QD Vol. 4, No. 1-Stein

Quaestiones
Disputatae
Selected Papers on
The Legacy of Edith Stein’s
Finite and Eternal Being
Sarah Borden Sharkey, Special Guest Editor
Selected Proceedings of the Franciscan University of

Steubenville Graduate Program in Philosophy
Annual Conference on Christian Philosophy
Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being,
Franciscan University of Steubenville,
Steubenville, Ohio
April 23rd and 24th, 2010
2
Quaestiones Disputatae
Vol 4, No. 1 Fall 2013
Introduction
Introduction to The Legacy of Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being

Sarah Borden Sharkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Articles
Faith, Reason, and the Place of ‘Christian Philosophy’ in Edith Stein

William Tullius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Edith Stein, Apophatic Theology, and Freedom

Karl Schudt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Present Potential in Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being, Chapter Two
Glenn Chicoine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Eternal Rest: The Beauty and Challenge of Essential Being

Sarah Borden Sharkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
The Wesen of Things, According to Reinach

Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
How did Homer know Achilles?

The Artist as Friend and Parent in Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being
David M. Cudnik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Manifesting Meaning: Art, Truth, and Community in St. Edith Stein

Christopher T. Haley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Stein and Aquinas on the Problem of Individual Being

John Finley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Person and Community in Stein’s Critique of

Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy
Timothy Martell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
3
Introduction to The Legacy of

Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being
Edith Stein completed her great philosophical opus, Endliches und ewiges Sein,
in 1937, but—despite her significant efforts—it was not published until
1950, eight years after her death.1 Although the English translations of Stein’s
collected writings began to appear in 1986,2 Endliches und ewiges Sein was not
published in translation until 2002 when it was published as Finite and Eternal
Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being. Sixty-five years after its
completion, English speakers finally have a version of this astounding work
available to them. But since then an increasing wealth of material contin-
ues to appear: Augusta Gooch’s unpublished 1986 translation will soon be
available on the website for the International Association for the Study of
the Philosophy of Edith Stein (IASPES, found at www.edithsteincircle.com);
Kurt Reinhardt’s 2002 translation from the Institute of Carmelite Studies
Publications is now widely available; Mette Lebech translated Stein’s appen-
dix on Heidegger (“Martin Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy” in Maynooth
Philosophical Papers, ed. Cyril McDonnell and Thomas A. F. Kelly, Issue 4
[2007]: 55–98); and Walter Redmond is hard at work on a new translation
of the full text, including both appendices, coming from the German critical
edition of Endliches und ewiges Sein (which was published by Herder Verlag in
2006).
Given this increasing availability of Stein’s later philosophical texts,
I trust that this issue of Quaestiones Disputatae makes its own distinctive con-
tribution to our continuing understanding of Stein’s work. In fact, it will be
the first English collection of scholarly essays dedicated to Finite and Eter-
nal Being. Three years ago, there was a gathering at Franciscan University in
Steubenville for what was, I believe, the first conference in the United States
dedicated to Edith Stein’s later philosophical writings and especially Finite and
Eternal Being. It was a joy to spend time talking with so many people about
Stein’s great work, and the sheer number of topics discussed was somewhat
overwhelming at times. This volume of Quaestiones Disputatae aims to provide
1
See Marianne Sawicki’s chronology of Edith Stein’s writings, available at
http://www.edithsteincircle.com/ biography/chronology-of-writings/.
2
The first book to be published in translation was The Science of the Cross,
trans. Hilda Graef (London: Burns & Oates, 1960), but this was not part of the
collected works that has since been developed and published by the Institute of
Carmelite Studies Publications in Washington, DC.
4 Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being
a taste of that conversation—and enlarge the range of discussion of Stein’s
philosophical masterpiece.
A number of themes arose repeatedly throughout the conference
and appear regularly in these essays; e.g., essential being and essential truth,
individuality, the centrality of personhood, and the deep relationship be-
tween Stein’s later thought and her early phenomenological writings. For this
publication, I decided, however, to arrange these essays roughly following the
order Stein herself chose for the chapters of Finite and Eternal Being.
* * *
The first two pieces, William Tullius’s “Faith, Reason, and the Place of ‘Chris-
tian Philosophy’ in Edith Stein,” and Karl Schudt’s “Edith Stein, Apophatic
Theology, and Freedom,” both take up Stein’s discussion of the nature of
Christian philosophy from the opening chapter of Finite and Eternal Being.
There, Tullius gives us a challenge: he brings together Stein’s explicit discus-
sion of the possibility of Christian philosophy in Finite and Eternal Being with
her approach to Christian philosophy in “Ways to Know God” in order to
defend the provocative thesis that Christian faith and revealed theology can
provide content for genuinely philosophical positions and, even offering con-
tent for phenomenologically supported positions. Schudt’s thesis, in contrast,
is that much of Stein’s work in Finite and Eternal Being is apophatic, although
in an interesting way. Namely, Schudt emphasizes the role of personhood in
Stein’s distinctive apophatic approach, connecting and pointing to the myste-
riousness of both human and divine persons.
Glenn Chicoine’s essay provides an in-depth and substantive intro-
duction to Stein’s challenging arguments in chapter two of Finite and Eternal
Being, which is a key turning point in the text. Chicoine provides a great
service to those interested in understanding her text by illuminating this core
chapter. In particular, he brings out the way in which Stein mixes a reliance
on Thomas Aquinas’s opusculum De ente et essentia with Husserlian phenom-
enological concerns.
My essay (Borden Sharkey) focuses on the notion of essential being,
introduced in chapter three of Finite and Eternal Being. Essential being is one
of Stein’s unique contributions to a contemporary discussion of being, and
the concept provides a provocative and beautiful addition to our reflection
on being. Although I ultimately argue that we ought not to agree with Stein
about essential being, Stein’s reasons for introducing it need to be considered
carefully and provide a substantive addition to our metaphysical reflections.
Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray turns the discussion from Stein’s understand-
ing of being to essence (Wesen) and she examines Stein’s account by clarifying
Stein’s relation to a number of early phenomenologists, with special attention
paid to the thought of Reinach. Given the centrality of essence in Stein’s
5
metaphysics—and given its deep tie to other themes discussed in this issue—
a deeper investigation of this topic is especially welcome.
David Cudnik and Christopher Haley provide very welcome pieces
on Stein’s aesthetic theory. Several years ago, Terence Wright opened the
discussion of Stein’s theory of artistic truth with a piece published in the
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.3 Cudnik and Haley pick up on Wright’s
initial work, but develop more fully Stein’s aesthetic theory. Cudnik interprets
Stein’s philosophy of art—with its particular focus on the role of essen-
tial being, or pure form—by comparing the artist with a friend and parent.
This metaphor does much to explicate what is going on in Stein’s discussions
of art. Haley deepens our understanding of Stein on this issue by situating
Stein’s comments about art within her broader metaphysical theory and, as a
result, begins the process of developing a full-scale Steinian aesthetic theory.
Haley focuses on the differing types of truth articulated by Stein and pro-
vides a particularly illuminating account of her various terms.
One of the interesting features of Finite and Eternal Being is its struc-
ture, which can be signaled as follows: first she works through detailed meta-
physical analyses of essence and being, next she moves into a discussion of
the transcendentals (including beauty), the tri-partite nature of all of reality,
and the interior of the soul, and culminates with a detailed analysis (and cri-
tique) of Thomas’s position on individuation. John Finley helps explain why
Stein organizes her great work in this way and how, in particular, the discus-
sion of the interior of the soul directly relates to her final, more technical,
discussions of Thomas on individuation. Finley argues that—despite initial
appearances to the contrary—Thomas and Stein agree fairly substantively
about individuation, and he argues that consideration of simply Thomas’s
or Stein’s set of questions will result in the appearance of deep disagree-
ment. Consideration of both sets of questions, however, serves to deepen
our understanding of the issues involved in being an individual and help to
illuminate the views of each thinker.
Finally, Timothy Martell addresses Stein’s appendix on Heidegger.
Given the number of issues Stein raises in this appendix, it is enjoyable and
refreshing to see sustained focus on one of Stein’s critiques that includes
development of the critique in light of Stein’s discussion of related topics
in her early works. Martell focuses on the nature of being-in-community
and argues, following Stein, that a more nuanced account of what would
make for truly authentic and inauthentic versions of being-in-community is
needed in Heidegger’s work. Martell gives a beautiful summary of key terms
from Stein’s earlier works, including pure ego, psyche, mind, and person, and
3
Terence Wright, “Artistic Truth and the True Self in Edith Stein,” American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2008): 132.
6 Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being
shows clearly their significance for not only understanding Stein’s thought
but seeing a true lacuna in Heidegger’s work.
It is my hope that this set of essays will cover a significant range of
topics in need of discussion from Finite and Eternal Being and help open a
vibrant field of English-language secondary literature on Stein’s later philo-
sophical thought.
—Sarah Borden Sharkey,

Special Guest Editor
William Tullius 7
Faith, Reason, and the Place of

‘Christian Philosophy’ in Edith Stein
William Tullius
Abstract
Paul Ricoeur claims that the tradition of philosophy is Greek
by birth and, as such, encounters the Hebrew and the Christian
always as an ‘other.’ The contemporary philosopher approach-
ing issues of faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition, true to his or
her Greek philosophical origins, can only approach the content
of faith and the experience of the believer in a neutralized form
and not in the mode of positive belief, rendering the idea of an
explicitly ‘Christian philosophy’ impossible. In contrast, the phi-
losopher Edith Stein argues for a strikingly different conclusion.
Faith, entering into the framework of philosophical discussion,
does not require a neutralization but stands as an authentic source
of knowledge and phenomenological experience of God with-
out which philosophy remains fundamentally impoverished on a
variety of fronts. ‘Christian philosophy,’ for Stein, is not only a
possibility, but is a philosophical necessity for the ultimate suc-
cess of the philosophical project as a whole. This paper explores
the nature of Christian philosophy, as articulated by Stein in Finite
and Eternal Being and her essay, “Ways to Know God,” in its rela-
tion to Greek thought; in particular, the way in which philoso-
phy is naturally dependent upon faith, and the way in which faith
forms the positive basis for a fulfilled intention of God that can
be worked into philosophical analysis without violating the nature
of philosophy.
* * *
In The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur seeks to give a ‘phenomenology of

confession,’ meaning by this a phenomenological analysis of the religious act
of faith on the part of the believer qua believer. In his introductory remarks
to this analysis, Ricoeur argues that the philosophical perspective from which
© William Tullius, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall 2013)

8 ‘Christian Philosophy’ in Edith Stein
the religious act of confession is analyzed is not that of the actual believer
himself. Rather, this act must be philosophically ‘re-enacted’ in a properly
philosophical, analytical mode. The standpoint of the philosopher arises
from within the heart of a particular tradition “from the depths of his Greek
memory.”1 Both historically and within the life of the individual philosopher
as always carrying the Greek tradition along with him or her, philosophy
encounters the Hebrew source of Judeo-Christian civilization, culture, and
religion as its first ‘other,’2 and as ‘other,’ it would seem to be the case that it
must always stand at some distance from philosophy which is always in itself
a distinctively Greek endeavor. Thus, Ricoeur argues, in performing a phe-
nomenology of confession, the philosopher must adopt all the motivations
and intentions of the believer. However, he writes, the philosopher “does
not ‘feel’ them in their first naïveté; he ‘re-feels’ them in a neutralized mode,
in the mode of ‘as if.’”3 Therefore, even if philosophy re-enacts the Judeo-
Christian religious belief in what he refers to as a ‘sympathetic imagination,’ it
remains the case that this faith exists purely in the mode of imagination and
does not come to be the faith of philosophy itself since it does not struc-
ture philosophy according to the range and depth of what faith itself has to
offer in the positive and non-neutralized mode of ‘what truly is.’4 Rather, it
would seem that philosophy itself remains ‘faith-less,’ or ‘a-theistic’ as Hus-
serl would say,5 and that, for all philosophical tasks—for the question of a
philosophical analysis of faith and for a philosophical judgment and appraisal
of the rational standing of the tenets of religious belief—“the Greek ques-
tion is situated at the beginning [and] orients the human space of religions
which is open to philosophical investigation.”6 Thus, one finds here, in prin-
ciple, the impossibility of what has, since the end of the nineteenth century,
been the persistent goal of the Christian intellectual tradition in the idea of a
truly ‘Christian philosophy.’7
1
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. and ed. Emerson Buchanan (Bos-
ton: Beacon Press, 1967), 20.
2
Ibid., 19.
3
Ibid.
4
Steven N. Dunning, “History and Phenomenology: Dialectical Structure in
Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil,” The Harvard Theological Review 76 (1983): 345.
5
Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band 14: Die Lebenswelt. Aus-
legungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihre Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937)
[The Life-world. Explications of the pre-given world and its consititution. Texts
from the estate (1916–1937)] ed. Rochus Sowa (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 167.
6
Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 20.
7
See Pamela Sue Anderson, “Agnosticism and Attestation: An Aporia con-
cerning the Other in Ricoeur’s Oneself as an Other,” The Journal of Religion 74 (1994):
65.
William Tullius 9
In contrast to this view, Edith Stein in her later philosophy—particu-
larly in Finite and Eternal Being and her essay “Ways to Know God”—argues
not only for the possibility of a ‘Christian philosophy,’ but indeed for its
ultimate necessity if philosophy is ever to make any progress towards a sys-
tematic treatment of the full range and totality of ‘what is.’ Thus, for Stein,
philosophy can be described as naturally dependent upon faith for attaining
a greater degree of specificity and fullness—for instance, in its conceptual-
ization of the divine not only as the conceptually empty and transcendent
ultimate causal principle of the motion of the cosmos, as in Aristotle, but as
a personal God who acts immanently in human history. A ‘Christian philoso-
phy’ will be capable of doing this, moreover, because of the fact that, for the
Christian believer who is undertaking the task of philosophy, the philosopher
does not set aside the content and backdrop of their faith but rather has ac-
cess to the full experiential content of their faith-life which gives concrete
access to a range of fully actual, fulfilled intentions (in Husserl’s sense of the
term), in which an object is given to the subject ‘in person’ and which can
form the basis for positive philosophical investigation and insight.
With this in mind, this paper seeks to give an articulation of Stein’s
discussion of the possibility and problems of Christian philosophy in Finite
and Eternal Being and the “Ways to Know God” essay. It will seek to accom-
plish this task by discussing Stein’s thesis that philosophy is naturally depen-
dent upon faith, as well as the claim that faith forms, in a way, the positive
basis for a fulfilled intention of God, and specifically one that can be worked
into philosophical analysis without violating the nature of philosophy as an
investigation of being from the standpoint of natural reason. It will also deal
with the relation of ‘Christian philosophy’ to the Greek philosophical tradi-
tion. In so doing, it will be possible to see Stein’s relevance for the continued
debate and the quest for the possibility of a fully ‘Christian philosophy.’ From
this analysis, it will become evident that there are certain ways in which the
logic of Stein’s thought accords with the necessity of a certain re-conceptual-
ization of the method of phenomenology itself insofar as faith remains, and
must remain for Stein, a non-neutralized stratum of investigation intention-
ally open to philosophical examination if it is to be studied philosophically
in its phenomenal givenness. Indeed, the philosophical examination of faith
supplied by St. Edith Stein lays the foundation for profound philosophical
examination as such.
Christian Philosophy and Its Necessity
Stein discusses the topic of the meaning and possibility of Christian philoso-
phy in the first chapter of Finite and Eternal Being, drawing largely from the
work of other scholars on the topic. Focusing on the work of Jacques Mari-
tain, she writes that one must distinguish between two different problems
or approaches to the question of Christian philosophy. In this connection,
one can ask after the nature of philosophy itself and its relation to Christian
faith, or one can ask after the actual situation of philosophy—i.e., its histori-
cal context and actual place within a broader social, political, cultural, and
religious milieu.8 If we are to ask the question of whether there can be such
a thing as a Christian philosophy and what such a philosophy would mean,
that is, how the adjective ‘Christian’ modifies the noun ‘philosophy,’ then we
must determine, first and foremost, what we mean by ‘philosophy’ and in
what sense it would even begin to be appropriate to attach to it the modi-
fier ‘Christian.’ For Maritain, according to its nature, philosophy is entirely
independent of faith and theology because it is a purely natural, specula-
tive discipline. However, Stein argues that it cannot be denied—particularly
in medieval, Renaissance, and early modern philosophy at the very least—
that “this nature is actualized within a specific frame of changing historical
conditions, and with respect to this actualization one may justifiably speak
of a Christian situation or condition of philosophy.”9 Thus, even while by nature
philosophy is a wholly secular undertaking, a philosophy can be thoroughly
imbued with Christianity from the standpoint of its actual situation within
a historical context, particularly in a time in which the greater social order is
thoroughly structured by the life of Christian faith and where Christianity
forms the basis for a society’s overall consciousness of itself and its place in
the cosmos, as was the case in medieval scholasticism.
On Stein’s own account, philosophy must be conceived of as a vital
activity which encompasses a particular intellectual undertaking, in the sense
that it encompasses of a range of questions that are properly philosophical
and which may be taken up by the natural capacities of the intellect. Also,
philosophy constitutes an enduring intellectual habit as well, in the sense
that it requires a capacity of the soul that is readily and habitually available
over the life of the individual qua philosopher.10 Moreover, philosophy has
the particular characteristic, as a vital activity, of being a rigorous science,
and here one can readily see Stein’s continued reference back to her Hus-
serlian phenomenological training.11 Philosophy, like every science, seeks to
8
Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, trans. and ed. Kurt F. Reinhardt (Wash-
ington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2002), 13 (henceforth, FEB).
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid., 14.
11
Ibid. In her description of philosophy as a ‘rigorous science,’ Stein is mak-
ing an explicit reference back to Husserl’s famous essay “Philosophie als strenge Wissen-
schaft,” in which he describes that which philosophy strives to realize in its theoretical
undertakings in terms of the ideal of ‘rigorous science.’ Cf. Edmund Husserl, “Phi-
William Tullius 11
investigate the world of objects and the states-of-affairs (Sachverhalten) which
it predicates of them; yet, every science must run up against the question
of whether or not it has within its capacity—both according to its method
and according to the finitude of human intellectual ability—the power to
constitute predicable states-of-affairs as corresponding to the ‘real’ in such a
manner that those states-of-affairs “can be conceived as a definitive totality
that exhausts all the possibilities of its object.”12
For Stein, a philosophical answer—prescinding from the question
of a parallel capacity for the exact natural sciences—must always be in the
negative, since the world “proves itself inexhaustible for any analytical or
discursive cognitive reasoning.”13 The inexhaustibility of the totality of ‘what
is,’ moreover, further serves as the basis for the multiplicity of scientific dis-
ciplines as well as their conceptual disjunction and, often, their incommen-
surability. However, inasmuch as philosophy takes upon itself the task of
clarifying and elucidating the fundamental principles of all the sciences in
general,14 by clarifying the fundamental principles of knowledge, of inves-
tigation, and the idea of method in the first place, philosophy does pretend
to take for itself the title of a science of the totality of ‘what is.’ As such,
philosophy must attempt to unify all the sciences in order positively to grasp
being in its totality; and this will be understood to be, for Stein, as it was for
her mentor Husserl, an infinite task. Yet, this can be accomplished in a finite
manner, she will argue, by entering into the historical and existential situation
of Christianity.
Once again invoking Maritain, Stein notes that theologically speak-
ing the graces of faith are such that they strengthen and purify the natural
intellectual capacities of the human mind in order to grasp the truth of real-
ity more perfectly and that, as such, faith contributes to the natural habitus of
philosophy as grace perfecting nature.15 This idea, though proving important
for later considerations, is not the main focus of Stein’s argument, for it
already assumes the supremacy of theology and of Christian doctrine over
and above philosophy without having yet established the possibility of such
a harmonious relationship between the two. First and foremost, then,
losophy as Rigorous Science,” in Husserl: Shorter Works, trans. and ed. Peter McCor-
mick and Frederick Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981),
166–97. Inasmuch as ‘rigorous science’ is, for Husserl, identical with the phenom-
enological method as such, it is clear that Stein is continuing to identify her particular
approach to philosophy in this connection with the phenomenological movement as
inaugurated by her mentor Husserl.
12
Stein, FEB, 18.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid., 19.
15
Ibid., 21.
Stein must consider the ways in which Christian doctrine and philosophi-
cal discovery are capable of interacting. In this connection, Stein writes that
historically, “Christian doctrine enriches philosophy with certain concepts…
which actually remained foreign to it as long as it did not draw from this
source.”16 In spite of their ‘foreign’ character, the concepts of Christian doc-
trine are capable of being positively integrated into the ‘world’ of philosophy
precisely because they have already entered into the experiential world of
the philosopher and have given the world itself a ‘new meaning.’17 In other
words, the concepts of Christian doctrine, while still foreign to the primal
Greek origins of philosophy, are nonetheless fully at home in the believer’s
philosophical grasp of the world because the ‘life-world’ itself of the philos-
opher qua believer—to borrow a term from Husserl in describing the world
as the pre-given meaning-frame of experience towards which we always live
and act—has been imbued with a new but consistent meaning. Moreover,
because the concepts of Christian doctrine are constitutive features of the
life-world of the Christian philosopher (which is still nonetheless the one-
and-only shared world of the whole of humanity) and because it is the task
of philosophy to accomplish the unification of the sciences (by bringing
about a complete systematization of the totality of ‘what is’ while drawing
on the insights of the individual sciences), it makes complete sense, accord-
ing to Stein and Maritain, that philosophy should draw on the discoveries
of the theological sciences as themselves completely authoritative within the
domain of its individual subject-matters.18
One of the chief ways in which, for Stein, philosophy is able to draw
on the insights of theology to aid it in accomplishing the sort of systematiza-
tion of the totality of being that it seeks to provide is through the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Such doctrines give content to
the otherwise conceptually empty notions of ‘first existent,’ ‘first cause,’ ‘un-
moved mover,’ etc., each of which have characterized the already identifiable
natural philosophical conceptualizations of divinity.19 With this deepened un-
derstanding of the divine drawn from Christian doctrine and theology, phi-
losophy is able to recognize the authentic ontological situation of the world
as it stands in relation to the infinite as its ultimate goal. Moreover, Stein,
again drawing on Maritain, points to the necessary incompleteness of any
ethics which does not also have a religious and theological basis in addition
to its philosophical systematization. Such an incompleteness is undoubtedly
part of the consistent failure of modern ethics of every stripe (deontological,
utilitarian, existentialist, virtue theories, etc.), identified by Alasdair MacIntyre
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid., 22.
19
Ibid.
William Tullius 13
as our modern moral malaise.20 Without a harmonization of these religious
discoveries into a philosophical system, philosophy as such fails in its essen-
tial task of giving expression to the totality of being. It fails in this task due
to the fact that it misses the fundamental meaning of what it is for the world
and its constituent entities to be finite in the first place and how finite entities
are ordered to the infinite both according to their perfections and according
to their teleological ends. Furthermore, without the understanding of the
fundamental differentiation of finite and infinite being provided by the open-
ing up of philosophy to the enlarged life-world of the believer, philosophy
misses a fundamental point about the meaning of being itself.
Thus, it should be clear that, for Stein, to have a philosophy which
is attentive to Christian insight is to have a philosophy which is more open
to the totality of being and is more capable of accomplishing the natural
tasks of philosophy than was previously possible. This being the case, Stein
is able to provide what might count as a functional definition of ‘Christian
philosophy’ as one that pays “heed to the truths of faith [and] bring[s] to light
a distinct temporal phase of the historical structure of philosophy—a struc-
ture which depends on faith and theology as the external conditions of its
full realization.”21 Nevertheless, Stein is clear that such a philosophy does not
become Christian in the sense “that it embodies in its own structure revealed
truths as such.”22 That is to say, the nature of philosophy is not changed by
being incorporated into the overall framework of Christianity such that phi-
losophy itself becomes a source of revealed truth with doctrinal authority or
by becoming itself a theology. Rather, a Christian philosophy is one which is
sensitive to, and which takes as its own, the discoveries of the inner ratio that
both permeates and motivates Christian doctrine.
Experience in Faith and the Fulfilled-Intention of God
As has already been said, Stein’s discussion of Christian philosophy for the
most part takes its cue from Maritain and others. If one looks at the begin-
ning ideas expressed in Finite and Eternal Being, one does not see much that is
thoroughly original in Stein’s presentation of the basic problems of this form
of philosophy. In order to understand the originality of her thought, as well
as the particularly phenomenological approach to the problem of faith and
reason which characterizes her understanding of Christian philosophy, one
must take account of the ways in which she tackles a particularly important
See Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
20
Dame Press, 1984), 51ff.

21
Stein, FEB, 24.
22
Ibid.
challenge to its possibility which has not yet been discussed. She writes that
with the opening of this new philosophy, which according to its particular
historical setting we call ‘Christian,’ philosophers endeavoring to understand
the totality of “that which is [das Seiende] in the light of its ultimate causes…
will be compelled by their faith to extend their reflection beyond that which
is naturally accessible to them.”23 This represents a problem for Christian
philosophy, especially given Stein’s commitment to a phenomenological phi-
losophy that both proceeds in its reasearch as a rigourous science and makes
use of what is evident within the field of lived-experience alone. If Christian
faith demands that philosophy study being in light of causes which essentially
evade the natural powers of human reason, then Christian philosophy must
provide a justification for how this is to be accomplished in fidelity to the
authentic tasks and demands of philosophical reasoning. Such justification
in Stein’s work is best found not in Finite and Eternal Being but in her essay,
“Ways to Know God,” in which the interaction between objects of faith and
the world of lived-experience that stand open to philosophical interrogation
is given a detailed phenomenological analysis.
It should first be noted, however, that Stein’s essay is a philosophi-
cal analysis of the attitude of the Pseudo-Dionysian ‘symbolic-theologian’
in connection with the objective presuppositions of such a theology. That
being the case, it might rather be termed a study in fundamental theology in
Rahner’s sense than a study of the issues of a Christian philosophy proper.24
Nevertheless, just as for Pseudo-Dionysius there is no great distinction be-
tween philosophy and theology as such at the level of actual truth and praxis,
so too for Stein there is no fundamental distinction between the experiences
of faith and the experiences of natural reason within the lived-experience of
the Christian believer who does philosophy—they both make up constitutive
elements of one and the same unified, personal life-world and thus provide
correlative noetic and noematic content for rigorous phenomenological in-
vestigation. As such, Stein’s essay can be used equally as a study in fundamen-
tal theology and as a study in the objective presuppositions of the possibility
of a Christian philosophy that is open to a phenomenological methodology.
Stein argues that with acts of faith—in particular those which are
not simply characterized by an assent to the individual propositional contents
of doctrine but rather those characterized in the most integral sense as acts
of faith in a personal God Himself—there is present a certainty derived from
the ‘feeling’ of God’s presence which makes Him ‘intuitively’ manifest.25 She
23
Ibid., 21.
24
For example, see Karl Rahner, SJ., Homanisation, trans. W. J. O’Hara (West
Germany: Herder K.G, 1965).
25
Edith Stein, “Ways to Know God: The ‘Symbolic Theology’ of Dionysius
the Areopagite and Its Objective Presuppositions,” in Knowledge and Faith, trans. and
William Tullius 15
writes that, “[w]e call this the experience [Erfahrung] of God in the most proper
sense. It is the core of all mystical living experience [Erlebnis]: the person-to-
person encounter with God.”26 In this context, Stein initially identifies the
particular experiential content of God present in the act of faith as apply-
ing first and foremost to the experience of the prophet in his being-called
into mission—i.e., in God’s theophanic self-revelation—and not the ordinary
lived-experience of God given in the act of faith of the everyday believer
(and certainly not of the Christian philosopher’s act of faith except in excep-
tional cases as, for example, in the mystical experiences of Thomas Aquinas).
In order to apply the results of such an analysis not only to Christian mysti-
cism but to every act of faith Stein must move to an intentional analysis of
the experience of faith as such—to the exclusion of such acts of faith as
would be found in John of the Cross’s concept of the ‘dark night,’ which are
characterized precisely by the lack of an intuitive feeling of God’s presence
to the believer.27
For something to count as experience, then, there must be an ‘im-
mediacy’ of a certain kind of the experiential-content to the subject of expe-
rience; that is, there must be an intention of a particular object that becomes
fulfilled through an originary, or primordial, contact of the subject with the
object.28 To this extent, Stein is invoking the Husserlian distinction between
fulfilled and unfulfilled intentions where fulfilled intentions are those in
which an object is actually present and where unfulfilled intentions are antici-
pations of objects which never become immediately present to the subject.
Stein seeks to apply this distinction to the intentional structure of faith as
the act of a human subject.29 Every act of faith is an intentional act in which
God is taken as object. She argues that “[f]aith…in a certain sense is already
ed. Walter Redmond (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2000), 92. Page numbers
refer to the pagination of the original German edition.
26
Ibid.
27
This lack of intuitive feeling of the presence of the divine in the midst of
the ‘dark night,’ as John of the Cross indicates, has an important mystical sense of its
own, however, which nonetheless seems to be a prelude in spiritual experience which
gives way into a spiritual passivity in which the divine becomes the principle active
agent, thus indicating a more profound sense of the immediate presence of God to
the subject than is immediately intuitable in ordinary acts of faith. Such mystical ex-
perience would deserve a phenomenological analysis of its own, and Stein does take
up this theme in her work The Science of the Cross, trans. and ed. Josephine Koeppel,
O.C.D. (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2002). Stein’s treatment of these issues,
however, cannot be taken up at this time.
28
Stein, “Ways to Know God,” 95.
29
Jane Duran, “Edith Stein, Ontology, and Belief,” Heythrop Journal 48 (2007):
711.
marked by fulfillment,”30 and thus already counts as knowledge.31 The sort of
fulfillment at work here is the fulfillment which is the “enrichment of the content
of knowledge (insofar as it tells us something new about God over and above
our natural experience and natural theology).”32 Here Stein situates faith as a
fulfillment of the knowledge that God must exist, which is characteristic of
any philosophy that has already sought to demonstrate God’s existence by
means of philosophical proofs.
Thus far, then, it is evident that Stein has in mind here the kind of
relationship between faith and philosophy as has already been seen in the
first chapter of Finite and Eternal Being. Here she portrays faith as not simply
serving as a sort of blind authority which steps in to fulfill an intention which
otherwise could never be fulfilled in any other way.33 Rather, for Stein, faith in
the experience of the believer who performs the act represents a fulfillment
analogous to “meeting a human being personally whose existence we previ-
ously only sensed in certain effects,”34 for example, meeting someone per-
sonally who we have come to know by reputation or whose picture we have
seen but never before met. That is to say, authentic acts of faith intend God
as already given in His personal presence—a personal presence originarilly
disclosed in the primal moments of the religious experience of ‘conversion.’
Since God’s infinity precludes the possibility of an absolutely fulfilled
intention of the Godhead on the part of a finite subject, faith, as a fulfilled
intention in a certain finite sense, re-presents the whole world anew and gives
it a meaning that was, up until that point, not yet fully evident; that is, the
world is meant now as God’s world, as standing in a relation to infinity—and
this is not a matter merely of theological or metaphysical theorization but
of lived-experience open to phenomenological analysis. It is for this reason
that, although the full, evidential value of Christian philosophy will remain
available in its completeness to the community of believers alone—and as
such Christian philosophy will have to maintain its scientific rigor by not bas-
ing its arguments on acts of faith as its first principle—Christian philosophy
stands prepared to justify itself as a philosophy genuinely grounded upon the
experience of the world of common life. In addition, Christian philosophy is
experienced in the context of its being as standing in a relationship of open-
ness to the transcendent not previously possible in philosophy.
30
31
Duran, “Edith Stein,” 709.
32
33
For example, Kant sees God as serving as a postulate in order that practical
reason might be able to justify its ethical demands while having no factual experience
of God Himself that is justifiable by means of pure reason.
34
Ibid., 96.
William Tullius 17
Concluding Remarks
An analysis of the intentional act of faith, then, can reveal the fundamental
ways in which faith is able to provide both conceptual content for philo-
sophical reflection and experiential openness to the world of life in its full
meaningfulness; the act of faith, according to Stein, is not only a necessity
for Christian philosophy but is, in fact, a necessity for a complete and uni-
versal philosophy. It remains now to see whether or not Stein might provide
an answer to the problematic set out by Ricoeur identified at the beginning
of this paper and what sorts of far-reaching implications might be derived
from her work.
As has been said, for Ricoeur, a ‘phenomenology of confession’ can
only be accomplished through what Husserl had called the ‘neutrality modi-
fication.’ A neutrality modification involves an original meaning or sense in-
tended in philosophical analysis that is essentially changed through the altera-
tion of one’s attitudinal approach to the phenomenon. It is, as Husserl writes,
“a modification which, in a certain way completely annuls, completely ren-
ders powerless every doxic modality to which it is related,”35 or a reduction
of the object of belief to the status of ‘mere phenomenon’—to the ‘as if,’ as
said by Ricoeur. This was, for Husserl, indeed a fundamental step in the phe-
nomenological method itself and one repeated by Ricoeur in this context.
This modification of sense is crucial to the phenomenological method be-
cause it, as Husserl argues, is closely related to the fundamental modification
of sense carried out by phenomenology itself; namely, the phenomenological
epoché inasmuch as the epoché itself makes use of a neutrality modification in
its activity of ‘bracketing’ the world.36 Consequently, if phenomenology is
to approach ‘confession’ in its intentional structure and in the religious and
valuative object of the act of confession (i.e., God), then it must do so by
modifying the sense of its current objects by reducing them to a neutralized
mode of phenomenality by way of the epoché which makes the full sense of
their universal, eidetic validity fully manifest. Thus, in a phenomenology of
religion and of religious belief, “believing is no longer serious believing… It
is a ‘neutralized’ believing.”37 In this sense, phenomenology would be capable
of entering into any religious attitude whatsoever—whether Christian, Bud-
dhist, Hindu, etc. It will be able to enter into such attitudes sympathetically,
35
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenologi-
cal Philosophy, Book 1, trans. and ed. F. Kerstenin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Pub-
lishers, 1983) [Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band 3: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie
und phänomenologischen Philosophie, I. Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie,
ed. Karl Schuhmann (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977)], 222.
36
Ibid., 223.
37
Ibid.
albeit neutrally, re-enacting the religious acts of these attitudes in order to
uncover the eidetic, or essential, relations which characterize these individual
faiths without phenomenology ever becoming in itself Christian (or, Bud-
dhist, Hindu, etc.). To that extent, phenomenological philosophy retains its
sense as being ‘a-theistic,’ in Husserl’s sense, and, even when pursuing the
idea of God in phenomenology, of doing so in a wholly ‘a-theistic,’ or non-
theistic, manner.38
However, as we have seen, for Stein, a Christian philosophy repre-
sents a philosophy which obtains its experiential validity precisely through
acts of belief wherein God is given in His actual ‘presence to faith.’ This
givenness of God must maintain a non-neutralized meaningfulness if it is
to be understood and experienced as possessing the authentic sense of be-
ing ‘fulfilled’ in its intention. From this perspective, proponents of Christian
philosophy accept the propositions of faith not as ‘hypotheses’ or as ‘neutral
senses’ as Husserl and Ricoeur’s phenomenologist would have to do, but
rather as positive ‘theses,’ that is, as experientially fulfilled.39 We might go
even further in saying that the beliefs of the Christian philosopher are never
neutralized even when subjected to the critical analysis implied by the Ansel-
mian activity of fides quaerens intellectum, which sums up the sense of the Chris-
tian philosopher’s self-understanding of their peculiar intellectual task. The
fundamental non-neutrality of sense which pervades the Christian philoso-
pher’s belief is precisely the source, moreover, of the experiential evidence
which they possess along with their rational implications and assumptions
which unfold in philosophical reflection upon the object of religious experi-
ence. The implication of this conclusion is that Christian philosophy as, in a
certain sense, a species of the phenomenon of ‘confession,’ or conversely, as
responding intellectually to this phenomenon, making it rationally articulable,
is not capable of being given in its full experiential evidence by means of a
neutrality modification. As a result, a standard phenomenological analysis
of confession as found in Ricoeur falsifies and obscures its object from the
start.
Christian philosophy exists as a genuine possibility only if the source
of its peculiarly Christian character is not already neutralized. This can be
seen as a first point derived from Stein’s analysis. In this sense, it would seem
at first glance that Christian philosophy is eo ipso incompatible with phenom-
enology. Were this the case, and if we can accept the earlier thesis that such
experience represents an authentic ‘widening of the life-world’ in the life of
the believer, it would follow that phenomenology would be fundamentally
limited by its method in its capacity to follow out a domain of experience
38
Husserl, Hua 39, 167.
39
Stein, FEB, 28.
William Tullius 19
in its full and authentic evidence in religious, and particularly Christian, re-
ligious experience. Moreover, it is clear from Stein’s work, as well as from
the work of Max Scheler,40 and from various instances in Husserl’s works
in which phenomenology (for Husserl, involved himself in carrying out a
renewal of European culture involving a return to the Christian sources of
authentic moral, social, political, and spiritual values41), that Christian phi-
losophy cannot be quite so clearly divorced in its essence and method from
the intentions of phenomenology qua phenomenology. What this implies is
that the insights, and indeed the very philosophical possibility, of Christian
philosophy as a particular style and form of philosophical inquiry, poses a
genuine challenge to the understanding of the phenomenological method in
Husserl himself. If the phenomenological method is so rigorous as to neces-
sitate the exclusion of a domain of experience and, even more fundamentally
for phenomenology, a domain of meaning, on account of the epoché and its
modification of sense to the bare ‘as if,’ then this method itself becomes in-
adequate to the task of articulating the phenomena which it seeks to study in
a phenomenology of confession. This would seem to necessitate a return to
the question of working-out a method for phenomenology which is capable
of dealing with all philosophically available phenomena—or perhaps more
to the point, indicates the need to employ the phenomenological attitude of
inquiry without further worry over determining what counts as a phenome-
nological method prior to its actual employment. The full justification of this
challenge, however, would require more space in working-out its implications
and assumptions than is available here, and as such I am content to merely
leave it as an interesting and provocative thesis which seems to suggest itself
from Stein’s work on the problems of developing a Christian philosophy.
40
See, for instance, Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath,
ed. Werner Stark (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 95, in which
Scheler describes phenomenology as taking up the task in our age of renewing the
basic sense of the Christian experience.
41
See, in particular, Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band 14:
Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektiviät. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil. 1921–28.
[On the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. Texts from the estate. Second part.
1921–28], ed. Iso Kern (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 174: “Wir denken hier
natürlich an die unendliche Liebe Christi zu allen Menschen und an die allgemeine Menschenliebe,
die der Christ in sich wecken muss und ohne die er kein wahrer Christ sein kann”; See also Hus-
serl’s Kaizo articles published in Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band
27: Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937) [Articles/essays and lectures (1922–1937)], ed.
Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1989). For more on this issue see William E. Tullius, “Groundwork to a Phenomeno-
logical Ethics in Edmund Husserl and Duns Scotus” (Ph.D. diss., The New School
for Social Research, 2011), 40–49, 93–98, and 426–33.
However, as we saw at the beginning, Ricoeur’s challenge is derived
not from the requirements of the phenomenological method alone as in-
cluding the neutrality modification in Husserl’s sense, but rather from the
historical genesis of philosophy and the foreignness of Judeo-Christian ra-
tionality with respect to this Greek source. It is clear from the opening of
Finite and Eternal Being that Stein recognizes the importance and uniqueness
of, to borrow a later-Husserlian term, philosophy’s Greek Urstiftung—or the
primal establishment of the tradition and the carrying forward of its mean-
ing in history42—and even incorporates this fact into her discussion of the
difficulty of understanding medieval philosophy and its attempts to translate
Greek concepts into the Latin tongue. Nevertheless, the foreignness of the
Judeo-Christian from Greek philosophy does not represent a problem for
Stein inasmuch as first, the actual historical situation that philosophy now
finds itself within the milieu of Christianity in such a way as to render the
new native home, so to speak, of Western philosophy the particularly Chris-
tian life-world; and, second, as her philosophy seeks always to be phenom-
enological. This can be seen in particular in the philosophical discussions of
the Renaissance and early modern periods which follow in the wake of me-
dieval thought. In these times, philosophy naturally borrows the theological
and metaphysical language of the scholastics and naturally continues to take
up the problems of God—e.g., Leibniz’s problem of the Theophany—from
within the overall sense of God as ‘Creator,’ ‘Father,’ ‘summum bonum,’ etc., all
of which are borrowed in one way or another from the Christian religious
tradition. Thus, it seeks to be a return to the original experiential sources of
all knowledge, among which Christian faith, as a fulfilled intentional act, is
now able to be counted. To that extent, and to the extent to which the Christ-
event as well as the individual act of faith both constitute a kind of Urstiftung
all their own which fundamentally alter the whole meaning of the world it-
self, a Christian philosophy is one which can be liberated, in a certain sense,
from its Greek origins. For, as Stein writes: “Christian philosophy is willing
to learn from the Greeks as from the moderns and to appropriate for itself
whatever can meet the test of its own standards of measurement [but]…[o]n
the other hand, it can well afford to display generously what it itself has to
offer.”43
—Independent Scholar
42
Eran Dorfman, “History of the Life-World: From Husserl to Merleau-
Ponty,” Philosophy Today 53 (2009): 294ff.
43
Stein, FEB, 28.
William Tullius 21
Edith Stein, Apophatic Theology,

and Freedom
Karl Schudt
Abstract
In Finite and Eternal Being, Edith Stein attempts an ascent to the
fullest understanding of being. She starts with the personal being
of the I and rises to the uncreated divine being, which is the for-
mal, efficient, and exemplary cause of all that is. This divine being
is also simple, and in this divine simplicity Stein pauses, remarking
that one cannot properly make judgments about God since the
very form of the judgment implies composition. God is, in the
end, knowable only through what he is not—using the apophatic
way of negation. God reveals himself as a person, and one who
has created humans in his image and likeness. I will show the
unique way in which Stein describes this image relationship: the
ultimately unknowable individual being or haeccitas of each human
person is a mirror of the unknowable being of God. Unknow-
ability becomes, paradoxically, a way to know.
* * *
St. Thomas Aquinas says in the beginning of the Summa Contra Gentiles, im-
mediately after proving the existence of God through the use of human
reason, that to know anything of God we must use the way of negation.
That is, we do not determine what God is, but what God is not. God is dif-
ferent from anything that is. To know this is a sort of knowledge of God,
but imperfect, “since it will not tell us what God is in himself.”1 So, one can
take the rest of his work, which runs to thousands of pages, to be a project
of apophatic theology, of saying what God is not. St. Edith Stein follows
St. Thomas’s method, stating at the climax of Finite and Eternal Being—her
attempt at an ascent to the meaning of being—that because of the utter
simplicity of God, it is inappropriate even to make a judgment of the form
Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I.14.3.

1
© William Tullius, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall 2013)

22 Edith Stein, Apophatic Theology, and Freedom
“God is X.”2 Any judgment implies a composition which is foreign to sim-
plicity. Stein, like Aquinas, says that nothing can be said of God positively,
and then proceeds to say much more, in many pages, about God. Stein’s ap-
proach to apophatic theology is different from that of St. Thomas in that the
unknowability of God is the basis for the mystical union of the believer with
God. The unknowable God communicates with the unknowable person in
a mutual free self-giving. I hope first to explain this aspect of apophaticism
in Stein’s thought, and then to show how it leads both to Stein’s theory of
the individuation of the human person and to her mystical theology. I will
examine her philosophical ascent to God, show how it leads necessarily to a
negative or apophatic theology. She then finds a contact point between God
as person and human beings as persons. Finally, I will show how she finds in
the very unknowability of the free person of God and the human being the
place where both can meet.
A Philosophical Ascent
At the beginning of Finite and Eternal Being Stein investigates what the nature
of Christian philosophy would be. “Christian Philosophy” seems to be a
paradox, if we mean by ‘philosophy’ the investigation of the whole of reality
strictly according to the limit of human reason. This is a limit that the even
the philosopher Socrates does not follow, as one can see in his ready adop-
tion of myths when convenient, but the limit is commonly enough accepted.
If the philosopher wishes to continue the telos of philosophy as directed to
a complete understanding of the causes of everything, according to Stein, it
is necessary for him or her to be able to turn to Scripture: “It is the task of
philosophy to harmonize these propositions at which it has arrived by using
its own devices together with the truths of faith and theology. Only then can
reality be made intelligible in its ultimate reasons and causes.”3 It is a common
response to the “undeniable fallibility of all purely human knowledge”4 to
limit the project, to make philosophy merely into conceptual clarification, or
into some sort of Stoic way to deal with the finitude of life, but Stein thinks
that the Christian philosopher does not need to do that. He or she can turn to
Scripture to help complete the picture. To spur philosophical reflection, faith
can provide formal certainty—that the universe is a well-ordered cosmos ac-
cessible to reason—as well as material concepts. For example, the notion of
2
Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning
of Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2002), 342
(henceforth, FEB).
3
Ibid., 23.
4
Ibid.
Karl Schudt 23
the person, can be derived from the doctrine of the Trinity. Thus, there is a
double dependence of philosophy on faith; both formal and material.5
But faith does not provide us insight; with a full and complete view
of God in the way that Euclid’s geometry gives us a full and complete in-
sight into the nature of the triangle. The knowledge that scripture provides is
dark: “Everything intelligible is placed in a setting with an incomprehensible
background.”6 This knowing of God is also limited in that it depends solely
on God’s self-revelation. We only get that which God deigns to reveal to us.
Triangles we can know, whether there are triangular prophets or not, whereas
the Trinity is only known from God’s own self-revelation. At this intellectual
abyss, the Christian philosopher, so Stein says, still may turn to scripture.
So, how does it work in practice? Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being has, after all,
the subtitle An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being which indicates the
heights of the Divine. She gives us an example in the second half of this
book what Christian philosophy could be, and ultimately gives us her vision
of a Christian philosophy.
Stein ascends by means of a consideration of the being of the I,
through an examination of causality, and through an examination of the ir-
reducible core of meaning at the root of all that is. Stein comes to the conclu-
sion, from this triple ascent, that everything that is receives its being from an-
other that does not likewise receive being from another. This “being”—and
one is well-advised to be cautious in referring to the cause of all being as “a
being”—is completely unlike any being that receives its being from another.
It is the only thing that is anything like itself. This first cause, the principle of
all that is, “everyone calls God,” as Thomas says, and God is infinitely unlike
anything else. The difference between created being and uncreated being is
inconceivable: God is far more unlike any created thing than a fish is unlike a
bicycle. Thus Stein is reluctant to go any further in a strictly philosophical as-
cent and does not even want to make any further judgments about God: “At
best we might perhaps legitimately say “God is—God,’ and we might take
such a statement as an admission of the impossibility of defining the divine
essence by anything other than God himself.”7 Any judgment would be ap-
plying a predicate that is not God to God as a subject, and hence introducing
division into that which is simple.
5
Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, trans. Walter Redmond (Washington, D.C.:
ICS Publications, 2000), 18.
6
Stein, FEB, 25.
7
Ibid., 342.
Apophatic Theology and God’s Self-revelation
The Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky gives a concise definition of the

necessary response to the God who dwells in inaccessible light; a definition
which could well apply to Stein’s work: “The negative way of the knowledge
of God is an ascendant undertaking of mind that progressively eliminates all
positive attributes of the object it wishes to attain, in order to culminate final-
ly in a kind of apprehension by supreme ignorance of Him who cannot be an
object of knowledge.”8 This is the puzzling part of any apophatic theology:
how can there be apprehension by ignorance? How does one know another
by not knowing? We shall see that ignorance is the secret to any knowledge
of God, and even to any knowledge of another person.
Faced with the unknowability of God, Stein turns to scripture. How-
ever, it is worth pausing for a moment to address an important question: is
philosophical reflection that takes its starting point from scripture still phi-
losophy? In answer, one can say that perhaps it is not pure in that it does not
rely solely on human reason. But this does not make it not philosophy. What
matters is the mode in which philosophy proceeds. Stein acknowledges that
the data of faith are not insightful in the phenomenological sense, and that all
that is told to us remains dark, set “with an incomprehensible background.”9
Philosophy takes as its task “to harmonize those propositions at which it has
arrived by using its own devices together with the truths of faith and theol-
ogy. Only in this way can reality be made intelligible to its ultimate reasons
and causes.”10 This is a legitimate way to proceed because such a method
maintains the guiding goal of all philosophy, the understanding of the total-
ity of being. We have already suggested that the notion of the person itself,
the individual substance of a rational nature that possesses its nature, is drawn
from Trinitarian theology. Furthermore, as Stein quotes Maritain, if the theo-
logically revealed doctrine of Original Sin is true (in whatever sense one un-
derstands it), then “no system of ethics can be complete if it rests exclusively
on a purely philosophical basis.”11 A damaged human nature, if true, is a fact
that ethics ignores at its peril. Thus, one can strive for purity in philosophy,
or one can strive for completeness.
Thus, Stein begins to turn explicitly to scripture and moves from
pure philosophy to a theologically informed philosophy. This involves a
change in methodology but the guiding goal stays the same, namely, the com-
prehensive understanding of being. Stein turns to Exodus 3:14 where God
8
Vladimir Lossky, John H. Erickson, and Thomas E. Bird, eds., In the Image
and Likeness of God (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 13.
9
Stein, FEB, 26.
10
Ibid., 23.
11
Ibid., 22.
Karl Schudt 25
reveals his name to Moses. Moses is not merely satisfied to report to Pharoah
that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has sent him, but asks for God’s
name. Names in the bible reveal the essence of the thing named, as can be
seen in the changes of name that accompany changes in the lives of bibli-
cal figures: for example, Abram becomes Abraham, Simon becomes Peter.
Moses gets the very odd answer that God’s name is “I Am.” What does this
mean? One must be cautious: revealed texts say what they say, but provide no
insight from which further facts could be deduced. Stein says “One hardly
dares interpret these words by using other ones.”12 She turns to a safe theo-
logical authority, St. Augustine, in order to interpret the words. According to
the Augustinian interpretation, the name “I Am” means that God is a person.13
The personal nature of the first cause is revealed, but it can also be
argued for, which puts it on the boundary of philosophy and theology. Stein
makes this argument by looking at what is necessary for personality: “Reason
and freedom, however, are the essential marks of personality.”14 So, if the
created universe shows order, the order implies rationality in the cause of the
universe. Further, if the universe is caused by something uncaused, it seems
that this must be a free act. To be free and rational means to be a person.
This is a thin argument relying on inductive claims about order and causality,
but it is still a rational argument. Nevertheless, combined with the revelation
of the name of God it allows us to find a point of contact between God and
human beings:
And thus we see that while the being of the I is separated from
divine being by an infinite distance, it nevertheless—owing to the
fact that it is an I, i.e. a person—bears a closer resemblance to
divine being than anything else that lies within the reach of our
experience. If we remove from this being of the I everything that
is non-being, this will make it possible for us to conceive—albeit
only analogically—of divine being.15
This gives us a way to continue the ascent.
St. Thomas Aquinas presents a method of ascending to the core
meaning of words used both of God and human beings in Question 13 of
the Summa Theologiae: Names applied to God are not univocal, not equivocal,
but analogical. The thing signified by a name truly is in both God and crea-
tures, or the name would be an equivocation. Nevertheless, it is not in God
and creatures in the same way. We do not know the essence of God but “we
12
Ibid., 342.
13
Ibid. Note that this appears to come from a manual, as Stein cites no spe-
cific text.
14
Ibid., 343.
15
Ibid., 344.
know God from creatures as their principle, and also by way of excellence
and remotion.”16 Thus we can take away the creaturely modi significandi and
find something of the res significata, even if, as Thomas says, we never get to
the essence of God. The commonality between God and man, revealed by
God to Moses, is personhood. We need to take the meaning of person and
abstract from it anything that pertains strictly to the creature. Whatever is
left will be a revealed, dark, uninsightful, fragment of understanding of God.
Note that this is only possible based on the self-revelation of God. If it were
not for the declaration of the name of God, and if it were not for the pas-
sage in Genesis that declares that man is created in the image and likeness
of God, there would be no connection. We could perhaps say that God is
“good,” and try to work out just how we can say “God is good” and “Pizza
is good” without equivocating, but to say that God is the source of good-
ness and is most desirable does not do much to bring the soul closer to God.
To say that God is a person is to open the gateway to mutual contact. The
uniqueness of Stein’s approach is that the place of contact is not in the will
or in reason but in the unknowable center of individuality.
Creation and Created Persons
Since the point of contact between God and humans is the status of both
as persons, Stein then turns to the structure of the human soul. The I is the
focal point at which life is most full. It is, according to Stein, “the breach
between the dark and deep ground and the clear luminosity of conscious
life.”17 One might call it, in Aristotelian terms, the second actuality of a body
capable of having life. The I is the way that the hidden depths of the soul
are manifested. In Stein’s psychology the I arises out of the depths of the
soul, which is the mysterious core which is the source of our action often
unknown to ourselves. A tired man, for example, weary of the demands of
life, certain that he can handle no other demands—with temper at a knife
edge—wants nothing more than to go home. Then, on the way to the car a
student in distress asks for help. Most surprising to himself, he answers with
generosity and magnanimity, which was out-of-the-question five minutes
previously. Strength was found by the I in the unknown reaches of the soul.
This can be evident in bad behavior as well, as in the case of an addict who
succumbs to an addiction repeatedly despite resolving never to do it again.
The desires arise out of the soul and are presented to the I as good action,
even though they are not wanted.
16
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 13, art. 1.
17
Stein, FEB, 376.
Karl Schudt 27
So, the I stands over against the soul: “the human soul is not a mean
between spirit and matter, but a spiritual creature—not only a formed struc-
ture of the spirit, but a forming spirit.”18 The I grows out of a soul, which is
a psychic horizon, but it is not a prisoner to it. We do not just act as a result
of our own hidden depths in a strict stimulus/response relationship, but we
have a part in forming the depths. One can change—can work to enter into
the core of the self and exercise freedom, which is not always an easy task.
In the inner part of the soul we are most spiritual, which means most free.
We can live collectedly in the center of the soul and find there the means to
complete the transformation of our essence. We see this most obviously in
the case of moral demands. We cannot do it—so we think—but we find the
ability to do it anyway. We are free from the apparent constraints of our lives.
The ought is an implicit can and presumes that we will find the strength, or get
the grace, to do so somehow.19
It is in the inner core—the castle of the soul—where one can experi-
ence the grace of God. But how can grace be received? It certainly cannot
be forced upon the recipient. It presupposes freedom and the creation of a
new heart in a person. But any external constraint does not change the heart.
Putting an alcoholic in an environment without alcohol does not make him
not and alcoholic. This is because his will is unchanged. But to transform the
will is possible for God. How can it happen? Stein writes, “God and the soul,
on the other hand, are both spirit and interpenetrate or permeate each other
as only spirit and spirit can interpenetrate, i.e. by virtue of a free and personal
self-giving.”20 Thus, God is free and we are free. Nothing else, so far as we
know, is similarly free. It is this freedom that gives the possibility to overcome
the apophatic impasse. No created thing could approach the creator in an
encounter of love, but a created free person can interact with the uncreated
free person in such a manner.
It is here where Stein gives us a very interesting statement of apo-
phatic theology. As explained above, the otherness of God requires us not to
say what God is, but rather to say what God is not. God is unfathomable and
one who dwells in unapproachable light,21 completely different from every-
thing else. But it turns out that this unknowability is similar to the unknow-
ability of humans: “But this very concealment and spring-like nature im-
parts to these spiritual beings some of the unfathomableness of the Divine
Being.”22 Immediately before Stein begins her discussion of the meaning and
foundation of individual being she mentions, as if in passing, that God and
18
Ibid., 427.
19
Ibid., 446.
20
Ibid., 459.
21
1 Timothy 6:16.
22
Stein, FEB, 468.
humans are both unknowable. She prefaces the discussion thus: “Our final
effort, therefore, shall be devoted to an attempt to disclose something of this
mysterious relationship.”23 The mutual unknowability is somehow related to
the possibility of a relationship between God and man.
I note at this point that Stein’s explanation of the image-relationship
in terms of unknowability is not unique. St. Gregory of Nyssa writes in chap-
ter eleven of On the Making of Man the following:
The image is properly an image so long as it fails in none of those
attributes which we perceive in the archetype; but where it falls
from its resemblance to the prototype it ceases in that respect to
be an image; therefore, since one of the attributes we contem-
plate in the Divine nature is incomprehensibility of essence, it
is clearly necessary that in this point the image should be able to
show its imitation of the archetype.24
The human mind, where St. Gregory places the image primarily is unknow-
able; but this is only proper since God is unknowable. Interestingly, St. Greg-
ory later calls human freedom the chief way in which the image-relationship
between God and man subsists.
Individuality and Mystical Theology
I suggest that this mutual unknowability is a motive for what seems at first
to be an appendix to Finite and Eternal Being, which focuses on thisness or
haeccitas and is a concept borrowed from John Duns Scotus. The concept of
thisness is a direct consequence of the focus on freedom. As a consequence
of the freedom of the human person the individual being is a thing itself; a
thing that cannot be defined, but ultimately only pointed at. The essence or
quidditas is shared with other things of the same kind but that which makes it
the individual that it is, its esse, is something shared with no other thing. Stein
attributes individuality not to the matter, as does St. Thomas Aquinas, but
to the essence itself. She says: “It seems to me that the essence of Socrates
is found in his being Socrates (which includes his being human), and I hold
that this essence differs not only numerically but by virtue of a special par-
ticularity from the essence of any other human being.”25 The individuation
23
Ibid.
24
St. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Making of Man,” trans. H. A. Wilson, in
vol. 5 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry
Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893), chap. 11. http://www.
newadvent.org/fathers/2914.htm.
25
Stein, FEB, 478.
Karl Schudt 29
is in the essence. We can see this through a thought experiment: imagine
that you are introduced to a stranger, a man who, considered strictly in his
universality, should be lovable for you. He has all the qualities and eminences
which should make him a good and noble man. But when you meet him you
are somehow put-off by his individuality. You cannot say precisely what it
is, but it is not the “what” of him that you do not like, but rather the “how,”
or the particular taste given by his person. Lossky, another theological per-
sonalist, says similarly: “Finally, we admit that what is most dear to us in
someone, what makes him himself, remains indefinable, for there is nothing
in nature which properly pertains to the person, which is always unique and
incomparable.”26
As a consequence, the essence of each human being is incommuni-
cable. It is from the place of freedom, from the interior castle of the soul,
that our soul gets its distinctive flavor. “The innermost center of the soul is
the how (poion) of the essence itself, and as such impresses its stamp on every
trait of character and every attitude and action of human beings, and it is
the key that unlocks the mystery of the structural formation of the char-
acter of a human being.”27 Because each individual is essentially different
from every other individual, no human name can express the person. It is
only in the mystical union with God that the individual can be truly named,
and the union comes about through “a free and personal self-giving.”28 The
commonality between God and human beings—the free nature of the per-
son—provides the basis for a further ascent, but it is no longer intellectual.
Further ascent comes from the free personal encounter. Philosophy finds its
completion in mystical theology, as Stein writes in her last work: “Thus upon
completing the ascent, positive and negative theologies give way to mystical
theology, which in utter stillness enters into union with the Ineffable.”29
Just as God can only be approached through negative theology, oth-
er people are also only encountered in mystery. Other people are unknow-
able: “Whatever we know or divine of the deeply hidden nature in ourselves
and in others remains dark, mysterious, and ‘ineffable.’”30 There are ethical
consequences to this insight: just as in the mystical life, in contemplation of
God, one must refrain from mistaking the images used to represent God
with the actual uncreated creator, so also one must be similarly cautious in
relations with other people. The other is never merely this or that; never able
to be objectified into some universal category.
26
Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY:
St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 121.
27
Stein, FEB, 502.
28
Ibid., 459.
29
Stein, Knowledge and Faith, 89.
30
Stein, FEB, 505.
So, we find in the ascent to the meaning of being a culmination in
the union of God and man by means of their mutual free personality. Per-
haps Finite and Eternal Being is not a book of philosophy at all. Perhaps it is
mystical theology, culminating as it does in a propadeutic to the mystical life;
a meditation on the hidden and free depths of the human soul, where God
and the human meet. The depths are hidden because they are free and must
be unfathomable to contain the unfathomable God. We must be unknowable
because God is unknowable. The focus on the individuality of the human
soul is revealed at the end to be the key to the understanding of the whole
work. The ascent to know God, if kept strictly philosophical, will be forced
to stop. But the structure of the human being as a free spiritual being, which
is shown to us in the unknowability of the person, provides the way for the
encounter with God, Who is the ultimate free spiritual being. The image-rela-
tionship of the human person and God makes the completion of the ascent
possible, and leads to the “the future fulfillment of the original ordination
of the natural being of people: their participation in divine life by means of
free, personal self-giving. A humanity united in Christ and through Christ is
the temple in which the Triune God has his abode.”31
—Benedictine University
31
Ibid., 527.
Glenn Chicoine 31
Present Potential in Edith Stein’s

Finite and Eternal Being, Chapter Two
Glenn Chicoine
Abstract
This paper follows the analysis from self to God in chapter two
of Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being. It proposes and brings
further to light the role she implies therein for the ‘real potential’
of the present moment and thereby uncovers key aspects of her
analysis. The key aspects of Stein’s analysis, which elucidate the
‘real potential’ of the present moment, are (a) the potential at-
tributable to the immediate self, (b) the potential in the world,
or creaturely potential, which includes the potential attributable
to the self-in-the-world, and (c) the pure potential that enables
an ego-pole over against a world to exist whatsoever. This last
potential correlates with “absolute being” in Stein’s sense, which
includes essential being, and ultimately bridges temporality and
Eternal Being. As Stein’s exposition suggests, only Divine Pure
Act can actualize pure potential for there at all to be a self and
world.
Introduction
Edith Stein implies, in her philosophical analysis from self to God in chapter
two of Finite and Eternal Being,1 that there exists ‘real potential’ that is both
1
Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of
Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt, Collected Works of Edith Stein, ed. L. Gelber and Ro-
maeus Leuven, vol. 9 (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2002; henceforth, FEB);
Edith Stein, Endliches und ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins, Anhang:
Martin Heideggers Existenzphilosophie and Die Seelenburg, Eingeführt und bearbeitet
von Andreas Uwe Müller, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe, vol. 11/12, Hg. im Auftrag der
deutschen Ordensprovinz des Teresianischen Karmel vom Internationalen Edith
Stein Institut Würzburg, Unter wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeit von Hanna-Barbara
Gerl-Falkovitz (Freiburg/Basel/Wien: Herder Verlag, 2006; henceforth, EES).
© Glenn Chicoine, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall 2013)
32 Finite and Eternal Being, Chapter Two
within and protends from the present moment.2 Uncovered by undeniable
self-existence, Stein explains, are the being of the self, the self of the being,
and the self that is aware both of itself and its act, and from these, given the
stream of experience, she exposits or argues for the explanatory and lived
presence of God. The grounding for Stein’s claims, as well as the notion
of real potential as implied in her analysis, can be found in the surrounding
context within which the second chapter of Finite and Eternal Being is situated.
Stein, through much of her career, worked toward founding a doc-
trine of being, while continuing the process of coming to terms with the
thought of both Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas.3 In particular, Stein
took the act/potency distinction to be an interpretive key to Aquinas, on the
one hand, but also the default commonality between Aquinas and Husserl,
on the other hand.4 She had previously undertaken an analysis from self to
God in her Potency and Act.5 Nevertheless, even though, as she tells us, the
initial section of both Potency and Act and Finite and Eternal Being remain es-
sentially the same, the different wording and development of both texts (as
her reader sees) makes the first part of Potency and Act relevant and useful for
reading the corresponding section of the subsequent work.6
2
Drafts toward a longer version of this paper received extensive critical input
from Robert E. Wood of the University of Dallas. Any enduring shortcomings are
mine. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 2010 Annual Confer-
ence on Christian Philosophy: Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being, April 23rd–24th, at
Franciscan University of Steubenville, Steubenville, Ohio. Input from several present
helped its completion. For another essay on this topic but with different emphases,
see Karl Schudt, “Edith Stein’s Proof for the Existence of God from Conscious-
ness,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82:1 (Winter 2008): 105–25.
3
To be sure, ‘Husserl’ here becomes in effect phenomenology and ontology
in general, along with Hedwig Conrad-Martius in particular, while ‘Aquinas’ becomes
in effect scholasticism in general, along with Augustine in particular. Stein, “Preface
of the Author,” in FEB, xxvii and xxxi–ii; chap. I, § 2, p. 6; § 3, p. 12; chap. II, § 2,
pp. 35–36, and 35–36nn5–8 (pp. 553–54); § 4, p. 43 and 43n25 (p. 555); § 6, p. 54n34
(p. 556); and § 7, p. 57n36 (p. 556). Etc. For the notes, respectively, see Stein, EES,
pp. 40–42nn7–10; p. 47n29; Anhang I, p. 465 (also for Heideggerian “thrownness”
[Geforwenheit], pp. 447–81, passim); and p. 59n48, with Anhang I, from pp. 495–499.
Besides Husserl, Stein follows Augustine, Confessions, bk. XI, 26 (33)–31 (41).
4
Stein, “Preface of the Author,” in FEB, xxvii–viii; chap. I, § 1, pp. 1–2, and
chap. II, § 1, pp. 31–35; also § 2, p. 37n9 (p. 554); § 3, p. 41 (p. 554); Stein, EES, p.
42n11; and p. 45n24.
5
Edith Stein, Potency and Act: Studies toward a Philosophy of Being, trans. Walter
Redmond, introduction by Hans Rainer Sepp, Collected Works of Edith Stein 11 (Wash-
ington, D.C.: ICS Publications; henceforth, PAA).
6
The corresponding section is the “first part” of FEB, literally chapter two.
Specifically, Stein writes that she only carried over untouched “the beginning of Part
1” of PAA to FEB. But the content of the rest of PAA, pt. I, is scattered throughout
Glenn Chicoine 33
Not unlike Aquinas in his De ente et essentia, who first covers being
and after that essence, in Finite and Eternal Being, after her introductory chap-
ter, Stein addresses being in chapter two and then essence in chapter three.7
Foundational for the rest of her book on the meaning of Being—since they
establish Eternal Being, self being, and essential being, with act/potency
pursued in each—these two chapters conclude to God being discoverable
as present to, and sustaining of, ego-experience, and as grounding the trans-
experiential, a-temporal stance of essence, respectively.8
At the beginning of chapter two, with the act/potency distinction
at hand, Stein begins with a concise statement of the hierarchy of being
expressed in De ente essentia: matter/form substance; nonmaterial, intellec-
tual substance; and the First Existent, God.9 Delaying an analysis of the
more purely Aristotelean components of the hierarchy until chapter four,
she takes from the second level (i.e., nonmaterial, intellectual substance) the
well-known distinction in something, or some being (ens), between ‘whatness’
or quiddity (essentia, quidditas) and ‘to be’ or actual existence (esse).10 Things
exist; and nothing brings itself into existence. To this point, Stein writes that
“whatever receives being is in potency with respect to this very being which
it receives.”11 Thus, to be potential is not to be nonexistent, nor is it a mere
logical possibility;12 rather, it is to be already a mode of being such that its
actuality is a move to higher being relative to it.
Analogically signified, actual existence is ultimately based on Pure
Divine Existence and Act, which it is Stein’s project in part to understand
the remainder of FEB, chap. II. See Stein, “Author’s Forward” in PAA, and chap. I,
§§ 1–3, pp. 1–26. Cf. Stein, “Preface of the Author,” in FEB, pp. xxvii–viii; and esp.
chap. II, § 2, pp. 35–38, as well as with §§ 3–7, pp. 38–60, passim.
7
Cf. e.g. St. Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence, translated, with an intro-
duction and notes by Armand Maurer, 2nd rev. ed., Mediaeval Sources in Translation
I (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,1969), “Prologue,” chaps.
I–II, pp. 28–44, along with chaps. III–IV, pp. 45–58, passim (henceforth, BE–M);
Stein FEB, chaps. II–III, pp. 35–120.
8
Also, both chapters are basic to the culminating chapter six, “The Mean-
ing of Being.” Specifically, chapter two is foundational especially for chapters seven
and eight—Stein’s Anthropology and Doctrine of Individuality, respectively—while
chapter three is foundational especially for chapters four and five—her Doctrine of
Form, Matter, Nature, and Substance, and her Doctrine of Existents as such or the
Transcendentals, respectively.
9
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 1, pp. 31–35, esp. 32–33; and Aquinas, BE–M, chaps.
II, IV, and V.
10
Aquinas, BE–M, chap. IV, pars. 6–8, pp. 55–57.
11
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 1, pp. 33–34, esp. 33. Cf. chap. I, § 2, p. 4; and § 4, p.
20.
12
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 6, p. 49; and chap. III, § 2, p. 68.
more fully.13 In God, existence and essence are one whereas in everything
else they are conceivably distinct.14 In and through “the realm of that which
is [Seiende],” while “comprising both finite and infinite being and as simulta-
neously encompassing the abyss which separates the former from the latter,”
God’s actual existence subsists in and of itself whereas in everything else
actual existence is received.15 Hence, God is Being itself.16 And Being itself,
Stein writes immediately after chapter two, “is everything.”17 She will later add
Divine Intellect, accounting for the discovered and not humanly made na-
ture of essence as well as for all or any meaning whatsoever.18 Given such
Fullness, “only what is nothing is not.”19 This makes true annihilation at least
conceivable, whether or not it is possible.
The Importance of ‘Real Potential’
Stein next turns to self-existence as her starting point proper20 and this be-
gins my primary focus. This section’s three-part title in Potency and Act offers
an itinerary of her intended course of argument, which is given as follows:
“The immanent starting point of philosophy. Act and potency in the imma-
nent sphere. From the immanent to the transcendent sphere.”21 I propose,
as noted, to further uncover that in this in her argument there is implied
an integral role for real potential that is within and that protends from the
present moment. “Real things” are that which are accessed in the natural
13
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 3, p. 41.
14
Stein, FEB, chap. I, § 1, pp. 1–2; chap. II, § 1, pp. 33–34; § 2, pp. 37–38; §
3, pp. 41–42; and § 7, pp. 56–60, esp. 59; and Aquinas, BE–M, chap. IV, par. 6, p. 56;
and chap. V, par. 1, p. 60.
15
Stein, FEB, chap. I, § 2, p. 4 (brackets in the original); and Aquinas, BE–M,
chap. V, pars. 1–3, pp. 60–62.
16
Aquinas, BE–M, chap. V, pars. 1–3, pp. 60–62.
17
Stein, FEB, chap. III, § 1, p. 61; see also chap. II § 2, pp. 37–38; § 3, pp.
41–42. This apparent pantheism and reduction of God to the formal existence of
‘the things which are’ are allayed by Stein’s analogically proportionate predication
between God and things due to the infinite difference between God and things. See
chap. II, § 2, pp. 37–38. Cf. Aquinas, BE–M, chap. V, par. 2, pp. 60–61.
18
Stein, FEB, chap. III, § 1, pp. 61–62; § 2, pp. 62–68, esp. 66–67; and § 12,
pp. 105–8.
19
Stein, FEB, chap. III, § 2, p. 68. Cf. § 1, pp. 61–62. See also chap. VI, § 1, p.
326.
20
Stein, FEB, chap. II, §§ 2–7, pp. 35–60; initially § 2, pp. 35–38.
21
Stein, PAA, chap. I, § 1, p. 9.
Glenn Chicoine 35
attitude prior to systematic reflection.22 In line with Stein’s scholastic pole,
‘real’ means “not nothing” and “in the thing.”23 “The thing,” she writes, “is a
self-enclosed, independent actuality…, a ‘something’ which bears its essence
within itself and which with the essence stands upon itself.”24
Thus, given potential as a preliminary stage of higher, actual being,
the “real” of real potential in my thesis also denotes “real being,” which Stein
eventually calls an unfolding “from potency toward act and within time and
space.”25 So, real being is temporal. Since in my focus Stein remains oriented
in ego-experience we are concerned exclusively with experiential and not ob-
jective time.26
Then too, in line with Stein’s Husserlian pole, given temporal experi-
ence, ‘protention’ in my thesis refers either to the projecting or sustaining of
conscious contents.27 The term goes with ‘retention.’ “These terms,” Stein
writes, “are indicative of the fact that the contents of the past and future
are ‘held’ by the present now,”28 without the past and future being able to be
spatialized, as if allowing entrance and egress. This explains, at least termino-
logically, my proposal that given awareness of self-existence there is integrally
real potential that is within and that protends from the present moment.
In phenomenology there is exclusively neither subjectivity nor ob-
jectivity.29 Since there is in this way initial and ever possible descriptive and
systematic subject/object confluence present potential that is real and that
protends resides either in the self or in things, or both; in things, of course,
in light of the actualization of things by, or with respect to, their presentation
in the self, including when the things originate extra-mentally.
22
Stein, FEB, chap. III, § 10, pp. 101–2, esp. 102; chap. IV, § 3, no. 2, p. 165;
and chap. VI, § 1, p. 331.
23
Stein, FEB, chap. III, § 2, p. 68; chap. IV, § 3, no. 20, p. 217; and chap. V, §
3, p. 282.
24
Stein, FEB, chap. IV, § 3, no. 20, p. 217.
25
Stein, FEB, chap. VI, § 1, p. 331.
26
For Stein remaining in ego-experience, see Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 7, p. 55;
and chap. III, § 3, p. 71.
27
See e.g. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans.
Fred Kersten, Edmund Husserl: Collected Works, vol. 2 (The Hague/Boston/Lan-
caster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), § 77, pp. 174–75 (henceforth, IDE–I);
and E. Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917),
trans. John Barnett Brough, Edmund Husserl: Collected Works, vol. 4 (Dordrecht/
Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), § 19, p. 47, §§ 24 and 26, pp.
54–55, and 57–59, and §§ 27–32, pp. 59–73.
28
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 6, p. 50n32 (p. 555); Stein, EES, 53n38.
29
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 2, p. 36; § 4, p. 43; § 6, pp. 53–54.
Finally, consider in its constitution the existent self, with its exis-
tence, its objects (including itself as a unique type of transcendent object),
and its continual presentation as self-and-world.30 Given this and the undeni-
able awareness of self-existence we must account for the absolute possibility
of ego-pole vis-à-vis world or object-pole. This is to give the conditions of
possibility of anything whatsoever insofar as Stein remains oriented in ego-
experience in my focus.
Hence, reiterating real potential that is within, and that protends
from, the present moment there is (a) potential attributable to the immedi-
ate self, (b) potential in the world, or creaturely potential (including potential
attributable to the self-in-the-world), and (c) pure potential enabling an ego-
pole over against a world. This last potential correlates with “absolute being”
in Stein’s sense, which includes essential being and which bridges temporality
and Eternal Being; the latter being at this point merely a concept.31 While
not exactly in the forgoing terms and categories in chapter two Stein refers
periodically to these spheres en masse; a totality that entails in her exposition
a present, requisite, and minable realm of potential that she later delineates
more extensively.32
Stein first proclaims indubitable ego-existence: “I am conscious of
my own being.”33 She also equates existence with life.34 Given this primor-
dial awareness of its existence the self can subsequently reflect upon itself
“purely,” which is to say, with its many presentations seen in the manner in
which they present without prejudice and as simply ‘being there.’ In this light,
and as Stein’s exposition progresses, the self is actually seen to co-present both
as self/world and act/potency.35 In this way the self turns from its natural
attitude and external objects and finds immediately three areas of concern:
(1) the being of which the self is conscious (the corollary of our [a], above);
(2) the self that is conscious of its being (the corollary of our [b], above); and
(3) the “intellectual movement [or stirring]” (geistige Regung) in which the self
30
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 5, p. 47; § 6, pp. 48–49 and 53; and § 7, p. 56.
31
By the expression “absolute being,” Stein means a realm encompassing
various conceivabilities that, while not necessarily Supreme Being, are at least nei-
ther actual, nor potential preliminarily to the actual. See Stein, PAA, chap. I, § 2, pp.
20–23. Cf. Husserl, IDE–I, §§ 49–50, pp. 109–14.
32
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 1, pp. 33–34; § 3, pp. 38–39 and 41–42; § 6, p. 52;
and § 7, p. 57; and chap. VII, § 3, nos. 1–4, pp. 363–78; § 8, pp. 424–27; and § 9, nos.
1–4, pp. 427–44.
33
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 2, pp. 35–36, esp. 36. Stein cites Augustine’s De trini-
tate, bk. X, chap. 3 (9, 12–16), and bk. XV, chap. 12 (12, 21).
34
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 3, p. 38; and § 6, pp. 48 and 52.
35
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 3, pp. 38–39; § 4, p. 43; § 5, pp. 46–47; and § 6, pp.
52–55.
Glenn Chicoine 37
exists, conscious both of itself and of the intellectual movement (the corol-
lary of our [c], above).36 We will now address each of these areas.
The Being of Self-Being (§§ 2–4)
When the self turns to its being as such (expressed in [1] above), it finds a
blend of being and non-being.37 This is to look at the self simply as ‘being
there,’ without (for instance) describing its structure, and thereby to uncover
pertinent ontological categories. However, existent self-act, or intellectual
movement, entails ontological peril since, given its contingent being and non-
being, it is of a piece with that same contingency.
In Stein’s exposition, intellectual movement soon becomes the “ex-
periential unit.”38 This unit is the whole of whatever is experienced either in
one mode, or at one moment, or point of ongoing temporal experience. Af-
ter that, the experiential unit is exposited as being determined by its content.39
Again, in experience, there is de facto co-presentation of self and world, inner
and outer.40 Hence, self-act, which is nothing in itself without its content, is
continually in danger of passing like each experiential unit, except for the ego’s
additional endurance from unit to unit.41 But, since the contingency of self-
act coexists with accompanying potential, that potential, which is attributable
to the immediate self and world, secures to a degree that same contingency:
“I can think, I can exist.”
There are at least two ways to view experiential temporality. One is
in a continuum that overarches the present.42 We live in unities, Stein writes,
“from-the-past-into-the-future whereby the potential is constantly actualized
and the actual constantly sinks back into potentiality.”43 The other is in the
present, from which self-experience protends.44 In its projecting and sustain-
ing of content from, and into, the immediate past and future, protention
makes self-act possible. Yet, whereas the self never accomplishes truly stable,
36
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 2, pp. 36–37; and Stein, PAA, chap. I, § 2, p. 13, and
“Index of German expressions,” pp. 441 and 450.
37
38
39
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 5, pp. 46–47.
40
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 5, pp. 46–47; and § 6, pp. 53–54.
41
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 2, p. 37; § 5, pp. 46–47; § 6, pp. 48–49 and 53; and §
7, pp. 55 and 56.
42
43
44
or, say, “full” existence or life, the self always exists—to the extent that it ex-
ists—in the present.45 Simultaneously, the present is determinately between
the immediate past and future; without these it would not be the present. To
that degree, the self in the present is “without temporal dimension.”46 The
otherwise enduring characteristics of the self in the present collapse. It is
manifestly “selective” (punktuell), or “here and there.” There is no one self-
act. In other words, in the mind/body churning that is able to be sorted, for
example, into intention, volition, and cognition, the temporal modes of past,
present, and future manifest variously, while always already existing in the
present. For instance, I can turn in memory to my past: a turning (consisting
of present and past) which is also, with the turning, thereby moving into the
future. The future, then, in one tack, is the sustained or projected presence
of potential self-act. So, being neither linear nor sequential, experience is the
present actualization of protentive and real potential.47
This is to say that, because of potentiality, the present is not merely
nondimensional; not merely phenomenal. For one thing, in principle, each
actuality must have commensurate potentiality.48 As I reach for the apple
on my desk I am only in certain respects in apparent indeterminacy. Rath-
er, I regularly—yes often must—follow prearranged, often concrete paths.49
Therein, either in presentation or concept, I find an apperceptive plenum of-
fering immediate, requisite potential to every actuality.50 If really reaching for
an apple, I disclose an apple and not an orange. Hence, the present is not only
a combination of being and nonbeing, and act and potency, but it is a combi-
nation “in which,” Stein writes, “these opposites are sublated [aufgehoben].”51
Although learning about the present’s frail transience from Hedwig Conrad-
Martius’s work, Stein instead conceives the present to be ontologically di-
mensional.52 In a word, for her, the being of the self has ‘breadth.’
45
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 3, pp. 38–43, esp. 38–39; § 4, pp. 44 and 46; and § 7,
pp. 56–57.
46
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 3, pp. 40–41; and Stein, EES, pp. 44–45.
47
48
49
50
51
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 3, p. 41 (brackets in the original).
52
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 2, p. 39 and 39n8 (p. 554), and p. 40; and § 3, pp. 38–
41 and 38–41nn13–22 (p. 554), esp. p. 40; and chap. IV, § 2, no. 7, p. 139n35 (p. 570);
Stein, EES, 42n10, pp. 43–45nn14–24, and p. 128n43. See Hedwig Conrad-Martius,
“Die Zeit,” Philosophischer Anzeiger II, 2 and 4 (1927/28): 143–182, and 345–390, esp.
2:17 and 4:387; reprinted in H. Conrad-Martius, Schriften zur Philosophie, vol. I, hg. Eb-
erhard Avé-Lallement (München: Kösel-Verlag, 1963), 101–84, esp. 112–13, 124–26,
130, and 139–43.
Glenn Chicoine 39
Even though in this way requisitely present, the potentiality of the
‘now’ is less alive than when it moves into the illumination of actual life.53 By
contrast, since an array of actuality remains always possible (given undeni-
able self-existence), and since experience includes the mental and extra-men-
tal, potentiality in principle always outstrips actual life in extent. “In other
words,” Stein writes, “the vitality of the ego does not embrace everything
which appertains to it.”54 So the self ’s underlying sustenance by potentiality,
together with the basis of that potentiality’s rudimentary level of being, are
beyond the self as carrier.55 Indeed, according to the Aquinas passage that
Stein has already cited, not only must potentiality’s actual existence be elicited
by another—now reasoned to be ultimately beyond the self as carrier—but
potentiality’s less lively, rudimentary existence must be thus elicited too.
For Stein, although undeniable, the ego endures, yet, given its perva-
sive and underlying potentiality, without being actual throughout its duration.
There are gaps; there are silent depths.56 The ego is at once actual and tem-
poral, which indicates both ontological fullness and frailty.57 This condition
gives rise to binary contrasts, she reasons, yielding the concepts that we have
seen that culminate in utterly coherent, a-temporal existence: being, non-
being, temporality, actuality, potentiality, Pure Being, and Eternal Being,58 the
last two of which are God-concepts.59 Having no non-actualized potential,
and so infinitely unlike human temporal experience, God is also conceivably
“Pure Act,” and so one candidate for the ground of being beyond, but in-
cluding, the self.60
We have now explicated Stein on the being of the self in its being/
nonbeing and act/potency transience, together with the potential attributable
immediately to the self, given indubitable self-existence. The self is sustained
by mostly un-manifest, though real, potential that outstrips the self in extent,
and so it requires a ground beyond, and including, the self.
53
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 3, pp. 39 and 41.
54
55
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 6, pp. 49 and 53–54; and § 7, pp. 55 and 58.
56
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 2, p. 37; § 6, pp. 52–53 (esp. 53); and § 7, pp. 57–58;
along with chap. VII, § 3, nos. 1–4, pp. 363–78 (esp. no. 1, p. 364), and § 9, nos. 2–4,
pp. 430–44.
57
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 3, p. 41; cf. § 2, p. 37 and § 6, pp. 53–54; and cf. chap.
VI, § 4, no. 3, p. 344; and no. 7, pp. 353–54.
58
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 1, p. 31; § 2, p. 37; and § 3, pp. 38–39.
59
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 1, p. 31; § 3, pp. 41–42; and § 7, pp. 55 and 59; and
chap. III, § 1, p. 61; and Aquinas, BE–M, chap. I, par. 6, p. 33; chap. IV, pars. 8–9, pp.
57–58; and chap. V, pars. 1–3, pp. 60–62.
60
The Self of Self-Being (§§ 5–6)
Stein subsequently turns her examination to the self that is conscious of

its existence (answering [2] above).61 This is to look at the self in its charac-
teristic presentations, irrespective of its existence, and hence to describe its
essential structures. This theme is neither psychological, nor anthropological,
nor necessarily a pursuit of phenomenological constitution, although there
are elements of constitution. Instead, using insights from these specialties,
Stein continues to analyze the existential predicament of the self by means
of this theme.
Ego and object are integrally part of each experience.62 With its parts
rising and declining the experiential unit also rises and declines.63 What is
experienced in this manner, that is, the presentative totality, is distinct, of
course, from the “specific character or mode of [its] being as such”; for in-
stance, that it is an experiential unit.64 In any case, an experience is united in
its content.65 Ego and object, then, are not only in each and every experience;
they are ontological conditions of each and every experience; for example, they
condition you (ego) presently reading these words (object). With the permu-
tations of the parts granted, once the overall unit reaches as it were “a critical
mass” of change, it disperses, replaced by another:66 you are no longer read-
ing; in kind, others will read. Still, except for traces and repositioning, when
existent instances of these units pass, they pass ineluctably and forever.67
The ego, on the one hand, and the past and future entailing temporal
experience, on the other hand, differ regarding act and potency. Then too,
the distal past and future differ in presentation from the immediate past and
future. For instance, you can immediately recall an event from your child-
hood, even palpably retrieve extra-mental objects therefrom, while at the
same time your childhood is ultimately without life and dimension in the
distal past.68 In actualizing the memory, you are the agent. In the retrieval of
extra-mental objects from your past, the world offers you aspects of a whole
in which (at this point in our exposition) you are wholly part. Protended into
future potential, each actual experience, which includes you in the world, is
the world’s spilled cornucopia upon which you rise and fall. “I walk across
the floor.” Hence, always presented and lived through in the ‘now,’ there is po-
61
62
63
64
65
66
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 4, p. 45; and § 5, pp. 46–47.
67
Cf. Stein, FEB, chap. III, § 2, pp. 62–68; etc.
68
Cf. Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 6, pp. 48–52.
Glenn Chicoine 41
tential for the things offered as well as for my being-in-the-world at any one
point.
Especially to the degree that it is not actualized, the ego in the present
moment shares potentiality eo ipso with the immediate past and future. For
example, “my next step is enabled and positioned by my last step.” Whatever
annihilation might be, it would have to sever the link of ego-time: potenti-
ality. Furthermore, the self does not actualize everything that actualizes in
relation to the self.69 If there is a knock at the door, a new experiential unit
arises, remains, and passes. Recall that we are not concerned with objective
time; that the objective and subjective are not exclusively distinct, and that
the basis of the plenum of potentiality is beyond and yet includes the self. So
“where,” Stein asks, “if not in time, do these units of experience have their
stand?”70
As seen above, Stein posited an analogy between manifest finitude in
experiential transience and conceptual a-temporality in Eternal Being itself.71
To secure, if not to in any way have, the existential moment, the self—albeit
fleetingly and at this point at least metaphorically—must ‘touch upon’ or
‘strain toward’ Existence as such, which again evinces the concept of True
Being, whether or not such being obtains.72 This is because the self cannot
strain toward anything else to be ultimately grounded.
The Self Conscious of Itself and World (§§ 6–7)
Filled with, and of a piece with, the experiential unit, the ego-and-world that
is available to self-reflection can be considered as such.73 This answers (3)
given above: the question of the intellectual movement in which the self ex-
ists, conscious both of itself and its movement.74 This is to look at the self
in the following ways: as the observer of itself, the self that is in this way
observed, and each instance of ongoing observation. That is, somehow, the
vantage of the ego takes in the vantage of the ego. That is, ‘transcendence’
less answers, than names, the paradox.
69
70
71
72
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 4, pp. 45–46; cf. § 3, p. 38 and § 7, p. 55.
73
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 6, p. 48. I do not mean “pure ego,” which has been
Stein’s orientation all along (esp. § 2, p. 36, § 6, p. 48, and § 7, p. 56), but “ego-and-
world considered as it is,” which in my focus is another way of considering ‘the
things that are.’
74
Recall that, irrespective of any of its parts, a whole experience in
fact rises, reaches its height, and passes. This means that the potential for
the whole experience is categorically different from the potential for any of
its parts, including the engaged ego and its object as parts.75 ‘To be a self ’ is
(at least) to be something that, over against the world, endures from expe-
riential unit to unit, with itself distally and in toto also rising and falling. In
other words, besides being in the world, the self is the ego-pole of self and
world, inner and outer. For the self to exist just means “to live”; but to live
in such a way that both existence and nonexistence have ultimate meaning
for it. Hence, the potentials for the self to exist and to be a self that entails
existential meaning are similarly different in kind from any of the parts of
the experience, object, and ego in the world.76 In the end, beyond being and
non-being there is the question of the ego’s own beginning and end, which
is unanswered by experience.77 This is the case even if there is for the whole
experience an otherwise conditioning worldly nexus of potential that includes
a potential for ego and object as such; for example effectively living in terms
of psychophysiology, society, and within a sustaining environment. This is
the case since, as is experientially testable, in the face of continual change in
its determining content the self as ego-pole of self-and-world is non-self-
generating in origin; it is non-self-sustaining in the present moment; it is
nothing in itself; and yet it is existentially sustained throughout these onto-
logical modes.78 And, by means of the self, any conditioning worldly nexus
faces the same ultimate question of meaning.79
Experience, ego, and object manifest correlative unity. I think, I am
‘in’ (immanent in), as well as ‘in contrast to’ (transcendent to) an inner and
outer world.80 Moreover, while there is a single unstoppable experiential
stream, the ego, in retention and protention, does not immediately release
its immediate content.81 Rather, the ego (so to speak) “straddles” the con-
tent. Even if extinction were possible, indeed, even if it were imminent, we
are creatures that, on this side of extinction at any rate, cannot completely
let things go. Hence, once more, transcendence—in Stein’s case Husserlian
transcendence—becomes relevant.82 We are always also beyond the things of
75
For whole and part, cf. perhaps Stein, FEB, chap. III, § 7, pp. 85–90, esp.
89.
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
Stein FEB, e.g. “Preface of the Author,” xxvii–viii; chap. I, § 3, p. 12; § 4,
pp. 15–17; chap. II, § 2, p. 36; § 5, p. 47 and 47n27 (p. 555); and § 6, p. 48 and 28 (p.
Glenn Chicoine 43
experience, together with being beyond the entire experience, and transition-
ing. Paradoxically, this tends to invite, foreshadow, or explain extinction.
Yet, although Husserlian transcendence is relevant, Stein here either
omits Husserl’s transcendental idealism or reduces it to the realm of consti-
tution.83 On the contrary, it is the very question of ultimate transcendental
ground that, beyond constitution, is required for an explication of the poten-
tial whole experience; including the self, the world, and the self as self.
Answering this concern, Stein articulates realms of immanence,
transcendence, and Pure or True Being in the corresponding section of Poten-
cy and Act.84 Therein transcendence bifurcates into that which “heralds itself
in immanence” and “absolute being.” Bridging immanence and True Being,
she says, absolute being is approachable in one way by reason. She arrives at
this ground in the earlier work once she has suggested that absolute being is
required by “the very frailty of my own being.”85 She does roughly the same
thing in the second chapter of Finite and Eternal Being, while taking up this
ground more fully in the book’s first culmination, chapter six, “The Meaning
of Being.”86
Husserlian transcendence is also relevant because, as is true of ego
and object, potency transcends act as well, whether qualifiedly or absolutely.
Potential as potential is, by definition, not actual, even when considered with-
in the limits of possible experience. At the same time, its imminent actualiza-
tion is already higher and livelier than its pure potentiality; it is on its way to
immanence. And self-potency (e.g. the ability to tell a joke) in particular tran-
scends even its own concomitant self-actualization (telling a joke). These all
involve qualified transcendence. By contrast, the pure potential of the whole
experience, the world, and the self as self, is absolute transcendence, which is
a corollary of Stein’s concept of absolute being.
The ego is not in all ways in act. It exhibits alternately both “actual
potentiality,” which is variously proto- or pre-realized, and a certain overarch-
ing indeterminacy, whether in its transition from potency to act in general
and from past to future in particular, or in its ultimate origin and end. There
is no Archimedean point for this final and absolutely pure potential, whereas
555); Husserl, IDE–I, e.g. §§ 27–55, pp. 51–130; and §§ 78–79, pp. 177–90; and Der-
mot Moran, “Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl,
Edith Stein, and Karl Jaspers, “American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 82.2 (Spring
2008): 265–91, esp. pts. II–III, pp. 271–80.
83
Cf. Stein, PAA, e.g. chap. VI, § 23, “Excursus on transcendental idealism
[viz. contra Husserl],” pp. 359–79; brackets are mine.
84
Stein, PAA, chap. I, § 2, pp. 20–23.
85
Stein, PAA, chap. I, § 2, pp. 21–22, esp. 21.
86
The second and third culminations are of course her philosophical anthro-
pology in chapter seven and her work on individuality in chapter eight.
potency and its actuation must be commensurate. Therefore, only absolutely
Pure Act can actuate absolutely pure potential. And if we conceive this new
final potential to be, or to be based on, absolute being shy of Pure Being—
say, to be essential being—what in turn is absolute, essential being based on
such that—in the face of constant ontological peril—we now exist undeni-
ably due to it? Ex hypothesi, it must be Being itself. No other ground suffices;
yet we endure.87
In De ente et essentia, Aquinas argues that Divine Pure Act and Sub-
sistent Existence accounts for the existent actualization of things other than
it.88 In his Third Way a Necessary Being accounts for the contingency, yet
nevertheless, the presentation of things.89 So too in Stein, Being itself ac-
counts for the undeniable and ineluctable existential sustenance of otherwise
ubiquitously contingent experience, self, and world.90
—University of Dallas
87
Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 6, pp. 53–55; and § 7, pp. 55–58. At this point Stein
turns to faith and theology as a greater vehicle than philosophy for intimacy with
God.
88
Aquinas, BE–M, chap. IV, pars. 6–8, pp. 55–57; and chap. V, pars. 1–3, pp.
60–62. Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 1, pp. 32–35; and § 3, pp. 41–43.
89
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, pt. I, q. 2 art. 3, c; Stein, FEB, chap. II, § 7, p. 59
and 59nn38–40 (p. 558); Stein, EES, p. 60nn51–53.
90
As is known, in Husserl, except for one proviso, the transcendency that is
God is in principle barred from the purview of phenomenology. Husserl, IDE–I, §
51 and “Note,” pp. 114–17; and § 58, pp. 133–34.
Sarah Borden Sharkey 45
Eternal Rest:
The Beauty and Challenge
of Essential Being
Sarah Borden Sharkey
Abstract
Stein develops a tri-partite account of being, distinguishing three
types of being: actual being, mental being, and essential being.
The third—essential being—is particularly significant for Stein’s
project of bringing together phenomenology and medieval meta-
physics; it provides a response to a weakness Stein sees in the
classic account of potency; it accounts for the deep intelligibility
of all that is; and it plays a role in Stein’s understanding of artistic
truth. In this piece, I lay out Stein’s understanding of essential
being and a few of the reasons she posits this notion of being.
I then contrast her account of essential being with at least one
interpretation (a ‘thin-essence’ existential reading) of Thomas
Aquinas on essence. Although Stein’s account of essential being
offers many advantages and answers certain difficult questions, I
end with challenges that her view faces, including what I see as a
problematic reliance on an overly spatial metaphor for being.
* * *
Stein’s notion of wesenhaftes Sein (i.e., essential being), as Kurt Reinhardt trans-
lates it, is a main theme of the third chapter of Finite and Eternal Being, and it
is one of Stein’s distinctive contributions to the philosophical conversation.
The notion of a being of the essence, or essential being, is not utterly new
with Stein in the history of philosophy,1 but it does not make an appearance
in contemporary philosophy—as far as I know—prior to Stein, particularly
in the way in which she uses it to marry phenomenology and a more meta-
physically informed realism regarding universals.
1
Henry of Ghent, for example, posits a “being of the essence” that has simi-
larities with Stein’s position.
© Sarah Borden Sharkey, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall 2013)
46 The Beauty and Challenge of Essential Being
There is also something absolutely beautiful about the idea. I find
the notion of a being that is rest—that there is a particular being to the intel-
ligible—to be lovely with important implications for our understanding of
individuality, art, essence, potency, and, ultimately, being.
In this paper, I would like, first, to lay out Stein’s understanding of
essential being and some of the attractions of her claim. I would then like
to compare Stein’s essential being to a Thomistic position on the being of
the essence, with a particular eye to Thomas’s notion of the limitation of act
by potency. Through this comparison I hope to bring out some of the chal-
lenges that come up for Stein’s notion of essential being as well as part of the
beauty and genius of it.
Stein’s Essential Being2
Stein writes the following in chapter three, section two: The “preeminence
[of essential being] in comparison with the actual experiental units lies in the
fact that, raised above the flux of time, it changelessly rests and abides on its
ontological summit.”3 Stein describes essential being as a kind of perfection
which is outside of time and beyond all change.4 It is being, but it is differ-
ent in kind from the being of little kids riding their bikes or the efficacious,
temporal nature of our actions.
Heidegger famously asked us to raise anew the question of the
meaning of being, and Stein responds by distinguishing differing types of
2
I seem to return to the same topics over and over. Stein’s account of es-
sential being has intrigued me for several years and less developed variants of this
discussion appear in my “The Meaning of Being in Thomas Aquinas and Edith
Stein” in Thomas Aquinas: Teacher and Scholar: The Aquinas Lectures at Maynooth, volume
2: 2002–2010, ed. James McEvoy, Michael W. Dunne, and Julia Hynes (Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 2011), 85–100; my “Edith Stein and Thomas Aquinas on Being and
Essence,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82: 1 (Winter 2008): 87–103; my
Thine Own Self: Individuality in Edith Stein’s Later Writings (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 2009), esp. chapter four; and my “How does One Limit
Being?: W. Norris Clarke on Thomas’s ‘Limitation of Act by Potency,’” in The Saint
Anselm Journal 7:1 (Fall 2009), an on-line journal found at http://www.anselm.edu/
Institutes-Centers-and-the-Arts/Institute-for-Saint-Anselm-Studies/Saint-Anselm-
Journal/Current-Issue.htm. The last piece has been particularly significant for the
current argument, and, although I have tried here to develop the argument more
fully, the second half of this piece draws heavily from the earlier version of a similar
argument written in honor of Fr. Clarke.
3
Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (Washington,
D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2002), 67 (henceforth, FEB).
4
See Stein, FEB, 67.
being. Not all being, according to Stein, is being in act. There is also a being
that is rest, a kind of eternal rest. We can perform, for example, the act of
understanding the Pythagorean theorem, and this event has actual being. But
there is also the being of the theorem itself—that is, the being not of my act
of grasping, but of the being of what is grasped. Stein claims that the Py-
thagorean theorem, as well as the structure of what I ought to be (whether I
ever achieve this or not), and all intelligible structures, possess essential being.
And that being exists and is, permanently and timelessly.
Stein makes clear that essential being is not divine being. It has a rela-
tion to divine being,5 but it is in itself finite. It lacks the perfection or plen-
titude of divine being, and essential being qua essential being does nothing.
It is, as Stein puts it, “inefficacious” and it can appear, in comparison to actual
being, to be “rigid and dead.”6 It is thus limited, ineffective, and non-actual.
Stein uses fairly strong language in contrasting essential and actual being. She
says of essential being that it is “not a becoming and passing away,” and that it
stands precisely “in opposition to actual being.”7 It is a kind of eternal rest (even
if not identified with divine being) in comparison to the vitality and motion
of actual being. Stein gives the example of the joy of a child: that joy in its
actual being belongs to a particular child at a particular time. It is temporal,
beginning perhaps at six a.m., and then undergoing a certain development,
fulfillment, and decline. That joy in its essential being, however, is prior to
any particular child experiencing joy and prior to there ever being a child, or
even a created order at all.8
Although I am less interested in this point at the moment, Stein
also contrasts essential being with mental being, or gedankliches Sein. Essential
being is not just the Pythagorean theorem as thought; it is the being of the
Pythagorean theorem itself, and insofar as I think well about that theorem, I
follow it along in its essential being.
The Place of Essential Being in Stein’s Work

Relation to Husserlian Phenomenology
Although not a frequent topic of discussion in Finite and Eternal Being, es-
sential being seems to hold an important place in Stein’s thought. I take it
to be tied to her project of articulating a broadly phenomenological posi-
tion in more metaphysical language.9 We might think of Husserl’s distinction
See especially ibid., III, §12.
5
Ibid., 67.
6
7
Ibid., 91.
8
Ibid., 95.
9
See, for example, Stein, FEB, 561n33 for a discussion of relation to a phe-
nomenological theory of essence.
between essences and facts. Essences are, for Husserl, necessary, permanent,
non-spatial, and atemporal. Facts, in contrast, are always contingent. It is a
fact that there are so many trees in the United States at this moment, but that
fact could have been otherwise. The existence of you and me at this moment
is a fact, but it could—tragically—not have been. Essences, however, could
never have been otherwise. Whether there are any triangles anywhere, it is
necessary that a triangle be a geometric figure with three interior angles add-
ing to 180 degrees. There are certain relations which, independent of all facts,
appear to be permanently true.
Husserl—particularly given certain readings of the epoché—almost
seems to suggest that essences are more real than actual things. And it is clear
throughout his work that he wants to uncover the ‘realm’ of eidetic structures
and articulates our mode of access to these eidetic necessities. Stein, in con-
trast to Husserl, articulates the distinction in metaphysical terms, distinguish-
ing not simply essences and facts but the being of each. But, further and more
significantly, she makes clear that essences are not more real than facts. She
explicitly claims that essential and actual being are co-equal.10 Both are truly
being and both have their own kind of perfection. But she does sharply
distinguish them. Actual being is a “perfection of being, ‘working itself out’ and
revealing itself in efficacious activity.”11 In contrast, essential being is “being-on-
its-summit,” repose in itself.12
Each year or so, I teach a course on Phenomenology, and, within the
first few days, I ask my students to attempt a number of eidetic analyses. These
generally do not go so well at the beginning; the students are tempted simply
to do an analysis of how we use language or to give a few general comments
unconnected to an attempt to encounter ‘the things themselves.’ But after a
few failed attempts, they gain some proficiency in the task. One of the best
moments is when they begin having fights about the eidetic structures. For
example, this year there was a rather vigorous fight that spilled over into the
break and continued after class. The topic was the structure of hoping versus
wishing, and there were disagreements about the way in which hoping af-
fects us (and whether such effects are essential to the act of hoping). What I
loved was that the students had a genuine disagreement and refused to accept
that this might simply be a different use of the same word. Whatever word
is used, they had become convinced that there were certain essential struc-
tures that could be picked out by any rational being. The clear underlying
conviction was that the structure of hoping is not, and cannot be, anything
one wants it to be, but is an act of particular sort with a very clear and even
10
See Stein, FEB, chap. III, §10, as well as page 106 and the discussion of
essential being in relation to the Trinity in the final section of chapter three.
11
Ibid., 92.
12
Ibid., 93.
precise nature. If one tries to make certain claims about hope, one simply has
not yet understood it.
Stein argues that, if there is some nature to our acts and if there are
permanent relations among these acts—such that anyone not fulfilling some
part of these relations is simply not hoping but merely wishing or perhaps
desiring—then they must be in some way.13 But their being does not seem
to be identical with any particular act of hoping. Our acts can more or less
perfectly actualize that structure; they can unfold that structure in time; but
none of our acts appear to be identical with the structure itself. If such a dis-
tinction is intelligible, then there must be—Stein claims—some being to the
structure itself which differs from the being of my or your particular act of
hoping. Furthermore, these essential structures give order to the life of the
ego and thus must be. That being, Stein claims, is properly essential being.14
Artistic Truth
In chapter five of Finite and Eternal Being, which is the chapter on the tran-
scendentals, Stein discusses a distinct kind of intelligibility: that of artistic
structures. In the section entitled “Artistic Truth,” Stein says:
If we now examine more closely what happens on the part of
the artist, we find—as was emphasized earlier—that the “emer-
gence” of the “idea” is more in the nature of receiving than of
creation…. The human intellect does not call ideas into Dasein;
it calls works into Dasein which it fashions upon the model of
ideas.15
There is, she claims, an ought to be for works of art, and this ought to be is not
simply the artist’s vision, but captures a pure form, an artistic ideal.16
She gives examples of works of art—a bust of Napoleon or perhaps
a play about his life, for example—which can be truer than history, that can
capture something of Napoleon, the man, better at times than even his own
13
Stein makes clear her commitment to this thesis: “Nevertheless, it cannot
be said that the nature of my joy is not prior to the actuality. Since we are able to
grasp the quid of the nature independent of its actualization in its object, the quid
of my joy must possess some sort of being in accordance with our assertion that
everything which is something must also be” (FEB, 83).
14
Ibid., 65.
15
Ibid., 301.
16
She says, “The work is not a genuine or true work of art if—though the
work expresses the intention of the artist—the ideas which the artist has fashioned
in his or her mind deviates from the pure idea” (FEB, 302).
choices.17 We have all met people who seem to have lost themselves, who
betray in various ways who they are. If facts can be untrue in this sense, they
must be untrue in comparison to something. This is part of the calling of the
artist, on Stein’s account: the artist’s job is to reveal truth and not merely the
facts of what occurred on day x or y. This truth is accounted for by essential
being. Stein says:
Now essential truth—understood as a congruity of the actual es-
sence with its primordial archetype (the pure form or idea)—is
found only where we also encounter the contrast between essen-
tial and actual being, i.e., in the world of those real things which
come into being and pass away in time.18
Making Sense of Potency
Stein employs essential being in order to make metaphysical sense of certain

phenomenological distinctions; she draws upon it in her account of the na-
ture of artistic truth, in contrast to other kinds of truth; and she uses it to
address an oddity in the Aristotelian and—as we shall soon see—particularly
the Thomistic understanding of potency.
Stein makes clear that neither the essence nor its essential being can
be identified with potencies in any straightforward way. She says:
The essence is not in time at all. For this reason it is not potential
in the sense in which the not yet fully alive joy is said to be poten-
tial. The being of the essence is not an inferior rudimentary phase
of actual being.19
Nonetheless, she describes the essence as “the condition of the possibility of
real being and of the latter’s actual and potential preliminary stages.”20
The notion of potency in general is a strange one. Potencies are non-
being of a certain sort, and yet they are not nothing. They are non-being with
a particular directedness and orientation toward certain forms of actualiza-
tion. It is, I think, a bit mysterious how something can be both non-being and
have character. Stein responds to this challenge by positing essential being.
Essential being is not mere potency; it is not a “rudimentary phase of [actual]
being,” or first steps into actual being. Rather, the types of steps a thing can
take into actual being are, Stein claims, laid out in essential being. Essen-
tial being accounts for why squirrels develop in certain ways—in contrast to
17
Ibid., 303.
18
Ibid., 304.
19
Ibid., 64.
20
Ibid., 68.
chipmunks—and how each of these animals can have such distinct forms of
potencies (i.e., distinct forms of non-actual being).
Without this distinction between actual and essential being, the kind
of non-being characteristic of potencies is, Stein thinks, quite unclear. The
detailed content of potencies—and yet their status as not-yet-fully-actualized
being—makes a ground in some other kind of being highly desirable. And
thus essential being can account for both the non-actual being of potencies
and yet the detailed character of them, which seems to require some kind of
being.
The Beauty of the Idea
Finally, I think that one of the most significant attractions of essential be-
ing is its sheer beauty. Stein’s account is clearly not Platonic. She makes clear
that essential being, although differing from actual and mental being, is never
wholly independent of either actual or mental being. Essential being is dis-
tinct, but inseparable, from the other types of being. Thus, the essential being
of the created order resides in God and God’s actual being, prior to the act
of creation. And in created things essential being is a being always accompa-
nying actual or mental being.
Although differing from Plato in this critical respect, Stein’s account
has something of the beauty of the Platonic account. This world is mysteri-
ous. It points beyond the ‘this,’ ‘here,’ and ‘now.’ It is alive with mystery; with
something more than ontic events and ‘one damn thing after another.’ There
is in everyday events something of the mystery of eternity; something of
the permanence of God; and, in the unfolding of each event, we bring a bit
of heaven to earth, thereby gaining a taste of the eternal rest possible in the
beatific vision. The sheer beauty of essential being is not a feature, I think,
we should disregard lightly. It does call to our hearts and can awaken us more
fully to the glory of what is.
Challenges
The Meaning of Being
Nonetheless, there are some challenges connected to Stein’s account. For

quite a while I was troubled by the question of what being means given Stein’s
tripartite division among actual being, essential being, and mental being.
What makes all three being, especially given Stein’s emphasis on essential be-
ing as opposed to act. Stein does, however, give us an answer to this question
expressed in a couple of places. Most important among these are her claims
in chapter six. Italicizing the claim for emphasis, she says:
Finite being is the unfolding of some meaning. Essential being is a timeless
(or non-temporal) unfolding above and beyond the contraries of potency and
act. Real being is an unfolding that proceeds from an essential form, from po-
tency toward act and within time and space. Conceptual being is an unfolding
in more than one sense.21
Stein here addresses the question, not of the meaning of being per se, but
of the meaning of finite being. But she does provide a striking answer to
the question nonetheless. Finite being—in all of its types—is fundamentally
unfolding. More basic for Stein than the relation between potency and act—
relations of becoming—are ones of unfolding. And all being—be it actual,
essential, or mental—is a kind of unfolding. Presumably, infinite being is that
in which all of the finite unfolding participates. It is not hard to see how finite
actual and mental being can be kinds of unfolding. When I think through a
math problem I walk through the steps, one-by-one. As a child grows and de-
velops, he or she unfolds the human structure a part at a time. It is less clear,
however, how finite essential being, particularly of ideal objects, can be a kind
of unfolding. The structure of what it means to be a human being does not
unfold, even if a child unfolds that structure in growing as a human being.
Stein responds to this by claiming that essential being is “a special
manner of the (non-temporal) unfolding.”22 There is a logic and set of rela-
tions to the Pythagorean theorem that could be unfolded temporally, and it
is thus intrinsically a kind of unfolding, even if, in its pure essential being, it
is not actually undergoing a process of unfolding. Thus, the meaning of be-
ing—at least finite being—is to unfold, or to reveal. What it means to be is to
lay-out or present oneself, whether it be actually, mentally, or essentially.
I think that there are still some mysteries about this response to the
question of the meaning of being that are well worth further investigation,
but I would like to focus on a different concern. For the moment, I will
simply accept that this is an adequate account of the meaning of being in
general. But I worry that there are still deeper challenges for her claim.
21
Ibid., 331.
22
She says, for example, “We have designated essential being as a being-
unfolded or unfolding [Entfaltung oder Entfaltetsein] of pure, meaningful structures”
(FEB, 327). And, for the sentence quoted above, “We may thus understand ideal being
as a special kind of essential being, and we may say that ideal being indicates a special
manner of the (non-temporal) unfolding of ideal objects” (FEB, 327). Presumably,
what she means by this distinction is that essential being as part of an actual being
unfolds in temporal ways, but in itself or as the being of an ideal object has merely a
non-temporal unfolding.
Stein’s position on essential being is clearly not Thomistic. There
are a number of different readings of Thomas on being but none of them
end up affirming anything quite like essential being. This, in itself, is not an
objection or even a challenge to Stein’s position. Stein never intended to be
Thomistic on this point, and she explicitly aligns herself, in section ten of
chapter three, with a Scotist rather than Thomist position on universals. As
Thomistic as she may be on other points, essential being was never intended
to be a point at which she places herself within the Thomistic tradition.23
I would, however, like to draw a comparison between Stein and
Thomas on essence and the being of the essence in order to draw out some
questions about both Thomas’s and Stein’s respective accounts of being. I am
interested primarily in an existential reading of Thomas on being and essence
because I think that this reading of Thomas brings out most clearly the dif-
ferences between Stein and Thomas.
Existentialist Thomism
Etienne Gilson should probably be given the credit for founding existen-
tial Thomism, although I will be following Fr. Norris Clarke’s reading more
closely. Existential Thomism, in contrast to other forms of Thomism, places
the act of existence at the center of its interpretation of Thomas’s claims.
This becomes particularly evident in the reading of essence. It is not merely
that things happen to exist or have actual being, or that we can talk about
God as pure act, but, rather, that the act of existence is the key to under-
standing what Thomas means by essence—and thus how he interprets the
whole of the created order.
In contrast, non-existential readings of Thomas understand exis-
tence as, in some sense, extrinsic to the essence. There is (in some sense) the
essence, on one side, which is given an act of existence. Now, in fact, essence
does not actually exist without existence but we can talk, in some sense, of
the “positive perfection” of the essence which is actualized by the act of
existence.24 Although this interpretation of Thomas does not posit essential
being, it articulates an account of essence with some important similarities to
Stein’s.
23
In Stein, FEB, chap. III, §8, Stein does analyze the notion of the ‘reception
of being’ in comparison to a Thomistic position.
24
See W. Norris Clarke, S.J., “What Cannot be Said in Saint Thomas’s Es-
sence-Existence Doctrine,” in The Creative Retrieval of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Essays in
Thomistic Philosophy, New and Old (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 129.
Clarke notes that this account is not so much unfaithful to Thomas as emphasizing
“the early, more Avicennian phase of his thought and language.”
In contrast, existential readings of Thomas understand the essence
to be, quite simply, a limitation of act but not something comparable to a
Steinian essence. There are at least two types of existential readings, and, for
the purposes of contrast, I would like to focus on the more radical of these
readings; what Clarke calls the “thin-essence” view (in contrast to a “thick-
essence” view). On this view, essence has, quite literally, no positive being
of any sort outside of the act of existence. One can distinguish essence and
existence but one does so in a way analogous to distinguishing an adverb and
a verb. The adverb is nothing but a description of how the verb is. Adverbs
have no being of their own; they are not nouns or things in any sense at all
but simply the how of some verb. In an analogous manner, essence—on the
more radical existential readings—is simply the how of an act of existence.
There are, thus, properly speaking, no positively existing essences of horses,
squirrels, or chipmunks. There are horse-y acts of existence, squirrelly acts of
existence, acts of existence in a chipmunkly style, etc. But the essence of each
of these is not anything in itself.25
The act of existence is the inner core of each thing. Existence does
not bring anything else (e.g., an essence) to act but, on the contrary, all the
perfection that a thing contains is contained solely in the act of existence
itself—and that act as an imitation of God as pure act. Thus, we could say
that the essence has no nature except as non-being, as articulating or marking
the limits of some particular act of existence. The act, and only the act of
existence, is what is.26
I would like to take this Thomistic ‘thin essence’ view of the non-
being of the essence and compare it with Stein’s account of the essential be-
ing of the essence. This Thomistic view has, I think, on the surface, a rather
obvious weakness in comparison to Stein’s position. But I think that if we dig
a bit deeper, there is an important strength to Thomas’s account that raises a
challenge for Stein’s account of essential being.
Thomas in Contrast to Aristotle on Potency
On Fr. Clarke’s reading—and in contrast to a number of other existential

Thomists27—there are two great traditions that come together in order to
25
Clarke describes essence as “nothing but the interior limiting principle, the
inner limit or partial negation…of the perfection that resides properly within the act
of existence itself ” (Clarke, “What Cannot be Said,” 129–30).
26
There are, of course, epistemological questions that need to be raised at
this point. I will, however, leave those to the side and pursue more metaphysical
questions.
27
For example, Gilson. Clarke loved to repeat the story of Gilson calling his
form Thomas’s existential philosophy: the Neoplatonic and the Aristotelian;
although synthesized uniquely by Thomas.28 I do not want to walk through
the full story of this synthesis, but I would like to highlight a few points.
The story begins with the ancient Greek identification of the infinite
with imperfection.29 For both Plato and Aristotle, for example, perfection lies
in that which is limited, that which has form, whereas the unlimited is with-
out form, without intelligibility, and is thus chaotic and imperfect. Thus, for
both Plato and Aristotle, although in very different ways, the chaos of matter
is perfected by the limiting work of form. Form introduces that which the
infinite, in its imperfection, lacks: namely, limit.
Such a view is quite different from the Thomist, Christian, or even
most contemporary accounts of infinity. There is certainly no room in this
Greek account for a God who is both perfect and truly infinite. If something
is perfect it simply cannot be without limit. A deity may be infinite in some
quite limited respect, but it could not be a God infinite in all respects. Limit is
thus identified by the ancient Greeks with both form and act, while the limit-
less is identified with that which needs form and the actualization of form.
Plotinus is the major figure challenging this identification, and he introduces
a truly perfect infinity, the One. The One, in being infinite, is not imperfect
but, rather, the source of all perfection. It is not in need of the perfect-
ing work of form, but is that out of which all limited things flow. Infinity
becomes thus mysterious rather than merely chaotic, a source rather than a
receptacle, and perfect rather than a defect.
Yet even when the infinite is articulated in this new light the ques-
tion must be addressed of how finite things are to be made finite. Once one
begins with an infinite, we need a principle of limitation accounting for, not
simply the one infinite, but the many finite things.
Thomas adopts from the Neoplatonic tradition the affirmation of
the perfection of that which is infinite. Like the Neoplatonists, Thomas
agrees that limitation needs justification and not vice versa. It is the infinite
and not the finite that is perfect and needs no further principle. Further, and
more significantly, he affirms with the Neoplatonic tradition the centrality
interest in pursuing the Neoplatonic influence on Thomas’s thought, ‘the work of

a madman.’ See, for example, W. Norris Clarke, S.J., introduction to Explorations in
Metaphysics: Being—God—Person (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1994).
28
W. Norris Clarke, S.J., “The Limitation of Act by Potency in St. Thomas:
Aristotelianism or Neoplatonism?,” in New Scholasticism 26 (1952): 147–57. Reprinted
in Explorations in Metaphysics, 65–88.
29
Fr. Clarke begins with Anaximander, who may have had a more positive
account of infinity, but this is a hesitant account and moves quickly into the more
dominant Greek view of infinity as an imperfection.
of participation. He affirms a hierarchical account of the universe; with a
principle of unity and source of commonality underlying the many-ness of
things.
Participation theories, in general, claim that where there are many
there must be one. That is, there is a single source for the similarities among
things. We, for example, recognize commonalities and take things to be
rightly grouped together based on similarities. Participation theories—both
Neoplatonic and Thomistic—account for this by positing a source for the
similarities; a source which possesses that attribute “in unmixed purity and
perfection, from which each of the inferior recipients derives its own dimin-
ished and imperfect participation.”30
But what is unique in Thomas’s participation metaphysic is that the
infinite, namely, the ultimate perfection, is not the One, as Plotinus argued,
or the Good, as Plato claimed, but is, rather, esse, being, the act of existence
itself. It is being—and not being which is divided into actual, mental, and
essential being, but simply the act of existence—which is at the top of the
hierarchy. Being, which is the act of existence alone, is absolute infinite per-
fection. Everything else is only insofar as it is a participation in this being.
It is worth noting that, according to Thomas, esse is not simply one
among the perfections of an infinite being, as, for example, Anselm’s onto-
logical argument suggests. Esse is absolute perfection. The act of existence is
the ultimate and only perfection. To be perfectly is, simply, to be fully. Thus,
esse is not the perfection of something else, but, rather, perfection simpliciter.
Thus, Thomas adopts the Neoplatonic commitment to participation, but he
understands that infinite perfection in which all other things participate to be
being itself. There is nothing outside of being that is more perfect or com-
plete, nor is there anything other than God that has the act of existence in its
infinite fullness.
Thomas’s account has some significant advantages over other par-
ticipation theories, such as those of Plato’s and Plotinus’s. But it also raises,
in a fairly pressing way, the question of how there can be anything finite. If
God is being—infinite act—and we are finite participations in that infinite
act, by means of what are we finite? What is capable of limiting that which is
intrinsically unlimited so that we can be finite? If there are finite beings and
if they are to be distinct from the infinite, then Thomas needs an account for
how that which is perfect and unlimited in itself (being) can be limited in the
case of finite and created beings. Finding something capable of ‘contracting’
being and accounting for the existence of individual finite creatures is no
small task. Had he chosen something less expansive than being, the ques-
30
W. Norris Clarke, S.J., “The Meaning of Participation in St. Thomas,” in
Explorations in Metaphysics, 90.
tion—although challenging—would not have been quite so daunting. But
what can possibly contract or limit being? Such a principle must be lower than
being. But what is lower than being? It must be, it seems, non-being. And yet
non-being is not—and thus it is not an obvious candidate for doing anything
at all.
Stein at least has differing types of being. She can appeal to par-
ticipations in the one type of being to act as principles of limitation for the
other. Essential being can limit actual and mental being. Thomas, in contrast,
has no such option open to him. Thomas’s answer to the question draws
from Aristotle. Aristotle, of course, distinguishes potency from act. A single
thing is the same over time, even while coming more fully into act, because
its potencies are actualized. It, as potency, is coming to act.
Stein well points out that this account of potency has some oddities.
They strike me, however, as less severe for Aristotle than for Thomas. Aris-
totle always understands the potencies to be potencies of already existing beings.
There are not potencies running around prior to the existence of something.
We can instead talk of the potencies of an acorn precisely because an acorn
already is and has some kind of structure that can then be understood as a
potency for further actualization.
When Thomas takes over the Aristotelian notion of potency, how-
ever, he interprets it somewhat differently. Fr. Clarke distinguishes these as
the horizontal and vertical meanings of potency. For Aristotle, potencies are
merely horizontal—i.e., potencies that have their basis in act, in something
already existing. For Thomas, potency becomes, in contrast, a principle by
which there can be any finite thing at all.
Thomas’s decision to do this is brilliant. He has a problem: he needs
a principle to limit being, which he takes to be intrinsically infinite. But this
principle, of course, has to be other than, well, being. Non-being is the only
candidate. But non-being is not obviously a good candidate for much. Poten-
cies, as particular sorts of non-being, seem to be the ideal answer. When a
potency ‘receives’ being, it can limit it to be the act of existence of a child or a
tree or some other type of finite thing. Thus, in its vertical role, potency func-
tions not merely for the sake of change over time of some already existing
thing but becomes that principle in virtue of which there can be an existing
finite thing at all.31 Yet stated in this way, this view of potency raises precisely
the worry Stein wanted to address in introducing essential being. If a potency
31
Clarke summarizes this Thomistic account: “Such an intellectual vision of
the universe permits a truly ultimate unification of the real, without dissolving its
multiplicity and diversity. All the latter, however, are now interpreted, not as the addi-
tion of something extra to existence, but as diverse modes of participation, through
interior limitation (that is partial negation), in this one all-inclusive positive “attribute”
of existence” (Clarke, “What Cannot be Said,” 120).
is supposed to do anything it must be in some sense; otherwise, it is nothing
and can do nothing.
There is a real oddity to the Thomistic claim: how can non-being
limit being? Stein’s non-Thomistic position has the strength of being able to
make sense of how essences could limit act. The essence is in a positive sense
and thus can do work, such as limiting an act of existence. Because essential
being is a kind of being there is nothing outside of being coming in to limit
the act of existence. The being of the essence participates in God’s Being,
just as the act of existence does, but they do so in slightly different ways, such
that the one is capable of doing the work of limiting the other.
One of the great attractions of Stein’s position—one which ought
not to be disregarded too lightly—is that Thomas’s association of essence
with negation, non-being, or a non-positively existing limitation seems to
sell short essence. It may be one thing to deny that limitation is itself more
perfect than the unlimited. It is quite another to deny that limitation has any
positive perfection at all. And yet the thin view of essence seems to do pre-
cisely this; it claims that qua essence, it is nothing.
Stein’s positive account of the being of potencies and essences ap-
pears, at least initially, to respond to this problem better than the Thomistic
negative one. Essences can limit act because essences simply are not nothing.
They are not acts of existence, but neither are they non-being. An essence
has its own being, in virtue of which it could then do something, such as limit
an act of existence.32 In giving this account of the being of essences, Stein
cannot be accused of introducing a perfection beyond being. Essential being
is, after all, still being. And God, as Being Itself, is still, on Stein’s account, pure
being. Nothing else is introduced. There is nothing about which we must ask,
“is it?” There is only being. But there is not only the act of existence; thus
there is (a) participated being capable of limiting an act of existence in finite
things and (b) participated being that may be an act of existence. There is
thus a clear way of understanding what it might mean to say that potency limits
act.
One might object that Stein’s position takes essence and existence to be
32
separable things, rather than metaphysical principles. Thomas never claimed that
essences existed separate from the act of existence. There is neither, for finite things,
without both. Essence and existence are co-principles, interrelated and interdepen-
dent. Stein, however, might respond: Regardless of which came first, regardless of
whether they can exist in separate states, etc., there is a logical problem. Clarke’s Thom-
as understands potencies as a kind of non-being. But metaphysical principles—even
if inseparable—have their own distinct lawfulnesses. How can a non-being have or
contribute any kind of lawfulness? Having being only within a composite unity is not
the same as being properly a kind of non-being.
Stein’s position is subtle but surprisingly clearly stated, and it pres-
ents a particularly powerful counter-position to the existential Thomistic one.
It would still be well worth unpacking in more detail how Stein’s essences
with essential being participate in a different way in the being of God than
acts of existence participate in God, but at least the broad strokes of how
this is supposed to work seem clear. And there is, more importantly, a com-
paratively clear principle by which actual being is limited so that there can be
finite acts of existence.
Despite these advances I have some worries. There are critical ques-
tions that I think we need to ask about the Steinian position; among them are
questions about their respective cognitional theories. All accounts of being
and essence have implicit within them accounts of how we have access to
both the being and the essence, or in Stein’s terms, actual and essential be-
ing.33 These accounts of human knowing need to be drawn out of each the-
ory, compared, and tested phenomenologically to see which, if either, more
accurately describes our experience of being and essence.
Second, we need to get a clearer account of the value of the actual
in Stein’s thought in contrast to that of Thomas. Clearly the introduction of
essential being changes our understanding of actual being. We might ask,
however, in what ways. A comparison of Thomas’s and Stein’s accounts of
not only art but also of the empirical sciences, everyday existence, and actual
being in all its forms is critical.
But third and finally—and the only theme I want to look at in the
remainder of this paper—is the question of the models that each thinker
is using for his and her metaphysical visions. None of our work is free of
analogies, metaphors, and models. This is, it seems to me, essential for finite
corporeal thinkers. But we must also be extremely careful about the models
we use, especially in thinking about being.
It seems to me that, despite Stein’s ability to answer relatively clearly
questions that require quite a bit of further elaboration in the Thomistic
account, Stein may do so at the price of accepting a model of being that is
excessively spatial. We are physical entities and we need to rely on sensory
models, but there is a real danger that these models may be problematic in
our understanding of being in particular. In the final section, I would like to
look just a bit more closely at the models which inform Stein’s account of the
being of essences in contrast to Thomas’s.
33
Stein acknowledges this in the preface to FEB, but—understandably, given
all she is doing—puts these more epistemological questions aside in this work.
Spatial Metaphors
In Finite and Eternal Being chapter three, section nine, Stein—like a good phe-
nomenologist—criticizes excessive reliance on spatial metaphor. She writes:
Only those who cannot rid themselves of the idea that all that
which is rigidly fixed in and attached to space and time will find
it difficult to understand that something can be simultaneously at
different times and in different places. They mistake existence in
space and time for existence as such.34
This was, as Husserl, Stein, and Heidegger reiterate, the mistake of so many
moderns. So many of the moderns thought in Newtonian categories, and
even when Descartes, for example, posits immaterial entities, he continues to
envision them as strikingly like material ones. Descartes’s mind, or res cogito,
functions in a way strikingly like a spiritualized body. Similarly Kant, just as
much as Descartes, Locke, and Hume, thought of knowledge as occurring
in some theater of our mind in contrast to the real which is somehow ‘out
there.’ This is, for the phenomenologists, to assume that understanding is
like sensing and that the major philosophical questions have to do with how
one gets over the bridge between one’s mind—treated as spatially located in
here—and the real world—which is treated as spatially located out there.35
Truly overcoming the temptation to model being (as well as know-
ing) on spatio-temporal entities is a challenge, and it can take, even for the
greatest of thinkers, a tremendous amount of time both to notice and over-
come this temptation. Augustine is perhaps the most famous example, and
his struggle in Book VII of the Confessions indicates the difficulties. He over-
came the materialism of his Manichean years but nonetheless continued to
think of God in material terms—as a great ocean, infinite in the sense that
God was stretched out without boundaries, but nonetheless modeled on spa-
tially extended things. Augustine then imagined each of us as sponges in
that great sea, being filled with and living in God. These images clearly raise
strange conundrums that slowed down Augustine’s intellectual conversion.
Augustine marks his transition to understanding God as spirit, and
thus different in kind from merely material things, as a key moment in his
own religious transformation. Spirit, Augustine argues, is not merely a spiri-
tualized body; that is, like corporeal things but immaterial. Rather, spirit func-
tions according to a whole different set of lawfulnesses. Coming to the re-
alization that his models for God had been excessively material (even with
34
Stein, FEB, 96.
35
This is a temptation, of course, not only of the moderns, but of many
thinkers, including a number of existential Thomists.
the added qualification ‘but not really’) was a key moment in his intellectual
conversion—and it was a difficult conversion to make.
It is easy to imagine material things; it is comparatively simple to
come up with spatial models and illustrations. It is harder to recognize, how-
ever, when these are and are not appropriate. Avoiding problematic versions
of the spatial models is difficult. All of us are, after all, corporeal beings;
our knowledge begins in sensation; and all of us learn by working through
concrete examples and sensible particulars. Further, much of our language is
deeply tied to our material life, and finding words that articulate that which is
different in kind from the material is not always easy.
We do have non-spatial, non-material models. Augustine’s focus, for
example, on the acts of our mind, our loves, and self-awareness all draw
from less spatial but nonetheless deeply human experiences. But there is
also an understandable tendency to draw from models that may be less ap-
propriate. It seems to me that this temptation is something we should be
particularly wary of in thinking about being. The use of material metaphors
can confine being—and the scope of the questions about being—to spatio-
temporal kinds of existence. Part of the genius of Stein’s text on Finite and
Eternal Being is the way in which she argues that all spatio-temporal being
must have a ground in something more basic, something that is not itself
spatio-temporal. Furthermore, she well recognizes that various readings of,
for example, Plato’s Forms, saddle him with such a material metaphor—even
while acknowledging that Forms are immaterial entities.
It is clear that Stein recognizes that we need to articulate different
types of lawfulness and that material lawfulness is not exhaustive of the law-
fulness of being. Furthermore, she well recognizes that claims to immate-
riality may not yet be free of problematic material metaphors. I am not yet
convinced, however, that she has—despite this progress—fully freed herself
from models for being that are still too spatialized.
An important question to ask is, first, whether Stein, despite her
progress on this issue, has nonetheless implicitly employed a spatial model
that is inappropriate for understanding being; and whether, therefore, some
of her objections to a more Thomistic position on being grow out of a less-
than-ideal use of spatial metaphors. If we return to some of the key passages
on essential being we can see that her dominant descriptions of essential
being include notions such as non-temporal unfolding [Entfaltung],36 giving
order to chaos,37 preservation of meaning within actual and mental being,38
36
See the passages cited above as well as FEB, 325.
37
Stein, FEB, 65.
38
See ibid., 100–101.
and grounding potentialities.39 She describes the world of essential being as
“a hierarchically ordered realm” and a “sphere of intellectual meaningfulness.”40
Each of these terms express certain types of images. If we begin
with the notion of unfolding, the most obvious examples that come to mind
include things such as unfolding a letter or a sheet of paper. The letter existed
as a whole prior to being unfolded, and the act of unfolding reveals what was
already in the previous form. Giving order to chaos brings to mind the image
of a primeval chaos that is brought to order by something else; and pres-
ervation and grounding both draw off images of that which underlies and
sustains. In each of these cases, essential being provides something which
is, more or less, thing-like and which does the work of limiting and direct-
ing actual being. In contrast to the Thomistic notion of potency limiting act
Stein introduces essential being as a limiting agent or entity—it is that which
is capable of doing the work of limiting and organizing act.
It is not clear to me, however, that limitation need occur through
anything existing positively. We might think of the way in which a student’s
knowledge, although gained from a highly skilled teacher, may nonetheless
be limited. That student’s knowledge could clearly be quite limited in com-
parison to the teacher’s and even limited in comparison to what the teacher
taught on that particular day. But in virtue of what is it limited? It is not clear
that it need be limited by anything positive. The child need not have day-
dreamed through class or thought about baseball instead of, say, algebra. The
child may not be less intelligent or perceptive than the teacher or have failed
to pay attention to the material. There might simply be less knowledge in the
child, but limited not by anything positive. There may be, in fact, nothing that
led the child to end with limited knowledge. The child’s lack of experience
and lack of familiarity may be sufficient to account for the limitation without
appealing to any positive principle of limitation coming in to limit the child’s
knowledge.
We could compare this case with other notions of limitation. We can
think of the limit for some color in a painting, with that limit as a positive
boundary drawn around the figure. Or one might limit the number of people
in a room by closing a door. In these cases of limitation something with
positive existence—the boundary, the door—comes in and does the work
of limiting. In these cases of limitation, in contrast to the child’s knowledge,
there seems to be some positively existing thing doing the work of limitation.
It is tempting to think of the principle of the limitation of act as like
a boundary or door, coming in to pick out a limited amount of being out of
the great plentitude or cutting off a finite quantity of being. Stein’s essential
39
See ibid., 83.
40
Ibid., 84 and 102.
being seems to me to function in something of this way. Actual being and
mental being get limited insofar as positively existing essential being ‘acts’ as
the principle giving order, articulating what is to be unfolded.
I am not yet convinced, however, that we need employ such a highly
spatial image for limitation. There can, it seems to me, be ways of limiting
things that do not require some further, positively existing principle of limi-
tation. As a child’s knowledge can be limited by the nothingness of a lack,
so too, it seems to me that we can think of actual being as limited—not by
essential being—but by the nothingness of potency. Limit may describe how
something pursues some aspect of the Infinite rather than what does the
work of cutting actual being along various joints.
Insofar as Stein has based her objections to Thomistic potencies and
Thomistic essences on a notion of limitation that presents itself in terms of
that which cuts off, she has drawn from more spatial models than I think nec-
essary. There is, of course, much more work that needs to be done in order
to articulate how a Thomistic account of potency can be made intelligible,
and whether—as we push on the analogies—the less spatial one I am rec-
ommending can truly do the theoretical work it is put to. But it does appear,
at least from a brief look, that Stein has favored a more spatial model for
limitation rather than a less. Given what I think are her correct worries about
excessive reliance on spatial metaphors, the quite spatialized images used to
discuss essential being ought to give us pause. Even if she is clearly not com-
mitted to spatialized Forms of the exaggerated Platonic variety, her account
of essential being leans more heavily on such metaphors than perhaps we
need.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I find Stein’s notion of essential being to be fascinating and a

genuine contribution to thinking through how phenomenology can become
metaphysical. I think that she does, in fact, articulate a strikingly phenome-
nology-friendly metaphysics that is nonetheless committed to the centrality
of being. I even think, although I have not argued this here, that her account
of the essential being of the essence is superior to Scotus’s claims about the
unity of the essence and thus presents a better form of extreme realism re-
garding universals than Scotus. Further, her way of bringing essential being
and eternal rest into all being should speak to our hearts and bring out some-
thing of the beauty of being in a way that Thomists have not, traditionally,
been quite as good at articulating.
But I think that the challenges require us to look carefully at her ac-
count of essential being and ask again whether it is truly necessary in order
to respond to the problems she raises. Perhaps those problems come up
because we are still all-too-tied to models that may not ultimately be fit to us
as self-conscious longers for God—or for finite being which is an echo and
participation in the great I AM.
—Wheaton College (IL)

Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray 65
The Wesen of Things,

According to Reinach
Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray
Abstract
In Edith Stein’s pinnacle work Finite and Eternal Being, she de-
scribes in a footnote that the act of bracketing (reduction) that
Husserl committed to starting in Ideas—an act that separates fact
from nature where only the aspect of essential being is consid-
ered—was the philosophic knife that severed phenomenology
into idealist and realist factions. In opposition to Husserl’s ap-
proach, she writes, Adolf Reinach, Alexander Pfänder, Jean Her-
ing, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and others were instead “guided
by the full meaning of the term nature, [and] became ever more
confirmed in their realistic ways.”1 In this paper, I will describe
what this full meaning of wesen is held by some of Husserl’s con-
temporaries and students and what it entails, specifically looking
to how Reinach conceived it. This will include a discussion of
phenomenological method, his views on the a priori, essences, and
the laws that govern them, as well as an investigation into why
Reinach felt reductions were dangerous and unnecessary for the
intuition of essences and essential being.
* * *
In footnote 43 of her Finite and Eternal Being,2 Edith Stein wrote:
1
Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of
Being, trans. Walter Redmond (unpublished manuscript, August 16, 2012), hence-
forth, FEB.
2
For this essay, I am using a translation currently being worked on by Walter
Redmond. I prefer Redmond’s translation because of his choice to translate ‘Wesen-
heit’ as ‘essentiality’ and ‘Wesen’ as ‘essence’; Kurt Reinhardt translated ‘Wesenheit’ as
‘essence’ and ‘Wesen’ as ‘nature,’ which not only created confusion when confronted
with instances when she used ‘Natur’ but also landed her terminology at odds or out
of sync with the way others have translated and understood early phenomenological
© Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall 2013)
66 The Wesen of Things
In Ideas (pp. 8ff) Husserl speaks of the possibility of focusing
on the what of an individual thing in our experience through an
intuition of essence [Wesensanschauung] or ideation [Ideation]. This dis-
tinctive intuition, different from all experience, disengages the
content [Gehalt] from the fact of experience without carrying
out [+ vollziehen] any positing of the experience [Erfahrungssetzung]
(without conceiving the thing as real [wirklich]), and it posits this
content as something that could just as well be realized [verwirkli-
chen] elsewhere, outside of the context wherein we experienced it.
Hence universality [Allgemeinheit] for Husserl belongs to essence as
such, regardless of the degrees of universality within the area of
the essence, which degrees he also refers to. That such a view is
possible obviously rests upon the twofold “essence” of essence
that we suggested. The view considers but one aspect, “essential
being [wesenhaftes Sein],” and cuts off the connection of the es-
sence with reality, which does not attach to the essence on the
outside, but belongs to it internally. This cut at the onset of the
divorce of fact and essence I daresay explains how Husserl came
to an idealistic interpretation of reality, while his colleagues and
students, guided by the full meaning of essence, became ever more
confirmed in their realistic view.3
This footnote corresponds to a sentence where Stein speaks of a ‘duality of
being,’ which consists of the being in objects—that which is temporal and
changing—and the whatness of a thing—that which is timeless and unchang-
ing. This boils down to a difference between the essence and the essential in
the object: the essential, or essentiality (Wesenheit), being the instantiation of
the essence in something. The essence and the essential are distinct and yet
related through coordination or subordination, according to Stein.
While I do mostly agree with Stein’s interpretation of the division
between Husserl and the early students in this note, I find it is not entirely
clear what she meant when she wrote that the phenomenological realists were
“guided by the full meaning of essence,”4 specifically concerning Adolf Rein-
ach. An early phenomenology student of Edmund Husserl’s in Göttingen
and later Stein’s teacher, Reinach—like many of his Munich Phenomenology
colleagues—was a committed realist and refused to make the transcendental
turn toward idealism with Husserl. Part of the confusion concerning Stein’s
comment arises from ambiguities in the term ‘Wesen’ and its varying and wide
works. Redmond’s English equivalents better capture Stein’s original meanings and
place her back within the framework of early phenomenology writings.
3
Stein, FEB, chap. 3, n43.
4
Stein, FEB, chap. 3, n43.
usage among early phenomenology members. In the case of Reinach, ‘Wesen’
meant ‘essence’ and there was no written formal ontological distinction in
his work between the ‘essence’ and the ‘essentiality’ of an object; for Reinach
there was the essence of the thing and the states of affairs (Sachverhalte) that
obtain or do not obtain about it. So, there is additional confusion regarding
Stein’s exact meaning. And, last but not least, there are translation problems
associated with ‘Wesen.’
In this paper, I will discuss ‘Wesen’ and its ambiguities in the context
of early phenomenology. I will attempt to explain what Stein meant when she
described the early members as guided by the “full meaning of the term es-
sence” and what this entails, with particular reference to Reinach. In doing so,
it will become clear why I am rather unclear about Stein’s intended meaning
of this phrase. In elaborating this position I will discuss phenomenological
method, Reinach’s views of the a priori, of essences and of the laws that gov-
ern that sphere, as well as why he felt reductions were dangerous and unnec-
essary for the intuition of essences and essential being. Although I will not
discuss Husserl’s commitment to an idealistic theory of reality and whether
it was necessary or the appropriate direction for phenomenology to take, I
intend to illuminate why the realist approach was maintained, preferred, and
championed by early members like Reinach—an approach that had a lasting
influence on the work of Stein. While I cannot promise absolute, precise
clarity concerning Stein’s comment about the early phenomenologists, I hope
to clarify some things about the concept ‘Wesen’ and the philosophical rela-
tionship between Reinach and Stein.
On The Ambiguities of ‘Wesen’
For English speakers, ‘Wesen’ is yet another German word that is a headache
to translate with accuracy. Knowing when it should be translated as ‘essence’
or ‘nature’ or ‘being’ is a matter of careful contextual understanding, patience,
and hope. In English translations of Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being, ‘Wesen’ has
been translated as ‘nature’ (Reinhardt) and as ‘essence’ (Redmond), and ‘We-
senheit’ as ‘essence’ (Reinhardt) and ‘essentiality’ (Redmond). And while this
lack of consistency is confusing for English scholars, what makes matters
worse is that ‘Wesen’ for Germans, when used as a concept, is often confused
and filled with ambiguities.
Concerning Stein’s comments contained in footnote 43 cited above,
my best guess as to her intended meaning is that she conceives of these real-
ist phenomenologists as using a more pregnant or broader sense of ‘Wesen’
(as essence), meanings that what can be considered ‘essence’ and ‘essentiality,’
along with the spatio-temporal facts of the object, are all so intimately tied
that they cannot be disconnected (at all or easily) by way of bracketing to un-
veil essential being. This charitable interpretation seems to fit with what she
says earlier in the footnote about Husserl’s ideation and his inevitable com-
mitment to transcendental idealism. However, some ambiguity arises when
this comment is directed at someone like Reinach, a phenomenologist who
did not make a formal ontological distinction between essence and essential-
ity as Stein did; rather, Reinach simply used ‘Wesen,’ and many translators have
often used nature or essence interchangeably when speaking of his work,
even though I think this is incorrect.5 When he spoke of nature in the sense
of ‘natural laws’ he used the German noun ‘Natur.’ Thus, to translate ‘Wesen’
as both nature and essence creates undue confusion. Hence the “full meaning
of the term essence” could reasonably indicate an inclusion of all things that
comprise for her both essence and essentiality or nature (depending on your
translation). But of course, this is simply a guess and nothing more.
Further confusion concerning this footnote of Stein’s comes about
when we look at the list of realist phenomenologists she provides, pertain-
ing specifically to their individual understanding of ‘Wesen’; not all realist
phenomenologists use or define ‘Wesen’ and ‘Wesenheit’ the same way. For
Reinach, ‘Wesen’ and ‘Wesenheit’ are simply translated and utilized as ‘essence’
and ‘essentiality’ without problem: one being the essence and one being the
instantiation of said essence. However, the key term for Reinach is essence
(Wesen). To contrast, Max Scheler used ‘Wesen’ to mean ‘being,’ and he tended
to prefer to use ‘Wesenheit’ when speaking of essence; however, this was with-
out the utmost diligence since sometimes one sees ‘Wesen’ when he is refer-
ring to essence. And further, Jean Hering’s distinctions of ‘Wesen’ and ‘Wesen-
heit’ (essence and essentiality, respectively), noted by Stein in this work, have
some unique characteristics not really seen in any other early phenomenology
work; for example, individual objects have their very own essence: one as in-
dividual as the object itself. This presents a problem for the English-speaking
philosopher and translator since both ‘essence’ and ‘essentiality’ can have
specific philosophical connotations and consequences. ‘Essence’ is tradition-
ally interpreted as something non-material (often Platonic) while ‘essentiality’
often denotes something material or empirical in accord with the traditional
(often Aristotelian) notion of instantiation.
In my own research on Reinach, I prefer to use ‘essence’ rather than ‘nature’

5
or ‘being’ as it better captures and fits best with the concepts and themes he works
with frequently: states of affairs (Sachverhalte), the a priori, material necessity, essential
laws, speech acts, etc.
Reinach’s Ambiguity of The Concept ‘Wesen’
Reinach noticed ambiguities in the usage of ‘Wesen’ occurring in philosophy,

not just in phenomenology, and he spoke about these ambiguities at some
length in his rough unpublished notes titled “The Ambiguity of the Concept
Wesen” (Die Vieldeutigkeit des Wesensbegriffs), written around 1912:
Must essences (Wesen) always be acquired with a view to objects
whose essences they are? Nelson [for example, identifies] essenc-
es and natures (Beschaffenheiten) of objects. Do we mean by es-
sence the essential (das Wesentliche) in them? No. Essence does not
consist in distinguished properties (ausgezeichneten Eigenschaften);
other things [are thereby] co-[intended]. Is it unequivocal simply
[to define] essence as determination [of an object]? Then it would
[belong] to the essence of the table that it is brown. One can
associate this table not only with the essentiality (Wesenheit) [of]
browns, reds, but much more [above all] with this brown [or] red.6
Here it seems Reinach is critiquing those who confuse essence with what
he calls ‘states of affairs,’ or a thing’s essential, necessary predicates. The es-
sence “brown” is not the same as this table’s being-brown. Reinach continues
by writing:
If by ‘determinations’ one means, for example, the individual mo-
ments of colour, then [however] these too have their essences.
[Here one can draw a] distinction between essentiality of how and
of what. This same essentiality [for example, the brown], can be
how-essentiality in relation to objects [for example, as the how of the
production of this table,] and what-essentiality in relation to [an] in-
stance of things [for example, as the what of this individual shade
of brown]. In the case of [a] what-essentiality [one says] always:
‘This is a case of….’ But the table is not [an] instance of brown.7
Reinach is now demonstrating that the ambiguity of ‘Wesen’ has consisted not
only of confusion but also important considerations have also been over-
looked or neglected. When we speak of essence we must take notice whether
that essence pertains to ‘Sachen’ or ‘Gegenstände,’ to things/matters (indefinite,
general—e.g., a thing of beauty, a matter for lawyers) or objects (definite,
often physically presented to the subject—e.g., the object on the bar is a wine
glass).
6
The original German notes can be found in Adolf Reinach, Sämtliche Werke
1, ed. Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith (Munich: Philosophia Verlag GmbH, 1989),
361 (henceforth, SW).
7
Reinach, SW, 361.
Further, he adds:
[It’s a difference between the sentences] ‘Red and blue [are] differ-
ent according to their essences’ [and] ‘Red and blue [are] at some
place in the world realizable.’ Saying this we refer to “essence”
in the two different senses coming into discussion. In the first
one could speak of the material essence. [But the] question [also
arises] whether it doesn’t here have to do with different levels of
a hierarchy in [or: belonging to] one sense, which one cannot do
in the case of things.8
The first is a material or qualitative difference that can be realized using the
imagination, and so no real-world example is required. The second phrase
speaks to the existence or potential existence of (the potential to be made
real) moments of red and blue, what would fall under modality, such as the
being-red of the apples in fall season in Washington State for example, and this
requires real examples to verify. Continuing with this point, he says: “[Yet the
situation is more precise concerning the] difference between ‘essence’ in ‘Red
and blue are different (but not as universality) according to their essence’
[and] ‘Red can realize itself (as universality [Allgemeinheit]) according to its
essence.’ [The] difficulty [is] always to grasp the moment of aspect (Hinsichts-
moment) as such in itself (there one would come immediately into [the] form
of universality).”9
On Stein’s Essence & Essentiality
Stein’s conceptions of ‘essence’ (Wesen) and ‘essentiality’ (Wesenheit) take sev-

eral cues from Hering’s important ontological work Observations on Essence,
Essentiality, and Idea (1921). It is a fact that both Hering and Stein were in-
fluenced by Reinach but it must be recognized that their usage of the terms
Wesen and Wesenheit differ from the latter in many ways. Hering’s configura-
tion of essence and essentiality served to highlight the difference between
the ‘being thus’ and the ‘whatness’ of a thing: for example, the difference
between an object ‘being green’ versus the color ‘green’ in itself. For Hering,
essence is individual, meaning that each object has its own essence; essence
is object-dependent. Two objects can have similar but non-identical essences.
Essentialities are ideal qualities, they are neither dependent nor independent,
and are such that they can become realized in some object (e.g., squareness,
blue in itself, etc.). As a result, essentialities as ideal qualities are the absolute
Reinach, SW, 362.

8
Reinach, SW, 362.

9
conditions for the possibility of things existing; however, ideal essentialities
themselves, of course, require no conditions for their possibility or existence.
Looking to Stein, essence is “that which determines the quid or what
of the object,”10 or in other words, what constitutes the individuality of the
thing, and are the “primordial source of all meaning and intelligibility”11;
that which determines all individual things (that partake in it). Essences are
said to be timeless and changeless entities (i.e., they have no being in space
and time), even though the objects that they inhere in are temporal, can be
spatial, and can undergo changes (and transmutation sometimes). Essences
are manifold, and as mentioned, are singular and individual. Concepts are
formed when the essence of something has been seized or discovered and
it is in this seizing that the object itself comes to be determined. Essence
reveals a structure of core features when discovered.
As stated above, Reinach does not make a formal ontological dis-
tinction between the ‘essence’ and ‘essentiality’ of an object—at least not
anything like what Stein does—and it is my position that he did not see a
need for such a distinction at the essential level since much of what the de-
marcating of ‘essentiality’ serves is performed by his conception of states of
affairs (Sachverhalte). A discussion of Reinach’s states of affairs is necessary
here prior to explaining my position.
Reinach states that apriority is not a property of propositions or acts
of knowing but rather a property of states of affairs. States of affairs are
necessary and immaterial, never immutable, ideal, or real: they are temporal
objectivities of a new variety. States of affairs substantiate the relationships
between the following: judgments and the objects judged, statements of claim
and obligation and their respective objects, and more generally, between the
predicate and the subject (since any kind of speech act can involve a state of
affairs). States of affairs are essential connections that obtain between the
thing judged and the properties judged, as in the case of “the being-red of the
rose”—and are different from the actual objects—like the rose—and differ-
ent from the proposition—such as “that rose is red.” Being a priori in nature
entails not only that states of affairs are independent of any judgment or
cognition in our minds but also that they follow strict laws that exist indepen-
dently of our acknowledgment as well. Reinach provides six characteristics
of states of affairs, and this list is not to be considered exhaustive nor does it
constitute a definition:
1. those entities which are believed or asserted and thus are the
objectual-correlates of judgments;
10
Stein, FEB, chap. 3, §3.
11
Ibid., chap. 3, §3.
2. the bearers of ontological modalities such as possibility and
necessity;
3. those entities which stand in the relation of ground and con-
sequent;
4. those entities which stand in the relation of contradictory
positivity and negativity;
5. obtaining or not obtaining (as opposed to existing),12 and
given (4) above, either a state of affairs obtains or its contra-
dictory opposite obtains;
6. neither sensually perceived nor intuited, but apprehended or
discerned on the basis of perception and intuition.13
Returning to my previous point—that Reinach did not see the need to on-
tologically distinguish between the essence and essentiality of something—
when we look at the characteristics provided for states of affairs what be-
comes apparent is that they are the essential, necessary predicates of objects.
When we judge we pick out predicates, both essential and material: when I
judge that “the black cat is on the brown mat,” I pick out the blackness or
being-black of the cat before me, the brownness, or being-brown, of the mat the
cat lies on, and the spatial-temporal situation. Stein tells us that the essential-
ity of something is what constitutes the individuality of the thing—its what-
ness—but one can ask, “what exactly is the individuality of a thing other than
its necessary, essential predicates?” Even if the essentiality of something is
not exhausted by its necessary predicates nevertheless it must include them
since they are very much a part of its make-up. Stein tells us that states of
affairs unveil essence and being, which are manifest in their connection and
separateness,14 and I believe Reinach would agree with her here on this and
add that this is exactly why a distinction between ‘essence’ and ‘essentiality’
is unnecessary: everything ontologically required is satisfied with the trinity
of object, essence, and state of affairs. To quote Reinach: “In immersing
ourselves in the essence of these entities (states of affairs), we spiritually
see what holds for them as a matter of strict law; we grasp connections in a
manner analogous in the nature of numbers and of geometrical forms: that a
thing is so, is grounded here in the essence of the thing which is so.”15
12
Reinach explains that objects differ from states of affairs in that physical
objects exist whereas states of affairs obtain or subsist.
13
James M. DuBois, Judgment and Sachverhalt: An Introduction to Adolf Reinach’s
Phenomenological Realism (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 27–28.
14
Stein, FEB, chap. 4 , §1.
15
Adolf Reinach, “The A Priori Foundations of Civil Law,” trans. J. F. Crosby,
Take for example two absolutely identical sheep, like Dolly (the
sheep cloned in Scotland in 1996 from an adult somatic cell by way of nu-
clear transfer); in other words, two sheep identical down to their very DNA.
These two sheep have individual, unique essentialities according to Stein even
though everything down to their genetic structure is exactly the same. So,
then, what is this unique essentiality each possesses? What is their unique
what-ness other than predicates—such as their time of birth—their spatial
locations (e.g., as in front of me)—or that one is making a sound at a certain
time while the other makes a sound at a different time? In the end, we must
ask: what is this unique essentiality each thing has? and does creating an on-
tological distinction between ‘essence’ and ‘essentiality’ accomplish anything
more than that of ‘essence’ and ‘states of affairs’?
Furthermore, and keeping with Stein’s footnote, the absence of a
distinction between ‘essence’ and ‘essentiality’ I think allows Reinach to steer
clear of Platonic tones and idealism more succesfully. Distinguishing between
‘essence’ and ‘essentiality’ is often deemed necessary to account for not only
how the immaterial participates with material objects (namely, the prob-
lem of access), but also how an object can change and yet remain the same
(namely, the problem of identity). Even though Hering, Stein, and others had
realist intentions, creating distinctions such as between an object-dependent
essentiality and an independent, timeless essence, puts them very close to
the arena of idealism and opens them up to misinterpretation. Because Re-
inach conceives of essences as being present in our world—albeit subsisting
around us rather than existing—and states of affairs as properties grounded
in the nature of object, or that the predication of them is grounded in the
essence of the thing, he keeps both immaterial objectivities well within realist
boundaries and less open to idealist misinterpretations.16 Essential intuition is
all that is required to grasp them, with no reductions or bracketing necessary,
and access to them is a matter of effort on our part to take hold of what is
already at hand. And states of affairs being the bearers of ontological modali-
ties implies that they can account for changes and transformations without
compromising their integrity or that of essences. The dissolution of a claim
and obligation upon its completion is necessarily grounded in the essence
of the claim itself by way of its state of affairs: the temporal nature of “I
will buy you a lollipop today” is evident in the being-today of the intended
action, its truth obtains when carried out on the day uttered, and it is also
Aletheia: An International Journal of Philosophy 3 (1983): 5 (henceforth, APF).

16
Reinach, APF, 6. Also found in Reinach, “On the Theory of Negative Judg-
ment,” in Parts and Moments: Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, trans. and ed. Barry
Smith (Munchen: Philosophia Verlag GmbH, 1982) 315–77, and Reinach, “Concern-
ing Phenomenology,” trans. Dallas Willard, The Personalist 50 (1969): 213 (henceforth,
CP).
understood that “I will buy you a lollipop today” is not a claim with everlast-
ing hold. Requests, commands, declarations (e.g., a pronouncement of death
or guilt), expressive acts (e.g., happy birthday) and acts of promising, as well
as other kinds of contractual obligation, are all examples of speech acts that
can involve temporal states of affairs. This also demonstrates that states of
affairs are not just realized or apprehended with acts of judgment, something
many philosophers fail to notice, but through various types cognitive/speech
acts.
Early Phenomenology: Realist Approach & Method
As mentioned earlier, Reinach believed essential intuition was all that was
required to grasp essences and states of affairs; with no reductions or brack-
eting necessary. Although Reinach never formulated his own phenomeno-
logical method outright, we can gather from his work (both published and
unreleased) that he disagreed with the additions and changes Husserl made
to the phenomenological method in Ideas that involved bracketing and reduc-
tions. The essential intuition to which Reinach refers is very much like (if
not the same as) the ‘Ideation’ Husserl described in the Logical Investigations
(henceforth, LI). This early conception in the development of the phenom-
enological method was the preferred method for most of the early students
in Göttingen, and it demonstrates not only their commitment to realist phe-
nomenology as outlined in LI, but also reveals the influence of their teacher
Theodor Lipps.
In LI, Husserl describes phenomenology as being concerned with
experiences intuitively seizable and analyzable in the pure gener-
ality of their essence, not experiences empirically perceived and
treated as real facts…. [T]his phenomenology must bring to pure
expression, must describe in terms of their essential concepts and
their governing formulae of essence, the essences which directly
make themselves known in intuition, and the connections which
have their roots purely in such essences.17
Phenomenology would reveal the sources of the basic concepts and laws of
pure logic so that they can be traced and made clear, thus allowing for epis-
temological critique and understanding of pure logic. Ideation, or general-
izing abstraction, was described as an act whose intention was directed solely
to the “idea” or the “universal,” where “we directly apprehend the Specific
Unity of redness on the basis of the singular intuition of something red. We
Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (Lon-

17
don: Routledge, 2001), 1: 166 (henceforth, LI).

look to its moment of red, but we perform a peculiar act…. Abstraction in
the sense of this act is wholly different from the mere attention to, or em-
phasis on, the moment red.”18 In order to apprehend essences, such as the
essence red, we need to return to the intuitive experiences they instantiate,
such as with the red apple or the red flower, and in doing so we also come to
grasp what the corresponding words we use really mean, revealing the formal
structures underlying.
Reinach’s Marburg lecture entitled “Concerning Phenomenology”
(1914) provides the best insight into what he conceives of essence intuition
as comprising and although it is by no means a complete picture, we can
gather from his words enough detail. This lecture is very much a key to un-
derstanding Reinach’s phenomenology since it informs us of his feelings
about reductions and it both describes his ideas concerning the role of de-
scriptive psychology in phenomenological investigation, and discusses the a
priori, states of affairs and essences.
Like Husserl, Reinach saw that direct apprehension of essences was
often difficult if not impossible due to the ‘practical’ attitude we have in daily
life: “We stand in the world as practically active beings. We see it, and yet we
do not see it; …even the poorest conscious life is yet too rich to be wholly
comprehensible to its bearer.”19 However, Reinach says that we can learn to
see what we once overlooked and learn to see through the fullness of our
experience to apprehend what was already there; things present that often
escape conscious awareness. And this learning to see what is already there
includes that one be dissatisfied with definitions, as they truly get us no closer
to the essence of the thing: when we deal with non-material things like num-
bers or abstract ideas like “freedom,” we can talk about them in a conceptual,
practical, every day manner, and yet their essence is removed from us. We
must get through all signs, definitions, and rules to the things themselves. We
naturally must begin with words and significations, but essence analysis is in
no way exhausted by investigations into signification. Reinach illustrates the
leap from signification analysis to analysis of essences by what he calls the
step from Socrates to Plato:
Socrates did signification analysis when, in the streets of Athens,
he put his question: —“you talk of such and such, Now just what
do you mean?” Here it is a question of clearing up obscurities
and contradictions of significations…. By contrast, Plato does
not start with words or significations. He aims at the direct view
of the ideas, the unmediated grasp of essences as such.20
18
Husserl, LI, 1: 312.
19
Reinach, CP, 195.
20
Ibid., 210.
To illustrate, when talking to Thrasymachus in the Republic, Socrates wants to
find out what the nature of justice is through the meaning and usage of the
word ‘justice,’ where as a dialogue like Phaedo, Plato presents his ‘Theory of
Forms’ which describe the highest reality as being held by perfect, timeless,
immaterial ideas and the material world around us as imperfect examples of
such universals. The point is that we begin essence analysis with inquiring
into what something means or how we talk about it, but if we want to know
‘essence’ we must go beyond language and meaning and embark into ontol-
ogy—what is the essence of this.
We are told that pure intuition into essences is the means to attaining
insight into the necessary laws that hold true for essences, and that these laws
are a priori. Reinach writes:
Experience refers, as sense perception, to the singular, to the
‘that-right-there,’ and seeks to grasp this…. Sense perception, in
fact, is essentially possible only from some point of view; and
for us men, this point of departure for perception must be in the
proximity of the perceived. With the a priori, by contrast, we have
to do the viewing and the knowing of essence. But no sense per-
ception is required in order to grasp essence. Here are involved
intuitional acts of a wholly different sort, which can be realized at
anytime, and wherever the representing subject may be.21
The example he uses to illustrate this is the act of mentally representing or-
ange as falling qualitatively between yellow and red. This does not require me
to reflect on specific instances of red, yellow, and orange I have experienced
even though a single case can suffice for apprehending a priori laws. Hume’s
missing shade of blue example works here as well, since when shown a pal-
ate of blue shades with one missing my mind can fill-in what shade ought to
be there without having ever experienced it—specifically, “Pure imagination
suffices.”22 The a priori should not be considered simply as thought-necessity;
orange being similar to yellow is not due to a compulsive feeling in one’s
thinking, but rather it is a necessity of being-orange: the similarity of orange to
yellow is grounded in the being of the color orange, and it is such regardless
of whether anyone thinks it whatsoever. A priori knowledge is capable of ir-
refutable ‘evidenz,’ according to Reinach, in that its content is intuitively given
in the strongest possible sense.
As mentioned, Reinach, like his colleague Pfänder, believed descrip-
tive psychology was a beneficial and necessary partner to phenomenology,
and this is another place where his ideas on method differed from Husserl
after LI. The discussion of the role of descriptive psychology took center
21
Ibid., 211.
22
Ibid.
stage often in the discussions of the early phenomenological realists, since
the students who arrived prior to 1910 had all been students of Lipps, and
these students were also well versed in the studies of the School of Brenta-
no. Descriptive psychology, according to Reinach, was the “discipline which
strives to take an inventory of consciousness, and to fix upon the various
species of experience as such”23 and, he further adds:
Now it is precisely with facts that descriptive psychology has
nothing to do. It has nothing to do with explanation of existenc-
es and the reduction of them to other existences…. Descriptive
psychology is not to explain and reduce to other things. Rather
its aim is to illuminate and expose. It intends to bring to ultimate,
intuitive givenness the “whatness” of experience, from which, in
itself, we are so remote.24
It is also important to mention here the idea of “real reality,” an expression
Lipps used in his lectures and which his students like Johannes Daubert and
Reinach continued to use, that was meant to differentiate the reality outside
myself from intended reality. Real objects are given through acts, and at the
same time the object’s independent existence from these acts is expressed:
All of that which can enter into the stream of our experience, that
which belongs, in the genuine sense, to the ego (e.g., our feeling,
willing, perceiving, and the like), is essentially distinguished from
all that which transcends the stream of consciousness, stand-
ing over against it as ego-foreign (e.g., houses, or concepts, or
numbers).25
Aside from seeing essences in the world and grounded in the nature of
things, this is yet another way Reinach and most early phenomenologists are
realists: he believed in a real world that is independent of our consciousness
of it. Laws of the natural world, just like the a priori, obtain regardless of
whether we apprehend them or not. Adherence to many ideas of Lipps al-
lowed Reinach and other early phenomenology students to keep a theoretical
independence from Husserl.
Speaking of theoretical independence, Reinach and many of his re-
alist friends rejected the idea of reductions and bracketing, especially when
essences were concerned: “People want to learn from the natural sciences,
and want to ‘reduce’ experience to the furthest possible extent…. Leaving
the broader sense of reduction undecided, reduction certainly has no applica-
23
Ibid., 197.
24
Ibid., 200.
25
Ibid., 198.
tion to essences.”26 This is understandable when one looks to the idea of ma-
terial necessity, detailed in Reinach’s essay “Kant’s Interpretation of Hume’s
Problem.” Reinach takes two relations Hume discusses in his infamous work
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: resemblance and causal. Both
demonstrate synthetic a priori characteristics, even though Hume did not ac-
knowledge this. Material necessity differs from modal necessity—the kind of
necessity mathematical propositions entertain—in that the necessity belongs
to the material content and determines the predicate in some way, as in “B
succeeds A,” whereas in “one stretch of time follows another” the necessity
determines the copula, not the material content, and hence the entire state of
affairs.27 Causality also implies an existential relationship: “Causality signifies
a necessary connection in the successive existence of two objects…. A causal
connection between A and B means that the existence of B is connected in
a definite manner with that of A. Neither the existence of A nor that of B
is thereby directly posited. But the existence of B is conditionally connected
with that of A.”28 And the same goes when speaking of resemblance, as in
the judgment “Red and Orange are similar”: the necessity once again belongs
to the material content of the two colors, not to the copula of the judgment.
I mention this idea of material necessity since I believe it is one of
the clearest ways we can see Reinach’s problem with bracketing and reduc-
tions. Husserl writes in Ideas that as people we belong to an ever-present
spatio-temporal fact-world; a world that I take and is given to me as existing
out there. This position in the fact-world is the essence of what he calls the
natural standpoint. Husserl, in a fashion similar to Descartes, wishes to sus-
pend the natural thesis, meaning that I disconnect from it, or put it out of
action. When I bracket or disconnect the natural standpoint I make no use of
what Husserl calls “experience as lived” and what we bracket is “whatever it
includes respecting the nature of Being.”29 I do not deny the fact-world exists
or doubt it is in front of me, but what I do instead is bar myself from making
any judgments about the spatio-temporal existence of it, which is known as
the phenomenological epoché.
Bracketing-off spatio-temporal existence from an object seems to
assume that those ties are inessential, which is something Reinach would
disagree with. Taking into account the material necessity of causal relation-
ships just discussed, the spatio-temporal aspect of the object or the qualities
changed is essential to understanding the essence. If we take the example of
26
Ibid., 199.
27
Adolf Reinach, “Kant’s Interpretation of Hume’s Problem,” trans. J. N.
Mohanty, Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 7 (1976): 182 (henceforth, KIHP).
28
Reinach, KIHP, 172.
29
Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R.
Boyce Gibson (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1952), 110.
the sight of a burning fire producing smoke, a situation that would produce
the judgment such as “smoke is the causal successor of fire,” the necessity
here lies in the material content. But, if we attempt to bracket off the natural
standpoint to concentrate on just the fire, then we end up in a situation where
some of what we bracket-off is essential to the essence of fire—the spatio-
temporal nature of the material necessity at work. Another example is that of
snow where precipitation falling from the clouds in the sky turns to snow at
a given temperature. The temperature at which rain turns to snow, or simply
water turns to ice, is part of the essence of water. Both examples mentioned
are cases where bracketing could render the observer without all the neces-
sary aspects of the object’s essence.
Bracketing appears almost as a restriction on the a priori at work and
fits with the criticism Reinach had for Kant’s subjectification of the a priori:
“All restriction, and all reason for restriction, of the a priori to the, in some
sense, ‘formal’ is lacking. A priori laws also hold true of the material—in fact,
of the sensible, of tones and colours. With that there opens up for investiga-
tion an area so large and rich that yet today we cannot see its boundaries.”30
Reinach would most likely bring up further examples from law, history, or
motivation connections. The essence of Napoleon contains the effects of
life events on his character, as well as character traits he inherited, the era
he matured in, etc. Bare empirical facts about Napoleon will never yield un-
derstanding; rather looking to motive connections we understand that “out
of this or that disposition, a certain action will arise.”31 Hence, motivation
connections are a kind of psychic causal relationship. Napoleon engaged in
the battle of Waterloo not out of necessity but rather as the result of pri-
or events in a chain of possibilities. Motivations are, according to Reinach,
essential connections of possibility: they are essentially-can-be-so—not an
essentially-must-be-so—and these rational connections are grounded in the
nature of things. Attempting to apprehend the essence of motivation could
not be done with bracketing, since the spatio-temporal connections involved
are essential. Bracketing is also not required to understand the essence of
Napoleon, fire, or water—the unmediated grasp of essence through intuition
is all that is required. These examples provided illustrate Reinach’s reasons
for seeing bracketing as problematic, and even at times calling it dangerous,
since one could always be in a position to bracket-off too much and thus be
left with an impoverished essence or an inaccurate apprehension.
30
Reinach, CP, 216 (italics in original).
31
Ibid., 217.
Concluding remarks
I began this paper talking about Stein’s footnote and how she described the
phenomenological realists as being “guided by the full meaning of essence.”
Although it is not entirely clear what she means by this, the guess I made
seems to hold. For Reinach, the full meaning of ‘Wesen,’ or essence must
include the a priori connections, its essential predicates known as states of
affairs, and the spatio-temporal connections that make up material necessity.
Certain phenomenological realists, I believe, preferred a simple phenomeno-
logical method (simple in its structure, not in its execution). They preferred a
phenomenological method that remained free of bracketing and reductions,
since it gave primacy and authority to the world around us rather than the
mind of the observer. The realist method maintains the role of the human
as an observer who can come to understand by way of intuition into what
obtains in the world regardless of his or her presence; s/he, that is, can utilize
a special ability to see what is already there, rather than act as an enforcer who
divides and distinguishes to get the answers.
—Independent Scholar
David M. Cudnik 81
How did Homer know Achilles?

The Artist as Friend and Parent
in Edith Stein’s
Finite and Eternal Being
David M. Cudnik
Abstract
A central distinction which guides Edith Stein’s aesthetics is the
distinction between Urbild, or pure form, which is the source of
artistic inspiration and Abbild, which is the completed work of
art whose source is the Urbild. The exemplary work of art is one
which is a clear communication of the Urbild that it copies. The
work of art therefore springs from the artist’s knowledge of the
Urbild. However, it is not knowledge of a conceptual kind but
rather of an essential kind. The human relationship that manifests
this distinct kind of knowledge is friendship. In the execution of
the work of art, the artist painstakingly constructs a manifestation
of the Urbild. In this, the artist resembles a parent who assists the
child in calling forth the underlying essence of the child. Thus
the knowledge and activity of the artist, as Stein describes it, have
analogues in the human relationships of friendship and parent-
hood, respectively. In the following paper, I will describe how the
artist resembles both friend and parent in more detail.
* * *
Perhaps the central principle in Edith Stein’s metaphysics is her distinction

between pure and essential form. In the work of her philosophical maturity,
Finite and Eternal Being, she holds that essential forms are “images or copies
[Abbilder] of the pure forms” and that pure forms are “the primordial arche-
types of all things in the divine mind” and, as such, form the ideals “to the
actualization of which the essential forms tend.”1 She applies this distinction
Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (Washington
1
© David M. Cudnik, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall 2013)

82 The Artist as Friend and Parent
in this work in a notable way in her description of artistic inspiration and cre-
ativity. In this account she identifies the pure form, or Urbild, as the source of
inspiration which founds and guides the work of the artist. The completed
work then stands as an Abbild, or a copy, of the Urbild. However, the work of
art does not itself possess an essential form but is rather “something which
resembles the real world because it copies the archetypal images [Urbilder] of
real existents.”2 As a result, she notes that artistic truth is “a modification of
essential truth” for just as essential truth expresses that which the essential
form ought to become, so does artistic truth express “the congruity of the
work with the idea.”3 Thus, in both instances, one sees the pure form behav-
ing as the normative standard according to which the existing thing is mea-
sured. However, the essential form lies within the existing thing and becomes
actualized as that thing attempts to realize its essential truth in the unfolding
of its very existence. In the work of art, on the other hand, the artist acts as
the conduit through which the Urbild finds its expression in the Abbild of the
completed work of art. Furthermore, the work of art is totally dependent on
the artist and is complete once the artist is finished with it.
The peculiar activity of the artist then is both receptive and produc-
tive. As such, artistic inspiration and creativity can be likened to two distinct
kinds of human relationship. First, the artist’s discovery of the Urbild is simi-
lar to the formation of a friendship. Second, the labor of the artist in pro-
ducing the work of art resembles the relationship between parent and child.
Since Stein’s main focus in her various discussions of art in Finite and Eternal
Being is on the artistic portrayal of human characters, these comparisons, in a
sense, coalesce. Thus, what Stein says about personhood and human relation-
ships is directly relevant to artistic inspiration and production: in particular,
the kind of artistic production which has human personality as its subject
matter. For Stein, the artist can either portray a person who has actually exist-
ed or the pure poetic character whose Urbild has not stepped into existence.
In the following paper, I will maintain that in relation to both per-
sonality types the artist becomes a friend to the subject matter of his work as
he discovers the Urbild and he acts as a parent in his production of the Abbild.
In the case of the artistic portrayal of someone who has already existed, the
friendship of the artist with his subject matter is more prominent than his
parenthood; whereas in the case of the creation of the pure poetic character,
the parenthood of the artist becomes more prominent. In the course of this
examination, two difficulties in Stein’s account of pure poetic characters will
become evident: First, Stein’s claim that each human being possesses an indi-
D.C.: ICS Publications, 2002), 231 (henceforth, FEB).

2
Ibid., 165.
3
Stein, FEB, 305.
David M. Cudnik 83
vidual pure form makes it difficult for her to explain how the poet can have
access to the Urbild of the unique personality of someone who has never
existed. Second, Stein holds that the uniqueness of the individual person is
rooted in the person’s self-awareness and ability to give oneself as a gift to
another. Since the pure poetic character never has been, nor ever will be, truly
self-aware, he cannot really give himself to the poet. Although these difficul-
ties remain, they may be mitigated through the idea that the poet behaves like
a parent in relation to his characters.
Friendship
A fruitful way to discern the essential features of friendship is to consid-

er how the friend differs from the stranger. The most obvious difference
between the two is that the friend knows the other person more than the
stranger does. However, this difference in knowledge is not merely accounted
for by a difference in the possession of external objective data. Indeed, one
may accumulate an extensive factual knowledge of a particular person yet
still remain a stranger. Thus, it is not a quantitative difference in knowledge
which distinguishes the stranger from the friend but rather a qualitative one.
In chapter three of Finite and Eternal Being, Stein identifies the con-
tents of these two distinct kinds of knowledge as concept and essence. She
observes that:
We form concepts by bringing into relief certain characteristic
marks of an object. We thus have a certain amount of freedom in
the formation of concepts. Essences, on the other hand, are not
formed by us but rather found or discovered. Here we have no free-
dom whatsoever. We are free, of course, to seek but the finding,
i.e., the found essence, does not depend on us. And because the
ultimate essences are simple, there is nothing in them that can be
brought into relief. For the same reason essences cannot be defined
in the manner we can define concepts.4
Although the concept resembles its corresponding object, it is a mental con-
struction distinct from the thing in reality and under the control of the know-
ing subject. This freedom of control experienced by the knower is therefore
founded on the detachment that the subject has from the object. Another
consequence of this control is that the concept is easily communicable. As a
mechanical unity, the concept can also be analyzed into a nameable inventory
of its characteristic marks. As such, the concept defines the thing in terms of
its parts and not in terms of its unity. Furthermore, these characteristic marks
4
Stein, FEB, 66.
are typically features that an object has in common with other objects. As a
result, the conceptual knower knows the object in terms of the similarities
and differences that this particular object has with other things.
The essence, on the other hand, is opposed to the concept by virtue
of its simplicity, which, in turn, makes it unique and incomparable to any-
thing else. The essence then is not fabricated within the mind of the knower
but is discovered in the object itself. Since the essence cannot be controlled
or fabricated it has a transformative effect on the thinking of the knower.
The knower who discovers the essence is confronted by something that did
not previously belong to his body of knowledge. As he incorporates this
essence into his thinking it has some effect, whether grand or miniscule, on
how he approaches the world after its discovery. In short: the discovered
essence becomes an intimate part of the person’s being. The difference be-
tween the stranger and the friend then lies in the fact the former knows the
other person in a conceptual way, whereas the latter knows the other person
in an essential way.
Stein clearly shows this distinction between the knowledge of the
stranger and that of the friend with her example of identical twins. Since the
striking similarities between these two include even the sameness of genetic
code, one cannot easily tell the two apart on the basis of external physi-
cal characteristics alone. The stranger betrays his ignorance of the twins by
relying on some arbitrary accidental difference to tell the two apart.5 The
friend, however, can easily distinguish between the two because he has dis-
cerned how the two personalities uniquely occupy the same physical struc-
ture.6 When the stranger becomes a friend the external characteristics, which
were once so prominent, now melt into the unity of the underlying essence.
In discovering who the twins essentially are one abdicates the freedom of
defining them and allows them to speak for themselves. Since the simplicity
of the essence frustrates conceptualization the friend sees and celebrates the
uniqueness of each twin and thus can no longer compare them with anyone
else or even mistake one for the other.
In her discussion of human individuality in chapter eight of Finite
and Eternal Being, Stein elaborates on the essence of the human being in the
following way:
This innermost center of the soul cannot be grasped in such a
manner that it could be given a universal name, nor can it be
compared with anything else. It cannot be divided into properties,
character traits and the like, because it is located in greater depth
than any of these. The innermost center of the soul is the how
5
Stein, FEB, 502.
6
Ibid., 502.
David M. Cudnik 85
(poion) of the essence itself and as such impresses its stamp on
every trait of character and every attitude and action of human
beings, and it is the key that unlocks the mystery of the structural
formation of the character of the human being.7
The friend possesses the key that remains hidden from the stranger. As
such, the friend enters into an intimate bond with the other person, while
the stranger remains a detached observer of external behavior. Therefore
the knowledge that is characteristic of friendship is trained on the individual
and not the universal. Indeed the joy of friendship has its source in the feel-
ing that one is known and affirmed by the other according to one’s unique
personality. Such knowledge is contingent upon a communion in which there
is reciprocal influence.
The Friendship of the Artist with the Urbild:

Historical and Artistic Truth
Like the friend who discovers the essential meaning of the other person
the artist discovers the Urbild, which for all artists “is independent and a
precondition of their workmanship.”8 Stein elaborates on the quality of this
relationship in the following way:
The “artistic structure” has its immanent organic law to which
the “master” must submit if his or her creation is to be a work of
art rather than a mere “artifact.” The formal structures which art-
ists mold have their own nature, a nature which “unfolds” before
their very eyes. They “watch” them observing how they “behave”
in this or that particular situation; they have no dictatorial power
over them.9
Thus, in the kind of knowledge belonging to the artist the distinction be-
tween essence and concept manifests itself again. If the artist exercises com-
plete freedom and control in his productive activity then the resulting work
will be a unity of divisible parts, like the concept. The artist then does not
construct the artistic structure but rather allows the organic structure to form
itself in and through him. This artistic structure is the gradual manifestation
of the Urbild, or pure form, in the mind of the artist.
At all levels of being, Stein holds that each individual possesses an
essential form, which has as its guiding principle of its unfolding the Urbild
7
Ibid., 501–2.
8
Stein, FEB, 158.
9
Ibid., 157–58.
that governs the species.10 Thus, one can assume that the artist who has sub-
personal being as his subject-matter can move beyond the individual and
consider the universal. Since the human being belongs to a species, Stein
holds that there is a general pure form which governs and unites all the
members of the human species.11 However, Stein notes in her example of the
identical twins that each twin “feels himself in his innermost essence as ‘an
authentic individual’ and is so regarded by those who have truly ‘grasped’ or
‘apprehended’ the nature of his personality.”12 The self-awareness and self-
possession of the human person makes the individual person stand out in
such a way that it leads Stein to claim that each individual human person
possesses a pure form as well.13 In his article, “Artistic Truth and the True
Self in Edith Stein,” Terence C. Wright interprets Stein’s distinction here in
the following way: “All humans as such reflect the primordial prototype of
human, which is their essential form. The individual form, however, is what
distinguishes Socrates as Socrates.”14 He then concludes that “like the essen-
tial form, this individual form is a reflection of the pure form of Socrates’
[sic] individual being in the divine mind.”15 Therefore, the artist who has hu-
man personality as his subject matter cannot move beyond the individual to
the universal in the way that he could with non-human beings.16
With regards to the portrayal of an actually existing human being,
Stein distinguishes between the limited scope of historical truth and the
broader scope of the more general category of artistic truth. Wright inter-
prets this distinction present in Stein in the following way:
This congruency with the pure idea distinguishes artistic truth
from historical truth. Historical truth must be congruent with
certain events. But an artistic presentation (a statue a painting
a poem etc.) can still be true even when it does not mirror the
facts.17
Wright’s observation above is based on Stein’s claim that “the artist, who
penetrates through the purely external and factual to the primordial arche-
10
Ibid., 261–63.
11
Ibid., 226.
12
Ibid., 502
13
Stein, FEB, 226.
14
Terence Wright, “Artistic Truth and the True Self in Edith Stein,” American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2008): 132.
15
Ibid., 132.
16
An important objection to this point would be the example of the family
pet. The pet is distinguished from other members of the species and comes to be
loved as an individual. One could perhaps say that the pet is adopted into the human
family and thus acquires a “personality” of sorts.
17
Wright, “Artistic Truth and the True Self,” 130.
David M. Cudnik 87
type [Urbild] can present more of the truth than the historian who remains
within the limited circumference of external data.”18 However, Wright seems
to overlook the essential role that the Urbild plays even in historical truth. Al-
though Stein agrees that historical truth is limited to the facts, she also claims
that “the attempt at historical truth fails if the image does not resemble the
primordial type [Urbild].”19 Therefore, the historian’s work must not only be
congruent with the facts but must also be congruent with the pure form.
This point clearly comes out when one considers the work of the historian.
The historian not only gathers and reports facts but also presents an
interpretation of those facts; that is, he proposes a unifying meaning. In this,
he necessarily emphasizes some facts and not others. If his task were merely
to report the facts, his resulting history would be tedious and cumbersome.
Although the historian must be selective in the facts that he presents, the
narrative that he imposes or discovers from those facts must paint a coherent
picture. In other words, he must unify his narrative through either an over-
arching concept or essence. If he chooses the former, his resulting history
runs the risk of being colored by his personal prejudices or of being molded
into a propagandistic account used to promote his political ideology. In either
event, this false historian would impose a meaning on the facts. The true his-
torian, on the other hand, discovers the essential meaning(s) from his chosen
subject matter and presents this to the best of his ability in his writing. The
true historian then discerns the essential meaning of his subject matter and
enters into a “friendship” with it as he allows it to speak for itself. He does
not shape the historical narrative but allows the historical truth to shape him.
Although artistic truth need not be concerned with facts it cannot
contradict the facts. In an extended footnote attached to her discussion of
artistic truth, Stein considers the case in which the artistic portrayal of “Na-
poleon” is inconsistent with the historical “Napoleon.” She notes: “However,
it might be questioned whether in this case the artist has the right to call
such an image ‘Napoleon,’ for if the artist uses this name, the artist thereby
advances a certain claim and assumes an obligation to historical truth.”20
The artist can, however, move beyond the actual because “what each human
ought to be—i.e., his or her ‘personal destiny’—pertains to the essence.”21 As
he discovers the pure form the artist knows not only the essential meaning
of what presents itself in experience but also the unrealized potential which
is also included in the Urbild. With the example of Napoleon, she concludes
that “a bust of Napoleon can be ‘true’ in this sense even though it bears little
18
Stein, FEB, 304.
19
Ibid., 303.
20
Stein, FEB, 592.
21
Ibid., 304.
resemblance to the historical Napoleon.”22 Since the life of the historical Na-
poleon “was not a pure realization of what he ought to have been,” the artist
is able to present a more complete version of his essence.23
This ability of the artist to penetrate beyond the factual is also re-
flected in friendship. The friend is not only moved by what the other person
actually is but also by what the other person could be. Therefore, the love of
the friend is able to call forth the unrealized potential of the beloved. Fur-
thermore, in the act of loving the friend the lover realizes more of his own
potential. This latter point is the thrust of Wright’s argument with respect
to the activity of the artist. Wright points out that in Stein’s view the activity
of the artist not only calls forth a penetrating expression of the Urbild that
inspires the artist but also actualizes the artist himself.24 The artist brings
out the best of his subject matter and likewise his interaction with his sub-
ject matter brings out the best in him. This fecund reciprocal relationship
between the artist and his source of inspiration has the mark of the human
relationship of friendship.
The Parenthood of the Artist
Although the source of artistic inspiration, the Urbild, is independent of

the artist, the completed work of art depends upon his productive activity.
Therefore, Stein attributes two sources of truth to the work of art. On this
point, she notes:
We call a work of art true when it is what it ought to be. However,
this “ought” has a twofold meaning. It may indicate that the work
of art corresponds to the intention of the artist, or that it corre-
sponds to a pure idea. The work is not a genuine or true work of
art if—though the work expresses the intention of the artist—the
idea which the artist has fashioned in his or her mind deviates
from the pure idea.25
The genuine work of art is one in which the artist’s intention coincides with
the pure idea. This occurs when the artist’s skillful execution adequately re-
flects the essential knowledge of its subject matter. On the other hand, when
the artist’s intention deviates from the pure form, the resulting work of art
originates from conceptual knowledge, which is itself fashioned by the artist.
The difference between these two informing sources is reflected in the fact
22
Ibid., 303.
23
Ibid., 303.
24
Ibid., 230.
25
Stein, FEB, 302
David M. Cudnik 89
that the genuine work of art will display an organic unity, whereas the work
of art originating from the concept will have a mechanical unity.
Stein invokes these two possibilities in her description of pure poetic
characters in the following passage from chapter four:
There are characters of poetic fiction of whom we say that they
are true to life, and there are others whom we call “untrue,” “dis-
torted,” or “impossible.” “True to life” in this case does not mean
that the characters must be exact copies of real life models. The
true poet is endowed with the gift of “creating” characters that
are true to life. This kind of creativity to be sure is of a peculiar
nature. It is not “free” in the sense of being completely arbitrary.
The more genuine and greater the art of the poet, the more his
creation will resemble a conception and birth and the less will it
show the marks of a mechanical construct.26
She places the term creation in quotation marks precisely because the pure
form that inspires the artist is independent of the artist. As Wright notes
in the context of the poetic work, Stein holds that “the imposition of the
writer’s will upon the character results in failure.”27
Stein here also invokes the idea of parenthood to describe the art-
ist’s relationship with his work of art. The physical development of the child
within the womb of his mother and her labor to give birth to the child thus
resembles the work of the artist to make the Urbild incarnate in the work of
art. In reference to the intention of the artist as a standard of truth for the
work of art, Stein also identifies an intellectual aspect to the development
of the work of art to which the image of gestation and delivery of the baby
does not do adequate justice. However, the analogy between the artist and
the parent can be extended to include both the physical formation of the
child and the character formation of the child as he or she is raised by the
parent.
Stein makes a distinction between the intellectual operation of
“making the idea stand out clearly” and the actual production of the work of
art.28 However, she quickly asserts that these two processes intertwine as she
claims that “the clarification” of the idea “takes place step by step during and
concomitantly with the execution of the work.”29 Thus, if the artist does not
want his work to deviate from the pure idea and devolve into a conceptual
structure, he must achieve a tenuous balance of remaining receptive to the
pure idea while at the same time actively expressing that pure idea through a
26
Ibid., 157.
27
28
Stein, FEB, 301–2.
29
Ibid., 302.
physical medium. In a similar way, the parent must continually stand recep-
tive to the essence of the child as it manifests itself over the course of the
child’s development, while at the same time taking an active role in form-
ing the child in accordance with that essence. Therefore, like the artist, the
parent’s “production” of the child runs the risk of deviating from the pure
idea. Thus, the parent can either impose a meaning upon his or her child, or
discover the unique personality of his son or daughter and do everything in
his power to bring this essence to full expression.
The analogy breaks down insofar as the child possesses an essential
form and individual form of his own, whereas the work of art does not
possess an essence but is merely a reflection of the Urbild. The work of art
stands entirely dependent on the artist for its formation. Although the artist
may forever tinker with a work, it stands completed once he decides that it
is finished. Although the parent forms the child, he does not complete the
child. As the child matures, he gradually takes ownership over the develop-
ment of his own character as he steps into conscious freedom. Indeed the
cultivation of freedom and self-possession is the end of genuine parenthood.
However, on this last point, the analogy between the artist and the
parent becomes apt again. Insofar as the genuine work of art is congruent
with the first standard of truth—namely, the pure idea—it will call to mind
the Urbild which is independent of the artist. In other words, the genuine
work of art is a reflection of the Urbild and not the artist. The work of
art is not an expression of the artist but rather something that expresses
itself through the artist. In a similar way, the child comes to express himself
through the help of his parents. One reason why the work of art or the child
may fall short of their respective potentials may be due to the pride of the
artist and parent respectively. The prideful artist constructs the work of art
with the primary motivation of having its success redound upon him. Such
an artist will exercise complete control over the execution of the work and
thus will produce a mechanical construct rather than giving birth to an or-
ganic expression. Similarly, the prideful parent, who is singularly motivated
by the praise that the good and successful child will bring him, attempts to
exercise complete control over the direction of the child’s life. This thwarts
the development of freedom and self-possession in the child.30 Like the work
of art, the development of the child is measured against two standards of
truth: the intention of the parent who forms him and the pure form that
30
A vivid example of the prideful parent comes from the movie Dead Poets’
Society. One of the main characters, Neal, was an exceptional student and a natural
leader. However, his father exerted dictatorial power over him by predetermining the
course of his life. Having despaired of the possibility of breaking free of his father’s
control, Neal tragically committed suicide.
David M. Cudnik 91
corresponds to the individual. The awesome responsibility of the parent lies
in striving to parent in a way that is faithful to the child’s pure form.
Once the child becomes a mature adult, that is, once he becomes
responsible for his own life, the two standards of truth against which the in-
dividual is measured are transferred from the parent to the child. The free in-
dividual has the power to shape his own life. As such, his intention is the first
standard against which his life is measured. However, the individual form is
the deeper standard of truth to which the free individual has a responsibility
to be faithful. The individual whose life is guided by this standard becomes
more fully himself. Once again the distinction between concept and es-
sence becomes apropos. The individual who assumes complete control over
constructing his own life builds a personality that resembles a conceptual
structure. The individual who discovers and lives according to his vocation
discovers his essence, and by virtue of this self-discovery his essence shines
radiantly through all of his actions. In short, he is a beautiful person. Wright
notices this parallel between the beautiful person and the beautiful work of
art in Stein’s aesthetics. He notes that “there is an implicit sense in which for
Stein the goal of the individual is to make him or herself true in much the
same way in which the work of art is true.”31 However, before the individual
is capable of forming himself he depends upon the formation that he is
given by his parents.
Bringing the Pure Poetic Character to Life
The “parenthood” of the artist is present in all forms of artistic creativity.

However it seems to be the most evident in the creation of the pure poetic
character; for, as the parent participates in bringing a new human being into
existence the poet brings into imaginative existence a personality that has no
real life counterpart. The artist who portrays a person who actually existed
must be faithful to the historic truth of that person. He uses the historic truth
to discover the underlying essence of the person. The pure poetic character,
on the other hand, is not bound by the same faithfulness to historic truth.
This does not mean, however, that the artist creates the character ex nihilo.
He too must be faithful to the Urbild of the character, which is independent
of the poet and is the source of his inspiration. In this there is no difference
between the artist who creates the pure poetic character and the one who
portrays an historic person. However, since the human being possesses an
individual form in Stein’s estimation, it does not seem clear how the poet
is able to access the Urbild of the pure poetic character. Furthermore, self-
31
possession is an essential mark of human nature. The pure poetic character
lacks real self-possession. As such, there is a secondary problem, namely, it is
unclear how the poetic character can reveal himself to the poet.
Stein uses the Homeric character Achilles as her example of the pure
poetic character. She notes that “Achilles, and with him the entire ‘world’ into
which he has been placed are sustained by the spirit of the poet (or of the
empathetic reader). Achilles does not ‘possess’ his nature or essence: It has
been ‘given’ or ‘loaned’ to him.”32 Insofar as Homer brings poetic character
into imaginative being he resembles the parent who is responsible for the ap-
pearance and the formation of a brand new human being.
The poet gives birth to the character in what Stein calls a “poetic
world of appearances.” Using Homer once again as an example she describes
this world in the following way:
And yet this entire Homeric world is not real: It is a “poetic world
of appearances” [Scheinwelt] and as such a product of poetic imagi-
nation. In other words, the human mind is capable of creating
something which resembles the real world because it copies the
archetypal images [Urbilder] of real existents [des Wirklichen], but
this something is nevertheless only apparently [scheinbar] real.33
In noting that this imaginary world resembles “the real world,” Stein cites
the world of experience as the source of the world of appearances. In other
words, the poet is still bound to historical truth insofar as the world he cre-
ates must resemble the real world. It is into this imaginary world that the pure
poetic character is born and is able to manifest his essence through the skill
of the poet.
Since the poetic world of appearances must conform to a generic
historical standard, the pure poetic character must resemble real world exis-
tents as well; that is, he must resemble real human beings in the general char-
acteristics that human beings share. Stein holds that there is a pure form that
belongs to human nature as such and an individual pure form. Therefore, one
could suggest that the pure poetic character is not inspired by an individual
form but rather by the Urbild of human nature as such. Wright adopts this
position and advances it in the following way:
The artist’s ability to capture this form is what is at work in Hom-
er’s creation of Achilles. But since this form is “unrelated to a par-
ticular matter” (because his Achilles is a poetic fiction) it guides
Homer only in the sense of an essential form not an individual.34
32
Stein, FEB, 165.
33
Ibid., 165.
34
David M. Cudnik 93
However, when Stein describes the artistic truth of the character Achilles she
clearly has an individual form in mind. She writes:
Assuming that Homer’s Achilles was designed in every particular
trait as a faithful copy of the pure form of the Urbild we may
conclude that in this Urbild were enclosed all of the individual
traits of his character and all of the possible modes of his action.35
The Urbild that Stein describes here is a structural unity that distinguishes
Achilles from Hektor, Patroclos, and indeed from any other human being.
Thus the poet is not only inspired by the Urbild of human nature but by the
individual pure form as well. Although the pure poetic character has no real
life counterpart, he shares human nature with real persons. The poet, there-
fore is first inspired by the Urbild of human nature. However, as he “makes
the idea stand out clearly,” he discovers the unrepeatable pure form of the
individual character.
It is the image of parenthood that helps to explain how the pure
poetic character can reveal himself to the poet even though that character is
not self-possessing and depends on the poet for his existence. The fruitful
bond of love between man and woman is capable of generating human indi-
viduals who did not previously exist. Although the child comes to be through
his parents, the individual pure form that corresponds to the child’s being is
independent and eternal. Similarly, the poet’s contemplation of human na-
ture allows him to discover and imaginatively generate pure poetic characters
who had not been previously known but whose Urbilder are also independent
and eternal. Nevertheless the child is independent in a way that the pure
poetic character, whose “nature is loaned” to him, can never be. Since Achil-
les has but an imaginative existence, he cannot actually be a self-possessing
individual. How then does the Urbild of Achilles compare to those of human
individuals who actually existed? It seems that it would be inferior since it
corresponds to an individual who will never be real. Nevertheless, Homer’s
Iliad presents a personality as unique and unrepeatable as any biography of
Napoleon.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Stein’s distinction between essence and concept is reflected

in the human relationships of friendship, parenthood, and even the person’s
relationship with himself. These human relationships of friendship and par-
enthood find a peculiar analogue in the activity of the artist. From Stein’s
35
Stein, FEB, 161.
basic distinction between essence and concept, one can distinguish the friend
from the stranger. Knowing through the concept, the stranger remains unaf-
fected and separate from the other person. The friend, on the other hand,
enters into an intimate relationship with the other person and knows him in
an essential way, which includes not only what he is but also what he could
be. In the artistic portrayal of human beings who actually existed the histo-
rian presents the essential nature of who the person is, while the artist is able
to also present the fullness of what the person could be. Like the parent,
the artist is responsible for both the physical production and the expressive-
ness of his work. In the case of the pure poetic character, the artist behaves
even more like a parent insofar as he produces and forms a new individual
character who has not stepped into existence. The parenthood of the poet
then transitions to the friendship of the empathetic reader who sustains the
existence of the pure poetic character. Through essential knowledge, which
is the defining feature of friendship, the reader is formed and influenced by
the pure poetic character. Although Achilles has never existed, he has had a
profound influence in the Western world for millennia.
—University of Dallas
Christopher T. Haley 95
Manifesting Meaning:
Art, Truth, and Community
in St. Edith Stein
Christopher T. Haley
Abstract
In this paper I investigate the peculiarities of artistic truth in rela-
tion to God, the artist, the work of art, and the artwork’s audience
in the context of Stein’s thought. In doing so, I attempt to fashion
from Stein’s unsystematic statements about art the rudiments of
an aesthetic theory. The core of this theory is the role of beauty
in the manifestation of truth and meaning in the world of finite
being. This manifestation, I argue, affords art a unique possibility
of creating a fuller harmony between finite and infinite being, and
so a fuller harmony with God.
* * *
Nowhere does Edith Stein articulate a developed theory of aesthetics. She

offers insightful statements about painting, music, literature and poetry
throughout her work. For example, she addresses the appropriate response to
art in Individual and Community and describes “artistic truth” in Finite and Eter-
nal Being. However, she never integrates her sporadic insights about art into a
complete philosophy of aesthetics. Yet, her frequent references to works of
art in metaphors and exempla leave no doubt that an aesthetic understanding
informs her philosophy, even if that understanding remains unformed and
inarticulate. In fact, she states explicitly that, “we shall not attempt to answer
all those questions which are relevant to a systematic theory of the beautiful
and aesthetic experience.”1 But it is worth making a fuller attempt because
her occasional remarks are rich with potential. In this paper I situate Stein’s
inchoate aesthetics within the broader context of her developed philosophy
and attempt to trace-out some of the developments that follow. I begin this
1
Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt, Collected Works
of Edith Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2002), 9: 320 (henceforth, FEB).
© Christopher T. Haley, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall 2013)
96 Art, Truth, and Community
examination with metaphysics, particularly her discussion of being, essence,
and truth. In the second section, I examine the peculiar position of the artist
and the work of art in reference to truth and knowledge. In the final section,
I trace-out some implications of the preceding investigation.
Section One
As a preliminary remark, it must be noted that Stein does not believe that all
things that might be called art are rightly so called. She distinguishes what
she calls “genuine art”2 from non-genuine forms according to a criterion of
truthfulness. Thus, for Stein, before we can speak of art, we must speak of
truth.
For Stein, truth is always relational; it is a relationship of congruity
between intellectual activity and an object. But this can be understood in
many ways, as there are not only many of types of objects, but many types
of intellects. In Finite and Eternal Being, Stein distinguishes various types of
truth: the logical, ontological, essential, transcendental, divine, artistic, and
truths of judgment. Three of these concern us here: historical truth, which
aims at congruence with the details of history, an historical person, or a state-
of-affairs; essential truth, which is the “congruity of some actuality with the
corresponding pure form”3; and artistic truth, which “denotes the congruity
of the work of art with a pure idea, regardless of whether or not something
in the ‘real’ world, i.e., in the world of experience, corresponds to it.”4 Artistic
truth thus has a dual role, since it pertains both to existents (the works of art)
and to essences (pure forms), though not to things in the “real” world; that is,
not to independent, self-enclosed beings, or protê ousia.5 Works of art, insofar
as they are artistically true, conform to the primordial existents (pure forms)
in a way that only essential truths can. However, unlike essential truths, there
needs be no real-world existent which conforms to the pure form. Thus,
Beethoven’s Ode to Joy may be an artistically true expression of the pure form
of joy, even though there is no essentially true expression of joy. To be essen-
tially true, some actuality would have to be in congruity with its pure form.
But there is no actuality, no protê ousia—the pure form of which is joy—and yet,
the Ode to Joy is truly joyous. To better understand this peculiar relationship
2
Stein, FEB, 298.
3
Ibid., 296.
4
Ibid., 303.
5
Stein uses protê ousia in two senses: (1) as a term properly applied only to the
first existent, i.e., God; and (2) as real world substances, things that are here and now.
Here Stein is using protê ousia in the latter sense.
between the work of art and the pure form, we need first to understand what
Stein means by ‘pure forms.’
Pure forms are “created” by God, but not in the way creatures are
created; that is, they have no Dasein (i.e., being in the real world).6 As such,
they are, though created, beyond the possibility of becoming or passing away.
Being created, they receive their being from another (God) and so are finite,
but they are held in being eternally by God. They do not themselves become, but
they are the ground of becoming in the real world.7 When something is in the
process of becoming, it is, according to its inner, essential form, striving to
become like the pure form; unfolding in accord with the eternally unfolded
meaning of the pure form. Pure forms are the pure meanings in the eternal
realm of the divine mind that finite existents strive to actualize. Stein calls
the pure form the “ideal, i.e., the ‘limit’ which”8 all real things, as well as our
ideas of real things, seek to approximate. This limit is fixed in the divine mind
prior to, and independent of, any actualization in the real world, and these
fixed limits of the pure forms exist for all things in the real world. Together
in the providential mind of God all pure forms cohere in the divine manifold
of meaning, which is the Logos.9 But this totality is only grasped by the mind
of God. When we finite intellects know we do not know the totality, nor
even the pure forms, but what we know we know according to the pure forms,
which make possible our intellectual grasping; for, all truths which are acces-
sible to us are true in relation to the pure forms. But there is a totality of mean-
ing of which the pure forms are but parts. When we know something, we
do not know it in this totality, but we know it in relation to this totality. I might
know Socrates through the writings of Plato and Xenophon, and through
the paintings of Raphael and Jacques-Louis David; I might even know him
personally; all of these are more or less true expressions of the pure form of
Socrates; but I still do not know the totality of which Socrates is a part. I do
not know Socrates like God knows Socrates, for God alone knows the pure
form of Socrates within the mysterious totality of being, which Stein calls
the Logos. Stein describes the relationship of pure meanings within the Logos,
and our relationship to this manifold of pure meaning with, of all things, an
artistic metaphor:
Their [the pure forms] standing together in the Logos is a totali-
ty of meaning. It may be compared to a perfect work of art in
which every single feature has its particular place and in the pure
and strict proportionality fits the total pattern and contributes to
6
Stein, FEB, 285. See also FEB, 105, 240, and 112.
7
Ibid., 105.
8
Ibid., 240.
9
Ibid., 112.
the harmony of the whole. What we grasp of the “meaning of
things,” what “enters into our understanding,” is in relation to
that totality of meaning like some forlorn sounds of a symphony
which are carried a long distance by the wind until they finally
reach our ear.10
Pure forms give meaning to existents—God gives being to pure forms—and
so God is “not only the Lord of being, but also the Lord of meaning”:11 that
includes not only abstract meanings, like the meanings of geometric struc-
tures or emotions, but also the meanings of individuals and of communities;
the meaning of a person has its being in God. To better understand this state-
ment, we need to understand the relationship between a person’s meaning and
that person’s being, or more precisely, the relationship between the being of the
meaning of the person, which is independent of the person, and the person’s being
in the real world, which is dependent upon that person’s meaning.
While a pure form (Wesenheit, Urbild) is the ground of the possibil-
ity of meaning, Stein uses the term nature (Wesen) for the medium through
which that meaning may be realized in a person. Natures are universals in the
particulars. Natures belong to existents and as such they are temporal; but
they are what determine and “contain” an existent’s essential possibilities and
in this way they are related to non-temporal essential being. An existent’s na-
ture both determines what it is and delimits what it can be. What an existent
is is constant; how it is admits of change. But from the fact that a thing’s what-
ness is constant it does not follow that what it is is what it is supposed to be.
What a thing is supposed to be according to its created nature is its Wesenwas,
or the ti ên; the “what” of the nature. Since natures inhere in existents which
are in a state of becoming, it is possible that an existent not be (ti einai) what
it is supposed to be (ti ên); for, in such a case the nature is not realized. Stein,
following Aristotle, calls a nature (Wesen) the to ti ên einai, the “to be what it
was and is,” that is, to be what it is supposed to be. What a thing is supposed to
be is its ideal limit—its pure form—which, as we have seen, is non-temporal;
and so a finite temporal being is never fully what it is supposed to be.12 Rather,
it is only a better or worse image of what it is supposed to be. A person in the
real world never attains to the pure form of that person, although the person
can be in congruity with the pure form. This congruity, we have seen, Stein
calls essential truth.
10
Ibid., 113.
11
Ibid., 106.
12
A being only fully becomes what it is supposed to be in the glory of the be-
atific vision: only there do all of a person’s essential possibilities become actual, since
one of those essential possibilities is to participate in the splendor of the beatific
vision. It is worth noting here that the “real world” to which Stein is referring is also
a fallen world.
Finite beings point beyond themselves to their pure forms. What we
get hold of when we form a concept is not the thing but the thing’s nature.
The thing’s nature always points beyond itself to the pure form of the thing.
In this way, the individual points to his or her nature and that nature points to
the pure form—or rather, the individual points through its nature to the pure
form. Therefore, Stein can say that “it is of the essence of every finite thing
to be a symbol, and it is of the essence of everything material and spatial to be
a symbol of something immaterial and spiritual.”13
Not all finite beings symbolize eternal essences equally well. A per-
son’s freedom includes “a possibility of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to their own
natures.”14 This freedom of the person’s is in relation to his or her ought is the
freedom of the person’s finite, individual being in relation to his or her eternal
meaning, which is mediated through the person’s nature (Wesen). In the real
world of becoming and passing away a human person does not necessarily
become what he or she is destined to be. Rather, the person’s becoming what
he or she is supposed to be depends on a number of factors— including
environment—but most important among these is self-knowledge. A person
must “learn to know itself, and it must come to be what it is destined to be.”15
This destiny is established by God, but it is not predestined that the person
attain it; for, alongside the possibility of finding oneself there is also the pos-
sibility of losing oneself.16 Without self-knowledge, the person cannot be (ti
einai) what he or she was created to become in the real world (ti ên). The less
a person knows of his or her nature, and the less a person lives in accordance
with it, the further the person is from his or her to ti ên einai. In this situation,
the individual points less clearly to the universal, and the finite points less
clearly to the eternal.
Stein goes this far, but we must go a little further if we are to see the
aesthetic ramifications of her metaphysics. We must recognize that a person
cannot fully realize in existence his or her meaning. For a person to be in full
conformity with his or her essence is to be a perfect image of a pure form—
but Stein says that in the temporal world of existence, “no real perfection
for us humans” is possible. Rather, perfection is only possible in the state of
glory; a state which is beyond finite, temporal existence.17 And since no finite
person can be in perfect congruity with his or her essence, it follows that it
is not possible for an existing human person to attain to full essential truth.
Thus essential truth remains mysterious and elusive to finite intellects.
13
Stein, FEB, 244.
14
Ibid., 400.
15
Ibid., 430.
16
Ibid., 509.
17
Ibid., 226.
We must make one more distinction in order to understand what
can and cannot be known about natures and essences. The natures of which
we have been speaking are what Stein calls “individual natures,” which she
distinguishes from “universal natures.” A person’s nature (Wesen) contains
both. While universal natures are conceptually knowable and communicable,
individual natures are not. As a result of this, the mind can form no concept
of them because in order to form a concept the intellect must grasp, exam-
ine, compare, and contrast multiple species. This condition is impossible in
regards to individuals qua individuals since the individual nature is not shared
with anything else. Thus, as a result, it cannot be contrasted, compared, or
conceptualized.
We began this inquiry into natures and essences in order to shed
some light on the peculiarity of artistic truth in relation to essential and his-
torical truth. We can now see that because no existing being is ever in full
congruity with its pure form, the possibility for realizing essential truth is
limited by the particularities of actual existence. Historical truth, in light of
our earlier remarks about the incommunicability of individual natures, must
be mostly concerned with states-of-affairs, and it can express historical truths
about individual natures only insofar as those are expressed as essential truths
in actuality. That is to say, historical truth is limited to the particularities of
history. However, the historical Napoleon was not the pure form of Napo-
leon. Now we see what is special about artistic truth, which “denotes the
congruity of the work of art with a pure idea, regardless of whether or not
something in the ‘real’ world, i.e., in the world of experience, corresponds
to it.”18 Artistic truth alone is not dependent in any way upon the realization
or communication of natures in the world. The essential truth and the his-
torical truth of Napoleon are both limited by the particularity of Napoleon’s
actual existence whereas the artistic truth of a painting of Napoleon is not.
Moreover, although there is neither an essential nor an historical truth of joy
there can be an artistically true communication of joy. The truth of art is not
limited to the particularities of existence. But if this is so, and the artist can
grasp pure forms and create finite works that correspond to eternal essences
independently of actual existence, then it must be that the artist, because of
his or her special receptivity, mediates truth to individuals and communities
in a way that non-artistic natures cannot.
Section Two
We have seen that finite intellects cannot grasp individual pure forms.
18
Ibid., 303.
However, there are two ways that finite beings can gain some access to the
pure forms: The first is through feeling, which Stein calls an act of “spiritual
apperception”19—this is commonly available to all humans, and Stein does not
say much more about it. She is more clear, however, about a second way,
which is unique to artists: “In the mind of the artist the idea flashes, attracts
the artist, leaves the artist no rest, urges the artist on to create.”20 How this
happens, Stein does not explain—she seems to adhere to the old adage: poeta
nascitur non fit. It is in the artist’s very nature to be an artist, and part of that
nature is the potency to receive ideas as flashes in the mind.
The idea of the artist is a structure of meaning to which the artist
must submit, or else the artist’s work will be a mere artifact and not a work
of art; the structure of meaning is the goal of the work of art.21 The struc-
tures are not real things in the real world but, since they are effective, they are
actual things. Their meaning unfolds before the artist but, as the structures
are beyond becoming and passing away, their meaning is independent of any
actualization. Stein makes explicit the identification with pure forms when
she writes:
Thus for artists there exist archetypal forms or images [Urbilder] which
they must seize and the being of which is independent and a pre-
condition of their workmanship. Here we are dealing with the
pure forms.22
Pure forms, which are unknowable to finite intellects, somehow “flash” in
the mind of the artist. Stein’s language makes it clear that artists cannot grasp
these forms at will but it remains the case that they can grasp them in way that
is uniquely theirs, and so can know what is otherwise unknowable.
The artist does not go after the idea, but rather the idea attracts the
artist. To manifest the idea in the work of art is the draw of the artist’s own
nature: “It is immanent to the nature of the artist to create.”23 There is something
about the very nature of the artist that makes him or her into a medium for
the manifestation of meaning in the real world. The closer the artist gets to
actualizing the received pure form the closer the artist comes to realizing his
own pure form. Thus the artist is a sort of vessel; a conduit for meaning.
Whatever meanings the artist receives and is able to manifest are determined
by the artist’s nature, and so, determined ultimately by the mind of God.
Thus every artist has assigned to him or her a task—a call or vocation—to
realize their own meaning by realizing specific eternal meanings in the finite
19
Stein, FEB, 503.
20
Ibid., 229.
21
Ibid., 157.
22
Ibid., 158.
23
Ibid., 230.
world. In manifesting meaning in a work of art, Stein says, “the artist himself
attains to a higher stage of ontic perfection.”24
In the work of art the artist attempts to realize an essence. The work
of art, like a person, has a ti ên—a what it is supposed to be (Wesenwas). This
is the foundational and constant element of meaning in the work of art. The
artist attempts to form the work of art (ti esti) in such a way that it realizes its
inner whatness (ti ên). In accord with our earlier inquiry into pure forms and
natures it seems that the artist, in relation to the work of art and the pure
form, occupies the role of a nature (Wesen), which is the medium through
which the eternal meaning is brought forth into the finite world. The success-
ful work of art, therefore, is one that is a to ti ên einai; something that is what
it was and is supposed to be, where what it “was,” the ti ên, is the pure form
which flashed in the artist’s mind.
There is, then, nothing arbitrary in the essential nature of a work of
art. There are essential possibilities regarding manner of execution, but the
work of art must be formed, and will be judged, according to the integral
laws of the meaning-structure of the pure form. This means, for example,
that literary characters are not themselves pure forms but their meanings
have pure forms. In Community in Reality, Stein writes, “that which I am able
to convey through narration isn’t contact with life in action, but with the con-
tents that were incarnated in it.”25 There is no pure form of Don Quixote;
what Cervantes grasped was the pure form of the quixotic, and it was that
which he incarnated in the eponymous knight. The artist is not, however,
limited to only fictional characters since the artists may poeticize pure forms
of real people also—Stein uses the example of Plato’s poetic account of
Socrates. A person’s life is lived-out of his or her essence but no one in their
life can realize all of their essential possibilities. Socrates was not the perfect
image of the pure form of Socrates. A person could not, then, know fully the
essence of Socrates even by living with him; artists don’t learn the essence
from the expression but rather receive them “in a flash.” It is therefore pos-
sible that an artist may know a person better than that person knows himself
or herself, and may realize that person’s essence in art more perfectly than
the person did in life. And so Plato’s Socrates could potentially be a more
complete Socrates than Socrates himself.
In addition to the pure forms of people and poetic characters the
artist can also manifest in a work of art realizations of the pure forms of
emotions. Stein holds that “there’s no quality of feeling, no mood, no rhythm
24
Ibid., 230.
Edith Stein, Philosophy and Psychology of the Humanities, ed. Marianne Sawicki,
25
trans. Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki, Collected Works of Edith Stein
(Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2000), 7: 218 (henceforth, PPH).
of life that couldn’t be incarnated in a tone pattern.”26 Presumably, this holds
good for the plastic and visual arts as well. And as with the other pure forms
which art realizes it wouldn’t matter if there were or ever had been in exis-
tence an actualization of this feeling. So in the same way that a work of art
can reveal more of a person than that person revealed in his or life, it can also
reveal more of joy, of exultation, of fear, than has been realized in real life.27
The work of art, like all finite existents, points beyond itself to
something eternal: the pure form. The work of art has a meaning. The mate-
rial out of which the work of art is made has been transformed: the painting
is no longer just paint and canvas but a meaningful existent; “a novum has
come into being.”28 This new thing is a new is; and according to the talent and
will of the artist, this is more or less perfectly realizes an ought. And the more
a work of art is what it ought to be the more beautiful it is.
Beauty denotes that an is corresponds to its ought. Beauty is grounded
in the whatness (Washeit /ti ên) of the existent but is not limited or confined
to the existing object.29 Beauty refers not only to the correspondence of the
real object with its essence, but also of the relation between the object and
the perception of the object; beauty, like truth, is relational.30 While truth
relates to the knowing intellect, beauty relates to a special spiritual power in
man: the heart. Beauty speaks directly to the soul. The meaning of the work
of art is not fully realized in the work of art alone, but depends also upon
a responsive audience; both “the souls of the artist and the listener help to
bring about this realization” of meaning.31
For the art’s meaning to be fully actualized that meaning must be
acknowledged, understood, and felt. Every object (and so, every work of art)
has a value, and for every value there is an appropriate response to that val-
ue.32 A demand is made upon the viewer when he or she is confronted with a
work of art. The responsive soul must comply with the meaningful demand
of the aesthetic experience and must seek to integrate the meaning into his or
her life. In this way, the meaning of the work of art is integrated into a higher
unity of meaning. This higher unity is a further development of beauty. What
is most beautiful is also most good and most true, and that is God, in whom,
as we have seen, all meanings stand together in the highest unity. When in the
real world of finite being, artist, art, and audience together realize in a har-
26
Stein, PPH, 218.
27
There could also be much said on this account for Christian iconography
and the experience of the holy—but that is another topic.
28
Stein, FEB, 214.
29
Ibid., 321.
30
Ibid., 321.
31
Ibid., 379.
32
Stein, PPH, 86.
monious way eternal truths, such a community of realization is a closer ap-
proximation to the divine unity of meaning than existed before—it is more
beautiful, and thus it is a clearer “mirror of the eternal.”33 What is more
beautiful is, therefore, more God-like, for “every meaningful demand which is
made upon the soul with obligatory force is a word of God. For there is no
meaning that does not have its eternal home and abode in the Logos”34 and so
the more fully realized the meaning of the work of art the nearer to God, the
Lord of Meaning, becomes the triune community of artist, art, and audience.
Section Three
In the last two sections we laid a foundation for understanding the work of
art in relation both to truth and to the artist, which allowed us to consider
the role of the audience in art. Here we aim to expand upon this relationship
among art, truth, and audience in greater detail, revealing in the process not
only what art is and does but also some of its essential possibilities.
Our initial examination of the role of the audience was limited to
the individual, but we feel not only as individuals, we feel also in community.
This communal feeling affords us a different view into the range of respons-
es called forth by a work of art. If a work of art calls to a person qua member
of a community, then the demand might not merely be that the individual
change his or her life, but that he or she change the community. In Individual
and Community, Stein says that individual experiences, when they are experi-
enced by an individual qua member of a community, “belong in a higher level
of constitution than the solitary experience”;35 we see in this expression the
seed of what later, in Finite and Eternal Being, she calls a ‘higher unity of mean-
ing.’ In that context, we can say that the response on behalf of a community
to the demand of a work of art is a higher and more perfect response. The
meaning of the art becomes more real; the community as a whole becomes
more beautiful. Stein describes how Goethe and Rousseau discovered and
manifested for Europeans the beauty of the Alps, which had previously been
regarded as dangerous and ugly. Furthermore, she explains that “individuals
can serve a community as organs making the community capable of contact
with the world of values, like the open eye with which the community peers
into the world.”36 This is the artist par excellence.
In addition to manifesting meaning to a community, the work of art
can also be a manifestation of a community’s meaning. This, Stein notes, was
33
Stein, FEB, 242.
34
Ibid., 445.
35
Stein, PPH, 141.
36
Ibid., 221.
precisely the case in the Renaissance, when people suddenly realized again
the meanings that had lain fallow in classical art for over a thousand years.37
Works of art are formed objects that contain an unwaning, or definite, mean-
ing. Even if the community that it once informed has vanished, the meaning
endures, waiting to be rediscovered. This possibility of a “renaissance” is
thus an essential possibility in all art. The actualization of that possibility,
however, brings forth an interesting question. How could people living for
centuries amidst classical art and architecture fail to notice the beauty of
those works if, as Stein has argued, works of art have definite and determined
meanings which do not change? Here we find Stein’s response to the old ad-
age that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ For Stein, beauty is relational. A
work of art cannot be beautiful in a vacuum. In the period between antiquity
and the Renaissance, classical sculptures were not beautiful—but they were
ready and waiting to be beautiful. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder,
but it does depend upon the eye of the beholder. And when potential beauty is
discovered and activated, what becomes in the world is not only beauty but a
new shared experience among peoples; an augmentation of one community
by another, limited neither by time nor place. In this way, the artist is able not
only to speak to his or her own community, but to speak to future communi-
ties as well.
A work of art aims to manifest the essential whatness (Wesenwas /ti
ên) of a pure form, and it is with this core meaning that the receptive audi-
ence comes into relation. When a work of art represents the essence of an
individual person that person becomes known to the audience. In a very real
sense, then, we can say that Socrates lives in the works of Plato and that we
can know Socrates in them. Thus by preserving in existence a manifestation
of the pure form of a person, art allows for a sort of community between
existing and non-existing persons.
Moreover, if art can manifest the nature of a dead person to a living
person, then it can certainly manifest the natures of living persons to one an-
other. This follows clearly from our previous inquiries, but we must still work
out the implications. Chief among such implication is that art can reveal to a
person aspects of another person that previously were unknown. In this ca-
pacity art can serve as sort of translator between people, perhaps even across
cultures, by revealing and appealing to common cores of meaning. A person’s
activities in the world are, for Stein, realizations of his or her inner nature,
but not full disclosures; what remains undisclosed in the person’s life could be
disclosed in a work of art. The same holds true for communities, who may
also be able to better understand other communities, past or contemporary,
ally or enemy, through works of art.
37
Ibid., 220.
Communities, thus, can be formed, informed, discovered, augment-
ed, and communicated by works of art. And to the degree that artists, works
of art, and audiences participate in, and become communities of, beauty, the
finite world becomes more true and more beautiful; that is, more God-like.
Let us return to the passage from Finite and Eternal Being that we
mentioned earlier, and which can now be understood in a richer context.
Stein writes:
Their [the pure forms] standing together in the Logos is a totality of
meaning. It may be compared to a perfect work of art in which
every single feature has its particular place and in the pure and
strict proportionality fits the total pattern and contributes to
the harmony of the whole. What we grasp of the “meaning of
things,” what “enters into our understanding,” is in relation to
that totality of meaning like some forlorn sounds of a symphony
which are carried a long distance by the wind until they finally
reach our ear.38
The “standing together in the Logos” is the highest unity of meaning. Art points
to that unity. In art there is an ontological ascent to meaning. It begins with
the artist’s reception of the meaning-structure of a pure form; the next high-
er structure is the work of art itself; an even higher unity of meaning obtains
between the artist, work, or art, and the individual; higher still is the unity
of artist, art, and community; and when art brings even diverse communi-
ties together, we have still a higher unity of meaning, as realized pure forms
stand together in greater harmony in the finite world. What follows upon the
individual perception of meaning, the initial relationship of beauty, is a fuller
integration of particular meanings into the totality of meaning and a greater
harmony of being. By becoming more beautiful, the finite world also be-
comes more divine. Art, by manifesting meaning, manifests God in the finite
world. God calls to individuals and communities through art; He demands
that they live in accordance with the meanings revealed in works of art, and
He demands that we integrate our lives more fully into the harmony of be-
ing, which has as its source and terminus in the divine nature. The work of art
not only demands, but also provides, a means by which we may become more
holy, as our Father in heaven is holy.
—University of Dallas &

Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project
38
Stein, FEB, 113.
John Finley 107
Stein and Aquinas on

the Problem of Individual Being
John Finley
Abstract
Concerning the question of individual being, Edith Stein and
Thomas Aquinas agree much more than her critique of the
Thomistic view indicates. This discrepancy has three sources.
First, Stein encounters Thomas through the writings of Joseph
Gredt, who misinterprets Thomas on several key issues. Second,
Thomas’s own language is admittedly often indeterminate when
it comes to discussion of individuals, individuation, and individu-
ality. Third, Stein and Thomas generally approach the topic of
individual being with distinct concerns and therefore distinct em-
phases: she considers individuality; he, individuation. An exami-
nation of Thomas’s thought reveals that he and Stein would in
fact agree on important points regarding matter, form, and sub-
sistence in connection with individuality. Differences between the
two thinkers remain, especially concerning form as a principle
of individuality, but these differences stem from distinct ways in
which Stein and Thomas think about the most fundamental meta-
physical principles: namely, essence and existence. Still, significant
harmony between the two on the question of individuality in-
dicates fruitful possibilities for an understanding of the human
person that draws upon Thomas’s objective analysis and Stein’s
attention to the subjective.
* * *
At the culmination of Finite and Eternal Being, Edith Stein reflects on certain
the theological ramifications of her anthropology, drawing attention to such
issues as the human being’s supernatural vocation, original sin, and its inheri-
tance, as well as the relation of humanity to Adam, Eve, Mary, and Christ
Himself. The link between these ultimate considerations and the massive
philosophical investigation that constitutes the bulk of Finite and Eternal Being
© John Finley, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall 2013)

108 the Problem of Individual Being
is Stein’s analysis of human personhood and interiority in chapter seven. This
discussion sets the stage for her encounter with a serious objection from the
Thomistic tradition concerning individual being. Thomas Aquinas’s position
seems to hold that humans and all sub-human beings achieve individuality
through the division of matter, and that anything individual about the be-
ing is in some way finally attributable to the being’s particular matter.1 How,
one wonders, could the Thomistic position square with Stein’s consideration
in chapter seven that human individuality is housed within the innermost
center of the spiritual soul?2 Stein sees the urgency of this objection and
accordingly devotes much of her final chapter, chapter eight, to a critique
of the Thomistic view of individuation as articulated by Joseph Gredt in
his influential textbook, Elementa philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae.3 Stein thus
responds more to the commonly accepted Thomistic view of her day as
expressed by Gredt than to the view of Thomas himself, whose brief but
nuanced statements on individuation offer distinctions that are both relevant
to Stein’s concerns and obscured by his interpreter.
In this essay I seek to articulate exactly where Stein and Thomas
agree and disagree on the question of individuality.4 I will begin by clarify-
ing the meanings of individuation and individuality a distinction that neither
Thomas nor Stein develops explicitly but that significantly assists a reader’s
comprehension of their respective thoughts both individually and in com-
parison with each other. Then, by attending to three questions that Stein pos-
es for the Thomistic view of individual being, I will show that a close look at
Thomas reveals greater agreement between him and Stein than Gredt’s artic-
ulations allow. At the same time, I shallconsider Stein’s most striking position
concerning individuality; namely, that it derives fundamentally from a being’s
form, and offer a Thomistic response. My primary purpose is not to down-
play the real differences that exist between Stein and Thomas on the topic
1
See Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning
of Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2002), 473,
479–80 (henceforth, FEB).
2
Stein remarks, for example, that “[a person’s] individuality is ultimately do-
miciled in the soul’s interiority” (FEB, 441).
3
Stein refers to the German translation of that work: Joseph Gredt, Die aris-
totelisch-thomistische Philosophie, Vol I (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder & Co., 1935). See
Stein, FEB, 609n4.
4
For related, comprehensive studies of Stein see Mary Catharine Baseheart,
Person in the World: Introduction to the Philosophy of Edith Stein (Boston: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1997); and especially Sarah Borden Sharkey, Thine Own Self: Individuality in
Edith Stein’s Later Writings (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 2010). An extensive bibli-
ography complied by Sarah Borden and Kevin Jones may be found at “2008 Edith
Stein Bibliography,” accessed Jan. 2011, http://www.baltimorecarmel.org/saints/
Stein/borden_bibliography%20intro.htm.
John Finley 109
of individual being but to indicate a realm of complementarity, which stems
from the fact that the two thinkers approach the topic with fundamentally
distinct concerns. I do not mean to label Joseph Gredt as a gross distorter
of Thomas who simply obstructed harmony between Thomas and Stein on
those differences that I take to be reconcilable. Indeed, indetermination in
Thomas’s own language partially contributes to the kind of misreading that
Gredt and many others adopt. The whole topic of individuals, individua-
tion, and individuality is sufficiently under-determined in Thomas’s thought
as to benefit from the aid of a more systematic framework such as the one
provided by Jorge J. E. Gracia in his studies on individuation in the Middle
Ages.5 It may take a certain set of questions and concerns—such as those
that occupy Stein—to enable one to see the indetermination in Thomas and
to retrieve from his thought the relevant principles and distinctions in all their
clarity. Stein, to my mind, has brought important questions to Thomas that
he does not address at length—questions that Gredt cannot answer because
of his inaccurate interpretation of Thomas’s thought. While I hope to show,
then, that Thomas’s thought is in fact capable of addressing Stein’s concerns,
it should be clear that the solution to this question is thereby indebted to her.
Individuation and Individuality
A significant difference between the considerations of Thomas and Stein

on individual being is elucidated by the distinction between individuation
and individuality. As Gracia has indicated, the grammar of the term ‘indi-
viduation,’ like ‘creation’ and ‘generation,’ primarily suggests the process or
determination whereby something becomes individual, while ‘individual-
ity’ refers to what in a thing accounts for its being an individual.6 Neither
Thomas nor Stein invoke this distinction explicitly or make use of it in any
detail. Thomas, as we shall see, is primarily concerned with individuation (the
term ‘individuality’ does not appear in the Summa Theologiae and rarely appears
in other works); he uses the term ‘individuation’ indeterminately to refer to
both individuation and individuality.7 Consequently, many of his interpreters
5
See Jorge J. E. Gracia, ed., Individuation in Scholasticism: the Later Middle Ages
and the Counter-Reformation, 1150–1650 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), and his Individu-
ality: An Essay on the Foundations of Metaphysics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988).
6
Gracia, Individuality, 4–5.
7
For example, in De Potentia 9.6, in the body of the article, Thomas refers
to the term ‘person’ as designating “incommunicability, or individuality (individuali-
tas)”—one of his rare uses of individualitas, but in his response to the fourth objec-
tion he speaks of the term ‘person’ as signifying “the principle of incommunicability
or individuation (individuationis).” (All translations of Thomas are my own.)
seem to hold that Thomas considers matter to be the principle of individu-
ation and of individuality; or at least they indicate no distinction that gives
individuality its due,8 even though his principles imply that individuality fol-
lows not simply or even primarily from matter but also from other substantial
principles in the thing.9 Unlike Thomas, Stein is primarily concerned with
individuality, especially in the human realm, though the actual term she em-
ploys most frequently in her analysis is ‘individual being’ (Einzelsein).10 Stein’s
window into Thomas, Joseph Gredt, fails to clarify matters since he does
not distinguish between individuation and individuality in Thomas’s thought
and actually melds the two questions into one through faulty interpretation
and misleading language. Accordingly, Stein’s opposition to the Thomistic
tradition rests on the misunderstanding that Thomas’s account generally ad-
dresses individuality, when in fact it more often concerns individuation. Still,
an open question for Thomas, but not for Gredt, is what provides individual-
ity—as distinct from individuation—in beings themselves. The significance
of the individuation-individuality distinction for Stein and Thomas will be-
come clearer in the rest of this essay. In particular, attention to Thomas’s
various statements reveals that which concerns individuation and that which
concerns individuality, and ultimately contributes to an accurate discernment
of his agreements and disagreements with Stein. I now turn to Stein’s en-
counter with the Thomistic tradition.
After articulating the Thomistic notion of ‘individual’ as “that which
is undivided in itself, but set apart from everything else,” or that which is
8
Examples of important and even valuable Thomistic studies that omit the
distinction between individuation and individuality or that employ the terms inter-
changeably include Henry Veatch, “Essentialism and the Problem of Individuation,”
Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 47 (1974): 64–73; Michael
Potts, “The Spatio-Temporal Theory of Individuation,” The Thomist 59 (1995): 59–
68; Kevin White, “Individuation in Aquinas’s Super Boetium de Trinitate Q. 4,” American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1995): 543–56; and Christopher Hughes, “Matter
and Individuation in Aquinas,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 13 (1996): 1–16. A few
thinkers who have seen the importance of the distinction are Gregory Coulter, “St.
Thomas Aquinas on Explaining Individuality,” Proceedings of the ACPA 65 (1991):
169–78; Christopher Brown, “Aquinas on the Individuation of Non-Living Sub-
stances,” Proceedings of the ACPA 75 (2001): 237–54; and, less explicitly, Joseph Ow-
ens, “Thomas Aquinas,” in Individuation in Scholasticism, ed. Gracia, 173–95.
9
See, for example, his claim that “this flesh and these bones and this soul”
are the “individuating principles (principia individuantia) of a man” in Aquinas, Summa
Theologiae I, q. 29, art. 4, c. (henceforth, ST); or Aquinas, De Potentia 9.1, ad 8, which
states that “substance alone is individuated (individuatur) through itself and its proper
principles.”
10
In her introduction to chapter eight, Stein remarks that the relevant ques-
tion “concerns the individual being (i.e., individuality) of human beings” (FEB, 469).
John Finley 111
non-communicable,11 Stein recounts Gredt’s analysis of the principles of
sub-angelic beings: matter, form, existence, and subsistence (which Stein and
Gredt also call ‘self-dependence,’ or ‘independence’).12 She then raises three
questions for the Gredt-Thomist position.13 The first and second questions
ask whether matter and form, respectively, in fact play the particular roles
that Gredt assigns them in relation to individual being. The third question
concerns the relation between individual being, subsistence, and existence.
Question One: Matter’s Role
The position that Stein accepts as the Thomistic view of matter and indi-
viduality is clearly expressed in one of her direct quotations from Gredt:
“[Matter] causes the substance to become incommunicable, i.e., it makes it
an individual thing.”14 Thomists think that “the inner principle whereby in-
dividual things exist (principium individuationis formale)—must be sought on the
side of matter.”15 Stein heartily opposes these claims as a true account of mat-
ter’s function regarding individual being.16 Remarkable in Gredt’s statements
is not only the language of active causality assigned to matter but also the
notion of matter making the substance itself to be individual. Unfortunately,
Gredt’s articulations here are not Thomas’s. In the latter questions of Super
Boetium de Trinitate, his most sustained consideration of matter and individua-
tion, Thomas makes it clear that matter viewed as principle of individuation
is a ‘principle’ in a relatively weak sense of the term, since matter is simply
what enables, through its division and reception of form, many instances
of one communicable essence.17 Note the language of passivity in a crucial
passage: “Matter is not the principle of diversity according to number except
insofar as, being divided into many parts and receiving in each of the parts
a form of the same kind, it constitutes [constituit] many individuals of the
11
12
Ibid., 473–77.
13
Ibid., 480.
14
Ibid., 479.
15
Ibid., 472. That Stein seems content with the identification of the principle
of individuation with the inner principle of an individual’s existence indicates her
own lack of attention to the distinction between the problems of individuation and
of individuality.
16
“[T]he question whether unformed matter suffices as a causal principle of
individual being must be answered in the negative” (FEB, 482).
17
Thomas discusses stronger and weaker senses of ‘principle’ in Super scriptum
libros Sententiarum I, 12.1.2, ad 1 and 29.1.1, c.; De principiis naturae, c. 3; and Sententia
super Metaphysicam V, l. 1.
same species.”18 Thomas’s thought here is remarkably similar to Stein’s own
response to Gredt: “By virtue of this generic nature [quantitative extension]
material substances bear in themselves the conditions of their being divided
into individual things. But this generic nature is not a sufficient reason for
the actual division.”19 Thus Gredt’s language of matter “making” something
individual is highly misleading. Even the verb ‘to individuate’ in this context
should be understood through reference to the function of a passive prin-
ciple or origin, as the starting line is said to begin or originate a race.
Gredt’s formulations not only misconstrue how matter individuates,
they also misinterpret what matter individuates in claiming that “it causes a
substance to become individual.”20 In Thomas’s milieu, questions pertaining
to individuals and individuation took their bearing largely from the realm of
logic, since ‘individual’ was first and foremost a term of second intention de-
noting that which is under ‘species’ as resulting from the species’s division.21
The problem of individuation does not so much refer to what makes an
existing substance distinct and incommunicable; in Thomas’s metaphysics,
the substance is individual to begin with and therefore does not undergo in-
dividuation. Rather, what is individuated is the species or essence considered
in its distinct and incommunicable instances, as the entire argument in Super
Boetium 4.2 indicates. When Thomas discusses individuation he is generally
concerned not with what makes Socrates to be Socrates the person but with
what makes the essence ‘man’ to be Socrates, Plato, and Callicles, and with
what makes those three, though different, members of the same species.
Thus, while Thomas’s own language on this point is occasionally unclear, he
views matter as a principle of individuation primarily with respect to things
considered as instances of a repeatable essence, not with respect to those
things considered simply as beings.22 It is the presence of matter in a sub-
angelic essence that allows it to exist in many instances; it is not primarily
the presence of matter that fundamentally makes any one of those instances
18
Aquinas, Super Boetium de Trinitate 5.3, ad 3.
19
Stein, FEB, 482.
20
Emphasis mine.
21
Thomas follows the Porphyrian tradition, stating that individuum is primar-
ily a term of second intention in Aquinas, Super scriptum I, 26.1.1, ad 3; Aquinas, ST
I, 29.1, ad 3; and Aquinas, De Potentia 9.2, ad 2, ad 5. See also Porphyry, Introduc-
tion, trans. Jonathan Barnes, Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
22
See Aquinas, ST I, q. 3, art. 2, ad 3; ST I, q. 39, art. 1, ad 3; ST I, q. 110, art.
1, c.; Aquinas, De Potentia 9.9, c.; and Aquinas, De anima, a. 17, ad 10 for passages that
refer to matter as individuating not the beings themselves, but the “form,” “nature,”
or “species.” That Thomas’s exact expression should vary is not surprising, given the
general under-determination of the question of individual being in his corpus.
John Finley 113
a distinct and incommunicable being in itself, since matter is a principle of
potency.
What allows Thomas to consider individuals both as instances of a
common species, simply, and as complete beings relates to a distinction he
makes in Summa Theologiae III, q. 2, art. 1:
Out of soul and body there is constituted in each of us a double
unity, that of nature and that of person. That of nature, insofar
as the soul is united with the body, formally perfecting it, so that
from the two one nature occurs, as from act and potency or from
matter and form.… Unity of person is constituted from them
inasmuch as there is someone subsisting in flesh and soul.
The context, especially the next article in the question, shows that this kind
of analysis could apply more broadly to any hylomorphic substance as the
distinction between unity of nature and unity of supposit. Consideration of
the substance in its unity of nature abstracts from the order of existence and
refers to the substance simply as a particular instance of the communicable
essence. This sort of consideration corresponds to the problem of individu-
ation, which seeks what in a communicable essence makes it able to exist re-
peatedly and incommunicably. When Thomas considers individuation, then,
he generally views the individuals somewhat abstractly, precisely as members
of a species. By contrast, a consideration of the substance in its unity of
supposit includes not simply the essence as present in this particular being
but also existence and even proper accidents.23 Such a consideration corre-
sponds to the problem of individuality, to what makes something individual
as a being and not just as a member of a species. Stein, interested primarily
in individuality, thus tends to view individuals concretely in the fullness of
their existence, while Thomas rarely does so in his discussions of individu-
als and individuation. Yet he would agree with Stein that matter could not
function as the kind of principle of individual being that Gredt makes it
out to be. While allowing for many instances of one essence, matter neither
causes those instances actively nor stands as the primary source of their own
individual being. I suggest that Stein’s own exploration of matter and indi-
viduality, more than prompting a consideration of the question from the
standpoint of Thomas’s principles, could serve in many important respects
as a guide to what Thomas might have said on the question had he attended
to it in greater detail.
23
Aquinas, ST III, q. 2, art. 2, c.
Question Two: Form’s Role
The other side of Stein’s criticism of the Thomistic account of matter and
individuation concerns the role that Gredt assigns to form. His claim is two-
fold: form functions as the principle that determines the species of a thing,
and it is communicable to this or that substrate, owing to which matter is the
fundamental principle of individual being.24 Thus, he writes, “the form is thus
and thus solely because it is in this or that matter.”25 Stein differs sharply from
Gredt on this point: she holds, with Thomas, that essential form (or what he
calls “substantial form”) is a principle of determination and intelligibility in
composite substances. Form not only establishes unity through structuring
and ordering the thing with respect to its content, but also establishes the
basis of distinction from other members of the same species by forming
matter with particular limits.26 So, for example, part of the meaning of being
the form of a squirrel is that matter will be formed in such-and-such a way,
and that the matter thus formed will grow to some definite size and remain at
or around that size. Further, as Thomas himself would say, matter and form
are utterly proportioned to one another so that just as the pure form (“es-
sence” or “nature” in Thomistic language) of ‘squirrel’ requires a bushy tail
and ability to climb, so the form of ‘this squirrel’ requires ‘this tail’ and ‘this
climbing ability.’27 It will not do, Stein argues, to speak of substantial form as
communicable to ‘this’ or ‘that’ matter, because the very meaning of form is
formation of matter, such that ‘this form’ and ‘this matter’ necessarily imply
each other.28 Since form in this mutual implication is active, while matter
exists for the sake of the form, Stein holds that matter is such-and-such
because of its relation to such-and-such form, not the other way around.29
It appears that Thomas would take issue with a crucial link in this
otherwise Thomistic chain of reasoning. For he claims explicitly in Super Boe-
tium de Trinitate (henceforth, SBT) that matter is the principle of numeri-
cal diversity precisely because every form, as form, is attributable to many.30
Undoubtedly this is the very sort of passage that Gredt relies on in his ex-
position of Thomas to which Stein objects. One might even wonder how
Thomas remains consistent with his own principles here: on the one hand,
24
25
Ibid.
26
Some of Stein’s crucial discussions of essential form in this context are
FEB, 213–14, 225–26, and esp. 251–58 and 481–82.
27
For Thomas, see Compendium theologiae I, c. 153; De Spiritualibus Creaturis a. 9,
ad 4; and ST I, q. 85, art. 7, c. For Stein, see FEB, 481.
28
Stein, FEB, 486.
29
Ibid., 481–86, esp. 481.
30
Aquinas, Super Boetium, 4.2, c.
John Finley 115
he maintains that form as such is not individual because it can be communi-
cated to many; while, on the other hand, he holds that matter and form are
completely proportioned to one another, such that no substantial form could
be communicated to one or another matter. Fido’s form, for instance, can-
not be conceived as simply the form of ‘caninity’ that ends up in a particular
matter, precisely because the very meaning of Fido’s form is the actualization
and formation of Fido’s matter. How would the Super Boetium passage just
quoted emphasizing form’s communicability, square with Thomas’s claims in
De ente et essentia and elsewhere that form is what makes matter to be a par-
ticular thing?31
Stein’s objection on this point poses the opportunity for a very fruit-
ful engagement with Thomas’s thought. It is crucial to keep in mind that his
chief interest in this context has to do with individuation—the multiplicity
and distinction of things as members of a species, while hers concerns indi-
viduality—the multiplicity and distinction of things as beings. A close look
at Thomas’s argument in SBT 4.2 reveals that when he calls form communi-
cable, he refers to substantial form not in its fullness as principle of being in
a supposit but as the principle in a thing that corresponds to a certain essence
or species, in abstraction from the question of existence. In other words,
Thomas here considers things with respect to their unity of nature, as is clear
from his argument in SBT 4.2, which links genus with matter, species with
form, and individual with dimensively quantitative matter. He sees form as
more properly contributing the nature or essence and matter as contributing
things incidental to the essence, including numerical distinction. Form con-
sidered abstractly, in this sense of corresponding to the common essence,
indeed requires some other principle whereby it becomes ‘this’ and not ‘that,’
which is to say that form requires matter as principle of individuation.
Yet when Thomas speaks of form as making something ‘this’ in De
ente et essentia, or when he states that things have being insofar as they have
form,32 he thinks more in terms of individuality than individuation. Substan-
tial form here is treated concretely as not simply providing a certain type of
essence, but doing so by first and foremost channeling being to matter in a
certain way, and thereby to the composite substance. Form in this sense is
immediately individual as belonging to an individual being. In contrast to
Gredt, then, Thomas does not maintain that substantial form only functions
as determining the species in a thing, nor does he hold that substantial form
is simply communicable to this or to that substrate. In these respects Thomas
31
See Aquinas, De ente et essentia, c. 2: “For through form, which is the act of
matter, matter is made a being in act and a particular thing (hoc aliquid).” See also
Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.58, n. 6 (henceforth, SCG).
32
Aquinas, SCG II.58, n. 5.
and Stein would concur; once again we see the possibility in Thomas of a
much more fruitful investigation of individuality than Gredt indicates.
It is doubtful, though, that Thomas would agree with the striking
conclusion Stein draws next; namely, that form is the source of individuality
in things: “We thus attribute to the form the individual being of the thing.”33
She argues for this claim on the grounds that form and matter as mutually
proportioned are incommunicable, and that matter as principle of potency
only exists in the first place through its relation to form. Stein is not propos-
ing formal (in the sense of species-making) differences between members of
a species; she rather means that each thing’s form fundamentally accounts
for its individual being regardless of the sorts of differences in content be-
tween beings.34 To some extent, we can see the strength of Stein’s claim on
Thomas’s own grounds: form is the limit and determination of being from
below as well as the actuality and former of matter from above, not just pro-
viding the nature at hand, but also contributing through limitation of being
to the thing in its finitude and thus distinction from others. Thomas himself
implies that form is a principle of individuality in any substance, since he
claims that substance is individuated through itself and its proper princi-
ples.35 He also states that things have being and individuality in the same way,
and since things have being through form, so they have individuality through
form.36 Where Thomas differs from Stein is in his insistence that individual-
ity derives not simply from form but also from the being’s other substantial
principles, such as existence and matter.37 While form may provide deter-
mination of being and actuality-with-limitation of matter, it does not on its
own provide incommunicability, which entails something that is not in another.
Thomas sees essence (including form and matter) and existence as so inte-
gral to any substance’s structure that from his point of view seeking for all
33
Stein, FEB, 486.
34
Ibid.
35
See note 9, above.
36
“Each thing, insofar as it has being, has [habet] unity and individuation”
(Aquinas, Responsio ad Magistrum Joannem de Vercellis de 108 articulis, a. 108). “Individu-
ation” in this passage should be taken to mean “individuality,” since (a) the claim is
not restricted to physical members of species, which alone are individuated in the
strict sense, and (b) things do not have individuation, strictly speaking, whereas they
do have individuality.
37
See notes 9 and 36, above. Also Aquinas, De Potentia 9.5, ad 13: “In created
things the principles of individuation…are the principle of subsistence (subsistendi).”
Since subsistence refers to a thing’s existence in itself and not in another, the prin-
ciples of subsistence include existence and the thing’s substantial principles such as
form and matter (Aquinas, De Potentia 9.1, c., ad 4; Aquinas, De Spiritualibus, a. 1, ad
8). In turn, then, all of these substantial principles function as the principles of indi-
viduality (“individuation” in this passage).
John Finley 117
substances a single principle of individuality in the order of formal cause is a
mistaken inquiry; much as seeking a single intrinsic principle of being for all
substances would be mistaken. Thus, while Thomas agrees with Stein, contra
Gredt, that form is immediately individual in and with the substance itself,
and that it plays a greater role than simply determining the species, he would
not maintain with her that form is the fundamental cause of individuality;
rather, he would say, that all of the being’s substantial principles are causes of
individuality. Individuality is thus the fundamental mode of being of every
non-universal thing,38 and this follows from the essence-existence composi-
tion that entails finite actuality.
Question Three: the Relation Between

Individual Being, Subsistence, and Existence
A brief look at Stein and Thomas in reference to her third question will in-
dicate the deeper metaphysical reasons underlying their contrasting views of
form and individuality. The question itself asks, “Is individual being ‘presup-
posed’ for self-subsistence [Selbstand] and existence [Dasein], as Gredt tries to
prove.”39
Gredt, Stein, and Thomas all agree that only individuals subsist
and exist, properly speaking, and that subsistence implies the perfection of
a nature through a positive determination.40 Yet Gredt further states that
subsistence (and presumably existence) “accrues to” an individual substance,
suggesting that the individual essence is really the same—just numerically
repeated—in all members of the species, while the subsistence unites with
the individual essence to provide independent being, activity, and the ability
to hold particular accidents.41 Stein rejects this articulation, holding instead
that subsistence “inwardly pertains” to the very structure of the individual
substance and “can merely be abstracted from it.”42 Thomas would agree
with Stein’s counter, since he argues that the act of being is most actual and
most perfect in a thing, and belongs to that thing more intimately (intimius)
than does anything else.43 The being of Socrates does not simply conjoin
with his being human, but includes it. That an individual is presupposed for
subsistence and existence need not mean that they accrue to it, but simply
that the three occur always simultaneously in mutual dependence.
38
Aquinas, De anima, a. 1, ad 2.
39
Stein, FEB, 480.
40
Ibid., 475–79. For Thomas, see the texts referenced in note 37, above.
41
42
Ibid., 478.
43
Aquinas, De Potentia 7.2, ad 9; Aquinas, De anima, a. 9, c.
Stein argues as well against Gredt’s notion that the individual essence
is the same in all members of the species, differing only numerically. Since the
being of Socrates includes, but goes further than, his possession of human
nature, his individual essence differs by a “special particularity” from that of
all other humans.44 In light of her claim that form is the principle of individu-
ality, the special particularity she means here seems to be something along the
lines of a distinction in the formal order. She views her own position, inter-
estingly, as most close to that of Duns Scotus.45 For Thomas, the solution to
this question would depend upon whether one considers the members of the
species in their unity of nature or in their unity of supposit. A consideration
according to the former, abstracting generally from existence, would see with
Gredt that the nature itself is the same in all members—which is exactly
why they are members of the same species. In contrast, a consideration of
individual beings in their unity of supposit, inclusive of existence and proper
accidents, would hold in agreement with Stein that sheer numerical distinc-
tion is insufficient to account for the diversity of the individuals. The acts of
being of two individuals in the same species cannot be regarded as simply
numerically distinct, since such a notion would imply that being (esse) is said
univocally of two substances, which is impossible. Thus, Thomas could agree
with Stein’s “special particularity” of each substance, yet this would not mean
that the individuals differ by virtue of something in the formal order. In-
stead, it means that the act of being in composition with the essence in each
thing entails greater actuality and incommunicability than does the essence
simply considered as individual.
Stein goes on to argue that although in corporeal beings individual-
ity, subsistence, and existence occur together,46 subsistence and individual-
ity can be present in certain sorts of beings that do not possess existence.
She considers a geometrical figure, triangle ABC. As distinct from any other
triangle, ABC is individual; it even possesses a kind of independence or sub-
sistence inasmuch as it carries its own nature and is not an accident inherent
in another substance as, say, the color of this page inheres in the page itself.
Yet triangle ABC is not actual in the sense of possessing existence (Dasein).47
Stein thus maintains that “Selbstand (subsistence) and individual being have
a common ground or foundation in the formal structure of existents. They
mutually need and require each other, so that one cannot be said to be ‘prior’
to the other.”48 In contrast, “individuality and independence [subsistence]
44
Stein, FEB, 478.
45
Ibid., 486, and 610n33.
46
Ibid., 487.
47
Ibid., 487–91.
48
Ibid., 492.
John Finley 119
may be said to be factually prior to Dasein (actual being, existence).”49 Objects
such as the mathematicals indicate to Stein a certain sense in which individu-
ality is presupposed for existence without existence being presupposed for
individuality, despite their simultaneous occurrence in the most actual sorts
of beings.
Again, Thomas sees things differently. He consistently holds that
being and individuality are present in things in the same way and from the
same source,50 such that were he to consider pure triangles as individuals in
some sense, he would also consider them existents in a corresponding sense.
Thomas sees a connection between individuality and existence in the strong
sense of the term (Stein’s Dasein), since he takes the crux of individuality
from the mode of being of first substances—existence in self and not in an-
other—which is the same articulation underlying his notion of subsistence.51
Individuality, for Thomas, is found most properly in first substances, which
exist as subsistent in the fullest sense of the term.52 He does not deny, then,
that in some sense triangles could be called individual and even subsistent
in a weakened or analogous sense of the term corresponding to a type of
independence. His claim, rather, is that both ‘individual’ and ‘subsistent’ are
adjectives applied most truly and fittingly to first substances. For her part,
Stein admits that pure mathematicals subsist in a lesser fashion than do first
substances,53 yet she makes no similar admission regarding individuality in
the two sorts of being. She thus gives a kind of priority to individuality,
and thereby to form, over existence in virtue of her claim that certain non-
existents possess individuality just as existents do. Further exposition of this
difference between Stein and Thomas would require a deep investigation of
the role of analogy in the two thinkers, and of Stein’s notion of essential
being—especially of empty form, which ultimately grounds individuality54—
and its relationship to actual being.
Conclusion
Once Gredt’s faulty expressions are exposed, Stein and Thomas appear much
closer on certain key issues involving individual being than Stein herself be-
lieves. Attention to the individuation-individuality distinction and to Thom-
49
Ibid.
See note 36, above. Also, Aquinas, De anima, a. 1, ad 2; Aquinas, SCG II.75;
50
Aquinas, De Spiritualibus, a. 9, ad 3.
51
Aquinas, Liber de Causis, Prop. 9; Aquinas, De Potentia 9.1, c.
52
Aquinas, ST I, q. 29, art. 1, c.
53
Stein, FEB, 490, 492.
54
Ibid., 492, 493, 496.
as’s distinction between unity of nature and unity of supposit reveals that he
and Stein largely agree on matter’s role in individuality and individuation. The
two also hold that substantial (or essential) form functions as more than a
determiner of the species, that the same form viewed in its fullest sense is in-
communicable, and that subsistence and existence pertain most intimately to
an individual substance. In short, Stein’s discussion of individuality on sever-
al counts could serve as the treatment that Thomas might have given had he
faced the question more explicitly. Nonetheless, Stein and Thomas disagree
on the principle of individuality—not because Thomas rejects form as such
a principle, but because he considers it insufficient on its own. Closely related
to this disagreement is a difference in their views regarding the distinction
between members of a species. Stein holds to an individual particularity that
derives fundamentally from essence or form, while for Thomas that particu-
larity is cast in terms of incommunicability deriving from the presence of esse
in union with the form and matter. Most likely, underlying these differences
between the two thinkers are their conceptions of the relations between indi-
viduality and existence, and between essential and actual being.
Differences notwithstanding, the degree of actual harmony be-
tween Stein and Thomas on the question of individual being can benefit
the thought of both. However prominent the problem of individuation may
have been for Thomas, the problem of individuality is more pressing today,
relating directly to issues such as the dignity of the person, human interiority
and subjectivity, and the development of psychology. Through her concern
with individuals in their concrete existence Stein urges a Thomistic thinker
to attend carefully to the principles and distinctions in Thomas that could
serve as a foundation for an exploration into individuality. At the same time,
Stein’s investigation of human personhood in the latter chapters of Finite and
Eternal Being profits from the confirmation it receives on many counts from a
Thomistic point of view. Stein’s project might even be improved through an
encounter with the “real” Thomas whose thought in this regard is closer to
hers than she knew. Students of both thinkers ought to be especially encour-
aged by Stein’s final inquiries into questions at the boundary of philosophy
and theology: the individual soul’s vocation to eternal life, the comparison of
human and angelic individuality, and the unity of the human race in the Mys-
tical Body.55 Greater attention to individuality might help open the way for
an inquiry into personhood that could begin with objective analysis, proceed
through an exploration of subjectivity, and conclude with a synthetic account
of human beings in relation to the various dimensions of their ultimate des-
tiny.
—Kenrick-Glennon Seminary
55
Ibid., 504–27.
John Finley 121
Person and Community

in Stein’s Critique of
Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy
Timothy Martell
Abstract
Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being: an Attempt at an Ascent to the
Meaning of Being is profoundly influenced by her early work as a
phenomenologist. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her cri-
tique of Heidegger’s existential philosophy. On the basis of her
early phenomenological research, Stein is able to identify a num-
ber of shortcomings in Heidegger’s analysis of the human way of
being, including that it fails to clarify what it is to be a person, fails
to clarify what it is for a number of persons to be in community
with one another, and mistakenly suggests that being in commu-
nity with other persons is predominantly a way of fleeing from
responsibility. Stein concludes that Heidegger’s analysis, though
often insightful, caricatures the human way of being. In this pa-
per, I present relevant parts of Stein’s early phenomenological
studies of the person and community and show how they support
her conclusion regarding Heidegger’s existential philosophy.
* * *
Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being is profoundly informed by her early work
as a phenomenologist. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her critique
of Heidegger’s existential philosophy.1 On the basis of her early phenom-
1
In connection with her work on the main body of Finite and Eternal Being,
Stein produced a summary and critical evaluation of Heidegger’s publications from
the later 1920’s and early 1930’s. This document, entitled “Heidegger’s Existential
Philosophy,” was to have formed Finite and Eternal Being’s second appendix. Editors
of the first German edition of Finite and Eternal Being decided against including the
second appendix, choosing instead to incorporate parts of it into the main body of
the text by way of footnotes. This has been corrected in the more recent German
edition of Finite and Eternal Being. The current English translation, however, is based
© John Finley, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall 2013)
122 Person and Community
enological research, Stein is able to identify a number of shortcomings in
Heidegger’s analysis of the human way of being, including that it fails to
clarify what it is to be a person, fails to clarify what it is for a number of
persons to be in community with one another, and mistakenly suggests that
being in community with other persons is predominantly a way of fleeing
from responsibility. Stein concludes that Heidegger’s analysis, though often
insightful, caricatures the human way of being. In what follows, I present rel-
evant parts of Stein’s early phenomenological studies of the person and com-
munity and show how they support her conclusion regarding Heidegger’s
existential philosophy. I begin with a brief explication of Heidegger’s analysis
of being-with others, and then turn to Stein’s critique, dealing first with her
account of persons and then with her theory of community.
Being-With Others in Being and Time
Like Finite and Eternal Being, Heidegger’s Being and Time is an approach to the
question of the meaning of being. Unlike Stein, Heidegger approaches this
question by way of a preliminary investigation of the human way of being,
which he calls ‘Dasein.’ His rationale for focusing on this way of being is that
Dasein is the being for whom its own being is an issue. As such, Dasein is a
being which must have some understanding of being.
Dasein’s understanding of its own being includes an understanding
of its world; and understanding a world is, for the most part, a matter of cop-
ing with practically significant objects while engaged in a number of familiar,
inter-related tasks. I understand my world, for example, by dealing with a
computer, desk, chair, printer, and books while writing a paper. Understand-
ing can also be a matter of operating shift levers, brakes, handlebars, and
pedals while cycling along a familiar bike route. In either case, I encounter
each of the items with which I deal as a piece of equipment; each piece of
equipment is intelligible as just that piece of equipment only in the context
of the others; and doing something with elements of a set of inter-related
pieces of equipment is a matter of realizing one of the possible ways to be
that are open to me, such as being a scholar or being a cyclist.
Dasein does not pursue scholarship alone, even if Dasein pursues re-
search apart from others. When writing a paper my activity is guided by vari-
ous conventions concerning length, content, and tone of such papers. Nor
does Dasein cycle alone, even if Dasein more often than not finds itself the
only cyclist on the road. When cycling, my activity is guided by the rules of
on the first German edition, so it too lacks the second appendix. See Mette Lebech’s
introduction to her translation of “Martin Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy,” May-
nooth Philosophical Papers 4 (2007): 55–56.
Timothy Martell 123
the road. As a result, I do not ride on the left side; nor do I peddle with great
force at low cadence: that is called “mashing the pedals,” and it is the sort of
thing only a novice would do. Thus, in the case of both writing and cycling,
my activity is guided by some awareness of how others carry out activities
of that type. Dasein, then, is being-with others even insofar as it carries out
solitary activities.
In order to talk about this orientation toward the manner in which
others carry out an activity, Heidegger introduces the term ‘das Man,’ a term
that has been translated as both ‘the They’ and ‘the One.’ Thus, Heidegger
would say that I ride a bicycle as One rides; and since bicycles are ridden as
One rides them, Heidegger would claim that the rider is, for the most part,
a One-self. Dasein also writes, eats, drinks, drives, shops, and walks; and, in
each case, the activity is carried out in conformity with how One does those
things. In response to the question of who Dasein is, Heidegger concludes
that Dasein is predominantly a One-self.
He also strongly suggests that being a One-self is being inauthentic.
Without going into the details of Heidegger’s theory of authenticity, suffice
it to say that being inauthentic involves a kind of irresponsibility. Rather than
taking a stand on how Dasein will be, inauthentic Dasein exists as One exists.2
Dasein might, for example, simply have to have the latest carbon fiber bike
components, despite the fact that their lower weight could not possibly make
a discernable difference to anyone save the like of Fabian Cancellara. Or
Dasein might write a paper by quoting or paraphrasing a series of theorists,
regardless of whether their views are consistent with one another or even
merit being treated as authoritative. They are simply the figures upon whom
One relies. In either case, Dasein flees from responsibility by letting the One
resolve the issue of how it will be for it.
Stein’s Critique
In light of Stein’s early phenomenological research, it is little wonder that she
2
According to Hubert Dreyfus, being authentic is not merely a matter of
taking a stand on one’s being, but doing so in a very particular way. Authentic Dasein
takes a stand on its being “in such a way as to manifest in the style of its activity its
understanding of the groundlessness of its own existence.” See Hubert Dreyfus,
Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1991), 27. This view of authentic human existence is starkly op-
posed to that of Edith Stein in her later thought. Finite and Eternal Being sets forth an
ontology on which human existence is grounded, though not through itself. If Stein
is correct, then human beings who count as authentic according to Heidegger have
in fact refused to own up to the sort of beings that they are.
would object to Heidegger’s account of being-with others. Her first phenom-
enological study, On the Problem of Empathy, provides a constitution analysis
of consciousness of other subjects. The goal of this analysis is twofold: first,
to note distinguishing features of the intentional states in which one is aware
of other subjects as such; second, to show how these intentional states work
with one another as well as with intentional states of other kinds so as to
give rise to consciousness of other subjects of various types. Stein is chiefly
concerned with empathy for other persons, but empathy is not exclusively for
persons. One might also empathize with non-human animals; animals which
we do not ordinarily take to be persons. This means that Stein had to take
up the issue of what it is for an object to count as a person in one’s experi-
ence rather than as non-personal subject of some other kind. She had, fur-
thermore, to distinguish between the various kinds of non-personal subjects.
Stein takes up these and other ontological issues in her subsequent work.
Persons
In her next major phenomenological study, Philosophy of Psychology and the Hu-
manities, Stein distinguishes between subjects of four types: pure ego, psyche,
mind, and person. If a subject falls under the description “pure ego,” this
implies nothing more than that the subject undergoes temporally structured
experiences. The subject, as pure ego, is aware at each moment not only of
that which is presently occurring, but is also aware of that which has passed
away and that which is about to be.
The temporal structure of experience allows for the constitution of
experiential units: series of temporally ordered experiences each of which
is comprehended as a part of a whole. In the course of my auditory experi-
ence, for instance, I might hear a tone begin, continue, and then die away.
Grasped as a whole, the series of auditory experiences is an experiential unit.
If a subject is described as a “psyche,” this implies that it is the enduring
subject of experiential units. It implies, furthermore, that this subject pos-
sesses capacities to undergo these experiences, such as the capacity to hear.
These capacities are exercised within limits which change from time to time
depending on preceding experiences. A psyche, then, is an enduring subject
of experiential units the limits of whose capacities at any given moment are
causally dependent on how those capacities have been exercised in the past.
In order to count as a minded being a subject must have intentional
states which are directed toward transcendent objects (i.e., objects that are
not the subject’s experiences or parts of such experiences). If a subject not
only hears a tone beginning to sound, continuing, and dying away, but hears
the tone as struck by a steel guitar, this experience is about a transcendent
Timothy Martell 125
object. As such, it qualifies as a mental state, and the subject of that state is
a minded being. Mental states stand in motivational relations to one another.
Roughly, one part of experience is a motive for another when the first is a
reason for the second. Suppose, for instance, that I see a coffee cup from
above. This gives me reason to expect that I would see roughly the same
color, as well as a flat, circular surface if I were to look at the cup from below.
Seeing the cup from above, in short, motivates my expectations about what I
would see if I looked at the cup from below.
Being a person involves more than having mental states. It requires
having mental states that are about objects of value, such as a pleasant cup of
coffee, a beautiful tone struck by a steel guitar, or a hard won victory. Stein,
following Scheler, maintains that valuable objects are primarily given in emo-
tional states such as joy or esteem. Insofar as the subject has emotional states,
the subject possesses levels of depth. These levels correspond to an objective
rank order of values: the higher the value, the deeper the level. Non-persons,
by contrast, are not even shallow. They are depthless.
Emotional experiences provide persons with motives which non-
persons lack. Approving of some course of action a person has reason to
pursue that course of action, and if a person has constituted, in emotional
experiences, a number of objects of value of different rank, the person has
reason to prefer the realization of objects of higher value. Personal existence
is further complicated by the fact that objects of emotional states need not be
transcendent; personal existence implies the ability to undergo second-order
emotional states; states that are about one’s own intentional states, including
one’s emotional responses to transcendent objects. Hence, I might feel quite
angry about something which I also regard as unworthy of any strong feel-
ings whatsoever; this could motivate me to feel disapproval of myself insofar
as I feel that anger.
With personal existence comes responsibility. Once a person has ex-
perienced objects of value, it is possible to form intentions aimed at realizing
those values. Other things being equal, a person who intentionally fails to
realize an object of value or intentionally realizes an object of lower value in
preference to an object of higher value is not just unreasonable but also irre-
sponsible. Note that an irresponsible person is not someone who has some-
how ceased to be responsible. Rather, this is someone who fails relative to
the rank order of values to which persons, as such, are oriented. To return to
the example given above, if I insisted on being angry about an object which
I regard as unworthy of anger, I would fail to be the person which I know I
ought to be. I would, in effect, be irresponsible toward myself.
The issue of what it is to be a person is among the first that Stein
brings up in connection with Heidegger’s thought. She notes that Heidegger
offers a cursory list of possible meanings of terms such as ‘I’ and ‘person’
at outset of Being and Time but declines to provide any clarification of their
meanings. In fact, he refuses to use such terms. Stein identifies a number of
problems with this lack of clarification. First, personal existence structures all
those features of the human way of being which Heidegger regards as funda-
mental. It informs the manner in which I write a paper (how much care, for
instance, I take to be clear and accurate), or the way in which I ride bike (how
far, for instance, I am willing to go in less than ideal weather conditions). It
informs how I feel about particular other persons (e.g., love, hate, indiffer-
ence) as well as how I act on the basis of these feelings. It sets conditions
on how I might enter into community with others. Given the sort of person
I am, some communities are such that I could not conceivably participate
in them while maintaining any sense of self-respect. Personal existence also
determines how I might be changed by membership in some community. If I
strongly approved of the goals for which I and others were acting together, I
might be willing to engage in new activities; activities through which I would
realize some latent potential. This is just a small sample of the myriad of
ways in which human existence is personal. Yet Being and Time lacks an analy-
sis of personal existence. This means that Heidegger’s account of the human
way of being is incomplete. Of course, Heidegger’s analysis never claimed
to be complete. But, Stein asks, “Does the investigation not in many places
and in surprising ways halt in front of the references which present them-
selves in a direct and imperious manner?”3 Discussion of personal existence
is one of these places at which Heidegger’s investigation comes to a surpris-
ing halt. Dasein is a personal being, and personal existence is crucial for every
aspect of its existence. Yet personal existence goes unanalyzed. This leads to
a second, more serious problem. Lacking an analysis of personal existence,
Heidegger fails to recognize the conditions on which individuals awaken to
a life of responsible agency. He fails, in particular, to recognize the role that
communal existence plays in the process of becoming a responsible agent,
and this, in turn, leads him to badly mischaracaterize being-with others.
Community
Stein begins her discussion of Heidegger’s account of being-with others by

noting that ‘das Man’ or ‘the One’ is ambiguous. Assertions about what one
does are sometimes assertions about what any one of some set of persons
will likely do provided that certain conditions obtain. Consider, for instance:
“one does not mow the lawn when it is raining.” People with lawns and lawn-
mowers generally do not mow when it is raining, and if someone did, this
Edith Stein, “Martin Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy,” trans. M. Lebech,
3
55–98.
Timothy Martell 127
might very well be irrational, but it would not violate any convention or social
norm. Compare this with “One does not pass other vehicles on the right.” As
a claim about what drivers nearly always do, it might not even be true. But as
a claim about rules of the road, it is true, at least for any person belonging to
a group of people who accept that rule. If a driver passes another vehicle on
the right, that driver is not merely irrational but also in the wrong relative to
social norms. In which sense, then, does Heidegger use the term ‘das Man’?
In light of the examples discussed above, my own view as well as Stein’s is
that he uses the term in the second sense. But in that case he owes the reader
an analysis of the conditions on which some number of people count as a
population for which there is a convention or a social norm. He owes the
reader such an account because he suggests that being a member of that sort
of group is being inauthentic. The latter claim can only be established if we
know what being a member of such a group involves.
Five years prior to the publication of Being and Time, Stein herself
had offered such an analysis. In the second half of Philosophy of Psychology
and the Humanities, she discusses several kinds of social collectivity, the most
important of which she calls ‘Gemeinschaft,’ a term usually translated as ‘com-
munity.’ Stein maintains that a group of persons is a community only if the
persons comprised by that group have intentional experiences of a particular
sort: communal experiences.4 Paradigmatically, I have a communal experi-
ence insofar as I take myself to have some intentional experience with other
persons.5 Seeing a cup of coffee with other persons would be a communal
4
I have only stated the necessary conditions for several persons to count as
a community since I am not clear on what, in Stein’s view, would suffice. It seems
to me that Stein’s account of community is somewhat difficult to follow in several
places because she simultaneously pursues two goals in her analysis. She attempts to
give a phenomenological account of thinking and acting as a member of group, and
she attempts to clarify a fundamental distinction of early twentieth century German
sociology, the distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (usually translated as
‘association’). While precise accounts of the distinction vary, ‘Gemeinschaft’ generally
has to do with forms of sociality which are supposedly natural and organic as op-
posed to the artificial and mechanistic forms to which the term ‘Gesellschaft’ usually
applies. Sometimes, then, Stein uses the term ‘Gemeinschaft’ very broadly. In these
contexts, it refers to any group of people who think and act as its members. In other places,
she employs ‘Gemeinschaft’ in a more restricted sense: it refers to a group of a par-
ticular kind, the natural and organic kind. In what follows, I will use the term in the
broader sense.
5
I say “paradigmatically,” since Stein allows that the class of communal ex-
periences is wider than the class of intentional experiences that one has with others.
I could also have a communal experience insofar as I have an intentional experience
which I anticipate sharing with others. As a result of carrying out some investiga-
tion, I might acquire evidence motivating a judgment to the effect that some state of
experience, as would judging with others that coffee is good, or even enjoying
with others Fabian Cancellara’s victory in the Tour of Flanders.6
I might also jointly accept rules with others concerning how to con-
duct an activity. In virtue of accepting these rules, it might be true that one
rides on the right side of the road, one does not mash the pedals, etc. Note,
however, that the latter expressions are potentially misleading. They might
suggest that someone other than individual cyclists carry out the activity for
which there are conventions or norms. They may even suggest that the com-
munity to which the individual belongs has somehow become the agent who
is responsible for the activity. But, as Stein’s analysis makes fairly clear, this
is a misleading suggestion. Persons who share a set of conventions are the
agents who ride, read, drive, or write as one rides, reads, drives or writes. If
anyone is responsible for an action that abides by the conventions of some
community, some person belonging to that community is responsible for it.
Thus, being a member of a community does not imply that a person some-
how cedes responsibility to that community.
Nor does community membership imply irresponsibililty. Suppose
that I belong to a community of persons who jointly accept a set of pro-
cedures according to which some people count as authorities. Suppose too
I judge that these procedures reliably identify persons with expert knowl-
edge. In that case, there is nothing irresponsible about accepting proposi-
tions on the basis of consensus among authorities. Indeed, assuming that
both knowledge and the desire to acquire knowledge are valuable, it would
be irresponsible not to accept such propositions. Of course, participation in
community can also lead to irresponsible actions. A community could have
conventions according to which certain figures are treated as authorities in
spite of the fact that relevant scientific communities reject their views. Con-
sider, for example, the rather odd status of Freudian psychological theory in
affairs obtains. If this is an investigation that I have been carrying out as a member
of a scientific community, then I would anticipate making this evidence available to
my colleagues, and thus anticipate consensus in light of that evidence. The relation
between a communal experience in which I anticipate sharing with others and a com-
munal experience in which I actually share with others is, then, rather like the relation
between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment as discussed by Husserl in the
Logical Investigations. For a similar example, see Stein’s discussion of communal grief
on the part of members of a military unit over the loss of their leader in Philosophy
of Psychology and the Humanities (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2000), 134–37.
6
Stein accepts that some communities are ephemeral. But the communities
that are of the greatest personal concern are groups that exist over considerable
spans of time. These communities continue to exist insofar as members take ongo-
ing communal experiences to belong to a temporally organized stream of communal
experiences.
Timothy Martell 129
the contemporary American academy. In some quarters, one treats Freud’s
views as authoritative in spite of the fact that academic psychologists have
long-since rejected many if not most of them. If someone who knows what
the psychologists think of Freud were to go along with the convention of
treating him as an authority, that would be irresponsible. But being-with oth-
ers in community does not, as such, require being irresponsible.
Stein goes one step further, contending that responsible action is not
only possible with others but that being-with others in community is a condi-
tion on which human beings become responsible agents. She writes that
According to its being the human being is co-originally individual
and community oriented, but its conscious life as an individual
begins later than the communal life in time. The human being acts
with and like what he sees others do, and is led and drawn by this.
And this is perfectly in order as long as nothing else is demanded
of him. A call is needed to awake the ownmost and most authen-
tic being. If this call has been felt and understood, and if it has
not been paid attention to, then the flight from authentic being
and from responsibility first begins. And only then does being-
with become ‘inauthentic’ being: or better said perhaps ‘coun-
terfeit’ being. Being-with is not as such counterfeit. The person
is just as much called to being a member as to be an individual;
but in order to be able to be both in its own particular way, ‘from
within,’ it must first step out of the imitating mode in which it
lives and is bound to live at first. Its ownmost being is in need of
the preparation provided by the being-with others in order to be,
in its turn, guiding and fruitful for others.7
In the first part of this passage, Stein claims that existence as a member of
a community antedates existence as an individual. Prior to realizing the po-
tential for responsible agency, human beings exist as members of communi-
ties such as families and circles of friends. Human beings who have not yet
developed into responsible agents cannot coherently be charged with fleeing
responsibility, and this means, contra Heidegger, that community membership
as such cannot be tantamount to inauthentic existence. Stein also claims it is
entirely appropriate that human beings who are developing their potential for
responsible agency not only act with others and like others but that they are
also led by others. This is consistent with the point made above concerning
the role of authority in a community. But Stein goes further here, maintaining
that participation in communal life is needed in order for the human being
to become an individual; a responsible agent. She does not provide any justi-
fication for this claim in the quoted passage, but her early phenomenological
Stein, “Martin Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy,” 72–73.

7
studies of person and community give some indication of the support she
could have offered. Through participation in communities, human beings
gain abilities requisite for experiencing objects as objects of value. Under the
guidance of a community’s educational authorities, they acquire the ability
to understand great works of cultural traditions; works possessing beauty as
well as insight. Acting with others, human beings also experience personal
qualities such as courage, perseverance, fidelity, and kindness; experiencing
such qualities in others, they seek to foster such qualities in themselves. Ac-
cording to her early phenomenological account of persons, something within
the human being awakens in the course of these experiences; human beings
acquire a depth they previously lacked.
However, this will not quite suffice as an interpretation of Stein’s
position, since her view of the person seems to have itself developed in
the period between her early phenomenological works and Finite and Eternal
Being. The passage makes clear that the human being becomes responsible
insofar as she or he is called, and this call has the form of a demand. I do not
think it is plausible to read this as a claim to the effect that, having experi-
enced a number of values of different rank, the human being is called upon
to realize the higher value. That, after all, is something that anyone would be
called to do. The call that Stein writes about in this passage seems not to be
a demand that is made of just anyone. It seems rather to be a demand that is
addressed to a particular human being on the basis of who she or he really
is.8 The call here is a calling. Once it is heard (and not before) a human being
is responsible for fulfilling it and thus, an individual.
Stein’s view of the relationship between community and responsibil-
ity must then be that participation in communal life is required for a human
being to hear a call in this sense. Perhaps her position is that participation in
community, especially participation that reveals a world of values of various
rank, puts the human being in a position to understand what is demanded
of her or him and how that demand might be met. It would be impossible,
for instance, to understand a calling to be an educator unless one had some
knowledge of what is true, good, and beautiful, as well as some understand-
ing of how to impart this knowledge to others. Arguably, knowledge of what
is true, good, and beautiful is stored within cultural traditions, and those tra-
8
I claim that the call is based on who one really is because Stein seems to link
the call to the essence of a human being. Immediately following the passage quoted
above, she adds that a view such as Heidegger’s must exclude the development of
the human being into an individual because a view of this kind “denies human beings
an essence different from their Dasein, the temporal unfolding of which is its exis-
tence.” Heidegger denies that a human being has an essence that might differ from
how she or he is in fact living, and this means that he must also deny that a human
being can have a calling. See Stein, “Martin Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy,” 73.
Timothy Martell 131
ditions can only be accessed by persons who have themselves participated in
an educative community.
Conclusion
At the close of her critical remarks, Stein claims that Heidegger’s analy-
sis “comes close to the mistaken affirmation that community life as such
is ‘deteriorated,’ and that ‘authentic’ being means lonely being, whereas in
fact both solitary and community life have their authentic and deteriorated
forms.”9 Communal existence does not imply a flight from responsibility. It
is possible to act both responsibly and irresponsibly as a member of a com-
munity. Communities, moreover, foster the development of human beings to
personal existence. Continuing her critique, Stein goes on to contest several
other aspects of Heidegger’s existential philosophy, including his account of
being-toward-death and his theory of authentic human existence. The sig-
nificance of those criticisms, however, can only be fully appreciated in light
of Stein’s later work.
—Murray State University
9
Ibid., 81.

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Quaestiones

Sarah Borden Sharkey, Special Guest Editor

Selected Proceedings of the Franciscan University of

Vol 4, No. 1 Fall 2013

Introduction to The Legacy of Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being

Faith, Reason, and the Place of ‘Christian Philosophy’ in Edith Stein

Edith Stein, Apophatic Theology, and Freedom

Eternal Rest: The Beauty and Challenge of Essential Being

The Wesen of Things, According to Reinach

How did Homer know Achilles?

Manifesting Meaning: Art, Truth, and Community in St. Edith Stein

Stein and Aquinas on the Problem of Individual Being

Person and Community in Stein’s Critique of

Introduction to The Legacy of

—Sarah Borden Sharkey,

Faith, Reason, and the Place of

In The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur seeks to give a ‘phenomenology of

© William Tullius, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall 2013)

Christian Philosophy and Its Necessity

Experience in Faith and the Fulfilled-Intention of God

Dame Press, 1984), 51ff.

Edith Stein, Apophatic Theology,

Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I.14.3.

© William Tullius, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall 2013)

The Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky gives a concise definition of the

Creation and Created Persons

Individuality and Mystical Theology

Present Potential in Edith Stein’s

The Importance of ‘Real Potential’

The Being of Self-Being (§§ 2–4)

Stein subsequently turns her examination to the self that is conscious of

The Self Conscious of Itself and World (§§ 6–7)

Sarah Borden Sharkey

Stein’s Essential Being2

The Place of Essential Being in Stein’s Work

Making Sense of Potency

Stein employs essential being in order to make metaphysical sense of certain

The Beauty of the Idea

Nonetheless, there are some challenges connected to Stein’s account. For

Thomas in Contrast to Aristotle on Potency

On Fr. Clarke’s reading—and in contrast to a number of other existential

interest in pursuing the Neoplatonic influence on Thomas’s thought, ‘the work of

In conclusion, I find Stein’s notion of essential being to be fascinating and a

—Wheaton College (IL)

The Wesen of Things,

In footnote 43 of her Finite and Eternal Being,2 Edith Stein wrote:

On The Ambiguities of ‘Wesen’

In my own research on Reinach, I prefer to use ‘essence’ rather than ‘nature’

Reinach noticed ambiguities in the usage of ‘Wesen’ occurring in philosophy,

On Stein’s Essence & Essentiality

Stein’s conceptions of ‘essence’ (Wesen) and ‘essentiality’ (Wesenheit) take sev-

Reinach, SW, 362.

Reinach, SW, 362.

Aletheia: An International Journal of Philosophy 3 (1983): 5 (henceforth, APF).

Early Phenomenology: Realist Approach & Method

Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (Lon-

don: Routledge, 2001), 1: 166 (henceforth, LI).

How did Homer know Achilles?

Perhaps the central principle in Edith Stein’s metaphysics is her distinction