Edited by Marianne Sawicki. Translated by Mary Catherine
Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki. Edith Stein's analysis of the
interplay between the philosophy of psychology and cultural studies,
particularly psychoanalytic theory and behaviorism.
ISBN
0-935216-73-1
ICS Publications Code: PH
324 pages, paper, $13.95
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"Do I have to?" is the most human of all questions. Children
ask it when told to go to sleep. Adults ponder it when faced with
the demands of the workplace, the family, or their own emotions and
addictions. We find ourselves always poised between freedom and
necessity.
In this volume, her most profound and carefully argued
phenomenology of human creativity, Edith Stein explores the
interplay of causal constraints and motivated choices. She
demonstrates that physical events and physiological processes do not
entirely determine behavior; the energy deployed for living and
creativity exceeds what comes to us through physical means. The
human body is a complex interface between the material world and an
equally real world of personal value.
The body opens as well to community. Stein shows that, strictly
speaking, there is no such thing as a solitary human being.
Communities are reservoirs of the meaning and value that fuel both
our everyday choices and our once-in-a-lifetime accomplishments.
This basic fact, she argues, is the starting point for any viable
political or social theory.
The two treatises in this book comprise her post-doctoral
dissertation that Stein wrote to qualify for a teaching job at a
German university just after the First World War. They ring with the
joy, hope, and confidence of a brilliant young scholar. Today they
continue to challenge the major schools of twentieth-century
psychology and cultural studies, particularly psychoanalytic theory
and behaviorism. Here, too, is the intellectual manifesto of a woman
who would go on to become a Christian and a Carmelite nun, only to
be killed at Auschwitz like so many others of Jewish ancestry.
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