another was not merely to register their experience, but to be drawn into relation with them. Empathy, once extended theologically, became inseparable from responsibility.
This shift did not lead Stein away from the world. It intensified her attention to it.
As the political situation in Germany deteriorated, Stein was increasingly aware of the danger facing Jewish communities. Even after entering the Carmelite order, she did not imagine herself exempt from the suffering unfolding around her. She refused to interpret religious vocation as withdrawal from history. Instead, she understood it as a different mode of presence within it.
Her later theological writings, especially those reflecting on the Cross, are often misread as expressions of passive suffering. In fact, they are deeply active. For Stein, the Cross names a refusal to stand outside the suffering of others. It is not sought for its own sake. It is endured as a consequence of remaining open when closure would be safer.
This is where empathy becomes costly.
When opportunities arose for Stein to escape Nazi persecution, she declined them. Not out of recklessness or fatalism, but out of solidarity. She insisted on remaining with her people. Empathy, in her life, was not a concept she could set aside when it became dangerous. It had already shaped the posture of her being.
In August 1942, Edith Stein was arrested and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was killed (with her sister) shortly after her arrival.
It is important to say this carefully. Her death does not prove her theology. It does not sanctify suffering or redeem violence. There is nothing edifying about Auschwitz. Stein did not choose her death. What she repeatedly chose was not to seal herself off from others to preserve her own safety.
Empathy did not save her life. But it shaped how she refused to abandon those with whom her life was bound.
That refusal matters.
In a time when empathy is often invoked as a soft or even an adverse virtue, Stein reminds us that it is not safe. Empathy exposes us to claims we cannot manage. It destabilizes the fantasy of sealed selves. It draws us into histories and responsibilities that exceed our intentions. Properly understood, empathy is not an ethical add-on. It is an ontological condition with consequences.
This is why Stein’s work continues to matter for ecological thought as well. If consciousness is porous rather than enclosed, if perception is already participatory, then our relationship to land, to other species, and to future generations cannot be reduced to management or control. Ecological harm is not only a technical failure. It is a failure of attention…a refusal to remain open to what addresses us from beyond ourselves.
Stein offers no solutions, but she still offers orientation as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
Her life traces a trajectory from perception to participation, from philosophy to theology, from empathy as description to empathy as fate. She shows us what it looks like when a thinker refuses to retreat from the implications of her own insights.
Empathy, in Stein’s hands, is not something we deploy. It is something we undergo. And once undergone, it changes how one inhabits the world.
That may be empathy’s greatest ontological demand of us.
Empathy, Selfhood, and the Fear of Porosity
Read against Suicidal Empathy, Stein’s life exposes a crucial misdiagnosis. What Saad names as empathy’s suicidal tendency is, at a deeper level, the fear of ontological porosity. The danger he senses is not empathy per se, but the collapse of a model of selfhood built on enclosure, control, and insulation from others’ claims.
From within that model, empathy must indeed be dangerous. If the self is a bounded container, then any sustained openness threatens depletion. Relation becomes invasion. Responsibility becomes theft. Withdrawal masquerades as wisdom.
Stein does not deny the cost of openness. Her life makes that impossible. What she denies is that enclosure is ever a genuine alternative. Empathy, in her phenomenological account, is not something added to an otherwise intact self. It reveals that the self was never intact in that sense to begin with. Consciousness is already exposed, already addressed, and already implicated.
This is why Stein cannot simply “turn empathy down.” There is no dial. There is only the choice between acknowledging relational vulnerability or fleeing into abstraction.
From this angle, the language of “suicidal empathy” that so many podcasters, YouTubers, and creators want to cling to risks misnaming the problem. What appears to be self-destruction may instead be the collision between two incompatible ontologies: one that assumes sovereignty and control, and one that recognizes participation and exposure as fundamental.
Stein’s refusal to abandon others was not a psychological failure. It was a metaphysical consistency.
None of this licenses coercive self-sacrifice or moral blackmail. Stein’s death does not obligate anyone else to follow her path. But it does stand as a rebuke to any account of empathy that treats withdrawal as the highest form of rationality. It reminds us that some forms of self-preservation depend on a prior fiction of separateness.
The real danger, then, is not an empathy that goes too far, but a culture that teaches us to fear what empathy reveals about who we are.
If empathy is structural rather than elective and ontological rather than sentimental, then the task is not to suppress it but to learn how to inhabit it without illusion. Stein does not offer comfort here. She offers clarity. And clarity, in a world built on sealed selves, will always feel dangerous.
That danger may not be suicidal. It may simply be the cost of refusing to lie about the nature of being.
