Edith Stein’s Account of Communal Mind and its Limits: A Phenomenological Reading

I translate the German term ‘Erlebnistrom’ with ‘stream of experience’ and not as ‘experiential current,’ and ‘Bewusstseinstrom’ with ‘stream of consciousness’ rather than ‘current of consciousness’. The idiosyncratic translation of ‘Strom’ with ‘current’ in the English version of Stein’s Beiträge (see 2000: xviii) truncates the well-established tradition of mutually translating ‘Bewusstseinsstrom’ with ‘stream of consciousness’ both in literature and in philosophy (especially William James and Edmund Husserl). Stein’s account thus loses its own hermeneutical background. Stein’s argumentation is based on the phenomenological divergence of stream of experience (Erlebnisstrom) and stream of consciousness (Bewusstseinstrom) in communal life. As I will argue, we can understand it only by reading it against the background of Husserl’s account.

I have discussed Stein’s social ontology of persons and personalities of higher order in Caminada (2011a).

Stein understands the psyche as a closed system of lifepower that can be influenced causally and shaped intentionally. The interplay of “lifepower” (Lebenskraft), “sentient causality” (psychische Kausalität), and “sentient abilities” or “psychological dispositions” (psychisches Vermögen) is defined in the first treatise as a “sensate mechanism” (psychischer Mechanismus) which can be powered by both material and mental energy. Thus, the interaction of causality and motivation, of sensate and spiritual lifepower, is at the heart of Stein’s psychological anthropology, which goes beyond the evidences of a phenomenological description of the mind, aiming at an ontology of both the biological psyche (Psyche) and the spiritual soul (Seele). Accordingly, she also gives accounts of her metaphysical insights, as well as descriptions of related intimate spiritual experiences. However, in this paper I address only issues related to the rationality of the common mind as it is implicated by Stein’s account of the community’s stream of experience.

Stein edited Husserl’s research papers for the publication of the second volume of Ideas based on this sharp distinction between mind and psyche, human and non-human. Sawicki (2000) even claims that this second volume should be considered as Stein’s first own philosophical work and that Husserl never published it because he may have “regarded Stein’s essays [the Beiträge] as a more appropriate conclusion to that phase of his own phenomenology” (2000: XXI). But, as the new edition of the second volume of Ideas, which is in preparation at the Husserl Archives Cologne, shows (see the forthcoming volumes IV-2 and V-2 of the Husserliana), it is more accurate to say that Stein edited Husserl’s research papers on his behalf, but according to her own conceptual systematization of both ontology and phenomenology. During her editorial work, Husserl did not spend enough time with her to discuss the project. Only some years after she quit the job did he realize that her systematization did not match with the leading line of his own research and with its further development. Stein, precisely due to her view on such sharp ontological distinctions, missed the central social–epistemological question of Husserl’s philosophical project. The development of Husserl’s genetic turn is, I believe, also related to this issue.

MacIntyre offers a vivid account of the “political dimension” of Edith Stein’s thought (see 2006: 93–98).

I implicitly borrow the analytic reassessment of the hegelian distinction between subjective, objective, and objectified mind from Hartmann (1933).

Smith and McIntyre identify the origin of this concept already in the first book of Ideas (1982: 236).

In the research papers she edited as the second and third book of Ideas the leading idea that brought Husserl to genetic phenomenology was already there. Following my interpretation of the new edition of Ideas II, I am inclined to say that her struggle between idealistic and realistic interpretations of phenomenology inhibited her to follow him on this path. Insisting on the presupposition of an objective reality and of an already structured subjectivity, she consequently reworded Husserl’s research papers in a manner in which MacIntyre (2006) rightly sees compatibilities with her later onto-theological approach between phenomenology and neothomism.

This jump, again, is characteristic of her later onto-theological account of constitution in Potenz and Akt, where objective reality has to be thought as reality as it is given to God (see 2009).

In my view this is the right point of Schütz’s otherwise uncharitable critique of her social ontology (1959), that is, his critique of Stein’s claim for an essentialistic account of nations and states. I do not, however, agree with Schütz in dismissing, in principle, any ontological description of super-individual subjects, as he does (see Caminada 2011a).

For a detailed description of Husserl’s account of individuation see Summa (2012).

This epistemological and metaphysical traits of essentialism are at the core of the divide between the so called realistic and transcendental account of phenomenology.