The Philosophy and Life of Edith Stein (Dr. Sarah Borden)

Edith Stein is a notable philosopher in the 20th century being most influential in attempting to synthesise the boundaries and movements of Thomistic philosophy with Husserlian phenomenology. In this video, we are joined by Dr Sarah Borden Sharkey to introduce Edith Stein's key ideas and help you get into the works of Edith Stein. We touch upon her relation to other notable thinkers, the meaning of her pursuit of being and more. 

Faith That Challenges. Conversations that Matter. Laughs included. Subscribe Now!
Breaking down faith, culture & big questions - a mix of humor with real spiritual growth.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Chapters

• 8:02 [Ad] Faith That Challenges. Conversations that Matter. Laughs included. Subscribe Now!
• 8:51 (Cont.) The Philosophy and Life of Edith Stein (Dr. Sarah Borden)

Transcript

Hello and welcome to this episode of Philosophy for All. I'm your host, Joshua Yen, and today we're greatly privileged to be joined by Dr. Sarah Borden Sharkey to talk about Edith Stein. Edith Stein is a very notable Catholic writer in the twentieth century. And it's a great privilege to have Dr. Borden onto the channel because she is a professor of philosophy at Wheaton College and specializes in feminist theory, Edith Stein and phenomenology. Thank you so much for coming onto the channel. Dr. Borden, how are you? I'm doing well. It's good to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Yes, and a quick Easter egg for those on this channel. In an alternative universe, I may have actually ended up at Wheaton College because that was indeed one of the places I've applied to. And in that alternate universe, I may have very much been Dr. Borden's student and have perhaps learned a bit more about Edith Stein than I do now. So sooner or later, I get to Stein, and I'm very excited for this topic indeed. So to get us started off, who was Edith Stein? Edith Stein was a twentieth century phenomenologist, one of Husserl's early students. She worked with Husserl and Göttingen and then followed him to Freiburg, did her dissertation there, worked as his assistant. She never had a post with university privileges, but she worked as a private assistant. She did run some sort of lecture courses and as she put it phenomenological kindergarten she edited his manuscripts and was deeply involved in lectures on internal time consciousness ideas too and several other collections of essays she famously converted to catholicism in um and became a Carmelite nun in, uh, nineteen thirty-three, um, did her major, her kind of biggest, uh, philosophic work in the convent, um, and then was killed in Auschwitz in forty-two. Um, she has since been canonized. She is one of the three co-patronesses of Europe, um, and there's a cause opened, uh, to name her doctor of the church. We don't, uh, don't know how that will go, but, um, there is at least, uh, very recently a cause has been opened for that. That sounds very fascinating and that opens up, I suppose, a very good introduction to all the different topics that we'll hopefully get into in this interview. So perhaps to start off with, let's talk a bit about her conversion from Judaism to Christianity, because I don't think I can think of that many philosophers or notable philosophers, especially in the twentieth century, who's made that shift from Judaism to Christianity, especially with their background. Can you tell us a bit more about this conversion? Sure. Her mother was devout. That's pretty clear. But her father died when she was a year old. There were seven kids in the family. The mother took over the business and ran the business and had a good number of children to care for. And so you shouldn't think of Stein as someone who was particularly devout as a child. I think her religious education was quite minimal. She was raised largely by, or at least her siblings had a pretty important impact. She loved her mother, clearly devoted. Mother was quite involved, but I don't think given the life circumstances, she was forming the youngest, it was the youngest of the kids, wasn't forming her as much as some of the older kids. And so she wasn't particularly well-informed, well-trained, as far as I know, never learned Hebrew. When she was a teenager, she says that she consciously gave up prayer. So she would have considered herself, at least in practice, an agnostic up until her work in phenomenology. And interestingly enough, I think that played a key role. One of the key ideas of phenomenology is to give a rigorous articulation examination description of our experience and to set aside assumptions about experience about which ones are valid or not and first describe experience before we can unpack the conditions under which you judge whether something is true or truthfully understood or not That appears to have played some role in opening her up to reexamining religious experiences. I think certainly the influence of Scheler in Göttingen was probably also an important factor. She talks about a few things. It's not clear exactly what happened. Some of them I'm sure were intellectual. Some of them appear to be personal. So the example of Anna Reinach, the wife of another one of Husserl students, Adolph Reinach, who was killed during World War I, the example of her way of dealing with her grief appears to have been important. Martin Luther's hymn, A Mighty God is Our Fortress, she describes as significant watching everyday people pause in their day to go to church and have pray quietly. She did a version of Ignatius of Loyola Spiritual Exercises. So there's several factors that she'll mention. Which is most important? Probably the most famous event is she was in Burg Saburn at Hedwig Conrad Martius's home and read Teresa of Avila's Life. And the story is that she stayed up all night reading the life and the next day said, this is the truth and decided. to become Catholic. It's probably the case she had already decided to become Christian, but she was debating between Protestant versus Catholic, either Lutheran or Catholic. And it appears that Teresa of Avila was pretty essential, both for deciding to become Catholic and then also her desire to become a Carmelite. So she was baptized January first, nineteen twenty two there in Bergs Auburn at St. Martin's Church. That seems like quite fascinating. You've named so many different names and some movements. Can you perhaps tell us a bit more about some of the thinkers and some of the movements, the philosophical movements which went into her thought, not just in relationship to Catholicism, but also, I guess, broadly her philosophy as a whole? Yeah, certainly Husserl has got to be named as a key formation for her. And I think throughout all of her writings, you have to read them in light of her engagement with Husserlian thought. It's not that she agrees with Husserl and everything, but that really is her intellectual starting point. But Hedwig Conrad Martius, who is another student of Husserl, she's not overly well known, but Stein, she was a friend of Stein's, also her godmother, interesting, even though Conrad Martius was Lutheran, she became her godmother. But she looked poised to become a major phenomenologist. I don't know that that's happened yet. I mean, there's not been as much work on it. But Stein was deeply influenced by Conrad Martius's thought. And then once you get to Stein's later works, she's increasingly reading, translating Thomas Aquinas, engaging with Duns Scotus, Augustine, Pseudo Dionysius, Aristotle. I think Hegel is showing up pretty heavily in her writings as well. That's quite, yeah, no, that's fascinating. I'm always tempted, I'm tempted to ask you, where is that Hegelian aspect in her writings? Because it does seem to jump out to see how Hegelianism can be introduced almost. Is that in relation to her Catholic theology, her phenomenology, or how does that actually? So both. I would see it coming up particularly heavily in her great philosophical work, Finite and Eternal Being. um it comes up before then but that's where I think it's most marked and on my reading I see her later writing trying to engage with tomistic metaphysics beginning from a phenomenological viewpoint and trying to engage with and adopt at least a metaphysical conversation that's Thomist. But her angle, I think her lens is slightly wider than Thomas. So she's trying to fit a Thomistic form matter potency act account of human beings within a notion of spirit that owes a lot to Hegel. So she sees soul or form as one expression of spirit, but spirit is a more fundamental category for her. than solar form that's quite fascinating and perhaps to delve into her presentation of phenomenology one of the thinkers or I guess the students of husserl which is also quite influential is heidegger and heidegger's phenomenology seems to be at least from my reading to to almost criticize the Thomistic conception of being, and in some sense goes into Duns Scotus, or at least has some preference for Duns Scotus. Whereas on the other hand, you talk about Stein is almost taking that Thomistic emphasis and trying to bring it in it to phenomenology. I was wondering how you would categorize Stein's, I suppose, phenomenology and her project in relation to Heidegger, and how should we conceive of these two projects? There are so many pieces to that question, so maybe I'll try a couple of pieces and you can follow up with those. But Heidegger and Stein knew each other and both of them were assistants for Husserl. Stein was earlier than Heidegger, but not long after Stein left that role Heidegger took over. They also interacted in the thirties when she applied for a job at Freiburg. And then she has an appendix on Heidegger in her work on finite and eternal being, which is about ways of being, which you can see here already a similar kind of question to what Heidegger is asking. On one hand, They share a training under Husserl and phenomenology and a commitment to serious engagement with the history of philosophy. And they both share certain sympathies with a SCOTUS approach. So in some ways, you can see both of them as a type of phenomenological SCOTUS in certain respects. But Stein is pretty explicit about thinking Heidegger's project is inadequate. She thinks his account of Dasein is incompletely developed and thus a problematic way into the question of the meaning of being. So her project is to ask again the question of the meaning of being, but she thinks on a more thoroughgoing basis in contrast to what Heidegger has done. They're good conversation partners. They're going to disagree, but that's exactly, I think, the same kind of question they're asking, but they're going to get to some differing endpoints. That's fascinating and your reference to Dasein and being and reformulating that question of being anticipates exactly the follow-up question that I wanted to have is what actually is being for Stein? You've talked a bit about how Hegel in spirit seems to be this foundational understanding in Stein's work or at least you could kind of view Hegel in that sense. as an influence. And once again, Heidegger tries to put being as his foundational question in philosophy. And Stein, where from that perspective of Daseinism as a self-interpretive being to this kind of Hegelian spirit, where does Stein fall on that scale? If you could even put her on that scale, is she presenting a new concept there? I'd say she's presenting a new concept. So certainly she shares with Heidegger this conviction that you can't ask the question of the meaning of being without having an account of how it's given to us, who we are, such that we can ask that question in the way we are oriented to answer. So like all phenomenologists, a description of how we can engage in certain questions. But she thinks, Heidegger, it looks like he's open to moving beyond just a description of Dasein to asking the question of being. He never quite finishes his text. Stein is going to give a more thoroughgoing answer. And she has this, I find it really provocative and fascinating account of three types of being. So she distinguishes actual being, which would be sort of she's going to place notions of potency to act a kind of Thomistic vision pretty tightly in actual being. And then she contrasts that with essential being and mental being. And I have hammered my head. I started out as a Thomist and sort of then worked my way into phenomenology or I suppose I've come at it slightly opposite direction of Stein herself. And my sort of Thomism, no, no, there's potency act. That's the basic way we think, there's actuality. Her notion of essential being really threw me for a while. But I like to study her and read her in part because I find it the most serious challenge to Thomism. that I have seen, one that wants to incorporate the insights of Thomism, but then her evidence for essential being is more challenging than I expected it to be. And I think there's something really fascinating. As far as I can tell, the distinction between actual and essential being has some precursors in the history of philosophy. So Duns Scotus uses some terms that look similar, but I don't see anyone else developing it as carefully and rigorously as she does. So I find it to be one of her unique contributions to the conversation is offering a range of different ways to understand being and types of being as she puts it. Can you perhaps develop on what she might mean by this essential being? What does she, what is she trying to bring across by creating this category? So by essential being, she means meaning, the being of meaning. So Thomas Gronkowski, who's a Stein scholar who teaches in Indiana, he titled his book Being as Unfolding. And I think that's a nice description of what is core to the meaning of being for her. And then she sees essential being as the unfolding of the intellectual dimensions of being. Actual being is the unfolding of potency to act relations. And then mental being has to do with the way our thoughts and concepts unfold. So she's going to see intelligibility and essential relations as one way things unfold. And we can see it in everyday experiences. There's a difference between your coming to understand a triangle versus what it means to be a triangle. And you could unfold different features of what it means to be a triangle. And then you can contrast that with the process you went through to get there. And we can assume you might be really quick to understand the differing features. Someone else might unfold them slowly. But the features, per se, of what it means to be a triangle have their own distinct being and way of relating. And that's different from or particular acts of coming to grasp that. And so essential being is where she sees the intelligibility and the types of unfolding characterizing intelligibility to be rooted. That's very fascinating. And perhaps to understand this, we're talking, I guess, with all phenomenological processes about individual engaging with the world. And we have this act of unfolding this meaning, this essential being. Now, there's two, there seems to be three components. We've talked about the being, that which we're engaging with, but we haven't necessarily discussed in its depth. And I think we should look at this a bit more, perhaps. Who is the I in this process of phenomenology? Because I guess Heidegger kind of criticizes Husserl in his view of the eye as, I can't remember exactly correctly his criticism, but it seems to be this view of the eye as this transcendent ego or this kind of this well-defined concept which then engages with the world. Heidegger says no, that's kind of fully self-interpretative. How does Stein view the eye and who is or what is the nature of the being which is doing the questioning? Right. So Stein's going to be much closer to Husserl on this in contrast to Heidegger. So she thinks you can't talk about Dasein as a way of being without having an account of the who of being, which Heidegger will agree with. I mean, he does want to talk about the who of Dasein, but he's very wary of any kind of substance language. Stein is willing to think of the ego as the center of experience and to describe it not necessarily as a substance, but at least closer to a Husserlian pure ego in our description of experience, although she's going to have a very embodied version of the the ego so like marilopanti she's going to say that our bodily orientation is a core part of our description of that experience even though we can pinpoint within that a pure ego and she will use that language and I guess with that understanding, how does one unfold or unfold essential being? Is it via, I guess as Heidegger says, use or how are we meant to engage with the world? Yeah. So there are all kinds of ways of engaging in the world. And we'd probably wanna, we'd have to unpack all the differing ways you could do it, but she's envisioning in the classic phenomenological way, a subject oriented toward being, and she'll unpack that horizon of orientation using the classic transcendentals. So she does, following Thomas Aquinas here, she will talk about a fundamental orientation to being, truth, goodness. She adds beauty as a transcendental, and she sees that as a fundamental orientation, you might say on the horizon of which particular objects are then understood as statues or as songs or as ideas or concepts. And so concepts for her would be among the objects that you would understand in terms of certain essential structures. So a kind of classic Husserlian subject oriented toward an object on some kind of background, but in terms of certain kinds of intelligibilities. That's quite fascinating. Perhaps for the listeners who may not be so used to these terms, I guess, and one of these terms which probably stand out is the word transcendental. How is one to understand it? Because I guess from a layman, they might think of transcendental and think transcendent. How should we engage with this definition? So the... The term, as she's using it, is drawing from the medieval conversations about traits or features that are coextensive with being. So classically, Augustine said anything that is is also good anything that is it also has a certain kind of unity anything that is um would have intelligibility or truth so he's thinking of descriptions that would be true of everything that has been and the medievals loved the transcendentals they'd have fights over how many they are exactly how you articulate them you're right it's fallen out of favor in more contemporary conversations Stein's trying to bring it back, but not as a feature of objects per se, but instead our fundamental orientation or type of question. So if you think of a sort of notion of the background, the gestalt, you see a figure, but on a background, she's thinking of the transcendentals as the kind of background of our orientation. that we're always asking questions. What does that mean? What's its intelligibility? Or is that true? Do I have evidence for it? Is that good? So she wants to say that's a description, you might say, of Dasein in Heidegger's sense. It's basic to our orientation to care about being truth, goodness, intelligibility. And that's, so she reinterprets the classic transcendentals to be fundamental to our experience or horizon of experience, if you wanna put it that way. So I suppose this, you use the term orientation, and I guess it comes to mind one of Kant's essays of what it means to orient oneself in thinking. And I was wondering whether the transcendental, therefore, from this, I guess, this question of what it means to actually orient ourselves, is a transcendental almost the light bulb, which kind of directs us forward, or whether the, in some sense, the transcendental is that which defines the way in which we engage in the world or understand how things are? Where does the transcendental tie in with our orientation of thought? That's a nice, I like that question. Um, She's treating the transcendental as an orientation of being per se. So you couldn't really fine tune it as action versus intellectual. All of our orientation is geared toward transcendentals. However, She then distinguishes. So you might be engaged in making a work of art and you're still oriented toward a truth. But what it means to get at the artistic truth is different from what it means to get at the historical truth or to get at the logical truth of something. So she thinks, although we're always oriented toward truth, There's a version of it the historian cares about, and that's being accurate to what actually happened in time. And artists may not actually be interested in that. They might be interested in what's the essential features that makes Napoleon, Napoleon. in part why you get movies that aren't historically accurate, but they seem to get something right in terms of who that person was and what motivated and what values characterize them. She would say that's getting at the artistic truth, which would differ from the historical truth. Truth might be the horizon, but then we could start to fine tune what kind of truth or good might be the horizon. But what kind of goods are we talking about? Practical goods, functional goods, aesthetic goods. So then we could start to fine tune when we ask about the type of activity we're doing. That's quite fascinating and I was wondering whether Stein touches upon what happens if or whether it's even possible for these transcendentals to almost contradict each other because it could be the case that truth runs in opposition with good perhaps hopefully in a Christian sense it doesn't but assume one of these things run in contradiction what is one meant to do or does Stein accommodate for these possibilities? Well So on one hand, I don't see her articulating the horizon with enough detail to have those conflicts. Your understanding of truth isn't the same thing as your orientation to truth. So on one hand, you couldn't recognize anything as a contradiction if you didn't already have an orientation to truth. You couldn't recognize something as conflicting without already an orientation to unity and oneness. So they're the kind of condition of picking out anything going wrong. So that's sort of one feature. I think one of the others though, This is a phenomenological description of how we are oriented to being on her account. When I first started working on Stein decades ago, I described her as a phenomenologist who turned to metaphysics. And I've decided that's not right. I really think she's a phenomenologist from her early work to her latest work. But she's asking how we can ask metaphysical questions in the later works. So she's not making a judgment yet about what's metaphysically true. She's proposing, you might say, hypotheses, ways of intending being, and then we'd have to unpack all the conditions and evidence you would need to affirm that description as true. So this is a sort of description of how we even ask questions about what is a contradiction? Where is attention? How do we pick them out and recognize them? That's very fascinating. And I would love to continue delving down this rabbit hole, but perhaps to switch our focus a bit to her theology, and perhaps you would return and that would kind of, we'll come back to this somewhere down the line, but we'll see where this conversation takes us. But in regards to her theology, and you raised reading Stein as almost this strongest criticism of aquinas can we perhaps start off with that how that how despite her attempt to integrate atomistic thought into phenomenology does that kind of end product seem to then pose in retrospect the strongest objection to tomism what's the arguments there um The things I find challenging to Thomism in her approach are certainly her account of being, that tripartite notion and particularly essential being. Her way of unpacking the pure I and its role in personhood I think is a significant issue. I find her engagement with Aristotle and thus by implication, a kind of Thomas conversation, really interesting. She thinks that the notion of matter as a pure potency is incoherent. Aristotle, it's not clear that he thinks there's prime matter, but he's thinking of matter as the principle of potency in contrast to form as the principle of act. And she thinks that isn't a coherent way to talk about matter because a potency is the potency of something. So I think part of what's intriguing is she's trying to rethink the nature of matter per se. And then that's going to have all kinds of implications for a Thomist adoption of a matter form metaphysic. She's rethinking matter. She's putting it in relation to spirit. And then she adds I think this is fascinating. But she has a concept of the original state of matter, the fallen state of matter, the redeemed state of matter, which offers some really fascinating theological resources for thinking about the nature of creation, how creation might have changed issues like the transmission of original sin, what grace looks like. And then finally, this is something I think all contemporary Thomists think about, but Stein also offers resources for thinking about classic notions of form in relation to evolutionary theory. and how you might rework a classic notion of form to have a robust way of engaging with evolutionary theory. She thinks not only can you adapt form to fit with evolutionary theory, you can even show that it's theologically significant that one embrace a robust account of evolution. And she has a sort of vision of how that might fit with the unity in the body of Christ and some of the theological implications. Can you perhaps develop a bit more about this theological view to evolution? I mean, it might be a bit of a tangent to this video, but I'm interested to see how you could apply this concept of form perhaps to this theory. Sure. So one of the things that characterizes Aristotle and Thomas, when they talk about form, they're usually, as far as I can tell, thinking of form both as a kind of biological species category, and then also a kind of intellectual structure that you're recognizing this squirrel under the form of squirrelness, and you take it to be a biological category as well. Part of what Stein does is distinguish different notions of form to distinguish the biological species form from what she would call the kind of form in its essential being. So she thinks of form in its essential being as the most important version. And then the material conditions can be such that you could have instances of that. And so she sees evolutionary processes as a process by which you set the material conditions for there to come about to be squirrels in contrast to other kinds of mammals. So she's okay with, or she's quite delighted with sort of evolutionary changes at the level of species, but they're still realizing, you might say, form in the most fundamental sense for her, which would be the kind of essential being a form. So that's sort of one key step is distinguishing different notions of form. One of the other key steps is she sees a lot of leeway and flexibility in each of the forms. So form of human being, for example. It is a very general form with lots of ways and types of expression. And so evolutionary variations would be still compatible with it all being a certain range, at least being of the human form. And then she has a notion of individual forms as well. Part of what I find intriguing is she has this notion that Christ is the fullness of the human form. He gives the fullest, complete, and perfect expression of the human form. But the rest of human beings are all of the human form, and yet we need all of us to give expression to the full range of form. the human form, a kind of expression that echoes the perfection of Christ expression. So I think it's a kind of intriguing way, new, different way of thinking about how we belong to each other and need each other to together express what humanity can look like. That's very fascinating. And as you're talking about kind of form and substance and incidents in some sense, I was thinking about how you may apply, I guess, Edith Stein's philosophy to other important theological notions, especially in the Catholic tradition related to mystic influence. And most notably, I think, is the Eucharistic view of transubstantiation. I was wondering how whether Stein, if you did try to apply Stein to transubstantiation, would that lead to a similar kind of connotations that you get with Thomism, or would it lead to a fundamental reinterpretation of transubstantiationism as a doctrine? That is a great question, and I have no good answers. I should own up. I'm not Catholic, and I have loved working with a Catholic figure and having the chance to enter into Catholic conversations, but I try to be pretty careful on theological claims. Yes. That's slightly outside my wheelhouse. And I would love I would love for you to work on that. You can tell us. Well, hopefully so. I think you're right. There's got to be something interesting there. It's going to be important. Yes. And she certainly has theological works. Does she discuss exactly that? I'd have to go back and look. That definitely sounds very fascinating. But perhaps let's move on from, I guess, this almost Thomistic theology and probably take a step back to say, well, what was her broader impact on theology as a whole? You talked about her potentially being canonized as a doctor of the church. What are some of those implications or things that she would be doing good doctoring for the church in that regards? Part of... what I love about finite and eternal being it's something like a contemporary summa you really don't have very many people writing texts that are trying to address the range of questions that Stein is in her finite and eternal being. So she does a kind of angelology and she uses angels in the way Thomas does in a certain sense, but also it's something like a eidetic variation to understand human beings, but she fits them into her account and asks what would it mean to receive grace qua angel versus receiving grace qua human being. And so what's the relationship between freedom and grace and different kinds of beings? Which I think is a really interesting question that the medievals would love. I don't see that as a major part of contemporary conversations. And so she brings, returns us to questions that I think actually do have significance, even though we've lost sight of what it might, how it might matter. She engages with quantum physics, evolutionary science. She was writing this work in the mid-thirties, so still not the most recent science by our standards, but she was getting, having brought into the convent various, some of the most recent scientific writings to try to struggle with them and think through notions of form. notions of matter, the different types of atomic structure and how those might be relevant to thinking about the nature of matter. So I think engaging with Thomistic categories, but in light of more recent science. Hmm. That's quite fascinating. And I was wondering whether Stein talks about the relationship between science and faith or science and philosophy, how these domains, which I guess can be seen as so, so distinct at sometimes yet so similar others, how does she, promote or how does she intend to bridge the gaps between these fields yeah so she sees faith as a kind of knowledge and does use it um as a way of seeing but she calls it a dark light that is um for us What we can see by faith is something we can't evidence in the same way you can evidence other things. So she's thinking of a Husserlian notion of we have kind of intentions or ways of understanding things. And then we ask, what's the evidence for that? To what degree can we confirm or fulfill that? Certain kinds of claims, like scientific claims, some of them we can get a pretty high degree of evidence for them, others less so. She sees faith as a way of intending or understanding reality, so it allows one to ask questions like, might there be an original or a fallen or redeemed state of matter itself? You can ask the question intelligibly, appealing to doctrine. She uses the Trinity in the same kind of way. Can we illumine different aspects of the world by asking what would it mean to be created by a Trinitarian God? But then She further asked, but what kind of evidence is possible given certain kinds of claims? And faith can offer a way of understanding many things. Some of them are partially true. evidence some you can't get full evidence for them in a way analogous to other kinds of claims but this distinction's present across all the disciplines how much evidence can you get certainly she'll grant faith is different it's a dark light but nonetheless it can offer a way of asking questions That's a very fascinating analogy or metaphor, you calling it a dark light. And I suppose I promised previously when we were departing from phenomenology that we may indeed return. And I do indeed think that this raises a question that I have, which came up when we were referring to faith as a dark light and referring back to the essay of Kant of what it means to orient oneself in knowledge. Kant likes to talk about God as a postulate in some sense, which orients our thought. Is Stein imagining faith almost as this dark light, as almost an orientation or almost apostolate, like in the Kantian sense? I don't want to say she's Kantian, but to say that faith is that which is orienting our pursuits in these different programs in the same way that God may orient our approaches towards these different doctrines or ideas. Is that kind of what she's getting at, or is that kind of a miscategorization? No, that would be a great way to think about it. Kant does certainly think we bring various categories, various forms and structures to how we experience. Stein seeing faith as functioning in very similar way. She's going to disagree with Kant on issues like idealism and realism sort of metaphor for being, then the assumptions that she sees underlying Kantian approaches, whether they've been adequately critiqued even by Kant. So there'll be points where they disagree, but I think Kant's a great analogy here. She's doing something similar in saying faith can be a way of illuminating and asking questions. She calls the content of faith a hypothesis that you can bring. to various kinds of investigation. It's a hypothesis that those who affirm the faith will take to be true. Those who don't affirm the faith might say, no, no, no, but both can treat it in the same way as a hypothesis that you're using to test and ask certain kinds of questions, whether you are affirming it as true or not, you could treat it as the same sort of structure through which you ask certain questions and start hammering on certain possibilities. Hmm. That's quite fascinating. perhaps, delving forward one step further, we're living in this world where, in some sense, feminism is coming up, and it's a very important topic, and Stein writes a lot about this. I was wondering her approaches to the roles of men and women, and also her influence in that field. Stein. In the nineteen twenties, she applied for a teaching position. She was. So we'll go back to biography a little bit. I will honestly get to this issue. But she was among the first women to go to university in Germany. So they opened their doors approximately nineteen eight to women in the universe to the universities, opened their doors to women about nineteen. She entered in nineteen ten. And then, of course, went all the way through and got a doctorate under Husserl. She tried to get a teaching post, writing a second dissertation to apply for various jobs, and she didn't get one. And in part, straight up sexism. Her letters, the letters of recommendation for her revealed it. praised her to the skies, but then raised questions. The host girl said, if it's appropriate to hire women, of course she would be. And she didn't get the job. She did end up writing to the authorities in Berlin and they did change the law, but Stein never got a teaching post in a university. So she ended up teaching in a girls high school and kind of teachers training institute. And it's during approximately the decade that she was working primarily in a high school setting. that she was asked by Father Eric Chivara, who was head of ,, the editor of a kind of Voices of Our Time newspaper in Germany. She was asked to start a translation project and a lecture tour. So she began translating some of Thomas Aquinas's works, John Henry Newman. And then she went all across Europe lecturing. And she was given the topic, the vocation of men and women. This has turned out to be among her more popular set of writings. And so they've been translated in a very readable translation into English and come up fairly regularly. And I think rightly because there's such an interest in issues of gender, early feminism, and she does play a key role. I hesitate with those writings, however, because she herself didn't develop them in great detail. They're a popular level set of lectures and the account of gender I think isn't as developed as some of her other thought and ideas. Exactly what do we do with it? I hesitate a little bit. Because I don't think it's as developed. However, she does have a notion of tendencies that are more common in women versus men. So she describes a kind of orientation to persons. that's characteristic of women and orientation to objects and the requirements of work that are a orientation to men. She thinks this basic tendency has characteristic ways in which we go wrong and that She describes sort of temptations that are more common. And I think some really interesting account of the different temptations and how much we need each other to curb and correct and improve the kind of tendencies to weaknesses. So she does have a notion of kind of a feminine and a masculine orientation. It's been pretty influential for John Paul II and his notion of the feminine genius. I think she's in the background of a lot of John Paul II's writings on women. But she's always clear that individuals are always unique. They have all kinds of individual variations, and one should not overplay the sort of gender tendencies because those are unique. simply one of the possible features in an individual, and they do not characterize every individual. They do not, in every case, they wouldn't be true, and they shouldn't be true for every person. Because we're all individuals, we have our own strengths and orientation. She's also quite clear there should be no job that shouldn't be open to women. And in fact, in every field, we need both men and women, because on her view, there are tendencies that are common for men versus tendencies common, more common among women. She thinks it's actually good for fields to make sure you're hiring both women and men. That's very fascinating. And I would like to perhaps push forward a bit to Edith Stein as a political thinker. But before I do that, I want to perhaps disentangle ourselves from the whole Stein debate or discussion for one question. And that one question is, do you think there's any intrinsic relationship or connection? between the movement of phenomenology as a whole and feminist philosophy as a whole? Because they do seem to be, almost a lot of feminist writers write in this kind of post-phenomenological sentiment or spirit or revolution in philosophy. Is there that connection there? Can you tie connections between the two? Oh, now that's an inch. Certainly part of what has come up in feminist conversations is questions of what does it mean to experience oneself as a sexed and gendered individual? And the university has been dominated for so long since its founding. at the founding of the universities, that's when you get the official prohibition of women in the highest levels of education because the universities were set up for monk status to be given to all students. And so that's a long period of time when women are officially barred from the highest forms of education. I think it is a really important question. Does our embodied life shape the kinds of concerns, the kinds of questions and the ways in which we approach issues. And so this return to the subject and the experience of the subject and what and the way in which we bring our full selves into everything we do is shared in certainly phenomenology, but then also at least a good number of feminist conversations. That's quite fascinating. I'm sure that if I did decide to pursue that, that would blow this conversation up again. But going back to Edith Stein, I was wondering how we ought to approach her political thoughts, because I guess with Heidegger, due to very unfortunate situations and due to his own kind of moral questions, you had connections to the Nazi party and with Edith Stein, she unfortunately died in Auschwitz. And I was wondering what her political thoughts were, I guess, firstly, in regards to the political situation going on in Germany during her life. And then secondly, perhaps more so to her views about human rights. Yeah. Stein, grew up in, I think of her as kind of assimilated Jew, so she grew up in Germany in an area that's now part of Poland, but there was a fairly large Jewish population there and I think a understandable desire to show their German-ness and their identity with this the nation. When World War I broke out, she was, of course, a full time student and she paused her studies, got training and then volunteered at a war front hospital for infectious diseases. She was committed to really supporting Germany in World War I. After the defeat, she wrote her only major political text, so an investigation, a phenomenology of the state, which when you think of the interwar German period and the political, economic devastation of the Versailles Treaty. That's a pretty marked time in German history. And she essentially argues that thinking carefully about exactly what we mean by the state is the dominant we need to do. We need to really understand the nature of what it is to be a political state, the way it's rooted in a community, the role and intersection of the community and the sovereignty of a state. So it's a very heavily theoretical text, but it does show the foundational issues she thinks are really necessary in that time of transition in Germany. She had worries about National Socialism from very early on. in, I believe it would have been, in nineteen thirty. She was living in Speyer at the time. Speyer was a region that the French were controlling because of the agreement at the end of World War One. And then you have the French troops leaving and finally giving military control back to Germany. And Stein recognizes that she's worried. She's one of the few Germans not celebrating the French leaving. I think she has concerns about, I am assuming, the cultural tendencies in Germany at the time. And we see it quite clearly in thirty-three. So when Hitler comes to power in thirty-three, she immediately tries to get a private audience with Pope Pius XI. She warns him that the National Socialist ideology is deeply problematic. When she doesn't get the audience, she writes him a letter encouraging him to speak now and to speak against the anti-Semitism that's written into the Nazi ideology. She begins her autobiography at that point, and at least one of the reasons for writing it, she doesn't talk about her conversion in it. She talks, it's titled Life in a Jewish Family. That is, one of her interests is to show how German, how normal, how everyday Jews are to counter some of the caricatures that were coming out. And then she, of course, loses her job in April of thirty three. She actually offers to step down from her post and take a leave of absence to protect the school. She knows that her Jewish background is going to be in trouble and end up never going back. She is adamant from day one. She will not support Hitler. Even in the convent when all the elections are rigged and everyone knows it, she says, no, I will not, no matter what the consequences, you do not speak in support of that man. So quite clearly speaking on a public's addresses as well as in her private life, quite concerned about the rise of National Socialism and fairly early on. That's a really fascinating insight into Stein's political philosophy. And one of the questions that comes up when she writes a home is the phenomenology of the state. Can you tell me a bit about that project? And from what perspective is she doing the phenomenology of the state? From a Hegelian mindset, someone could always look at David Friedrich Strauss and talk about the Volkgeist, or the self-experience of the state knowing itself through its people, or however that may come across. Is that what she's doing, or is that just a completely outlandish take of the word phenomenology of the state? That is not what she's doing, but you can see some Hegelian tendencies in what she wants to talk about. So she's asking, what is the most basic structure? What's the necessary feature to be a state? And then once you figure out what is necessary to be a state, what are the kinds of features that enables states to be healthy and strong and what are the kinds of features that make them weak and susceptible. So she's trying to unpack, given a description of what's essential, how you'd unpack what's necessary and what's not. She certainly wants to focus on individuals and on individual rights, human rights, certainly. But she also thinks that there is no individual that isn't rooted in a community. And she'll distinguish different notions of communal relations, talks about mass versus association versus community. And she thinks that communal relations are essential for strong states. So shared values, a sense of shared life is where you're going to get the kind of granting of sovereignty by the people that you have to have for a state to be sustained. So that's quite fascinating and would How would you, I suppose this is kind of a random thought in my mind, but how would that combine the view of human rights in relation to perhaps social contract theory, where we kind of all just participate in the state? How would those two ideas kind of, I guess, engage with each other, maybe as a juxtaposition to kind of illustrate Stein's views? You can see something of her kind of Husserlian phenomenology in the way she's going to answer that question as well. So for Husserl and certainly on Stein's way of doing it, there's a kind of center of experience that would be the pure ego. And at that level, you can talk about kind of structural similarities that everyone would experience. sort of writes in the same kind of way, or they might all have certain basic features that characterize human experience per se. But none of us are simply pure egos. We're all embedded, embodied, and we bring, although you can say within the full person, you can pinpoint the features that are the pure ego that enable us to see commonalities that allow us to make social contracts or allow us to talk about human rights across different cultures and traditions and conditions. But none of us are simply those egos. And if you don't also have a robust account of the peoples, the embodied life, the shared values that are different from the abstract rights, but go to more community-based, localized values, you're going to have too thin of a community to sustain a state over the long haul. That's quite fascinating. And perhaps to almost wrap up this section on Stein's philosophy and her thoughts, where does she ground human rights? Because human rights seems to be this concept which comes up a lot in contemporary popular discourse in modern philosophy and society. some people like to ground it in in God perhaps to say God these rights are God given some people try to maybe just try to define as part of the human experience it just is the way we are that we have human rights where does this human rights come to or come upon us in in Stein's perspective So like most more Thomist thinkers, she's thinking in terms of a kind of basic structure to human beings per se. She thinks we can access it in our experience and you can give evidence within our experience for it, but she is thinking of something that a Thomist would talk about as a human form. So not necessarily, I mean, ultimately maybe given by God, but you don't need to make the argument to tie it to God, to give a description of human beings and their basic structures and orientation and the commonality across human experience that grounds human rights. That's very fascinating. And now that we've talked so much about Edith Stein's philosophy, perhaps we can take a step back and look at Stein as a philosopher and our current contemporary debates in modern philosophy. What can we learn from Edith Stein as a philosopher? One of the things that I find rather disturbing in our contemporary conversation and very much a part of contemporary is thinking about artificial intelligence and how do we even talk about artificial intelligence? And now we're talking about artificial agents and we're talking about personhood and the personhood of corporations, at least here, and using terms that and applying them to things that least traditionally we haven't thought about computers as either intelligent or agents so what do we mean by that and what kind of evidence would you give and is that the right kind of language um stein's phenomenological approach of first-person description of first personal subjective experience and using that as a methodological starting point for giving an account of personhood, for giving an account of agency, an account of intelligence. I think is pretty crucial to our current conversations. When we talk about artificial intelligence, what do we mean? It's already implying a methodological account of how you have access to intelligence, make judgments that something is intelligent. I think one of her values is the detailed use of phenomenology to have a very rigorous and careful account of agency, personhood, experience that I think is pretty crucial to having further conversations about whether it's even appropriate to think of an agent that isn't that's artificial. I don't know if agency is the right word, what do we mean by an agent? We'd have to talk about in what sense it means to will or not will and I think Stein has a lot she can offer on that front. That's quite fascinating and perhaps I just want to make sure I'm understanding this clearly and hopefully this kind of might resonate with some of the audience's thoughts right now about well what actually is when we talk about a form of a human especially or a form of an agent kind of with the aristotelian or optimistic influencers it was the rational soul it's something which is rational perhaps can think Is that almost the same as what Stein's saying with the form of a human, that a human is more its kind of intellectual contemplative capacities? Is that mixed with almost the physical components, almost having two arms, two legs, what not? Is it a mix between these two ideas? How do those ideas combine to each other? So one of the things Stein worries about with classic Aristotelian and Thomistic conversations is that we tend to adopt a kind of third personal perspective in the sense of you describe it as a soul or you describe it as related to matter in this way. And I take it part of the lesson of Descartes and Kant is we need to turn to first personal and not just third personal, because when you're doing a third personal description, we can ask whether that's the right lens to use, whether that's the right description. We need evidence that this isn't just a cultural inheritance, but genuinely grounded in something we can confirm across different individuals. I also think in general, the turn to the subject and first personal experience is especially critical when we're talking about something like intelligence or rationality that are You see the effects of rationality in a third-person way. I don't know that you can see rationality per se from the outside. You experience it. You live it. You don't see intelligence. You see the effects of someone's intelligence in their words or in their writing. But I don't know that you see intelligence except first personally. So part of what I find helpful, it differs from the sort of classic because it's very intentionally drawing from the Cartesian and Kantian turn to the subject, turn to first personal experience. And so you do end up, I think ultimately Stein wants to say there's a lot in what Thomas or Aristotle were doing that's important, that's correct, that can be confirmed in first personal experience. But there are also some things that we'd want to fine tune, develop a little differently, particularly on issues of ethics and value theory. That's where you get some really interesting analyses that I think contribute something important to ethical conversations. That's very fascinating. I think that does clarify things significantly. Now, as a last question to wrap up this interview, what can we learn from Edith Stein, the person? Because someone doesn't become a Catholic saint for just being a good philosopher. There's loads of good philosophers who are Catholic in history. What can we learn from her as a person? One of the things I find humbling that I suppose we'll put it what part of what I've learned She was a really promising student. From very early on, it was seen that she had a particular brilliance. She was one of the first women in the university. She was going places, gets a PhD, works as an assistant to one of the major leading thinkers of the day. She looks like her life's going to be a success. And then it's not, it's just a failure. In all kinds of ways, she doesn't get a job. She ends up teaching at a high school. She's got a PhD under the top person in Germany. And she's working at a little convent teaching high school students. And then it starts to look like her career will take off. She's asked to do lecturing across Europe. She's asked to do translation. She applies for jobs again. Doesn't get a university post. Finally gets something at a teacher's institute, but it's not. And she's asked by the authorities in Berlin to work with them on reform and education and then loses her job less than a year later. She spends time in the convent. fine-tuning her work, really doing a major, major text, tries to find a publisher. They agree to publish it, but then the laws against Jewish authorship come through and they had already typeset it. They had paid a lot of money to get it all set. And then they just stop and say, Nope, I'm not going to publish it. Um, and so she realized she's not going to get her major work published. She's not going to get a job. She's not going to be able to do the things she was trained to do. She looked like she can do part of what I find so striking is that, um, She, in each case, when all the doors seem to be slammed, she turns to whoever's in front of her and takes care of them. So when she can't work in the university, she throws herself into her high school teaching. And her students, she has a very rigorous schedule. Her students loved her. She was really an involved teacher. She doesn't. seem bitter that she couldn't have the university post. She takes action. She certainly writes to the authorities in Berlin. She gets the law changed, but then moves on and does what she can do and serves the people she can serve. When she loses her job in Munster and no longer has access because of the new laws in Nazi Germany, She begins writing for her religious sisters, the people she's living with. So she changes her audience and she begins to do things that would be relevant to them. When she's on the train going to Auschwitz, the story is told that she was taking care of the kids on the train. The parents, understandably, were panicked. falling apart. And she's right there taking care of all the children, trying to make sure she can give whatever comfort she can. I find this ability to handle that level of disappointment without bitterness. But even when the doors get slammed in your face, you don't pretend like it didn't happen or that it isn't a genuine harm, but you also serve in whatever way you can with whoever's before you. I find it a pretty striking example of how to live faithfully, even when it looks like everything you've worked for, everything you've been prepared to do is going to end in nothing and dust. At the end of her life, She didn't have any reason to think the major writing she'd been working on, a significant number of books would ever get published. And it came pretty close to not happening. But I don't see that in none of her letters does it appear to be, she wants them published, but she's not holding onto it in a way that prevents her from faithfully serving wherever she's placed. That's just such a beautiful lesson that I think we all can really feel with and really learn from. And I think through this talk, in this interview, we've covered a lot of different aspects of of Stein's philosophy, her work, her engagement with other thinkers. We've covered a lot of ground, and I'm sure, just as I have learned so much more about Stein and I want to perhaps get into her work even more, I guess if the audience wants to read more about Stein or want to understand more about Stein, where would you recommend them to start reading? Any order which you recommend reading her works? Any good secondary sources that you recommend? Where should someone go from here? There are a lot of secondary sources that are available. So if I brought it because I'm so excited. This is Stein's magnum opus. There's a new translation that just came out a few months ago. If you are interested in her as a fully developed philosopher engaging with the medieval tradition, bringing phenomenology in conversation, her finite and eternal being is now, the full text is accessible in a beautiful translation. I think Meta Lebec has done some great work commentating on Stein. If you're interested in her phenomenology, her dissertation on the problem of empathy is quite accessible. The first chapter was cut off because it was during the war and they were trying to save paper. So it's actually quite short in the published form. And then our philosophy of psychology and the humanities. If you want a biography, I think Waltraud Herbstre's biography is just a lovely, account of Stein's life. And then I have an overview of Stein's life and thought, covering the major areas of her thought in a little book titled Edith Stein. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming on to this channel. I'll try to put these book recommendations on to my web page when this video comes out. So you can go check that out. My web page is something that you can for these viewers, for the viewers out there, you can check that out. I upload blog posts with all the relevant information to the interviews I upload on this channel there. So if you want to get more information out of that, you can check and put into your Google browser, www dot josh-yan.com or you can find a link to that in the description below. Likewise, we talked a lot about Heidegger in this video as kind of an interlocutor or a dialogue partner to understand Stein. So if you want to go check out an interview I did with Dr. Taylor Carmen on this channel, you could also check that out in this playlist. So thank you so much for coming onto this channel. I really, really enjoyed this discussion and I hope to see you all in the next video. Thank you for watching and God bless. I'll see you next one. Thank you so much. Wonderful. Thank you so much for coming onto the channel.