Thine Own Self: Individuality in Edith Stein's Later Writings

Preface

ix Preface What it means to be a human being is a critical question, but it is also important—in an even more personal way—to say what it means to be an individual, to be a particular human being. There is increasing concern, in both our philosophical community and our more general society, for difference, and there is a worthwhile emphasis on respecting difference and on recognizing and being ethically responsible to alterity. Yet this concern for alterity can run the risk of making others so inaccessible and unintelligible to us that we lose all sense of our commonality and membership in a common community. Questions of both commonality and difference are philosophically important, and all substantive accounts of the person ought to be able to account for both. Plato and Aristotle both account for our commonality in terms of form and our differences in terms of matter.1 Although each presents an elegant account, many thinkers have worried that such an approach inadequately appreciates our differences, our individuality , and our personalities. John Duns Scotus’s thought has been attractive to many for precisely this reason: Scotus posits not only a common human form, but also a haecceitas (individuating form) for each individual, and thus he places individuality at the level not of matter (which is precisely the unintelligible in which the intelligible comes to be), but of form. 1. Their respective understandings of form and matter differ, but both nonetheless place the responsibility for commonality on our form. In Plato’s case, at least in the most common interpretations, this is a Form separate from this world, which, in some sense, is “stamped” upon matter and thus made into many items of the same general type. According to Aristotle, the form is not separate from material items, but comes to be in and through matter. Each member of one species has the same (structurally, not numerically) form, but will differ in terms of the matter in which that form comes to be. x Preface Scotus was, however, a medieval thinker, and his positing of such a formal principle of individuality was in the context of medieval debates regarding individuation. He certainly was not writing in the light of more recent research into personality theory, philosophical personalism, or the contemporary sense of the value and uniqueness of each individual person. Although perhaps his notion of haecceitas might be compatible with such contemporary concerns, Scotus did not explicitly address these issues. Edith Stein writes about individuality with more modern sensibilities . Like Scotus, Stein appreciates the medieval scholastic tradition , and her later works reveal a deep interest in Platonic, Aristotelian , and Thomistic thought. Further, like Scotus, Stein is thoroughly committed to a substantial understanding of our human commonality , positing a common human form. Unlike Scotus, however, Stein addresses concerns regarding individuality from a number of quite different angles and discusses explicitly not only the question of individuation , but also questions of individual uniqueness, personality , and who each of us as an individual ought to be. • Stein was born at the end of the nineteenth century and was in the last years of her schooling when World War I broke out. Her initial studies were in psychology, which was then forming itself into the discipline as we now know it, but she turned to philosophy , tempted by the call to a new method in Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Stein studied at Göttingen with a number of the early phenomenologists, including Adolf Reinach (who was then Husserl’s privatdocent), Theodor Conrad, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Max Scheler (who was then lecturing in cafes around Göttingen), Hans Lipps, Roman Ingarden, and Fritz Kaufmann. Stein followed Husserl to Freiburg, finishing her dissertation in 1916 and working for eighteen months as Husserl’s private assistant. Stein attempted to habilitate, writing a second dissertation necessary for academic posts in Germany, but—in part because she was a woman—was unsuccessful . She turned instead to high school teaching, and eventually accepted a position at an educational institute in Münster. She xi Preface lost the position in 1933 because of her Jewish heritage and entered the Carmelite order in October of that year. None of Stein’s writings were done from a position as a university professor, but she was nonetheless actively involved with an academic community, keeping in regular contact with her fellow phenomenologists, writing essays for Husserl’s Jahrbuch, continuing her efforts...