The certainty of being and formative dialogue in Edith Stein.

Abstract

This paper addresses a phenomenological approach to the “simple certainty of being” in Edith Stein’s thought and how, from this certainty, a contribution is made to a formative dialog. For this purpose, the complexity this “certainty” involves is analyzed in depth, as it is thought in Potency and Act and Being Finite and Being Eternal. This conviction emerges from the basic fact that I am in the world “I think, feel, and want.” For Stein, her starting point is placed on “feel” to access the self and its “certainty of being simple” in the world. In this way, “the self” emerges, “conscious” of its being, as long as it “feels”. This realization would be the basis of human formation, meaning that we must start from “the self”, from this mysterious and ineffable presence experienced in the relation between being and not-being, experienced from temporality as present and potentiality as an extension of existence. Thus, a dialogical formation requires the effort of integrating the whole existence of the student, concentrate on “the self”, which “is built” from oneself, that is, from the one that “lives” and “feels that he lives”, from a transcended contention or sheltered in his immanence in which the fundamental questions of origin, obsolescence of existence, and the absolute are imperatively manifested from a deeper level.