Edith Stein, Empathy & the Loss of Wonder with Allister Lee

I was actually not familiar with Stein at all.

I've seen the name here and there, but I knew nothing of it.

So kind of reading one of your works, I suppose it was an essay

or was it a paper draft? Well, it was a draft for a paper in a conference, but it's currently being developed into a chapter of my thesis.

Oh,

gotcha.

Okay, awesome.

So that was really interesting to me.

And because, again, like you said, it's not kind of a major figure.

So I'm assuming that it's the same level of knowledge or background for a lot of other people.

So maybe give a little bit of context and background about her philosophy in general.

Like what was she trying to do? And then we'll pick up from there of kind of how you use them.

Yeah, so my research focuses at the moment in her earlier phenomenology, what I kind of consider her pre-conversion work.

As I mentioned earlier, she wrote her dissertation on the problem of empathy in her own autobiography.

She wrote that she was listening to a lecture by Rousseau, and he brought up the term empathy, which at that point was being used by Theodore Lipps, another kind of psychologist, psychologist, philosopher of her time who kind of put out a kind of simulation theory of empathy we can go into that a bit later and she's like this is not satisfactory to her in her view and she wanted to put forward a phenomenological account of in tandem with Max Scheller, who is another phenomenologist at the time who was also working on the problem of empathy and sympathy.

But for her, empathy, she understood it not as the way we understood it nowadays as, oh, put your feet into someone else's shoe or taking the position of another person.

For her, empathy was more a kind of intuitive thing quasi-perceptual experience of another person's own subjectivity.

And she kind of justified it by saying that there's a sense of there's a sense of unity between the experience and the expression.

And this unity is a unity of meaning, right? If I see someone smiling, without having to take the person's position or imagine myself, when I smile, what is my affective state? I can just tell from someone smiling that they're happy.

And

for her, that's a way that we encounter the other without having to refer back to ourself.

And she saw that as a more genuine way of how we move around the world and actually build the world.

As well because for her, empathy plays a pretty important role in kind of how we constitute ourselves, how we distinguish ourselves and the other person.

Because when I see your smile, when I see your sadness, I know that that is not my sadness.

And in that sense, it's through empathy that we kind of distinguish the self and the other.