--- date: 11/06/2025 description: Einfühlung id: Empathy modified: 2026-06-05 15:08:23 GMT-04:00 tags: - philosophy title: Empathy created: 11/06/2025 published: 11/06/2025 pageLayout: default slug: thoughts/Empathy permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/thoughts/Empathy.md generator: quartz: v4.6.0 hostedProvider: Cloudflare baseUrl: aarnphm.xyz full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt --- Stein: - basis for intersubjective experience, not be treated as thing, but a person - a direct perception, as the mode of perceiving other persons as persons Stein’s account is in _On the Problem of Empathy_ (1917), her dissertation under Husserl. The “direct perception” claim needs one qualification. I see a friend’s embarrassment in the blush and the change in voice; I do not infer it. But I do not live through the embarrassment either. The act of empathizing is mine and happens now, while its content is given as the other’s experience and not as my own. Stein calls the act originary and the content non-originary. Because of this split, empathy keeps the line between self and other, and this is what lets me meet the other as a person and not as an object that I project onto. She describes three steps, and an encounter can stop at any of them: 1. the other’s experience appears in their body and expression, still vague; 2. I fill it out by following the motives that led to it, almost from the inside; 3. I take the filled-out experience as an object, which I can then think about. She rejects two theories that were current at the time. Lipps’s theory of inner imitation fails because imitation would make the feeling mine. Mill’s inference from analogy fails because we do not reason from our own body to the other’s mind before we notice their grief. Empathy is also different from sympathy: I can grasp a rival’s joy exactly and still feel envy. Source: [SEP, “Edith Stein,” §2.1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stein/).