施泰因 St. Edith Stein (1891—1942)

[Introduction by Thomas Szanto , Dermot Moran - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Stein maintains that human beings are “beings in the world”. Persons are integrated into both the material and the immaterial, spiritual worlds: “The being of human beings is a composite of body, soul, and spirit”. Humans are necessarily embodied; the soul is “bound to matter”. Human spirits exhibit “being-tied-to-the-body”. Following Aristotle, she maintains that the body receives its vitality through the soul. For Stein, the soul is the principle of formation, animateness, nutrition, and reproduction. The soul, furthermore, grows primarily from its affective nature; the soul is conditioned by the body, but the spirit can also condition and curb the emotions. In humans, the spirit is dependent on the senses for its natural activity. “The soul cannot live without receiving”. Human persons as spirits are intentionally influenced and formed “from above”(i.e., from purely spiritual motivations) and also “from below”, i.e., from bodily drives. Spirit arises from a “dark ground”, an “obscure depth”.

For Stein, the soul is not static and complete but evolving and developing , fulfilling its innate capacities. It is a living “root” whose innate capacities have to be activated. The human being actualizes itself in the acts that come from its subjectivity. Ordinary daily existence conditions the soul and the spirit. Humans can repress actions and shape them. Stein maintains that the soul has its own inner “openness”: openness to other subjects but also, following Scheler in particular, openness to value. The soul, however, must be open to values to receive them. The soul is more important than the pure ego: The pure ego is, as it were, only the portal through which the life of a human being passes on its way from the depth of the soul to the lucidity of consciousness.

Persons are psychic wholes or totalities that must be approached as such. “Every I is unique” with its own “peculiarity”, that is incommunicable, even though it also has a “quid” that it shares with other egos. Every human being has “unrepeatable singularity”. In the human ego, there is a contrast between “ego-life” and “being”. The ego is “transparent” to itself. For Stein, every person is an ego, but not every ego is a person. A person must be aware of itself and there may be egos (e.g., animal egos) that do not have this self-awareness and transparency. In this regard, to be a person requires a degree of developing self-awareness.

Stein maintained throughout her work that each human being has an individual personal “core” that remains unchanged and that contains potentiality that can be actualized. For the personal core, Stein drew on Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Max Scheler, and Hedwig Conrad-Martius. The person “unfolds” or “ripens” but the personal core is never completely “disclosed or disclosable”. This core is directly knowable only by God. We only actualize some of it in our finite lives, but, in contrast to Heidegger, we actually are this deeper core. Our being has a wholeness which our finite life does not exhaust.

The person’s character properties are its capacities for apprehending values, and in them the core unfolds itself outwards. Kindliness as a character trait doesn’t just show itself in kind actions; a person can be kindly even if he doesn’t get to do kind actions. Not everything in the person comes from the core. Some experiences are “proper to the I” whereas others are “foreign to the I” . Here Stein draws heavily from Husserl. There are emotional and other sentient traits that are “indifferent” to the core. External impressions do not penetrate deeply into my soul and have little personal involvement. The same sound can slip by me, but if I am concentrating, it can disturb me and make me angry. It penetrates my person and affects me inwardly. There are “depths of the I” . People live at different depth dimensions. The more a person lives at depth, the more his or her core will unfold. Stein distinguishes not just between “surface” and “depth” of the self but also between center and periphery. I may be concentrating and open a window to get air but don’t fully notice myself doing it. Penetrating things with understanding is a work of depth and is an “achievement of the will”.

Stein appropriated the notion of “life” (Leben) from Husserl, Scheler, Dilthey, and Bergson. Development of the person continues through life but the person does not cease after death. The person enters eternity “as what s/he has become”. In our innermost feeling of being alive we remain the same—from child to adult to old age.]

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FINITE AND ETERNAL BEING
- An Attempt at an Ascent To the Meaning of Being

Selected passages:
II. ACT AND POTENCY AS MODES OF BEING
§6. THE "PURE EGO" ["REINE ICH"] AND ITS MODES OF BEING p.48-55
§7. THE BEING OF THE EGO AND ETERNAL BEING p.55-60


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§6. THE "PURE EGO" ["REINE ICH"] AND ITS MODES OF BEING p.48-55

To emphasize the contrast to this hidden ego that lies behind immediate conscious experience, Husserl calls that self which is immediately given in conscious experience the pure ego. We shall speak of this latter ego exclusively as long as our discussion is confined to the realm of immediate consciousness, i.e., to what is nearest to and inseparable from us.

Husserl says of the pure ego that It has no content and cannot be described as it is in itself. “It is pure ego, and that is all.” This means, then, that the pure ego is alive in every such statement as “I perceive,” “I think,” “I draw conclusions,” “I experience joy,” “I desire,” etc. and, furthermore, that the pure ego in one way or another tends toward what is perceived, thought, desired, etc. We need not decide here the question whether the purity of the pure ego must be so interpreted that, as far as its content is concerned, it is completely unspecified and therefore differs from other selves only numerically. Right now the important thing is to make it clear that the pure ego is alive in every experience and cannot be eliminated from it. It is inseparable from the experiential content but nonetheless not actually a part of this content. Rather the converse is true: Every experience is part of the pure ego; the pure ego is alive in every experience; its life is that very flux in which ever new structures of experiential units arise.

This last statement, however, means not only that all experiential contents are part of the pure ego. This ego is alive, and its life is its being. It lives perhaps right now in the experience of joy, a little while later in longing, and again a little later in thoughtful reflection, but most of the time in several such experiential units simultaneously. But while joy fades away, longing dies, and reflection ceases, the ego does not fade or pass away: It is alive in every now. This does not mean, however, that it possesses eternal life. We need not ask at this time whether it always has been and always will be. We are merely trying to show that this pure ego does not come into being and die away like the experiential units but that it is a living ego whose life is filled with changing contents. And this latter assertion again does not mean that its life is comparable to a ready-made vessel that is gradually being filled with varying contents: It is rather a life that wells up a new at every moment;in every moment its being is actually present.

The fact that the experiential contents attain to real being, although they touch it only punctually [punktuell] at any given moment, may now appear a little less enigmatic. The real being they touch is in fact not their being, since in and by themselves they are incapable of real being.The experiential contents receive a share in real being only by virtue of the ego into whose life they enter. With respect to what owes its being to the ego and rises to the level of being only by virtue of and within the ego, the latter thus exists in a preeminent sense.The ego is not,to be sure,existentially superior in the sense that it could be said to embody the height of being (as compared with rudimentary degrees of being) but rather in a sense that indicates a relationship existing between a carrier and the thing carried[dasTragende and das Getragene].

But before we look further into this significant distinction between a carrier and the thing carried, we must first clarify the way in which the ego is related to the height of being and the rudimentary stages of being (act and potency). According to what has been established up to this point, it would seem that the ego must always be in act and can never be in potency. It will be remembered that by potentiality we did not mean the mere logical possibility of passing over from not-being to being, but rather a rudimentary phase of being which itself, however, is already a mode of being.

For the ego, too, it is possible to step into existence [Dasein] out of nothingness. But to be without being alive — in the sense in which a past joy is said to have a “lifeless being” -— that seems to be an impossibility. If the self is not alive, it neither is nor is it an ego: It is nothing. It is empty in itself, and all its fullness derives from the experiential contents; and these in turn receive their life from it. But it nevertheless seems possible and even necessary to speak, with respect to the ego, of different degrees of vitality [Lebendigkeit]. In order to understand this clearly, we must scrutinize still further the specific life of the ego.

We have observed that whatever life there is in the experiential contents derives from the ego and is present in all of the ego’s experiences. It is therefore obvious that the experiential units — although they are compact in themselves and separated from each other — are not juxtaposed like the links of a chain. Husserl is thus justified in speaking of a stream of experiences. The ego, always alive, proceeds from one content to the next, from one experience to another, so that its life is one constant flux. From the point of view of the ego, on the other hand, it is also clear why “what is no longer alive” or “is past” does not simply sink into nothingness but continues to subsist in a modified form and why what is “not yet alive” or “will be in the future” is already in a certain manner before it is actually alive. The ego does not release immediately what it has experienced, but for a while retains its grip on it and, similarly, it stretches forward and reaches out for what is to arrive. And even what the ego does not presently have in its grip remains in some way within its reach.

The question whether something can really be so completely forgotten that it can never “rise again” and “be called back to memory” need not be discussed here. It is certain, however, that things which lie far back and of which I have not been thinking at all for a long time can be “made present” by way of recollection (as, for example, the joy which we children felt when our mother returned from a trip). This making present can happen in several ways: I may simply know as a matter of fact that and how deeply I felt this joy at that particular time. In this case I presently live in this knowledge, and the object of my knowledge is the fact that at that particular time in the past I experienced joy. The joy of which I merely know is neither really alive nor “actually present”: The ego does not live in it.

There is, secondly, the possibility that I allow myself to be “carried back” in my memory to that particular time so that I live, as it were, “once again” in the expectation of that Wiedersehen with my mother and thus re-experience step by step this joyful event. How, then, does the description “really alive” or “actually present” fit this situation? What was at that time an original occurrence I now repeat in retrospect. The situation is similar to the one in which I may co-experience by way of empathy what a companion of mine presently experiences. As long as the joy of this other person or my own past joy is only re-experienced in recollection, my present life is nothing but this retrospective experience. But this kind of joy is not fully alive: It is merely an experience of a “past” joy or, in our second example, the experience of the other person’s joy in the mode of a making present. In both instances the experience of joy lags behind the being-fully-alive of my present joy.
Now what does all this mean with respect to the ego? At what time am I really alive? When my memory carries me back to the past? In the present now? Or in the moment that has just passed? Is my present ego really alive in my past joy? Or is it another — a past ego — that lives in the past joy and that is therefore not actual?

As far as time is concerned, it seems that my ego lives now and at that past time simultaneously. It lives “now” — for my memory carries me back from the present moment into the past moment, and yet I do not relinquish my hold on the present moment. And my ego lives “at that time” — for my memory carries me into the past moment, and hence I live in it. What does all this mean, however, if we remember what has been stated above, namely, that nothing can really be or be real in the past? I really am only now, and I cannot actually return to the place at which I really was in the past. Intellectually, however, I have in my grip this place in the past as well as everything which was real “then and there,” including its approximate distance from my present now, and I can freely recall what was real at that time to the extent, at any rate, that it is still within me in potency.

In sober truth, then, it must be stated that it is not possible to live now and at that past time simultaneously: What has passed remains past, and I can merely recall what was real at that time and, in doing so, I must remain conscious of the fact that I merely repeat or recollect the past intellectually. But the past — i.e., the former now — does not thereby become the present now. The two remain separated in my consciousness by my experience of “carrying myself back,” i.e., by the experienced contrast between my total situation now and then and by the span of time which stretches from the then to the now, a span of time “filled” with my past life.

I do not live in my past joy as I live in my present joy, inasmuch as I merely relive the past. It may happen then that I (my present ego) occupy the place of my past ego and relive its life. But though I am conscious of the fact that “at that time” my joyful experience differed from my present reliving of that experience, there are not two egos, but only one. It may also happen, however, that in the making present my past self appears to me as a stranger and that I co-experience its joy as if it were that of a strange ego. In this case I (the presently living ego) stands at the side of that past ego which is not now alive. All I know is that this past ego — or rather I myself — was alive at that time. Does this mean then that in this case we are dealing with a potential ego and that we must thus speak of two egos, one actual and one potential? Such an assumption would not correspond to the situation. The “past ego” is nothing but an image of myself, an image of the manner in which I was once alive, and no mere “image” of the self can properly be called an ego.

There is finally the possibility that the past joy is reborn in me and thus becomes a real joy; and the same may happen with respect to my sympathetic co-experience of another person’s joy: It may result in a genuine personal experience of joy, The past is said to be within me potentially in the strict sense precisely because the making present implies the possibility of a passing over into the actually present. The being of the past is thus truly a preliminary phase of that reborn actually present being into which it may pass over again and again.

The ego is then, we conclude, always actual, always actually living present. On the other hand, there appertains to it an entire stream of experiences, comprising everything that lies “behind it” and “ahead of it,” that is, everything in which it was once alive in the past and everything in which it will be alive again in the future. It is this very totality which we designate as the “life of the ego.” But this totality is not actual as a whole. Only that part of it which is alive “now” is a present reality. In other words, the vitality of the ego does not embrace everything which appertains to it: The ego is always alive as long as it is,but its vitality is not that of the all-embracing being of the pure act but rather the temporal vitality advancing from one moment to the next.

And let us not forget this qualifying condition:as long as the ego is. We have seen that the ego can, as it were, “go backward,” surveying the stream of its past life and calling back into life one or another part of it. What is thus recalled or resumed is then always the ego’s own former life. But in doing this the ego’s freedom is not unlimited: It always encounters some lacunae which it cannot fill. In these empty temporal spans the ego finds nothing that could be made present, nor does it discover in them its own self. Occasionally this failure may be due to blanks in the ego’s memory. In this case other persons may possibly aid in filling these gaps and in calling back to the ego’s memory some of these forgotten things.

But there are also other reasons for such blanks. Let us take, for example, a dreamless sleep or a fainting spell: Was the ego alive in these temporal intervals or did its being suffer a real break? And, furthermore, the stream of experience is for the experiencing ego neither definitely limited nor altogether unlimited. Viewing its past and going back farther and farther, the ego is in the end unable to distinguish anything definite: Everything begins to “blur.” Is there an outer limit to this kind of “haziness”? The ego itself, it seems, does not arrive at any beginning. True enough, others may testify to the beginning of it bodily existence,but what about the ego as a whole? Has its being also had a beginning? The ego’s immediate experience answers neither the question relating to its actual beginning nor the question relating to its possible end. And thus there gapes a vacuity at several points.

Has the ego risen from nothingness? Does it move toward nothingness? Is it suspended above the abyss of nothingness at every moment? The being of the ego, of which we stated only a little while ago that it is being in a preeminent degree (cf. p. 49 above) appears suddenly as very frail indeed. And yet, it is being in a preeminent degree, even in a dual sense: It is always alive in comparison with what is no longer or not yet alive, and as a carrier in relation to what is carried (the latter owing to the ego the ontological height of its life).

Although this double preeminence of the being of the ego is unshakable, it reveals at the same time the peculiar weakness and fragility of this preeminent being.The ego,as we have pointed out,is always alive, but it is nevertheless unable to keep enduringly alive those experiential contents which it needs to sustain its own life. Without these contents, the ego is an empty nothing. The ego imparts life to those contents, but only momentarily at any given time, whereupon they fade away again.They remain being of a sort,not as possessing any sovereign ruling power, but merely in that weakened mode which pertains to things that are no longer truly alive.

Furthermore, whence does the ego acquire those contents without which it is nothing? When, for example, a noise “breaks in upon me” from without, this noise obviously does not originate in the ego but only “falls upon” the ego, and the ego “lends an ear” to it. If, on the other hand, joy arises “within me,” then this experience evidently originates within, though as a rule it responds to some external stimulus. What, however, is the meaning of this with-in? Does the joy originate in the pure ego? If by pure ego we understand with Husserl only that self which is alive in every “I think,” “I know,” “I desire,” etc. and which is conscious of itself as a thinking, knowing, desiring ego, then we must conclude that this joy originates in a transcendent [jenseitige] depth which discloses itself in the conscious experience of joy, without, however, becoming transparent. The conscious life of the ego depends thus by virtue of its contents on a twofold beyond [transcendence in Husserl’s sense of the term], an external and an internal world both of which manifest themselves in the conscious life of the ego, i.e., in that ontological realm which is inseparable from the ego [immanence in Husserl’s sense of the term].

But what about that life itself which, as has been stated, the ego imparts to the experiential contents? Is the ego then a source of life? Since life is the being of the ego, this would mean that the ego imparts to itself or posits its own being. This, however, does not accord with the previously established peculiar characteristics of the ego’s being: The mystery of its whence and whither,the lacunae of its past which cannot be filled, its powerlessness to call into being and sustain in being the experiential contents. Above all, it does not accord with the manner in which the ego itself is and experiences its own being.

The ego knows itself as a living, actually present existent and simultaneously as one that emerges from a past and lives into a future; itself and its being are inescapably there: It is a being thrown into existence[insDaseingeworfen]. This,however,marks this being as the extreme opposite of an autonomous and intrinsically necessary being a se (by itself).

The being of the ego is alive only from moment to moment. It cannot be quiescent because it is restlessly in flight. It thus never attains true self-possession. And we are therefore forced to conclude that the being of the ego, as a constantly changing living present, is not autonomous but received being. it has been placed into existence and is sustained in existence from moment to moment. This,however, implies the possibility that this being may have a beginning and an end and that it may suffer a break.
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§7. THE BEING OF THE EGO AND ETERNAL BEING p.55-60

It is time now to ask: Whence comes this received being? According to what has been said concerning the life of the ego, there seem to be several possibilities of answering this question. Either the ego receives its life as well as the contents of its experiences from those “transcendent worlds” — external or internal or both — which manifest themselves in these experiences, or the ego owes its being directly to that pure being which is by itself and in itself [a se and per se], eternally immutable, autonomous, and necessary. This second possibility would not absolutely exclude the first one. If it were admitted that the ego is placed into and sustained in existence by a direct act of pure being, then there might well be assumed an additional dependence of its life on either the external or the internal world, or on both, A received being, on the other hand, that is independent of eternal being is inconceivable because, aside from eternal being, nothing exists that is truly in full possession of being.
Everything finite is placed into and sustained in existence and therefore by itself incapable of positing and sustaining being or existence. We cannot, however, predicate anything concerning the manner in which the ego is related to those transcendent (external and internal) worlds unless and until we cease to confine our investigation to that realm of being [Seinsbereich] which is directly and inseparably linked with our own existence. We may legitimately ask nevertheless whether it is possible to make some valid predications concerning our relationship to pure being within the limitations of this finite realm of being.

My own being, as I know it and as I know myself in it, is null and void [nichtig]; I am not by myself (not a being a se and per se), and by myself I am nothing; at every moment I find myself face to face with nothingness, and from moment to moment I must be endowed and re-endowed with being. And yet this empty existence that I am is being, and at every moment I am in touch with the fullness of being.

As was stated above (p. 37f.), the becoming and passing away which we discover in ourselves reveals to us the idea of true and eternally immutable being. Those experiential units which are in the modes of becoming and passing away stand in need of the ego in order to attain to being. But the being they receive through the medium of the ego is not eternally immutable but is merely this very becoming and passing away, with an added crest of being at the moment of transition from the phase of becoming to the phase of passing away. The ego itself seems to be closer to pure being because it attains not only to the crest of being for one single moment, but is sustained in it at every moment (though not, to be sure, as immutable being, but as being that constantly changes in its existential content).

The ego is capable of arriving at the idea of eternal being not only by way of envisaging the becoming and fading away of its experiences, but also on the basis of the experienced specific nature of its own being, which is confined to an existence from moment to moment. The ego shrinks back from nothingness and desires not only an endless continuation of its own being but a full possession of being as such:It desires a being capable of embracing the totality of the ego’s contents in one changeless present instead of its having to witness the continually repeated disappearance of all these contents almost at the very moment they have ascended onto the stage of life. The ego thus arrives at the idea of plenitude[IdeederFülle] by crossing out from its own being what it has come to know as privation.


The ego, moreover, experiences in its own self various degrees of approximation to the fullness of being. Its present (what fills it now) does not always exhibit the same circumference. This may be explained by the fact that the ego may be comprised of more or less content at different moments. But there is also the further fact that the ego itself has at different moments a larger or smaller amplitude. And a similar observation may be made regarding the manner in which the ego is related to what it — still or already — firmly holds in its grip of the contents of past and future.

To these differences in amplitude must be added those in the degrees of vitality in the ego’s present existence, i.e., its greater or lesser intensity of being. Proceeding intellectually beyond all the stages within its own reach to the outer limit of what can be conceived by the human mind, the ego is capable of arriving at the idea of all-embracing being in its highest degree of intensity. This procedure confirms our previous contention (pp. 49–50 above) that the continuous actuality of the ego admits of varying degrees. In comparison with the perfect being of the pure act, the actual being of the ego appears as an infinitely far removed and feeble image, but even in this remoteness from the primordial prototype there are found different gradations of being. And as against those rudimentary modes of being which we designated as potentiality, the actual being of the ego appears so clearly marked off that it would be highly inappropriate to include it in the category of potentiality, notwithstanding its gradations and the possibility of its passing over from lower to higher degrees. At most one might be entitled to speak of a combination of actuality and potentiality. This “combination,” however, is different from the one we referred to in our discussion of experiential units (pp. 43–44f. above).

If we now designate real being as act, then we have on one side the pure act (i.e., perfect, eternally immutable being, super-eminently alive in its plenitude), and on the other side the finite acts (that is, infinitely feeble images in varying degrees of imperfection). To these finite acts, in turn correspond different potencies as rudimentary stages of these acts. The finite act as such is, however, in our present frame of reference first and foremost the being of the ego, and it is only by virtue of the ego that the experiential units share in the finite act.

For the ego that has once grasped the idea of the pure act or of eternal being, this idea becomes the measure of its own being. But how does the ego learn to see in eternal being also the source or the genuine cause of its own being? The nullity and transiency of its own being becomes clearly manifest to the ego once its thinking seizes upon its own being and seeks to lay bare its deepest roots. But the ego also touches upon these depths of its own being prior to all reflective and retrospective existential analysis in the experience of anxiety [Angst]. Existential anxiety accompanies the unredeemed human being throughout life and in many disguises — as fear of this or that particular thing or being. In the last analysis, however, this anxiety or dread is the fear of being no more, and it is thus the experience of anxiety which “brings people face to face with nothingness.”

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【Source: EDITHSTEIN (Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross Discalced Carmelite): FINITE AND ETERNAL BEING - An Attempt at an Ascent To the Meaning of Being, Translated by Kurt F. Reinhardt ICS Publications Institute of Carmelite Studies Washington, D.C. 2002】