Edith Stein’s Account of Communal Mind and its Limits: A Phenomenological Reading

Edith Stein claims that communal experiences are not reducible to the collection of individual experiences directed to the same object or upon the same content. Based on this intuition she gives a phenomenological description of the intentional structure that is proper to communal experiences regarding to their content, mode, and subject. While expanding on her attempts to reassess Husserl’s description of intentionality in an original social-ontological framework, I will stress her precious distinction between individual consciousness and communal stream of experience. I will argue that, if Stein defines the being of the community through its the communal stream of experience (Erlebnisstrom), the latter has to be interpreted through Husserl’s teleological concept of ideal multiplicity of experiences (Erlebnismannigfaltigkeit). Discussing Stein’s account both against the background of the methodology of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and contextualizing it within the social-ontological struggle that took place in Germany during the Great War, I will focus on her description of we-intentionality and aim to unearth its phenomenological core as well as its methodological limits.status: publishe