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The Catholic Turn of Phenomenology:

A MacIntyrean Rendition of the Thomistic Detour of Edith Stein

Jovito V. Cariño
University of Santo Tomas

Abstract

Prior to her religious conversion, Edith Stein was reputed to be a close disciple
of Edmund Husserl and one of the pioneer exponents of phenomenology. When
Husserl however turned away from the realist commitments of phenomenology
and pursued instead its idealist direction, many within Husserl’s close circle
chose to do phenomenology against Husserl’s Kantian proclivity. It was this
dispersal of the pioneers of phenomenology that gave rise to what is now known
in the history of philosophy as phenomenological movement, referring not so
much to a kind of a concerted, common effort but to isolated individual
initiatives to address the issues and problems left open by Husserl and
phenomenology. But what became a purely philosophical engagement on the
part of other phenomenologists like Ingarden, Lipps and Conrad-Martius,
Stein’s phenomenological studies became for her an avenue towards a spiritual
and intellectual evolution which culminated to her embracing the Catholic faith.
Stein’s reconciliation of faith and reason, in her life as well as in her scholarly
works, paved the way for a different method of pursuing phenomenology by
creating a room for faith in the critical examination of consciousness just as it
introduced an alternative way of doing Catholic philosophy which during her
time was practically reduced to silence in the face of modern sciences and
various cognitive systems. Her detour to Thomistic thought enabled Stein, in the
narrative of Alasdair MacIntyre, to contribute to the resurgence of Catholic
philosophy which for most of the modern period was sidelined by its complicity
with modernity’s priority of epistemology. This paper shall trace the evolution
of Edith Stein’s philosophy on its way to the consolidation of her own
phenomenological system and the modern reconstruction of Catholic
philosophic tradition. The discussion shall be guided by the question: What are
the elements of phenomenology as articulated by Edith Stein which contributed
to the resurgence of Catholic philosophy?,

Key words: phenomenology, MacIntyrean rendition, Thomistic philosophy,

Catholic philosophy, Kantian “transcendence,” realism

Introduction

At first glance, the term Catholic philosophy appears harmless and can in fact easily

betray the inherent complexity it is laden with both in history and content. If by Catholic
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philosophy, one means Catholics doing philosophy, then doubtless we say Catholic philosophy

has been in existence since the time of the Church Fathers. But to consider Catholic philosophy

as a singular activity of Catholics doing philosophy would be to gloss over intellectual positions

which sharply divided such figures like Ireneaus and Tertullian on one hand and Justin Martyr

and Origen on the other; or much later, Aquinas on one corner and on the opposite side

Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure or Siger of Brabant. One may even oppose Aquinas to one of

his successors, Francisco Suarez whose philosophical position is likewise distinguished from a

near contemporary and fellow Catholic, Rene Descartes (Swindal and Gensler 2005). To

construe Catholic philosophy therefore as an aggregate activity of its individual proponents

would be misleading. It is rather appropriate, following Alasdair MacIntyre, to think of Catholic

philosophy as a constituted tradition. A cursory review would reveal that the Catholic

philosophy as we know it is undergirded by a single tradition, that is the tradition which

promotes the unity between faith and reason. Such tradition however plays out in a variety of

ways in different stages of history and in different participant traditions, hence the term

constituted. The Catholic appreciation of the unity of faith and reason does not rest on purely

formal or transcendental claims but on fundamental substantive assertions. The recognition of

the existence of God and the adherence to the rational demonstration of the certainty that comes

with such recognition is founded on the affirmation of a reality that cuts across the earthly and

beyond the earthly. Modernity however did not only question the continuity of such ontology

but ruptured it in favor of the immanence of the world. It is important to note that in the context

of modernity, immanence refers not only to the material sphere of human experience but to the

primacy of human subjectivity as declared by Descartes in his famous cogito ergo sum. Other
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rationalists, like Spinoza and Leibniz would continue to invoke God in their discourses but it is a

god that has been accommodated according to their rationalist calculations.

The crisis therefore that would beset Catholic philosophy at the dawn of modernity was a

result of a radical change of worldview which considered human subjectivity as the primary

standard of the reckoning of reality. With the outright rejection of all metaphysical and

foundationalist claims, God himself, the ultimate representative of metaphysical thinking, was

banished from modernity’s intellectual landscape. Whereas early modern philosophy considered

God as an epistemological guarantor and hence subsumed within reason, late modern thought

completely quarantined God from reason thus transforming philosophy into a purely

epistemological enterprise. Rejecting all prior modes of unifying reason with the question of

God’s existence (cosmological, ontological and physic-theological), Kant (2007) declared that

“all attempts at a purely speculative use of reason, with regard to theology, are entirely useless

and intrinsically null and void, while the principles of its natural use can never lead to any

theology whatsoever” (p. 528). The dissolution of the classical unity between faith and reason as

a consequence of the discounting of being from all philosophical discourse left Catholic

philosophy without an advocate with the lone exception perhaps of Antonio Rosmini-Serbati

(MacIntyre, 2009). However, despite Rosmini’s courageous attempt to confront modernity head-

on, much of his views were not received well within and beyond the Catholic circle (Hunt,

2000). Rosmini’s rejection however amounted to more than just a personal loss on his part. Its

biggest drawback in fact would be on the Catholic faith itself when, by default, Catholics were

sidelined from the debates of the time, hence disempowered from participating in intellectual

contests which shaped the modern cultural landscape. MacIntyre (2009) lamented:
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The loss was to the inhabitants of those cultures in which the cultural and moral
claims of the Catholic faith were not heard, let alone understood and to the
intellectual formation of those generations of educated Catholics who had no
opportunity to confront and respond to, let alone from the most important
critiques of Christian theism. So encounters with Hume and Rousseau, with
Diderot and Robespierre, with Feuerbach and Marx and Nietzsche were
postponed (p. 134).

In the face of the widespread adherence to the Kantian segregation of faith and reason, Pope Leo

XIII issued the encyclical Aeterni Patris in 1879 in the hope of responding to the claims of the

modern intellectual culture which were in general antithetical to the traditional positions of the

Catholic Church. By proposing the wholesale recovery of the philosophy of St. Thomas

Aquinas, Leo XIII was optimistic the Church could continue its dialogue with modern

philosophies and modern sciences without compromising the special place it gives to faith. Leo

XIII’s efforts were complemented by the initiatives undertaken by Cardinal Henry Newman to

renew among modern Catholics the appreciation for the synthesis of belief and knowledge.

Newman thought that the cultivation of the mind cannot be pursued independent of the

individual’s spiritual and moral growth. Commenting on what Newman tried to achieve,

MacIntyre (2009) wrote:

Subtract the knowledge of God from our knowledge, either by denying God’s
existence or by insisting that we can know nothing of him, and what you have is
an assortment of different kinds of knowledge, but no way of relating them to
each other. We are condemned to think in terms of the disunity of the sciences.
But it is precisely because we are able to find the universe that we inhabit and
ourselves within it intelligible, only if and insofar as we presuppose some
conceptions of the unity of the sciences, that we cannot but acknowledge that we
do possess knowledge of God (p. 147).

Against its primary intention however and without Leo XIII realizing it, Aeterni Patris resulted

to something widely contrary to what he aspired for. It was true it stirred a new wave of
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enthusiasm for Thomism but it likewise diminished Thomism’s original vigor by subsuming it

under the epistemological motif imposed by modernity. Thomism was proposed as an antidote to

Kantianism and there were those, like the Jesuit Joseph Marechal, who believed that, if

corrected, Kant’s transcendental incursions could very well open up to rather than detract from

the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas. Marechal’s position invited severe resistance from

Kantians as well as from fellow Thomists like Jacques Maritain in the same way that Leo XIII

inspired a Thomism in Reginald Garrigou Lagrange that was opposed to the Thomism

propagated by Etienne Gilson. Rather therefore than consolidating a Catholic response in the

face of modernity, Aeterni Patris bred a variety of Thomisms each claiming the singular

privilege of providing the right answer to the modern question. Once reduced to an

epistemological system among many, Thomism was deprived of its character which would have

allowed it to be a genuine alternative to Kant and modernity. By the turn of the 20th century, the

modern period, bannered by the emerging sciences, had come a long way. New worldviews and

crises have come to the surface in response to which Catholic thinkers had yet to find a voice in

unison. The popular Catholic thinkers of the time were Henri Bergson (1859-1941), Max

Scheler (1874-1928) and Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) and none of them counted himself as allied

to Thomism.

The Persistence of Kant

The impact of Kant and his transcendental inquiries continued to impact philosophy well

into the threshold of the twentieth century and if we were to subscribe to Tom Rockmore’s

(2006) assessment, practically the entire twentieth century philosophical landscape was

configured under the shadow of Kant. In Rockmore’s reckoning, the major philosophical
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schools that emerged in the twentieth century, namely, Marxism, pragmatism, phenomenology

and analytic philosophy, were bred by a conscious decision on the part of the later generation of

thinkers to improve on or to undo Kantian transcendental claims. In the words of Rockmore

(2006) himself:

It seems clear that Kant is particularly influential in focusing the modern debate
on questions of knowledge. I contend that, consciously or more often
unconsciously, the main thinkers in the twentieth century are in dialogue with
each other on the basis of a shared Kantian tradition, which they understand in
different ways, often markedly so. Put differently, to an often underappreciated
extent the entire later debate largely consists in alternative, often incompatible,
readings of Kant (p. 19)

It is within this context of the Kantian motif of the twentieth century that I shall now turn to

Edmund Husserl and phenomenology and the possibility created by both for the resurgence of

Catholic philosophy.

While associated with his name, the term phenomenology certainly antedates Edmund

Husserl. In the Republic Book 7 517b and 524c, Plato was already making a distinction between

what is visible and what is knowable as well as drawing the line between noumena and

phenomena. Kant (1999) was said to have used the term phenomenology in his letter in

September 2, 1770 to a contemporary Johann Henrich Lambert and again, in another letter on

February 21, 1772 written to Marcus Herz. With the former, he discussed how metaphysics

presupposes a general phenomenology and to the latter, he pointed out how both metaphysics

and phenomenology will be treated separately in his book soon to be published, tentatively

called, The Limits of Sensibility and Reason, which later on would simply be known as Critique

of Pure Reason. Hegel (2010) also used the same term in order to explain the historical

conditions of the acquisition of knowledge, the theme undergirding his book Phenomenology of
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the Spirit which served as a kind of propadeutic to another work dedicated mainly to the study of

consciousness, namely, The Science of Logic. In his explanation of the design which connected

the two works, Hegel wrote:

In this fashion have I tried to portray consciousness in the Phenomenology of

Spirit. Consciousness is spirit as concrete, self-aware knowledge – to be sure, a
knowledge bound to externality, but the progression of this subject matter, like the
development of all natural and spiritual life, rests exclusively on the nature of the
pure essentialities that constitute the content of the logic. Consciousness, as spirit
which on the way of manifesting itself frees itself from its immediacy and
external concretion, attains to the pure knowledge that takes these same pure
essentialities for its subject matter as they are in and for themselves. (p.10)

The term phenomenology therefore was already operative in the vocabularies of Kant and Hegel

but neither was responsible for its introduction into the philosophic discourse. The credit as to

the originator of the term apparently belonged to JH Lambert, a peer of Kant who used the term

the first time in his Neues Organon which came out in Leipzig in 1764 (Spegielberg, 1967).

When Husserl appropriated the term, it was for the purpose of describing his project

involving a series of studies and inquiries aimed at providing philosophy and the rest of the

sciences a new starting point. Husserl (1965) felt that the various types of modern

epistemologies put the assumptions of philosophy in question just as they undermined the claims

of the modern sciences. The epistemologies in question were the naturalistic philosophy or

naturalism identified with John Locke and David Hume and historicism and Weltanschauung

philosophy associated with Wilhelm Dilthey. Husserl rejected naturalism because of its unilateral

appeal to nature; he was also critical of historicism because of its propensity to reduce everything

to history. Following Kant, Husserl believed that the phenomenon is what is given to

consciousness. It is an essence that can be intuitively grasped and expressed through conceptual
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statements. Phenomenon was distinct from experience and matters of fact. Any attempt to

equate them with such as what naturalism and historicism was trying to do was definitely out of

step with philosophy’s efforts towards apodictic knowledge. Both worldviews shared the

tendency towards relativism and ultimately to skepticism which for Husserl was antithetical to

the possibility of certainty not only for philosophy but for the modern sciences as well. As Kant

hoped for the metaphysics of the future which would serve as foundation for philosophy and the

sciences, Husserl was optimistic too that philosophy would be scientific and it is for that vision

that he endeavored to found philosophy anew. He acknowledged his effort as an extension of the

revolutionary impulse which sought to reset philosophy to a new beginning as exemplified by

such great exemplars like Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Kant and Fichte. Husserl (1965) explained:

The question of philosophy’s relation to the natural and humanistic sciences –

whether the specifically philosophical element of its work, essentially related as it
is to nature and the human spirit, demands fundamentally new attitudes, that in
turn involve fundamentally peculiar goals and methods; whether as a result the
philosophical takes us, as it were into a new dimension, or whether it performs its
function on the same level as the empirical sciences of nature and of the human
spirit – all this is to this day disputed. It shows that even the proper sense of
philosophical problems has not been made scientifically clear. (p. 72)

Husserl worked out the project of transforming philosophy into a rigorous science in works such

as Logical Investigations published in 1900 and 1901 and Philosophy As A Rigorous Science

which came out in 1911. Between the two, Logical Investigations enjoyed greater preeminence

in the minds of Catholic thinkers for it was these works that lent phenomenology to a more

Catholic-friendly reading, specifically, the Fifth Investigation of Vol. II which Husserl dedicated

to the topic “On Intentional Experiences and Their Contents”, more commonly known as

intentionality. In this particular segment, Husserl harked back to Franz Brentano’s theory of

rationality which was basically Aristotelian and scholastic in texture. The term “intentionality”
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itself is of scholastic pedigree, rooted in the term intentio that was used by medieval thinkers

such as St. Thomas Aquinas. The word intention comes from the word tendere which means to

tend towards something. Intentio therefore has some sense of a disposition or orientation

towards an end or a telos or a kind of terminus. In the words of Brentano (1995):

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle

Ages called the intentional (or mental)† inexistence of an object, and what we
might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction
toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing) or
immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object
within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation
something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love
loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (p. 68)

It was intentionality that led Brentano to consider consciousness as something that meant

“consciousness of” an object” (Brentano, 1995, p. 79) which was also the very notion of

consciousness that Husserl adopted in the Fifth Investigation of his Logical Investigations.

Husserl (2001) however tried to rework Brentano’s notion of consciousness by stipulating an

inclusive account of the object of consciousness. Husserl therefore was making a bold move by

overcoming the distinction between mental object of consciousness and its external referent. He

explained his position by saying:

It is a serious error to draw a real (reell) distinction between ‘merely immanent’ or

intentional objects ‘ on the one hand and ‘transcendent’ ‘actual’ objects which
may correspond to them on the other. It is an error whether one makes the
distinction one between a sign or image really (reell) present in consciousness and
the thing it stands for or images, whether one substitutes for the ‘immanent
object’ some other real (reelles) datum of consciousness, a content, e.g. as a
sense-giving factor…It need only be said to be acknowledged that the intentional
objects of the presentation is the same as the actual objects and on occasion as its
external object, and that it is absurd to distinguish between them. (p.126-127)

There are three things we can infer from this important episode of Husserlian phenomenology.
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First, that phenomenology for the early Hussel was a study of both consciousness and the

object of consciousness. What Husserl basically attempted to do was to navigate his way

between the positions of the empiricists and the Neo-Kantians of his time by insisting that the

study of the phenomenon requires close attention to the categories of consciousness and against

the Neo-Kantians, he maintained that the study of consciousness cannot be disassociated from its

object. The net effect of course was the fusion of both tendencies into a single philosophical

view we now know as phenomenology (Borden, 2003).

Second, by affirming the unity between the content of the mental act and its external

referent, phenomenology allied itself with the key Scholastic position regarding the knowledge

of essences (Borden, 2003). In doing so, it practically overcame the Kantian distinction between

noumenon and phenomenon. The Husserlian injunction to go back to the things themselves was

an open invitation to take in and examine the essential structure of our experiences which are

constantly present to us in their givenness. Such essences were not simply out there, independent

of the mind. There was no essence that was not in some sense related with a knowing subject. It

is for this reason that phenomenology may be seen as the study of essences according to their

given nature.

The third and final point was probably the closest thing to the Catholic thinkers of the

time. After recognizing phenomenology’s openness to the knowledge of essences, some

phenomenologists shared the sense that the objective world has an inherent capacity to draw our

response and direct our attention to some transcendent power to whom the same objective realm

owes its intelligibility. This was the view shared by such early phenomenologists like Dietrich

von Hildebrand, Max Scheler, Adolf Reinach, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Roman Ingarden, Karol
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Wojtyla and Edith Stein (MacIntyre, 2009). It should be noted that Thomists of the time, like

Jacques Maritain, would rather not subscribe to the basic tenets of phenomenology. It was at this

juncture that Stein would make her intervention and thus point to the possibility that indeed, the

Kantian separation of faith and reason could be overcome.

From Phenomenology to Thomism

The early phase of phenomenology or what we may describe as early Husserl was rather

pronounced in its commitments to realism and this was what made it appealing to Catholic

sensibilities. Stein herself, as early as 1913, while not yet a Catholic, reported how the early

phenomenology was likened to scholasticism and how it was heralded as a breakthrough from

Kantian philosophy. Stein (1986) wrote:

The Logische Untersuchungen had caused a sensation primarily because it

appeared to be a radical departure from critical idealism which had a Kantian and
neo-Kantian stamp. It was considered a “new scholasticism” because it turned
attention away from the “subject” and toward “things” themselves (p. 250).

The realist phenomenology however would turn out to be a mere episode of the constantly

evolving Husserlian project. Soon after making his imprint in the realist tradition, Husserl

started shifiting back to Kantian transcendental idealism and this was something he did not keep

a secret among his students. Stein (1986) had detected this as early as the publication of his

early Ideas but as MacIntyre (2006) would write, it would be Roman Ingarden (1975) “who was

to formulate most clearly and to pursue most strenuously the charge that Husserl had in Ideen

abandoned his earlier realism (p. 74).”

Stein’s own critique on Husserl whom she reverently referred to as “Master” stemmed

likewise from the latter’s ambivalence regarding his tendencies towards realism. It was pointed
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out earlier how Husserl’s early realism underscored phenomenology’s affinity with Catholic

philosophy represented by Thomism. This was of course not as neat as it seemed. Despite shared

realist commitment, certain Thomists think that philosophizing for a phenomenologist always

begins from a first-person stance, that is the human subject, in direct contrast to the Thomistic-

Aristotelian position whose starting point is always the given world. These Thomists thought

that the phenomenologist’s Cartesian stance basically prevents it from justifying its relation with

the external world and other objects outside the mind. It was this tension between

phenomenology and Thomism that Stein negotiated resulting thus to a fusion of Husserlian and

Thomistic philosophies.

Stein accomplished this with her theory of empathy. Stein’s starting point was basically

the same problem Husserl himself pointed out in Ideas. Husserl himself merely adopted the

problem of empathy from Theodor Lipps and in Ideas cited it several times but did not really

give it a fuller treatment. When Stein approached him for advise for a possible dissertation

project, Husserl suggested that she take up Lipps’ notion of empathy. She was initially reluctant

about this but after consultation with mentor and confidant Adolf Reinach, Stein proceeded to

undertake her research on empathy and ended up exceeding Husserl’s and even her own

expectations. Despite the interruptions brought about by war as well as the growing personal

distance between herself and Husserl, Stein (1989) managed to work on her doctoral dissertation

and later magnum opus, On The Problem of Empathy. On August 3, 1916, she took her oral

examinations and was awarded the honor summa cum laude for her work, a rare feat in the

University of Freiburg.
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The notion of empathy basically raises the question about the possibility of the body as

another body. The question is important in that the possibility of empathy practically raptures

the solipsistic tendencies of phenomenology as well as the primacy of its transcendental leanings.

Stein succeeded in pushing for her argument by recognizing first of all the presence of the

individual as an embodied mind which is at once situated and constituted through interaction

with others. One knows therefore oneself as one is known by those individuals around her. This

situatedness with other bodies allows me to see and recognize the feelings and thoughts of others

as embodied experiences and not as aspects of some inner-world realms. But bodily expressions

are not just physical gestures determined by some mechanical rules. They are in fact

manifestations of an intentional act of a variety of thoughts and feelings. There is no duality

therefore between the body and the mind; the body and the mind form a single entity,

functioning and operating as one. With her study, Stein unwittingly arrived at the same

conclusion reached by St. Thomas Aquinas centuries before her concerning the unity of the

human person. This was the period when Stein had yet to read a single page of Thomistic

literature (MacIntyre, 2006, pp. 75-97)

In adopting a Husserlian framework to carry out the resolution of a Husserlian problem,

Stein accomplished what she herself did not envision to achieve, that is, the overturning of the

Husserlian priority of the idealist element of later phenomenology in favor of its inherent realist

content. Whereas for Husserl, it was the “I” that serves as the foundation of consciousness, for

Stein, it was instead emphatetic awareness. As summed up by MacIntyre (2006) in his

commentary of Stein’s achievement:

For Stein by contrast emphatetic awareness of others and of their acts of

perception, memory and imagination is not just one more phenomenon waiting to
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be studied. It is only through an adequate phenomenological account of

emphatetic awareness and of the indispensable part that bodies have in such
awareness that we can understand how the objects of perception are constituted as
objects of consciousness (p. 102).

Stein’s work on empathy antedates her later conversion to Catholic faith in 1922. Her case is an

example of an intellectual transformation preceding the act of faith, the same case that we find in

the religious conversion of other intellectuals like St. Augustine, Cardinal Henry Newman and

Adolf Reinach. What she achieved in her work in empathy would mark the next stage of her

philosophic career that would bring her closer and closer to Thomistic tradition. In 1929, when

asked to contribute for a Festschrift in honor of Husserl, Stein (2000) submitted a seminal work

entitled Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. In such work,

Stein recognized the commonality between the two in their shared optimism with regards to the

task of philosophy and its orientation towards the search for logos. The similarities

notwithstanding, she also pointed out in the said piece what she considered as the main point of

departure between the Husserlian and Thomistic philosophical systems. As a consequence of

Husserl’s Kantian turn, Stein asserted that the biggest liability of phenomenology in its search

for objectivity is its strict adherence to the primacy of transcendental consciousness and its

bracketing of the external world. Thomistic philosophy, on the other hand, does not have this

attitude towards external reality. It looks at the world as already knowable and not as something

yet be constituted. For St. Thomas Aquinas, therefore, truth is real and not just as regularive

ideal as Husserl claims. It is in this respect that, in MacIntyre’s reading (2006), Stein was able to

present her philosophy as an alternative to both modern and Catholic philosophies. Her realist

claims brought her closer to Thomistic philosophy and allowed her to mitigate the idealist claims

of Husserl and phenomenology. Her engagement in phenomenological research likewise allowed

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her to show a way of dialoguing with modernity which relied not so much on polemics and

anathema sit but on sincere and rigorous philosophical work. A fuller statement on her newly

found Thomistic commitment would be her habilitationsschrift Potency and Act from which the

publication, Finite and Eternal Being (2002) was developed as well as the The Science of the

Cross (2002), her last major work before her martyrdom at Auschwitz in 1942. Edith Stein

discovered St. Thomas Aquinas, thanks to the Jesuit priest Erich Przywara who introduced her to

his thoughts by enlisting her to translate into German St. Thomas’ Quaestiones de Disputatae de

Veritate. Stein’s acquaintance with Thomism was a fitting sequel to her reading of St. Teresa of

Avila, Ignatius of Loyola and Soren Kierkegaard, three influential sources which eventually

stirred and led her to a fuller intellectual awakening and spiritual conversion. Stein was baptized

a Catholic on January 1, 1922 and was received into the community of the Discalced Carmelites

in 1933. Edith Stein found in Thomism the missing link in her philosophical sojourn and even

without her willing it, Thomism found in her the long sought emancipation from its confinementt

within the modern epistemological quarantine and in the process obtained the affirmation of the

inherent vigor of its own philosophical tradition.

Conclusion

Stein doubtlessly was a bona fide citizen of modernity as shown by her non-conformist

ways, her iconoclastic stance towards tradition and her dogged pursuit for self-emancipation in

which philosophy played a major role. When it was not fashionable for any woman to undertake

an academic profession, much less, take up philosophy as a career, Stein was tirelessly working

to make a clearing for herself in world that was, in Germany of her time, culturally and

institutionally masculine.
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Stein did not look for Catholic philosophy nor aspired to be a Catholic philosopher. If one

follows MacIntyre’s account, it would appear that her spiritual and intellectual conversion to

Catholicism was actually a serendipitous consequence of her intense engagement with her own

questions concerning phenomenology. Similar to the predicament of fellow phenomenologists

like Reinach, Ingarden, Conrad-Martius, Hildebrand and Lipps, Stein had, early on, seen the

inherent incompleteness of the kind of phenomenology espoused by Edmund Husserl. As

narrated by MacIntyre, it was her latter discovery of Aquinas via her German translation of

Aquinas’ Quaestiones de Disputatae de Veritate which confirmed this. While the translation

pleased neither the Thomists nor phenomenologists, such endeavor opened up for Stein a new

theoretical mooring which lent support to her critique against the hegemony of human reason

advocated by Kant and later seconded by Husserl. Following St. Thomas Aquinas, Stein posited

the limitations of reason but unlike Kant, it was a set of limitations which did not come from

reason itself.

Stein supposed that Kant committed theoretical contradiction when he proposed that

reason can be limited only by itself. Husserl followed the lead of Kant in his hope to find a safe

path to knowledge that is error free. Stein, assuming a Thomistic position, found Husserl’s

proposal improbable considering that such kind of knowledge is by nature inaccessible to human

subjects. A knowledge that is absolutely certain is something which only God enjoys. One

therefore cannot adequately account for the nature of knowledge and its certainty without

bringing in the matter of divinity into the discussion of phenomenological research.

It was her critical stance therefore towards Husserlian return to Kantian

transcendentalism and her tacit commitment to realism that led Stein to see in St. Thomas
 17

Aquinas the fullness of a philosophical position already implicit in her earlier research

undertaking. As MacIntyre noted, Stein’s conversion to Catholicism was a turnabout not so

much from Judaism as from atheism. With her receipt of the Catholic baptism and her eventual

membership in the community of discalced Carmelites, Stein herself embodied the harmony

between faith and reason, the same harmony which marked philosophy for the Catholic and

Thomistic traditions.

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About the Author

Jovito V. Cariño is a faculty of the Department of Philosophy, University of Santo Tomas (UST)
Manila. He earned his MA in Philosophy from Ateneo de Manila University. He is currently a
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PhD student at UST. His research interests include ethics, political philosophy, Aristotle,
Aquinas and Alasdair MacIntyre.