Abstract

Edith Stein and Gerda Walther place great value on community, for both thinkers view it as the fundamental, common, and necessary terrain in which one can grow and be formed as human beings. Although they share a phenomenological framework, they describe community in different ways. Stein starts from I-experience to reach her understanding community, which is analyzed deeply and in all its constitutive elements, whereas Walther moves from the social self and, hence, from the background of psychic interiority in which the communal we moves and lives. However, through different ways, both thinkers arrive at the same conclusion: they converge on the role played by the I-center in the actualization of the lived experience of community.