An idea · Twentieth Century (to mid-century) · first attested 1916
Empathy (Einfühlung)
How is another's consciousness given to me?
In her dissertation, written under Husserl, Stein takes up a question phenomenology had long stepped around: how is another consciousness given to me at all? I never live your pain the way I live my own – and yet I do not infer your inner life like the answer to a puzzle; I see your suffering directly in the way your face contracts. Einfühlung is a distinct kind of experience in which another's living-through is given to me precisely as another's, present and at the same time unreachable from within. Stein restores the other person to philosophy as a living presence and lays a foundation that later reflection on "the other" – in Sartre, Levinas, and Beauvoir – would build on.