 But how exactly is, say, the distress of another subject perceptible or given in a bodily countenance? Stein analyzes the precise nature of the relation between expression and what is expressed (1917: 93–103[75–84]) and concludes that it must not be conceived as any sort of referential, symbolic, associative or inferential relation. Rather, what empathic perception directly grasps is the “unity” between the bodily expression of an experience and the experience itself (a unity that is also given to, and indeed experienced as a unity, by the other). The underlying phenomenological claim is that the other’s body is not given purely as a physical entity (Körper), a meaningless “container” of experiential items, but as a lived body (Leib), as the visible field of always already expressive phenomena. Accordingly, the distress is “co-given” in the distressed countenance, and the two “form a natural unity” (1917: 95[77]). The unobservability thesis only follows if we assume that the only directly visible properties of another person are the meaningless physical events that the body is displaying. Once we appreciate that we are directly grasping the sense of another’s expressive bodily behavior in empathy, the need to refer to conceptual inferences or simulation processes to penetrate some allegedly opaque bodily barriers loses its motivation.