The Valuing and Willing Person

This chapter is a focused exploration of the spiritual aspect of the body-soul-spirit unity that is the human person according to Edith Stein. She argues that we experience the world not just as a world of natural causal connections, but as a world of values and volition. I explore her efforts to differentiate between causality as the “lawfulness” governing the physical events of the material world, and motivation governing the intentional acts of the spiritual world. The spiritual subject encounters the world as meaningful and valuable, and creatively and freely responds to this value. In this way, our valuing is an expression of our personhood. Furthermore, in these spiritual acts, we also allow our own individual nature to unfold to ourselves and we thus “become ourselves.” This becoming is not a movement away from the self, but a revealing of the self and a bringing of it to light. In their creativity and their freedom, spiritual acts are movements out to the world and a transcending of the boundaries of the self, but not a severing from the self or the creation of a new self. The spiritual life is what Stein calls a “superabundant, diffusive life” of self-expression and self-transcendence toward life outside of the self. In unfolding out toward the world and toward other individuals, we also are opened up to receive this self-expression from others (their “going out of themselves”). In this way, our spiritual activity is a sharing of value, meaning, and spiritual products in the life of the human community. It is by nature of our individual personhood that we are able to be spiritually active and expressive, and thereby to be part of a larger whole made up of relationships between individual persons, and it is through this relating that our individual nature is fulfilled.