"Hand-Rolling Own SMOKES" Post Dys re Stein's EMPATHY

On the Problem of Empathy seems to me to be Stein’s most-properly phenomenological work. Yet I do not think her presentation in this work about Einfuuehlen/Einfuehlung gets to basics, limning the little-whats and wherefores of the making of awareness-- validly truly authentically-- about some constellation of impressions-framed-in-assumptions that ever/in-any/every-way glimpse somewhats as someones-out-there has the same “ideas” as me.

To read the German original or translation of Das Einfuehlungsproblem . . . one becomes aware of a substantial group of predecessors, with her “dropping names” that an American of the 21st century would usually draw a “near zero blank”; to some extent, though I have followed the Verstehen tradition in German social science unto and through Gadamer (Truth and Method), indeed a larger number of the savants cited in Stein’s . . .Empathy need “extra reading” on my part. In this work by Stein, we have many references and disputes with the luminaries in psychology who had come before her.

Moreover, I find her abundant in generalizations about what empathy is supposed to be, but fewer specifics; I draw away from this reading in translation or the Kindle Deutschtexte never quite sure how I myself might analyse/synthesize an awareness of some linked personalism as being from a person so esteemed. So I am developing ideas about how to posit somewhat personal as a personality, in great awareness that neither Stein nor German predecessors on this subject in agreeable awareness do so-- to me-- in a way that I can make-do for myself, or explain helpfully to someone-else.

I am compiling documentation on the how somewhat in social frame permitting becomes a congenial someone. I am already confident that the most clarity I can bring to such documentation will to my reading-digest be more fathomable for praxis in such seeking/finding will “do” better than my present understanding of Stein about empathy, admittedly an important topic.

vernonlynn stephens

Meeting This-Person, E. Stein et al @ The Granular Real Level

I am reading Edith Stein, reading her as much and as quickly as I can; I have expressed a yen to fathom, Verstehe, among other conditions her bio and life presents, the seeming departure from strict phenomenology (requiring that one abandon any effort to prove one’s ideas in cognition) to dogmatics in near exactitude to that of almost all the Doctors, Fathers, and occasional “Mother” in Catholicism.

Following my instructor in hermeneutics, F. Schleiermacher, this understanding makes the difference between “short schrift” of studied personality via “personalism” VERSUS a certain comfort in knowing-- with or without agreement with the person’s ideas-- exactly the way in which the person’s utterance makes sense to her/him.

In such a way, I don’t want to resort to the easily-wrongheaded mode of seeing simple psychopathology in the subject I study-- that stance being wrongheaded precisely and facilely by some “headshrinker’s” shrinkage of the one studied to a describable-- perhaps formally indefinable-- sickly and lower status. Edith Stein’s choice to go from one-time atheism to ultra-Catholic fideism (incumbent with hermitage and celibacy) to me cannot-- except by those perverting hallowed status from religion-- be called psychopathological, “crazy.” While my worth-ship/worship has gone from the etheral nimbus to the raw meat of Things meeting me sacredly-- while I go a direction rather opposite to Stein’s for my own hermitage, “seg,” “the Hole,” this cell in which those who beget those beings, the Mothers, ear-rings, cramps, bloods, moods have become the ilk of weather in this Kentucky-- transitioning as I transition, with heat and cold, wet dry in a seasonality of Everything opposite unchanging metaphysical and math certainty.

No. I do not think the transition Stein made was sick. . . She in turn likeliest would not go the transition I am making, and there are dogmatists who would label both Stein and myself as having “gotten in touch with our psychoses” by what we do make our lives to have become.

To the extent that we need use-Stein-to-explain-Stein, some venture into defining others and their respective comforts and strangenesses, we need I think to examine the lit by which she approaches the Einfuehlung, oddly what we have translated as “empathy.”

Stein’s doctoral thesis was on feeling-at-one “empathy?” the subject topic words she uses to describe awareness-of-others. It could be considered her most-phenomenological work, and makes headway for me to think more fundamentally about the awareness of Other-Self via beholding in my-self how I know this other person; and I am perfectly aware that there is a universe of Other-Selves in the Big World of whom I know-not, will never know, and other selves said to have selves which are fictitious, are not. Whether God and the Angels are of this latter sort I have to demur from judgement, but am aware that sometimes from Punctures in life, the real penetrations need be described for the pre-disposed soul/Geist/mind by metaphors of power sufficient to point to mountain-peak magnitude.

Yet, as far as I am concerned, the examples Stein uses to show various forms of Einfuelung abide more at the surface/face-to-face level than needs to be the case for me in defining transF and as hermit. . .

the occasional knock on the door, the pushed advertisements for junk and otherwise, and in them occasionally a luv note from a perceived Other-Self who recognizes me-- and so I the she/he-- and from there the building of the existential hovel of friendship. . .

In such a way, I find an Other-Self in my captive hostage pet Kittie, who upon arrival in this pad, and after seeing both food/water dishes and poopy-box, began kissing me, kissing me on homecoming to this hermitage, kissing me always unto Now, and again a Personality found both ways as Friendship.

IF I can get to a granular level with Stein-- I do think such finding is possible in reading an Other-Self’s written work-- if I can get beyond my sense of oddity strangeness Unheimlichkeit of what she did in being-toward-death (as well as a hint that there may be Nimbus Cumulus-Cloud He’en from which she certainly have found me transF strange ;-)  I do suppose Verstehen can become, even with some inconsistency of first-opinions, yes disagreements about what a Person should do to become Real Person.

vernonlynn stephens, hermit, sissy, proud in penance to Mater Generatrix

Reaching for the Song-- Strange to Me-- of Edith Stein

Edith Stein is a “special person,” to-me only in part because Pope John Paul II canonized her as Catholic and Jewish martyr during the Holocaust; my current effort to limn her Worldview/Weltanschauung has begun a process of casting about for proper and real measures of her specialty in human kind and kind woman kind. I quickly came to realise that any “content analysis” on a model of reverse-psychopathology as in the psychiatric mental status exam would-- first of all-- inconvenience any search for rooted Dasein, here Stein’s particular awareness in a lyric here-and-now, there-and-then re-collection (which Kierkegaard contrasts with memory-- a basal process of recounting “just the facts, just the facts)." The facts do not per se fashion a meaning that conveys re-collected understanding of “the song of one’s life”; the ten components of a mental health exam simply provide a “box of categories” yes in a kind of phenomenology that describes the Geist (“Soul” and “Mind”) but not a “moving picture” of the person’s legend-- skimpy or opulent depending on divergence from trivial herd-mentality, by which I impute that those re-collecting need be found rather outside than inside “conventional wisdom.”

I QUESTION Martin Heidegger as functional then in Stein’s time as Nazi collaborator; yet in his testament that being-toward-death, being-as-such-being-that-from-which-Dasein-flees, AND his later  simplification of the analysis of Dasein (Daseinanalyse) as best described in the mode of lyric-- the thinker as lyric-poet, the lyric-poet exuding Being-per-Se (that deep understanding as Kant called-- and existential phenomenologists in personalism to call the Ding-an-Sich, what an English spirit-minded person would call “The Soul,” “the understanding of meaning in life that one has.” Heidegger-- perhaps in penitent re-collection and recoil from bastard-Nazism-- at death was beginning to esteem existential phenomenology as lyricism, a reaching for the “song in the face of death, and the Abyss Death.

This awareness feels gainful to me=> in the same way that Heidegger waxed as lyric poet recoiling from Nazism, in the way that he saw lyric poet Hoelderlin as bearing an utter truth-song, we can I think esteem Edith Stein as having a quaint being-toward-death psalm, voiced in total conversion from secular Judaic near-atheism to the martyr’s song in the utterly Roman Catholic idiom, conversion experience from the-gonadal to that-end-of-life’s intercourse as Virgin-Facing-Hot/Cold-gas-at Auschwitz.

Conversion experiences-- like mine repenting man hood-- ever always have a strangeness (by reference to the “world” left-behind); the would-have-been-Night Stein left behind opens into a New Song, along the perfect metre and melody of martyrdom sometimes-to-seculars-evincing-wince of the placid martyr submitting to the Devil’s immolations.

It seems clear that Stein is spirited in the dancesteps lying between the carefully bracketed phenomenology toward the emphatic certainty, always as “Eye in the center of Storm,” to “speak with authority” as did Messiah Jesus toward His Cross. In The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, the seeming paradoxical nature of conversion plays a signal topic; for strangeness of going from a Night to a Day James does not reach for lyricism, but we need heed Heidegger to trace Stein from the phenomenological Husserlian “hard science” in her walk to Auschwitz, to the utterly protracted and yet lyric Kreuzeswissenschaft “Science of the Cross,” ostensibly an amelioration of The Dark Night of the Soul  by John/Cross with elements as well of Ste. Teresa de Avila and Ste. Therese de Lisieux.

Therefore-- regard!-- I shall reach for the-song; in this conversional song of Stein, I note music that nearly goes opposite of mine-- for I went from what Wayne Oates the Baptist called “sick religion” in a hyper-orthodox-fanaticism to a surrender of My Stud Ideas to surrender to Mater Generatrix and the coming-Matriarchy-- with almost the same acceptance of penitent sexuality as we find in Pope John-Paul-II’s Love and Responsibility or the Corpus of Dionysius called Areopagite in the mode that Divine Love is inextricably erotic, an emptying of self into the Cave, toward Life.

Now I note the notes and song of Ste. Edith Stein; my own and almost opposite spiritual veneration of the Creators, The Matem Marias, the Wombed as my being-toward-death and phishy resurrection.

vernonlynn stephens, hermit, sissy, penitent

A Sour Note in Readng Stein's Choice for Heroine Saints

[In some ways, I am ‘Merican enuff to shun almost any value for royalty, just as the Constitutions of USA and Kentucky prohibit titles of nobility-- the “Gentlemen with Peerage” in Colony Virginia made literal bastards Stephens (formerly surname Stevens as  proper English spelling) which was indeed a main reason for crossing the Eastern Mountains into “Kaintuck.” Edith Stein has an entire chapter in Die Frau, Woman which treats of a noble St. Elizabeth, which in better-flesh would have dealt with some saintly “Pug”/Cockney as  I without any Peerage, BUT. . .]

At the end of this chapter, Stein gives me “the flesh” I spiritedly like better, about her putative differentiation between the faithwalk of human kind. . .

“In dem Bekenntnis zur ‘unverbildeten menschlichen Natur’ lebt der Glaube an eine formende Kraft im Menschen und sein Leben zu eine harmonischen, formvollenden Gebilde gestaltet. Wohl ist die Form im Innern verborgen,aber verstrickt in wuchernde Gewebe, die eine reine Auswirkung hemmen. . . Unsere Erkenntnis ist Stuckwerk; unser Wollen und Wirken, wenn es auf sie allein baut kann kein vollendetes Gebilde schaffen; kann es auch darum nicht, weil es Ziel zusammenbricht.” ‘In knowledge of ‘unformed human nature’ dwells Faith/belief on formation inhumans and their lives unto a harmonious, well-formed constitution. Exceedingly so, the formation is inwardly lost, rambling into a cobweb that kindles that which confines pure works. . .Our (feminine form) knowledge is but patchwork; our willingness and deeds, when she alone cannot make a well-formed constitution, such that as well meanwhile, as destroying Purpose.’

“Bad habits are facile; methinks due to the afterglow of the fire of Originalsin-- despite baptism an abundantly replicated concupiscence of humanity, often various by gender, but in all a love-of-mschief. I think that in my danglingly-evidenced-cis-gender, the ramble into flaming entanglements has been happily quelled in part by girly hormones (estrogen, progesterone, anti-androgen; now I am at peace loving all of Hers, but not for conjunction; I am now freer to serve Her, all woman kind being in Type or Archetype on the last of Maria Theotos, Mother of God, Mothers-All of Living. In other places, I think Stein has concurrence with this last postulate here. In good part,my shattered male hubris and Her Mercy as well as girling hormones are too making here in me a gentle man.

vernonlynn stephens Avowed-Hermit, sissy, penitent, proud in repentance. 

Having Finished Die Frau/Woman, Deemed A Phenomenology, I Try Clinical-Phenomenology on this Work Etc.

Having Finished Die Frau/Woman, Deemed A Phenomenology, I Try Clinical-Phenomenology on this Work Etc.

Stein essentially seems to speak to woman kind as a proper spirited counter to man hood; I take great joy in her analyses of the “negative archetype” of masculinity. Yet while I share much of the phenomenological/descriptive-psychological interest that was the lifelong or nearly lifelong preoccuppation of this important feminist/philosopher/martyr, my  phenomenology (with deep immersion in psychiatry and psychoanalysis as moral endeavors), I am inclined to use “my psychology and reverse-psychology :-)” toolwise to fathom this woman, this woman so engaging to me from a variety of vocations/callings.

Karl Jaspers, in his great work General Psychopathology, especially in the Chapter “Subjective Phenomena of Morbid Life (Phenomenologie),” I am provided with such tools for examining a perceived utterance as indicative of what-- indeed-- may be “morbid” “pathological” “deviant from reasoned discourse.” This does not  mean to me that Stein has more pathology than I-- a plausible assumption for I am “manic D,” but that any and every deviation from her intent “Thomistic logic,” i.e. formidable logical rigor indeed, I can list in the category “less/questionable logic,” a “check-yes” in that category. Variation in emotional tone from philosophic dis-passion can thence be checked, as well. . . Judgment and insight from (her/any-other) texts can be so-metered as well. So then, incompletely but meaningfully, from the immense Corpus of Edith Stein, beginning from my fond prime example of this signal text of Stein’s on “Catholic Feminism,” I can use the metrics of clinical-phenomenology on what-all and what-here I read of Stein, and in so metrification I bare soul of the-In-Me, what Germans with great Teutonic philosophical terms call “Das Ding an Sich,” “The Thing Itself,” that which the soul understands.

I shall make first clinical phenomenological comments of Stein from this prime text about the meaning of being woman kind; from what I have already read of her, aside, this seems to be the focal and prime document to fathom her “noumenon”/intuitiion  as for her cisF and abiding-so, and my penitient transition from man hood.

vernonlynn stephens avowed hermit, transF-penitent, proud in metanoia

In finishing E. Stein’s Die Frau, I did not wish to make a closely quoting of her material, but in the depth-sense I have been reflecting as much on her not infrequent discomfiture of the Man-as-Slavemaster!!!

Fellow-Seekers! In finishing E. Stein’s Die Frau, I did not wish to make a closely quoting of her material, but in the depth-sense I have been reflecting as much on her not infrequent discomfiture of the Man-as-Slavemaster, as well as the primary status of Catholic Woman as instrument of peace and domesticity. Her disparagement of man hood as of some obscene tendency to total power, repulsive to her and greatly so to me-- cisM trying to become like those with natural wombs and of estrogen, deeply penitent of the inevitable stain my natural testosterone and androgen have inflicted on the newing order, the matriarchy with Mater Generatrix atop of the Governance coming.

Yet I do not think that being mindful of the male as in the image of Joe Hovah, or any yes even the drilled-in-ness of any Christian catechism does best to tame the dangler man into the etiquette that cleanses “him” of that sin of grabbing mastery, over the World, especially Her World, the only world there-be, one-verse/universe, the Salve of Regina.

The best training to rid the Stud of Hybris would seem to best be  coupled with his thwarted Dominion, that school that knocks him hard, with the poverty and scorn by the most humiliated of Her Kind kind. Generatrix, he needs but learn, begets Adams, and when the Devil’s Advocate asks him if true that She is his spare ribs, he demurs, thence finds a place in the bliss of the begotten.

Testosterone and the birth sin with it are not utterly washed-away in baptism; “concupiscence and lust have of itself the nature of sin,” the ninth of my 39 Articles in my Prayer Book (the Common) instruct me, and such passions root in testosterone, yes deep in unhumiliated men, as well in the wombed as “deep ditches” (cf. Proverbs 23.27); I speak as one bitten badly in calling the testosteronic “love,” and I am repenting via humiliation and estrogen, etc.

I think, I tell ye now, that I shall continue to entrhrone the Generatrices, the Theotokoi, the Mothers-- a never and ever nether He’en that shall never but by reverence-distantly attain-- and now it seems

. . .that I need to study the great diverse and wailing feminists of Woman’s History. . . with E. Stein bitter with Husserl regarded as  weibliche secretary of his shorthanded notes, rejected for her love by two Lordly men, and I think the bitter quality that emerges betimes in Die Frau toward the testosteronic gender, his hood, and she will be a North Star

. . . to my studies of the Feminine feminists, here let me include Wollstonecraft, and deemed sinful and in the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books, the Simone de Beauvoir of special memory to existential-phenomenology, then-- if I can get a used “pauper’s paperback of The Feminine Mystique, I can further the depth of my surrender to Her, Queen of Heaven, Queen of Peace, the Salve of Regina.

vernonlynn stephens, avowed hermit, sissy, penitent, proud in surrender to Mom

There is a German phenomenological-existentialist Edith Stein, who regards the Lordly Studs with the same bitterness as I-- except perchance I hate Studs worse than she ;-).

I am tired of lit with heroes and superheroes-- Jesus being the superhero some read who like Superman always again and again and again wins. Now, my In-Breath, my Center in the Blood of Womb, I want now most to study the heroines, all of whom are superheroines for dealing with those dangledown, the men who would like to be The Lord over Her.

I have told ye, English is first of my readable tongues, then German, then French, and in the Greek I can read there are Maeneds, Wild Women, and even in the Bible women who war for righteous womanly causes. I want to tell ye that I want to begin to worship these papered womb-en, and share their militant feminism with ye. I just downloaded on this tablet Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, which was anti-clerical and anti-male-chauvinist; I also downed a pdf of Le Duexieme Sexe, The Second Sex by French Philosopheress Simone de Beauvoir; whose total advocacy of Thine and the bleeding woman periodically as I also worship Thine. There is a German phenomenological-existentialist Edith Stein, who regards the Lordly Studs with the same bitterness as I-- except perchance I hate Studs worse than she ;-).

In the spirit emanating from that cleansing flood which bleeds New World each epoch for Thee, this question (RSVP too). . .

Would Ye well-regard my sharing of True Feminism with Thee, read from the superheroine’s original  tongues, with my reflections aimed at worshipping Thee, thy Bloods, thy Womb???

v. lynn sissy

The Sacramental Life, Riff on Eucharist in Womanly Life Re Edith Stein, Die Frau, Woman

The Sacramental Life, Riff on Eucharist in Womanly Life Re Edith Stein, Die Frau, Woman

“Ein Frauenleben, das die goettliche Liebe zur inneren Form haben soll, wird ein eucharistisches Leben muessen. . .wer  den Innerste seiner Seele aufnimmt in der Kommunion. . .” ‘A life in woman kind, which need have the In-Most part of their soul, who takes on the In-Most in Commuunion’ p. 103, “Ethos, Berufsethos, Ethos der Frauenberufe,” III.3.b

Stein makes clear that the”Type” of those be-wombed is in motherly nurturance, including the help to “Adam(s)” as women who by one allotment or another are childless, happy mothers. I think I can follow psychoannalyst C.G. Jung in the tenet that the “Seele/Soul” of the cis-male is Anima, the feminine, breathing spirit. In a way then, there can be progression of the cis-male toward woman-kind, that which makes by Stein from Cardinal Newman (Idea of the University) the making of “gentle-men.”

For me, in deep commitment to fomenting Matriachia Mariae of the kind-kind, “communion” comes closes making vision, not so in ways to far from “spiritual Eucharist” in the primal mode; of course most of us recourse to absent spiritual communion in our plague a-swallowing us in a world prefigured in the plague-time figured in The Apocalypse of John-Divine; to that throbbing vision made Eucharist-Spiritual I focus on the true disclosure of Maria Mother in Rev.12 passim.; my soul wants a Mom begetting God-from-Woman who rules in mysterium tremendum et fascinens, ‘pulsing mystery whose visage (like the advent of horrid death) with fascinating-compulsion.

MY communions are best and ever like punctures of the cis-hubris of my man hood into awareness as She hits me with Richter11 tsunami, in the magnified focus from the lens that blinds the eye of physics, opens the eye of reverence, of repentance, in penitence, that forces most from me to become gentle man, submitting in In-Most to the epiphany of Mom’s Matriarchy.

v. lynn sissy, avowed-hermit, sissy, penitient, proud of penitence