"Per visibilia ad invisibilia": percorsi di ontologia in Edith Stein

The research in hand is an attempt to bring to light the reproposal of the question of being that Edith Stein developed after becoming acquainted with the thoughts of Thomas Aquinas and having compared his ideas, with particular reference to the two principal philosophical works by the German writer, Akt und Potenz and Endliches und ewiges Sein. The problem of the relationship between ontology and gnosiology, which can be considered as a constant reflection of the complete works of Stein and which is tackled in the two above mentioned works, had already emerged in the framework of the phenomenological research studies carried out by Husserl and his students and had been a special subject of debate after the publication of Ideen: as can be seen from the analysis of the various works in which Edith Stein deals with Husserl's so-called “transcendental idealism ”, the oscillation that appears to characterise the position assumed by Stein can be traced back to her own way of seeing the comparison and discussion with the philosophers of the present and of the past: the way in which she approaches these, in fact, is not so much that of the historian of philosophy classifying the various currents with intent to adhere to one rather than to another, but rather that of the philosopher who, convinced that there is an ideal thread uniting different traditions of common research into truth, allows herself to be permeated by shades of meaning in the search for an original and personal pathway. The same hermeneutic attitude can also be found in the works, here likewise considered, written between 1925 and 1931 – and hence preceding Akt und Potenz – in which the suggestions offered by Husserl are compared with the reflections expounded by Thomas Aquinas, above all in De Veritate: prompted by the conviction that tradition should not be considered as a closed and definitive system and that the history of philosophy cannot be intended as the development of a thought that would necessarily be better understood with the passage of years and centuries, the German philosopher, starting from her own cultural background, endeavours to read the writers of the Middle Ages, consulting them as to the questions that characterise her own time. And this – as emerges in her later works – allows her to embark upon the metaphysical pathway without the need to renounce the method of phenomenological description. The central part of the thesis is dedicated to Akt und Potenz, still today one of the least studied works by Edith Stein, even within the German framework: here full consideration is given to the historico-cultural circumstances in which the work was written, and a thorough analysis of the text is presented, designed to bring to light the originality of a work that secondary literature has for the most part considered as being surpassed by Endliches und ewiges Sein, which arose from it. As can be ascertained from the research studies conducted, Akt und Potenz represents, instead, the first completed version of that which, from 1929, appears to be the task most strongly felt about by Edith Stein herself, that is, the attempt to bridge the gap between tradition and modern philosophy, to reconnect between them the gnoseological problem and the metaphysical one: in that text, in fact, by taking up Thomas Aquinas' categories of action and power, Stein describes the structure of being in its various stratifications, with particular reference to the human personal-spiritual being and to the human relationship – also cognitive – with the surrounding world. The comparison between the preparatory work and Endliches und ewiges Sein, an analysis of which constitutes the last chapter of the thesis, brings to light a certain convergence with respect to the question of being, which is tackled in both works, albeit along differing paths. Although in effect Akt und Potenz discusses the relationships between action and power in the structure of being and Endliches und ewiges Sein is an attempt to explain more fully the ascension to a sense of being, what the two texts have in common is the fact that in a human being, that is to say, in a being that is personal and free, a reciprocal relationship can be disclosed that places him in relationship with an absolute, infinite spirit, to which it is possible to ascend by two pathways: the Augustinian one, by way of immersion in the inner self, thereby regaining the signs of one's own finiteness and creaturality and the emergence of the eternal, or the Aristotelian one, moving from the perceptible things attained in experience and in finiteness and then proceeding to the essential search for these, to locate and reveal those essential contents that are irreducible to the subjective conscience, explicative in themselves of a meaning rooted in the eternal Logos. Both pathways, the first of which is already to be found in Akt und Potenz, lead to an awareness that can no longer be intended as the possibility to categorise and “enclose” entities – and all the more so the being that constitutes them - into conceptual classifications that claim to be exhaustive and hence to intellectually dominate the object in question, but rather that is to be considered in terms of the reception of the revelation of a sense that is manifested in all that is and which harks back to that Sense that, concealed from the eyes of the flesh, is visible to those of the spirit. The ontology of Edith Stein, then, initially intended by the philosopher herself phenomenologically as the doctrine of the fundamental forms of being and entity, is increasingly specified precisely as an “ontology of the spirit”, to the extent to which the latter comes to be conceived as that formal element that permeates all that is, and is present even in matter, which, precisely because it is formed, thus comes to acquire its own sense: not only to be searched for as a meaning for a conscience but, precisely as the sign of a “beyondness” that is manifested on the horizon of the spiritual subject. For Stein, who here follows the tradition that harks back to Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, all visible things can in fact be transfigured into a meaning that, thanks to divine illumination, turns them into pathways of access to the Invisible. Since, however, there is an incommensurable disproportion of being between The One who sheds the illumination (who for Dionysius is beyond being, an unattainable highness, of a qualitatively absolute excellence) and the one who receives the illumination, it is impossible to liken these divine traces to the ontological categories and to the claims of rational knowledge: the only knowledge to which we can aspire, defined by Edith Stein as obscure, and which is merely the least inadequate to express the Inexpressible, thus results as being that which is participative, through which we recognise ourselves as being rooted and belonging to a reality of which we know nothing but which together we grasp as that from which we come as existent beings. That Aufstieg to the sense of being that is indicated in the subtitle of the great Steinian ontology indicates that this is not immediately revealed to the thinker but is given if the latter is open to the horizon of being and if the thinker himself resides in the being: approaching the question of the sense of being thus already presupposes being within the being and the free yielding to this gift, which involves the yielding of the whole person.