Empathy Not as a Weakness but as an Ecological Practice: Edith Stein’s Gift for the Carolinas
Why feeling "cut off" isn't just a human feeling these days
No matter your politics or religion or socio-economic status, we all speak often these days about feeling cut off… from neighbors, from forests, even from our own bodies. I know as a parent of young children and teenagers, I longily look back at the “good ole days” of my youth in the 80’s and 90’s when we backward-project about dreamy childhoods of bicycles and being out until dark wandering the neighborhood before the era of cell phones and smart watches. However, feeling cut off doesn’t have to be this way, and approaching the topic of religion, ecology and phenomenology offers a different path.
A century ago, Edith Stein argued that part of the antidote begins with Einfühlung, a disciplined act of letting another’s experience appear within our perception without dissolving the difference between “you” and “me.” For Stein, empathy is not sentimentality. It is a phenomenological doorway into what she called “foreign subjectivity,” and it grounds every genuine community we build, human or more-than-human.
Empathy has even come to be seen as a sort of evolutionary or genetic weakness in some political circles and thought bubbles. Stein urges us to reconsider that path towards mechanistic human ideation and projection, however. I think she is exactly right.
Stein, Husserl, and the Turn Toward Lived Experience
Stein extends Edmund Husserl’s insight that the world first arrives as a stream of immediate consciousness. Where Husserl worried about how we ever know another mind, Stein insisted we do so every day. We perceive a grieving friend’s slumped shoulders, interpret the posture as sorrow, and then feel the heaviness that is theirs in a secondary, non-primordial way. That double movement (perception… imaginative participation) is empathy’s core. It never collapses the boundary between two centers of experience, yet it binds them in a relational field.
Why Her Story Matters for Religion, Ecology, and Spirituality
Stein’s early phenomenology makes empathy a method: I do not merge with the other, human or more-than-human… I attend so carefully that their inner animation announces itself. Later, in Carmel, she reframes empathy as kenosis, an emptying that lets another’s reality impress itself on my own. These two moves illuminate today’s crises:
Alienated labour and “human resources.” When people are reduced to data points, Stein’s insistence that every consciousness is primordially alive calls us back to relationship.
Forests logged as board-feet, rivers ranked by “use class.” Her method invites us to perceive the Black River cypress-tupelo swamp or a Piedmont longleaf stand as centers of experience rather than standing reserve.
Climate fatigue and ecological grief. The Science of the Cross argues that genuine hope does not flee pain; it abides with it until new life can grow. That stance underwrites projects like the Cape Fear PFAS coalition or Charlotte’s Tree Canopy Action Plan, where citizens stay with the wound until policy shifts.
“Empathy is a kind of act of perceiving sui generis… it is the experience of foreign consciousness in general.” Edith Stein
These sentences bracket her journey: the first sets the intellectual frame, the second the spiritual depth. Taken together, they invite Carolinians to practice an empathic ecology and to meet rivers, pines, and neighbors as bearers of interiority, and to remain present even when that interiority groans.
From People to Pines, Rivers, and Marshes
Contemporary phenomenologists such as David Abram and Emmanuel Falque have pointed out that the same structure can open into ecological relationships. The pine that bends before a coastal storm, the salt marsh breathing with the tide, even the Cape Fear River carrying PFAS residues… each has its own rhythms. When we attend with Stein’s discipline, we let those rhythms “announce” themselves rather than treating them as data points or commodity flows.
Carolina Snapshots
Cape Fear River, NC – Water utilities spent millions to filter “forever chemicals,” only to watch new federal rollbacks delay stricter PFAS rules. Residents now face a decade-long wait for relief, a reminder of how policy can mute empathy for unseen biotic suffering.
Charlotte’s shrinking tree canopy – The Queen City has lost thousands of urban trees and is scrambling to draft a new protection plan. Without empathic regard, trees become line-items in a budget instead of living co-citizens moderating heat and absorbing CO₂.
South Atlantic Salt Marsh Initiative – A regional partnership is mapping one million acres of marsh for conservation. Their language of “living shorelines,” “wetland guardianship” is an institutional hint of Stein’s insight that marshes are subjects in the coastal story, not scenery.
Duke Energy’s latest petition – The utility’s February request to soften coal-ash rules shows what happens when corporate vision remains locked in resource logic… groundwater communities and river ecologies become expendable.
Practicing Empathic Ecology
Stein teaches that empathy is not a feeling we wait to surface; it is an active stance we take toward the appearing world. Practiced locally, it reframes “natural resources” as partners in a Carolina commons… and it nourishes the human desire to belong rather than to dominate.
Practicing empathic ecology begins as a quiet turning of attention… a resolve to let the world show itself before I impose my measurements or management plans. Edith Stein reminds me that empathy is not an emotion but a mode of perception. When I step onto the floodplain of the Congaree, I try to set aside the checklist that names every species in scientific Latin. Instead, I linger with the sweetgum that leans over the tannin-dark water and allow its particular tension, its year’s growth against gravity, its silent conversation with fungi at the root zone, to register in my awareness. The point is not to project my feelings onto the tree; it is to sense that the tree (they, not an it) is already conducting a life in which I am a guest.
Something similar happens on the streets of Spartanburg when a heat haze shimmers above the asphalt, and the street map tells only part of the truth. Walking, I attune to the slow wound of missing canopy along the curb. The absence itself carries a story… of ordinances deferred, of budget lines trimmed, of neighborhoods that once bore deeper shade. Stein’s discipline teaches me that empathy is possible even with a lack, with an ecological vacancy, because the city still aches with its memory of trees. I feel that ache in my own chest, not as guilt or sentimentality, but as a call to stand with the place in its longing for wholeness.
The practice matures when I sit at the kitchen table and pour a glass of tap water drawn from reservoirs from our watershed, of which we humans are an integral part. I pause long enough to recall the upstream tributaries, the micro-life that rides in every drop, the recent debates over PFAS standards that decide who carries toxic residues and who profits by delaying cleanup. To drink is to enter an exchange, and empathic perception stretches that moment into a covenant. My body joins a watershed that is already alive with its own aspirations for flow and clarity. Our bodies (even our bones) are mostly water, and we ourselves function as flowing bodies in a watershed as well.
In each instance, the forest pause, the urban walk, and the simple act of drinking water, I notice a shared grammar of vulnerability. The organisms, the landscapes, even the depleted patches of earth communicate a desire to flourish that is never fully my own yet always implicates me. Stein calls that double insight the safeguard against both romantic fusion and cold detachment. Empathic ecology, then, is a lifelong apprenticeship in reciprocity… a habit of letting the more-than-human world announce its secret interiority, and of answering not with control but with companionship.
“One can only gain a scientia crucis—knowledge of the cross—if one has thoroughly experienced the cross… Ave, Crux, spes unica.” Edith Stein
Links and references
NPR, “How empathy came to be seen as a weakness in conservative circles,” March 22, 2025 (npr.org) 🔗
WUNC, “EPA rolls back PFAS drinking water standards a year after the agency adopted them,” May 14 2025. (wunc.org) 🔗
WFAE, “New policies in the works to protect Charlotte’s trees as canopy continues to shrink,” June 10 2025. (wfae.org) 🔗
Marsh Forward!, “A Regional Plan for the Future of the South Atlantic Coast’s Million-Acre Salt Marsh Ecosystem,” March 2025. (marshforward.org) 🔗
WUNC, “Duke Energy asks EPA to roll back carbon pollution and coal ash regulations,” Feb 28 2025. (wunc.org) 🔗
Edith Stein, “On the Problem of Empathy" 🔗
Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross (Internet Archive) 🔗
Duke Energy’s stock performance lately…
