On Freedom

Edith Stein (1891-1942) was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism, became a Carmelite nun, and was ultimately executed at Auschwitz. In 1998, she was canonized as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. A student of the influential Austrian German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, and a major figure in phenomenology herself, Stein wrote influential works on empathy, embodiment, and the structure of consciousness. Her philosophy distinguished between Körper, the object-body governed by physical laws, and Leib, the lived body that experiences subjectivity and agency.

Snyder places Stein at the heart of his first form of freedom: sovereignty. For him, Stein’s insistence that we only know ourselves through recognition of others reframes liberty as a fundamentally social process. He argues that empathy is not a soft virtue but a necessary condition of knowledge, and thus of freedom. This philosophical foundation allows Snyder to critique negative freedom (freedom from rules and restrictions), which isolates individuals and leaves them vulnerable to manipulation.

Stein’s fate also sharpens Snyder’s argument. Her death in a Nazi concentration camp exemplifies how the reduction of people to Körper—the body as object—produces atrocity and strips away the possibility of sovereignty.