A força vital segundo Edith Stein: fenômeno expressivo da unidade da pessoa humana

Abstract

The life-force’s conception (Lebenskraft) is presented by the german philosopher Edith Stein, designating the potentiality of the soul that ensures life, is described by her as a phenomenon according to the phenomenological method from Edmund Husserl, her master. Based on Husserl's conception of the human person understood as the integration of dimensions of the living body (Leib), soul (Seele), and spirit (Geist), Edith Stein highlights the presence of life-force in the epistemological discussion on psychic causality. By advancing the articulation of Husserl's phenomenology with the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas, the philosopher elaborates her “the human being’s vision” through the phenomenological description of the human dimensions in his philosophical anthropology, the axis of your thought. The phenomenology of the life-force is expanded in the thematizations about intersubjectivity, embracing the relational character between human beings and themselves, with alterity, the relationship human person-community, and the Transcendent. As both a phenomenon and

anthropological concept in Stein’s work, the life-force emerges as the motivation for historical- critical research. Given that the status quaestionis of the vital force is concentrated on the

epistemological perspective of the 1922 work, Psychic Causality, the character of newness of the research consists of an exegesis of Edith Stein’s reflections, on the subject within the phenomenological, epistemological, anthropological, metaphysical, ontological and mystical aspects of the writings from 1916 to 1942. Questions regarding the role of the life-force in steinian anthropology led us to argue that it is possible to recognize the unity of the human dimensions through the phenomenon of the life-force. With this objective, we investigated the phenomenological descriptions of life-force in Stein's itinerary – related to empathy, psychic causality, value and motivation, potentiality and actuality, the structure of the human person, and aspects of mysticism – among them, we discovered “interpretive keys”. In the light of husserlian notions like intentionality, Erlebnis, perception, eidetic reduction, noesis-noema, intuition, and expression, we can confirm that the phenomenon of the life-force expresses the unity living body-soul-spirit. In conclusion, we emphasize the value and philosophical potential of the life-force as an expressive phenomenon of the dimensions’ unity of the human person.