Abstract
To speak of community in our globalized reality seems anachronistic, for we live in a world where one can efficiently travel beyond one’s own national borders, where the collapse of one bank can result in a global financial crisis, where temporal and spatial distances are drastically reduced, where one can create community for whatever reason and with anyone in the world thanks to new technologies. What, then, does community mean today? Edith Stein replies to the aforementioned question by arguing that a human being, a man or a woman, makes community because it is the locus wherein, from birth, sedimented affects, interwoven relationships, growth, maturation, becoming men and women, all happen. Experiences lived from within the community represent the indelible, non-erasable substrate that each of us always carries within ourselves, at every instant of our own lives, and in whatever place we find ourselves, on whatever day: community is what we live.
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Notes
- 1.
Scheler [1, 516].
- 2.
Ibid., 522.
- 3.
In her autobiography, Life in a Jewish Family, Edith Stein demonstrates how a community must support and sustain its own members. For example, one finds lots of descriptions of her mother giving her daughter Edith financial and moral support. Stein writes about her mother’s help with great fidelity, testifying to her mother’s willingness to help, without being saccharine. Stein also served as a nurse in the First World War, despite the objections of her family. She helped alleviate the suffering of various people from different ethnic and religious communities. She even helped her fellow philosophers who found themselves in economic distress, including Roman Ingarden, as testified by her letters to him. See, Stein [2].
- 4.
Stein [3, 103–104].
- 5.
Ibid., 186.
- 6.
The moment one opens oneself to one’s enemy and feels hate is the moment one becomes overwhelmed with hate. The hate with which I respond to my enemy is not the same as my enemy’s: our mutual hate differs qualitatively and in terms of intensity. Stein affirms that love acts on the lover as a stimulating power capable of nurturing in the lover a strength or force greater than the energy expended. Hate, on the contrary, especially if understood in terms of content, consumes more energy and strength than the very living of hate. Love and all positive position-takings are sources of force or strength that can possibly nourish others without being depleted.
- 7.
Stein [4, 3].
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Edith Stein, Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person, 145.
- 10.
Ibid., 203.
- 11.
The relation between the state and a people is different because these two realities need not coincide. A people may not be capable of forming a state or it may no be capable of surviving outside of a state. A people that dies out, however, leaves a spiritual patrimony that is inherited by future generations, for example, we in the west are the inheritors of Greco-Roman culture.
- 12.
Husserl [5, 183].
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Translation from Simmel’s Soziologie, 176. See footnote n. 193 of PPH 252. Simmel [6, 227–228].
- 15.
Arendt [7, 129–130].
References
Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die material Wertethik: Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethisches Personalismus (Halle: Verlag Niemeyer, 1927)
Edith Stein, Letters to Roman Ingarden (Washington, D.C., ICS Publications, 2014)
Edith Stein, Martin Heideggers Existentialphilosophie (Louvain: Herder, 1962)
Edith Stein, Aus dem Leben einer jüdischen Familie (Freiburg: Herder, 2002)
Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, vol. 2, in Husserliana 14, ed. Iso Kern (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973)
G. Simmel, Soziologie, trans. K. Wolff, in The Sociology of G. Simmel (New York: The Free Press, 1950)
Hannah Arendt, Responsabilità e giudizio (Torino: Biblioteca Einaudi, 2004)
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Pezzella, A.M. (2016). Intersubjectivity and Community in Edith Stein’s Thought. 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_5
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