Body, Text and Science—The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein

What is scientific about the natural and human sciences? Precisely this: the legibility of our worlds and the distinctive reading strategies that they provoke. That proposal comes from Edith Stein, who as Husserl's assistant 1916-1918 labored in vain to bring his massive Ideen to publication. She argued that human bodily life itself affords direct access to the interplay of natural causality, cultural motivation, and personal initiative. This study explores the hermeneutical background of Stein's phenomenology and shows that she composed crucial passages of the Ideen manuscripts. Stein's own works on empathy and on psychology establish that natural science is a cultural achievement, resting on the ability to isolate caused data by recognizing and subtracting motivated data from raw data. This subtractive literacy is the most basic scientific competence, and it is fundamentally interpersonal. The reality of the illegible causal remainder overcomes the critiques of science recently offered by psychoanalytic and standpoint feminisms.