Basing on Edith Stein’s understanding of it, I present a brief analysis of sympathy.
Tag: sympathy
Sympathy (Fellow Feeling)
“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 as a Lived Experience
One day, I heard my 4-year old niece cried so loud because her mother would go out to meet up with someone. Upon leaving, her mother asked me to assist my niece who was crying non-stop. I went to my niece who was on the floor shouting. What I did, however, was just to sit beside her.
It was my niece’s own experience. But I knew what she felt.
Empathy is an experience of the other person’s experience. I want to focus on this experiential aspect of the act of empathy. What is unique about empathy is that it grasps the experiential attributes of the other person. I might have heard a loud cry from my niece, but without empathy, I would not have known what she felt while doing it.
Agreeing on some of Lipps’ ideas, Edith Stein would say that empathy is “a kind of act undergone (Stein 1989, 12).” This means that in empathy, the subject goes through the experience of the other person. With empathy, I do not just settle in knowing that the other person is feeling this or that. Instead, I am called to share what he or she is feeling. And if I respond in the affirmative, I would be experiencing the other person’s experience because I would be in the other person’s shoes, so to speak. This makes empathy so special.
Empathy, therefore, is a lived experience. When empathizing, I am living the experience of the other person. It is as if I am the other person, itself, experiencing. Though I still preserve my individuality, I share the feelings of the other person to the point of being one with him or her. Meaning to say, what the other person feels, I know directly. Empathy, after all, is the foundation for sympathy (feeling with).
References:
Stein, Edith. 1989. On the problem of empathy. The Collected Works of Edith Stein. 3rd Rev. ed. Translated by Waltraut Stein. Vol 3. Washington, DC: ICS Publications.
Empathy 