Abstract
Edith Stein and Gerda Walther place great value on community, for both thinkers view it as the fundamental, common, and necessary terrain in which one can grow and be formed as human beings. Although they share a phenomenological framework, they describe community in different ways. Stein starts from I-experience to reach her understanding community, which is analyzed deeply and in all its constitutive elements, whereas Walther moves from the social self and, hence, from the background of psychic interiority in which the communal we moves and lives. However, through different ways, both thinkers arrive at the same conclusion: they converge on the role played by the I-center in the actualization of the lived experience of community.
Translated by Antonio Calcagno.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
By constitution, Husserl means the mode in which objective unities (like the other) become manifest and known in consciousness.
- 2.
See Husserl’s Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Cartesianische Meditationen, and Pariser Vorträge.
- 3.
See Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, ed. by E. Marbach (Husserliana Materialien Series No. 14) (The Hague: Springer, 1973), 197.
- 4.
Michele Lenoci, “Logica, ontologia e fenomenologia in A. Pfänder,” in Il realismo fenomenologico. Sulla filosofia dei circoli di Monaco e Gottinga (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2000), 673.
- 5.
See Angela Ales Bello, Fenomenologia dell’essere umano. Lineamenti di una filosofia al femminile (Rome: Città Nuova Editrice, 1992), 67. Angela Ales Bello was the first person in Italy to introduce Gerda Walther’s philosophical work to the public.
- 6.
Edith Stein, Lettere a Roman Ingarden 1917–1938, Italian trans. by E. Costantini and Erika Schulze, revised by Anna Maria Pezzella (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2001), 69.
- 7.
Edith Stein, Lettere a Roman Ingarden 1917–1938, 103.
- 8.
Edmund Husserl, Briefe an R. Ingarden (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 12.
- 9.
Stein, Lettere a Roman Ingarden 1917–1938, 69 and 103.
- 10.
Gerda Walter, Zum anderen Ufer—Vom Marxismus und Atheismus zum Christentum (Remagen: Otto Reichel Verlag, 1960), 185.
- 11.
Edmund Husserl, La filosofia come scienza rigorosa, trans. Filippo Costa (Pisa: ETS Editrice, 1990), 65.
- 12.
Edith Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, trans. by Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2000), 41.
- 13.
Edith Stein, Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person (Vorlesung zur philosophischen Anthropologie) (Freiburg: Herder, 2004), 134.
- 14.
Edith Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, 133.
- 15.
Edith Stein, Kreuzeswissenschaft:Studie über Johannes vom Kreuz (Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe No. 18) (Freiburg: Herder, 2015).
- 16.
Antonio Calcagno, “Gerda Walter. Sulla possibilità di un senso passivo della comunità e della coscienza interna del tempo,” in Edith Stein, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Gerda Walter. Fenomenologia della persona, della vita e della comunità, ed. by Angela Ales Bello, Francesco Alfieri, Mobeen Shahid (Bari: Edizioni Giuseppe Laterza, 2011), 774.
- 17.
Gerda Walther, Zum anderen Ufer, 270.
- 18.
Alice Togni, “Reciprocità e responsabilità: l’analisi delle comunità sociali in Gerda Walter,” in Per la filosofia, vol. 100–101, May–December, 2017, 62.
- 19.
Gerda Walther, “Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften,” in Jahrbuch für Pholosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Vol. VI (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1923), 1. In the first volume of the Ideas, whose index Walther prepared, Husserl deals with the question of ontology. He maintains, “Every concrete, empirical object inserts itself with its material essence into a higher material genus, in a region of empirical objects. A regional essence corresponds to a regional eidetic science or, in other terms, a regional science”—E. Husserl, Idee per una fenomenologia pura e per una filosofia fenomenologica, Vol. I, ed. by E. Filippini (Torino: Einaudi, 1982, 26). The question of ontology is a vexata quaestio because a minor or major determination of an object signals the divide between realist and transcendental phenomenologists. On this question of realist versus transcendental phenomenology, Walther follows her teacher, Pfänder, who understands formal ontology as a theory of the object and its properties. But this ontology serves also as the foundation for further determination of content that can form material ontologies, which are more determined than formal ontologies, even though they need to follow certain laws. Walther maintains that, in Husserl, there is no individual essence, understood in the strict sense. One can speak of general essences to the point that one can achieve knowledge of an individual essence: “[…] jedes eidos […] sich verkörpern kann […] bei in jeder geistigen Person im Sinne Schelers, […], bei jedem Grundwesen im Sinne A. Pfänders, auch das Wesen eines “Engels” oder einer einmaligen Kunstschöpfung” (Gerda Walter, “Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften,” in Jahrbuch für Pholosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, cit. p. 5, note 3). Edith Stein takes up later the aforementioned question in her Finite and Eternal Being. In note 43 of chapter 3 she discusses Husserl’s position as developed in his Ideas, which maintained that the quid of an individual thing could be seized by seeing the essence, but without actualizing a position from experience. Stein writes, “This concession only takes one side of reality into consideration, namely, the essential essence; it cuts the link to reality, a link that does not exist external to the essence, but which intrinsically belongs to it. It is precisely from the standpoint of this cut, made at the root that separates fact and essence, that one can understand how Husserl arrived at his idealist interpretation of reality, while his followers (Max Scheler, Alexander Pfänder, Adolf Reinach, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Jean Héring, etc.) all guided by the full sense of essence, followed always more intensely as realist conception.”
- 20.
Edith Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, 130.
- 21.
Edith Stein, Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person, 136.
- 22.
Edith Stein, Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person, 137–138.
- 23.
This example is framed by the context of the WWI. Stein’s own service as a nurse in a lazaretto near the front, where Stein attended to many sick and dying soldiers, and the death of her beloved teacher, Adolf Reinach. Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities was written in 1919 and published three years later in Husserl’s Jahrbuch.
- 24.
Edith Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, 137.
- 25.
Edith Stein, Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person, 134.
- 26.
Gerda Walther, “Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften,” 29–30.
- 27.
Gerda Walther, “Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften,” 69.
- 28.
Gerda Walther, “Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften,” 69–71.
- 29.
Gerda Walther, “Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften,” 7.
- 30.
Edith Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, 195–196.
- 31.
Gerda Walther, “Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften,” 87.
- 32.
Gerda Walther, “Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften,” 114.
- 33.
Edith Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, 206–207. Here, one may also understand the Christian edict to turn the other cheek: I hate the other; I do not respond with hate, but with love. I offer the other cheek as a sign of this love.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pezzella, A.M. (2018). On Community: Edith Stein and Gerda Walther. In: Calcagno, A. (eds) Gerda Walther’s Phenomenology of Sociality, Psychology, and Religion. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97592-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97592-4_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97591-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97592-4
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)