Intersubjectivity and community in Edith Stein's thought
pp. 49-63
in: Antonio Calcagno (ed), Edith Stein: women, social- political philosophy, theology, metaphysics and public history, Berlin, Springer, 2016Abstract
To speak of community in our globalized reality seems anachronistic, for we live in a world where one can efficiently travel beyond one's own national borders, where the collapse of one bank can result in a global financial crisis, where temporal and spatial distances are drastically reduced, where one can create community for whatever reason and with anyone in the world thanks to new technologies. What, then, does community mean today? Edith Stein replies to the aforementioned question by arguing that a human being, a man or a woman, makes community because it is the locus wherein, from birth, sedimented affects, interwoven relationships, growth, maturation, becoming men and women, all happen. Experiences lived from within the community represent the indelible, non-erasable substrate that each of us always carries within ourselves, at every instant of our own lives, and in whatever place we find ourselves, on whatever day: community is what we live.
