Edith Stein (1891-1942), known by her religious name as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was a Jewish-German philosopher, Carmelite mystic, nun, and martyr who lived during the tumultuous period of Nazi occupation in Europe. According to the New World Encyclopedia, her martyrdom preceded some pretty nasty political retaliation:
[T]he Dutch Bishops’ Conference had a public statement read in all the nation’s churches condemning Nazi racism on July 20, 1942 […] the Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, retaliated by ordering the arrest of all Jewish converts to Catholicism on July 26, 1942. On August 2, Stein was transported by cattle train to the death camp of Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chambers on August 9. Stein’s younger sister Rosa, also a convert, died there as well.
Canonized in the Roman Catholic Church by St. Pope John Paul II in 1998, St. Teresa was bestowed the honor of being one of the patron Saints of Europe [ii]. Her scholarly works, among which include: Finite and Eternal Being; Knowledge and Faith; On the Problem of Empathy; a translation of Aquinas’ De Veritate; The Science of the Cross: Studies on John of the Cross (in German: Studie über Joannes a Cruce: Kreuzeswissenschaft), and others, reveal a remarkable spiritual insight typical for a serious contemplative in the Carmelite Order, her own religious order. In fair estimation, her writings have served not only the Church, but the atonement and cleansing of Europe, the world, and the souls of numerous individuals.
Edith was a student of the Göttingen School–an association of thinkers at the University of Göttingen that stood for, or otherwise represented, one of the most prominent philosophical and academic movements of the early 20th century: phenomenology, the study of eidetic (essential) structures underlying phenomena (appearances). The discovery of the Göttingen School, and/or the phenomenological method associated with it, is attributed to Edmund Husserl, who’s regarded as the father of phenomenology. Edith Stein eventually achieved a terminus through her studies with Husserl, a spiritual and vocational calling to the Carmelite Order as a philosopher-mystic, spiritual writer, and vowed nun. If we want to understand how she reached her end, we ought to consider the method that helped her reach it: i.e., Husserl’s phenomenological method. To do this, we can begin by comparing Husserl’s method to that of another.
It appears clear that Stein favored Husserl’s phenomenological method above others, like that of the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Stein’s phenomenological method was virtually indistinguishable from Husserl’s; and Husserl’s method differed from that of Heidegger’s. Husserl’s and Heidegger’s method can be distinguished by revealing Stein’s critiqued of each. Stein identified in Husserl’s phenomenology an adequate foundation upon which to build her own philosophical view; his was a method of application [iii]. Stein identified Heidegger’s phenomenology as a “being-in-need” of greater, and more exact, phenomenological description [iv]. According to an account of her critique of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Heidegger’s phenomenology, and therefore his philosophical method, lacked a sense of what Husserl termed “exact science” [v]. In critiquing Heidegger’s phenomenology, Stein raises key issues about the value of mere description vs. exact description approaches to doing philosophy.
Stein’s critique of Heidegger’s Being and Time focused on “the faithfulness of Heidegger’s phenomenological description of Dasein” [vi]. Stein argues that Heidegger’s concept of Dasein (i.e., Heidegger’s term for a “being-there”), provides “no real account for the body and the soul, for they are obscured by the vocabulary of being” and, by lack of this real account of Dasein, Heidegger never really draws out the implications of his concept of Mitsein (i.e., Heidegger’s term for a “being-with”) [vii]. According to Stein and others, Heidegger’s phenomenology proposed that the “individual is charged with the task of achieving an eigentliches Sein (authentic being), whereas the community is only a receptacle for a fallen or fleeing Dasein” [viii]. Stein critiques Heidegger sharply on this point: Doesn’t the community play a much greater role than that in the formation of Dasein? [ix]. Stein’s questioning points to a perhaps more reasonable method for achieving a greater phenomenological description of Dasein. She points to a need for a peri-phenomenological method, a method of exact description, or a method of descriptive science, that centers on “being-around” others by means of “ostensibly peripheral phenomena” [x]. Stein also points out an inadequacy in Heidegger’s phenomenological method, because according to Stein’s own phenomenological method, we need others, the community, to help us; we need to ‘be-around’ a community so to address our faults adequately and therein be restored from our, or Dasein’s, fleeing, fallen status. According to an account of Stein’s phenomenology, our method of being is not exact without others and/or the community. Heidegger, in contrast, takes community to be something accidental, and not essential to, the restoration of Dasein. So while Stein held that an adequate philosophical method required, essentially, a “being-in-need” of community, Heidegger did not; and while Heidegger did not outright reject that a philosophical method can never include a “being-in-need” of community, it seems he didn’t think it was essential to his philosophical method.
At any rate, Stein’s critique of Heidegger’s Being and Time brings us to a further consideration: Where does Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical method fit in? In other words, where does scholastic methodology fit in? In Knowledge and Faith, Stein gives us three core-functions for doing philosophy. In holding to these functions, it is assumed that we will have an adequate philosophical method and foundation that contains the key to sufficient description and which, furthermore, may limit us from committing grave errors or mistakes. For Stein, these three core-functions are three agreements shared by both Husserl and St. Thomas Aquinas. They are: (1) sensation, (2) intellectual processing, and (3) passivity of understanding [xi].
Sensation
- Agreement #1:
“All knowledge begins with the senses.”
Commentary: Thomas and Husserl agree on a particular thing about this proposition–namely, “[One] is very far from requiring any particular kind of sense intuition, such as an actual external perception, as a support for all knowledge” [xii].
Intellectual Processing
- Agreement #2:
“All natural knowledge … is acquired through the intellectual processing of sense material.”
Commentary: Accordingly, intellectual processing of sense material is through the intellect which divides and composes (intellectus dividens et componens). In reference to Husserl’s phenomenology, intellectual processing is an “act of consciousness that intends or refers to any object by way of a noema or noematic sense (i.e., a ‘reason of supernatural sense’).”[xiii]
Passivity of Understanding
- Agreement #3: The meeting, or agreement, of “opposition” to “any subjective arbitrariness” is “the conviction that intuiting, in the sense of passively receiving, is the proper contribution of the understanding and that all of its action is but a preparation for it.” [xiv]
Commentary: The passivity of understanding is not a proper contribution to the understanding insofar as it does not contribute to the understanding through action. In other words, intuition without an accompanying form of intellectual action does not properly contribute to the understanding. Husserl is simply agreeing with Thomas on the nature of passive potency. It seems Husserl and Thomas agree that the contribution of understanding is an intellectual processing of intuition that manifests itself through a form of proper activity, which is typically called demonstration. In other words, Husserl and Thomas, according to Stein, agree on the method of doing philosophy, and for Stein this agreement is worthy of our attention because it signifies objectivity in philosophical method. What Stein gives to us is a reasonable demonstration of the core-methodology that philosophers have been utilizing for well over 2,000 years. She showcases that modern trends, despite being modern, may, unbeknownst to many, be entirely in league with the way philosophy should be done, even if the doctrines are the method are adjusted to a particular time in history.
REFERENCES
[i] Edith Stein (2000). Knowledge and Faith: The Collected Works of Edith Stein. (Redmond, Walter, Tr.). Washington: ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies; 35. (Original published under the title Erkenntnis und Glaube). Print.
[ii] cf., “Edith Stein” in the New World Encyclopedia. DOI: https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Edith_Stein. (Web accessed, summer 2019).
[iii] cf., introduction to Jon C. Wilhemsson’s The Philosophical Contributions of Edith Stein (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016). Print.
[iv] Calcagno, Antonio (2007). The Philosophy of Edith Stein.Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press; 116-18. Print.
[v] Casey, Edward S. (2017). The World on Edge.Indiana: Indiana University Press; 9-12. Ebook.
[vi] Calcagno’s The Philosophy of Edith Stein, 116
[vii] Ibid., 116, 118
[viii] Ibid., 118
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Edward’s The World on Edge, xviii.
[xi] Edith Stein (2000). Knowledge and Faith: The Collected Works of Edith Stein. (Redmond, Walter, Tr.). Washington: ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies; 41-7. (Original published under the title Erkenntnis und Glaube). Print.
[xii] Ibid., 41-2
[xiii] Ibid., pp. 44-5; also, see Smith, David Woodruff, “Phenomenology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward Zalta (ed.), URL = <plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology/>.
[xiv] Ibid., 46
Dr. Lance H. Gracy 
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