Edith Stein between Husserlian Intersubjectivity, Heideggerian Being-With, and the Levinasian Face
© 2026. Natalie Ross. All rights reserved.
This essay reads Edith Stein’s 1916 phenomenology of empathy as a resource internal to the dispute Emmanuel Levinas later opens against his teachers, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Levinas charges both with reducing the Other to a modification of the Same: Husserl by constituting the alter ego analogically within the sphere of ownness (Cartesian Meditations, Fifth Meditation), Heidegger by subordinating any relation to another person to the prior, anonymous structure of Being-with (Mitsein). Drawing exclusively on Stein’s doctoral dissertation On the Problem of Empathy, Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Levinas’s Discovering Existence with Husserl, Time and the Other, and Totality and Infinity, the essay argues that Stein’s insistence on the irreducible, non-primordial givenness of the other’s experience already strains against the egological architecture that produces it — an immanent critique of Husserlian intersubjectivity, conducted from within phenomenological method itself, prior to and independent of Levinas’s more radical external critique. The essay then extends this reading into Stein’s later Catholic and Carmelite writings, where empathy deepens into charity and vicarious co-suffering, disclosing a structure of substitutionary self-gift that runs, in a different idiom and without any demonstrable line of dependence, alongside the structure of substitution that Levinas — working from his own, quite different sources — makes central to his ethics.
II. Stein’s Point of Departure: Empathy as a Sui Generis Act within the Husserlian School
III. Husserl’s Fifth Meditation: The Alter Ego as Analogical Modification of the Same
IV. Heidegger’s Ontological Demotion of Empathy: Being-With as Prior Existentiale
V. Levinas’s Critique: Ethics as First Philosophy against the Same
VI. Stein as Immanent Critique: Straining the Egological Framework from Within
VII. The Deepening of Empathy: Charity, Vicarious Suffering, and a Comparative Note on Substitution
VIII. Beyond Empathy: Unchosen Witness and the Still Small Voice
Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas together frame one of the most consequential disputes in twentieth-century European thought: whether phenomenology, on its own methodological resources, can ever adequately give an account of another person as genuinely other, rather than as a construction, projection, or structural correlate of the self that is doing the accounting. Levinas’s answer, developed across several decades of primary writing, is essentially negative with respect to both of his teachers. Husserl, he argues, constitutes the alter ego as an analogical modification of my own ego, reached from within my primordial sphere of ownness. Heidegger, in turn, subordinates any concrete relation to another person to a prior, anonymous, and reciprocal structure — Being-with — that precedes and conditions it. In both cases, on Levinas’s reading, the Other is absorbed into a structure of the Same before it can appear as irreducibly other at all.
Edith Stein’s 1916 doctoral dissertation on empathy sits, historically and methodologically, prior to this dispute rather than as a party to it. She wrote as Husserl’s student and, immediately afterward, as his research assistant at Freiburg, where between 1916 and 1918 she prepared for publication the manuscripts that would become the second book of the Ideas, itself concerned at length with the constitution of other animate bodies and other psychic lives.1 The question this essay poses is what happens when Stein’s own treatment of that same problem — composed from entirely within the Husserlian school, using Husserl’s own descriptive method, before either Heidegger’s ontological turn or Levinas’s ethical one had been articulated — is set against the terms of the later dispute. The wager of this essay is that her account does something neither Husserl’s Fifth Meditation nor Heidegger’s account of Being-with manages: it generates, from inside phenomenological method and without abandoning that method’s basic commitments, a description of the other’s alterity that the egological framework producing it cannot fully absorb.
This is what the essay means, throughout, by immanent critique: a critique conducted using the internal standards and procedures of a system, which discloses tensions or insufficiencies the system generates on its own terms, from within. This is to be distinguished carefully from Levinas’s own mode of critique, which is external and architectonic in a specific sense — he does not merely describe a phenomenon more carefully than his predecessors; he proposes that ethics be installed as “first philosophy,” prior to and independent of ontology and transcendental constitution as such, thereby stepping outside the framework he is criticising in order to criticise it. Stein’s dissertation, composed a decade and a half before Levinas begins publishing his critique of Husserl, and three decades before his fullest critique of Heidegger’s account of Being-with in Time and the Other, undertakes no such step. It should be said plainly at the outset, so that nothing that follows is mistaken for more than it is: nothing in the primary record indicates that Levinas ever read or engaged Stein’s dissertation directly, and no line of influence in either direction is claimed here. What follows is a reconstruction of where her account stands in relation to his critique, not a report of a documented dialogue between them. It is worth recalling, too, the peculiar intimacy of Levinas’s own relation to his principal target text: together with Gabrielle Peiffer, he translated Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations into French, the translation appearing in 1931 as Méditations cartésiennes — so that Levinas’s mature critique of the Fifth Meditation is levelled against a text he had himself rendered, word by word, a decade earlier.2 This detail sharpens rather than diminishes the stakes of setting Stein’s independent, earlier treatment of the same material against both Husserl’s published answer and Levinas’s later objection to it.
The essay proceeds in three stages. Sections II through VI reconstruct the philosophical dispute proper: Stein’s original account of empathy, Husserl’s Fifth Meditation, Heidegger’s demotion of empathy in favour of Being-with, Levinas’s critique of both, and finally a sustained argument that Stein’s 1916 account already performs, avant la lettre, an immanent version of the critique Levinas will later mount from outside. Section VII extends the argument into Stein’s later Catholic and Carmelite writings, where empathy is deepened into an explicitly theological register of charity and vicarious suffering, and asks what light this casts — comparatively, and with appropriate caution — on the structure of substitution central to Levinas’s own mature ethics. Section VIII then goes a step further, arguing that the lived witness examined there is not merely a deepening of empathy but a departure from it, and closes on the older, quieter source at the root of Stein’s own vocation.
II. Stein’s Point of Departure: Empathy as a Sui Generis Act within the Husserlian School
Stein’s dissertation, submitted at Freiburg in 1916 and published the following year as Zum Problem der Einfühlung, begins from a term she inherits and immediately contests. Einfühlung — empathy, literally “in-feeling” — had been given its most influential prior treatment by Theodor Lipps, for whom empathy names a kind of inner imitation: I feel my way into an object or another person by an involuntary process of projecting my own bodily and affective responses onto what I perceive. Stein rejects this model at the root. On her account, empathy is not projection, imitation, or inference from outward signs to an inferred inner state; it is a distinct type of act, an Akt sui generis, through which the experience of another is given to me directly, as such, but in a manner categorically unlike the way my own experience is given to me.3
The precision of this distinction is the achievement of her analysis. Stein insists that what empathy delivers is given non-primordially (nicht originär): I do not live the other’s grief as a present, actually undergone experience of my own; it is given to me as belonging, essentially, to another. Yet — and this is the point on which her whole account turns — this non-primordial givenness is not a deficient or second-rate mode of primordial experience, a faint copy of something I might in principle round out into full possession. It is a positive mode of givenness in its own right, as original within its own class as ordinary perception is within its class of acts.4 Grief empathised is not grief half-felt; it is another’s grief, given as such, and given as something I cannot make my own no matter how vividly I attend to it.
Stein develops this distinction in explicit dialogue with her second major interlocutor, Max Scheler, whose 1913 study of the phenomenology of sympathetic feeling had already moved some distance from Lipps’s projection model but had not, in her assessment, secured the strict irreducibility she is after. Against both, she argues that empathy is not one psychological curiosity among others but the founding act on which the entire edifice of intersubjective and objective experience depends: it is only through empathy that the sense “other subject” — and with it, ultimately, an objective, shared world of nature and culture standing over against any merely private one — becomes available to consciousness at all. Without empathy, Stein maintains, there could be no constituted sense of an other zero-point of orientation, and therefore no world held in common rather than merely mine.
This is not an abstract or free-floating philosophical exercise. Stein’s dissertation was written in the closest possible proximity to Husserl’s own unfinished labour on the same problem: her subsequent editorial work on the manuscripts that became Ideas II — itself devoted at length to the constitution of the other’s animate body (Leib) and psychic life — placed her, quite literally, inside the workshop in which Husserl’s mature account of intersubjectivity was being assembled.5 The custodial history of that labour is itself part of the primary record: her working papers passed, after her death, into the care of Herman Van Breda and the newly founded Husserl-Archives at Leuven,6 and her own personal manuscripts were later transferred to the Edith-Stein-Archiv in Cologne.6 The point to establish clearly at this stage is simply this: whatever critical force her account will later be shown to carry, it begins entirely from within the Husserlian household, composed by one of its most trusted junior members, working alongside — not against — the master’s own unfinished texts on the identical problem.
III. Husserl’s Fifth Meditation: The Alter Ego as Analogical Modification of the Same
Husserl’s own mature, published treatment of the same problem appears more than a decade later, in the Fifth of the Cartesian Meditations. The text originated as lectures delivered at the Sorbonne in 1929, and reached its first published form not in German but in the French translation Levinas himself co-produced with Gabrielle Peiffer in 1931 — the German original text was not published in Husserl’s lifetime at all.7 The Fifth Meditation sets itself an explicitly Cartesian problem: having reduced the world, through the phenomenological and transcendental reductions, to what is given within my own primordial sphere of ownness (Eigenheitssphäre), Husserl must explain how an objective world — a world of other subjects and shared, mind-independent objects — can be constituted without smuggling in, illegitimately, what the reduction was meant to bracket.
His solution proceeds by two connected steps. First, I perceive another organism as an animate body (Leib) rather than a mere physical thing because it resembles, in its bodily comportment, my own animate body — a resemblance Husserl calls pairing (Paarung), a form of passive, associative similarity that does not require an explicit inference. Second, on the basis of this pairing, I apperceive — by what Husserl terms analogising apperception — a foreign stream of consciousness appresented alongside the body I do perceive directly, in a manner structurally continuous with the way I appresent the unseen far side of an ordinary physical object from the side I actually see.8 I never intuit the other’s consciousness directly; I apprehend it only as appresented, on the analogy of my own case, mediated by the resemblance between the other’s body and mine.
The structural consequence of this account is exactly what becomes, a decade and a half later, the focal point of Levinas’s objection. The alter ego, on Husserl’s own telling, is reached only as an analogon of my ego — a sense constituted from within my primordial sphere, arrived at by extending to another person the same basic mechanism of appresentation that governs my constitution of ordinary physical things. However carefully qualified, the other is, in the final analysis, a modification of the same constituting achievement that gives me the world of objects generally, rather than an independent origin encountered as such. It is this structural feature — not any crude reductionism, but a precise and technically sophisticated one — that will draw Levinas’s sustained critical attention.
IV. Heidegger’s Ontological Demotion of Empathy: Being-With as Prior Existentiale
Heidegger’s Being and Time, published in 1927, takes a still more radical route through the same terrain. Rather than refining the empathy-based account of access to others, he rejects its starting point outright. In §26, he argues that the entire tradition running from Lipps through Scheler — and, by clear implication, encompassing both Husserl’s appresentative model and Stein’s sui generis act — begins from a mistaken picture of the human subject: an isolated, worldless ego that must then construct, by some special cognitive achievement, a bridge to other such egos.9 For Heidegger, this picture inverts the actual order of ontological priority. Dasein — his technical term for the human way of being — is never, even in principle, a worldless subject subsequently thrown together with others; Being-with (Mitsein) is one of the basic constitutive structures, an existentiale, of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world as such, operative always already, prior to and as the condition of possibility for any particular encounter with another Dasein.
The consequence for empathy is precise and deliberately deflationary: empathy does not first open up access to others, and so cannot be what founds Being-with; rather, empathy — understood now as a particular, derivative comportment — is itself made possible only on the basis of a Being-with that already, always, structures Dasein’s existence.10 The philosophical puzzle that occupied Lipps, Scheler, and Stein — how does an isolated subject reach another? — is, on Heidegger’s reading, not so much solved as dissolved: it is shown to rest on a false premise about what a human being fundamentally is.
A further detail belongs in the historical record here, established not by inference but by the published text itself. In 1928, a year after Being and Time appeared, Heidegger edited and published Husserl’s lectures on the phenomenology of internal time-consciousness, delivered originally between 1905 and 1910. The introduction to the standard English translation of these lectures documents, as part of the text’s own editorial history, the substantial and largely uncredited role Stein herself had played roughly a decade earlier in transcribing, organising, and editing the very manuscripts on which Heidegger’s 1928 edition was based.11 It is a small detail, but a telling one for the argument of this essay: the labour of the same scholar whose philosophical category — empathy — Heidegger would go on to subordinate so thoroughly had, only a decade before, quietly made possible one of the texts on which his own reputation as Husserl’s editor partly rested.
V. Levinas’s Critique: Ethics as First Philosophy against the Same
Against this composite picture — Husserl’s other reached by analogy from within my own sphere, Heidegger’s other dissolved into an anonymous, prior Being-with — Levinas mounts a critique that spans several decades and several books, though its structure is consistent throughout. The essays gathered in Discovering Existence with Husserl, composed and revised across the 1930s to the 1960s and collected in French as En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, return repeatedly to the Fifth Meditation, pressing the objection already anticipated above: that appresentative pairing, however technically refined, derives the sense of the Other from within the resources of my own primordial sphere, so that the Other I reach is never, strictly, other — only a variant, an analogon, of the Same.12 This is the seed of the far broader argument Levinas develops in Totality and Infinity, where he contends that the entire Western philosophical tradition, transcendental phenomenology very much included, treats knowledge of another person as a form of comprehension: a thematising, totalising cognitive act that assimilates whatever it grasps into the horizon of the one who grasps it. Against this, Levinas proposes that the relation to another person be understood, more fundamentally than any such cognition, through the figure of the face (visage) — that which addresses me, ethically, prior to and in excess of anything I could constitute or comprehend about it, and which resists, by its very structure, absorption into “the Same” (le Même).13
His critique of Heidegger runs on a related but distinct track, developed most explicitly in Time and the Other.14 There Levinas argues that Heidegger’s Being-with, for all its ontological priority over empathy, remains a relation of reciprocal, symmetrical solidarity — a togetherness oriented toward a shared world or a common task, a “with” that Levinas characterises as fundamentally neuter. It is not, on his reading, a relation to another person’s irreducible alterity as such, but a structure in which any particular other is already dissolved into an anonymous, shared situation. Where Heidegger subordinates the interpersonal to the ontological — Being-with as a structure of Dasein’s own self-understanding — Levinas wants, in the end, to reverse the priority entirely: ethics, not ontology, as first philosophy.
The composite charge against both teachers, stated plainly, is this: Husserl reduces the Other by constituting it, however elaborately, as a modification of my own ownness; Heidegger reduces the Other by dissolving any particular relation to another person into a prior, anonymous structure of shared Being. In neither case, on Levinas’s reading, does alterity as such ever actually appear; in both cases it is pre-empted by the very framework meant to explain how I have access to it at all.
VI. Stein as Immanent Critique: Straining the Egological Framework from Within
Having reconstructed Levinas’s composite charge against Husserl and Heidegger, it is now possible to ask where Stein’s much earlier account of the same problem stands in relation to it. The decisive methodological fact about her dissertation is that it never leaves the ground on which Husserl himself stood. Unlike Levinas, who eventually installs ethics as a “first philosophy” prior to and independent of ontology and transcendental constitution altogether, Stein performs her analysis entirely within Husserl’s own eidetic-descriptive procedure: she asks not whether an objective, shared world is possible — Husserl’s guiding, quasi-Cartesian anxiety in the Fifth Meditation — but, more narrowly and more purely descriptively, what, essentially, is the act by which another’s experience is given to me at all.15 That narrower brief matters. Because Stein is not labouring under the systematic pressure to secure the alter ego’s sense entirely from within my own primordial sphere — the pressure that drives Husserl toward pairing and analogising apperception as a way of keeping the whole constitutive order intact — she is free to describe empathic givenness with a rigour that resists assimilation to any other class of act.
This is the crux. Stein insists that the non-primordial character (nicht originär) of empathised experience is not a deficient or derivative mode of primordial experience — not a faint copy of “the Same” — but a positive, irreducible mode of givenness belonging to its own genus, as original in its class as perception is in its.16 The other’s grief is not given to me as an occluded profile of something I might, in principle, round out by changing my position, in the way the unseen back of a physical thing is appresented from its visible front. It is given as belonging, essentially and permanently, to another zero-point of orientation I cannot occupy. This is exactly what Stein resists in the models she inherits from Lipps and Scheler, and it is, on close reading, considerably more resistant to Levinas’s later charge than Husserl’s own account will prove to be. Husserl’s Fifth Meditation explicitly models the constitution of the alter ego on appresentation generally — the same associative mechanism that lets me appresent the far side of an object from its near side is extended, by analogy, to the other ego.17 That extension is precisely the move that licenses Levinas’s charge of reduction: the other, on Husserl’s account, is reached as an analogon of my own ego, a sense constituted from within my ownness by a mechanism common to my constitution of mere things. Stein’s empathy declines exactly this assimilation.
This escape, however, is only partial, and the limit must be stated with equal precision or the argument overreaches. What Stein’s empathy declines is a reduction of content: the collapse of the other’s experience into a variant of my own. What it does not decline is a reduction of a different kind, at the level of architecture rather than content. Her analysis still proceeds from what she calls the primordial “zero-point” of my own lived body (Leib) as the felt centre from which any other animate body is apprehended as animate at all.18 The recognition that there is another subject there — as opposed to a mere physical thing — still runs outward from my own bodily self-experience as its indispensable template. So while the content empathy delivers is not reduced to sameness, the possibility-condition of access to it still originates in, and depends upon, my own primordial sphere. This is precisely the structural feature — an egological point of departure — that Levinas will indict in Husserl a decade and a half later, and it applies to Stein too, however much more carefully she treats what is delivered once that point of departure is granted.
The interpretive payoff is exactly this asymmetry between content and architecture. Stein does not reject the egological starting point; she is not proposing, as Levinas will, that ethics precedes and displaces constitution. Working rigorously within Husserl’s own method, however, she generates a structure — an otherness the constituting ego can access but never convert into sameness — that the egological framework cannot fully digest on its own terms. The strain is visible in 1916–17, a decade and a half before Levinas’s intervention, and from a thinker who never breaks with transcendental phenomenology as a method in the way Levinas eventually will. This is what earns the description immanent critique in the strict sense: not an external correction imposed on phenomenology from an ethical standpoint outside it, but a fissure the tradition’s own most careful internal practice had already opened. The historiographical consequence is worth stating plainly: the received narrative — Husserl and Heidegger, then Levinas’s corrective from without — needs revising. The tradition Levinas attacked was already, from within, fissured by one of its own practitioners.
VII. The Deepening of Empathy: Charity, Vicarious Suffering, and a Comparative Note on Substitution
The tension identified above — an otherness accessed but never dissolved by an egological act — does not remain, in Stein’s own trajectory, a purely epistemological puzzle. Following her reception into the Catholic Church in 1922 and her entry into the Discalced Carmelite order at Cologne in 1933, it is taken up and transposed into an explicitly relational, and finally religious, register.19 In Endliches und ewiges Sein, composed in the 1930s and published posthumously in 1950, Stein attempts a synthesis of her phenomenological training with Thomistic metaphysics of act and potency, situating the finite human person within the horizon of eternal, Trinitarian Being.20 The person’s relation to other persons increasingly exceeds the register of epistemic access — how another’s experience is given to me — and moves toward participation and communion.
That movement reaches its furthest point in her final, unfinished manuscript, Kreuzeswissenschaft, composed in 1941–42 at the Carmel of Echt on the mystical theology of St John of the Cross.21 Here, the direct descendant of 1916’s empathy is co-suffering (Miterleiden), and it is no longer primarily a mode of cognitive access to another’s interiority at all. It becomes a mode of substitutionary offering, modelled explicitly on Christ’s own kenotic self-emptying and suffering on the Cross. The epistemic question of 1916 — how is another’s experience given to me — has been transposed into a properly theological one: how may I offer myself, vicariously, for another, after the pattern of the Cross. The archival and epistolary record — her correspondence, and testimony preserved by the Discalced Carmelites and the Edith-Stein-Archiv in Cologne, drawn upon in the process leading to her 1987 beatification and 1998 canonisation — records her own explicit framing of her vocation, and finally her death at Auschwitz-Birkenau on 9 August 1942, in exactly these terms of offering.22 This material should be treated here as primary historical testimony to how she herself construed the arc from empathy to self-gift, not adjudicated as doctrine by the essay itself.
It is worth setting this trajectory beside Levinas’s own mature thought, carefully. His concept of substitution, developed fully in Otherwise than Being and already present in the language of being “for-the-other” in Totality and Infinity, describes a structurally comparable figure: a radical, non-reciprocal answerability for the other that precedes any contract or choice, extending to responsibility even for the other’s fault, to the point of the self being made “hostage” to the one it faces.23 The necessary caution has to be stated without softening: Levinas repeatedly and explicitly declined to have his ethics read as theology, and grounded it in specifically Jewish sources — above all the Talmud, which he treated in separate confessional writings distinct from his philosophical corpus — insisting that his argument be assessed as philosophy in its own right, not as a philosophical translation of doctrine.24 He was not a Christian thinker, and his structure of substitution should not be read as derived from, or covertly identical to, Christian kenotic theology.
What can be said, carefully, is narrower and more historiographical than theological: two thinkers, formed within the same phenomenological school and moving in the 1930s and 1940s toward two textually distinct religious grammars — Stein’s explicitly Christian and Carmelite, articulated through imitatio Christi and a mystical theology of the Cross; Levinas’s biblical and rabbinic, resisting the label “theology” even as it draws on scripture — arrive independently at a structurally similar figure: a substitution for the other that exceeds and cannot be reduced to comprehension, exchange, or reciprocity. Neither line depends demonstrably on the other; nothing in the primary record suggests Levinas ever engaged Stein’s work. But the convergence is worth recording precisely because it shows the limit reached immanently by Stein’s 1916 phenomenology — an otherness the egological act can access but never convert into sameness — finding two independent completions: one Christian and theological, one philosophical and ethical with an acknowledged biblical substrate that its author, for good primary-source reasons documented in his own writing, refused to call theology at all.
VIII. Beyond Empathy: Unchosen Witness and the Still Small Voice
Every account offered so far, however far it has been deepened, has remained answerable to the concept with which this essay began. Empathy, on Stein’s own definition, is an act performed by a subject who reaches, non-primordially, toward another’s experience: however irreducible the content she insists it delivers, it remains structurally a relation of grasping something given to me, across a distance the act itself does not close. What Stein underwent from 1938 onward, and what Levinas set down in captivity between 1940 and 1945, will not fit inside that structure. Neither is a case of one consciousness reaching toward another’s interior life from a position of safety. Both are cases of two or more people sharing, without the mediation of any epistemic act, the same imposed fate. Measured against this, empathy — the concept this essay has spent seven sections defending, refining, and setting against Husserl and Heidegger — starts to look like what it always was on Stein’s own terms: a first word about the other, and not, in the end, the last one.
Stein’s own arrest supplies the clearest case. On 2 August 1942, in direct retaliation for a pastoral letter the Dutch Catholic bishops had ordered read from every pulpit in the country condemning the deportation of Jews, the occupying authorities extended an arrest order already in force against Jews to Catholics of Jewish descent as well. Stein and her sister Rosa, both converts, were seized that afternoon at the Carmel in Echt. Testimony gathered for the process that led to her beatification and canonisation records Stein steadying her disoriented sister with the words, “Come, we go for our people,” as they were led to the waiting van.25 Nothing in this sequence was sought. It was imposed, on a day and in a manner neither sister chose, by an apparatus of retaliation neither had any part in setting in motion; what Stein offered in the moment was not a bid for suffering but steadiness in the face of a suffering already and irreversibly under way.
Levinas’s own primary reckoning with the same catastrophe is preserved in a different kind of document, and one only available since 2009: the notebooks he kept as a prisoner of war, published as Carnets de captivité.26 Conscripted into the French army in 1939, he was taken prisoner during the fall of France in June 1940 and held for the remainder of the war in a barracks reserved for Jewish prisoners at Stalag XI-B, near Fallingbostel, forbidden any form of religious observance and assigned, unlike his fellow French officers, to forced labour. It was in these notebooks, written inside a captivity he had not chosen and could not end, that he set down the first workings of the thought that would become Existence and Existents and Time and the Other. Beyond the wire, his father, his two brothers, and his father-in-law were murdered in Lithuania in 1941; his mother-in-law was deported and never heard from again. His wife and infant daughter survived the war in hiding, sheltered at considerable risk by friends. The philosophy of radical responsibility for the other that Levinas would go on to develop was not, on this record, arrived at from a position outside suffering, offered as advice to those who might seek it out. It was arrived at from inside a loss he was powerless to prevent.
The difference this makes is not one of degree but of kind, and it can be stated with the same precision this essay has tried to bring to Stein’s original distinction. Empathy, however irreducible its content, is always a relation between a subject and a content given to that subject: something is delivered to me, non-primordially, and I receive it as belonging to another. Substitution, as Levinas comes to define it, and the co-suffering Stein comes to live, are not deliveries of this kind at all. To stand in the place of another, to answer for what befalls them, to be arrested alongside them or to labour beside them in the same barracks, is not to be given their experience at one remove; it is to share, without mediation, the same exposure. Nothing is represented, appresented, or empathised across a gap, because there is no longer a gap left to cross. The deepening traced in the previous section is better described, in the end, as an exceeding: not empathy stretched to its limit, but the point at which empathy’s own vocabulary of givenness, grasping, and distance closed by an act of consciousness stops being adequate to what is actually taking place between two people.
This is also the point at which it becomes necessary to look past the register in which Stein’s later writing is usually received, back to a source earlier than John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, or Thérèse of Lisieux, on whose stark vocabulary of the night and of victimhood the popular memory of Carmelite spirituality still substantially rests. The Order’s own primary self-understanding does not trace to the penitential extremity of the sixteenth-century reform but to a community of hermits gathered, in conscious succession to the prophet Elijah, beside a spring on Mount Carmel. The Rule those hermits received from Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem, around 1209, addresses them as living simply “by the spring on Mount Carmel,” and asks of them nothing more dramatic than allegiance to Christ “from a pure heart and a good conscience,” silence, work, and the meditation on Scripture “day and night.”27 There is no rhetoric of sought suffering in it. The fullest primary statement of the Order’s self-understanding, the fourteenth-century Book of the Institution of the First Monks, names the Carmelite end as twofold: a heart made pure through the hermit’s own effort, and, received purely as gift, the tasting “in the heart” and experiencing “in the mind” of the divine presence, “not only after death, but even in this mortal life.”28 The end named is a foretaste of life and nearness, freely given, not a suffering earned or sought.
Behind both texts stands the founding narrative itself. Fleeing for his life in 1 Kings 19, Elijah is told to stand on the mountain, and the text is exact about where God is not: not in the great wind that tears the mountains and shatters the rocks, not in the earthquake, not in the fire. God is in what follows the fire — a still, small voice, a sound of thin silence (1 Kings 19:11–13, NRSV). It is this theophany, and not the fire that precedes it, that Carmelite tradition names as its origin. Nor is this life-giving register, read carefully, as absent from the Order’s three great mystical doctors as their popular reception suggests. Thérèse of Lisieux’s Little Way was conceived, on her own account, expressly against the harsher penitential culture of her convent, an insistence on littleness and confidence in love rather than on self-imposed austerity.29 John of the Cross’s dark night is described throughout as something undergone, a passive purification, and the poems that follow it, the Spiritual Canticle and the Living Flame of Love, are poems of union and delight, not of pain.30 The starker, suffering-centred image often attached to Carmelite spirituality in general devotion sits less easily against these primary texts than against their later hagiographical reception.
None of this licenses a theology in which Christ’s sacrifice must be sought out again, replicated, or added to in every generation’s fire. Its own primary theology is emphatic that it was made once and is sufficient: “by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14, NRSV). What approaches, on the reading this essay has been building toward, is not a further demand for suffering but a presence that outlasts it — the same still, small voice Elijah heard on the mountain that gives the Carmelite order its name, and which is not without its own distant echo in the Levinasian face examined in Section V: a presence that addresses before it is comprehended, prior to and in excess of anything a subject could constitute about it. The two are not the same claim, made from within two different and, on Levinas’s own insistence, irreducibly distinct primary traditions; but both refuse, on their own terms, to let the last word belong to the wind, the earthquake, or the fire. Written in 2026, with that wind, earthquake, and fire again a live possibility rather than a historical memory, this is not an incidental detail for the essay to have recovered.
The movement traced here repeats, at a further remove, the one Section VI traced within Husserl’s phenomenology. There, Stein’s own account was shown to strain immanently against the egological framework that produced it. Here, the lived witness of Stein and Levinas alike strains against the very concept — empathy — that this essay took as its point of departure, and finally exceeds it. Empathy opened this essay as the ground on which the other first becomes available to consciousness; it closes it having been shown its own threshold — a door the argument needed to pass through, not the room in which it was ever going to be able to stand.
The argument of this essay has moved in three stages, and it is worth drawing them together plainly. Philosophically, Stein’s 1916 account of empathy, read carefully against Husserl’s Fifth Meditation and against the critique Levinas would later mount against it, occupies a genuinely distinctive position. She does not, as Levinas will, step outside the transcendental-phenomenological framework in order to secure the Other’s irreducibility; her method remains Husserl’s own descriptive-eidetic procedure throughout, and in that sense she never breaks with the tradition Levinas eventually indicts. And yet, applied with sufficient rigour to the phenomenon of empathy specifically, that same method yields a structure — an otherness given to consciousness but never convertible into sameness — that the egological architecture producing it cannot fully absorb on its own terms. This is what earns the description immanent critique in the strict sense used throughout this essay: not a correction imposed from an external ethical standpoint, but a fissure the tradition’s own most careful internal practice had already opened, a decade and a half before Levinas’s intervention and from within a method he would go on to indict as incapable, in principle, of producing exactly this result.
Theologically, the same fissure does not remain a purely descriptive puzzle in Stein’s own later trajectory. Empathy, transposed across her Catholic reception and her Carmelite vocation, becomes co-suffering, and finally an explicitly kenotic structure of vicarious self-offering, articulated in her final manuscript on the mystical theology of the Cross and confirmed, as primary testimony, in her correspondence and in the archival record surrounding her death and subsequent canonisation. Set beside this — carefully, and without claiming any line of dependence in either direction — Levinas’s own mature concept of substitution, developed from decidedly different, Jewish and biblical sources that he was insistent should not be read as theology, discloses a structurally comparable figure of radical, non-reciprocal answerability for the other.
A third movement, finally, has shown that even this theological deepening still answers, formally, to a concept it has by then outgrown. What Stein underwent in 1942 and what Levinas set down in captivity were not further instances of empathy, however extended, but unchosen participations in another’s fate for which empathy’s own vocabulary of givenness and distance has no adequate description. Read against the older, quieter source at the root of Stein’s own vocation — Elijah’s still small voice, sought neither in the wind nor the earthquake nor the fire — the essay’s governing concept turns out to have been a threshold rather than a destination: necessary to open the question of the other honestly in 1916, but finally too thin a word for what this witness discloses.
The historiographical point this essay has sought to establish is, in the end, a modest but consequential revision to the standard narrative. The Husserlian school was not simply superseded, from without, by Levinas’s later ethical turn. It already carried within itself, in the work of one of its own most careful practitioners, resources that strained against its own totalising tendencies — resources that took shape first phenomenologically, in a dissertation written before either Heidegger’s ontology or Levinas’s ethics existed, and later, in that same author’s own life and final writing, theologically. Immanent critique and the more familiar external, ethical critique were not, in this generation of phenomenologists, sequential stages in a single story of progress. They were contemporaneous, independently arrived at, and — read together, as this essay has tried to read them — mutually illuminating. And the concept that made the whole inquiry possible — empathy — turns out, on the same evidence, to have been only its threshold: indispensable for asking the question in 1916, but not, in the end, capacious enough to hold the answer.
1. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), §§43–47.
2. Edmund Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes: Introduction à la phénoménologie, trans. Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1931; repr. Paris: Vrin, 1947).
3. Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein, 3rd rev. ed., The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989), chap. 1.
4. Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, chap. 2.
5. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, §§43–47.
6. Husserl-Archives Leuven, “Archives,” KU Leuven, accessed August 2026, https://hiw.kuleuven.be/hua.
7. Edith-Stein-Archiv zu Köln, “History of the Archive,” accessed August 2026, https://www.edith-stein-archiv.de/en.
8. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), Fifth Meditation, §§42–54; on the French translation, see Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes, trans. Peiffer and Levinas.
9. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §50.
10. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), §26.
11. Heidegger, Being and Time, §26.
12. John Barnett Brough, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).
13. Emmanuel Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998).
14. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
15. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987).
16. Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, chap. 1.
17. Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, chap. 2.
18. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, Fifth Meditation, §§42–54; see also §50.
19. Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, chap. 1; Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, §§43–47.
20. Edith Stein, Self-Portrait in Letters, 1916–1942, trans. Josephine Koeppel, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 5 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1993); for the autobiographical record of the family and background from which she converted, see also Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family: An Autobiography, 1891–1916, trans. Josephine Koeppel, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986).
21. Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002).
22. Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross, trans. Josephine Koeppel, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 6 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002).
23. Stein, Self-Portrait in Letters, 1916–1942; Edith-Stein-Archiv zu Köln, “History of the Archive.”
24. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981); Levinas, Totality and Infinity.
25. Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl; Levinas, Time and the Other; Levinas, Totality and Infinity.
26. Edith-Stein-Archiv zu Köln, “History of the Archive.”
27. Emmanuel Levinas, Œuvres complètes, tome 1: Carnets de captivité et autres inédits, ed. Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier, preface by Jean-Luc Marion (Paris: Grasset/IMEC, 2009).
28. Albert of Jerusalem, “The Rule of Saint Albert,” trans. Bede Edwards, Carmelites (O.Carm.), accessed August 2026, https://www.ocarm.org/en/item/5438-the-carmelite-rule-text.
29. Felip Ribot, The Ten Books on the Way of Life and Great Deeds of the Carmelites (Including the Book of the First Monks), ed. and trans. Richard Copsey (Faversham: Saint Albert’s Press; Rome: Edizioni Carmelitane, 2005).
30. Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, trans. John Clarke, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996).
31. John of the Cross, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991).
Albert of Jerusalem. “The Rule of Saint Albert.” Translated by Bede Edwards. Carmelites (O.Carm.). Accessed July 2002. https://www.ocarm.org/en/item/5438-the-carmelite-rule-text.
Edith-Stein-Archiv zu Köln. “History of the Archive.” Accessed December 2010. https://www.edith-stein-archiv.de/en.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960.
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989.
Husserl, Edmund. Méditations cartésiennes: Introduction à la phénoménologie. Translated by Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1931. Reprinted Paris: Vrin, 1947.
Husserl, Edmund. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Edited by Martin Heidegger. Translated by John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
Husserl-Archives Leuven. “Archives.” KU Leuven. Accessed January 2011. https://hiw.kuleuven.be/hua.
John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Rev. ed. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Discovering Existence with Husserl. Translated by Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Œuvres complètes, tome 1: Carnets de captivité et autres inédits. Edited by Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier. Preface by Jean-Luc Marion. Paris: Grasset/IMEC, 2009.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Ribot, Felip. The Ten Books on the Way of Life and Great Deeds of the Carmelites (Including the Book of the First Monks). Edited and translated by Richard Copsey. Faversham: Saint Albert’s Press; Rome: Edizioni Carmelitane, 2005.
Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being. Translated by Kurt F. Reinhardt. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.
Stein, Edith. Life in a Jewish Family: An Autobiography, 1891–1916. Translated by Josephine Koeppel. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 1. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986.
Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. 3rd rev. ed. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.
Stein, Edith. The Science of the Cross. Translated by Josephine Koeppel. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 6. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.
Stein, Edith. Self-Portrait in Letters, 1916–1942. Translated by Josephine Koeppel. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 5. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1993.
Thérèse of Lisieux. Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Translated by John Clarke. 3rd ed. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996.
- Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), §§43–47. [↩]
- Edmund Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes: Introduction à la phénoménologie, trans. Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1931; repr. Paris: Vrin, 1947). [↩]
- Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein, 3rd rev. ed., The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989), chap. 1. [↩]
- Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, chap. 2. [↩]
- Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, §§43–47. [↩]
- Edith-Stein-Archiv zu Köln, “History of the Archive,” accessed August 2026, https://www.edith-stein-archiv.de/en. [↩]
- Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), Fifth Meditation, §§42–54; on the French translation, see Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes, trans. Peiffer and Levinas. [↩]
- Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §50. [↩]
- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), §26. [↩]
- Heidegger, Being and Time, §26. [↩]
- John Barnett Brough, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991). [↩]
- Emmanuel Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). [↩]
- Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). [↩]
- Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987). [↩]
- Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, chap. 1. [↩]
- Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, chap. 2. [↩]
- Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, Fifth Meditation, §§42–54; see also §50. [↩]
- Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, chap. 1; Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, §§43–47. [↩]
- Edith Stein, Self-Portrait in Letters, 1916–1942, trans. Josephine Koeppel, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 5 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1993); for the autobiographical record of the family and background from which she converted, see also Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family: An Autobiography, 1891–1916, trans. Josephine Koeppel, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986). [↩]
- Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002). [↩]
- Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross, trans. Josephine Koeppel, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 6 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002). [↩]
- Stein, Self-Portrait in Letters, 1916–1942; Edith-Stein-Archiv zu Köln, “History of the Archive.” [↩]
- Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981); Levinas, Totality and Infinity. [↩]
- Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl; Levinas, Time and the Other; Levinas, Totality and Infinity. [↩]
- Edith-Stein-Archiv zu Köln, “History of the Archive.” [↩]
- Emmanuel Levinas, Œuvres complètes, tome 1: Carnets de captivité et autres inédits, ed. Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier, preface by Jean-Luc Marion (Paris: Grasset/IMEC, 2009). [↩]
- Albert of Jerusalem, “The Rule of Saint Albert,” trans. Bede Edwards, Carmelites (O.Carm.), accessed August 2026, https://www.ocarm.org/en/item/5438-the-carmelite-rule-text. [↩]
- Felip Ribot, The Ten Books on the Way of Life and Great Deeds of the Carmelites (Including the Book of the First Monks), ed. and trans. Richard Copsey (Faversham: Saint Albert’s Press; Rome: Edizioni Carmelitane, 2005). [↩]
- Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, trans. John Clarke, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996). [↩]
- John of the Cross, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991). [↩]