WorkEdith Stein

Husserl and Aquinas: A Comparison

A birthday essay for Husserl that sets him beside Thomas Aquinas and marks the one point where the two philosophies part.

by Edith Stein57 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des hl. Thomas v. Aquino
First published: 1929(aged 38)
Original language: German

Report a rights issue

Overview

For Edmund Husserl's seventieth birthday, on 8 April 1929, his former assistant first wrote a dialogue for two speakers: Husserl himself and Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican theologian who had died in 1274. Martin Heidegger, Husserl's successor in the chair at Freiburg, had her take the dramatic elements out, and the piece went into the birthday volume as an essay. Edith Stein was equipped to write either version. Husserl had trained her; baptised a Catholic in 1922, she had studied Aquinas intensely ever since, and her German translation of his Disputed Questions on Truth appeared in 1931 and 1932. The essay argues that the two men share more than their followers supposed, and that they part at one point which cannot be bridged. Both treat philosophy as sober work of reason, never a matter of feeling or taste, and Stein traces a line from one to the other through Franz Brentano, Husserl's teacher, who had been schooled in Catholic scholastic thought. Even the phenomenologists' much-attacked Wesensschau, the direct insight into what a thing essentially is, turns out on her reading to be laborious analysis of a kind Aquinas also practised and described as reading the inside of things. The break comes over where philosophy starts. Husserl looks for certainty in consciousness examined from within, and the world he recovers stays a world for a subject. Aquinas begins from God as the first truth and counts faith as a second road to knowledge beside natural reason, one that reason needs in order to mark its own limits. Stein names the two orientations egocentric and theocentric. Aquinas's verdict, as she sets it out, is that philosophy from natural reason alone is bound to remain a fragment: a full understanding of the world needs both sources together. The dialogue stayed in manuscript until 1993. Walter Redmond's English translation of 2000 prints the two versions in parallel columns.

Key concepts

What is the intuition of essences?

The intuition of essences, Wesensschau in German, is the grasp of what belongs to a kind of thing as such. It does not come from comparing many things and listing what they share. One example may be enough. The philosopher looks away from whatever could be otherwise without the thing ceasing to be, say, a material thing, and fixes on what could not. Stein insists that this is work of the understanding.

What are natural and supernatural reason?

Natural reason is what the human mind reaches by its own powers, and supernatural reason is the mind enlightened by faith. For Husserl reason means only the first, and its task is endless. Aquinas, as Stein presents him, agrees that this road never arrives and adds that it is not the only road. God possesses the whole truth and shares part of it through revelation, received in faith during this life.

What counts as first philosophy for each thinker?

For Aquinas first philosophy is about God, and for Husserl it is about consciousness. Aquinas takes God as the first truth and treats the theory of knowledge as one part of a general doctrine of being. Husserl, needing a starting point secure against every doubt, studies how a world is built up for a consciousness examined from within. Stein calls his result the same doctrine of being with its sign reversed.

What does philosophia perennis mean here?

Here it means the spirit of genuine philosophising, not a fixed body of doctrine handed down. Stein finds that spirit in anyone driven by inner necessity to trace the reason at work in the world. It is born as a capacity and awakened by a teacher, as Plato, Aristotle and Augustine were teachers to Aquinas. In this sense true philosophers reach out their hands to one another across space and time.

What kind of certainty does faith have?

Faith has the highest certainty a human mind can reach, and it is a certainty without insight. The believer does not see why what is believed is true, as one sees a proof. Even so, on Aquinas's account as Stein gives it, faith is no matter of feeling. It is a road to truths otherwise closed, and other claims to knowledge are measured against it. This certainty is a gift of grace.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Where philosophy begins: the self or God

Can reason mark its own limits, or does it need faith to show where they lie? On that question a modern philosopher and a medieval one part for good.

Husserl and Aquinas share more than their followers supposed. Both want philosophy as sober, rigorous work, and the phenomenologists' insight into essences proves to be patient analysis of a kind Aquinas called reading inside things. They divide over the starting point. Husserl seeks certainty in consciousness examined from within, and his world remains a world for a subject. Aquinas starts from God as first truth and counts faith a second road to knowledge. Stein names the two egocentric and theocentric, and by Aquinas's measure reason alone yields a fragment.

epistemology
phenomenology
scholasticism
faith
reason
faith and reason
truth
certainty
intuition
essence
limits of knowledge
first principles
revelation
philosophical method
god
knowledge

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 57
distinct concepts: 95
by passages held, corpus-wide: #635

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “phenomenology” and “scholasticism”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 16 pairings. 68 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
phenomenology	scholasticism	8
epistemology	phenomenology	7
epistemology	faith and reason	6
essence	phenomenology	6
faith	reason	5
epistemology	essence	4
epistemology	scholasticism	4
essence	scholasticism	3
epistemology	truth	2
faith	phenomenology	2
faith	scholasticism	2
epistemology	faith	1
epistemology	reason	1
faith and reason	truth	1
reason	scholasticism	1
scholasticism	truth	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1917 On the Problem of Empathy (Zum Problem der Einfühlung)
Her first book and the one most read today. Everything she later wrote on persons and communities starts from the account of the living body and the other self worked out here.
DE
1922 Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities (Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften)
It extends the dissertation's study of the individual in two directions — inward, to the forces that drive a mind, and outward, to groups — and supplies the social categories her treatise on the state takes over.
DE
1925 An Investigation Concerning the State (Eine Untersuchung über den Staat)
Political theory from a phenomenologist: it takes the crowd, the association and the community distinguished in the 1922 treatises and asks which of them a state is.
DE
1929 Husserl and Aquinas: A Comparison (Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des hl. Thomas v. Aquino) you are here DE

— or open another of their works