Edith Stein: Is the State Responsible for the Immortal Soul of the Person?

WHILE EDITH STEIN WAS WORKING with Edmund Husserl as his assistant at Freiburg, she managed to produce a series of texts that have only recently come to light for their phenomenological and philosophical relevance. Both On the State (Eine Untersuchung über den Staat) and Psychology and the Human Sciences (Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften) were published by Husserl in his famous Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. ¹ Stein also wrote an unpublished text that now has been called Introduction to Philosophy (Einführung in die Philosophie). ² This text was written between 1917 and the early '30s. The majority of the text stems from the time Stein was working on Husserl's Ideen, and, in fact, can be read as a commentary and reformulation and seen as the organizing principle of the Ideen. The work follows very closely the structure of the Ideen that has come to us presently. ³

All three aforementioned texts aim at carrying Husserl's early phenomenological project to its conceptual end. Phenomenology is seen as providing the key to understanding certain empirical sciences like psychology and the human sciences like history (EP, 225ff.; B, 269ff.). But it was also designed to provide eidetic descriptions of the constitution of social and subjective objectivities. One of the key social objectivities that Göttingen or mundane phenomenology had in its purview was the essence of the state and its constitutive components: mass, society and community.

If Aristotle's insight that politics implies metaphysics is considered valid, then Stein has something relevant to say, for Stein gives an ontic description of the state (US, 1-96). The phenomenology she gives of the state lays out the various Abschattungen or profiles constituent of the being of the state. One of the key operative principles of the being of the state is that it is viewed in personal terms, yet it is not conceived as a super-person or a super-individual. The state is defined by the relationships that exist within the entity of the state, and one of the foundational relationships within the state is that of the community of persons. A person is described as a physico-psycho-spiritual unity characterized by his or her own individualized personal core (Persönlichkeitskern). This very same personal core is described as being localized in the human soul, the immortal soul. If the soul of the person is immortal, and if the state is seen as characterized by its personal essence as incarnated in the community of the state, then we must ask: Is the state responsible for the immortal soul of the person? Why or why not? And, if the state is responsible, how is it responsible? This paper seeks to explore such questions using Stein's phenomenology in the hope of bringing to the fore questions that should be asked today, especially if we still view the state in ontological (metaphysical) terms. I shall proceed by first giving a brief description of the nature of the state and then I will proceed to give a description of the nature of personal community. Given such descriptions, I will begin to explore what responsibility means, in a Steinian sense, and what the state's responsibility consists in vis-à-vis the immortal soul specialiter and the person generaliter.

The State

The ontic structure of the state is constituted by three basic elements. Stein borrows the foundational distinctions of Georg Simmel: mass, society, and community. First, the mass is the most basic associative relationship of individuals that one can find in the state. In the mass, people dwell next to one another, but have no form of concrete or interpersonal relationships. "Individuals influence one another without recognizing the force of the influence exerted or received" (US, 1). There is contact, but...