In dialogie with Edith Stein

Empathy as inner resonance
Re-reading Edith Stein in the light of Metamodern connectedness

 

 

 

 

 

I do not write this as a theologian, but as a seeker. As someone who has been touched by encounter — and by its absence. Who believes that truth does not begin with facts, but with presence. That love is not a feeling, but a field of force. And that empathy is not merely a skill, but a memory of who we are.

 

From this perspective, I wish to re-read Edith Stein — not as a saint or mystic in service of the Church, but as a woman who dared to enter the silence in order to listen for a truth within the unspeakable, a truth that concerns us all.

 

 

 

Empathy as access to the other

Edith Stein grounded her thinking in the phenomenology of Husserl, but added something unique: a deep attentiveness to the vivid inner world of the other. In her dissertation Zum Problem der Einfühlung (1917), she describes empathy not as projection, but as an original structure of consciousness. We do not perceive the other as an object, but as an ensouled body — as an Other Self.

 

For her, empathy is a form of co-experiencing, in which the distinction between I and You does not dissolve, but is held. A space in-between arises — what I call the field of Love — in which we are touched by the existence of the other, without wanting to define or control them. It is precisely there that truth emerges: not as knowledge, but as recognition.

 

 

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The Self as rooted in relational openness

Stein opposes the idea of a self-contained ego. She sees the human being as a soul with open boundaries: shaped through encounter and resonance. Her spirituality is essentially relational. That she names this openness toward the divine is understandable within her context — but her vision can easily be translated into a more universal language: what she calls ‘God’ may also be understood as the vast field of loving connectedness that underlies everything.

 

For Stein, the soul is not a possession, but a receptivity. In this sense, her work beautifully aligns with my understanding of love as a foundational principle: something we live in, something we arise from and something we can return to — through empathy, vulnerability and silence.

 

 

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Encounter as a Spiritual Space

In her later work, Stein gradually shifts from a strictly phenomenological to a more existential-spiritual approach. She writes about the path of the soul, about inner transformation, about the mysterious workings of grace. But what she is really describing is a process of remembering: a return to the true Self that lives in connection.

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This ‘grace’ can also be understood as a radical openness to life itself: a state in which we do not seek to control existence, but learn to bear it. In the encounter with the other — whether that be a child, a beloved, a text or silence — something appears that is greater than the self.

 

Edith Stein lived this: in the way she listened, wrote, loved — and ultimately chose solidarity to its furthest extent — a choice that led her to the convent and to her death in Auschwitz. Her life bears witness to a love that did not seek its limits in safety, but in fidelity.

 

 

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Ethics as responding to the other

While many philosophers speak of empathy as ‘understanding’, Stein speaks of responsiveness. In this, she anticipates Levinas: the Other calls me, asks for my presence — not because I can fix anything, but simply because I am here. In her thought, empathy is not optional — it is the existential ground form of loving responsibility.

 

I call this truth as an act of love: being faithful to the other without reducing them to your own frame of reference. In that sense, her ethics is radically gentle — and precisely because of that, powerful.

 

 

 

The Other as mystery: between recognition and irreducibility

What Edith Stein intuitively senses in her emphasis on responsiveness is later radically developed by Emmanuel Levinas. Whereas Stein describes empathy as a form of co-experiencing, Levinas stresses the irreducibility of the Other. The Other, for him, appears as a face that calls me — not to understand, but to take responsibility. In this encounter something becomes visible that does not fit within my framework, and precisely for that reason, it is meaningful.

 

This tension between recognition and mystery is fertile. Empathy, in a metamodern sense, holds both: the inner resonance with the suffering of the other and the awareness that the other can never be fully understood or absorbed. Where Stein speaks of the soul being touched, Levinas speaks of the ethical appeal that allows no defense. In that sense, their thinking complements each other — and invites an ethics of not-knowing, in which empathy is not reduced to projection, but continues to vibrate at the threshold between I and You.

 

 

 

A Metamodern Re-reading

Although Stein is deeply rooted in Christian mysticism, her thinking is strikingly open. She wrote about womanhood, upbringing, social responsibility and inner growth. Her truth is not dogma, but a living process. She dared to think and to feel, to pray and to suffer, to act and to remain silent.

 

Within a metamodern consciousness — one that does not oppose faith and doubt, rationality and mysticism, self and other, but keeps them in dynamic tension — her work gains new resonance. One need not take her religious language as literally true. One can read her as bearing witness to connected humanity, to the courage of being moved and to the fidelity to that which calls in silence: love, truth and presence.

 

 

 

Connection to the Feminine

What often remains underexposed in Stein’s work is her subtle yet powerful vision of the feminine as bearer of a different kind of knowing. She wrote extensively about the soul of woman — not from a limiting idea of roles, but as a recognition of receptivity, of a wisdom that lies not in domination, but in presence.

 

This vision resonates with the longing for a different kind of ethics — one in which care, embodiment, intuition and connectedness are not secondary notions, but the very heart of what it means to be human. In a time when feminine forms of knowing — such as intuitive insight, embodied experience and relational sensitivity — are once again being recognized as valid epistemologies, her thought gains renewed urgency.

 

 

 

The human being as a bridge between immanence and transcendence

Stein’s view of the human being is steeped in the tension between immanence (the here and now, the bodily) and transcendence (the longing, the beyond). In her later work, she does not try to resolve this tension, but to bear it. She shows how the human being is that bridge: wounded and yearning, touched and seeking.

 

This echoes my own thought — that empathy and love do not merely point to connection, but embody it. The human being as incarnation of the field of love, as a tangible point of resonance between the visible and the invisible.

 

 

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The soul that remembers

Edith Stein once wrote:

 

“The deepest mystery of the soul only reveals itself when she forgets herself in loving turning to the other.”

 

Perhaps that is exactly where Stein and I meet: in the conviction that empathy is not an instrument, but a form of truth; that love is not a sentiment, but the underlying tone of existence; and that whoever is truly present, remembers who she is — a human being of connection.

 

In this encounter between my philosophical intuition and Stein’s mystical wisdom, a new space opens. A space where religious language is no longer an obstacle, but a poetic window onto something greater than ourselves — and at the same time the most intimate thing we know:

 

Loving presence.