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Edith Stein’s Encounter with Edmund Husserl and Her Phenomenology of the Person

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Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood

Part of the book series: Contributions To Phenomenology ((CTPH,volume 94))

Abstract

Stein’s early engagement with Husserl in Göttingen and Freiburg, first as his doctoral student and then as his research assistant, was decisive for her philosophical development. Husserl’s phenomenology shaped her philosophical thinking. Despite embracing, in the twenties, a Christian metaphysics inspired by Thomas Aquinas, she continued to engage with phenonenology through the nineteen thirties, even writing a short review of Husserl’s Crisis when it appeared in Philosophia in 1937. In this paper I outline Edith Stein’s personal engagement with Edmund Husserl and his phenomenology, and outline her phenomenology of empathy and embodiment, including her conception of individual personhood.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hedwig Martius (who married another Göttingen phenomenologist, Theodor Conrad, and took his name) was best known, at that time, for her essays in epistemology and realist ontology, especially her monographs, Zur Ontologie und Erscheinungslehre der realen Außenwelt. Verbunden mit einer Kritik positivistischer Theorien (Conrad-Martius 1916) and Realontologie (Conrad-Martius 1923). She also wrote a prize-winning essay entitled Die erkenntnistheoretischen Grundlagen des Positivismus [The Epistemological Foundations of Postivism] (Conrad-Martius 1920) and Metaphysische Gespräche [Metaphysical Conversations] (Conrad-Martius 1921). She contributed an essay, ‘Farben’ [‘Colours’], to Husserl’s seventieth-birthday publication (Conrad-Martius 1929). See Ales Bello et al. 2010; Hart 2008; and also Pfeiffer 2008 (among other papers in this special issue of Axiomathes devoted to Edith Stein ). Conrad-Martius defended Husserl’s Wesensschau and opposed his transcendental turn. She also offered a richly layered ontology of entities but in later years she focused on a philosophy of living beings. See Ales Bello and Calcagno 2012.

  2. 2.

    Gerda Walther wrote on the phenomenology of religious intuition and mysticism, published as Gerda Walther, Phänomenologie der Mystik (1923); substantially revised and expanded (Walther 1955). This book discussed mystical intuition as a sui generis kind of intuiting with its own evidence and fulfilment. It was dismissed by Heidegger in his early 1923 lectures. Walther later wrote a fascinating autobiographical reflection, Zum Anderen Ufer. Vom Marxismus und Atheismus zum Christentum [Towards the Other Shore. From Marxism and Atheism to Christianity] (Walther 1960) in which she discussed her time as a student of Husserl and records some of his old-worldly paternalist and somewhat chauvinist attitude to his women students.

  3. 3.

    There were several other women members of the Göttingen Philosophical Society including, according to Edith Stein’s autobiography (Stein 1986: 255): Grete Ortmann, Erika Gothe (both somewhat older that Edith, since they had taught school for a while before coming to university) and Betty Heymann, a Jewish student from Hamburg, who had been a student of Georg Simmel. These women, who were pedagogy students undergoing teacher training and taking further lecture courses in Göttingen, were not completing doctorates. See Lyne 2000: 26. See also Posselt 2012.

  4. 4.

    See Mazon 2003.

  5. 5.

    See Stein Stein 2000a: 1–63. Edith Stein wrote several drafts of this essay.

  6. 6.

    Cfr. Husserl 2014. Hereafter ‘Ideas I’ followed by the page number of the English translation and the Husserliana volume and page number. Schuhmann’s edition includes comments and corrections added by Husserl in his four different personal copies of the text.

  7. 7.

    Cfr. Scheler 1973.

  8. 8.

    Cfr. Husserl 2002.

  9. 9.

    Cfr. Husserl 1969.

  10. 10.

    Cfr. Husserl 1960.

  11. 11.

    Cfr. Husserl 1970.

  12. 12.

    See Moran 2008.

  13. 13.

    Cfr. Husserl 1964.

  14. 14.

    See Moran 2015.

  15. 15.

    It is now much more evident that Husserl was developing this transcendental idealism from 1908 onwards. See Husserl 2003 and Bernet 2004.

  16. 16.

    Stein 1986: 250. Conrad-Martius was a defender of a pluralist real ontology. Indeed, her motto was precisely the opposite of Occam’s razor: ‘entia non sunt diminuenda sine necessitate’, which is found in her Metaphysische Gespräche (Conrad-Martius 1921).

  17. 17.

    See Ingarden 1975 and Heffernan 2016. Stein mentions that Husserl’s followers – beginning with Scheler – were put off by his ‘closeness to Kant’ (Annäherung an Kant), as she mentions in her 1930/1931 Die Weltanschauliche Bedeutung der Phänomenologie, in Stein 2010a, b: 99.

  18. 18.

    Stein 1989: 3, German edition: 1. Hereafter PE followed by the page number of the English translation and the page number of the German edition.

  19. 19.

    In this sense, Stein accepted the phenomenological reduction but not the transcendental reduction, although her terminological is a little unclear, possibly because she did not want to convey in public a disagreement with Husserl.

  20. 20.

    “Das Phänomen in seinem reinen Wesen, losgelöst von allen Zufälligkeiten des Erscheinens zu erfassen, ist also die erste Aufgabe”.

  21. 21.

    Stein Stein 2000b: 99.

  22. 22.

    For a further discussion of Stein’s account of empathy, see Moran 2004, Jardine 2015, and Vendrell Ferran 2015.

  23. 23.

    This passage was cited in citation ‘vii’ which cited Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, Husserliana I, 2d ed., ed. S. Strasser (1963), §44, p. 128 (Husserl 1960: 97).

  24. 24.

    See Vendrell Ferran 2008 and Vendrell Ferran 2015.

  25. 25.

    It seems Stein was influenced by Theodor Lipps’ conception in his Leitfaden der Psychologie (Lipps 1909) of ‘psychic force’ [psychische Kraft] which he distinguishes from the physical concepts of force and energy. See Betchart 2009, Betchart 2010. Hedwig Conrad-Martius also spoke of the Lebenstriebkraft of animals. As Betchart points out, the term has connections with vitalism and is included as the entry «Lebenskraft», in Eisler’s Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe (Eisl 1904: 584). It is likely the term also has some resonances of Bergson’s élan vital – and Stein’s friend Roman Ingarden wrote his doctoral thesis with Husserl on Bergson. See Stein 2000 b: 22 n.34.

  26. 26.

    Cfr. Darwin 1998. Darwin’s book created great controversy at the time. It was followed by William James 1884.

  27. 27.

    E. Stein, ‘Besprechung von: Edmund Husserl , Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie’ (1937), in Stein 2014: 122–125.

  28. 28.

    See Stein 2010b: 102ff. See also Borden Sharkey 2010.

  29. 29.

    Edith Stein wrote a reflective essay on Teresa of Avila entitled The Interior Castle, see Stein 2004.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

    Dermot Moran

  2. Department of Philosophy, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Boston, MA, 02467, USA

    Dermot Moran

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  1. School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

    Elisa Magrì

  2. Department of Philosophy, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Dermot Moran

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Moran, D. (2017). Edith Stein’s Encounter with Edmund Husserl and Her Phenomenology of the Person. In: Magrì, E., Moran, D. (eds) Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 94. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71096-9_2

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