The phenomena of empathy (Einfühlung) and the constitution of the sel...

In this theoretical contribution, the phenomena of empathy (Einfühlung), as described by Edith Stein, is discussed in relation to the nature of learning and and educational research. Edith Stein a student of Husserl wrote her dissertation on the problem of empathy (Einfühlung), as a phenomenological description. She views empathy as sensual and emotional empathy, not merely as perception but as experience that is led by foreign experience through the sensations of the living body (Stein, 2008). Empathy is an experience of another person’s experience “in an unmediated way, but dissimilar to perception and similar to others forms of experiences such as imagination, in that the meaning content of the experience is not given directly to the empathizer” (Svenaeus, 2017, p. 743). The act of empathy is similar to the act of remembering as “ I am making something present in my experience in a kind of secondary way, because the experience in question is brought back in memory and is not there in its actuality” (Svenaeus, 2017, p. 744). Stein describes the significance of empathy for the constitution of our own self as awakening to something through the experience of the other that is sleeping inside us. (Stein, 1989, p. 116).