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Husserl’s work and Stein’s became closely intertwined. We are going to quote from the two books separately, but they are hardly that.

Stein: “A friend tells me that he has lost his brother … I become aware of his pain … [because] his face is pale and disturbed, his voice toneless and strained. Perhaps he also expresses the pain in words.” This is not my pain, but I become pained, for him. Stein asks, “What kind of awareness is this?” Her answer: “the act of empathy.”⁴⁰⁸ Or, to rephrase, empathy is a solidary meaning, a transposition between other and self, expressed multimodally.

Husserl: The “intersubjective” self “stand[s] in a relation of empathy to the other cognizing subjects, and for that he must have Corporeality and belong to the same world.”⁴⁰⁹ Subjects stand in relation to subjects, separate bodies, connected by shared corporeality.

Stein: “The subject of the empathized experience … is not the subject empathizing, but another. And this is what is fundamentally new in contrast with the memory, expectation, or the fantasy of our own experiences.” As I remember my own pain, I can anticipate pain, I can fantasize pain, and each of these meaning transpositions (to rephrase in the terms of our grammar) is a transposition over time within the first person-self. Empathy, by contrast, is “reflexive sympathy, where my original experience returns to me as an empathized one,” a transposition of other-to-self-to-other across bodies and space.^§MS2.2 Stein references Adam Smith’s notion of “sympathy” here.^§AS2.3.2a Empathy is a “particular case of reiteration” of meaning.⁴¹⁰

Husserl: “[A]ll that is thingly-real in the surrounding world … has its relation to the Body,” including the “possibility of ‘other’ Bodies, understood in the sense of an apprehension of the human.”⁴¹¹ Instances of the self and other, these come together in the form of solidary interests in the human-in-general.

Stein: “How is my body constituted within consciousness?” The body is “a real thing, a physical body,” where the “tactile and visual senses … call each other as witnesses, though do not shift the responsibility on one another.”⁴¹² Our gloss: consciousness is grounded in multimodal meaning.

Husserl: “Such an intersubjective experienceability … is thinkable only through ‘empathy,’ which for its part presupposes an intersubjectively experienceable Body.” In this way, “reciprocal empathy” is “unified into a nexus which constitutes intersubjective objectivities,” – the objectivities of society and history, “when we live with one another, talk to one another, shake hands with one another in greeting, or are related to one another in love and aversion, in disposition and action, in discourse and discussion.”⁴¹³

Stein: “By empathy with differently composed personal structures we become clear on what we are not … Thus, together with self-knowledge, we also have an important aid to self-evaluation … [A]t the same time as new values are acquired by empathy, our own unfamiliar values become visible … Every comprehension of different persons can become the basis of understanding.”⁴¹⁴

Husserl never goes as far as Stein, because his empathizing self establishes a connection with the other by an idealized identity in abstract meaning. But now, in Stein, there comes a recognition that empathetic meanings are meanings as much in the materiality of bodies. Empathy is no merely textual or discursive meaning. It can at times become a viscerally full-bodied experience. You may cry during a movie, empathizing with the fate of a character. You might laugh with a conversational partner, recognizing the absurdity of their situation. You might fear for another person’s danger. Simply, and ordinarily, “to feel for” is a transposition of self and other. In these moments of empathy, you virtually become other, a functional transposition. Identities that have moved apart by differentiation draw towards assimilation by empathy, another functional transposition.

Because she was a woman, Husserl didn’t support examination of Stein’s habilitation thesis which would have allowed her appointment to the university as a professor.⁴¹⁵ The second volume of Ideas was not published until after his death. Husserl must have thought highly of Stein’s dissertation because he published it in his Yearbook in 1922.⁴¹⁶ Edith Stein never became a professor but nevertheless went on to become one of Germany’s most significant twentieth-century philosophers and feminists.⁴¹⁷

Husserl: “The historian asks what the members of the society in their communal life represented, thought, valued, desired, etc. How have these people ‘determined’ themselves reciprocally, how have they allowed themselves to be determined by the surrounding world of things, how have they, for their part, shaped the world in turn, etc.? … Phenomenology … investigates the total system of possible acts of consciousness, of possible appearances and meanings related to precisely those objects.”⁴¹⁸

Stein: “[T]he goal of phenomenology” – the science of sciences – “is to clarify and thereby to find the ultimate basis of all knowledge.”⁴¹⁹

In his late works, Husserl gave a new name to what he and Stein had previously called the “surrounding world”: the “lifeworld.” This is the world of everyday experience, contrasted with the depth and breadths of science and phenomenology. “The lifeworld is a realm of original self-evidences. That which is self-evidently given is, in perception, experienced as ‘the thing itself,’ in immediate presence, or, in memory … lies in these intuitions themselves as that which is actually, intersubjectively experienceable.”⁴²⁰

In the lifeworld, we “are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world … ; it is to this or that object that we pay attention, according to our interests; with them we deal actively in different ways; through our acts they are ‘thematic’ objects.” In these ways, the lifeworld is a place of “naïve experiential self-evidence, the certainty of coming to know, through seeing, touching, feeling, hearing etc., the same thing through its properties, through ‘repetition’ of the experiences.”⁴²¹

However, there are “two sorts of truth: on the one hand, everyday practical situational truths, relative, to be sure, … exactly what praxis, in its particular projects, seeks and needs.” This is the truth of the lifeworld. But “on the other side are scientific truths, and their grounding leads back precisely to the situational truths.”⁴²² Science or the phenomenological method are processes of “uncovering … intentional horizons, … a radical clarification of the sense and origin (or of the sense in consequence of the origin) of the concepts: world, Nature, space, time, psychophysical being, man, psyche, animate organism, social community, culture, and so forth.”⁴²³ In our grammar, we will call this the parsing of interests.

In science and phenomenology “[w]e find ourselves with the self-evident capacity to reflect – to turn to the horizon and to penetrate it in an expository way. But we also have, and know that we have, the capacity of complete freedom to transform, in thought [at least], our human historical experience and what is there exposed as its lifeworld.”⁴²⁴

Stein: “In the ‘exchange of thoughts’ a thinking together arises … as our common thinking. All scientific activity is executed in this form … on the basis of the already accumulated repertoire that I take over … And with this mental doing of mine, I find myself inserted into the great network of motivation, the knowledge-process of humanity.”⁴²⁵

Moved by the atrocities of the First World War, Stein volunteered as a Red Cross nurse, later studying and working under Husserl.⁴²⁶ One of his sons had died in the war, and the other was severely wounded. A Jew by birth and an atheist while working with Husserl, she converted to Catholicism in 1921, taught in several religious colleges, then joined the Carmelite Order in 1933, assuming the monastic name of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. When the Nazis came to power, for safety’s sake the Carmelites transferred her to a monastery in the Netherlands. After the invasion of the Netherlands she was arrested by the SS and sent to Auschwitz. She died in the gas chambers in August 1942.⁴²⁷

Edith Stein was made a saint by the Catholic Church in 1998, controversially for some Catholics, because they said she had not been martyred as a co-religionist, but murdered for her Jewish “race.”⁴²⁸ Stein’s entry to sainthood was on the basis of a miracle in which the father of Benedicta, a little girl who had swallowed enough Tylenol to kill her sixteen times over, prayed to her namesake, and the child miraculously recovered – a transposition by empathy, it might seem, of which only saints are capable.

Dr. Ronald Kleinman, who had treated the young Benedicta at Massachusetts General Hospital, attended Edith Stein’s canonization by Pope John Paul II at St Peters, Rome in October 1998.

“I’m not saying it was a miracle,” said Dr. Kleinman, “I’m saying it was miraculous. I’m Jewish. I don’t believe per se in miracles, but I can say I didn’t expect her to recover.”⁴²⁹

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⁴⁰⁵ Michel Foucault, 1969 [1972]; The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M.S. Smith, New York: Pantheon, pp. 202–03.

⁴⁰⁶ Jacques Derrida, 1962 [1989], Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; Jacques Derrida, 1967 [1973], Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, translated by D.B. Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

⁴⁰⁷ Alisdair MacIntyre, 2006, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 99–108; Marianne Sawicki, 1997, Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein, Dordrecht: Springer Science, pp. 153–65.

⁴⁰⁸ Edith Stein, 1917 [1989], On the Problem of Empathy, translated by W. Stein, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, p. 6.

⁴⁰⁹ Edmund Husserl, 1952 [1989], Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer, p. 87.

⁴¹⁰ Edith Stein, 1917 [1989], On the Problem of Empathy, translated by W. Stein, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, pp. 10, 14, 18.

⁴¹¹ Edmund Husserl, 1952 [1989], Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 61, 86.

⁴¹² Edith Stein, 1917 [1989], On the Problem of Empathy, translated by W. Stein, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, p. 41.

⁴¹³ Edmund Husserl, 1952 [1989], Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 101, 118, 192.

⁴¹⁴ Edith Stein, 1917 [1989], On the Problem of Empathy, translated by W. Stein, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, p. 116.

⁴¹⁵ Edith Stein, 1987 [1993], Self Portrait in Letters, 1916–1942, translated by J. Koeppel, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, p. 35.

⁴¹⁶ Edith Stein, 1922 [2000], Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, translated by M.C. Baseheart and M. Sawicki, Washington, DC: ICS Publications.

⁴¹⁷ Edith Stein, 1959 [1987], Essays on Woman, translated by F.M. Oben, Washington, DC: ICS Publications.

⁴¹⁸ Edmund Husserl, 1952 [1989], Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 241, 325.

⁴¹⁹ Edith Stein, 1917 [1989], On the Problem of Empathy, translated by W. Stein, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, p. 3.

⁴²⁰ Edmund Husserl, 1954 [1970]; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 127–28.

⁴²¹ Ibid., pp. 108, 343.

⁴²² Ibid., p. 132.

⁴²³ Edmund Husserl, 1931 [1960], Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, translated by D. Cairns, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, pp. 153–54.

⁴²⁴ Edmund Husserl, 1954 [1970]; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 374–75.

⁴²⁵ Edith Stein, 1922 [2000], Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, translated by M.C. Baseheart and M. Sawicki, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, p. 170.

⁴²⁶ Edith Stein, 1933 [1986], Life in a Jewish Family, 1891–1916: An Autobiography, translated by J. Koeppel, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, pp. 318–67.

⁴²⁷ Waltraud Herbsrith, 1971 [1985], Edith Stein: A Biography, San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.

⁴²⁸ Harry James Cargas, ed. 1994, The Unnecessary Problem of Edith Stein, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

⁴²⁹ www.nytimes.com/1998/10/11/world/child-s-close-call-aided-nun-s-way-to-sainthood.html

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 311–316. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Edith Stein’s “On the Problem of Empathy” §AS2.5b