The immediate givenness of another subject as subject. Empathy is not reducible to projection, inference by analogy, or associative transference. Edith Stein presented the fundamental phenomenological analysis of this experience in her dissertation Zum Problem der Einfühlung (1917) (German). She defines empathy as “the basic form in which other embodied, experiencing subjects are given to us.” Empathy is an independent intentional experience that grasps the unity between bodily expression and lived experience (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 188 ff.).
In the Thomistic-personalist analysis, empathy is at once a personal act and a archphenomenon. As an archphenomenon it is irreducible. It cannot be traced back to simpler psychic processes.
The attempt to explain empathy as the mere projection of one’s own experiences onto the other misses its core. In empathy the other is given precisely as other, as a foreign subject, not as a mirroring of one’s own ego. The inference by analogy likewise fails (“I infer from the behavior of the other to his experience by analogy with my own”). Empathy precedes the inference: without a prior grasp of the other as an experiencing subject, the inference by analogy would not be possible at all.
In the body of the other, the other’s interiority shows itself. Facial expression, gesture, and voice are not mere physical data that are only subsequently “interpreted.” They are the immediate expression of personal experience. The phenomenological analysis shows that the body possesses its own dimension of expression, which is grasped directly in empathy. Empathy is thereby a fundamental form of cognition. It is not theoretical-conceptual cognition, but an original becoming-aware of the other as a person.
For interpersonality, empathy is constitutive. Without it there would be no encounter from person to person, no understanding of the other in his subjectivity. The interpersonal relation rests on the fact that the person grasps the other not as an object but as a Someone — as a being with its own interiority, its own lived experience, its own dignity.
In this sense empathy is the presupposition of all affirmation and love. One can affirm the other for his own sake only if one has first grasped him as a subject.
Ontological classification:
- Genus: Personal Act, Archphenomenon
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: What Is Human Personhood?
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Stein, Edith (1917): Zum Problem der Einfühlung. Dissertation, Freiburg im Breisgau (German). [English edition: On the Problem of Empathy, transl. Waltraut Stein, ICS Publications.]