CHAPTER VII

 

OTHER BODIES AND OTHER MINDS IN

EDITH STEIN:

OR, HOW TO TALK ABOUT EMPATHY

 

JUDY MILES

 

 

In this paper, I will defend Stein’s discussion of empathy from certain feminist critics who have claimed that it is incorrect to describe empathy as "projection." My aim here is to show that it is not only correct to talk about empathy as "projection" but that doing so helps to solve certain philosophical problems about the Other that any other view of empathy would leave untouched.

Empathy is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "the power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation." This definition has its origin in the aesthetics of the 19th century German psychologist Theodor Lipps and it was his work that served as the basis for Edith Stein’s 1916 phenomenological analysis of empathy. Lipps promoted a theory of "Einfühlung" (translated as "empathy") that accounted for how we can comprehend an aesthetic experience or a work of art. He claimed that we "project ourselves into" the work in order to understand it. Arnulf Zweig summarizes Lipps’ approach by saying that "Empathy, according to Lipps, is an act of sympathetic projection into objects or persons distinct from the agent." 1  Stein points out in her autobiography, Life in a Jewish Family, that "What Husserl, judging by his brief indications, thought of as ‘empathy’ and what Lipps designated as such apparently had little in common."2  Since Husserl never detailed exactly what empathy is, Edith Stein set out to do so. She spells out her method in the first paragraph of her dissertation:

 

All controversy over empathy is based on the implied assumption that foreign subjects and their experience are given to us. Thinkers deal with the circumstances of the occurrence, the effects, and the legitimacy of this givenness. But the most immediate undertaking is to consider the phenomenon of givenness in and by itself and to investigate its essence."3 

 

Stein concludes this section by saying,

 

All these data of foreign experience point back to the basic nature of acts in which foreign experience is comprehended. We now want to designate these acts as empathy, regardless of all historical traditions attached to the word. To grasp and describe these acts in the greatest essential generality will be our first undertaking.4 

 

So empathy for Stein is the act of grasping foreign experience and she aims to describe what this grasping consists in. She describes the essence of empathy by comparing it with other acts:

 

Let us take an example to illustrate the nature of the act of empathy. A friend tells me that he has lost his brother and I become aware of his pain. What kind of an awareness is this? I am not concerned here with going into the basis on which I infer the pain. Perhaps his face is pale and disturbed, his voice toneless and strained. Perhaps he also expresses his pain in words. Naturally, these things can all be investigated, but they are not my concern here. I would like to know, not how I arrive at this awareness, but what it itself is.5 

 

Stein then goes on to compare empathy with outer perception. We certainly have no outer or direct perception of another’s pain. Our experience of our own pain is what Stein calls a "primordial" or first-hand experience. Our awareness of another’s pain is non-primordial or second-hand but the experience we have of becoming aware of his pain (our awareness of our awareness of his pain) is itself, of course, primordial for us. So the empathized experience – the pain of the Other in this case – is non-primordial for us. But his pain – that which we are trying to grasp – is of course primordial for the person with whom we are empathizing. Hence, empathy is a non-primordial experience that announces a primordial one. Our own experiences, too, can be non-primordial for us when they are given in memory, expectation or fantasy. Stein describes this in the following example:

 

I actively bring to mind a former joy, for example, of a passed examination. I transfer myself into it, i.e., I turn to the joyful event and depict it to myself in all its joyfulness. Suddenly I notice that I, this primordial, remembering ‘I’, am full of joy. I remember the joyful event and take primordial joy in the remembered event. However, the memory joy and the memory ‘I’ have vanished or, at most, persist beside the primordial joy and the primordial ‘I’. Naturally, this primordial joy over past events can also occur directly. This would be a mere representation of the event without my remembering the former joy or making a transition from the remembered to the primordial event. Finally, I may be primordially joyful over the past joy, making the difference between these two acts especially prominent.6 

 

Notice that this is all about one’s reflection on one’s own experience. The very same procedure, however, occurs when the object of reflection is someone else’s joy. Stein continues:

 

Now let us take the parallel to empathy. My friend comes to me beaming with joy and tells me he has passed his examination. I comprehend his joy empathically; transferring myself into it, I comprehend the joyfulness of the event and am now primordially joyful over it myself. I can also be joyful without first comprehending the joy of the other. Should the examination candidate step into the tense, impatient family circle and impart the joyful news, in the first place, they will be primordially joyful over this news. Only when they have been ‘joyful long enough’ themselves, will they be joyful over their joy, or perhaps as the third possibility, be joyful over his joy. But his joy is neither given to us as primordial joy over the event nor as primordial joy over his joy. Rather it is given as this non-primordial act of empathy that we have already described more precisely.7 

 

Several contemporary women writers have raised objections to this way of talking about empathy, however. We have seen that the Oxford English Dictionary defines empathy as "the power of projecting one’s personality into the object of contemplation" and this certainly seems to capture Edith Stein’s understanding of the notion. The four authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing, however, complain that the OED’s definition of empathy as "projection" favors the masculine point of view. They write, "this phallic imagery may capture the masculine experience of empathy, but it strikes many women – Nel Noddings, for example – as a peculiar description of ‘feeling with.’"8  Empathizing requires knowing what the feelings the Other is having feel like, but it does not require that one simultaneously share those feelings as sympathy does. My objection to these women’s objection lies in their claim that the OED’s definition of empathy, which involves mental projection, somehow favors the masculine experience of empathy. I take them to mean, when they complain about phallic imagery, that since the masculine experience of sexuality involves physical projection that an experience involving mental projection necessarily favors males.

This argument seems to me unsound for at least two reasons. First, it does not follow that empathy, which involves mental projection, has anything to do with the (stereotypic) male experience of sex. I take the kind of "projecting" which empathy involves to be very much like the experience an actress has when "putting herself in character." She contemplates the character she is about to portray and imagines what it would be like to be that person. She imagines herself in the other’s place. This is necessary to being able to portray a role convincingly and one’s skill at doing this is what distinguishes good acting from bad. If it is correct to model acts of empathy on acts of sexuality, and if empathy is necessary to good acting, then it would seem to follow that women would generally be better actors than men. But acting seems to be one of the few professions in which there never has been any claim of a "gender war" regarding skill. We just don’t say that someone is likely to be good at acting because of his or her gender.

My second point about the objection to seeing empathy as projection is that, if one redefined empathy so that it favored the "feminine point of view" (whatever that might be), one would still be favoring one gender over the other. Men could then claim that the definition unfairly favored the female experience of empathy and hence disadvantaged them. This would not mean that the definition had been improved; it would only mean that men and women had exchanged places as the victims of injustice. This would hardly be progress.

Nel Noddings, however, does want to suggest that to redefine empathy in favor of women would be an improvement over the OED’s definition. She objects that empathy is defined in the OED as "projection" and claims that this is a false description. She says empathy (again, "feeling with" on her view) is more like reception than projection. "I do not project. I receive the other into myself, and I see and feel with the other."9  While the idea of "receiving the other into myself" might seem a kinder, gentler image than that of "projection" I think that Noddings’ description is actually the wrong way to talk about empathy and not Stein’s or the OED’s.

Noddings also wants to object to the claim that we "put ourselves in the other’s place" in empathizing. But this just is what we seem to do. It’s certainly not that the Other is coming into our situation, as the description "receiving them into ourselves" suggests. The point is that we are trying to understand another mind outside ourselves – a mind that is outside us and that remains itself while being understood by us. The example of an actress "getting into character" serves well again here. When we try to understand another we try to put ourselves in that person’s mind or situation. How better to describe this mental activity than by projection? Stein’s example of being joyful over someone else’s joy is clearly a case of putting ourselves in that person’s place – not of bringing them into ours. Furthermore, while Noddings objects to the images the word "projection" creates, there is good reason to object to the image of "taking the Other into myself." It suggests that the Other is being enveloped by me and that the Other’s identity is being altered or even obliterated as the Other. But this is precisely what we don’t want to bring about. We don’t want to be changing the Other in the process of trying to comprehend the Other for then empathy would not be a way of knowing another mind; it would simply be a way of altering it. This is the philosophical beauty and utility of Stein’s view of empathy, namely, that it allows one to understand a mind outside our own while permitting that other mind to remain a subject – to remain itself.

So what now is the advantage of saying we are "receiving the Other into ourselves" over saying we are "projecting ourselves into" the Other? Simply that of getting away from the word "projection." I think this redefinition is well intentioned at best and absurd at worst.

So what does all this amount to? What does it really matter whether empathy is described in terms of projection or reception? Well, the point I have just made about empathy (as traditionally defined) leaving the Other intact is one very important implication of the definition. What is so useful about the traditional notion of empathy is that it is a way of perceiving the Other’s mind without altering it at the same time. There needs to be such a provision for us to communicate at all, and it seems that empathy, as traditionally conceived, is the best way of describing this process. W.V. Quine’s paper "Promoting Extensionality" summarizes some of his most relevant points concerning the role empathy plays in language acquisition. I will conclude by showing how Quine’s examples of empathy provide further reason for seeing empathy in the way Stein has described it.

The context of Quine’s comments about empathy is that of propositional attitudes. Claims like

 

x believes that p’, ‘x hopes that p’, ‘x says that p’, and the rest – are in conspicuous violation of extensionality. We may well believe that p and not that q, though both be true.

 

What is worse, even scandalous, is that these idioms violate the substitutivity of identity: the putting of equals for equals. How can something be true and false of the same thing under different names?

 

Yet these idioms are useful to the point of indispensability. Moreover, I think they are rooted in the earliest stages of language. I picture the earliest idiom of propositional attitude as ‘x perceives that p’, where ‘p’ stands for an observation sentence such as ‘It’s raining’, ‘That’s milk’, ‘That’s a dog’. When the mother is monitoring the child’s utterance of such a sentence, she has to empathize with him. She imagines herself in his place, facing in the same direction, and then checks whether she, thus oriented, feels moved to volunteer the sentence herself. In short, she checks, however inarticulately, whether the child really perceives that it’s raining, that it’s milk, that it’s a dog. This much in the way of an idiom of propositional attitude, all unspoken, is essential to the very handing down of language from generation to generation; for observation sentences are the child’s entering wedge to language.10 

 

Quine goes on to say that when Frege was confronted with the problem of the failure of substitutivity of identity, he concluded "that in those idioms the recalcitrant terms have changed their reference and taken to referring to what would normally be their meanings, or senses, rather than their normal objects." Quine claims that empathy can help answer a philosophical question about this failure of substitutivity and his example suggests that he also sees empathy in terms of putting oneself in the other’s place. He continues:

 

A better solution is suggested by the mother’s relation to the child in monitoring his observation sentence; namely empathy. When someone ascribes a propositional attitude to someone, he impersonates that person to some degree. The subordinate clause of the construction is uttered from the subject’s point of view, somewhat as if from the subject’s mouth. No wonder substitutivity of identity fails; the subject, poor fellow, didn’t know the things were identical. Likewise for failure of extensionality: the subject would have been unprepared to interchange the two coextensive clauses in question, simply because he didn’t know they were coextensive.11 

 

I do not have time to discuss the full implications of Quine’s claim that empathy may be the answer to the puzzle about the failure of substitutivity but I wanted at least to mention his examples because his suggestions are such interesting ones and because they offer further evidence that empathy is ordinarily understood to be projection and not reception.

I now want to anticipate an objection Nel Noddings might have to my own. I suspect she would deny that the Other is altered or obliterated when taken into oneself.

But even if the Other isn’t altered, "reception" just does not seem to be as natural or accurate a word for the process our minds go through in what we typically call "empathy." "Projection," rather, comes up over and over in the literature and in our everyday descriptions of our experience. We "transfer ourselves into the experience of the other" as Stein says or we "put ourselves in the other’s place" as an actress says or we "impersonate" or "utter as if from the subject’s mouth" as Quine says.

These descriptions have a ring of truth which descriptions of empathy as reception lack.

 

NOTES

 

  1. Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York: Macmillan, 1967, Vol. 4, p. 485.

  2. Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986, p. 277.

  3. Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 3d. rev. ed. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989, p. 3.

  4. Ibid., p. 3.

  5. Ibid., p. 6.

  6. Ibid., p. 13.

  7. Ibid., pp. 13-14.

  8. Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule, Women’s Ways of Knowing, New York: Basic Books, 1986, p. 122.

  9. Nel Noddings, Caring, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 30.

  10. W.V. Quine, "Promoting Extensionality," Synthese, 98 (1994), p. 145.

  11. Ibid.