Edmund Husserl and His Influence on the Philosophies of Edith Stein and Karol Wojtyła

Edmund Husserl is a notable figure in contemporary philosophy. He is most famous for establishing the school of phenomenology, which is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. The influence of this school from its inception in the early 20^th century spread quickly throughout Europe and North America with the names of Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Emmanuel Levinas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty featuring prominently in its arc of influence. Today, the Husserlian phenomenological tradition extends even to scholarships in Eastern and Oriental thought.¹ It is no surprise, then, to see that Husserl has also had an influence on Catholic thought. In this respect, two figures draw attention: Edith Stein and Karol Wojtyła. 

This post will analyse the influence of Edmund Husserl on these two Catholic thinkers. First, a presentation and review of Husserl’s phenomenological method will be given. Then, Edith Stein’s thought, which was founded directly on the framework of Husserl’s phenomenology, will be discussed. Following this, Karol Wojtyła’s thought will be presented in this context, especially his work in “The Acting Person”. Finally, the post will be concluded accordingly. 

Since this is a very long post, I’ll provide here a table of contents so that you can jump to a particular section as you see fit. Also, every footnote can be hovered over to view its contents so you don’t have to scroll to the bottom of the page each time you wish to read something additional.

Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl began his academic career in the late 19^th century not in philosophy but in mathematics, logic, and psychology. At that time there was a trend, called psychologism, to reduce the entire lawfulness of logic and mathematics to merely psychological lawfulness. That is, logical axioms were said to be grounded on and exhausted by psychological laws such that the existence of logic was entirely dependent on man who thought them. Logic, hence, did not have validity outside of man’s psychic activity.² Initially, Husserl subscribed to this position. In 1891 he published a book entitled “Philosophy of Arithmetic”³ that was a study around psychologism on the concept of number, which is the most basic concept on which arithmetic and mathematics is founded. 

It was only after reading criticisms of psychologism by figures such as Paul Natorp, Carl Stumpf, and Gottlob Frege (who, in fact, directly criticised Husserl’s “Philosophy of Arithmetic”) that Husserl converted away from psychologism. He saw this position as being fatal to logic because among other things, he argued that it is impossible to interpret logical principles based only on our way of thinking. He also pointed out that psychology deals solely with psychological phenomena. Mathematics and logic, on the other hand, deal not with operations such as counting but with products and conclusions of such operations and with numbers themselves. Husserl also argued that psychologism leads to skeptical relativism where man in his instability becomes the measure of everything else. And, following on from this, relativism is self-contradictory because it negates the possibility of all knowledge while simultaneously maintaining that its statements must be true.⁴

In this respect, in 1900 Husserl published the first volume of his famous work entitled “Logical Investigations: Prolegomena to Pure Logic” where he concluded that mathematics and logic are pure and independent of man’s thinking. He stated that although there is no mathematics and logic without man to think these, it is only, however, the factual appearing of this thought that depends on man. The validity of what is thought is entirely independent of any psychic activity of man.⁵ 

Since psychological laws are not the foundation of all facts and knowledge, Husserl was interested in discerning exactly what this foundation could be. Being a scientist, he wanted a sure bedrock upon which all other sciences could be built. Like René Descartes, he wanted to ascertain what can be known without doubt and how this knowledge is possible. In this sense, also like Descartes, Husserl took pure consciousness as what is known indubitably and focused his studies on this area.⁶ What resulted was the school of phenomenology, with its core ideas initially laid out in another of his famous works entitled “Ideas”, which was published in 1913. 

In “Ideas”, Edmund Husserl described how it is possible for the objects of consciousness to be necessary objects and that the study of these would be the sure bedrock he was seeking. Husserl saw that consciousness itself, unlike also what psychologism was claiming, was not just a describable function that belongs to the realm of things or facts. It was independent of these and consequently could be regarded as the seat of knowledge. The content of this knowledge, therefore, distilled of everything factual and contingent, had being in the full sense of the term. And scrutinising the beings of indubitable consciousness would be grasping their very essences, laying the foundation for universal philosophy.⁷

To scrutinise the beings of consciousness Husserl developed a new method called the phenomenological method of reduction. The idea behind this method was to suspend all knowledge of the natural world in order to leave behind purely the realm of transcendental consciousness: “epoché must be transformed consciously into a reduction to the absolute I, to the I that is the ultimate functional center of any constitution”.⁸ Suspending all knowledge of the natural world, including that it exists, means not taking it into consideration; it means treating it as a presupposition that ought to be bracketed out. Certainly, the “real” world does exist for Husserl – that is, the area under consideration is a realm of objects which are the same objects existing in the natural world – the difference is that we are simply looking at things from a different standpoint in regard to them. This standpoint constitutes the indubitable element of consciousness.

When all knowledge of the natural world is suspended a pure consciousness remains. To get to the essence of objects (phenomena) in this consciousness, the structures of consciousness need to be reduced also. This is performed by examining consciousness and its limitations. Indeed, Husserl was the first person to examine the structures of consciousness in this way.⁹ As he himself stated, consciousness, this new region of being, has “never before [been] delimited in its own peculiarity.”¹⁰ Among other things, Husserl saw consciousness as always being active and directed towards something.¹¹ That is, transcendental consciousness is intentional: it always includes a subject, an act, and an object. The subject is the person performing actions such as willing, analysing, dreaming. The object, then, is what is willed, analysed or dreamt. Consciousness, hence, is constantly in flow like a stream.

Once a reduction to phenomena is performed, the phenomenologist is able to intuit the essence (eidos) of these objects. This is done via acts that Husserl called eidetic intuition and eidetic variation. These acts scrutinise phenomena by imaginative free-play (i.e. imagining variation) on an object. It involves asking: “What holds up amid such free variations of an original… as the invariant, the necessary, universal form, the essential form, without which something of that kind… would be altogether inconceivable?”¹² In other words, we imagine if certain features of an object can be thought without destroying the object as an instance of its kind. If it is inconceivable that the object lacks these features, then they must constitute the essence of the object. 

At the time of Edmund Husserl, Immanuel Kant was very much in vogue, so it is interesting to note the differences and similarities between these two philosophers. Husserl once wrote that “I have learnt incomparably more from Hume than from Kant. I possessed the deepest antipathy against Kant, and he has not (if I judge rightly) influenced me at all”.¹³ This, however, is probably an exaggeration despite there existing significant differences between their two philosophies. The main contrast being that one deals with objects (Kant) the other with phenomena (Husserl). The point of emphasis here is divergent and significant. For Kant, appearances are objects from the mind-external world that we inhabit and it is these objects that he investigates. In Kant’s studies, the mind-external object and its way of being is important. But Husserl is not interested in object-based analysis, only in how an object is grasped by the subject.

In other words, Kant analyses the objective forms of the objects of experience while Husserlian phenomenology turns inward into the subjective side of experience. Husserl is not concerned with the objective world – so, even if subjects hallucinated and defied the laws of physics in their minds, this would still be his area of investigation. In fact, Husserl brackets out what Kant investigates. Hence why Husserl focuses on consciousness (subjective realm of reality) and Kant on reason (objective realm of reality). 

Having said this, the influence of Kant on Husserl is clear. Husserl is a variation of the Kantian transcendental method of analysing the forms of experience to determine the necessary conditions and properties of objects. But Husserl considers the subjective investigation of how objects appear in our consciousness. He does this in order to determine something about the objects themselves as an alternative or, in fact, foundation to other scientific investigations (as discussed above).  Chances are, then, that without Kant’s work, Husserl’s method of reduction and his acts of eidetic intuition and variation would not have been explored. 

It is also necessary, in the scope of the investigations of this post, to call attention to certain weaknesses of Husserl’s framework and analyses of consciousness. Specifically, two such weaknesses will be mentioned because they are addressed (directly or indirectly) by Edith Stein and Karol Wojtyła in their works. The two deficiencies are namely: the seeming one-dimensionality of consciousness as well as a lack of consideration for the unconscious.

With respect to the first weakness, and as was mentioned earlier, Husserl’s intentional consciousness is incessantly in action and directed towards something. What results is consciousness being depicted as being constantly in flow, like a stream. Although this stream may include the “actions” of passivity it does not allow consciousness, at least directly, to simply rest or “be”. Hence, consciousness is characterised as being flat. Indeed, a stream is like a line in mathematics, which is one-dimensional in the Euclidean space. A one-dimensional representation of consciousness certainly does not do justice to something that is the depthless realm constitutive of the person. 

The second mentioned weakness also contributes to consciousness being seemingly given only one-dimension by Husserl. Sigmund Freud showed that experiences which have taken place in the past can by repressed by the superego and exist in the unconscious of man: “What is forgotten is not extinguished but only ‘repressed’; its memory-traces are present in all their freshness, but isolated by ‘anticathexes’… they are unconscious – inaccessible to consciousness”.¹⁴ From the unconscious, these experiences can break out into the conscious and affect the behaviour of the person but not necessarily in a recognisable way. Husserl leaves little room for dealing directly with repressed experiences in this respect nor for the unconscious element of man. This is a significant weakness of his framework.¹⁵ 

Finally, before the post proceeds to consider Stein and Wojtyła, it should be noted that in the 1920s Husserl turned to idealism. This caused a break with many of his notable students such as Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Nikolai Hartmann, Oskar Becker, and Hedwig Conrad-Martius.¹⁶ These students felt that the later Husserl departed from experience and they subsequently did not give much heed to the Husserl that followed this turn.¹⁷ Catholic thought in the likes of Edith Stein and Karol Wojtyła followed suit and hence the “later” Husserl will not be considered in this post.

Edith Stein

Edith Stein, another German philosopher, was inspired by the new philosophical movement that had emerged in the early 20^th century. In 1913, she enrolled at the University of Göttingen in order to study with Husserl. She worked closely with him by first completing a doctoral dissertation in 1916 under his supervision and then becoming his assistant for the following three years. 

During her time with Husserl, she studied his works diligently and played a prominent role in the editing and drafting of Husserl’s second volume of “Ideas”¹⁸ (sometimes referred to as “Ideas II”) as well as his “On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time”.¹⁹ In fact, she was instrumental in shaping Husserl’s thought in key areas of “Ideas II”, despite not receiving any acknowledgement for her contributions.²⁰ 

It is not surprising, then, that Edith Stein came to endorse the phenomenology of “Logical Investigations” and “Ideas” and saw it also as a universal philosophy, especially with respect to psychology.²¹ Throughout her academic career she always saw herself as faithful to Husserl’s earlier thought. However, she did broaden and deepen phenomenology in a way that indirectly dealt with the weaknesses of the method described above. This is apparent in two of her seminal works: her PhD dissertation on empathy entitled “On the Problem of Empathy”²² and her work entitled “Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities”.²³ 

In “On the Problem of Empathy”, Stein attempts to steer away from Husserl’s analogical theory of empathy.²⁴ She sees empathy as not being just perception, representation or neutral positing but a sui generis. Indeed, empathy is the givenness of foreign subjects and their experiences; it is an act in which we appreciate the consciousness of other people: “Empathy… is the experience of foreign consciousness in general, irrespective of the kind of the experiencing subject or of the subject whose consciousness is experienced”.²⁵ 

To elaborate on this idea, in Chapter III of her dissertation Stein quite intuitively describes in her own way how the psycho-physical individual is constituted within consciousness. Inspired by Aristotle, she presents the soul and body together as forming the psycho-physical facet of the human being.²⁶ The soul, seen as the basic bearer of all experiences, is founded on the body with the latter being given concomitantly under two guises: as a physical body in outer perception, and as a living-body in inner perception. The constitution of the soul and body is unified by the phenomenon of fusion.²² 

Since body and soul are a unity, bodily sensations, as Stein argues, are constituents of consciousness as well and cannot, therefore, be suspended. They should remain in the scope of experience alongside other acts of consciousness: “As an instance of the supreme category of “experience,” sensations are among the real constituents of consciousness, of this domain impossible to cancel. The sensation of pressure or pain or cold is just as absolutely given as the experience of judging, willing, perceiving, etc.”²⁷ However, sensations are peculiarly characterised compared to other acts of consciousness: the former do not issue from the pure “I” as the latter do; they do not turn towards an object in a reflective, cogito manner; i.e. sensations are never aware of themselves. In fact, they are spatially localised “somewhere” in the living body at a distance from the “I” – perhaps very near to the “I” but never in it.²² 

With the assimilation of the body into consciousness – that is, the accepting that the body is an essential dimension of human understanding in tandem with others – Husserl’s phenomenological framework was broadened. This framework was even further extended in “Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities”, which was a work that attempted to bring the two academic fields of psychology and philosophy closer together. In this publication, Stein incorporated the philosophy and psychology of Max Scheler into Husserl’s framework. She borrowed and refined Scheler’s four phenomenal divisions of activity within the human individual: the physical, the sensate, the mental, and the personal. The physical realm is the material aspect of my being that is causally connected to the physical world; the sensate realm is the living responsive body; the mental division is the undivided mind, intelligence, spirit; and the personal realm is the individual person with his unique personality.²⁸ 

Each realm is porous and mutually permeable, so when an external event occurs, influences travel across from one layer to another. Individual realms will treat an event in its own characteristic way. The sensory realm, for example, pushes the impact of experiences to the mental and personal realms – in this respect it is deemed a “communicative” layer. The last two realms, however, are not governed by causal influences such that decisions and actions resulting from them cannot be completely understood in causal terms.²⁹ Further, the personal layer has the feature of opaqueness from the standpoint of other sentient beings. That is, one cannot “see” into other individual persons much like one cannot see through physical matter. The individual person as such is a mystery. Hence, only the sensate and mental levels are phenomenally available to other people. 

The human being, then, is a multiply stratified being – and since the body and soul are fused into a union, the four realms are all located in the soul and body simultaneously. One can see here that Husserl’s consciousness has been expanded with additional realms that merge and interplay much more strongly with psychology. However, the one-dimensional stream of Husserl’s consciousness is still present. Indeed, Edith Stein likens this stream to an electrical current: 

The original current of consciousness is a pure becoming. Experiencing flows along… the phases flow into one another, no series of disjoint phases emerges, but just a single steadily expanding current. Therefore it wouldn’t make any sense to ask about a “connecting” of phases.

Edith Stein, Empathy, p. 9.

Hence, although the uniqueness and singularity of the human person is intuitively investigated and expressed better by Stein,³⁰ the passive and reflective capabilities of consciousness are still not directly captured in her thought. Husserl’s framework that Stein fundamentally uses is restrictive.

Stein, however, does appear to give room in her phenomenology for Sigmund Freud’s unconscious element of man from which repressed experiences can break out into the conscious. There is a mode of existence for past experiences that is called the mode of non-actuality where an experience moves out of activity into passivity: “This volition that remained unfulfilled for a long time has not fallen “into forgottenness”…, has not sunk back into the stream of the past… It has only gone out of the mode of actuality over into that of non-actuality, out of activity into passivity”.³¹ Then, from this mode it can later resurface to affect current behaviour:

Part of the nature of consciousness is that the cogito, the act in which the “I” lives, is surrounded by a marginal zone of background experiences in each moment of experience. These are non-actualities… not accessible to reflection. In order to be comprehended, they must first pass through the form of the cogito, which they can do at any time… Thus, it is not something past which affects the present, but something that reaches into the present.

Angela A. Bello, “Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein: The question of the human subject” in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 82, no. 1, 2008, p. 73.

This is undoubtedly a valuable addition of Stein’s work – one arrived at by the method of phenomenology. It tackles the second weakness of Husserl’s framework described above, albeit without seemingly any influence from Freud. For this, Stein in her dissertation gives credit to Max Scheler and indirectly to Henri Bergson.³²

Karol Wojtyła

Karol Wojtyła, the Polish philosopher who later became Pope John Paul II, was also a phenomenologist who was greatly influenced by Husserl. His most famous phenomenological work entitled “The Acting Person” he credits as being “within the framework of a phenomenological inquiry of Husserlian orientation”.³³ In fact, in the first footnote in his book he states his indebtedness to Husserl because of how he opened up experience to philosophical scrutiny:  “for phenomenologists, ‘experience’ means immediate givenness of every cognitive act in which the object itself is given directly—‘bodily’—or, to use Husserl’s phrase, is leibhaft selbstgegeben”.³⁴

Nevertheless, although Wojtyła gives credit to Husserl for founding phenomenology, he actually recognises Max Scheler as his primary source of influence. This is not surprising considering that the Polish philosopher wrote his PhD dissertation in Sacred Theology on the feasibility of a Catholic ethic based on Scheler’s ethical system. 

Wojtyła’s thought was, hence, founded more on Scheler than Husserl,³⁵ which gave his phenomenology greater freedom and eloquence. This is because, among other things, Scheler unshackled the first weakness of Husserl’s method discussed in this post. For instance, Scheler placed a different emphasis on a priori knowledge. He saw a need for Husserl’s life world (a universe of what is self-evident or given that subjects may experience together³⁶) to combat the mechanistic explanation of the world arising from influences such as science³⁷: “the sphere of a priori essential knowledge extends beyond the purely formal and rational domains to include the essential forms of cultural life (love, hate, sympathy, resentment and so on).”³⁸ But Scheler had his own take on the life world. For him, it was the entire beingness of the person that constituted it and it was this beingness that enters into a relationship with things. As a result, the life world became for him the focus of attention rather than consciousness itself.³⁹ 

Moreover, in the life world, intentionality was understood differently. Intentionality is itself a structure of the lived experience: it is part of the life world and is not solely psychic states.⁴⁰ Furthermore, consciousness is not just directed to one thing because a “halo of potentialities is a part of my consciousness, though it lacks a focusing upon something.”⁴¹ Hence, Husserl’s idea that consciousness is of only one thing gets dissolved in Scheler. It is no longer one-dimensional – vastness and depth have found their rightful place in the understanding of it. Wojtyła, by building on Scheler, reaped this improvement to Husserl’s thought in his phenomenology. However, being the original thinker that he was, he did also give his own interpretations and developments to phenomenology.

Like Edith Stein, the Polish Cardinal maintained that a human being is not just a subsistent consciousness. There exists a unity between soul and body such that Descartes’ dichotomy of the two needs to be rejected. Later as pope he wrote the following in Veritatis Splendor: “In fact, body and soul are inseparable: In the person, in the willing agent and in the deliberate act, they stand or fall together.”⁴² 

To understand better the unity of the soul and body and also the order that governs the world, he greatly relied on Aquinas’s metaphysics. He used Aquinas in his phenomenology as a guide to help understand phenomena better. But he also verified Aquinas through phenomenological analysis.⁴³ In other words, Wojtyła engaged the conceptual apparatuses developed by Aquinas and then rigorously tested them against the things themselves. So, by incorporating teachings and principles of Aquinas, he enlightened the sphere of investigation, while continuing to use the phenomenological method. 

Indeed, Wojtyła saw the uniqueness and value of contemporary philosophy with its emphasis on consciousness. He saw that this modern approach to philosophy was lacking attention in Aquinas. In an essay from 1967 entitled “Ethics and Moral Theology”⁴⁴, the then archbishop of Cracow wrote: “Together with the emergence of the philosophy of consciousness and the development of the cognitive tools proper to it (e.g. the phenomenological method), new conditions are taking shape for enriching the concept of the human person in terms of the whole subjective, ‘conscious’ aspect”. And similarly he said the following in the introduction to his seminal work, “The Acting Person”: 

The inspiration to embark upon this study came from the need to objectivize that great cognitive process which at its origin may be defined as the experience of man; this experience, which man has of himself, is the richest and apparently the most complex of all experiences accessible to him.

Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, Introduction, p. 3.

In this respect, Wojtyła also saw the benefits of contemporary philosophy as being capable of more aptly grasping the interior life of man, the part of man where the human person most deeply responds to the loving call of God.⁴⁵ And providing the means to more precisely grasp this part of man is indispensable when attempting to give a full account of the human being. 

Hence, although Wojtyła’s phenomenology was characterised by a deep appreciation for metaphysics, he also greatly respected contemporary philosophy to bring forth depths of the person and man’s lived experiences previously left predominantly untouched by philosophy. In fact, as he showed in “The Acting Person”, both medieval metaphysics and contemporary phenomenology can mutually enrich and complement each other. In this respect, he managed to achieve something similar to Edith Stein⁴⁶: to enrich phenomenology with metaphysical influences and provide something more to Husserl’s original framework. 

As well as synthesising St Thomas’s anthropology and phenomenology, Wojtyla also proposed an original understanding of consciousness in his phenomenology. This involved an intuitive realisation that no matter what we know, we are also concomitantly aware of ourselves as knowing it: “Man’s experience of anything outside himself is always associated with the experience of himself, and he never experiences anything external without having at the same time the experience of himself”.⁴⁷ This orientation to what is within and this self-awareness is actually what characterises consciousness. There is a difference, then, between objective acts of knowing on which philosophies of being (like medieval metaphysics) focus their attention and consciousness understood in this way. And it seems that “The Acting Person” attends to this notion by pointing out that, hitherto, acts of knowing and acts of consciousness (i.e. acts of awareness) have not been correctly related to one another. Wojtyła explains the difference aptly:

It lies in the essence of cognitive acts performed by man to investigate a thing, to objectivize it intentionally, and in this way to comprehend it. In this sense cognitive acts have an intentional character, since they are directed toward the cognitive object; for they find in it the reason for their existence as acts of comprehension and knowledge.

Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, p. 32.

But consciousness is unlike this. The Polish philosopher, arguably influenced by Scheler’s rejection of Husserl’s intentionality, proposes his own original view:

[Acts of consciousness] are not essentially intentional by nature, even though all that is the object of our cognition, comprehension, and knowledge is also the object of our consciousness. But while comprehension and knowledge contribute in an intentional way to the formation of the object… consciousness as such is restricted to mirroring what has already been cognized. Consciousness is, so to speak, the understanding of what has been constituted and comprehended.

Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, p. 32.

So, although consciousness is object-oriented (i.e. a knowing of knowable objects) it is nonetheless not intentional and not dynamic in terms of object-formation. In this way it does not seemingly pass out into the world of objects known but is actually more passive and object-mirroring; that is, it is reflective of what happens in man and of his acting.⁴⁸ It is something that penetrates and illuminates whatever becomes in any way man’s cognitive possession.⁴⁹ And this penetrative illumination is “rather like keeping objects and their cognitive meanings “in the light,” or “in the actual field of consciousness””.⁴⁹ Wojtyła calls this action the reflective function of consciousness. 

He also gave another action to consciousness, which he called its reflexive function. This function was consciousness’ interiorising effect by which it passively receives the things known into ourselves as the knowing subjects. This interiorising is how we experience reality and, along with regular acts of cognition, how we also enter the world of objects: 

[I]t is not only cognitively that man enters into the world of other men and objects and even discovers himself there as one of them: he has also as his possession all this world in the image mirrored by consciousness, which is a factor in his innermost, most personal life. For consciousness not only reflects but also interiorizes in its own specific manner what it mirrors, thus encapsulating or capturing it in the person’s ego.

In this sense, this reflexive function, also has a constitutive action. Although it does not constitute objects like acts of cognition, it actually constitutes experiences as something uniquely subjective.

Wojtyla also gave room in his phenomenology to the subconscious. He defined it as “an inner space to which some objects are expelled or withheld and prevented from reaching the threshold of consciousness”.⁵⁰ These objects, however, remain in the subject in a dynamic state to emerge in consciousness, for example, when it is in a weakened state. Wojtyła saw the importance of studying the subconscious for an adequate anthropology. He recognised that this aspect of man reveals the richness of the human potentiality not entirely given by consciousness alone. Hence, he gave it due consideration and allowance in his phenomenology, unlike Husserl.⁵¹ 

In the way that Wojtyła elaborates on consciousness and delineates the difference between acts of cognition and acts of self-awareness and by his allowance for the subconscious, he greatly surpassed Husserl’s original phenomenological framework. Consciousness is much more than an incessant focus upon one sole object. Passivity and the subconscious are necessarily characteristic of it. As such, Husserl’s one-dimensionality of consciousness was stripped away by Wojtyła allowing for greater depths to be given to this paramount aspect of man. Moreover, by following the developments contributed by Scheler, it seems that Wojtyla’s phenomenology is worth more consideration and attention than that of Edith Stein who, as was discussed earlier, was confined by relying directly on Husserl’s original framework. 

Conclusion

This post has analysed the influence of Edmund Husserl on two prominent Catholic thinkers: Edith Stein and Karol Wojtyła. First, a presentation and review of Husserl’s phenomenological method was given. Like René Descartes, Husserl wanted to ascertain what can be known without doubt and how this knowledge is possible. In this sense, he took pure consciousness as what is known indubitably and focused his studies on this area. What resulted was the school of phenomenology where phenomena become the objects of philosophical scrutiny after the bracketing out of all knowledge of the natural world. Two weaknesses were then discussed with respect to this original thought: the seeming one-dimensionality of consciousness as well as a lack of consideration for the unconscious. Edith Stein’s thought was then presented. Since she founded her philosophy directly on Husserl’s, she remained restricted by it. However, by showing that bodily sensations are constituents of consciousness as well and cannot, therefore, be suspended, she managed to broaden the scope of phenomenology. Furthermore, she left room in her philosophy for the unconscious through what she termed the mode of non-actuality where an experience moves out of activity into passivity. Lastly, this post analysed the thought of Karol Wojtyła, especially with respect to his seminal work entitled “The Acting Person”. It was shown that since Wojtyła relied more on Scheler than Husserl, he unshackled Husserl’s weaknesses and managed to give consciousness greater depths. And also like Stein, he incorporated the body into his thought while also leaving room for the unconscious. Considering that Wojtyla did not rely as heavily on Husserl as did Stein, his phenomenology is arguably worth more consideration than Stein’s.

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Footnotes

1. See for instance: Nader El-Bizri, The Phenomenological Quest Between Avicenna and Heidegger (New York: Global Publications SUNY, 2000); and also refer to: Nader El-Bizri, “Avicenna’s De Anima between Aristotle and Husserl”, in The Passions of the Soul in the Metamorphosis of Becoming, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), pp. 67–89.
2. Joseph J. Kockelmans, A First Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology, (Louvain: Duquesne University Press, 1967), p. 6.
3. Edmund Husserl, Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations, tr. Dallas Willard, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003).
4. Kockelmans, A First Introduction, p. 10.
5. Ibid., p. 11.
6. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), p. 27.
7. Kockelmans, A First Introduction, p. 6.
8. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 188.
9. Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 211-227.
10. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, tr. F. Kersten, (Hingham: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), p. 63.
11. This particular feature of consciousness was inspired by Franz Brentano under whom Edmund Husserl initially studied; cf. Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, ed. Linda L. McAlister, (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 88–89: “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 towards an object,… or immanent objectivity. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is afformed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on”.
12. Edmund Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, tr. John Scanlon. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1977), sec. 9a.
13. Letter to Arnold Metzger of 1919 (Philosophisches Jahrbuch der Görres-Gesellschaft, München. vol. 62, no. 1, 1953, pp. 195-200), as quoted in R. A. Mall, Experience and Reason: The Phenomenology of Husserl and its Relation to Hume’s Philosophy, (Dordrecht: Springer Science & Business Media, 1973).
14. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays, tr. James Strachey, (London: Hogarth Press, 1974), 1-137.
15. Talia Welsh, “The Retentional and the Repressed: Does Freud’s Concept of the Unconscious Threaten Husserlian Phenomenology?” in Human Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2002, pp. 165-183.9.
16. Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II, tr. P. Guietti and F. Murphy, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997), p. 54-55.
17. Mette Lebech, “Why does John Paul II refer to Edith Stein in Fides et Ratio?”, (2002), pp. 154-180.
18. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, tr. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989).
19. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, tr. J. B. Brough, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).
20. cf. Marianne Sawicki, “Making up Husserl’s Mind About Constitution” in Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society, 2007, pp. 191-216; and Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: a Philosophical Prologue, (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 99-101.
21. cf. Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, tr. W. Stein, (Washington: ICS Publications, 1989), p. 22: “…psychology is entirely bound to the results of phenomenology”
22. Ibid.
23. Edith Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, tr. M. C. Baseheart and M. Sawicki, (Washington: ICS Publications, 2000).
24. cf. Ian Owen, “Husserl’s Theory of Empathy: Meaning Arrives with the Other” in Existential Analysis, no. 11, 2000, pp. 11-31.
25. Stein, Empathy, p. 11.
26. “This is the step from psychic to psycho-physical. Our proposed division between soul and body was an artificial one, for the soul is always necessarily a soul in a body” (Stein, Empathy, p. 41).
27. Ibid., p. 42.
28. Stein, Philosophy of Psychology, Editor’s Introduction, XV-XVII.
29. Ibid., p. 32.
30. Angela A. Bello, “Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein: The question of the human subject” in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 82, no. 1, 2008, pp. 146-147.
31. Ibid., p. 73.
32. Ibid., p. 72.
33. Karol Wojtyła, “The Intentional Act and the Human Act, that is, Act and Experience” in Analecta Husserliana, 5, 1976, no. 2, p. 276.
34. Karol Wojtyła, The Acting Person, tr. A. Potocki (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), Note #1, p. 301.
35. In fact, the original Polish edition of The Acting Person carried the subtitle: ‘An Attempt at Constructing Catholic Ethics on the Basis of Scheler’s Philosophy’; cf Roderick Chisholm, “Review of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła’s “The Acting Person””, in Religious Studies (1981), 17, no. 3, pp. 408-409.
36. cf. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis, pp. 108-109.
37. Michael B. Barber, Guardian of Dialogue: Max Scheler’s Phenomenology, Sociology of Knowledge and Philosophy of Love (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993), p. 25.
38. Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney (editors), The Phenomenology Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 200.
39. Macon W. Boczek, The Methodology of Phenomenological Realism in The Acting Person by Karol Wojtyla, PhD diss., Kent State University, 2012.
40. Martin Heidegger describes this aptly: “Intentionality is not a relationship to the non-experiential added to experiences, occasionally present along with them. Rather, the lived experiences themselves are as such intentional.” (Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, tr. T. Kisiel, (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 31-32).
41. Eugene Kelly, Structure and Diversity: Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler, (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. 18-22.
42. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 1993, 49.
43. Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyła, pp. 353, 356.
44. This essay has been published in John Paul II, Person and Community: Selected Essays, tr. T. Sandok, (New York: P. Lang), 1993, p. 103.
45. Gustavo Santos, Wojtyla’s Personalism and Kantian Human Dignity: Parallel Avenues of Reason within the Tension Toward the Ground of Existence, (2011), p. 2
46. It should be noted that Stein after her conversion turned to Aquinas also and undertook similar things to Wojtyła here.
47. Wojtyla, The Acting Person, Introduction, p. 5.
48. cf. Wojtyla, The Acting Person, p. 31: “Although it is true to say that in the ultimate analysis the function of consciousness is cognitive, this statement describes its nature only in a very general way; for in this function consciousness seems to be only a reflection, or rather a mirroring, of what happens in man and of his acting, of what he does and how he does it.”
49. Ibid., p. 33.
50. Ibid., p. 141.
51. Jaroslaw Kupczyk, Destined for Liberty: The Human Person in the Philosophy of Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II, (Washington: CUA Press, 2000), p. 110.