Here I shall be concentrating on her understanding of being...

Here I shall be concentrating on her understanding of being as fullness and of the ego as the primary sense of being, as somehow encapsulating the mystery of being. Stein sees a way of combining the insights of Husserlian eidetic phenomenology with traditional Thomistic talk about the divine, to find a new way of articulating transcendence.

What unites Husserl, Stein, Jaspers, and Heidegger is that they all accord a special place to the transcendence of the self, the transcendence of human existence, or the transcendence of Dasein. The paradox at the centre of their philosophies is that the most immanent self-experience is precisely that which reveals transcendence. Transcendence means literally ‘going beyond’.

In one sense, transcendence refers to the region of ‘otherness’, whatever lies beyond or is other, especially other than one’s self.[^7] In this regard the French phenomenologist Natalie Depraz has claimed, for instance, that phenomenology is the philosophy of otherness.[^8] But, in Husserl’s phenomenology, transcendence as going-beyond is intrinsically related to a deeper experience of selfhood or ‘self-experience’ ( Selbsterfahrung ) such that, paradoxically, genuine transcendence has to be discovered in immanence.

The original transcendence, for Husserl, is the living ego itself, in that it is directly experienced, and is temporally constituted and hence never completely capturable in a totalising view. The self is essentially self-transcending. Heidegger makes this ‘transcendence of Dasein’ into an essential part of existential analytic of human existence. Both Husserl and Stein begin, as do in their own ways Saint Augustine and Descartes, with one’s own first-person experience of one’s own being.

Self-experience, as Husserl argues in the Cartesian Meditations [^9] has to be the starting point and the measure for all other experiences if these experiences are to be captured purely under the epoché . Of course, that is not to say that self-experience ought to be considered as self-enclosed and solipsistic. Quite the reverse. Husserl and Stein both saw subjectivity as a one-sided abstraction from the interrelated nexus of concrete intersubjectivity.

On the other hand, it would be phenomenologically inaccurate to deny that experience is deeply ‘egoic’ and first-personal in its core originary nature.