Edith Stein

Key ideas

Empathy

Empathy is the basic way we meet other embodied subjects with experiences of their own, a kind of experience of its own, not built from perception or inference. I live through my empathising first-hand, but what it presents is another’s experience, so it always keeps the difference between self and other.

Empathy is not fellow feeling

Stein distinguished empathy from feeling with someone in their grief, from sympathy and compassion, from imitation and emotional contagion, and from feeling at one with another. Empathy also comes in layers, from a basic, perception-like form to complex understanding of another person.

Psychic causality

The mind is neither reducible to physical nature nor cut off from it. “Life-feelings” such as weariness or freshness colour the whole stream of experience, a causality of its own kind, whose laws are vague and allow only defeasible predictions, so they settle nothing about determinism.

Finite and eternal being

After her conversion Stein joined Husserl’s phenomenology to the metaphysics of Aquinas, beginning from realism about being, not from the meditating subject. Her eternal being was a Christian answer to Heidegger’s being as finitude, and with Duns Scotus she held that each individual has an essence of its own.

Women’s nature and calling

Stein defended women’s right to enter every profession and every branch of education, rejecting the idea of a “weaker sex”. Yet she held that women differ from men in soul as well as body, and criticised suffragists who, for the sake of equality, denied that women have a distinctive nature.