Abstract
The talk illuminates the tension in the phenomenon of love in Edith Stein and Jean-Paul Sartre. Love, as the most intesive attempt to get close to another person, can stand as a example for the limits and dangers but also the possibilities of intersubjective relationships.
The impossibility to reach the other and the futility of intersubjective relations which stems from Sartre's phenomenology of the look reveal themselves in the failure of love in their most condest and clear form. In comparison Stein's phenomenology of the act of empathy reveals the possibility of mutual understanding which reaches its highest level in the phenomenon of love.
The failure of love in Sartre is thus contrasted with love as the ideal of the possible understanding and grasping of the other in Stein.