“Edith Stein and the Ethics of Renewal: Contributions to a Steinian Account of the Moral Task,”

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (Forthcoming).

Edith Stein and the Ethics of Renewal: Contributions to a Steinian Account of the
Moral Task

William E. Tullius

Abstract. While Stein never developed an ethics of her own, her work is nonetheless suggestive of
an ‘ethics of renewal’, which appears in nuce in various moments of her corpus. First, in her
phenomenological treatises, Stein analyzes the ethical development of personality in the unfolding
of the personal ‘core’ as responding to ever higher value domains. During the 1930’s, this becomes
a project of living out a moral vocation bestowed by God. In Endliches und ewiges Sein, the moral
life becomes a work of renewal in connection with the Teresian metaphor of the ‘interior castle’.
Morality, for Stein, emerges from out of an inner, personal work of the soul’s conscious
refurbishment according to its essential structure by coming to terms with the value-world and
with God. This paper will attempt to develop Stein’s account of the nature of the moral task as
renewal and some implications for moral theory.

I.

Introduction. It is well-known that Edith Stein never produced a systematic study on ethics.

Rather, her various phenomenological and metaphysical works from across her corpus

demonstrate an unwavering interest in philosophical anthropology, albeit from ever shifting and

developing profiles and with differing questions forming the backdrop upon which her theory of

the human person consistently comes to the fore.1 From this core interest, her thought expands

outward to investigation into the various phenomena which shed light upon her developing

anthropological picture and which in turn acquire their own constitutive sense first and foremost

in connection to the notion of ‘person’. In this connection, Stein’s project does demonstrate a

consistent attention to the rootedness of the person in axiological/ethical contexts and vice versa.

However, so far as Stein’s philosophical anthropology seems to touch upon ethics for the most

1
Antonio Calcagno, Lived Experience from the Inside Out: Social and Political Philosophy in
Edith Stein (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2014), 12, and Peter J. Schulz, “Toward
the Subjectivity of the Human Person: Edith Stein’s Contribution to the Theory of Identity,”
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2008): 161–176, at 163.
 2

part in a tangential way, it might be assumed that, while Stein’s thought indeed possesses ethical

ramifications or connections, Stein herself has no ‘ethics’ to speak of that are explicitly her own.

Whether or not this is a correct assumption to make, however, Stein’s philosophical anthropology

certainly does have ramifications for ethical theory, which Stein insists on making clear at

numerous moments. These moments, moreover, indicate the degree to which such connections are

made not in a careless or even unreflective way, but rather do indeed indicate a depth of insight

into the ethical life calling out to be unearthed and further developed.

A close reading of some of the most ethically significant moments of Stein’s work serves

to indicate across her thought a discernibly connected set of reflections upon the notion of the

ethical task, to the extent that it might very well make sense to speak here, at least loosely, of a

Steinian ‘ethics’. Moreover, the apparently undeveloped character of her ethics might be shed

away if read upon the backdrop of the ethical discourse concerning value, vocation, and ethical

renewal which formed the heart of the very tradition of phenomenology of which Stein was a

member. Reading Stein’s ethics upon the backdrop of this tradition, and the works of Husserl and

Scheler especially, it becomes evident that the notion of the ethical life which undergirds her

thinking, and which even could be said to undergird the very conception of the nature of the human

person itself with which the whole of her philosophy is concerned,2 is the notion of what Husserl

had called an ethics of ‘renewal’.

Over and above all else, Stein demonstrates a certain effort to articulate the task of the

individual human life in terms of one’s self-responsibility for what she eventually calls ‘renewal’

(Erneuerung). Ultimately, such renewal of the person is represented as a reorganization of the

2
Mette Lebech, The Philosophy of Edith Stein: From Phenomenology to Metaphysics (Oxford:
Peter Lang, 2015), 18.
 3

architecture and furniture of the soul conceived along the lines of a Teresian ‘interior castle’, as

the reorganization of the soul targeted at the possibility of drawing ever closer to the core of oneself

wherein one might encounter God in a personal way. While this latter dimension of Stein’s ethics

of renewal might seem more of the nature of mysticism/religious life, i.e. more a spirituality than

an ethics of renewal, it is indicative of the degree to which, for Stein, ethics is rooted in

philosophical (and theological) anthropology, just as are psychology, the spiritual sciences, etc.,

and thus is rooted in a holistic conception of personality which cannot, as in Kierkegaard, for

instance, distinguish strongly between the ethical and the religious.

This paper, then, will attempt to accomplish three things in the further elaboration of

Stein’s ethics of renewal. First, it will attempt briefly to recount the idea of an ethics of renewal in

the work of Husserl and Scheler in order to situate Stein’s ethical thought within a context capable

of illuminating her own work. Secondly, it will set out to trace the development of Stein’s ethical

thinking in various moments of her thought, first in her pre-conversion phenomenological treatises

and her analysis of the ethical development of personality; secondly, in the 1930’s lectures on

women’s education and on the structure of the human being, where this task is conceived as a

project of living out a personal and universal vocation bestowed by God; and thirdly in Finite and

Eternal Being, wherein the moral life is suggested as a work of renewal in connection with the

Teresian metaphor of the ‘interior castle’. Finally, it will conclude with a brief consideration of

the contribution which Stein’s own ethics of renewal makes to the discussion as articulated in

Husserl and Scheler.

II.

Phenomenology and Stein’s ‘Ethics’. The most direct and systematic expression of the idea

of an ethics of renewal among the phenomenologists is expressed by Edmund Husserl in a series

 4

of articles submitted to the Japanese journal The Kaizo. There, Husserl makes an impassioned plea

for renewal, understood here both as the necessary renewal of the individual as well as of society

and its culture. He writes in the first of his Kaizo articles that, “[r]enewal is the universal call in

our present time, so full of suffering, and in the whole realm of European culture.”3 Precisely what

this entails, Husserl clarifies when he writes that, “something new must happen; it must occur in

us and through us ourselves, through us as co-members of humanity who, living in this world,

form it through ourselves and ourselves through it.”4 Husserl calls for an ‘ethical struggle’

(ethischen Kampf), refusing to resign ourselves to the Spenglerian fate of the ‘decline of the West’

while also demanding the formation of ourselves and of the world anew through free reason. Of

course, such an ethical struggle must have some telos, and, for Husserl, the goal of renewal is

ultimately the formation of a ‘better humanity’ (eine bessere Menschheit) and of a ‘genuine human

culture’ (eine echt humane Kultur). Such a notion of genuine, or as he also describes it, ‘true’

(wahre) humanity, is established as normative, as a kind of Platonic ‘idea of man’ (Idee des

Menschen), which relativizes all factual forms of humanity and, if we live rationally, becomes the

entelechy of all self-formation in the renewal of oneself or one’s culture in an, ideally, ever-

increasing approximation to the ideal of genuineness.5

The notion of renewal becomes emblematic of the whole ethical project itself: “the renewal

of man—of the individual man and of the communalized humanity—is the highest theme of all

3
Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band XXVII: Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–
1937), ed. Thomas Nenon und Has Rainer Sepp (Dordrecht: Kluwer Acamemic Publishers, 1989),
3: “Erneuerung ist der allgemeine Ruf in unserer leidensvollen Gegenwart und ist es im
Gesamtbereich der europäischen Kultur.” [Henceforth, HUA XXVII]
4
Ibid., 4.: “Ein neues muß werden; es muß in uns und durch uns selbst werden, durch uns als
Mitglieder der in dieser Welt lebenden, sie durch uns und uns durch sie gestaltenden Menschheit.”
5
For a more complete account of Husserl’s Kaizo articles, see Donn Welton, “Husserl and the
Japanese,” Review of Metaphysics 44 (1999): 575–606.
 5

ethics.”6 This work is predicated upon the reflective recognition of the nature of man as a personal

and free being who forms his or her personal character through either free and rational or merely

passively affective and sensuous acts of position-taking towards values. Rational, active position-

taking represents an accomplishment of a genuinely personal nature; a merely passive giving-way

to sensuous or habitual inclination is representative of the sub-personal, sub-rational life of

passivity which undergirds personal life.7 Much of the moral task, for Husserl, then, is

characterized in terms of a wresting of personal life from out of the unreflective and impersonal

grip of the merely passive.8 Husserl also characterizes this in terms of a contrast between a merely

animal and a genuinely human life. However, the genuineness of the human life is also to be

discerned in something more than its opposition to mere animality; the genuine human life is a

tension towards genuine values.9

The task of renewal, for Husserl, requires constant work and vigilance. The entropic

tendency towards passivity rather than activity requires that the ethical person engage in the

constant effort towards self-conscious awareness of their own rational self-responsibility, and,

above all, it requires the constant work of self-regulation on the road to realization of the ultimate

and universal goal of a single human life. Husserl describes this through the metaphor of a

professional vocation. Just as an occupation requires, within one’s professional/vocational time,

constant self-regulation in order to realize its ends, so also is the ethical life a universal vocation

6
HUA XXVII, 20: “Erneuerung des Menschen – des Einzelmenschen und einer
vergemeinschafteten Menschheit – ist das oberste Thema aller Ethik.”
7
Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band XXXVII: Einleitung in die Ethik:
Volesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924, ed. Henning Peucker (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 2004), 110–113.
8
Henning Peucker, “From Logic to the Person: An Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Ethics,” The
Review of Metaphysics 62 (2008): 307–325, at 322f.
9
HUA XXVII, 26.
 6

requiring constant self-regulation in order to realize the individual end of becoming one’s true self,

or the self which I ought to be as recognized through the free and rational position-taking of

autonomous reason.10 The pursuit of one’s ‘true self’ as the absolute and highest value realizable

is, for Husserl, ultimately a work of renewal so far as the achievement of the ‘true’ or ‘ideal self’

brings about ‘something new’, a “truly rational human being.”11

Max Scheler’s essay “Ordo Amoris” demonstrates a similar ethics of renewal. Here,

Scheler argues that the person’s openness to the world is conditioned upon the concrete manner in

which the person orders values into a hierarchy through acts of loving and hating. The extent to

which I value in accordance with the objective hierarchy of value-types, which Scheler had worked

out in his Formalismus,12 is the extent to which I am open to the world of being as it is. It is also

in this connection that I am, in my present state of character, as I ought to be. As Scheler writes,

“it follows that any sort of rightness or falseness and perversity in my life and activity are

determined by whether there is an objectively correct order of these stirrings of my love and hate,

my inclination and disinclination, my many-sided interest in the things of this world. It depends

further on whether I can impress this ordo amoris on my inner moral tenor [Gemüt].”13 Moving

forward, Scheler recognizes that much of the task of the moral life is concerned with the formation

or renewal of the ordo amoris to ensure that one’s own inner ordering of loves and hates becomes

a perfect microcosm of the world of true values themselves.

10
Peucker, 323.
11
HUA XXVII, 33: “wahrhaft vernünftigen Menschen.”
12
See especially, Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. and
ed. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston, IN: Northwestern University Press, 1973),
104–110.
13
Max Scheler, “Ordo Amoris,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. and ed. David R.
Lachterman (Evanston, IN: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 98.
 7

The work of moral life, then, is primarily concerned with wresting one’s loves and hates

from the concrete, factual manner in which they are currently formed. It consists in responding to

the ‘calling’, or vocation, of each person to conform, in a genuinely individual manner, one’s inner

moral tenor with the order of true values, reforming or renewing the person’s very soul in the

process. In doing so, the person achieves her authentic ‘destiny’ as opposed to succumbing to mere

‘fate’.14 The work of renewal embraces the particularity of individual personality and specifies the

moral task to the individual and the realization of her individual essence as ‘bestowed by God’.

This is particularly the case so far as the task of renewal and the achievement of one’s authentic

destiny can only be achieved through the spiritual work of cultivating an infinite love for God.15

As we approach the ‘ethics’ of Edith Stein, it may be seen that Stein’s references to the

work of renewal in light of the vocation to pattern oneself after the highest value-types and their

objective relations are in many ways heavily influenced by the ethical insights of Husserl and

Scheler. On the other hand, the influence of these thinkers might also help to provide deeper insight

into the cogency and systematic promise of Stein’s own contribution to ethics if more conscious

reference back to these thinkers is kept in mind.

III.

Edith Stein’s Ethics of Renewal in the Context of her Work: The Ethical in the

Phenomenological Treatises. It is now our task to pursue an account of Stein’s ethical thought as

it unfolds in her work. Much of Stein’s ‘ethics’ is already substantially contained in her earliest

phenomenological works, but nonetheless unfolds in particular and concrete ways in the later

works which serve to further specify the moral implications of the foundational concept of the

14
Scheler, “Ordo Amoris,” 104.
15
Ibid., 110–114.
 8

ethical first coming to prominence as early as On the Problem of Empathy. It is to the systematic

unfolding of this ethics which this paper must now turn.

In On the Problem of Empathy, Stein begins to develop an account of the constitution of

the spiritual dimension of the human being which is given, over against the merely natural, in its

being-motivated rather than caused. Here, Stein makes a seemingly offhand reference to the idea

of ethics as a science parallel to logic which discloses a priori normative rational laws for feeling,

willing, and conduct.16 While she seems at this juncture to do little with this idea, as she

immediately moves on in the investigation to uncover possible variations of the essential

correlation of willing and motivation, nonetheless, close reading of the sections which follow

indicate that the continuing development of her philosophical anthropology contains leading clues

for an ethics which Stein does not refrain altogether from following out here. It will be useful to

discuss these investigations in further detail.

The anthropological framework for Stein’s ethics is developed in particular as she begins

to work out the problem of the constitution of the individual person. There, Stein argues that person

is constituted as essentially correlative to the world of value, as values inform and shape personal

identity.17 Values are given originarily, for Stein, following Brentano, Husserl, Scheler et al., in

emotive experience. Moreover, it is this dimension of affectivity that most discloses the concrete

person herself so far as it is only such experiences that can reveal the depth of subjective life most

demonstrating personality rather than the mere logical subject of rational acts disclosed in

reflection back upon what Stein calls ‘theoretical acts’. She writes, “In ‘theoretical acts’, such as

acts of perception, imagination, relating or deductive thinking, etc., I am turned to an object in

16
Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. and ed. Waltraut Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS
Publications, 1989), 97. [Henceforth, OPE]
17
Lebech, 31; Calcagno, 99.
 9

such a way that the ‘I’ and the acts are not there at all. There is always the possibility of throwing

a reflecting glance on these, since they are always accomplished and ready for perception. But it

is equally possible for this not to happen, for the ‘I’ to be entirely absorbed in considering the

object.”18 In other words, experientially, there is little of the ego to be immediately discerned in

acts of theorizing. It is only in acts of pure reflection back upon the experience that one must draw

the logical conclusion that, as for Kant, the ego must accompany all subjective acts.19 However, in

terms of the primordial lived-experience of theoretical acts itself, there is nothing specifically of

the ‘person’ on display there. This is altogether different in the case of feeling-acts, in which person

shows itself as a constitutive element of the experience, as the ‘face’ or performer of the act itself.

She writes, “as it feels [the I] not only experiences objects, but it itself. It experiences emotions as

coming from the ‘depth of its ‘I’.’ This also means that this ‘self’-experiencing ‘I’ is not the pure

‘I’, for the pure ‘I’ has no depth. But the ‘I’ experienced in emotion has levels of various depths.

These are revealed as emotions arise out of them.”20 The metaphor of depth will be crucial for

Stein’s ethics of renewal; thus, it will be helpful for us to dwell on it at some length.

It is instructive that emotion reveals not only the phenomenon of depth, but also, more

importantly, that this phenomenon is characterized by levels of depth. In this connection, Stein

begins to speak in terms of depth and periphery, or depth and surface. What is experienced as being

in the ‘depth’ of one’s ‘soul’, is revealed as more intimately tied to the self objectivated in its

personal selfhood and thus discloses more completely who one is by indicating what is most

important to the person, revealing something about the identity and type of person that she is.21 On

18
Stein, OPE, 98.
19
Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 108.
20
Stein, OPE, 98.
21
Calcagno, 97.
 10

the other hand, what is only experienced superficially will be less tied to the person, and this also

tells us something about the type and individual identity of the person: this type of person or this

individual is one who is not deeply affected by such and a such a value or bearer of value. Thus,

as Stein writes, “in feelings we experience ourselves not only as present, but also as constituted in

such and such a way. They announce personal attributes to us.”22 However descriptive all of this

may be, it is perhaps not yet adequately clear what is specifically meant by ‘depth’ and ‘periphery’

and how these spatial metaphors may adequately be applied to the person herself.

On the one hand, Stein describes the pleasure or pain of sensory feeling as experienceable

only on the periphery of the I. That is, the sensory feeling of the pleasure of the warm sun shining

down upon me is something that cannot be felt in the ‘depth’ of my personal ‘I’. On the other hand,

the contentment arising from throwing off all consideration of the mountain of work left on my

desk and allowing myself to rest and relax in the moment of sitting on a park bench while basking

in the first warm sun after a long winter may be something which can be felt in my ‘depth’. Or, as

in Stein’s own example, “[a]nger over the loss of a piece of jewelry comes from a more superficial

level or does not penetrate as deeply as losing the same object as the souvenir of a loved one.

Furthermore, pain over the loss of this person himself would be even deeper.”23 This stratification

of the self which Stein is attempting to describe indicates the way in which the self may be more

or less profoundly aroused or affected by different things or may be more or less ‘invested’ in

things. The more one ‘puts oneself’ into something, the more profoundly will it affect the person

in positive or negative ways. Now, it should be noted that Stein’s specific stratification of the self

in accordance with value is representative of a kind of normative ideal to which Stein is appealing

22
Stein, OPE, 99.
23
Ibid., 101.
 11

more than to how things factually may be. That is, the superficiality with which one ought to feel

the loss of a piece of jewelry really ought to pale in comparison with the depth with which one

ought to feel the loss of a person, yet it is certainly conceivable that one might be more profoundly

affected by the loss of the jewelry than by the loss of a friend. However, it is evident that such an

inversion of the depth and superficiality of the person as it corresponds to different value domains

would represent a certain irrational or perverse inversion of values themselves; as in Scheler, it

would represent the degree to which the subjective ordo amoris of this individual has failed to

correspond to the objective hierarchy of values which it ought, ideally and normatively, to mirror.

In either case, as Stein continues her analysis, “every time we advance in the value realm,

we also make acquisitions in the realm of our own personality. This correlation makes feelings

and their firm establishment in the ‘I’ rationally lawful as well as making possible decisions about

‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in this domain.”24 In this connection, Stein reasserts her interest in the ethical

implications of her theory of personality, but she also begins to indicate an account of the ethical

task as a task of renewal in Husserl’s sense. If, as she puts it, someone deeply overcome by the

loss of their wealth feels this ‘being-overcome’ as ‘irrational’, then this indicates to the person that,

while they do in fact feel this way and are the kind of person to feel in this way, they nonetheless

ought not to feel in this way, and this indicates also the need for a renewal or a reform of the

formations of depth and surface in order to become adequately ‘rational’.25 She makes this clearer

a little further on when she writes that, “I can enjoy a work of art and at the same time enjoy my

enjoyment of it. The enjoyment of the work of art will ‘reasonably’ be the deeper one. We call the

‘inversion’ of this relationship ‘perversion’.”26 In part, Stein in this passage begins to work on the

24
Ibid.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid., 102.
 12

outlines of a pure axiology wherein it will be clear what kinds of acts have a higher or a lower

value essentially as well as the pure normative moral lawfulness which would follow from this

pure axiology;27 however, for our purposes here what is of particular interest is purely the fact that,

so far as inversions of the proper ‘rational’ order of valuing is possible precisely in the inversion

of feeling from out of one’s depth or surface, the ethical task must be conceived first and foremost

as a task of rightly ordering the feeling of values in correspondence to what is rationally given as

objectively lawful concerning their order.

Now, Stein further develops her notion of the depth and periphery of the personal ‘I’

drawing on Pfänder’s notion of an ‘I kernel’, or what she will also call the ‘core personality’

corresponding to her notion of depth.28 That which pertains to the person in her very depth pertains

to the kernel or core of personal identity which is the full self or actual character of the person as

such. This will be an important notion moving forward. However, at this point Stein makes clear

that, drawing upon this distinction between core and periphery, there is an essential connection

between the dual projects of philosophical anthropology and axiology and that, going along with

this, a complete presentation of both theory of the person and theory of values is already disclosive

of the outlines of an ethics. Thus, she writes, “the ideal person with all his values in a suitable

hierarchy and having adequate feelings would correspond to the entire realm of value levels. Other

personal types would result from the abolition of certain value ranges or from the modification of

the value hierarchy and, further, from differences in the intensity of value experiences or from

27
This in itself would be an interesting and fruitful topic of discussion in further uncovering Stein’s
‘ethics’; however, discussion of the ins and outs of Stein’s axiology goes beyond the scope of this
paper and would best be left for a separate investigation.
28
Alexander Pfänder, “Motiv und Motivation,” in Münchener Philosophische Abhandlungen
(Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1911), 169.
 13

preferring one of the several forms of expression, such as bodily expression, willing, action, etc.”29

The recognition of the correspondence of the ideally normative personality to ideally normative

values in their hierarchical levels along with the factual variation of divergent personality types

from the ideal and normative is, again, indicative of the moral task as a task of renewal. The feeling

of moral duty towards the cultivation of an openness for such renewal comes to the fore largely in

relation to Stein’s borrowed notion of the kernel or core of the person and the idea of a personal

type referenced in the passage just quoted.

Stein argues that, given in the free variation of the idea of an individual personality, there

is something empirically fortuitous about the individual nature or ‘soul’ (Seele) of this or that

individual person so far as one is and may be shaped by any number of empirical influences, e.g.

culture, circumstance, conditions in the psycho-physical structure of the individual, etc.30

However, Stein argues that there are essential limits to the variability of an individual personality

which we run up against in considering what Stein calls the “unchangeable kernel, the personal

structure” of the person.31 She writes, “I can think of Caesar in a village instead of in Rome and

can think of him transferred into the twentieth century. Certainly, his historically settled

individuality would then go through some changes, but just as surely he would remain Caesar. The

personal structure marks off a range of possibilities of variation within which the person’s real

29
Stein, OPE, 108.
30
It should be noted that, as Peter Schulz has shown, by ‘soul’ Stein does not intend to indicate a
metaphysical principle, e.g. a subsistent form of the living body, but rather refers to the ‘space’ of
the playing out of that life of affectivity (Schulz, 166) through which the person responds to the
objective world as this person who shows forth a good or a bad character (Pamela Chávez Aguilar,
“On Freedom: Three Steps in the Thought of Edith Stein,” in Alles Wesentlich lässt sich nicht
schreiben. Leben und Denken Edith Steins im Spiegel ihres Gesamtwerks, herausgegeben von
Andreas Speer und Stephan Regh, in Zusammenarbeit mit Sr. Antonia Sondermann OCD
[Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder Verlag, 2016], 338).
31
Stein, OPE, 110.
 14

distinctiveness can be developed ‘ever according to circumstances’.”32 The core of the self

indicates at a certain level that I can be this person who I am only so far as I value characteristically

in certain ways and in no other. This will be an important concept for Stein as she develops her

notion of moral vocation in later works. However, it is significant here so far as the personal core

ideally, essentially, and normatively mirrors authentic values and thus cannot be thought of as

perverse. Perversion enters the framework only so far as, for Stein, “the psycho-physical empirical

person can be a more or less complete realization of the spiritual one.”33 In other words, the

personal core corresponding to the life of depth is a normative ideal, which the person must strive

ethically to unfold. However, in the incompleteness of self-unfolding characteristic of actual life,

my actual personality may fail to fulfill what Stein elicits, on the back of her previously developed

axiology, as a normative ethical law, “if you feel a value and can realize it, then do it,”34 and thus

calls out for reformation or renewal of the actual self in light of the spiritual one.35

Finally, as deformations or incomplete approximations of the ideal personality,

personalities may be grouped into types. Personality types, as correlative of value classifications

or levels, provide the possibility for disclosing, through empathy, particular value levels possibly

not available to me. Thus, Stein writes,

32
Ibid.
33
Ibid., 111.
34
Ibid., 114.
35
It is especially in this passage, as also in her notion of ‘perversion’, that the ethical motivations
of Stein’s analysis here may fully come to the fore. Thus, while it is certainly true that Stein is also
interested in the problems of what one may call, generally, the problem of ‘human development’,
i.e. the development of personality through maturation, cultivation of interests, education, etc.,
here she makes it clear that the particular ‘development’ with which she is especially concerned is
a specifically ethical one. That is, she is concerned for the cultivation of the highest values,
fulfillment of value as ideal, in Scheler’s sense, as carrying a genuine ‘ought-to-be’, as opposed to
a merely relative importance as a potential source of non-obligatory but nonetheless laudable
higher interest.
 15

“I can be skeptical myself and still understand that another sacrifices all his earthly

goods to his faith. I see him behave in this way and empathize a value experiencing

as the motive for his conduct. The correlate of this is not accessible to me, causing

me to ascribe to him a personal level I do not myself possess. In this way I

empathically gain the type homo religiosus by nature foreign to me, and I

understand it even though what newly confronts me here will always remain

unfulfilled.”36

In spite of Stein’s seeming agnosticism here, or her apparent hopelessness in the face of the

experience of religious values, what she has indicated ethically thus far is a certain demand for the

unfolding or deepening of personality demanded by the empathic experience of levels of value

previously unavailable to her, to pursue a renewal of the soul in order to encounter those previously

inaccessible values in their authentic height and to order her life accordingly.

In light of this, in her Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, Stein understands the

moral effort to take on a right character or to eliminate a negative one to consist in an alteration of

how one values. Thus, she writes, “Any work on yourself, any efforts toward a cleansing of your

soul can consist only in this: to suppress negatively valued deeds and stirrings of your soul and to

combat the disposition to them, or even not to let them arise, and conversely to hold yourself open

for positive values.”37 This ‘holding oneself open’ for values to which one may not already be

oriented or to which one may not have had first-hand originary experience, of course, does not

represent a possible ‘development’ of the soul, since the core of the person itself does not develop

36
Ibid., 115.
37
Edith Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanitites, trans. and ed. Mary Catharine
Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2000), 232–233.
[Henceforth, PPH]
 16

but unfolds; rather, it constitutes a reorganization of the concrete soul, of the formations of valuing

through which the core unfolds or into which it blooms.38

Similarly, in An Investigation Concerning the State, Stein asserts that “ethical values are

personal values. They attach to the essential substance of the person in her ways of comporting

herself. They show up in her comportment toward values of all kinds: in how she allows herself to

be filled up by a value, how she takes a stance toward it, the values to which she gives precedence

before others, and those for which she decides to take action.”39 The rooting of ethical values in

personal values is essentially linked with the fact that ethical values may be realized only in persons

who realize states of affairs that are characterized by ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’. However, moral

value is not strictly concerned with the external state of affairs realized by the act, but, as Stein

indicates here, has just as much to do with the attitudes, dispositions, and feelings which give rise

to the act in the first place. Failures to realize ethical states of affairs, or failures with regard to a

disorder in morally relevant attitudes, dispositions, etc., result in a state of guilt. At this juncture,

Stein discusses the phenomenon of guilt at some length, and her analysis will be of use to us so far

as her discussion of guilt as borne by the individual responsible for moral failure bears upon the

general essence of the moral project as one of renewal.40

Stein describes ethical guilt as characterized by a “tainting of the soul…[having] no sense

at all apart from the person who has ‘taken it upon herself’.”41 Distinguishing such ‘being-guilty’

in the sense of moral ‘sin’ from the ‘being-guilty’ in the sense of having transgressed the legal

38
Ibid., 235; Schulz, 166.
39
Edith Stein, Investigation Concerning the State, trans. and ed. Marianne Sawicki (Washington,
D.C.: ICS Publications, 2006), 155. [Henceforth, ICS]
40
Of course, the project of renewal in the context of this work is a political one as well, for Stein.
However, the notion of political renewal and the overlapping of the political and the ethical in
Stein’s thought cannot be explored here.
41
Ibid., 157.
 17

order, Stein argues that, while legal guilt can be eradicated through punishment which restores

equilibrium to the social and political order, sin is a phenomenon essentially untouched by any

punishment stemming from political authority, even where a moral transgression is at the same

time a legal transgression subject to punishment. Rather, as Stein writes, “[w]hat sin calls for is

not punishment but repentance, which means something that happens within the soul, just like sin

itself…Sin as defilement of the soul can be wiped out by perfect repentance.”42 Now, Stein is

careful to note that part of the act of repentance might include an act of expiation as a kind of self-

imposed penalty for sin; however, such self-imposed punishment is a function purely of a

‘readiness for repentance’, and is not the same thing as repentance itself.43 Repentance, rather,

requires an intentional reorientation of the soul’s volitional commitment towards ethical values.

This is an act essentially independent of expiation and punishment alike.

Now, Stein insists upon an important distinction between ethical values and norms which

obtain a priori and the concrete prevailing morality, or ethos, of a given community. This ethos

consists in “the habitus of soul of a community of persons, its basic stance toward the world of

values.”44 Such a habitus, which likewise expresses itself in the contrast between the depth and

superficiality of the community itself as a personality of a higher order in its relation to values,45

can be subjected to a possible transformation, on the one hand, where legal regulation does not

coincide with the prevailing morality and produces an alteration of that morality through a legally

enforced modification of public practical behavior. This may be a good or a bad thing so far as the

prevailing morality does or does not reflect a proper correspondence to a priori ethical norms and

42
Ibid., 159–160.
43
Ibid., 163.
44
Ibid., 171.
45
Lebech, 82.
 18

to the extent that the legal order is meant as a correction to ethical disorder on the part of the

prevailing ethos. On the other hand, what this possible transformation and its dual implications

show forth, although Stein does not say this directly, is the fact that moral guilt may obtain not

only from the act of a person counter to prevailing morality, but may also stem from the failure of

a cultural ethos to conform to a priori ethical norms. In this regard, the transformation of a guilt-

laden prevailing morality becomes the requirement through a call for communal repentance,

repentance which is not only a sorrowful acknowledgement of guilt and a will to its negation but

which is worked out by taking a renewed and proper stance towards values, as Husserl had called

for in the Kaizo articles.

If this is the moral demand, Stein makes a further development in her moral account so far

as she acknowledges that “the ethical quality of a person does not depend on the person alone—

neither the ability to grasp values nor the way the person is filled with them is a matter of her

liberty.”46 Seemingly acknowledging Kant’s worry over the contingency of value-feeling,47 Stein

recognizes that the way in which an individual feels values and their capacity for value-feeling is

very much rooted in the prevailing ethos into which they are born, and thus they are not entirely

responsible for having produced characteristic position-takings towards the order of values and

value levels. However, Stein insists nonetheless that, “the ethical duty (the simple fact of what

should be done) addresses itself to [the person’s] liberty and makes sense only in reference to that.

If it’s not left in our hands to procure for ourselves access to values, we’re still free to ‘listen’ for

them, and that can be required. If it remains without result, then a disvalue may well attach to that,

46
Stein, ICS, 171.
47
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Alan W. Wood (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), AK 4:399.
 19

but it is not a violation of duty.”48 This acknowledgment of the moral demand to ‘listen’ for moral

values, access to which we may be presently denied, amounts to an openness for ethical renewal

so far as one must cultivate a desire that one’s characteristic moral position-takings towards values

should correspond perfectly to the a priori order of values themselves. She acknowledges that such

work may be unsuccessful for any number of reasons; yet, the person would not have violated

moral duty in a failure to ‘hear’ even where there has been a concerted effort to ‘listen’. Thus, an

openness to renewal without actual renewal does not entail a violation of the moral task, even

where its pursuit may tragically fail. Stein here seems to be acknowledging the weakness of human

moral power, even as she insists upon the necessity of the moral task itself which can and must be

fulfilled regardless.

The interpretation of the moral task along the lines of a project of ethical renewal growing

out of Stein’s early phenomenological works has highlighted Stein’s notion that the moral project

consists essentially in an effort to conform oneself, as well as the community, to the objective

value-hierarchy itself, along with the development of a sensitivity for the ideally normative ‘ought-

to-be’ of the highest values. In On the Problem of Empathy, this is first clarified as a project of

enlargement of the personality by acquiring new personality characteristics accessing ever new

and higher regions of value, felt in their proper depth in accordance with their objective value-

height. Such a work must be fitted into the true sense of the self as the core personality which, as

she develops this notion further in the Philosophy of Psychology, ideally is to blossom out into the

renewed personality characteristics acquired through the work of renewal. In doing so, the person

must ethically strive to stamp out and cleanse from the soul any improper position-takings towards

value which, in the context of the Investigation Concerning the State, has been further identified

48
Stein, ICE, 171–172.
 20

as productive of the negative phenomenon of guilt within the soul. Stein’s ethical considerations,

then, so far as they emerge in the early works, are unified by a shared development of the ethical

demand as a demand for renewal which must be pursued even if it is not realized in fact. The

development of Stein’s ethical thought undergoes further clarification in the context of her post-

conversion work of the 1930’s, yet closely based on the groundwork already established in her

early works. It is now necessary to turn to those works in order to uncover the further enhanced

sense of the ethical with which Stein is working there.

IV.

The Ethical in Stein’s thought of the 1930’s. Beginning in the 1930’s, Stein describes the

obligation to the project of ethical renewal in terms of a vocation bestowed by God to the

cultivation of an objectively correct ethos as well as to the project of self-formation brought about

through education in the context of her lectures of the period on women’s professions and

philosophical anthropology. It will be helpful to piece together Stein’s understanding of how these

themes enlarge her discussion of the essence of the moral project as it takes shape in this period.

For Stein, to every vocation there corresponds an ethos, or “something which is operative

within [the person] himself, an inner form, a constant spiritual attitude which the scholastics term

habitus.”49 For Stein, such an attitude designates an enduring way of comporting oneself on the

basis of characteristic and likewise enduring position-takings towards value. As a result, she states,

“such constant spiritual attitudes give a definite uniform character to changing behavioral patterns,

and the attitudes manifest themselves through this character in external action.”50 As a spiritual

attitude, moreover, we are dealing with characteristic modes of comportment and valuing that are

49
Edith Stein, Woman, trans. and ed. Freda Mary Oben (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications,
1996), 43.
50
Ibid.
 21

not owing to temperament or natural dispositions, but rather to ones explicitly taken up and imbued

with rationality and personality. In the context of her discussion here, Stein is specifically

interested in what she calls a ‘professional ethos’ which will be useful for addressing the ethos of

women’s professions. Leaving the special issue of gender aside to focus in on the development of

Stein’s concept of ethos, generically, a ‘professional ethos’ refers to “the totality of habitus which

emerges from within as the formative principle in a person’s professional life…when the

professional life demonstrates objectively a uniform character.”51 For instance, being a policeman

requires that loyalty, conscientiousness, courage, service to the community, and commitment to

upholding law and order be enduring characteristics of the person’s life and action, at the very

least so long as they act and remain, as Husserl would put it, within the particular vocational time

(Berufszeit) of their profession, i.e. so long as they are ‘on duty’. However, the professional ethos

takes on a distinctively moral character so far as the profession is approached not as a “mere source

of income or as a pastime,” but instead as “an authentic vocation.”52 It will be helpful to clarify

here what Stein means by ‘vocation’.

According to its etymological signification, a vocation designates something into which

one is ‘called’. But, Stein asks, “what does to be called mean?”53 She answers by indicating the

point that, essentially, ‘to be called’ designates a relational essence, requiring: 1) one who calls,

2) one who is called, and 3) something to which they are called.54 The content of all three are,

obviously, essentially variable; however, it is clear that the ‘something’ of vocation is understood

as a particular kind of human occupation or activity. One may be called in various ways, but most

51
Ibid., 43–44.
52
Ibid., 44.
53
Ibid., 59.
54
Ibid.
 22

generically, one’s calling is designated as “that to which he seems to be called.”55 This seeming

can occur in various ways, e.g. appointment by a human institution, authority, etc. However, Stein

insists that such a calling presupposes a recognition of a prior calling ‘according to’ ability,

education, or formation.56 All ability, education, and formation can be developed, however, only

on the basis of one’s natural potency, and thus the calling is, for Stein, “prescribed in human

nature; the course of life fructifies it and renders it recognizable to other people so that they are

able to declare the calling in which he might happily find his place in life.”57 Stated in another

way, one could say that one’s vocation is rooted in one’s essential, unchanging core personality as

well as the general human nature which the individual person possesses and which is especially

disclosed through empathy. I am called to the cultivation of this core personality and to the

particular ethos to which the core personality is correlative as increasingly opening onto values,

and more and more as opening onto the other and to God.58 As such, it is clear that the notions of

the ethical with which Stein was working in her earlier writings is redeployed here in a deepened

way. The ethical is rooted in calling for the purpose of renewal of the person and the specifically

human in man. This is a deepening of the account of the ethical insofar as it is clear that moral

obligation is not simply a generic demand to achieve the highest possible values or value domains

available in general and in a manner identical to everyone else. Rather, I must do so in the specific

way in which I am individually called according to my nature and in communion with others, and

with God most of all.59

55
Ibid.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid., 60.
58
Donald Wallenfang, Human and Divine Being: A Study on the Theological Anthropology of
Edith Stein (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017), 2 and 16.
59
Donald Wallenfang, “Awaken, O Spirit: the Vocation of Becoming in the Work of Edith Stein,”
Logos 15 (2012): 64f.
 23

This represents, moreover, a deepening in another respect so far as Stein goes on to include

a theological dimension to the account of vocation as well. She writes, “the person’s nature and

his life’s course are no gift or trick of chance, but—seen with the eyes of faith—the work of God.

And thus, finally, it is God Himself who calls. It is He who calls each human being to that to which

all humanity is called, it is He who calls each individual to that to which he or she is called

personally, and, over and above this, He calls man and woman as such to something specific.”60 It

is in this theological dimension of approach to the notion of vocation, and more broadly to the

notion of the ethical as it emerges from the discussion of philosophical, and now theological,

anthropology that the idea of a professional and moral ‘calling’ obtains a personal sense. If, merely

philosophically, I am called by my nature to something, then this is a ‘calling’ only in an extended,

metaphorical sense, for here it would not be an alter ego who calls but merely my ‘ideal I’ as

spiritual core personality which calls. While such an account might satisfy a Kantian demand for

autonomy, it is not obvious, apart from a prior (ideological) commitment, why such a self-calling

would be normative.61 As a calling typically involves two independent subjects rather than one, it

would seem to be ill-suited to its typical use as well as the use to which Stein puts it if it is merely

a calling of myself to myself, i.e. if caller and called are identical with one another.62 However,

60
Edith Stein, Woman, 60.
61
Terrence C. Wright has shown that it is precisely on this issue in the interpretation of the ‘call
of conscience’ that one finds the crux of the difference and later dispute between Stein and
Heidegger (see Terrence C. Wright, “Artistic Truth and the True Self in Edith Stein,” American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2008): 127–142, at 139. Moreover, Michael F. Andrews has
given a good indication that, given Stein’s account of empathy generally, Kant’s Enlightenment
conception of autonomy may be phenomenologically discredited (see Michael F. Andrews, “Edith
Stein and Max Scheler: Ethics, Empathy, and the Constitution of the Acting Person,” Quaestiones
Disputatae 3 (2012): 33–47, at 47).
62
The same implication seems to be in force even where we encounter other moral linguistic
symbols. For instance, if morality is experienced as a ‘demand’, there must also be, as in a calling,
one who demands, one of whom something is demanded, and something which is demanded of
them.
 24

introducing the theological dimension both provides the vocation with an account of its own

normativity as well as provides the context within which the idea of a ‘vocation’ is no longer

merely metaphorical but becomes a literal calling to the project of renewal. Thus, at this stage,

morality is equally a philosophical as a theological project, and will require a constant contact with

the theological dimension of human personality as well as an openness to the thematic of grace.

This she makes clearer in her 1932/33 lecture course Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person.

Stein’s main interest here is in drawing out the implications of her theory of human nature

for pedagogical theory. However, it is clear from her introduction that Stein understands education

itself as a kind of ethical work. As such, philosophical and theological anthropology in this text

serve as the ethically normative foundation for an ethically valuable work of education.63 Thus,

Stein writes, “behind all human activity stands a logos which guides it.”64 The human logos both

guides human action as bestowing its meaning65 as well as provides the normative framework

within which such action ought to take place. It is, then, in studying the logos of man that the

ethical tasks of education are disclosed, namely as the self-formation of the individual student

according to the very ideal of humanity itself.66 Education is thus itself a work of ethical renewal

63
Thus, some scholars have rightly seen in Stein’s concept of Bildung, or the formative work of
education, the basis for a theory of ethics. See especially, Letterio Mauro, “Formare l’uomo e la
donna a ciò che devono diventare: la Bildung in Edith Stein,” in L’Uomo (In)formato: Percorsi
nella paideia ieri e oggi, ed. Angelo Campodonico and Letterio Mauro (Milano: FrancoAngeli,
2011), 59–73, and Calogero Caltagirone, “‘Dar-forma’ all’uomo: dimensione antropologica, etica
ed educative della Bildung in Edith Stein,” Conjectura: Filosophia educação 18 (2013): 20–23.
64
Edith Stein, Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person: Vorlesung zur philosphischen
Anthropologie, ed. Beate Beckmann-Zöller (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 2004), 2: “Hinter allem Tun
des Menschen steht ein Logos, der es leitet.” [Henceforth, ESGA 14]
65
Wallenfang, Human and Divine Being, 8.
66
ESGA 14, 2.
 25

aimed, as Mette Lebech has pointed out, at systematically shaping the student and the community

by bringing true values to their attention.67

Stein acknowledges that there are a variety of conditions contributing to the formation of

a person, including environmental conditions, both natural and social, as well as historical events

playing themselves out in the lives of individuals and communities, the interventions of culture,

religion, etc. In addition to such extrinsic conditions of personal development, Stein insists that

the person is also responsible for her own formation. But, she asks, “what does it mean that the

human being may be responsible for itself? It means that it lies within what he is and that it is

demanded of him to make out of himself something determinate: he can and ought to form

himself.”68 Such self-formation is a work of the person so far as person is understood as free and

spiritual. She writes that, “the free I which can decide for itself to do or to undertake something,

to do this or that, feels itself called to do this and to allow that.”69 Yet it is only the I which

experiences itself as free, i.e. as having the potential to decide for itself, that also feels itself called

to this or that obligation. Thus, the very sense of the ought is rooted, for Stein, in the content

(Inhalt) and origin (Ursprung) of the moral ‘calling’ itself.70 We have already seen that Stein thinks

of the origin of the call, from a theological perspective, as rooted in the divine. We will have to

return to this theme presently; however, purely phenomenologically, it is evident that what one

seems to be called to is the formation of the self. But what does this demand?

67
Lebech, 37 and 70.
68
ESGA 14, 78: “Was heißt es, daß der Mensch für sich verantwortlich sei? Es heißt, daß es an
ihm liegt, was er ist, und daß von ihm verlangt wird, etwas Bestimmtes aus sich zu Machen: Er
kann und soll sich selbst formen.”
69
Ibid., 79: “Das freie Ich, das sich entscheiden kann, etwas zu tun oder zu unterlassen, dies oder
jenes zu tun, fühlt sich im Innersten aufgerufen, dies zu tun und jenes zu lassen.”
70
Ibid.
 26

The answer to this question comes to the fore in Stein’s posing a separate question. Are the

I who forms and the self which is formed the same? She argues that the I as subject of the act of

self-formation is given in reflection back upon the act itself; however, the self as object of the act,

or as ‘material’ that is shaped by acts of self-formation, is clearly not given in reflection there.

Rather, in a manner reminiscent of Aristotle, the material of formation is the person’s “entire

animal nature. And the consequence of this forming would be the fully formed, personally worked

out human being.”71 The formation of the soul as characterized by the habitual position-takings of

the person relative to the world of values, requires, for Stein, a reordering, a renewal, of the actual

animal nature with its formations of habitual position-takings relative to value which have been

constituted passively in the instinctual tension towards pleasure and away from pain.72 This work

requires special attention to the constellation of spiritual acts of willing and comporting through

which the self is formed either consciously or unconsciously, which are rooted in the primordially

value-giving domain of feeling. Formation of the soul involves primarily, then, explicitly taking a

position through active comportment towards values and the feelings which intend values as

positive and negative, affirming or disavowing feelings, moreover, so far as they conform or do

not conform to the objective hierarchy of values themselves.73 In doing so, the soul is shaped

according to values as they are, and willing and comporting also, for Stein, acquire a ‘personal

form’ so far as they are touched and affected by the self’s personal freedom,74 which is thus also

enacted only in the movement towards actively living from out of one’s depth.75

71
Ibid., 80: “seine ganze animalische Natur. Und das Ergebnis dieser Formung wäre der voll
ausgebildete, personal durchgeformte Mensch.”
72
Ibid.
73
Schulz, 167.
74
ESGA 14, 82.
75
Aguilar, 343.
 27

Stein reaffirms, moreover, her insight already developed in On the Problem of Empathy

that the work of formation is also concerned with filling out properly the height and depth, the

surface and the center of the soul so that what touches the deepest center of the person herself are

those things which rightly ought to do so and also so that the person may act rightly from out of

their deepest center in external comportment regarding values of the deepest significance.76 This

individual project of formation resonates out into the community and its social moral task as well.

As she had argued as early as her Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities,77 the individual

project of moral formation is always already enmeshed in the moral project of the community’s

own self-formation insofar as the individual person is, according to his or her own individual

essence, a member of a particular community/communities in addition to being a member of

humanity generally as a kind of ‘all-community’, to use Stein’s term.78 Likewise, so far as the

community itself is given as a “super-personal unity”,79 or as a ‘personality of a higher order’ with

its own communal soul and stream of life in relation to values and their normative order to what

is most deeply valuable, the individual person is always implicated in the moral tenor of the

community and is thus obliged to its proper moral formation. What is of deepest moral significance

includes, of course, social values such as, for instance, the value of justice, but also values of the

holy and the profane and the dimension of the human nature which is transcendent to the purely

natural. For Stein, this dimension is already indicated within purely phenomenological

investigation. This is evident so far as one can recognize, independent of the question of the real

existence of God, that the human being is the being who asks after the ground of being itself. As

76
Mauro, 62.
77
See especially Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, 196f and 272–75.
78
ESGA 14, 134 and 136.
79
Ibid., 136.
 28

such, she writes, “the question concerning this Being, the search for God, belongs to human

being.”80 Theologically, then, presuming through faith God’s actual existence, the project of self-

formation or self-renewal which Stein has been describing must be understood in such a way as to

recognize the dimension of human nature which is disclosed in a specifically Christian

anthropology, in particular, that the human being is a created being owing its whole essential being

to the Uncreated Being. The moral call to self-formation stems from God and must have reference

to God.81 Stein writes, “what the human being is most deeply and specifically is thanks to God

alone… He is obliged to God with everything that he is… What I have to accept responsibility for,

I have to accept responsibility for before God.”82 Not only the moral calling to renewal is rooted

in one’s responsibility before God, but the very rule of one’s value itself is rooted in God’s calling

to the individual.83 Fulfillment of the task of renewal may be beyond the power of the natural

human will; however, through cooperation with grace, Stein is confident in the possibility for

perfect renewal of the human being.84

V.

The Ethical in Finite and Eternal Being. Stein’s presentation of the ethical as it emerges in

the context of her magnum opus, Finite and Eternal Being, repeats in essentials much of her

thought on the ethical so far as it has been developed up until this point. However, it is here in

particular that the notion of renewal of the soul in relation to the ultimate and highest bearer of

value, namely God, emerges most forcefully.

80
Ibid., 32: “Die Frage nach diesem Sein, das Suchen nach Gott gehört zum menschlichen Sein.”
81
Lebech, 90.
82
ESGA 14, 157: “Das Tiefste und Eigenste, was der Mensch ist, verdankt er Gott allein… Gott
ist er mit allem verpflichtet, was er ist… Was ich zu verantworten habe, das habe ich vor Gott zu
verantworten.”
83
Ibid., 158.
84
Ibid., 10.
 29

In the fifth chapter of her Finite and Eternal Being, Stein distinguishes between logical,

ontological, and transcendental truth. Logical truth refers to truth as the relation of knowledge to

the real or ideal objects which it intends.85 This is distinct from ontological truth so far it designates

the ‘being in truth’ that pertains to any being whatever and which serves as the condition for the

truthfulness of logical truth as the adequation of the mind to a being which really is in the way in

which I intend it.86 However, where ontological truth might designate the facticity of any given

existent allowing me to make true statements about it as it is hic et nunc, this is by no means the

total limit of the ‘truth-statements’ that I can make about it. Rather, that the thing is what and how

it is, “still does not mean that it is entirely that which it ought to be: therein there is a more and a

less.”87 The discrepancy between actual being in the here and now and the how-it-ought-to-be of

the thing Stein owes to the distinction between actual and essential being, or between what she had

earlier in the work called the essential form (Wesensform) and the pure form (reiner Form). The

actual form that the being possesses may be in greater or lesser correspondence to the genuine

transcendental truth or essential truth about the thing, which necessarily includes how the thing

ought to be. This pure form, or the essential truth about the thing, is ultimately understood as the

‘pure idea’ (reine Idee) that is the divine prototype (göttliches Urbild) according to which the thing

is what it is and is ‘called’ to be what it ought to be.88 It is in this connection that Stein, in turn,

argues that, when it comes to persons specifically, and thus to the ethical task of the individual

person, “what any human being ought to become—his personal ‘destiny’—belongs to his

85
Edith Stein, Endliches und Ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins, ed. Andreas
Uwe Müller (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 2006), 255. [Henceforth, ESGA 11/12]
86
Wright, 129.
87
ESGA 11/12, 256: “damit ist noch nicht gesagt, daß es voll und ganz das ist, was es sein soll:
darin gibt es ein Mehr und Minder.”
88
Ibid.
 30

essence.”89 In linking the ought with the notion of essential/transcendental truth, Stein depicts the

work of morality as a calling from God that blossoms from out of the individual essence of the

person herself, and thus as available to believer and nonbeliever alike.90 On the other hand, the

moral task as a work of renewal requires cooperation with divine grace.

Stein’s explicit use of the term ‘renewal’ to depict the moral task now emerges in the

context of Stein’s use of the Teresian metaphor of the soul as ‘castle’ (Seelenburg). This metaphor

is meant to accomplish two things relative to Stein’s understanding of the soul. On the one hand,

with the metaphor of the ‘interior castle’, Stein reasserts in new language her notion of the soul as

possessing a dynamic of depth and periphery.91 On the other hand, the use of this metaphor, with

its explicitly mystical overtones, is meant to imbue her phenomenological understanding of the

soul with a distinctively mystical sense. She writes, “the soul as ‘interior castle’…is not point-like

like the ‘pure I’, but is a ‘space’—indeed a ‘castle’ with many dwelling places—, wherein the I

can freely move, presently going towards the outer, now drawing back more into the interior. And

it is no ‘vacant space’, although it can come to be penetrated and absorbed by a fullness, indeed it

must, if its own proper life should unfold.”92 The sense of spatiality, again, refers here to the notion

89
Ibid., 262: “was ein jeder Mensch werden soll – seine persönliche ,Bestimmung’ –, gehört zu
seinem Wesen.”
90
For a more complete account of the connection between the ought and essential being in Stein’s
‘ethics’ in Finite and Eternal Being, see William Tullius, “Edith Stein and the Truth of Husserl’s
Ethical Concept of the ‘True Self,’” in Alles Wesentlich lässt sich nicht schreiben. Leben und
Denken Edith Steins im Spiegel ihres Gesamtwerks, herausgegeben von Andreas Speer und
Stephan Regh, in Zusammenarbeit mit Sr. Antonia Sondermann OCD (Freiburg im Breisgau:
Herder Verlag, 2016), 290–306. See also Wright, 129f.
91
Angela Ales Bello, “Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein: The Question of the Human Subject,”
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2008): 143–159, at 153.
92
ESGA 11/12, 318: “Die Seele als ,innere Burg’…ist nicht punktartig wie das ,reine ich’, sondern
ein ,Raum’ – ja eine ,Burg’ mit vielen Wohnungen –, worin das Ich sich frei bewegen kann, bald
nach außen gehend, bald sich mehr ins Innere zurückziehend. Und es ist kein ,leerer Raum’,
obgleich eine Fülle darin eindringen und aufgenommen werden kann, ja werden muß, wenn sie
das ihr eigentümliche Leben entfalten soll.”
 31

that I can feel such and such a value more or less in my depth, nearer to the true self, or more in

the periphery of my being. However, part of what the new metaphor of the soul as a castle with

many dwelling places accomplishes is in capturing the idea that I myself may dwell more or less

from out of the depth of my own soul, i.e. that I may dwell at a greater or lesser proximity or

distance from my very self in the sense of what Stein had called the ‘core personality’. Reminiscent

of Augustine, I may live my life absorbed in the external world and in things outside of myself,

thus losing myself in the process, or I may retreat into the depths of my very self and thus find and

be at home with myself93 (and God)94 there. The fullness of which Stein speaks here, somewhat

enigmatically, will refer, on the one hand, to the values through which the soul acquires character

traits, and ultimately, on the other hand, to God who mystically fills the soul as one lives in the

heart of the ‘interior castle’.

Stein again highlights the possibility of cooperating in the work of self-formation which is

manifested by the experience of freedom. The possibility of self-formation here may be understood

in one way as the possibility of developing or curbing habits or abilities that I may recognize in

myself.95 However, such efforts at molding oneself, into the kind of person who is good at painting

or who is slow to judge others, for instance, “does not arrive at the essence of the soul and for that

reason is also not a genuine forming of the essence.”96 The ‘essence of the soul’ that Stein refers

to here is the ontological truth of the essence which I factually possess at this moment. In order to

form that essence, it is necessary that such an act of formation should take place in the ‘depth’ of

the soul where I am intimately aware of myself and my need for formation as an existential or

93
Bello, 156.
94
Calcagno, 17.
95
ESGA 11/12, 364.
96
Ibid.: “wird das Wesen der Seele nicht erreicht und darum auch keine echte Wesensgestaltung.”
 32

moral need, rather than a merely social/conventional or personally desirable aspiration. Stein gives

an example of what she means here. If I deeply wound another through my own rash judgment of

him or her, then I may become aware of the great disvalue of my behavior and likewise become

deeply aware of the fact that I am implicated in it. In such a case, Stein writes, “I experience here

in an originary and authentic way what it is to judge. A horror seizes me before the seriousness of

my act; I come to abhor myself in my moral thoughtlessness.”97 This kind of repugnance towards

oneself as the originator of an abhorrent act is something, for Stein, potentially and authentically

felt in the depths of the soul. One can feel such abhorrence most keenly if one lives in one’s depth

or, alternatively, one may be drawn into experience of one’s depths through such an experience

from a life lived largely on the periphery of the self. On the other hand, a life lived exclusively and

single-mindedly on the periphery of the self may be unable to hear the voice of conscience

emanating from the depths. Regardless, concerning this feeling of abhorrence, Stein affirms that

“this is the ‘contritio’, the repentant remorse which makes the soul capable of a genuine inner

renewal.”98 Such renewal or reformation of the soul from its ill-formed state consists in “seizing

the evil at its root,”99 by which Stein means to suggest a total alteration of the habitual position-

taking of the will in my comportment towards another or towards the constellation of values and

disvalues at stake in rushing to rash judgment.

The work of renewal is evidently, here, bound up with living in the depth of the ‘interior

castle’ of the soul. What is morally necessary here, then, is a work of interior recollection without

97
Ibid., 365: “Ich erfahre hier in einer ursprünglichen und eigentlichen Weise, was es um das
Urteilen ist. Es erfaßt mich ein Entsetzen vor der Folgenschwere meines Verhaltens, ich werde mir
in meiner Leichtfertigkeit selbst zum Abscheu.”
98
Ibid.: “Das ist die çontritio’ [sic], die reuige Zerknirschung, die die Seele zu einer echten inneren
Erneuerung fähig macht.”
99
Ibid., “das Übel an der Wurzel gepackt.”
 33

which moral renewal, and moral life in general, will be impossible. The impossibility of moral

action apart from renewal and the interior recollection which conditions it may be linked, on the

one hand, to the problem of the limits of personal self-awareness if, as we have already said, one

who lives entirely absorbed in the superficial will be insensitive to the reproach of conscience

issuing from the soul’s depths.100 On the other hand, Stein indicates a further dimension in which

capacity for renewal and thus active engagement in moral life is conditioned upon inner

recollection. This has to do with her notion that all of human psychic living is engaged in a constant

exchange of vital energy, or life-power (Lebenskraft), as activity consumes the total quantity of

energy available for human activity.101 In this regard, Stein insists that, “every free act is a

‘performance’ which consumes power.”102 Constant performance of free action without

replenishment of power, through various possible sources, may lead to total exhaustion of the

available vital power ready for use in free volition. Thus, there are potential limits to what the

person may freely do so far as, potentially, an action may appear, and may really be, altogether too

much for a person to perform. While Stein, in her Beiträge had insisted that vital power may be

replenished from material sources rooted in the body, e.g. food, relaxation, sleep, etc., she had

insisted that life-power could also be replenished from the spiritual, motive power of values

themselves. In this respect, in Finite and Eternal Being, citing the Kantian dictum that ‘I can

because I ought’, Stein reinterprets Kant to be suggesting that a moral ought to do that which

appears beyond my power may still obtain so far as I experience the value of the moral obligation

as itself power-giving.103 This is the only reason why the ought may be insisted upon even apart

100
Wright, 138.
101
For a more complete explanation of the notion of ‘Lebenskraft’ and its dynamic interplay with
motivational striving, see Lebech, 32.
102
ESGA 11/12, 374: “Jede freie Tat ist eine ,Leistung’, die Kraft verbraucht.”
103
Ibid., 374.
 34

from consideration of capability. However, I can obtain power for moral action that extends

beyond my present reserves of vital power only to the extent that I live from the depths of my soul

wherein the value of moral action is adequately felt; thus, recollection is necessary for the work of

renewal and of moral life generally.

However, it is not merely value which is ultimately power-giving, but rather, Stein insists,

also, and perhaps ultimately, “faith gives the answer to the question of where this source of power

may be sought.”104 Through divine grace, the moral agent has access to a power extending beyond

the merely natural, rendering possible what would otherwise be impossible. Morally, this is the

ultimate condition for the ought’s holding sway even in those without faith, as grace is, in principle,

on offer to all, and thus the source of power for fulfillment of the ought is available to all.

Nonetheless, such faith which makes perfect renewal possible105 still requires sufficient interior

recollection to render such faith-experience available. Finally, in characterizing morality in this

way, it is clear that Stein has indicated the respect in which, lying at the heart of the moral project

itself, there is a need for moral striving to be linked essentially to a mystical dimension, i.e. that

spirituality and morality cannot ultimately be disentangled from one another but are mutually

constitutive of the human vocation itself. Thus, Stein ultimately writes of the human vocation in

her Kreuzeswissenschaft that “human beings are called upon to live in their inmost region and to

have themselves as much in hand as possible only from that center-point; only from there can they

rightly come to terms with the world. Only from there can they find the place in the world that has

been intended for them.”106

104
Ibid., 375: “Der Glaube gibt die Antwort darauf, wo diese Kraftquelle zu suchen sei.”
105
Ibid.
106
Edith Stein, Science of the Cross, trans. and ed. Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D. (Washington, D.C.:
ICS Publications, 2002), 160.
 35

VI.

Conclusion. As has been seen, Stein, working very much in the tradition of Husserl and

Scheler, characterizes morality in terms of the task of renewal which involves an inner work of

forming the soul insofar as it is the vital structure showing forth attributes of personality correlative

to values and so far as the soul may correlate to values in correct or incorrect ways. The work of

renewal, for all three thinkers, is a work of reforming the soul to respond to values perfectly in

relation to their true nature and thus to what is objectively important. Such a project of self-

formation and renewal is understood as a responding to the call of God who bestows upon human

nature generally and the individual person in particular a moral vocation arising out of the very

core of the person herself. Disclosing this vocation and acquiring the power for its fulfillment

ultimately requires a work of interior recollection wherein the self and God may be encountered.

Morality is thus equally a spirituality. It is especially, although not exclusively, in this latter regard

that Stein’s contribution to the investigation into ethics as a project of renewal progresses beyond

its Husserlian and Schelerian roots.107 While Scheler recognizes love for God as essential to the

107
Although I would like to emphasize this aspect as, in certain regards, the most significant
development on Stein’s part in regard to the problems of ethics, as its implications are most far-
reaching for moral philosophy as a whole beyond the immediate context of the conversation with
her phenomenological interlocutors, there are indeed other respects in which one might find Stein
making contributions to ethics beyond those already made in the works of Husserl and Scheler.
For instance, although Scheler demonstrates his sensitivity to the notion that ethical renewal is, as
Stein has shown, a matter of metanoia, i.e. of conversion, which implies not only a kind of self-
formative shaping of the soul towards those values which are genuine and ultimate, but also a
movement of repentance struggling against the reality of personal moral guilt (see especially
Scheler’s analysis of repentance in Max Scheler, On the Eternal In Man, trans. and ed. Bernard
Noble (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010), 33–65), one finds little evidence of
this theme in Husserl’s extant moral texts. On another note, Stein develops her theory of vocation
farther than Husserl or Scheler by delineating a moral calling addressed to the person who is
obligated to a genuinely personal vocation as well as to a generically human vocation which cannot
authentically conflict. On this and related developments in Stein’s theory of moral vocation see
my article referenced above (“Edith Stein and the Truth of Husserl’s Ethical Concept of the ‘True
Self’”) as well as William Tullius, “Edith Stein on Social Ontology and the Constitution of
 36

work of renewal, and while this may implicitly necessitate cultivation of a religious spirituality

alongside ethical striving, and while Husserl likewise will argue that the highest requirement of

the ethical life is a rational faith in God,108 neither thinker goes so far as Stein in thinking out the

problem of grace in ethical life and its theological implications for the nature of the ethical project

as effectively erasing any strong distinction between the ethical work of renewal and its fulfillment

only in an authentic religious expression. Thus, Stein goes farther in delineating the need for a

rapprochement between philosophical and theological ethics as well as the need for the cultivation

of a spiritual life as personal encounter with God in the depths of the soul through personal

religious practice, constituting the moral life where distinction between the ethical and the

religious becomes untenable. This is the case because, as has been seen, for Stein morality requires

attentive focus on the inner work of self-formation since, on the one hand, I am incapable of

perceiving moral obligation if I have not sufficiently recollected myself into my depths wherein I

can hear the call of conscience, and, likewise, since I am incapable of responding adequately to

values if my personality has not been shaped through renewal adequately to do so. On the other

hand, without the dimension of interiority which Stein has captured in the Teresian metaphor of

the ‘interior castle’, there is no access to the gratuitous power on which moral action must be

vitally based. Thus, as we have seen, morality is both a natural and a supernatural endeavor, both

an ethical striving and a spiritual engagement with the divine.

Dickinson, North Dakota

Individual Moral Identity,” in History of Women Philosophers, ed. Sebastian Luft and Ruth
Hagengruber (New York, NY: Springer Publishers, 2018), 31–43.
108
Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke Husserliana, Band XLII: Grenzprobleme der
Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik. Texte
aus dem Nachlass (1908-1937), ed. Rochus Sowa und Thomas Vongehr (Dordrecht: Springer
Science+Business Media, 2014), 203.