My interest in the philosophy of Edith Stein arose while I was teaching a philosophy course on death where the final third of the course was devoted to grappling with the question: Do any of the philosophies of death we have encountered in the course provide us with resources for thinking about multi-species extinctions? In what ways might we philosophically imagine existential and ethical orientations towards the extinction of other than human beings? Might such being-towards-extinction foster care and responsibility for the more than human multi-species world? We approached these questions by experimenting with the possibilities of extending, assembling, and modifying philosophical theories and concepts of death so that they could be brought to bear on the contemporary social-ecological moment of accelerated extinctions.
Stein’s phenomenological explorations of empathy, affect, individuality, death, and community in her philosophical works have generative potential in thinking about ethical re-orientations towards social and ecological extinctions and bio-cultural losses. In what follows I outline her extension of empathy to other than human living beings, the role of community in her existential analysis of death, and her account of communal grief, and briefly sketch some ways her work might help us to think expansively about death beyond the human.
Multi-species Empathy
Western philosophy, especially its modern iteration, tends to maintain a strict, hierarchical division between human and nonhuman being. In conjunction with producing and maintaining gendered and racial hierarchies between human beings, this human exceptionalism makes it difficult for many of its practitioners to imagine ethics and justice extending to other than human creatures and multi-species communities. Stein’s phenomenological analysis of empathy in its affirmation of vital interconnectedness offers some potential for ethical and political thinking about other than human creatures and collectives.
In On the Problem of Empathy, Stein defines empathy as “the experience of foreign consciousness” (11). It is an act of perceiving whereby one perceives the other’s experience but does not experience it as they do. She distinguishes the primordial having of an experience from the non-primordial grasping of the other’s experience, likening it to acts of memory. In empathy we are directed to the experience of the other, but we do not “have” their experience. Through empathy we are able grasp the psychic life of others. While the bulk of her account of empathy concerns empathy between human beings, she does think that human beings can empathize with nonhuman living beings.
Phenomena of life such as “growth, development and aging, health and sickness, vigor and sluggishness” (68) are part of the living body and psychic experiences of human individuals. We can empathically grasp the health or sickness of another human being because such phenomena of life are part of our own constitution. This empathic grasping is possible also, according to Stein, with animals and plants though modified and limited. In the case of plants, Stein thinks that we cannot consider them to be awake or to have an “I” and thus our capacity to empathize with them is limited by their difference from us. These differences, however, do not justify distinguishing between the phenomenon of life in humans and plants. It is owing to this shared vital constitution that humans can access, to a degree, the vitality of other living beings. While a common rejoinder to calls for justice for plants, animals, and ecosystems is that it is impossible for humans to sense or know what it is that these nonhuman entities want and need, Stein’s account of empathy provides material for a response; all living beings share a vital constitution that enables the psychic grasping of the vital needs of nonhuman others.
Stein’s acknowledgment of the human capacity to empathize with other than human living beings furnishes some philosophical material for understanding contemporary guardianship models around protecting the rights of nature. In 2021 the Mutehekau Shipu river was granted the status of legal personhood and as such given rights. The alliance of different groups responsible for protecting the river’s rights includes Indigenous Guardians who will monitor the well being of the river. Although Stein might not accept that rivers could be persons or that multi-species communities such as watersheds and ecosystems share in the phenomenon of life that makes human empathy with them possible, we can imagine her account of empathy can be fruitfully brought into conversation with contemporary ethical and political discourse on the rights of nature.
Experience of Death and Responsibility
Several philosophies of death draw attention to the way that attention to and meditation upon one’s own death can change the way one lives in the world. Acute awareness of the inevitability of no longer being can bring tranquility and free one from worry, enhance one’s joy in being alive, or bring one to a heightened awareness of one’s freedom and individual responsibility for one’s life. Stein thinks that an existential orientation to one’s death can give rise to freedom and responsibility. But, her philosophy of death departs from the idea that it is only through the angst I experience in relation to the inevitability of my individual death that I become capable of taking up my life as my own and thus take care with its possibilities. She rejects the claim that the “experience of the death of others is not an authentic experience of death” (62) and cannot reveal human being as care and the possibility for individual responsibility. Instead, Stein thinks that we learn about death through relationships with people who die.
Most are faced with the fact of death through the death of others. Heidegger claims that we cannot experience the death of others, and we do of course not experience it in the same manner as our own death. Yet the dying and death of others are fundamental to our knowledge of these and thus also for the understanding of our own being and of the human being as such. We would not believe in the end of our lives and we would not understand anguish, yes, in many anguish would not even erupt (without it being disguised as fear for this and that), if we did not constantly experience the fact that others die. (77)
The experience of anguish cultivates existential orientation towards one’s own death that gives rise to responsible being. “Responsibility begins with the awakening of the individual to its own life” (73). Such awakening is made possible through experiencing the death of others.
Stein’s account invites thinking about how an existential orientation to the loss of others could prompt the extension of care to relations and community. One’s orientation toward their own death individuates them as a relational and communal being capable of being responsible for themselves and to their communities. Relationship and community are for Stein foundations of ethical becoming rather than barriers to authentic being. “According to its being the human being is co-originally individual and community-oriented, but its conscious life as an individual begins later than the communal life in time” (72). While the danger remains for Stein that an individual might take flight from responsible being by only imitating others in the community, being-with others is a precondition and not necessarily an obstacle to freedom and responsibility. Communal life supports the development of the conscious life of the individual.
What bearing could Stein’s philosophy of death have on how we think about multi-species community? For those for whom multi-species community is a vibrant experiential reality, does attention to the disappearance of caribou, bumblebees, and wild rice (manoomin) give rise to an expansive notion of responsibility? For those for whom multi-species community is only an abstract concept, can an orientation towards species-extinction awaken them to multi-species communal life?
Collective Grief
Grief is a psycho-social emotion for Stein that is not limited to bounded and separate individuals but can be shared collectively. In Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, she gives an account of collective grief. Describing the loss of an important group member she states that she grieves as a member of the community: “I feel it as our grief. The experience is essentially colored by the fact that others are taking part in it, or even more, by the fact that I take part in it only as a member of a community” (134). While the emotions of grief are felt in the bodies and minds, nervous systems, or psycho-motor systems of individuals differently, the phenomenological content of collective grief is the same across all the individuals who make up the collective. While not everyone may have the experience, even if only one realizes it, it is still collective because it is in and through the collective that the meaning of the loss of a member is generated.
Stein’s insights into the structures of collective grief can assist us in understanding how biocultural losses such as loss of land and associated lifeways through dispossession, eradication of culturally significant boreal plant species, disappearance of salmon along with entwined traditions, and genocide of the buffalo gives rise to and sustain collective grief in the communities who suffer these losses. Thinking about the loss of homelands, shared spaces of community, interdependencies with plant and animal life, biological species, and lifeways can be informed by the concept of collective grief. Such grief affirms the vital reality of collective life and resists the ideological and material forces that attempt to relegate collectives to the past. Attention to the phenomenon of collective grief can foster empathy with those who have lost or are in danger of losing their relationships with land and members of their multi-species communities. Recognizing the existence of collective grief and its power to sustain collectives in the aftermath of biocultural loss can inform multi-species ethics. Confronted, as we are, with massive losses of human life due to state violence, settler colonial extractivism, and multiple extinctions (civic, biological, and cultural), capacities for collective grief provide an antidote to the despair and evasion that strengthens social and ecological violence. Stein’s account of collective grief lays some groundwork for affirming and caring for and about multi-species collectives, both those of which we are members and those to which we bear witness. Collective grief is a stitch of community life but also one of inter-community life.
Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) was born in Breslau Germany in 1891 to a Jewish family and raised by a single working mother. She converted to Catholicism in 1922 after reading St. Theresa Avila, although she had been an atheist for some time before that. After the National Socialists took power in Germany in the spring of 1933 and passed anti-Semitic legislation, she was forced to resign her teaching position. She entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne later that same year. The following year she entered the novitiate taking the name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross). In 1938 she transferred to a Carmelite convent in Holland for safety and in 1939 she wrote to Pope Pius XI beseeching him to speak out against the injustices being perpetuated by the Nazis against Jewish peoples in Germany. She was arrested by the Gestapo on August 2, 1942, and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp where she was murdered with her sister Rosa on August 9th, 1942 at the age of 50.
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Suzanne McCullagh
Suzanne McCullagh is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Athabasca University. Suzanne's research in ethical and political, and environmental philosophy frequently involves bringing disparate thinkers into conversation in order to experiment with conceptual boundaries through the philosophical analysis of concepts and discourses (political space, empathy, solidarity, self, habit, formation, extinction, etc.). Her published work includes reading Hannah Arendt with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on the concepts of political space and action, Saint Augustine and Gilles Deleuze on the concept of ethical becoming, Simone Weil and Jacques Rancière on the concepts of deformation and political community, and Simone Weil and John Locke on the concepts of labour and individuality. She co-edited Minor Ethics: Deleuzian Variations (MQUP 2021) and Contesting Extinctions: decolonial and regenerative futures (Lexington 2021). Her current work includes a critical analysis of the temporality at work in dominant extinction narratives which brings conceptions of time and temporality from Black and Critical Indigenous Studies texts into conversation with contemporary philosophies of time.
