Empathy by Edith Stein and the heart from Dilexit Nos by Pope Francis
Author(s)
Date Issued
2026
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Journal
New Blackfriars
Abstract
This paper explores the epistemic foundations of empathy and intersubjectivity in Edith Stein’s analysis, placing it in dialogue with Pope Francis’s reflections on the heart in his last encyclical, Dilexit Nos. Beginning with Stein’s development of empathy, the author examines how empathy grants us an awareness of the other’s inner experience, which is non-primordially present and foreign to the empathizing subject. While this structure reveals a fundamental asymmetry between self and other, it also leads Stein’s account of empathy to an epistemic insufficiency: it can describe the givenness of the other, but not the depth of relational life. At this insufficiency, I turn to Pope Francis’ notion of the heart as a lived space of spiritual life. The heart, in this vision, is where contradictions and polar tensions between self and other are not solved but held – a space of receptivity, affectivity, and interior openness. Drawing on the image of bamboo that survives precisely through its emptiness, I suggest that a spiritually receptive heart allows us to live in the asymmetrical experiences between self and without collapsing the other into abstraction.
SFU Affiliated Publication
Yes
Availability at SFU Library
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