Edith Stein was the student of the philosopher Edmund Husserl. She worked for and with him on several of his important manuscripts from the fall of 1916 until her baptism, on New Year’s Day in 1922. Stein’s 1916 doctoral dissertation on empathy was followed by three more essays written during these years, and published in 1922 and 1925. Those four treatises together form a cohesive statement of Stein’s phenomenology, which is the focus of these remarks.
Introduction: Edith Stein's Life and Philosophical Context
Edith was the darling and precocious baby sister
of a large Jewish family. Her capable and pious mother ran a prosperous
lumber yard, having been left a widow when Edith was just a toddler. Among
the uncles and cousins were numerous professional men. Careers in medicine
were chosen for Edith and her closest sister, Erna. Accordingly, the young
ladies were enrolled in the university in their home city, Breslau. Erna
did complete her training and had a successful practice as a gynecologist.
Edith was interested in a different medical specialty,
a specialty that today we call psychiatry. She wanted to understand how
the mind works, what troubles afflict the heart, and how to heal the soul.
Remember, now, that the year is 1911, Edith is 19, and the sciences undergirding
the psychiatry and psychology of today have not yet been born. Over in
Vienna, Sigmund Freud is puzzling over those neurotic lady patients, while
on the Susquehanna, a 7-year-old named B.F. Skinner is trying in vain
to train chipmunks. The term "psychology" still means a branch of philosophy.
In other words, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the other foundational
theories of psychology, as we know it, are just taking shape. University
professors and their students are devising the first controlled laboratory
experiments to investigate the processes of sensory perception. They are
trying to figure out, if you will, how to think about thinking, how to
do so reliably, productively, and scientifically. Some are guided in this
endeavor, as Edith discovers, by a two-volume work called Logical Investigations,
published in 1900-01 by Edmund Husserl. So Edith Stein, age 21, decides
to transfer to the University of Göttingen to study with Husserl
and become initiated into the new philosophy of science called "phenomenology."
Under Husserl's tutelage, Stein earned her doctorate
in 1916, and she immediately went to work for him as his research and
teaching assistant. This partnership was tremendously productive for about
18 months; but Husserl's undisciplined work habits also made it quite
frustrating. Edith quit in early 1918, but with independent income from
her mother, she continued to be closely involved in the various projects
of Husserl and his circle. This is the period, 1916 through 1921, when
she wrote the four treatises that I'll be talking about here, three of
which Husserl chose to publish in the journal that he co-edited. This
superb philosophical output came from someone not yet 30.
Stein lived another 21 years. She experienced a religious
conversion, was baptized, taught at an obscure teacher-training institute,
was enlisted in the theological cause of German neo-Thomism, and began
to achieve public stature as a lecturer in the wake of the publication
of her translation of the De Veritate of Thomas Aquinas. In the early
1930's she took another stab at launching the university career that had
been denied to her a decade earlier after Husserl's refusal of a proper
recommendation on grounds of gender. She had barely begun teaching at
Münster when the anti-Semitic regulations of 1933 took that job away
from her. This cleared the way for her to follow the vocation that she
had felt ever since her baptism, and she was accepted into the Carmel
at Cologne at age 42. Stein's mature philosophical work was completed
in the cloister. I won't get into this mature work in these remarks; we're
looking instead at its foundations. But please bear in mind that the questions
and the methods of Stein's phenomenology are the foundation and prelude
to both the Thomistic and the Sanjuanist phases of her philosophy. And
the key to seeing how all this is going to fit together is to remember
her generative intellectual quest: How to heal broken hearts, the hearts
that a broken world breaks.
Stein’s own life ended very sadly. After the riots
of late 1938, she transferred to the Carmel in Eckt. But she was arrested
there in August 1942 and deported to Auschwitz, where she was probably
gassed. Catholics call her a martyr because of the witness of her life,
her general intention to offer that life for the sake of the people of
God, and the specific intention of her murderers to kill her in reprisal
for the Dutch Catholic bishops' public criticism of Nazi policy toward
the Jews. She should also be regarded as a great philosopher, as we shall
see.
1. "On the Problem of Empathy," 1916
The first of the four great early treatises
is Stein's doctoral dissertation on "empathy," completed in 1916 and published
the following year. The very title asks us not to assume that we already
know what empathy means, but instead to let Stein show us its problematic
character. Now, it might go against the grain for you to "let yourself
to be shown" something in philosophy. If you studied philosophy in college,
you probably picked up a couple of bad habits that you need to lay aside,
at least while considering these remarks. First, you may have assumed
that a philosophy is a set of statements. Your job as student was to memorize
those statements so that you could bring them forth in an exam or apply
them in some future situation. The statements as you recalled them were
"correct" or not according to how closely they repeated the account in
the textbook or the professor's lecture; it didn't dawn on you that you
yourself had the means to check whether the book or the teacher "got it
right." You just downloaded the package faithfully. That's why this is
called a "dogmatic" or "authoritative" approach to philosophy. But to
Stein and the phenomenologists, this approach would be the very antithesis
of philosophy. For them, anyone can and must "check." We all have the
means at hand to see, directly, the basis upon which philosophical claims
are made: this basis is simply the immanent living operations within conscious
experience itself. We all have first-hand experience of conscious life,
and that's where the evidence is. This same source also enables us to
check out the coherence among the statements comprising a philosophical
argument. In other words, the teacher is not the authority who guarantees
the philosophy, but rather the coach or guide who enables you to do it
yourself. The teacher or writer of philosophy is showing you what you
can see for yourself. This is Edith Stein's intent.
The second bad habit is: assuming that
someone's philosophy depends upon "the kind of person she is," as if philosophy
were like taste or personal style. This leads into some bad mistakes;
for example, assuming that arguments made by good people are good arguments,
or even worse, that understanding someone's philosophy requires nothing
more than a sympathetic appreciation of her personality. But Edith Stein
the thinker does not want you to accept her philosophy because she was
a nice person or because she went to heaven; she wants you to check out
how its claims fit together and fit the evidence. For this, her biography
is irrelevant. Sure, it's usable as an introduction, while I've got my
coaching hat on. But her conclusions are not "caused" by the particular
events of her life, nor is the reliability of her philosophy guaranteed
by her personality. If a philosophy were nothing other than the personal
style or creation of a philosopher, then only the one who wrote it could
vouch for its validity, and the rest of us would have to accept it dogmatically.
But on the contrary, understanding Edith, and understanding Edith's thought,
are two separate and independent tasks. And demonstrating exactly what
the difference is, is what phenomenology Stein-style is all about.
This difference is simply the difference between what can be shared, and
what cannot. You can share or replicate a great deal of another person's
experiences, including her insights and moods. But you cannot share either
her individual personhood or the concrete physical events that are registering
with her as bodily sensations. What do I mean by experience? The German
term, Erleben, means "living through." I -- which is to say, an i, any
i -- am surfing along on a current of life. I am the "now" who anticipates
each new moment and lets fulfilled moments subside into my past. The current
or stream of my consciousness is filled in various ways as various components
of it appear to me in their own proper manner. (This is where the term
"phenomenology" comes from; "phenomenon" is Greek for "what appears.")
What kinds of appearances fill the streaming
life of my i? Well, items in the material world offer themselves to me
one face at a time. I perceive the front precisely as something that promises
to show me its sides and back if I walk around and take a look. Items
never offer all sides at once in perception. It is I who gather up the
appearances from the different "now's" in my flowing experience and assemble
them into one whole item. The term for this egoic accomplishment is "constitution."
I constitute an object in consciousness: for example, this lectern. This
doesn't mean I have a little lectern in my head, or even a little picture
of a lectern. No, I have a sense or notion of the lectern. This is the
object "intended" by my consciousness, as we say in phenomenology. Besides
physical items, we constitute the fields of space and time in which they
interact. We also constitute the realm of values and the particular values
within that realm. We constitute states of affairs -- scenarios -- past,
present, or future.
Now here's where it gets interesting. Do "we" do all of this jointly,
or individually? If jointly, then the "we" doing the constituting must
itself have been constituted somehow. How? But if individually, how do
I constitute "other i's" before partnering with them? Believe it or not,
by 1913 Husserl had not yet noticed this problem. And it's a very big
problem. Technically, in logical terms, Husserl had "begged the question"
of other people. That means: his arguments to show how it is possible
for us to know other people already assume that there are other people
around, right from the start.
And this is the problem that Edith Stein detected. At first, she could
hardly believe the scope of what she had discovered. Husserl was the most
brilliant man of his generation, and she was a 25-year-old kid, of the
wrong gender. If you read her dissertation, therefore, you will find her
"pulling her punches" and trying to camouflage her discovery as if it
were just another implication of Husserl's own theory of constitution.
In fact, she demonstrates that empathy is not a constituted sense, one
among others; rather, empathy is the prior condition of the possibility
of any constitution at all.
What does this mean? The English word "empathy" is not an exact equivalent
for the German Einfühlung. The German word means "in-feeling," that
is, both feeling-into and feeling-within. It's actually how you find yourself
in your own experiences: you feel yourself within them. Aesthetic theory
at the turn of the century was using this term to account for art appreciation:
you understand the statue or painting by "feeling yourself into it." So
the term is ambiguous. And Husserl was using it without addressing this
ambiguity.
Stein realized -- although she does not express
this well -- that the individuation of ego into egos (plural) is not always
in force. Sometimes it is suspended. In other words, egos do not always
appear as discrete multiples, like potatoes in a pot. There are indeed
egoic experiences that are not personalized, owned by me. For example,
in entertainments of various kinds, we live vicariously through the experiences
of others: the somatic registration of vertigo from observing the flying
acrobat, the somatic registration of sexual arousal from reading erotic
literature. There's also that lift we get from the sentiments expressed
in a happy song or poem, that grief we feel when someone is bereaved.
Any such feeling -- happiness, grief, dizziness, arousal -- has its own
distinctive sense-content. Now Stein argues that that content must include
the following notion: this feeling is felt originally by someone, but
the someone isn't myself. That's how she solves Husserl's problem: "someone
else's" is a manner of appearing of experience, not a sense constituted
out of experience, much less an analogical inference on the basis of comparative
perceptions. (It's an adverb, not a noun.) This manner of appearing is
more primitive than the acts of constitution that it founds.
So what? What use is this information?
It has many technical uses in philosophy. For one thing, it guarantees
that the reality of other people is given to us immanently in those ego-drenched
experiences, without the possibility of illusion or error. Illusions arise
only during the activity of perception; errors arise in logical inferences;
but this insight is more primitive than either perception or inference
is. So I'm neither deluded nor mistaken in believing that there are other
egos -- or to put it another way, in affirming that I myself do not exhaust
the plenitude of egoic value in this reality of mine. I might be deluded
or mistaken about the characteristics of locations of the others. But
I know infallibly that I am not alone, because "experiences of others"
are available to me as such.
More practically, Stein's work on empathy yields a hermeneutics, or theory
of understanding, equally applicable to the sciences and the humanities.
This is no mean feat. It’s especially interesting to specialists in "philosophy
of science." (In fact, Husserl himself made major contributions toward
the philosophy of science early in the century, as mentioned above.) Philosophers
of science investigate the thinking -- the logical inferences -- that
turn raw data into accepted statements of fact. They ask how data get
to be "data" in the first place. Some scientists, and most of the general
public, assume that the data are just "caused" by the experiments, and
that a good scientist merely reports findings without adding any "interpretation."
They assume that anything "added" by the scientist would introduce bias,
and would spoil the possibility of other scientists' getting identical
results from running the same experiment. Science is supposed to be "impersonal."
By contrast, the humanities are supposed to focus on distinctive personal
and cultural factors.
This distinction was already being made in Husserl's
day, and it was made in the following terms. Natural sciences study causes,
humanities study motivations. In other words, reality is knowable in two
ways. The physical world is a network of causal chains, and you come to
know this world when your mind runs along those chains and sees how they
connect. The world of value is a network of motivations. Now "motivations"
doesn't mean "motives" or "drives" in the Freudian sense. (Remember, it's
1911 and Freud hasn't yet figured out his psychoanalytic theories.) "Motivation"
has another technical sense: it is the valence or inclination of the current
of experience to flow forward from one active experience into the next.
The stream of consciousness presses forward all by itself, of course,
as we surf along on "now." But the contents of the experiences of "nows"
also invite us to follow certain paths -- as when perceiving the front
of the lectern beckoned you to walk around and look at the back. That's
one sort of motivation, and it figures into the perception and constitution
of items in the physical world. More complexly, specific emotions and
courses of action are suggested by specific events. Or, a possible future
state of affairs -- once you imagine it -- can be chosen, and so become
a "motive," and so "motivate" the course of action that will realize just
that desired state of affairs. You can see now why motivation is not causation:
Motivation is optional, causation is necessary. With motivation, a given
state of affairs can motivate a range of rational choices; while a given
cause always produces the same effect and no other. And their sequence
is different too. The cause precedes the effect, but the motivating state
of affairs is actualized subsequent to the choices that it has motivated,
the choices that bring it into existence.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
MOTIVATED SEQUENCE
Time 1:
Imagined possible state of affairs. I'd rather be fishing.
Time 2:
State chosen as "motive." I'm going fishing now.
Time 3:
Motive motivates action. Grab my rod and head for the lake.
Time 4:
Action realizes state of affairs. I'm fishing now.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Now, as the phenomenologists all agreed, scientific
knowledge comes from tracing the networks of necessary causal connections
which structure the physical world, while knowledge in the humanities
comes from tracing the networks of non-necessary connections that structure
the world of culture, value, beauty, goodness, etc. Husserl argued that
the regularities common to these two different kinds of world-coherence
in fact should be treated as a third and foundational realm, and that
this would be the realm investigated by his phenomenology.
Edith Stein did something a little different, which
turns out to be much more useful for resolving this issue in the form
that we confront it today. She holds that the common ground of the humanities
and the sciences lies not so much in the fact that both are logically
coherent (Husserl's proposal), as in the way in which their respective
coherences are accessible for human knowing. Both coherences are knowable
through tracing, that is, through following. We let our egos run through
the sequence of connections, "feel them out." But here's the difference:
it feels different to follow a causal connection than a motivational connection.
We cannot feel-into a causal connection. It is opaque to the ego. We know
it from outside. By contrast, a motivational connection is in-feel-able.
The passage from act to motivated act is something that I can let myself
vicariously ride through. It registers inwardly with me. That means, the
way in which a motivated coherence appears to me exhibits, as a primal
feature, its quality of having originated in another's choice. Choices
let me in: I re-live them, I understand them empathically. Causes, I can
only stand outside of and observe. In any given situation in the real
world, causes and motivations are intricately intertwined. For example,
why are you sitting in those chairs? The cause is gravity. The motivation
is to hear me out and get a chance to respond later. Stein adds one more
thing. I call it her theory of the subtractive literacy of science. The
only way to identify a cause is to subtract all the motivations. Scientific
"data" are what's left after we account for, and discount, whatever in
an appearance is owing to personal choice. I.e., bias is eliminated. (So
paradoxically, scientific data as such are not caused, but chosen, in
that they are remaindered out of mixed appearances by a motivated subtraction
of all the motivated aspects of those appearances. Natural science is
the intention to build knowledge upon purged data only.)
2. "Sentient Causality,"1918
We may designate Stein's empathy theory as a hermeneutic, a theory
of interpretation. It talks about how people understand one another. "Understanding"
-- that means more than transfer of information. It means to grasp the
very processes that produce the pieces of information in question, and
to comprehend the networks of coherence of the realities in which they
are embedded. It means to know the "why's," the "becauses." The "i" is
the capacity to trace the tracks that other i's have made through networks:
to run through them, read them, replay them sequentially, but also to
look at them "all at once," from the top down, as it were. The i is a
follower.
For example, suppose I am teaching my logic class the patterns of valid
inference. I present the conditional statement: "If it is Tuesday, we'll
go to the movies." Assume that this conditional is true, I say to the
class. Now, assume we're not going to the movies. What does that tell
you? It tells you that it isn't Tuesday. Why? The answer, in logic, is
that this fits a valid pattern of inference: If A then B implies if not
B then not A. But why is this pattern valid? Aha! This is always a favorite
moment for me. The students expect it to be valid because it's in the
textbook, or because I back it up with my authority as a teacher. But
no. It's valid because when you run through the steps, you have a flash
of insight and you see it. This pattern is hard-wired into reality, and
you as a thinker are built to register and certify such correct patterns.
That's the bottom line. That's what you are. That's what any "i" is. It's
the ability to live-through a pattern sequentially while recognizing the
pattern and the kind of pattern it is.
In logic, we're looking for patterns with rational necessity, but not
all patterns have rational necessity. Some patterns show themselves to
be materially necessary: these are the relations of cause and effect --
causal relations. Other patterns show themselves to be rational but not
necessary: these are the relations between situations and creative, motivated
human choices, in art, literature, politics, business, family life --
motivations. The i tracks those patterns too, in the manners appropriate
to them. And the i can tell, from the quality of the tracking that it
is able to do in any given instance, just which kind of network it's dealing
with. Let's return to our example of Tuesday-night movie-going, and pursue
its "why's." Both kinds of networks come into play: causal and motivational.
If I focus on the family's choice of some particular PG movie, or it's
choice in general to include this recreation in its weekly schedule, I
find that I can empathically "live through" those choices. Inside myself
I can replicate how the decisions have branched, going as far back as
you like: choice of this spouse, effort to start a family, love and care
for these little children, fatigue in the wear-and-tear of parenting,
selection of movie-going rather than roller-blading as appropriate recreation
for pre-schoolers and frazzled parents, and tonight, preference for Pocahantas
over Cinderella. None of these was required, either causally or rationally.
From a range of possible rational options, one choice is made.
I could go further into the motivations of each choice. If I did so, eventually
I would come up against barriers in two directions, beyond which my "following
i" could not re-live the flow of events inwardly, but could merely observe
it from the outside. One frontier is that of material causal processes,
which go forward non-optionally. The physical world is structured by causal
chains that I cannot empathically experience, or live through. For example,
physiological processes cause little children to behave erratically and
stay awake when fed large amounts of sugar in the evening. While I can
empathize that feeling, I cannot empathize the chemical process itself.
But because I know about the causal role of the chemistry -- know it as
causal precisely because it is opaque to any effort to empathize it --
I understand the child's feelings and behaviors better. I can gauge how
much is under voluntary control, and I can respond accordingly. The other
frontier beyond which I cannot empathically follow is the unique personal
ingredient in choices. Why did these two parents marry each other? Why
did the movie director add just that melody at just that moment? The realm
of the personal is just as opaque to our understanding as the realm of
matter is. We cannot penetrate empathically what goes on in either of
them, although both are involved in every situation we face. My only direct
access to these opaque realms -- matter, and value -- is the matter that
I am, my body, and the value that I am, my person. My body, my hands and
feet, participates in chains of physical cause and effect. And as a person,
I am a unique value who creates value in reality and, unfortunately, sometimes
diminishes it.
This is the complex but very familiar picture that Stein was trying
to sort out with her account of the four permeable levels of human being.
Now you see why the permeability of the levels is so important. The "middle"
layers pass influences between the top and bottom layers, the material
and the personal. The sentient and mental layers pass influences into
the material world. Moreover, since the top and bottom layers are off-limits
to other people's following, the middle layers offer the only available
access to someone else's thoughts, feelings, motivations. What we understand,
when we understand someone, is understood by re-living the registrations
of sentient processes and mental processes.
Well, that's a nifty little theory -- if you like that kind of thing.
What good it is? The young Stein saw two very important uses. The first
is therapeutic. Already in her dissertation, she envisioned a kind of
psychiatric practice in which mental, emotional, and physical illnesses
would be diagnosed as to the layer of the human being where the trouble
was originating. In our example of the child acting out with a sugar high,
the problem originates in the physical chemical mechanisms of the body.
Remove the candy, and the behavior improves. Other pathologies are rooted
in the other levels. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, Stein did not pursue
this application in her own work, but it remains a promising approach.
The other use is historical and political. We can see any given present
situation as having been structured by the intricate interplay of causal
chains and motivational sequences. Then, turning toward the future, we
can project possibilities and go on to actualize them. This is where the
essay on sentient (psychic) causality picks up. It examines the dynamics
of human decision-making. Let me first say a word about its odd name.
As I've been telling you, causal coherences govern the physical level.
But owing to the permeability of the layers, causal effects produced physically
in the body will evoke registrations at the sensate level. (The four-year-old
is shrieking and running through the dining room instead of going to sleep;
these are expressions of frantic elation. She feels like, "wow, ain't
it great to be alive!"; she doesn't feel like there's too much sugar in
her bloodstream.) Causal influences "travel upward" all the way. (Stein's
famous teacher, Edmund Husserl, once claimed that he made philosophy out
of coffee.) But influences travel downward, too. We can be invigorated,
physically, by a thought or an idea, or an artistic experience of beauty.
(Could you do your aerobics without your music tapes?)
Now here's the crucial point. These inter-level influences are not
all causal. Properly speaking, only events that originate in the physical
and sensate realms are causal; they are no longer causal when they cross
into the mental and personal levels. By the same token, impulses originating
in the personal or mental realm resonate causally when they influence
the sensate and physical realms. Stein's task in this essay was to demonstrate
that inter-level influences really do occur, and then, once that was established,
to show how personal and mental impulses acquire causal potency to become
effective in the material world.
Stein's demonstration for the reality and the effective mutual permeability
of the four levels is a scientific proof, based on the principle of the
conservation of energy. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, and all
living processes consume energy. Stein shows, in numerous intricate examples,
that life processes at the sentient and intellectual levels routinely
consume more than the power available from physical sources. Admittedly,
this determination cannot be made exactly, for we have no units of measurement
for the quantitative assessment of "lifepower," Stein says. But "more"
and "less" are qualitative terms; you can tell when something is more
or less than something else by comparing two cases, perhaps a "before"
and "after" case. Therefore, an empirical science of sensate causality
if quite possible. You can observe variations in lifepower.
What is "lifepower"? Stein has taken Husserl's metaphor of the "current"
or "stream" of living experience and given it a new twist. Experience,
she says, flows like electricity. The current of life is not constant;
rather, its voltage waxes and wanes. It is spent down in the various activities
of living, and it is charged up again from its own self-renewing reservoirs
or from outside. The i, with its four functional layers, is not only a
follower but a transceiver or transistor for the modulation of power.
The four permeable "layers" of human being, then, have their own distinctive
ways of registering, channeling, applying, and receiving this current,
whose force is designated as "lifepower." Fluctuations in lifepower allow
us to detect the impact of causality and motivation within our experiences;
they offer indirect proof of the reality of both the physical world and
the world of value, as well as the accessibility of those worlds.
In Stein's account, there seems to be a certain steady recharging of lifeforce
from the physical processes of nutrition, and a steady drain upon it by
metabolism. Over and above that, though, we "gain energy" from other people
-- not simply for mood enhancement, but for productive creative work.
Here her power-analogy breaks down, because the person whose cheerfulness
lifts me up does not thereby experience a lowering of his own energy.
Stein would respond that this energy is not literally electric, but is
only like electricity in some ways. It is the peculiar character of the
mental and personal layers that they can "give without losing." Yet Stein's
proof stands up in the many examples where strength for perseverence in
a task is gained from the influence of others or from the realm of value
directly.
If these terms sound a little strange -- lifepower, sentient causality,
and so forth -- please recall that the customary terminologies which they
challenge once sounded strange as well. I'm referring to the vocabulary
of psychoanalytic and marxian theories: "libido," "the unconscious," "repression,"
"alienation," "false consciousness." Those more familiar theories, especially
in their popular and cultural versions, do not make the crucial distinction
that Stein insists upon: the distinction between causality and motivation.
In popular psychoanalysis, the influences that Stein so carefully distinguishes
are lumped together as "cause and effect." Actions are explained as "resulting"
from drives, complexes, or, in the case of marxism, inexorable social
contradictions. Freud's version of lifepower, which he calls libido, is
imagined like a fluid under pressure seeking whatever outlet it can find.
In psychoanalytic interpretation, the process of decision is not rational;
only the interpreter is rational. And the interpreter does not rationally
follow what he is interpreting, he only explains it from outside, as if
he were watching a pot of potatoes stew on a stove. Stein's account of
decision-making, based on her empathy theory, is more nuanced and fits
the evidence better. It also makes a place for a creative will that is
free in important respects, although always causally conditioned by circumstances
as well.
Recall that creation and causality differ in their temporal structure.
At Time 1, suppose we have an ego whose sentient level is registering
a feeling of hunger because of physiological processes. Time 2, he wanders
into the kitchen, where he sees a bowl of fruit and a tray of Reese's
Pieces. He recognizes and constitutes both as objects, and he values them
as "food." Time 3, the ego feels an inclination toward the food. This
is not a causal pull emanating from the physical makeup of the candy or
the fruit, but a motivation arising from the imagined possibility of a
personal future in which he is enjoying the consumption of one of the
foods; this future scenario itself is motivated by the act that construes
("constitutes") the items and construes them as potential food. Nothing
makes him eat, or eat a candy instead of an apple. Time 3.5, he may or
may not pause to do some reasoning about the likely consequences of the
choice he is facing. Time 4, the ego executes what Stein calls a "fiat."
He goes for it. He issues a resolve from the depths of himself, actualizing
his value in terms of the material options confronting him, the material
options whose specific sense he has constituted. Time 5, this "fiat" is
mediated "downward" from the personal level, and the physiological mechanisms
are activated. The hand reaches out.
Notice the many steps here, and how many of them involve non-causal
processes: recognition of food, weighing the arguments pro and con, the
"go for it," the translation of the "go for it" into neural signals and
muscle contractions. These same steps that occur in snacking also must
be there in all of the creative and political decisions that structure
our lives. At Time 1 in any volitional sequence, the determinants may
be simple physical causes (like hunger, in our snacking example), or they
may involve complex influences in which other persons are involved. We
profoundly affect one another in our choices, and this brings me to Stein's
third great treatise.
3. "Individual and Community," 1919
Let’s pause for a moment to recall that "freedom" is a very important
theme in philosophy. It's almost an article of philosophical faith. There
are three general strategies that philosophers have used when making assertions
that involve freedom: a dogmatic appeal to tradition ("This country was
founded to protect our 'natural' freedom"), a pragmatic appeal to expediency
("Without free will, we can't call upon people to obey laws or punish
them when they don't "), or an existential appeal to experience ("I feel
the anguish of my lonely freedom in the face of the contingency of my
existence.") Each of these strategies begs certain questions, which need
not concern us here. My point is, Stein uses none of them. Instead, she
approaches the free will of the individual (and analogously, the creativity
of communities and the sovereignty of states) as the other influence whose
reality and potency are immediately and infallibly given, in and as the
shortfall of causality in accounting for the temporal actualizations of
possibilities, at the individual, community, or political level, respectively.
In other words, she applies her principle of the conservation of lifepower,
and she scientifically demonstrates that these regions operate not as
closed physical systems, but rather as dynamic equilibrations between
the physical realm of nature and the non-physical realm of value. Nature
leaks. Non-material meanings are involved in those transfers of lifeforce
whose manifestations are observed in the material world.
The ingenuity of Stein's strategy is apparent, even though we can't get
into the technical points of her scientific proofs here. Among human individuals,
she says, there are some transfers of lifepower that are merely causal,
that is, transfers involving only the material and sentient levels of
human being. People can "catch" feelings from one another; there can be
contagious enthusiasms or hatreds that grip every member of a crowd and
intensify as they pass back and forth among the individuals. Animals experience
this, too. But with humans, matter plus sentience is still not a closed
system. On one hand, individuals often resist or modify feelings after
they catch them; causal necessity fails. On the other hand, individuals
"download" more energy and information than is accounted for by contagion.
Structures "bigger" than the individual seem to come into play for those
fluctuations in lifepower. As an individual I participate in certain shared
experiences that would be unintelligible if they stopped at the borders
of my own individuality. For example, as I was skimming through the information
in the Starr Report on the Internet, my experience had dimensions that
distinguished it from my experience when I'm merely reading a novel: this
experience involved a character who is chief of the state that I belong
to; moreover, as a single reader I was part of the multitude before whom
this spectacle was being published, and whose character as a community
it was affecting. This thing was bigger than any of the individuals involved.
That very fact was impacting the individual me.
The transfers of lifepower occurring in community and political
events seem to involve what the phenomenologists call "intentional structures,"
Stein says. The term "intention" means the content that consciousness
has in view. The community in general, or the state in particular, subsists
in the notion of it that each of us entertains cooperatively with all
the other members. As phenomenologists say, we "intend" this community.
A certain state of affairs -- "being in this specific community" -- is
continuously intended by the members of the community. It is our "motive,"
in the technical sense I explained earlier. (For example, "marriage.")
That doesn't mean we're always deliberately working on the idea, or even
conscious of it. It means that this motivating intention -- "marriage,
and this marriage" -- is a latent sense within a certain range of our
decisions, attitudes, and behaviors. Community (and therefore the state)
lives as the meaning by means of which lifeforce is transmitted and distributed
in distinctive ways into the material manifestations that we observe.
Distinctively human lifeforce-transfers presuppose such meaning-structures
in the realm of value in order for humans to live at all in the realm
of matter. This is Stein's great insight. Correlatively, the human individual
is built as an energy exchanger, to receive lifeforce by means of those
structures, to contribute lifeforce to those structures, and to create
and maintain the structures themselves. All of which is to say: individuals
are not literally individual. We are radically and constitutively connected
along the power circuit that runs through the realm of meaning and value.
And this very connectivity is plainly apparent in the very individuality
that we exhibit, first in the realm of matter (where we appear to each
other as separate bodies) and then in the realm of meaning (where we appear
to each other in our ineffable, irreplaceable uniqueness as personal sources
of creative innovation). I say it's plainly apparent -- once you have
a coach like Edith Stein to show you how to look at your own immediate
experiences. Was Stein a mystic, who tapped into mysterious sources of
revelation? I don't know. What I do know is that she provides logical,
scientific arguments for everything that I have asserted. You don't have
to accept the reality of grace, creation, or the waters of the soul in
order to follow her arguments. Stein herself did not accept them at the
time when she figured all this out.
Stein has shown, then, that human individuals presuppose community (Gemeinschaft)
of some kind. What kind? Political states? Business corporations? Universities?
Convents? Some of those (and some aspects of all of those) are not communal
but associational. (This well-known distinction was set forth in an 1887
work by the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies.) An association (Gesellschaft)
is a voluntary alliance, and its members treat one another instrumentally,
as means to some end (in contrast to community, which is intrinsic to
our personal being as humans and in which personal welfare is the principal
intention). Stein shows that community is presupposed even for the most
instrumental and dehumanizing of our institutions, however. To manipulate
somebody, you don't have to coerce him by brute material force (although
that surely happens). Rather, associations manipulate people by co-opting
and diverting the very intellectual and personal structures through which
individuals are online with the world of value. But we can see here once
again a scientific demonstration of the reality and the impact of these
transpersonal structures. Consider the flow of advertising dollars through
our economy. In the example of that movie-going family that I mentioned
earlier, ask yourself why the kids and the parents want to see Pochahantas.
Advertising and marketing influences account for a large part of the "why,"
and these have effectively delivered our little family to the movie theater
precisely because the ads invoke communal connections even though they
do so in order to fulfill non-personal, even anti-personal, commercial
objectives.
4. "On the State," 1921
In the fourth and final treatise that we're looking at, the treatise
on the state, Stein pursues the question of human connectivity in regard
to various social forms. Some of these are political: the state, governmental
agencies, national sovereignty. Some are cultural: race, nationality,
(and today we would add gender). Stein has already established that community
structures in some form are required by humans -- not just for the flourishing
of humans, but to account for the energy transfers that are empirically
observable among humans. The various kinds of communal structures plug
us in to reservoirs of lifeforce in the world of value. Some help, some
hurt. Individuals interface with these structures "at the personal surface"
that I was describing earlier. Which means: what these structures structure
is an interface between persons, and what they mediate is the energy for
creativity, innovation, and nurture of the new.
Now, one common way of discussing these social forms -- especially the
political form, the state -- is to analogize it as a "big person" aggregated
out of all the little persons, like Hobbes's "Leviathan." Husserl, for
example, would talk about a "personality of a higher order," and Scheler
would say the community is the body of a collective personality. Stein
corrects these approaches. The state is not a person, she shows, because
it does not work like a person: constituting value, transferring energy,
and engaging with matter as persons do. States don't do that. Rather,
the state is an accessory to persons. (If you will, it's my placenta,
not my big brother or my twin.) This approach directly overturns "social
contract theory," which held that the state is founded in the free decision
of individuals to band together to gain certain protections by renouncing
certain liberties. Stein demonstrates that the concept "individual person"
is oxymoronic -- an unreal and unrealizable abstraction -- and that multipersonal
community is the necessary condition for personhood, not a mere option
open to persons.
A community, then, is not a person, but in some ways it can be thought
of as partly analogous to an individual person. The similarity consists
mainly in the uniqueness of cultural expressions. The meanings that originate
within one community could never have achieved that particular nuanced
value anywhere else; yet once they are expressed, they become available
to be re-experienced and appreciated by members of other communities --
where they may even give vise to further variations and distinctive cultural
responses. (One example of this would be the musical traditions of jazz
or the blues. These are certainly appreciated and even elaborated upon
in communities beyond the one where they originated.)
But is the state a community? Stein says no. The state is a community's
tool, an instrumentality devised for the realization of values. It is
constituted as having a certain value, but it is not a source of value.
The state has a people for its "soul" -- which means something analogous
to its character, its dynamic personality. The state's territorial boundaries
may embrace more than one people, but in that case, there will be a tendency
toward the coalescence of all the inhabitants into one people. This happens
intentionally. Now, recall that "intention" is a technical term for phenomenologists.
It means that the people is not "caused" by genetic or geographical or
historical factors. Rather, the people is constituted as a meaning. Being-a-people
is chosen as a motive. The being of peoplehood lies in its future, as
a projected and chosen state of affairs, guiding the choices of concrete
actions in the here-and-now. The shared notion of our peoplehood motivates
our choices; it is always latent within them, and sometimes it is quite
explicitly the goal of our actions. Political choices, then, construct
the various agencies of the state in order to actualize the values of
this particular peoplehood, as well as to provide for the concrete material
needs of people according to the material particulars of the historical
circumstances.
So, Stein situates state-formation and politics within an on-going process
of adaptation, wherein the material world is reluctantly supporting human
life while we, more or less ingeniously and successfully, organize our
activities to provide for our material needs. In the process, we are gradually
actualizing and creatively modifying our intention of community. From
these efforts, political and economic structures arise, while at the same
time a particular average "type" of person may be taking shape. This "typicality"
is what Stein means by a race. Race is neither an essential form, nor
a result of genetics, nor a product of historical choices. Race arises
from the adaptive strategies that accommodate our general human needs
to the particular challenges of the environment at a given place and time.
These strategies are creative, therefore they are personal, therefore
once intergenerationally routinized they subsist within the souls of persons,
where they in turn become resources for distinctive cultural creativity.
Thus race and racial expression is never exclusive or opaque; rather,
it is one of the structures for openness and mutual energy-enhancement
among persons. Clearly, then, some of what we usually include under "race
problems" in American political discourse is not genuinely "racial" at
all in Stein's terms; instead, these are phenomena of exploitative "associations,"
the very antithesis and counterfeit of community. Conversely, to hate
on racial grounds is nothing less than an act of hatred against the very
structure of our common humanity. If you hate the fact that there are
different races and racial differences, then you are refusing your own
humanity. You are blocking off the channels of access to lifeforce, which
is what even made you human in the first place. This hatred is suicidal.
Race is a channel of lifeforce, in a way that the state and civil structures
never can be. Race assists cultural productivity because shared race can
motivate community. The state does not motivate community; we would say
rather that the motive to be a community motivates people to form the
intention of political association and take the concrete steps to set
up civil agencies. The causal and motivational series behind these contrasting
activities run differently. But -- these are points requiring technical
discussion among phenomenologists. Let me simply observe that Stein thought
and wrote these things in 1921, fully a decade before National Socialism
proposed a very different account of the status of the state and its relation
to race.
Conclusion.
Stein's basic faith, before her baptism, was vested in something
that she had both seen and believed. In these remarks I have been trying
to work with you in the way that the young Stein would have done, enabling
you to see something of the phenomena from which her beliefs arose. The
basic insight is the availability of your experiences to me and mine to
you, owing to the essential human capability of "following" the patterns
of thought and decision laid down by someone else, observing the patterns
of causality in material events, and recognizing both the distinctiveness
of these two sequences and their intricate interplay in everyday life.
Having followed Stein's thinking from 1916 to 1921, we can perhaps now
close by formulating the questions that may have been most salient for
her in the summer of 1921, when she was poised on the brink of an encounter
with Christianity that would lead on into encounters with the philosophy
of Aquinas and the psychology of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila.
What follows is speculative, but is based on the four treatises that Stein
wrote between 1916 and 1921, examined above.
First, Edith must have wanted to know more about this thing that she was
calling "lifeforce." Theoretically, having provided a scientific proof
for "leaks" in material reality, she wanted to know more about spiritual
sources of the energy that was leaking in. She wanted to understand the
actual and possible structures for the mediation of spiritual energy.
And on a very practical level, she wanted to improve her own connectivity
with the realm of transpersonal value. We know from her autobiography
and especially from her correspondence that she had experienced some disappointments
in her own personal relationships, and that she had also marveled at the
resources that certain friends seemed to have accessed when bearing up
under tragic losses during the war. As a philosopher, I just want to emphasize
that these personal emotional factors in Edith's life had their theoretical,
intellectual side as well.
Second, Stein probably wanted to do some further research into the kinds
of concrete social formations that would best provide for the welfare
and flourishing of human beings. Postwar Germany knew severe economic
hardship because of the burdens of reparations imposed by the victors.
Those hardships reverberated throughout the society; intellectual and
cultural life was deeply affected. Old patterns of economic and political
organization were failing. Where could the nation look to find new, more
workable designs for recovering its political sovereignty and economic
integrity? It’s hard to keep from asking: If gender prejudice had not
denied Stein an academic career, and if a university appointment had enabled
her to continue her research and publishing, would her voice not have
offered answers to these questions very different from the ones that National
Socialism gave? What if Husserl's successor had been she, not Heidegger?
Third, Stein may well have been reflecting on this very point. What can
I, as one person, do now? She knew full well how important it was for
her country to think clearly and act rightly concerning these issues.
She had done her very best to present her case. In fact, two of the four
essays considered above were designed to be part of the Habilitationsschrift
or "second dissertation" that would-be assistant professors presented
as part of a job application. Stein's were rejected. Rejection is painful
for any job applicant, but Stein must have seen that more was at stake
here than her own private disappointment. Having tried her best to use
"the normal channels" of an academic podium to introduce these issues
and concerns into Germany's intellectual and political agenda, and having
failed, she must have been looking for alternative routes. She was a woman
in a man's world, and she was a Jew in Germany. But given her fundamental
commitment to the possibility of understanding, she was refusing to accept
the opacity, the finality of the twin hatreds deployed against her: sexism
and racism. She was trying to understand them, to find the intelligibility
in them, precisely insofar as they were perversions and refusals of something
basically good about human being: its intrinsic motivation toward community.
If you will, she was trying to understand the boot that was kicking her
and crushing her. She refused to end up as roadkill. She knew she was
more than that, and she knew she had more to accomplish before she curled
up and died.
These remarks must break off before the end of the story, but we can peer
ahead and make two suggestions. First, it’s likely that Edith read Saint
Teresa's autobiography as a scientist, and thus took it to be providing
independent corroboration for her hypothesis that people can and do get
energy downloads from the transpersonal realm. Second, but much later,
Edith came to see Judaism in general, and the Jewishness of Jesus in particular,
as channels of access to a distinctive value that was available in no
other way. She came to regard the hatred of Jews as a hatred of the humanity
of Jesus -- which is none other than our own common humanity, our common
dependence upon our very connectivity for the life energy that we need.
These insights, if correct, point toward an understanding of why Edith
sought baptism and the life of cloistered prayer.
This introduction to the phenomenology of Edith Stein has led the reader through some of the philosophical moves that Stein pioneered. In closing, let me encourage you, if you are at all able to do so, to take the time to work through Stein's texts themselves. You must decide if this introduction was accurate, and more importantly, if Stein herself was right.
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