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| Edith Stein, Husserlian & saint |
I'm oftentimes amazed at the types of intersections to be encountered between culture and divinity.
What's in phenomenology that two spiritual masters, Frank Samperi and Edith Stein and perhaps many more, have recoiled from it and named it inimical to the spiritual itself? After all, it was touted in its day as a doctrine of empathy with the world or a sane procedural suspension (epoché) of belief in the face of the absurd and problematical. The reduction of life-experience to radically lived (ego-centric) sensations seemed to offer intuitive certainty in regards to human knowledge. Some have seen in it a sort of "spell of the sensuous" (David Abram) from which the most sublime world-knowledge can derive still.
Samperi had, however, derived his distaste for phenomenology from what he thought was its wildly processual and reductivist nature: resulting in a sort of metaphysical pagan nation-worship or, as he puts it in a letter to Cid Corman, "the Pretense that there's One Nation" to which everything can be traced and in which there's no room for his venerated "Tradition of forms". Stein herself must have seen in her own collegial relations with both Husserl and Heidegger similar allegiances of any sort of Weltanshauungen to essentially tribal notions of gender and ideology particularly and their always deleterious effects on intellectually gifted women like Stein. Her doctoral dissertation on "empathy", inspired and guided by Husserl himself, provided a way out of this intellectual hegemony: as she says, "Husserl...named this experience "empathy", but did not explain what it consisted of. Here was a gap which was worthwhile filling". She could also have said the same thing about the fashionable atheism she'd embraced in her Freiburg years. A gap is a gap.
So to a Dante-inspired poet and Discalced Carmelite nun something meant to be a privileged look into the world's own "hidden meaning and teleology" (The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 18) was strictly anathema. To Samperi and Stein phenomenology was a pretense and a sham (though Stein had been asked even as a Carmelite to contribute to phenomenological discussions). Samperi called it "the great Usurper [who] taketh away the Kingdom of the Divine Intelligential Poet" (In Samperi's mind, poet Bill Bronk happened to be the Usurper in person). To both it amounted to the irreligious claim that the arts and sciences in general end in doctrine and perhaps a kind of rapacious will to be to which can be traced all the vilest human instincts. Saints and poets alike are bound to register the dangers first.
This bill of indictment against philosophers and the fruits of cognitive labour was no pose. And the denunciations were more than figurative. In the absence of Greek dichotomies between intellect and the world (which Husserl thought he'd disposed of with his handy notion of experience,"Ehrfarung") the Christian hoped for real bodily transfiguration, real earthly paradise: a radical type of "depersonalization" strictly incompatible with the "Material Ideal" (as Samperi describes it in his 1969 notes on Dante) of process philosophies. After the conversion there's no leftover "matter" anywhere. Again, Samperi:
no poetry has been written in this century -- propaganda yes!
verse yes! but a poetry not an end in itself no!
unless , of course, I exclude
myself -- and I am not being
egotistical...
Therefore: to withdraw from
the literary world is a must.
This proves than our style no
style is Ars imitatur naturam in sua operatione.
For Stein the only real "depersonalization" was to be found within the "narrow space" of her monastery: an even more enforced type was, of course, to be reenacted in her own extinction at Auschwitz. As she says just weeks before her deportation, "To erect the structure of holiness in it, one must dig deep and build high, must descend into the depths of the dark night of one’s own nothingness in order to be raised up high into the sunlight of divine love and compassion." Instead of Husserlian "empathy" there were "depths of the dark night" into which the convert eagerly burrows.
What drove them both from enlightened rationalities to this credo of withdrawal must lie somewhere in that vacuous knowledge metaphor always more terrifying in its results than in its methodology: or perhaps, more specifically, in just that Husserlian equation of 'being' to the way things actually appear to be. Something in that must have seemed a gross usurpation of the mystic's way: something terribly inimical to the creative spirit that Samperi (encouraged by Corman) termed "bureaucratic". Presumably, no one but the saint or poet-pilgrim could lay claim to a sort of 'mystic's' love of terminal understanding along such lines as Stein's own:
Are you the ray
That flashes down from the eternal Judge's throne
And breaks into the night of the soul
That had never known itself?
But mystics and poets presume to know nothing, after all. Knowledge for them is agoraphobic. The vessel fills with "ray" only and understanding abetted by grace alone becomes "divine intelligential". And what is "grace" but the suppression of "difference" (as between the street and hermitage, the university office and the ovens) and embrace of the celestial journey "sanza mezzo" ("without intermediaries"). There's nothing here for phenomenologists to gnaw on, not a single shred of sense, judgement or life-world. There's prayer and the abyss.
Perhaps it's not too incredible to suggest that significant poetries have always purposely courted "the dark night" and looked indifferently on the ashes.
