Title
Edith Stein’s Philosophy of Community in her Early Work and in her Later Finite and Eternal Being: Martin Heidegger’s Impact
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-2011
Journal
Philosophy & Theology
Volume
23
Issue
2
First Page
231
Last Page
255
Abstract
Edith Stein’s early phenomenological texts describe community as a special unity that is fully lived through in consciousness. In her later works, unity is described in more theological terms as participation in the communal fullness and wholeness of God or Being. Can these two accounts of community or human belonging be reconciled? I argue that consciousness can bring to the fore the meaning of community, thereby conditioning our lived-experience of community, but it can also, through Heideggerian questioning, uncover that which remains somewhat hidden from consciousness itself: its own ground or condition of possibility, namely, being—a being that is both one and many, unified, communalised, and very diversified. If my reading of Stein is correct, the traditional understanding of the split between Stein’s strictly Husserlian/phenomenological period and her later Christian philosophical period must be renegotiated, at least when it comes to the philosophical problem of community or human togetherness.
Notes
This article is not available online here. If you are affiliated with The University of Western Ontario, please use the Shared Library Catalogue's Classic Search to check whether the journal in which this article was published is available in Western Libraries.
If you are not affiliated with The University of Western Ontario, search WorldCat to find out where you can get access to the journal.