Philosophers are lined with eyes within

And, being so, the sage unmakes the man.

In love, he cannot therefore cease his trade;

Scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek,

He feels it, introverts his learned eye

To catch the unconscious heart in the very act.

His mother died – the only friend he had, –

Some tears escaped, but his philosophy

Couched like a cat sat watching close behind

And throttled all his passion. Is’t not like

That devil-spider that devours her mate

Scarce freed from her embraces?

 

– Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) 1 

Emerson’s poem provides an artist’s objections to subjective idealism in 19th century philosophy. The critics to whom Edmund Husserl objected most vigorously in his later years were those who read subjective idealism into his transcendental idealism. They did not understand his position, he argued. It was symptomatic of the crisis for science, for philosophy, and for culture generally that such a misunderstanding could exist. The crisis is no less present to us in the seventy years following Husserl’s death in 1938, when philosophy seems reduced to the role of a servant to the empirical sciences and divided into a host of seemingly incompatible disciplines each denied the role which Husserl would give it of a unified foundational discipline. The problems of subjectivity, objectivity, and inter-subjectivity become the matters of the greatest moment and concern for Husserl in later works such as the Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.2  His friends and students – Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, Edith Stein and others – were at odds with him as to the true nature of phenomenology.3 

The concerns of Husserl’s friends and students centred on three critical issues: his neglect of "being," the tendencies to an objectionable subjective idealism, and his attitude to the history of philosophy and metaphysics. In Stein, these questions lead first to an interest in expansion of his notion of inter-subjectivity. The problem of inter-subjectivity arose to some extent out of Husserl’s notions of humans as monads without windows, which Husserl tempers with the notion of empathy.4 

Early in Husserl’s career at Göttingen, he notes that the objectivity of science seems to fall away under reflective scrutiny.5  Errors and confusions which result from the reflections result in theories of knowledge and metaphysics in which the contradictions between the real and the ideal constitute the subject matter. The proper escape from these puzzles lies in discovery of the essence of cognition itself.6  In his early work he took "ontology" as an alienating expression, but "ontology" returns in Ideas,7  published in 1913. The return to metaphysics and ontology does not mean, he says, that he reasons from metaphysical postulates but, rather, from a sense independent "sense giving consciousness."8  The phenomenological "epoché" and "reduction" aims to escape the realist-idealist problem, which Ingarden and others regard as arising from Husserl’s method. The Cartesian Meditations, written some thirty years later contain the same message9  of the rejection of subjective idealism, as does his The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology.

In Crisis, written in the thirties close to the end of Husserl’s life, he points to the collapse of metaphysics10  with a consequent collapse of faith in humanity itself.11  The new "science of essential Being,"12  phenomenology, leads to knowledge of essences rooted in the reflective grasp of the essence of consciousness itself. We could, on this understanding, imagine nature and the physical as annulled.13  To the objection that this could mean an objectionable subjective idealism, he responds that this misunderstanding arises from making the world philosophically absolute rather than recognizing that the "whole being of the world consists in a certain ‘meaning’ which presupposes absolute consciousness."14  Husserl’s escape from the charge of solipsism is heavily dependent on empathy as a way to otherness.

In Ideas, Husserl writes of the inter-subjective world "mediated through empathy."15  In the Cartesian Meditations, he considers "thereness for me of others, a theory of so-called empathy,"16  which is expansive. He proceeds in Crisis to write of the experience of others in a mediated experience called empathy.17  The concept of empathy, which played a minor role in the early works, in the later works becomes vital in avoiding subjective idealism. The two preceding concerns, metaphysics and consciousness are dependent on empathy as a way to other minds. The Husserlian background is essential to understanding Edith Stein’s approach to empathy and her differences from Husserl.

Before considering Edith Stein’s unique philosophical contribution to the problem of empathy, a relevant contemporary concern with the problem should be addressed. The large Oxford English Dictionary18  does not have an entry "empathy" in its general contents. The fourth edition of the Oxford Paperback Edition defines empathy as "the ability to identify oneself mentally with a person or things and so understand him or her feelings or its meaning."19  This definition seems to accord best with Husserl’s definitions. The Oxford Universal Dictionary of 1955, however, provides what seems to be an idealist conception: "the power of projecting one’s personality into and so fully understanding the object of the contemplation."20  A recent Webster’s dictionary (1997) provides both the first sense of identification and a second sense of imaginative projection.21  This ambiguity in the dictionaries is present both in Husserl and in Edith Stein.

The topic of empathy was proposed to Stein by Husserl with the plan that her thesis be in the form of a dialogue with Theodore Lipps22  because of Lipps’ particular interest in intersubjectivity and because of Lipps’ work on the concept of empathy. Stein’s original thesis was followed by her work three years later in Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, prepared for an application for a position in philosophy at Gottingen.23  The paradoxical nature of "fellow feeling" and of sympathy in Hume and other empiricists arise when knowledge is limited to impressions and ideas but seems to have an inter-subjective sense in fellow feeling and sympathy. Empathy, too, suffers from this paradoxical setting in monads without windows in Husserl. There is room for a refined understanding of empathy with this background when it is neither "primordial"24  nor given in objective experience. Stein argues that while empathy is not primordial in outer perception, ideational, or reflective experience, it is primordial in present experience (but not in content).25  Empathy, although not primordial in content, is a kind of act of perceiving26  which is "there for me."27  In summary:

Empathy… is the experience of foreign consciousness in general, irrespective of the kind of experiencing subject or of the subject whose consciousness is experienced.28 

Having defined empathy, various alternative conceptions are rejected: Lipps’ "inner participation including the remembered and the expected"29  and Witasek’s view of empathy as idea.30  Stein’s final contention is that the perceived world and the empathetic world are different perspectives of the same world.31  Empathy becomes the foundation for all inter-subjective experience. The ambiguities remain however when contrasted with Husserl’s account in which the whole constitution of the world is present in my psyche in the monadic being of the world.32 

Recognition of the paradoxical quality of Stein’s account in her thesis is seen when she does use terms such as "projection."33  Recognition that the doctrine was unclear and unfinished was quite evident to Stein herself and to her friend Roman Ingarden.34  She notes that Husserl himself made no comments on her thesis and she recognized that there is a need to ground her work – particularly as her work was related to Husserl’s doctrine. She looked at her study of intersubjectivity as a lifetime project, only lightly outlined in the original thesis. Her work in Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities begins to carry out this project, and deals directly with the problem of the consciousness and the soul in the causality realized in sensate consciousness, in relation to the body, and in relation to the community.

Stein’s work on the soul, the Philosophy of Psychology, is an attempt to develop some of the background for the original thesis.35  A key issue is the expanded notion of causality, which Husserl had already provided – a view radically different from empiricist notions of conjunction, dependency and necessity.36  Descartes had already argued that the physical reality extrinsic to the mind cannot enter into the mind even in causal action.37  Husserl seems to break this restriction with some qualifications38  which lead to apparent inconsistencies. Stein attempts to deal with these inconsistencies.

Stein points to the serious criticisms which David Hume made of ordinary notions of causality.39  She maintains that the "natural world which served as the starting point for reaching phenomenology’s field of research, doesn’t exhaust the totality of the correlates of consciousness."40  She objects to the Humean linked phases of objects, arguing that consciousness lies in a continuum41  of unities merging in a flow of specified duration. In contrast, mechanical causation begins with an "originating occurrence.42  In experiential causality

the origin may be seen in a fact that a shift enters the life sphere. Sensate causality relates to the state of the individual while physical causality relates to necessity in the natural order. Experiential causality is crucial in describing motivations and the acts of individuals, in free acts of agents.43 

 

The early development of the unitive model put Stein at odds with Husserl. She notes in a letter to Ingarden in 1917 that a key difference with Husserl lay in her claim that the body is necessary for empathy.44  In fact, from 1917 to 1919 – when she composed Psychische Kausalität – she took a more original position in psychology. She worked closely with Husserl and undoubtedly profited from his critical presence, but proceeded in her own way. She made clear the originality in a striking passage which points to the person as a psycho-physical individual who is essentially relational, an embodied spirit.45  Her later works give matter a role as the principle of individuation, but by itself it has only potential being. In order to exist, it must have an "essence form" (wesenform).46  In this view, she presents a more traditional unity of soul and body which provides a unitive sense of the person, a substantial unity of body and soul. The body is seen thus as essential to sensate causality and to the wholeness of the person, but also to the community with others, hence the body is essential to empathy. As well the species into which the individual falls is relational and essentially communitarian.47 

The recognition of persons as psycho-physical beings places individuals in the context of community – not as isolated monads, but as interrelated by nature. The human person is both essentially social and essentially political. Stein followed her work on psychology and community with "An Investigation Concerning the State," completed in 1921 and published in 1925.48  Having provided a ground for inter-subjectivity in sensate causality and in embodiment, her philosophy moved towards a political doctrine of her own. There is "an impinging of causal occurrences from one individual to the other which is made possible by a ‘communal’ life feeling.49  The communal life feeling is located in the psycho-physical unity of body and soul.

The genesis of the community lies in the reciprocal dependence of individuals in the community. Persons, as essentially relational, are what Stein calls, using a happy phrase, "person detectors."50  The relational is a qualitative aspect of each individual.51  Husserl’s neglect of the political, perhaps arising out of his monadic view of individuals, is however complemented by Stein’s work which he probably endorsed since he supported its publication.

Husserl’s skepticism about metaphysics as traditionally taught,52  is in contrast with Stein’s later work on Aquinas and her personal commitment to deepening her historical understanding. Her work on Potency and Act (later titled Finite and Eternal Being) place her squarely within classical metaphysics. Her aim was to put traditional historical work in focus, with the aim of bringing together modern phenomenological and scholastic thought.53  Husserl’s influence had been valuable in shaping the conceptual tools which were applied effectively by Stein in her original studies. As years passed, the relationships of phenomenology to past thought led her into creative work in epistemology and metaphysics. By 1932, she endorsed a positive definition of Metaphysics,54  was in close touch with Jacques Maritain,55  and was called to conferences on the relations of phenomenology to Thomistic thought.56  She continued to confess her ignorance of the history of philosophy and her need to grow in an understanding of the traditions.57  She maintained her close relations with Husserl until his death,58  had a late, brief, unsatisfactory encounter with Heidegger,59  but read his works carefully.

Stein’s reflections on the relationships of sciences to each other brings a more precise understanding of the interrelations of the sciences. Her work in metaphysics became more and more indebted to historical and theological reflection in which metaphysics is a ground for rational understanding of the world.60  This understanding is enlightened by the natural and supernatural with a phenomenology at ease in the harmony of metaphysics and theology.61  Her early focus on epistemology and theory of knowledge shifts to a placement of epistemology as a part of a general ontology or metaphysics.62  Metaphysics becomes the primary discipline. A phenomenological world based on the subject alone would remain "a world of the subject"63  even a transcendentally subjective world.

In the days before her transportation to Auschwitz, where she experienced the extremes of national self-assertion, Edith Stein worked on an article for the Thomist (focusing on Dionysius the Areopagite) and on her final opus, The Science of the Cross (on John of the Cross).64  In this latter work, she presents the alternative to the philosopher’s eyes which "are lined with eyes within… to catch the unconscious heart in the very act." The senses provide the images from which symbolic theology leads to the Transcendent Other since there is an "objective commonness" between the world of sense and the spiritual world, the world of beauty. Ultimately "all harmony and all commonness of beings subsists through it, (the Transcendent beauty) for it guides everything to itself through love and unifies everything in this striving."65 

  1. Emerson, "<Philosophers are lined with eyes within>" See Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems and Translations (Library of America), ed. Paul Kane and Harold Bloom, New York: Library of America [dist. by Penguin Books USA], 1994. Emerson’s concerns with inter-subjectivity are reflected in a number of other literary works. Camus’s The Outsider, Sartre’s No Exit, Dostoevsky’s Letters from the Underground and countless other literary works reflect the same concern. One might characterize it as the problem of the "hermeneutic circle."

  14. Ibid., p. 153. Ingarden maintains that there was a radical shift in Husserl’s philosophy away from realism. [Ingarden, On the Motive, p. 8] to a more subjective idealism.

  46. Edith Stein, "Actual and Ideal Being Species Type and Likeness," Knowledge and Faith, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000, p. 78: "To come into existence matter needs forming of two sorts. It must be formed by the species the thing to its content (the essence-form [wesenform] to be distinguished from empty form) and by the form of the individual into which matter as formed by the species idea."