Alma von Stockhausen was a German philosopher, founder and long-time director of the Gustav Siewerth Academy in Weilheim-Bierbronnen. Her contribution to the book lies in her analysis, in the history of ideas, of dialectical thinking as the second strand of the oblivion of the person — alongside the empirical-functionalist strand of Locke and Singer.
Life and Work
Alma von Stockhausen was born on 30 September 1927 in Münster and died on 4 May 2020 in Heroldsbach. She studied philosophy, theology, and German philology, received her doctorate in 1954, and completed her habilitation in 1962 at the University of Freiburg. As a professor at the Freiburg University of Education she taught Thomistic philosophy.
In 1988 she founded the Gustav Siewerth Academy in the Black Forest — named after the Freiburg philosopher Gustav Siewerth (1903–1963), a student of Heidegger who developed the Thomistic concept of being further in confrontation with fundamental ontology. The academy became a center of Thomistic-realist philosophy in the German-speaking world.
Key Contribution: The Line Luther–Kant–Hegel–Rahner
Stockhausen’s principal work Der Geist im Widerspruch — Von Luther zu Hegel (1990; engl.: The Spirit in Contradiction — From Luther to Hegel) traces the step-by-step dissolution of Thomistic realism:
- Luther separates reason and faith: reason can no longer know the being of things; faith becomes irrational.
- Kant restricts reason to appearances: the thing in itself — and with it the being of the person — is unknowable.
- Hegel abolishes the principle of identity: contradiction becomes the motor of reality; substance dissolves into process.
- Rahner transfers Hegelian dialectic into theology: the human being becomes the hearer of the word, whose essence is disclosed only in the historical process — not as an abiding nature, but as open possibility.
At each step, the capacity of thought to know the being of things is curtailed further. Stockhausen shows: this line issues in an anti-essentialism that undermines the substance-ontological concept of person.
Defense of the analogia entis
Against the dialectical dissolution, Stockhausen defends the analogia entis — the analogy of being — as the fundamental structure of the real: being is realized in different degrees, yet truly known in every degree. The Thomistic adaequatio intellectus et rei — the correspondence of thought and being — remains valid: thought reaches being, and being is of itself knowable.
This position is decisive for personal ontology: if thought reaches the being of the person, it can also know the dignity of the person — not as an ascription, but as an ontological state of affairs.
Significance for the Book
Stockhausen’s analysis makes visible that the oblivion of the person stems not only from empiricism (Hume, Locke, Singer), but also from a dialectical tradition that attacks the principle of identity itself. Both strands converge in the present: the functionalist strand denies personhood wherever no functions are visible; the dialectical strand denies personhood as abiding being altogether.
The Gustav Siewerth Academy and the journal AEMAET, edited by Raphael Bexten, stand in the continuation of this philosophical program.
Place in the Book
Stockhausen’s critique of dialectical thinking forms the background for the presentation of the theoretical oblivion of the person in Chapter 5 (German). The distinction between the empiricist and the dialectical strand sharpens the eye for the variety of paths by which personhood can fall into oblivion.
Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 218–254 (theoretical oblivion of the person).
Further sources:
- Stockhausen, Alma von (1990): Der Geist im Widerspruch — Von Luther zu Hegel (engl.: The Spirit in Contradiction — From Luther to Hegel). Weilheim-Bierbronnen: Gustav-Siewerth-Akademie.
- Stockhausen, Alma von (1954): Die analogia entis bei Thomas von Aquin (engl.: The analogia entis in Thomas Aquinas). Phil. Diss., Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.