Abstract
For Edith Stein, experience of God is not founded merely as a cognitive phenomenon. In fact, the experience of transcendence is no phenomenon at all. Rather, Stein holds that experience of God is a non-experience, it emanates as a response to a call that comes from outside the self. Experience of God describes a calling or invitation, an ethical command to respond, a “being laid claim to” without limit and without sufficient reason why. Such experience of transcendence reveals a kind of givenness or dark knowledge, it points to a third term of ecstatic wonderment, to what Bernini called the “spiritual ecstasy” of that other Jewish convert to Carmel, Teresa of Avila. It is the paradox of excess, of supplement, of joy; it is the surplus of desire without concern for self. Edith Stein’s understanding of experience of God thus radically places into question transcendence and the whole world that gets opened up by language and through which reality becomes manifest.
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Notes
- 1.
Much of this discussion is highlighted in Herbert Spiegelberg’s [1].
- 2.
The theme of Einfühlung (“empathy”) occupied much of Husserl’s writing from Ideas II to the Cartesian Meditations. We will discuss this in greater depth below.
- 3.
Vetlesen [2, 201].
- 4.
Vetlesen, 201.
- 5.
Mitscherlich [3, 158].
- 6.
Vetlesen, 96.
- 7.
Stein’s argument is complicated as she explores the thematic of social and cultural constitution, including, for example, the distinction between “association” and “genuine community,” in her habilitation essay, Philosophy of Psychology and the Human Sciences, published in 1922.
- 8.
Vetlesen, 201.
- 9.
This important theological theme will be developed in more depth in the last section of this paper.
- 10.
Vetlesen, 201.
- 11.
The emphasis here is my own.
- 12.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Book Two, translated by R. Rojcewic and A. Schuwer. Volume 3 of Collected Works: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 93. Hereafter parenthetically cited as Ideas II. See also “Translator’s Introductory Notes,” xi-xiii. I have also seen and studied these notes myself at the Husserl Archive, and can attest to the chaotic condition of this manuscript.
- 13.
It is important to note that the basis for such a study of social constitution is laid out by Husserl in the “Fifth Cartesian Meditation” (which, interestingly, was written in 1929, almost a decade after he had worked on this problem in his notes to Ideas II.) Here, Husserl accomplishes in Ideas II what he said could be done in the Cartesian Meditations.
- 14.
Ideas II, 206.
- 15.
Ibid., 208.
- 16.
Zahavi [4, 19].
- 17.
Ideas II, 210. Emphasis mine.
- 18.
Zahavi, 19.
- 19.
Ibid., 20.
- 20.
Ibid., 21.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
The claim here that empathy constitutes me as an ethical subject is not merely metaphysical but also physical. Similar to Karl Rahner’s description of the human person as a “hearer of the word,” contemporary research in neuroscience indicates that the brain atrophies unless it is linguistically addressed. Language does not merely appear to a disinterested child as a possible method of communicating; language is the condition that makes brain development possible. In effect, being addressed through language stimulates synapses within a dormant central nervous system from which thought and enactive thinking emerges.
- 23.
This thematic is important to highlight in light of Stein’s critique of Heidegger’s project. Edith Stein notes that it is the task of Christian dogmatics and not Christian philosophy to treat of doctrinal exegesis: “Is it then correct when Heidegger asserts that in Christian dogmatics the questions concerning the nature of both being and nothingness remain unasked? This assertion is correct inasmuch as it is not at all the function of Christian dogmatics as such to ask questions but rather to teach Christian doctrine” (FEB 556).
- 24.
Makkreel [5, 200].
References
Herbert Spiegelberg The Phenomenological Movement, volumes I and II (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969)
Arne Johan Vetlesen, Perception, Empathy, and Judgment: An Inquiry into the Preconditions of Moral Experience (College Park, PA: State University Press, 1994)
Alexander Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York: Grove Press, 1975)
Dan Zahavi, “First-Person Thoughts and Embodied Self-Awareness,” in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, eds. N. Depraz and S. Gallagher, volume 1, no. 1 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002)
Rudolf Makkreel, “How is Empathy Related to Understanding?,” in Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II, eds. T. Nenon and L. Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992)
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Andrews, M.F. (2016). A Phenomenology of Ethics and Excess: Experiences of Givenness and Transcendence According to Edith Stein. In: Calcagno, A. (eds) Edith Stein: Women, Social-Political Philosophy, Theology, Metaphysics and Public History. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21124-4_11
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