Potency and Act: Studies Toward a Philosophy of Being

The central claim is that a philosophy of being must be built by fusing phenomenology and scholasticism, not by choosing between them. Stein uses the Thomistic modal pair of potency and act to analyse how possibility is grounded in actuality, and how essence relates to existence . She rejects the assumption that Husserlian phenomenology and Thomistic metaphysics are incompatible, aiming instead to 'get from scholasticism to phenomenology and vice versa' and let the two ways of doing philosophy resolve within her . The work also implicitly critiques Husserl's transcendental idealism by anchoring intentionality in a realist ontology of essences and actual being .

Stein wrote Potency and Act in 1931 intending to submit it as her habilitation thesis at the University of Freiburg, but the project did not come to fruition . The work remained unpublished during her lifetime and appeared in print for the first time only in 1998, as part of the Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe . The English translation was published by ICS Publications in 2009, translated by Walter Redmond and edited by L. Gelber and Romaeus Leuven, as volume 11 of The Collected Works of Edith Stein . The long delay means the work was received by scholars only after her later Finite and Eternal Being had already been known for decades.

Potency and Act is the immediate predecessor and complement to Finite and Eternal Being. Stein described both as parts of her 'life's task' of relating phenomenology and scholasticism . The 1931 study is 'modal' in approach, analysing possible worlds and form as prescribing possibilities, while the later work is more concerned with the structure of finite and eternal being as such . The habilitation failure marked the end of Stein's university career, and the intellectual project she had begun in Potency and Act became the starting point for Finite and Eternal Being a few years later . Together they constitute her mature metaphysical synthesis.

Stein's analysis of the person in Potency and Act combines phenomenological and Thomistic elements. She identifies intellectuality and freedom as the two characteristic marks of the personal spirit, a claim that draws on both Husserl's account of intentional consciousness and the scholastic understanding of rational agency . Her treatment of affective phenomena and values, and their stratification at different levels of depth, is continuous with her earlier phenomenological work on empathy and the structure of the person . The innovation lies in embedding these phenomenological descriptions within a broader ontology of potency and act, so that the person is understood not merely as a locus of conscious acts but as a being whose essence is realised through free actualisation.

The title reflects the work's central methodological device: the Thomistic distinction between potency (possibility, capacity) and act (actuality, fulfilment) is used to analyse the structure of being. However, scholarship has raised questions about the title. The manuscript itself bears 'Potenz und Akt,' but Stein often wrote 'Akt und Potenz' in her letters, and one scholar has argued that her definitive correction on the manuscript was 'Akt und Potenz' . The editors of the German edition retained 'Potenz und Akt,' and the English translation follows suit. The dispute is minor but reveals the care with which Stein scholarship attends to the textual history of her posthumously published works.

Scholarly reception has focused on Stein's synthesis of Husserl and Aquinas. A 2024 article in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie examines her account of intentional acts in Potency and Act, arguing that she borrows the actuality-potency dichotomy and the distinction between sensible and intelligible species from Aquinas to develop her own conception of intentionality, including a critical interpretation of Husserl's transcendental idealism . Other scholarship has explored her treatment of personhood, arguing that the phenomenological reflection on the person is combined with a Thomist view of the person as a being of essential and irreducible dignity . The work is now recognised as a key text for understanding Stein's mature philosophical project.