Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, November 28, 2022
Speaker: Paulina Monjaraz (Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí)
Respondent: Tommaso Bertolasi (Istituto Universitario Sophia)
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Paulina Monjaraz is a collaborator of Relational Ontology Research (ROR) group and her seminar dealt with a question that touches the very heart of this research group: is it possible to reach a proper relational ontology departing from the existentialism developed by Heidegger?
To Paulina Monjaraz, in the works of Edith Stein we find an answer to this question, and it is negative. In Martin Heideggers Existenzphilosophie [Martin Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy], an appendix to Endliches und ewiges Sein [Finite and Eternal Being], Stein criticizes Heidegger’s existential philosophy. Monjaraz argues that from that text we can conclude that Heidegger’s view is not compatible with a relational ontology, because of a failure highlighted by Edith Stein: the failure of Heidegger’s existential philosophy to consider human corporeality, thus making it impossible to understand the empathic act as constitutive of the human person, and consequently ruling out the identity-alterity relational binomial, where the I is constituted from the You. Thus, paradoxically, the apparent corporeal finiteness of the human being is the starting point from which the same human being can project himself into eternity. On the contrary, to Heidegger, the Dasein – that in the end is the concrete human being – remains in its own finiteness.
Monjaraz supports her reasoning and the respective conclusion in a deep analysis of Martin Heideggers Existenzphilosophie, but throughout the exposition it becomes clear that the proposed interpretation is based on a vast knowledge of Edith Stein’s work. This allows her to conclude by proposing that, in contrast, we could speak of a relational ontology in Edith Stein. It would be an ontology starting from consciousness, that is, an ontology that does not seek to speak of being as being, speaking instead of the sense or meaning of being as referred to the other from its constitution.
