Phenomenology of Values: Stein on Motivation, Feelings, and Belief

Explores Edith Stein’s phenomenology of values as found in her early work-specifically herContributions to a Philosophical Foundation for Psychology and the Humanities (1922).

Mette Lebech makes a constructive exposition of Stein’s phenomenology of values by discussing the experience of value and motivation (Part I), that which is constituted in value-response (Part II), and how certain later approximations of value-phenomenology can be completed by means of it (Part III). Stein’s synthesis of Husserl’s project of founding the sciences with Scheler’s phenomenological discussion of values, emotion, and sociality carries Stein’s specific contributions. These are 1) the distinction between psychic causality and motivation, which allows for a clear interpretation of how emotion relates to values (Part I) and 2) the understanding of how the experience of value and preference leads us to constitute the personal ＂I,＂ the basis for the value hierarchy, the psyche, the structure of intersubjectivity (with its three modalities, mass, association and community), the world, and the real world (Part II). Finally, a Steinian discussion of the vestiges of value phenomenology found in Heidegger, Levinas, and de Beauvoir contextualises the investigation (Part III).

Mette Lebech is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Maynooth University, Ireland.