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In her Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person [The Structure of the Human Person], Edith Stein describes the human person as a spiritual and free being. These two aspects highlight the essential role of the I as (i) being spiritual means to be “awake” and “open”, thus entailing, respectively, the intentional characters of attention and openness to “exteriority” and “interiority”; that is, on the one hand, the I is open to otherness and to the world of values, and, on the other, it is self-conscious, be it on a unreflected level or by reflecting on its own acts; and (ii) being free is related to the power of the will, i. e. to the I can [ich kann], in the sense that the individual gains control over certain factors imposed by the natural realm (psychophysical sphere), which is fundamental for the self-formation of personal character. Intentionality and freedom are thus essential traits of the I, whose basis, according to Hedwig Conrad-Martius, implies in examining its original constitutive source, namely the pneumatic substance. We hereby intend to present how the basic elements that are intrinsic to the ontic-ontological foundation of the human self relate to each other in both authors’ phenomenological approaches.
