Part 2-Why Did the Nazis Kill Edith Stein?

The Difference Between Ens (a being) and Esse (being as such)– Part Two (2/3)

Husserl’s Undertaking

Husserl’s philosophical activity emerged at the dawn of the 20th century with meticulous studies in logic. Moreover, he was a skilled mathematician, possessing a form of mind (forma mentis) accustomed to rational rigor—a trait he would maintain throughout his life. His mind was extraordinarily meticulous in reasoning and in describing the inner facts of consciousness, a quality that earned him immense respect from the intellectual milieu of his time.

Building upon this scientific training, he conceived the idea of founding a truly radical, unassailable, and rigorous philosophy, especially in light of the low intellectual level of his era, dominated by positivism, empiricism, subjectivism, scientism, vitalism, materialism, psychologism, and Hegelianism.

To counter this state of affairs, he issued to the philosophers of his time a frank and courageous call to objectivity—to the vision of essences, to rigorous reasoning, and to the careful observation and experience of what is given to us, what presents itself, or what appears in consciousness immediately, manifestly, and indisputably.

This call to trust in the possibility of establishing a truly foundational knowledge for all the sciences was justified by Husserl through his proclamation of having discovered a new science, which he called phenomenology. Its object was an entirely new and vast domain of being, hitherto unknown. In this domain, he identified the radical science that serves as the foundation for all others.

The field of phenomenology, according to Husserl, is what he terms the realm of absolute consciousness, the pure ego, or the being of consciousness. It excludes the existence of any being outside consciousness—all being is immanent to consciousness.

For Husserl, the ego is what I become aware of when I think of myself or gain self-consciousness. In this act, I form a concept of myself, which I designate with the word “I.” According to Husserl, the ego in its purity is the absolute—the totality of being—beyond which nothing exists.

However, Husserl holds that in this act of self-awareness, we do not immediately recognize this pure ego. Instead, we remain at the level of our human, psychological ego, with its materiality, individuality, limitations, and frailties—an ego that perceives a world outside itself and a God who would be its creative cause, as well as the creator of my human self, composed of body and soul.

For Husserl, the naïve realist conceives of his ego as surpassed by the universe he perceives around him and, above all, as transcended by its cause—God—whom he regards as the supreme and primary ens, upon whom everything depends, including his human ego. This human ego, according to Husserl, has yet to discover its pure ego, beyond which nothing exists, because, as previously stated, the pure ego is the totality of being.

What appears external to the human ego is, in reality, internal and immanent to the pure ego. Unlike the human ego, the pure ego does not depend on any external reality; rather, it exists by itself and is the very principle of all things, constituting and grounding both itself and what appears to the human ego as the external world.

The pure ego exists of itself and by its power—it is not created. Instead, it is the human ego that is formed or constituted by the pure ego. The entire problem of truth, the foundation of the sciences, and morality hinges on the ego’s ability to strip itself of its empirical humanity by suspending its spontaneous yet deceptive judgment concerning the existence of external reality, and thereby discovering the pure ego, in which all things reside and from which all things originate. This process of focusing exclusively on the pure ego while disregarding everything else is what Husserl calls transcendental reduction.

For Husserl, then, the task is to understand that what appears to the human ego as an external and transcendent world is, in reality, an ideal construction of its pure ego—that is, of consciousness itself, within which, and only within which, all that exists has its existence.

Thus, for Husserl, it is naïve rather than scientific to believe that one’s ego depends for its existence on an external, superior, and transcendent reality called “God.” Indeed, for him, the world that seems to exist beyond the ego and to give existence to the ego itself is, in reality, the effect of an inner and intentional activity—not of the human ego, but of the pure ego. The existence of God is not outright denied, but rather affirmed only as a construction of the pure ego, existing within the pure ego itself. In this, Husserl’s view bears little difference from Kant’s notion of God as the supreme idea of reason, immanent to reason itself.

Husserl articulates this conviction—one that is unmistakably idealist in character—quite clearly in his famous work Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology, which Edith Stein must certainly have read, though evidently without immediately grasping the full implications of Husserl’s words, which he expresses as follows:

“No real being that, through appearances, consciously represents and justifies itself, is required for the being of consciousness itself—construed in the broadest sense as the stream of Erlebnisse. Immanent being is, therefore, indubitably absolute being, in the sense that, in principle, nulla “re” indiget ad existendum.” [1]

I observe that while it is true that I produce my concepts, the real things those concepts represent—including myself—are not produced by me! Here, it is evident how Husserl, under the pretext of highlighting the philosophical significance of consciousness, replaces God with the ego, owing to the false distinction he draws between the human ego and the pure ego. This pure ego, which needs nothing to exist, clearly takes the place of God, even if it appears distinct from the human ego. But this human ego is not my person standing before the person of God. That is, the absolute, self-subsisting, and infinite pure ego is not God—not another transcendent Ego, the Creator of my ego—but always remains myself in a state of purity, independent of my human mode of being.

As an absolute I, I do not need a creator, for I exist from myself. It is clear how, in this passage, Husserl usurps the divine name I Am from Exodus 3:14. It seems incredible, but Edith Stein, in the immense hope she placed in Husserl, did not realize for several years the gravity of this tremendous imposture.

Indeed, for Husserl, just as, in a certain sense, for Hinduism, my I is not merely a human I, but is, in substance, a divine I. However, at the outset, being inclined to consider things external to myself, I lack awareness of this reality. Phenomenology, much like Indian yoga, leads us to recognize that our true I does not exist merely as something created by God, but rather possesses existence in and of itself.

On the contrary, if one wishes to speak properly of a pure I that gives meaning and constitution to man and the world, this I is God, not myself, no matter how much I may illuminate my I in its purity. At a certain point, Edith Stein became aware of this, and this decisive realization led her to abandon Husserl’s pure I and embrace the true God—God of Israel and Jesus Christ, the God of Aristotle and Saint Thomas.

Nevertheless, Husserl also regarded idealism as false due to its identification of the subject with the object, the ideal with the real, the concept with the thing (Ding), and thought with being. He therefore sought to recover the notion of intentional being to explain the fact of knowledge. According to him, knowledge does not imply an ontological identification of subject and object; rather, consciousness intends the object—it intuits or sees being as essence (Wesenschau), as a "correlate of consciousness." Thus, being is not understood as a real entity external to and independent of consciousness, but as being of consciousness, immanent to consciousness.

Husserl did not mean by this to invalidate the naturally realistic attitude of the human mind, which conceives of a reality external to itself. However, he regarded this attitude as a form of naïveté, incapable of providing a first foundation for knowledge. In contrast, he believed that such a foundation was offered by what he presented as a new science—phenomenology, which he claimed to have discovered. In this framework, certainty is not grounded in contact with an entity external to consciousness, but rather in the interior vision, intuition, or experience of being of consciousness.

Husserl was indeed aware that the act of knowing is an act of the spirit, immanent to the spirit and independent of space. However, he failed to grasp that, despite this, the intellect, in knowing, without exiting itself spatially, still reaches and apprehends a material reality external to the intellect—one that exists outside in space. Moreover, it also grasps a spiritual reality, such as the person and God Himself, which are not spatial entities but immaterial. These are outside in the sense that they are truly distinct from and independent of consciousness, to the extent that God is even the creator of consciousness.

For Husserl, however, the outside is always inside, because it is not truly external but is only thought of as internal. Yet, in doing so, he effectively treats the inside as the outside, thereby transforming his spiritualism into a form of materialism. As Maritain insightfully observes [2], Husserl ultimately mistakes the intellect for a material form, whose act consists of filling itself with the content given by the object.

In this way, as was already the case with Kant, knowledge acquires a form and a matter. The form of the object is the intellect itself, while the matter is the object’s material content. In the act of knowing, the intellect does not immaterially receive the form of an external entity; rather, it fills the form with the content of the object, which, being originally material, is then transformed into something formal.

For Husserl, therefore, the cognitive activity does not involve contact with the external world but is resolved into a purely reflective activity in which the object is not presupposed as something external and is perceived through the senses. Instead, it already exists within consciousness, felt, so that consciousness merely acknowledges the object.

Being, for Husserl, is not an external being to consciousness, pre-existing and independent from it. It is being-for-consciousness; being is that which appears to consciousness—the phenomenological being, the being of phenomenology, a being which, according to him, no one had ever considered before and which he discovered as an infinite field of certain philosophical investigation.

Thus, despite his spiritualism, Husserl remains tied to the Kantian conception of knowledge, in which the intellect is an "empty form" that gets filled with the matter of the object. In this view, it is not the intellect that is informed by the form of the object, but rather the object that is shaped by the form of the intellect. Husserl overlooks, however, the crucial insight of Aristotle: it is not the stone that is in the soul, but rather the image of the stone.

It is the real stone that is composed of matter and form. However, the appearance of the stone in the soul—whether as an image, concept, or idea—is a pure form. The form that the stone has, in reality, is the same form that the intellect perceives immaterially within itself. This is the true act of knowing.

When the intellect knows a stone, it abstracts from its matter and knows only the form of the stone, while the matter remains unknown to it. In knowing, it is not a matter of filling empty forms, but of intentionally and representatively apprehending, in concepts and ideas, the forms or essences of external reality—whether material or spiritual—while their existence can be grasped by intellectual intuition, through the senses.

End of the Second Part (2/3)

P. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, March 13, 2025

Source:

https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/perche-i-nazisti-hanno-ucciso-edith_15.html

Notes:

[1] Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1976, p. 107.

[2] Les degrés du savoir, Desclée de Brouwer, Bruges 1959, pp. 197-198