Shifting Modern Paradigms of the State: Edith Stein's Political Phenomenology
Time: 8.11.2024, 13-14
Place: Unioninkatu 33 (inner courtyard), 2nd floor, room 247, and on Zoom.
Zoom link: https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/63606837087
Abstract
Edith Stein’s insistence on the foundational structure of communal sociality as key for the sovereign relation of law-givers and law-followers consistent with her idea of state sovereignty is what makes Stein’s Liberal concept of the state both unique and problematic: on one hand, we have the displacement of the centrality of the material individual (as in Hobbes and Locke) as the primary state actor, who is replaced by a community of individuals who live in solidarity with one another in and for the law. On the other hand, it could be said that Stein radically undermines the originary status of the state as a legal, constitutional entity, as she describes it, that can of its own freedom articulate and prescribe its own laws, which it legally has the right to enforce though its own self-given power—the state, understood as a being/entity in law, is not conditioned by or dependent upon material-historical circumstances for its existence, including the individual. How can Stein uphold both the primacy of a communal sociality and an originary state, which exists in and of itself, presumably independent of any form of material historical sociality? Is not the state, understood as a legal, objective entity, its own reality that lies above and beyond its constituent community of historical-material law-givers and -followers, that is, its own material-historical subjects? For the state to be a state it must be able to enact itself, its own powers and laws: it cannot merely be an historical subjective form of political or communal life, as Stein describes.
In classical Liberalism, the state and the individual are two discrete entities, though they come to relate and differ from one another. In Stein, it would seem that the state is a community of individuals. I argue here that the only way to justify Stein’s position is to understand the state community in a transcendental sense, that is, as condition of possibility that makes the historical civic life of the state and its community members possible in time and space. Just as Rousseau argues that his idea of the “people” and la volonté générale are understood as unique forms of political constitution, not to be confused with everyday groups of citizens who will in time and space to make majority decisions on practical matters, but as unique supra-individual forms of political reality that inform concrete citizens of what is right and just to will and enact. It is transcendental phenomenology that allows Stein to offer her new configuration of the state. Further, if we accept Stein’s transcendental account of a state community, this state community is marked by unique psychic and spiritual, that is, affective, motivational and valuing capacities. In the end, it is these psychic and spiritual layers of the state community that allow it to be seen in quasi personal, conditioning terms.
Antonio Calcagno
Antonio Calcagno is Professor of Philosophy at King’s University College at Western University in London, Canada. He currently serves as the Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. He is also the author of On Political Impasse: Power, Resistance and New Forms of Selfhood (2022); Lived Experience from the Inside Out: Social and Political Philosophy in Edith Stein (2014); Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and Their Time (2007); The Philosophy of Edith Stein (2007), and Giordano Bruno and the Logic of Coincidence (1998). Along with Silvia Benso, he is the translator of Elena Pulcini’s work Between Care and Justice: The Passions as Social Resource (2024), which appears in SUNY Press’ Contemporary Italian Philosophy series. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.