Empathy as the understanding of spiritual persons

pp. 91-118

in: Edith Stein, On the problem of empathy, Washington, D.C., ICS Publications, 1989

Abstract

So far we have considered the individual "I" as a part of nature, the living body as a physical body among others, the soul as founded on it, effects suffered and done and aligned in the causal order, all that is psychic as natural occurrence, consciousness as reality. Alone, this interpretation cannot be followed through consistently. In the constitution of the psycho-physical individual something already gleamed through in a number of places that goes beyond these frames. Consciousness appeared not only as a causally conditioned occurrence, but also as object-constituting at the same time. Thus it stepped out of the order of nature and faced it. Consciousness as a correlate of the object world is not nature, but spirit.