Einfühlung
Literally "feeling into": the act through which Stein has me grasp another's body and experience as like mine, and myself as others see me.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Only one body, mine, is lived from inside; other bodies reach me as exteriors. Empathy, by analogy and pairing, lets me take those exteriors as living bodies someone else inhabits.
Put simply Stein: I feel only my own body from the inside; everyone else's I see from the outside. Empathy is what lets me see those bodies as people living in them, as I live in mine.
In the text In On the Problem of Empathy (1917), Stein rejects inference by analogy as an account of empathy; "pairing" is Husserl's term, from Cartesian Meditations §51.
Empathy does more than reveal others, Stein argues: it hands me my own self, teaching me that other subjects take me as their object, in body and psyche alike.
Put simply Stein: empathy doesn't only show me other people. It shows me myself too, because through it I learn that I am someone others look at, body and mind.
Someone watching me might catch me fishing for approval while I believe myself simply generous. Stein's point: imagining their view of me can correct my self-picture, so empathy enlarges self-knowledge.
For Stein, empathy underwrites realism: how the world appears depends on each consciousness, but the world that appears is the same for everyone and so independent of any mind.
Put simply Stein: we each see the world from our own angle, yet it is one world. Empathy confirms that others see it too, so it is real and not just in my head.
Links from these claims to others in the course. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
HusserlHusserl's first route to other minds is epistemological: I grasp another ego by analogy with mine, and the result is a community of monads, each still self-contained. L17 · 5:32
SteinOnly one body, mine, is lived from inside; other bodies reach me as exteriors. Empathy, by analogy and pairing, lets me take those exteriors as living bodies someone else inhabits. L17 · 25:33
Stein reaches another's living body by the same analogy and pairing that Husserl uses for other egos, but adds the body he leaves out.
SteinEmpathy does more than reveal others, Stein argues: it hands me my own self, teaching me that other subjects take me as their object, in body and psyche alike. L17 · 26:48
SartreBeing looked at makes me someone's object, and that very fact brings home that the looker is a subject. In Sartre's words, "I cannot be an object for an object." L17 · 32:07
Shore says Sartre takes up Stein's idea that I am an object for other subjects; she does not claim direct borrowing.
Throughlines that pass through one of these claims.
Terms that appear in the same claims.