Something done very beautifully in the philosophy of Edith Stein is the relationship between the individual and the community. It helps navigate conflicts of interest, such as when there are my rights and needs and those of the community, and what must I do when they do not align? There is also a matter of personal identity. We belong to communities from birth, and not always the ones we like best. My belonging to a community may come with baggage. Is this fair?

Stein provides us with some excellent tools to understand the relationship and navigate the problems. She never sets aside the uniqueness of the individual. But in her astute observations of what it takes to be an individual, to come to awareness of oneself in one’s individuality, and to act accordingly, she recognizes how the community shapes the emerging individuality. Now the extremes are avoided: We are neither detached individuals trying to define ourselves on our own terms, nor are we mere tokens of the communities to which we belong.

We learn much more than language from the people who raise us; we also learn that they care for us, pay attention to our needs, and respond to our needs. Eventually, we learn to respond and begin to experience ourselves in a relationship with them. We learn to understand each other and why we act the way we act. We learn what values motivate the actions of those who care for us. As we grow in awareness of ourselves and the values by which we act, we understand them better from our individual perspective and embrace values with full personal assent. And then we act with true individuality: Shaped by a community, and attentive to communities, but nevertheless capable of being a responsible individual.

But throughout, Stein’s philosophy is never just about consciousness and its development. She always remembers that all of what happens in this process is mediated by bodies through embodied expressions. This is probably obvious to anybody who has ever held a baby and tried to make it smile, but few philosophers are as attentive to the place of embodiment in the perception of ourselves as Stein. This is another major advantage of her work.

We are embodied, and we cannot set our bodies aside without doing harm to who we are. This emphasis on embodiment provides a bridge to biology. Biology provides a context for understanding ourselves that is an anchor for understanding ourselves that is not of our own making. For people of faith, like myself, this is a major consolation. God has provided us with the power to understand our biology. This means that we need not fear biological determinism, as if we were merely what biology dictates, as if biological nature were sovereign. Instead, biological understanding of who we are and what sustains us can now come together with what else we know.

This makes the forces that shape us, biology and community, very important, but what remains at the centre of understanding existence is the individual. But this individuality is deeply informed by both our communal and embodied existence. To live our individuality to the fullest, we cannot deny either, but neither one overrides who we truly are.

So, is it fair that we might be born with baggage not of our making? By understanding this baggage and understanding how it shaped us, we learn much. It may not be fair, but we can put it to good use.