What Empathy Is For
On the Feast of Edith Stein, August 9
The church keeps a martyr’s feast on the day of her death... the dies natalis, or the birthday into the life that doesn’t end. So August 9 belongs to Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), who was killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau on this day in 1942. I’ve spent some time out under the black walnut this morning with my water bottle and a book, and the book today was hers: On the Problem of Empathy, the dissertation she defended at Freiburg in the summer of 1916, when she was twenty-four years old and Edmund Husserl’s assistant and had not yet read Teresa of Ávila or heard of Carmel. It’s become one of the load-bearing texts of my own work (The Ecology of the Cross), and this morning I found myself marking passages I’ve marked before, the way you wear a path into a yard by walking the same line to the same tree.
“Our uniform, isolated stream of consciousness is not our soul. But, as we already saw in examining inner perception, among our experiences there is one basic experience given to us which, together with its persistent attributes, becomes apparent in our experiences as the identical “bearer” of them. This is the substantial soul.”
What she’s after in that early book sounds technical, but it's anything but. How is my body constituted within consciousness? German gives her two words where English sorta conflates without an adjective: Körper, the physical body, one object among objects, and Leib, the living body, the one I don’t observe so much as inhabit.
“How is my body [Leib] constituted within consciousness?”
A living body perceived only from outside, she writes, would always remain a peculiar physical thing and never “my living body.” My sensations are never in the I... they’re localized somewhere, in a hand, behind the eyes, near the I, but never inside it... and all of them gather into the unity of the Leib, which surrounds what she calls the zero point of orientation. Everything spatial arranges itself around that zero point. The yard I’m looking at this morning, the fence line, the other walnuts down the slope, the walnut’s first fork about nine feet up near our children’s tire swing: all of it is given to me from here, from a point that can’t itself be located on any map of my body, because it’s where the maps are drawn from.
“A living body [Leib] only perceived outwardly would always be only a particularly disposed, actually unique, physical body, but never “my living body.””
And this is where the walnut enters, as it enters everything I write. The tree stands about 50 yards from our back door, and by Stein’s own careful account, I can only ever perceive it outwardly. Its bark, its compound leaves going ragged in the August heat, the green hulls hardening toward fall: all Körper, on a strict reading. But the whole burden of her dissertation is that outward perception isn’t the end of the story.
“To speak of distance from “me” is inexact because I cannot really establish an interval from the “I,” for it is non-spatial and cannot be localized. But I relate the parts of my living body, together with everything spatial outside of it, to a “zero point of orientation” which my living body surrounds. This zero point is not to be geometrically localized at one point in my physical body; nor is it the same for all data. It is localized in the head for visual data and in mid-body for tactile data. Thus, whatever refers to the “I” has no distance from the zero point, and all that is given at a distance from the zero point is also given at a distance from the “I.””
Empathy, Einfühlung, is the act in which foreign experience is given to me... in which another zero point of orientation announces itself inside my field, a center I can orient toward but never occupy. She works this out for other human beings, and cautiously for animals. My whole project has been to ask how far the act stretches, and under what discipline: whether a chastened, trained Einfühlung can give me the walnut as a center of its own life, drawing water, timing its year, holding its ground chemically against competitors, and never once as an object that exists for my perception of it. I keep insisting that perception precedes ethics, that we can’t be argued into caring for what we’ve never actually perceived as living. Stein is the philosopher who shows what that perception is made of, seam by seam. She gives the phenomenology of the thing that Thomas Berry and Lanham give the practice of with their ecotheologies.
“Since sensation is always spatially localized “somewhere” at a distance from the “I” (perhaps very near to it but never in it), I can never find the “I” in it by reflection. And this “somewhere” is not an empty point in space, but something filling up space. All these entities from which my sensations arise are amalgamated into a unity, the unity of my living body, and they are themselves places in the living body.”
Her feast asks us to hold the whole life together, though, and the whole life runs from Freiburg to Auschwitz. She read Teresa of Ávila’s autobiography through a single night in 1921 and closed it, saying she had found the truth. She was baptized in 1922, joined the Cologne Carmel in 1933, and the same year, the race laws ended her teaching. In the convent, she wrote Finite and Eternal Being, a phenomenologist’s long ascent through Aquinas, in which she argues that every finite creature can reflect only a fraction of the divine nature, so that God’s unity appears in creation as broken into countless rays.
I don’t know a better one-sentence warrant for biodiversity in the whole theological tradition. The manuscript of Kreuzeswissenschaft, her study of John of the Cross, was unfinished on her desk when the SS came to the Echt convent on August 2, 1942, in reprisal for the Dutch bishops’ public protest of the deportations. She died a week later with her sister, Rosa. The church calls her a martyr, μάρτυς, which is simply the Greek word for witness (lexical form μάρτυς, μάρτυρος for my fellow nerds): one whose perception of the truth was so complete that her body was conscripted into the testimony.
“But the living body is constituted in a two-fold manner as a sensed (bodily perceived) living body and as an outwardly perceived physical body of the outer world.”
In The Science of the Cross, she says that a science becomes a science of the cross when the mystery of the cross becomes its inner form, a living energy that shapes the soul by what the soul receives. I’ve borrowed that architecture without apology. An Ecology of the Cross is knowledge of the living world whose inner form is kenosis (κένωσις, from κενόω, to empty), knowledge shaped by what it receives rather than by what it seizes. And I don’t think it’s an accident that the one place Paul lets creation itself speak, it speaks in empathy’s grammar. Romans 8:22: πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις συστενάζει καὶ συνωδίνει, all creation groans together and labors together (the textual forms συστενάζει and συνωδίνει, from συστενάζω and συνωδίνω). The prefix σύν here does so much work for what I think Paul is implying directly. The groaning is shared, consensual in the old sense, and felt-with. Paul is claiming that the creation has an inner life that can be suffered alongside, and Stein, decades before her conversion, was building the philosophical framework that makes such a claim more than poetry.
The walnut doesn’t know it’s St. Edith’s Feast Day. It’s doing what it does every ninth of August in the Piedmont: finishing nuts it began in April, provisioning squirrels it will never meet, casting shade it can’t feel onto a human it can’t see. But I know, and the knowing changes the sitting. She said once that all who seek truth are seeking God, whether it’s clear to them or not, and elsewhere she left the line I return to more than any other: refuse any truth that lacks love, and any love that lacks truth. Under this tree, on her day, that reads as a method. Perceive until truth and love arrive together, and don’t stop before they do. It’s what empathy is for. It’s what she did, all the way to the end, and the end was this day, and the church is right to call it a birth.
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Quotes from Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy (The Collected Works of Edith Stein Book 3). ICS Publications, 2016.