If you’re like me, you are tired of being told what matters. Every day arrives already crowded with urgency from cable news to social media to our email inboxes. There is always something demanding a response, a position, a statement, a judgment. The crises are real and here at home, as we’re seeing in Minneapolis, but also here in Spartanburg. Ecological collapse, technological acceleration, political fracture, spiritual exhaustion. And yet the constant pressure to decide, to weigh in with friends or on social media, to declare allegiance or outrage over Trump’s latest missive, even which news outlets to consume… often leaves us less capable of genuine care rather than more. Moral life begins to feel like triage, and eventually like performance.
I have been wondering whether this exhaustion has less to do with a lack of ethics and more to do with how quickly we rush toward them.
Before we decide what matters, something quieter has already taken place. The world has appeared to us in a certain way. Something has shown up as worthy of concern, or not. Something has addressed us, or passed unnoticed. That prior moment, the way the world first comes into view, is rarely examined. Social media algorithms are designed to outrage us before we have even a moment to process an event. And yet this initial moment of appearance may be the most decisive moral act we ever perform.
Attention is not neutral. It is formative.
We often speak about ethics as if it begins with principles, values, or rules. But those only function once something has already been perceived as meaningful. I cannot care about what I do not notice. I cannot respond to what never appears. Long before moral reasoning begins, there is a posture of perception, a way of being present to what is other than myself.
This is where empathy has become important to me again, not as a sentiment or virtue, but as a mode of knowing. Empathy, understood phenomenologically, is not agreement or emotional fusion. It is not a projection of myself into another, nor a collapse of difference. For Edith Stein, empathy names the experience in which another’s interiority becomes present to me as other, irreducible, and real. It is a way of perceiving foreign consciousness without possessing it.
Crucially, empathy in this sense is not something that follows understanding. It is what makes understanding possible in the first place.
Seen this way, empathy is not primarily ethical. It is ontological. It concerns how beings appear to one another, how the world is allowed to disclose itself, how alterity is either received or flattened. Stein is careful here. Empathy does not erase distance. It preserves it. The other is never absorbed into my own experience, but neither is the other sealed off from me. Relation becomes possible without domination.
For example, this matters deeply for how we think about ecology. Much contemporary environmental discourse quickly shifts toward solutions, metrics, and outcomes, from AI data center debates at city council meetings to creation care initiatives once a group decides to engage locally. These are necessary, but they often skip the slower work of learning how to see. Ecology becomes a problem to manage rather than a field of relationships in which we already participate. The natural world is framed as a resource, a threat, or a victim, rarely as a presence capable of addressing us.
Stein herself did not write ecological theory, but her account of empathy offers a discipline of attention that easily extends beyond the human. If empathy is the experience of encountering another as a center of meaning, not of my own making, then it trains us to resist reducing the world to what it can be used for or controlled. It teaches restraint before response. Attention changes this.
To attend to a tree across seasons, to notice how it sheds, scars, and persists, is not to solve anything. It is to be apprenticed into a different tempo of significance. Ecological time resists panic not by denying urgency, but by deepening responsibility. It trains us to remain with what unfolds slowly, unevenly, and often without spectacle.
This kind of attention does not produce immediate answers. It produces orientation.
I have come to think that much of our moral confusion stems from a failure of perception rather than a failure of values. We argue about what ought to be done while remaining inattentive to what is actually present. We leap toward ethical frameworks while bypassing the more difficult task Stein insists upon by allowing the other to show itself as it is, before we decide what it means or what is owed.
Attention is costly (and incredibly valuable, as social media algorithms have taught us over the last decade, as I noted in my 2015 post). It requires patience, vulnerability, and restraint. It asks us to linger rather than react, to receive rather than master. In a culture shaped by speed and extraction with news cycles lasting just a couple of days, this can feel almost irresponsible. And yet without it, our ethics float free of the world they claim to serve.
To attend is already to take responsibility.
Not because attention guarantees correct action, but because it establishes the conditions under which action can be something other than projection or control. When we learn to notice, to listen, to allow meaning to emerge rather than be imposed, we begin to recover a moral life that is responsive rather than reactive.
Perhaps the most urgent task before us is not deciding what matters next, but recovering the capacity to perceive what has been asking something of us all along.
Footnote: Edith Stein describes empathy not as inference, emotional contagion, or imaginative projection, but as a direct experiential act in which another’s consciousness is given as other while remaining irreducibly distinct from one’s own. Empathy, for Stein, is thus neither ethical evaluation nor moral sentiment, but a foundational mode of perception through which meaning first becomes accessible. See Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989), 10–12, 19–21.
