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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Immanence, Self-experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein and Karl Jaspers Edith Stein and the Recognition of the Eternal at the heart of the Finite Edith Stein first attempted a reconciliation of Aquinas and Husserl in her contribution to the invited collection prepared for Husserl’s seventieth birthday Festschrift collection in 1929.[^49] There she began by emphasising the link with Brentano and the Scholastic background of exact concept formation.

She portrays both Husserl and Aquinas as seeing philosophy as a matter of reason ( logos or ratio ) not ‘feeling and fancy’ or ‘soaring enthusiasm’.[^50] Stein says that Husserl would not have accepted Thomas’ distinction between natural and supernatural reason.

Husserl would have seen that distinction as empirical; he is referring to ‘reason as such’.[^51] Stein recognises that Husserl, like Kant, begins from the critical and transcendental standpoint: we can work only with our own organs of knowledge - ‘we can no more get free of them than we can leap over our shadow’.[^52] Stein focuses on the fact that for Husserl philosophy and reason unroll themselves endlessly and that full truth is a Kantian regulative idea.

Aquinas, on the other hand, holds that ‘full truth is ’, God as truth is ‘fullness at rest’.[^53] Furthermore, Stein believes in a distinction to be made between original and fallen reason. Not everything that is beyond our mind in its natural setup is beyond our mind in its ‘original makeup’.[^54] For Stein, as for Aquinas, God as ultimate being is the first principle of knowledge, and hence epistemology is really a chapter in ontology.

Stein contrasts phenomenology as egocentric with Thomistic philosophy which is theocentric . Her basic criticism is that transcendental phenomenology can only uncover being which is for consciousness; being is understood as that which is constituted by consciousness, whereas for Thomas being has to be what it is in itself. The ego, for Stein too, is the primary transcendent entity but in a manner which is very difficult to articulate. There is ‘fragility’ of the ego (FEB, p. 53).

According to Stein, following Husserl, the ego relies on a two-fold transcendence: one that is ‘external’ and one that is ‘internal’. The external is, of course, the content of the world. The internal transcendent is mood, emotion, inner experience.