According to Edith Stein, empathy is non-primordial in its content. Her first warrant for this is that there are acts that are non-primordial in content. She brings into the discussion the acts of memory, fantasy and expectation, which are primordial as an act, but non-primordial in content.
Now, her second warrant is that in empathy, while the act is primordial, the experience is foreign (i.e. not mine). Stein says that the object of empathy is precisely another subject, which is wholly different from me. In contrast to the contents of my other acts which I claim to be mine, the experience in empathy is someone else’s.
This specific non-primordiality (i.e. grasping the experience of another individual) makes Stein think that empathy is a sui generis act of perception.
The primordiality of the act of empathy is part of Edith Stein’s general claim that empathy is “an experience of foreign consciousness in general.” She breaks down this claim into two sub-claims: (1) empathy is a primordial act (or “originary” for some texts) and (2) empathy is a non-primordial experience.
Stein opens up the claim of primordiality with a warrant that the object of empathy is in the “here and now.” In other words, in the act of empathy, the object directly faces me, without any mediation. Stein’s ground for this is the “seeing” of the pain of someone in the bodily expression of pain. This perception of someone’s pain is direct and immediate. She supports the warrant in saying that outer perception (i.e. the act that grasps physical expressions) does not give us the experience of pain.
So, for Stein, empathy is primordial as an act, analogous to outer perception. It is primordial because it is a present experience (i.e. happening here and now) when executing. Thus, when I empathize with someone, I directly perceive the experience of the individual without any detour to anything.
Pure acts are acts of the subject targeting objects of the real world. These acts are, precisely, the mediation between the subject and the object world.
After a few days of reading On the Problem of Empathy, I finally came up with a matrix showing the targets of some pure acts, categorizing them into two (2): the “I” and the other.
What is shown below is that the acts (the ones in the rows) can or cannot access certain parts of the individual (the ones in the columns).
The Matrix
Outer perception can access the physical body of the self, and also the physical and living body of the other. Bodily perception can access both physical and living body of the self. Inner perception can only access one’s own psyche. Empathy, which is a sui generis form of perception, can access the psyche of the other.
An insight that I get from this is that the subject, which is a psycho-physical individual, has itself acts which may be of help in getting a clearer picture of itself and of the other individual.
Clarification of Terms
The “I” is, of course, the self.
The other is another self, another “I.”
The psychic refers to the mind, the spirit, or the soul.
The physical body refers to the human body, but treated as a thing comparable to a pen or a chair.
The living body refers to the human body that has sensations.
In an empathic experience, I become aware of a unique experience through empathic awareness. Then, being led by this experience, I experience an intimate connection through empathic fulfillment. And when this is finished, a new level commences, which I call empathic comprehension.
For Edith Stein, there are three (3) levels of empathic experience. This would mean that empathy lets the subject go through a unique experience, so unique that Stein would say that it is sui generis.
The third, and final, level of empathic experience is the “comprehensive objectification of the explained experience.” This refers to a comprehension of the unique experience of empathy. What happens here is that the subject has finished grasping the other’s experience and therefore recognize it as foreign. In other words, it is the completion of empathy where I recognize the experience as the other’s experience.
Only at this level that I become aware of the non-primordiality of the experience (i.e. the experience is not mine all along). Of course, Stein would say that there is never a fusion of the two subjects (i.e. they do not become one and the same). Nevertheless, the recognition of alterity in an empathic experience happens only at this level.
This level, thus, lets the subject return to how it was in the first level. In the first level, the subject faces the object and connects with it through empathy. Here at the third level, the subject faces the object again, but with a new kind of objectification: a comprehensive understanding of the situation of the other.
Empathic Comprehension In Practice
What does this level look like in practice?
In practice, it looks like this: when after you have “put yourself in the other’s shoes,” you as if say to yourself, “That is his problem, not mine” (of course, not in an insensitive way). There is just, thus, a recognition that the experience that you have undergone through empathy (the second level) is not yours but the other’s.
It is, then, just like coming to your senses.
P.S. A disclosure: “empathic comprehension” is my term as I describe the third level of empathic experience.
“But the living body is constituted in a two-fold manner as a sensed (bodily perceived) living body and as an outwardly physical body of the outer world. And in this doubled givenness it is experienced as the same. Therefore, it has a location in outer space and fills up a portion of this space. (p.43)”
Bodily perception is analogous to outer perception. Both are pure acts of consciousness. And both give us the body as physical, thus part of the world.
But these acts differ in their correlates. Outer perception gives the outer world as its correlate. In other words, it is an act that perceives the physical aspects of the objects of the world. Thus, with outer perception, we can see our body as just one object among many. Bodily perception, on the other hand, gives us the body as a living body. With it, we can see that our body is not merely a thing that occupies space, but it is living, that is, it has sensation (which is the “bridge” between the “I” and the body). Bodily perception, thus, perceives this unity of the “I” and the body, making us see the body as a living body.
*All of the above is based on Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy.
Empathy 