husserl Archives - Sam Harrelson

Edith Stein and the Lost Art of Understanding Another Being

We often talk about empathy as if it were simply a moral virtue. We tell children to “be more empathetic,” or we describe someone as lacking empathy when they seem indifferent to the suffering of others. Empathy, in this everyday sense, becomes something like kindness or compassion.

But for the philosopher Edith Stein and, later, as the Carmelite St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, empathy was something much deeper. It was not primarily a moral instruction. It was a structure of perception.

Stein (1891–1942) was a German phenomenologist and a student of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. In her early philosophical work On the Problem of Empathy (1917), she explored a deceptively simple question: How do we know that another person has a mind at all?

After all, we never directly experience another person’s inner life. I cannot feel your thoughts. I cannot directly access your emotions or sensations. All I ever encounter is your presence in the world: your gestures, your voice, your expressions, your actions.

And yet we rarely doubt that other people are conscious.

We move through the world constantly encountering others as beings who perceive, feel, hope, suffer, and rejoice. Stein wanted to understand how this is possible.

Her answer was empathy. She writes:

“Empathy is the experience of foreign consciousness in general.”
— Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy

That phrase may sound abstract at first, but Stein’s insight is actually quite intuitive. When we see someone wince in pain, we do not simply observe a physical movement. Nor do we literally feel their pain ourselves. Instead, we encounter their expression as the expression of another experiencing subject. Their suffering appears to us as theirs.

Empathy, in this sense, is neither emotional projection nor detached observation. It is the way consciousness recognizes another center of experience. It is how the presence of another mind becomes visible in the world.

And importantly, Stein insists that empathy always preserves difference. When I empathize with another person, I do not become them. Their experience remains irreducibly theirs. Empathy allows us to approach another’s experience without collapsing it into our own. This small philosophical insight carries enormous implications.

Because if empathy is a structure of perception, then the ethical life begins long before moral decisions are made. It begins with how we see. Before we decide how to treat another being, we must first encounter them as a being at all. In my opinion, that may be where many of our contemporary problems begin.

We live in a moment shaped by powerful technologies, accelerating ecological crises, political fragmentation, and deep cultural anxiety. In response, many discussions revolve around solutions: better policies, better systems, better innovations.

But beneath these debates lies a quieter crisis. It is a crisis of perception. More and more of the world appears to us as background… as resource… as infrastructure… as data.

Other people become categories. Landscapes become economic zones. Forests become board-feet of timber. Rivers become a water supply. The world flattens into utility.

Stein’s philosophy points in the opposite direction. She reminds us that our most basic encounter with reality is not with objects but with presences. We are constantly surrounded by other centers of life. However, this does not apply only to human beings.

Anyone who has spent time closely observing animals, forests, or even a single tree begins to notice how quickly the language of “objects” breaks down. The living world presses back against our assumptions. It asks to be encountered differently.

In my own small way, I experience this most mornings sitting near the black walnut tree in my backyard here in Spartanburg. I am not imagining that the tree possesses consciousness in the human sense. But the encounter still shifts something in perception. The tree ceases to be merely part of the scenery. Its form, its rhythms, its seasonal changes begin to register as expressions of a living presence. The experience is subtle but unmistakable. The world becomes populated again.

Stein helps us understand why this matters. Empathy, properly understood, is not simply a feeling we extend toward others. It is a capacity that allows us to perceive the world as filled with beings whose lives unfold alongside our own.

And once that perception awakens, the ethical implications follow naturally.

If the world is full of beings who experience life in their own ways, then the question of how we live together becomes unavoidable. Ethics grows organically from perception. But if perception collapses… if everything appears merely as matter to be manipulated… then empathy fades before ethics even has a chance to begin. This is why phenomenology still matters today.

Husserl, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, and others in the phenomenological tradition were not merely interested in abstract philosophy. They were trying to recover something that modern life had begun to obscure: the richness of lived experience and the relational character of reality.

Stein’s work on empathy remains one of the clearest windows into that project. She reminds us that the world is not made up only of things. It is made up of encounters. Perhaps in a time defined by distance, screens, distraction, and abstraction, recovering that simple insight is more important than ever.

Empathy, in Stein’s sense, is not sentimental. It is perceptual. It is the quiet realization that we are never alone in the world we inhabit.

Ecological Intentionality and the Depth of Being

Over the past several years, much of my academic and spiritual work has been circling a single question… not first of ethics or policy, but of perception.

How does the world show up to us in the first place?

Contemporary ecological crises are often framed as failures of knowledge, governance, or technology. Those failures are real. But they rest on something deeper and more habitual: the ways we are trained to perceive the more-than-human world as background, resource, or raw material rather than as something that addresses us, resists us, and exceeds us.

The paper I’m sharing here, “Ecological Intentionality and the Depth of Being,” is an attempt to think carefully at that deeper level. It asks how consciousness discloses the natural world as meaningful… and whether that meaning is merely projected by us or grounded in the being of things themselves .

At the center of the paper is the concept of ecological intentionality. By this I mean the structure of consciousness through which the world appears not as neutral matter but as relational, expressive, and worthy of regard. Ecological intentionality is not an ethical stance layered on top of perception. It names the perceptual and metaphysical conditions that make ethical concern possible at all.

Philosophically, the paper stages a slow dialogue between two thinkers who are rarely brought into sustained conversation.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty helps us see how perception is not passive reception or conceptual construction, but an embodied openness to a world that already carries meaning. The body does not stand over against nature as a detached observer. It inhabits a lived field in which landscapes, paths, animals, and places solicit response, invite movement, and resist reduction.

Edith Stein, working from within the phenomenological tradition but refusing to stop at description alone, insists that what appears in experience corresponds to a real ontological depth. Finite beings are not exhausted by how they show up to us. They participate in being analogically, possessing integrity, essence, and contingency that are not conferred by human attention.

Held together, these two approaches allow ecological intentionality to be articulated as both phenomenological and metaphysical. The world appears as meaningful because it is meaningful… not because meaning is imposed upon it.

A key thread running through the paper is Stein’s account of empathy, understood not as emotional projection but as a disciplined mode of access to another center of being. While Stein develops empathy primarily in interpersonal terms, the structure she describes opens a way of encountering non-human life as possessing its own depth and integrity without collapsing difference or resorting to anthropomorphism. Empathy, in this sense, becomes an ontological posture rather than a sentiment.

This matters for ecological thought because it shifts the conversation away from mastery and toward recognition. If beings exceed our grasp, then perception itself must be reformed. Ecological intentionality names that reformation… a way of perceiving that is open, restrained, and attentive to finitude.

The paper does not offer an environmental ethic, a policy proposal, or a theological program. Instead, it tries to clarify the philosophical ground on which such projects stand. Before we decide how to act toward the world, we must first learn how to be addressed by it.

I’m sharing the paper here as part of an ongoing line of work that I’ve been calling phenomenological theology and spiritual ecology, and as a contribution to a larger project (my dissertation) titled Ecology of the Cross. I hope it proves useful to those thinking at the intersection of phenomenology, metaphysics, theology, and ecological concern… and I welcome slow, careful conversation around it.

You can read the full paper here:

Ecological Intentionality and Depth of Being Public Download

Listening as a Way of Life: Practicing Ecological Theology in a Noisy World

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about listening as we’ve navigated the holidays, Winter Break from school, family events, travel, and the everyday chores that demand our family’s attention. Not listening as a metaphor or as a communication skill. Listening as a way of being in the world.

Most of us are constantly surrounded by sound (especially those of us with young children!), but we listen to very little of it. We register noise. We filter information. We scan for what is useful, threatening, or affirming. That kind of listening is instrumental. It asks in advance, “What can this do for me?”

Ecological listening begins somewhere else. It begins with attention that does not yet know what it is for. I’m thankful for my black walnut friend for this guidance.

From a phenomenological perspective, listening is not passive. It is an intentional act. To listen is to allow oneself to be addressed. It is to let something outside the self take the initiative, even briefly. That is harder than it sounds. We are trained, especially in modern Western life, to approach the world as a set of objects to be managed, interpreted, or optimized. Listening disrupts that posture. It asks us to suspend our need to control the encounter.

This is why listening matters theologically. Before doctrine or ethics or activism. There is the question of whether we can be addressed at all.

Listening and Intentionality

Phenomenology reminds us that consciousness is always consciousness of something. Our attention is directed, but that direction can be narrow or wide, defensive or receptive. Edmund Husserl called this intentionality. Merleau-Ponty pressed it further by reminding us that attention is embodied. We do not listen from nowhere. We listen with ears, with posture, with breath, with a body situated in a place.

Edith Stein’s work on empathy adds another layer. For Stein, empathy is not projection or a weakness that many “podcast bros” or TikTokers proclaim in our modern context. It is not imagining the other as a version of myself. It is a disciplined openness to the reality of another as other. That discipline applies just as much to non-human life as it does to human relationships. Listening, in this sense, is not about understanding everything. It is about refusing to collapse alterity.

Ecological listening asks us to practice this refusal again and again.

Listening Beyond the Human

When I sit outside with the black walnut tree in my backyard, I am not listening for a message. I am listening for presence. The creak of branches in the wind and the uneven rhythm of leaves falling or squirrels navigating its trunk. The shift in bird calls when a hawk moves through the canopy. None of this arrives as information. It arrives as an encounter.

The temptation is always to turn these moments into symbols. The tree teaches patience. The hawk represents vigilance. The wind speaks of change. Sometimes those interpretations are beautiful and even true. But they can also become a way of not listening. Metaphor can be a shortcut around attention.

Ecological listening stays with the phenomenon longer than is comfortable. It notices how quickly the mind wants to label, interpret, or move on. It resists that urge. Not forever, but long enough to allow the world to remain more than our categories.

This matters because the ecological crisis is not only a technical failure, and we need to reframe our thinking and intentionality if we are to move ahead as a species. It is a failure of attention. We have become very good at seeing the world as a resource and very poor at encountering it as a neighbor.

Theological Stakes

The biblical tradition is full of listening language. Hear, O Israel. Let anyone with ears listen. The still small voice. These are not commands to acquire information. They are invitations into relationship.

Listening, in this sense, is kenotic. It requires a kind of self-emptying. To listen well, I have to loosen my grip on certainty, productivity, and mastery. I have to accept that the world does not exist, nor did it come into being primarily for my use or our corporate use as humans.

This is where ecological theology becomes concrete. Creation is not mute matter waiting for meaning to be imposed upon it. It is a field of address. To listen is to acknowledge that agency, vitality, and value are not confined to human consciousness.

This does not mean romanticizing nature or pretending that trees speak English. It means recognizing that the more-than-human world expresses itself in ways that exceed our interpretive habits. Growth patterns. Stress responses. Seasonal rhythms. Resilience and fragility. These are not metaphors for spiritual truths. They are realities that can form us if we attend to them.

Listening as Practice

Listening is not a mood. It is a practice. And like any practice, it requires repetition and restraint.

Here are a few ways I have been trying to cultivate ecological listening in ordinary life:

First, sit with the same non-human presence more than once. Not once. Not occasionally. Return to the same tree, creek, patch of ground, or stretch of sky. Familiarity deepens attention rather than dulling it, if we let it.

Second, listen without recording. No photos. No notes. No audio. Just the body in place. Notice how uncomfortable that can feel. Notice the urge to capture rather than receive.

Third, attend to sound fading into silence. Wind dying down. Birdsong pausing. Traffic thinning late at night. Silence is not the absence of sound. It is a texture of listening.

Fourth, notice how your body responds. Does your breath slow or tighten. Do your shoulders drop or rise. Listening is not just auditory. It is somatic.

None of this is dramatic. That is the point. Ecological listening trains us to value what does not announce itself loudly.

Why This Matters Now

We live in a culture that rewards reaction more than attention, from social media to news headlines to political donations and church sermons. Outrage travels faster than listening. Certainty feels safer than curiosity. But ecological life does not flourish under those conditions. Neither does theology.

If theology is going to speak meaningfully in a time of ecological unraveling, it cannot begin with answers alone. It must begin with the discipline of being addressed by a world that is already speaking, even when we are not listening.

Listening will not solve the climate crisis. But without listening, every solution risks becoming another form of domination.

To practice listening is to practice humility and empathy. It is to accept that the world is not exhausted by our understanding. That may be the most theological claim of all.

Curiosity and Empathy Aren’t Bad: What Leonardo da Vinci Can Teach Us

Leonardo da Vinci is often treated as the emblem of genius, the Renaissance mind par excellence. And yet, late in life, Leonardo regarded himself as something of a failure (a point that gets picked up a good deal in mainstream articles about him these days). He believed he had not finished enough, not delivered enough, not brought his restless investigations to proper completion, as in this post I read this morning, Why Da Vinci Thought He Was a Failure, The Culturist.

Obviously, this feels almost absurd. How could someone whose work reshaped art, anatomy, engineering, and natural observation judge himself so harshly… The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, having a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle named after you (also my favorite one)? But if we approach Leonardo phenomenologically, attending not to outcomes but to lived experience, his dissatisfaction begins to make a different kind of sense.

What Leonardo struggled with was not a lack of talent or discipline, but the burden of curiosity itself.

Curiosity as a Way of Being

Leonardo’s notebooks reveal a mind endlessly drawn outward. I suffer similar tendencies, and the notebooks that I’ve meticulously kept since around 2010 would probably testify to that for an outside reader. He observed water curling around obstacles, birds banking in flight, muscles tightening beneath skin, and light diffusing through air. These observations were not collected for a single project. They were acts of sustained attention to the world as it presented itself.

Curiosity, for Leonardo, was not an instrument aimed at mastery. It was an orientation toward phenomena, a continual turning of the self toward whatever appeared. In phenomenological terms, this resembles intentionality, the basic structure of consciousness as always being consciousness of something that we find in Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I (PDF here).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty later argued that perception itself is a bodily engagement with the world rather than a detached mental representation (Phenomenology of Perception… dense but one of my fav works that should be more read these days!). Leonardo seems to have intuited this centuries earlier. His curiosity was embodied, sensory, and relational. He learned by lingering, sketching, returning, and allowing phenomena to resist easy explanation.

From this perspective, curiosity is not a trait one possesses. It is a way of inhabiting the world.

Why Curiosity Can Feel Like Failure

Leonardo’s sense of failure arose precisely because this mode of being does not align well with cultures of completion. He moved slowly, followed questions wherever they led, and often abandoned works when new phenomena called for his attention. Patrons expected finished paintings. Leonardo found himself perpetually unfinished. I often feel the same!

Phenomenologically speaking, this tension reflects a clash between two temporalities. One is the linear time of production and achievement. The other is the lived time of attention, where meaning unfolds through repeated encounters and deepening perception.

Leonardo lived primarily in the second. What looks like failure from the outside can, from within, be fidelity to experience. To remain curious is to resist closure. It is to stay with the world longer than efficiency allows. It’s certainly a curse on one level and we often treat it with pharmaceutical medication these days… but it’s also a blessing or superpower, depending on your persuasion.

Empathy as Curiosity Turned Relational

Leonardo’s curiosity did not stop at nature or mechanics. It extended deeply into human expression. His drawings and paintings reveal a remarkable sensitivity to gesture, posture, and facial expression. He did not simply depict bodies. He rendered states of being.

This is where curiosity becomes empathy.

Phenomenologically, empathy is not projection or emotional contagion. Edith Stein describes it as a way of accessing another’s experience while preserving their otherness (Stein, On the Problem of Empathy PDF, which should be required reading in all colleges and universities, if not in high schools). Empathy begins with curiosity, with the willingness to attend to another without collapsing them into our own expectations.

Leonardo’s art practices this attentiveness. His figures invite us to linger with them, to sense the interiority suggested by an angle of the head or a softness around the eyes. He does not explain them. He lets them be encountered.

This pairing of curiosity and empathy is essential. Curiosity without empathy becomes extractive. Empathy without curiosity becomes sentimental. Together, they form a disciplined openness to reality as it shows itself.

Curiosity Beyond the Human

Leonardo’s curiosity was also ecological, long before the term existed. He did not treat nature as inert matter to be controlled. Water had character. Air had movement. Plants and animals exhibited their own intelligences.

This resonates strongly with phenomenological approaches to ecology, where attention is given not only to systems but to lived encounters with the more-than-human world. To observe a tree across seasons, or to watch how rain alters the texture of soil, is not merely to gather data. It is to practice a form of relational knowing grounded in care.

Curiosity, in this sense, is ethical before it is theoretical. It teaches us how to stay with what exceeds us.

Real Being as Attentive Presence

Leonardo’s evident dissatisfaction with his life’s output may say less about his achievements and more about the cost of living attentively in a world that rewards closure. His life suggests that real being does not consist in finishing everything we begin, but in remaining responsive to what continually addresses us.

Curiosity keeps us open. Empathy keeps us responsible.

Together, they shape a way of being that is not centered on control or accumulation, but on presence, participation, and care. If Leonardo indeed felt like a failure, perhaps it was because he measured himself by standards that could never capture the depth of his engagement with the world.

Phenomenology invites us to reconsider those standards. It asks not what we have produced, but how we have learned to see, to listen, and to remain with what is given.

In that light, curiosity and empathy are not distractions from real being. They are its conditions.

Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being

When I first entered into Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being, I realized almost immediately that I was not reading a standard metaphysical treatise. I was stepping into a conversation about how being itself becomes available to us, how the meaning of existence slowly discloses itself through experience, relation, and attunement. Stein calls the book “an ascent to the meaning of being” in her preface and describes it as written “by a beginner for beginners” (Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, Preface). Yet the scope is anything but beginner level. She begins from the finitude that shapes every human life, our embodied and time-bound existence, and traces the ways it naturally presses toward an origin and fullness of being that is not our own. What strikes me is how this ascent mirrors what I am trying to articulate in The Ecology of the Cross. I am trying to understand how cruciform life opens us to deeper belonging in the more-than-human world, and Stein provides a metaphysical grammar for that movement.

Plasma, Consciousness, and the Phenomenological Cosmos: Relational Fields

Most of the visible universe is not solid, liquid, or gas. Instead, it is plasma, an electrified, dynamic, relational medium that shapes stars, nebulae, auroras, and the vast glowing threads between galaxies. Plasma is not a passive substance but a field that responds, organizes, circulates, and transforms, as far as we understand it, according to the classical model of physics (having been a Physics and AP Physics teacher for years). When physicists describe plasma, they speak of currents, waves, resonances, and instabilities with terms that sound far closer to phenomenology’s language of relations than to the inert mechanics of early modern science.