Edith Stein's philosophy of empathy
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 มิ.ย. 2022
- Support Overthink on Patreon here: / overthinkpodcast
Professor Ellie Anderson, co-host of Overthink philosophy podcast, introduces Edith Stein's phenomenology of empathy, which holds that empathy is the perception of foreign consciousness. She notes how Stein's view takes an alternate stand than dominant approaches to empathy in philosophy and psychology, especially the simulation theory vs. theory theory debate. To read Stein for yourself (please please do!), check out her book On the Problem of Empathy (1917), trans. Waltraut Stein.
This video was created just for our TH-cam subscribers (thank you for your support!) based on Professor Anderson's Phenomenology course.
For more from Dr. Anderson, check out Overthink podcast! Available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen (including previous episodes here on TH-cam!)
overthinkpodcast.com
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
![[MPD직캠] 베이비몬스터 치키타 직캠 4K 'LIKE THAT' (BABYMONSTER CHIQUITA FanCam) | @MCOUNTDOWN_2024.6.13](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/h99J4vWm7Ew/mqdefault.jpg)
This video permitted me to discover the work of Edith Stein and then read about her extraordinary life and tragic end in Auschwitz. I am very grateful to you for this discovery and even more grateful to Edith Stein for having done all she has done to make ourselves more humans ! I also subscribed to your channel and to you podcast. Thank you very much Dr. Anderson. Namaste
Great explanation! Empathy is neither imagination (simulation) nor reasoning (inference). It is the primordial perception of otherness. I am a Steinian!
These lectures are great. Thank you
any particular idea you liked?
Being happy for a friend who's enjoying a trashy concert is an experience of radical otherness indeed! God bless my mirror neurons!
And thanks a lot for this great video!
"It's almost as if in empathising with another person I am receiving their subjectivity". Very nicely put! This is the feeling I get when someone is able to receive my subjective experience without the feeling the need to reason about my subjective experience based on their own.
Thank you so much for your lecture.
I'm a student of Philosophy.
I'm planning to do my thesis on Edith Stein's philosophy of empathy.
With Gratitude,
Bivin Sunny
Indifference: Oh, I didn't see you there.
Sympathy: Oh, that happened to me once, let me tell you about it...
Empathy: I have no idea what you are going through, but, I'm here for you; how can I help?
She is not just a phenomonologist - first and foremost she is a Carmelite nun and Saint
Feel blessed that I found your lil channel. love your content, please don't stop uploading ♥️
I've noriced that while talking to other people I do not imagine myself in their shoes in order to understand their feelings. And I've always thought that it was abnormal to do so. But after your video I realized that in fact no, maybe I wasn't really understanding how empathy works. I shoud really check out this work of Stein. Thank you for this insight!
Thats Saint Edith Stein
☦️ Yes. Blessed Edith.
The way of the Cross...
Not to be taken lightly.
It IS draining.
I know what I feel when someone else understands what I'm enduring.
Their understanding brings (my) relief and eases my plight.
They're a rare species.
well, Ste. Teresia Benedicta a Cruce, but point made.
Fabulous! Wonderful to run across a talk on Edith. She was great. Studied under Husserl but in some important ways went beyond him. Very important insights. More on ES please.
I learned a lot from this presentation. Thank you Prof. Anderson.
Thank you so much. Great lecture. I'm doing my research on “Empathy as the Experience of Foreign Consciousness: An Analysis of Edith Stein's Phenomenological Concept of Einfühlung.”
Great one! Would love more Edith Stein.
Very well done! Great and lively summary of this genuinely interesting view! Greetings, a fellow philosopher
Wow! Thank you. I loved receiving ideas about my elusive beloved empathy. I'm really inspired that there are so many ways of thinking about empathy that I have not thought of already. And I loved especially the distinction between primordial and non-primordial experience.. There is something so satisfying to me in learning about this. Now let me see. I'm learning this from your lecture and not from my experience, but I think it is still primordial since learning from your lecture is my experience. Maybe it is that the lecture gives a name to some content of primordial experience that exists in me already.
Anyway, I'm very grateful to hear what you had to say and also that you were able to present in a way that I could receive.
This is a great channel
Your content is INCREDIBLE👏👏👏. Thank you
many thanks to ur videos. the work you made is amazing.
Thanks! I hope there's more phenomenology to come.
Thank you so much for sharing this clip.
Nice. I like the way you give examples ( memory of day at the beach etc.) because phenomenologists traditionally used them so sparingly, as if they were only for simpletons. I have ploughed through thousands of pages Husserl and Heidegger, and came away with nothing.
I am new to your channel and so happy to discover someone dealing with the same subjects I'm studying as a post-grad!
Wow. Wonderful short lecture. Thank you very much. !
Cool thought. I think there is something possibly overlooked here for clarification/expanding.
*
Since memory is the non primordial origin of the phenomena we primordially experience, just in the past.
And fantasy is the same thing, but the non primordial phenomena being in the future...
Empathy is our primordial experience of the non primordial phenomena in the Now - just now the distance between us is not time, but space (perspective). It is outside of us.
This could put empathy in the same boat as Any other type of experience of anything. Unless clarified further.
Via the quality of the outside phenomena.
-For example "I feel the wind blowing at me"... I primordially experience it.. and the content is primordial too...
But the same can be said for empathy as long as we just react emotionally to our primordial experience (content) of seeing another persons emotions.
-So in case of true empathy, there is something different then experiencing the actual content, but also different from reacting to past or future non primordial content. But the mix + more.
The memory being the strongest experience, due to having a direct contact with the content before. (Reconstruct)
The fantasy being a close second, by constructing the content from mental information that is based on past input... which is experientially same as a "fake memory". (Reconstruct + Modify)
While empathy, like fantasy, constructs an inner representation of the non experienced content. But unlike fantasy which constructs it from just pieces of past input - which is a two step process... Empathy does the same, but not only basing the fantasy on past input but also on present outside perspective assumption.
Which is (React to outside (space) + Reconstruct (time) + Modify)
*
And the modify part being relevant too, not just the space + time, since we never experienced it ourselves like a memory, so empathy is like a fantasy of what the other person is feeling. (Based on the emotional content primarily. Since a fantasy can be created from sensory + emotional information both... and while sensory information might also be fantasized to aid the empathy reaction, the emotional information will be primarily what is recognized as empathy. Since we are very well capable of fantasizing only with emotions without sense use.)
This is theoretical logic of the mechanism of course.
How it Actually happens is a biological process though (like what all of psychology comes down to in the end), most likely to do with mirror neurons copying what the eyes and ears see and hear.
The philosophical exploitation is really just wordplay most of the time, trying to find the most accurate way to describe the process of something verbally.
Wonderful lecture. Informative and breaks it down for greater understanding.
Thank you for this explanation! I'm using this for my BA paper and referencing you. Cheers.
Being afflicted with empathy I feel like I have a well developed understanding. Modeling is practical for acting purposefully. Some people who have difficulty controlling themselves have detailed models that include their weakness to 2nd guess themselves. Models that describe the world. Models that describe other people. Sometimes these models of other people draw too much from self, or too little. Feel bite of a high standard or the rub of the low standard.
Model of a person permits an escalation where the model can be queried instead of the person, which is leading to dehumanization since respect would give wider berth. Reliance on the model can lead to many problems where it blocks our view of the existential. Is it an ethical violation to have a model of what makes someone happy? I have some fresh thoughts on this where I examined whether empathetic reaction could be evidence of vain or improper judgment. Judgment requires belief in the model and belief prevents us from seeing to the origin. The first chapter of Bonhoeffer's Ethics in the discussion of origin is relevant here. This is a huge area of personal ethics for me. All of my self examination is based on the plurality of models.
The empathetic connections is uncomfortably deep. It lies beneath the model, it short circuits a sensory pattern into our very being. We are not modelling with empathy, we are feeling as nearly as possible the actual sensations according to the depth of the connection we created. We exposed ourselves directly to other peoples experience. If only there was a pill.
Your comments changed my whole perspective on life
Thank you!
This lecture was so insightful that made me create a playlist called philosophy on youtube. And to have many ideas popping in my head. This makes me become a writer, an intelectual, a lover, a floating tree with roots in the sky. Making clouds their home, their secret keepers, and the sun the storyteller. Basically it made me imaginative and grounded at the same time. Thank you
I loved the video 😊
Good ! Edith Stein is awesome
Hi Ellie, love the content you're making here, very illuminating! 😁 I study philosophy and, at the moment, we're covering Stein's phenomenology. I've made notes while watching this video, but noticed a discrepancy between what you said and what I read in the text I have in front of me, 'The Essence of Acts of Empathy'. Stein says, and I cite, "Are empathized experiences primordial or not? [...] After the preceding discussion, we can flatly answer the first question in the negative (p.18)." Now, if I'm not mistaken, you said that they were in fact primordial experiences with non-primordial content, right? I hope you have the text at your disposal 😅Please let me know if I misinterpreted you.
muito boa explicação. very good explanation. há muita confusão no debate atual sobre empatia. there is a lot of confusion on the actual debate about empathy. obrigado. thks
I think that empathy is the only bridge between the otherwise separate internal subjective experience and the external objective world.
Can you do a video on Martha Nussbaum's thoughts on the emotional life?
Love it! Really interesting to see how it could be applied to the relationship of human beings and animals
Human beings are animals. If you wanted to empathise with other animals you would need to free yourself from many prejudices and conditionings.🌱
Superlike desde Guatemala.
To make a point you made more explicit, Stein's view of empathy as perceptual is the condition for the possibility of the more discursive and heuristic approaches to empathy (simulation and analogy) being meaningfully empathetic. We must first know the other as possessing the full dignity or reality as a separate person, or locus of subjectivity, before we can expand our understanding of their unique situation through the tools of simulation and analogy.
I like it!
Just seeing another person as a separate being with their own world that we will never know!
AND the only way we are ever going to get close is to start from that fact. I can’t know what it’s like to be the other person. To assume to do actually shuts yourself off in your own head.
Hello, please how can I get to you?. I need to learn more about empathy in Edith Stein
Interesting.
Thus her exclaim after reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, "That is truth".
Empathy is an intellectual virtue.... any way thanks for the lecture.peace.
it could be, but doesn't have to be that necessarily.
@@illiakailli you don,t understand, or you lack understanding, i feel sorry for you or i empathize with you.
@@nowrozraisani6920 you came to a very good channel, that's already a step in a right direction, well done!
any relevant comments regarding content of the lecture?
I wonder why for me at least I can empathize with say someone's suffering but not with their joy . So if something good happens to a friend then I am pleased for them but if they are suffering in some way - illness or loss say - then I feel it viscerally. It reduces otherness for me . More of a mystical experience of oneness of their suffering. Simone Weill I think was an extreme example of this - taking only limited amounts of food because of people going hungry in the world ✌️
Ditto for me.
I feel the pain of another.
It is draining.
Though I'm not much of an intellectual 😉
I wonder if there are two different uses of the word empathy. Maybe one is empathy in its philosophy usage, which has more to do with how we know what another person is thinking or feeling -- or more generally, how we know that another person is experiencing mental states at all, as opposed to a cup of coffee, or any inanimate object, that has no emotive or cognitive experience. Empathy in this philosophical sense refers to how we differentiate objects from persons (which Ellie Anderson touches on in the beginning of her video). Taken that way, Stein's account outlines the phenomenological basis for how this process occurs; the source of this emotion or thought is not from within but from without. When I look at someone, I "perceive" their emotions and thoughts. Then, there is empathy in its common parlance, which is what I think you're touching on -- what the video calls "living in another person's shoes." I think in some of the video's examples, it's not always easy to see when we're taking about the general process of knowing what someone else is feeling or thinking (its philosophical meaning) vs. when we're talking about the being-in-someone-else's-shoes sense of empathy (the more common way the word is used in English). I think the philosophical meaning that Stein's after has more to do with the problem of other minds, whereas run-of-the-mill empathy is something more specific.
So if we read text from the past, like historical texts, and we try to understand the mind of the writer in the past, we empathize for Stein?
Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, pray for us!
Any chance we can hear about Levinas ?😊
Keep an eye out--you're in luck!
you are very hardworking Prof....Also, beautiful...I love your lectures
Please do a cast involving the current political situation, as controversial as it….
I like general idea of it, but it seems that terminology around it is overly complicated without a real need. If we drop 'primordial experience' and leave 'primordial content' and 'non-primordial content' terms, things will be much easier to understand.
We can distinguish between memories/fantasies and real experience, otherwise we'd be lost in hallucinations ... so 'content primordiality' emphasizes this difference. I think its important to point out that any experience itself varies not only by its intensity, but also by its ability to trigger subjective association chains which are unique for every individual, therefore ideal empathy as well as ideal theory of mind is impossible. This doesn't mean you can't reach high levels of similarity between primordial and non-primordial contents, as the whole purpose of theory of mind is prediction of future behaviour. Therefore, you need high levels of empathy in order to be a good predictor!
Stein merged Husserl with the Catholic sacrament of confession . Check out Simone Weil on this as well .
Kaboom - my mind has been blown
Well, I think that was all pretty self-evident. Does she ever get into the mystery of consciousness itself in a way that is provable?
🌷😇🌷
Conseuently why does some degee of empathy feel inherenty necessery for being able to even remotly listen to another person? Like w Lex I don't belive he has bad intentions exactly, but the ability to treat Tart as somone who's views could have the remotest trace of something that isn't absulut evil is in like a lack of empathy enogh to make me so totally angry at some I had admired?
How is this not just a verbose adaptation of simulation theory? Could one easily not argue that fantasy, memory, and empathy all fall under a broad umbrella category of simulation?
Imo, a lot of people confuse empathy with sympathy.
Great Work....take some leave for freedom....perhaps at least State your opinions at the end.
Hi there! The purpose of these videos is to offer short and to-the-point summaries of key ideas. If you're interested in more of Dr. Anderson's opinions, you can listen to our audio podcast: overthinkpodcast.com (or wherever you get your podcasts). We discuss Stein in the Empathy episode from 2021.
This is a great explanation but secular scholars really need to respect her status as a Carmelite Nun and Catholic Saint. Its almost never mentioned in these videos. Its not inconsequential to her philosophy.
Not sure what suggests a lack of respect for this status? As a video about her theory of empathy, this isn't biographical (although, apropos of that, she wasn't yet a nun or even Catholic yet when she wrote "On the Problem of Empathy"). Her theological ideas are also worth discussing, but that would be for a different video!
Later St Teresa Benedicta of the cross. A Jew who became an atheist then a Roman Catholic.
aren't you just mirroring/masking, then? you manipulate people into liking you, pretending to enjoy things when you really don't?
Some things are much better said in german
Start with Husserl's inter-subjectivity, end with Sartre's being-for-others. Stein is famous for her death, so is German philosophy. German philosophy ends in WWII.
...sry "it" , a Freudian! or King?...
This is such bad philosophy it's incredible