Human Destinies: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Gerald Hanratty

Chapter Nineteen: Presuming the Other from Stein to Husserl

n i n e t e e n Presuming the Other from stein to Husserl empathy and the margins of experience Belinda McKeon Habent sua fata libelli. “Books have their fate.” With this time-honored maxim begins erwin straus’ eloquent foreword to the english translation of edith stein’s work from 1917, Zum Problem der Einfühlung.1 rendered into english by Waltraut stein, a grand-niece of the author, that 1964 edition comprised an account of the problems of intersubjective experience that was as full of poise as of provocation, as stein turned her gaze on the question of empathy between human beings and of its possibilities and limitations, given the conditions of human consciousness . Books have their fate—or, it might be said, their destiny—and such was the achievement of the doctoral dissertation which stein presented at the university of Freiburg in 1916, under the supervision of edmund Husserl, that this book, which emerged out of that dissertation , was bound to come into existence, and bound to make an impact 468 Presuming the Other from stein to Husserl 469 on the phenomenological scene. its power stemmed not just from the depth and the intelligence of its engagement with the very core of Husserlian phenomenology, and with the intricate problems converging on that core, but from the unique intimacy of its understanding where that phenomenology and those problems were concerned. Here, it was clear immediately, was a thinker on Husserlian phenomenology , writing literally from within Husserlian phenomenology itself. Here was a thinker on the inside track. stein had been preoccupied— in fact, obsessed—with Husserl’s phenomenology since her teens, had studied with Husserl at Göttingen, and, at Freiburg, had written her dissertation under him while working as his private assistant. Her work as Husserl’s assistant fed enormously into her work on her dissertation ; most crucially where her formulation of the problem of empathy was concerned, it gave her a clear window onto the complexity of Husserl’s thought as he developed the manuscript that would, many years later, become his Ideen ii. stein assisted Husserl on the organization and reworking (indeed, very possibly on the rewriting) of the Ideen ii manuscripts, and her own manuscript on empathy reflected her access and her intimacy with the complexity of Husserl’s thought. in Zum Problem der Einfühlung, stein was able to consider and to respond to the emerging shape of Husserl’s changing perspective on phenomenological intersubjectivity and on empathy, long before that perspective would be published (posthumously) under Husserl’s own name. Books have their fate. as a graduate student in the philosophy department at university College Dublin working on a thesis about Husserl ’s theory of intersubjectivity, and about the problems encountered by Husserl over the course of his career as he reworked and reconsidered that theory, i met with the thorny question of empathy early on in my research. What was this Einfühlung, and how was it different from sympathy, and from compassion, and from less positive interpersonal experiences like projection and presumption—from what might be called pigeonholing? How could Husserlian phenomenology, which accounted so intricately and so compellingly for the intersubjective nature of our experience of the world, and of objects in that world, account also for our intersubjective experience of other subjects—our 470 Belinda McKeon intersubjective nature of intersubjectivity itself—in a manner which both recognized and described the experience of the other subject as other? How, that is, could Husserlian phenomenology account for the other as subject rather than as an object with a horizon, an object containing an open referentiality to other subjects? Was Einfühlung enough? Knowing that i was circling around the question of empathy, and knowing that i was searching for another perspective on the phenomenological problem of otherness, Dr. Gerald Hanratty introduced me to the work of edith stein. One day after class—at uCD, he taught a graduate seminar on the philosophy of religion—he beckoned me to step into his office and gave me his copy of Zum Problem der Einfühlung. “read this,” he said, “and come back to me.” stein wouldn’t make Husserl easier to grapple with, he warned me; in fact, her thesis would cast light on new complications, new densities in the relation between self and other, and with how that relation could be understood in terms of consciousness and in terms of...