Abstract
Applying phenomenological method and discoveries to the understanding of Autistic Syndrome Disorders (ASDs) is long overdue. Since all consciousness displays structures of intentionality, meanings that autistic persons make are available through their gestures, sounds and language to an empathetic pairing partner. While still Husserl’s student, Edith Stein wrote the book on the nature and practice of empathy. Her insights allow us to recognize consciousness of the personalistic world as that which people with “high-functioning” Autism or Asperger’s Syndrome lack since they lack empathy. Emergence from autism means entering into and living in the personalistic world, as one among others.
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Notes
- 1.
In Body, Text and Science (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 218, Marianne Sawicki writes, “… even the most astute philosophical commentaries on Stein rest content with giving a historical account of what she wrote. They do not discuss its social genesis, nor do they redirect any of Stein’s investigations or amend her results. This has the unfortunate effect of sealing Stein’s thought into the past, for without being bent and pruned it cannot grow into a living resource for today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.” She acknowledges Mary Catherine Baseheart’s Person and World (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), as a noteworthy exception. Since then there is Dermot Moran’s beautiful study, “Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein and Karl Jaspers” in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Spring 2008, an issue dedicated to Edith Stein. Angela Ales Bello provides a measured analysis of “Edith Stein’s Contribution to Phenomenology” in Analecta Husserliana, Volume LXXX, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002) and in “Causality and Motivation in Edith Stein,” Causality and Motivation, ed. Roberto Poli (Heusenstamm bei Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag 2010). Corinne M. Painter applies Stein’s work in her 2007, “Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal,” in Appropriating the Philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein: Animal Psyche, Empathy, and Moral Subjectivity (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2007). This is a small sampling of research published on Stein recently.
- 2.
Antonio Calcagno in The Philosophy of Edith Stein (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2007), 2, suggests that sexism may be a cause. Also, many Catholic scholars are only recently revisiting their Scholastic heritage and becoming open to Stein’s recuperation of it, following Karol Wojtyla among others.
- 3.
See Potenz und Akt, Band XIX of Edith Steins Werke 18 (Freiburg: Herder, 1998), translated as Potency and Act. Henceforth (PA). Walter Redmond. (Washington D.C.: ICS, 2009).
- 4.
Archivum Carmelitanum Edith Stein Band VII,Ausdem Leben einer Judischen Familie, Das Leben EdithStein: Kindheit und Jugend (Druten: R. Bosman, 1985). OCD as Life in a Jewish Family, trans. Josephine Koeppel (Washington D.C.: ICS, 1986), 186. Henceforth, LJF.
- 5.
Edith Stein, Endliches und ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins, Edith Steins Werke 2 (Louvain: E. Nauwelaerts, and Freiburg: Herder, 1950) and Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 11/12 (Freiburg: Herder, 2006). Translated from the 1950 edition as Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies Publications, 2002), 12. Henceforth ES.
- 6.
“The Logische Untersuchungen had caused a sensation primarily because it appeared to be a radical departure from critical idealism which had a Kantian and neo-Kantian stamp. It was considered a ‘new scholasticism’ because it turned attention away from the ‘subject’ and toward ‘things’ themselves. Perception again appeared as reception, deriving its laws from objects not, as criticism has it, from determination which imposes its laws on the objects. All the young Göttingen phenomenologists were confirmed realists. However, the Ideen I included some expressions which sounded very much as though their Master wished to return to idealism.” (LJF, 250.)
- 7.
“In his course on nature and spirit, Husserl had said that an objective outer world could only be experienced intersubjectively, i.e., through a plurality of perceiving individuals who relate in a mutual exchange of information.” (LJF, 269.)
- 8.
Karl Schuhmann, “Husserl’s Yearbook,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50, Supplement (Autumn, 1990): 1–25.
- 9.
Calcagno in The Philosophy of Edith Stein, p. 17, writes, “Other philosophers, including Ingarden, Scheler, and Conrad-Martius, chided Husserl for his transcendental turn. They, and Stein, continued to follow the phenomenological approach inspired by Husserl prior to his transcendental turn, resulting in the production of a vast corpus of work that remains in archives and libraries but that has not been fully investigated and studied.”
- 10.
Husserl acknowledges that empathy provides insufficient grounds for evidence of other subjects. Edmund Husserl Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, I. Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phanomenologie. (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1913). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. Fred Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983). “The intersubjective world is the correlate of the intersubjective experience, i.e., experience mediated by ‘empathy.’ We are, as a consequence, referred to the multiple unities of things pertaining to the senses which are already individually constituted by the many subjects; in further course we are referred to the corresponding perceptual multiplicities thus belonging to different Ego-subjects and streams of consciousness; above all, however, we are referred to the novel factor of empathy and to the question of how it plays a constitutive role in ‘Objective’ experience and bestows unity on those separated multiplicities.” (363)
- 11.
LJF, 269.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
As Waltraut Stein wrote in her “Preface to the First and Second Editions” of her translation, On The Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989), xiv. Henceforth PE. “Scheler considered Stein’s analysis so pertinent that he referred to it three times in the second edition of (this work (Sympathiegefuhle) 1923).”
- 14.
Ibid., 27.
- 15.
“The Master had joked: ‘Your thesis pleases me more and more. I have to be careful that my satisfaction with it doesn’t get too exalted.’” (LJF, 410.)
- 16.
Edith Stein, Self Portrait In Letters 1916–1942,trans. Josephine Koeppel, ed. Dr. L. Gelber and Romaeus Leuven, O.C.D. (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1993), 1.
- 17.
Sawicki’s Body, Text and Science is the standard resource for the chronology of Ideen II. The present study has extensively relied on its research. Further scholarship into the influence that Stein had on the text of Ideen II and the significance of its supplements must take Sawicki’s account seriously. As the reader shall see, this commentator differs with Sawicki due to my own non-pernicious interpretation of Husserl’s “transcendental idealism.” From mid-October 1916 to February 1917, Edith Stein, no longer a student, but now Husserl’s first assistant, re-visited the manuscript that Husserl wrote immediately after what became Ideen I, 157. In the Introduction to their translation of Ideen II, Rojcewicz and Schuwer comment, “In 1918, Stein completed her second redaction. This time her work involved much more than merely transcribing. By incorporating into the text writings of the folio and others from the war years, the main text of Ideen II began to take its present form” (xii). That Stein took an active role in two of the manuscripts that became Ideen II seems unarguable. See also Antonio Calcagno “Assistant and/or Collaborator? Edith Stein’s Relationship to Edmund Husserl’s Ideen II,” Contemplating Edith Stein, ed. Joyce Avrech Berkman (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2006), 243–270.
- 18.
Adelgundis Jaegerschmid, O.S.B., “Conversations with Edmund Husserl, 1931–1938,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (Seattle: Noesis Press, Ltd., 2001). Husserl reportedly said: “People even claim that I have retreated to Kant. That only shows the degree to which I have been misunderstood!” (338) And, “Yes, Thomas, I adore him—but he wasn’t a neo-scholastic either.” (346)
- 19.
Stein wrote: “as a consequence [of the discussion] I have experienced a breakthrough. Now I imagine I know pretty well what ‘constitution’ is—but with a breakfrom Idealism. An absolutely existing physical nature on the one hand, a distinctly structured subjectivity on the other, seem to me to be prerequisites before an intuiting nature can constitute itself.” (SP,8)
- 20.
According to Sawicki, 153–162, Stein composed §§43–47 (chapter 4 of Part Two). If this is the case, then Husserl may not be responsible for the infamous sentence that begins §47, “Empathy and the Constitution of Nature,” namely, “Empathy then leads, as we saw earlier, to the constitution of the intersubjective Objectivity of the thing and consequently also that of man, since now the physical Body is a natural-scientific Object.” Perhaps the entire chapter includes Stein’s closeted realism, rather than Husserl’s transcendental idealism. We will see that Husserl reverses the above constitutive order in the Cartesianische Meditationen.
- 21.
“The thing that is their body becomes evidence for me of a life of a subject that is analogous to my own life; it motivates in me the belief in an existence that is just as much an absolute for others as mine is for me.”(2009, 375) Motivated belief, however, is not Evidenz.
- 22.
See Stein’s introductory chapter in Endliches und Ewiges Sein wherein she encourages the genuine philosopher to adopt Christian teachings in order to investigate where the hypothesis leads.
- 23.
PA, 376.
- 24.
Alfred Schutz, “Edmund Husserl’s Ideen, Volume II,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 13, No 3 (Mar., 1953): 394–413. Quote from page 395.
- 25.
Here we move into “communities of higher orders” of interest to both Husserl and Stein in their later work. See the CM and K Manuscripts and Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und Phanomenologische Forschung 7 (1925): 1–123. Edith Stein, An Investigation Concerning the State, trans. Marianne Sawicki (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2006).
- 26.
Husserl’s analysis in §151 of “Strata of the Transcendental Constitution of the Thing. Supplementary Considerations,” begins in primordial empirical consciousness that develops into the personal doxic worlds, as we see in thematized in his later genetic analyses.
- 27.
Although the stratum of immanence can achieve unities such as bodies recognized as things through acts of association of sensory experience, the thing body of the other takes on the sense of substantial-causal thing before becoming independent of the nexus of consciousness.
- 28.
Manuscript E-III-5 transcribed by Marly Biemel in 1952. Reprinted from Telos 4 (Fall 1969). “Universal Teleology,” Husserl: Shorter Works, trans. Marly Biemel, eds. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 335–337. Edith Stein, Die Frau (Louvain: E. Nauwelaerts, 1959); Woman, trans. Freda Mary Oben (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1996). See especially pp. 94–97.
- 29.
Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay graphically describes his mother’s determined intrusions into his autistic mind, which enabled his development. How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2008). Temple Grandin expresses similar gratitude for her mother’s persistence, see especially Emergence Labeled Autistic (New York: Warner Books, reissued April 2005). Clara Claiborne Park’s classic The Siege (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982) conveys her efforts as the parent of an autistic child in her dedication: “To those behind walls, and to all their besiegers.”
- 30.
Regardless of the initial deterrent to development, Connolly and Craig write: “Ten modalities provide sensory input that must be organized and processed by human subjects: (1) touch and pressure, (2) kinesthetic, (3) the vestibular system, (4) temperature, (5) pain, (6) smell, (7) taste, (8) vision, (9) audition, and (10) the common chemical sense. Each modality has a special type of sensory receptor (end organ) that is sensitive only to certain stimuli, and each as a separate pathway from the sensory receptor up the spinal cord to the brain. Sensory systems especially important to motor learning are: tactile and deep pressure, kinesthetic, vestibular and visual. When these systems exhibit ‘delayed’ or ‘atypical’ function, motor development and/or learning is affected.” Maureen Connolly and Tom Craig, “Stressed Embodiment: Doing Phenomenology in the Wild,” Human Studies 25, 4 (2002): 451–62.
- 31.
Stanley I. Greenspan and Serena Wider, Engaging Autism (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, Perseus Books Group, 2006).
- 32.
Maxime Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1999), 252.
- 33.
My use of the masculine pronoun throughout is indicative of the preponderance of males on the spectrum.
- 34.
CM, 141.
- 35.
Blind people often speak of being able to “feel” colors. See Oliver Sachs, An Anthropologist on Mars (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) for further examples of atypical consciousness.
- 36.
CM, 125.
- 37.
We know from experiences with adolescents that separate identities are not established easily or completely during this early period of development, but the normal overlapping of the pair mother-child begins to pull apart well before the teenage years.
- 38.
Ideas I, 363–364.
- 39.
“Eventually I distinguished people from things and nature, and came to think of them as people-objects: second-rate, distant, difficult to comprehend but usable. I learned to function” (Op. cit. Williams, 70).
- 40.
Yasuhiko Murakami, “On The Future—Autism and Temporality” (paper presented at The Future of Applied Phenomenology: The Second Conference of Phenomenology as Bridge between East and West, Seoul, Korea 11–13 February 2007), 137.
- 41.
Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie Der Intersubjektivät Dritter Teil: 1929–1935, ed. Iso Kern (Den Haag: Martinus Nifhoff, 1973), 604–608.
- 42.
Although Husserl’s power in explicating an essential level of object constitution suggests that his rigorous foundationalism is necessary for grounding empathetic acts and their correlates, Stein’s analysis of empathy completes the constitution of the shared world as the personalistic world.
- 43.
PE, 91.
- 44.
An interesting note here is that autistic children often keep babyish features well beyond what their age would dictate.
- 45.
Donna Williams, Nobody Nowhere (New York: Times Books, 1992), 195–198.
- 46.
This makes sense of early references to spectrum children as feral. The psychic life of the wolf is not up to making the intrusions appropriate to introducing a child to his humanity. See Paul Collins, Not Even Wrong (New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2005).
- 47.
Ideas II, 204.
- 48.
Corinne Painter, “Appropriating the Philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein: Animal Psyche, Empathy, and Moral Subjectivity,” Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal: At the Limits of Experience, ed. Corinne Painter and Christian Lotz (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 97–115.
- 49.
T. S. Eliot, “The Lovesong of J. Alred Prufrock,” Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1963), 7.
- 50.
Op. cit. Painter.
- 51.
This is not the venue for speculation on the differences in the symptom complexes. DSM IV has preferred to obviate this discussion by categorizing them both as Autism Spectrum Disorders.
- 52.
PE, 34.
- 53.
Op. cit. Painter, 101. Husserl, 193.
- 54.
Ibid. Painter.
- 55.
Indeed, the list of important figures in the past (Mozart, Einstein, Wittgenstein to name a few widely agreed upon) suggests that often the exceptional focus on special interests characteristic of this end of the ASD spectrum fuels exceptional abilities.
- 56.
Op. cit. Painter 102.
- 57.
Donna Williams wrote in Somebody, Somewhere (New York: Times Books, 1994): “Autism had been there before I’d learned how to use my own muscles, so that every facial expression or pose was a cartoon reflection of those around me. Nothing was connected to self. Without the barest foundations of self I was like a subject under hypnosis, totally susceptible to any programming and reprogramming without question or personal identification. I was in a state of total alienation. This, for me, was autism.” (5.)
- 58.
Dr. Grandin is renowned for transforming methods of slaughtering animals, her work as a professor at Colorado State University and her descriptive autobiographic works. See especially, Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures (New York: Doubleday, 1995) and Emergence Labeled Autistic (New York: Warner Books, 2005).
- 59.
For Husserl, Stein and Merleau-Ponty, among others, touch is the first sensory substrate to be synthesized into “self,” “own” and not-I since touching oneself is self-reflexive while touching objects reveals a resilience that may provide resistance. Touching a body which will come to be recognized as the body of an other is different again. The warm, soft flesh which can be experienced in touching is not the lived flesh which is touched. When the infant feels the flesh of the other, he intuits in the incomplete fulfillment of his intention that his body has boundaries. We note here that many severely autistic persons are hyper-sensitive to touch, seemingly from birth. Touch then cannot be readily synthesized or its epistemological clout cashed in.
- 60.
Emergence, 37.
- 61.
Emergence, 73.
- 62.
Emergence, 40.
- 63.
Ibid., 41.
- 64.
Ibid., 7.
- 65.
Ideas II, 195.
- 66.
Ideas II, 200.
- 67.
Ideas II, 200.
- 68.
Ideas II, 201.
- 69.
Ideas II, 203.
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Haney, K.M. (2013). Edith Stein and Autism. In: Embree, L., Nenon, T. (eds) Husserl’s Ideen. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 66. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5213-9_3
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