Introduction

For Stein, one of the characteristic features of the human mind, besides its personal shapes and spiritual (geistig) openness, is its ability to share a common world. Essentially, sharing a common world means to be entangled in the structure of what Stein calls “the stream of experience of the community,” the communal Erlebnisstrom.Footnote 1

In her Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften (1922) (Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities (2000)) Stein investigates the embedding of the individual psyche (Psyche) into the causal nexus of nature and society, as well as in the motivational structures of the mind. The book is divided into two treatises: the first is dedicated to “sentient causality” (psychische Kausalität), elaborating on the concept of causality that is proper to the realm of psychology; the second, in which Stein aims to lay the ontological foundation for the humanities, deals with the dialectical relation between individual and community. Whereas in her dissertation Zum Problem der Einfühlung (1917) (On the Problem of Empathy (1989)), Stein focused on how other minds are given to us or, in contemporary terms, on social cognition, in the second treatise of the Beiträge, she describes the structure of communal life, which is today addressed as the problem of collective or we-intentionality and social ontology. We-intentionality is for Stein the proper intentionality of the socio-ontological unity that she refers to as community as opposed to society, whereas empathy is the main way to access other individuals’ life in society. Her social-ontological account of communal experience relies on both an original application of the mereology of Husserl’s third Logical Investigation on parts and wholes and on Stein’s metaphysics of the human person as an individual being pre-delineated by a soul or core.Footnote 2

In this paper I do not aim for a systematic account of Stein’s social ontology, but only a discussion of Stein’s description of community as the motivational structure of intentionality which is related to a communal rational point of view. Therefore, I will not address issues related to psychic causalities, embodiment, and sentience which are essential to other forms of social associations (e.g., mass phenomena, social contagion, animal communities), but, instead, the rationality of the common mind as it is implicated by Stein’s account of the community’s stream of experience.

Stein’s Account of the Intentionality of the Community’s Stream of Experience

The point of departure of Stein’s considerations is her philosophical astonishment at the fact that the singular mind from which each of us lives in the first-person perspective can enter into a community of life with other subjects. Being responsive to the life of the community means for Stein that the individual subject can become a member of a super-individual subject and that something like a super-individual stream of experience can arise out of this community of subjects. In order to describe this astonishing ability of the human mind to transcend “its uniqueness and ineliminable loneliness” (Stein 2000: 133 [119]), Stein implements the terminology Husserl developed in the early studies on time consciousness, which she edited as Husserl’s assistant and which Heidegger published 1928 as the sole editor.

Stein describes the mind as a stream continuously flowing from the ego. According to Stein, in fact, the ego is the source of the life of consciousness:

“ActualFootnote 3 life arises from this source, becoming lived life as soon as it turns in the past, structuring itself in the unity of the constituted stream of consciousness. Constituting life flows from the past, while the constituted stream is always in coincidence with the formerly constituting stream”. Stein stresses here that “what streams out of one ego, belongs to only one stream of consciousness, and this stream is a self-contained system, separated from every other streams of consciousness as from their ego” (2000: 133 [119]).

The tension within Stein’s description pertains, on the one hand, to her strict interpretation of Husserl’s static framework of phenomenology and, on the other, to her firm adhesion to a holistic account of group minds. As we shall see, her holistic understanding does not neglect the individual, but on the contrary stresses the responsibility of the individual for the accomplishment of the life of the community. Her understanding of Husserl’s account of intentionality is influenced by Max Scheler’s distinction between psyche and mind, a distinction she tries to sharpen even more. In her account, intentionality and motivation are proper features of the mind, while causality governs the “mechanism” of the psyche. Accordingly, she considers the psyche as a separate and self-contained monadic system that can only be influenced causally by exchange of lifepower.Footnote 4 Only if a (human) mind is embedded in the psyche can the psyche perform intentional acts and become shaped by super-individual motivational structures. While the non-human psyche is not capable of transcending its own loneliness, the human mind is only able to intend jointly with other subjects. Mind (Geist) and its capability to bridge mental separation among animals expresses in her account the ‘anthropological difference,’ i.e., the key distinction between animals and humans. In contemporary terms: only the human mind is capable of forms of we-intentionality.Footnote 5

To accomplish her phenomenological description of the communal structure of intentionality, she assumes the perspective of the member of a given community. Interestingly, she develops her analysis along rather tragic examples, based on her experience of the Great War. The war was for her generation the paradigm of what Scheler (1916) called Gesamterlebnis: the abrupt revelation of the life of the nations as a mode of communal life as opposed to the individual mode (Stein 2000: 280). The point of departure of Stein’s reflection on the community is therefore eminently political and is the expression of the theoretical struggle of an engaged patriot for understanding the ontological reality of the subjects of her political passions.Footnote 6 Surely, her passions and opinions are not immune from the exaltations of war ideology (Kriegsideologie) which radically contrasted the pre-war bourgeois individualism of the liberal belle époque society with the sense of community revealed facing death in the fate of the nation and fighting for its cultural values (see Losurdo 2001). Nevertheless, her phenomenological description preserves and at the same time appeals to individual responsibility, rationality, and care for the community. Problems may arise in the definition of the limits and the reasons of the community as well as in Stein’s essentialist account of identity. But let us follow her argument.

Stein asks her readers to reflect on this example: “The army unit in which I am serving is grieving over the loss of its leader” (2000: 134) and to consider the difference between the following related experiences:

  1. (a)

    I grieve, because the leader of my troop is dead;

  2. (b)

    I grieve, because the friend of mine is dead who is the leader of my army unit.

Stein claims that, even if these two experiences refer to the same person, they are different with regard to: (1) the subject of the experience, (2) the structure of the single experience and (3) the structure of the stream of experience. Let me review this distinctions one by one.

The Subject of the Communal Experience

The subject of the experience is a plurality of egos and not an individual one: I grieve, but I am not mourning alone, because of my personal loss; rather I grieve our grieving. The experience is essentially coloured by the fact that others take part in it and that I take part as member of the community in the grieving of the community itself. As Stein elaborates the inner motivational structure of this experience, we are subjected to the loss of the leader, and therefore we grieve. But this ‘We’ embraces not only those who feel the grieving like me, but all those who are encompassed by the unity of the group, even those who know nothing about the tragic event, those members of the group who lived previously, and those who will live in the future (Stein 2000: 134 [120]; see Szanto in this issue).

If one of us feels to be compelled to grieve, she does it in the name of the group and in the name of every member of the group. This group is the specific subject of this community-experience and this subject lives in each of us. This is the subject that we feel to be affected in us when we have a community-experience. That’s why Stein can conclude her example by stating: I grieve as member of the troop, and the troop grieves in me (2000: 134 [120]).

I would like now to stress that the concept of We that Stein is applying to the situation of the fallen soldier assumes a highly idealized extension: to this We ideally belong all the past and the future members of the group, as well as all the actual and the potential grievers.

According to Stein, then, there is a super-individual subject who lives in the individuals. Within communal experiences, this super-individual subject somehow refers to the whole group and to each member thereof. However, this super-individual subject does not have a polar mind—a mind which has its own source in one ego—but a multi-polar one. A super-individual subject has no pure ego constituting its own mind; the experiences of this community-subject have. On the contrary, their sources in the individual ego of the members who contribute to the communal life. Stein again stresses that with respect to the concepts of subject and ego, one ought to clearly distinguish between constituted and constituting subjectivities; between pure ego and personal ego; between personality and personhood (see Caminada 2011b). For her, only the ego can be the original source of constitution. If individual experiences are accomplished by the individual according to a communal stance, they can compose super-individual ones and enable the manifestation of phenomena of a super-individual level of constitution. Nevertheless, this further level of constitution is constituted by the individual as member of the community and not by the community as such.

The Structure of the Single Communal Experience

Not only the subject, but also the given experience has a different structure. Following Husserl, Stein distinguishes three moments in intentional experiences: (1) content (Gehalt), (2) mode (Erlebtwerden), and (3) pre-reflexive awareness (Bewußtsein von dem Erleben) and self-consciousness or the capacity of reflection (Selbstbewußtsein).

Content

The concrete content is lived individually by every member, each of them experiencing it as a member of the community. Nevertheless, if they were living their own personal private experiences though referred to the same intentional object, their experiences would be completely different from the common experience they live as members of the community. They grieve personally over the same loss, but as members of the same community. Every member lives her own grief, while feeling the same grief (Stein 2000: 135 [121]). According to Stein, this sameness is given thanks to the rationality of the content:

The mourning is not only an individual content that I feel. It has also a sense (Sinn) and because of this sense it demands to be referred to something that lies beyond the individual experiencing, something that objectively subsists (Stein 2000: 135f. [121]). In the example of the fallen soldier, the objectiveness of the experience, that is the correlate of it, is given in the matter of fact “loss of the leader”. This matter of fact is the sense of the content, it is its noematic sense, to put it in Husserl’s terms (1913), its Sachverhalt, in Reinach’s (1913), or better its Wertverhalt, as Scheler (1913, 1916) would say, i.e., the objective “matter of values” which requires a motivated emotional answer.

Echoing Scheler’s view on the existence of individual absolutes, Stein claims further that there are contents that can be originally given only to particular subjects. As in Scheler, this goes also for community: there can be contents that can be originally given only to a particular community. Because of this peculiar destination, these experiences appeal to the identity values of individuals and communities. In the example of the fallen leader this content has to be felt by every member of the troop and by every patriot.

Every member ought to feel it. The experience that accords with this, the appropriate grief, is normatively bound to this matter of fact, to the loss of the leader. The ‘is’ demands rationally (vernünftig gefordert) an ‘ought’. The rational answer to this claim that is placed upon the subject of the experience is therefore the realization of the appropriate experience. If this happens, if the rationally claimed grief is actually experienced or ‘lived’ by someone, if it is realized in the experience of individual members, if they fulfil the requested intention, this grief is constituted as content of the experience of the community (Stein 2000: 136 [121]).

The rational normativity of the expressions Stein chooses in order to describe the intentionality that lies in the group subject is unequivocal. On the one hand, we have an ideal, normative “rational point of view” (as Rovane (1998) would phrase it) motivated by a matter of fact, and on the other, we have an actual content of experience as experiential fulfilment of the rational point of view. If no one feels the appropriate grief, then one has to say that the loss of the leader was not deemed worthy. But if only one of the members actualized in herself the content that was rationally demanded to be actualized, then this can’t be said anymore. One fulfilled experience redeems the whole community: at least someone has felt what it was due to feel in the name of the group. At least in this member the group met the demand (Stein 2000: 137 [121]). Thus, for Stein, it is enough that only one member of the community feels what everyone was supposed to feel to let all the experiences of the members who did not respond to the rational demand of the matter of fact belong to the stream of experience of the community. Omitted and false experiences belong to the unity of the same stream of the community in the same way as illusions and misinterpretations can belong to the unity of one same perception (Stein 2000: 137 [123]). Therefore, in Stein’s account, each member is called upon to be responsive to her duties towards the community. The weight of the responsibility for the whole community can even be carried by just one of its members. Clearly, this account reflects an essential trait of her peculiar spirituality: her unconditional allegiance towards concrete ideals—be it the experiential source of the leading example of the present paper, i.e., her loyalty to the Prussian German Empire till the end of the Great War, or, later, her dedication to God within the Carmelite order (on the problem of normativity, see Szanto in this issue). But before I go on to briefly address the problematic overlapping of military and religious horizons in her concrete characterisation of the essential structures of the community in her Beiträge, the phenomenological framework of her argument has to be brought to the fore.

The unification of all these experiences into a single stream of experience can be understood only if we consider the fulfilled intention. If the intention is actualized by just one member, it means that somehow one should ascribe a relative empty intention to every other member, even to those members who do not know about the event in question. The unity of the super-individual experience is accomplished primarily (even if not exclusively) on the noematic side, since it is the noematic sense of this experience that demands a rational point of view that each member of the community ought to make their own. Borrowing an expression from Rovane (1998), I shall define the stance taken on the basis of the fulfilled sense as “rational point of view”. This point of view is characterized by the fulfilment of the rational demands that is prescribed by the evidence of a given object and its intentional sense. More precisely, the rationality of this point of view is motivated by the content in its “fullness” (in Husserl’s terms: by its “core,” see 1983: 316). The rational point of view therefore has its focal point in the core, as “the unity of a rational position with that which essentially motivates the position” (Husserl 1983: 328). Therefore, the rational point of view is the optimal point of view among all the possible experiences of the sense because only from there is a full view of the matter of facts in question possible.

If a single individual member of the community can, by whatever means, reach the rational point of view, then it is, according to Stein’s view, the whole stream of experience which is brought to reality, not only the individual’s experiential core. The ideal web of rationality, which was latent, remaining in an ideal space, now becomes real thanks to the responsibility of this single member who has assumed the appropriate stance towards the event.

Mode

For Stein, if the content of the community-experience is actualized by at least one member, it is possible to speak about the modes of this accomplishment. Stein distinguishes noetic and noematic modes. Among the noetic modes, she lists the depth of the experience in the personal structure of the members and the intensity of this experience. The grief can be experienced deeply or superficially by the subject (“in its heart”) and can have more or less influence on its life, depending on the energy and concentration with which it is lived.Footnote 7 On the contrary, the noematic modes are described as colouring of the content itself, as the “how of its modes of giveness,” as Husserl would say (1983: 316). According to the noematic mode that characterizes the lived experience, the content of an experience can acquire different degrees of relevance in the life of a subject or a group. In this regard, feeling in the name of the community is a peculiar way of experiencing in which the member is not subject, but is subjected to the experience of the community. This common experience is in us, and is accomplished through us, as Stein writes (2000: 139 [125]).

“Feeling a grief” refers only to the noetic side of the grief, while “living a grief” refers to the fact the subject is directed to the loss in a particular mode: this emotional experience of the loss may motivate sentiments, thoughts, or actions. If several subjects feel the same grief, they are sharing the same mode of grieving toward the same object. They can objectify their grief in speech or other forms of communication and representation, but first of all they share a common space of possible motivations.

Finally, the mode of experience involves the rationality of the experience, too. Since the community-experience is noetically and noematically constituted through the experiences of the single members, one can say that the community feels in a right or in a wrong way, if one can find members that respond to the affordances and demands of the content in a right or in a wrong way.

Bewußtsein (Awareness and Reflection)

Finally, Stein comes to address the question of whether the community can be said to be conscious itself. Her answer relies on her distinction between two senses of the term consciousness:

  1. 1.

    being pre-reflectively aware of its own experience (self-awareness);

  2. 2.

    being reflectively conscious of its own experiencing (self-consciousness).

Now, she rejects the view that communities can be conscious subjects in both regards. A community can be aware only in its members, but this kind of consciousness is a property of the members as individuals and not of the community in the members. Thus, Stein claims that the consciousness of the community in its members does not constitute a super-individual consciousness in the same way as it is possible to speak of the constitution of super-individual contents and of super-individual modes of experiences (2000: 139 [125]). Therefore, Stein concludes that if the individual lives, feels, and acts as a member of the community, the community lives, feels, and acts in the member and through the member. But if the member becomes aware of its experiencing or reflects on it, then it is not the community that becomes aware or conscious, but it is the member that becomes aware of what the community experiences in the member itself (Stein 2000: 139f. [125f.]).

The Structure of the Communal Stream of Experience

We have seen how Stein tends to attribute to the community the faculty of experiencing or living, acting, and feeling in and through its members. This faculty, however, is a blind one: it is only an “objective” mind within the members,Footnote 8 and can be actualized only through them, and cannot be aware of itself outside of their minds: The community can be a subject only if its members are actually subjected to it. Finally, with regard to a further difference between individual and communal experiences, Stein refers again to the Husserlian terminology of time-consciousness:

For Stein, the ultimate, constituting stream can have its source only in individuals, and only at the level of constituted experiences can individual and communal experiences become separated or be individuated. Moreoever, it is only the constituting stream that is accompanied by consciousness proper. In contrast, every constituted stream is accompanied by consciousness only secondarily, and only as long as this stream refers back to the constituting stream, that is the stream of individual members. Hence, for Stein, there can be neither a community-constituting stream of consciousness, nor properly speaking any communal or collective consciousness (2000: 140 [126]).

Stein, however, introduces an interesting terminological differentiation: within an individual mind, stream of consciousness and stream of experience are not divided, because the constituting flow of experiencing as well as the sequence of experiences constituted in this flow coincide. Within an individual mind, the word consciousness usually covers not only the structural moment of the experience—consciousness proper—but also the experience as a whole (Stein 2000: 140 [126]). As Stein emphasizes, in the case of the community-experience there is no stream of consciousness as originally constituting flow. However, the single experiences of the community combine themselves into a unity as individual experiences do. That is why in her account it is possible to speak about the stream of experience of the community in the first place.

Whereas the unity of the stream of consciousness is necessarily given by the unity of the temporal flow of consciousness, the unity of the experience, even in a single subject, is subjected to the motivational structure of this experience. Stein relies on Husserl’s description of the unity of perceptual experience, i.e., on his description of the intentional unity of real perceptual objects for individual minds; and she tries to apply it in the description of the intentional unity of communal experiences. She claims that both individual and common experiences are unified through motivation and contained or realized in the individual and constituting stream of consciousness. Once she admits the possibility of a stream of experience separated from its constituting stream(s) of consciousness, Stein faces the challenge of giving an account of the foundational basis of this intentional structure. A stream of experience without the constraint of the self-containing subject of the stream of consciousness, without a subjective mind, could risk vanishing outside individual minds if none is able to collect them as possible moments of individual experiences. In Stein’s account, individual experiences are necessarily retained in the individual stream of consciousness. This is not the case for common experiences. If these are not actualized by the individuals, they remain latent. They are neither realized or real.

Stein stresses that communal experiences are not simple experiences taken from the pool of individual experiences. They are not states of mind among other states of mind. Therefore, we cannot say that some states of mind belong to the set of individual experiences and some to the set of communal experience (Stein 2000: 141 [126f.]). On the contrary, the experiences of the individuals as members of the community are the material out of which communal experiences are made of. But these belong to another level of constitution. This new constitution level precisely is the level of the community’s stream of experience. And since according to Stein the We of the community embraces each of its potential members all potential and ideal experiences that are demanded by the rational point of view on a given event or state of affairs also belong to this new level of constitution.

Stein then asks how this new level is to be understood: is it an implicit part of the experience, or is it constituted through new operations, like the theorizing of a historian or the action of a politician? In answering these questions, Stein criticizes Simmel’s theory, according to which the historian shapes history, by relying on discrete events (2000: 141 [126f.]). In Simmel’s view (1908), outside of the historical context, these discrete events have no meaning. The experiences of the soldiers on the battlefield have no meaning outside the political event of the Great War, that is before the historian sets them in the right context. Simmel refers to such discrete events as the “atoms of history”. The historian has to collect them and assign them their historical form, attributing to them their historical meaning. Stein, on the contrary, insists that these atoms are, on the one hand, already constituted unities in the stream of consciousness of each individual and, on the other hand, parts of the collective stream of experience. The personal experiences of the soldiers are, at the same time, part of the stream of experience of the troops, of the nations, and so on (2000: 142 [127]).

Stein addresses here the existential situation faced by her generation in Germany after the defeat of Germany, an existential tragedy that can only be understood against the background of the high expectation they have placed upon that war. Stein expressed in 1917 her firm belief that the German Empire was since Sparta and Rome the state with the most developed consciousness of itself and that, because of this strong consciousness of the state in its citizens, a defeat was simply out of question (see MacIntyre 2006: 93). At the dawn of the armistice in summer 1918, she even got “accustomed to the idea of possibly not living to see the end of the war”. But she saw in that no motive to despair, since the war was somehow the expression of “a turning point in the evolution of the intellectual life of mankind”. In the face of the global sense of the war, she wouldn’t “complain that the crisis last longer than is acceptable to the individual” (Stein, quoted in MacIntyre 2006: 93f.). The delusion of this unconditional confidence and willingness to sacrifice for the cause accordingly couldn’t be bigger: the sufferings (Leid) of a defeated nation (besiegtes Volk), she claims, are so terrible and crushing, that the individuals, even as members of the nation, are confronted with something incommensurable (2000: 143f. [129]). She is not referring here to those who survived, suffering and grieving for the millions of fallen, or to the bodily and psychological pain inflicted during the conflict. She is actually referring to the suffering of the nation itself, the suffering of that community which goes far beyond its actual living members, both in the past and in the future. In her phenomenological terms: no one can rationally fulfil the intention of such suffering. Even someone who belongs to the defeated nation and who has a share in its sufferings finds these sufferings unfathomable and incomprehensible (unermeßlich und unfaßbar). What he or she feels partaking at these sufferings is only a small contribution to the total experience (gesamtes Erlebnis). The individual can only have a foreboding (ahnend) of the sufferings of the nation, but can not fulfil the experience of the defeated nation (Stein 2000: 144 [129]). Thus, if no one can feel these sufferings in their fullness, the intentional object of the correspondent national stream of experience can only be felt emptily, as an ideal limit. A limit that goes beyond human comprehension.

Here, as well as in other parts of the Beiträge, the spiritual tension underlying Stein’s questions clearly comes to the fore. But my purpose is not to face some hidden “theodicy” of Stein’s (war) philosophy. Rather, in the following, I would like to discuss a systematic methodological problem which, in my view, is part of this context and then offer some critical remarks.

The Phenomenological Limits of Stein’s Account of the Community’s Stream of Experience

So far, I have shown how the content of an experience demands an appropriate attitude through which the rational point of view can be reached. This attitude can require a super-individual stance, if the content concerns a group or a community. Whoever assumes this rational point of view fulfills the intention of this content and reaches its “noematic core. But the evidence that discloses this rational point of view can be given only in the fulfilment of the intention of this content. The argumentation is therefore circular. Every actual stream of experience of a community implies an ideal, communal rational point of view motivated on the full content. But the fullness of the latter can be experienced only by assuming the communal point of view.

As already remarked, Stein is here applying Husserl’s concepts derived from a (static) analysis of correlation, with which she was intimately acquainted given her work as his graduate assistant for the edition of the second book of Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. If my interpretation is correct, the stream of experience has to be seen primarily in its formal structure as the set of all experiences that can be unified through the “same sense”. This set of experiences demands its fulfillment through a rational point of view. However, it can, at the same time, remain in the limbo of not being fulfilled by any of the members of this, thereby latent, community. But every factual community is somehow related “teleologically” to this rational point of view, as to the telos of its common intention. According to Stein, an individual experience, to be constitutive for a community-experience, has to be targeted at this communal experience and to tend to embrace or encompass it (2000: 144 [130]). She acknowledges that more detailed researches are needed to clarify how this tendency operates and how is it possible for individual experience to embrace the stream of experience of the community, whether there are essential limits to their capacity for fulfillment, or whether other individual experiences bring the communal experience to giveness (2000: 145 [130]).

In this last section I aim to clarify the underlying phenomenological framework through which Stein understands the relationship between individual experiences that are realized in the name of the community and the stream of experience of the community. I identify this framework as Husserl’s intentional multiplicity or manifold (Erlebnismannigfaltigkeit). Husserl expresses his mature view of this concept in Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929).Footnote 9 There, he labels as the “all-pervasive teleological structure” of intentionality, its “fundamental law,” namely the tendency of conscious life toward evidence, toward reason, and writes:

Absolutely any consciousness of anything whatever belongs a priori to an open endless multiplicity of possible modes of consciousness, which can always be connected synthetically in the unity-form of conjoint acceptance (con-positio) to make one consciousness, as a consciousness of ‘the Same’. To this multiplicity belong essentially the modes of a manifold evidential consciousness, which fits in correspondingly as an evidential having, either of the Same itself or of an Other itself that evidently annuls it. (1969a: 160)

The structural analogy with Stein’s account is striking: her concept of a stream of experience (Erlebnisstrom) is, in my reading, a rather uncritical and inappropriate application of Husserl’s idea of Erlebnismannigfaltigkeit to the realm of social ontology. That is, she applies the concept of an ideal manifold of all the experiences related to a noematic clue (Leitfaden), which can also be seen as an infinite set of variations of a noematic core, an infinite set of modes of evidential consciousness. This open infinite set has its “teleological center” in possible direct experiences (Husserl 1969b: 315f.). But whereas Husserl is referring to an ideal and open infinite set of logical possibilities related to a real act, Stein insists on claiming that this whole multiplicity is actually constituted. For example, considering the community of all knowing subjects, she stresses the fact that every single subject, as a member of the group of the knowing subjects, actually constitutes the universal stream of experience that has its intention in the totality of the universal being, independently of the question how much of this universal knowledge each subject has actualized (Stein 2000: 166f. [150]). Whereas for Husserl this ideal universal set remains a regulative idea that conforms to scientific reason from within, for Stein one single act of knowing puts the constitution of this universal stream of experience into operation. Only within this phenomenological framework it is possible to understand Stein’s claim that even if there are no more members of a community, the being of this community does not have an end, but only rests (2000: 167 [150]). On her account, indeed, the being of the community relies upon its stream of experience which does not consist of the structure of all the actually realized experiences of its community, but can go far beyond it. Borrowing a term that Smith and McIntyre use to define Husserl’s idea of Erlebnismannigfaltigkeit, the being of the community in Stein’s account could be thought of as coextensive with the “maximal horizon” (Smith and McIntyre 1982: 244) disclosed by the core of the content of the act that defines the community.

Now, coming back to the example of the débâcle of the German nation, Stein even claims that there is no possible evidential experience for that suffering, even for the members of that community. There is no rational point of view from which such a defeat can be fully felt; it can be only presaged (Stein 2000: 144 [129]). The members can only have an obscure idea of it, they can only grasp it in an empty mode (ahnend umfaßen). In this claim Stein therefore reaches the limits of phenomenological reason: she posits the existence of a tragic matter of fact (the sufferings of a defeated nation) that at the same time subjects the members of this nation to the demand of feeling it properly and negates the possibility of there being any correspondent evident (fulfilled) experience! The members of such a defeated nation are subjected to the tragic task to feel the unfathomable.

Theodicy and nationalism seem to overlap. Where does this empty idea come from? A sympathetic reader could attempt to read her claim within the framework of what Husserl defined as the “limit problems of phenomenology” (see Hua XLII). However, this would presuppose that the object of investigation has to be seen as somehow entangled in existential and metaphysical questions.

The stream of experience of the community defines for Stein the being of the community. The accomplishment of one act in the name of the community constitutes in her account the reality of this stream, which was interpreted in this paper through Husserl’s teleological concept of ideal multiplicity or maximal horizon. Whereas Stein claims the existence of the stream of experience for the community, Husserl defines it in his static account as an ideal manifold and in its later genetic account—which, to be sure, Stein couldn’t know when she wrote the Beiträge Footnote 10—as a form of “bound ideality” of the lifeworld (see 1973: 267). Husserl considers super-individual subjects as “ideal bearers” of mental properties (Hua XIV: 199) and, accordingly, their members as concrete bearers of these idealities. In his genetic phenomenology he eventually stressed the importance of the concrete history of the constituting subject and the complex operations that may lead, through various steps, from a concrete single experience of something to its idealization as if it would be experienced by an open inter-subjectivity, or by an idealized community of infinite members. The result of this idealization ad infinitum is in his account the condition of possibility for the constitution of the idea of objectivity as the correlate of constitutive open intersubjectivity (see Zahavi 2001). Only once this idea has been reached, it becomes a regulative idea for every rational mind. It becomes constitutive of the rational point of view on objective reality. If this goes even for the scientific community, as the bearer of the infinite task of objectivity, it goes also for different kinds of communities. If the former are bound to universal truths, the latter are bound to “territories”: they can be bound to a peculiar historical state, i.e., a constitution or to a peculiar artwork; they can be truths only for the earth or only for mars, etc. (Husserl 1973: 267).

In contrast, Stein seems to neglect in her account of communal experience the steps that allow in the first place the member of a community to experience something from the communal rational point of view, a point of view that embraces an open set of potential members. Her argument seems to jump directly from concrete facticity to infinityFootnote 11; from one single act in the name of the community to the constitution of the whole stream on behalf of the maximal horizon of the community. She understands the being of the community as already pre-delineated by the sense or meaning of one single concrete act in the name of the community.

But how can we understand this kind of pre-delineation? Is it a priori bound to the analytic content of the concrete intentional object? Is it the product of history? Is it a metaphysical presupposition? Whereas Husserl will develop a phenomenological account of historicity in his genetic phenomenology, Stein does not take the concrete historicity of the constituting subject into consideration. In talking about values and cultural identities she employs rather an essentialist notion of identity, which she defines as the core or soul of persons, and it is against this backdrop that she understands the constituted “soul of groups,” such as community and nations.Footnote 12 Enhancing the methods of eidetic variation, Husserl will stress in his genetic phenomenology the epistemological limits of essences: they are ideal types bound to the concrete tokens, from which they are ideated. This means that even essences are “bound idealities”. By contrast, for Stein, following Scheler, essences are epistemologically absolute. Furthermore, whereas Husserl refuses the idea of individual essences,Footnote 13 i.e., the essence of individual identities such as persons, communities, nations, etc., Stein, again following Scheler, insists on the rationale of individual essences, which in her account have metaphysical weight.Footnote 14 In the intellectual turmoil of the war and of its ideology these essentialist traits came to the fore in Stein’s nationalism. Her unclarified concept of stream of experience of the community risks therefore in its highly idealized structure to justify a metaphysical, even theological reading of the communal body: if the nation, in its infinite horizon in the past and in the future, can be carried and sustained by the single act of one individual, it is only a short step to identify the troop with the mystical body of the nation. It is only a short step to declare that the sufferings of the national body are incommensurable.

The English editors even suggest that one can read the passages where Stein refers to the individual’s responsibility for the life of the community through the figure of Isaiah’s Servant Songs (Editors’ footnote 18 in Stein 2000: 137). In doing so, the editors bridge Stein’s description of the grief for the loss of the soldier to Christian theologies of “substitutionary satisfaction for sin,” which surely play a role, after her conversion, in Stein’s self-understanding and even in the way she interpreted the persecution of the Jews (see her spiritual testament (1939), and Köder 2012). In 1916, during his war service, Reinach reflected on possible illusions in the realm of religious experiences and referred to nationalism. He claimed that religious experience can take its departure from concrete objects such as one’s state or its people (Volk) and can idealize them, increasing their value ad infinitum. However, Reinach depicted the idolatry of mundane communities (therefore also states and nations) as the most extreme form of paganism (see Beckmann 2003: 120f.). The movement from facticity to the infinite within Stein’s description of the stream of experience of the community has to be understood cum grano salis. Otherwise, on the basis of Stein’s example, a precipitous overlapping of war ideology and theology cannot be avoided: it is only a short step from this idealization from actual to potential subjects of this concrete experience to identify the army unity with a kind of corpus mysticum, the troop with the mystical body of the soldiers. An idealization ad infinitum is patent in Stein’s account but, as has been shown, it comes from her interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenological framework and not from her spirituality. At least not primarily.

Otherwise, Stein’s insights can motivate, and will motivate in her political and philosophical post-war engagement quite an opposite attitude: since the community has no proper agency and no consciousness on its own, its moral responsibility is founded on the individual responsibility of its members. They are responsible for the acts they accomplish in the name of the community (on her theory of political responsibility see Stein 1925). But, as I have argued in this paper, Stein is committed to this individualistic account not only because of her phenomenological description of the stream of consciousness, but mostly because of her metaphysics of time-consciousness, according to which only individual egos can be creative sources of life, and because of her personalism, i.e., the idea of the individual person as metaphysical entelechy or soul, as well as the ultimate root of freedom. Ironically, however, based purely on her description of the stream of experience, and without clarifying the limits of its phenomenological framework, it would be possible to construe very different social philosophies out of this, not to speak of normatively or politically highly questionable conclusions; even the total sacrifice of individual reason for the (ir)rational point of view of an unconditionally demanding community.

Conclusions

Stein argues for the existence of experiences that are not reducible to the collection of our individual experiences: in her analysis, Stein stresses their rational and normative content, which demands from the individual the displacement, or integration, of the individual point of view into the communal one. If one assumes the rational point of view of the community, the communal mind can be partially lived by its members and phenomenologically reconstructed through reflection. Members can follow the communal perspective, its reasons, and its rational point of view. In this sense, it is possible to say that Stein claims that groups have both a rational and a phenomenological mind. Members can indeed experience in the name of the community, they can embody it and partake in its ideal stream of lived experiences. However, this stream of experiences, as it is depicted by Stein, is in my interpretation an ideal unity founded on common experiences. To argue for the real existence of the whole ideal manifold because of one act that allegedly can realize the communal stream is not justified within the limits of phenomenology. Stein’s insistence on this point is more a matter of belief than of phenomenological evidence. As it stands, the unity of such a rational, communal space can only be an ideal one.

If my interpretation of the stream of experience as an ideal unity is correct, the next step for clarifying the intentional structure of communal experiences would then be to think that we need not only mental bearers for this ideal structure, but also material ones, to assure the ideal continuity of this super-individual stream of life. By material bearers, I mean all the domains of the objectified mind: artefacts such as monuments, documents, books, works of art, and so on. They have to be thought of as media necessary to objectify the rational point of view of the community, to take its perspective, to act in its name. Within the limits of phenomenology this task is only possible following Husserl’s genetic account, accounting for the interplays that let common reasons shape the mental life of individuals and that enable them to act in the name of objectified ideals and communities.