Love and Solitude: Contemplementary Modes of Givenness of the Other by Edith Stein and Jean-Paul Sartre
Abstract
The phenomenology of empathy according to Edith Stein and the phenomenology of the look according to Jean-Paul Sartre form two different philosophical approaches, that have each taken the problem of the Other, adressed by Edmund Husserl, further in their own way. The book is dedicated to the task of confronting these two different modes of givenness of the Other, which branched out from Husserl's Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity, and making them fruitful for one another.
The author not only attempts to see Sartre and Stein as counterparts, but also allows them to enter into a dialogue. Such a dialogue, which points beyond the fundamental incompatibility of the two modes of givneness and shows a complementarity, that is able to prove that the reception can be extended or at least sharpened by a counter-reading of both drafts.
The productive tension that emerges in the respective approaches culminates in the campoarison of the two authors' concepts of love. The failure of Sartre's love leads to an experience of loneliness, which in turn reveals the solitude of separation as a fundamental condition of the possibility of being able to relate to another.
In Stein, the possibility of love is opposed to this failure and enlightens how and to what extend the Other can indeed be reached. In the departure from the parallel reading of both modes of givenness, it becomes apparent how it is possible to transcend loneliness towards a love as a relationship of equal orignary partners.