Spirit, Expression and Community in the Philosophy of Edith Stein

This book examines and elucidates the concept of spirit in Stein’s philosophical work, particularly the role it plays in her philosophical anthropology and her understanding of intersubjectivity and community. Although she draws from and synthesizes the ideas of thinkers such as Husserl, Dilthey, and Conrad-Martius, Stein’s approach is distinctive and uniquely suited to comprehensively addressing these topics and questions. Despite the significance of the notion of spirit, however, very little Stein scholarship focuses directly on examining it, and there has never been an attempt to trace its development over the whole of Stein’s corpus. This book fills this lacuna by undertaking a comprehensive study of Stein’s understanding of spirit.

The author argues that the key to understanding Stein’s notion of spirit is to understand it as expressive, and in so doing to recognize expression as a fundamental characteristic of the human person. This view of the person as expressive provides an understanding of the person as an embodied being that lives in the world and shares it with other embodied beings, but in this very living and sharing, moves beyond the material bounds of embodiment and constitutes the world as a world of meaning and value. The notion of expression is not only crucial to making sense of Stein’s own account of spirit, but furthermore, provides a way of understanding the person as inextricably bound up in community without compromising the individual. In going out toward others in spiritual expression, one not only forms community with the other; one also becomes more oneself. Thus, Stein’s understanding of spirit as fundamentally expressive helps make sense of what it means to be an individual human being and what it means to be a part of the human community. This volume appeals to students and scholars working in phenomenology.