Person in Community, Repentance, and Historical Meaning: From an Individual to a Social Ethics in Stein’s Early Phenomenological Treatises

Care Ethics and the Feminist Personalism of Edith Stein

“…This deeply relational perspective on the human person becomes manifest in Stein's ethical reflections that start from the notion of the person. As she argues already in her dissertation, "one's own moral life and moral character is constituted alongside the moral encounter with the other and in one's own response to her moral character" [29] (p. 81). In the ethics derived from the relational perspective "the other, the good of the other, is not only something tolerable or acceptable, but it is indispensable for the same comprehension and realization of one's own good -one's own good cannot be carried out without the other's own good and vice versa" [32] (p. 206).…”

“…What we ought to be and do shows itself to us through the feelings we develop in encountering the experiences and actions of other persons [34] (p. 757). In line with the emotional value realism of Scheler, Stein claims that the structure of personal depth and periphery is mapped out in response to a range of values and that the person ought to be affected in the deepest way by the highest values [29] (p. 74). On the top of the hierarchy of values resides the absolute value of the human person: "the human person is more precious than all objective values" [33] (p. 256 -cited in [35]).…”

“…In spite of the fact that Stein has never wrote any systematic work on ethics per se, it is plausible to argue that her entire philosophical corpus "implicitly entails a consciously developing ethical vision entering into conversation with ethical philosophy's major representatives" [29] (p. 73-74) and "ethical concern is deeply and thematically woven into the fabric of her studies in anthropology, community, and political existence" [29] (p. 86). In the phenomenological phase of her philosophical work, from the late 1910s to the early 1930s, Stein's ethical views draw heavily on the personalist ethics developed by Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler.…”

“…Attitudes such as love, trust and gratitude have the effect of 'enlivening' the person who receives them inasmuch as there is real community among persons who are evaluatively 'affirmed' in and through them. The opposite acts of "distrust, aversion, hatred -in short, the whole set of 'rejecting' manner of behavior" [36] (p. 211) are devitalizing, because in them the person is evaluatively negated [29] (p. 78).…”

“…On this trajectory, Stein arrives at a normative ideal of community (Gemeinschaft as opposed to Gesellschaft) as "the union of purely free persons who are united with their innermost 'personal' life, or the life of the soul, and each of whom feels for himself or herself and for the community' [36] (p. 273). This ideal of community -of love freely given and received -is oriented around the consciousness of collective and individual responsibility for one another [29] "not separated living but common living, fed from common sources and stirred by common motives" [36] (p. 215). In her Investigation Concerning the State, Stein conceives of political community as a major stage upon which social-ethical responsibility is born [29] (p. 82).…”