Potency and Act

by Edith Stein

Potency and Act is the second of three works in which Edith Stein said she endeavored to fulfill her proper mission in philosophy, her life s task : relating the phenomenology of her teacher Edmund Husserl and the scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas. But more than critically comparing the two ways of thinking, she wished to fuse them into her own philosophical system, searching for that perennial philosophy lying beyond ages and peoples, common to all who honestly seek truth. Edith Stein was a Jewish phenomenologist who became a Catholic after reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Jesus and entered the order of Discalced Carmelites founded by the saint. Stein died in Auschwitz in 1942 and was herself canonized in 1998 as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Her philosophical thinking had been formed by Husserl, but she came to find a home in Aquinas s thought world. In Potency and Act she aimed to get from scholasticism to phenomenology and vice versa and allow the two ways of doing philosophy to come to resolution within herself. The first of the three works in which she carried out her mission was a play where Husserl and Aquinas appear on stage to discuss their agreements and differences (in Knowledge and Faith, ICS Publications, Edith Stein s Collected Works, vol. 8). The second, Potency and Act, was written in 1931 but published for the first time in 1998. The third was her major work, Finite and Eternal Being, written around 1935 and also published posthumously, in 1950 (Collected Works, vol. 9).Potency and Act is complementary to Finite and Eternal Being, for they are quite different in content. The approach to the study of being in Potency and Act is modal as the title implies; her treatment of possible worlds and of form prescribing possibilities relates to phenomenological themes and also to recent developments in logical semantics.Philosophy of religion, of course, is a central concern. We reach God not only through faith and contemplation, she says, but by thinking, using logical reasoning both from the world without (as in St. Thomas) and from the world within ( the way of St. Augustine ); indeed, God s existence is also a purely formal conclusion. Her many searching analyses are suggestive in their own right: on human freedom, temporality, self-knowledge, individuality, evolution (which she fits into the scholastic world view ), atheism, eschatology.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology

576 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Edith Stein, also known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, OCD, (German: Teresia Benedicta vom Kreuz, Latin: Teresia Benedicta a Cruce) (12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942), was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to the Roman Catholic Church and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She is a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church.

She was born into an observant Jewish family, but was an atheist by her teenage years. Moved by the tragedies of World War I, in 1915 she took lessons to become a nursing assistant and worked in a hospital for the prevention of disease outbreaks. After completing her doctoral thesis in 1916 from the University of Göttingen, she obtained an assistantship at the University of Freiburg.

From reading the works of the reformer of the Carmelite Order, St. Teresa of Jesus, OCD, she was drawn to the Catholic Faith. She was baptized on 1 January 1922 into the Roman Catholic Church. At that point she wanted to become a Discalced Carmelite nun, but was dissuaded by her spiritual mentors. She then taught at a Catholic school of education in Speyer. As a result of the requirement of an "Aryan certificate" for civil servants promulgated by the Nazi government in April 1933 as part of its Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, she had to quit her teaching position. She was admitted to the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne the following October. She received the religious habit of the Order as a novice in April 1934, taking the religious name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross ("Teresa blessed by the Cross"). In 1938 she and her sister Rosa, by then also a convert and an extern Sister of the monastery, were sent to the Carmelite monastery in Echt, Netherlands for their safety. Despite the Nazi invasion of that state in 1940, they remained undisturbed until they were arrested by the Nazis on 2 August 1942 and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they died in the gas chamber on 9 August 1942.

Reviews

[Kexuan Yang · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first sections on formal and general material ontologies and her critique of Husserlian idealism are interesting. The major parts might feel ambiguous and redundant if you have already read her On the Problem of Empathy and Finite and Eternal Being. One should not blame Stein for that, since the book is not finished. But it does create some uncomfortableness in reading.

One curious aspect of this book is her recapitulation of Hedwig Conrad-Martius' ontology. For Conrad-Martius everything is initially in an "abyss" of chaos, in an orderless motion and a desiring that is nothing but potentially everything. Then through the Incarnation the Logos puts these motions in order so that everything is then "born from above". Stein criticised Conrad-Martius' doctrine of the abyssal nothingness and claimed that motion itself is preordained by God and directed towards God. She also used Conrad-Martius' own distinction between hungering spirits and Satan to demonstrate the difference between orderless motion and active evilness.

Conrad-Martius' theory, however speculative, may not be as unintelligible as it seems to be. As Hume not wrongly observed, we unconsciously connect an idea with another idea that is similar own to some constitution of our body. Now evilness cannot happen without abstraction, that is, confusing one object with another for similarities in appearance. And similarities in appearance is an abstract common property. So we have an abstract common property, and then the orderless motion within our body migrates from one thing to another within the abstract property and creates confusions. When these confusions reach our faculty of distinguishing ends, evil will happen. I am not pretending that my explanation is correct, but Conrad-Martius' doctrine might be unavoidable if one reasons in this line.

I cannot give a final verdict on this issue. It seems to me that Stein was phenomenologically correct, but ontologically insufficient to explain the origin of evilness. She tried to tame the speculative tensions of her godmother, but she did not offer a good alternative, at least within this book.

[Dukat · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

A prolix text without much point beyond the obvious goal of syncing catholic dogma with the popular philosophic texts of the era.