Beyond Empathy; Love. Person and Otherness in the Thought of Edith Stein

Summary

The article examines why Edith Stein, after her early doctoral work on empathy, stopped using the term in her later philosophy. It argues that the concept of 'empathy' became too narrow for what Stein wanted to describe. Following her conversion to Christianity, Stein expanded her understanding of personhood and social relations, integrating them with the experience of a loving God. The author shows how Stein's early ideas on empathy, otherness, and personhood reach their full development in her later writings, where the encounter with otherness and the unfolding of the person are inseparable from divine love.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Debating the nature of social cognition, there has been an upsurge in studies on empathy since the turn of the century. The contribution of Edith Stein’s doctoral dissertation On Empathy has also been brought to the forefront. In her philosophy, there is a continuous concern for the questions of social relations and human community, the explorations of the human person and its unfolding in the encounter with otherness being a leading thread in her work. Still, after her dissertation, the notion of empathy is no longer in use. What does this signify? I propose that the notion of ‘empathy’ proved to be too restrained for what Stein discovers and wants to phenomenologically describe. After her conversion to the Christian faith, working in the intersection of philosophy and theology, she expands and transforms her notion of what it means to be a person and, correspondingly, her intuition of the social relation. In the interpretative readings of this article, I show how Edith Stein’s early intuitions on empathy, alterity, and personhood come to full development in her later writings, where the relation to otherness and the unfolding of the person are conceived as inseparable from the experience of a loving God.