By Katharina T. Kraus
Abstract:The life of the mind plays a central role in Edith Stein’s work – from her early dissertation On the Problem of Empathy (1917) to her last and major work Finite and Eternal Being (1950). A central goal of her philosophical work is to examine the specific kind of being (Sein) that we have as human persons and to elaborate the ontological place of human persons in relation to both the natural world and the world of intellects (German: Geist). For Stein, one’s own being as a person is both partly actual, namely insofar as it exists in the present, and partly potential, namely in terms of what is no longer (i.e., lies in the past) or has not yet been actualized (i.e., a potential for future being). The human person is a kind of being that is necessarily subject to a temporal development of becoming and passing away, and that is precisely what Stein attempts to capture with the notion of life.
In this chapter, I explore what I call her multi-level model of the human person, which involves three types of life: bodily-organic life (leibliches Leben), psychic life (psychisches Leben), and intellectual life (geistiges Leben). Each type of life adheres to its own distinct causality, and yet they are interwoven in complex ways in a person’s life. Drawing mainly on her work Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities (1922), written around the time when she edited Husserl’s Ideas II, I discuss specifically the interrelation between psychic life, which for Stein follows a deterministic, law-like causality, and intellectual life, which is characterized by a holistic or teleological causality. I conclude by outlining a proposal (and a critique) regarding the temporal structure and the relation of determinism and indeterminism in Stein’s model.
To be published in:
Berlin: Springer, Forthcoming