Ep. 366: Edith Stein on Empathy (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 366 is something like, how can we know the emotional states of others? We read Edith Stein's on the Problem of empathy from 1917. More information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer feeling primordial joy live from my eye in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:37 Seth: This is the foreign living body of Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:41 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey primordially grasping my non primordial experiences in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:47 Mark: Yes, we got some of the theory out here.

0:50 Seth: We actually have yet another version of foundational grounding primordial. It's a new way to say something direct, immediate, unmediated.

1:04 Mark: Yes, we just came off of talking about Scheller's take on sympathy, similar to empathy. But Stein had read the first edition of that is reacting to that. So it's not the full text that we read, which was doubled in its second edition a few years after this, which was in turn reacting to Stein like, so Scheler had read Stein. So this is definitely a dialogue. Unfortunately, some of the parts that of Scheler she's reacting to is not what we read.

1:29 Dylan: I want to know which part's primordial and which part's non primordial. That's my only question about that whole interaction.

1:35 Mark: Right. So Scheler was really concerned about the contrast he drew was between sympathy, which is just taking someone else's joy or sorrow as my intentional object, the thing that I'm thinking about. And he didn't want us to confuse that with actually identifying with them, putting ourselves in their shoes, which would just make sympathy into some kind of egoism. Right. If you and I are on some level one, if the boundary between us has been broken down, then my sympathizing for you is really just sympathizing for myself. And a lot of other thinkers had posited something like that.

Well, Stein is trying to find something in between those two options, which. It's a dynamic process. So it's. We come to understand somebody else. So first she's doing exactly what Scheler's saying. I'm taking, Hey, I see you are happy about eating Chinese food. And then I do as part of this dynamic process. Well, like, what's that? Like, I actually focus on the Chinese food. I try to get excited with you about the Chinese food, even if I hate Chinese food. And I brought this up because Scheler, I think, used the example of those Japanese, they really love raw fish.

And we Westerners can't get into it. But then. So I have a desire for knowledge, for fulfillment. And once I kind of enter imaginatively into that emotional space with you and feel the joy about the thing that you are feeling joy about, then I retract again into myself. And I have a fuller appreciation for what you're about and why you're excited. Not that I'm swept away and I must go get some Chinese food now myself again. Maybe I don't even like it. Maybe I would never like it. So I've participated with you. But ultimately I'm sort of like Scheler says, just appreciating your experience with you being fundamentally somebody that is other than me.

But she spends a lot of time in the book saying how this is sort of like Hegel's story of how we build self consciousness. That empathy is how we expand our self. Maybe I discover through your joy. Maybe I should check out this Chinese food stuff like that. And I can only understand you to the degree to which I understand myself as a coherent whole. So, you know, she can explain why some people just can't have empathy for other people because they are too egoistic, too locked off in themselves. Just really don't understand how people tick.

4:07 Seth: I almost feel like that characterization Mark is. It's a little too normative. It's got a little bit of normativity in it. She's trying very hard. So first off, we should say this was her doctoral thesis that got turned into a book and it reads that way. It's very well written, very earnest, very clear, kind of like over explanation in points, you know, that kind of thing.

4:30 Mark: Too much engaging with past thinkers that we didn't read in a very specific way.

4:36 Dylan: Yeah, Extended engagement with lesser known entities.

4:40 Mark: Theodor Lipps again he Lipps.

4:43 Seth: That's two P's folks. But also sort of the flip side of that is that it's like exceptionally clear about what she's trying to do and accomplish. And the scope is constrained. So one of the things that I think is really important is that she's talking about this as a phenomenological undertaking. It's in the strictest sense of a Husserlian definition of what a phenomenological investigation would be. So the first thing she says is, look, I'm going to suspend any attitude towards the existence or non existence of the things I talk about. So I don't know the existential status of Other people or of the outside world or whatever.

I'm just going to talk about the phenomena as they appear to me. So I'm just going to say I'm taking it from my own experience, right? Which is what phenomenology does, of course, we're going to generalize from there to other subjectivities, experience. But the point is she wants to examine the phenomena of other consciousnesses or other people's essentially inner states as they impact us. So instead of seeing physical things in the world or the other person's physical bodies, it's. We have an experience of where we feel what other people feel, or we are impacted emotionally by the way other people seem.

Look, act, exhibit. This is just a phenomena that occurs in the world. Like, it's just a way of being that we have this experience. And she wants to describe it. So it's an attempt to be much more descriptive and much less normative.

6:23 Dylan: So this is the very first section and like in the third paragraph after she says, I'm just going to doubt everything. So, you know, thinking she's going Descartes on you. But no natural science, no natural experience that says what can be left if the world and even the subject experience it are canceled. So this is the bracketing part. We bracket out all that stuff. In fact, there remains an infinite field of pure investigation. I can doubt whether what I see before me exists. Deception is possible. Therefore, I must exclude and make no use of the positing of existence.

But what I cannot exclude, what is not subject to doubt, is my experience of the thing. The perception, memory and other kind of grasping together with its correlate the full phenomenon of the thing. This phenomenon retains its entire character and can be made into an object of consideration. So that sounds like what you just described, except for all the part that being able to talk about a thing. In the end, even when I bracket it, it feels like I'm still not bracketing it Right. It's also. Maybe it's just because it's 1917, or maybe it's still the way people think about.

Maybe the science aspect is also the kind of bracketing she's talking about. I find it funny to say, well, we're not going to do science, because of course, science never brackets anything. So the very thinking that she's talking about, maybe I'm bringing to bear like 80 years more of work after Husserl, right? About exactly what it means to have an experience and have that experience be conditioned.

8:04 Seth: So I'm glad you brought this up. We might as well Have a little excursion on phenomenological method here, because I'm as sympathetic to phenomenology as a way of doing philosophy as I am almost any other method.

8:18 Dylan: Yep, sure.

8:19 Seth: At the same time, the Husserlian notion of bracketing is problematic. And it's not just Stein. It's exactly what you describe is no matter how you do it or how you do it, you know, that's why by the time you get to Heidegger and some of these later phenomenologists, they don't really talk in that same way about bracketing out experience. And I think, what if I was going to give a charitable characterization of Stein here just to kind of get us past this so we can move on to other things. It's. I think what she's trying to avoid by saying what she does is I don't want to get into some kind of realist, idealist, skeptical debate about the existence of other mind.

Look, we're not going to have that conversation. That's not what we're doing here. I'm just putting the existence aside and just. Let's just talk about describing our experience. And, you know, you could think of this as kind of almost Hegelian in a certain way of like, going back to. And she's just like, I'm not going to invoke God to try to make sure we secure all these epistemic relationships and all that sort of thing. It's just like, I'm going to describe what it's like for me to get upset when I see my best friend be upset. And hopefully that's descriptive to you of your experience of it.

And then we can look at mechanically and conscious and, you know, ontologically, like, how does this stuff all pan out?

9:38 Dylan: Yeah. So what you described is pragmatism, and that is. I totally get that, and I'm on board. And I agree that that's the right charitable interpretation. I had forgotten in the Husserl that I read years and years and years ago about the deeply Cartesian aspect of phenomenology in its rootedness. I had totally forgotten that it really is a conceit at getting metaphysically to what the true thing is. I totally forgot about that. I always thought that the Bracketing was basically pragmatism, but I was wrong about that. Yeah, that's the way I want to read it, but that's not the way at least they thought about it. And so that was a good reminder.

10:26 Seth: That's one of the reasons why Husserl is so deeply unsettling yeah, he came up with the term trans ego. Right. A menace. Coming out next year, folks. Dylan's book, Pragmatic Phenomenology, Volume 1.

10:39 Mark: Yeah. Just to clarify a little. So the Husserl that we read on the show, the Cartesian Meditations, was Husserl's very mature work. It was lectures from 1929. Quite a bit after this had happened. However, Stein was Husserl's actual research assistant and was very familiar with his book Ideas, which is dwells for so long just on phenomenological method. Like the fact that Stein and Scheler are actually talking about humans in our interacting practical situations. Husserl is so much less satisfying than that, which is why we haven't spent a lot of time with him on this podcast. It's just really hard to get anything out of a small number of pages of him.

11:20 Dylan: He starts with rocks. I haven't read Ideas.

11:24 Mark: Well, we did some on close reads recently so people can get a taste of that. Just setting up what this, the bracketing means, what it is to set aside science.

11:33 Dylan: Got it.

11:34 Mark: One of the things I think relevant to our listeners. Right. We're very as modern people, scientifically oriented. And so philosophy is going to try to make us actually pay attention. I think this is not pragmatic. Pay attention to the essence of the phenomena. What is it not? How do we biologically tell if somebody is upset? Oh, maybe they give off pheromones. So those are scientific genetic accounts. And she is just expressly not interested in that. She's trying to give something that is at a more experiential. There's lots of different ways somebody could say something.

Somebody could give an expression. It could be just by the context. Maybe you hear right. Don't you sympathize? Oh, I hear that, you know, there was an earthquake. Wow. I really feel for all those people, I don't even know their names that were affected by the earthquake. So those are potential ways that we could sympathize or empathize. We need to get a little clearer on the distinction. But yeah, that are not the actual step by step account of how it happened to you. You would think that that's what reporting on your experience would be, would be reporting on this particular experience.

But she wants to get at the essence of all experiences of how is the foreign experience grasped is how she puts it.

12:47 Dylan: Yeah. So that makes sense. And I see now why you would make that distinction with science, particularly the part of scientific activity that is effectively modeling and focused on causal connections. The Sort of the part that's the physics in this respect. Phenomenology is a lot like observational biology. It's going out and saying, this is what I found out there, this is the parts. I'm going to kind of group them together. You know, these things that all have six legs, I'm going to call those insects. I mean, there's something much closer to what she's doing in the science of biology, particularly at this point. There's some biology going on that's more directly causal, but there's still lots and lots and lots of observational biology. That's what it feels like.

13:37 Mark: I think there's also a suspicion of model building that science does. Certainly she's constructing a model of what the human being is and how the mind relates to the body and how we exist as psychophysical organisms, you know, in the world with each other. That enables us to be empathic. And she has, as I referred to, you know, some of these stories about what, what might be blocks to empathy. What is it we're actually learning about other people, how, how does it relate to their values, the, the coherence of their motivations, these things. But I think her way of giving models wouldn't be like, for instance, Freud's, which.

Where you set up these mechanisms that are unseen to the person. They're not experienced. And you say. If I just say there's these three sources of motivation or even just, you know, Plato's, there's the eros and there's the thumos and there's the logos, and these are parts of our soul and we can explain everybody's behavior in terms of the interaction of these fundamentally unseen faculties. Like that is very anti. Phenomenological. You want to give a more surface level description is kind of. The point is to. We want to get to the things themselves that we're actually describing away from our theories about them.

So Hume's. Even though Hume is trying to describe experience, the fact that he immediately comes with, oh, well, everything we experience is either an impression or an idea like this is much too reductive, much too simplifying. We want to leave the messiness of phenomenology right there. So he is in very much in discussion with descriptive psychologists like Brentano, like William James, you know, so the pragmatists, some of them. And Theodor Lipps, this person she's directly responding to, I think was an introspective psychologist. And I think she admires, she thinks that he went a good way in coming up with some of the things that she's wanting to consider.

And maybe we should start with that point. Right. That she makes on page six, which Scheler had referred to as well, is how do we tell. What do we see when we see somebody that is crying or, you know, just has an upset expression on their face? According to Lipps, this was. The crying is a symbol for that. So just like seeing a sign that says stop, then. Okay, well, somebody put the stop sign there. It means that I should stop here. Something like that. And I think Stein wants to say there's something good about that, but it's actually more immediate that we experience.

Well, yeah, I could read the quote.

16:06 Dylan: Yeah, go ahead and read it.

16:06 Mark: Sure. Page six. Lipps says we perceive outer expressions that are symbols for inner emotions. Stein says, I not only know what is expressed in facial expressions and gestures, but also what is hidden behind them. Perhaps I see that someone makes a sad face but is not really sad. I may also hear someone make an indiscreet remark and blush. Then I not only understand the remark and see shame in the blush, but also discern that he knows his remark is indiscreet and is ashamed of himself for having made it. Neither this motivation nor the judgment about his remark is expressed by any sensual appearance.

The fact that you can hear if the blush was just a symbol, then you would just be taken straight to, okay, this symbol indicates a meaning that's not there. Somebody else wrote that stop sign. But it's like the speaker, you know, the expressor in this situation is right there. So I can see. Yes, they're using symbolic language, or I shouldn't even say language. They might be talking, obviously, they might say, I am sad. But you could also. It's a holistic experience where you're getting their gestures, you're getting their tone of voice, you're getting all this stuff that is.

She says, it's actually in your experience. Right. You're trying to be a scientist by saying, all I ever perceive is the outer shape of people's bodies and the way that they move and the sounds that they make. And then my mind fills in the gaps and says, hmm, I conclude that this person is sad. And she wants to say, phenomenologically, we see the sadness. It's right there, immanent in the expression.

17:34 Seth: Yeah, she actually. I think it's later in the essay, she spends a lot of time talking about, like, signification versus symbolism. But there's kind of two things happening early on. She's like, we're going to designate all acts empathy, where foreign Experiences are grasped in whatever way. So it's a very broad definition of empathy. And the experience of grasping a foreign experience, as Mark says, is grasping the experience, not the externally presented signs of the experience. So what she's trying to say is it's not simply that I see somebody wincing and that's a sign that they are in pain.

It is kind of like part of the phenomena. And we'll talk later about how you interpret those phenomena, how that communicates. But she essentially says simultaneously communicated with that is a hidden thing, something you aren't seeing. And that's the. Essentially the internal state, if you will, of the other person. So that's the first. There's content that gets communicated, a foreign experience which is not explicitly presented that by the foreign body, not picked up by your senses. The second thing is that that experience, and this is where that word primordial came up that Dylan was talking about earlier, is that grasping of that foreign experience is not a having of whatever experience you are grasping in the same way as when you have it yourself.

So when you are fully aware empathetically that somebody is in pain, say they fell off their bike and they're bleeding and you're like, oh, and you're empathizing with them. It is not the same as you having the experience of falling off your bike and bleeding. That experience has. As she. The word she uses is it has more of a primordiality. And that the experience of the other's pain is non primordial. And we. For now, she's just trying to distinguish, characterize descriptively. And I think it's. We can all agree you just don't experience other people's pain the way you experience your pain.

You can use whatever words you want, but the reality is when it happens to you, it's different than when you empathize with somebody and it's happening to them.

19:53 Dylan: So that last part I totally buy, and it made a lot of sense to me, that distinction, which seems to me at the root of empathy. When you're getting into empathy, you're trying to get at that. What is it that you're experiencing when you are experiencing observation of experience of another being? What are you doing when that. And that's what you're unpacking here. The notion that I'm getting at the. Say, let's take the pain, I'm accessing the pain, or identifying the pain as an object as. And grasping it not merely through signs. Right. And I'm actually grasping that thing in itself did strike Me as confusing.

She brings up things like deception and stuff like that, which I wasn't sure if it would go down this road. But it does seem the way you described it made it sound like, well, I can be sure of the thing that I'm grasping when I am empathizing and be right about it in the same way that I'm right about my own experience of pain. I can be right about that with respect to empathy, because I can grasp something more than the experience. Now, maybe I'm interpreting that wrong, but that's what it sounded like. And that, on the face of it, sounds wrong because I could certainly have somebody who is a very good actor who I could not distinguish their presentation of their pain from them actually being in pain.

And so to me, that kind of deception, which is surely possible, where I could have a full empathetic reaction to them, even though their primordial experience has nothing to do with pain.

21:39 Seth: Yes.

21:40 Mark: Yeah. This is just a glaring thing that jumps out if you say I'm actually just directly perceiving. I'm not just concluding that you're in pain from the outward signs, but I'm actually seeing the pain even non primordially. You can add that.

21:53 Dylan: Yes.

21:54 Mark: Word to it. Yeah. What if her response just seems to be. And this comes much later, the book just that. Well, how do we correct this? Well, it's by more empathy. So it just shows you that empathy is. So I think it's very parallel to direct realists about perception that say we just perceive the object there. I don't perceive the shape and the color of my water glass and then conclude that there's a water glass there. I just actually see the water glass. And they're like, well, what about illusions? What if like. Well, then you have to look more closely and do more perception.

And she compares this, seeing this being exposed to somebody else's inner life, to the hidden parts of an object that you see. So when I see this glass, I assume that it has. Part of. What would confirm is that I can pick it up and that it has solidity. It's not just like a picture of the glass or a hologram of the glass or something. So the hidden sides of the glass, I assume glass is not a great example because you can see through it. But you know, our barn example of like the people that saw barns, but they're actually just facades of barns.

23:03 Dylan: Yeah.

23:04 Mark: You know that when you see a barn, you conclude. Conclude is the wrong word. You also extrapolate experience. I mean, both of these conclude Extrapolate. They all sound like a reasoning process. But it's like we non primordially experience the. The unseen sides of the barn, that we know that barns have backs and bottoms and roofs, even though we're not looking at them. And insides. Yes. And so the same thing is that I know that a smile indicates. Normally indicates happiness. And so if the person is smiling for some other reason or is smiling to hide their embarrassment, is trying to convince me that he's happy even though he's not happy, then I just have to look more closely. Just like I would have to actually

23:49 Dylan: go approach the barn or get other signs.

23:53 Mark: Yep.

23:53 Dylan: This points out what I think phenomenology is trying to do successfully, but also the challenge of it. Right. You're trying to look closely at something just in the word, the phenomena, the what's going on as unconstrained mode and flexible mode as you can, but still actually talk about it. That's fine. You know, I'm going to talk about the experience, I'm going to try to catalog it, I'm going to make some associations, but I'm not going to insist on building it up to get to kind of derive that and sort of put down all the metaphysical and structural landscape in order to make that conclusion be wholly consistent.

I'm going to work with what I've got. The part that is confusing is this notion that I'm still having direct access to anything. So in the way she's writing, I feel this kind of back and forth. There's times where I'm really focusing on phenomenology where I'm not going to worry about having even the notion of direct access. It's sort of qualified. And other times it feels like, oh yeah, actually back to Descartes, there are things that I know for sure and I'm going to point those out. And maybe Mark, you brought up the earnestness. The earnestness seems to be like, oh, yeah, I got to that part.

25:14 Seth: So let me try to put a spin on this that might be helpful. I think when we typically talk about empathy, at least nowadays, and in my experience, people think of empathy that it's an emotion or they think of it as somehow part of the emotional apparatus of a human being. And what Stein is saying is she's using the term empathy an analogous way to perception or something like that.

25:45 Dylan: She's explicit about that. It's a kind of perception.

25:48 Seth: Yes. It's a mechanism for grasping. It's an explanatory mechanism for some of the phenomena in our Universe of experience. Phenomena that we can't get directly through eyes, ears, whatever. And it's also. It's not direct and immediate in the sense that you're born with it. It's learned behavior. Empathy needs to be developed and refined. It's a faculty, if you will, in that sense. And just in the same way that it's an apparatus of perception, in some sense it can be deceived and so on.

26:22 Dylan: But you're born with the power, but your ability to use it effectively, like any power, bears refinement.

26:29 Seth: Yes. Like you couldn't empathize with somebody in pain if you had never been in pain. Right. In some sense. Oh, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't jump on me on for that thing yet, okay? Because we are going to talk about what empathy isn't and how it doesn't work. But what I'm trying to get to is she's trying to describe the mechanism of how we have this experience. And just like you said, it gives us access. She says that we're experiencing some phenomena which is not the same as the phenomena of the actual living body of the other person.

So we have the perceptual experience of the phenomena of somebody wincing, being in pain, crying, smiling, whatever. Empathy allows us to experience a phenomena of essentially the inner state that is signified in some sense by those behaviors. But it's richer and more developed and more. It's actually, it's not as simple as just signification. Where there's smoke, there's fire. Where there's smiling, there's happiness. That's not exactly the way it works because of our own subjectivity and our experience and our ability to feel and all these things that make us who we are.

It's kind of a little bit of a mystery. But that experience itself is, she thinks, primordial. In the same way that our experience of the physical attributes of the living body are. So it is a root basic phenomena that we empathize. It is a root, basic phenomena that we see. It is not a root basic phenomena that we feel the same thing that we are empathizing with. That's a second order thing. It's not transference, it's not unity, it's not oneness. But the experience of empathy is, as she says, primordial. And it is not the same thing as perceptual experience.

You're right, that's confusing.

28:27 Mark: I want to get clarification on this living body thing because you were saying we don't just see the living body, we Experience the, you know, non primordial leave their inner life. But I thought the whole point of bringing up living body is to contrast it with the physical body. So if you were just a materialist, if you're a scientist, you said, all I see is your material body. And you know, yes, I see. Can see it moving around and things. I can tell that you're not dead. But that's different than saying the living body. I think this is a phenomenological term of art to say that yes, I experience the living bodies of others.

That is to say that I experience that they have inner lives, that they have purposes, that they're going to be acting according to motivations. Again, living body could mean an animal. And she says, well, that's the broadest possible thing we can empathize with. We could never empathize with a stone. You know, even if a stone has telos, it likes to fall down, as Aristotle says, not going to empathize with that. But it's something that can be in pain. Even a mosquito, like we could empathize to that degree. So I guess we are attributing. We're seeing.

She hasn't really addressed this. Are we saying the mosquito has an inner life? You know, that is not a purely. Certainly in the case of individuals, we. By saying I encounter the living body. I think this is pre saging Heidegger, et cetera, and Merleau Ponty. Yeah, we experience just the point we've been making. So it's. The living body is not contrasting, I think, with the inner life. Living body builds the inner life into it. Just that term. Or did you understand it differently?

29:59 Seth: So I didn't really give it too much more thought beyond the fact that. Well, she does spend. We haven't really talked about this yet. About what. She spends a lot of time early on talking about the I. What is the I? What do we mean when we talk about consciousness itself? So the living body is in one sense the physical representation or the physical container, embodiment of the eye. The living body is how we identify foreign consciousnesses, foreign experiences that we associate them with the body in the most sense. But it's also. I just think of it as kind of like it's the medium through which our experience of others happens. Just in the same way that like the floor of my room is the thing on which I walk. It's like the body of the other person is the thing that is the way in which I experience them. Because there would be no other way.

30:51 Dylan: Well, there's Both it's your eye. And then recognizing that they have an eye. Right.

30:57 Mark: I mean I know the physicality is bodily before me. So that is my primordial outer sense, my experience. And then non primordial. I'm experiencing them, their emotions.

31:09 Dylan: I guess I'm having a non. I am using primordially my powers. But my empathy is accessing non primordial experiences of theirs. This is where, I mean, this is the derivation she gets to where empathy is like memory.

31:27 Mark: Yeah. Talk more about that because that was really interesting.

31:29 Dylan: Yeah. So I mean we can just go through. And this is section two. Do we want to do like her presentation of perception, empathy, primordial, non primordial. And then memory and experience. Do we want to go through that or do we want to just jump to it?

31:44 Mark: Right. In my summary of the whole thing was the. You know that it has three stages, she calls them grades. This is what empathy is. And the question she gets, she poses to get us there is is it like seeing the unknown sides of a thing? So you already talked about that. And then is it like relating to my own past emotions, which is what you just brought up. So I think this is the next really salient point and she really makes once she establishes that yes, in some ways it is like, you know, dealing with your eye as a non primordial thing. I can't experience your eye the way I experience my eye.

Capital I, the ego. But I can experience it non primordially. Well, that's the same as experiencing my own. When I think of what I did yesterday and how much fun, then it's like there's another eye. It's just obviously per Locke. There's a continuity of memory and things that connects my past eye with my present eye. That doesn't connect your eye as I'm considering it with my eye. But there's still eyes that I'm considering non primordially. And once he gets on this, then there's gonna be a lot of parallels. So, so much of the book seemed like she was on a tangent from talking about actual empathy because she's talking about how is it the I, how is the self, the psychophysical individual, constructed as a being in space?

Just doing this full on phenomenology of perception. Like you know, prefiguring what you, you're going to see in, in Merleau-Ponty in Heidegger in a way that I'm like when is she going to start talking about empathy? But that's because there's such a strong Parallel between relating to yourself and relating to others or.

33:17 Dylan: Yeah, that's right. She's going to nail it down to Empathy is very much like we relate to ourselves or parts of ourselves. We've been using these words primordial and non primordial, and I think we've been using them consistently. But they're so important. I just want to give a couple quotes about it. So in seven, one of the ways she talks about it, this primordial givenness is there's ideation, which is the intuitive grasping of essential states. Insight into a geometric axiom is primordially given, as well as valuing. And finally, and above all, our own experiences as they are given in reflection have the character of primordiality.

All our own present experiences are primordial. She says what could be more primordial than experience itself? But not all experiences are primordially given nor primordial in their content. So that's memory, expectation and fancy do not have their object bodily present before them. They only represented. And this character representation is an immanent essential moment of these acts, not a sign of their objects. So it is possible for every experience to be primordially given. That is, it is possible for the reflecting glance of the I in the experience to be there bodily itself.

Furthermore, it's possible for our own experiences to be given non primordial in memory, expectations and fancy. So I think we've been consistent about using primordial in this way. The direct experience of myself. The easiest part for me was that my memory is not primordial. I'm experiencing. I'm using a primordial ability, that is my natural inherent ability to experience something. But when I am remembering something, I am not doing so in the direct act of actually experiencing it. My act of remembering is non primordial in that respect. It's reconstructed.

35:23 Mark: Or is it the object that's non primordial or is it the act? Because all acts that are performing right now are primordial. Right. I'm doing the remembering my present I. But the object is non primordial. This is what I'm a little unclear about. It's just whether.

35:37 Dylan: Well, when she says it is possible for our own experience is to be given non primordially in memory.

35:43 Seth: Yeah.

35:44 Dylan: So in the next section, the memory of a joy is primordial as a representational act now being carried out, carried out, though its content of joy is non primordial. Right. So my act of remembering it is primordial, but the content of the object is not Primordial.

36:03 Seth: Yeah. So we have to remember that Husserlian phenomenology is very heavily predicated on intentionality. So you can somehow sort of like substitute the idea of primordiality with like objectivity in the sense of when there's an act of consciousness, it is intentional, and there's a subject grasping or having some kind of interaction with an object. The object of any kind of conscious intentional act is always going to be present, primordial, etc. That's kind of, I think, what she means here. So when she says, like, I have a memory, the memory of, let's say this X is the experience I had in the past.

I graduated from college, it made me happy. Now I am remembering graduating from college. The remembering itself is primordial. It's a present conscious thing. But the content of that memory, which is the actual graduation and the emotional experience that I had at that time, are not primordial. I can represent. Re. Present those things to myself through this faculty of memory, but my experience of them in that state would not be primordial. Now I may get happy remembering it, and then that little tiny happiness that I have over the remembering would itself be primordial because it's happening presently.

Absolutely.

37:26 Dylan: That's exactly right. And you can see now, just in the way you described it, how you're going to get to empathy being like memory.

37:33 Seth: Totally. And it's. Yes.

37:36 Mark: And this gets fun because of the recursivity.

37:39 Dylan: Yeah.

37:39 Mark: I mean, I guess I could remember in the. When I was a kid, what did I think I would be when I turned 50. And then I could think that on my 50th birthday. So it's like I'm thinking of past representation of my current self, but it's not really of my current, like, you know, it was what I imagined, what I fancied that I might be. But in empathy I could. And this is, you know, again, I keep comparing it to the Hegel's building of self consciousness, but I empathize with somebody else who is looking at me in a certain way. And part of my empathy for them is to then see myself through their eye.

And I could even see how they see my view of them. Like, you think that I look down on you. I don't actually look down on you. You're wrong about this. But so we're using. We're constantly using empathy to build up ourselves by getting these images of ourselves from other people. He's not saying, like Hegel did, that we don't even have a self until somebody comes along and looks at us and points at us. But it does help reveal things about ourselves.

38:44 Seth: Mm. I mean, this was one of the things that I found. There are a lot of things I liked about this particular reading. It makes me want to read maybe some of her more mature work. It also makes me want to understand she was a student of Husserls and so was Scheler, and all this, like, Heidegger must have been floating around here somewhere at the same time. And I'm almost sure they probably had some kind of a strained relationship. But anyway, the idea that the mechanism of empathy is similar to the mechanism of memory and then how. It'd be interesting.

She doesn't explicitly address this, but when she has that section where she says, well, empathy is not analogy and empathy. Empathy is not association and empathy is not. But representation. The question then, of course, right, Is how do you build the capacity for representation? How does that get enriched? And then are we trying to explain the phenomenological experience of, like, why, in fact, do we represent what is going on with other people to ourselves? Why does that even happen?

39:42 Mark: Right. You're getting at this. Is it normative? Like, if you're asking why, like, is there a purpose? There's certainly a way. We just do. It's just part of our humanity. But it's definitely, like, in. By even putting it that way, it's like in our telos. So there is some sort of, I wouldn't want to say obligation, but it is part of self growth, self fulfillment to experience other people. And of course, it ends up being right again. We did this whole unit, I thought, because we were going to do ethics, because we were going to give a phenomenology of ethics.

And Brentano was the only one of these three, three we read so far that is just straightforwardly giving us an ethics. With Stein, as with Scheler, like, most of the time we're talking about these phenomena and how we connect with other people, and only as a side thing, only as sort of something in here, at the very end of the reading, do we get to. Oh, yeah, you know, and people are unique and valuable in themselves, and that's why we should appreciate them at the deepest possible level. Right. Some straightforward ethics. So in terms of why we would do this, for what is the normative purpose?

40:44 Seth: You can think of, like, why it wouldn't have to be normative. You could also think about it in terms I was of, like, evolution. Why did we evolve this capability? And brought me back to Tomasello, thinking about how Language works like. Because basically. And her description of empathy is very much in concert with Tomasello's description of language acquisition. We have language so that we can represent the inner states of others to ourselves and communicate with them. And empathy is the faculty by which we are able to grasp that others actually have.

And it differentiates us from the apes. So it's like, wow, it's just kind of like it. Interestingly, the whole phenomena of empathy has been completely sort of elevated and also simultaneously mystified to me by this whole experience. And it's making me think very deeply about what purpose does it serve. And you know, functionally, especially at the end where she says, you know, empathy, she kind of does get Hegelian. Right. Because you need empathy in order to understand yourself. It's a mechanism for self realization because you can see in others that which you lack in yourself or that which you aspire to in yourself or, you know, you can see a lack in others of what you yourself are capable of.

And it helps you understand your own limits and capabilities and.

42:04 Mark: And expand them.

42:06 Seth: And expand them. Yeah, it makes it possible for you to basically fulfill your. As you said. Now we can start talking about telos and that sort of thing. But this is really, to me, fascinating.

42:16 Dylan: On, on 10, she moves, she says now to empathy itself. She says it's primordial as present experience, so non primordial in content. And this content is an experience which again can be had in different ways, such as in memory, expectation, or in fancy. In the way we were just talking about it, we've mentioned that empathy is like perception. I can experiencing the world, but then there's this activity in perception that I'm also turning. Well, maybe this is the distinction we sense and perception. I'm turning, I'm perceiving objects. Right. And so in empathy you are perceiving objects and then they become part of your thinking.

And so like you, Seth, in reading both Scheler and Stein and I brought him up quite a bit just thinking about Tomasello and this inherent power that we have to represent it with empathy or being able to, as you pointed out, manifest in us with language as the way in which we think about objects that are not, strictly speaking, physical objects and write and reason about them.

43:30 Mark: Sure. I mean, there are things we. I primarily experience my own eye, not as a physical object. She's saying, you know, other people might say you actually only know you have an eye because you're in a body and you're.

43:42 Dylan: Exactly.

43:43 Mark: I think she. We skipped some of those parts. So I can't fully recreate what she says about that experience, but certainly it is relevant. I think we should wrap up our first part here. We should talk more about this. There's a lot more to get into in this project and in the Limits of Empathy, the how empathy more relates to our knowledge of ourselves. Please come back next week or if you become a Partially Examined Life Supporter, partially examined life.com support through our website or through Patreon, then part two should be in your feed right now or very soon. If you're doing it through Apple Podcasts, you'll still see it next week. Thanks, everybody.

44:19 Dylan: Thanks. Good night.

44:20 Seth: Thanks.