The ego-life thereby reveals itself as soul-life...

The ego-life thereby reveals itself as soul-life, and the soul-life - by its going forth from itself and by its ascending to the brighness of light –simultaneously reveals itseld as spiritual life. (FEB, p. 430). Depth of soul is something Stein analyses subtly and at great length. She gives the example of two people hearing of the assassination the Serbian monarch that gave birth to the First World war (FEB, p. 437). One person hears it, registers it and goes on planning his vacation.

‘The other is shaken in his innermost being’ (FEB, p. 437) and foresees the outbreak of war etc. In this latter case, the news has struck deep in his inner being: In this latter kind of thinking the ‘entire human being’ is engaged, and this engagement expresses itself even in external appearance. He thinks with his heart (FEB, p. 437) She goes on to write that the personal I is most truly at home in the innermost being of the soul (p. 439), but few human beings live such ‘collected’ lives.

Because of its essentially changing nature, Stein characterises the being of the ego as received being (ibid.).

(Jaspers has a very similar claim in his Existenzerhellung, Volume Two of Philosophie where Jaspers describes my being as temporal and partial but in ‘metaphysical transcending’ I can address my being on the basis of a completed temporal existence –the view from eternity as it were.[^55] ) For Stein, as for Augustine and Jaspers, my own experience of myself is a kind of void or nothingness (p. 55). Again Jaspers writes: I myself as mere being am nothing.

Self-being is the union of two opposites: of standing on my own feet and of yielding to the world and to transcendence. By myself I can do nothing; but once I surrender to the world and to transcendence, I have disappeared as myself. My self is indeed self-based but not self-sufficient.[^56] On Stein’s account, there is something very similar in regard to my zones of self-familiarity. My self-experience runs off into vagueness. I don’t have awareness or direct intuition of the origins of my ego.

There is always a horizon of vagueness. It is precisely this sense of horizonality that leads Stein to think of the ego as finite and created. In fact, Stein, following Husserl (and Augustine) takes the divine self-revelation as the ‘I am who am’ and interprets that as meaning that the personal I has primacy (FEB, p. 342).[^57] Only a person can create according to Stein (ibid.).