Stein 3 pages 21-34
I think that one of the major contributions that modern existential psychotherapy has made has been in recognizing that the repression of feeling often results in pathology. Associated symptoms like high blood pressure, migraine headaches, hypertension, etc., can usually be relived when a good therapist can bring a feeling into givenness and redirect its expression from a destructive negative release to a positive healthy release. The results vary depending upon the patient and the therapist. In theory, however, feeling mav, be compared to the static charge of electricity incomplete in itself. "As it were loaded with an energy which must be unloaded."44
There are many examples of the psychic influencing the somatic. I think that it is interesting to note that even while one sleeps the psychic feelings seem to exert physiological effects. For example, one can be frightened in a dream and find upon awakening that their heart is beating rapidly and they are short of breath. So psychological causality is not dependent upon a cognitive faculty, even though it may be cognitively examined. Stein uses the example of blushing. One may blush in anger, from embarassment, or as the result of strenuous exercise. In the first and second instances we have perceptual phenomena produced from felt expression and in the third from a result of exertion. It takes a turning of the glance to distinguish the meaning of the blush.
The will also externalizes itself in action and presents us with another case of psycho-physical unity. Arthur Schopenhauer, in his careful study of the
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44 Stein, p. 48.
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will described its physical manifestations in the individual.
On what does the identity of the person depend? Not on the matter of the body; which changes as a whole and in all its parts, except in the expression of the glance, by which we still recognize a man even after many years. This proves that in spite of all the changes produced in him by time, there yet remains in him something wholly untouched by it. It is just this by which we recognize him once more, even after the longest intervals of time, and again find the former person unimpaired . . . . the identity of his person has not in any way been lost. That
rests on the identical will and on its unalterable character: it is also just this that makes the expression of the glance unalterable.45
It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider whether the will is free in its essence. It is, however, commonly agreed by phenomenologists that the will is experienced as free. "Action is always the creation of what is not. This process can be carried out in causal succession, but the intuition of the process, the true intervention of the will is not experienced as causal but as a special effect."46 When one plans a course of action, for example getting a degree,the working out of the plan may be causally connected. But the original decision experienced as an act of will appears independent of any causal necessity. This is not to say that the physical can't exert an influence upon the will. For example one may become fatigued and be unable to carry out an action. Yet the will is also within limits able to overcome the purely physical causes that would thwart it. In medicine,for example, we are very much aware of the importance of a will to live. Thus, willing has the "capacity to make use of psycho-physical causality, but it can only be said that the willing "I" is the
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45 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York, 1958), pp. 238-39.
46 Stein, p. 52.
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master of the living body."47
Returning to the discussion of feeling, we can now see how feelings are related to our approach to intersubjectivity. For general or mental feelings such as vigor and sluggishness are not only perceived as belonging to my "I" but they are given in our outer perception as belonging to foreign individuals. For example, we can by watching someone see how he feels. At least see whether he is energetic or tired. Empathy allows us to comprehend the experience of the other. Stein in an especially interesting passage considering the time and school of philosophy in which she was writing held that not only is empathic fulfillment possible with other people but also with all other living beings including plants. She held that plants also have general mental feelings or psychic existence. "Empathic fulfillment is also possible here. Of course, what I grasp in this case is a considerable modification of my own life."48
Although she clearly recognizes them as lower forms lacking even
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47 Stein, p. 52.
48 Stein, p. 64. She was careful to limit her emphatic claim to plants. "A plant's general feeling does not appear as the coloring of its acts, for there is no basis at all to believe such acts are present. Neither do I have any right to ascribe an 'awake' I to the plant, nor a reflective consciousness of its feelings of life. Even the otherwise familiar constituents of animals are absent. It is at least doubtful whether the plant has sensations, and so our empathy is unjustified if we believe that we are inflicting pain on a tree by cutting it down with an ax. A plant is not the center of orientation of the spatial world . . . . even though it is capable of alive movement in contrast with the inorganic.
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voluntary mobility, she argued, "The absence of this constitution does not justify us in interpreting what is present in a new way and distinguishing the phenomena of life in plants from our own."49 She wanted to reserve judgment on whether life phenomena is essentially psychic, however. Further, in ascribing a kind of low grade consciousness to plants, she hints at a theme that was only recently more fully developed in the philosophy of such thinkers as A. N. Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin.
Here I would like to point out that our empathetic grasping of plants is usually restricted to the first modality and seldom carried to fulfillment. The first grade of empathy is by far the more common instance. For example, we can easily see the difference between driving a nail into a wall and pricking a hand.If one is incapable of this type of empathetic act, they must be severely lacking in perceptual awareness. Given this minimal level of empathy, Stein's remark that a doctor's concern for his patients is the same as a gardener's for his plants, becomes clear. For as noted earlier, we do not wish the doctor to project himself into his patient's illnesses and forget his scientific objectivity. Yet, at the same time we hope he is advanced enough to recognize the difference between putting a needle into an orange or an arm.
Finally, in the analysis of feeling Stein discusses a notion of sensing in. She gives the example of our perceiving the hand of another person. Through empathy we can grasp the common feelings in the other hand. She
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49 Stein, p. 64.
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also admits a variation in the quality of empathy based upon the similarity of the foreign individual or object to our own. Hence, we are more able to empathize when the limb given is the hand of a human. Yet, we are also able to look at the paw of a dog and note if it is hurt. However, due to the difference in bodily construction there are many areas that must remain outside of our empathetic knowledge.
Returning to the discussion of will, let us consider that which moves the will to act. Stein reasons:
While causal relationship is always announced in the form of if...then, so the givenness of one occurance (be it psychic or physical) motivates a progression to the givenness of the other one, here the proceeding of one experience from another is experienced in purest immanence without the detour over the object sphere. We want to call this experienced proceeding "motivation".50
If our knowledge of the foreign individual is to penetrate beyond the casual observation of physical causality we must through repeated acts of empathy come to some understanding of their motivation, though it always remains somewhat subject to mystery. Yet as Stein recognized, it can happen that another can come to judge us better than we can judge ourselves. The example given is that while one may think he is being kind out of a generous spirit, another might observe that he always looks around to see if someone is watching. So the motive of seeking attention would have to be considered. This kind of corrective attention given us by the foreign individual aids in the formation of our own self-understanding. Stein notes: "This is how empathy and inner
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50 Stein, p. 78.
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perception work hand in hand to give me myself to myself."51 Thus, our friendship with others leads us into a confrontation with their "transcendental subjectivity" or what Husserl calls the will. "If the relation is particularly close and fortuitous, the other self reaches much more closely and intimately into my own subjectivity than it does if the self is distinct and indifferent to me."52
III.
Empathy as the Comprehension of Mental Persons
In this section a clear definition of the mental person cannot be given, as will be further explained. The discussion, however, centers around the aspect of consciousness that is object-constituting; whereas in the former section the psycho-physical individual was described in terms of nature, in this section the mental person is described as having the ability to step out of the realm of nature and face it.
Further, in the final chapter, Stein attempted to link the descriptions of will and feelings to our comprehension of the mental person. As was noted
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51 Stein, p. 82.
52 Peter Koestenbaum, Vitality of Death (Connecticut, 1971), p. 503. It was in one of Dr. Koestenbaum's classes that I first became interested in the problem of intersubjectivity, and he encouraged me to look into the phenomenological analysis of empathy for a solution. Although I take full responsibility for any errors in this paper, his classes provided the background for this study, and for my understanding of phenomenology, I am indebted to him.
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earlier, consciousness is always consciousness of something. The triad, ego- cogito-cogitationes is omnipresent. Thus, in describing feeling we find that it has the unique character of being given simultaneously in outer perception (material, extended realm) and in inner perception (nonextended, immaterial realm). With feeling we have, so to speak, one foot in the psychic and one in the body. Unexpressed feelings are an impossibility. The expression of feeling gives us self-knowledge and knowledge of the foreign individual. For Stein, as for the scholastics, all knowledge is received through the senses.The knowledge we have of other minds or of past history is also given to us,the psycho-physical individual, through the medium of materiality. In regard to this point, David Hume argued in the same manner, noting for example,that our knowledge that Caesar crossed the Rubicon is given through the printed or spoken word. The record of the past is physical whether the information is hewed in stone or kept alive in the consciousness of a people by being passed verbally from generation to generation. Stein admits of one possible exception in the motivation of the religious type. Although at this point in her philosophy she dismissed Socrates' oracle as something that "certainly should not be taken so literally."53 However, it is difficult to understand her development of the notion of person along purelv rational lines. Yet, I will briefly trace the argument.
It is possible to conceive of a subject, only living in theoretical acts, having an object world facing it without ever becoming aware of itself
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53 Stein, p. 106.
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and its consciousness, without "being there" for itself. But this is no longer possible as soon as this subject not only perceives, thinks etc., but also feels. For as it feels it not only experiences objects but it itself. It experiences emotions as coming from the /depth of its "I". This also means that this "self"-experiencing "I" is not the pure "I", for the pure "I" has no depth. But the "I" experienced in emotion has levels of various depths. They are revealed as emotions arise out of them.54
Hence she recognizes that this "I" has a kind of hermeneutical nature. Perhaps a good mental model for it would be an onion or an artichoke. For the different layers are more or less closely positioned to the "kernel". Hence some emotions affect only the outer layer while others penetrate to the very kernel of the "I". The interesting analogy she proposes is that of the color and intensity of light. Moods proceeding outward from the center would affect the whole, while emotions such as joy may start at the outer layer and proceed inwardly. Those proceeding in would eventually reach the kernel and take possession of the whole or they could be blocked by a stronger emotion pushing outward. So feelings have a quality of depth. Loving, for example, is deeper than inclination. Also they have qualities of length or the ability to spread throughout the "I" and duration. To these gradations of feelings she assigns the concept of value. Moreover, given the various qualities of feelings she has the basis for establishing a hierarchy of felt values. This hierarchy is the constitution of the person. Hence through empathy, we come to recognize the person from his felt values. The personality is constituted in experience according to rational laws (motivation). And Stein held:
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54 Stein, p. 89.
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Person and world (more exactly value world) were found to be correlated . . . . The ideal person with all his values in a suitable hierarchy and having adequate feelings would correspond to the entire realm of value levels. Other personal types would result from the differences in the intensity of value experiences or from preferring one of several forms of expression, such as bodily expression, willing action, etc.55
Hence, the development of personality is seen to be an arranging and unfolding of various values. Experience is of great importance in this unfolding. For a person who never meets another worthy of great love will not penetrate to the depths of love that his own personality is capable of. Or a person that lives all his life in the city would be incapable of a great love of nature. So training and experience go hand in hand to reveal values. Stein does see, however, that there can be a kind of inauthentic development produced by the wrong kind of training. For example, "He who does not feel values himself but acquires all feelings onlv through contagion from others, cannot experience 'himself. He can become, not a personality, but at most a phantom of one."56
I think it safe to assume that anyone who has reached the age when he begins to philosophize has come into contact with inauthentic personalities.An example that Stein uses is the moral type of person. The existentialists and in particular Friedrich Nietzsche were extremely sensitive to the influence of contagion of feeling in personal development, resulting in as Nietzsche calls it "herd morality". Here the person acquires his values from circumstances and, perhaps entirely unaware of what is transpiring, pretentiously uses them
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55 Stein, p. 98.
56 Stein, p. 101.
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as if they were his own. For example,
An instance is authoritative moral education. If he who has been educated in "moral principles" and who behaves according to them looks "into himself," he will perceive with satisfaction a "virtuous" man. This is true until one day, in an action bursting forth from deep inside him, he experiences himself as someone of an entirely different nature from the person he thought himself to be until then.57
The psycho-physical individual and the mental person are more or less in agreement. Growth in personal maturity and life experience are the basis for authentic personal unfolding, and we sense the personalities of others in emphatic grasping of their felt values. We can grasp these values individually in given instances of experience or as is often the case we grasp the type of mental person. "I consider every subject in whom I empathically grasp a value experiencing as a person whose experiences interlock themselves into an intelligible, meaningful whole. How much of his experiential structure I can bring to my fulfilling intuition depends upon my own structure. "58
Also we obviously grasp the mental life of the other through language. In order to limit the length of this paper, I did not present Stein's analysis of language and empathy. However, it would have to be included in any detailed discussion of meaning. Stein saw the interpretation of words as mere symbols to be a great mistake, however. Noting that the word arising as an expression of feeling would also have to be empathetically analyzed.
Finally, returning to our constitution of the mental person, Stein ends her thesis by holding that it is through empathy that we come to understand the
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57 Stein, p. 100.
58 Stein, p. 104.
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felt values of another person. I found it disappointing that her work ends in a discussion not of individual persons but types of persons such as the moral type, the religious type, the Gretchen type, etc. We can through empathizing with persons of our own type become aware of our own hierarchy of values. And by empathizing with persons of another type we can become aware of a range of values that are closed to us. Thus, she held that we may understand the materialistic individual whose chief motivation is money even though we can see that he is closed to higher values. Further we can respect persons of a different type, for example, the artistic or religious, even though their values might remain closed to us.
I suggest that her purely rational description briefly breaks down when she considers the act of love.
Now, in the act of love we have a grasping or intending of the value of a person. This is not a valuing for any other sake. We do not love a person because he does good. His value is not that he does good, even if he perhaps comes to light for this reason. Rather, he himself is valuable and we love him "for his own sake."59
Hence, Stein's description of empathy as the constitution of other mental persons ends with a question of the possibility of personal knowledge received without resource to sense perception. She leaves the question unanswered and suggests for further study, an examination of religious consciousness.
Concluding Remarks
I think that Edith Stein's careful and detailed analysis of empathy is
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59 Stein, p. 93.
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philosophically convincing. It is, however, a subtle argument and may extend some of the basic philosophical terms beyond what phenomenologists other than Husserl would be willing to agree to; for example, her assumption that we are given the phenomenon of foreign psychic life in the transcendental realm.
The first section of the thesis is, in my opinion, the most convincing for pure phenomenology. Credit has to be given to Descartes for first posing the mind-body problem, and Stein's attempt to resolve this problem without appealing to the veracity of God builds upon what I consider some of the best epistemological insights of Descartes.
It seems that in the second section, Stein, like other German scholars of her time, tends to intermingle philosophical and psychological arguments. Here she attempts to define empathy more by designation, pointing to an example and noting that this is what we mean by empathy rather than discovering and describing what is given in pure consciousness. Her concept of the cogito is somewhat unclear in this section, and it is difficult to determine whether she is discussing it in terms of the empirical or transcendental ego. Of course we now look back upon her work with over sixty years of phenomenological research. At the time she was writing phenomenology was a young science. I suggest that she thought she was working within the transcendental, nevertheless, considering the muddle she had to start with, she does establish clear avenues for approaching various aspects of the problem.
Also, one is lead to an appreciation for her psychological insights in
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this area of study. Not only did she give a careful critique of Lipp's, Scheler's and Dilthey's work in the field, but she also makes new discoveries and submits them to the test of real life experience. For example, her notion of background experiences affecting present actions was apparently discovered independently by herself and Freud, as was pointed out by Dr. Waltraut Stein. In this theory she held that past or future events, even though not actively present in the consciousness, nevertheless affect present behavior. For example, I do not forget my friends even though I'm not thinking about them.
In Stein's work, however, a philosophical definition of another person, except as contained under some type, is still missing. Hence, given her theory we can know the universal type. For example, a type of philosophical person, but we would still not know the individual person, for example, Descartes. I think that Stein's theory like those of many philosophers who have worked on the problem of intersubjectivity comes back to a basic difficulty of predication and language. As St. Thomas Aquinas noted, we can predicate "Socrates" of man, but not "man" of Socrates. For then everything that it was to be a man would be Socrates. How is it then that we can know individual persons? Schopenhauer's answer of the glance still seems to be the most appropriate response. For, a particular person may be classed under or belong to many different types. Yet, we do not know a person simply and only by his profession, his race, or his religion, etc., and I think that any theory that we do, falls into the danger of prejudicial thinking which is exactly what Stein would have wished to avoid.
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Her thesis ends, as Husserl's work did, in an understanding of community. In terms of her work we easily understand a concept of intra-subjectivity, but the concept of genuine intersubjectivity still seems to have eluded her readers.
Stein's description of empathy, however, does bring us out of solipsism and extremely close to a theory of intersubjectivity, and I believe we have to credit her for the positive aspects she has contributed toward resolving the difficulty of knowing a person phenomenologically.
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