The Philosophy of Edith Stein

4. Empathy as a Feminine Structure of Phenomenological Consciousness

4 Empathy as a Feminine Structure of Phenomenological Consciousness
Edith Stein’s decision to cease working with Edmund Husserl coincided with her resolution to pursue her own philosophical work. The break with Husserl, however, did not mean that she forsook her interest in phenomenology for a more Christian philosophy.1 Rather, Stein saw her project as trying to bring phenomenology into dialogue with Christian thought and her own feminist philosophy. Husserl was aware of her project, though he was never completely comfortable with her synthetic approach.2 To this end, Stein’s later philosophical works, including her writings on women contained in the volumes Die Frau and Ganzheitliches Leben,as well as her Münster lectures and her Endliches und ewiges Sein, must be read not only as dialogues with Christian philosophy but also as dialogues with Husserlian phenomenology.3 As mentioned in previous chapters, Stein’s writings are not only concerned with Husserl, but also with other prominent phenomenologists, including Scheler, Conrad-Martius, Heidegger, von Hildebrand, and Pfänder. 63 In this chapter I will argue that Stein’s discussion of gender, through the essence of woman, plays a significant role in the constitution of the person. I shall demonstrate that Stein’s writings on woman may be employed to show how the uniquely feminine (das Weibliche) comes to phenomenological givenness within the framework of empathy, thereby challenging and redefining Husserl’s and Stein’s early positions, which had nothing to say about gender. Furthermore, if it is true that women have certain essential (eidos)4 qualities which distinguish them from men and which characterize the unicity of their understanding, then such differences would necessarily affect the structure of female consciousness and the constitution of intersubjectivity itself. To this end, Stein sees women as constituted in a more intersubjective, empathic way than men. Ultimately, she must be viewed as the first phenomenologist to introduce and develop the notion of gender in relation to the phenomenological question of the essence of the person in general , and she was the first to make the connection between gender and the empathic structure of consciousness, thereby challenging us to think phenomenological consciousness as gendered. This chapter, however, does not discuss Stein’s feminism within the context of contemporary feminist debates; rather, the focus is on her essentialism and its relation to the claims of early phenomenology. According to Stein, empathy, or Einfühlung, is the way humans become inwardly aware of themselves and others, and it is through empathy that the other becomes constituted in consciousness. Stein not only describes the other merely as other; she also sees the other constituted as a person dwelling in a social world. In both Stein’s and Husserl’s early accounts of empathy, understood in its most basic form, the human body does not appear as essentially feminine or masculine. Husserl does not speak of a sexed body. Furthermore, the psycho-spiritual constitution of the other person does not appear to be affected or informed by one’s maleness or femaleness. Husserl remarks in his Nachlass, “Empathy in the other sex: Here, my attempt to clarify my understanding of this very problem through the key of analogy is countersensical .”5 Husserl realizes that sexual difference in another’s body cannot be accounted for through analogical apperception because male and 64 The Philosophy of Edith Stein female are quite distinct in this regard.6 This passing comment demonstrates that he was aware of the difficulties in his treatment of intersubjectivity vis-à-vis sexual difference. For early phenomenology, sexual difference, unlike some other differences, cannot be a matter of character , personality, or style. Stein would argue that we are all sexed persons and this is certainly universally essential; moreover, the modes in which we are sexed (that is, male and female) color our persons in a profound way, as we shall see later in this chapter. Though Husserl does not make explicit reference to sexed bodies, one need not assume that he is completely oblivious to sexual difference .7 Empathy not only allows me to see or understand the inner life of another and the body of the other as both other and similar to my body, but it also permits me to see what I am not insofar as the other is not simply a modification of my own ego, my own person. Physically, the sexual difference between men and women...