Abstract
This article brings Stein’s philosophical and feminist views together to examine developments in her thinking in the early 1930s. I focus on Stein’s essay “Spirituality of the Christian Woman” as it relates to her philosophical questions about existence and essence in Finite and Eternal Being. I contend that Stein’s “Spirituality of the Christian Woman” is both elucidated by and helps make sense of her philosophical developments at this time. I maintain that my contention can help us better understand Stein’s relationship to gender essentialism.
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Notes
- 1.
Stein includes similar language about “sketching” out essential characteristics of women in “The Ethos of Women’s Professions,” (W 45), and in “Separate Vocations of Man and Woman According to Nature and Grace” (W 60).
- 2.
Scholars of Stein’s feminism have focused on her more ontologically accessible gender essentialist statements about women’s essence, nodding to her phenomenological method without directly addressing its influence. See, for example, Brenner [1, 212–225], Baseheart [2], Haney [3, 213–236]. This focus arises, in part, because Stein’s phenomenological method is hard to trace when considering her feminist work on its own. Yet, it plays a central role in the methodological attention she gives to the question she asks herself in “Spirituality of the Christian Woman,” namely, “Can we speak in general terms of the soul of woman?” (W 86). Other views of Stein’s feminism exist. Linda López McAlister’s seminal article on Stein’s relationship to gender essentialism explores similarities and differences between Stein’s thought and those of current gender essentialists. See McAlister [4]. My paper links Stein’s essentialism to its place in her general phenomenological thought, building on Antonio Calcagno’s explication of Stein’s phenomenological feminism. See Calcagno [5].
- 3.
De Beauvoir [6].
- 4.
MacIntyre [7, 29–38].
- 5.
Stein’s goal to find common ground between scholasticism and phenomenology was prescient. Following the recent ‘theological turn’ in phenomenology (1990s), interest has increased in scholastic influences on major phenomenologists. See, for example, Janicaud’s [8].
- 6.
Husserl’s original focus on the scientific objectivity possible in phenomenology came from Franz Brentano, from whom Husserl had learned, according to Stein, “that philosophy could be more than aesthetic banter and that done properly could meet the highest standards of scientific rigor” (KF 6).
- 7.
Reinach, one of Husserl’s students and a member of the Göttingen group, extended this understanding of scientific rigor to include the phenomenologist’s need to check his or her work against a community of phenomenologists who are all inquiring into the same material to find objects’ essences. MacIntyre, Prologue, 57.
- 8.
Stein developed her view of our interactive understanding through her work on empathy, which she began as a student and continued in work as scribe on Husserl’s Ideen. See Sawicki [9, 144–183].
Simply sharing our emotions does not gives us full understanding of them, Stein contends. Part of that understanding comes as we see recognition and response to that emotion in another person’s face (MacIntyre 77). Similarly, our bodies are not fully comprehended by us individually but require others’ interactions to complete our own awareness (MacIntyre 76). We become fully aware of ourselves and others through empathy (Calcagno 64).
- 9.
Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being began as an inquiry into the relationship of potency and act, but in later drafts developed into a question into the meaning of being. It is written partially in response to her reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time, and more directly addresses what has happened over time to the concept of ‘experience’ in Husserl’s work (FEB xxi; Calcagno 113).
- 10.
She had at least a full outline of Finite and Eternal Being in 1931, before giving her “Spirituality” lecture in 1932, though she made many changes to the manuscript after 1933, the year she completed a draft of the work. In addition, Stein explored the part of the work being considered here about a rose’s redness in a fragment that may have been written contemporaneously with her “Spirituality” essay. This fragment at least implies that in 1932 Stein was thinking seriously about how some essential aspects of an object (like a rose’s redness) are so closely linked with the object that it is impossible to separate them from how they are given in experience. See, L. Gelber and M. Linssen, O.C.D., “Editor’s Introduction” (KF xxi).
- 11.
This point responds to Professor Angela Ales Bello’s article contained in this volume. I suggest that Stein’s thought into the 1930s moved away from her previous view of the object as concretization of essence.
- 12.
Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset wrote in realist style, considering many issues relating to women. She was outspokenly against the women’s movement, criticizing the ways it pulled away from the reality of women and their proper roles. See Solbakken [10, 55]. Olaf Audunnsohn was the main character of a four-part tetrolagy, known as The Master of Hestviken.
- 13.
Henrik Ibsen, also Norwegian, wrote plays in a realist and naturalist style, and “A Doll’s House” was his most famous play, written in 1879 and performed throughout Europe.
- 14.
Iphiginia in Tauris, written in 1779, is Goethe’s reworking of the ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides.
- 15.
Those that begin with a general sketch include “The Ethos of Women’s Professions,” “The Separate Vocations of Man and Woman According to nature and Grace,” and “Fundamental Principles of Women’s Education” (W).
- 16.
Stein does not always approach philosophical questions by building an entire structure of understanding in order to analyze specific practical philosophical questions. With God as first principle, Stein does not feel philosophically bound to step back far enough to establish first principles in every case. As Aquinas does, she sometimes might contend with practical problems that arise in life (such as the proper way to educate women) and apply philosophical tools in order to understand and solve them (KF 30).
- 17.
Ingunn’s character connects well to Stein’s discussion of the potential state of redness in relation to the actual (KF 75).
- 18.
Concerning this point, I am indebted to email correspondence with Fr. Thomas Gricoski. O.S.B.
References
Rachel Feldhay Brenner, “Edith Stein: A Reading of Her Feminist Thought,” in Contemplating Edith Stein, ed. Joyce Avrech Berkman (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006)
Mary Catharine Baseheart, “Edith Stein’s Philosophy of Woman and Women’s Education,” in Hypatia 4, No. 1 (1989), 120–131
Kathleen Haney, “Edith Stein: Woman and Essence.” Feminist Phenomenology, ed. Linda Fisher and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000)
Linda López McAlister, “Edith Stein: Essential Differences,” in Philosophy Today, 37 (1993), 70–77
Antonio Calcagno, The Philosophy of Edith Stein (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2007)
Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Pashley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972)
Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006)
Dominique Janicaud’s (ed.) Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate, trans. B.G. Prusak (Fordham University Press: New York, 2000)
Marianne Sawicki, Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997)
Elisabeth Solbakken, Redefining Integrity: The Portrayal of Women in the contemporary Novels of Sigrid Undset (Peter Lang: Frankfurt, 1990)
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Beer, L.J. (2016). Women’s Existence, Woman’s Soul: Essence and Existence in Edith Stein’s Later Feminism. In: Calcagno, A. (eds) Edith Stein: Women, Social-Political Philosophy, Theology, Metaphysics and Public History. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21124-4_4
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