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5.0 out of 5 stars
: Edth Stein nursed dying soldiers and probed the philosophical depths of "empathy", February 18, 2011
This review is from: Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913D1922 (Paperback)
In 2006 appeared Notre Dame University philosophy professor Alasdair MacInyre's EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE, 1913 - 1922. It covers ten years (ages 21 - 31) in the life of Edith Stein (1891 - 1942). She was born Jewish, grew up in Silesian Breslau as a Prussian citizen, stopped practicing her faith as an early teenager, plunged into the secular life of the mind, became a philosopher of no little renown, a translator, teacher and advocate of women's rights. In 1922 she was baptized a Roman Catholic. In 1933, aged 42, she became a Carmelite nun. In 1950, she and her older sister Rosa, were arrested from a Dutch convent by the Gestapo, sent by cattle car to Auschwitz and gassed to death in August 1942. In 1998 Pope John Paul II canonized Edith Stein, whose name in religion was Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce, a Catholic martyr and proclaimed her one of six patron saints of Europe. Since then students and readers have flocked to the English translations of all her major works -- for any number of different reasons. Helpfully, biographer MacIntyre draws on the English versions, including Stein's 500 page unfinished autobiography LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916.
Professor MacIntyre's book is longer than it need be for general readers. Many readers would settle for Cliffs Notes summaries of Edith Stein's earliest philosophical writings over an eight year period, a sort of PHENOMENOLOGY FOR DUMMIES. But MacIntrye devotes perhaps 3/4 of his 186 page narrative to elaborate, detailed setting the stage for Stein's first handful of philosophical essays. He sketches the history of her family, reviews her schooling and first two years of university in Breslau, describes her friends among philosophy professors and fellow-students at Goettingen, Freiburg-im-Breisgau and elsewhere and her brief stint as a nurse in World War I in the typhoid ward of a 4,000 bed Austrian Army hospital.
MacIntrye stresses that Stein built her adult life around the insights she won in philosophizing, and those insights came to her from many sources: disciplined reading, personal interchanges, work for her PhD under Edmund Husserl, founder of the Phenomenological method within German philosophy and her increasing attention to her once abandoned belief in God. Unlike her fellow phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (Germany's most influential 20th Century philosopher by virtue of his 1917 BEING AND TIME and later an ardent Nazi), Stein's life was a seamless, morally consistent moral garment. Her life embodied her values at every stage in every year.
Yet only six of 17 chapters of EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922 are devoted by MacIntyre to the text of Edith Stein's first essays in philosophy. Those are, I think, an excellent guide to what young Stein does and does not achieve. Yet Stein's philosophical work is no longer well known even to academic philosophers, much less to general or devotional readers. The professor obviously felt that he had to devote pages 19 to 62 (Chs. 3 - 6) to the history and milieu in which Edith Stein philosophized. It is a good, clear overview of developments beginning with David Hume and Immanuel Kant and moving past Hegel and Idealism into the neo-Kantian revival of the 1850s and 1860s which still dominated German universities in the early 20th Century. There is considerable attention -- and rightly so -- to the phenomenological method of Husserl and to the dozens of young thinkers from various lands who flocked to wherever Husserl was teaching.
Edith Stein concentrated on "theory of knowledge." What do we know of the real world through our five senses? Are our bodies, our embodied souls, in direct intuitive contact with real bodies, real persons and if so how? Or do my senses give isolated me mere disconnected, chaotic impressions: colors, shapes and such and our imagination (Hume) or our mind (Kant) and I impose necessary order on an unknowable or barely knowable world of bodies in motion?
Husserl's earliest students had been attracted to him through his LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS (1900, 1901). There he seemed to be reclaiming for German thought mediaval neo-Aristotelian "realism," belief that humans are in direct contact with the real world through their senses. Human minds receive the real world; they do not create, mould or structure extra-mental reality. The real world is made up of independently operating bodies which impact upon us. In later works, especially IDEAS (1913) Husserl seemed to an alarmed Edith Stein and others to be backtracking toward the dominant ideas of Immanuel Kant and followers.
The centerpiece of MacIntyre's intellectual biography of young Stein is Chapter 9, "Stein on Our Knowledge of Other Minds": inter-personal empathy, the subject of her 1906 doctoral dissertation for Husserl. MacIntyre sees ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY as the work of a brilliant but still young philosopher, the work of a promising "apprentice." It raises more questions than it answers but they are good questions and Stein will probe them more deeply in the years to come. Stein's subject is "empathy" (German Einfuehlung). She believes that if we pay minute attention to our consciousness, we discover that our primal experience (versus Hume and Kant and even Husserl) is not of shapes or even mere colored bodies. Rather we directly intuit other human beings very much like ourselves as knowers and wanters. Stein's way of phenomenologizing is like the scientist's way of doing science: cooperative. There are things about myself that I can understand only when others tell me what I see in me. From these basic insights, Stein goes on to sketch a philosophy of friendship, associations, professions, society and politics.
By 1922, however, she had been studying religion for years. After reading in one night from a friend's library the AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Carmelite Saint Teresa of Avila, Stein said to herself, "Here is the truth" and demanded immediate baptism from the local Catholic priest. She soon proved that she was ready for the sacrament. She also concluded that powerful as it was, the phenomenological method could not alone lead to God.
This is a fine book. But the more philosophy you have first read into, the more you will get out of EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 -1922.
-OOO-
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