Three Caesars Jean Hering and Edith Stein on the core of the essence, individuality, and the a priori (and early phenomenology) (with a coda on Ernst Kantorowicz)
Abstract
The present contribution will provide a systematic analysis of one of Edith
Stein's most important philosophical concepts-that of the "core of the essence" or
"core of the person"-as it is used in her early works. Contrary to those interpretations that tend to understand it as a genetic principle of the person's own development, we will make the case for regarding it as an essential principle of "intelligibility": the core of the essence designates that most intimate component of the essence's structure, the only component that can grant us the possibility of understanding the essence itself as a whole. As we will further argue, the introduction of the notion of the core of the essence can be appreciated only if it is regarded from the standpoint of early phenomenology's concern about the problem of how to justify ontologically the existence of sciences that investigate "individual" objects (such as historiography). Toward the end of the chapter, a hypothesis will also be proposed to the effect that the work of the German literary critic Friedrich Gundolf represented one of the possible sources of Stein's understanding of the core of the essence.