14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting primer on a fascinating life, March 23, 2004
This review is from: Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account (Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol 1) (Paperback)
The genesis of Edith Stein's intellectual and emotional development come to life in this insightful and eloquent tome. At the request of her superiors, and in part to help stem the tide of hateful propaganda launched agianst the Jewish people at the beginning of the Third Reich, Stein decribes with alacrity the underpinnings of her development as a woman, philosopher, and academic. She writes with the insight, self-knowledge, and humility that will appeal to readers who appreciate the meditative value of introspective thinking. My greatest disappointment in reading this book was to have it end many years before her death in Auschwitz. At the time of her deportation, she had only completed the course of events in her life until about 1917. Due to this, we never fully understand, in her own words, why she converted to Christianity when she did. Although we get glimpses in the form of anecdotal memories and side comments to earlier recollections, we are deprived of the writer's conscious musings that specifically focus on her religious conversion. Upon completing this volume, I was left with many questions about Edith Stein's later consciousness and her development as a Catholic philosopher and Carmelite nun.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"... an objective outer world could only be experienced intersubjectively", March 4, 2011
This review is from: Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account (Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol 1) (Paperback)
PRELIMINARY NOTE BY REVIEWER: after a 50 year absence from studying and doing academic philosophy (an intense seven year period in my then young life) I have recently re-entered the field, starting with "phenomenology." Naturally, I began with phenomenology's founder Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938). Almost immediately, however, I discovered and was immediately attracted to Husserl's student Edith Stein (1891 - 1942) and the glass ceilings she bumped up against, first as a woman and secondly as a Jew, trying in vain to make a career in philosophy in pre-Hitler German universities. In 1998 Pope John Paul II declared Catholic convert and professed Carmelite nun Edith Stein a model of holiness and canonized her as a Roman Catholic saint, Teresa Benedict of the Cross. But the first 25 years of Stein's life are the subject of her Autobiography. She was a decent, at times prissy, but life-loving young woman who was a good dancer, intended to marry, but was intensely this-worldly and remarkably uninterested in any revealed religion. END NOTE.
There are two biographies of Edith Stein that you may want to read before tackling her own autobiography. That by Waltraud Herbstrith is a good (but not great) survey of Stein's entire life: Jewish, atheist and Catholic. The outstanding intellectual biography by Notre Dame philosophy professor Alasdair MacIntyre is subtitled "A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922" and focuses on the background of German philosophy (mainly neo-Kantian) after the 1860s and Stein's earliest years as one of Europe's most promising young philosophers.
With the Herbstrith and MacIntyre biographies under your belt, you are well prepared for Edith Stein - LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916. In the year 1916 Edith Stein was awarded a PhD degree in philosophy summa cum laude by the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. Her thesis, directed by the great Husserl himself, was on the subject of the "empathy" that one human feels for another and what makes it both necessary and possible. The insights that Stein developed in writing her dissertation were foundational for her life's work and ongoing project: later writings on the human person, natural and private organizations and associations and finally the State itself (all reviewed in the MacIntyre biography).
Stein's autobiography, dashed off almost entirely in 1933 just after the Nazis took power in Germany, looks back from age 42 to the first 25 years of her life. She grew up in the frontier city of Breslau (Prussian Silesia) the seventh and youngest surviving child in a successful Jewish mercantile (lumber trade) family of Steins and also embedded in her mother's family, the Courants. Edith's energetic, resourceful, much adored mother Auguste Courant Stein paid off current debts, kept the lumber firm going and led it to new heights of prosperity after her husband Siegfried unexpectedly died young, Edith being then only two years old. My impression from Edith's autobiography is that within her extended family, all of the males were secularized, non-believing Jews, as were all of the younger women. The clearest exception as a religious family member was Frau Auguste Stein, always a very pious, observant Jew, but persuaded by relatives over the years to leave off some Orthodox practices and traditions. All family members were intensely proud to be Prussian Germans.
In her early teens, during an extended visit to her oldest sister and her dermatologist husband in Hamburg, Edith Stein ceased praying and became a convinced but non-demonstrative atheist. She continued quietly attending synagogue with her mother, even after she was baptized a Roman Catholic on New Year's Day 1922.
"Empathy" (German "Einfuehlung") is the starting point of Stein's claim to orginality as a philosopher. From the earlier philosophical writings of Edmund Husserl Edith took over and developed what philosophers call "realism": the belief that our common sense appreciation of the world of our senses is essentially correct. That is, there is a "real" world of time, space, bodies and ensouled bodies (humans) "out there," with whose essences we are in real contact. Our mind does not create that world. It receives it, interacts with it. That is what is meant by philosophical "realism." Later, Husserl seemed to retreat from "realism" back towards either the then dominant neo-Kantianism or Hegelian Idealism -- to the discomfort of Stein and other younger phenomenologists. In later years, after her conversion to Christianity, Stein would attempt a synthesis between the ideas of Husserl, Saint Thomas Aquinas and other medieval Aristotelian "realists."
But Edith Stein and many other young phenomenologists themselves remained staunch realists. Stein notably believed not only in a knowable external world but that the very act of knowing that "outside our minds" world of bodies in time and space is cooperative, inter-subjective. This puts her brand of philosophical phenomenologiy very much in the camp of modern science as a co-operative venture. We cannot even know ourselves without the helpful insights given us by other sympathetic, instructing humans. Stein herself in autobiography Ch. 7 ("1913-1914") tells how Husserl's insights led her toward her very original 1916 doctoral dissertation, EMPATHY:
"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. Accordingly, an experience of other individuals is a prerequisite."
But Husserl additionally required Stein to base her dissertation on preliminary massive readings into everything already written on all forms of "empathy," especially the very different views of philosopher Theodor Lipps.
But before she describes her earliest years in philosophy, Edith Stein in her autobiography, tells at considerable length and in detail the prehistory elsewhere of her Breslau family, what it meant to grow up among achieving Steins and Courants of both sexes, of her primary and secondary school years and above all of her passion "to know the truth." We also learn of her several months as a World War I volunteer nurse's aide in a hospital ("Lazaretto") for Austrian solidiers with infectious diseases. Here she picked up a smattering of eight languages used by the polyglot Austro-Hungarian army, spoke Latin with Hungarian and Polish doctors (she found their grammar atrocious), smoked, drank much coffee and learned much hands-on "empathy."
Before she decided to take herself quietly in hand at age seven, Edith had indulged in temper tantrums and mean pranks. But one day, for reasons never entirely clear to her, she put that negative phase decisively behind her. One consistent mark of Edith Stein's life is its series of obvious turning points with no looking back at what might have been: conscious atheism as a religious choice, psychology as a university major, only two years later to be decisively rejected in favor of philosophy and working with Professor Husserl, and on and on.
Edith Stein's was a great life. Some see her as the patron saint of atheists. And her genial, open-minded, atheistic, this-worldly life phase is very much the focus of her autobiography. The book's editorial and translational qualities are very high. There are helpful photographs of Edith Stein, her family and friends. The end notes are abundant and detailed. A fold-out map of the world she lived is also invaluable. This is as good and as scholarly and as easy to read a book on Edith Stein as you are ever likely to find.
-OOO-
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