Experiencing Empathy through Music (after Edith Stein)

Abstract

How is it that, at moments of music listening, we might experience the sense of a living subject arising out of the movement of melody? Rather than seek the origin of this phenomenon in an imagined encounter with the person of a composer or performer, this article focuses on the temporal unfolding of melody, reading Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy together with Edmund Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Using a discussion of memory to elucidate the structures of internal time-consciousness that underpin the experience of empathy, the article situates the expression of melody at the very intersection of the flowing potential and actualized moments of a living subject.