Hey, you're listening to the partially examined life episode 366 part two.

We have been discussing Edith Steins on the problem of empathy.

And she had said that empathy was the non-primorial experience of other people's mental life of their emotions specifically.

I guess I wanted to, just before we get into more of the text, ask, I compared it to epistemology of people saying, well, a direct realist would say I directly experience the objects

in the world, an indirect realist, no, I only perceive my own representations. And those, I think,

represent the things out in the world. Why do you think, I mean, is that distinction and the problems

with that, why she wants to use this primordiality as opposed to

indirect? In other words, do I, I directly am perceiving my own experience now. I'm indirectly

perceiving my past memory because I'm perceiving it through the lens of my memory. I'm indirectly

perceiving your mental states because I'm perceiving it through the lens of your bodily

expression, something like that. I mean, could she have used indirect and direct just as easily as

primordially or not? I don't know. I don't like that. Direct and indirect to me has a slightly

different connotation or just like I was saying, like talking about mediated versus unmediated.

I feel like what she's trying to drive at is something more like, boy, it's hard to characterize.

Again, I can only, I think of it in terms of the structure of intentionality, that in every

experience, there will be something that is immediately present, that is the direct object of the intentional

conscious experience, whatever that may be. And in that sense, it has a privileged relationship

to the I, which we call primordiality. But maybe connecting it to our own body would help make more sense of

it because she uses the term content, right? It's like the content of the experience can be

primordial or non-primordial in some sense. The experience itself is always primordial. But really what

she's driving at is like, is this phenomena an experience that the

eye is having in a direct intentional relationship with its own perceptual or cognitive mechanism?

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