In October 1943, Henrich Himmler gave two speeches in Posen, Poland. The Posen speeches, as they have come to be known, represent the first time a member of Hitler’s Cabinet had publicly articulated the Nazi policy of the extermination of the Jews. Himmler, the head of the SS, acknowledged that the task was not without personal difficulty—to see 1,000 corpses and remain “decent” was hard, he said, but the experience made those who carried out the exterminations “tough.” What about the killing of women and children? According to Himmler, they needed to be exterminated because they might become—or give birth to—avengers of their fathers. In the end, he said, “the difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth.” Empathy, while a natural human response, needed to be set aside.
A year earlier, 51-year-old Edith Stein had been one of those disappeared by the Nazis on 9th August. Born Jewish, she was one of the remarkable women who had become part of the first followers of the new philosophy of phenomenology. She received her doctorate at the age of 25 and became, along with Martin Heidegger, one of Edmund Husserl’s teaching assistants and closest intellectual confidantes. Her doctoral thesis tackled one of phenomenology’s most pressing questions: it was called On the Problem of Empathy.
For Stein, “the problem of empathy” was more than a theoretical subject: it guided her brief life in unexpected ways—killed for being Jewish, she was at the time of her death a Catholic nun. Too often overlooked as a thinker, she is now one of the six patron saints of Europe known as St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
What is empathy? While the word only came into the English language in the early 20th century as a translation of the German term Einfühlung or “feeling into,” the problem of empathy has long been a key question in philosophy. In particular, it has long been bound up in the question of “other minds.” While in the 17th century, Descartes had stated emphatically that “I think therefore I am”—that I think means I exist—this gives no guarantee that anyone else exists (they may be a figment of my imagination). More vexing—even if I accept that other minds do exist, I have no guarantee that they are, that they see the world, the same as me.
For Stein and the nascent philosophy of phenomenology, as conceived by Husserl, the problem was particularly acute. Phenomenology posited that the proper field of study for philosophy was not whether things existed, but how we experience them—the world is created by this encounter, and given meaning by it, and whatever is independent of human experience is beyond human speculation. That this includes other humans—other generators of meaning—was hugely problematic.
In On the Problem of Empathy, Stein argues that the way we encounter humans is not the same as the way we encounter other things in the world, and this difference is not something added on after the initial encounter. Rather, empathy is an immediate and structural part of being human. This is known as a “direct perception account” of empathy—we do not need to refer to our own experiences to know that someone is feeling scared, or ashamed or happy. We just know. We can also, again uniquely, adopt the perspective of the other. We can, in a way which we are unable to do as fully with non-human encounters, care.
Stein’s word for what we encounter in the other is their “spirit.” The term is problematic for a number of reasons, not least its religious connotations, and subsequent accounts have sought other possible descriptions. For Stein, however, the use of the word is revealing. Born into an observant Jewish family, Stein was a professed agnostic when she began studying under Husserl, but On the Problem of Empathy can be read as much as a document of spiritual awakening as one of philosophy.
Shortly after her book’s publication, Stein read the autobiography of the 16th-century mystic Teresa of Avila. Later she would write: “when I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth.” As Edward Baring has set out in his 2019 study Converts to the Real, a number of phenomenologists found Catholicism in the 1920s, but Stein was perhaps the most emphatic convert. She took Holy Orders as a Carmelite nun in 1922, a mere six months after reading St Teresa. Dissuaded from entering a convent immediately, she spent the next 10 years teaching, while keeping close contact with Husserl, and visiting both him and then in 1929 his student Martin Heidegger, who infamously became a member of the Nazi Party in 1933.
Her teaching ended abruptly in 1933, when new antisemitic laws forced her resignation. In October the same year she entered Discalced Carmelite monastery St Maria vom Frieden, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Her account of her entry into the convent makes agonising reading—the distress of her mother is particularly harrowing. Not only was her daughter leaving Judaism, she was leaving it when Jews were under great threat—a double betrayal. Stein provides a vivid portrait of grief—her mother swinging between floods of tears and motherly devotion. This was empathy tested to its limits.
Shortly before she had written to Pope Pius XI—she sought, but had been unable to obtain, an audience with him—to denounce the Nazis and their attacks on Jews. Faithful Catholics throughout the world were, she wrote, “waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this abuse of Christ’s name.” It is not known if the pope saw the letter, but if her Jewish origins were not enough already to condemn her to the gas chamber, this letter was her death warrant.
Transferred to the Netherlands in 1938 for her own protection—the Nazis would annex it in 1940—she continued to write, producing both spiritual works and Finite and Eternal Being, in which she seeks to combine phenomenology with the work of St Thomas Aquinas. And yet, in many ways, On the Problem of Empathy, written before her conversion, does this better. Shorn of the theology, her theories of spiritual communion still resonate.
On 20th July 1942, the Bishops’ Conference of the Netherlands released a statement condemning the Nazis. In the next two weeks all Jewish converts to Catholicism were arrested, including Stein. On 7th August, she was one of 987 Jews deported to Auschwitz. Two days later she was gassed to death. She had, she wrote, prepared herself for this day from the moment the Netherlands fell.
For Stein, empathy was both fundamental and complicated. Basic to the way we encounter the world, it could be both manipulated and destroyed, and in this we were deprived of our spirit. Populists in her time and our own have manipulated our urge to identify or to exclude in brutal ways casting those whom we are encouraged to oppose as less then human, while the war in Ukraine has reminded us that one dehumanises by reducing one’s ability to empathise. It has also reminded us of the opposite—that at a time where we have been becoming more and more individuated and solipsistic, empathy can humanise us.
When Stein was canonised, and further made a patron saint of Europe, the scenes between her and her mother were repeated on a grander scale—did she die as a Jew or as a Catholic martyr? Is her death an opportunity for Catholic and Jewish dialogue, or a Catholic land grab? Her translator, biographer and niece, Susanne Batzdorff, was one of 97 family members who attended her canonisation, and who have felt this complication as part of their daily lives. She offers no neat solutions, but in one way echoes her aunt. To be human, she writes, we must “learn about each other’s beliefs and ideology with open minds and mutual respect.” And, as Edith Stein put it in her letter, “Those who remain silent are responsible.”
