“Should empathy persist beside primordial joy over the joyful event… and, moreover, should the other really be conscious of the event as joyful…, we can designate this primordial act as… fellow feeling (sympathy) (p.14).”
For Edith Stein, sympathy is when two (or more) subjects feel the same feeling over the same event. To sympathize with the other, then, means to feel what the other is feeling (i.e. to have a primordial feeling relatively the same as the other’s) over the same event. The caveat, of course, inherent in Stein’s argument for empathy, is that the feeling of the “I” will never be one and the same as that of the other. Individuality is still preserved. On the above passage, Stein uses the example of when the two subjects feel joy over a joyful event.
The question now is: is empathy necessary for the fulfillment of sympathy? In other words, is empathy the condition for sympathy?
*All of the above is based on Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy.
Empathy 