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Modern Theology 30:1 January 2014 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

DOI: 10.1111/moth.12056

BEING AND TIMELESSNESS: EDITH STEINS CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGERIAN TEMPORALITY


JAMES ORR
Heideggers self-consciously secular elaboration of existentialist philosophy springs from a revisionist account of time as the primordial ontological feature of being-in-the-world. This account pointedly rejects the theological notion of eternity as an empty and derivative correlate of time. His distaste for the eternal was characteristic of a widespread antipathy amongst twentieth-century existentialists towards the metaphysics of essence against which they so often dened themselves. For a commitment to essentialism was typically thought to presuppose a commitment to the ontological priority of a substances essence over a substances existence, and one crucial metaphysical feature of that priority was the formers resistance to temporal ux. But Heideggers conception of temporality in his early period1 was also an explicit reaction against the alleged pessimism in theologys construal of time as an indelible mark of human nitude and fallenness from which believers must hope ultimately to escape.2 This article challenges the coherence of Heideggers revisionism and his corollary critique of Christian theologys alleged antipathy to time. It aims to do so by retrieving some unjustly neglected criticisms levelled at his

James Orr St Johns College, Cambridge, CB2 1TP, UK Email: jtworr@gmail.com 1 The ensuing discussion focuses on the early Heidegger, a phase in his thought that can be identied, following Kisiels periodisation, with his rst Freiburg period (19191923), his Marburg period (19231928), and the rst year of his second Freiburg period (19281929). See Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. xiii. 2 Michael Theunissen identies a consistently negative attitude to timeprior to but exacerbated by Christian theologyrunning from Parmenides to Kierkegaard. See Michael Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), esp. pp. 321371.
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approach by the Jewish-born phenomenologist and Carmelite spiritual writer, Edith Stein.3 Steins substantive challenges to her erstwhile colleague are primarily to be found in an ambitious neo-scholastic synthesis of medieval and phenomenological insights, Endliches und Ewiges Sein (hereafter, EES),4 and in a much shorterand remarkably underexploredreection originally intended as an appendix to EES, Martin Heideggers Existentialphilosophie (hereafter, MHE).5 The argument of the present study unfolds as follows: in Section I, I briey trace the relevant historical background to the time-philosophical approaches adopted by Heidegger and Stein. Section II rehearses how Heidegger constructs his account of authentic temporality in polemical
3 A number of scholars have surveyed different aspects of Steins response to Heideggers early thought. See e.g. my own Edith Steins Critique of Sociality in the Early Heidegger, Neue Zeitschrift fr Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 55/3 (2013), pp. 379396, and The Fullness of Life: Death, Finitude, and Life-Philosophy in Edith Steins Critique of the Early Heidegger (forthcoming); Antonio Calcagno, Die Flle oder das Nichts? Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger on the Question of Being, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 74/2 (2000), pp. 269285; Lina Brsig-Hover, Edith Steins Auseinandersetzung mit Martin Heideggers Existentialphilosophie, in Lina Brsig-Hover (ed.), Ein Leben fr die Wahrheit (Fridingen an Donau: Brsig, 1991), pp. 198214; Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 19131922 (New York and London: Rowman & Littleeld, 2006), esp. pp. 184186; Rainer Marten, Edith Stein und Martin Heidegger, in Hermann Schfer (ed.), Annherungen an Martin Heidegger: Festschrift fr Hugo Ott (Frankfurt: Campus-Verlag, 1996), pp. 233248; John H. Nota, Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger, in John Sullivan (ed.), Edith Stein Symposium (Carmelite Studies 4) (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1987), pp. 5073; Osvaldo Rossi, Sein und Zeit in the Works of Edith Stein: the Possibility and Forms of Existence, Analecta Husserliana 83/5 (2004), pp. 593613; Maria-Chiara Teloni, Time and the Formation of the Human Person: A Comparison of Edith Steins and Martin Heideggers Thoughts, in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.), Timing and Temporality in Islamic Philosophy and Phenomenology of Life (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007); and Vincent Wargo, Reading Against the Grain: Edith Steins Confrontation with Heidegger as an Encounter with Hermeneutical Phenomenology, Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology 42/2 (2011), pp. 125138. Nevertheless, no extended analysis and assessment has hitherto been undertaken of her central criticisms of the role played by temporality in Sein und Zeit that is sufciently sensitive to their theological dimension. 4 Edith Stein, Endliches und Ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins, Gesamtausgabe 1112 (Freiburg: Herder, 2006); trans. K. F. Reinhardt, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002) (where relevant, references throughout list German and English paginations respectively). 5 Edith Stein, Anhang: Martin Heideggers Existentialphilosophie, Gesamtausgabe 1112 (Freiburg: Herder, 2006), pp. 445499; trans. Mette Lebech, Martin Heideggers Existential Philosophy, Maynooth Philosophical Papers 4 (2007), pp. 5598. The publication history of MHE betrays an indifference to Steins editorial intentions which extends well beyond the tragic circumstances of her death, and which brings into sharp contrast the painstaking care devoted to Heideggers own Nachlass. By way of brief summary of that publication history, a few weeks before EES was due to be published in the summer of 1937, the galley proofs were suppressed by the local authorities as a result of the Aryan publication laws introduced by the NSDAP in 1935. It was nally published in 1950, eight years after Stein was gassed in the Little White House at Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 9, 1942. The editorsfor reasons that remain a little unclearomitted to include MHE in this edition. It was nally published in 1962, but only as an independent treatise alongside shorter occasional writings. In any event, interest in it by this point would have been extremely limited on the basis that the intellectual mood had largely shifted in favour of an examination of the thought of Heidegger in his later period. It was not until 2006exactly seven decades after its compositionthat MHE was nally published according to Steins original wishes.

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contradistinction (i) to a construal of time as an endless, spatialised succession of present moments and (ii) to what I shall term an onto-chrono-logical understanding of eternity with which he alleges this construal to be structurally complicit. Section III analyses Steins striking phenomenological elaboration of Aquinas argument for Gods existence ex contingentia, namely that the selfs introspective awareness of existential fragilityso astutely articulated in the pages of Sein und Zeitpoints ultimately not to Heideggers nothing, but rather to an ontologically ultimate being transcendent of temporal limitation. Section IV examines Steins unique adaptation of Przywaras analogia entis with which she seeks to advance this argument and shows how she recovers Kierkegaards notion of the moment from Heideggers attempt to vitiate its theological suggestiveness. I conclude that these multiple strands coalesce into a searching critique of Heideggers phenomenology of temporal awareness that should unsettle those who remain sympathetic to it. More constructively, I suggest that Steins theological engagement with Heidegger hints indirectly at the falsity of the dilemma between a commitment to the broadly essentialist metaphysics of classical theism and an existentialist attunement to the phenomenology of lived experience. I. The approaches adopted by Heidegger and Stein to the metaphysics of temporality trace their ultimate lineage to Kants arguments for times ideality set out in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the rst Critique. Kants account is of course notable for its insistence that time should be understood by reference to the structures of human subjectivity, and not as an intrinsic feature of reality itself: as a pure form of intuition (Form der Anschauung), it orders the manifold of experience as part of a cognitive process internal to the experiencing subject.6 This position inaugurated an inuential construal of time as an indispensable medium through which the faculty of understanding is able to conceptualise the manifold of intuition (Mannigfaltigen der Anschauung), namely sense experience. Although Bergson alleged that Kant failed adequately to distinguish time from space (the other form of intuition), his own concept of the dure pure was ultimately motivated by the latters rejection of temporal realism. In Bergsons view, the classical model of timea descendant of Aristotles principle that time is the measure of change7 and ostensibly underwritten by Newtons discoveriessuffered from the illusion that time was primarily to be understood as an evenly divisible series of equal, successive moments. Bergsons recurring complaint against this model was that by conceiving of time exclusively in terms analogous to the physical division of a material
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See e.g. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781/1787), A22/B26. The locus classicus is Aristotle, Physics IV.1014 (217b 29224a 17).

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object, the metaphor contaminated its referent: time, in other words, came to be spatialised.8 The aim of Bergsons own model of time as duration was to uncover instead a more primordial qualitative grasp of temporality that accorded a proper primacy to the experiencing subject. Thus Bergson dismissed what he considered to be the falsely objective chronometric model in favour of one that stressed the interpenetration of temporal states of consciousness. It was only this kind of model that could do justice to a subjective awareness of time as structured in a single, unied whole constituted by past, present, and future experiences. A few years after Bergson had begun to formulate this approach, Husserl began to develop a still more nuanced account of temporality that nevertheless shared much with the one he advanced.9 For Husserl, temporality was not only constituted by a complex intentional structure; it was itself the condition of possibility for many other forms of intentionality. According to his view, a primal impression corresponded to the now-moment of a temporal object (to borrow Husserls own example, a single note from a familiar melody). But this itself was to be understood as part of a larger, unied intentional structure, for if an object were only ever given to sense experience in a chronologically discrete now-moment, it could not in fact be discernible as temporal at all. Husserls proposal was to identify temporality as a function of what he termed the pre-intentional inner consciousness. In addition to the primal impression, this structure is understood to be constituted by: (i) a temporal background (retention) in which the object is reproduced (since the single note in the melody is never heard in isolation, but rather in the context of the sequence of notes that precede it); and (ii) a futural dimension (protention) in which the object is anticipated (since the note is heard in the context of the sequence of notes that succeed it).10 The cursory character of the foregoing survey should neither obscure the numerous differences between these three thinkers philosophical emphases nor suggest that other thinkers did not make equally signicant contributions.11 I claim only thattaken togetherthey (i) represent a broadly
8 Henri Bergson, Time and Freewill: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008), pp. 90139. 9 At a conference in 1911 held by the Gttingen Circle (the group from which the phenomenological movement partly sprang), Husserl is said to have remarked: We are the true Bergsonians now (quoted in Rafael Winkler, Husserl and Bergson on Time and Consciousness, in Anna-Teresa Tymienecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XC (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), pp. 93115 at p. 93). 10 See in particular Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (Dordrecht: Springer, 1991), pp. 2175. A brief but instructive diagrammatic account of Husserls phenomenology of time can be found in David Woodruff-Smith, Husserl (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 210217. 11 A useful recent overview of these contributions may be found in John McCumber, Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2011). McCumber argues that the continental traditions distinctive approach to time and historyin particular its fundamental rejection of atemporalityis its dening characteristic.

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continuous historical trajectory of approaches to time in continental philosophy during the century and a half or so prior to Heidegger and Stein; and (ii) form the intellectual hinterland of Heidegger and Steins own treatments of temporality. This second point can be unpacked in three closely connected ways. First, the axis just sketched signals a marked shift in at least one highly inuential strand of the Western philosophical tradition in this period towards a more subjectivist understanding of time. Second, this subjectivist position goes hand-in-hand with a highly critical view of its realist counterpart, a position that it sees as adopting an excessively functional and reductive stance towards time as nothing more than a putatively objective measuring-stick for the unfolding of reality. Third, the philosophical task of inquiring into the nature of time comes to be intimately bound up with a phenomenological analysis of temporal awareness. II. Few thinkers exerted a greater inuence than Husserl on the thought of Stein and Heidegger. Both inherited their Doktorvaters suspicions that a putatively objective model of time should be seen as denitive; both shared his sympathy for models emphasising the primacy of the subjective awareness of temporality. It is partly against the backdrop of Husserls phenomenology of time that Heidegger develops his own critique of the ordinary or vulgar concept of time (der vulgre Zeitbegriff), though his corollary argument for the priority of ecstatic temporality as that which confers unity on ones entire existence, and not simply episodes in ones conscious awareness, represents a clear departure from Husserl. Like Bergson (of whom he was nevertheless often critical), Heidegger holds that the ordinary Aristotelian conceptone might term this, following his own analysis,12 clock-timeerroneously construes time in spatialised terms as if it were a kind of entity. Clock-time founds Daseins inauthentic temporality (uneigentliche Zeitlichkeit), which is in fact derivative of a more primary authentic temporality (eigentliche Zeitlichkeit) understood as an existential disposition towards time which allows Dasein to grasp the concrete there-ness of its lived existence. For Heidegger, time is the fundamental existential category: an authentic grasp of time allows Dasein both to project itself or run ahead (vorlaufen) to the very edge of its existence and to lay hold of the way in which its past lives on as a having-been (Gewesenheit) within a present which is consequently

12 In The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 46, Heidegger asks: What do we learn from the clock about time? Time is something in which a now-point may be arbitrarily xed . . . And yet no now-point of time is privileged over any other . . . This time is thoroughly uniform, homogenous. Only in so far as time is constituted as homogenous is it measurable . . . What primarily the clock does in each case is not to indicate the how-long or how-much of time in its present owing, but to determine the specic xing of the now.

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stretched. Time therefore unies Dasein within a threefold model of ecstatic temporality.13 It is only in the context of this model that Heidegger acquiesces to any discussion of the selfs attaining authenticity by orienting itself towards Being.14 Given the centrality accorded to the task of interpreting Dasein against the backdrop of time in Sein und Zeit (hereafter, SZ), it is perhaps hardly surprising that the question of eternity is scarcely raised as its argument unfolds. Yet in the opening to a lecture given to the Marburg Theological Society three years prior to the publication of SZ, Heidegger offers an intriguing explanation of this subsequent foreclosure of the question: If our access to God is faith and if involving oneself with eternity is nothing other than this faith, then philosophy will never have eternity and, accordingly, we will never be able to employ eternity methodologically as a possible respect in which to discuss time. Philosophy can never be relieved of this perplexity. The theologian, then, is the legitimate expert on time (So ist denn der Theologe der rechte Sachkenner der Zeit) . . . The philosopher does not believe. If the philosopher asks about time, then he has resolved to understand time in terms of time or in terms of the aei, which looks like eternity but proves to be a mere derivative of being temporal (ein bloes Derivat des Zeitlichseins).15 In light of Heideggers later and much more aggressive methodological distinction between philosophy and theology as, respectively, an ontological discipline and a subordinate ontic one,16 this passage is expressed with relative tact. The message is clear: philosophyby which he means phenomenologylacks the resources with which to understand temporality sub specie aeternitatis. The eternity with which philosophy conjures when it fails to grasp this point is ersatz eternity: no phenomenological analysis of time could ever disclose the only conception of eternity that is not a mere derivative of being temporal, namely the conception found in the theological tradition.
13 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tbingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953); trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 65 passim. Cf. Heideggers unmistakable inuence on Sartres analysis of temporality in Being and Nothingness (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 107: The three so-called elements of time, past, present, and future, should not be considered as a collection of givens for us to sum upfor example, as an innite series of nows in which some are not yet and others are no longerbut rather as the structured moments of an original synthesis. 14 In this article, the term Being is capitalised whenever (i) a reference is intended to Heideggers Sein and/or (ii) Heideggers version of ontological difference between ontological being as such and ontic, particular beings has a bearing on the point that is being advanced. 15 Heidegger, Concept of Time, pp. 12 (emphasis original). 16 Martin Heidegger, Phnomenologie und Theologie, in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2004), pp. 4778; trans. William A. McNeill, Phenomenology and Theology, in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 3962.

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Although Heidegger rarely alludes to the notion of eternity in SZ, this basic attitude of qualied respect is still discernible. In the rst of two signicant references, he connes his remarks to a mere footnote; but these represent a tantalising moment in his early thought that comes to have a crucial bearing on Steins own approach: The fact that the traditional concept of eternity as signifying the standing now (nunc stans) has been drawn from the ordinary way of understanding time and has been dened with an orientation towards the idea of constant presence-at-hand, does not need to be discussed in detail. If Gods eternity can be construed philosophically, then it may be understood only as a more primordial temporality which is innite. Whether the way afforded by the via negationis et eminentiae is a possible one remains to be seen.17 This passage annotates Heideggers contention that eternity is structurally complicit with inauthentic temporality: when the ontology of the present-athand (Vorhanden) is applied to the eternity of God, the latter is conceived as an unending series of putatively countable present moments. Thus in the second signicant reference, he cites Platos claim that time is the moving image of eternity18 as an egregious instance of this mistake. One crude way of framing this polarity is to suggest that, where for Plato time is the image of eternity, for Heidegger eternity is the image of inauthentic temporality. As far as Heidegger is concerned, the traditional notion of eternitymisleadingly construed as the iterative reication of a single spatialised moment is oblivious to the spannedness (Gespanntheit) of time that denes the stretchedness (Erstrecktheit) of authentic temporality.19 Previously Heidegger had been willing to treat the theologian as the expert on time for his ability to draw an illuminativeeven constitutivecontrast between eternity and time. In SZ, by contrast, the handful of references to eternity shows Heidegger to be more trenchant in his treatment of theological elaborations of the notion. It is a critique, moreover, that exhibits a fascinating andso far as I am awarepreviously unnoticed structural parallel to Heideggers later onto-theo-logical critique of metaphysics. By way of reminder, metaphysics is constituted by onto-theo-logy because it: (i) hypostasises particular ontic entities (and in so doing ignores their primordial ontological origin) before (ii) unreectively projecting these entities onto a metaphysical backdrop that it illicitly construes as ontologically
Heidegger, SZ, p. 427/p. 479, n. 13. Ibid., p. 423/p. 475, n. 10. Cf. Plato, Timaeus 37d. 19 George Kovacs, The Question of God in Heideggers Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), p. 111. It is worth noting that nowhere in SZ or elsewhere does Heidegger seem aware ofmuch less discussthe crucial distinction drawn in theological debates on time between sempiternity and timelessness.
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foundational for all beings. In a similar vein, Heidegger seems to claim that what one might term onto-chrono-logical metaphysics: (i) reduces time to an unending series of present ontic moments before (ii) illicitly extrapolating from this reduction an ontological eternityconceived as a reied, foundational series of present momentsthat is in fact tacitly derivative of it. If it is correct to suppose that Heideggers critique of ontochronology does indeed foreshadow his later broadsides against ontotheology, it is important to recall oneself to an important but frequently forgotten feature of those broadsides. By this I mean the inuential view that Heidegger did not intend the ontotheological critique to be a rejection of the God of Christianity, but rather a purgation of idolatrous metaphysical intrusions upon the authentic experience of the early Christians (a view that was, of course, largely received wisdom in the wake of the so-called Hellenization Thesis advanced by Bousset, Harnack, and Bultmann). Only once this process of purgation is complete, claims Heidegger, can human beings fall to their knees, dance, and play music before God. The stated purpose of the critique is, in other words, to re-orient believers away from the simulacra of the philosophers towards the true object of faith, and this, presumably, is what motivates the sharp remark that this god-less thinking is perhaps more open to [God] than onto-theo-logic would like to admit.20 So too, I suggest, with ontochronology: that conspicuous reluctance to administer a coup de grce to theological reectionthe desire to purify and re-align theology rather than abolish it tout courtlies just beneath the surface of this earlier critique. This is most obviously attested by Heideggers declaration that the possibility of some viable concept of eternity becoming available is a question that remains to be seen. At the very least, it is a question that Heidegger keeps pointedly open in SZ. Moreover, he does so specically in the context of analogy (the way afforded by the via negationis et eminentiae). As we shall see, the implications of this for Steins engagement with him are twofold. First, her attempt to re-open a theological window onto the concept of eternity does nd a concrete exegetical basisalbeit a slender onewithin the connes of SZ itself; at any rate, it is fair to suppose that Heidegger did not take every conception of eternity to be tainted with ontochronology, especially in light of his remarks in the Marburg Lecture cited above. Second, as far as Heidegger is concerned, the most promising means of developing a conception that is not ontochronological are to be found in the way of analogy. It is through this slender opening that Stein attempts to pick a route from temporal self-awareness to an atemporal source of the possibility of such self-awareness.
20 Martin Heidegger, Die onto-theo-logische Verfassung der Metaphysik, in Identitt und Differenz (Pfulligen: Verlag Gnther Neske, 1957), pp. 3168; trans. Joan Stambaugh, The OntoTheo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics, in Identity and Difference (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 4274.

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Just as Heidegger sees temporality as intimately bound up with Dasein, so Steins philosophy of time is shaped fundamentally by her phenomenological analyses of the life of the essential self (Ichleben). Both therefore share a resistance to a concept of time as extrinsic to the world of the self. Indeed at one point Stein specically disclaims the container view of time for which Heidegger evinces such contempt.21 But she departs from him in rooting her account of the life of the ego in arguments that recall Augustines De Trinitate and Descartes Mditations, texts that famously argue for the indubitability of the existing, thinking self on the basis of introspective reection on ones capacity for self-awareness. In this context, Stein argues that what remains in the wake of the phenomenologists reductions or bracketing22 is a residual eld of primordial self-awareness that encompasses the individuals cognitive and affective dimensions: [T]he same [indubitability] applies to all my desires and volitions, my dreams and hopes, my joys and griefsto everything, in short, in which I live and am, to everything that manifests itself as part of the being of the self-conscious ego.23 Yet Steins appeal to the Augustinian sum and Cartesian cogito resists the epistemological foundationalism to which these strategies tended to give rise in the modern era. What interests her is not whether the sense of epistemic certainty arising from self-awareness transcends all other reective activity, but the much more modest observation that self-awareness exhibits a perduring quality that illuminates by contrast the temporality and transience characteristic of other realms of conscious experience.24 Stein contends that introspective analysis confronts the individual with the question of the nature of that Being of which he is conscious and indeed of the self that is conscious of this Being. This question in turn points to an intimate association between Being and time that parallels Heideggers own account of Daseins ecstatic temporality and its relationship to the nothingness of Being (die Nichtigkeit des Seins): When I turn toward Being as it is in itself, it reveals to me a dual aspect: that of Being and that of not-being. The I am is unable to endure this
21 Stein, EES, p. 44/pp. 3940: Although the present moment could not be without past and future, these latter two dimensions of time are not static: they are not containers in which something could be preserved or from which something could emerge; no enduring being can be concealed in them. 22 The term refers to the practicepioneered by Husserlof suspending ones ordinary beliefs about sensory objects in order to lay bare the purely qualitative impact of phenomena on subjective experience. 23 Ibid., p. 41/p. 36. 24 Ibid., II 3.

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dual perspective . . . This means that the Being of which I am conscious as mine is inseparable from temporality . . . But by its breaking apart in its ux into Being and not-being, the idea of pure Being is revealed to us. In pure being there is no longer any admixture of not-being, nor any no longer and not yet. In short, pure Being is not temporal but eternal.25 Stein seems implicitly to favour a durational, experiential model of time fundamentally akin to that espoused by Heidegger: past and future clocktime are folded into the stretched present; time is not represented by means of spatial metaphors. Only in the present can an individual grasp the past (through memory) and the future (through expectation) in a way that makes sense of these as temporal dimensions that can be lled with the existential breadth of Being.26 Time is therefore nothing more than the selfs experience of the passing present, and only in this present is Being disclosed as actual: existence, she concludes, is an ever repeated ashing-up of actuality.27 Much of Steins analysis therefore bears the stamp of Husserls intentional structure of time-consciousness averted to in Section I. Given that her stint as his assistant included extensive work on the editingand, in all likelihood, much of the drafting28of his denitive statement on the subject, this is not entirely surprising.29 But it also shows signs of a profound engagement with Heideggers analysis of Daseins stretched temporality and with the role that non-being plays within that temporal structure. Stein agrees that phenomenological analyses of moods provide a legitimate basis for a philosophical inquiry into the nature of time, that temporality is inseparable from nite being, and that temporality is to be construed not as clock-time but ecstatically. Furthermore, she endorses Heideggers claim that Daseins being is suspended on a knife-edge, that it juts continuously out into nothingness: My own being, as I know it and as I know myself in it, is null and void . . . by myself I am nothing; at every moment I nd myself face to face with nothingness.30 Yet axiomatic to Heideggers analysis is the assumption that the Nothing that supposedly enshrouds Dasein is impenetrable: his own philosophical
Ibid., p. 42/p. 37 (emphasis original). Ibid., p. 44/p. 39. 27 Ibid., p. 62/p. 61. 28 Marianne Sawicki, Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), p. 164, n. 38. 29 Cf. note 10 above. Husserl handed the manuscript for this work over to Heidegger, who hurriedly published an unpolished version of it in 1928no mention was made of Steins extensive contributions. 30 Stein, EES, p. 57/p. 55.
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inquiry into it returns the mystical proclamation, famously ridiculed by Carnap, that the Nothing noths (das Nichts nichtet).31 For Stein, by contrast, the radical contingency of Dasein that emerges when it is set against the backdrop of nothingness serves only to exacerbate the problem of Being, not to resolve or clarify it. If, for instance, Dasein is so thoroughly encompassed by the Nothing, why does it return so incessantly to the question of the meaning of Being? In Steins view, Heidegger fails adequately to confront the signicance of his own insight: The human being is designated as thrown . . . With this, however, the question concerning the origin does not completely disappear. One might try by whatever power to silence it till it dies or to prohibit it as meaninglessit always inevitably arises again from the displayed distinctiveness of the human being and requires a something which is founding without being founded, something which founds itself: one that throws the thrown. Thus does thrownness reveal itself as creatureliness.32 Differently put, if Daseins existence really bears the marks of radical contingencyas Heidegger of course claims it doeswhy is it incoherent for one to ask after the availability of a non-contingent correlate to existential contingency?33 Stein notes that it cannot be the ego that self-sufciently sustains conscious life, since this would be inconsistent with the phenomenological deliverances of its self-awareness. It must therefore be sustained by something altogether different: The ego . . . and its being are inescapably there: it is a being thrown into existence [which] marks [it] as the extreme opposite of an autonomous and intrinsically necessary being a se . . . The being of the ego, as a constantly changing living present, is not autonomous but received being. It has been placed into existence and is sustained from moment to moment

31 Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2004); trans. David Farrell Krell, What is Metaphysics? in Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 116/p. 103. 32 Stein, MHE, p. 465/pp. 7071. 33 In a related context, Stein asks: Does [Heideggers] investigation not in many places and in surprising ways halt in front of references which present themselves in a direct imperious manner? (ibid., p. 465/p. 7071). Quoting from a review of SZ by her friend (and godmother), Hedwig Conrad-Martius, she remarks that it is as if in Heideggers case a door [viz. the question of the meaning of being] . . . is blown wide open . . . and then immediately closed again, bolted and so thoroughly blocked that any further opening seems impossible (Ibid., p. 481/p. 81, quoting Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Phenomenology and Speculation, Philosophy Today 3/1 (1959), pp. 4351 at p. 45).

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(Es ist ins Dasein gesetzt und wird von Augenblick zu Augenblick darin erhalten).34 Stein has already noted that the temporal ux that is constitutive of Daseins conscious experience points to the idea of pure being.35 But she goes on to argue that the contingency of the ego itself introduces Dasein to the idea of fullness (Idee der Flle), since it awakens within it a desire not only [for] an endless continuation of its own being but a full possession of being as such.36 Elsewhere Stein describes the ontological dependence characteristic of temporal being in terms of the ongoing receiving of Being as gift.37 But at this point she simply draws attention to the philosophical legitimacy of her inquiry into the origin of this received existence: [T]hus eternal and temporal, immutable and mutable being (and also non-being) are ideas which the intellect encounters within itself; they are not borrowed from anything outside itself. This means that we have now found a legitimate point of departure for a philosophy based on natural reason and natural knowledge.38 Stein agrees that Daseins experience of anxiety (Angst) signals that it has been brought face-to-face with nothingness itself. But she is quick to deny Heideggers claim that this mood is dominant, insisting that prior to it lies a more prevalent mood of fundamental existential security: normally, she notes, we go through life almost as securely as if we had a real grip on our existence.39 Yet according to Heidegger, this attitude to life is to be dismissed as entirely unreasonable given Daseins exposure to nothingness. What this would imply, claims Stein, is that the fundamental sense of existential security reveals Dasein to be in the grip of a delusion, so that the rational human approach ought to consist in (again quoting Heidegger) a passionate . . . consciously resolute anxiety-stricken freedom toward death.40 She strongly rejects this inference by reverting to the earlier account of the perduring quality of the Ichleben that withstands and unies the ceaselessly uctuating character of conscious experience. Heidegger rejects the selfs sense of existential security as a supercial mark of Daseins lostness in the One (das Man). But for Stein, it is in fact an entirely warrantedand more phenomenologically crediblecounterpoint to the anxiety that Heidegger takes to be
Stein, EES, pp. 5657/p. 54 (Steins emphasis). Ibid., p. 42/p. 37. 36 Ibid., p. 58/p. 56. 37 Ibid., p. 62/p. 61: Whatever exists in the mode of temporality does not possess its being but receives it ever anew as a gift. 38 Ibid., p. 42/p. 37; cf. p. 57/p. 55. 39 Ibid., p. 59/p. 58. 40 Ibid.
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Daseins existentially determinative mood. It is here that one reaches the very core of Steins disagreement with Heideggers interpretation of the transcendental temporality that frames Dasein: The undeniable fact that my being is limited in its transience from moment to moment and thus exposed to the possibility of nothingness is counterbalanced by the equally undeniable fact that despite this transience, I am, that from moment to moment I am sustained in my being, and that in my eeting being I share in enduring being . . . This security [is] the sweet and blissful security of a child that is lifted up and carried by a strong arm . . . For if a child were living in the constant fear that its mother might let it fall, we should hardly call this is a rational attitude.41 Stein proceeds to position her account of the selfs awareness of temporal contingency as the rst premise in an argument that seems to have been adapted from Aquinas argument for Gods existence from the contingency of creaturely existence.42 The temporal contingency of the I that introspection lays bare suggests an ultimate reliance on a source of being that is not itself contingent: The security which I experience in my eeting existence indicates that I am immediately anchored in an ultimate hold and ground. Everything temporal is as such eeting and therefore needs an eternal hold or support.43 Furthermore, since the ultimate source of received being cannot itself receive being, it follows that no separation can be drawn between what it is and that it is: this being, Stein concludes, must be its very act of existing.44 Phenomenology may strike some as an unprepossessing point from which to defend the doctrine of divine simplicity. Yet this is precisely what Stein attempts. For her, what separates the necessary identity of essence and
Ibid., pp. 5960/p. 58. Karl Schudt, Edith Steins Proof for the Existence of God from Consciousness, in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82/1 (2008), pp. 105125 at p. 118. Schudt argues that Steins argument bears a closer resemblance to Aquinas argument in De Esse et Essentia (which she had translated for the rst time into German) thanas was previously thoughtto the tertia via in Summa Theologiae Ia q.2 a.3 resp. 43 See esp. Stein, EES, p. 60 / p. 59. 44 Ibid. Cf. De Ente et Essentia IV: Et quia omne, quod est per aliud, reducitur ad illud quod est per se sicut ad causam primam, oportet quod sit aliqua res, quae sit causa essendi omnibus rebus, eo quod ipsa est esse tantum . . . Et hoc est causa prima, quae deus est (And since everything which exists by virtue of something else can be traced back to that which exists by virtue of itselfthat is to say, a rst causethere must be something which is the cause of the existence of all things and which for this reason is being itself . . . And this is the rst cause which is God). For further discussion, see James Lehrberger, The Anthropology of Aquinas De Esse et Essentia, Review of Metaphysics 51/4 (1998), pp. 829847 at pp. 836838.
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existence in God (on the one hand) from the contingent connection between the essence and existence of nite beings (on the other) is the very gulf of ontological difference it is Heideggers stated ambition to recover for Western thought. But in Steins thought that difference is greater than any conceivable on Heideggerian terms. Indeed so totalising is the horizon of temporality in Heideggers early thought that he applies it with apparent indifference to both beings and Being. It is because no meaningful diremption between beings and Being seems possible on that basis that Steins complaint carries such force. Put differently, her charge is that in establishing time as a univocal feature spanning both sides of the divide between beings and Being, Heidegger abolishes that divide. By contrast, her own analysis of temporality exhibits considerable sensitivity to the ontological difference. For the eeting-yet-perduring contact between nite and eternal being is best understood, she claims, in terms of the analogia entis.45 IV. It is at this point that Steins developing integration of neo-scholasticism and phenomenology interacts most fruitfully with the work of her friend and mentor, Erich Przywara.46 But the specically phenomenological twist that Stein applies to Przywaras retrieval of the doctrine represents an intriguingand genuinely novelre-fashioning of the traditional approach to understanding the relation between the temporality of the I and the atemporality of God that it eetingly glimpses. In recognition of the conceptual debt to Przywara, one might term this Steins analogia mei:47
I explore this point at greater length in The Fullness of Life (see note 3 above). Stein read and commented in detail on an early draft of Przywaras 1932 work, Analogia Entis, in the late 1920s. Together with his Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie (Mnich: Druck und Verlag R. Oldenbourg, 1926), this work represents the rst and most inuential modern statement of this crucial theological insight. It is a measure of the remarkable neglect with which this work has been treated that the rst English edition has appeared so recently, some 81 years after its original publication; see Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphisik, Ur-struktur und All-rhitmus (Einsiedeln: Johannes-Verlag, 1932); trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2013). On the close intellectual kinship and friendship between Stein and Przywara, and the possible inuence of the former over the latter, see Thomas F. OMeara, Erich Przywara, S.J.: His Theology and His World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), pp. 119127. See also the pertinent remarks in John Betz, Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part Two), Modern Theology 22/1 (2006), pp. 150 at p. 26: [O]ne must bear in mind that [Przywaras] Analogia Entis was conceived at least in part as a response to Husserls increasingly transcendental phenomenology; that it begins precisely as a phenomenological investigation like Heideggers Sein und Zeit, which was published only a few years earlier; and that Przywaras rst reader was none other than his friend (Husserls assistant) Edith Stein, who was in many ways Przywaras only intellectual companion. 47 The phrase analogia mei is itself indebted to Philibert Secretans description of Steins use of lanalogie du je suis. See Pierre Gisel and Philibert Secretan (eds.), Analogie et Dialectique: Essais de Thologie Fondamentale (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1982), p. 140.
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What is meant by analogia entis (as indicative of the relationship existing between temporal and eternal being) also becomes faintly visible at this point. Actual being, at the moment at which it is, reveals something of the nature of being as such, i.e. of the fullness of being which knows of no temporal change . . . Momentary or temporal being, on the other hand, is merely a remote image or likeness, related to the primordial prototype of its similitude but yet innitely far removed from it by its dissimilitude.48 Central to the success of Steins argument is the claim that the existential conundrum in which the self nds itselfteetering as it does on the knifeedge between time and timelessnessis ultimately resolved by means of the very option to which Heidegger himself alludes with a measure of approval.49 Along the via negationis, all comparisons between the temporalised self and the timelessness of the divine being are always and everywhere to be denied. The via eminentiae, by contrast, licenses an interpretation of the selfs ashing glimpse of its permanence as revealing the dimmest point of contact between the creaturely I and the immutable vitality of God, albeit a point of contact that is always superseded by an ever greater unlikeness.50 At least four related points can be afrmed in connection with Steins phenomenological rendition of the analogia entis. First, in adopting the mechanism of analogy, she deliberately follows the only route to a concept of eternity that Heidegger explicitly refuses to foreclose. Second, her insertion of an analogical interval between created time and divine timelessness insulates her doctrine of God against Heideggers later critique of ontotheology. Third, her deployment of analogy in relation to the distinction between temporality and atemporality crucially safeguards her analysis from the ontochronological critique discussed in Section II. This is because any alleged similarity between nite and innite temporality is perpetually qualied by the ever greater (semper maior) dissimilarity between them. Finally, the analogical method opens up an ontology of time that is nuanced enough for Stein to preserve the ontological difference with more philosophical coherence than Heidegger himself. Set against the backdrop of her discussions in EESwhich constitute the bulk of her critique of Heideggers treatment of timethe explicit criticisms Stein raises in MHE begin to assume a shape and point lacking in their absence. Reversing Heideggers strategy of co-opting motifs from the Christian philosophical tradition, Stein re-claims an insight arising from Heideggers appropriation of Kierkegaards jeblik (glance of the eye or
Stein, EES, p. 42/pp. 3738. Cf. note 10 above. 50 Stein cites the classic formulation of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): Inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo norari quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda (Between creator and creature no similarity can be identied, however great, that would not require one to identify a greater dissimilarity).
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moment), by means of which the latter intended to illustrate the individuals eeting sense of contact with eternity as contemporaneity with Christ.51 She notes with approval Heideggers attempt to break open a temporality characterised by a bustling that dwells on no particular thing, but always hastens towards the future [and] does not do justice to the moment.52 For he rightly sees that each moment contains a fullness that suggests it is not simply to be taken as a mere moment in time, a section between stretches of past and future.53 Nevertheless, in an echo of her earlier criticisms, according to the terms of Heideggers analysis Dasein remains so dened by temporality that it becomes impossible to make sense of how temporality might be transcended in this way. It is precisely this that Stein insists Kierkegaards notion permits once it is interpreted in a manner more consistent with the phenomenological method: From the standpoint of an understanding of time that knows of no eternity and declares Being as such to be temporal, it is impossible . . . to clarify the meaning [Heidegger] gives to the moment . . . That we . . . despite our beings eeting nature, can take the timeless up into ourselves, maintain something (what Heidegger calls having-been), proves that our being is not simply temporal, that it does not exhaust itself in temporality.54 Stein then touches upon a point rarely remarked upon in the extensive commentary on Heideggers early thought. The criticism relates to whether any delimitable grasp of what Heidegger means by temporality and nitude is possible given his resolute refusal to attribute so much as a hypothetical status to the correlative notions of eternity and the innite. For Stein at least, this refusal betrays a prejudicial indifference to the possibility thatfrom a purely conceptual point of viewhuman nitudes true meaning derives from the fact that it is conditioned by innitude. In other words, it is not through phenomenological analysis alone that human nitude points suggestively beyond itself. Theoretical reection also uncovers a connection between the dependentor, as Stein concludes, createdstatus of an individuals temporalised existence and a non-dependent, timeless source of that existence. If
51 For an insightful discussion of Kierkegaards inuence on Heideggers concept of Augenblick, see John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumour of the Hidden King (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 195198. For an overview of the concepts role in Heideggers thought, see Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 187 and p. 221; William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 114136; and Koral Ward, Augenblick: The Concept of the Decisive Moment in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Western Philosophy (London: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 97124. 52 Stein, MHE, p. 480/p. 79. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid.

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the notion of nitude is not to be entirely evacuated of conceptual content, at least some sense must be made of that which delimits and denes it. As Stein notes with some astuteness, this problematic implication of Heideggers instinct for the immanent is one that laps at the edges of his early thought. She alludes in particular to some intriguing remarks made in the closing paragraphs of his bookpublished in 1929on Kants doctrine of schematism and time, a work widely considered to have been the material intended for inclusion as the rst division of SZs projected but unnished second part: [Createdness] can be proved rationallyperhaps not the [biblical] kind of creation . . . but the necessity not to be per se or a se, but ab alio, which follows from the fact that the human being is something but not everything. Is this not precisely the authentic meaning of nitude? Heidegger touches on this when he nally brings up the question: Is it possible to develop the nitude in Dasein, even as a problem, without presupposing innity? He must immediately add a further question: What is the nature of this presupposition in Dasein? What does the innitude thus posed mean?55 Stein implicitly translates the tension between authentic resolution and possibility that energises Dasein into the Thomistic idiom of a tension between act and potency. That tension arises from its temporal condition and manifests itself in care (Sorge). Yet she denies that this represents the nal meaning of Daseins Being. On the contrary, according to their testimony both invite themselves to be overcome in order to reach the fullment of the meaning of its Being.56 And the mode of being that achieves this is one in which the distinction between the timeless moment and temporal duration is itself overcome, with the result that the nite reaches its highest possible participation in the eternal . . . midway between time and eternity that Christian philosophy has designated as aevum.57

55 Ibid. (Steins emphasis). Steins reference is to some tantalising remarks made in the closing paragraphs of Heideggers 1928 Kant-buch, a work often considered to represent the projected sequel to SZ. See Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1951); trans. Richard Taft, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 222/p. 191: Lsst sich aber die Endlichkeit im Dasein auch nur als Problem entwickeln ohne eine vorausgesetzte Unendlichkeit? . . . Was bedeutet die so gesetzte Unendlichkeit? (Is it possible to develop the nitude in Dasein, even as a problem, without presupposing innity? . . . What does the innitude thus posed mean?). 56 Stein, MHE, p. 480/p. 80 (emphasis original). 57 Ibid. For an analysis of the medieval concept of the aevum, see Carl Peter, Participated Eternity in the Vision of God (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1964), pp. 1219. For further discussion of the (almost indistinguishable) concept of participated eternity in Aquinas thought, see pp. 2034.

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Resisting such metaphysical extravagance, dedicated followers of Heidegger may well conclude that Steins assiduous efforts at re-orienting Dasein towards eternal being twist his account of temporality into tting a conception of transcendence that he studiously and repeatedly rejects. Yet in other quarters this sort of objection might legitimately provoke a tu quoque rejoinder. For as we have seen, Heideggers barely acknowledged trespasses across the terrain of the Christian philosophical tradition give rise to a number of interpretative tensions in his own account of temporality. Nevertheless, the primary aim of the foregoing analysis has not been to buttress this kind of rejoinder with various illustrations of the way Stein makes legible the theological script hidden beneath Heideggers secular palimpsest. Rather, it has been to suggest that her recurring insistence that contingency must be grounded in necessity, that nitude should not be separated from innitude, and that a phenomenology of lived experience should make sense of apparently timeless moments in that experience, coalesce into a body of penetrating objections to the internal coherence of Heideggers account that are independent of theological commitment, even as they speak to the latters theoretical power. These objections, consenting as they do to Heideggers own methodological starting point in phenomenological analysis, should disquiet anyone still broadly committed to his account, or to one that would trace its lineage from it. More positively, the constructive counterpoint to Steins critique hints at one way in which attentiveness to the experiential dimensions of temporal existenceso central to twentieth-century existentialism and continental philosophy more generallyneed not have come at the cost of jettisoning an ontology in which God and the self are construed as essences wholly or partly resistant to temporal ux.58

58 My deepest thanks to Sarah Coakley, Anthony Orr, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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