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

0:07 Mark: Hey, you're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 366, part 2. We have been discussing Edith Stein's life on the problem of empathy. And she had said that empathy was the non primordial experience of other people's mental life, of their emotions specifically. I guess I wanted to just before we get into more of the text ask. I compared it to epistemology of people saying, well, a direct realist would say I directly experience the objects in the world. An indirect realist is, no, I only perceive my own representations and those I think represent the things out in the world.

Why do you think. I mean, is that distinction the problems with that, why she wants to use this primordiality as opposed to indirect, like, in other words, do I. I directly am perceiving my own experience now I'm indirectly perceiving my past memory because I'm perceiving it through the lens of my memory. I'm indirectly perceiving your mental states because I'm perceiving it through the lens of your bodily expression. Something like that. I mean, could she have used indirect and direct just as easily as primordially or not?

1:17 Seth: I don't know. I don't like that. Direct and indirect to me has a slightly different connotation. Or just like I was saying, like talking about mediated versus unmediated, I feel like what she's trying to drive at is something more like, boy, it's hard to characterize. Again, I can only. I think of it in terms of this structure of intentionality that in every experience there will be something that is immediately present that is the direct object of the intentional conscious experience, whatever that may be. And in that sense it has a privileged relationship which we call primordial to the I, which we call primordiality.

But maybe connecting it to our own body would help make more sense of it. Because she uses the term content, right? It's like the content of the experience can be primordial or non primordial. In some sense, the experience itself is always primordial. But really what she's driving at is like, is this phenomena an experience that the I is having in a direct intentional relationship with its own perceptual or cognitive mechanism? Or is it an experience that it is attempting to represent? So is it present or is it re. Present? Right. Memory would fall in the same.

And in that sense primordiality in some sense is about presentation or representation.

2:48 Mark: So it seems though, if I have a. Okay, she's a phenomenologist, maybe this is going to cheat. But if I have a physical object in front of me, am I primordially experiencing that object? Qua phenomenon where we can. I guess I am right. Even though it's not my own mental workings. But in a sense, because she's a phenomenologist, it is. It's my own sensation. But I'm just. Because she's a phenomenologist, I'm not saying it's merely my own sensation and there's a real thing out there in the world, or I'm not saying I'm actually directly representing. So by saying it's primordial, I think maybe this is her way of translating unmediated or direct or indirect into phenomenology speak.

3:27 Dylan: Isn't your experience of the object primordial? Because in that way the apple is the object of that experience?

3:39 Mark: I think so. And it would be have to be though. But the unseen parts of the apple are non primordial experience, but they're still directly experienced. We don't want to say, well, I guess this was the question. Am I experiencing the back of the apple by way of the front of the apple? Is it mediated through the appearance of the front of the apple? Or do we want to just say, well, it's all direct. It's just that some of it is primordial. Some of it is, as you were saying, Seth, the stuff that's actually in Humean terms, like an actual appearance in front of me, which is only the front of the apple. And then Hume would say, we conclude, you know, we assume something about the back.

4:14 Dylan: So to me, this would get to the distinction between something like the notion of sense versus perception. So the seeing, the photons on your eye of the apple and are the sense, but the perception is of the apple. And I think she would say that the apple is primordially perceived.

4:34 Seth: I agree. It's not simply like the manifold or the field of perception kind of thing. You're having a primordial experience of an apple. Although in traditional philosophical terms we would say, of course, that that's already got so much mental content that it counts as a representation as opposed to nakedly present. I think for her, presentation and representation is really about. It's kind of a distance from the experience itself, not what kind of conceptual apparatus is required to construct the experience.

5:10 Mark: So I'm representing in memory, but it seems like I'm not representing the back of the apple and I'm not representing. Well, this is the question in empathy, that person who's experiencing the joy is having a primordial experience. And my primordial experience is of contemplating this other person and their experience, but my relation to their, you know, I'm experiencing their experience, their joy. Non primordial. So it's only. It seems like it's only by contrast, the way that you would put it, Seth, you know that if it's your own head. So even the picture of the apple or the picture of the human being in front of you, those are, in a sense, in my own head, they're primordial. He doesn't want to say in. Again, that would be violating phenomenology. We don't want to say in your own head. But yeah, so the things that are not that.

5:57 Seth: That are so. Exactly. Maybe the two words, is it direct and is it present? If the experience is directly happening to you and it's happening right now, in this moment, it's primordial. If it's indirect, even if it's present, as in the case of foreign experiences, then it's non primordial. It's non primordial, non primordial. Or if it's in the past, even if it's direct, like a memory, it's non primordial.

6:22 Dylan: Yeah. She talks about this distinction between content and object. So at the bottom of 10, when she turns to empathy. In her discussion of working her way up to empathy after having talked about similar things like memory and fancy and expectation, she says, here too, we are dealing with an act which is primordial as present experience. Though non primordial in content, this is empathy. And this content is an experience which again can be had in different ways, such as in memory, expectation or in fancy. Not that empathy is those things, but just like memory, expectation and fancy, which she had talked about earlier, you can have experience content differently.

When it arises before me all at once, it faces me as an object. Such as the sadness I read in another's face. But when I inquire into its implied tendencies, for instance, try to bring another's mood to give clear givenness to myself, the content, having pulled me into it, is no longer really an object. I am now no longer turned to the content, but to the object of it, am at the subject of the content, in the original subject's place. And only after successfully executed clarification does the content again face me as an object. So I think that's the distinction we're talking about, that when we are experiencing the content, it's primordial, but when we're turned to the object of it, it's not primordial.

And so like a memory, remembering something is primordial, but the content of that is non primordial. So I'm primordially engaging in a non primordial.

8:13 Mark: Sure. I think even though that sounds weird, I think we've said it enough times that people should understand.

8:19 Dylan: I think so. But maybe the reason we keep coming back to it is there is this recursiveness that is part of her account of empathy, which seems right, but that's why we keep coming back to it, because this is maybe the secret sauce of talking about empathy successfully is breaking it apart from sort of simplistic subjective objective distinctions. Right, Right.

8:47 Mark: So one of the things I think we said that is going to distinguish her from Scheller's account of sympathy is Scheler is just saying, you know, giving an experience of fellow feeling with another person, whereas she is concerned with a journey of exploration, that it starts out just like Scheler. I'm contemplating your experience as you are having it, I'm focused on you, but then I do enter into it. I'm at the content of your experience and I learn more about it and then I recede. And now I have this fuller picture of you as an individual. And as we've said, this tells me things about myself as well, which is also something Scheler does not really get into.

So dynamic. It is not merely like she asked a little later, is it a piece of knowledge? Is it an idea? Right. I just, I have an idea that you were upset. Well, then, yeah, somebody else she's criticizing like says it's not even emotional at all. Like Scheler has said that I don't actually feel your pain. That would be identification. And Stein agrees with that. But she doesn't want to go far as this Würzburg somebody later that she brings up and just say, well, it's just an idea that we have that you are in pain. No, that misses the second step, where you actually do enter into the other person's shoes for a second and not associated with when you were in pain.

I guess this was a question that. Seth, you said, I couldn't actually sympathize with your pain unless I'd been in pain myself. And then, Dylan, you were like, I don't know about that. Because this seemed to be a point of ambiguity, that there are ways in which, if I've just never experienced anything like what you are, then I'm not going to be able to go through that second step. I'm not going to be able to enter into your shoes. But it's also. We don't want to, as Scheller's warned us about. When I enter into your shoes, just think about, like, let me think about the past times when I was in pain.

I want to actually appreciate you and your experience, not just bring my own baggage.

10:46 Seth: Yeah. So I think what I was trying to say earlier was if you haven't developed as a human being and had experiences of your own where you went through ranges of emotions and experiences, your capacity for empathy, your both sensitive and expressive capacities of your empathetic facility will be stunted.

11:07 Dylan: Sure.

11:08 Seth: Now, in tying into what she says later. Right. And then talking about what Dylan mentioned earlier, which is, no, you're definitely born with the capacity for empathy. And it's very possible that we could say, look, even if you have no concept, by virtue of not having gone through an experience that somebody you're empathizing with has gone through, that in itself, your empathy will tell you that you are hitting the limits of your own empathetic capability and that there are places you could conceivably go. Like we could say you have this innate empathetic ability to recognize that something is happening, positive or negative, put some kind of value on it.

Right. Because there is this discussion of value, and then recognize that that's not in your experience. And maybe you don't want it to be in your experience, or maybe you do. But I guess what would be stunted would be your ability to try to represent. Actually, I just talked myself out of my own point of view. Isn't it wonderful to be willing to be wrong? So there's a sense in which what I said earlier about developing your capability for empathy and having all these life experiences so that you can know exactly what somebody else is feeling is really based on a mistaken understanding of what empathy is, which is either association or analogy.

One of the things she dismisses I think it's in chapter three, right, where she says, well, it's not unity and oneness. You're not merging, literally or figuratively merging with the other person. It's not imitation. You don't have an empathetic experience and then imitate what's going through them. It's not association, and which would involve the actual function of memory. You would see somebody experiencing something and then you would remember your own experience of it. And it's not analogy, but instead you can empathize. And in fact we do all the time, as I think one of you mentioned, you can empathize with people having experiences that you have never had and never will have.

I can empathize with a woman who loses a child to a miscarriage, but I don't do it by association, analogy, imitation, any of those things. And I could never have the experience to build up the characteristics that would allow me to have anything like that.

13:26 Dylan: That's exactly right. And so on 11 where she's sort of. To me, she's really nailing how she's talking about empathy. So she says empathy is a kind of act of perceiving. Empathy, which we examine and sought to describe is the experience of foreign consciousness in general, which I think you led off with Seth. The experience which an I in general has of another I in general looks like this. This is how man grasps the psychic life of his fellow man. So that just sounds like what you described. I do want to also bring up the fact that almost out of the blue, but maybe reminding us that Edith Stein is a canonized saint who.

14:14 Mark: Well, not yet, but.

14:15 Dylan: Yeah, no, not yet, but she becomes. She converts to Catholicism and then becomes a canonized saint after having been executed in Auschwitz in 1942. She goes on to bring God in also as a believer. He grasps the love, the anger and the command of his God in this way. And God can grasp man's life in no other way. As the possessor of complete knowledge. God is not mistaken about men's experiences as men are mistaken about each other's experiences. But men's experiences do not become God's own either, nor do they have the same kind of givenness for him. So she links up empathy and the way in which we have primordial, non primordial experience as the way in which God interacts with us. Though God is never mistaken in his non primordial experiences.

15:09 Mark: Yeah, you think God by definition knows everything, right? He knows all your secret thoughts, but he knows them non primordially. They do not have the same kind of givenness for God.

15:19 Dylan: Exactly. Right. Yes.

15:21 Mark: So there are limits to God's. You can't know me the way I know me God, because you're not finite. You're not stuffed into my little brain. You don't have, you know.

15:30 Dylan: And that little twist there, you know, makes the distinction. You know us as entities being distinct from God, but still, you know, has the notion of God knowing who we are. But it's very interesting that we grasp God in this way and God grasps us in this way. I mean, empathy is an example of the way in which we know God and God knows us. I didn't expect that at all when I got to that section.

15:58 Mark: Yeah. Because we ran into a similar thing with Scheler that he wants to make it, even though in both cases they're prototypical. Examples are there's somebody right in front of you in pain or having joy, and how do you experience them? But he wants us to be able to. He wants to recognize that. And Stein now wants to recognize that we can relate to historical figures. We can relate to people that we've never met. I just mentioned hearing there was a flood across the world. And then I empathize with the people whose homes were destroyed. You don't even know who they are. How can you empathize? But you can.

16:29 Dylan: You can.

16:29 Mark: So it's an interesting question of how much of this book is providing material that is tangential to considering those prototypical cases, but is to allow. So this last chapter, we haven't really said anything about the structure of the book before that we've all just been talking about chapter two. So chapter one was, I guess, about the history of how people treated empathy in her dissertation and was removed from publication. And at least in our version, they just started with chapter two. So you have to. I was like, is the authors for the one page.

And Seth had to remind me that, oh, no, it actually Sundays. So chapter two, which is only 35 pages long, is. Is laying out her theory of empathy and comparing it to a bunch of other people's, Lipps and Scheler and other people. Then she goes on for 50 plus pages on the constitution of the psychophysical individual. So talking about the pure I, the stream of consciousness, the I and the living body. All this, what I said, is, you know, her prototype of Merleau Ponty's phenomenology of perception of, like, what it is to compose a person. And it's mostly your experience of yourself.

It's only, like, way into that. So we Sort of skipped ahead. I had suggested section L in that chapter, the foreign living body as the conveyor of phenomena of expression. So, all right, at least we're now talking about other people and their emotions again. But so much of it is like, we're building up this. And then chapter four, Empathy is the comprehension of mental persons. So she's again talked about the psychophysical individual, which is supposed to. Right, includes the psycho already. So what's left? Well, there's mental persons. And she starts this chapter off.

This is just the last 30 pages of the book or so, which we did read, talking about history and how people make sense of history. And I'm like, why is this in here? And I guess it's just because key to empathy is like making sense of a person. Yes, I could sympathize with. I guess if you see an animal in pain, you probably can figure out why it's pain. I mean, at least there's something physically going on with it. But if you're indignant about something, then I have to make sense of your motivations. I have to be able to fit. I have to understand how people tick psychologically a little bit.

Otherwise, like, so we would not understand. If we were little ants and the equivalent of human beings who are so much more emotionally developed than we were came along, we would not understand them. We can't really understand the motives of God. God is too huge. But we can think about the motives of Caesar. We can sympathize with Caesar, apparently.

19:07 Dylan: Yep.

19:07 Seth: Sympathize or empathize.

19:09 Mark: Sorry, empathize. Right. We could not enter into fellow feeling with Caesar, can we? Anyway, that was a digression to just get into what all weird stuff is in this book. Because once if I say I can sympathize with Caesar, then, well, as Scheler said, like, I could sympathize with Jesus because I'm sort of walking his path, even though I don't know anything about the historical Jesus. But I, you know, enough has been passed down to me about his personality and his teachings that I can. I could get on board with that. And I can. I guess Stein wants to say we have similar knowledge of God's self.

19:42 Seth: Well, I guess it might be a decent point to just stop and ask, like, where are we going with all of this? Is this just. And this gets back to the question of why? And we didn't read the rest of the book, but is this just basically a big explication in her phenomenological terms of how empathy works? At which point we Say, great, this is like a, you know, textbook for a class? Or is there some fallout? Is there some, you know, some conclusion we're going to get to? Like, okay, empathy is not all the things that all these other people said it was.

Here's how it works, here's what it does. And this means that Nazis are bad or we should be doing this? Is it the, you know, is the big conclusion that empathy is the mechanism whereby we connect with otherness and otherness is required for selfness because of this, that last bit of chapter four, or whatever it was that we read? I mean, I'm not sure.

20:39 Mark: Doesn't the same issue come up with Heidegger, for instance? Like, yeah, you could draw normative conclusions from Heidegger. Don't be inauthentic. Don't fall in with the they. But I think reading Heidegger is like, I'm just doing pure phenomenology. I'm just describing what the human condition is. And so I feel like this was something that the phenomenologists in particular before World War II, before everything from Arendt and Beauvoir and Sartre has to be about. How do we never fall prey to the evils of Nazism again at this more innocent time.

Yeah. Which is still like, they had World War I recently, you know, could be just like, yeah, descriptive psychologists have been doing it wrong. This is my dissertation and I'm going to. Now, on this firm basis that Husserl has given us for phenomenology, I'm going to lay out the right thing. And she does get into some areas that we might find more practical. That the very end of the book is about is kind of like Scheler was making that distinction between, well, I could just sympathize with you. Your sort of surface level condition, like, oh, your home was destroyed by a flood, I feel sorry for you.

Or I could actually grasp you as an individual, which seemed like it had some sort of religious significance. And the very end of this book gets very specific about that, that there is something about individuals that is not just their species being. It is about, like, the form of Sethness, the form of Dylan Ness, you know, and that's actually what makes you. And it's not made up by your qualities, the things that you've gone through. It seems like it is. We don't want to go metaphysical. We're still doing phenomenology here. It seems like it is your individual soul.

So this is what. Eventually she's giving a phenomenology of moral experience in that just as Kant says, you know, every human being is an end in itself, is an irreplaceable individual. From what I understand. This is. I just watched a lecture on YouTube about this. This is the thing that she ran with. And so in her more mature work that she like, like Scheler also has some work that's about, you know, the. I think Schellers was called the Eternal in Man. I'd have to look up what the name of Stein's was for magnum opus, but is very explicitly religious.

The Finite and Eternal Being is the name of her magnum opus. So, yes, if you want to get at what her ultimate ethics is and how it's based in this picture of the human being. But I think this is ultimately why she has the separate chapter on the psychophysical individual. Well, this is the phenomenon that we run into. But then actually it is like there's an individual soul with a telos that can get exposed or not exposed. Maybe some people are like, as she says, unfinished works of art. And empathy is going to be one of the things that helps unleash aspects of your personality, that helps unfold you as the individual flower that you are.

23:38 Seth: I just keep going back to Tomasello on this and thinking about evolutionarily, like, you know, if you think of empathy as an evolutionary capacity that developed and language, let's say, is the. Is part and parcel. I have to think about how they might all be related. It's like you want to say, then that puts us in the realm of human exceptionalism. Like, oh, we're the only people that have symbolic representational language. But we don't want to necessarily say we're the only species that experiences empathy. I don't think. Anyway.

24:11 Dylan: No, you don't have to do that. I mean, Tomasello was explicit about that. There is even among apes and maybe some other organisms, the forming of community and the perception of the other and the senses that they have of that is of a next level. But human beings, our form of ape is exceptional in the end because of the recognition of others.

24:41 Seth: Well, we're exceptional because of the development of a way of explicitly representing.

24:48 Dylan: Yes, yes.

24:49 Seth: Representing the internal life, you know, the internal states of others.

24:53 Dylan: Yes, yes.

24:54 Seth: And that's what I find interesting is like, I feel very confident that my dogs can empathize in the sense that dogs know when you're in a good mood and a bad mood and they know when you're in pain for.

25:05 Dylan: And same thing for other dogs too.

25:08 Seth: Yeah. So I just think it's. I think I Might have over determined reading backwards through the lens of Tomasello and all the other stuff we've done. Kind of read into this more than maybe there is, but this idea that I would be curious how we could take Stein's account of empathy and talk about it in terms of dog to dog or something like that. Because we would have to say it's a basic built in faculty, it's something they're born with. And I got so wrapped up in this and so wrapped up in this thesis about signs and signification, which is my big hang up and the language acquisition bit and all that. I think I made it more. Now I have to rethink. Maybe I have to bring it down a notch from where I mean it

25:58 Dylan: is going to be really tied up with how memory is working and the way in which memory is forming present experience as well as generating, activating your agency. And this isn't really what we're talking about here. But what's the difference between the way in which memory is working and the way in which I'm constructing my experience that I prepare for actions now such that my kid graduates from high school and graduates from college versus I'm a salmon and I need to get to the headwaters of the river to spawn. What's the difference between those two things?

I submit that the first one is a kind of phenomena that Tomasello would be pointing to that is activating our agency in our higher level of interaction and be able to perceive what the future state of our child is and looks like. And taking actions, exerting our agency to develop their agency for that and that it's not, you know, with the salmon we would be talking about start going down the road of instinctual or hormonal or stuff like that. But there is something. They are being drawn and they are taking actions towards doing something. So there is something like agency, which Tomasello would say yes, absolutely.

They have agency that is being activated that takes them up that river. Right, but that's why he has this evolutionary account of it that all of these things, an amoeba has agency. Right.

27:37 Seth: Okay.

27:37 Mark: But Stein is.

27:38 Dylan: I don't think Stein's not going to do that.

27:40 Mark: It's not going to agree with that. Right. Because the fact that everything is causally rational, like obeys causal laws can be studied scientifically. That is not an invitation for empathy. It's sort of. I was saying that, well, you can't empathize with the rock just because it's falling according to causal laws. So insofar as animals are acting merely as causal insofar as they seem. But if they're in pain, that seems different. Right. For that, we actually can sympathize with that because that brings in motivation. They don't want to be in pain.

Do they want to get to the top of the salmon? I mean, maybe we can empathize a little with the struggle, But I guess this brings in how much are we, in any case of empathy? How much are we projecting? Right. She warns us against projecting, but it seems like the fact that you could be wrong, that we can't actually directly, primordially experience somebody else's purposiveness. You know, I might grasp unerringly that you are in fact in pain, but it's a mental pain, and it's because you're disappointed about something. And I would have to know all about your circumstances and your plans and your purposiveness.

For the most developed kind of empathy, we have to grasp each other. Yes. In their plans. And not just being caused materially, but being caused rationally. Being caused by having a coherence in your motivations.

29:05 Dylan: Yeah. So you reconstruct their I.

29:08 Mark: And you can't simply. You can't empathize with somebody if they're being crazy. He specifically says that if their actions make no sense according to any motivations, then, well, that's like they're a malfunctioning machine. You can't actually empathize with that.

29:21 Dylan: Yeah. You might be able to think about what they're doing, but it's not an act of empathy.

29:27 Seth: Yeah, I feel like there was some point we're talking about those acts of judgment that are part of active empathy. She says somewhere that empathy does require you to be able to, like, characterize. There is an act whereby you. You have to have some recognition of the thing and some identification. Like, you don't just empathize with something that you don't even know is a subjectivity of any sort. So if there is some level of judgment that goes on. And then she has the section in the latter half and the last chapter about the characteristics of feeling that are associated.

So there's relation to depth, reach, and duration. So it's like if you just talk about when we feel something, you know, phenomenologically you can feel something more or less strongly. You can feel something for an individual or for many or for some or for types or for things that have certain experiences. And then feelings typically have. You know, they start and they end. They don't last forever. And I Think that notion is intended to illuminate how the emotive side of empathy works. That I might say, oh, I feel for you. Right. That's a turn of phrase.

I feel for you what you're going through. But of course I can feel for you, but not feel with the same intensity or for the same amount of time that you're experiencing it. A primordial experience presumably would be more intense, longer lasting, more associated with a direct object.

31:03 Mark: I thought she specifically said that was. I mean, you're right, it tends to be. But it certainly doesn't have to be that you.

31:09 Seth: No, no, exactly. Yes.

31:10 Mark: Yeah.

31:11 Dylan: I thought when we started going down to the end of the book and talking about value, I thought we were beginning to make the link to ethics.

31:19 Mark: Let's make sure to do that. Yes, please.

31:22 Dylan: And to me the connection is going to be about judgment because that's going to be about action. The way in which we would make empathy would be part of the powers we have for making judgments about actions that affect our own actions and our expectations of the actions of others would be the way in to talking about ethics. What you ought to do.

31:51 Mark: Right. She never gets full on normative about this, but she does. When we are hooked into somebody's motivations, right, to empathize with them again, we have to be aware of them as a rational, not a rational being, because it could be emotions, but motivated by some coherent human plan, human constitution. Let's say that in fact, here's. I'm just looking at where I quoted the word value in my notes here, page 98, a summary. We have sketched the constitution of personality in outline. So what is it about a person that makes them so special that we.

The thing that we're hooking on to when we empathize, we have found it to be a unity based in experience and further distinguished by its subordination to rational laws. Right. Motivations, person and world, more exactly, value world were found to be completely correlated. An indication of this correlation is sufficient for our purposes. Hence it follows that it is impossible to formulate a doctrine of a person for which we naturally take no responsibility here without a value doctrine, and that the person can be obtained from such a value doctrine.

The ideal person, with all his values in a suitable hierarchy and having adequate feelings would correspond to the entire realm of value levels. So she's saying, look, I'm not going to give an ethics here, it's outside of my scope, but this is very relevant.

33:10 Dylan: Yeah, I can see ethics from here is basically what she's saying

33:16 Mark: page 99, during empathy, I'm given a level of the person and a range of values, in principle experienceable by him. This in turn meaningfully motivates the expectation of future possible volitions and actions. So I'm grasping the person's values. And yeah, the very first thing Scheler had said is you think all ethics is based on sympathy or empathy. Well, if you're sympathizing with someone who's doing evil, that's bad. Don't do that. So this discussion that we've had of like, well, what are the limits of. Yeah, you're probably not going to. Actually, if you read Mein Kampf and you see Hitler's inner life, hopefully you're not really like, empathizing with him because.

Because he's expressing all this bilious. You would definitely be tapping into something. Your own resentments and yeah, your resonant. So, yeah, I guess it's possible it's somebody's diary, basically to sympathize with, to empathize with this guy. But maybe don't. You're compromising yourself ethically if you do that. So it's not always good to expand your horizons. I tend to feel like that it is the joy of literature as opposed to the diary of a real person. But like, yeah, okay, so there was a movie that's entirely Maniac, I think it was called from the point of view of a serial killer.

Like literally the camera through the person's eyes. It was Elijah Wood in the remake, but there was an older version of it. And where do you want to put yourself? I mean, isn't that morally compromising to do that? Well, no, because it's literature. And if you use this to exorcise your own demons, how you wish you were a serial killer, that's much better than you going out and actually killing people.

34:56 Dylan: Well, there's also that movie and you know, various other shows, Manhunter. Right. Where his. His superpower was basically being able to, as a detective was be able to get into the headspace of such a person as a way of figuring out what they were going to do. Which of course causes in the conceit in the show, of course causes him all kinds of grief.

35:22 Mark: I think as a closing thing, we should try to get. Because even the fact that at this point, two hours into our discussion, I'm saying sympathy or empathy. Since there's a section on Scheler in here and we read Scheler, let's at least kind of review what we understand of how. How Stein is Different or similar to what we read about in Scheler. Is that worth. I mean we know that they both don't like identification. We know that they both don't like, don't want to say sympathy or empathy is just either projecting your own feelings onto somebody else or losing yourself in them.

Like these are both, these are things we can do psychologically but they're not sympathy or empathy. And I think I said that the difference between sympathy and empathy according to her is that sympathy is only one step of it. Whereas empathy is. Has this knowledge aspect that's going in having your expectation fulfilled and then coming out with a richer understanding of somebody. I don't know if Scheler would really disagree with that because for Scheler the deepest kind of sympathy is not just I hear that your house was destroyed by a flood.

That would be terrible for anybody. I feel for you but like I grasp your individual personhood. Scheler also, like Stein, has this very individualized, probably Christian soul oriented view of personhood. Were you so unmotivated by like what she had to say about Scheler and that you just don't.

36:45 Seth: I don't care how they were kind of. I mean I think she got into it and I just kind of glossed it but I thought you could. I mean wasn't it sort of. She's basically saying that Shaler's own. He's just a little too psychological. He's not really. He's not doing phenomenology so much as he's doing psychology or she felt like it wasn't foundational enough in the sense of, you know, setting the foundations for a science, whatever this phenomenology is supposed

37:09 Dylan: to do or did I.

37:10 Seth: Am I confusing another part of the reading?

37:13 Mark: It could very well be that it's not like this other character that she. We could characterize Scheler in the way. I don't care what this person's name, Würzburg or something like that. Who says actually there's no emotion involved. That first sign to empathize is to non primordially experience an emotion. Whereas for Scheler it is as you just said, it's more knowledge. Like I know that you are having an emotion. I'm focused on that emotion. So is Scheler being too clinical according to Stein? Stein is.

37:46 Seth: Well, we can go to one of the criticisms she has of him which comes across on page 27 and 28 is his concept of the I that his characterization of the I that has, you know, inner perception and experience is she says a psychic individual. And he speaks of experience that is present before eyes are constituted. So in her mind, he's still wrapped up in this. Like, there's a world and there's a consciousness that comes into that world. And she's. Remember, she's trying to get her concept of the I is this very, very minimal phenomenological unity of experience. And that doesn't presuppose the existence of anything else. Like it's.

38:31 Mark: Is it the Kantian transcendental ego, I think accompanies every one of my perceptions, even if I'm not explicitly thinking of it. But it's always every experience is owned. Is that that's what I associate it with?

38:43 Seth: Yes, I think so. And then I think she. Remember, we talked about deception, but to the listeners, we didn't talk nearly as much about deception in this conversation as is represented by the conversation of it in the text. There's quite an extensive. She goes on and on and on. But I think she thinks that Scheler can't really. The way he describes how it works, he can't account for the fact that people can be deceived or his account has gaps. I think if we had put more on Scheler in terms of what we were banking on, but I didn't, I would. It would be more interesting to go through this in more depth. But this isn't like Hegel and Fichte.

39:25 Mark: Well, one place I noticed. So there's a footnote on page 17 where we actually discussed in our discussion, can we actually share a joy, or is it that each of us has our own, our team wins and we both big fans and we're in the bar together. Are we having a shared joy or am I having my joy and you're having your joy? So she says Scheler thinks that there's real shared joy. We can have strictly the same feeling, yet the two subjects are still retained. However, he does not consider that the unified act does not have the plurality of the individuals for its subject, but a higher unity based on them.

So she elaborates, has the I been freed from its monadic character? So this is referring to Scheller's. And I think this only came up in, like the intro of the book we read. It's from his ethics book or something, the formalism book that we didn't read this idea that yes, before we identify our individual I, we just have ideas and we don't know are they my ideas. Like, we got a little about this in, you know, all this talk of identification and the fact that we could inherit like your parents, prejudices and stuff like that. So yes, there are senses in which we have to develop a sense of self and decide, yes, this was actually my idea, but we still, very primordially, for Stein, we know which experiences are mine and which are somebody else's.

That's just basic phenomenology. There's no point at which we are confused about this and have to. I don't know, I mean, babies. Do they. This is. Scheler claims that a baby in utero or just considers the mother and the child to be the one being and doesn't make any distinctions between that. But I don't know if I buy that. I think I might be on Stein's side. I think that once you develop the ability to think coherently at all phenomenologically, your I is attached only to your experiences. You're never actually confused. Even if it had its ultimate source that like, well, this idea I had only is because somebody else told me to it or it's an emotion that leeched off from somebody else, still it is mine.

All right, so can. Has the I been free from its monadic character? Not entirely. Stein says, I feel my joy while I emotionally grasp the others and see it as the same. And seeing this, it seems that the non primordial character of the foreign joy has vanished. Indeed, this phantom joy coincides in every respect with my real live joy. And theirs is just as live to them as it is to me. Now I intuitively have before me what they feel. It comes to life in my feeling. And from the I and you arises the we as a subject of a higher grade. Yeah, so this seems weird for Stein to be saying that there is a higher.

This sounds like Hegel or something like that. There could be a. Oh yeah, it's not me that's feeling the shared feeling, it's the we. But it's, you know, it's the we of the Geist that is like, yeah, I still am an individual and you're an individual. It's just we have created a society and we've designated the emotion to be held by this society that we have in common. It just seems very strange. And if she's saying, well, Scheler didn't have anything like that, so my theory is better, like, well, you got to explain much more of this Stein. And she doesn't elaborate on this to my knowledge, but maybe this was part of what happens.

What we've already talked about, how we expand ourselves is maybe actually we have different capacities for joy. So I think this is another quote. Joyfulness may be more richly accessible to others, which difference I grasp empathically. I empathically arrive at the sides of joyfulness, obstructed in my own joy. This ignites my joy. And only now there is complete coincidence with what is empathized. If the same thing happens to the others, we empathically enrich our feelings so that we now feel a different joy from I, you, and he, in isolation.

But I, you and he are retained in the we. A we, not an I, is the subject of the empathizing. Not through the feeling of oneness, but through empathizing do we experience others.

43:18 Dylan: So it seems to me she's trying to make a different account of what was the thing with Scheler, which was

43:25 Mark: the fellow feeling is how he describes empathy is that.

43:27 Dylan: But the experience of like a mob mentality. He says contagion is not fellow feeling. But she seems to be wanting to make it more. One thing, part of empathy is what he would have considered contagion.

43:45 Mark: I think we were saying that at the time that he was like, if I go into a bar because I want the happiness of the people in the bar to make me happy, well, that's not sympathizing with them. That's not being a fellow feeling with them. That's just wanting to be. To catch their happiness disease, their happiness condition. But we were saying, don't you. When you go into the bar, you actually talk to people. You don't just sit among them and try to soak in there. You try to actually relate to them. And the fact that I'm right now having some ennui and I'm not able to, you know, it's Christmas season and I don't feel the Christmas spirit.

Charlie Brown, what do I do? You know, I go among people and I don't just catch their Christmas spirit. I relate to them. I empathize. I see the other side. Oh, the other side. The true meaning of Christmas. The other side of Christmas. I catch from empathizing with you and thereby I'm able to build it up in myself. And it's like, now we have the brotherhood of man. That's what Christmas is about.

44:40 Dylan: Yeah. I honestly did not pay very much attention to this part of the book and this particular criticism of Scheler. And I agree with you that she doesn't in the rest that I read, doesn't really get into this distinction.

44:54 Mark: All right. Well, as Wes and I are on close reads, have started to read Scheler talking about the Eye himself. So maybe we will get a little bit of an idea on how Scheler thinks he's different from Kant about this. So maybe through that we can get a little more of this idea. I mean, I think we started reading that this is his, you know, Formalism, his ethics book to get at his idea of the personality. But maybe we will get more of this stuff that Stein is criticizing about the confusion that apparently we have between ourselves and other people and how we relate to others.

Let's just give our closings. I wish I was more excited about Stein. I'm looking at her overall biography and I see that, right, obviously this is just her early work and she's really just trying to do right by Husserl and connect his work with something very practical, maybe that Husserl didn't talk as much about. But then she, you know, had this full on conversion. And so I see that she has three works in a row that had to do with connecting Husserl with Thomas Aquinas. So maybe we better at least read some Thomas Aquinas before we ever even considering reading more Edith Stein.

So knowledge and faith, potency and act and then that magnum opus published until after her death. Finite and eternal being. So just like I'm kind of curious about Scheller's theology, I'm kind of curious about Stein's theology, but I'm never going to be super curious about anybody's theology. That's what it comes down to.

46:23 Seth: Yeah. No, I feel exactly the same way. Like, it's like I want to put her in my pantheon of female Jewish heroes kind of, you know, like with Hannah Arendt. And I can't. So it's sad. And I really, you know, this is the way I like in a lot of respects, this is the kind of philosophy that gets me excited. It so reads like a PhD thesis and it makes. I was reading it and I was thinking, could I have written this when I was 24, 28, whatever it was we were when we were in grad school, would I've been able to pull something like this off? And I think I probably could have written something like this.

Maybe I shouldn't have bailed. Maybe I should have been fully examined like Dylan. And then at the same time it's also like, it's the work of a young philosopher, so to speak. You can see it and you're like excited about what it could build to as we've done with other philosophers. But if she's going to convert to Christianity and go the God route, then I can give it a pass.

47:19 Mark: Any final thoughts? Dylan, do you want to read more? Stein Ever based on this?

47:23 Dylan: I'm not like it was fine.

47:26 Seth: Okay.

47:27 Mark: All right. Next time we're actually going to continue considering the relationship between ethics and emotions, but we're going to get away from Germany and go back in time to one of the original texts people were reacting to. I know we've done some Hume on ethics in the past, but we're going to do Hume's inquiry concerning the principles of morals. Thanks, everybody. Reach out to us. Let us know what you want us to cover. Pel partially examined life.com Comment on the blog post associated with this at partiallyexaminedlife.com Reach out through Twitter, through Facebook, through Instagram, whatever you would like. Good night, everybody.

48:01 Seth: Good night.

48:02 Dylan: Good night.