husserl Archives - Sam Harrelson

A Life in Act: Edith Stein and the Education of Attention

A photograph of Edith Stein, taken around 1920, has become very meaningful to me. She’s not a Catholic, a Carmelite, or the woman the Church will canonize as Teresia Benedicta a Cruce. She’s a philosopher in her late twenties who has already written the most careful phenomenological study of empathy, who has already been told, in ways both polite and structural, that the university has no chair for her. Her gaze in the photograph is level and unhurried. It’s the gaze of someone who has learned to look at things until they give themselves up, which is, in the end, what phenomenology asked of its practitioners and what very few of them managed. I’ve spent the better part of the last few years learning to look at a black walnut tree in my backyard with something like that patience, and I have come to believe that the discipline Stein practiced in Göttingen seminar rooms and the discipline I attempt under Piedmont shade are the same discipline, differently housed. This essay is an attempt to say why her life and her work have come to sit so near the center of my own, and to trace the company she kept along the way, because Stein is unintelligible apart from her conversations… with Husserl, with Reinach, with Scheler, with Conrad-Martius, with Aquinas across seven centuries, with Teresa of Ávila across four, and finally with John of the Cross in a Dutch monastery as the trains began to move.

Breslau

Edith Stein was born on October 12, 1891, in Breslau, then a German city in Prussian Silesia, now the Polish city of Wrocław. The date was important to her mother and came to matter to Edith, as it was Yom Kippur that year, the Day of Atonement, and Auguste Stein always regarded her youngest child’s birth on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar as a kind of sign.[1] She was the youngest of eleven children, seven of whom survived. Her father, Siegfried, died of heatstroke on a business trip before Edith was two, and Auguste took over the family lumber business and ran it with the shrewdness and iron piety that Edith would later describe, with unmistakable love, in the memoir she wrote to preserve the texture of German Jewish life against the caricatures then hardening around it.[2] That memoir, Aus dem Leben einer jüdischen Familie, is worth including here because it establishes something about Stein that her philosophical reputation can obscure: she was a writer of place and household, of lumber yards and holiday tables and the particular smell of her mother’s ledgers. When she set out, in 1933, to answer Nazi propaganda, she did not write a treatise. She wrote down what her family’s life had actually been like, trusting description over argument. Anyone who has tried to write about a home place under threat recognizes the move. Perception first; the ethics arrives through the seeing.

That piety, however, did not last. Around the age of fourteen or fifteen, by her own account, she deliberately stopped praying.[3] She would describe her adolescent and university self as an atheist, though a restless one, a young woman who had traded the God of her mother for what she called the search for truth, without yet suspecting that the two searches might converge. She began her studies at the University of Breslau in psychology under William Stern, and found the discipline, then in its experimental adolescence, unable to say what a psyche even was. Somewhere in those years she read Edmund Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, and the effect was the one Husserl’s early readers so often report: here was a philosophy that did not begin from theories about consciousness but from consciousness itself, patiently described, its structures allowed to show themselves. In 1913 she moved to Göttingen to study with Husserl directly. She was twenty-one.

Göttingen

The Göttingen that received her was one of the strangest and most fertile philosophical communities of the century. Husserl held court, working his way toward the transcendental turn of Ideen that would eventually estrange him from many of his best students. Adolf Reinach, Husserl’s brilliant assistant, taught the newcomers what phenomenology actually meant in practice; Stein always said it was Reinach, more than Husserl, who taught her to work.[4] Max Scheler moved through the area periodically, lecturing on sympathy, value, and, increasingly, on Catholic religious experience with the enthusiasm of a man in the middle of one of his several conversions. Stein later credited Scheler with removing her rationalist blinders: he did not persuade her of anything, but he made the world of faith visible to her as a world, a region of experience that a phenomenologist had no right to dismiss unexamined.[5] Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a few years ahead of Stein and already doing the realist ontology of nature that would occupy her whole career, became a close friend, and her farmhouse in Bad Bergzabern would later become the site of the decisive night of Stein’s life. The Göttingen circle believed, against the master’s developing idealism, that phenomenology’s slogan, zu den Sachen selbst, to the things themselves, meant the things were really there. Stein evidently belonged to that realist wing from the beginning, and the conviction that essences are discovered rather than constituted never left her. It is the thread that leads, twenty years later, to Aquinas.

Husserl assigned her a dissertation topic that he had left as a gap in his own work: empathy, Einfühlung, the act by which one consciousness apprehends the experience of another. World War I interrupted her dissertation work, and Stein left her studies in 1915 to serve as a Red Cross nursing aide in a lazaretto for infectious disease at Mährisch-Weißkirchen, tending Austrian soldiers with typhus and cholera, an experience of bodies in extremity that marks the dissertation on every page.[6] She completed the doctorate under Husserl at Freiburg in 1916, summa cum laude, and Zum Problem der Einfühlung was published the following year.[7]

The publication is the hinge of everything I take from her. Stein argues that empathy is a sui generis form of intentionality. It is neither inference by analogy, as if I reasoned my way from your grimace to your pain, nor a merging of selves, as the popular use of the word suggests. It is a direct, though non-primordial, givenness of foreign experience: I perceive your joy in your face the way I perceive the tree in its bark and leaf-flutter, immediately, though your joy is given to me as yours and never becomes mine. The other is disclosed as a living body, a Leib rather than a mere Körper, a center of orientation and sensation that I apprehend from outside while acknowledging an inside I can never occupy. And Stein presses the analysis beyond the human: the perception of livingness, of sensate and striving interiority, extends in her account toward the animal, and the question of how far down the ladder of life such apprehension reaches is left standing in the text like an open door.[8] I walked through that door years ago and have not come back. What I have termed ecological intentionality in my dissertation work is, at its root, an attempt to ask Stein’s question at the scale of a watershed on an ecological basis: what would it mean to say that Lawson’s Fork, or the black walnut, or the shoal that remembers its shad runs, is given to consciousness as living, as an interiority I apprehend without occupying? Stein supplies the rigor that keeps such a question from dissolving into sentimentality. Empathy, on her account, is a form of perception with its own evidence, its own fulfillments and disappointments, its own discipline. It can be practiced. It can be trained. It is, in the strict sense, an education of attention, and everything I write under the sign of the Ecology of the Cross begins from her demonstration that such an education is philosophically respectable.

The Assistant

From 1916 to 1918 Stein served as Husserl’s private assistant at Freiburg, a role that consisted largely of imposing order on the master’s mountain of shorthand manuscripts. She organized and substantially edited the materials that became Ideen II, Husserl’s great unfinished study of the constitution of nature, animal life, and spirit, and scholars have increasingly recognized how much of that volume’s architecture bears her hand.[9] It is one of the quiet ironies of the tradition that the phenomenology of the living body which Merleau-Ponty would inherit and transfigure came to him partly through pages Stein arranged. When I set Stein and Merleau-Ponty side by side in my own chapters, I am in some measure reuniting a text with its editor.

She attempted to habilitate, the German qualification for a professorship, and was refused. Göttingen would not consider a woman; Freiburg deferred, and her 1919 petition to the Prussian ministry helped prompt a 1920 circular declaring that sex should be no bar to habilitation. This ruling came too late to help her and stands as one of those bureaucratic monuments built on a particular person’s closed door.[10] She wrote Potenz und Akt in 1931 as a final habilitation attempt, and it too went nowhere institutionally with publishers or her correspondence network. The academy’s loss is difficult to overstate. I read it as the historical condition of her freedom. Denied the academic chair, she was spared the chair’s constraints, and the work that followed, the Aquinas translations, the Münster lectures, the Carmelite metaphysics, has an amplitude that the Ordinarius system of her day rarely produced.

The Spiritual Turn

Stein’s conversion has been told so often that it risks falling into legend, and the legend flattens what the record shows: a convergence of encounters over roughly four years, each one phenomenologically dense. The first was Anna Reinach. Adolf Reinach died in Flanders in November 1917, and Stein went to Göttingen expecting to console a broken widow and to help sort his papers. She found instead a woman held upright by the Cross, grieving fully and yet somehow already handing her grief over, and Stein said late in her life that this was the moment her unbelief collapsed… her first meeting, as she put it, with the Cross and its divine power, borne by someone who carried it.[11] Notice what kind of evidence this is. Rather than an argument, it’s a perception of another’s interiority, an act of Einfühlung, and what Stein perceived in Anna Reinach was a real power operating in a real soul. Her own dissertation had prepared her to trust this sort of givenness. The philosopher of empathy was converted through an empathic perception; the system, so to speak, executed on its author.

The second encounter came in the summer of 1921 at the Conrad-Martius farmhouse in Bad Bergzabern. Left alone one evening, Stein took a book at random from the shelf, the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila, and read it through the night. She closed it at dawn and said to herself, das ist die Wahrheit, that is the truth.[12] Teresa’s Life moves beyond the genre of apologetics. Instead, it’s a first-person description of an interior itinerary, the most sustained piece of phenomenology of prayer the sixteenth century produced, and Stein read it as a phenomenologist reads a protocol: here is a report of experience, coherent, differentiated, bearing its own evidence. She was baptized on January 1, 1922, at St. Martin’s in Bad Bergzabern, with Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a Protestant, standing as her godmother, an ecumenical detail I hold onto for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who knows my own churchly arrangements.[13] Her mother wept when told. Edith knelt beside her in the synagogue afterward and prayed the psalms; she never regarded her baptism as a departure from the people of Israel, and everything that followed, to the very end, confirms that she was genuine in that belief.

She wished to enter Carmel immediately. Her spiritual advisors, sensibly, said no. Her mother’s grief was fresh, and her gifts were needed in the world. So from 1923 to 1931 she taught German language and literature at St. Magdalena’s, the Dominican sisters’ teacher-training school in Speyer, living semi-monastically, teaching adolescent girls by day and working through the nights on the project her Jesuit director Erich Przywara set before her: a German translation of Thomas Aquinas’s Quaestiones disputatae de veritate.[14] Przywara, whose Analogia Entis was taking shape in those same years, understood that the phenomenological school and the Thomist revival needed each other, and he engineered the meeting inside one mind. Stein’s Aquinas is a working philosopher’s Aquinas, rendered into the vocabulary of the phenomenologists so that the two traditions could actually converse, and her 1929 contribution to Husserl’s seventieth-birthday Festschrift, a staged dialogue comparing Husserl’s phenomenology with the philosophy of St. Thomas, remains one of the great short documents of twentieth-century thought. The student, with perfect filial respect, informing the master that intentionality does not itself settle the question of being.[15]

Here’s where Stein’s biography enters my comprehensive exams. Husserl held that essence, Wesen, could be described in bracketed independence from existence; the epoché suspends the question of being precisely so the structures of givenness can appear. Stein came to hold, with Thomas, that the analysis cannot rest there, because essence in a finite being does not carry its own act of existing. What a thing is and that it is are really distinct in creatures, and the distinction opens finite being toward the One in whom essence and existence coincide. In the terms Aristotle bequeathed to both of them, δύναμις (dynamis, potency) is intelligible only from ἐνέργεια (energeia, actuality), and the ἐντελέχεια (entelecheia) of a living form, its being-at-work-staying-itself, is prior to every capacity it grounds.[16] Stein worked this out first in Potenz und Akt (Potency and Act) and then, in the Cologne Carmel, expanded it into her masterwork, Endliches und ewiges Sein, Finite and Eternal Being. This was an attempt, as she framed it, at an ascent to the meaning of being with phenomenology and Thomas as the two guides.[17] My present argument about ecological normativity, that the self-maintaining organism can bear normative weight only as form-in-act and not as bare autopoietic process, is Stein’s argument against Husserl transposed into the philosophy of the organism. Potency cannot norm itself. The criterion arrives with act. I found the lever in her, and I keep finding that when I press on Bergson or Ruyer or the autopoiesis literature, the argument in the material is wherever Stein has already been standing.

Münster, the Letter, and Carmel

In 1932 Stein was appointed lecturer at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, where she lectured on the structure of the human person and on the education and vocations of women, essays that anticipate, with a calm that now reads as courage, arguments about the full intellectual dignity of women that the Church would take another half century to begin catching up with.[18] The appointment lasted a year. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, April 1933, ended the teaching career of every German academic of Jewish descent, and Stein, seeing with terrible clarity what was coming, wrote directly to Pope Pius XI, asking the Church to speak publicly against the persecution of the Jews, warning that silence would be purchased at the price of complicity. The letter received a routine acknowledgment. It was sealed in the Vatican archives until 2003.[19] I don’t know a sharper parable of institutional religion in the modern era, and I say that as an ordained minister who loves the institution enough to keep writing it letters.

The closed doors had, by then, become a sort of corridor. In October 1933 she entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne, and at her clothing in April 1934 took the name she had, in a sense, been carrying since Anna Reinach’s parlor: Teresia Benedicta a Cruce, Teresa Blessed by the Cross.[20] Her superiors, to their lasting credit, ordered her to keep writing. In the cell in Cologne she finished Endliches und ewiges Sein, whose publication was blocked because its author was, in the new legal fiction, non-Aryan. After the November pogrom of 1938 her presence endangered the Cologne community, and on New Year’s Eve she was driven across the border to the Carmel in Echt, in the Dutch Limburg. Her sister Rosa, herself by then a Catholic, joined her there as a portress. In Echt, at her superiors’ request, she began a study of John of the Cross for the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth: Kreuzeswissenschaft, The Science of the Cross, a phenomenology of the dark night in which the mystic’s itinerary of dispossession is read as the form of the soul’s conformation to Christ crucified.[21] The manuscript’s final pages were on her desk, unfinished, on the second of August, 1942.

The Dutch Catholic bishops had, the previous Sunday, read from every pulpit a pastoral letter publicly condemning the deportations of the Jews. The occupation’s reprisal was precise: the arrest of all Catholic Jews in the Netherlands, the converts, the ones the Church had claimed as her own. Stein and Rosa were taken from the Echt Carmel that afternoon. Witnesses in the transit camps at Amersfoort and Westerbork describe her moving among the distraught mothers, washing children, combing hair, a Leib among Leiber, doing what she had done in the typhus wards of 1915.[22] Her reported words to Rosa at the moment of arrest were, come, we are going for our people.[23] The transport reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 9, 1942, and she was killed in the gas chambers that day, with Rosa, among the people of her birth, under the sign of the name she had chosen. The Church beatified her in Cologne in 1987, canonized her on October 11, 1998, under Pope John Paul II, and named her, a year later, co-patroness of Europe, a Jewish philosopher standing in the calendar beside Benedict and Bridget and Catherine, which is either an astonishing act of ecclesial repentance or the beginning of one.[24]

Why She Holds Me

Stein instructs me at four depths, and the deepest is the one hardest to write about.

First, she gives me the philosophical warrant for the kind of attention my work depends on. Einfühlung, in her strict sense, is the perceptual act in which foreign interiority is given without being possessed, and her analysis is the strongest available foundation for what I have been calling ecological intentionality: the claim that creatures, watersheds, and living places can be apprehended as centers of striving and sensation, that such apprehension is perception rather than projection, and that it carries evidence and admits of discipline. When I stand under the black walnut in early May and register its leafing-out as an act it is performing rather than an event merely occurring, I am doing something Stein described in 1916, and her rigor is what lets me distinguish that perception from wishfulness. The tree is given as living. The givenness can be interrogated. That is her gift, and it is why perception precedes ethics in everything I write. She showed that the seeing itself, done honestly, already carries the claim.

Second, she models the route from phenomenology to ontology that my dissertation attempts to walk. Description was never enough for her, because the described essence kept raising the question of its own act of being, and she followed the question all the way to the real distinction and to the God in whom essence and existence are one. The organism that grounds ecological normativity in my work does so only as form-in-act, ἐντελέχεια, and I learned to make that argument from her long negotiation between Husserl and Thomas. She teaches that fidelity to the phenomena eventually requires metaphysics, and that the metaphysics must be earned, page by patient page, never imported.

Third, there is the Cross. My theological work gathers under the phrase the Ecology of the Cross, and I owe the grammar of that phrase to her Kreuzeswissenschaft, The Science of the Cross. Stein read John of the Cross’s dark night as a science (not in our current objective-minded understanding of what that term implies), a structured knowledge of dispossession, the soul unmade in its attachments so that it may be conformed to the crucified and rising Christ. Paul writes in Philippians that Christ ἐκένωσεν ἑαυτόν, emptied himself (the verb is κενόω; the noun tradition drew from it is κένωσις or kenosis), and Stein’s insight, the one I have carried into ecological territory, is that this self-emptying is a pattern legible in the structure of creaturely existence itself.[25] The fallow field, the leaf abscission of October, the flood that unmakes a channel so the channel can live, the whole creation that Paul says συστενάζει, groans together (Romans 8:22, from συστενάζω), in the futility, ματαιότης, to which it was subjected in hope: these are, I have come to believe, the science of the cross written in the book of “nature,” and Stein is the one who taught me that such a science could be rigorous.[26] She also, in the manner of her death, finished the teaching. The last thing she wrote was a phenomenology of dispossession, and the last thing she did was undergo one, freely construing it as an offering for her people. The work and the life close like two halves of a hinge on a door that swings open.

Fourth, and least articulable: she shows me that a life does not have to choose between the seminar room and the sanctuary, between the archive and the prayer bench, between the people of one’s birth and the faith of one’s conviction. Every institution she approached partially refused her… the university for her gender, the Reich for her blood, and even the Church, in her lifetime, gave her petition a form letter. She responded to each refusal by going deeper rather than elsewhere, and the depth turned out to be where the work was. I teach Sunday school in a Presbyterian church as a Baptist minister while writing a dissertation at an institute in California on phenomenology, trees, and mycorrhizal networks, and there are days when the arrangement feels less like a vocation than a filing error. Stein is the figure I consult on those days. Her life argues that the integrations the institutions cannot imagine are exactly the ones a person can live, provided the person is willing to let attention, rather than ambition, set the itinerary. She looked at things until they gave themselves up. Then she let herself be given. The order of those two sentences is, I think, the whole lesson from her work and life and faith, and I am still early in learning it, out under the walnut, where the light comes down through the leaves the way it must have come down through the grille at Echt, ordinary and unrepeatable, asking only to be seen.

Notes

[1] Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account, trans. Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D., The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986), 71–72. Stein records her mother’s attachment to the Yom Kippur birth in the memoir’s opening chapters.

[2] Stein began Aus dem Leben einer jüdischen Familie in 1933, framing it explicitly as testimony against National Socialist caricature; see her foreword, Life in a Jewish Family, 23–25.

[3] Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 148. Her formulation is that she “deliberately and consciously” gave up praying.

[4] On Reinach’s pedagogical role in the Göttingen circle, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 58–74.

[5] Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 260–261, where she credits Scheler with dismantling the “rationalistic prejudices” of her upbringing and opening “the world of faith” to her regard.

[6] Stein’s lazaretto service at Mährisch-Weißkirchen is narrated at length in Life in a Jewish Family, chaps. 8–9.

[7] Edith Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung (Halle: Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1917); English: On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein, 3rd rev. ed., Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989).

[8] Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 58–63, on the constitution of the living body (Leib) and the extension of empathic apprehension to animal life. For the systematic development of sentient and plant life, see also her Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, trans. Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki, Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 7 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000).

[9] On Stein’s editorial shaping of the Ideen II materials, see Marianne Sawicki, Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), esp. chaps. 5–6.

[10] The Prussian ministerial circular of February 21, 1920, issued in the wake of Stein’s petition, declared that membership in the female sex constituted no obstacle to habilitation. See MacIntyre, Edith Stein, 14–15.

[11] Stein’s testimony, reported by the Jesuit Johannes Hirschmann from her own account at Echt, names the encounter with Anna Reinach as “my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it imparts to those who bear it.” See Waltraud Herbstrith, Edith Stein: A Biography, trans. Bernard Bonowitz (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 56–57.

[12] Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 65. The night reading of Teresa’s Vida at Bad Bergzabern occurred in the summer of 1921.

[13] Stein was baptized January 1, 1922, at St. Martin’s Church, Bad Bergzabern, taking the baptismal name Theresia Hedwig, the latter in honor of Conrad-Martius, who stood as godmother despite her Protestantism. Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 68–69.

[14] Thomas von Aquin, Untersuchungen über die Wahrheit (Quaestiones disputatae de veritate), trans. Edith Stein, 2 vols. (Breslau: Borgmeyer, 1931–1932). On Przywara’s direction, see Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 82–86.

[15] Edith Stein, “Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des heiligen Thomas von Aquino,” in Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Ergänzungsband (Halle: Niemeyer, 1929), 315–338; English in Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, trans. Walter Redmond, Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 8 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000). The published essay recast an original dialogue form in which Husserl and Thomas converse at night in the master’s study.

[16] Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (Θ), 1049b4–1051a3, on the priority of ἐνέργεια to δύναμις; De Anima II.1, 412a19–b9, on first and second actuality and the soul as ἐντελέχεια of the organic body.

[17] Edith Stein, Potenz und Akt: Studien zu einer Philosophie des Seins, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 10 (Freiburg: Herder, 2005; composed 1931); Endliches und ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 11/12 (Freiburg: Herder, 2006; composed 1935–1936); English: Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt, Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002).

[18] The Münster lectures and related addresses are collected in Edith Stein, Essays on Woman, trans. Freda Mary Oben, 2nd rev. ed., Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996).

[19] Stein’s letter to Pius XI, dated April 1933 and transmitted through Abbot Raphael Walzer of Beuron, was made public upon the 2003 opening of the relevant Vatican archives. For the text and circumstances, see the documentation of the Cologne Carmel and Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 104–107.

[20] Stein entered the Cologne Carmel on October 14, 1933, and received the habit and her religious name on April 15, 1934.

[21] Edith Stein, Kreuzeswissenschaft: Studie über Johannes vom Kreuz, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 18 (Freiburg: Herder, 2003); English: The Science of the Cross, trans. Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D., Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 6 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002).

[22] The Westerbork testimonies, including that of the Dutch official Wielek and fellow prisoners, are gathered in Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 180–186.

[23] “Komm, wir gehen für unser Volk.” The words were reported by witnesses in the Echt community; see Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 177–178. As with most last words, the attestation is testimonial rather than documentary, and I report it as such.

[24] Beatified by John Paul II in Cologne, May 1, 1987; canonized in Rome, October 11, 1998; named co-patroness of Europe, with Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, in the apostolic letter Spes Aedificandi, October 1, 1999.

[25] Philippians 2:7, ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών (“but he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant”). The verb is κενόω, “to empty”; the theological noun κένωσις derives from it.

[26] Romans 8:20–22: the creation subjected to ματαιότης (“futility,” the Septuagint’s rendering of הֶבֶל in Ecclesiastes) in hope, and πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις συστενάζει καὶ συνωδίνει, “the whole creation groans together and labors together” (συστενάζω, “to groan with”). I have traced this line at greater length in “The Ecology of Ecclesiastes,” Carolina Ecology, 2026.

Bibliography

Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Harrelson, Sam. “The Ecology of Ecclesiastes.” Carolina Ecology, 2026.

Herbstrith, Waltraud. Edith Stein: A Biography. Translated by Bernard Bonowitz. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992.

John Paul II. Spes Aedificandi. Apostolic letter. October 1, 1999.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

Sawicki, Marianne. Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997.

Stein, Edith. Endliches und ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins. Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 11/12. Freiburg: Herder, 2006.

Stein, Edith. Essays on Woman. Translated by Freda Mary Oben. 2nd rev. ed. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 2. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996.

Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being. Translated by Kurt F. Reinhardt. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Stein, Edith. “Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des heiligen Thomas von Aquino.” In Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, 315–338. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Ergänzungsband. Halle: Niemeyer, 1929.

Stein, Edith. Knowledge and Faith. Translated by Walter Redmond. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 8. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000.

Stein, Edith. Kreuzeswissenschaft: Studie über Johannes vom Kreuz. Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 18. Freiburg: Herder, 2003.

Stein, Edith. Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account. Translated by Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 1. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986.

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. 3rd rev. ed. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stein, Edith. Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. Translated by Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 7. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000.

Stein, Edith. Potenz und Akt: Studien zu einer Philosophie des Seins. Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 10. Freiburg: Herder, 2005.

Stein, Edith. The Science of the Cross. Translated by Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 6. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Stein, Edith. Zum Problem der Einfühlung. Halle: Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1917.

Thomas Aquinas. Untersuchungen über die Wahrheit (Quaestiones disputatae de veritate). Translated by Edith Stein. 2 vols. Breslau: Borgmeyer, 1931–1932.

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Edith Stein – A Life in Act Download

Edith Stein and the Lost Art of Understanding Another Being

We often talk about empathy as if it were simply a moral virtue. We tell children to “be more empathetic,” or we describe someone as lacking empathy when they seem indifferent to the suffering of others. Empathy, in this everyday sense, becomes something like kindness or compassion.

But for the philosopher Edith Stein and, later, as the Carmelite St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, empathy was something much deeper. It was not primarily a moral instruction. It was a structure of perception.

Stein (1891–1942) was a German phenomenologist and a student of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. In her early philosophical work On the Problem of Empathy (1917), she explored a deceptively simple question: How do we know that another person has a mind at all?

After all, we never directly experience another person’s inner life. I cannot feel your thoughts. I cannot directly access your emotions or sensations. All I ever encounter is your presence in the world: your gestures, your voice, your expressions, your actions.

And yet we rarely doubt that other people are conscious.

We move through the world constantly encountering others as beings who perceive, feel, hope, suffer, and rejoice. Stein wanted to understand how this is possible.

Her answer was empathy. She writes:

“Empathy is the experience of foreign consciousness in general.”
— Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy

That phrase may sound abstract at first, but Stein’s insight is actually quite intuitive. When we see someone wince in pain, we do not simply observe a physical movement. Nor do we literally feel their pain ourselves. Instead, we encounter their expression as the expression of another experiencing subject. Their suffering appears to us as theirs.

Empathy, in this sense, is neither emotional projection nor detached observation. It is the way consciousness recognizes another center of experience. It is how the presence of another mind becomes visible in the world.

And importantly, Stein insists that empathy always preserves difference. When I empathize with another person, I do not become them. Their experience remains irreducibly theirs. Empathy allows us to approach another’s experience without collapsing it into our own. This small philosophical insight carries enormous implications.

Because if empathy is a structure of perception, then the ethical life begins long before moral decisions are made. It begins with how we see. Before we decide how to treat another being, we must first encounter them as a being at all. In my opinion, that may be where many of our contemporary problems begin.

We live in a moment shaped by powerful technologies, accelerating ecological crises, political fragmentation, and deep cultural anxiety. In response, many discussions revolve around solutions: better policies, better systems, better innovations.

But beneath these debates lies a quieter crisis. It is a crisis of perception. More and more of the world appears to us as background… as resource… as infrastructure… as data.

Other people become categories. Landscapes become economic zones. Forests become board-feet of timber. Rivers become a water supply. The world flattens into utility.

Stein’s philosophy points in the opposite direction. She reminds us that our most basic encounter with reality is not with objects but with presences. We are constantly surrounded by other centers of life. However, this does not apply only to human beings.

Anyone who has spent time closely observing animals, forests, or even a single tree begins to notice how quickly the language of “objects” breaks down. The living world presses back against our assumptions. It asks to be encountered differently.

In my own small way, I experience this most mornings sitting near the black walnut tree in my backyard here in Spartanburg. I am not imagining that the tree possesses consciousness in the human sense. But the encounter still shifts something in perception. The tree ceases to be merely part of the scenery. Its form, its rhythms, its seasonal changes begin to register as expressions of a living presence. The experience is subtle but unmistakable. The world becomes populated again.

Stein helps us understand why this matters. Empathy, properly understood, is not simply a feeling we extend toward others. It is a capacity that allows us to perceive the world as filled with beings whose lives unfold alongside our own.

And once that perception awakens, the ethical implications follow naturally.

If the world is full of beings who experience life in their own ways, then the question of how we live together becomes unavoidable. Ethics grows organically from perception. But if perception collapses… if everything appears merely as matter to be manipulated… then empathy fades before ethics even has a chance to begin. This is why phenomenology still matters today.

Husserl, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, and others in the phenomenological tradition were not merely interested in abstract philosophy. They were trying to recover something that modern life had begun to obscure: the richness of lived experience and the relational character of reality.

Stein’s work on empathy remains one of the clearest windows into that project. She reminds us that the world is not made up only of things. It is made up of encounters. Perhaps in a time defined by distance, screens, distraction, and abstraction, recovering that simple insight is more important than ever.

Empathy, in Stein’s sense, is not sentimental. It is perceptual. It is the quiet realization that we are never alone in the world we inhabit.

Ecological Intentionality and the Depth of Being

Over the past several years, much of my academic and spiritual work has been circling a single question… not first of ethics or policy, but of perception.

How does the world show up to us in the first place?

Contemporary ecological crises are often framed as failures of knowledge, governance, or technology. Those failures are real. But they rest on something deeper and more habitual: the ways we are trained to perceive the more-than-human world as background, resource, or raw material rather than as something that addresses us, resists us, and exceeds us.

The paper I’m sharing here, “Ecological Intentionality and the Depth of Being,” is an attempt to think carefully at that deeper level. It asks how consciousness discloses the natural world as meaningful… and whether that meaning is merely projected by us or grounded in the being of things themselves .

At the center of the paper is the concept of ecological intentionality. By this I mean the structure of consciousness through which the world appears not as neutral matter but as relational, expressive, and worthy of regard. Ecological intentionality is not an ethical stance layered on top of perception. It names the perceptual and metaphysical conditions that make ethical concern possible at all.

Philosophically, the paper stages a slow dialogue between two thinkers who are rarely brought into sustained conversation.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty helps us see how perception is not passive reception or conceptual construction, but an embodied openness to a world that already carries meaning. The body does not stand over against nature as a detached observer. It inhabits a lived field in which landscapes, paths, animals, and places solicit response, invite movement, and resist reduction.

Edith Stein, working from within the phenomenological tradition but refusing to stop at description alone, insists that what appears in experience corresponds to a real ontological depth. Finite beings are not exhausted by how they show up to us. They participate in being analogically, possessing integrity, essence, and contingency that are not conferred by human attention.

Held together, these two approaches allow ecological intentionality to be articulated as both phenomenological and metaphysical. The world appears as meaningful because it is meaningful… not because meaning is imposed upon it.

A key thread running through the paper is Stein’s account of empathy, understood not as emotional projection but as a disciplined mode of access to another center of being. While Stein develops empathy primarily in interpersonal terms, the structure she describes opens a way of encountering non-human life as possessing its own depth and integrity without collapsing difference or resorting to anthropomorphism. Empathy, in this sense, becomes an ontological posture rather than a sentiment.

This matters for ecological thought because it shifts the conversation away from mastery and toward recognition. If beings exceed our grasp, then perception itself must be reformed. Ecological intentionality names that reformation… a way of perceiving that is open, restrained, and attentive to finitude.

The paper does not offer an environmental ethic, a policy proposal, or a theological program. Instead, it tries to clarify the philosophical ground on which such projects stand. Before we decide how to act toward the world, we must first learn how to be addressed by it.

I’m sharing the paper here as part of an ongoing line of work that I’ve been calling phenomenological theology and spiritual ecology, and as a contribution to a larger project (my dissertation) titled Ecology of the Cross. I hope it proves useful to those thinking at the intersection of phenomenology, metaphysics, theology, and ecological concern… and I welcome slow, careful conversation around it.

You can read the full paper here:

Ecological Intentionality and Depth of Being Public Download

Listening as a Way of Life: Practicing Ecological Theology in a Noisy World

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about listening as we’ve navigated the holidays, Winter Break from school, family events, travel, and the everyday chores that demand our family’s attention. Not listening as a metaphor or as a communication skill. Listening as a way of being in the world.

Most of us are constantly surrounded by sound (especially those of us with young children!), but we listen to very little of it. We register noise. We filter information. We scan for what is useful, threatening, or affirming. That kind of listening is instrumental. It asks in advance, “What can this do for me?”

Ecological listening begins somewhere else. It begins with attention that does not yet know what it is for. I’m thankful for my black walnut friend for this guidance.

From a phenomenological perspective, listening is not passive. It is an intentional act. To listen is to allow oneself to be addressed. It is to let something outside the self take the initiative, even briefly. That is harder than it sounds. We are trained, especially in modern Western life, to approach the world as a set of objects to be managed, interpreted, or optimized. Listening disrupts that posture. It asks us to suspend our need to control the encounter.

This is why listening matters theologically. Before doctrine or ethics or activism. There is the question of whether we can be addressed at all.

Listening and Intentionality

Phenomenology reminds us that consciousness is always consciousness of something. Our attention is directed, but that direction can be narrow or wide, defensive or receptive. Edmund Husserl called this intentionality. Merleau-Ponty pressed it further by reminding us that attention is embodied. We do not listen from nowhere. We listen with ears, with posture, with breath, with a body situated in a place.

Edith Stein’s work on empathy adds another layer. For Stein, empathy is not projection or a weakness that many “podcast bros” or TikTokers proclaim in our modern context. It is not imagining the other as a version of myself. It is a disciplined openness to the reality of another as other. That discipline applies just as much to non-human life as it does to human relationships. Listening, in this sense, is not about understanding everything. It is about refusing to collapse alterity.

Ecological listening asks us to practice this refusal again and again.

Listening Beyond the Human

When I sit outside with the black walnut tree in my backyard, I am not listening for a message. I am listening for presence. The creak of branches in the wind and the uneven rhythm of leaves falling or squirrels navigating its trunk. The shift in bird calls when a hawk moves through the canopy. None of this arrives as information. It arrives as an encounter.

The temptation is always to turn these moments into symbols. The tree teaches patience. The hawk represents vigilance. The wind speaks of change. Sometimes those interpretations are beautiful and even true. But they can also become a way of not listening. Metaphor can be a shortcut around attention.

Ecological listening stays with the phenomenon longer than is comfortable. It notices how quickly the mind wants to label, interpret, or move on. It resists that urge. Not forever, but long enough to allow the world to remain more than our categories.

This matters because the ecological crisis is not only a technical failure, and we need to reframe our thinking and intentionality if we are to move ahead as a species. It is a failure of attention. We have become very good at seeing the world as a resource and very poor at encountering it as a neighbor.

Theological Stakes

The biblical tradition is full of listening language. Hear, O Israel. Let anyone with ears listen. The still small voice. These are not commands to acquire information. They are invitations into relationship.

Listening, in this sense, is kenotic. It requires a kind of self-emptying. To listen well, I have to loosen my grip on certainty, productivity, and mastery. I have to accept that the world does not exist, nor did it come into being primarily for my use or our corporate use as humans.

This is where ecological theology becomes concrete. Creation is not mute matter waiting for meaning to be imposed upon it. It is a field of address. To listen is to acknowledge that agency, vitality, and value are not confined to human consciousness.

This does not mean romanticizing nature or pretending that trees speak English. It means recognizing that the more-than-human world expresses itself in ways that exceed our interpretive habits. Growth patterns. Stress responses. Seasonal rhythms. Resilience and fragility. These are not metaphors for spiritual truths. They are realities that can form us if we attend to them.

Listening as Practice

Listening is not a mood. It is a practice. And like any practice, it requires repetition and restraint.

Here are a few ways I have been trying to cultivate ecological listening in ordinary life:

First, sit with the same non-human presence more than once. Not once. Not occasionally. Return to the same tree, creek, patch of ground, or stretch of sky. Familiarity deepens attention rather than dulling it, if we let it.

Second, listen without recording. No photos. No notes. No audio. Just the body in place. Notice how uncomfortable that can feel. Notice the urge to capture rather than receive.

Third, attend to sound fading into silence. Wind dying down. Birdsong pausing. Traffic thinning late at night. Silence is not the absence of sound. It is a texture of listening.

Fourth, notice how your body responds. Does your breath slow or tighten. Do your shoulders drop or rise. Listening is not just auditory. It is somatic.

None of this is dramatic. That is the point. Ecological listening trains us to value what does not announce itself loudly.

Why This Matters Now

We live in a culture that rewards reaction more than attention, from social media to news headlines to political donations and church sermons. Outrage travels faster than listening. Certainty feels safer than curiosity. But ecological life does not flourish under those conditions. Neither does theology.

If theology is going to speak meaningfully in a time of ecological unraveling, it cannot begin with answers alone. It must begin with the discipline of being addressed by a world that is already speaking, even when we are not listening.

Listening will not solve the climate crisis. But without listening, every solution risks becoming another form of domination.

To practice listening is to practice humility and empathy. It is to accept that the world is not exhausted by our understanding. That may be the most theological claim of all.

Curiosity and Empathy Aren’t Bad: What Leonardo da Vinci Can Teach Us

Leonardo da Vinci is often treated as the emblem of genius, the Renaissance mind par excellence. And yet, late in life, Leonardo regarded himself as something of a failure (a point that gets picked up a good deal in mainstream articles about him these days). He believed he had not finished enough, not delivered enough, not brought his restless investigations to proper completion, as in this post I read this morning, Why Da Vinci Thought He Was a Failure, The Culturist.

Obviously, this feels almost absurd. How could someone whose work reshaped art, anatomy, engineering, and natural observation judge himself so harshly… The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, having a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle named after you (also my favorite one)? But if we approach Leonardo phenomenologically, attending not to outcomes but to lived experience, his dissatisfaction begins to make a different kind of sense.

What Leonardo struggled with was not a lack of talent or discipline, but the burden of curiosity itself.

Curiosity as a Way of Being

Leonardo’s notebooks reveal a mind endlessly drawn outward. I suffer similar tendencies, and the notebooks that I’ve meticulously kept since around 2010 would probably testify to that for an outside reader. He observed water curling around obstacles, birds banking in flight, muscles tightening beneath skin, and light diffusing through air. These observations were not collected for a single project. They were acts of sustained attention to the world as it presented itself.

Curiosity, for Leonardo, was not an instrument aimed at mastery. It was an orientation toward phenomena, a continual turning of the self toward whatever appeared. In phenomenological terms, this resembles intentionality, the basic structure of consciousness as always being consciousness of something that we find in Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I (PDF here).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty later argued that perception itself is a bodily engagement with the world rather than a detached mental representation (Phenomenology of Perception… dense but one of my fav works that should be more read these days!). Leonardo seems to have intuited this centuries earlier. His curiosity was embodied, sensory, and relational. He learned by lingering, sketching, returning, and allowing phenomena to resist easy explanation.

From this perspective, curiosity is not a trait one possesses. It is a way of inhabiting the world.

Why Curiosity Can Feel Like Failure

Leonardo’s sense of failure arose precisely because this mode of being does not align well with cultures of completion. He moved slowly, followed questions wherever they led, and often abandoned works when new phenomena called for his attention. Patrons expected finished paintings. Leonardo found himself perpetually unfinished. I often feel the same!

Phenomenologically speaking, this tension reflects a clash between two temporalities. One is the linear time of production and achievement. The other is the lived time of attention, where meaning unfolds through repeated encounters and deepening perception.

Leonardo lived primarily in the second. What looks like failure from the outside can, from within, be fidelity to experience. To remain curious is to resist closure. It is to stay with the world longer than efficiency allows. It’s certainly a curse on one level and we often treat it with pharmaceutical medication these days… but it’s also a blessing or superpower, depending on your persuasion.

Empathy as Curiosity Turned Relational

Leonardo’s curiosity did not stop at nature or mechanics. It extended deeply into human expression. His drawings and paintings reveal a remarkable sensitivity to gesture, posture, and facial expression. He did not simply depict bodies. He rendered states of being.

This is where curiosity becomes empathy.

Phenomenologically, empathy is not projection or emotional contagion. Edith Stein describes it as a way of accessing another’s experience while preserving their otherness (Stein, On the Problem of Empathy PDF, which should be required reading in all colleges and universities, if not in high schools). Empathy begins with curiosity, with the willingness to attend to another without collapsing them into our own expectations.

Leonardo’s art practices this attentiveness. His figures invite us to linger with them, to sense the interiority suggested by an angle of the head or a softness around the eyes. He does not explain them. He lets them be encountered.

This pairing of curiosity and empathy is essential. Curiosity without empathy becomes extractive. Empathy without curiosity becomes sentimental. Together, they form a disciplined openness to reality as it shows itself.

Curiosity Beyond the Human

Leonardo’s curiosity was also ecological, long before the term existed. He did not treat nature as inert matter to be controlled. Water had character. Air had movement. Plants and animals exhibited their own intelligences.

This resonates strongly with phenomenological approaches to ecology, where attention is given not only to systems but to lived encounters with the more-than-human world. To observe a tree across seasons, or to watch how rain alters the texture of soil, is not merely to gather data. It is to practice a form of relational knowing grounded in care.

Curiosity, in this sense, is ethical before it is theoretical. It teaches us how to stay with what exceeds us.

Real Being as Attentive Presence

Leonardo’s evident dissatisfaction with his life’s output may say less about his achievements and more about the cost of living attentively in a world that rewards closure. His life suggests that real being does not consist in finishing everything we begin, but in remaining responsive to what continually addresses us.

Curiosity keeps us open. Empathy keeps us responsible.

Together, they shape a way of being that is not centered on control or accumulation, but on presence, participation, and care. If Leonardo indeed felt like a failure, perhaps it was because he measured himself by standards that could never capture the depth of his engagement with the world.

Phenomenology invites us to reconsider those standards. It asks not what we have produced, but how we have learned to see, to listen, and to remain with what is given.

In that light, curiosity and empathy are not distractions from real being. They are its conditions.

Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being

When I first entered into Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being, I realized almost immediately that I was not reading a standard metaphysical treatise. I was stepping into a conversation about how being itself becomes available to us, how the meaning of existence slowly discloses itself through experience, relation, and attunement. Stein calls the book “an ascent to the meaning of being” in her preface and describes it as written “by a beginner for beginners” (Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, Preface). Yet the scope is anything but beginner level. She begins from the finitude that shapes every human life, our embodied and time-bound existence, and traces the ways it naturally presses toward an origin and fullness of being that is not our own. What strikes me is how this ascent mirrors what I am trying to articulate in The Ecology of the Cross. I am trying to understand how cruciform life opens us to deeper belonging in the more-than-human world, and Stein provides a metaphysical grammar for that movement.

Plasma, Consciousness, and the Phenomenological Cosmos: Relational Fields

Most of the visible universe is not solid, liquid, or gas. Instead, it is plasma, an electrified, dynamic, relational medium that shapes stars, nebulae, auroras, and the vast glowing threads between galaxies. Plasma is not a passive substance but a field that responds, organizes, circulates, and transforms, as far as we understand it, according to the classical model of physics (having been a Physics and AP Physics teacher for years). When physicists describe plasma, they speak of currents, waves, resonances, and instabilities with terms that sound far closer to phenomenology’s language of relations than to the inert mechanics of early modern science.