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
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