Stein’s Spiritual Influences

This chapter explores some of Edith Stein’s significant philosophical influences in developing her understanding of spirit. Since, after all, spiritual expression is activity in relationship and community with other persons, it is fitting that at least a part of an analysis of Stein’s work on spirit (in other words, an analysis of her spiritual production) must examine how her ideas were formed and arose in the context of her relationship to other thinkers and their philosophical work (their spiritual products). In working through her thought on the spiritual nature of the human person, Stein engages with a number of philosophers, both contemporaries and figures in the history of philosophy. Several key thinkers serve as compelling interlocutors to Stein—in this chapter, specifically Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, and Hedwig Conrad-Martius—and exploring their work illuminates Stein’s own view in the way that she engaged with them, took up aspects of their thought, and approached it with her own original nuance. Dilthey provides Stein with important insight into the Geisteswissenschaften as the shared products of human beings’ spiritual activity, and their distinction from the natural sciences. Husserl (whose relationship to Stein need hardly be introduced) introduces her to phenomenology, fosters her ideas on empathy, and inspires her in his efforts to overcome reductive naturalist approaches to the world and to the person. Conrad-Martius accompanies Stein in her turn toward her explorations of being (though neither Stein nor Conrad-Martius ever fully abandon phenomenology for the sake of metaphysics), and Conrad-Martius’ ontology provides a nuanced account of the nature of the person and the person’s relationship to God that allows Stein to strengthen and deepen her own through engaging with it.