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Philippine copyright 2007 by Far Eastern University by Maybelle Marie Padua Published in 2012 by Far Eastern University Publications Far Eastern University Nicanor Reyes Street, Sampaloc, Manila, Philippines Telefax: (632) 7350038 Email: amalcampo@feu.edu.ph All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher The National Library of the Philippines CIP Data Recommended entry: Padua, Maybelle Marie O. Contemplating woman in the philosophy of Edith Stein / Maybelle Marie O. Padua.-- Manila: Far Eastern University Pub., c2007. p. cm. 1. Stein, Edith, Saint, 1891-1942. 2. Woman (Philosophy). 3. Feminist theory. I. Title. B3332.S67 108.2 2007 P073000254 ISBN 978-971-678025-3 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover: Pananghalian sa Bukid (Lunch in the Farm) (Jose Blanco, oil on canvas, 1972) with permission from Michael Blanco, Blanco Family Museum, Angono, Philippines. (blancomuseum@yahoo.com) Cover design: Ross Joseph B. Copiaco Layout: Iren dela Cruz-Briones fonts used: (cover) Rage Italic, Papyrus (body) Perpetua

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To my parents.

To all women.

Contents
Acknowledgements ................................................. vii Foreword by Sarah Borden ............................................... xiii Introduction ........................................................... 1

1 The Feminine Genius of Edith Stein................................ 7 2 Stein and the Battle for Gender Identity ......................... 11 3 What Makes Woman Woman ..................................... 21
The Ethos of Woman .......................................... 21 Real Feminine Distinctiveness ................................ 26 Two Essential Characteristics of Feminine Nature ........ 35

4 Emotion: Womans Strength or Frailty? ........................ 45

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5 Womans Empathetic Understanding of Persons ............... 63

What is Empathy ............................................... 63 Edmund Husserl and the Problem of Empathy ............ 68 Edith Steins Theory of Empathy ............................. 74 Empathy as Ones Own Experiencing of Persons..... 74 Sensations and Feelings ................................... 83 Transcending the Limits of Individual Perception .... 87 Individuality ................................................ 90 Perception and Intuition .................................. 94 Value ........................................................ 100 The Value of Persons...................................... 104 Other Minds ............................................... 110 The Necessity for Empathy in Society: Womans Role ....................................... 115

6 The Meaning and Significance of Woman for the World ..... 122
Notes ................................................................ 131 Citation .............................................................. 147 Bibliography ........................................................ 149 Index ................................................................. 153

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Acknowledgements

Contemplating Woman is the fruit of my research for a masters thesis that started in 2003. When my thesis, The Ethos of Woman in the Philosophy of Edith Stein (October 2004) was conferred an award1 by the Center for Womens Studies of the University of the Philippines (March 29, 2006), I felt that to be accorded this singular honor called for turning the recognition over back to the subject of my philosophical investigation: woman. Hence, the decision to convert this work into book form.

Every two years since 2000, the UP Center for Womens Studies and the UP Center for Womens Studies Foundation, Inc. hold the Atty. Lourdes Lontok-Cruz Awards for BestThesis and Dissertation to distinguish significant women and gender-related studies conducted by postgraduate students from different colleges at the UP System. Padua was among five awardees in the masters thesis level, chosen among 17 studies on women and gender issues in UP covering the period 2004 to 2006. A copy of this citation is included in this book.

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Woman has a distinct value for the world and this book invites its readers to ponder the meaning of this profound reality, which I explored in the thought of Edith Stein. In womens studies, Stein is singled out for her emphasis on womans nature as the basis of feminism. If Edith Stein were alive today, I would have handed this book over as a tribute to her. Many scholars pay her that tribute for her invaluable contributions to philosophy. Among them is Sarah Borden who writes the foreword to Contemplating Woman. Borden who holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Fordham University and teaches at the Wheaton College, Illinois, U.S.A. has generously provided me with readings for my research and followed through its development from beginning to end. I had written to Borden after having read her review of literature on Steins work in the internet, and we have corresponded since then. Borden, who answered all my queries -- always warm and encouraging in her response -- linked me to other Stein scholars and reviewed my work. She made incisive comments on the final form of this book to ensure that it is consistent with Steinian thinking. I am deeply indebted to her. I do not know how to thank her enough. I thank my thesis adviser, Ciriaco Sayson, Associate Professor at the University of the Philippines (Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts, U.S.A.), for supervising this work in its inception as a masters thesis. Sayson himself has fostered great interest in women philosophers, having taught Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil at the University of the Philippines. I have never met a professor so patiently devoted to his students. His passion for teaching is wonderfully infectious.

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I am grateful to my good friends who had supported me through this undertaking: Liza Manalo, for clarifying a number of philosophical and existential problems with me and for her instructive insights on woman; Sofia David, for her suggestion to explore the works of Stein, for lending me books, for the phone calls; Sue Sinay, for her skillful editing of my workpaying careful attention to the minutest details in writing: a footnote here, a dash and punctuation thereand for giving me insightful guidance in the synthesis of this work for an oral presentation; Gemma Balein and Cynthia Diaz, friends in the teaching profession, who were with me when this work was conferred the Atty. Lourdes Lontok-Cruz Award for Best Thesis at UP; Lea Deriquito, for running my last-minute errands when this book was defended as a masters thesis: such assistance is crucial during most pressured moments; Jane Pulido and Mimi Fabe, for humoring me in the early stage of this assiduous work; Ken Lupisan, Claire Alba, Fe Atanacio, Eda Ibasco, Beth Paquing, Lindy Saguinsin, and Marisse Urquico whose insights on woman and whose life experiences provided deep considerations about womans place in the family, in culture and civilization; Corinne Romabiles and Rouche dela Cruz, for their thoughtful assistance in the choice of an apt painting for my book cover; and to all the friends who had sustained my energy and remembered me in their prayers along the way. My indebtedness goes to my parents for their faith, hope, and trust. They have ingrained in me the meaning of freedom and responsibility. I am the woman I am today because of their love.

I likewise thank my entire family: Tess, who, as the big sister in the family, is always there for us during critical instances of much-needed support; Craig and Marivic, for buying my books; Rico, Jocee, Boyet, Agnes, Ted, George, Nicole, Katrina, Richard, Camille, Erika, and Dominicfor teaching me what a womans place is in the home. My great appreciation goes to FEU President Lydia Echauz; I am not one to take for granted that the head of the university took time out to read my manuscript and write a generous commentary about my book; I am edified by her immediate response to my request for a review of my work. To FEU Vice-President Elizabeth Melchor, for showing interest in this work (I well remember that she had asked me to leave a copy of my thesis for her to read through the summer after it had won an award; that gesture gave me the first inkling to publish my thesis into book form). To my dean, Jaime An Lim and to my department chair; Noel Bejo, for recommending the publication of my book and for their sincere interest to see this work through completion; to Lucio Teoxon, my first department chair at the Far Eastern University, whose recognition of the potential of my early writings started me off publishing in journalshe knew how to praise and boost morale; to my colleague and friend, James Owen Saguinsin art historian from the University of the Philippines and Humanities professor at FEU for the kind favor of acquiring the Blanco familys permission to feature their fathers painting, Pananghalian sa Bukid (Jose Blanco, oil on canvas, 1972), on my book cover. James knows the value of this book for men as well. I am grateful to Josefina Constantino, O.C.D., brilliant thinker, journalist, and UP professor before she joined the

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Carmelites (an avid reader of Edith Stein) for her conscientious scrutiny of my work; I put the final touches and refinements on this book following her kind suggestions. This book will not be what it is without the wonderfully reliable team of Agnes Malcampo, Iren dela Cruz, and Ross Joseph Copiaco. Agnes who is always unflustered amidst the constantly immense workload at the FEU Publications Office wears a constant smile that makes a warm welcome to all who enter her workplace; to the hardworking Iren and Ross, their computer and artistic expertise gave flesh to the ideas in this book. My greatest gratitude goes to Divine Providence for supervising this arduous project. When I am able to surpass my limitations in a difficult accomplishment, I can only affirm the achievement as a spark of the Divine. Maybelle Marie Padua December 8, 2006 Manila, Philippines

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Foreword

There is a unity to Edith Steins thought. There are sets of concerns that occupy her throughout her writing and inform her reflection, even when engaging in theoretical work that may initially seem far removed. The question of womanof what it means to be a woman, of whether there is a feminine distinctiveness and, if so, in what it might consistis one of those questions. It is tempting to think of Steins work on such questions as limited to her series of eleven lectures, composed between 1928 and 1933, explicitly on the topic, but, as Maybelle Padua well shows here, such a limitation is a mistake. Although it is certainly true that Stein is most explicit in those texts, there are important connections between Steins thought on woman and her phenomenological works, particularly her accounts of the intentional structure of emotions and the fundamental nature of empathy.

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Neither our emotional life nor our empathetic experiences are dispensable aspects of human experience. Our emotions, our affective life, are central to our perception of reality. They are that by means of which we perceive the differing values of what we encounterand such value perception is a theme not unimportant to what it means to be a person, an individual, and a free, choosing agent. And empathyi.e. following along with anothers experience1is the condition of constituting anything as real, accessible to another in this way, and thus objective. Ifas Stein arguesthe feminine distinctiveness consists in two primary features, orientation toward persons and to wholeness, and ifas Padua argues these two have important connections to emotional attentiveness and empathetic development, then Steins work has far-reaching implications. Many centuries ago, Aristotle strikingly described women as mutilated males.2 He developed a philosophic account of the inferiority of women to men. Although by no means the only theoretical influence creating the situations women still struggle with today, it is fitting that a philosophic response be given to Aristotle. This has been one of the tasks of feminist philosophy. But part of what makes Steins response so critical is that it is developed in clear connection with an account both

See Paduas chapter five as well as Marianne Sawickis Body,Text, and Science (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997). See Aristotles On the Generation of Animals II, iii and Paduas discussion of this point in the second chapter.

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of our common humanity and each of our unique individualities. Stein has a strong conception of the distinctiveness and value of the feminine, but she cannot be accused of reducing the individuality of each woman to her femininity or of forgetting our common humanity. She famously says: no woman is only woman.3 No one is a generic human being; we are also sexed and gendered. And no woman or man is a generic member of a sex; we are also deeply individual. But our individuality neither denies nor compromises our gendered being or our common human being. It is here that Steins genius lies: she has provided an account of femininity with real content that is tied deeply to our personhood, individuality, and humanity, and yet she has done so without reducing or losing the distinctiveness of each of these elements. Such a feat is no small theoretical task, and we are fortunate to have the guidance of Padua in working through Steins account. Frederick Buechner famously describes our calling as when the hearts deep gladness meets the worlds great hunger. He sees our individual calling or vocation as the meeting of desire and duty. In more religious language, we might understand this calling as relational. Someone hasthrough your desiresput a calling on your life to meet someone elses deep needs and hungers.4 Thus, one finds ones vocation, at

Edith Stein Essays onWoman (The CollectedWorks of Edith Stein 2), trans. Freda Mary Oben (ICS Publications, 1996, revised edition), p. 49. I am grateful to Jorge Garcia for emphasizing the relational aspects of calling during a paper he gave at Boston College on February 24, 2006.

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least in part, by recognizing both her distinctive skills, abilities, and interests and the real needs in the world. Ones vocation is where the two meet, although figuring this out is rarely an easy task. Steins work on woman leads us to this vocational question. Is our femininity (or masculinity) in any way vocationally significant? In our present era, there isat least comparativelya great openness to both women and men pursuing a wide range of jobs. This is not to say that all doors are open to the degree that they rightly might be, but it is simply to note that, in comparison to previous times, both women and men, at least in many parts of the world, have a great range of opportunities. Stein would be in agreement with this move. She says: Should certain positions be reserved for only men, others for only women, and perhaps a few open for both? I believe that this question also must be answered negatively. The strong individual differences existing within both sexes must be taken into account. Many women have masculine characteristics just as many men share feminine ones. Consequently, every so-called masculine occupation may be exercised by many women as well as many feminine occupations by certain men. It seems right, therefore, that no legal barriers of any kind should exist.5

Edith Stein Essays onWoman, p. 81.

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But simply affirming that career fields ought to be open to both women and men does not yet fully answer the question of whether there might be a gender vocation.6 There are more ways in which we have a calling and vocation than our literal job title. There is another meaning to vocation, and a meaning relevant to our gender. It is common in Catholic circles to speak of vocation solely in terms of religious vocations, and thus priests, monks, and nuns might have a vocation, but the rest of us do not. But that is too narrow an understanding of vocation. As Jorge Garcia rightly points out, vocation is a relational idea, and it need not be limited to a specifically religious role. All of us are called to be someone or some type of thing for someone else. The work for which one is paid may be part of that vocation, but all of our work, paid and not, is vocational. Further, it is not simply what one does that is vocational, but also how one does it, that is, the foci, concerns, emphases, and questions that one brings to the challenges, tasks, and problems is vocational. It is on the level of how that we might ask about a gender vocation. I do not wholly know whether we ought to aim for more equitable distribution in actual careers and jobs. There are surely significant situations in which one ought to do so and significant reasons for pursuing greater

The term gender vocation comes from Dr. Mary Lemmons, of University of St.Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and aptly describes, it seems to me, Steins claim. I am grateful to Dr. Lemmons for the invitation to work through these thoughts and for her comments and reactions. Part of the following was initially given as a talk at University of St. Thomas on gender vocations, April 2006.

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openness. But, independent of the question of numbers, Steins notion of the feminine makes a strong case for the need to affirm more explicitly and regularly the traits and qualities considered characteristically feminine. That is, attentive focus on concrete actual human beings, a focus on well-developed, subtle and nuanced emotional attentiveness, a concern for holistic and full development, and an orientation toward wholes and relations within broader contexts are surely valuable abilities and concerns that our societies ought to celebrate and encourage. All of us have more potential than any of us can realize in the few years that we have. We cannot do everything. It is the great temptation of youth to hope that one can be all things, and it is the temptation of age for this hope to turn into despair at what one will not be able to do. We are finite. We have limited time, energy, material resources, and opportunities. Even in a world of greater opportunity, our opportunities will necessarily be limited and finite. Given this situation, all of us decide daily what to attend to and what not to attend toand thus what to become and what not to become. There is a calling on all of our lives to develop our own abilities and not to let a dissipation of our time and energy end with no development at all. Given this competition, we ought to consider well those capacities we have a special aptitude or calling to develop. Those will be not only individual talents and skills, but also gender inflected talents and skills. Once again, this need not imply feminine jobs or careers in contrast to masculine ones, but to a particular way of engaging all of our lives, careers, and relationships. Some might argue that this is a troubling claim. The claim that womens geniusto use John Paul IIs wordlies in their

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personal and relational capacities, as an orientation toward concrete, actual persons and their holistic development, is precisely the view of women that has caused trouble all these years. This view is, in fact, the reason the womens movements and feminism were born. The critics might insist that, although Stein might claim that she is not limiting women to the nursery and home, yet that would be precisely the effect. In arguing that womens genius lies in persons and attention to persons, Stein they would say has in essence put women back in childrens wards and the low-paying jobs and blocked their path to higher education or positions of leadership. One might argue that no matter what Stein may say about not limiting roles or jobs, this will be the inevitable result of allowing such gender distinctions into our discussion. The objectors might further argue that Steins descriptions also play into the hands of the worst stereotypes about womenseeing women as submissive, as secondary, simply the assistants to the more important work, and the ones who clean up all the dirty work when the day is done. Women care about people, so let them be the martyrs for all the men. These fears are real and have a basis. Women have had and continue to have, in too many cases, limited access to education, health resources, legal protection, etc. This fear is indeed something to be taken seriously. But it is not clear that the answer is to deny distinctivenesses. Such an approach has its own dangers and risks of abuse. If there are indeed gender differences, then positions denying this will inevitably end up baptizing one of the genders as the proper way to be human, and quietly denigrating the other. Carol Gilligan makes precisely this critique in In a Different Voice. Gilligan claims that we have

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researched and focused on moral development, presuming that there is only one model. The researchers presumed that mens or masculine moral development was simply human development. Thus, they understood so many of the womens concerns and approaches as immaturity, lack of development, stunted growth. Gilligan argues that the very attempt to model all human beings on one approach created inequalities and inappropriate judgments about women. She calls us to look again, to notice that there are in fact at least two kinds of and patterns of moral development.7 Stein provides an account of why not all individual men or women will fall perfectly into their particular genders patterns but, nonetheless, why we may distinguish such patterns. Thus, a first answer to the objection is: If it is indeed right that there are feminine and masculine distinctivenesses, then we run greater risks and damage to women in denying this than in attending carefully to the differences. Certainly the objectors are right that we ought to work to avoid abuses; we must be diligent in preventing claims to distinctiveness from falling prey to the temptation to denigrate either sex or sharply circumscribe our roles and jobs. But it is not clear that the only way, or even the best way, to do so is to deny gender differences. Secondly, none of us can do everything. There is a genuine need for the traits and emphases more characteristically feminine. It is not simply that women tend toward certain

Carol Gilligan In a DifferentVoice (Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. Introduction and Chapter 1.

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emphases and virtues, but that we are in grave need as individuals and as a society of precisely those emphases and virtues. We live in an era of specialists. Such specialization has surely been good and beneficial in many ways. It has encouraged focused concentration and detailed attention to specific problems, and our knowledge and information has, because of this specialization, multiplied substantially. But specialization has not been all good. We have also been encouraged to so focus that we are tempted to lose sight of our own and others whole development. In an era where all of us are good at somethingbut so few of us are capable in all areas of our liveswhat we desperately need now are saints, those who still aim for the development of the whole panoply of virtues, and not simply impressive accomplishment in some single area. We know what impressive but one-sided development looks like. It is all too common in our world. But there are too few people who are truly well developed in nearly all areas of their lives. We are in need of people who have developed the skills and capacities relevant to doing worthwhile and rewarding work, who know all of their neighbors names, who can offer words of genuine comfort in times of struggle, who give truly judicious, perceptive, and insightful advice, who are loyal, generous, kind and hospitable, who have made substantive and permanent commitments, and who communicate love and celebratory joy to those around them. There are too few such people. Yet there is also something truly human about such a full focus. None of us live simply in some specialized area. All of us are also daughters and sons, mothers, fathers, neighbors, and colleagues, as well as people with individual specialized pursuits.

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Such relationships and contexts are not insignificant for our functioning well as human beings. Computers can run through a great deal of data, tallying it together, and spitting out a few answers, but they have no vision. Computers do not see a whole picture; they cannot see the parts in relation to each other, the relative worth and value of each aspect, and make judicial judgments in light of all of the evidence and issues. This ability to understand wholes and the relations within broader wholes is critical: we work in contexts, understanding the broader situation even as we focus on particular elements; we make judgment calls in light of the broader concerns and issues; and we focus not simply on one or two thingsor even a million individuals thingsbut the relations among the parts and their unity as a whole. Such a holistic orientation is both importantly human and critical to our survival as a race. And such an orientation is, Stein claims, one of the human skills more easily developed by women. Women are oriented toward, not simply specialized development, but holistic development. Further, they tend to develop the abilities and capacities to encourage such development in others (both men and women). Such an ability, like any skill, requires development. One must cultivate attentive concern for and perceptive understanding of relations within a whole as well as a critical focus on the parts. If Stein is right that such holistic orientation is an ability in need of development but nonetheless more easily developed by women, then there would be important reasons to encourage womens involvement in all areas of societyand their involvement not just on the models and with the emphases of men, but on the models and with the emphases more characteristic of women. Thus, it seems that Stein makes an

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important case for discussion of gender vocationsnot gendered jobswhich is rather a call to cultivate our distinctive skills and abilities. Those abilities may have a gender inflection that is not to be avoided, denigrated, or denied, but recognized as truly human and desperately needed. Sarah Borden December 26, 2006 Illinois, U.S.A.

Introduction

Women philosophers are rare in the world. It is not frequent that we come across one so gifted, scholarly, courageous, and so praiseworthy all at the same time that she figures in as a prominent and respected thinker among her intellectual counterparts who are men. Edith Stein is significant to philosophers as one of those few feminist scholars who have tackled fundamental truths about woman by making an inquiry into womans essence. She broke new ground in academic research by introducing the consideration of woman as a fundamental category for philosophical investigation. She is also recognized as a notable thinker in the history of philosophy for her work to reconcile Thomism with phenomenology and integrate psychology and philosophy in the study of empathy. The thoughts

of Stein on woman give us fresh and original insights that reveal womans essence. Stein unravels the profound meaning of feminine nature in a manner that makes us fully appreciate womans distinct value for the world. Edith Steins philosophical anthropology1 holds that women and men are essentially different. In this book, I examine the philosophers claim that womans nature as biological mother affects her whole being. At the same time, I present a hermeneutical reflection on Steins ontological study of woman and defend the position that, regardless of what our subjective judgments may say otherwise, woman has an intrinsic feminine value. Using Steins philosophical consideration of woman, I articulate that womans ontology, significance, and dignity are most appropriately examined, described, and elucidated through the notion of her distinctive feminine nature. This book aims to answer the questions What is woman? Is woman inferior to man? Philosophers who think that women and men are intrinsically different hold that for biological, psychological, intellectual, or spiritual reasons, the sexes are meant to be different. The thought of Edith Stein on woman brings out the metaphysical notion of the being of woman in a fuller sense. The fact is that womans reproductive cycle prepares her to nurture a new human being within her very body. Whether as biological mother or single, womans psyche is naturally designed for an integral perception of others. In her philosophy on woman, Stein brings to the fore two essential characteristics of woman: attraction to the personal and attraction to wholeness. Whether it is an awareness and sensitivity toward her own personal being or that of others, it is the central role of womans emotions that is responsible for this feminine kind of holistic knowledge and discernment. Through

emotions, woman grasps the relationship of another being to herself. This leads us to consider womans emotional life as an important hallmark of feminine nature. Moreover, woman is distinguished by her empathetic perception of persons, an intuitive grasp of a persons being and value as person. Stein offers us a rich backdrop of insights against which we can interpret more traditional readings of woman, challenging claims to the woman as the weaker sex and claims to the metaphysical inferiority of feelings. Edith Stein, a German Jew born in 1891, became a protagonist in the German feminist movement. Her consciousness of womanhood reinforced her humanistic values amidst Nazi anti-Jewish terror. Although considered to be one of the few women who belonged to the German philosophical intelligentsia of her time, Stein, was never given full credit then for her contribution to philosophy because of her gender. Stein studied and trained under Edmund Husserl, the founder and father of phenomenology. Husserl had considered Stein his best student. She obtained her doctorate summa cum laude from the University of Freiburg in 1916. Her dissertation is entitled On the Problem of Empathy. Stein articulated an important position on woman that may be considered the ideal for an authentic feminism to resolve contemporary problems and ailments on woman and her existence. She is distinguished in womens studies for being among the pioneers who studied the unique nature of womans psyche. Challenging the system of girls education in her time, Stein assessed the system to be one that was not concerned about the differences between man and woman. She paved the way for educational reform, introducing an educational system that

took into account the specific needs of the feminine and masculine psyche to replace an educational system that was designed to address more the needs of boys. Stein died at Auschwitz during the Second World War. John Paul II canonized her in 1998, remarking, I feel the decision to choose this feminine model of holiness as particularly significant within the context of the providential tendency of the Church and society of our time to recognize ever more clearly the dignity and specific gifts of women.2 In the light of the subordination and denigration that woman has suffered for centuries, this tribute paid to a woman by a pope sends the world a message loud and clear: humankind must reinstate women to their status of respect and importance. To understand the reasons for womans inferior position in society, I traced its historical background in the second section of the first chapter of this book. The chapter explains why there was a need for woman to be emancipated. My research shows that womens negative position goes back to pre-Socratic times wherein patriarchy was the dominant form of societal order: the male was simply regarded as superior to the female. In fact Aristotle held that man was a being in act, woman, a being in potency. In his book On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle wrote, the female as it were is a mutilated male. For him, the subordination of woman is presumed to be a given, equated to a natural condition. Surprisingly, this misogynist construction of Aristotle resonated for nearly two thousand years.3 Thus two centuries after Aristotle, as the founding fathers of the American Republic recognize the Negros moral status as a person in the Constitution, hardly did anybody deem womens status as an issue for debate at all. In Germany, at the time of Stein, women were

seen by law as minors and placed in the same class as children and the mentally retarded. In most parts of the civilized world, up around the 1960s, women had no right to vote, were deprived of education, and had restricted access to resources, jobs, and selfsupport. Feminist consciousness emerged when women became aware that they were considered a subordinate group and that they suffered wrongs. Thus, they felt the need to join with other women to remedy these wrongs. Congregating in groups to provide an alternative vision of societal organization, feminist movements were born. Among the women in these movements are Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Edith Stein who came way ahead of these women. With women clamoring for equal rights, Germany came to recognize women as equal to men. In 1919, German law officially grants women full citizenship. It is at this time that Stein tackles the concern for womans feminine value. I had embarked on this study to know more about Edith Stein, the woman philosopher in whose footsteps I wanted to tread as a philosophical investigator. In doing so, I have come to understand more my own womanhood. Being the writer of this work, I am foremost to have benefited from Steins thoughts. It is my deep hope that others will seek to derive the same wisdom and light from her clear and fertile ideas.

Edith Stein at home in Breslau, 1925. With permission from Sr. Dr. Antonia Sondermann, O.C.D., Edith Stein Archiv, Germany

The Feminine Genius of Edith Stein

Edith Stein who is Jewish by birth, was born in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), Germany in 1891. She was the youngest of eleven children (four of whom had died as infants), an independent, intelligent, and precocious child, who was known to be constantly putting in her two cents-worth in adult conversations when she was a child. She was a brilliant girl who was always at the top of her class. When she graduated from high school, the principal remarked of her, Strike the stone (stein in German means stone) and wisdom will gush forth. Knowing how exceptionally gifted she was, Stein in her intellectual selfassurance upon reaching her second year of college, and being an atheist since age 14, declared that unless she could prove something by reason, she would not believe. Later, however,

CHAPTER I

steeped in her studies in phenomenology, she would realize that religion and the Catholic Faith were phenomena she could not ignore. While visiting a Catholic cathedral as a tourist, she observed how a woman entered the Church on an ordinary day with her shopping baskets and packages, knelt down to say a prayer, to visit her friend. Stein never forgot that experience. All she had ever witnessed in the Jewish synagogue when she would accompany her mother for services was a cold gathering of people who came together on the day of the Sabbath. For the rest of the week, the synagogue was closed. One day, in the house of a friend, she pulled out a copy of the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila from the bookshelf. She sat up all night reading it. When she had finished the book the next morning, she exclaimed, This is the truth. Stein acquired a catechism and soon after studied the Catholic Faith. After attending Mass one day, she approached the priest to ask for baptism. Astounded by her answers to his questions on the Faith, he asked her who taught her. Stein said no one, but herself. Shortly after, Stein was baptized. She was 30 years of age. Stein entered Carmel at the age of 42 to be a contemplative nun. In 1942, she was among those gassed to death in Auschwitz during Hitlers persecution of the Jews. She died two months before her 51st birthday. Edith Stein is an important figure in philosophy for three innovations: the reconciliation of Thomism with phenomenology, the integration of psychology and philosophy in the particular study of empathy, and her philosophical reflection on woman. It was Stein who first translated Thomas Aquinas Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate (Disputed Questions on Truth) into German. She wrote numerous public addresses on woman including topics such as The Function of Woman in

THE FEMININE GENIUS OF EDITH STEIN

National Life, The Ethos of Womens Vocations, and Problems of Womens Education. Having trained and worked with Edmund Husserl, father of phenomenology, as his assistant, Stein displays her own method to be just as extensively phenomenological. Her writings and lectures on woman likewise show that Steins knowledge of phenomenology and Thomism are brought to bear on the question of the differences and similarities of man and woman. As previously mentioned, Stein graduated summa cum laude in 1916 from the University of Freiburg. Her dissertation was On the Problem of Empathy. Historically, Edith Stein ranks among those humanistic pioneers who were involved with the unique nature of womans psyche. A lasting importance is attributed to her essays on the history of Differential Psychology. In her work as instructor, Edith Stein found herself in an educational system which was totally oriented to and coordinated with the intellectual needs of the masculine psyche. The efforts of the educators then were not concerned with developing a young girls unique nature but were rather more on forming her as a suitable companion of man. Perceiving the unique character and the intrinsic value of woman, Stein asserted the fundamental necessity to give a girl an all-round education suited to her feminine uniqueness. This position enabled Stein to challenge the existing system of girls education of her time. She writes, One-sided development should be replaced by an emotionally formative education; the different subjects of the curriculum should be so selected and handled that they advance the girls spontaneous approach to living reality and to the individual.4 Stein paved the way for educational reform that would incorporate at least three concepts from her pedagogical theory: first, a concern for a

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CHAPTER I

proper understanding of our human, feminine or masculine, and individual natures; second, the need for a harmonious education which develops our emotional, intellectual, and physical capacities; and finally, the religious foundation of all formation.

Stein and the Battle for Gender Identity

While in her student days, Edith Stein was an active member of the Prussian Association for Womens Suffrage in Germany, a feminist movement. Then concerned primarily with emancipation, Stein, together with the feminists, was working for the removal of the fetters which prevented woman from entering into the same educational and professional activities as men.5 Women were seen by the law as minors and placed in the same class as children and the mentally retarded. The prevailing opinion then was that women were unqualified to work in certain masculine professions. As Simone de Beauvoir would later describe society: women were defined and treated as a second-class sex by a male-oriented society whose structure would totally collapse if that orientation were genuinely destroyed.6

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That woman has had a negative position and status in society can be traced back to pre-Socratic as well as Biblical times. Long before Steins time, patriarchy was the dominant form of societal order. History shows that civilization gradually institutionalized assumptions about gender that have powerfully affected the development of history and human thought. One such assumption is that: Men are naturally superior, stronger and more rational, therefore designed to be dominant. From this follows that men are political citizens and responsible for and representing the polity. Women are naturally weaker, inferior in intellect and rational capacities, unstable emotionally and therefore incapable of political participation. They stand outside of the polity.7 Metaphors of gender emerged constructing the male as the norm and the female as deviant; the male as whole and powerful; the female as unfinished, physically mutilated and emotionally dependent. Out of this thinking arose a functioning system of patriarchal hegemony resulting in complex hierarchical relationships with the womans place and condition as lower than man in social, economic, political relations, and in systems of ideas. Gerda Lerner writes, Not only have women been excluded through educational deprivation from the process of making mental constructs, it has also been the case that the mental constructs explaining the world have been androcentric, partial and distorted. Women have been defined out and

STEIN AND THE BATTLE FOR GENDER IDENTITY

13

marginalized in every philosophical system and have therefore had to struggle not only against exclusion but against a content which defines them as subhuman and deviant.8 Gender became the dominant metaphor by which Aristotle defended and justified the system of slavery. At the time of Aristotles writing of Politics the question of the moral uprightness of slavery was still problematical. It was certainly questionable in the light of the very system of ethics and morals Aristotle was constructing. Why should one man rule over another? Why should one man be master and another slave? Aristotle reasoned that some men are born to rule, others to be ruled. He illustrated this principle by drawing an analogy between soul and body the soul is superior to the body and therefore must rule it. And the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity extends to all mankind.9 The analogy extends also to mens rule over animals which Aristotle expressed as follows: And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is equally not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life. It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right.10 It is notable in this explanation that there is a need for justification about the difference in opinion regarding the rightness of enslaving captive peoples in the event of an unjust

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war. But as regards the inferiority of women, there is no difference in opinion. The subordination of woman is presumed to be a given, equated to a natural condition, which makes the philosopher use the marital relationship as an explanatory metaphor to justify slavery. By rejecting and disregarding the need to explain the subordination of women, and by the kind of biological explanation that he had offered elsewhere, Aristotle had in fact fixed women to a status of being less-than-human. For him, ontologically, man was a being in act, and woman, a being in potency.11 The female is, in his words, as it were, a mutilated male12 and his misogynist construction is reiterated for about two thousand years.13 The Old Testament, for instance, contains a number of disparaging declarations about women. Sirach writes, I would rather dwell with a lion and a dragon than dwell with an evil wife.14 With reference to the story of original sin which tells of how woman disobeyed God and invited man to eat of the forbidden fruit, Sirach comments later in his book, From a woman, sin had its beginning and because of her we all die.15 The Old Testament further records restrictions on women and their exclusion from the covenant community. Some Fathers of the Church followed suit. The great Saint John Chrysostom is recorded to have said, Among all wild beasts, there is none to be found which is more harmful than the woman.16 The Christian era is one that charges Eve, and with her, all women, with moral guilt for the Fall of humankind.17 More than two thousand years after Aristotle, the founding fathers of the American republic are debating on the Constitution. The issue at hand is the existence of slavery in their republic. While the Declaration of Independence states,

STEIN AND THE BATTLE FOR GENDER IDENTITY

15

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, implying that by nature all human beings were endowed with the same rights, ironically their decision was that a slave was to be counted three-fifths of a man for purposes of voting apportionment.18 Implicit in both language and debate was the acknowledgment that the Negro was indeed human. Debates continued, however, on laws regulating the slave trade, assigning responsibility for the return of fugitive slaves and apportioning voting rights. Ironically, what was at issue were not moral principles or considerations that defined the Negros moral status as a person, but his status as property, determined by political and economic interest.19 As a result, the slavery issue not only presaged the Civil War but set in motion the ideas and expectations that would fuel the struggle for the slaves eventual emancipation and their admission to full citizenship.20 But as for women, it was different. There was no controversy or debate on the definition of a voter as male. The American Constitution embodied the patriarchal assumption, shared by the entire society, that women were not members of the polity. There was no felt need even to mention, much less to explain or justify, that while women were to be counted among the whole number of free persons in each state for purposes of representation, they had no right to vote and to be elected to public office (U.S. Constitution, Article I, 3). The issue of the civil and political status of women never entered the debate, just as it had not entered the discussion in Aristotles philosophy.21

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What followed were private discussions among several influential female members of elite families on womens rights as citizens. Yet despite their thrust into public debate, the women went unheard and unrecognized. Emboldened by the revolutionary rhetoric and the language of democracy, women began to reinterpret their own status. As did slaves, women took the preamble of the Declaration of Independence literally. But unlike slaves, they were not defined as being even problematic in the debate.22 In 1776, Abigail Adams, wife of then U.S. President John Adams urged her husband in a letter to remember the ladies in his work on the legal code for the new republic, reminding him that wives needed protection against the naturally tyrannical tendencies of their husbands. Gerda Lerner recounts, Abigails language was appropriate to womens subordinate status in marriage and society she asked for mens chivalrous protection from the excesses of other men. Johns reply was As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. He expressed his astonishment that like children and disobedient servants, restless Indians and insolent Negroes, another tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest [had] grown discontented. Chiding his wife for being saucy, he trivialized her argument by claiming that men were, in practice the subjects. We have only the name of masters. And yet, for an instant, John Adams allowed himself to think seriously on the subjecther code of laws, if enacted, would lead to a social disorder: Depend upon

STEIN AND THE BATTLE FOR GENDER IDENTITY

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it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems.23 Within this background of the historical development of patriarchy emerging as the dominant form of societal order, we see how the rights of men to control became gradually institutionalized. From this form of dominance came others such as slavery. Becoming a functioning system of complex hierarchical relationships, patriarchy transformed sexual, social, economic relations and dominated all systems of ideas. In the course of its establishment as a societal order, and constantly reinforced, the major idea systems which explain and order Western civilization incorporated a set of unstated assumptions about gender, which powerfully affected the development of history and human thought.24 From the time of the establishment of patriarchy to the present, not only have women been excluded through educational deprivation from the process of making mental constructs, it has also been the case that the mental constructs explaining the world have been androcentric, partial, and distorted. Womens access to resources and self support was restricted. They were deprived of education. Women were defined out and marginalized in every philosophical system and have therefore had to struggle not only against exclusion but against a content which defines them as subhuman and deviant.25 This system repressed women over the centuries, in such a way as to make concerned women join together to recreating the system which oppressed them. Educational disadvantaging was a major force in restoring womens individual and collective consciousness. Forced to prove to themselves and to others their

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capacity for full humanity and their capacity for abstract thought, women sought for ways to counteract the pervasive patriarchal assumptions of their inferiority and incompleteness as human beings till it became their major intellectual endeavor. Feminist consciousness developed: Women became aware that they were considered a subordinate group; that they have suffered wrongs as a group; that their condition of subordination is not natural, but is societally determined; that they must join with other women to remedy these wrongs; and finally, that they must and can provide an alternative vision of societal organization in which women as well as men will enjoy autonomy and selfdetermination.26 What followed was the birth in different parts of the world of womens movements organized by feminists to free women of the conditions and constraints patriarchy imposed upon them. Shut out of institutions of higher learning for centuries and treated with condescension or derision, educated women began to develop their own social networks in order for their thoughts, ideas, and work to find audiences and resonance. In Germany, the feminist movement Stein found herself in was one that clamored for equal and fair treatment of women. Insisting that a womans place is in the home, critics of the emancipation and the womens movement, however, became concerned that such emancipation would imperil womens vocation as mothers. The feminist movement often responded to its critics by denying any female nature or singularity, that as far as they were concerned, women were indistinguishable from men. Because of this, Stein describes the situation as one wherein, one could not speak of an intrinsic feminine value.27

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19

The early battles of the feminist movement created two factions: those in support of the emancipation of women, but who denied an essential female nature, and those against female emancipation, who affirmed such nature. There was no ground, however, for the support of both emancipation and gender differences. Stein articulates this controversy on the topic of woman in a lecture before an organization of women as follows: A discerning young girl asked me recently, Why is that at this time, so much is being said, even by men, about the nature and vocation of women? It is astonishing how this topic is constantly being taken up by various parties, and how differently it is being treated. Leading intellectuals are painting a shining ideal of feminine nature, and they are hoping that realization of this ideal will be the cure for all contemporary ailments and needs. At the same time, in the literature of the present and last decades, we see woman presented again and again as the demon of the abyss. A great responsibility is being laid upon us by both sides. We are being obliged to consider the significance of woman and her existence as a problem. We cannot evade the question as to what we are and what we should be. And it is not only the reflective intellect which faces us with these questions; life itself has made our existence problematic.28 In 1919, with changes introduced to the Weimar Constitution by the German government, the feminists saw the end of an initial feminist battle in Germany. The law upheld genuine equality between the sexes; women, who came to be

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recognized as having equal standing before the law as men, then became full citizens. With this triumph for those fighting for emancipation, the country was now ready, Stein claims, to tackle these long-standing concerns about feminine value. In these circumstances, some issues could now be resolved. Do women have a distinctive feminine value? If they did, is this value based on a distinguishing nature? To both questions, Steins answer was a yes. She clearly affirms real equality and emancipation, yet she also claims there are real differences between the two sexes and that for biological, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual reasons, the sexes are meant to be different. Thus, in her lectures compiled in a book entitled Essays on Woman,29 she argues for the claim that there is a real feminine distinctiveness. Steins position may be examined against the Thomistic view of all human beings sharing a common nature: a human nature. Along with Aquinas and Aristotle, Stein acknowledged that there are traits exclusive to the human soul, abilities (or at least dispositional traits) that are shared by every member of the species. If these traits are common, how then can woman have a distinctive nature or value of her own? To answer this question I would like, first, to present Steins ontological examination of woman. Second, I will discuss Steins view of womans emotional life as an important hallmark of the female species. Third, I will examine Steins phenomenological notion of empathy, which was the topic of her doctoral dissertation, as a philosophical theory that can be employed to understand the profound sense of womans ethos and feminine value.

What Makes Woman Woman

The Ethos of Woman

The inquiry into the essence of woman has its logical place in a philosophical anthropology. For so long a time, the difference between man and woman has been both overrated or underrated. In a monumental work by Prudence Allen entitled The Concept of Woman,30 a fruit of 32 years of research, Allen examines philosophers thoughts on gender and identity between 750 B.C. to 1250, in a first volume, and 1250 to 1500 or the early humanist reformation, in a second volume. Allen articulates three basic theories of womens identity in these encyclopedic volumes. The first theory is the unisex view of Plato which claims that there are not significant differences

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between man and woman and that the soul is sexless. The second theory is Aristotles polarity view, which argues the male is superior to the female, while the third theory, the complementarity view, holds that men and women have significant differences, but are equal in dignity. Allens first volume explores the way in which the polarity view came to dominate Western thought by the end of the 13th century. In the second volume, Allen shows the fresh base for complementarity in renaissance humanism, with complementarity emerging in the Benedictine monastic tradition with philosophers like Hildegard of Bingen. Then education shifts from monasteries to universities. The University of Paris, where Aristotle is a required reading, becomes the paradigm. The Aristotelian argument becomes dominant and the Aristotelian thinking about gender is what cascades down through the centuries. With the assumption of womens inferiority and incompleteness as human beings, women are excluded from universities for centuries. Since women are traditionally considered inferior to men, Sigmund Freud declared that such is the dictate of nature: Anatomy is destiny.31 With the long-standing discrimination against women, the task of specifying the distinctiveness of what is feminine is highly controversial. It is no wonder that feminists have early on sought to defend the dignity of womanhood and have clamored, angrily at times, for their basic social, economic, and political rights. Women felt forced to prove to themselves and to others their capacity for full humanity and for abstract thought. They manifestly desired to counteract the pervasive patriarchal assumptions of their inadequacy for educational, political, and economic life. Thus a problematic issue in womens intellectual

WHAT MAKES WOMAN WOMAN

23

history was that for women, far longer than for men, education was a class privilege.32 With the long journey that womans liberation has taken, the study of woman is imperative, even crucial. The query What is woman? acquires a fundamental and lasting theme in the long history of humanity and intellectual inquiry. To answer the question requires a profound and indepth reflection on womans nature and existence. That she is different from man is a reality to be studied seriously, and to achieve full respect for women and their identity, it is vital to understand her feminine ontology. In giving this section the title, The Ethos of Woman, I employ Steins use of the term ethos to refer to womans nature. A dictionary definition of the term ethos yields the following meanings: habit, habitation, custom, character, characteristic attitudes, philosophy. 33 Understood within its scholastic definition, the term ethos in Stein refers to an inner form. Ethos encompasses a persons constant spiritual attitude or habitus as the scholastics would call it34 The term inborn habitus is used to refer to a natural basic disposition of the soul such as cheerfulness and melancholy. Along with ethos, this general concept of habitus is made specific by focusing on values. To speak of ethos is to designate habitus , one or several, which possesses positive value.35 Thus, this study examines the value of woman as explicated through the idea of a distinctive nature36 of the feminine species which encompasses a natural basic disposition of a feminine soul that cannot be modified by environmental, economic, cultural, or professional factors.37 From her reading of Genesis, Edith Stein deduces that humanity is divided into the double creations of man and woman. To be a member of the human race means to be so, as either

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male or female. Between the two sexes, Steins claim is that there is a difference not only in body structure and in particular physiological functions, but also in the entire corporeal life of man and woman. Stein used the creation narratives of Genesis to draw out what she considered to be the natural vocation of woman. Recording the creation of Eve out of the rib of Adam, Stein reasons that as Eve was designed as a helpmate, every woman is meant to be both a companion (her spousal vocation) and a mother. Her close connection with human birth and with the development of a new human being is what leads woman to seek and easily bond with whatever is living, personal, and whole. According to the intended natural order, her place is by mans side to master the earth and to care for offspring. But her body and soul are fashioned less to fight and to conquer than to cherish, guard, and preserve.38 Woman is naturally inclined to what is human, and tends to give relationships a higher importance than work, success, reputation, etc. Stein upholds the claim of Thomas Aquinas that the human person is a subsistent unity of body and soul (unlike the radical dualism of Descartes representing soul and body as two different and distinct entities). Since each natural substance is a composite of form and matter and since matter is what distinguishes one human being from another, the body is therefore essential to the person, and is not simply a machine or a shell for the soul that could be discarded without serious loss to the real self.39 Rationality, she explains, and along with it, free choice, belong to every human being and so to every woman as a human person. But if the soul is the formative principle of the body (anima forma corporis), as Stein infers from a formulated truth of St. Thomas, and the form of humanity is

WHAT MAKES WOMAN WOMAN

25

individuated and united with this body or that one, Stein argues that the feminine body must correspond to a feminine soul just as the masculine body must correspond to a masculine soul.40 The womans soul then will have a spiritual quality distinct from the mans soul. The physical distinctions therefore profoundly mark their personalities. The womans body stamps her soul with particular qualities that are common to all women but different from distinctively masculine traits. Stein saw these differences as complementary and not hierarchical in value, and so they should be recognized and celebrated rather than minimized or deplored.41 Stein asserts, there are then two ways of being human, as man or as woman. It is this view of Stein that the 20th century has seen as akin to that of re-emerging personalists. In fact, it is this same view that personalist John Paul II had used to build a new foundation for complementarity in a man-woman relationship,42 while Prudence Allen, commenting on Edith Steins view, believes that this same view will likewise be the prevailing one in the near future on womens identity because her [Steins] view is based on the truth about the human person.43 The principle of complementarity here means simply that explanations of the respective identities of woman and of man are both needed to explain the identity of the human being.44 Allen elucidates the principle by reversing the traditional philosophical approach, switching the concept of woman into front position for more attention and putting man in the background. It could be said that traditional western thinkers have used primarily one eye when they focused entirely on the concept of man and neglected the concept of woman. By repeated use this one eye became extremely strong. The other

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eye, which focuses on the concept of woman, is much weaker because of its historical lack of use. Therefore, by strengthening the weaker eye, we hope to offer a more accurate perspective on the intertwined conceptual histories of men and women.45 In other words, the focus on woman is really aimed at achieving the full development of all men and women. All this makes Steins view worth examining closely.

Real Feminine Distinctiveness

While Stein affirms the equality of the sexes and her commitment to a common human nature and the uniqueness of each individual, Stein argues that there is a real feminine distinctiveness. The task of explicating the distinctiveness of that species is difficult. She says, no woman is only woman46. Each woman, just like each man, has her own individual talents and capacities, be they artistic, scientific, technical, intellectual, or otherwise. No one has merely or purely, a feminine or masculine nature. In this regard, Stein is strongly critical of any essentialism that attempts to deny the uniqueness of any person. Rather, each of us is human, and within human nature, there is a division between the feminine and the masculine.47 Steins contention is based on her phenomenological study of man and woman enriched by her interpretation of the Old Testament. She writes, The first passage of the Bible which concerns humanity assigns a common vocation to both man and woman. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let

WHAT MAKES WOMAN WOMAN

27

them be masters of the fish of the sea and the birds of heaven and over the entire earth and all crawling animals that move upon the earth. (Genesis 1:26) And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, He created them male and female. (Genesis 1:27) And God blessed them and said: Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and conquer it, and be masters over the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, and all the creatures which move upon the earth. (Genesis 1:28) Thus, in the first account of the creation of man, the difference between male and female is immediately proclaimed. But mutually they are given the threefold vocation: they are to be the image of God, bring forth posterity, and be masters over the earth. It is not said here that this threefold vocation is to be effected in different ways by man and woman; at best this is implied in the quotation cited on the separation of the sexes.48 According to Biblical text, from the beginning of time, humanity was incarnated male and female. By citing Genesis, Stein attempts to develop a Christian perspective in her philosophical framework to assert the originality of man and woman as two distinct sexes. On the whole, however, as shall be seen in the subsequent chapters, Steins approach is both phenomenological and metaphysical, and the novelty of her method provides a new slant to solving the persistent problem of womans status and position in society. On the other hand, one must not reduce the difference between men and women to mere biology. There exists without any doubt such things as

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specific feminine or masculine features of the personality. Many feminists try to deny or at least minimize the existence of sexbased personal characteristics, much as many modern women are eager to efface this difference in adapting their demeanor to that of men, the difference in personality structure of man and woman remains an undeniable reality. Stein explains that individual persons, however, do not fall simply into one category or the other. In general, more females have feminine traits, and they tend toward the feminine, while males tend toward the masculine, but all of us have our distinctive individual nature and may realize the feminine or masculine nature in different degrees and in differing ways. A man, take for instance, a male teacher, manifests the feminine traits of gentleness and compassion with his schoolchildren when he is mild, tender, and affectionate in his manner of teaching. A woman, on the other hand, possesses the masculine traits of firmness and fortitude when she staunchly fights for equal rights to professional advancement in a male-dominated work environment. In its operation, in its behavior, there is, nevertheless, an inescapable relationship between the person acting and the nature of the one acting. In a couple of very brief passages, Stein makes the provocative suggestion that the relation of soul and body may differ in men and women, suggesting that in women the union may be more intimate. She says, [w]omans soul is present and lives more intensely in all parts of the body, and it is inwardly affected by that which happens to the body; whereas, with men, the body has more pronouncedly the character of an instrument which serves them in their work and which is accompanied by a certain detachment.49 She argues here that women are present

WHAT MAKES WOMAN WOMAN

29

to and affected by their bodily lives in a way that men are not. In her lecture on The Separate Vocations of Man and Woman According to Nature and Grace50, Stein asserts that the relation of body and soul differs for men and women, and this difference is connected to their psychic lives. While woman is ordained to the roles of mother and companion, man is designed to be a provider, guide, and protector of his wife and children. In her lecture, Stein examines the second passage of Genesis, which deals more extensively with the creation of man, to elucidate this idea. It (Genesis 2:7ff) relates the creation of Adam, his placement in the paradise of bliss to cultivate and preserve it, and the manner in which the animals were brought to him and received their names from him. But no helpmate corresponding to him was found for Adam (Genesis 2:20) The Hebrew expression used in this passage is barely translatable Eser kenegdo which literally means a helper as is vis--vis to him. One can think here of a mirror in which man is able to look upon his own nature. The translators who speak of a helpmate suitable to him perceive it in this way. But one can also think of a counterpart, a pendant, so that indeed, they do resemble each other as one hand does the other. And the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helpmate who will suit him. And the Lord made Adam fall into slumber and took from him one of his ribs and formed a woman from it and He led her to Adam. Then Adam declared, This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She is to be called woman, for she was taken from man. That is why

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man leaves his father and mother and adheres to his wife and they both become one body. (Genesis 2:24)51 Stein explains that this passage from Scripture is not to be interpreted as man having sovereignty over woman. It tells us that Scripture has named woman companion and helpmate and since man will cling to her and that in marriage, both are to become one flesh signifies their equality as a single human pair, to be considered the most intimate community of love, that their faculties were in perfect harmony as within a single being.52. They exist for each others mutual benefit. Being one flesh captures the notion of communion of man and woman in marriage and their complementarity as human beings. Pope John Paul II affirms this with Stein as he writes in Mulieris Dignitatem, his encyclical on the dignity and vocation of women, Both man and woman are human beings to an equal degree, both are created in Gods image Man is a person, man and woman equally so.53 Scripture tells us that man cannot exist alone. He can only exist as a unity of two, and therefore in relation to another human person. It is a question here of mutual relationship: man to woman and woman to man. Being a person in the image and likeness of God thus involves existing in a relationship, in relation to the other I.54 Stein maintains that the complementary relationship of man and woman appears clearly in the original order of nature: mans primary vocation appears to be that of ruler and the paternal vocation secondary (not subordinate to his vocation as ruler but an integral part of it); womans primary vocation is maternal; her role as ruler is secondary and included in a certain way in her maternal vocation.55 Shifting to the New Testament, Stein draws support

WHAT MAKES WOMAN WOMAN

31

for the notion of complementarity from the letters of St. Paul to the Corinthians. However, what I want you to understand is that Christ is the head of every man, but man is the head of woman, and God is the head of Christ. Any man who prays or prophesizes with his head covered renders disrespect to his head. But any woman who prays or prophesizes with head uncovered shames her head; then it is as if her head were shaved off. A man should not cover his head, for it is the image and glory of God, but woman is mans glory. For man does not come from woman, but woman from man. For man was not created for the sake of woman but woman for the sake of man. Yet in the Lord, man is neither independent of woman nor woman independent of man. (1 Corinthians 11: 3-4)56 Stein clarifies that the term Paul used, man is head of woman, corresponds to the Thomistic concept of man as the principle and end of woman. She explains that if a principle is that from which something else follows, then the scriptural text cited above signifies that woman was made from man and signifies further the principle as primary and that which follows as subordinate. The end as Aquinas uses it means, first of all, that to which another strives, that wherein it finds peace and fulfillment; hence this signifies that the meaning of feminine being is fulfilled in union with man. End signifies further that for whose sake another exists. Thus, it means that because man needs woman to fulfill the meaning of his being, she was created for his sake. Steins reading of St. Paul, however, is that he could

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be misunderstood to mean woman was created only for mans sake, to serve mans selfish ends, for that matter, or to satisfy his sexual needs. The meaning of feminine being is rather to be understood in the light of her role as eser kenegdo, as mans helpmate, in that she enables man to be the person he is intended to be. We can glean from the clear word of Scripture that woman, from the beginning of the world, is destined to be wife and mother. Both physically and spiritually she is endowed for this purpose, as seen clearly from practical experience. This natural endowment enables woman to guard and teach her own children. But this basic attitude is not intended just for them; she should behave in this way also to her husband and to all those in contact with her.57 Thus, even if a woman does not become a biological mother (because she is single or a consecrated celibate), her psyche is naturally designed for connectedness with other persons. Since womans maternal gift is joined to that of companion, writes Stein, it is her gift and happiness to share the life of another human being and to take part in all things which come his way, in the greatest and smallest things, in joy as well as in suffering, in work and in problems.58 Man, on the other hand, is consumed by his enterprise, and he expects others will be interested and helpful; generally it is difficult for him to become involved in other beings and their concerns,59 because he has the specific capacity to emancipate himself from the affective sphere.60 On the contrary, it is natural for woman, and she has the faculty to interest herself empathetically in areas of knowledge far from her own concerns and to which she would not pay heed if it were not that a personal interest drew her into contact with them. This endowment is bound closely to her maternal gift. An active sympathy for those who fall within

WHAT MAKES WOMAN WOMAN

33

her ken awakens their powers and heightens their achievements.61 Clearly, there is, according to Stein, some way in which a womans body and her reproductive role are related to the union of body and soul, and this intimate union is connected to the entire nature of the woman. Thus, the nature of any woman is always three-fold, which includes: the common human nature, her wholly individual nature, and that specific to her as a woman.62 Steins analysis leads us to perceive a threefold goal prescribed by the nature of woman: the development of her humanity, her womanhood, and her individuality. These are not separate goals, just as the nature of a particular human individual is not divided into three parts but is one: it is human nature of a specifically feminine and individual character. Women from the womens liberation movement may insist, however, on the sameness of the response of the nature of men and women. Sound psychology, nevertheless, has proof of the predictable and indeed required difference of response precisely because of the radical natural differences between men and women. We may summarize these differences as: anatomic (in body structure), biologic (woman can give birth to another human being, man cannot; the chromosomal composition is xx for woman, and xy for men; hormonal composition is also different), intellectual (men are generally left-brained or logical thinkers, women, in general, right-brained or creative thinkers), psychological (most women are more emotional than men), in roles (women are mothers, men are fathers), and the soul, according to Stein, is either feminine or masculine. While we are able to delineate these differences as specifically feminine or masculine features, experience tells us, that it is possible for there to be an overlapping of features in one person. To the

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extent then that man may imitate woman in certain feminine qualities and roles and may even alter his body for a feminine one (todays advanced scientific and medical technology makes this possible), how do we argue for the claim that woman is unique or distinct from man? The answer lies in Steins position that woman as biological mother distinguishes her whole being: only woman can engender another human being in her womb. Man may play on or take on the role of mother together with his fatherly role (for instance, in the absence or loss of a mother), he can strive to strengthen his right-brain thinking, he may display greater emotion at times, but he will never be able to carry another human being in his body. It is in this aspect that woman is clearly unique and distinct from man. A consequence of womans maternal nature is that in certain areas the feminine psyche is better disposed for spirituality not in its essence but in its operational aspect than the male.63 We find in woman a unity of personality by the fact that heart, intellect, and temperament are much more interwoven, whereas in man there is a specific capacity to detach oneself from the feelings through the intellect. This unity of the feminine type of human person displays itself also in a greater unity of inner and exterior life, in a unity of style embracing the soul as well as the exterior demeanor. In a woman, the personality itself is more in the foreground than objective accomplishments; whereas man, who has a specific creativity, is more called than she to objective accomplishments. In the course of her study on woman, it is to be noted that Stein arrived at her position through philosophical and phenomenological study and through an interpretation of the

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Old and New Testaments. It must not be discounted, however, that Steins own studies in psychology, years of teaching experience,64 and observations have added strength to her claim. Nevertheless, Stein, as in all her phenomenological work, expects us to check her claims against our own experience and judgment. Stein has parallel arguments for her claims that draw from revelation, and she repeatedly appeals to Scripture in explicating her position. While her basic claims do not depend on revelation, one can sense her deeply religious worldview in her development of insights. Her attempt to develop a fully Christian anthropology is also apparent.

Two Essential Characteristics of Feminine Nature

Without undermining the equality of the sexes, Stein brings to the fore two distinctive characteristics of feminine nature. First, she claims that women have an orientation toward the personal, whereas men are more objective, and secondly, she claims that women are directed toward the whole, whereas men tend to compartmentalize.65 She says of man, it is natural for him to dedicate his faculties to a discipline (be it mathematics or technology, a trade or business management) and thereby to subject himself to the precepts of this discipline.66 In contrast, woman is oriented toward people and the personal; her concern is for living things, especially her own personal life and that of others. She focuses on the living, concrete person, and involves her total being in her work, not dividing the various aspects of her life. In Essays on Woman, Stein writes,

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According to the intended original order, her (womans) place is by mans side to master the earth and care for offspring. But her body and soul are fashioned less to fight and to conquer than to cherish, guard and preserve. Of the threefold attitude towards the world to know it, to enjoy it, to form it creatively it is the second which concerns her most directly: she seems more capable than man of feeling a more reverent joy in creatures; moreover, such a joy requires a particular kind of perception of the good, different from rational perception in being an inherent spiritual function and a singularly feminine one. Evidently, this quality is related to womans mission as a mother which involves an understanding of the total being and of specific values. It enables her to understand and foster organic development, the special, individual destiny of every living being.67 Whereas men tend to have a one-sided development because of their submission to some discipline, women have a drive toward totality and full development, both of themselves and others.68 Her theoretical and her practical views correspond; her natural line of thought is not so much conceptual and analytical as it is directed intuitively and emotionally to the concrete.69 Nurturing comes naturally to her; she more easily responds to the neediness of all men. It is important to note that this thinking is corroborated by psychoanalysts who explain that a woman has facility for inner communication with other persons by virtue of her capacity for motherhood. In maternity, there exists an infantile preconceptual communication with the

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mother.70 This flux, according to feminine psychology, is by no means a one-way affair. The mother herself participates similarly in the communication with the child. Long after the umbilical cord is severed, there persists an invisible cord. What exists is a deeply knowing relationship between child and mother a mode of knowledge which precedes the advent of reason and, in a sense, transcends it.71 This notion has led experts in psychology to think the male component of intelligence does not participate in this. The father does not have the same inner relationship to the newborn child as the mother. The kind of inner communication that the mother has is not shared by the father until the child himself communicates by signals.72 Experts hold that the man even with all his sharing in parenthood always remains outside the process of pregnancy and the babys birth. In fact, in many ways he has to learn his own fatherhood from the mother.73 We see that psychology can substantiate Steins claim about the womans greater capacity (than man) for awareness of, sensitivity to, and empathy for persons. To be feminine is to manifest such qualities as warmth, tenderness, care, empathy, sweetness, responsiveness, and intuitive wisdom. In consequence, her awareness of the needs of the living being benefits not only her posterity, but all creatures as well. It particularly benefits a man in making her a companion and helpmate appreciative of his aspirations.74 Because of her intuitive wisdom, woman is more easily able to ponder over the realities of life. Stein elucidates this as follows: This is closely related to the vocation of motherhood. The task of assimilating in oneself a living being which is evolving and growing, of containing and nourishing it,

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signifies a definite end in itself. Moreover, the mysterious process of formation of a new creature in the maternal organics represents such an intimate unity of the physical and spiritual that one is well able to understand that the intimate unity imposes itself on the entire nature of woman.75 Because of this natural inclination to wholeness and selfcontainment, Stein suggests that women tend to aim more toward a holistic expression of personality, while men tend to aim toward the perfecting of individual abilities. She argues that women have a natural tendency toward empathy in that they seek to grasp the other person as a whole being. This characteristic manifests itself in a womans desire for her own wholeness and in her desire also to help others to become complete persons. Woman, Stein writes, is psychically directed to the concrete, the individual, and the personal: she has the ability to grasp the concrete in its individuality and to adapt herself to it, and she has the longing to help this peculiarity to its development.76 At one point, Stein defines a womans self-containment as an integrity of her inner life which no extraneous intrusions can imperil. The woman yearns for optimal perfection in herself emotionally, volitionally, and intellectually she also desires that same psychosomatic wholeness in others with equal intensity. Part of her natural feminine concern for the right development of the beings surrounding her involves the creation of an ambience, or order and beauty conducive to their development.77 Woman more easily focuses on the individual, and on a concrete, particular person with all of his or her own needs and

WHAT MAKES WOMAN WOMAN

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potential. Further, this maternal concern aims at the total development of the other person as a unity of body, soul, and spirit. Stein sees the maternal aspect of woman as a universal calling for women and not simply a task to be exercised by biological mothers with their children. She claims that all women are naturally inclined to the good of persons with whom they come in contact in some way. Stein also explains that the woman is more interested in wholes than in parts, thus womens minds do not dissect an object; they grasp it in totality. Without denigrating the analytic power of mens minds, Stein shows that the female nature is structurally geared to what is metaphysically higher. She writes, God has given each human being a threefold destiny: to grow into the likeness of God through the development of his faculties, to procreate descendants, and to hold dominion over the earth. In addition, it is promised that a life of faith and personal union with the Redeemer will be rewarded by eternal contemplation of God. These destinies, natural and supernatural, are identical for both man and woman. But in the realm of duties, differences determined by sex exist. Lordship over the earth is the primary occupation of man: for this, the woman is placed at his side as a helpmate. The primary calling of woman is the procreation and raising of children; for this, man is given to her as protector. Thus it is suitable that the same gifts occur in both, but in different proportions and relation. In the case of man, gifts for struggle, conquest, dominion are especially necessary: bodily force for taking possession of that exterior to him, intellect for a cognitive

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type of penetration of the world, the powers of will and action for works of creative nature. With the woman, there are capabilities of caring, protecting, and promoting that which is becoming and growing. She has the gift thereby to live in an intimately bound physical compass and to collect her forces in silence; on the other hand, she is created to endure pain, to adapt and abnegate herself.78 From all this, it is more understandable why woman imbues us with a sense of the mysterious. Hence, a womans love is perhaps the only thing which is not achieved by reasoning, Karl Stern writes.79 He adds, The elusive and trans-rational in the core of womanhood, the fact that in the creativeness of feminine love and of maternity exists an element of hiddenness, anonymity, something that resists geometrical definition.80 Evidently the quality can be attributed to womans psychological design arising from her nature as mother. In Edith Steins own words, An especially strong natural desire for spiritually nourishing values lives within the soul of the woman. She is predisposed to love the beautiful, inspired by the morally exalted; but above all, she is open to the highest earthly values, the inexpressible ones which remain in the essence of the souls themselves.81 This she achieves using mind and heart (her mind works best when animated by her heart), thus her holistic grasp of persons and objects. She is disinclined to fall into the traps which threaten specialists, who no longer see the forest because of the trees. Many great minds specialize so much in one facet of reality that they lose sight of the whole picture.82 But for woman, her mission as mother makes her more adept at

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understanding persons in their totality. Stein acknowledges, however, that these very aspects of the feminine identity could also be womans drawback: from her natural attraction to the personal arises lack of objectivity, too much interest in personalities, and superficiality, curiosity, gossip, vanity. Mothering can become smothering; intuitive empathy becomes an overcuriosity about what is personal to others; care becomes officious nagging. Stein gives several examples of deformed versions of the personal attitude, pointing to, for example, an inappropriate concern for persons that leads to a blind, unrealistic attitude about oneself and others. In such a case, the woman loses the ability to endure criticism, which is seen as an attack upon her person. Her own children are the best, her husband the best, and so on. Or someone may have an overly-intrusive interest in the lives of others, a busy-ness resulting in a perverse desire to penetrate into personal lives83. Rather than waiting for the other to reveal himself or herself, she may push to know, understand, and invade the interior life of the other. Likewise, the interest in the personal may result in a desire to lose oneself completely in another person, a desire to sacrifice everything for the sake of another, which ends in an excessive passivity doing justice neither to her own humanity nor to others. Every need of the other becomes her law and every concern of another is her own. She loses herself (and thereby her own ability to help others develop themselves) in her interest in the other, and in her concern for persons, she fails to be herself a full person. She renders herself a slave of other persons. Stein recommends two things as correctives for such degeneration in the feminine nature. First, she suggests that

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objective work of any variety housework, a trade, or science will help develop an appropriate evaluative distance. Anything that requires submitting to the laws of the matter concerned encourages a degree of objectivity in regard to ones moods, emotions, and disposition. Second, a womans emotional life should not be stifled, but neither should it be blinding. In focused tasks, the woman gains a kind of freedom from the self, and can curtail excessive interest in her personal concerns as well as a check on the tendency toward superficiality.84 Stein paints a shining ideal of feminine nature in her ontological examination of woman. She answers the questions Does woman have a distinctive value? and If she does, is this value based on a distinguishing nature? Steins basic claim is that womans nature as biological mother affects her whole being and that woman has a distinctive nature and value of her own. Steins claim will be examined here in the context of three basic theories on gender and identity expounded by Prudence Allen in her book The Concept of Woman: the Unisex View of Plato which holds that there are no significant differences between man and woman, the Polarity View of Aristotle which sees the man as superior to woman, and the Complementarity View of St. Augustine as espoused by Edith Stein and Pope John Paul II, which asserts that men and women are equal in dignity as persons, but have significant differences. In examining woman, we have mentioned that Steins philosophical methodology is phenomenology fused with Thomism enriched by her interpretation of Sacred Scriptures. As previously mentioned, Stein upholds the Thomistic notion that man and woman share a common human nature and an equal human dignity. However, Stein holds that there are real differences between man and

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woman: anatomic, biologic, intellectual, psychological, in roles and in the soul (see earlier section, Real Feminine Distinctiveness). Stein agrees with Aristotle and Aquinas that the human person is a subsistent unity of body and soul, a composite of matter and form with the body being the matter of the human being, and the soul, being its form. Using The Thomistic formula of the soul as the formative principle of life, Stein infers that if the soul is the formative principle of the body and the form of humanity is individuated and united with this body or that one, then the feminine body must correspond to a feminine soul just as the masculine body must correspond to a masculine soul.85 With the differences between man and woman being an undeniable reality, we can then speak about real feminine distinctiveness, says Stein. Stein, however, saw these differences as complementary and not hierarchical. They do not make one superior to the other. In examining womans feminine nature, we see that womans body is designed so that she can give birth to another human being. Because of this, womans psychological make-up is made for close connection with persons. If such is womans nature, Stein contends that her natural role in society, her vocation or calling is to be of assistance to persons or mans helpmate as mother and companion. Stein draws light from the Old Testament to elucidate her theory. In Genesis 2, she reads that God created woman as eser kenegdo a Hebrew term meaning a helper vis--vis to man. Stein interprets this to mean a companion in relation to another person; woman was created to be of assistance to another human being. As Stein says, It is womans gift and happiness to share the life of another human being.86 Thus it is natural for woman to interest herself in

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people. This inclination stems largely from her maternal gift. I reiterate Steins claim on feminine nature as having two essential characteristics: that woman is oriented to persons and that she is oriented to wholeness. Orientation to the person for Stein means that her body and soul are fashioned to cherish, guard, and preserve, because she can carry another human being inside her body. Mans body and soul, on the other hand, are fashioned to fight, conquer, and protect. By orientation to wholeness Stein means woman can grasp realities in totality. She does not dissect an object but grasps in wholes. She can understand another person as a whole being through intuition, emotion, and empathy. Man, on the other hand, is inclined to analytic thinking and knows things following stages of abstraction; this he achieves by reasoning. We note that it is womans capacity for motherhood that affects practically her ways of thinking and behaving; it determines her whole being. Stein ascribes this to womans specific tendency to sympathize and to serve another life.87

Emotion:Womans Strength or Frailty?

Stein believes that it is womans emotional life that is the source of her attraction to the personal and to wholeness. The two essential characteristics of woman attraction to the personal and to wholeness point to another hallmark of the female species: a womans emotional life as the source of her attraction to the personal and to wholeness. Whether it is an awareness and sensitivity toward her own personal being or that of others, it is the centrality of a womans emotions that is responsible for this feminine kind of holistic knowledge and discernment. According to Stein, without the emotions, the soul of a woman would never know itself or others in their totality. Each woman perceives her own being in the stirrings of her emotions. That is, through her emotions, each woman comes

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to know who she is and how she is. It is through her emotions that a woman also grasps the relationship of another being to herself. Stein predates Simone de Beauvoir, foundress of womens studies and author of The Second Sex, which influenced the contemporary feminist movement of 1949-50, by 19 years. In de Beauvoirs time, the feminists were fighting the male rationale that women are the weaker sex and hence must play a secondary role. They resented the fact that women have been referred to as the weaker sex. What, anyway, can be meant by weaker? An obvious answer would be that the fair sex is physically weaker than its male counterpart. Certainly, the glorification of strength and the denigration of weakness have become the basis of modern thought and feminist belief. Physical strength became glorified and weakness was looked down upon as a proof of inferiority.88 Weak is also used to refer to what is fragile, delicate, breakable, vulnerable, sensitive. That woman is in this sense weaker than man is exemplified by female tears. Not only do they cry much more than men, but moreover, they are not ashamed of their tears, whereas there are men who would rather die than be tearful. Because of the meld of heart and mind which characterizes women, women are more likely to be wounded than men, whose power of abstraction often shields them from negative feelings. Women usually have greater sensitivity, they are more intuitive. Women have a more developed affective life and are more attentive to their emotional lives; they are more emotionally responsive. Their bodies are mirrors of their psyche and seem to be more closely connected than in men.89

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As women have become victimized by this distortion of the hierarchy of values, Steins philosophy on woman may as yet help to restore the proper hierarchy of values. Steins views recognize the unique value of femininity and its crucial mission in the world. Womans emotions, looked upon as her frailty, can in fact be her very strength. We see this clearly in the following passage from Steins Essays on Woman: The strength of the woman lies in the emotional life. This is in accord with her attitude toward personal being itself. For the soul perceives its own being in the stirrings of the emotions. Through the emotions, it comes to know what it is and how it is; it also grasps through them the relationship of another being to itself, and then, consequently, the significance of the inherent value of exterior things, of unfamiliar people, and impersonal things. The emotions, the essential organs for comprehension of the existent in its totality and in its peculiarity, occupy the center of her being. They condition that struggle to develop herself to a wholeness and to help others to a corresponding development, which we have found earlier to be characteristic of womans soul.90 The importance of her emotions stems from the fact that the womans monthly reproductive cycle makes her a potential bearer of a new human being within her very body. But even if she is single or celibate and does not become a biological mother, her psyche is naturally constituted for the greatest closeness and affinity with others. Whether it is an awareness and

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sensitivity toward her own personal being or that of others, it is her emotions that is responsible for this feminine kind of holistic knowledge and discernment. But does this mean that woman is less capable of abstract thought and less oriented to what is objective? Sarah Borden answers this question in an essay entitled Woman and Womens Education: In saying that women are more personally and less objectively-oriented, Stein is not claiming that women are less capable of abstract thought; rather, as Mary Catharine Baseheart puts it, characteristically women are not content to remain on the level of the abstract.91 There is a drive in the feminine to relate the conceptual back to the concrete, the psychological back to particular psyches, and the theoretical back to the world of experience. Thus, the orientation toward the personal and the concrete need not be a denial of the abstract and conceptual, but it does indicate a dissatisfaction with the merely abstract and conceptual, and an unhappiness with only a part when one can be oriented to the whole.92 This leads us to sum up Steins arguments about a womans emotional life as a distinct property of the female species in one word: motherliness . Woman tends to the mothering of all she meets. The feminine is characterized by feeling, intuition, empathy, and adaptability whereas the masculine is characterized by bodily strength, the ability for predominantly abstract thought and independent creativity.93 Women are made to love and cherish all living things and to desire their full development. The feminine is characterized by

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a responsiveness to the real. Psychologist and neo-feminist Carol Gilligan concurs with Stein on this view. In her book Concepts of the Self and of Morality, Gilligan writes about woman differing fundamentally from the man in that she is less political and more interactive, relating two subjects: speaker and listener, as opposed to a subject and object, seer and seen. Man associates knowing more with speaking and listening, than with seeing. While masculine vision lends itself to stages, steps, positions, and levels, marking differences with fixed boundaries, establishing connections about space, the feminine vision is grounded on love, friendship and the recognition of needs.94 In her 1982 book, In a Different Voice, Gilligan further asserts that even in ethical reasoning, men differ from women in that women tend to an ethics of care and men, to an ethics of justice. Within an ethics of justice, men are more likely to reason by reference to abstract and universal principles, treating relations with colleagues and strangers in such a manner that they are governed by rules and conventions which abstract selves from particularities of circumstance and are driven by the imperative to formulate universal principles.95 Women, on the other hand, exercise an ethics imbedded in life which inclines one away from the tendency to reduce morality to a matter of obedience to abstract laws or principles, moving one instead in the direction of preparedness to change the rules, or even to forsake entitlements, if by so doing, extremely meaningful, though faltering, human relationships, stand a chance of being rehabilitated.96

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Gilligan contends that the fundamental characteristic that differentiate the ethic of care from the ethic of justice stems from a vital sense of personal imbeddedness within a web of ongoing relationships. Whereas the typical man will tend to downplay and even deny the value of intimate, particular relations, focusing instead upon relations and actions in accordance with universalizable maxims for action (justice, fairness, rules, rights), the typical woman will attend more closely to the daily experiences, wants, need, interests, and aspirations and moral dilemmas of peoples imbedded in relations and friendships that are quite fluid and often presuppose and require a trust and imaginative engagement for which there are no rules.97 Contemporary Christian thinkers like Alice von Hildebrand, G.K.Chesterton, and Karol Wojtyla, share this position. Alice von Hildebrand contends that Female interests are centered on the human side of their lives: their family life, their relationships to those they love, their concern about their health, their welfare and, if they are Christians, the spiritual welfare of their childrens souls; in other words, about human concerns. Most men speak about the stock market, politics, and sports; some speak about intellectual and artistic concerns.98 Chesterton declares, Women speak to each other, men speak to the subject they are speaking about.99 In his book, Love and Responsibility, Karol Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II), writes about emotion being stronger in woman than in man because she experiences more powerfully the value of a human being, while sensuality, which is oriented towards the body as an object of enjoyment, is in general

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stronger and more importunate in men. 100 This view on emotion in woman, understood with the theories on the feminist thinking on morality, helps us better understand Steins claim about how emotion in woman can in fact be viewed as her strength, rather than her frailty. At the heart of every emotion is a set of fundamental ontological and evaluative commitments, writes Robert C. Solomon in his book The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life.101 All emotions are intentional, because they are about something, ultimately both about ourselves and our world. One is never simply in love; he or she is in love with someone. It is impossible to fall in love without falling in love with someone. In phenomenological tradition, this feature of emotions called intentionality tells us that all emotions are about something.That which the emotion is about is called its intentional object, or simply its object. As a matter of logic, every emotion has its particular object. Furthermore, it is this particular object which constitutes the emotion. In his book, Solomon gives the example of someone being angry, the object of his emotion being that a person, John, had stolen his car: I am angry that John stole my car. The object of ones anger is irreducibly that-John-stolemy-car. To show that the emotion is determined by its object just as it is the emotion that constitutes its object, Solomon expands his example as follows: Having long wanted to get rid of my car, I may also be relieved that John stole my car. Of course, the fact which stands at the base of my anger is identical to the fact which stands at the base of my relief. But my anger and my relief are not separate feelings or acts or attitudes which are directed toward one and the same object. The object

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of my anger is an offense; the object of my relief is a boon. Thus the object of my anger is not the same as the object of my relief.. There are not two components, my anger and the object of my anger.102 Solomon stresses that an emotion is not distinct or separable from its object; the object as an object of this emotion has no existence apart from the emotion. To understand an emotion, therefore, it is necessary to understand its object. Stein argues, however, that while an emotion is not separable from its object, it is distinct from its object. For example, the object of a mothers joy is her baby smiling at her. The mother feels happy and relieved of her tiredness from work upon beholding her babys lovable and angelic smile at her. The object of her joy is that-the-baby-smiled-at her. We see in this example that the emotion is determined by its object which helps us understand the intentionality of the emotions: emotions are directed toward some intentional object. But while the emotional and intentional object are not separable, they are certainly distinct. The emotion is how I am related to the object. Because that toward which one is directed and the being-directed itself are distinct, one can judge that ones emotional response is too strong or weak, given the object and thus one is led to ask whether her lifepower is depleted and she is too exhausted to feel very intensely, or whether there are factors in her life making her particularly sensitive to this type of thing. This view is corroborated by Anthony Kenny in his book Action, Emotion and Will where he presents his theory of the object-directedness of emotions.103 For Kenny, emotions, unlike sensations, have an intentional structure. He writes, Emotions,

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unlike pain, have objects: we are afraid of things, angry with people, ashamed that we have done such-and-such.104 He calls this feature of emotions their intentionality.105 Kenny analyzes the intentionality of emotions employing the scholastic notion of a formal object (that to which a thing is directed). Emotions, Kenny explains, are mental states and mental states are specified by their formal objects, and not by their material objects (that by which something came to be) or by their causes. Mental states can have material objects and be caused by, or in some other way be related to, material objects; but mental states are not specified by their material objects or by their causes. To understand an emotion, and consequently, to understand why persons experience certain emotions or to comprehend why they react emotionally to certain situations, it is not sufficient to know what caused (material object) an occasion that gave rise to the incidence of the emotion. One needs to know to what the emotion is bound or directed. For instance, it is not enough to know that the onset of darkness causes one to fear walking home alone. One is afraid of someone who or something that arises during the darkness of the night such as an assailant or a robber attacking him/her. The formal object of the emotion fear characterizes the directedness of the emotion in such a way as to specify the emotion itself. If the same person, on another instance, experiences delight instead of fear, it would be because his/her emotion is directed to that which inspires delight in him and not fear. In other words, the formal object of an emotion restricts the emotion to be of a certain emotion and not another. Kennys example is, One cannot be afraid of just anything, nor happy about anything whatsoever. If a man says he is afraid of winning 10,000 in the pools, we want to ask him more: does

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he believe that money corrupts, or does he expect to lose his friends, or to be annoyed by begging letters, or what? If we can elicit from him only descriptions of the good aspects of the situation, then we cannot understand why he reports his emotion as fear and not as hope.106 We see with Kenny that the formal object of an emotion is linked to the emotion itself. One may say with Kenny that the formal object of an emotion is conceptually connected with the emotion. Or, we may say, that its formal object is part of the concept of the emotion.107 If we are therefore to explain the behavior of persons, it is helpful to discover the object to which their emotions are linked. To be able to identify the object of emotions is to say that emotions have logical connections with something real. Emotions link us to concrete objects in our world. If we are to understand our world, it is of vital importance that we understand the nature of the objects that affect us and make us emotionally responsive to them. The cause of an emotion may help explain how the emotion came up, but it has nothing to do with the intentionality and nature of an emotion. In Kennys terms, the cause of an emotion needs to be distinguished from its object which can be thought of as the target or the concrete particular at which the emotion is actually directed.108 To illustrate this, I may be angry at a certain student at this moment; we might say, my anger is caused by a change in the chemical reactions and neurological changes in my body; the object of my anger, however, is that this student of mine is not listening in class and is uselessly talking with his seatmate, thus is distracted from his lessons and performs poorly. My anger may be caused by certain physiochemical processes, but that I am angry at this particular person for this particular reason is what circumscribes my emotion of anger.

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We are elucidated further on the distinction between causes and objects of emotion in this passage from Kenny: emotions are specified by their objects. That is to say: if someone betrays the marks of emotion (as fear or embarrassment) we may seek to find the object of his emotion, by asking what are you afraid of? or what is embarrassing you? Having learnt the object of his emotion, we may then go on to ask such questions as but why are you afraid of the dark? or but why do bawdy jokes embarrass you?; and the answer to these questions may, though it need not, assign a cause for the emotions thus specified. In such cases, we are seeking a cause for a general tendency to experience certain emotions in certain situations, or at certain objects. In other cases we may seek a cause for a particular emotion at a particular time: as when we ask why the manager has been so irritated this morning at small things (object) and learn that it is because he is suffering from dyspepsia (cause). Causes are sought for emotions-regardingparticular-objects, not for emotions simpliciter: we look for the causes of a mans fear of mice, or dislike of strawberries; we do no look for the causes of his fear, or his dislike: for this would be to ask the question why does he have fears? or why does he have dislikes? to which the only answer seems to be: because he is a human being.109 With Kenny as with Solomon, we see how emotion is intentional. The object of an emotion is never the same as its

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cause. The cause, we may say, is objective, while the object is subjective, a part of the world as one perceives it, whether or not it is in fact the case or not (as in a case wherein I am angry that my student is talking to his seatmate and conclude that he is not listening to my lecture, when, in fact, he may have been listening intently and is clarifying a point with his seatmate, which is why he is talking). While psychological and physiological theories explain brain functions, complex factors in the upbringing of a person such as childhood traumas, or chemical constitution to be the causes of emotions, we realize that they have nothing to do with subjectivity and individual experience. 110 If what characterizes an emotion is its object, we can appreciate that our emotions reflect our way of seeing the world. For phenomenologists like Max Scheler,111 the notion of intentionality denotes that all feelings possess a lived reference to the I (or the Person). The intentional correlates of the feelings of life are the values closed within ones own vitality; those of the spiritual feelings are the self-value of the Person.112 Emotions, for Scheler, are self-involved in that they are about objects that are important to us. To understand Schelers notion of intentionality, we must first distinguish between the feeling of something and feeling states. In his book, Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Value, Scheler writes that there is original emotive intentionality in the feeling of something as opposed to feeling states.113 All specifically sensible feelings, are by their nature, states, and may be more or less objectless. They include moods, which may have causes but are not directed to any object in particular. For example, one may feel sadness and ask why he or she is in such a mood today, the cause being that the sky is downcast and the weather is damp and cold. In itself, the feeling

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of sadness is not related to an object. In Schelers words, It does not take anything, nor is there anything that approaches me. There is no signifying in it nor is there any immanent directedness in it.114 With intentional feeling, however, there is a connection between the feeling and what is therein felt. Scheler writes, There is here an original relatedness, a directedness of feeling toward something objective, namely, values. This kind of feeling is not a dead state of affairs that can enter into associative connections or be related to them; nor is such feeling a token. This feeling is a goal-determined movement, although it is by no means an activity issuing forth from a center (nor is it a temporally extended movement). It is a punctual movement, whether objectively directed from the ego or coming toward the ego as movement in which something is given to me and in which it comes to appearance. This feeling therefore has the same relation to its value-correlate as representing has to its object, namely an intentional relation. It is not externally brought together with an object, whether immediately or through a representation (which can be related to a feeling either mechanically or fortuitously or by mere thinking). On the contrary, feeling originally intends its own kind of objects, namely values.115 In the passage cited, Scheler tells us that values are genuine (phenomenological) objects of acts of intentional feelings. Such value contents of intentional feelings are,

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according to Scheler, pre -given to any other act of consciousness.116 Moreover, in every experience, there is always an experience of values. We are, either attracted or repelled from that which we are experiencing. Or, to put it in other words, we are drawn toward or pushed from all objects in any kind of experience. Manfred Frings elucidates us on Schelers notion of pre-given intentional feeling in the following passage: Scheler makes the following comparison. He argues that in the same way as colors are given to the sense of sight, sounds to the sense of hearing, and concepts to acts of reasoning, values are given in intentional feelings as their intuitional correlates. Scheler can, therefore, say that a being who would have only intellect and will, but not intentional feeling, could have no experience of value at all. Such a being would be comparable to someone born blind, never having had colors given in sense experience. Acts of intentional feeling are, for Scheler, an original intentionality toward their proper objects: values. In practical life, such a value experience is most conspicuous in acts of love, upon which all intentional feeling ultimately rests.117 In his essay, Ordo Amoris, Scheler wrote, Man is, before he is an intellectual being and before he is a being of will, ens amans (literally meaning man is a loving being or a being who loves). An analysis of the expression love at first sight may help us understand what Scheler means. In many customary experiences of love (not love at first sight), the object of ones love (the person who is loved) is thought about, judged, or

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assessed before he/she is loved. In love at first sight however, love is there first even before any assessment or analysis about the object of ones love has been made. Quoting Blaise Pascal who said, The heart has its reasons that reason itself does not understand, Scheler holds that there is a type of experiencing whose objects are completely inaccessible to reason; reason is as blind to them as ears and hearing are blind to colors.118 If for Aristotle and Kant the significance of the emotional was hardly recognized, for Scheler, the emotional sphere of man has a place of importance side by side with all laws of logic and reason. The emotional sphere of man occupies a fundamental place for Scheler, a sphere which he called, together with Pascal, the ordo amoris which is the harmonious structure of emotional intentionality and intentional feeling together with immanent intuited objects: values. Man, therefore, is the ontic place in which values occur.119 Edmund Husserl likewise recognized the intentional character of feelings, even though he assumed that they (feelings) were founded in knowing intentionality. Franz Brentano had maintained that the movements of the heart represent a special mode of the relation of psychic activity to a content.120 At this point, it is important to recognize Jean Paul Sartres contribution to the anthropology of emotions to appreciate the conception of emotion as intentional phenomenon. For Sartre, feelings and emotions, according to their very essence, belong to the existential turning of a subject to persons, things and circumstances of the environment and the world. As objects of feeling-consciousness, something is true of them that is not in consciousness. Therefore, the movements of the heart, according to Sartre, are determined upon objects and

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situations.121 He illustrates his notion of intentionality through an analysis of a happy reunion. His analysis assumes the standpoint of a positivistic-scientific objectivism where there is indeed no object called friend, which causes happiness, nor a happiness-producing event like a reunion. The advocate of a natural-scientific approach will simply establish the at-handness of a particular example of the species homo sapiens and its spatial progression in a certain direction. Factually, this is the raw material out of which one who is awaiting his friend makes the object of his happiness. That the emotionally aroused imagination plays a dominant role in the formation of this hyle is indeed incontestable. Moreover, this is also confirmed by empirical psychologists. Emotion is thus not only a passive being-grasped, but also an active intention. The intention releases in the experiencing subjective formative powers which bestow upon reality a particular physiognomic expression: one that is happily-winged, one that is fear-inspiring, one that is hopeless, and so forth.122 Sartre shows that emotions cannot be conceived of as states of excitement, or as confused reactions to some stimuli, nor as accidents of human existence. They are actually ways of seeing and living in the world. In emotion, we open ourselves to others, allow ourselves to share their experiences and opinions, their world views, and ultimately, their other emotions.123 Since woman is naturally inclined to nurturance, close personal attachments, and emotional response to others, it is easy to understand why persons are logically the object of

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her emotions and that her emotions are associated to their object. For Stein, this is simply a consequence of her innate capacity for motherhood (be it cultural or spiritual), which includes a spousal dimension, the role of companionship. This role involves sharing the life of another, entering into it, and making that persons concerns ones own. One might argue that this is a vocation for both men and women, and it is unlikely that Stein would deny that it is. But it may also be true that women generally possess a special genius for friendship, because of their natural orientation to the human and personal, and because of their greater capacity for exercising empathy. This thinking tells us that women have a richer conception of persons and that they can more easily imbue human relationships with care and affection. Life is enriched and softened by the moral perception of women who respond to others with empathetic engagement rather than detached application of abstract principles. Since morality for the typical woman, expresses itself in activity directed at the concrete, specific persons who need to be loved, cared for, shown compassion, women then tend to be better attuned than men to care thinking which enforces a duty to care for and empathize with the members of the human community.124 While this kind of moral reasoning has been dismissed as irrational, it has fashioned a clearly ethical tradition of kindness and benevolence in an otherwise violent world. Certainly this standpoint is quite unlike the legalistic contractual thinking of men stressing individual freedom and arms-length relation with others. If womens different voice of emotion, care, responsibility, concern, and connection is essential to human living, then what traditionally has been regarded as womens defective and

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deficient moral judgment ought to show forth as a sign of their strength. A world hardened by autonomy, discontinuity, and aloneness with domination and maleness may yet be a better place to live in with the gentleness, relation, understanding, concern, empathy, in short, the mothering of femaleness.125 Steins dissertation on the subject of empathy was completed some years prior to her lectures on womens roles, but one can see its influence on that later work. She describes empathy as a clear awareness of another person, not simply of the content of his experience, but of his experience of that content. In empathy, one takes the place of the other without becoming strictly identical to him. It is not just understanding the experiences of the other, but in some sense, taking them on as ones own.

Womans Empathetic Understanding of Persons

What is Empathy
Edith Steins theory of empathy is important to understanding how woman naturally feels for persons and for elucidating how woman is innately nurturing towards them. Stein wrote a doctoral dissertation on empathy entitled Zum Problem der Einfhlung (On the Problem of Empathy) intending to address a basic problem that would provide the key to understanding all of the various theories of empathy that were current in the literature of her day.126 The problem was: the question of empathy as encountering of/by alien subjects and their live experiencing.127 What empathy is, what alien subjects are, and what live experiencing exactly means will be clarified in this chapter.

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Translators of Steins dissertation claim that the English word empathy is not an exact equivalent for the German Einfhlung. Empathy comes from the Greek im (in) and pathe (suffer, feel), literally translating as to feel in. It is not the same as sympathy which is from the Greek sym (with) and pathe (suffer, feel), meaning to feel with.128 To empathize is a more difficult than to sympathize. The German word means in-feeling, that is, both feeling-into and feeling-within. It refers to how a person actually finds himself/herself in his/her own experiences: one feels oneself within them. Aesthetic theory at the turn of the century applied the term to art appreciation: you understand the statue or painting by feeling yourself into it.129 The term then was vague and Edmund Husserl, Steins mentor, was using it without addressing this vagueness. The question of empathy was introduced by Edmund Husserl in the first volume of his 1913 book Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie (Ideas) and promised that he would discuss the problem more lengthily in the second volume. For Husserl, the intersubjective world is the correlate of the intersubjective experience, mediated, that is, through empathy. In the Cartesian Meditations, he writes, Thus the problem is stated, at first, as a special one, namely, that of the thereness-for-me of others, and accordingly as the theme of a transcendental theory of experiencing someone else, a transcendental theory of so-called empathy.130

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How I come to know other persons, or other Is,131 in Steins usage, was the problem that Stein wanted to address. Assuming the I of another to experience whatever is he/she is experiencing, i.e., his joy or sorrow, is what Stein meant by empathizing with persons. What does Stein mean by experience? The German term, Erleben, means living through.132 We all have first-hand conscious experience of conscious life or someone else, another I than my own. To elucidate the depth of such an experience and to investigate its relevance to knowing persons was Steins goal in her dissertation on empathy which she wrote after one semester of study with Edmund Husserl. Her choice of the topic reflects her interest then in psychology, the science that she had studied in Breslau for four semesters before coming to Husserl.133 It must be noted that Husserls great influence on Stein cannot be discounted. Edith Steins work on empathy thus cannot be understood unless it is positioned within the phenomenology of The Master, as Stein referred to her mentor. Moreover, one may find Steins notion of empathy far-fetched and baseless without knowing the historical setting wherein Stein lived. Stein had examined the state of the question Einfhlung before the First World War when, as a student at Gottingen, she confronted it.134 An account of how Stein received Husserls approval of her dissertation topic tells us how she came to decide on empathy for her dissertation: In this course on nature and [intellect], Husserl had said that an objective outer world could only be experienced intersubjectively, i.e., through a plurality of perceiving individuals who relate in a mutual exchange of information. Accordingly, an experience of other

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individuals is a prerequisite. To the experience, an application of the work of Theodore Lipps, Husserl gave the name Einfhlung. What it consists of, however, he nowhere detailed. Here was a lacuna to be filled; therefore, I wished to examine what empathy might be. The Master found this suggestion not bad at all.135 Trained in Husserls school of thought, Edith Stein uses phenomenological reduction to arrive at the essence of empathy. Phenomenology was then in its incipient stage. It is necessary to ask at this point: what is phenomenology? Although the phenomenological movement goes back to the nineteenth century, to date, there is no simple or adequate answer to the question what is phenomenology? Emerita Quito says, if to define is to assign limits, then phenomenology is indefinable. After almost a century since it appeared, there is yet no single definition that will cover the myriad aspects of phenomenology.136 In order to tackle Steins theory of empathy, however, I will move around a working definition of phenomenology as the study of human experience and of the ways things present themselves to us in and through such experience.137 As a philosophical method, phenomenology aims at arriving at the knowledge of things in their givenness to our consciousness, by bracketing the non-essentials of a thing so that we reach its essence or the thing-in-itself or the pure phenomenon. I will unravel the meaning of the key terms phenomenon, bracketing, consciousness, and givenness as I proceed with this chapter. The term phenomenology had been used by other philosophers in the history of philosophy. The Empiricists,

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namely Locke, Berkeley and Hume, made use of the term phenomenon. Hegels masterpiece is entitled Phenomenology of the Mind.138 The word phenomenon is derived from the Greek word phos, meaning light; from phaino, to make appear or to reveal; from phainesthai, that which shows itself, and finally, phainomenon, that which is manifested or that which appears. Husserl refused to go beyond the only data available to consciousness, namely appearances or phenomenon, thus his choice of the term phenomenology for his philosophical method. In fact his supreme rule was zu den Sachen selbst or back to the things themselves.139 For Husserl, we come to know things through our consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no subject and object of knowledge. An object may be reflected in a mirror in the same way that it can register on the optical faculty, but without consciousness, it is only an object and not a correlate of consciousness, hence, not knowledge. This was what Husserl meant by Bewusstsein von Etwas (consciousness of something). The conscious perceiver sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches its object or correlate of consciousness.140 In the course of knowing, Husserl uses a method known as bracketing or reduction or epoche. The aim of this method is apodicticity which means clearly and demonstrably certain. After the natural world is bracketed, one delves deeper on a transcendental level where a special kind of pure phenomenon appears to the pure I and which he calls a phenomenological residue.141 In writing her dissertation, Stein follows the usage of Friedrich Scheiermacher142 for whom intimate personal conversation was the touchstone of communication and the model for theorization of the reading of texts, 143 but she uses Husserls phenomenological reduction to arrive at the essence of

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empathy.144 It is thus necessary to be acquainted with Husserls phenomenology before we discuss Steins theory of empathy.

Edmund Husserl and the Problem of Empathy

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) hails from a Jewish family in Moravia but received a German education. He studied Mathematics in Berlin and Vienna and earned his doctorate in 1882 with a dissertation on the theory of the calculus of variations. His first published work was Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891). He also trained in physics, astronomy, and philosophy. He is known as one of the forerunners of Gestalt psychology. His phenomenology requires a background of psychology, epistemology, mathematics, and philosophy. His exposure to Franz Brentano started his work in phenomenology. Although Brentano did not claim to be a phenomenologist, Husserl called Brentano my one and only teacher of phenomenology. 145 Herbert Spiegelberg refers to Brentano as the first phenomenologist in history. Husserl earned his reputation as a philosophical genius with his Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) which came out in 1900 and 1901 in two volumes. As a psychology student, Stein had read the first volume of Logical Investigations in its entirety. Husserls ideas attracted her as offering an answer to her search for clarifying first principles. In his book, Husserl was struggling toward a rediscovery of Spirit, toward a purified knowledge, freed from a conceptual apparatus, which could get at the being of things through an intuitive perception of their essence.146 This served as inspiration for Stein, prompting her

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transfer to the University of Gottingn to study under Husserl. With a long history of philosophy before Husserl as the search for the Absolutewherein philosophers improved on an existing philosophy in order to arrive at an absolute idea Edmund Husserl conceived phenomenology as philosophy of science, that is, the philosophy of the foundation of all the sciences. 147 Husserls formulation of phenomenology is presented in Ideas. It was Stein who had arranged Ideas for publication when she worked with Husserl as his assistant in 1916, transcribing, editing, and re-writing his shorthand lecture notes and typing them. Husserl wanted to base philosophy on a scientific foundation and in so doing, he had changed the contours of philosophy by pulling down walls that separated one basic philosophy from another. He claimed that philosophy needed a new method in order to detach itself from 19 th century philosophy of the ideal and the abstract.148 Logic, Psychology, Metaphysics, and Epistemology have common boundaries; one basic philosophy entails the others. What Husserl wanted was a scientific basis of philosophy as a whole, which would entail Logic, Psychology, Metaphysics and Epistemology all at once, defying boundaries.149 He insisted that the absolute foundation of human knowledge is a total subjectivity (hence, personal) and a total objectivity (hence external). There is a compenetration of complete subjectivity and complete objectivity, but based on a completely different ground, namely phenomenology.150 Thus Husserl introduced to the philosophical world a new method, a new way of regarding philosophy.151 The phenomenological method of Husserl starts with the natural or nave attitude which connects with the objects of the natural world. The method involves three levels of

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consciousness. The first level of consciousness begins with the natural or empirical I as rooted in the natural world. On this level, there is no apodicticity. Our interpretation of phenomena, even those that are immediately given, is mixed with prejudice or prejudgment.152 For instance, I may interpret some noise even before I actually ascertain what it is, what caused it, or where it comes from. By doing so, I disengage myself from the thing itself. I never really get to the thing because I have gone astray in the web of preliminaries that lie between the conscious I and its object. I then formulate a hasty reading of or make a rash judgment of reality. Using Husserls phenomenology, to get to the essence of the object, one must suspend all data that are irrelevant to the object or bracket all non-essentials, so that the true phenomenon can come to light. This is called epoche or abstention or bracketing of all underlying prejudices. In this method, the natural world is not erased or eliminated but merely suspended in order to arrive at a deeper level of consciousness. In this regard, Husserl considers existence, location, time, as extraneous hence irrelevant to the true essence of the object. Husserl believes that the existence of the object does not detract from its essence, but even existence has to be bracketed.153 Then comes a second epoche, the reflexive level, in the field of transcendental consciousness in which the reflexive I relates to pure and transcendental phenomena. To those who ask what remains after the first level has been bracketed, Husserl answers that a new field of experience is reached. For what can remain over when the whole world is bracketed, including ourselves and all our thinking?154 We have literally lost nothing, but have won the whole Absolute Being which, properly

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understood, conceals in itself all transcendences, constituting them within itself.155 Hence, a new panorama turns up on this second and deeper level which is the reflexive I and a deeper aspect of the object appears that phenomenological epoche lays open an infinite realm of being of a new kind as the sphere of a new kind of experience: transcendental experience.156 On this level, the object or correlatum of the reflexive I is more transparent than the object on the first level or natural standpoint. A deeper look into our consciousness allows a deeper phenomenon to emerge as its correlatum. In daily experience, this happens when, in order to understand a thing better, one shuts off from the noise and distractions around, closing ones eyes, for instance, so as to probe into oneself and concentrate better on the object. The deepening of both subject and object is simultaneous. The natural standpoint or attitude and its objects had already been bracketed. The object on the second level has more apodicticity or certainty.157 But, Husserl writes, such reflection is not yet phenomenological nor is the apprehended consciousness pure consciousness.158 Husserls method goes even deeper into a third level of consciousness which he calls the pure I or phenomenological I or the transcendent ego wherein a more trenchant object or phenomenon becomes its correlatum and where apodicticity is achieved.159 What finally remains after two levels of epoche or bracketing is what Husserl refers to as phenomenological residue. One has reached the phenomenon or essence, the thing-in-itself or the pure phenomenon. Many philosophers are skeptical, however, about this third level where the pure phenomenon appears and which is purportedly the real thing because it has been denuded of all the incidental, irrelevant data which covered

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it initially. Husserl on the other hand is aware that it requires a great effort, in fact, a supreme effort of the human mind to get out of the natural standpoint and to enter upon the pure immanence of phenomena accessible only to the transcendental I. The description and interpretation of transcendental phenomena remain hidden in the natural attitude and hence, the epoche or phenomenological bracketing had to be resorted to.160 This leads us to conclude that if consciousness always has an equivalent relation to something, then the three levels of consciousness, namely the natural I, the reflexive I, the pure or phenomenological I would likewise have their corresponding levels of the object, each level clearer than the previous ones.161 By delving more deeply into ourselves, we are better able to see the world and its true meaning. With regard to persons who come in contact with our consciousness, we reach the persons real self, we arrive at his ontological worth; we acknowledge his noble essence, not being detracted by our impartial estimation or regard for his true personality.162 Aptly does Husserl quote St. Augustine in the last sentence of his [Husserls] five Cartesian Meditations: Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas (Do not wish to go out, go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.)163 As Stein employs the word consciousness in the Husserlian sense, we must understand the term consciousness within Husserlian philosophy. Emerita Quito discusses the three concepts of consciousness in Husserls phenomenology: 1) Consciousness as the general understanding of consciousness as opposed to lack of awareness as in sleep.

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We know the object not in itself but only inasmuch as it is embedded in our individual lived experience. This consciousness corresponds to the first or empirical I in the natural standpoint whose object is enveloped in the prejudices or prejudgment of the individual. To arrive at the real or pure object, all irrelevant data such as time, location, existence, etc., must be bracketed which is the epoche or abstention. 2) Consciousness as in a deeper sense wherein there is now concentration on the object as the exclusion of nonessentials of time, location, etc. which have already been bracketed. On this second level, consciousness is better able to pay attention to the object while itself sinks into reflection. This second level of consciousness corresponds to the second or reflexive I whose object is necessarily clearer and closer to the thing as it is in itself. But this is not yet the phenomenological I, and hence another epoche or bracketing or abstention has to be resorted to. 3) Consciousness as transcendental in the sense that it has left behind our entire personality and even lived experience and is now on the deepest region which is rarely reached. The object on this level is a phenomenological residue (phanomenologisches Residuum). One reaches the pure or phenomenological I whose object is the pure essence or the thing-in-itself.164 In Husserlian thinking, one can attain this third level or the deep recesses of ones being through a second epoche and would still be within the phenomenological field. Thus in regard to perceptions of ones consciousness, appearance is reality.

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Whatever one sees or feels, the feeling and the seeing are certain and indubitable; it is reality. Can one really be questioned about whether his seeing or feeling is real?165 One has apodictic certainty of his perceptions; the madman, the dreamer or the subject of perception must be taken at their word, and we merely need to confirm that their language in fact expresses what they are experiencing.166 We note that Husserl does not speak of truth but of apodicticity. While truth is a conformity between two entities (i.e., metaphysical truth is the conformity between a thing and the Divine Mind; logical truth is conformity between thought and thing; moral truth is conformity between word and thought)167 in apodicticity, it is enough that one is convinced of something whether or not his conviction conforms or does not conform to reality. Therefore, even the madman or the dreamer must be taken at his word. What matters most is ones conviction, ones unquestionable stand on an issue, right or wrong, for at the depth of ones consciousness is found the true self, the real I in its purity.168

Edith Steins Theory of Empathy

Empathy as Ones Own Experiencing of Persons Edith Steins initiation into phenomenology came about at a time when academic theorists in Germany thought big: their quest was for a unified account of academic disciplines that would guarantee in one stroke the reality of the world and the reliability of knowledge. At that time, the insulation of the humanities,

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including philosophy, from psychology and other sciences was not yet in place as we know it today.169 Considered only in its gestation, phenomenology as Stein knew it was still very much a program undergoing construction and contestation. In studying empathy, Stein was interested in ones own experiencing of other people as human beings; that is, how people are available to one another to be understood. For Husserl, however, experience of other individuals referred to their experiencing of the world. Husserl meant to specify that an objective world was a world available for other people to experience. Stein, however, would diverge from Husserls account of Einfhlung in her creative misconstrual of what he meant by an experience of other individuals.170 Stein holds that knowledge about other human beings cannot be completely accounted for through Husserlian analysis of the transcendental constitution of objects in consciousness.171 This is so because something elusive has been left behind after the alien body, psyche, and soul are constituted; or rather their constitution as objects within consciousness presupposes something extra that cannot be constituted. We might ask, How is it that I register live experiences in which someone has been active although the someone was not I myself? Such experiences begin in sensibility, perhaps with the sight of a wound or the sound of a cry. How do I register that someone hurts although it is not I who hurt? The content hurt tends to follow the regular transition pathways through live body and soul toward the intellect, but it is impeded in a distinctive way. All this is unsaid by Husserl, but it is the missing link to his remark: Where is empathy to be accommodated?172

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Therefore Stein proposes that other human beings are not constituted as such but are rather felt into. Implicitly, Stein suggests that empathy (einfhlung) is not only a technical alternative to constitution, but is prior to it and founds its possibility as well. 173 An inquiry into the use of the word einfhlung in the history of philosophy is helpful. Theodor Lipps term Einfhlung, adapted by Husserl, was one of a cluster of terms coined for nineteenthcentury explorations of the availability of the world to the mind and of the mind to other minds. (The term Einfhlung comes from Robert Vischer. See Mallgrave and Ikonomou 1994:21 in Sawicki, BTS, p. 2.) In the wake of Leibniz, the German hermeneutical tradition revered the monadic character of the mind. Leibniz had taught that each mental individual in some way contains or implies the knowledge of all other individuals comprising its universe. For such an individual or monad, experience would consist not in absorbing information from others outside itself, but in unfolding within itself that of others which was already given in its own being as necessary. This notion of an in-built, pre-given (albeit rather minimal) mutual accessibility among individuals continued to spur the imaginations of German intellectuals even after the Rationalism of Leibniz went into eclipse behind Romanticism in the humanities and Positivism in the sciences.174 Yet one must go beyond vocabulary in unfolding empathy. Stein claims that the problem of empathy fuses the

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epistemological, pure descriptive, and genetic-psychological aspects which were undistinguished from one another.175 Because of this fusion, the question of empathy remains to be solved. She recognizes that the basic problem of empathy is the perceiving of foreign subjects and their experience,176 that is, how I come to the knowledge of other Is and their experience, e.g., of another Is grief over a tragic event. To give an example, how does a mother sense that her child is troubled by something as she sees her child just approaching her, even as her child has not said anything yet about what is bothering her? Can we presume that empathy always involves the presence (or givenness) of foreign experience?177 In the example given earlier, how do we explain how a mother feels or intuits her childs anxiety even before her child has spoken? Stein unfolds the meaning of givennes, the exact translation of Gegebenheit, a word which could at times mean presence or embodiment. The object of outer perception is always an embodied givenness, e.g., I see someone frowning. I start to presume he is sad and yet, what is perceived as empathy may not be this givenness. In reality, the person frowning is not sad at all; he is simply musing over a difficult philosophical problem. In her dissertation, Stein gives the following example: I may hear a person make an indiscreet remark and then blush. Then I not only understand the remark and see the shame in the blush, but I also discern that he knows his remark is indiscreet and is ashamed of himself for having made it. Neither this motivation nor the judgment about his remark is expressed by any sensory appearance.178

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What Stein is saying is that there are other ways of being given than the givennness of actual perception. In this case, the remark and the blush were given but the empathetic understanding was not. 179 (Note that some translators use empathic as the adjective for empathy, but since it has another meaning in English, stressful or insistent, I shall use empathetic subsequently.) What Stein aims to undertake in her dissertation is to examine the indubitable appearance to me of living souls that are not my own.180 Owing to the depth of her ideas and the phenomenological language she uses, however, Steins book On the Problem of Empathy is not an easy reading. In a difficult language, Stein gives an intricate explanation of how other souls are given with the same complete immediacy that invests ones awareness of ones own experience.181 As she elucidates and develops Husserls thought on personal relationships, Stein asserts that immediate experience of others is an essential component of being an I any I.182 In simpler terms, Stein was concerned with persons and was speculating on how we come to connect to persons as persons.183 But to avoid oversimplication of this idea, I turn to Sawicki to expound what Stein means: Empathy was construed as a feeling-into, with the projecting feeler and the targeted feeler ontologically distinct from each other and from a third thing, the felt content. In contrast, Stein describes empathy as an appearance without any coming in or going out of personality or information. The feeling registers entirely within ones consciousness, but it registers there in a way that announces a foreign life. I feel the feeling of another,

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as such, in that I am aware of something about my own feeling that directly presents the other human being. I feel myself led (geleitet) in this feeling.(See Stein ([1917] 1980: 10).184 Steins point is that what I feel may not necessarily have a corresponding outer perception (wherein the object or noema is present in embodied givennness or as an act given primordially), but may have the primordiality of outer perception. (Primordiality in Steins thesis is rendered in German as originr for which translators give the English primordial as equivalent. Primordial comes from the Latin primus (first), ordinis (order) meaning original, first, or beginning from.) All our own present experiences are primordial, says Stein.185 But not all experiences are primordially present or primordial in their content. She cites memory, expectation, fantasy as examples: these do not have bodily-present objects or what Stein calls givenness (Gegebenheit),186 although there is a similarity between empathy and these reflective activities. As acts, they have essentially identical structures: they bring an I into coherence with another I, that is, with an I lying at some temporal or spatial distance.187 Sawicki explains, in reflective activity, I grasp the I-drenched character of the acts upon which I am reflecting. She writes, My reflection is memory if, between the I that is saturating the live experience upon which I am reflecting and the I that I am, I can grasp a flowing sequence of the I-to-I face-offs and identity-recognitions in any one of which I can reawaken as an I recognizably my own without the

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recognizers ever fusing with the recognized in perfect identity at any stage.188 For instance, the memory of joy is primordial but the joy itself is non-primordial. The joy was once upon a time primordial; the past was a former now. Two Is are now involved: the I of the past and the I of remembering it. The object of the present I is the past I. Empathy deals with an act which is primordial because it is experienced now but its content is non-primordial. While I am living in the others joy, I do not feel primordial joy.189 Since the others joy is passed over to me or is a second-hand type of joy, it cannot be primordial. Nonetheless, empathy is the experience of foreign consciousness in general, regardless of the kind of the experiencing or of the subject whose consciousness is experienced.190 For expectation, on the other hand, the present I has the future I for its object.191 And in fantasy, there is no distance of time between the fantasizing I and the fantasized I although the I that fantasizes is primordial and the I in it is nonprimordial.192 In his Ideas, Husserl writes, In outer perception we have primordial experience of physical things, but in memory or anticipatory expectation, this is no longer the case; we have primordial experience of ourselves and our own states of consciousness in the so-called inner or self-perception, but not of others and their vital experiences in and through empathy.193

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We see the importance here of becoming aware of this aspect of ones awareness of ones lifestream having been led into anothers lifestream. In my own lifestream, I now experience what is a now experience elsewhere in some lifestream either an alien lifestream, or my own lifestream at some other time.194 For this to have come about required that I allow appearances occurring within my own conscious life to register through a reflective act. Thus, we see how the full and ultimate essence of empathy in Steins monadic model is ones inward awareness of others.195 The problem of empathy, however, is more complicated than it seems. Empathy is feeling in a foreign subject. What I perceive in the foreign subject (another I) may not be what the other I is really feeling. One could be mistaken in understanding the foreign behavior, more so if the foreign I is simply pretending or conducting himself in a manner contrary to his true feeling. Sawicki notes that Empathy of others, then, is an act we can recognize by its content . Within an eidetics 196 of empathy, individual differences among Is become important. Idifferentiation appears as an aspect of empathized content. The relevant distinction among Is occurs in two stages. First, I reflect that I have been registering a live experience, an experience in which someone lives, and that the I living there is not recognizably identical with my own I. Thus an alien I appears. That much is given immediately. Second, I can go on to discover just who that alien I might be. (But this second step would be a

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matter for empirical investigation, and therefore lies beyond the scope of Steins eidetic study.)197 When I understand anothers joy, I am putting myself into his joy and am now primordially joyful myself. But this joy was not given to me primordially. Empathy is always given nonprimordially. Stein argues that our understanding of a foreign consciousness is through the primordial I who empathizes with anothers experience. This helps us see the difference between empathy and sympathy. Since sympathy is joy-with-him or fellow feeling, it can be primordial,198 but empathy, which is in-feeling, is nonprimordial. Empathy sets the I in a foreign consciousness, while sympathy simply feels with the foreign I. While the I feeling the empathy is primordial, the living I in it is non-primordial. If I experience a feeling as that of another, I have given it twice: once primordially as my own and once non-primordially in empathy as originally foreign.199 Moreover, Stein maintains that since empathy is in-feeling, an alien human being is never transcendentally constituted 200 as an object within consciousness in Husserls notion of empathy. Empathy which is inner awareness of another human being as such is something altogether different from recognizing a living body or soul or character. What can be understood of other human beings is that of them that can be empathized . 201 As Sawicki explains, to empathize (einfuhlen) is to share a live experience from the inside: to let ones I be led along through the coherent flow of an epidode (consciousness) in which an alien I is living originarily.202 It implies entering into consciousness of the person empathized with so that I get inside his frame of

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reference, so that I can look through it and see the world the way this person sees it; I understand his paradigm I understand how he feels. The I is not detached from the other persons experience as one who is simply registering or reflecting on something outside himself. Empathized understanding of a sentiment precisely someones sentiment, as how someone is is something altogether different from objective knowledge of the sentiment, Sawicki writes.203 Empathized understanding is the I dealing with the reality inside the other persons heart and head. The I is assuming the others thoughts, feelings, and motives, putting itself inside the human soul of the person empathized with. There is a soul to soul flow such that the I reaches pure knowledge and understanding of the empathized person. Sensations and Feelings Every conscious experience involves a pure I. And the pure I is one that experiences sensations and feelings. Stein maintains that sensations are among the real constituents of consciousness, which means that they cannot be suspended or doubted any more than the cogito can.204 To begin with, sensations emanate from the pure I. Body and soul are so conjoined that one has an effect on the other. Whatever stimuli the body receives are sensed or felt by the pure I. For instance, the pleasantness of a savory dish, the agony of a sensual pain, the comfort of a soft garment are noticed where the garment clings to the bodys surface.205 The experiences of the body have an impact on the soul or psyche, another way of saying that all our experiences are psychosomatic, i.e., involving soul and body. Purely physical

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events such as a foreign body being forced under my skin or a certain amount of heat coming into contact with the surface of my physical body are the phenomenal cause of sensations of pain and of temperature.206 The soul together with the living body forms the psycho-physical individual.207 As Quito explains, When the I feels vigorous or sluggish, all its sensations are vigorous or sluggish even when the stimuli should engender the opposite sensations. Thus, when a person is in a depressed mood, he sees everything as dark and hopeless. On the other hand, a buoyant mood brightens the blackest of moods. Body and soul are so intertwined that one affects the other.208 To this effect, sensations survive the phenomenological reduction; they are components of consciousness that cannot just be cancelled or ignored. They are live experiences, and so are given just as absolutely as are such acts as judging and willing that Husserl would include among what is available to inner perception (albeit through an act of reflection).209 In other words, they have more value than simply their empirical substantiation: they are soulful as well as psychic (employing Schelers distinction). Yet they differ from the soulful-intellectual acts of inferring, judging, and willing in significant ways.210 Since sensations do not flow out of the pure I, they do not have the form of the cogito directed toward an object. They are a response to stimuli, and the I does not live-through them, because live experiences of sensations cannot be doubled over in reflection to disclose the I, since they necessarily remain spatially localized and therefore distanced from the I. By understanding that

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sensations connect the soul and the I or the psychophysical body, we can better comprehend persons. For instance, pain is both in an injured limb and in me. When I am hurting from an injured limb, all my body parts and their motions manifest the pain. In the same manner, cheerfulness belongs to the soul and does not localize in the body; nevertheless it affects bodily perceptions and intellectual activities alike.211 There is true and bi-directional causality between the body and the mind. 212 Sawicki explains, The activities and condition of the body affect the capabilities of the mind. For example, an overly tired body impedes thinking. By the same token, physical training and practice can cultivate and sharpen ones mental powers of discernment and appreciation. A bodyless pure intellectwould experience joy or fear but not as the effect of physical or psychic events. For us, by contrast, joy makes the heart pound and fear makes the mind boggle. Moreover, the pounding and the boggling are given precisely as caused effects. They are not the feelings but rather are symptoms of the feelings and appear as having been caused by them. Thus psychic causalityis immediately given in such experiences.213 We may wonder what Steins reason is for investigating what the pure I experiences. If the main problem of empathy is how to understand other persons and how they feel, Stein shows us that we have to understand ourselves before we can understand foreign feelings. By scrutinizing the pure I, its involuntary expressions of physical and psychic states, its

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sensations, and motivations, Stein demonstrates to us how we can come to know other human beings and understand them by feeling into them. Sawicki explains, To understand is to go with the flow of the sentiment by living through its discharge in the other human being, but non-originarily. The I flows, that is its essence. Moreover, one can understand that another has chosen the modes, or the combination of modes, in which sentiments discharge themselves. One can even understand that another may be dissimulatingand why.214 By learning to empathize with other persons, we can discover considerable differences in our perceptions. Appreciating these differences can have an impact as people try to work together in independent situations. For one, a person does not become wrapped up in his own worldview. He takes other perspectives and positions into consideration as he comes to know the intellectual movement, the logical inferences of other Is. By empathizing with others, he can then be discerning, sensitive, and aware of other persons preferred approaches to a situation. He can live outside his solitary world, appreciate people, sense their heart, sense their hurt, and see life through their eyes. He would then be better able to give people the psychological air they need to work or live together effectively.215

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Transcending the Limits of Individual Perception What about the possibility of misinterpreting others as we attempt to understand them? Stein leaves room for what cannot be known about others. There is a threshold beyond which one person may not flow-along-with the other.216 Persons remain mysterious even though they are in some unspecified way fused with other Is. In our own field of sensation, there is a primordial givenness as we bodily perceive objects. Other persons fields of sensation are there in the same way. Although not primordially given to us, we perceive other persons not simply as objects within our field of sensation, but as another I, a foreign I. Stein calls this kind of givenness con-primordiality. Within this field of sensation, it may happen that what I sense non-primordially or only con-primordially coincides exactly with the others primordial sensation.217 For instance, I may sense-in the pain of someone wounded from cutting himself accidentally while working in the kitchen. I associate this pain with similar feelings I have felt before having been wounded in the same manner. While interpreting the feelings of the foreign I, I am empathetically projecting myself into that I. In doing so, I attain a new perspective of the spatial world, a new zero point of orientation.218 I still retain my own zero point and my primordial orientation even as I empathetically and nonprimordially obtain the other one. This orientation is conprimordial to the other I even though non-primordially to me. This is how a person, having his own point of orientation, assumes anothers point of orientation. But in going from one standpoint to another, from my standpoint to that of the empathized I, would my interpretation always coincide exactly with the

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experience of the foreign I? This is a problem in empathy according to Stein. Deception or misinterpretation is always a possibility. Since the feelings of these foreign Is are not before me in embodied givennness nor are they given primordially, I can always be deceived.219 Sentiments may flow into a discharge of some kind; a feeling may be expressed differently from how it is actually experienced. For instance, ones interpretation of a foreign Is sullen face as sadness may not correspond correctly to the foreign Is actual disposition at that moment. Stein says, Whether a blush means shame, anger, or is a result of physical exertion is actually decided by the other circumstances leading me to empathize the one or the other.220 Whether it means shame or anger will depend on other circumstances surrounding it. Empathy must rely on other means like insight, body language and educated guesses as well as intuition in the perception and interpretation of foreign experience. 221 Basically, this perception is a matter of hermeneutics or interpretation. Quito offers an analysis as to why this is so: Words and actions are not always universally understood and interpreted. There is no unique interpretation. Between an act or word and its meaning lie myriad factors depending on ones age, education, background, culture, and sometimes even on mood as stated above. A thunderous applause after a stage performance can be interpreted as a high tribute to the artist. Or, as a relief that it is finally over.

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Likewise, an unmusical person may pretend to enjoy a Beethoven symphony, or a philistine may pretend to enjoy a Raphael painting but these deceptions can be corrected if we look into their faces and see the expression of deadly boredom. Here common sense is a usable means of reaching knowledge about the foreign psychic life. Empathy can also tell me about myself. As Stein says, Empathy proves to have yet another side as an aid to comprehending ourselves Empathy now offers itself to us as a corrective for such deceptions along with further corroboratory or contradictory perceptual acts. It is possible for another to judge me more accurately than I judge myself and give me clarity about myself. (Stein, p. 89) It happens that sometimes my gestures can be mistaken for other motives. I may not have smiled at a person and it is misconstrued as hostility or animosity but I may only have been thinking of an unpleasant event at the moment the person was within my eyesight. The same could happen when a person does not smile at me. This is how empathy and inner perception work hand in hand to give me myself to myself. (Idem) Hence, empathy works two ways: the empathizing I could take the place of the empathized I.222 In this manner, we human beings get to acquaint ourselves with the psychic lives of our fellow human beings. We learn to transcend the limits of our individual perceptions and comprehend how others think and feel. We break the barrier of differences that may separate us from others and establish

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relations imbued by cooperation and mutual respect. We can see the world from the others point of view and facilitate interpersonal communication. Individuality How does a pure I hold together several interrelated conscious experiences? There are causal processes that occur between physical organs and sentient fields, between psyche and character. Whatever affects one level affects all levels. There is a fusion or blending of live body and soul. The tendency to complete ones awareness of the whole psycho-physical-ensouled individual whenever one of those levels is given ensues from this blending. Steins example was the hand. Physical perception of a handshaped thing tends to carry through into perception of a hand that can make things and gestures.223 Another example she gives is that you see someones face configured sadly and as you perceive its bodily expressions of tears and moans, and based on his outward appearance, you walk around the person as you would have walked around a house and taken a closer look at the object of your perception, and then you conclude that the person is in grief. But grief is not like that; it is perceived whole and at once.224 To give an example in the realm of experiences of the external, I am given a glass of fresh orange juice, I see the glass of fresh orange juice, I smell the aroma of fresh orange juice, I taste the flavor of orange, I touch the glass of orange juice, I pick it up and drink the orange juice. The experience of one object, orange juice, entailed both individual external sensations and collective or common sensations. In like manner, one event such as a war, can involve simple and collective

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experiences held together by a pure I. A simple highlighted experience of a war also implies a pure I.225 Set against a background of a stream of experiences wherein the I shifts over from one experience to another, the pure I can attain a unity of experiences only within one stream of consciousness: its own. For instance, sometimes it is only in memory that we remember where the I once lived. How does the present, living, pure I unite itself with the I of the past? How, for instance, does a Jew who survived the Holocaust and recalls his stay in a Nazi concentration camp contain the present I and the I of the past that suffered indignity under Hitler? How can he contain in one I the many varying experiences of degradation for his racial origin, his separation from his family, his subjection to hard labor, and starvation among sundry experiences of public humiliation and suffering? The pure I makes it possible for there to be the unity and totality of all our experiences, even as every simple experience is characterized by its peculiar position in the total context of experiences.226 The constitution of the individual is inseparable from the topic of empathy. As Stein asks, What does individuality mean?,227 she shows the pure I to be the ground of all perceptions, my judgments, the fountainhead of all action.228 It is from the pure I that the understanding of the other I who is also a pure I proceeds. By individuality Stein means that it is itself and no other. This selfness is experienced and is the basis of all that is mine.229 Stein gives an important explanation of how we become conscious of our individuality through the consciousness of an other: Naturally, it (selfness) is first brought into relief in contrast with another when another is given. This other

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is at first not qualitatively distinguished from it, since both are qualityless, but only distinguished as simply an other. This otherness is apparent in the type of givenness; it is other than I because it is given to me in another way than I. Therefore it is you. But since it experiences itself as I experience myself, the you is another I. Thus the I does not become individualized because another faces it, but its individuality, or as we would rather say (because we must reserve the term individuality for something else), its selfness is brought into relief in contrast with the otherness of the other.230 Because of this individuality, Stein holds that persons will always be mysterious, even though they are in some unspecified way fused with other persons through affinity or close relation. We may not understand other persons as they are, because there is a limit beyond which one person may flow-along with the other. Just as there is a doubling of Is between knower and known, where the knower gravitates irresistibly toward overlaying and becoming one with the known, it invariably encounters an impenetrable barrier. An I essentially withholds its I-hood. It keeps its secret.231 Thus each person is unique and irreplicable. The instrumentality for knowing the subjectivity of others is ones own subjectivity; yet what is ownmost about subjectivity is its ultimate inaccessibility to others. 232 Consequently each human body is indispensable. Just as the human person is not just soul but soul and body and their operations, like perceiving and thinking, the body is part and parcel of the human person. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty says, But I am not in front of my body, I am in it, or rather I am it.233

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Or as Gabriel Marcel wrote, I am my body.234 Stein establishes that the body is both less and more than a physical thing: it gives itself with gaps and doublings. It is precisely psychophysical.235 She writes that the I does not require others to come into its own individuality by withdrawing from them. I can instead begin the journey toward reflective awareness of my I by starting out from the unique givenness of my own body.236 While Husserl believed that the other body is a moveable spatial center, because I can displace it with my own body and so enjoy its viewpoint for myself, (called the Husserlian foundation of science), Stein maintained that I do not displace the other, but rather I consent to live in a world with more than one centerand am the richer for it.237 Steins contrast with Husserl is very clear. Whereas Husserl was concerned with the highways of logical necessity, where by the inner lawfulness of I-hood itself every I goes the same way, Stein cared for the byways rendered valuable by their very difference and irreplicability.238 Stein also wanted to stress the difference between body as the material element (corpus) and living body as immaterial (soul). She distinguishes between body space and outer space. The living body is constituted in a two-fold manner: as a sensed living body and as an outwardly perceived body of the outer world. The foreign I or foreign living body that I wish to understand also appears to me as a mere body in the outer world. Through mere outward perception, I would not arrive at the living body. I may perceive a human being beside me like I perceive a table at my side. But one needs more than just that to see the body of a person before him, and to be aware of his presence as a person to be empathized. Thus Stein introduces

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the foreign body as a living body and not just body, and hence the problem of empathy. I would not reach the foreign I or the foreign living body by merely perceiving it.239 The foreign living body is unlike a material object, e.g., a piece of furniture, before me. The foreign living body is another I whom I can relate to as one who thinks, feels, senses as I do. Perception and Intuition How perception happens is another phenomenon that Stein investigates. We may assume that when we perceive something, we merely see. Stein clarifies that perceiving often goes with seeing, feeling, sensing, ascertaining all at the same time. For instance, in perceiving a table, we not only see the table and feel its hardness, we also see its hardness. Steins own example is, in Van Dycks paintings, we see the robes not only as shiny as silk but also as smooth and as soft as silk. In other words, one sees and feels the silkiness of the robes in the painting at the same time.240 Merleau-Pontys words, we do not only see a red spot or a red apple, but a cascade of other qualities crowd into the perception of redness.241 We associate seeing with feeling. Stein explains the phenomenon of association in her dissertation as follows: Association is typically experienced as something reminding me of something. For example, the sight of the table corner reminds me I once bumped myself on it. However, this corners sharpness is not remembered, but seen. Here is another instructive example: I see a rough lump of sugar and know or remember that it is

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sweet. I do not remember it is rough (or only incidentally), nor see its sweetness. By contrast, the flowers fragrance is really sweet and does not remind me of sweet taste. This begins to open up perspectives for a phenomenology of the sense and of sense perceptions. 242 This goes to show that a persons perception is not separate from a host of other perceptions, observations, insights, and judgments about something. Applied to persons as the object of ones perception, Stein says, The seen living body does not remind us it can be the scene of manifold sensations. Neither is it merely a physical thing taking up the same space as the living body given as sensitive in bodily perception. It is given as a sensing, living body.243 Persons are certainly a being set apart. Empathy as intersubjective experience is only possible with persons. It is not possible with things. Steins account of how seeing and feeling go with perceiving is important to understanding the phenomenon of intuition in woman and explaining how it is distinctly more developed in woman than in man. A faculty allied to instinct and intellect, intuition is the power of the mind by which it immediately perceives the truth of things without reasoning or analysis.244 Intuition is this perceiving with seeing, feeling, judging happening all at the same time as discussed above. Also called superlogic, intuition is what popular opinion credits to woman as quickness of perception and the accusation that she jumps to conclusions.245 Experts hold that women can see things more quickly than men and that they are unable to trace the steps along the path of reason that led them to the particular

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conclusion has brought people to apply to women the epithet illogical.246 Using Steins analysis of empathetic perception, it seems that the adjective for woman should rather be superlogical and not illogical to describe her quickness of apprehension. Stein sees that superlogical ability of woman as attached to emotion. The incitements of the emotion are the mainsprings of the will, writes Stein.247 Attributing much importance to emotion in the total organismus of spiritual being, Stein describes emotion to have an essential cognitive function: it is the central pivot by which reception of the existent is transmuted into personal opinion and action.248 F.J. Gould concurs in this thinking as he writes, Instinct, intuition, intellect are at bottom one: they are complicated with each other. But broadly speaking they can be analyzed into separate aspects. Instinct is feeling in animals and men which directs beneficent ends. Intuition is instinct combined with consciousness but distinct from ratiocination.249 Professor Bergson, known as the specialist on intuitionism, speaks of intuition as the spiritual sensibility through which we apprehend reality as instinctively tense, mobile, free, and creative. It is that form of mental fellow-feeling by virtue of which we are able to pass inwardly into an object so as to come into touch with the unique, ineffable quality that distinguishes it from everything else.250 This supports what Stein wrote as follows about womans distinct characteristics of feminine feeling, intuition, empathy, and adaptability: With the woman there are capabilities of caring, protecting, and promoting that which is becoming and growing. She has the gift thereby to live in an intimately bound physical compass and to collect her forces in

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silence; on the other hand, she is created to endure pain, to adapt and abnegate herself. She is psychically directed to the concrete, the individual, and the personal; she has the ability to grasp the concrete in its individuality and to adapt herself to it, and she has the longing to help this peculiarity to its development.251 Bergson in his Creative Evolution aligns with Stein in the position that woman, through empathetic intuition, has the capacity to reflect upon the object of her empathy disinterestedly, while enlarging it indefinitely. He explains that intelligence and instinct are turned in opposite directions, intelligence toward inert matter, instinct towards life. Intelligence delivers up to us more and more completely the secret of physical operations by means of science which is its work. Of life, Bergson explains, intelligence brings us a translation in terms of inertia. It goes all round life, taking from outside the greatest possible number of views of it, drawing it to itself instead of entering into it. But it is to the very inwardness of life that intuition leads us.252 The sociologist George Simmel remarks that for woman being and idea are indivisibly one (unmittelbar eines).253 This creates the impression, so often expressed in popular psychology, that women have no logic. This popular view expresses, according to Simmel, a lack in man: for him the idea can be conceived only as an outside and an above; it is not immanent. It is in a very similar sense that Jean Guitton observes that love, as a natural gift, is a characteristic element of all womanhood.254 As we shall see, intuitive intelligence is more intimately tied up with love than analytical intelligence. Hence, womans strength is the intuitive grasp of the living concrete;

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especially of the personal. She has the gift of adapting herself to the inner life of others, to their goal orientation and working methods. Feelings are central to her as the faculty which grasps concrete being in its unique nature and specific value; and it is through feeling that she express her attitude.255 In Steins dissertation, inner intuition (innere Anschauung) can also be understood as inner perception, where Logic no longer applies, where the rules of knowledge are suspended, where one uses supra-logical means to arrive at truth.256 Stein proposes that other peoples experiences register with us in inner perception.257 In Husserls phenomenology, this is the same as intuition where at the deepest level of consciousness, one arrives at the phenomenological residue and where apodicticity is reached.258 According to Husserl, the knowledge acquired through intuition is a form of insight fundamentally different from that obtained through discursive reason. Intuition allows an immediate beholding of essences as opposed to insights obtained by analysis.259 It is through reflection that the lived experience is allowed to display its quality of being I-drenched, that is, of being something lived-through inwardly.260 In the last chapter of her dissertation entitled Empathy as the Understanding of Spiritual Persons, Stein writes, Consciousness as a correlate of the object world is not nature, but spirit.261 She explains that in every literal act of empathy, i.e., in every comprehension of an act of feeling, we have already penetrated into the realm of the spirit. For, as physical nature is constituted in perceptual acts, so a new object realm is constituted in feeling. This is the world of values.262

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The implications of Steins statement run deep. What Stein means is that perception by itself may not be spiritual but the comprehension of an act of feeling is already a penetration into the realm of the spirit. When one begins to understand or comprehend a foreign Is feeling, bodily perception is not enough because expressions proceed from experiences; in other words, we have the spirit here simultaneously reaching into the physical world, the spirit becoming visible in the living body.263 Person and world are completely correlated.264 Stein writes about this total comprehension of a person, both as body and spirit, as a typically feminine spiritual attitude, a natural endowment of woman. In Essays on Woman, she says, Woman naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal, and whole. To cherish, guard, protect, nourish and advance growth is her natural, maternal yearning. Lifeless matter, the fact, can hold primary interest for her only insofar as it serves the living and the personal, not ordinarily for its own sake. Relevant to this is another matter: abstraction in every sense is alien to the feminine nature. The living and the personal to which her care extends is a concrete whole and is protected and encouraged as a totality; this does not mean that one part is sacrificed to another, not the mind to the body or one spiritual faculty at the expense of others. She aspires to this totality in her self and others. Her theoretical and practical views correspond; her natural line of thought is not so much conceptual and analytical as it is directed intuitively and emotionally to the concrete.265

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Value Where spiritual persons in the world are concerned, the concept of value cannot be overlooked in empathy. Value refers to the Is experience of persons or things he/she attaches more worth to. Following the phenomenological tradition, Stein takes the analysis of consciousness and conscious experience as the appropriate starting point for philosophical investigation of the notion of value. One begins with the subject and asks how we are related to the world.266 There are a number of ways in which we experience things. There are experiences that are thematic or intentional (experiences of which we have greater awareness or consciousness of or deliberately think about) and there are experiences in which we are just tacitly aware of something, but refuse to acknowledge and make thematic that which we are aware of. For instance, that I see the table before me and I acknowledge that it is a table or that I see a human being coming towards me and I admit I see the person approaching is a thematic experience. On the other hand, someone with a deep phobia of spiders may refuse to make the experience of spiders thematic or intentional even as she suspects that there are spiders in the corner of her room. Because of a need to finish a task, she tries to turn her eyes away and just tenaciously works on and thus does not notice that there are in fact spiders lurking not so far away. She does not turn her eyes; she does not even ask herself whether spiders are present; she just persistently works on. But the condition of studied avoidance is certainly that one is not utterly ignorant of the presence of spiders. In general, experience includes both the thematic and the tacit.267 We do not merely have sensations but understand them as having some

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basis. For Stein, values are experiences of something or someone we hold to be thematic and it is through emotions that a person responds to these values. For example, an adult who cherishes the childhood experience of holding close to his mother on a cold rainy day, enjoying the security of her warmth as he watches the downpour of rain in the storm from his window by her side, feels deeply moved whenever the occasion of a storm brings back these memories; he is comforted with the thought of his mother cuddling him; he feels consoled when he hears songs that make him remember his mothers tenders voice, her gentle compassion; he is profoundly affected by any reminder of the woman who bore him in her womb, who fed him when he was an infant utterly dependent on her, who nursed him when he was sick, who made him feel especially sheltered from the rages of a violent storm. Deep down (because literally deep down in his body at an organic level), he could feel his fusion with the woman who gave him more than nourishment because she gave him love. And in a cold, rationalistic world where activism and intellectualism shove us to a denial of feeling, this is one emotional relationship he is not ashamed of nor embarrassed about. He revels at the thought of motherly tenderness: he could be a defenseless babe again, if only to be secure about receiving love. The example shows how a person understands the importance of that which he holds as dear to himself (the extraordinary need to be mothered in the example cited) and how he is touched by the experience of that value. Emotions, says Stein, are a persons affective responses to value. In her book Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, she elucidates this further with an analogy between our perception of physical objects and our emotional perception of value.268 For us to

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perceive any visual object, we must have eyes to see, with wellfunctioning cones and rods. If a blind man cannot see a painting or if a deaf woman cannot hear an orchestra, similarly, an emotionally dead person cannot perceive value. If a particularly remarkable landscape does not strike me as awe-inspiring whatsoever, then I have missed its beauty. Certain feelings are vital for perceiving a value. We might say that just as to perceive a color is to see it, so too is to perceive a value to feel it. Values are, she claims, part of objects in a way analogous to other aspects or qualities of a thing. In order to perceive that part of the object, one must have an appropriate receptor.269 Thus, just as the perception of color requires good eyesight, so the perception of value requires a well-developed heart and affective life.270 Further, Stein claims that in the same manner that understanding the colors, sizes, shapes, sounds, and smells of the world requires the ability to perceive each of these aspects of things as well as the energy and will to do so, so does perceiving value often require that our affective life be developed well enough and that we have the energy and will to recognize, identify, and respond to value. Feeling values, says Stein, is the most natural behavior for the person.271 What is of value to a person reveals his inner self. For Stein, we can get a glimpse into the core of the person we want to empathize with by knowing what the person values. A persons values are the gauge of ones soul because values are the result of the habit which a person freely develops during life.272 Since values result from the capacities of the soul, Stein thinks that personal structure is closely connected with the categorical structure of the soul and this does not change. A spiritual subject does not lose a value it feels.273 Moreover, every time we advance in the value realm,

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we also make acquisitions in the realm of our own personality.274 These values can be refined by use or blurred by disuse, but they persist nonetheless in the soul. For instance, a person who generally values and esteems all persons regardless of race suddenly finds himself in an environment where there is discrimination against blacks. He may not have been constantly thinking that he is not racist, but in such an environment of hostility against non-whites, his deep respect for the equality and dignity of all men may be challenged. Quitos example is, If he who has been educated in moral principles and who believes according to them, looks into himself, he will perceive with satisfaction a virtuous man. This is true until one day, in an action bursting from deep inside of him, he experiences himself as someone of an entirely different nature from the person he thought himself to be until then. It may happen that a person may act the contrary to how he behaved so far. This, however, happens rarely. A person may act out of character when circumstances so warrant it. Esau sold his birthright for a mess of porridge which he could not have done under normal circumstances. A runner may give up the race on the last half mile because he has reached the end of his forces. A persons sense of values is always the ground of his behavior.It is impossible to formulate a doctrine of a person without a value doctrine. (Stein, p. 108)275 We might say that these values remain on the third level of consciousness; they may sometimes be covered by the day to day concerns in life as when one acts on the first level or the

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natural world, but when circumstances require a proof of values, these usually come to the fore. As we get inside a person, we get to know his true color.This is accomplished through empathy. As my own person is constituted in primordial spiritual acts, so the foreign person is constituted in empathetically experienced acts.276 In fact, I experience values empathetically and discover correlative levels of my person, even though my primordial experience has not yet presented an opportunity for their exposure.277 For example, a person may never have looked danger in the face, but can understand another persons experience of danger. The Value of Persons Another problem of empathy is the experiencing of value considering the four levels or layers of the person: the personal or individual, the mental or intellectual, the sensory or the sentient, and the physical (see previous section, Edmund Husserl and the Problem of Empathy). Does the I recognize the worth of the person empathized separately on each of the four levels? Stein says, I consider every subject whom I empathetically comprehend as experiencing a value as a person whose experiences interlock themselves into an intelligible, meaningful whole.278 In this regard, Stein quotes Wilhelm Dilthey,279 The interpretive faculty operating in the cultural sciences is the whole person.280 Essences are seen in their entirety, not followed sequentially. 281 Thus, all levels of the person can be established a priori from the standpoint of a universal recognition of worth.282 The person is recognized in his entirety, as a whole, not just as body or even only as soul. The person is one unit, a

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compenetrating whole, and his values go together with the whole. To a large extent, this phenomenological analysis of the experience of the value of a person helps us understand the intricacies of feminine empathy better. Women have a greater capacity for exercising empathy, because they have a natural orientation to persons in their totality or wholeness. Stein writes, In woman, there lives a natural drive towards totality. This drive has a twofold direction: she herself would like to become a complete human being, one who is fully developed in every way; and she would like to help others to become so, and by all means, she would like to do justice to the complete human being whenever she has to deal with persons.283 Stein emphasizes that this value of what is personal and the tendency to completeness emerges from womans nature. She writes, Each human being is called naturally to this total humanity, and the desire for it lives in each one of us. We may consider that the drive for this which is particularly strong in woman is well related to her particular destiny of companion and mother. To be a companion, that means to be a support and mainstay. To be a mother is to nourish and protect true humanity and bring it to development.284 We must consider, however, that empathy can also pose problems in that the I can make the self the standard. We lock ourselves into the prison of our individuality, writes Stein.285 The self becomes the basis for interpreting foreign consciousness.

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But how can we be sure about our assessment of the experiences of the foreign I? Certainly I feel myself to be one with others and allow their emotions to become motives for my willing. However, this does not give me the others, but already presupposes their givenness. And I consider as my own that which penetrates into me from others, without my knowing it. This establishes no exchange of spirits.Who can say there is genuine experience present here or whether there is that unclearness about our motives which we found in considering the idols of self-knowledge?286 Stein says that the study of religious consciousness seems to be to her the most suitable means of answering this question. Religious consciousness, however, is a new topic altogether, and Stein concludes her dissertation by a non liquet which means, It is not clear. It may be puzzling that, after an entire dissertation on the problem of empathy, Stein should end with a note of uncertainty. And yet, even in the work of the master, Edmund Husserl, empathy was already a complex problem since two Is are concerned here. He had already stated in the second volume of Ideen zuthat the pure I is then never subject which cannot become object.287 Quito helps us recall that after the natural world has been bracketed or suspended, there remains an infinite field of pure investigation. (Stein E., op. cit., p. 4.) Husserl went so

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far as to say that we would have won the whole Absolute Being which, properly understood, conceals in itself all transcendences. (Husserl, Ideen zuI, p. 50) What Husserl and Stein mean is that, after having abstracted or bracketed or suspended on the third degree, what remains is being (ens qua ens). On the first degree of abstraction, quantity is removed; on the second degree of abstraction, quality is removed; on the third degree, all materiality is removed and what remains is a transcendental, supra-generic concept which is being, and which covers all.288 If empathy comprises an abstraction of the third degree where we encounter all being which includes the foreign I that we wish to understand, we are benefited with the knowledge of the metaphysics of the person. With empathy, we reach apodicticity about the essence of the human being, an objective understanding about the mans being as person. Such an understanding, first of all, leads us to perceive the reality that there are persons and non-persons. What radically sets man apart from non-persons is that he has the capacity for rational thought. In the physical world, man is wholly distinct from other biological life-forms. His power, judgment, and discrimination enable him to skillfully adapt to the evolving demands of his surroundings. His conscious activity within the organic context of the physical environment allows him to develop a culture which befits the rational character of his nature. Moreover, he has the capacity to love, recognizing himself as I capable of giving himself to another. The recognition that a person is an I

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demonstrates that man is aware that he or she is not merely something, but somebody. Personhood has moral implications: we adjudge human beings as persons by virtue of the supposition that they are moral beings and agents. As a person man must be treated with an unconditional worth and that respect is an attitude which has application to persons only and never to things.289 In one word, we attribute to man the term dignity, a term which goes beyond worth or value, even when interpreted as intrinsic value. Dignity designates, first of all, a unique value that endows each person with an intrinsic and objective preciousness. The dignity flows intelligibly from the being and essence of the person. That dignity springs from his intrinsic and absolute value that is just not relative to our inclinations, appetites, or satisfactions. Dignity makes a person positively important in himself or herself . 290 This essential distinction between persons and non-persons is necessary because technology, science, or society can undermine a persons being. Society can tell us, for instance, that a person is just a stem cell that could be experimented on and manipulated and that it were justifiable to discard him if the experiment failed. Metaphysics, as the science of being as being, tells us a person is an intelligent being of dignity and worth, a subject worthy to be an end in himself or herself. The reference to man as person involves an ontological admission of his subjectivity and rational way of being. Man the person is not a linguistic invention of philosophical and theological language but a subject who acts and lives in a moral context.291 Men like Hitler were obsessed about the idea that a man, if he were a Jew, was reducible to some kind of individual object in reality an inert material thing to be trampled upon, disposed of, or thrown away. With

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a metaphysics of the person, we arrive at the realization of what a persons being is, regardless of our prejudices against his race, color, gender, culture, or whatever our preferences or subjective mental states dictate the person to be. Given our biases, we could easily subject persons to our own personal paradigms and may indiscriminately confuse persons to be mere things subject to exploitation, manipulation, and control (as Hitler did with the Jews in World War II. Stein herself was among the Jews who died in Auschwitz, when she was sent to the gas chambers with other Jews in a concentration camp.) With a metaphysics of the person, we arrive at the certainty of the moral dimension of a persons being. To a person, we attribute invaluable worth which we never apply to a material thing. Clearly, there is a big advantage to this type of knowledge, which is that there is no possibility of error.292 Quito comments that it is as though, having looked deeper than the surface, we would have encountered all human beings and would have understood one another. She adds, this is the opposite to Louis Lavelles LErreur de Narcisse where we merely looked at the surface of the well, and what we saw was our own image. What he means is that on the surface of the well, we see individuals, but at the bottom, what we see are generalities, rational animals.293 This poses a difficulty for empathy as empathy does not see persons with a cold rationalistic attitude. Empathy does not approach human relationships as if they were matters of technical or scientific manageability. It does not regard human beings with the mechanics of engineering or the calculation of mathematical expertise. Empathy approaches another human being in communion of soul to soul. It is ready to make room for what the heart detects about another person even if one does not

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know how to rationally prove it to be such. It is open to receiving tenderness and protection. It allows one to feel through persons, especially in areas of human life where techniques have no place, instead of dealing with them via a cold intellect. An empathetic position makes room for intuition (an awareness and cognition which is not only independent of reason but goes beyond it) where a rationalist stance (especially an exceedingly rationalist one) will insist on analysis (that which can be figured out and examined by reason alone). Other Minds Empathy presents an alternative solution to the problem of other minds which asks whether one can ever know anything abut the mind of another. The problem of other minds is an epistemological problem of explaining how it is possible for one person to know anything about the quality of another persons inner experience, or even that other people have inner experiences at all. We read from Encyclopedia Britannica, According to a standard example, because each persons pain sensation is private, one cannot really know that what another person describes as pain is really qualitatively the same as what one describes as pain oneself. Though the physical manifestations the other person exhibits can be perceived, it seems that only the other person can know the contents of his mind.294

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Philosophers and metaphysicians have had difficulties about how we know what we claim to know about minds. They have raised questions such as How does a man know from the behavior and surroundings of another the feelings of the other? How do I explain within my mental state the bodily act of another? How does a man know from the images and feelings which float on the surface of the stream of a persons spiritual activity the currents in that stream or whether the stream exists at all?295 The problem of other minds asks what are the facts that lead people to say that others cannot know a man the way he knows himself. In the same vein, it asks whether we have a way of knowing how another man feels. In Meditation IV of his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl himself had shown how we could understand the existence of physical objects, but he had not demonstrated how one understands another person (which Husserl referred to as the Other) as an experiencing agent. William Cornwell, in an analysis of the problem of other minds as expressed by Husserl, notes that Husserl maintained that the understanding of the Other cannot be exhausted by the physical presence of the Other, because neither the other Ego himself, nor his subjective processes or his appearances themselves, nor anything else belonging to his own essence, becomes given in our experience originally (1991, 109). The Others experiences have not just happened to escape my experience; they necessarily elude me, because if what belongs to the others own essence were directly accessible, it would be merely a moment of my own essence, and ultimately he himself and I myself would be

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the same (1991, 109). All attempts to verify the existence or nature of the Others experiences will be thwarted, so how can I understand them?296 To re-state the problem using a concrete example, we might ask, how do we know that the pain another person is experiencing from an intense headache is exactly the way we imagine it to be when we do not have the headache ourselves? To give a situation, if Kathy knows that her friend Joyce, who is a cancer patient, is in pain, but she herself is not, can we say that Kathy has an objective experience of Joyces pain? Or that she sees into the mind of Joyce? The philosophical skeptic will argue that a person, A, never really knows how another, B, feels or that one person will never know the mind of another as it really is, because that would mean being the same person as the other. Or, he might argue that in our example above, Kathy can never really know the mind or feelings of Joyce, but only the way Joyce frowns and squirms in her pain. It is tempting to suppose that no one ever knows anything about the mind of another and even that no one ever has any right to assert anything about the mind of another. When we claim that we know the thoughts and feelings of another person, we realize that our observations or our empathetic perception of that persons pain and suffering are, at least, phenomena that we could not ignore if we are to be good phenomenologists. In other words, we cannot deny the facts about what ultimately gives us grounds to make statements about our thoughts and feelings about another persons sensations or emotions. Thus, when we assert that we know a man is angry, we know this definitely not in the way we know that water is boiling which is

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by deduction from physical symptoms. In knowing that another man is angry, our tendency is to use the analogy of our own feelings: we have experienced anger and know how it feels to be angry.297 In John Stuart Mills classic formulation, because my body and outward behavior are observably similar to the bodies and behavior of others, I am justified by analogy in believing that others have feelings like my own and are not simply automatons.298 Strictly speaking, however, the knowledge we arrive at in knowing that a man is angry is actually non-analogical; by feeling through the angry man, we arrive at a direct knowledge of his angry state. Through empathy, we can know the anger, the so-called feelings of another person. Empathetic comprehension allows for this possibility of a glimpse into and, even deeper than a glimpse, a profound understanding of the mind and feelings of the another person when the I performs the spiritual act of entering into the stream of consciousness of the other I. Stein explains, As my own person is constituted in primordial spiritual acts, so the foreign person is constituted in empathically experienced acts. I experience his every action as proceeding from a will, and this, in turn, from a feeling. Simultaneously with this, I am given a level of his person and a range of values in principle experienceable by him. This, in turn, meaningfully motivates the expectation of future possible volitions and actions. Accordingly, a single action and also a single bodily expression, such as a look or a laugh can give me a glimpse into the kernel of the person.299

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We note that empathy avoids a singularly mentalistic approach to the knowledge of other persons, since the main problem of empathy is how to understand other persons in their totality as persons, who are not solely thinking beings, but also feeling and sensing beings all at the same time, and are, therefore, not just minds. With empathy, we can claim that the knowledge of someone elses mind, as well as his emotions and sensations, are really quite available to us. Nevertheless, we reiterate that empathized understanding of a sentiment precisely someones sentiment, as how someone is is something altogether different from objective knowledge of the sentiment.300 We will always grasp the others feelings nonoriginarily. The other person, in his individuality and distinctness as another person, as another I who is not my own, will never be the same person as myself. This is why empathetic perception allows for error in ones reading of the other. But what cannot be denied is the fact that we had become aware of the others mental or emotional state or that we had bothered to notice or mind him/her at all. In this sense, Steins significant contribution to the clarification of the problem of other minds is that, aside from rejecting skeptical worries about the knowledge of other minds, it unfolds the person as a meaningful and intelligible whole as a psycho-physical, empirical, and rational personality, going beyond a purely mentalistic view of personhood that limits the person to a mind or to reason. Thus, in the words of John Wisdom, if the question is whether we sometimes do know what is in the mind of another, the point is this is a question of fact and not of philosophy. But the fact is we do.301 Being a phenomenological problem, empathy can continue to be further explored. As far as it aids us in

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comprehending deeply womans intrinsic connectedness with persons, empathy is certainly a major accomplishment by Stein as a theory that can be employed to arrive at an incisive analysis and at a penetrating understanding of womans ethos and of the distinct value and singular importance of her feminine nature. The Necessity for Empathy in Society: Womans Role We can glean from Stein that empathy is a fundamental human ability, and without empathy, we would not be able to constitute this world as objective. Without empathy, we would not have any sciences, any accounts of objectivity. It is a human ability and is more basic than constitution. While empathy per se is not a singularly feminine trait, women are particularly inclined to develop their empathetic abilities fully. This ability does aid in sustaining all deep personal commitments, e.g. marriage and child-rearing. But we can assume that it can and should be exercised in other relationships as well. For women who are single, or for those who have consecrated themselves to God as religious, this aspect of their vocation, in fact, may take on a more universal scope, as they respond to a call for a more disinterested (or more divine) kind of love. In this case, a womans tender, maternal solicitude for others goes beyond the domain of her family, but acquires a more extensive scope as it embraces people outside her kin. Instead of limiting her maternal service as wife and mother to her husband and children, she is able to reach out (a nun, for instance, who performs missionary work in foreign lands) to the whole of mankind with the same love and commitment in a calling of service to the country, city, or parish.

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Womens role within society concerned Stein very deeply. Stein observed how Nazism had reduced womans role to the biological function of [bearing] babies of Aryan stock302 in a rule of terror under Hitler who had vowed to purify Germany of the Jews. In the process, Germany had become a society of a mechanistically ordered structure...[determined] merely on a biological basis303 where women were to become baby-makers of a Teutonic race. Aware of the implications of such a catastrophic political situation, in a series of lectures, Stein had called upon women for political involvement and to take up joint responsibility with men to ensure democratic freedom for their country. Stein was herself a professional woman, and she taught younger women at the secondary and later at the university level. Thus, asked whether women should be confined to the domestic sphere, to home and hearth, Steins answer was negative. She saw the gains made by the womens movement in this respect to be positive, opening up the professions and political life to women and providing equal opportunities to them as to the men in these areas. Stein translated Newmans The Idea of a University into German, and she held that a liberal education can be just as helpful in the formation of women as in the formation of men. If some subjects are more naturally attractive or interesting to women, perhaps because of clear connections with the living and personal, others may be helpful correctives to an excessively personal outlook. Since domestic skills can be learned at home, Stein suggested a curriculum for university women that does not differ significantly from what would be offered for men. Still, she felt it is of utmost importance that teachers of women

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should know how to connect their subject matter with the particular concerns and sensitivities of women. She thought it very important that girls and women be taught primarily by women to address these sensitivities.304 Does the natural vocation of woman rule out certain professions as unsuitable to her? Stein herself asks, Should certain positions be reserved for only men, others for only women, and perhaps a few open for both? Steins answer clarifies that work is an individual choice made by men and women based on aptitude, interest and inclination. Women are free to choose whatever profession they think they are suited to, just men are. Thus, Steins answer to the problem is, I believe that this question also must be answered negatively. The strong individual differences existing within both sexes must be taken into account. Many women have masculine characteristics just as many men share feminine ones. Consequently, every so-called masculine occupation maybe exercised by many women as well as many feminine occupations by certain men.305 We understand Stein to mean that it is likely that some professions will continue to attract more women than men, partly because of their strong human component. We might expect to find a large percentage of women drawn to fields like teaching, medicine, law, social work, psychology, etc. Obviously, not everyone can make a choice when entering the job market as to what sort of work they would find most attractive, and many women (along with many men) will work at jobs which are not especially suited to them. But every profession can be

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practiced in a feminine way; that is, every profession can be humanized, made more person-friendly, and brought into greater contact with human concerns. Stein holds the view that is a good thing for the society that women should be found in every profession. When society is beset by the sickness of turmoil, disunion, deficiency of convictions and moral principles, and aimless drifting, it is in need of persons who are authentically concerned to provide healing from social ills, more than just giving an anesthetic to the pains of the social ailing. Such persons, in Steins words are immune to contemporary sickness; they are steadfast on eternal principles, unperturbed in their views and in their actions by the changing modes of thoughts, follies, and depravities surrounding them. Every such individual is like a pillar to which many can fasten themselves, thereby attaining a firm footing. Consequently, when women themselves are once again whole persons and when they help others to become so, they create healthy, energetic spores supplying healthy energy to the entire national body.306 Since womans approach to persons is holistic, just as she would approach a sick person addressing all the persons material, moral, and spiritual needs, she would do the same for a nation. This makes women significant for national life. If she fulfills her vocation as mother, every workplace the factory, the office, the school, the political sphere, the home would be imbued with the strength and vigor of her motherliness.

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she would prevail upon trouble-laden hearts to be opened to her through a friendly word, a sympathetic question; she will find out where the shoe is pinching and will be able to provide relief. Everywhere the need exists for maternal sympathy and help, and thus we are able to recapitulate in the one word motherliness that which we have developed as the characteristic value of woman. Only, the motherliness must be that which does not remain within the narrow circle of blood relations or of personal friends.307 Stein especially encouraged women to become involved in political life. The maternal concern of women, she felt, should lead to a deep interest in the life of the community, from the parent-teacher association to the presidency. Since the decisions made in the public square have a deep impact on the family and on human persons generally, women automatically have a big stake in them. In dark times, as in Edith Steins generation, but also in our own, women are especially called upon to speak out with courage and to make an impact beyond their own families and communities. Stein often urged women to look to their own mothers for insight into what it means to be a woman. Her own essays on women owe much to the example of her mother, and it is clear that she felt a deep love and friendship for her throughout her life. Stein encouraged every woman to seek to live out in her own life and circumstances the ideal of true womanhood. This means especially exercising that maternal vocation, which is given primarily to women, and which holds little in the way of

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glamour or attraction for many women today. The work of a mother is hidden for the most part, and even its rewards are intangible. This is exactly why Edith Stein looked to women to preserve within human society those spiritual values that cannot be measured. It is not that the public achievements of women are unimportant of course, but that women must not lose sight of those ends to which all other things are only the means. In Essays on Woman, she writes, Our mission is to become flexible instruments in Gods hand and to effect His work to which He leads us. If we fulfill our mission, we do what is best for ourselves, for our immediate environment, and together with it, what is best for the entire nation.308 This section sought to clarify the problem on whether the womans place of work should be limited to the home. We learn from Stein that maternal solicitude for others is intrinsic to feminine nature. This empathetic attention for others can extend outside her family and, in fact, encompass more people outside her kin. Stein does not think women should be confined to the home. She saw the womens movement successful in this respect as society gave way to their cause and opened up professions and political life to women, providing equal opportunities to them as the men in these areas. We also glean from Stein that it is likely that some professions will appeal more to women than to men, because these professions are personorientedfor instance, the teaching profession which requires the motherly attention of the teaching practitioner and the medical and nursing professions which call for nurturing and care. Nevertheless, every profession can be imbued with the feminine touch, that is, a genuine interest in and concern for persons. The maternal concern of women, Stein felt, should

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lead to an involvement in all aspects of the life of the community, be they small-group associations in school or the leadership of the country. Since the decisions made in the public square have a deep impact on the family and on human persons generally, women should feel a big stake in them. For Stein, women have the potentional to provide a blessed counter-balance precisely here where everyone is in danger of becoming mechanized and losing his humanity.309 With womens sensitivity to persons, in public life, they will be able to convey the necessity and value of empathetic subjectivity.

The Meaning and Significance of Woman for the World

The contention of this book has been to reaffirm the thought of Edith Stein on woman. Certainly, Stein offers us a rich backdrop of insights against which we can interpret more traditional readings of woman, challenging claims to the woman as the weaker sex and to the metaphysical inferiority of feelings. Steins argument for a real feminine distinctiveness can be viewed as an unambiguous metaphysical framework within which we can dispute long-standing claims about the woman being inferior to man. History shows that society has downgraded woman for centuries and placed her in a position of inferiority in relation to man, which is what precipitated the feminist movements to equalize woman with man as individuals. Steins philosophical anthropology seeks to clarify the confusion

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of the fundamental and complementary equality of man and woman with physical and quantifiable equality. Women cannot lay claim to male characteristics that really oppose their feminine originality.310 They have distinct tendencies that arise from their feminine nature and are singularly important in themselves. Steins position is that womans intrinsic value emerges from her feminine ethos which this work sought to defend from three standpoints: first, from Steins ontological examination of woman; second, from the view of emotional life as an important hallmark of the female species; and third, from Steins phenomenological notion of empathy (the topic of her doctoral dissertation) as a philosophical theory that can be employed to understand the profound sense of womans nature and feminine value. Stein offers a deeply metaphysical and phenomenological answer to the perennial question on the essence, meaning, and significance of woman. Her ideas can be considered foundational in feminist philosophy and be employed to clarify, correct, or refute negative views on womans position and status in society. For instance, that many famous men have spoken disapprovingly of women cannot be denied. There are numerous statements about women that are far from complimentary. Alice von Hildebrand in her book The Privilege of Being aWoman311 lists some as follows: According to Luther, the meaning of a womans life is to procreate: the work and word of God tell us clearly that women must be used for marriage or for prostitution. If women get tired and die of bearing, there is no harm in that: let them die so long as they bear: they are made for that.312 The secularist view is hardly more flattering.

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In Hamlet, William Shakespeare wrote the often-quoted words: Frailty, thy name is woman.313 John Milton writes that the woman is a pretty mistake.314 (What should be said, we might ask, of a woman who is not pretty?) Kant in one of his humble moods writes that the woman is less talented, morally inferior to man.315 With Teutonic brutality, Friedrich Nietzsche writes, When you go to a woman, do not forget your whip. Arthur Schopenhaur speaks of women with contempt: Women are childish, frivolous, and shortsightedbig children all their life long.316 With sarcasm and wit, he gives vent to his intense dislike for his mother. His essay on women is a long litany of negative female attributes. Not only does he despise a womans intellect, but he even objects to calling women the fair sex. According to him, women are the unaesthetic sex.317 We see that defending the woman has been a long process and that the understanding of feminine singularity is just half the story. I endeavored to show that integral to the defense of woman is the examination of man and woman as two different expressions of human nature and the acceptance of the existence of this duality of human nature as possessing great value. In Steins philosophical anthropology, we come to understand that women and men are essentially (biologically, psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually) different. While Stein acknowledges (along with Aristotle and Aquinas) that there are traits exclusive to the human soul or abilities shared by every member of the species, she has carefully laid down evidence for real feminine distinctiveness. Her phenomenological method

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gives full description of phenomena defining and explicating the particular and unique features of woman. Genetically, physiologically, anatomically, psychologically, and even intellectually, woman is distinct from man, but the two genders are nevertheless complementary. It is womans nature as biological mother that radically differentiates her from man, Stein asserts. It stands to reason, however, that we have to first accept the fact of this differentiation and complementarity of the sexes before we can even propose to return to woman the honor and dignity that are rightfully hers. We need to recognize that this differentiation and complementarity are in fact good and would benefit humanity in many ways. Even if we prescind for the moment from all biological reasons as well as from procreation, we must see how much richer the world is because this difference exists.318 One just needs to look at the family to see how a childs upbringing calls for paternal and maternal care, for a holistic development. We see that society needs the physical strength, abstract thinking, and firm legalism of man for organization and order in the state, but requires as well the tact, tenderness, sweetness, compassion, attention to details, generosity, self-denial, elegance, concern for beauty and other feminine qualities that only naturally arise from woman as she exercises her role as mother, wife, sister, daughter, or as friend and companion in the workplace.319 Moreover, Steins philosophy helps us to appreciate how motherhood is the sole privilege and unique advantage of woman. Every human beings first experience of love comes about through motherhood which involves a special communion with the mystery of life, as it develops in the womans womb.320 In exercising her motherhood, whether biological or spiritual,

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woman can imbue human relations with empathy, delicateness, nurturing care, in short, with love. In a fast mechanizing world where automation is designed to bring about impersonal efficiency and productivity, we come to the conclusion that feminine presence is necessary to build a civilization of love. Influenced by Edith Steins ideas on woman, John Paul II wrote in Mulieris Dignitatem, The mother is filled with wonder at this mystery of life, and understands with unique intuition what is happening inside her. In the light of the beginning, the mother accepts and loves as a person the child she is carrying in her womb. This unique contact with the new human being developing within her gives rise to an attitude towards human beings which profoundly marks the womans personality. It is commonly thought that women are more capable than men of paying attention to another person.321 It is only to woman that we properly ascribe motherliness from which ensues the empathy that arises naturally from her feminine ethos and which this world so badly needs to counterbalance a culture of cold abstraction, anonymity, and distancing. As Steins theory of empathy shows, intuitive intelligence is more intimately tied up with love than analytical intelligence. The intuitive grasp of the living concrete, especially of the personal element is womans strength.322 She has the special gift of making herself at home in the inner world of others.323 In short, woman is endowed with unique qualities with which she can contribute to the common good in no way that man can since he is short of those qualities or possesses

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them on a lower scale.324 Thus in these times, the question of womans position or standing in society takes on new significance in the light of her feminine singularity. Consider what Karl Stern wrote, If we equate the one-sidedly rational and technical with the masculine, there arises the ghastly spectacle of a world impoverished of womanly values.325 Steins philosophy on woman may yet help to restore the proper hierarchy of values. That woman is inferior in relation to man is a mental construct to which the feminists reacted with a battlecry bellowing that there be no legal prescriptions preventing women from holding any job. Stein grants that women will not want to pursue certain, more masculine jobs (like construction work, mining, plumbing), but she also insists that there should be no legal barriers against women holding any job (e.g., a university post, authorship of books as these were reserved for men in her time). In fact, Stein encouraged women to take up these posts often held by men only and thus broaden how these jobs are done. With the recurrent question and controversy on the importance and value of woman, Steins defense of the nature of woman which fuses phenomenology (using reason and experience) with Christian philosophy (recourse to prayer, the sacraments and to divine revelation) presents itself as a remarkably deep source of enlightenment. In this regard, I think we could equate Steins position to a claim for authentic feminism. Stein gives us a fundamental reminder about womans distinctness from man. The consideration of womans nature and destiny tells us that on the one hand, it is unfitting for women to demand equal treatment with men in society in a way that would take them apart from their feminine nature. That would

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CHAPTER 6

mean moving about society as men, proving themselves masculine, and forcing themselves into conditions of work and life unbecoming for women. On the other hand, it would be an injustice to women if society were to maintain them in a position of subordination or to completely disregard their differing needs and capabilities in the organization of social structures. For instance, the right to vote, the right to education, and to professional opportunities outside the home are as clearly the rights of women as they are of men. Feminist views, therefore, that support woman emancipation claiming no essential difference between men and women (embracing the underlying notion that a woman can then take on a mans role as husband, for instance, in a lesbian relationship, and that a man, for that matter, can function as wife and mother in a homosexual relationship) have yet to consider the implications of the profound reality of the distinction of the male and female genders based alone on their biological nature or ethos. We must remember that human nature is incarnated in two different but complementary ways.326 Thus, it is inevitably necessary to understand that womans nature is different from mans nature and the feminist standpoint that sees woman as oppressed (i.e., because her generative capacity is considered as reproductive enslavement and that motherhood is regarded as a demeaning confinement to the home) only foists unnecessary bitterness over the design of human nature. To feel subjugated, exploited, or limited because one can bear children is not to celebrate a singular power and gift reserved for woman. In reflecting on womans natural predisposition toward the personal, we come to a fuller appreciation of womans value, especially in ethical and moral life. The human person, after

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129

all, is more precious than all objective values.327 Women can set a balance to a society that risks becoming mechanized, cold, and impersonal. Since womans attitude is personal, she can compensate for mans objectivity, which makes him focus more on his discipline than on persons, with her natural proclivity to motherly nurturing and to empathy.328 Thus, the greatest contribution to society would be the enhancement of her intrinsic feminine value. It is certainly necessary to understand feminine singularity within metaphysics and realism to appreciate that on womans capacity for motherhood lies womans distinct value and prominence. Issues that further tackle the complementarity of the male and female sexes, since they closely connect with the issue of feminine singularity and how it relates within ethics and personalist ontology, can be explored at length in another study. At this point, given the arguments presented in this book, I come to the conclusion that we can promote a universal recognition of the dignity and value of the woman more than simply the condemnation of discrimination and prejudices. This dignity can be recognized, in spite of historical conditioning, by reason itself which can grasp clearly the ultimate anthropological basis of feminine distinctiveness and dignity. It is my vision that a revolutionary movement can then be attained in the contemporary world in achieving full respect for women and their identity.

131

Notes

Stein writes, Anthropology clarifies the meaning of sexual differences and proves the substance of the species. Edith Stein, Essays on Woman trans. Freda Mary Oben, 2 nd edition, revised (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996), p. 174. Henceforth to be cited as EW. 2 John Paul II, Apostolic Letter, Proclaiming Saint Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, and Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) Co-Patronesses of Europe, October 1, 1999, par. 3. 3 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness From Middle Ages to 1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p.7. 4 EW 15. 5 EW 254. 6 Simone de Beauvoir, Interview with John Gerassi, 1976, Society, Jan-Feb. 1976. http://www.lang.soton.ac.uk/students/french/FrenchThought/ beauvoir/gerassi.htm. 7 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness From Middle Ages to 1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 4. 8 Ibid., p. 5. 9 Aristotle as quoted by Lerner, p. 6. 10 Ibid. 11 Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Bk. 1, 729b14 and Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, IV-2. 766 b-33 in Dietrich von Hildebrand, Man and Woman (Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 1996), p.36. 12 Aristotle as quoted by Gerda Lerner, p. 6. 13 Aristotle as quoted by Gerda Lerner, p. 6. 14 Sirach 25:15. 15 Sirach 25, 23.
1

132 Quoted in Alice Von Hildebrand, The Privilege of Being aWoman (Michigan: Veritas Press), 2002, p. 4. 17 Ibid., pp. 6-7. 18 Lerner, p. 8. 19 Lerner, p. 7. 20 Ibid., p. 8. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 9. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 3. 25 Ibid., p. 5. 26 Ibid., p. 14. 27 EW 254. 28 EW 87. 29 Edith Stein, Essays on Woman trans. Freda Mary Oben, 2nd edition, revised (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996), henceforth to be cited as EW. 30 Sister Prudence Allen, R.S.M., The Concept of Woman (Michigan, U.S.A.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002). 31 In Hildebrand p. 3. 32 Lerner, p. 16. 33 Websters Twentieth Century Dictionary (U.S.A.: World Publishing Company, 1970), p. 628. 34 EW 43. 35 Ibid. 36 Ethos meaning character is derived from the Greek charrassein which means distinctive mark. 37 EW 174. 38 EW 73. 39 Laura Garcia, Ibid. 40 EW 21. 41 Ibid. 42 Roxanne King, Sister Prudence Allen releases monumental work, The Concept of Woman, vol. 2, http://www.archden.org/dcr/archive/ 20020306. 43 Ibid.
16

133 Buckminster Fuller, author of Critical Path (New York: St. Martins Press, 1981) and Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (New York: Macmillian, 1982), notes the philosophical significance of the discovery in 1922 of the fundamental principle of complementarity in the physical universe through Niels Bohrs explanation of light in terms of waves and particles (cf. Prudence Allen, p.2). 45 Rev. Francis Martin, author of The Feminist Question: Feminist Theology in the Light of the Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), suggested this metaphor of perspective (cf. Prudence Allen, p. 2). 46 EW 49. 47 Sarah Borden, Woman and Womens Education, Stein: Edith Stein (London: Continuum Press, 2003), pp. 88-115. 48 EW 61. 49 EW 95. 50 In 1931, Stein conducted a lecture tour through the Westphalian industrial district in Rhineland. This was organized by the Academics Association. She spoke in the great hall of the Ursuline school in Aachen on October 30, 1931 on the theme The Separate Vocations of Man and Woman According to Nature and Grace. EW 25. 51 EW 61. 52 EW 62. 53 John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, no. 6. 54 Mulieris Dignitatem, no. 7. 55 EW 74. 56 EW 65-66. 57 EW 45. 58 EW 46. 59 EW 46. 60 See Dietrich von Hildebrand, Man and Woman, p. 13. 61 Ibid. 62 Borden., ibid. 63 Mead, p. 199. 64 As Husserls assistant (1916-1918), Stein had taught in some of Husserls classes, initiating his young students to phenomenology. Unable to get a post as university professor after Husserls refusal of a proper
44

134 recommendation on grounds of gender, Stein continued as a private tutor in phenomenology. Giving up plans for a scholarly career because of the restrictions on women, Stein taught German for a number of years at the Dominican Sisters School in Speyer, Germany. In 1932, she was appointed lecturer at the German Institute for Educational Theory in Mnster, a position she lost after a single year of productive work due to anti-Semitic Aryan Laws. See Waltraud Herbstrith, O.C.D., Edith Stein: A Biography (San Fransisco: Ignatius Press, 1992). 65 Borden, ibid. 66 EW 255. 67 EW 73-74. 68 We can validate Steins claim against studies which hold that genetically, physiologically, psychologically, and even intellectually, the two genders are different. Anatomically, there is striking difference between the male brain and the female brain: In the female brain, the corpus callosum which divides the two hemispheres into left and right brain contains more jump leads communicating both halves than does the male brain. As a result, the different functions of the brain are more continuous and symbiotic in the female, and so more sensitive to the continuum of reality than the male, who is more inclined to a digital measurement of reality, and more inclined to activity than to receptivity. This makes women more intelligent and men more rational. Joseph M. de Torre, From Woman to Feminism in Generation and Degeneration: A Survey of Ideologies (Manila: Southeast Asian Sciences Foundation, Inc., 1995), pp. 175-184. 69 EW 45. 70 Karl Stern, The Flight from Woman (New York, U.S.A.: Paragon House, 1985), p. 32. 71 Ibid. 72 Stern, p. 32. 73 Mulieris Dignitatem, No. 18. 74 EW 74. 75 EW 95. 76 EW 100-101. 77 EW 78. 78 EW 100.

135 Karl Stern, The Fight from Woman, p. 26. Stern, pp. 26-27. 81 EW 136. 82 Alice von Hildebrand, The Privilege of Being a Woman (Michigan: Veritas Press, 2002), p 62. 83 EW 257. 84 Borden, ibid. 85 EW 21. 86 EW 46. 87 EW 72. 88 Alice von Hildebrand, p. 35. 89 Ibid., p. 37. 90 EW 96. 91 Edith Steins Philosophy of Woman and Womens Education in Hypatia. A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 4:1 (1989), p. 273. 92 Borden, ibid. 93 EW 82. 94 Carol Gilligan, Concepts of the Self and Morality (U.S.A.: Harvard Educational Review 47, 1997), p. 484 in Luis S. David, S.J., Ph.D., Womens Standpoint, the Gendering of Moral Voices/Moral Selves, and the View from Foucault, Social Science Diliman, January-June 2001, vol. 2, no. 1 (Philippines: University of the Philippines, 2001), p. 7. 95 David, p. 6. Fr. David notes that the paradigm for this, of course, is Immanuel Kants self-legislating moral subject, for whom the most distinctive thing about ethical reasoning lies not in any effort at consultation with others, but in the ability to deploy quasi-mathematical approaches in stating, defending, and applying universal principles. 96 Ibid., p. 7. 97 Ibid. 98 Alice von Hildebrand, p. 107. 99 G.K. Chesterton, What is Wrong with the World, p. 113 in Hildebrand, p. 47. 100 Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility (San Fransisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), p. 177. Being the giver of the sperm in a sexual act, sexual arousal happens faster in man than in woman (see Wojtyla p. 272), the arousal curve being
79 80

136 shorter and more violent in man (see p. 275). 101 Robert C. Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (U.S.A.: Hacket Publishing Company, Inc. 1993). 102 Ibid, 117. 103 Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion, and Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). 104 Kenny, p. 14. 105 Kenny uses intensionality in his book. I will employ intentionality, a more familiar usage. 106 Kenny, p. 192. 107 Ciriaco M. Sayson, Jr., Emotions and their Objects unpublished ms., (University of Massachussetts, Spring 1994), p. 5. 108 Ibid., p. 6. 109 Kenny, pp. 73-74. 110 Solomon, p. 124. 111 Edith Stein had attended Max Schelers lectures in Gottingen. She was intrigued with Schelers ideas on the phenomenon of sympathy. Since Steins interest in empathy was then emerging, Schelers ideas had an instant impact on her. Joyce Avrech Berkman, Contemplating Edith Stein, (USA: University of Notre Dame, 2006), p. 27. 112 Stephan Strasser, Phenomenology of Feeling (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1977), p. 84. 113 Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Value (U.S.A.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 256. 114 Ibid., p. 257. 115 Ibid, pp. 257-258. 116 Manfred S. Frings, Max Scheler, Non-Formal Ethics in our Time, Philosophy Today, vol. 9/24 (U.S.A.: De Paul University, 1965), p. 87. 117 Frings, pp. 87-88. 118 Scheler, p. 255. 119 Frings, p. 89. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid., pp. 84-85. 123 Ibid, p. 215.

137 David, p. 8. David, p. 10. 126 Marianne Sawicki, Body,Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein (U.S.A.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997) p. 90. To be cited henceforward as BTS. 127 Ibid. 128 Emerita S. Quito, Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein (Philippines: De La Salle Press, Inc., 2001), p. 55. 129 Marianne Sawicki, Personal Connections: The Phenomenology of Edith Stein (New York: lecture delivered at St. Johns University, October 15, 1998. See http://www.nd.edu/~colldev/subjects/catholic/personalconn.html.) To be cited henceforward as PC. 130 Edmund Husserl, E., Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), p. 92. 131 Since the equivalent of the German ich is I, das Ich will be rendered here as the I, the Is and so forth. In German, the first person singular pronoun ich is not capitalized when appearing as the pronominal subject of a sentence. But phenomenologists sometimes turn the pronoun into a noun by capitalizing it: das Ich, die Iche. (These neuter forms serve both as subjects and objects in sentences.) In English, we do not capitalize nouns as Germans do, but we do capitalize the first-person nominative singular pronoun I. Sawicki , BTS, pp. 12-13. 132 Sawicki, PC. 133 Edith Stein entered the University in Breslau in 1911. She was 19. At that time, the term psychology meant a branch of philosophy. The sciences undergirding the psychiatry and psychology of today had not yet been born. Over in Vienna, at this time, Sigmund Freud was puzzling over neurotic lady patients, while on the Susquehanna, a 7-year old named B.F. Skinner is trying in vain to train chipmunks. Psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the other foundational theories of psychology, as we know it, were just taking shape. Sawicki, PC. 134 Sawicki, BTS, p. 1. 135 Collected Works of Edith Stein, to be cited as CWES, Vol. 1, p.269 in Sawicki, BTS, p. 1. 136 Quito, p. 8.
124 125

138 Robert Solokowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (U.S.A.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 2. 138 Quito, p. 9. 139 Ibid. 140 Quito, p. 10. 141 Ibid. 142 Friedrich D.E. Scheiermacher (1768-1834) was a theologian, preacher and philologist as well as a professor at Berlin. He called for a general hermeneutics as the art of understanding, which would explicate the common principles underlying the specialized interpretive work of biblical exegesis, literary criticism, legal interpretation, and so forth. He made no practical distinction between understanding texts and understanding unwritten communication such as those involving speech, gesture, or symptoms; indeed, he tended to assimilate the spoken word to the written. For him the possibility of access to the mind of another was given in texts. Sawicki, BTS, pp. 3-5. 143 Sawicki, BTS, p. 3. 144 Quito, p. 55. 145 Herbert Spiegelbeg, The Phenomenological Movement Vol. 1., p. 28 in Quito, p. 6. 146 Waltraud Herbstrith, O.C.D., Edith Stein, A Biography (U.S.A.: Ignatius Press, 1992), p. 34. 147 Sawicki, BTS, p. 2. 148 Quito, p. 37. 149 Ibid. 150 Quito, p. 6. 151 Husserls thinking on unity, wholes, and parts derives from the mereological theory of Franz Brentano. Brentano held that whatever is present to consciousness is in some way complex, yet because of its presence, this complexity cannot be sequential or syntactic. Thus the essential structure of the whole inference is not present in any of the parts while the proof-pursuing mind is working its way through the articulated steps of inference one by one. The premises do not causally produce the conclusion, nor does the conclusion motivationally arrange the premises. In other words, when parts are intrinsically related to the whole, their relation is neither
137

139 motivated nor caused, but essential. By contrast, motivation and causation are two ways of understanding the integrity of wholes whose parts are not intrinsic to them: motivated series and causal series, respectively. One sees essential unities but feels motivations and causations. Sawicki, BTS, pp. 56-57. 152 Quito, p. 13. 153 Ibid. 154 Husserl Ideas, Vol. 1, p. 33 in Quito, p. 14. 155 Ibid, p. 50, in Quito, p. 14. 156 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 27. 157 Quito, p. 15. 158 Husserl, Ideas, p. 51 in Quito, p. 15. 159 Quito p. 15. 160 Ibid. 161 Ibid., pp. 15-16. 162 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Man and Woman (U.S.A.: Sophia Institute Press, 1992), p. 25. 163 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 157. 164 Quito, pp. 16-17. 165 Mearleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phnomnologie de la Perception, Avant Propos, p. 334 in Quito, p. 18. 166 Mearleau-Ponty as quoted by Quito, p. 18. 167 Quito, p. 18. 168 Ibid. 169 Sawicki, BTS, p.2. 170 Ibid. 171 Sawicki, BTS, p. 145. 172 Sawicki, BTS, p. 88. 173 Ibid. 174 Ibid. 175 Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, Foreword (U.S.A.: ICS Publications, 1989), p.1. To be cited henceforth as Empathy. 176 Idem. 177 Quito, p. 56. 178 Empathy, pp. 5-6.

140 Quito, p. 56. Stein ([1917] 1980:3. 181 Sawicki, BTS, p. 95. 182 Ibid. 183 Steins celebrated theory of person is the last major feature of her dissertation. To appreciate Steins thinking about woman as naturally empathetic and to understand how woman is innately person-oriented, it is necessary to understand what Stein means by person. For Stein, Person does not mean human being. It indicates the topmost of four layers of human being: (1) the personal or individual, (2) the mental or intellectual, (3) the sensory or sentient, and (4) the physical. The layers are interrelated and can be pictured like a capital H turned on its side, or a capital I with serifs. At the bottom, the base of that I, is the physical which is matter: your physical organs and the physiological processes of your body. This is your interface with the physical world. When you act upon the world or it acts upon you, chains of cause and effect come into play across this surface. At the top of the I, put personal individuality. Through this surface you are plugged into the realm of value, you create and receive meaning. These are spatial terms that help us understand Steins theory, but the reader has to bear in mind that these are really non-spatial, phenomenal realms (realms of appearance). Sawicki, PC. 184 Sawicki, BTS, p. 96. 185 Empathy, p. 7. 186 Quito, p. 56. 187 Sawicki, p. 96. 188 Ibid., p. 97. 189 Empathy, p. 11. 190 Quito, p. 57. 191 Quito, p. 57. 192 Ibid. 193 Husserl, Ideas I, 1 in Quito, p. 57. 194 Sawicki, BTS, p. 96. 195 Ibid. 196 Eidetics comes from the Greek word eidos meaning essence or form;, hence, eidetics is the study of essences. See Sokolowski, p. 177.
179 180

141 Sawicki, BTS, p. 97. Empathy, p. 14. 199 Empathy, p. 34. 200 Stein picked up the term constitution from Husserl. The 1913 Ideas makes constitution the central point of view of phenomenology. Constitution is a function of consciousness providing the bridge between the givenness of sequential multiple appearings and the givenness of unified essential form for the thing to which the appearings are referred. Sawicki, BTS, p. 108. 201 Sawicki, BTS p. 145. 202 Ibid. 203 Ibid., pp. 145-146. 204 On the Problem of Empathy, Foreword, p. xx. 205 Ibid., p. 48. 206 Ibid. 207 Ibid., p. 50. 208 Quito, p. 61. 209 Sawicki, BTS, p. 117. 210 Ibid. 211 Ibid., p. 119. 212 See Stein: 54-56. Mind is not Steins term, but Sawicki uses it as a convenient way to refer collectively to the psyche and the soul or intellect, which Stein contrasts with the body at the point. Sawicki, BTS, p. 119. 213 Sawicki, BTS, p. 119. 214 Ibid., p. 145. 215 Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Restoring the Character Ethic (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 253. 216 Sawicki, p. 146. 217 Empathy, p. 59. 218 Empathy, p. 62-63. 219 Quito, p. 65. 220 Empathy, p. 85. 221 Empathy, p. 21. 222 Quito, pp. 63-64. 223 Ibid.
197 198

142 Empathy, p. 5. Quito, p. 59. 226 Ibid., pp. 38-39. 227 Empathy, p. 38. 228 Quito, p. 58. 229 Empathy, p. 38. 230 Ibid. 231 Sawicki, BTS, p. 103. 232 Ibid. 233 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de la Perception, p. 175 in Quito, p. 59. 234 Marcel Gabriels Being and Having in Quito p. 59. 235 Sawicki, BTS, p. 117. 236 Ibid. 237 Ibid., p. 146. 238 Ibid. 239 In Quito, p. 60. 240 Empathy, p. 44. 241 Ibid. 242 Ibid., p. 45. 243 Ibid. 244 Chambers definition in E.M. White, The Woman-Soul, International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 22, No. 3 (U.S.A.: University of Chicago Press, April 1912), p. 327. 245 E.M. White, p. 328. 246 Ibid. 247 EW 96. 248 Ibid. 249 E.M. White, p. 327. 250 Ibid. 251 EW 100. 252 E.M. White, p. 327. 253 George Simmel, Philsopische Kultur, Gesammelte Essais. Alfred Kroner, Leipzig, 1919. The essay in question is entitled Das Relative und das Absolute im Geschlechter-Problem in Karl Stern, The Flight from Woman (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1985), p. 26.
224 225

143 Jean Guitton, Lamour humain. Aubier, Editions Montaigne, Paris, 1955, in Karl Stern, p. 26. 255 EW 188. 256 Quito, p. 65. 257 Sawicki, BTS, p. 100. 258 Quito, p. 65. 259 Stern, p. 44. 260 Sawicki, BTS, p. 100. 261 Empathy, p. 91. 262 Empathy, p. 92. 263 Ibid. 264 Ibid., p. 108. 265 EW 45. 266 Stein, Sentient Causality in Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities (hereafter PPHu), trsn. Marianne Sawicki and Mary Catharine Baseheart, ed. Marianne Sawicki (Washington DC: ICS Pubications, 2000), p. 7. 267 Sarah Borden, Value, Emotions, and Edith Stein (hereafter VEE), a paper presented at the Notre Dames Center for Ethics and Culture conference on Formation and Renewal, October 4, 2003. 268 See Stein, Individual and Community in PPHu, I, 2c. 269 Borden, VEE. 270 See PPHii, 2c and II, 3c. 271 PPHii, 227. 272 Quito, p. 68. 273 Empathy, p. 110. 274 Ibid., p. 101. 275 Quito, pp. 67-68. 276 Empathy, p. 109. 277 Ibid., p. 115. 278 Empathy, p. 115. 279 Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) studied philosophy at Berlin. His ambition was to establish a common epistemological foundation for all the human sciences. These would be sciences of understanding, not sciences of explanation like the natural sciences. Where Scheiermacher had seen that both language and the individual psyche were continually in flux yet unbounded by
254

144 beginning and endings, Dilthey saw the streaming of life. Where Scheiermacher had described the Divination through which the text allows the reader access to the writers psychic motivation, Dilthey decribed the Nacherleben: the living out in understanding of some experience already lived by another. Sawicki, BTS., p. 6. 280 Empathy, p. 116. 281 Sawicki, BTS, p. 55. 282 Empathy, p. 114. 283 EW 255. 284 EW 256. 285 Empathy, p. 116. 286 Empathy, p. 118. 287 Husserl, E., Ideen zuII p. 23 in Quito, p. 69. 288 Quito, pp. 69-70. 289 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, Vol. 6 (London: Collier Macmilliam Publishers, 1967), p. 108 in Lisa Ocampo, Autonomy, Person, and Law (M.A. thesis, University of the Philippines, Diliman, 1995), p. 2. 290 Sofia David, Personalist Foundation of the Moral Assertions on the Person and Human Life in Evangelium Vitae: An Interpretive Inquiry (M.A. Thesis U.P. Diliman, October 2003), p. 130. 291 Lisa Ocampo, p. 167. 292 Quito, p. 70. 293 Ibid. 294 Problem of Other Minds, http://www.britannica.com/ebc/ article?tocId=9374234&query=automaton&ct=. 295 JohnWisdom, Other Minds (U.S.A.: NewYork Philsophical Library, 1952), p. 226, Questia Media America, Inc. /www.questia.com. 296 William Cornwell, Making Sense of the Other: Husserl, Carnap, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, Mary Washington College, http://www.bu.edu/wcp/ Papers.htm 297 John Wisdom, Other Minds (U.S.A.: NewYork Philsophical Library, 1952), p. 218, Questia Media America, Inc. /www.questia.com. 298 Problem of Other Minds, http://www.britannica.com/ebc/ article?tocId=9374234&query=automaton&ct=. 299 Empathy, p. 109.

145 Ibid., pp. 145-146. John Wisdom. 302 EW 145. 303 EW 197. 304 See Steins lecture on Fundamental Principles of Womens Education, EW, pp. 129-145. 305 EW 81. 306 EW 206. 307 EW 264. 308 EW 265. 309 EW 48. 310 Mulieris Dignitatem no. 10. 311 Alice von Hildebrand, pp. 3-4. 312 Martin Luther, Works, 12.94 and 20.84 (Germany: Weimer Press, 1883), in Alice von Hildebrand, p. 4. 313 William Shakespeare, Hamlet: Prince of Denmark; Act I, Scene 2, in Alice von Hildebrand, p. 4. 314 Quoted in Hildebrand, p. 4. 315 Ibid., p. 70. 316 Selections from Schopenhauer (NewYork: Charles Scribner, Modern Students Library, 1928), p. 435, in Hidebrand, p. 5. 317 Ibid., p. 441. 318 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Man and Woman (Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 1996), p. 37. 319 Joseph M. De Torre, From Woman to Feminism in Generations and Degenerations: A Survey of Ideologies (Manila: Southeast Asian Sciences Foundation, In., 1995), pp. 175-184. 320 Ibid, no. 18. 321 Mulieris Dignitatem no. 18. 322 Edith Stein, Problems of Womens Education. In Writings of Edith Stein, Selected, translated and introduced by Hilda Graef. Newman Press, Westminster, Md., 1956. 323 Ibid. 324 De Torre, pp. 175-184. 325 Stern, p. 6.
300 301

Ibid. EW 248. 328 Rachel Feldhay Brenner, Writing as Resistance, Four Women Confronting the Holocaust (U.S.A.: Pennsylvania State University, 1997), p. 165.
326 327

Citation

147

That the paucity of women in the field of philosophy is conventionally well accepted makes this thesis a welcome addition to the discipline in particular and to womens studies in general. This study is important in its exposition of the thought of Edith Stein on woman, as well as, on its documentation of the life, intellect and philosophical innovations and contributions to the history of philosophy of a woman at the turn of the 20th century when the field was indisputably masculine, male-centered, and the efforts of the educators were not concerned with developing a young girls unique nature but rather in forming her as a suitable companion of man.

149

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150 Chervin, Ronda. Feminine, Free, and Faithful, RealWomen. San Fransisco: Ignatius Press, 1986. Covey, Stephen. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Restoring the Character Ethic. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. David, Luis S., S.J., Ph.D., Womens Standpoint, the Gendering of Moral Voices/ Moral Selves, and theView from Foucault. January-June 2001, vol. 2, no. 1. Philippines: University of the Philippines, 2001. David, Sofia. Personalist Foundation of the Moral Assertions on the Person and Human Life in Evangelium Vitate: An Interpretive Inquiry, M.A. Thesis. U.P. Diliman, October 2003 De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993. De Torre, Joseph M. From Woman to Feminism in Generation and Degeneration: A Survey of Ideologies. Manila: Southeast Asian Sciences Foundation, Inc., 1995. Encyclopedia Britannica. Problem of Other Minds. http:// www.britannica.com/ebc/article?tocId=9374234&query= automaton&ct= Frings, Manfred S. Max Scheler, Non-Formal Ethics in our Time, Philosophy Today, vol. 9/24. U.S.A.: De Paul University, 1965. Garcia, Laura. Edith Stein - Convert, Nun, Martyr. Crisis (June 1997). Gerassi, John. Interview with Simone de Beauvoir. Society, Jan-Feb. 1976. Gilligan, Carol. Concepts of the Self and Morality. U.S.A.: Harvard Educational Review 47, 1997. Herbstrith, Waltraud. O.C.D., Edith Stein: A Biography. San Fransisco: Ignatius Press, 1992. Husserl, Edmund E. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness From Middle Ages to 1870. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

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Index

Adam, 24 Adams, Abigail, 16 Allen, Prudence, 21, 25, 42 American Constitution, 15 Aquinas,Thomas, 24, 43 Aristotle, 13, 22, 43, 59 Aristotelian, 22 Augustine, 22, 42 Polarity view, 22 Unisex view of Plato, 21, 42 Life, 123 Maternal nature, 34 Meaning of, 124 Nature of, 33 Reproductive cycle, 47 Roles, 62 Soul, 47 Vocation, 30 Baseheart, Mary Catherine, 48 Beauvoir, Simone De, 11, 46 Biological Mother, 32, 34, 47 Borden, Sarah, 48 Brentano, Franz, 59 Breslau, 7 Care, ethics of, 49-50 Chesterton, G.K., 50 Christian perspective, 27 Companionship, 61 Complementarity, 30 principle of, 25 Consciousness, 72-73 Corinthians, 31 Descartes

Radical dualism of, 24 Dignity, 108 Dilthey,Wilhelm, 104 Discrimination, 22 Emotion, 45-48, 50-56, 59-61 Emotional Lives, 46 Life, 47-48 Intentionality, 59 Response, 60 Emotionally responsive, 46, 54 Empathy, see Edith, Stein, Theory of Empathy Epoche, 67, 70-71 Eser kenegdo, 29, 32, 43 Essentialism, 26 Ethos, 23 Evaluative, 51 Eve, 24 Family life, 50 Female Interests, 50 Species, 45-48 Tears, 46 Femaleness, 62 Feminine, 22, 25, 26, 28, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 43, 45, 48 Characteristics, 35-36, 44 Ideal of, 42 Meaning of, 32 Ontology, 23 Traits, 28 Vision, 49

154
Feminism Femininity, unique value of, 47 Feminist belief, 46, 51 Feminist movement, 18, 46 Feminists, 22, 28, 46 Freud, Sigmund, 22 Frings, Manfred, 58 Gender Differences Men and Women, 33, 42-43 Theories on, 42 Genesis, 23-24, 27-30, 43 Gilligan, Carol, 49, 50 Givenness, 77-79, 87, 92 Goal-determined movement, 57 Habitus, 23 Concept of, 23 Inborn, 23 Hildebrand, Alice Von, 50, 123 Hildegard of Bingen, 22 Human Relationships, 61 Human, ways of, 25 Humanist reformation, 21 Humanity, 23-24 Form of, 24-25 Husserl, Edmund, 9, 59, 64, 84, 93, 98, 111-112 Autobiography, 68-69 Phenomenological method, 69-74 Independence, declaration of, 14 Individual Perception, 87-90 Individuality, 90-94 Intuition, 94-98 Intuitive, 46 John Paul II, 25, 30, 42 Kant, 59, 124 Kenny, Anthony, 52-55 Lerner, Gerda, 12, 16 Lipps,Theodor, 76 Luther, 123 Male, 37 Marcel, Gabriel, 93 Masculine, 25-26, 28, 33, 34 Maternal 38 Maternal Gift, 32, 44 Maternity, 36-37 Matter, 24 Men, 38 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 92 Milton, John, 124 Moral Dilemmas, 50 Judgement, 62 Perception, 61 Morality, 49, 51, 61 Mother, 36-37, 43, 52, 126 joy, 52 Motherhood, 61, 125 Mothering, 48, 62 Motherliness, 48, 126 Mulieris Dignitatem, 30 New Testament, 30-31, 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 124 Old Testament, 14, 26, 35, 43 Ontological, 51 Original sin, 14 Pascal, Blaise, 59 Patriarchy, 12, 17 Perception, 94-95, 98-99 Personal attachment, 60 Patriarchal, 22 Phenomenological residue, 71, 98 Phenomenon, 67 Physiognomic expression, 60 Primordial, 79 82 Prussian Association for Womens Suffrage, 11 Psychoanalysts, 36-37 Pure I, 83-86, 90-91 Quito, Emerita, 72-73, 84, 88-89, 103, 106107 Rationality, 24 Real feminine distinctiveness, 26, 35-36, 43 Relationships, 50

155
Renaissance humanism, 22 Reproductive role, 33 Responsibility, 61 Saint John Chrysostom, 14 Sartre, Jean Paul, 59-60 Scheler, Max, 56-59 Schopenhaur, Arthur, 124 Scripture, 30, 32, 35, 42 Self-value, 56 Shakespeare,William, 124 Slavery, 13, 15, 17 Solomon, Robert, 51-52 Spiritual welfare, 50 St. Paul, 31-32 St.Thomas, 24-25 Stein, Edith, 45-48, 51-52, 62 Autobiography, 7-10 Philosophical anthropology, 122, 124 Philosophy on woman, 127 Theory of empathy, 63-66, 74-120, 126 Works of, 8-9, 20 Stern, Karl, 127 Thomism, 42 Thomistic concept of man, 31, 43 Value, 100-110 Values, 56-59 Vischer, Robert, 76 Weaker sex, 46 Weimar Constitution, 19 Wojtyla, Karol, 50 Woman, 11-19, 23-24, 37, 38, 45-50, 60-61 Concept of, 26 emotional life, 45, 47-48 Identity, theories of, 21-22 Aristotles Polarity view, 22, 42 Complementarily view of St.