Abstract

Although scholarship on the philosophy of Edith Stein has attended to nearly all aspects of her work, her notion of community in its own right has remained largely unexplored. This dissertation is an attempt to rectify this situation. Edith Stein achieves important distinctions that not only bring community to clearer givenness, but that also clarify the nature of the individual person. ;Community coalesces from individual persons; therefore, the dissertation begins by presenting Edith Stein's understanding of the individual, especially as she develops this in her early works. There are several phenomenal levels within the individual, and Edith Stein explains that some, though not all, of these levels can be had in common with others. Since the individual's psychic and spiritual levels can be shared, they can contribute to the constitution of community. ;Community, Edith Stein explains, is a spiritual reality wherein individuals are united into a higher subjectivity, into a "we." In this higher subjectivity motives interweave and interpenetrate. The common life of a community typically manifests itself in communal willing and acting. Community can be viewed from two perspectives: by the member as he lives within it, and by the individual as he sees it as a unified reality. Each of these stances brings to prominence different features of community. ;The essence of community is further clarified in Edith Stein's treatise on the state, where she elaborates the differences between association and community. After her conversion to Catholicism, Edith Stein continues to be interested in community, even though she does not devote any work explicitly or primarily to it. Her popular lectures on woman, education, and the individual contribute to her developing thought on the subject. In these lectures she shows that the individual and community are in some sense dependent one upon the other, so that she can say that they always grow together. ;In her thought on community Edith Stein shows that the individual is both ontologically prior to and yet also dependent upon community. Community, in turn, is dependent upon its members, although it also exceeds its members and has a reality of its own