Self and Other: Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion

SELF AND OTHER: ESSAYS IN CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

SELF AND OTHER: ESSAYS IN CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Edited by

Eugene Thomas Long University of South Carolina Columbia, SC, USA

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Reprinted from : The International Journal for Philosophy of Religion Volume 60, Nos. 1-3, December 2006

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To Anaïs

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Special Issue Self and Other: Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion Eugene Thomas Long (University of South Carolina, USA) Self and other: An introduction Michael Purcell (University of Edinburgh, UK) On Hesitation before the Other Richard A. Cohen (University of North Carolina, USA) Levinas: thinking least about death — contra Heidegger Pamela Sue Anderson (Oxford, UK) Life, death and (inter)subjectivity: realism and recognition in continental feminism William Franke (Vanderbilt University, USA) Apophasis and the turn of philosophy to religion: From Neoplatonic negative theology to postmodern negation of theology Hent de Vries (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) From “ghost in the machine” to “spiritual automaton”: Philosophical meditation in Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Levinas Anselm K. Min (Claremont Graduate University, USA) Naming the Unnameable God: Levinas, Derrida, and Marion Merold Westphal (Fordham University, USA) Vision and voice: Phenomenology and theology in the work of Jean-Luc Marion Eugene Thomas Long (University of South Carolina, USA) Suffering and transcendence Calvin O. Schrag (Purdue University, USA) Otherness and the problem of evil: How does that which is other become evil? Edith Wyschogrod Repentance and forgiveness: the undoing of time Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame, USA) An end to evil? Philosophical and political reflections Maeve Cooke (University College Dublin, Ireland) Salvaging and secularizing the semantic contents of religion: the limitations of Habermas’s postmetaphysical proposal

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Int J Philos Relig (2006) 60:1–7 DOI 10.1007/s11153-006-0001-x O R I G I NA L PA P E R

Self and other: An introduction Eugene Thomas Long

Received: 15 December 2005 / Accepted: 20 January 2006 / Published online: 28 November 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

It is well known that the philosophy of religion has flourished in recent decades in Anglo-American philosophy where philosophers are bringing new techniques to bear on many of the traditional problems, including the rationality of religious belief, the attributes of God, religious language, the problem of evil, and religious diversity. Much of this discussion is carried on within the context of western religious belief and so-called classical or traditional theism. Although there is more diversity in Anglo-American philosophy of religion than is sometimes recognized, it nevertheless provides a body of literature with a recent history that is sufficiently coherent to enable commentators to identify the movement with some clarity. The story is somewhat different with the emerging field of recent continental philosophy of religion where many of the philosophers referred to are not generally known as philosophers of religion and where many of the approaches are based upon a critique of traditional western theories of rationality, experience and theism and an extension of more traditional boundaries of philosophical reflection on religion. The essays in this volume were invited with the hope that they might make more widely available and contribute to some of the discussions that are shaping recent continental philosophy of religion. For good reason most commentators are reluctant to provide a definition of continental philosophy of religion. Perhaps the best one can say is that continental philosophy of religion is philosophical reflection on religion within the particular context of such nineteenth century European philosophers as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx and, in particular, as mediated through Martin Heidegger and more recent French philosophers, many of whom are themselves influenced by, even when departing from Heidegger. Continental philosophers of religion, however, do share much common ground and by way of introduction I hope it may be useful to provide for some readers a brief summary of some of the recurring themes of their discussions.

E. T. Long (B) University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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First, there is a turn from the image of the human being as primarily a disembodied, rational being and disinterested observer to the image of the human being as a temporal, linguistic and interpretive being. We find ourselves, to put it in the language of Heidegger, already beings in the world in relation to other persons and things or in the language of Gadamer and Ricoeur already immersed in a world of linguistic meanings. To understand human existence in this way is to understand ourselves as historical beings. This means that there can be no ahistorical or unconditional standpoint from which one can determine truth or falsity in religion. The philosopher is always a subject rooted in a particular culture, language and gender. Philosophical reflection on religion is understood to begin from the point of organic togetherness of self and world and the self as interpreter of the experienced world. For many continental philosophers of religion, experience is understood to be a historical and temporal process in which inference and interpretation are inherent in and essential to identifying and making explicit what is perceived. The most fundamental difference seems to be between those who think of experience as mediating divine reality and those who think of divine reality as interrupting or disrupting human experience. Although one often hears the criticism that this approach to truth leads inevitably to scepticism, relativism, or even nihilism, defenders of even the more radical versions of this view usually deny this. In different ways many argue for a non-authoritarian approach to truth, one in which in dialog with others we may be open to diverse insights while evaluating and expanding our own worlds of experience and discourse. Second, and closely related to the first is the theme of self and others. If we find ourselves already thrown into a world in relation to other persons and things we can speak of ourselves only in the context of our relations with others. This was the point made by Martin Buber in his criticism of Kierkegaard and other existentialists for what he considered to be an overemphasis upon the individual. In contrast to Buber, however, some contemporary European philosophers have emphasized an asymmetrical relation to others. The alterity or otherness of the other appears to be less a relation between equals and more a deferral of one to the other in order to avoid depriving the other of her otherness. Some argue that in meeting the other person I find myself already responsible to her otherness, at her disposal, so to speak. A critic might argue that in some cases it appears that the otherness of the other calls for a denial of self before the other. Such thinkers as Levinas also understand the relation to the otherness or alterity of the other person to provide an avenue to the infinite other for in encountering the otherness of the other I am at the same time confronting a trace of the total otherness of the Infinite. This is reminiscent of Buber’s argument that in every I-thou relation I catch a glimpse of the eternal thou, except that in the case of Levinas the emphasis is upon the ethical rather than the ontological. Other thinkers are more reluctant to give up the ontological arguing that the encounter with the infinite is not limited to the ethical and that the ethical implies the ontological. Third, although the infinite other or God appears for some continental thinkers in the context of our encounter with the other of other persons, the infinite other as conceived in this context, is not a bodiless, timeless, omniscient and impassible entity standing outside time and history providing foundations for our truth claims. The God of traditional theism is understood to have died along with the disembodied rational self. Where God is conceived God tends to be thought of as more organically related to the world. God may be spoken of as working in and suffering with the world, initiating and inspiring our becoming, our human transcending towards fulfilment. In some cases there are hints of a return of Feuerbach. God appears to be conceived

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in terms of the construction of values and goals leading to human fulfillment or the on-going formation of the self. Continental philosophers and theologians do not usually think of God as an entity that can be conceived like other entities in the world, not even the greatest entity. God is understood to be beyond or other than being and this has led to a renewed interest in the mystical tradition and in metaphorical and apophantic discourse. In some cases talk of God beyond being seems to lead away from ontological claims altogether and some might wonder whether we can speak of knowledge of God at all. Ironically, in some cases it appears that we are ultimately led in a pre-modern direction and an appeal to revelation and authority. At the heart of many of these discussions is the question whether or not philosophy can or should be purified of theological influence or whether or not theology can or should be purified of philosophical influence. Finally, I should add that the shift from seeking eternal truths to an understanding of the historicity of human understanding, awareness of the religious dimensions of moral experience and the focus on otherness or alterity have led to a critique of religion in its historical forms and to more emphasis being placed upon the cultural, ethical and political dimensions of religion. In its decision to focus on disinterested analysis, the truth or falsity of beliefs and abstract considerations of such topics as the problem of evil, traditional philosophy of religion itself, it is argued, is reflecting a particular culture, a particular set of values which are unexamined. If, however, the search for truth is now understood to take place within an inter-subjective context one must become more aware of the impact of history and culture upon one’s thinking and indeed upon one’s religions. If alterity or the wholly other applies to both human and divine, as some argue, then religion itself must be held before the test of the other. Perhaps many would agree that religion in its struggle to give content to the wholly other is always at risk for doing violence to the wholly other. Some thinkers such as Derrida go further than this speaking of a religion without religion, a kind of prophetic vision of justice not limited by the determinant historical contents of particular historical religious traditions while others wonder if such a religion is not in the final analysis itself a vague abstraction. The first three essays in this volume are concerned with an analysis of the relation between the self and others. In “On Hesitation before the Other”, Michael Purcell is concerned with a phenomenology of hesitation or the moment when unexpectedly someone else is there. Reflecting on the work of Blanchot and Levinas, Purcell argues that the other often jolts us out of our self-complacency and self-contentment and invites us into a situation of responsibility in which the self is no longer for itself but for the other. The other or alterity is said to create a fissure in being’s self-contentment, an ontological difference, and ethics opens the closure that ontology would seek to effect. Subjectivity gives way before the other and ontology becomes ethics. To be is to be-for, to be chosen before any choosing on the part of the subject. Richard Cohen’s paper, “Levinas: Thinking Least About Death-Contra Heidegger”, begins with the theme of being-towards death as explored in Heidegger’s Being and Time and then argues that Levinas provides us with an original and deeper account of human mortality. Heidegger is concerned not with death as a biological event, but with our experience of being-towards-death. Death, as he understands it, may be said to disclose our finitude. Being-towards-death calls us back from our inauthentic way of being and helps open up the possibility of taking upon ourselves our own authentic way of being. Levinas takes us in a different and more ethically and socially oriented direction in which death is understood to open up for us the moral primacy of caring

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first for the mortality of the other person. We become aware of an infinite responsibility for the other person and beyond this of justice for-all-others, or for society as a whole. Cohen argues for the superiority of Levinas’ phenomenology of death with its more social view of the self and its emphasis upon the ethical as having priority over the ontological. Pamela Sue Anderson argues, in “Life, Death and (Inter) Subjectivity: Realism and Recognition in continental Feminism”, that a significant tension exists in contemporary feminist philosophy of religion between self-identity and other. Through a critical engagement with Luce Irigaray she seeks to demonstrate that a woman needs to recognize her own identity, or her “becoming divine”, but that each subject, whether male or female, must also struggle in relation to another subject in order to maintain realism about life, love and death. With Michèle Le Doeuff Anderson moves from subjectivity and divinity to inter-subjectivity and argues that we must risk our autonomy in seeking to recognize inter-subjectivity. In contrast to some feminist philosophers Anderson’s contention is that neither man nor woman can become divine and that the ultimate goal of a woman’s philosophical search for identity is mutual recognition. Even if unreachable it serves as a guiding ideal and, if successful, would enable human subjects in society to autonomously embrace each other in love and justice. The next four essays are concerned with thinking and speaking of the self and the infinite other. This has always been a problem in discussions of the western religious traditions and it takes on particular significance in a time when emphasis is placed upon divine reality as wholly other or unnameable. The focus upon the other or alterity, the effort to find a sight from which philosophy can reflect upon itself without depending upon a foundation that does violence to the infinite other often seems to lead contemporary continental philosophers in a direction that shares much in common with the tradition of negative theology. The essay by William Franke, “Apophasis and the Turn of Philosophy to Religion: From Neoplatonic Negative Theology to Postmodern Negation of Theology”, takes up this theme. Franke’s essay represents the beginning of an effort to rewrite the history of metaphysics in terms of what philosophy has not said and cannot say. He argues that a religious moment in language and thought is found in the “limitless criticism,” in the irreducibility of our experience and being to words and thoughts, and that while this does not directly warrant positing being or God, it does illuminate the necessity from which such conceptions arise. This is understood to apply not only to theological language but to all language which, as infinitely open, points in a direction which becomes theological. Stanley Cavell has suggested that in the historical development of scepticism regarding other minds, practices of philosophical meditation have culminated in an understanding of the problem of the other as a replacement for the problem of God. Philosophical meditation, argues Cavell, functions in ways similar to that of the argumentative styles of religion and theology and expresses a deeply metaphysical and existential concern that is too often glossed over in the scientific, epistemological and moral discourse of modernity. In “From ‘Ghost in the Machine’ to ‘Spiritual Automaton’: Philosophical Meditation in Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Levinas”, Hent de Vries provides a critical analysis of Cavell’s discussion of philosophical meditation and scepticism of the other while elucidating fundamental agreements and disagreements among Cavell and Emmanuel Levinas. He focuses in particular on the diverse ways in which Cavell and Levinas adopt the idea of the Infinite from Descartes’ Meditations

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and explores the adoption of the meditative model and its intrinsic relation to the legacy of confession, conversion, spiritual exercise and kinship. In his essay, “Naming the Unnameable God: Levinas, Derrida and Marion”, Anselm Min discusses and critically evaluates three primary efforts to deal with the problem of speaking of God as infinite other. For Levinas the problem is to think of God beyond intentional or representational consciousness, to think of God beyond being and beings, beyond even the greatest being. God for him is never experienced directly but only as a third person whose infinity is testified to in the infinity of responsibility to others in which our subjectivity is disrupted and de-centered. Derrida and Levinas share common ground in their rejection of more traditional language of being and God (so-called ontotheology) but Derrida focuses more explicitly on a critical appropriation of the tradition of negative theology. For Derrida, God is the unnameable wholly other beyond positive or negative predication. God remains accessible only as the indeterminate term of pure reference in prayer, a speaking to another whose name remains forever unspecified while inherent in all human struggles for authenticity and justice. Marion shares with Derrida and Levinas the dismissal of ontotheology and the aim of going beyond the language of predication in a way that will preserve the otherness of God. However, as an alternative to either saying or keeping silent, Marion advocates not pure prayer but prayer as praise from the perspective of a Trinitarian theology of the gift. In his comparison and analysis of the three views presented Min argues that we need to go beyond the alternatives provided by phenomenology and ontotheology and proposes the model of the contemplative intellect. Implicit in several of the essays discussed above is the question of the relation between philosophy and theology and this helps provide entry into the next essay by Merold Westphal, “Vision and Voice: Phenomenology and Theology in the Work of Jean-Luc Marion”. As suggested above, some continental philosophers seek to purify philosophy of theology while others seek to purify theology of philosophy. Jean-Luc Marion is often classified in the second category and then criticized for ultimately appealing to authority in theological matters. Westphal defends Marion against some of the criticisms and argues that the kind of phenomenology that Marion (and Westphal) consider useful to theology is a hermeneutical phenomenology, the kind of phenomenology that we find in such thinkers as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. On this account phenomenology is understood as a description of possible experience in contrast with theology which claims that revelation or epiphany is not merely veridical, but actual. Phenomenology in this sense will be concerned with intentionality but also with the beyond of intentionality in which the intentional arrows, according to Westphal, are experienced as coming from an other and conferring meaning on the subject from without. Understood in this way phenomenology may be said to play a maieutic, not a dictating, role in relation to theology and the revelation of God. The magnitude of evil and suffering in the twentieth and post-twentieth centuries is at the root of many discussions in continental philosophy including in particular discussions of evil and suffering, repentance and forgiveness and the role of religion in human society. The next five essays are concerned with these subjects. In “Suffering and Transcendence”, Eugene Long explores the experience of suffering in order to see to what extent it can understood in the context of the human condition without diverting the reality of suffering or denying the meaning of human existence and divine reality. More specifically he describes and interprets what he calls the tran-

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scendent dimensions of suffering with the intent of showing that in the experience of suffering we come up against the limits of what can be accounted for in ordinary terms and point towards transcendent reality. In religious faith the transcendent dimensions of suffering may be understood to come together with other transcendent dimensions of experience in a more distinctive or focused encounter with transcendent reality. He argues, however, that the conception of God that is suggested by the transcendent dimensions of suffering differs from the dominant model of God in western theism. In “Otherness and the Problem of Evil”, Calvin Schrag is concerned with radical evil, of which genocide is the most intense expression, and the questions, how does the other become evil and what is the proper response to such evil? Genocide, he argues, is the mind-set that considers an alien group to be radically evil and desires its annihilation simply because it is other. The possibility of dealing with others who do not share our beliefs and practices is made possible by the gifts of language, dialog and communication, understood as a means of deliberating and seeking possibilities for convergence among ethnic, racial, political and religious differences in order to embrace the greater good of all. To achieve this goal Schrag argues that we need to move beyond strictly national criteria for identity in the direction of what he calls a trans-political resolution to the problem of the demonization of the other. This would require that we transcend the more limited notions of friendship based on the friend/enemy distinction in the direction of the notion of gift understood as a thinking and giving without expectation of return and approaching its culmination in the gift of love. Gift is understood as an ethico-religious dimension, but not one characterized by institutions. It is a religion without religion, so to speak, in which unconditional love of neighbor extends to our enemies. In “Repentance and Forgiveness: The Undoing of Time”, Edith Wyschogrod explores the topic of repentance and forgiveness in view of the question of impossibility that derives from the magnitude of the evil and suffering in recent history. Jacques Derrida argues that forgiveness, understood as the victim’s offer to lift the burden of guilt that accrues to the victimizer in the death camps, is rendered impossible by the scale and character of these evils. Using Derrida’s view as a starting point for her discussion Wyschogrod turns to Vladimir Yankelevitch, who argues that an all or nothing view of forgiveness ignores differences in magnitude among infractions. He calls for a distinction between ascribing inexcuseability to an act that is grounded in a judgment of its magnitude and forgiveness which lies outside all juridical categories. Wyschogrod uses this distinction to help pinpoint some difficulties with Derrida’s view leading her to explore some responses to these difficulties raised in several texts of the Talmud and in Levinas’ use of the Talmudic perspective. She examines in particular Levinas’ notion of repentance in light of the trace of transcendence that is understood to infiltrate the work of atonement and the power of repentance to undo the work of time. In “An End to Evil? Philosophical and Political Considerations”, Fred Dallmayr is particularly concerned with recent developments in society in which the goal is understood to be the victory over or forced termination of evil. Beginning with an historical survey Dallmayr offers some topologies of traditional conceptions of evil ranging from monism(theodicy) to radical dualism(Manichaeism) to the unconventional construal of evil offered by Schelling. Dallmayr argues that Schelling affirms the reality of both radical evil and human freedom without lapsing into a dualism of good and evil, and that his view of a “becoming God” allows him to affirm the goodness of God without denying God’s complicity in the reality of evil. Appealing to Schelling’s

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view Dallmayr challenges the post 9/11 view in which goodness is arrogated to oneself in the name of seeking the victory of good over evil. Dallmayr contends that the extermination of evil by political or military force often means the termination of human freedom, including political freedom. He argues further that by putting dualism or Manichaeism aside the struggle against evil can be more productively thought of as a struggle in common, a struggle where all particularities combine in a search for goodness. Implicit in Dallmayr’s article is the question of the proper role of religion in society, and this question is treated in the final essay by Maeve Cooke, “Salvaging and Secularizing the Semantic Contents of Religion: The Limitations of Habermas’s Postmetaphysical Proposal.” Cooke is concerned with the role of religion in public political deliberations and in particular with Jürgen Habermas’s understanding of the relationship between post-metaphysical philosophy and religion. Cooke traces the development from Habermas’s earlier more dismissive attitude towards religion to his recent and more receptive stance in which he argues that religious contributions, drawn from informal public discussions and translated into secular language for purposes of decision making, should be included in more formal political deliberations where only secular reasoning is permissible, and that post-metaphysical philosophy should salvage the semantic content of religious traditions in order to supply the inspirational narratives needed for social and political projects. Cooke critically evaluates Habermas’s later view arguing that the translation requirement impairs the political autonomy of religious believers and that a distinction between epistemologically authoritarian and non-authoritarian religious beliefs may help alleviate this difficulty. She also argues that one may not be able to tap the semantic power of religious traditions without relying on metaphysical assumptions and that here a distinction between authoritarian and non-authoritarian approaches may also be useful. In the best of worlds this volume would have included an article by Grace Jantzen, Professor of religion, culture and gender at Manchester University, on the theme of religion, power and gender in postmodernity. Grace notified me in January that due to illness she would be unable to complete her article in time to meet our publication schedule. While this volume was in proof, I learned with a deep sense of sadness and loss to the profession that she died from cancer on May 2, 2006 at the age of fiftyseven. Well known for her work in continental philosophy and western mysticism and a leading voice in feminist philosophy of religion, Grace will be remembered for her challenging criticisms, her ability to make us look at traditional questions in new ways and her deep sensitivity and passion for the other.

Int J Philos Relig (2006) 60:9–19 DOI 10.1007/s11153-006-0004-7 O R I G I NA L PA P E R

On Hesitation before the Other Michael Purcell

Received: 6 February 2006 / Accepted: 23 February 2006 / Published online: 10 November 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Abstract Hesitation is a phenomenological moment. One is disturbed when, unexpectedly, someone else is there. There is that sharp intake of breath which accompanies being taken by surprise, and even a suspension of time, before one exhales. The other person takes us by surprise and often jolts us out of self-complacency and self-contentment, but also introduces us and invites us into a situation of responsibility in which the ego is no longer for itself but for the other. This is declining subjectivity otherwise and in terms of the other. This short article takes as its point of departure a simple incident: one halts or gives way before someone pushing a child’s pram. One says, ‘after you.’ With Levinas and Blanchot, this moment of ‘giving way’ needs to be phenomenologically frozen in that very moment of giving way, for hesitation is a hesitation in being. ‘To be’ is a reflexive verb, and existence is already fissured. Into this wound within existence, an other may enter, and provide an exit from ontology to ethics. Keywords Levinas · Blanchot · Existence · Anteriority · Posteriority · Hesitation The politeness and politic of forming a queue is one of the caricatures of the ‘British character’. It seems that the British have a quite natural tendency to ‘form a queue’ or to be in a queue. A few years ago, following the death of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, when crowds were queueing to pay their respects to this grand old lady who, most memorably, was associated with the 1939–1945 war-time period, a news reporter noted how the queues were extensive and it was as if people just wanted to be there to be in a queue. Queueing, it would seem, is a form of British civility. ‘One gives way before the other.’ Social etiquette requires it. One must queue, for queueing ensures that all are equal, and that ‘first come is first served’. Allied to this seemingly innate tendency to form a queue, is the peculiar propriety of ‘after you’, when one gives way before the other, allowing the other person to pass first. Thus, does one hold the door open for another to pass first, or give ones seat up to another on the bus. Such is civility M. Purcell (B) Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, Mound Place, Edinburgh, EH1 2LX Scotland, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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and propriety. Of course, such civility, were it the case, would lead to the ridiculous situation of the bus arriving and everyone in the queue so intent on giving way before the other, or the civility of ‘after you’, that no one would ever get on the bus, which would leave empty. Of such stuff is farce made, and, of course, it is a caricature of character. The French do it otherwise. But the ‘otherwise’ is not in manners or civility. Crushing into the London Underground or Paris metro is more or less the same experience, although there will always be some who give way. The ‘otherwise’ is in the way in which phenomenology, particularly in France, captures a moment of ‘giving way’ and subjects it to a scrutiny which is both existential and phenomenological. What possibly does ‘after you’ mean, or indicate? What is the significance of ‘after you’, or giving way before the other. In the simple moment of the hesitation which provokes ‘after you’, what is the significance of that hesitation? Can that moment be captured, frozen, and exposed phenomenologically? This article hopes to speak ‘on hesitation before the other’. In so doing, its mood intends to be both existential and phenomenological and catch itself in that moment of hesitation which disrupts and disturbs existence. The interlocutors are Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. Hesitancy concerns ‘giving way’, and ‘giving way’ is an interruption in being, and a phenomenological concern. Implicated are Levinas’ early indicative works on the inherent tension and fragility within being itself in On Escape and Existence and Existents, and the movement towards an ethical resolution of this inherent tension by way of alterity in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. The point of departure is a brief article by Maurice Blanchot on The Madness of the Day (La folie du jour) (Blanchot, 1999), to which Levinas refers and comments upon in Sur Maurice Blanchot. (Levinas, 1975).

La folie du jour In The Madness of the Day, Blanchot inscribes an anonymous I, self contained and self-complacent, but in the midst of therapy for this existential state of madness and the exclusion from social life. But others are not absent, and intervene and disturb, and are a moment for reflection. Thus, we read, ‘Am I an egoist? I feel drawn to only a few people, pity no one, rarely wish to please, rarely wish to be pleased, and I, who am almost unfeeling where I myself am concerned, suffer only in them, so that their slightest worry becomes an infinitely great misfortune for me, and even so, I have to deliberately sacrifice, I deprive them of every feeling of happiness (sometimes I kill them).’ Again, ‘I had no enemies. No one bothered me. Sometimes a vast solitude opened in my head and the entire world disappeared inside it, but came out again intact, without a scratch, with nothing missing.’ What Blanchot is inscribing in his typical non-descriptive way is an anonymous self for whom alterity is a threat, a self that, in its madness or folly, is excluded from the ordinary commerce of the day which is an engagement with alterity, a self which might perhaps sustain its own existence by way of neither acknowledging nor giving way to alterity. The other, implicitly included in the reflection, needs excluded to maintain the ego in its isolation, for alterity is disruptive.

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Thus we continue to read in the Madness of the Day that ‘that vast other person made me feel much more than I would have liked’ and the question becomes ‘who was I?’ The vastness of the other (the very infinity of the other) disturbs the vastness of the solitude (the very totality of the self), and this incursion of the other introduces ‘a different law’ and a reversal of the relation between the same and the other. The one whom I can (perhaps) terrorise and make a victim is the one by whom my ego is displaced. It is as if victims always have the last word, and the ghosts of delirium continue to haunt the paths of consciousness, for one of the ‘aims was to make me “see justice done”.’ Now, this ‘me’ is important, for it is ‘a special case.’ Unique in its isolation and in the madness which that isolation epitomises, the ego, safe and secure in its own happy possession of its own existence—forbid that the other should intervene and disrupt—finds itself nonetheless re-configured as unique responsibility for the other person. The ego remains solitary, but there is a translation of this solitariness from the isolation of egoism to the isolation of excessive responsibility. I was alone, undisturbed and happy before the other person crossed my path. I, now and in this moment, have to give way, and, now in this moment, I am alone and solitary in my responsibility. “‘But, as you said, I’m a special case.” “Special if you act — never, if you let others act.”’ The (in)significance of a pram (un voiture d
enfant) Into this narrative, Blanchot introduces an occurrence, which becomes the very moment of reflection. The anonymous I, encased in the Madness of the Day, overlooks a scene, very ordinary and everyday: ‘Outdoors, I had a brief vision: a few steps away from me, just at the corner of the street I was about to leave, a woman with a baby carriage had stopped, I could not see her very well, she was manoeuvering the carriage to get it through the outer door. At that moment a man whom I had not seen approaching went in through that door. He had already stepped across the sill when he moved backward and came out again. While he stood next to the door, the baby carriage, passing in front of him, lifted slightly to cross the sill, and the young woman, after raising her head to look at him, also disappeared inside.’ What is happening here? It is important to hesitate here and consider the existential significance of this hesitancy—which is a hesitancy in being—which gives way to an other. One hesitates and gives way, almost quite naturally and before thought which comes later, to another. It is this moment, perhaps out of time, which needs further phenomenological reduction. The existential is otherwise, and it introduces a new madness and an impossible folly. The anonymous I continues, ‘This brief scene excited me to the point of delirium. I was undoubtedly not able to explain it to myself fully and yet I was aware of it, having seized the moment when the day, having stumbled against a real event, would begin hurrying to its end.’ Such is the madness of the day, and the disruption which the other provokes. What is of significance is this notion of ‘stumbling against a real event’ that interrupts being in its self-reflexivity by way of giving way to another.

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The moment of hesitation before ‘a pram’ Now, Levinas takes up this instance and gives the hesitation in being which the other person provokes an ethical dimension. What we are talking about is the very interruption of being. Levinas comments on Blanchot’s short work in an equally short work Excercices sur ‘La Folie du Jour’, and specifically in a section on Une voiture d’enfant (Levinas, 1975, pp. 68–74). Referring to Blanchot’s anonymous author who has experienced the loss of friends, Levinas draws attention to the interruption and the inversion of solitude which is occasioned by an other. ‘Rapport avec autrui—dernière issue. D’un bout à l’autre du récit cette relation se rappelle. La perte des êtres aimés fut le choc même qui interrompt le bonheur our, plus exactement, qui en inveritit la félicité en étreinte étouffante de la solitude, le seule qui soit assurée.’ (Levinas, 1975, p. 68) The particular incident which disturbs being, or opens a fissure in solitary existence is the seemingly insignificant scene of someone giving way to another. It is the simplicity of an ‘after you’ and what is implicit in this moment of giving way that needs phenomenological exposure. Levinas describes it, ‘C’est la petite scène où, devant une porte cochère un homme cède le pas à une voiture d’enfant, qui est l’évenément où quelque chose advient—c’est-à-dire advient “sans convenir”—l’un se retire devant l’autre, l’un estpour l’autre.’ (Levinas, 1975, p. 68) The important moment that needs phenomenologically frozen is ‘one gives way to the other’ (‘l’un se retire devant l’autre’), or one draws oneself back before the other person. The simple incident of a woman with a pram causes me to halt and give way. The ego is displaced and declined as me. Said otherwise, alterity creates a fissure in being’s self-contentment and self-complacency. Ethics prises open the closure that ontology would seek to effect. The ethical intervention of the other is both the first and last word. There is something akin here to the insight of the author of the letter to the Hebrews who speaks of the insinuating capacity of another word to disrupt being and its own clinging to itself, and open up a possible intervention of an other. ‘The word of God is something alive and active: it cuts more incisively than any two-edged sword: it can seek out the place where the soul is divided from the spirit, or joints from the marrow; it can pass judgement on secret emotions and thoughts’ (Heb 4:12–13). Were there not already and always a fissure in being—an ontological difference, as Heidegger would have it, or the laborious effort to maintain a contract between existent and existence, as Levinas would have it—the advent and intervention of the other would not be possible. Existence, in its fragile and fractured state, is always an opening to and for alterity. An existence wholly for itself with no regard from or for the other is not a human existence. Human existence may be nomadic, and such is the journey; but it is most certainly not monadic. The incisive and invasive intervention into the fissure within being draws attention to an open wound within existence, out of which ‘we must give an account of ourselves’ (Heb. 4:13). Levinas draws out themes in Blanchot, and both texts need to be read in parallel. The self which is concerned for itself and its own perseverance in being (le moi soucieux de soi—la perseverance dans l’être) yields before the other person. This giving

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way before the other does not simply comply with the ordinary social conventions and courtesies, the observance of which would enable conscience undisturbed to return to itself (la conscience altruiste retourne à elle-même). Altruism is more fundamental than courtesy and convention, and marks a disruption of being to the extent of self-disinterestedness (dés-intér-esse-ment), a disinterest which disturbs a seemingly original interest in being (esse). In short the other comes first, and although, phenomenologically, the intersubjective reduction comes after the subjective reduction, it is originary. Subjectivity gives way before intersubjectivity. ‘La transcendance de l’intersubjectif est oppression par excellence et l’altruisime, abrutissant: le “je” étouffe dans sons essence de cheval.’ (Levinas, 1975, p. 72)

Hesitation and escape The incidental incident tends to be disruptive to the totality. Other people get in the way, and disrupt schemes and plans. Yet, one gives way before the other. But, this hesitation is of ontological significance: it is a hesitation in being. It is an interruption in being’s possession of itself in which being itself is called into question. One of the earliest themes in Levinas is that being seeks self-contentment, but that this is not without effort. In Existence and Existents, as we will see, ‘to be’ involves labour and fatigue. It is hard to be. Existence is not simple but reflexive. To be is a having to be ones self. Life is tough, and perhaps more often than not. The demand of simply existing invites the respite of both evasion and hesitation. It is these moments of existential hesitation that become the moment that Levinas subjects to phenomenological scrutiny—a sharp intake of philosophical breath before the intervention of alterity, yet remaining on the verge of exhalation. It is worth revisiting Levinas’ early work On Escape (De l’evasion) (Levinas, 2003) since this, too, concerns the problem of being. This was originally published in 1935/36, and so it straddles his doctoral thesis on the Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, which is the fruit of his consideration of Husserl’s phenomenology, and Existence and Existents (Levinas, 1978), which lays out the key concerns which will occupy his subsequent thinking and mature work. On Escape, then, falls between reflections on Husserl and Heidegger and the emergence of Levinas’ own project which both tries to take Husserl further and also to escape from the culmination of ontology in Heidegger.1 Like Existence and Existents, On Escape should be considered as a seminal work, all the more important for its rude and rudimentary insights—the stuff (hyle) of phenomenological reflection. Jacques Rolland describes it as ‘a youthful work’ and an ‘introduction’ into a space of questioning, namely ‘the ancient problem of being qua being’ and the possibility of an escape from being into an otherwise than being. Of note is the element of phenomenological analysis which Levinas employs, and which will characterises his phenomenological style in his later, more mature 1 This is a fractious point. Heidegger rightly raised the question of ontology in Western metaphysics, making the distinction between Being (sein) and beings (das Seiendes). Metaphysics, as Levinas recognises, had been deaf to Being and Heidegger re-awakened the notion of the verbality of Being. The question remains as to whether Heidegger is the culmination of metaphysics in the west—the final chapter written—or a new point of departure. To some extent he is both. Phenomenology acquires an existential voice with Heidegger and opens on to new pathways. Heideggerian ontology, however, remains closed to ethics.

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years. Levinas’ concern in On Escape is ‘getting out of being by a new path, at the risk of overturning certain notions that to common sense and the wisdom of nations seemed the most evident’ (Levinas, 2003, p. 73). What are important are the existential analyses which Levinas undertakes in a phenomenological mode. In On Escape, these are the experiences of pleasure, shame, and nausea, experiences that need to be phenomenologically exposed and further existential analysis. It is worth recalling that On Escape was written in the same period in which Sartre was undertaking existential analyses of nausea in Being and Nothingness (1943), an essay in phenomenological ontology. It is also worth noting that criticisms of Levinas’ phenomenology by such as Janicaud are precisely criticisms of a seeming abandonment of strict Husserlian scientific phenomenological rigour in favour of the ordinary. For example, for Janicaud, Levinas displays ‘philosophical aplomb’ when he ‘loftily and categorically affirms’ ‘the primacy of the idea of infinity, immediately dispossessing the sameness [mêmeté] of the I, or of being [être]’ (The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology) (Janicaud, 2001). Levinas ‘takes liberties’ with Husserl with his emphasis on ‘overflowing the intentional horizon’ and in trying to overcome ‘the purely intentional sense of the notion of horizon.’ Indeed, for Janicaud, the beginning of the errance of phenomenology in its French mood from the scientific discipline and rigour of Husserl can be traced from the publication of Sartre’s The Phenomenology of the Ego (1937) in which ‘Sartre abandoned [the workplace of French phenomenological investigations] to turn resolutely towards politics and an ethics of engagement.’ For Sartre, according to Janicaud, phenomenology in its Husserlian form, was altogether too abstract, ‘too detached from concrete situations and sociopolitical struggles.’ Yet, it is precisely this ‘existential turn’, inaugurated by Heidegger in Being and Time (1927) which characterises the analysis of existence in its ordinary and everday mode that, far from being an inauthentic way of existence, is the locus for further analysis. Being is already disturbed by the advent of the other person; its own self-complacency is already called into question by the ethical encounter with the other person, and it is this which gives the possibility of an escape from being. This would also be the entire signification of hesitation before the other, and the withdrawal of being before ethics, which is ‘getting out of being by another way.’ It is worth pursuing this further (and it should not be surprising that one can get so much phenomenological mileage out an ordinary incident involving a pram).

‘To be’ is a reflexive verb For Levinas human existence exhibits ‘a type of duality’ (Levinas, 2003, p. 55). This is exhibited in the phenomenological analyses of indolence and fatigue and the effort involved in maintaining one’s self in being which Levinas develops in Existence and Existents. It is as if—using the image of awakening—it is an effort for an existent to clothe itself with an existence which is experienced as burden, and the corresponding effort to maintain one’s self engenders fatigue. ‘To be’ is a reflexive verb; it is not just that ‘one is’ but that one is oneself’ (on n’est pas, on s’est) (Levinas, 1978, p. 28). There is a fissure in being. Thus, Levinas can write that, in the awakening of the subject as a substantive being (a hypostasis of existent and its existence), existence is still experienced as a weight. The ego may have a foothold in existence, but existence is a weight that is heavy for a solitary self to bear. Levinas writes,

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‘The I always has one foot caught in its own existence.. . . It is forever bound to the existence which it has taken up. The impossibility of the ego not to be a self constitutes the underlying tragic element in the ego, the fact that it is riveted to its own being.’ (Levinas, 1978, p. 84) The ‘ego is chained to itself,’ and ‘[t]he enchainment to oneself is the impossibility of getting rid of oneself. . .. To be an ego is not only to be for oneself; it is also to be with oneself’ (Levinas, 1978, p. 88). Now, this reflexivity of being is already indicated in On Escape. The phenomenological analyses of pleasure, shame, and nausea point to a tension within existence. For example, pleasure involves ‘a loss of oneself, a getting out of oneself’ (Levinas, 2003, p. 60). Ecstacy is an ek-stasis, an escape from existence. ‘Yet it is a deceptive escape. For it is an escape that fails’ (p. 62). Pleasure comes to an end and one returns to oneself, and the fact that one must exist. Similar is the case with shame and nausea. ‘Shame’s whole intensity, everything that it contains stings us, consists precisely in our inability not to identify with this being who is already foreign to us and whose motives for acting we can no longer comprehend’ (p. 63). Shame is being exposed in its nakedness. Similarly with nausea: to be nauseous is to be disoriented with no sure ground on which to place oneself; one wants to be elsewhere but has no place to go. ‘There is in nausea a refusal to remain there, an effort to get out’ and ‘this fact of being riveted, constitutes all the anxiety of nausea’ (p. 66). Rolland describes it in terms of the disorientation which accompanies ‘seasickness’, a disorientation in which the ‘recoil of beings in all their aspects’ is experienced, which is the experience of no thing. Nausea ‘manifests nothing’ (p. 21). An existent is on the vertiginous point of falling back into the anonymity of existence, ‘the very experience of pure being’ (p. 67). Duality, then, is the mark (stigmate) of existence, and so the question of escape becomes ‘the need to get out of oneself, that is to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I (moi) is oneself (moi-même) . . . to break the chains of the I to the self (du moi à soi)’ (p. 55). This, of course, reflects Levinas’ appropriation of, and attempt to overcome, Heidegger’s ‘ontological difference’ between Being (sein) and being (das Seiendes), and its translation into the difficult contract between an existent and its existence. It is into this very fissure in being—this ontological difference—that Levinas will insert the other person, and thus ontology will become ethics, for it is the other who makes the difference. In other words, existence without others remains an enchainment to a solitary existence from which there is no escape. Sustaining and maintaining one’s contract with existence and one’s possession of being is the tragic stigmata of solitary existence. It is an effort and struggle which one wants both to evade and escape. Jacques Rolland notes that this indicates ‘a defect or taint inscribed in [the] very fact of existence’ (Levinas, 2003, p. 10). The solitary I is a work yet to be achieved, and not without effort. Its sustaining requires sustenance and maintenance. Thus Levinas will write in Existence and Existents that ‘everything in the subject is here’, but the misfortune of being is that the here of the solitary self provides no means of salvation. ‘It can only come from elsewhere’ (Levinas, 1978, p. 93). How, then, might we get out of being by another way?

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The intervention and ethical priority of the other So, after a while of hesitant perambulation, we come back to the simple act of someone saying ‘after you’ and someone giving way to someone pushing a pram through a door, the very awakening of Blanchot’s subject to reality and its escape from solitude. ‘One gives way before the other.’ Levinas speaks of this in terms of ‘the posteriority of the anterior’. By this he means that thought—always the phenomenological point of departure—discovers, through reflection on its own conditions of possibility, that it has a history. And these transcendental conditions strike the subject with all the force that the ethical encounter with the other person brings to bear.

‘The posteriority of the anterior’ Levinas speaks of the ‘posteriority of the anterior’ in Totality and Infinity (Levinas, 1979) when considering the notion of separation and discourse. Separation marks the disengagement and withdrawal of the self from the world which it happily enjoys and its recollection of itself as the here of consciousness from which thought proceeds. This moment of separation is also the first movement of transcendence, the very possibility of engagement with another. Separation is the inauguration of distance, and distance gives the possibility of transcendence. Levinas pursues his argument by drawing attention to Descartes’Third Meditation in which Descartes speaks of an idea which exceeds the cogito, namely, thee idea of infinity. But the discovery of the idea of infinity comes only as ‘a second move’ in the chronology of thought. The paring away of evidence establishes the cogito as the first—but momentary—indubitable. ‘The present of the cogito, despite the support it discovers for itself after the fact in the absolute that transcends it, maintains itself all by itself—be it only for an instant, the space of a cogito (Levinas, 1979, p. 54). For Descartes, the cogito is established as the here on the basis of which other certainties can be deduced. In other words, ‘thought . . . is . . . here’ (Levinas, 1978, p. 68). Now, the logical order of thought would progress from this original indubitable starting point. However, in Descartes’ Meditation, this origin finds itself thinking a thought of which it cannot be the origin, a thought that interrupts the logical order by introducing a chronology of difference. ‘That there could be a chronological order distinct from the “logical” order, that there could be several moments in the progression, that there is a progression’ (Levinas, 1979, p. 54)—here is the recognition of a precedence by which the present proceeds. The present as the recollection or gathering of the subject into self-presence might seem to be the logical beginning of temporality, the instant from which time unfolds. This instant, as the instantiation and inception of the subject, might seem to be the logical beginning of time which unfolds from the present of self-presence. The future, as time that is yet to come, would be the field of possibility yet to be determined from the vantage point of the present, and the past would be an archaeology and genealogy (and possible justification) of the present. In short, time would be a function of the subject. For Levinas, however, time is not a function of the subject, nor is the present of presence to be conceived as the bestower or arbiter of meaning of either past or future. Time functions in relation to the other person, and is a function of that relationship

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with the other which the other establishes. The subject finds itself emerging into a time which is not its own, and of which it is neither author or origin. Said otherwise, if, logically, time begins with awakening, awakening finds itself somewhat lately always and already to have been disturbed and awoken. The ‘sheer youthfulness’ of thought which is enjoyment and elemental is yet ‘heedless of its slipping into the past and of its recovered self-possession in the future’ (Levinas, 1979, p. 54). What thought discovers is that ‘[e]ven its cause, older than itself, is still to come. The cause of being is thought or known by its effect as though it were posterior to its effect’ (Levinas, 1979, p. 54). But this ‘as though’ is not illusory; neither is it unfounded. Levinas continues, ‘The posteriority of the anterior—an inversion logically absurd—is produced, one would say, only by memory or by thought. But the “improbable” phenomenon of memory or of thought must precisely be interpreted as a revolution in being’ (Levinas, 1979, p. 54). Such ‘a revolution in being’ is an ethical revolution which disturbs ontology and enables a subject that not only is conscious but also has a conscience, and where both consciousness and moral consciousness are provoked by what it other than the self. It is the birth or the emergence of the subject is the time of the other. It is, in a more biblical language with which Levinas is also familiar, the discovery of paternity in the very awareness of filiality. In short, the intervention of the other person provokes thought as a separation which is self-consciousness but which is also consciousness of the other person who, in making consciousness conscious of itself, summons it to ethical response. Inwardness or interiority thus becomes aware of its origin in an other than itself. ‘Separation is not reflected in thought but produced by it. For in it the After or the Effect conditions the Before or the Cause: the Before appears and is only welcomed’ (Levinas, 1979, p. 54). Now, this means that subjectivity is not primarily transcendental or historical, but, beyond and prior to this, is primarily ethical. The subject is not so much a victim of history, but a hostage to alterity. ‘Interiority is the very possibility of a birth and death that do not derive their meaning from history. Interiority institutes an order different from historical time in which totality is constituted, and order where everything is pending, where what is no longer possible historically remains always possible.’ (Levinas, 1979, p. 55) Subjectivity ‘is not, in the last analysis, the “I think” (which it is at first) or the unity of “transcendental apperception” [but] is, as a responsibility for another, a subjection to the other’ (Levinas, 1987).

Responsibility without prior commitment The theme of the ‘posteriority of the anterior’ appears again in Levinas’ second major work, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, though here it finds itself translated into the language of response and responsibility. The subject who would be understood as origin and freedom finds itself, before ever it has made a commitment, to

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be in a situation of having to be responsible. The Sartrean condemnation to being, or the Heideggerian ‘having-to-be’ becomes, in Levinas a ‘having-to-be-responsible’ for responsibility is the new determination of being: ‘to be’ is ‘to be-for’. It is to be in a position of ‘being-responsible’ before ever choosing to be responsible. It is to have been chosen before ever any choosing on my part is possible. It is not the case that one is free, and then responsible; one is already called to responsibility, and this determines my freedom. Freedom flows from and follows on from responsibility rather than preceding it, just as subjectivity which is seemingly first comes after the other before whom one gives way. Confronted by another, I am placed in question. My own self-concern is displaced by the other, and thus I am constituted as a moral consciousness, or conscience, and summoned to be response. Some decision needs made within the bounds of this demand to respond. Subjectivity is constituted as response and responsibility. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Levinas, 1981), the hesitation in being becomes articulated in terms of anarchy, diachrony, and anteriority. The disturbing and arresting proximity of the other person places the self as self-consciousness in question. One must decide whether or not one is ‘for-myself’ or whether one is ‘forthe-other’. But such a decision is already provoked by the advent of the other person whose presence was there before I could command it. This indicates that the ‘one-forthe-other has the form of sensibility or vulnerability, pure passivity or susceptibility, passive to the point of becoming an inspiration’ (Levinas, 1981, p. 67). The fissure within being is already exposure to the other, and occurs as the vulnerability of sensibility, which also affirms the flesh as the hinge of salvation (caro cardo salutis). In the shock or hesitation of giving way before the other—in that sharp intake of breath which the unexpected provokes—one breathes in the other and is instantiated as responsibility. The self is identified as responsibility, and is at the service of the other. How exhalation takes form remains within the delimited area of freedom, but it is either as responsibility or as its refusal. ‘In the form of responsibility, the psyche in the soul is the other in me, a malady of identity, both accused and self, the same for the other, the same by the other.’ ‘The soul is the other in me’ (pp. 69, 191, n. 3). Now, this rendering of the self as the one-for-the-other of responsibility is not an operation which has its origin in the self; rather, it is a willing and co-operative response to the other-in- me who calls on me to respond. Responsibility, though it is experienced by the self, is not a function of the self; rather, it is the other-in-me who establishes me as for-the-other. In terms of the posteriority of the anterior, the proximity of the other is an anarchy whose ‘me-ontological and metalogical structure’ is discovered ‘in a responsibility that is justified by no prior commitment, in the responsibility for another—in an ethical situation’ (Levinas, 1981, p. 102). Being instantiated as responsible for the other is not the result of any choosing on my part, but ‘is an assignation of me by another . . . an obligation anachronously prior to any commitment [whose] anteriority is “older” than the a priori.’ It is an obsession, where obsession is to be understood as a ‘relationship with exteriority “prior” to the act that would effect it’ (p. 101). In other words, responsibility is not a matter of efficient but of formal causality, an effecting of the soul as an affectivity towards the other. Levinas writes, ‘The one is hypostasised in another one. It is bound in a knot that cannot be undone in a responsibility for others. . .. In the exposure to wounds and outrages, in the feeling proper to responsibility, the oneself is provoked as irreplaceable, as devoted to others, without being able to resign, and thus incarnated in order to

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offer itself, to suffer and to give. It is thus one and unique, in passivity from the start, having nothing at its disposal that would enable it not to yield to provocation.’ (Levinas, 1981, p. 105) Again, the origin of the self ‘does not begin in the auto-affection of a sovereign ego that would be, after the event, “compassionate” for another. Quite the contrary: the uniqueness of the responsible ego is possible only in being obsessed by another, in the trauma suffered prior to any auto-identification, in the unrepresentable before. The one affected by the other is an anarchic trauma, or an inspiration of the one by the other, and not a causality striking mechanically a matter subject to its energy’ (Levinas, 1981, p. 123)

Giving way to a conclusion Blanchot’s anonymous subject in The Madness of the Day ends with a soliloquy beyond the solipsism with which it began. Reporting the exchange between those who seek to diagnose the madness and find reason, we read: ‘I had become involved in their search. We were all like masked hunters. Who was being questioned? Who was answering. One became the other. The words spoke by themselves. The silence entered them, an excellent refuge, since I was the only one who noticed it. I had been asked: Tell us “just exactly” what happened. A story? I began: I am not learned; I am not ignorant. I have known joys. That is saying too little. I told them the whole story and they listened, it seems to me, with interest, at least in the beginning. But the end was a surprise to all of us. “That was the beginning,” they said. “Now get down to the facts.” How so? The story was over!’ “‘Just exactly” what happened’? One gave way before another, and that moment, beyond description, opens a door to phenomenological reflection, and the escape from the solitude of the ‘having-to-be’ with and by oneself. The hesitation in being, which the other provokes, is the fissure into which the other enters and enables the self to escape. Here is no salvation; it comes from unanticipated elsewhere and otherwise. Though lately discovered, the other comes first. References Blanchot, M. (1999). The madness of the day. (L. Davis (trans.)), In Station Hill Blanchot reader. NY: Station Hill (All quotes from Blanchot are taken from this text). Hereafter, MD. Janicaud, D. (2001). The theological turn in french phenomenology. NY: Fordham University Press. passim. Levinas, E. (1975). Sur Maurice Blanchot. Paris: Fata Morgana. Levinas, E. (1978). Existence and existents. The Hague: M Nijhoff. Levinas, E. (1979). Totality and infinity. The Hague: M Nijhoff. Levinas, E. (1981). Otherwise than being, or beyond essence. The Hague: M Nijhoff. Levinas, E. (1987). God and philosophy. In Collected philosophical papers. The Hague: M Nijhoff. pp. 165 Levinas, E. (2003). On escape. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Int J Philos Relig (2006) 60:21–39 DOI 10.1007/s11153-006-9101-x O R I G I NA L PA P E R

Levinas: thinking least about death—contra Heidegger Richard A. Cohen

Received: 8 February 2006 / Accepted: 23 February 2006 / Published online: 10 November 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Abstract Detailed exposition of the nine layers of signification of human mortality according to Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological and ethical account of the meaning and role of death for the embodied human subject and its relations to other persons. Critical contrast to Martin Heidegger’s alternative and hitherto more influential phenomenological-ontological conception, elaborated in Being and Time (1927), of mortality as Dasein’s anxious and revelatory being-toward-death. Keywords Death · Levinas · Heidegger · Ethics · Mortality · Suffering · Justice

Introduction In fact Levinas thinks a great deal about death. The death he thinks least about (but not least of), however, is death as Martin Heidegger understood it in his magnum opus Being and Time (Heidegger, 1962; Henceforth BT). Indeed, no thinker has analyzed human mortality with greater precision, made it more central to human existence, given it more prominence for thought, especially the thought of being, or broken more radically with philosophy’s millennial long flight from death, than Heidegger. The flight from death is well known to us Westerners, and certainly not only from a religious point of view. We are familiar with Cicero’s dictum “that to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.” Socrates, the paradigmatic philosopher,

An earlier version of this paper, relating Levinas to Spinoza rather than to Heidegger, entitled “Levinas: Thinking Least about Death—Contra Spinoza,” was presented on January 19, 2006, at an international centennial conference on Levinas held at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel. The present paper was delivered as a lecture at St. John’s College, Sante Fe, New Mexico, on January 27, 2006.. R. A. Cohen (B) Department of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University city Blvd., Charlotte, NC 28223, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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had long before publicly declared after his condemnation to death by an Athenian jury, according to Plato’s Apology, that death is nothing, either literally as dreamless sleep or as a gateway to yet another world. From thereafter the denial of death is an intellectual drama with many acts. It reaches its systematic and rational peak, it seems to me, more than two thousand years after Socrates in the Ethics of Spinoza, according to which, in the now famous Proposition 67 of Part IV, “a free man thinks of death least of all.”1 Prior to Heidegger, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Montaigne, Vico and Kierkegaard), philosophers would confine the love of wisdom to the virtual “life” of the mind, to the pure activity of thought thinking thoughts, preferring to cognize a deathless truth than to face the truth of death. All this changed with Heidegger, who brought human mortality to the center stage of philosophy. In an interview of 1982, published under the title “The Philosopher and Death,” Levinas remarks: “Spinoza will say, as you know, that philosophers should think of nothing less than of death. Heidegger, by contrast, is the one who pursued philosophical thought’s reference to death the farthest.” (Levinas, 1999a, p. 155). Of course, let us add, when Spinoza says that philosophers should think of nothing less than of death, it is not because he thinks of life and its vicissitudes, but because he has eliminated both life and death from the eternal and necessary truths which alone are meant to preoccupy the philosopher. The thesis of this paper is primarily expository, but it is also critical. It aims to show Levinas’s conception of mortality and in so doing to also show how and that mortality and morality are inextricably linked. By showing this it will also show, by contrast, why and how Levinas rejects the Heideggerian account of death and its intimate link to ontology. Finally, in exposing Levinas’s conception of death the paper hopes to leave the reader persuaded that what Levinas said of Heidegger’s thought actually applies to his own, namely, that it “pursued philosophical thought’s reference to death the farthest.” Thus, while thinking least about death as conceived by Heidegger, I want to show that it is Levinas nevertheless who thinks the most or farthest about death. And, if this is true, it means that Levinas has thought the farthest about human mortality not, as one might imagine, by standing on Heidegger’s shoulders, but rather, more originally, by proposing a radically different but philosophically superior account of the nature and significance of human mortality.

Heidegger I will begin, then, with a few words about Heidegger’s conception of human mortality. I will assume that this conception is not only better known than Levinas’s, but, given its prominence, that it is reasonably well known. Accordingly, and also for the sake of brevity and because the real topic of this paper is Levinas’s conception of death, I will provide only a summary review of Heidegger’s conception instead of a full blown exposition of it. First of all it is important to note that it was not from some personal eccentricity or morbidity that Heidegger brought death to the center stage of philosophy. No doubt Kierkegaard and Rosenzweig had earlier given death a prominence it had never had 1 See, Spinoza (1992). Proposition 67 of Part IV asserts that: “A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death.” (p. 192).

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before in philosophy. But Heidegger, in contrast to these and other prior thinkers of death, was trained in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, which is, it seems to me, the first modern philosophical method fully equipped to grasp and present for scientific verification the meaning and significance of such phenomena as death, that is, significations whose sense lies outside of the confines of a conception of modern science hitherto restricted to mathematic or quantitative measurability. Heidegger, in other words, took full advantage of the expanded notion of science and the method for such a science that he learned from Edmund Husserl.2 And so, too, as we shall see, did Levinas, Husserl’s other most distinguished and original student. One of Heidegger’s central phenomenological discoveries in Being and Time is that a human being’s relation to death is, first of all, of the utmost importance for that human being to discover his or her own basic, genuine or authentic being and, second, that such an “understanding of being,” revealed in relation to death, is essential for being itself—the being of all beings—to be revealed for what it is genuinely or authentically. Thus, a human being’s authentic relation to death, which Heidegger calls “being-toward-death” (Sein zum tod), functions as the central revelatory moment which both defines authentic human subjectivity and opens up the root philosophical question of the meaning of being. Mortality, then, far from being the sort of thing the philosopher must flee or dismiss for the sake of purified intellection and eternal truth, is to the contrary the most philosophical of all moments. It is only in beingtoward-death that the temporality of one’s own being, and the historical–ontological context within which one’s own being finds its ultimate sense, are disclosed. How, then, does Heidegger understand authentic human mortality, what he calls “being-toward-death”? “Death,” he says in Being and Time, “is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. Thus death reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped (Tod al die eigenste, unbezugliche, unaberholbare Moglichkeit)” (BT, p. 294). (1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5) (6)

Death is “ownmost”—nothing is more one’s own than one’s own death. For Heidegger the human subject is “individuated,” becomes its “authentic” or “genuine” self, properly occupies its Da, the “there” of its of Da-sein, in beingfor-death. Death is “non-relational”—in being-toward-death the authentic subject has broken its relations with others: “all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone” (BT, p. 294). “The ‘they,” as Heidegger calls everyday social life, “does not permit us the courage for anxiety in the face of death” (BT, p. 298). Death is “not to be outstripped”—in being-for-death Dasein understands death as the inescapable, unavoidable, certain future, in a certainty that “demands Dasein itself in the full authenticity of its existence” (BT, p. 310). Death reveals Dasein as “possibility”—facing the “possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all” (BT, p. 307). Dasein sees itself as a projection into possible futures. The mood consistent with being-toward-death is anxiety (Angst), indeed, Heidegger claims that “Being-toward-death is essentially anxiety” (BT, p. 310). Being-toward-death is disclosure, revelation, understanding mortal Dasein understands in the sense that Heidegger already indicated in the Introduction to Being and Time: “Dasein . . . is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being,

2 Heidegger’s re-interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology in hermeneutic and ontological terms can be found in the second part of the introduction to BT (pp. 36–63).

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that Being is an issue for it. . . . Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being”3 . What being-toward-death reveals to Dasein about itself is that Dasein is a temporal being, an “ecstatic” temporalizing being. Finally, because being-toward-death is not a self-understanding that Dasein can maintain at all times, when Dasein does realize itself this way it enters into the back and forth movement of “fallen” (Verfall) or “inauthentic” Dasein and authentic Dasein. Heidegger will speak of Dasein as being “resolute” (entschlossen) when it maintains itself in its authentic understanding of being as being-toward-death.

The most important, deepest and founding question of philosophy is for Heidegger the “question of being,” i.e., the question of the meaning of the historical character of the being of all beings. This is because for Heidegger, as Levinas is quick to point out, being is thought as a verb, an event, rather than as a noun or substantive, first as the projective-retentive (“anticipatory”-“thrown”/”repetitive”) movement of Dasein’s temporality, and then, more broadly, as the projective-retentive context within which Dasein finds its meaning as part of being’s “historicality” (Geschichtlichkeit) or “historicizing” (geschehen), to speak properly of the eventfulness of verbal be-ing. Being, then, is the free or unbound source that gives meaning to beings, and hence gives meaning to the configuration or dispensation of meaning that is for each of us our own being, and for all of us and for all beings historical being, while at the same time never fully exhausting its generosity, withdrawing into and holding itself in reserve. Dasein, the distinctive manner in which humans are “there” in being—as a being-in-the-world and a being-with-others—is awakened from the superficiality of its worldly and social distractions to the distinctive manner of being which is its own and as such to its role as the language-speaking-opening of being’s disclosure-withdrawal of itself. All this follows from human subjectivity grasping itself as being-toward-death. In appropriating its own being by grasping itself as mortal, a fully resolute Dasein at the same time grasps itself as the mouthpiece, the voice, the opening wherein being itself is disclosed. The being of Dasein revealed in facing itself as mortal is precisely the issue or issuing of being as the “understanding of being.” Human mortality is not only the key to the individuation and self-awareness of human beings; it is nothing less also than the key to the authentic being of being itself.4 3 BT, p. 32. That Dasein is understandingly is of the utmost importance, as Theodore Kisiel points out in terms of Heidegger’s relation to Husserl: “The displacement of categorical intuition by the understanding-of-being is in the effect the transformation of Husserl’s transcendental–eidetic phenomenology into Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology.”; in Kisiel (2002). 4 It is hardly controversial, and I am certainly not the only one to see in being-toward-death the lynchpin of Heidegger’s thought. In a lecture of the 1950s, Leo Strauss contextualizes the point as follows: “Yet while according to Plato and Aristotle to be in the highest sense means to be always, Heidegger contends that to be in the highest sense means to exist, that is to say, to be in the manner in which man is: to be in the highest sense is constituted by mortality.” I mention this not so much for its own sake but rather to draw attention to another quite telling remark Strauss makes in the same lecture: “Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight [of historicist relativism]. But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger” (Strauss, 1989). Strauss died in 1973, so he could have read a good deal of Levinas. It is a pity and a surprise, to say the least, given his intellectual sensitivity, that he was unaware, apparently, of Levinas’s thought, and therefore unaware of its greatness as an alternative to Heidegger. It seems to me that Strauss would have found in Levinas a far better answer to his “intellectual plight” than his own somewhat skittish foray into “natural law” theory. Strauss simply missed the boat.

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Levinas Levinas, like Heidegger, will oppose philosophy’s conceptual flight into deathless eternal truth. Like Heidegger he is a contemporary philosopher, one who takes time—and hence movement, change, contingency, growth, embodiment, language, textuality and history— seriously. Like Heidegger he is a phenomenologist, one who bases his analyses on relevant evidence (the perceived for perceiving, perceiving for the perceived, the imagined for imagining, imagining for the imagined, etc.) rather than on the remains of reductionist presuppositions, however rational or logical or practical. Yet at the same time Levinas radically and completely opposes Heidegger’s account of death—opposing each and every component of Heidegger’s analysis, and opposing the larger ontological framing within which Heidegger makes ultimate sense of mortality. Indeed, the death that Levinas thinks least about, as I have indicated, is precisely Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death and the understanding of being it is said to reveal. To confirm or challenge a phenomenological result is a natural part and indeed a methodological requirement in the ongoing and progressive development of phenomenological sciences. As a science, phenomenology is self-correcting: all of its results are subject to and demand confirmation or disconfirmation. Superficial or incorrect analyses are replaced with deeper or more correct ones. Thus the fact that Levinas’s phenomenological analyses of death challenge and supersede Heidegger’s on every point means, if Levinas’s analyses are indeed superior, an advance in scientific knowledge, a better understanding, a clearer and more distinct knowledge of the meaning of death. No one faults Copernicus for not being Kepler; or Kepler for not being Galileo; or any of them for not being Newton. We are grateful for every advance in knowledge. Levinas will force us to rethink the meaning of death. This is because—and the proof is only in the pudding—Levinas, like Heidegger, Michel Henri and Merleau-Ponty, is one of the masters of phenomenology. But, having said all this, it is also true that Levinas is doing more than simply advancing the state of phenomenological knowledge. And because Heidegger was also doing more than simply advancing the state of phenomenological knowledge, Levinas is also not simply correcting and supplementing Heidegger. Heidegger re-interpreted phenomenology as hermeneutic ontology, and he did so based on his account of Dasein as being-toward-death, and being-toward-death as the self-understanding of being. In challenging this account, therefore, Levinas is not only deepening Heidegger’s phenomenological analyses, he is contesting the entire hermeneutic-ontological edifice Heidegger claims to have built upon and within which he ultimately framed those analyses. By proposing deeper more insightful phenomenological analyses of death, and by following the significance traced in mortality beyond the limitations of a pure phenomenology, and thereby by discovering that the proper frame—or non-frame—of mortality is not ontological but ethical, Levinas is radically contesting the entire Heideggerian edifice of ontology and offering in its stead an alternative vision of ethics as first philosophy. Let us then turn to Levinas’s positive philosophical contributions, both in phenomenology and in ethics. Thinking least about Heideggerian ownmost death, Levinas nevertheless thinks most about the death of the other person. Indeed, it is precisely when and only when thinking least about one’s own death and most about the other’s death, precisely when care for the other’s death takes precedence over care for one’s own—all the way to the extreme point of “dying for” the other—that the human subject achieves its true

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humanity, and hence the proper height of a morally and socially responsible selfhood. Morality is not for Levinas a gloss on (or of) being, a merely “ontic” region of signification. Rather, it is at once beyond-being and better-than-being: beyond-being precisely because and insofar as it is better-than-being. To be for-the-other before oneself, caring for the other’s mortality and suffering before one’s own, is for Levinas the very height of a person’s own humanity, the highest form of selfhood in the sense of the morally best—the kindest, the most compassionate, and in this sense the most excellent and noblest. It is also the most “individuated” selfhood in the sense that moral agency, moral responsibility, is inescapable and non-exchangeable: it is incumbent upon me—in the first person singular, me, myself—to respond responsibly to the suffering of the other, independent and regardless of whether others are or are not also responding responsibly. Thus in the same interview mentioned above, Levinas will also say: “I think that the Human consists precisely in opening oneself to the death of the other, in being preoccupied with his or her death. . . . But above all, it is no longer just a question of going toward the other when he is dying, but of answering with one’s presence to the mortality of the living. That is the whole of ethical conduct” (Levinas, 1999a, pp. 157–158, p. 164). Although these inspiring formulations regarding the moral priority of the other’s mortality and suffering express the culmination of Levinas’s conception of the meaning of death, his position—refined and developed over half a century, based in phenomenological investigations but not limited to phenomenology—is in fact far richer and multilayered than these highpoints For this reason the following exposition, aiming to be faithful to the complexity as well as the core inspiration of Levinas’s thought, presents its key elements or dimensions under what I have identified as nine headings, which are to some extent (but not entirely) presented in a progressive development of conditions and conditioned.5 First, however, a final preliminary remark to obviate a potential misunderstanding. Levinas’s thought is both phenomenological and ethical. In its epistemology, where it upholds and is upheld by the rigorous and universal standards of scientific knowledge and truth, Levinas’s approach is phenomenological, based, therefore, on the descriptive and verifiable evidence of disciplined investigations into various fields of signification, such as, as in this case, the meaning of human mortality. Nevertheless, because the central claim of Levinas’s thought is not ultimately a knowledge claim, and therefore not a thesis or a theme that can be fully represented in propositions, but a moral imperative—the “idea of infinity” as the irreducible height and transcendence of the other person and self-sensing as the irreducible independence or separation of 5 Three texts serve as our primary though certainly not as our exclusive guides to understanding the meaning of death as Levinas understands it. First, from the third part of Time and the Other (1947), two contiguous subsections entitled “Suffering and Death” and “Death and the Future”; Levinas, Time and the other and additional essays (1987, pp. 68–73). Henceforth TO. Second, from the third section of Totality and Infinity (1961), two contiguous subsections entitled “The Will and Death” and “Time and the Will: Patience”; Levinas, Totality and infinity, (1969, pp. 232–240). Henceforth TI. Third, a short lecture of 1987 given at a colloquium on Heidegger’s thought, published as an article in 1988, and then re-printed in Levinas’s collection Entre Nous (1991) under the title “Dying for. . ..”; Levinas (1998). A fourth text of value is the one I have already cited, the transcript of an interview with Christian Chabanis which Levinas gave in 1982, published the same year under the title “The Philosopher and Death” and now found in a collection of Levinas’s shorter writings entitled Alterity and Transcendence (pp. 153–168). For reasons I have given at length in a book review (Cohen, 2003), the much edited transcripts of student notes taken at Levinas’s (2000) Sorbonne lectures of 1975–76, published under the title God, Death, and Time, are of only very limited use despite the pages devoted to the topic of death therein.

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subjectivity—his philosophy pursues phenomenology as far as it is able, as far as the evidence goes, but reaches a point, indeed the most important point, the very point of importance, where it encounters the imposition of a non-cognitive significance (a “saying of the said,” to use Levinas’s formulation) whereby the imperatives of morality are traced in and overwhelm the very intentional (“consciousness off. . .”) and constitutional (transcendental consciousness) structures which define phenomenology as a science. It is in the excess, the “more,” the surplus of these moral imperatives that impose themselves beyond what are the most rigorous and specific phenomenological inquiries that one discovers the wisdom—the “love of wisdom” in the service of the “wisdom of love”: ethics—which is Levinas’s special contribution to the justified truth which constitutes philosophy. Thus, in the following list of the distinguishable dimensions of sense which together constitute the full meaning of mortality, the lower or conditioning layers, let us say from one to six, are primarily or for the most part phenomenologically driven analyses, while the higher or more conditioned layers of sense, from seven to nine, are ethical significations. However, precisely because the ethical is ethical because it takes precedence over the ontological, because it disabuses naïve or spontaneous subjectivity of its naiveté, the ethical is already operative even at the most primitive levels of sense, all the way “down,” as it were, to the deepest layers of the self-sensing of subjectivity. In this sense one must read this list twice, first as a phenomenology which happens to build up to its own unworthiness as an instrument of understanding, and a second time to see how the ethical, because it is first philosophy, is already operative at all layers of meaning. (To further clarify the significance of this peculiar structure of re-conditioning exceeds the limits of this paper.)

1 Suffering While the ultimate meaning of death comes to the self from the other’s mortality and not its own, death nevertheless does not come unannounced, as it were, as a complete surprise. For Levinas, however, death does not announce itself in the immanence or worldliness of subjectivity through the mood of anxiety (Angst) as it does for Heidegger. Rather, death is first intimated in the phenomenon of suffering, “in the suffering,” as Levinas says in Totality and Infinity, “called physical” (TI, p. 238), which in Time and the Other he had identified somewhat more dramatically as “the pain lightly called physical” (TO, p. 69). Let us note right away, to avoid picturing Levinas as a philosopher of suffering and pain, as a morbid thinker, that in his constitutional analyses of the origin of subjectivity as such, Levinas describes the separation and independence of an existent out of anonymous existence as a sensuous reflexivity, a “hypostasis,” which is originally an “enjoyment” (jouissance), the carefree joy and oblivious contentment of a sensibility satisfied with sensing sensations. Of course, neither do Levinas’s analyses end with this primitive condition of contentment. As a sensible being the nascent human subject is also a dependent being, a being vulnerable in its sensibility, subject to pain and suffering, and hence concerned to protect itself through the world. But death, the sense of one’s own mortality, this comes first in suffering. Of suffering, wherein lies the birth of a consciousness of death, which is for the most part a fear of death, Levinas notes that its acuity, the acuity of suffering, comes from the enforced passivity of the sufferer. That is to say, pain occurs in a doubling

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up of pain: there is pain and like a shadow there is also its inescapability, which is part of and increases the painfulness of pain. It is on the horizon of bodily pain, whose wretchedness comes from its insurmountable enchainment to itself,6 the self burdened with itself as something it would rather escape but cannot, that there appears a fear (and perhaps, in extreme cases, a welcome?) of a complete enclosure, suffocation or compression—per impossible—of this doubling over of sensing and sensation. What is announced, that is to say, in the extremity of the acuity of suffering, of the flesh suffering insufferably from itself, is death. Obviously, not all suffering—I am thinking of minor cuts and bruises—raises the fear of death (though who has not on occasion dreaded death even in a minor bruise or ailment?). Nevertheless, it is the suffering encumbered with an insufferable suffering that must nonetheless be suffered that Levinas in Time and the Other characterizes “as the call to . . . the proximity of death” (TO, p. 69). In Totality and Infinity, as in his earlier texts, suffering is again interpreted as a doubling of pain owing to its inescapability. “The whole acuity of suffering,” Levinas reiterates, “lies in the impossibility of fleeing it, of being protected in oneself from oneself; it lies in being cut off from every living spring. And it is the impossibility of retreat” (TI, p. 238). Indeed, the physical pain of suffering brings one closer to death than a psychological fear of or anxiety before death: “In suffering,” Levinas continues, “the will is defeated by sickness. In fear death is yet future, at a distance from us; whereas suffering realizes in the will the extreme proximity of the being menacing the will.”7 Indeed, as we shall see, because for Levinas death is never present, it is actually in suffering, and not in fear-of or being-toward death, that the will is menaced: “The supreme ordeal of the will [or “of freedom”] is not death,” Levinas writes, “but suffering” (TI, p. 238). For this reason, too, Levinas rejects the alleged purity, the immaculate freedom of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “for-itself,” and instead finds “ambiguity”

6 This notion of “enchainment to oneself”—“a kind of dead weight in the depths of our being” (p. 60)—is the central themes of Levinas’s 1935 article entitled “On Escape”; Levinas (2003). There already Levinas writes: “Nevertheless, death is not the exit toward which escape thrusts us. Death can only appear to it if escape reflects upon itself.” (p. 67). 7 TI, p. 238. Here is the place to mention Michael J. Hyde’s fine book, The call of conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, rhetoric and the euthanasia debate (2001). Because his topic is the euthanasia debate, Hyde’s approach to death in Heidegger and Levinas occurs precisely at the level of suffering, of the death that is “announced” in suffering. Hyde discovers that suffering persons who oppose euthanasia find sufficient meaning in life despite their enormous suffering. Those who support euthanasia and choose to die voluntarily, do not. They refuse to live a life hopelessly debilitated, as they see it, by enormous suffering. It is because his book is about suffering, then, and not really a philosophical debate over the ultimate significance of death, that for Hyde: “These two thinkers [Heidegger and Levinas] can (and must) go together.” (p. 254). Accordingly, he describes the human being who faces tremendous suffering, whether choosing to live or to die, as “a creature whose existence is at the same time a being-unto-death and a being for others.” (p. 237). Instead of attempting to engage or decide the Levinas–Heidegger debate in terms of the root “definition” of human subjectivity, Hyde rather uses their respective insights as two perspectives which are both useful to understand concrete human responses to pain. To the extent that something is said regarding this debate, however, Hyde argues that Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death as non-relational is by itself inadequate and dangerous (for those who suffer), and must be tempered with Levinas’s account of the irreducible inter-subjective and hence moral context of human mortality (see, especially, the subsection entitled “Heidegger and Levinas”; pp. 7–10).

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(as did Maurice Merleau-Ponty) in the embodied will. “Suffering remains ambiguous: it is already the present of the pain acting on the for itself of the will, but, as consciousness, the pain is always yet to come. In suffering the free being ceases to be free, but, while non-free, is yet free” (TI, p. 238.) Such a formulation upsets the niceties of logic, but it accurately describes a will both independent and dependent. The will is not absolute: though independent and free, it is nevertheless threatened, backed up against itself, fearful in suffering. But what is it that is glimpsed at on the hither side of acute suffering?

2 Mystery For ages, common sense has understood that death is unknowable. As we say, “no one comes back.” If you “come back,” then you were not dead in the first place! (despite all the so-called “after death” experiences hyped in the media). In Time and the Other Levinas goes farther. It is not enough to say that death is unknowable. Its inscrutability goes beyond the known and unknown. It is not known, to be sure, but it is also not simply unknown, as if it were somehow within the realm of knowledge but not yet known or even unknowable in principle. The point, very simply, is that knowledge is not its proper medium. Levinas therefore calls death a “mystery” (TO, p. 75). Although it was Gabriel Marcel (whom Levinas greatly respected) who a few years prior to Levinas gave this term a certain philosophical legitimacy, unfortunately, because he never defined it or presented precise formulations of its specificity, the term “mystery” in Marcel’s usage remained vague and, let us say it, rather mysterious.8 For Levinas, in contrast, when speaking of death as mystery he means something quite precise: “It is not unknown but unknowable, refractory to all light” (TI, p. 76). “I have characterized this event as mystery because it could not be anticipated—that is, grasped” (TI, p. 77). We will return to the futurity of death shortly. The point at hand is its recalcitrance to knowing, not only with regard to its “when” (which is perhaps only a provisional unknown based on our current limited scientific knowledge of human genetics, biology and physiology), but more fundamentally death is recalcitrant to knowledge regarding its nature. It is not enough to say that one knows nothing and can know nothing about what death is. Rather, the mystery of death—that which is ungraspable—is not an object of knowledge, of any knowledge. It is, to say the obvious, outside of all grasp. In Totality and Infinity Levinas reaffirms the impenetrable mysteriousness of death. “Death is a menace that approaches me as a mystery; its secrecy determines it—it approaches without being able to be assumed, such that the time that separates me from my death dwindles and dwindles without end, involves a sort of last interval 8 Marcel’s Gifford Lectures of 1949–1950 at the University of Aberdeen were published in two volumes under the title Mystery of Being (Volume One: Reflection and Mystery (whose final chapter is entitled “Presence as Mystery”); Volume Two: Faith and Reality). He also takes up the notion of “mystery” in his Metaphysical Journal, first published in French in 1927, and then translated into English (with Marcel’s help) by Bernard Will and published in 1952. One of Marcel’s efforts to provide what he calls a “definition” of the term “mystery” occurs in a volume collecting several of his writings in English translation, by Manya Harrari, which appeared under the title The Philosophy of Existentialism (1956), in its first essay entitled “On the Ontological Mystery,” written, Marcel informs us, in 1933: “A mystery is a problem which encroaches upon its own data, invading them, as it were, and thereby transcending itself as a simple problem.” Mysterious indeed.

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which my consciousness cannot traverse, and where a leap will somehow be produced from death to me” (TI, p. 235). It follows, as Levinas points out in a footnote to this passage, that death or human mortality cannot be understood, as Heidegger thought, as “the possibility of impossibility,” in which case it remains within the grasp of comprehension (it is ultimately the “understanding of being”!), but rather “the impossibility of possibility” (an expression Levinas attributes to Jean Wahl), something essentially outside of or beyond all human capabilities whatsoever. “This apparently Byzantine distinction,” Levinas notes, “has a fundamental importance” (TI, p. 70, n. 43). It is fundamentally important, as shall become even clearer as we proceed, because by treating death as that which is beyond possibility, as a mystery beyond the realm of any sort of comprehension, death transcends rather than confirms the self-understanding of human subjectivity, and in this way heralds the transcending of human subjectivity as understanding.

3 Passivity Before turning to what is perhaps the most distinctive structure of death that has already been hinted at, that is, death as that which comes to me and not I to it, we must first underline another level of meaning that has just been touched upon, namely, the “passivity of the subject” (TO, p. 70). In the approach of death, in the dying person’s sinking into the closure of suffering, “in the crying and sobbing,” Levinas sees the end of the subject’s liveliness and verve, “the end of the subject’s virility and heroism” (TO, p. 72). In this regard, dying is a “supreme irresponsibility” and “infancy” (TO, p. 72). Or, as Levinas puts it in a formula that he will later repeat in Totality and Infinity, “in the face of death one is no longer able to be able” (TO, p. 78). The subject in approaching death through suffering and illness, in dying, is emasculated, debilitated, incapacitated—rendered passive. Levinas is clearly posing such passivity in direct contrast to Heidegger’s claim that authentic Dasein must be “resolute” (entschlossen) in its being-toward-death, that in contrast to the pusillanimous and anonymous crowd the individuated Dasein must “have the courage” of its “anxiety before death.” Furthermore, Dasein in being-toward-death is not only resolute; it is an understanding, a comprehension, a revelation of being—and it is this understanding that under girds its resolution: Dasein is resolute because it resolves to understand being. “Being toward death,” Levinas writes of this, “in Heidegger’s authentic existence, is a supreme lucidity and hence a supreme virility. . . . Death in Heidegger is an event of freedom, whereas for me the subject seems to reach the limit of the possible in suffering. It finds itself enchained, overwhelmed, and in some way passive. Death is in this sense the limit of idealism” (TO, p. 71). Death, for Levinas, is not facing up to and grasping a possible future, it is rather to face the impossibility of a future. It is therefore debilitating rather than strengthening. Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness describes his own wrestling with death as “the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot . . . without glory, without the great desire for victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism.”9 “There 9 Joseph Conrad, Youth a Narrative: and Two Other Stories (1902); Memorial Edition: Collected Works of Joseph Conrad, Vol. VI (New York: Doubleday, Page Co., 1925), p. 150. I thank Professor James Mclachlan of Western Carolina University for this reference.

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is only one thing that I dread:” said Dostoyevsky, “not to be worthy of my suffering” (cited in Frankl, 1959). Here we must make a very important observation about the contrast between Levinas and Heidegger on death. Heidegger in speaking of being-toward-death is in no way necessarily talking about the dying subject, the subject critically ill or on a deathbed, the subject that Levinas seems to be invoking in his analysis of death. Being-toward-death in Heidegger is a basic ontological structure (an “existential”) of Dasein’s authentic being and not a specific reaction to a specific occasion, to a sickness or an injury, say. So are Levinas and Heidegger simply talking at cross purposes, simply talking about two different meanings? Let us answer in the following way, linking these two approaches: insofar as being-toward-death is an essential structure of Dasein’s authentic being, if and when Dasein does happen to suffer the pains of sickness or injury, if Dasein is authentic then is will remain resolute, self-possessed, a care for being, and in this sense courageous, active and virile. Looked at this way, we can see that Levinas’s reading of the suffering and pain of dying is indeed an alternative directly critical of the Heideggerian account. For Levinas the meaning of death lies in suffering as incapacitation and passivity, not in a being-toward-death lucid and virile as an openness to being’s free meaning-bestowal. 4 Futurity While the passivity, incapacitation, irresponsibility and intimation of death felt in the suffering of illness and injury, all establish that the subject maintains an intimate relationship with death, for Levinas, nevertheless, death itself remains forever future, and hence exterior to the self-presence that constitutes the separated subject. In Time and the Other, citing the adage of Epicurus that “If you are, it is not; if it is, you are not,” Levinas approves of its recognition of the “eternal futurity of death” (TO, p. 71.). “Death,” he writes, “is never now. When death is here, I am no longer here, not just because I am nothingness, but because I am unable to grasp” (TO, p. 72). It is true that for Heidegger also the primary temporal dimension of death is its futurity, but for Heidegger this does not derive from its aspect of “not yet,” its being “something still outstanding” (an interpretation Heidegger explicitly considers an inauthentic construal of the futurity of death10 ), but rather from Dasein’s comportment, from Dasein’s being-toward itself as being-toward possibilities. For Levinas, in contrast, death is never now, is always to come, always remains future, not because the human subject somehow projectively integrates what is coming, which for Levinas is impossible, but quite the reverse because the human subject cannot catch up to, cannot embrace, cannot be-toward death which is always and ever future. Totality and Infinity also affirms the absolute futurity of death, but, as we shall see in sub-section nine below, for Levinas that futurity will be associated with the as yet unmet demands of justice.

10 BT, p. 293: “The Interpretation in which the ‘not yet’—and with it even the uttermost ‘not-yet,’ the end of Dasein—was taken in the sense of something still outstanding, has been rejected as inappropriate in that it included the ontological perversion of making Dasein something present-athand.”

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5 Postponement11 Because death is always future, and when I am it is not, on the rebound, as it were, it is always in the “meantime”—not toward death but before death, prior to death—that human life is lived. “Prior to death,” Levinas writes in Time and the Other, “there is always a last chance.”12 On this point Levinas invokes Shakespeare. “Like Hamlet,” Levinas comments, “we prefer this known existence to unknown existence” (TO, p. 78). Indeed, in this early work Levinas presents an entire exegesis of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He cites MacBeth’s final defiant words, perhaps said as much to himself as to McDuff, when it seems that all hope is lost: “Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane, and thou oppos’d, being of no woman born, yet I will try the last” (TO, p. 73). MacBeth refuses to accept death; death is precisely what cannot be accepted, precisely because it is always still outstanding, no matter how close or how inevitable it may seem. Levinas could equally well have cited verses from Dylan Thomas’s now famous poem for his dying father: “Rage! Rage! Rage against the night! Do not go gently into that good night.” Or the following more gentle verses from Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave,/ Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;/ Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave./ I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” In Totality and Infinity Levinas will speak of the time of this last chance, this interval between death and myself, the time that ever remains before a future that never arrives, as a “postponement” constitutive of time and of meaning (and, though I am putting this off, of sociality). “The postponement of death,” he writes, “in a mortal will—time—is the mode of existence and reality of a separated being that has entered into relation with the Other. . . . In it is enacted a meaningful life which one must not measure against an ideal of eternity, taking its duration and its interests to be absurd or illusory” (TI, p. 232). Or: “The will, already betrayal and alienation of itself but postponing this betrayal, on the way to death but a death ever future, exposed to death but not immediately, has time to be for the Other, and thus to recover meaning despite death” (TI, p. 236). Putting aside for the moment the announcement of the 11 A book (a revised dissertation?) that purports to be on the topic of death and responsibility in Levinas: Keenan (1999), in fact focuses more narrowly on the time of “postponement.” And even here, dealing with what is only a component of Levinas’s far more complex account of death, Keenan further limits himself to a deconstructive interpretation influenced especially by Derrida’s The Gift of Death. Typically, then, Keenen misreads Levinas’s faithful descriptions of the ambiguities inherent in incarnate freedom as if Levinas were naively guilty of “contradictions,” as if propositional logic determined phenomenological descriptions. So too does Keenan’s “reading” manage to discover that Levinasian responsibility is guilty of. . . irresponsibility! So it goes. Poor Levinas, one wonders how he managed to get through Philosophy 101 or get all those sloppy books published. Keenan can assert all he wants (a great deal apparently) that his is “a close, careful, and detailed reading” of Levinas, “a matter of nuance.” In fact it is nothing of the sort, more nonsense than nuance. As for Keenan’s Master, Derrida, I am reminded—beyond Shakespeare’s “The lady doth protest too much.”—of Levinas’s comment in a 1985 interview with Angelo Bianchi: “I have often wondered, with respect to Derrida, whether the differance of the present which leads him to the deconstruction of notions does not attest to the prestige that eternity retains in his eyes, the ‘great present,’ being, which corresponds to the priority of the theoretical and the truth of the theoretical, in relation to which temporality would be failure. I wonder if time—in its very dia-chrony—isn’t better than eternity and the order of God itself” (Levinas, 1999b, p. 173). Also, see Cohen (1994). 12 TO, p. 73. Psychologists refer to the “delusion of reprieve” of persons condemned to death who just before their execution misinterpret signs in the surrounding world to believe that a pardon is immanent. One thinks also of Ambrose Bierce’s remarkable and jarring story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”

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other person, it is within this meantime, in this last change which lasts forever, in this time of postponement, that the entire dimension of human meaning is opened. Death is one of life’s inevitabilities, so it seems—but it is not now, this is Levinas’s point. In this “being against death,” (TI, p. 236), as Levinas calls it (and the allusion to and criticism of Heidegger could not be more obvious), in the meaningful life that it makes possible, the mortal subject lives in a time where there is time to postpone violence and to establish the institutions that guarantee, as much as anything can be guaranteed across time and history, the postponement of violence. 6 The grim reaper It is at this point that our attention must be drawn to something quite astonishing that Levinas saw as early as Time and the Other, namely, the idea that time itself is neither objective nor subjective but is intersubjective, something we have just heard in the citations above taken from Totality and Infinity, in which Levinas has spoken of the time of postponement as a “time to be for the Other,” or, even more directly, when he writes that such time “is the mode of existence and reality of a separated being that has entered into relation with the Other.” Death is not only a future that always comes but never arrives; its transcendence is like nothing so much as, is tantamount to, is as if it were the approach of another human being. I cite another longer passage by Levinas from Totality and Infinity which makes this same point even more pointedly. In the being for death of fear I am not faced with nothingness, but faced with what is against me, as though murder, rather than being one of the occasions of dying, were inseparable from the essence of death, as though the approach of death remained one of the modalities of the relation with the Other. The violence of death threatens as a tyranny, as though proceeding from a foreign will. The order of necessity that is carried out in death is not like an implacable law of determinism governing a totality, but is rather like the alienation of my will by the Other (TI, p. 234). Before explicating this description of death as like another human being approaching, and hence death as if coming like murder, let me first focus more narrowly on Levinas’s use of the expression “as though.” It does not at all simply indicate a simile or metaphor. It has rather to do with Levinas’s manner of doing phenomenology, and occurs in many places in Levinas’s work. To understand the meaning of a term, any term, Levinas seeks out its most extreme sense. For instance, to understand the feeling of entrapment or enclosure, which we mentioned earlier with regard to the meaning of suffering, it is not enough to invoke the phenomena of claustrophobia, say, which leaves open the possible misinterpretation that one is merely pyschologizing. One must rather seek out where or how this feeling originally gains the full force of its signification; one must search for more extreme forms of entrapment. For Levinas such a deeper sense derives from the way the body is encumbered with itself. And here, too, one can go farther. In his early article entitled “On Escape,” Levinas will say that the body’s nausea with itself derives its ultimate significance as an encounter with being, as that beyond which one feels it is impossible to go, an existence without escape, without exit. Being is encountered as that which has no exits, the ultimate trap, the ultimate enclosure, and it is from this meaning of being, being as entrapment or enclosure, that all “lesser” senses of enclosure, for instance “claustrophobia,” gain their sense by near or far derivation. So, as a general rule of phenomenological inves-

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tigation, for Levinas it is from the most extreme meaning of a signification, the one without any presuppositions, that the lesser meanings of that same signification derive their meaning. And this is why Levinas sees in the futurity of death—murder. It is an important transition, so let us review it carefully. We have seen that death is first intimated in pain, as a fear, as an intimation of an extremity of the doubling over of pain. It is experienced as that which lies over the border of an extreme passivity as an ever more extreme passivity to the point of a never-experienced but feared massive inertness. A living being, however much it may suffer, is never dead. Its passivity has limits. A body is not a corpse. Death never arrives. It always remains future. It transcends the present, opens up a meantime wherein everything meaningful occurs. But, the phenomenologist must ask a further question, hence Levinas must ask, what does it mean really to say that something never arrives into the self-presence of the self, that it remains always future? Is this signification ultimate, irreducible, presuppositionless? And if it is not, from whence does the futurity of the future derive its sense? It is because he approaches meaning in this way that we can understand the justification for Levinas’s answer: the transcendence of death as futurity makes sense, or takes it sense from the even more transcendent futurity of the other person. Death is thus like, or as though, or tantamount to, the transcendence of the oncoming futurity of another person. Thus death comes like murder. And with this signification we shift from phenomenology to ethics, because for Levinas inter-subjectivity, the relation to the other person, my relation to you, is first significant as an ethical relation. Nothing could be farther from the ontological analysis of Heidegger which left ethics and other persons behind as merely ontic or inauthentic. 7 The doctor Thus, too, even my mortality (before we consider the other’s mortality) is not, as Heidegger thought, a matter of solitude. My own death, my “ownmost” death, as Heidegger said, is not “non-relational.” Being-with-others is not merely inauthentic. For Levinas, a mortal being, most especially when wounded, suffering or dying, remains in relation to that which is transcendent, remains in relation to the other, and hence remains within an ethical relation. Again I cite Levinas at some length, and again from Totality and Infinity: The solitude of death does not make the Other vanish, but remains in a consciousness of hostility, and consequently still renders possible an appeal to the Other, to his friendship and his medication. The doctor is an a priori principle of human mortality. Death approaches in the fear of someone, and hopes in someone. . . . A social conjunction is maintained in this menace (TI, p. 234). My death, however much it remains mine in the compression of my suffering, always retains its social and hence its ethical character: I can be saved, and in the meantime of dying, in the ever future futurity of death, hope remains for a cure or recovery. This is why some terminally ill persons pay to have their dead bodies frozen—perhaps a cure will be found in the future. This is why euthanasia is a risk. . . a cure might be found. It is interesting, too, and too little considered, that it is not inorganic matter that is infinite but rather the organic, life, which through reproduction literally—though at the species level and not the individual level—has no end, goes on to infinity. A rock, however hard, eventually wears away, disintegrates and vanishes. But life, or at least species life, has absolutely no internal end and under the right conditions can go on

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forever. I bring up this interesting fact because it confirms Levinas’s idea that death comes to the self from the outside, and comes to the self from the outside not, as Spinoza thought, “like an implacable law of determinism governing a totality,” but as though it were murder. One can, in principle, even as an individual, live forever. Every death, even the most natural death, comes as though it were murder. Under different conditions, in a different time, say, one might have gone on living. According to certain Bible interpretations, Adam was meant to live forever had he not eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And the early biblical figures, if we trust the numbers given in the Bible, certainly lived very long lives. Death comes from the outside, hence it comes like murder. “The doctor is an a priori principle of human morality,” because in principle life can be extended forever, and thus all deaths come as murders. 8 Morality: dying for the other But there is another side to death: if all death comes as murder, it is not only my death that comes as murder, so too does the other’s death come as murder. And this consideration brings us to the ultimate sense of death, which lies not in my suffering or even in my dying, but rather derives from the primacy of the other person that we have already detected in the futurity of death, and the manner in which dying remains a social event. For Levinas, it is not my mortality and suffering that come first, but rather and precisely the mortality and suffering of the other. Death remains a social event, and sociality is, in Levinas’s view, initiated in the primacy of the ethical, initiated, that is to say, in the primacy of the other person. So, considering the meaning of death, the death that remains social and hence ethical, the primary directive, the over-riding moral imperative is to alleviate the suffering of the other, the one whose mortality comes first. The imperative of the face of the other, Levinas writes, “commands me to not remain indifferent to this death, to not let the Other die alone, that is, to answer for the life of the other person, at the risk of becoming an accomplice in that person’s death.”13 If the face of the other, as Levinas has taught, first appears in the imperative “Thou shall not murder,” then to not murder the other I must tend to the other’s suffering, to the other’s mortality, and do everything in my means to avert the violence which produces the death of the other. “Thou shall not murder” means the “face” of the other person, as all readers of Levinas know, but it means this not as an abstract and remote command, but as the concrete requirement, the command, to support the life, to alleviate the pain and suffering, and to forestall the dying of the other. And the most extreme meaning, indeed, the paradigmatic meaning of “Thou shall not murder,” in the sense of caring for the mortal other’s suffering, is captured in the extreme formula that Levinas invokes in his later writings: “dying for the other.” One can not only sacrifice one’s own money, and time, and needs to alleviate the other’s suffering, but one can be called to make the ultimate sacrifice for the other, the ultimate self-sacrifice, to give (as we say) one’s life for the life of the other. This extreme notion, which of course is not simply an idea, is no idle fancy either, for it is precisely what all but a handful of war heroes have actually done, or, as Merleau-Ponty put the point shortly after the end of World War II: “The heroes are all dead.” 13 Emmanuel Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation”(1982), in TO, p. 108.

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It is in the moral extremity of this notion, “dying for the other,” that Levinas finds the ultimate sense of mortality, and perhaps also the ultimate sense of morality, living for and caring for others—“to not let the other die alone.” Levinas will invoke this sense to understand the very humanity of the human. As he writes in his 1988 article entitled “Dying for. . .”: “[T]he human, in which worry over the death of the other comes before care for self. The humanness of dying for the other would be the very meaning of love in its responsibility for one’s fellowman and, perhaps, the primordial inflection of the affective as such” (Levinas, 1998, p. 216). Here is yet another citation from the same article. (But it is not the last word.) The priority of the other over the I, by which the human being-there is chosen and unique, is precisely the latter’s response to the nakedness of the face and its mortality. It is there that the concern for the other’s death is realized, and that “dying for him,” “dying his death” takes priority over “authentic” death. Not a post-mortem life, but the excessiveness of sacrifice, holiness in charity and mercy. This future of death in the present of love is probably one of the original secrets of temporality itself and beyond all metaphor (Levinas, 1998, p. 217). 9 Justice beyond death I have said that “dying for” the other is the ultimate meaning of mortality and morality, but it is nonetheless not the last word to be said about death. The last word must be given to justice, because justice supplements morality and as such provides another dimension to the meaning of “dying for.” The moral person dies for the other, for the well-being of the other. The just person dies for all others, for the freedom and equality that in society at large make possible a moral life. To die for another, to make the most extreme and ultimate sacrifice, is not enough because the world goes on after my death. Of course, to die for the other is indeed the ultimate sacrifice, and assuming that such dying is the morally right thing to do, a genuine requirement of an exceptional compassion, then nothing else is or can be required of he or she who gives his or her life. But morality, whatever the sacrifices it requires, is for Levinas not sufficient by itself. Morality must be supplemented by justice, since to give all to one person does not (without further consideration) take account of what is needed by others, by those who do not face me but who face the other, say, or who face others who are not facing me. Society is made up of more than two persons. I am speaking, of course, of what Levinas calls “the third,” he who is other to the other, of society at large. It is here that my compassion for the one who faces is insufficient. It is here that justice is demanded, where each person who is unique, singular, unequal to another, must be treated, under law, as an equal to others. It is here that institutions—courts, legislatures, police, etc.—are required to ensure justice and morality. But what has death to do with justice? It has everything to do with justice! Indeed, just as justice is required by morality for the sake of morality, so justice is the final and ultimate meaning of mortality, even beyond the extreme sacrifice of “dying for the other.” The meaningful world, we have seen, occurs in the meantime, in the time of postponement before death. But the meaning of the meaningful world derives from morality, from care for the other’s mortality before my own. And, as we have just noted, morality must be supplemented by justice, by a care for all others, a care that cannot be accomplished solely in the love and compassion one person can have for another, but requires institutions and law

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also, to postpone violence and to secure a world in which the imperatives of morality can be fulfilled without fear or harm. All this is another way of saying that not only must the self place the mortality of the other before its own mortality, but the self must live for a time beyond its own time, beyond, that is to say, its own death. “Signification,” Levinas writes, “comes from an authority that is significant after and despite my death, signifying to the finite ego, to the ego doomed to death, a meaningful order significant beyond this death. This is not, to be sure, some promise of resurrection, but an obligation that death does not absolve.”14 To serve an authority—the authority of justice—beyond one’s own life, “after and despite my death,” is not as strange as it may first sound, and is indeed almost an everyday consideration. It is at work when one buys life insurance. It is at work when one votes for a bond issue for school financing, or for parks or bridges. It is at work when one plants a tree for one’s children or grandchildren. The futurity of justice lies beyond the futurity of the one who faces. The world, as I have said, does not disappear with one’s own death. The world will need to be just beyond our own deaths, and our care to ensure and secure the institutions of justice is a requirement coming from the depth of our commitment to morality. . . all the way to the requirement of justice, of a world where everyone can be moral without violence. “In any case,” Camus writes at the conclusion of The Rebel, “if he is not always able not to kill, either directly or indirectly, he can put his convictions and passion to work at diminishing the chances of murder around him.”15 The biblical “stranger” toward whom Levinas directs our moral compassion is not simply or not only the other person who faces or those “neighbors” who are far away, but also those who are not yet born. The ultimate sense of the future, the ultimate sense of mortality, thus lies beyond morality in justice, for those as yet unborn, for all the generations to come. There is in the Other a meaning and an obligation that oblige me beyond my death! The futuration of the future does not reach me as a to-come, as the horizon of my anticipations or pro-tensions. Must one not, in this imperative signification of the future that concerns me as a non-in-difference to the other person, as my responsibility for the stranger—must one not, in this rupture of the natural order of being, understand what is—improperly—called super-natural?16 Levinas invokes the much abused religious term “super-natural” not only because morality and justice move counter to our natural selfishness and clannishness, but also because the concrete meaning of the divine, of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of monotheism, makes sense to humans precisely in and as the work of justice. Whether we call it “justice” or call it “God,” the ultimate “authority”—transcendent, better, “super-natural”—in whose imperative force death and mortality make sense, lies here. And with this, I conclude my account of the ninth and final dimension of 14 Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” TO, p. 114. At the conclusion of Dostoyevky’s The Brothers Karamovoz, it is only after he has declared to the gathered children that he wants “to suffer for all men,” and only after he has taught them to love one another as a proper memorial to their dead friend Ilusha, and only in response to a direct question put to him by one of the children, does Alyosha, “half laughing, half enthusiastic,” assent to a literal and consoling interpretation of resurrection. 15 Camus (1956). In this book, Camus, like Levinas, defends being-against-death as the very heart of human “rebellion,” i.e., of finite human freedom: “The consequence of rebellion . . . is to refuse to legitimize murder because rebellion, in principle, is a protest against death.” (p. 285). 16 Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” TO, p. 115.

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Levinas’s account of death, with a citation from Levinas: “The futuration of the future is not a ‘proof of God’s existence,’ but ‘the fall of God into meaning’.”17 The meaning of death as morality and justice is precisely and nothing less than the sense that God makes for the difficult freedom of a unachieved humanism. Not “God or Nature,” as Spinoza thought, sacrificing morality and religion to an eternal and impersonal nature, or “Temporality and Historicity,” as Heidegger thought, sacrificing a mortal humanity to the historicizing of being, but “God or Justice,” as Levinas claims, respecting transcendence and authority in the nobility of the quest for justice, the unfinished personal and communal adventure of social redemption.

Conclusion Levinas’s phenomenological–ethical account of death thus has a deeper “bottom” and a higher “top,” as it were, than Heidegger’s phenomenological–ontological account. It begins more deeply, in subjectivity conceived in the self-sensing of sensibility, thus in suffering, rather than in a subject first defined by the worldly (instrumentality) and social (“the they”) distractions that are overturned in anxiety and the resolute selfunderstanding of one’s ownmost non-relational being-toward-death. And Levinas’s account of death faces a more radical or greater transcendence in the priority and exigency of an infinite moral responsibility for-the-other’s mortal being, ultimately a “dying for” the other person, and in the transcendence of an as yet unachieved justice for-all-others. All this in contrast to Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s mortal and hence temporalizing understanding finding its authentic being in a bespeaking of being’s never fully actualized historicizing. Transcendence for Heidegger requires that mortal beings be responsible not for other persons but for being, to be as the caretakers, the shepherds, the mouthpieces of the historicizing being of all beings. In critical contrast, Levinas saw that beyond the being of all beings, a responsibility was incumbent on beings as beings, specifically on mortal and suffering human beings, though separate from one another, to rise to a higher, nobler, responsibility, to care for one another, the I for-the-other, the other who as a mortal being suffers and should not face death alone, who requires help, who imposes the moral demand to be saved from the violence of death, imposing thereby—from the transcendence of the other’s mortal separation from me—the infinite demands of morality and justice.

References Camus, A. (1956). The Rebel, trans Anthony Bower (pp. 285–286). New York: Alfred A. Knoft. Cohen, R. A. (1994). Derrida’s mal(reading) of Levinas (ch. 14). In Elevations: The Height of the good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (pp. 305–321). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cohen, R. A. (2003). Book review. International Studies in Philosophy, XXXXV/2, 154–161 Frankl, V. (1959). From death-camp to existentialism, trans. Ilse Lasch (p. 66). Boston: Beacon Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. Hyde, M. J. (2001). The call of conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, rhetoric and the euthanasia debate. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Keenam, D. K. (1999). Death and responsibility: The “work” of Levinas. Albany: State University of New York. 17 Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” TO, p. 115.

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Kisiel, T. (2002). From intuition to understanding: On Heidegger’s transposition of Husserl’s phenomenology. In Thedore Kisiel, Heidegger’s way of thought (p. 175). New York: Continuum. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis. pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1987). Time and the other and additional essays, trans. richard A. Cohen. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1998). “Dying for …” In Entre nous, trans. Michael B. Smith (pp. 207–217). New York: Columbia University Press. Levinas, E. (1999a). The philospher and death. In E. Levinas, Atterity and transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press. Levinas, E. (1999b). Violence of the face. In E. Levinas, Alterity and transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press. Levinas, E. (2000). God, death, and time, trans. Bettina Bargo. In Jacques Rolland (Ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press. Levinas, E. (2003). On escape, trans. Bettina Bargo. Stanford: Stanford Univesity Press. Spinoza, B. (1992). The ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett. Strauss, L. (1989). An introduction to Heidggerian existentialism. In Thomas L. Pangle (Ed.), The rebirth of classical political rationalism: An introduction to the thought of Leo Strauss (p. 37, p. 29). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Int J Philos Relig (2006) 60:41–59 DOI 10.1007/s11153-006-0013-6 O R I G I NA L PA P E R

Life, death and (inter)subjectivity: realism and recognition in continental feminism Pamela Sue Anderson

Received: 13 December 2005 / Accepted: 23 Febraury 2006 / Published online: 25 November 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Abstract I begin with the assumption that a philosophically significant tension exists today in feminist philosophy of religion between those subjects who seek to become divine and those who seek their identity in mutual recognition. My critical engagement with the ambiguous assertions of Luce Irigaray seeks to demonstrate, on the one hand, that a woman needs to recognize her own identity but, on the other hand, that each subject whether male or female must struggle in relation to the other in order to maintain realism about life and death. No one can avoid the recognition that we are each given life but each of us also dies. In addition, I raise a more general, philosophical problem for analytic philosophers who attempt to read Continental philosophy of religion: how should philosophers interpret deliberately ambiguous assertions? For example, what does Irigaray mean in asserting, ‘Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign’? To find an answer, I turn to the distinctively French readings of the Hegelian struggle for recognition which have preoccupied Continental philosophers especially since the first half of the last century. I explore the struggle for mutual recognition between women and men who must face the reality of life and death in order to avoid the projection of their fear of mortality onto the other sex. This includes a critical look at Irigaray’s account of subjectivity and divinity. I turn to the French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff in order to shift the focus from divinity to intersubjectivity. I conclude that taking seriously the struggle for mutual recognition between subjects forces contemporary philosophers of religion to be realist in their living and dying. With this in mind, the lesson from the Continent for philosophy of religion is that we must not stop yearning for recognition. Indeed, we must even risk our autonomy/divinity in seeking to recognize intersubjectivity. Keywords Ambiguity · Autonomy · Beauvoir · Body · Feminist · Fluidity · Hegel · Intersubjectivity · Irigaray · Le Doeuff · Life · Love · Mortality · Natality · Reciprocity · Recognition · Sovereignty · Subjectivity

P. S. Anderson (B) Regent’s Park College Pusey Street, Oxford, OX1 2LB, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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Introduction “Let me go where I am not yet!’ The ambiguity of these words were meant by Hanneke Canters to preserve what she found to be the ‘fluidity’ of the original French: ‘Laisse-moi aller où je ne suis pas encore’.1 Canters’s words have taken on a life of their own for the young feminist philosopher of religion who died tragically in 2002. As a postgraduate student writing a doctoral thesis in Philosophy, Canters was determined to take seriously a woman’s philosophical search for identity as portrayed in Elemental Passions. The latter is a difficult, some might say highly obscure, poetic text written by the Continental philosopher and psycholinguist Luce Irigaray. However, with the posthumous publication of Forever Fluid: A Reading of Luce Irigaray’s Elemental Passions, we can reflect with Canters on the meaning of life and its passions, even after her death.2 It seems right and timely to take the publication of Forever Fluid as a starting point for my critical assessment of Irigaray’s admonition that women become divine. One implicit aim of this assessment is to illustrate a more general, philosophical problem with interpretations of Irigaray’s writings. How do we read ambiguity?3 This question can also be seen as a real obstacle for analytic philosophers who attempt to read Continental philosophy of religion. To structure my assessment, I will focus upon a topic which continues to have a central role in contemporary Continental philosophy: the life and death struggle for mutual recognition between gendered subjects. A distinctively French reading of the Hegelian struggle for recognition has preoccupied Continental philosophers especially since the first half of the last century.4 Roughly, in Simone de Beauvoir’s French Hegelian terms, to understand male domination of the female other it is necessary to reveal the way in which woman as the Other is forced to represent death (like evil or sin) in life: she takes on man’s fear of mortality (so, too defilement); the struggle for recognition, then, explains how domination avoids a confrontation with the reality of one’s own death. Once a woman recognizes her (gender) identity as free and autonomous, man’s fear re-emerges as the inevitable fate of any being whose consciousness is embodied. The significant critical tension in this topic for feminist philosophy of religion is that a woman not only needs to recognize her own identity, for instance, in Irigarayan terms, in ‘becoming divine,’ but each woman and each man must struggle in relation to another subject in order to maintain realism about life, love and death. A critical look at Irigaray’s account of becoming divine as 1 Hanneke Canters died on 6 September 2002 – not long after she had received her PhD in Feminist Philosophy from the University of Sunderland, UK. The words quoted here make up Canters’s English translation of the original French statement by Irigaray (1982, p. 30); I also note that Hanneke is thanked for being ‘my ideal reader’ and for her ‘remarkable excitement’ about the first monograph in feminist philosophy of religion, see Anderson, (1998, p. xvi). 2 Work which went into Canters’s doctorate is published posthumously in a book completed after Hanneke’s death by Grace M. Jantzen; cf. Canters and Jantzen (2005). It is with great sadness that I must add another note: since the time when this article was completed, Grace M. Jantzen herself has died on 2 May 2006. The article should be read with this in mind. 3 A word about the meaning of ‘ambiguity’ (ambigue) in French philosophy. Ambiguity can mean, as in English, a linguistic expression which has more than one interpretation or is uncertain in interpretation. However, in French ambigue can also mean the way in which two opposing qualities are united or two contradictory things participate in one nature without being synthesized. Love is an example of something, which certain French philosophers take to be ambiguous in the latter sense. See Levinas (1992, section IV, subsection A, pp. 254ff). Also, see footnote 13. 4 For helpful background on this French reception of Hegel, see Butler (1987) and Roth (1988).

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one way to achieve a real sense of gendered identity, will constitute a necessary first step toward self-recognition. The next step uncovers a common human passion in the philosophical search for self-identity: what I will call ‘yearning’.5 But this step involves risk in struggling to uncover such passion. The French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff uncovers certain dangers for those subjects whose identities and relationships are undermined by philosophical practices of exclusion. With the help of Le Doeuff, our attention is moved from subjectivity and divinity to intersubjectivity in her sense of ‘a collective historical experience’.6 My contention is that the ultimate goal of a woman’s philosophical search for identity is mutual recognition, even if unreachable. The struggle of mutual recognition serves as a guiding ideal; it also ensures a realism. I should qualify my reference to our yearning for recognition. I am indebted to the (post)-Hegelian account of longing in Judith Butler’s ‘Longing for Recognition’.7 Yet I employ the specific term, yearning, to stress the cognitive and political nature of a common passion for equalitarian reciprocity.8 This cognitive passion unites subjects across gender, sexual, racial and class divides. But the yearning for recognition ensures both the realism and the risk of intersubjectivity. This risk – or peril – is captured in the following lines which Canters selects from Irigaray’s Elemental Passions: we can never be sure of bridging the gap between us. But that is our adventure. Without this peril there is no us. If you turn it into a guarantee, you separate us (Irigaray, 1982, p. 28). Keeping these, however, ambiguous words in mind we shall approach intersubjectivity, indirectly, in first considering the relationship between subjectivity and divinity as currently debated in the field of feminist philosophy of religion.

5 ‘Yearning’ has been a central concept of my writings in feminist philosophy of religion, Anderson (1998, p. 22). Also see, hooks (1990). Roughly, I appropriate the term itself, ‘yearning’, from bell hooks to identify a common, rational passion which is a vital reality of religion. My account of yearning builds upon the imperative of feminist standpoint epistemology: to think from the lives of others, especially to think from the lives of outsiders within the dominant cultural framework. A reading of bell hooks in particular enabled me to consider how we/I might learn to think from the lives of African–American women who had been excluded from the practices of Anglo-American philosophy. In bell hooks’s words, ‘under the heading Yearning… I looked for common passions, sentiments shared by folks across race, class, gender, and sexual practice, I was struck by the depths of longing in many of us. Those without money long to find a way to get rid of the endless sense of deprivation. Those with money wonder why so much feels so meaningless.… there are many individuals with race, gender, and class privilege who are longing to see the kind of revolutionary change that will end domination and oppression even though their lives would be completely and utterly transformed’ (hooks, Yearning, pp. 12–13). 6 For Le Doeuff’s (1991) more recent account of the means by which institutions perpetuate maledominated spaces of knowledge and knowing, see Le Doeuff (2003). 7 See footnotes 13, 23 and 65 (below). It should also be noted that the women philosophers under discussion, including Beauvoir, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Butler and even my reading of bell hooks are broadly speaking informed by the struggle for mutual recognition of Hegel’s lord and servant (this would include master and slave, man and woman, or any pair of terms describing a relationship in which one subjects dominates another). A good question is how much of feminist discourse is posthegelian. My own debt in this essay is largely to Beauvoir’s reading of Hegel and its influence upon French feminisms; cf. Bauer (2001). 8 I owe this conception of equalitarian reciprocity to Le Doeuff (1991, pp. 108 and 278–280).

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On divinity My general contention is that contemporary philosophers of religion avoid at their own cost the writings of current Continental philosophers who contest the nature and extent of the relationship between subjectivity and divinity. This contestation can expose highly significant ethical matters, including hidden assumptions of philosophers of religion, concerning men, women and divinity. Take, for example, the writings where Irigaray elucidates in a most provocative manner the gendered meanings of subjectivity and divinity, especially in debates concerning women and the divine. In particular, no definite agreement exists on what precisely Irigaray herself means here: ‘to become woman . . . [a] woman needs a god who is a figure for the perfection of her subjectivity’.9 Neither is there any more general agreement in contemporary debates about the gendered nature of subjectivity, whether male or female. Allow me to clarify further my opening critical contention concerning the relationship between subjectivity and divinity. I maintain, firstly, that we can understand a common desire to be divine, especially in conditions of domination; for instance, the conditions of a woman under patriarchy. But, secondly, this should be understood in the larger context of a yearning for mutual recognition. This larger context is necessitated by the fact that neither man nor woman can become divine. However, this ‘fact’ is at least implicitly contested by the transformative project of becoming divine which has been proposed notably by Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion.10 As already suggested, from my perspective, the crucial philosophical task in a woman’s search for identity is to recognize a common yearning for recognition. This yearning is evident in sexual desire, political rage, unavoidable grief and self-giving/self-creating love.11 Yet I will maintain that these gendered passions still do not indicate a woman’s need for ‘divinity’, if she is to become ‘free, autonomous, sovereign’, or for ‘the help of the divine’. Instead the urgent, however, difficult task is to recognize oneself and another in the inevitable risk of loss which characterizes intersubjectivity. More precisely, in response to certain ambiguous assertions from Irigaray’s ‘Divine Women’, I am arguing that recognition, once successful, would enable human subjects in ‘human society’ (Irigaray, 1993, p. 62)12 to freely and autonomously embrace each 9 Irigaray (1993, p. 64). For philosophical and theological readings of Irigaray’s ‘Divine Women’, see Grosz (1993); and see the editors’ introductions to excerpts from Irigaray’s essays on religion in Joy, O’Grady and Poxon (2002, especially pp. 13–17 and 40–41). 10 See Jantzen (1998). For more general background, see Nancy Frankenberry, ‘Feminist Philosophy of Religion’ at http://plato.Stanford.edu/entries/feminist-religion/ 11 For background to the role of epistemology and ethics in my own approach to philosophy of religion, see Anderson (2004, pp. 87–102). On the craving for infinitude, see Moore (1997, pp. 275–277) and Anderson (2001). 12 Concerning this ambiguity in achieving a rightful relationship with the other, see Hegel (1977, paragraph 180). Hegel calls the sense of the subject being split ‘ambiguity’ (Doppelsinnes). This ambiguity is at the heart of the subjectively self-certain being’s initial response to the encounter with the other. As will be important to my argument ‘the relinguishing of a certain form of narcissism in favour of risking an uncertain, unfixed, ambiguous relationship with the other’ is the ethical moment in gaining self-consciousness – on the way to the mutual recognition of subjects (see Bauer, 2001 p. 93 and more generally, pp. 86–103). In a recent lecture, Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘Woman and/as Death: Ambiguity and Ambivalence in the Philosophical Imaginary’ (8 January 2006), I sought to focus critically on the role of ambiguity in French feminist philosophy, tracing its significant role back to De Beauvoir (1948); and De Beauvoir (1989). Cf. Langer (2003) and Schott (2003).

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other in love and, hopefully, in justice.13 This hope engenders our guiding ideal: that of mutual recognition. Of course, being able to realize a loving, discerning embrace of (gendered) subjects is far from simple.14 Debating the issues between Irigaray and Le Doeuff on (inter)subjectivity will help avoid some difficulties. At this stage, I turn to the common ground for this debate. This is the framework which they each inherit from the French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Let us, then, consider carefully the two assertions from Irigaray’s ‘Divine Women’: Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign.15 No human subjectivity, no human society has ever been established without the help of the divine.16 The critical question is, how exactly do we understand Irigaray’s references to ‘divinity’ and to ‘the divine’? Knowing that in ‘Divine Women’ Irigaray is appropriating, or having a fling with, Ludwig Feuerbach does not make understanding her terms any easier.17 Is divinity meant to be a set of qualities which women need but also need to project before they recognize them as their own? Or, does the divine refer to a personal being who exists and from whom we receive help? In resisting any fixed answer, Irigaray’s bold, but (again) ambiguous assertions may offer women a certain poetic license to explore the meaning of divinity – and with this, certain readers may find a freedom to express and interpret their own need to become free, autonomous, sovereign.18 However, a serious danger accompanies this sort of poetic freedom precisely because it may not generate real (actual) freedom, let alone give good guidance to the reflective male or female reader. The ethical and conceptual problem with Irigaray’s conception of becoming sovereign, as I will argue with insight, first, from Beauvoir and, second, from Le Doeuff, is a failure to attempt to establish an egalitarian reciprocity between autonomous subjects. This failure results in an asymmetrical relation between one subject and another. Beauvoir confronts this failure in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre where one subject, the man, gains his identity at the cost of the Other who is a woman, or ‘the second sex’, who must remain an object (in-itself).19 To elucidate my ethical concern with the ambiguous meanings of divinity and the divine, I will explore the inconsistencies, which threaten to undermine a woman’s well-being. First, does a woman really need a god for ‘her subjectivity’ in the sense of 13 For a contemporary account of the extent to which love and justice can be understood as compatible, see Gheaus, (2005, submitted). 14 See the Kathe Kollwitz sculpture on the cover of Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion, p. ii. For a more significant discussion concerning the (potential) significance of the imagery of a loving embrace, see Anderson (2005, pp. 85–99). 15 Cf. Beauvoir (1989, pp. 622–628, especially p. 628); and Irigaray (1993, pp. 55–72). 16 Irigaray, (1993, p. 62) emphasis added. These assertions were cited in the Call for Papers, ‘Women and The Divine’ Philosophy conference, University of Liverpool, 18–19 June 2005; and the second sentence (assertion) appeared again in the Call for Papers, ‘Gender in Cultural Practice I: Sacred and Profane Identities: Gender and the Expression of Selfhood’, Annual Programme Exchange 2005, Universities of Lancaster, UK, and of Groningen, The Netherlands, held in Groningen, 18–19 November 2005. 17 The subtext is Feuerbach (1957). For background to Irigaray’s provocative style of reading philosophy, known in feminist circles as ‘her fling with’ male philosophers and their texts, see Burke, Schor and Whitford (Eds) (1994). 18 On the dangers of narcissism for the mystic and the (heterosexual) lover, see Beauvoir (1989, p. 674). Hollywood (2002). 19 See Beauvoir; CF. Satre (1966, 1989).

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a personal being who supports her specifically as female? Alternatively, is divinity an ideal, representing the distinctive qualities of a female subject, roughly, a model for a woman’s subjectivity? Second, whether a personal being, a set of ideal qualities, or a model for subjectivity, what is the precise relation of divinity to the three characteristics listed by Irigaray: ‘free, autonomous, sovereign’?20 Assume that free implies being metaphysically undetermined and personally unencumbered; that autonomous means thinking for oneself, following an univocal yet universal law of one’s own nature as created human, not divine.21 But then, sovereign is a difficult term to define.

On becoming sovereign Political philosophers have traditionally applied sovereign to the state or to law. As an attribute of a person rather than an institution, sovereign would minimally mean independent of external domination and internally supreme; it could also mean that the sovereign person exercises ultimate authority over every other person. So what is implied when sovereign is attributed to a free, autonomous female subject? Free and autonomous could be qualities which all human subjects possess at least potentially, but sovereign would seem to introduce a new quality. It would imply that a female subject could reign supreme over other human subjects as (if) divine.22 It is significant that this third term brings Irigaray’s assertions concerning human subjectivity close to what Beauvoir criticizes as a ‘sovereign liberty’ in The Second Sex – to which I will turn as one possible reading of Irigaray’s sovereign female subject (Cf. Beauvoir, 1989, pp. 619, 628, 673–678). As a feminist philosopher with Kantian leanings,23 I can understand and embrace the desire for autonomy, which would disallow anyone else to think in one’s place. The degree to which we can each be free also remains a significant philosophical question. But, even if we recognize autonomy and freedom as genuine concerns for a woman, why is divinity necessary for becoming, in Irigaray’s terms, free, autonomous, sovereign? Shouldn’t it be the reverse? The autonomous subject must give up her heteronomous and narcissistic dependence on the divine; that is, a sense of female divinity at most would give rise to an illusion of a woman’s sovereignty!24 To avoid 20 For an additional context to understanding the French philosophical debates about becoming sovereign and divinity, see Camus (1971, pp. 91–92); this passage is cited by Moore (2003, p. 147). Compare this account of ‘sovereignty’ to Murdoch (1970, pp. 77f). 21 This might imply that ‘free’ would, then, be ‘negative freedom’ as described by liberal political theorists; and ‘autonomous’ would, alongside this, be similar to the liberal idea of ‘positive freedom’; cf. Miller (1991). 22 Irigaray’s use of Feuerbach who was himself a young Hegelian gives a post-Hegelian subtext to her terms which would also draw Irigaray close to the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. For both Irigaray’s dismissal of Beauvoir and Beauvoir’s reading of Hegel, see Bauer (2001, pp. 13–14, 88–103). For a defence of G. W. F. Hegel’s conception of sovereignty as distinguishable from a despotism eclipsing the autonomy of individual parts, see Williams (1997, pp. 336–342, especially, p. 339); Cf. Hegel (1991, pp. 268–276). The question is whether this Hegelian form of reciprocal recognition can be achieved and preserved (by a Hegelian conception of state), including the self-respect of its individual subjects/members. 23 My Kantian position goes back to work which I did on Paul Ricoeur who I read in the light of his own self-attribution of a ‘post-Hegelian Kantian’, see Anderson (1993, pp. 21–32); and Anderson (2002b, pp. 15–31). 24 For a philosophical critique of Freud’s critique of morality and religion, see Lear (2005, pp. 192– 208); and for background to narcissism, see ibid., pp. 165–179, 243n2.

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such self-deception, I urge each woman to avoid an appropriation of the (Irigarayan) divine which bears any similarity to what Beauvoir reveals as the emprisonment of the female mystic or lover whose freedom, as the second sex, is undermined by her own narcissism. As will be seen further on, Beauvoir’s picture of the female mystic, or lover, seems to be modelled on Sartre’s paranoid, yet still nascent subject who is haunted by the ambivalence of his (or her) own reflection in the look of the other.25 In fact, Beauvoir makes reference to the ‘masculine firmness’ of ‘the great female saints’ (Beauvoir, 1989, p. 622). On the basis of this reliance on Sartre’s account of the female mystic, we can call this particular picture of a female lover (the divine-man relation) ‘masculinist’. The decisive question is whether in becoming divine the nascent female subject can avoid or go beyond any destructive (masculinist) preoccupation with her own self-love, beyond the mirror which in reflecting her own image closes her in, excluding her from intersubjectivity. We may need to recognize in Irigaray’s call to become autonomous, sovereign as a subject on her own, the stage of primary narcissism when the girl first finds her own image reflected back at herself. But then, what is the next step forward in becoming a free, autonomous, sovereign subject?26 It is possible that the female subject far too easily becomes preoccupied in identifying her own body with the divinized body of a feminized figure of Christ: like the female mystic who sees her own passive, bleeding body in the suffering of her god (Beauvoir, 1989, p. 619; cf. Hollywood, 2002, pp. 120–145). Beauvoir captures this situation of a woman whose body emprisons her: . . . the way the woman regards her body… is a burden: worn away in service to the species, bleeding each month, proliferating passively, it is not for her a pure instrument for getting a grip on the world but an opaque physical presence, it is no certain source of pleasure and it creates lacerating pains; it contains menaces: woman feels endangered by her “insides”. . . . And yet it is also her glorious double; she is dazzled in beholding it in the mirror; it is promised happiness, work of art, living statue; she shapes it, adorns it, puts it on show (Beauvoir, 1989, p. 619). Beauvoir goes on to reveal how the female mystic can be a figure who, with the help of the divine, only appears to become free. The lesson is that a woman’s desire for self-love may generate a sovereign liberty, but this freedom is only an illusion, a deified reflection. In Beauvoir’s words, We can understand how intoxicating it is for the narcissist when all heaven becomes her mirror; her deified reflection is infinite like God Himself, and it will never fade. And at the same time, in her burning, palpitating, love-inundated breast she feels her soul created, redeemed, cherished, by the adorable Father; it is her double, it is herself she embraces, infinitely magnified through the mediation of God (p. 674). 25 For a dramatic representation of this conception of the subject’s struggle with the Other, see Sartre, No Exit. Nancy Bauer argues that Sartre’s subject remains trapped in what Sigmund Freud identities as ‘secondary narcissism’, which is a narcissistic personality disorder, but Sartre thinks that this disorder is the ‘normal’ human condition; and it is this conception of the subject which Beauvoir will expose and reject for a better alternative; see Bauer (2001, pp. 117–135); cf. Beauvoir, 1989, pp. 621–628). 26 This question has some affinity with the desire for recognition discussed in Butler (2004, chapter 6).

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In this light the question to readers of Irigaray is whether in becoming divine, the female subject who seeks to become free and autonomous can move beyond the lacerated desire of the narcissist whose exclusive desire for sovereignty conceals her own heteronomous dependence on the divine in whom she only sees her own gender ambivalent image, whether of masculine-like sovereignty or of female divinity. It is precisely this latter sort of self-division which allows an only apparent autonomy27 to hide a heteronomous self-love, reinforcing women’s material and social oppression by the Christian God, father and son.

On being beside oneself In contradistinction to the assertions we have considered so far from Irigaray’s ‘Divine Women’, the problem with human subjectivity and human society for women in our western tradition would seem to have been the so-called ‘help of the divine’. This sort of ‘help’ unwittingly excluded a woman from reciprocal love, leaving her enclosed in her debilitating narcissism: in a state of paranoia.28 Admittedly Irigaray does recognize the way in which the Christian God has helped man, not woman, to exist in a gender specific relation to the infinite. In Irigaray’s own words, Man is able to exist because God helps him to define his gender (genre), helps him orient his finiteness by reference to infinity. .. To posit a gender, a God is necessary: guaranteeing the infinite. . . . And man, clearly, is able to complete his essence only if he claims to be separate as a gender. If he has no existence in his gender, he lacks his relation to the infinite and, in fact, to finiteness. To avoid that finiteness, man has sought out a unique male God. God has been created out of man’s gender.29 Let us suppose for a moment with Irigaray that woman, like man, needs this sort of help. That is, she needs help to create her own god out of (a) woman’s gender and so, to become in relation to the infinite. What, then, would prevent this from being, at best, a recipe for conflict between male and female gods, and at worst the reversal of sexism? Perhaps creating god out of a woman’s gender would result in a feminized Christ or even a trinity of divine women. But, if the male God has excluded women from human subjectivity, from human society, would a female god do the same for men? Moreover, I still do not see how divinity ‘frees’ a woman (and/or a man) to be autonomous. Instead this creation of a god out of (a) woman’s gender would at most make woman sovereign at the expense of man, while encumbering her with man’s 27 For two other contemporary feminist accounts of the limits of our (sexual) autonomy, see Ander-

son (2003) and Butler (2005). For Butler on the problems with a woman’s claim to sovereignty, see her discussion of Hegel’s Antigone in Butler (2004, pp. 166–168); cf. Butler, (2000, pp. 8–11, 23, 27–28 and 39–40). 28 On the role of Christianity in addressing ‘feminine paranoia’, see Kristeva (1987). 29 Irigaray (1993, p. 61) Irigaray’s translator has inserted a footnote reference to Feuerbach at this point. And Irigaray explains, . . .we have to have a will. It is necessary, not for our morality, but for our life. It is the condition of our becoming. In order to will, we have to have a goal. The goal that is most valuable is to go on becoming infinitely. In order to become, it is essential to have a gender or an essence (consequently, a sexuate essence) as horizon (p. 61)

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dependence.30 In this light, divinity is not much better for women’s relationships than it was for men’s. In some sense, Irigaray herself knows this. Irigaray clearly insists that ‘There comes a time for destruction. But, before destruction is possible, God or the gods must exist’ (Irigaray, 1993, p. 62). This insistence appears consistent with Feuerbach’s theory of man’s self-projection: the ultimate destruction of man’s initial projection of himself in creation of his male God means destruction of the gods he has created. Yet Irigaray claims that a woman still needs to create a god in her own gender: ‘God or the gods must exist’ (Irigaray, 1993, p. 62). So we need to explore what Irigaray and/or her female readers mean by ‘exist’. Does the existence of God or the gods mean: (i) instantiation of god as a being who exists in the empirical world, (ii) idealization of a god as existing in a regulative sense, or, (iii) imagination of God as a wish-fulfilment? We must recognize that within Irigaray’s ambiguous terms, God’s existence could be real, ideal or illusory. The decisive problem with Irigaray’s route to destruction of the gods via becoming divine is that her conception of divinity does not demonstrate how we can motivate or achieve the equality and reciprocity necessary for the mutual recognition of subjects in justice.31 Crucially, this would have implications for establishing ‘human society’ (Irigaray, 1993, p. 62). If these qualities of equal and reciprocal, accompanying the crucial social virtue of justice, are incompatible with divinity then society might be better off not having ‘help’ from the divine! In fact, Irigaray’s assertion that, as cited already, ‘no human society has ever been established without the help of the divine’ is not obviously true. Moreover, the terms of her assertion appear incompatible – in however different ways – with, on the one hand, autonomous subjects and, on the other, sovereign subjects. To gain further insight into the question raised in the previous section, I spoke with a political theorist about her understanding of autonomy and sovereignty, especially as discussed in liberal political accounts of a state’s autonomy and/or sovereignty.32 An asymmetry was suggested to me. That is, one can be autonomous without being sovereign; but not sovereign without being autonomous. Essentially, autonomy in liberal political debates is understood to mean a positive inward freedom; hence, not controlled inwardly by heteronomous forces. In contrast, sovereignty means not being controlled by outer forces or heteronomous structures – for which the subject must also be autonomous. The question is, what does Irigaray have in mind? As mentioned from the outset, Canters’s novel reading of Irigaray finds possibilities in the fluidity of poetic imagery, especially the poetic imagery of Irigaray’s Elemental Passions. However, I remain unconvinced philosophically that this fluidity can be straightforwardly a good thing; perhaps this is where the contemporary analytical and Continental philosopher disagree. In fact Canters herself was also often frustrated by the way in which Irigaray’s poetic style returned her to herself. No interpretation of the meaning of Irigaray’s terms could, or can, be agreed with any degree of certainty. 30 See Le Doeuff’s account of failure of discussion (Le Doeuff, 1991, p. 278). 31 In part, Irigaray’s failure might be explained by her dismissal of Beauvoir’s project of social justice,

including equality and mutual recognition. Certainly Irigaray does not grant Beauvoir a philosophical position of her own. Yet Beauvoir’s philosophy is not only distinct from Sartre’s position but offers a significant feminist critique of the disorder of Sartre’s narcissistic-paranoid subject. For a reading of Beauvoir which would informs this explanation of Irigaray’s failure to understand Beauvoir, see Bauer (2002, pp. 13–14 and especially, 223–237). 32 I thank Henriette Dahan-Kalev, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, for this discussion and other constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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I would stress the real danger of misunderstandings and bad advice due to the failure of Irigaray to define her significant terms – dare I say, in less ‘fluid’ ways! In this case, ‘free, autonomous, sovereign’ are not obviously compatible with ‘help of the divine’. Thus, we are left in a quandary. When reading Irigaray’s assertions from ‘Divine Women’, are we to think that the divine helps to initiate a process – perhaps – whereby the subject recognizes, first, her freedom in becoming; next, her autonomy in contradistinction to divinity; and finally, her sovereignty in achieving the destruction of the gods? If so, we might be closer to Feuerbach; but it still remains unclear what sort of help this divine gives to (a) human society, whether understood as the communal relations of women or the social grouping of women and men. Does the divine pass on sovereign power to the human subject? If so, to which one, or for which gender? To each at different times?33 To restate my criticism: at best we have a recipe for interminable conflict between male and female divines; at worst the continuing oppression of the feminized, now divinized body of the emprisoned woman. Readers like Canters may welcome plenty of flexibility for interpreting Irigaray’s words, even for my line of questioning. Notwithstanding Irigaray’s own thoughts on the matter which I simply do not know with any certainty – nor does any one else – it is apparent that for certain female interpreters ambiguity seems all to the good. For these latter women, ambiguity leads to an open-ended understanding of ourselves as female, to finding ourselves through sight, touch, smell, taste, sound, to embodiment, to female morphology – and, ultimately, to that which ‘the female divine’ refers. In Irigaray’s defence, it is claimed that the apparent openness is attractive, even though this attraction is also seductive. The danger remains in this irony: an openness conceals a closure, whereby female subjectivity becomes fixed in relation to divinity. Admittedly, there is no question that intrigue also surrounds the readings of Irigaray’s ambiguous texts. For example, this is more than demonstrated by Canters’s reading of a woman’s philosophical search of her own identity, or possibly divinity. Forever Fluid is a graphic witness to how ambiguity exercises the reader seeking recognition in relation to a poetic text written by Irigaray. In Canters’s case this is the struggle for mutual recogntion of ‘I’ – woman and ‘you’ – man in Elemental Passions. Forever Fluid becomes the means by which Canters, with the additional material and structure from Jantzen in completing this posthumous publication for Canters, can still teach us about the life–death struggle for mutual recognition.34 Such teaching makes clear the gender of our own subject-identity. The ambivalent nature of this struggle in real life relationships adds to both the ambiguity and the real risk taken by gendered subjects in seeking to realize a significant sort of intersubjectivity. For me, the crucial obstacle to mutual recognition is the risk that one’s autonomy will either fail to be achieved and/or preserved. Butler demonstrates in a powerful and disturbing account of grief that this need not be the case. Unwittingly, Canters also teaches a similar lesson, which is taking me time to understand; that is, we are beside ourselves in loss, not only in bereavement, but in any loss of relationship. Perhaps 33 Irigaray seems to assume a highly (culturally) specific sort of agency in ‘Divine Women’. This raises a serious question concerning the subject who is supposed to gain sovereign power: how many (religious) women are in a situation, or engage in ritual practices, which would enable their sovereignty? For an excellent, incisive challenge to the western feminist philosopher’s assumptions concerning the unequivocal value of a liberal political conception of agency and subjectivity, especially of autonomy, sovereignty and self-realization, see Mahmood (2005). 34 Butler (1987) and Langer (2003, pp. 90–91, 93f).

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a woman’s search for identity comes full circle in ‘being beside herself’. In Butler’s moving and deeply insightful words: ‘We are undone by each other.35 If we are not, we are missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire’ (Butler, 2004, chapter 1, p. 19). Here is Butler’s account: …one mourns when one accepts the fact that the loss one undergoes will be one which changes you, changes you possibly forever, and that mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation, the full result of which you cannot know in advance. So there is losing, and there is the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned. ... one is hit by waves, … one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and one finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted, but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan or project, larger than one’s own knowing. Something takes hold, but is this something coming from the self, from the outside, or from some region where the difference between the two is indeterminable? What is it that claims us at such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? (Butler, 2004, p. 18). … grief displays the way in which we are in the thrall of our relations with others that we cannot always recount or explain, that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. … if I can still speak to a ‘we’, or include myself within its terms, I am speaking to those of us who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether it is in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage (pp. 19, 20). We can also learn from the above that autonomy cannot mean strictly speaking separation or independence from others.36 Instead women only seem to recognize their autonomy insofar as they recognize that each of us is beside herself in relationship to other women, past and present. Or, in Michèle Le Doeuff’s words, that ‘we need to inherit from [other women] (as they really were)’ and so our autonomy must be understood to be a collective historical experience (Le Doeuff, 1991, pp. 128, 243). As will be seen in Beauvoir’s words, our political liberation can only be ‘collective’. Returning to Beauvoir’s earlier insights into the situation of women, consider a further word of caution about, in particular, the sovereign liberty which appears to be one ideal (interpretation) of Irigaray’s claim to become sovereign. This ideal, as Beauvoir’s critique of a certain (narcissistic) form of female mysticism suggests, is illusory; that is, it conceals the real situation in which apparent sovereignty confuses the woman’s love of the divine with self-love, confuses human subjectivity and human society with a divinized female body propping up a society of male subjects. Admittedly, ‘ambiguity’ as employed by Beauvoir herself may allow for both the sovereignty and the collectivity of subjects; but then sovereign crucially requires a real, concrete relationship, however ambivalent, to the collective. The contemporary critical issue of how to conceive women and the divine is not one which can be left to poetic imagery alone or allusive terms on their own. I remain anxious about self-destructive uses of ambiguity; and, in a similar manner, fluidity may 35 Here I cannot help but think of Rose (1995, especially pp. 98–99, 131–135) – to which I have referred in another context in memory of Hanneke (Anderson (2002a,b). Also, see Rose (1997). 36 Again, we could consider this point in the light of Mahmood (2005).

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also unwittingly create dangers. As a result I would insist in terms reminiscent of Paul Ricoeur that ‘the symbol’ or, in this case, poetic image gives rise to critical thought.37 Our thinking needs to be even more careful, critical and precise than found in some Irigaray scholarship on the question of ‘becoming divine’. To give further background to this issue of interpretation let us turn from Irigaray’s text, at least for the moment, to read Beauvoir and Le Doeuff who would unequivocally disagree with those followers of Irigaray advocating a feminism of sexual difference.38

A woman in solitude and in company Le Doeuff advocates a woman’s productive dialogue with philosophical ideas, whether in solitude or in company with other thinkers (Le Doeuff, 2004; 2005). Such dialogue would allow for the potential disagreement and insight to be found in political readings of the twentieth-century French context (of feminisms) and in dialogical readings of philosophical texts (even in solitude). Now, Le Doeuff must be clearly distinguished from those contemporary ‘French feminists of difference’ who are known to advocate sexual difference, female subjectivity and becoming divine (women).39 But note that Le Doeuff also has a distinctiveness which resists being lumped together with a feminism of strictly formal equality.40 That is, it is not possible to place Le Doeuff’s feminist politics under a ‘feminism of equality’ insofar as this describes a feminist concern with an abstract notion of being equal. Instead Le Doeuff remains uniquely, passionately and actively engaged with the concrete lives of women and their political struggles in the past and the present. So, Le Doeuff’s originality forces rejection both of these well-known feminist labels for her work. By developing her political sensitivity to the social and material locations of each woman in the history of philosophy, Le Doeuff does not have to choose between a feminist mandate for equality and a feminism of difference. She simply rejects both the assumption of a fundamental difference between a man and a woman on the grounds of (the innate seeds for) knowledge and the belief that an abstract notion of equality alone has excluded women from politics or public life. We can recognize the strongly dissenting voices of Beauvoir and of Le Doeuff. Neither would agree with the role given to divinity in Irigaray’s account of female subjectivity; and their voices are heard to offer their own ideas. For this reason, reading these two French women philosophers alongside Irigaray generates a lively and critical debate. I have demonstrated in part already how Beauvoir enables me to recognize the danger of being seduced like the female mystic by one’s own identity. This mystic’s lacerated desire to be all there is would appear to end tragically in either 37 Writing an earlier draft of this lecture at the time of Ricoeur’s death, I could not resist a quotation from Ricoeur (1967, p. 348, also see p. 350). cf. Anderson (1993, pp. 1–3 and 72–73). 38 Although Irigaray and Le Doeuff are each informed by Beauvoir, they differ radically in their accounts of women in philosophy and ‘feminism’ itself. Irigaray advocates a feminism of difference, insisting upon an ethics of sexual difference, while Le Doeuff strongly objects to this feminist emphasis on the sexual difference between women and men. For Le Doeuff’s own early subversive account of a feminism of difference, as well as her doubts about a feminism of equality, see Le Doeuff (1991, pp. 222–230). 39 Le Doeuff (1991, pp. 224–230). For additional discussion concerning the controversy surrounding the term ‘French feminism’ and the French contribution to feminist debates on religion in particular. For further critical discussion concerning the idea of ‘becoming divine’, see Pozon (2003). 40 See Anderson, Michèle Le Doeuff.

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extreme narcissism or strict nihilism. As for Le Doeuff, although not speaking about divinity, she equally inspires caution on the question of woman’s subjectivity, especially objecting to sexual difference as the defining quality of relations between men and women. This contribution of Le Doeuff will become more clear in my penultimate section on ‘The Possibilities of Intersubjectivity’. Basically, in contrast to Irigaray, each of Beauvoir and Le Doeuff speak for equality and reciprocity, ushering in social justice not (the) sovereignty (of sexual difference). Granted this is not a simple contrast, yet Beauvoir and Le Doeuff each recognize serious ethical dangers for the nascent female subject in society due to a lack of equality. Neither advocates becoming divine (sovereign) nor creating the divine out of a woman’s gender. Instead they both speak insightfully as follows: on the one hand, we hear Beauvoir’s voice speak to the problems of a debilitating narcissism, and on the other hand, Le Doeuff’s voice is heard warning of an absolute altruism whereby a woman becomes ‘a nothingness in the eyes of the other’ (Le Doeuff, 1991, p. 280). Without a concrete goal of balancing equality and reciprocity. (Le Doeuff, 1991, pp. 278–279) between (male and female) subjects to ensure the justice of intersubjectivity, we can easily face the problems associated with a self-annihilating mysticism within patriarchal societies. Admittedly justice is not the only goal of feminist philosophy: even today some feminist ethicists who would argue that an ethics which sustains loving relationships (that which is often discusses as ‘an ethics of care’) remains in a serious tension with liberal theories of distributive justice whose goal is equality.41 Similarly I do not want simply to dismiss Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference as one thing or the other, that is, for loving relationships or for distributive justice. Yet it does seem that Beauvoir anticipates the decisive dangers of Irigaray’s assumptions concerning the divinized female body. The latter is not naïve, nor is Irigaray to be dismissed out of hand. In fact, there is a very interesting parallel between Irigaray and Beauvoir. Read in tandem their distinctive attempts to transcend the female body as it has been conceived by the human (male) subject which dominates patriarchal societies can generate new, critical knowledge.42 On the one hand, there is little doubt that Beauvoir’s own account of religion, mysticism and the female lover remains limited by her preoccupation with a masculinist form of female mysticism, especially insofar as the subtext here is Sartre’s (normalized) account of a paranoid subject. I admit that uncovering a debilitating narcissism is highly significant as a philosophical form of suspicion or critique; but this is neither a fair nor a complete picture of female mysticism (or desire). In this context, it is Irigaray who might offer a significant alternative for women and the divine. Beauvoir only sees the choice between an annihilation of the body of the female mystic in her love of self/god or a transcendence of the body by the female mystic – her notable example is Teresa of Avila – who achieves a situated autonomy and reciprocity in her practical projects. The latter sort of mystic represents, in Beauvoir’s words, ‘women 41 Gheaus captures this tension well in (2005, pp. 85–138). After carefully ‘circumscribing’ the concept of care in the literature of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, Gheaus turns to focus upon Rawlsian theories of distributive justice and its tension with ‘care’. Her argument that care and justice cannot go together all the way could be usefully applied to a debate between Irigaray’s concern with love and personal relationships of sexual difference, and Le Doeuff’s critique of any form of intersubjectivity which eclipses the dual norms of equality and reciprocity. 42 I owe a special debt to Hollywood for her reading of the body of the female mystic in each of Beauvoir and Irigaray, and strongly recommend Hollywood (2002). For other philosophical readings of Beauvoir’s feminism, see Bauer (2001) and Doeuff (2004, especially pp. 22–36).

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of action. . . who know very well what goals they have in mind and who lucidly devise means for attaining them: their visions simply provide objective images for their certitudes, encouraging these women to persist in the paths they have mapped out in detail for themselves’.43 On the other hand, Irigaray has (elsewhere) developed her own account of the sensible transcendental, that is, the sensible as the condition for redeeming and transforming a woman’s body. Transcendence in immanence is her ideal – roughly, it is an embodied place where subjectivity is revalued.44 In particular, Irigaray tries to give new value to the Christian narrative of salvation, that is, give sexually specific value to the female body in realizing the significance of the (Christian God’s) Incarnation. God becomes incarnate in and through a woman’s body and this could imply that when God becomes flesh (a) woman’s complete desire can be recognized; her joy is complete and her body becomes divinized. However, this ideal remains problematic: neither concretely fixed nor completely thinkable; its full meaning is constantly deferred, never achieved.45 In other words, the dangers of this ideal may imply the impossibility of ever locating this concept of the incarnation of a divine being who suffers, and yet (ironically?) brings joy, in and through a woman’s body. Once, or if, this concept is fixed, without a perpetual deferral of its meaning and use, we will find ourselves back in a position similar to that criticized by Beauvoir as the emprisonment of the female: There have been … and … are many women trying to achieve individual salvation by solitary effort. They are attempting to justify their existence in the midst of their immanence – that is, to realize transcendence in immanence. It is this ultimate effort – sometimes ridiculous often pathetic – of imprisoned woman to transform her prison into a heaven of glory, her servitude into sovereign liberty, that we … observe in the narcissist, in the woman in love, in the mystic (Beauvoir, 1989, pp. 627, 628, emphasis added). Instead, Beauvoir insists that ‘there is no other way out for woman than to work for her liberation … which must be collective’ (Beauvoir, 1989, p. 628, emphasis added). In other words, Irigaray’s predecessor Beauvoir limits the extent of our liberation as solitary women.46 The becoming of female subjectivity is limited by what Beauvoir sees as the ‘ridiculous’ or ‘pathetic’ effort at an individual transformation. Her account of female mysticism also uncovers the tension between two conceptions of recognizing the self and the other; this tension is between recognizing oneself as the Other in 43 Beauvoir (1989, p. 678); cf. Hollyood (2002 pp. 130–135). Beauvoir’s reading should be compared

to Irigaray’s later reading of Teresa of Avila, representing female mysticism as a transcendence that operates through immanence, in Irigaray (1985). 44 For a highly insightful postcolonial critique of Irigaray’s ‘sensible transcendental’, see Keller (2003). Keller points out that in the course of her own writings Irigaray presents various other examples of realizing the sensible transcendental: (1) Platonic divinity is realized in beauty as the possible personal attainment of experiencing divinity within one’s own corporeality; the sublime, then, is the ideal of attaining one’s personal potential; (2) divine women achieve transcendence in immanence with exchanges between women and men, as well as with other women; (3) the sensible transcendental is realized in a practice and ideal of breathing and breath (ibid., p. 72). 45 For rich background on the Incarnation in the history of Christianity, and specifically on the contentious implications of any recognition (whether by Beauvoir or Irigaray) of ‘the salvific power of the body and of femininity insofar as it is identified with human beings bodily nature’, see Hollywood, (2002, pp. 198–203). 46 For a transgressive liberation which undoes gender and (masculine) sovereignty in an original reading of the solitary figure of Antigone, see Butler (2000, pp. 8–11 and 23).

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relation to man-God who is the Subject and collapsing the rightful boundaries that distinguish self and other. These equally unattractive alternatives for the female subject and her desire in these relations to the male subject and his desire appear to be (i) domination with extreme, or so-called ‘secondary’, narcissism or (ii) annihilation with absolute altruism. The hope is that a third possibility emerges with the ethically significant challenge of mutual recognition between subjects in love and in justice.47

The possibilities of intersubjectivity Let us not remain exclusively with Irigaray or Beauvoir who reflect upon the figure of a female mystic and her male God. Instead consider Le Doeuff’s salutary words concerning the possibility of dialogue between subjects – or intersubjectivity – characterized by reciprocity and equality. Arguably, these latter qualities constitute the necessary conditions for the possibility of mutual recognition of oneself and another in justice.48 And yet there is a critical question as to whether or not our personal (intimate) relationships break with the virtue of justice, and its norms of equality and reciprocity, in order to give and sustain love. In contradistinction to justice, love is arguably constituted by care which responds to the need for intimate relationships and on the basis of this love forgives wrongs; and potentially forgives a serious injustice. But forgiveness is a topic for another essay.49 It is significant enough to consider Le Doeuff’s argument that unequal subjects will not be able to recognize one another, since failing to seek the ideal of intersubjectivity in dialogue. I suggest that this failure of mutual recognition would be magnified under similar conditions when seeking the ideal of intersubjectivity – of goodness and justice – between a human and a divine subject. The relevant feminist ethical question in this context is whether Irigaray’s female divine implies the loss of one subject in another, in this instance, of woman in the divine. To move toward an answer let us look closely at a passage where Le Doeuff warns her readers against a certain ‘absolute altruism’.50 I turn to the point in Hipparchia’s Choice at which Le Doeuff explains how a common desire for honesty involves responsibility for both subjects in dialogue. Notice 47 This Hegelian alternative is that of mutual recognition, generating a problem with which after Kant and Hegel philosophers struggle. Note that Judith Butler demonstrates how Hegel reads Antigone as a figure without (sexual) desire and so lacking any possibility of recognition, see Butler (2000, p. 11 and 13). 48 This conception of justice as recognition should be mentioned as different from the liberal theory of distributive justice, the latter being concerned with redistributing goods in order to overcome social and material inequalities, Gheaus (2005, submitted pp. 185–211; notice her footnotes 3, 4, 12 and 16 on different conceptions of justice). 49 It is interesting to speculate about Le Doeuff’s understanding of forgiveness. Can it be strictly a religious concept, if it is associated with sustaining love and intimate relationships generally? I note that Le Doeuff’s rejection of an ‘absolute altruism’ for an idea of ‘equalitarian reciprocity’ would appear to be in part criticism of the moral philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch (see the next footnote for references to this) who published significant writings on forgiveness. For example of his work in English translation, see Jankélévitch (2005). 50 Note that Le Doeuff’s criticism of what she calls ‘an absolute altruism’ has as its object the work of her own supervisor at the Sorbonne, in particular, Jankélévitch, (1981), especially pp. 161–165; and see Le Doeuff (1991, pp. 278–282) and especially the footnote about her supervisor and friend, ‘Janké’, p. 352n85.

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how equality and reciprocity are essential norms for ensuring the justice of one’s morality: When two people who are both driven by a common desire to have an honest discussion meet, they each see this as an opportunity to strip themselves of at least some of the obscure and irrational elements buried within us all; reaching an agreement with somebody always means overcoming idiosyncrasies and fixedness which, far from being personal, have usually been shaped by the diktat of some force. Only another person can mediate these fantasies, in other words establish, through discussion, a minimal distance between oneself and these automatisms. Whenever a man has power over a woman (unilateral power, by definition), it is possible that he will be manipulated by many different things… … a sex which oppresses another is not free either. When there is absolute command on the one hand and servile obedience.. on the other, the one who commands may of course have the illusion of exercising ‘a lawless will’. But since there is then a lack of the discussion with other people which introduces thoughtfulness, that will is very likely to be subject to orders from who knows where. At this point the moral perspective of intersubjectivity … is easily twisted and in order for it to be defined as a good thing, something must always be added to it, notably the idea of equality and reciprocity, in other words a reference, however elementary, to the very different perspective of justice. A simplistic apology for dialogue is mystifying to the extent that dialogue often proves eristic, and the same is true of the simply ethics of relations with others. We have seen that if one of the protagonists in a discussion acknowledges the other’s point of view and the latter does not reciprocate, the result is the worst possible situation in which one person is ultimately the victim of her or his own morality. Of course we need to keep in reserve the idea that there may be situations in which one gives oneself up to another person’s cruelty for moral reasons, but this is valid only when the sacrifice is made in favour of a third party and not of the dreadful tyrant... What these two considerations have in common is that they require the moral person to take herself into account as well as others (Le Doeuff, 1991, pp. 278, 279). The above account of intersubjectivity categorized by a reciprocal equality differs markedly from Irigaray’s search for divinity. In fact, it would seem closer to certain readings of Kant’s autonomous reasoning which unites rational agents equally in a kingdom of ends. But I would also insist that we should avoid the equally damaging alternatives of a woman’s choice between extreme narcissism and absolute altruism; the ethical norms of autonomy and altruism can easily be corrupted without the proper balance of self- and other-love.51 Le Doeuff presents a powerful case against the one extreme: an absolute altruism whereby a woman becomes a nothingness in the eyes of the other. Le Doeuff is also equally adamant about the necessity of a certain autonomous thinking (so clearly not passive suffering): hence she defines a feminist as a woman who allows no one else to think in her place (Le Doeuff, 1991, pp. 28, 29). 51 My current work explores the topic of love, focusing on a problematic notion of ‘unselfing’ in love; see Anderson (forthcoming).

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Le Doeuff’s own thinking and her regulative idea(l) of a feminist are intimately linked with practical-political action. Her caution concerning any lack of justice between subjects gives one possible response to Beauvoir’s female mystic: that is, a woman insofar as the second sex may have imprisoned herself in relation to a man-God, but there is hope yet for her practical projects and the confidence which she has found in her concrete activities. But these projects are not done in isolation whether for the love of God or love of self. Instead the real task for liberating the spiritual and practical dimensions of a woman’s life demands the right balance of equality and reciprocity in dialogue with other women and men. This idea of balancing equality and reciprocity is crucial for Le Doeuff; and with it we can aim to avoid either the totalization or the annihilation of a woman in the divine (other). Thus, woman is not forced to represent the ambivalence of life and death.

Conclusion To conclude I return to Canters’s philosophical search and its legacy for a woman’s identity as mediated by the texts of Continental philosophy. In the face of death and loss, how do we interpret Canters’s search for a woman’s identity? Does it culminate in divinity? With this question I am thinking, roughly, of Jantzen’s appropriation of Irigaray’s conception of becoming divine. How do we respond to feminist philosophical interpretations of Irigaray’s ‘Divine Women’? Do we accept the Continental feminist interpretations of such other texts as Elemental Passions which celebrate embodied life and, in particular, natality (instead of mortality)? Yet isn’t there something selfcontradictory about the feminist claim that a woman’s identity is natal in becoming divine, not immortal in life after death, since the latter is a masculinist preoccupation? (Jantzen, 1998, pp. 137–140). On this claim I remained perplexed as a feminist who needs to think of Canters and now Jantzen after their deaths. How does a feminist understand life after death? We might wonder how natality – say, as rebirth in philosophy – can be celebrated to the exclusion of mortality. I am not sure that feminist readings of Irigaray’s texts have or should have any answers to this line of questions concerning the reality of death. Nevertheless, we can learn together from the life and posthumous publication of Canters about a woman’s philosophical search for the right words to speak about her life, love, desire, but also death – topics highly relevant to the emerging field of feminist philosophy of religion. In the face of a young philosopher’s death, these questions are personally painful and difficult. And yet, whether directly or indirectly, I suggest that Continental philosophy of religion helps us to address them. Personal, social and political questions about our religious and philosophical practices concerning life and death are highly significant for Continental philosophers of religion. Even from this brief excursion into French feminism, it is fair to conclude with confidence that politics is inseparable from philosophy and from religion on the Continent. From what I can report about Canters’s work on French feminist philosophy and about her passion for living life, we can begin to understand how the struggle for mutual recognition forces (Continental) philosophers of religion to be realist in their thinking and acting. With this in mind, the lesson from the Continent for philosophy of religion is that we must not stop yearning for mutual recognition. Indeed, we must even risk our autonomy in acknowledging the potential of our intersubjectivity. My last words recall Le Doeuff’s succinct conclusion: ‘these … considerations … require

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the moral person to take herself into account as well as others’; and repeat Canters’s selection of lines from Elemental Passions: we can never be sure of bridging the gap between us. But that is our adventure. Without this peril there is no us. If you turn it into a guarantee, you separate us (Irigaray, 1982, p. 28; emphasis added).

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Int J Philos Relig (2006) 60:61–76 DOI 10.1007/s11153-006-0012-7 O R I G I NA L PA P E R

Apophasis and the turn of philosophy to religion: From Neoplatonic negative theology to postmodern negation of theology William Franke

Received: 3 January 2006 / Accepted: 23 February 2006 / Published online: 10 November 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B. V. 2006

Abstract This essay represents part of an effort to rewrite the history metaphysics in terms of what philosophy never said, nor could say. It works from the Neoplatonic commentary tradition on Plato’s Parmenides as the matrix for a distinctively apophatic thinking that takes the truth of metaphysical doctrines as something other than anything that can be logically articulated. It focuses on Damascius in the 5–6th century AD as the culmination of this tradition in the ancient world and emphasizes that Neoplatonism represents the crisis of Greek metaphysics on account of the inability to give a rational account of foundations for knowing and of the ultimate principle of beings. Neoplatonism discovered how all such ultimate principles were necessarily beyond the reach of reason and speech. This apophatic insight is drawn out with the help of contemporary criticism of Neoplatonic philosophy, defining also some points of divergence. The essay then discusses the motives for thinking the unsayable in postmodern times on the basis of this parallel with Neoplatonic thought. Discourse’s becoming critical of itself to the point of self-subversion animates them both. However, the tendency in postmodern thought to totally reject theology, including negative theology, is a betrayal of its own deepest motivations. This tendency is debated through an examination of the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. While any traditional discourse can be negated, the negating and self-negating capacity of discourse itself is infinite, and this is where a perennial negative theological philosophy of the unsayable is to be located. Language, eminently the language of philosophy, as infinitely open, points in a direction which becomes equally and ineluctably theological. Keywords Apophasis · Negative theology · Neoplatonism · Postmodern thought · Unsayable · Metaphysics · Parmenides · Damascius · Nancy W. Franke(B) Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road MB256 KKU, Hong Kong, China Present Address: Departments of French and Italian, Vandervilt University P.O. Box 6312, Station B, Nashville, TN 37235, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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The situation of philosophy today makes it peculiarly receptive to a great variety of apophatic discourses, not only to those devolving from traditions concerning the unnameable Name of God in mystical currents, including the Kabbalah and Sufism, but also to negative theological speculations like those of the Neoplatonists. What reasons may be surmised for this receptivity? If the quest for foundations is the inaugural project of modern philosophy since Descartes, it has fallen into crisis and in many quarters today is given up for lost. Neoplatonism was similarly born of a crisis of foundations in ancient philosophy that in crucial ways parallels that of modern and especially postmodern times. In spite of its appearance of propounding elaborate metaphysical systems, Neoplatonism, profoundly considered, contemplates the impossibility of articulating any rational foundation for thought and discourse. It thinks the radical lack of any articulable first principle for metaphysics, especially as this type of thinking evolved out of the late speculations of Plato. More than this, Neoplatonism provides implicitly a general theory for why philosophy and indeed knowledge in general must be foundationless. Its theory of the One as the transcendent, unknowable source of all opens up a fissure in reality that irreparably separates everything that is from its ultimate ground. Everything that is exists in total dependence on what is not—on what has no objective existence in the manner of finite beings, which is to be with and among other beings. The first principle, the One, is beyond being and is therefore unknowable, since knowledge consists necessarily in a Logos of being. It might be said that this unknowable ground alone is in a higher, truer sense, but there is no telling what being in this sense might mean. Such an imputation can at best express only a negative knowledge of the ontological dependence of all that is on what is not and cannot be in the ordinary way. All that is known in relation to the absolute transcendence of the Neoplatonic One is that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the world of things and anything that can be their ground. If the One is to ground all that is, it must not be, not at least in the way of being that can be known from the things which are—otherwise its own being would itself have to be grounded. Nothing within the set of existing beings can furnish a support from outside for the non-self-sustaining nature of beings. What has been grasped here is the apparently foundationless existence of beings in the world. So far as things within the world are concerned, there is no ground. No worldly being can serve this purpose of grounding things in the world. If there is to be any ground at all for the astonishing fact that things are—and Greek thought had always been profoundly committed to the idea that all that is is somehow grounded—it must be of a wholly other nature, outside of and beyond the world. Whether or not we hold to the presumption that there is any ground at all for beings, the Neoplatonic conception of the radical transcendence of the only possible ground has far-reaching consequences: it means that all knowing opens upon and issues ultimately in unknowing. In this respect, Neoplatonism is based on a critical overcoming and surpassing of classical Greek ontology (Aubenque, 1971). Particularly the metaphysical assumptions of a realist Platonic ontology are discarded, or at least no longer secure, no longer assured by an intuitively certain knowledge descending from above, where the Good as the supreme principle of all intelligibility is ascertained with apodeictic certainty. The knowability of things in general is infirmed and even evacuated by the recession of the first principle out of the world into unknowability, into a dimension to which not knowledge but only a kind of mystical experience can gain access. Viewed from within the world, things are foundationless, and yet that they are and even somehow hang together is given as a fact, and to account for this Neoplatonists still infer or

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imagine that there is some kind of ground. It is just that the ground cannot be anything within the ambit of beings that we can know. It follows, moreover, from its not being within the ambit of beings and thus of things knowable that nothing at all can be said of the One that must not also at the same time be unsaid. It cannot even be said to be One. It is rather ineffable. Or rather, it is “not even ineffable,” for it is not anything at all. The cleavage between a presumably knowable universe and its necessarily unknowable first principle or ground leaves knowledge without foundation, gaping open and suspended upon an abyss. As an important consequence of this predicament, Neoplatonic discourse attains to a highly refined critical self-consciousness of how even its very own discourse must undermine itself and become self-subverting. That the One is one, that it is ineffable, that it is at all become problematic affirmations that must at the same time be negated: whatever is said of this supreme principle must in the same moment be withdrawn. And yet all that is evidently depends upon such an enigma that cannot be said to be anything at all, or even be said to be. On this basis, Neoplatonism reaches a penetrating insight into why there can be no knowledge of anything such as a first principle, not even so far as to be able adequately to call it a “first principle.” Just this is, in fact, the conclusion demonstrated by Damascius (c. 462–538? A.D.), the last of the ancient Greek Neoplatonic philosophers, in his treatise On First Principles (De principis). (Damascius, 1966, See, further, Combès, 1996; Dillon, 1997).1 This work constitutes a culmination of a tradition of thinking the aporiae of any attempt to think the One, that is, to think the first principle or ground of the universe. At the other end, at the beginning, of this tradition of ancient Neoplatonism stands Plotinus (205–270 A.D.). But the tradition actually starts from the aporiae of Plato’s Parmenides. Plato had hypothesized a One that cannot be, since if being were added to it, then it would no longer be perfectly one (Parmenides 137b–144e). This was a principle basis on which Plotinus was to construct his theory of the One beyond being, the first “hypostasis,” source of all that is. The approach of the mind to this highest principle of its knowing and of every being and even of being as such enjoins a relinquishing of Logos and of discourse and of knowing altogether. Such apophatic speculation develops through a line of Neoplatonic thinkers from Porphyry, Plotinus’s direct successor, through Iamblichus to Proclus, Damascius’s immediate predecessor. In its most mature phase, with Damascius, the apophatic thrust of ancient Neoplatonism is played out in extremis and becomes fully explicit and programmatic. It becomes clear that the whole intricate order of things is suspended from something (or rather from nothing) that can be ordered to no articulable principle, nor belong to any order whatsoever. While this might be taken to be only an extreme consequence, it actually results from what was most essential to Neoplatonic thinking all along. In what might be considered the seminal notion of Neoplatonism, being came to be conceived of as infinite (Armstrong, 1979; see further Heiser, 1991). And that meant that any definition of its ground or even of being in its totality was necessarily inadequate. Every expression for the cause or first principle of being comprehended something only finite and definable and would have to be rejected in opening outwards toward the infinite and indefinable. The result was an open-ended quest, the new style of speculative 1 My introduction to and translation of Damascius, Doubts and solutions concerning first principles,

Part I, cc. 3–8 in Arlon: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 12/1 (2004): 111–131.

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mysticism inaugurated by Plotinus. This quest can still be characterized as a quest for an ultimate ground, however it becomes an endless quest because the ground can never be delimited and defined. The Neoplatonists are often known mostly for their invention of complicated and artificial metaphysical discourses and systems, but more deeply considered they represent the crisis of all discourse and the confrontation with the ineffable that escapes every possible system. This Neoplatonic philosophy of the ineffable, commonly called negative theology, is critical of all rational formulations as inadequate to what they intend to describe. Negative theology arises at a very advanced stage in the development of rational reflection in any given culture, a stage where the founding myths of that culture, and lastly language itself as the foundation of all culture, come into question. At this point, language can no longer be used unself-consciously as having a direct grip on reality and as simply delivering truth. Discourse’s constitutive negativity becomes a central theme in Neoplatonism: its self-negating nature and transforming, annihilating powers become a major preoccupation for certain of the Neoplatonists. No longer concentrated exclusively on what language does manage to convey by the light of Logos, Damascius attends obsessively to its failures. In this respect, the hypertrophy of critical thinking that characterizes philosophical discourse today goes down the path once blazed by Neoplatonic thought. From our position today, Neoplatonism can be seen retrospectively to represent an early apotheosis of critical philosophical thinking. It is philosophical thinking critical first and foremost of itself. In fact, every thought that can be thought and therefore expressed is viewed as ipso facto inadequate and subject to critique. All that can be thought or said, affirmations and negations alike, must be negated. This critical aspect of Neoplatonic thought reaches its sharpest formulations in Damascius, “the last and most critical of the great pagan Neoplatonists” (Armstrong, Kenney 1993). The situation of philosophy, especially of continental philosophy, today is likewise one that seems to know no alternative to unrestricted and endless criticism: every positive doctrine that can be formulated encounters objections immediately. If there is any consensus, it is about there being no given foundations or stable principles for philosophy to work from—though this view, too, as soon as it is formulated and stated in words, proves controversial and difficult, if not impossible, to defend. The current philosophical milieu of “limitless criticism,” to use a term Hilary Armstrong derives from the French Neoplatonist scholar Jean Trouillard, can be illuminated especially well by the negative theology of the Neoplatonic school and its sequels and spin-offs all through the course of Western intellectual history down to the present. (Trouillard, 1961)2 With negative theology, critical philosophical thinking becomes indistinguishable from religious thinking: it becomes infinitely open, open even to the infinite, rather than remaining circumscribed by any method or organon. Philosophical and religious belief alike are subject to this criterion of limitless criticism, according to Armstrong, not only in Hellenistic times but again for us today: “A genuine religious faith in our time must be compatible with limitless criticism.” The principle of limitless criticism has a “positive” and even a prescriptive content—although it cannot be stated. In fact, it cannot be stated because it is so purely “positive.” Any statement requires differentiating what is as stated from what is not, 2 Underscoring how Plotinus’s spiritual, religious approach to reality, in the context of Hellenistic mysticism, radically curtailed the claims of natural reason and philosophy to gain access to an intelligible Truth, Trouillard concludes that philosophy is left with essentially a critical function (“il reste à la philosophie une fonction indispensable qui est essentiellement critique,” p. 440).

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and hence only a delimited positivity. By contrast, the unsayable principle that makes further criticism always possible and any correction never definitive is purely positive and absolutely negative at the same time, indeed more positive and more negative than any proposition that can be stated. Nevertheless, this ultra-positive, ultra-negative unsayability makes a claim to being normative for philosophical discourse: it is necessary in order to prevent philosophical discourse from absolutizing itself or some one of its conceptions, including such concepts as experience and openness, just as much as those of matter or substance or structure. The ways of experiencing and of being open and responsive to this indefinable absoluteness are exactly what apophatic tradition is concerned to explore and so must not presuppose as having any known or definable shape or content. Apophatic awareness as a form of critical consciousness entails the negation of all discourses. However, all discourses, from this point of view, can be recognized as themselves, in effect, already negations. Any discourse we start with, anything we conceptualize and say, is itself always already a negation—the negation of reality itself as it transcends all our concepts and discourses. Apophatic discourse is, then, the negation of this negation. It intends to point back towards what, anterior to all negations in statements, is simply there, unarticulated by any speech. Apophasis does not presume to say what is really real but leaves it alone—and thereby lets it show itself as what this discourse (and any discourse) is not and cannot say. The specific ways in which language withdraws and is undone in the face of what it cannot say offer images testifying to this transcendent-of-discourse. The ruins of discourse remain as ruins witnessing to what they cannot depict or determine in any reliable or even readable way. Their very unreadability says all that can be said about the unsayable. What distinguishes apophatic thought is that its truth is not in what it affirms and articulates but in the . . . unsayable it-knows-not-what that its self-negation simply makes room for. In terms of content, it has nothing particular or positive to offer, but methodologically it can play a key regulatory role, given the pluralistic situation of philosophy today, by offering a theory as to why this pluralism of discourses is necessary in the first place. For when different philosophies are re-positioned and re-defined as attempts to say what cannot be said, they reflect upon each other as reflecting a common . . . something/nothing that they cannot say—except each in its own inadequate way, illuminating in withdrawing, in taking its positive affirmations back, yet leaving some indefinable sense of what they were getting at. Different philosophies are revealed thereby as necessary to each other rather than as excluding and having to suppress each other. Apophatic thought does, then, have something normative to offer to the whole spectrum of philosophical discourses, even without being able to say anything at all directly about reality as such. From the perspective of Christian, Jewish and Muslim negative theologies, all of them derivative from pagan, Greek Neoplatonic negative theology as the cradle of apophaticism historically, it is imperative to acknowledge the ineffable “God” as absolute in order to avoid falling into belief in idols. We might think that we need believe in no gods at all. But somewhere in our logic there is bound to be a fixed point or foundation that will in effect be our Absolute, and if this is not a truly absolute Absolute, one that cannot be said at all, like the “God” sought in vain by negative theology, it will be rather a relative absolute, one conditioned by some form of representation, and as such it will be an idol. We will be tempted to take it for the absolute Absolute if we do not keep that position open through some discourse about why it must remain empty for us and for all our discourses. Empty though it

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must be, still this place of the Absolute (or “place” as itself absolute) needs to be kept under surveillance to prevent its being falsely usurped. This is the vital role of negative theology as a sort of empty metaphysic and quasi-transcendental logic of the unsayable. Philosophy without absolutes is an illusion. We always assume something absolute even in denying it. In effect, we contradict ourselves in saying that nothing, absolutely nothing can be absolute. We need an understanding of how this absoluteness impinges on our discourses in order to keep them translucent and open, and in order to keep the absolute and the relative in relation with one another, and yet not utterly confounded together, in which case they would become, each of them, imposters. The ancient wisdom of negative theology, from its matrices in Neoplatonic thought, developed just this sort of theoretical alertness and understanding. That is why it has so much to offer to our philosophizing today. This wisdom entails self-awareness of the relativity of all our thinking and its articulations, yet this relativity remains, nevertheless, intimately bound in relation to what it cannot delimit or in any way relativize. It is affected and disturbed from outside itself, from above (or below). Not only does this critical, negative thinking guard against usurpations by false systems of closed, self-sufficient rationality; it can also help open us to the inarticulable experience of all that is or at least appears, all that tantalizingly escapes the grasp of discourse and reason. For it disabuses us of rational systems that would close off possibilities outside and beyond themselves. Cultivating an apophatic outlook can train us to look again and let happen what is truly incomprehensible to us, for negative theology is a discourse reflecting on our discourse that shows and reminds us that it is only discourse and thereby opens it to what it cannot comprehend. This special character and virtue of negative theology has been brought out especially by the recent revival of apophatic thinking leveraged from scholarship on Neoplatonist philosophers. I wish now to situate the view I am articulating within this revival and at the same time to take positions differing from some current scholarship based on my sense of the overall thrust and significance of apophatic thinking. For J. P. Williams, who claims to be following Hilary Armstrong and Denys Turner, apophasis is fundamentally about discourse itself and represents a possibility of “limitless criticism.” It makes no ontological claims (Williams, 2000; see also Kenny, 1991). Williams differentiates sharply, indeed categorically, between negation that is self-referential, so as to negate even negation, and negation which only qualifies affirmations, revising them into a higher form of affirmation according to the via eminentiae (Introduction and p. 18). The latter is the doctrine of negation in Thomas Aquinas and in Middle Platonism, and it is to be held rigorously separate from truly apophatic negation in the strict sense of negation of the negation. Yet these distinctions in the history of philosophy deal with doctrines codified and interpreted in words, not directly with the deeper apophatic intent of the discourses in question. It is not truly apophatic to make any distinctions in discourse ultimate. So granting the heuristic value of the differences Williams points to, which are in fact commonly evoked in the scholarship on apophaticism, I do not believe that they discriminate between what is and is not authentically apophatic. All discourses in words fall short of the apophatic, as apophatic writers concordently insist.3 The attempt to delimit and define apophasis so as to avoid promiscuous and indiscriminate use of the term has strong scientific 3 Good examples can be found in the readings of selected classic authors in O. Davies and D. Turner (Eds.) (2002).

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motivation, but apophasis remains recalcitrant to all definition and simply does not lend itself to being made a useful and well-behaved scientific term. My conviction is that it cannot be sharply delineated by any unequivocally stateable formula or concept, but must be discerned through a finer, indefinable sort of sensibility. I do not mean to charge that these leading interpreters do not understand apophasis—except to the extent that apophasis, by its very nature, withdraws from any and every attempt to understand it. It is just that the formulation which makes apophasis a disourse about discourse gives it a positive object. Like all formulas, this one too must be withdrawn. Apophasis is not about that either, nor about anything that can be said. As Denys Turner states, “The apophatic is the linguistic strategy of somehow showing by means of language that which lies beyond language” (Turner, 1995). He points out how negative language per se is no more apophatic than affirmative language is, distinguishing crucially between “the strategy of negative propositions and the strategy of negating the propositional; between that of the negative image and that of the negation of imagery” (p. 35). We must, then, also remind ourselves that the negation of imagery is not simply its absence; images must appear in order to be negated. Sara Rappe’s conception of Neoplatonism, culminating in Damascius, as text-oriented and exegetical in essence, likewise makes apophatic philosophy essentially a second-order discourse about discourse rather than a discourse making ontological claims (Sara Rappe, 2000). Yet Rappe realizes—and Damascius in her reading is well aware—that it is wrong to say that apophasis is only about discourse itself. It demonstrates discourse to be not sufficient unto itself and to be beholden rather to what is neither discourse nor susceptible of being incorporated into discourse. There is a strong temptation to interpret apophasis as being only about discourse, since then we can say definitely what it is about. But this sells it short, for then apophatic discourse is presented as having no bearing upon extralinguistic reality, no ontological import. While apophasis makes no particular ontological claims, its negations do bear upon what has traditionally been treated under the rubric of ontology. This realm is redefined by apophasis as the open space into which discourse opens at the limits of what it is able to articulate—as what it cannot formulate and determine in terms of itself. So beyond its necessary self-critical moment, apophatic discourse is all about this something other, other than itself, other than discourse altogether. Apophatic discourses testify to some dimension (or at least limit) of experience: they are touched by experience that cannot be spoken in words (whether it is of reality or unreality, being or non-being, is not finally decidable). Presumably, this experience cannot be made manifest “itself,” “directly” at all, for it is beyond representation altogether. Yet for Wittgenstein the unsayable nevertheless “shows itself” (L. Wittgenstein, (1922). There must, by any account, be some way of “showing” or apprehending at least that there is something that cannot be said, even if what it is can in no way be determined. Still this indeterminate “it” may actually be, as Benjamin and Blanchot in different ways suggest, more immediate than any immediacy that is caught between the poles of presence and absence, more present than any presence, though the unmediated experience of it could only be madness, or perhaps the bliss of beatitude. (Benjamin, 1977; Blanchot, 1993). Like ancient Neoplatonic thinking, modern and phenomenological philosophy too have their apophatic moments. And here again generally only withdrawal from representation, and even from every possibility of presentation, can be allowed to characterize what cannot be said. This is the movement of withdrawal—apprehended as having taken place always already—from the zone of articulable experience.

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Language for what cannot be said is in this sense a “trace” which can never be traced back to any origin. In deconstructive thinking, the linguistic trace of what cannot be said must precede—and in fact constitute—any presencing or evidencing of the unsayable, which is to this extent intrinsically linguistic, that is, an effect of language. The possibility of talking about what cannot be said originates with language as its trace, and indeed there is first something to talk about at all as what cannot be said only retrospectively—as what has always already vanished, leaving but a trace. Rather than the trace being derived from the presence it traces, the trace is all that ever becomes real and effectual of the presence, which is never manifest as presence itself and as such but always only as some recognizable, specifiable trait, an instituted trace, which refers to what it is not and cannot re-present but can only mark as vanished, absent, inaccessible.4 Admittedly, then, all that can be said about apophatic discourse fails to attain anything like its “essence.” Such discourse can be defined only by its relation to something it does not comprehend and cannot adequately or commensurately express. It is what this discourse arises in the face of and in response to that constitutes its essential, albeit essentially incommunicable, meaning or rather import. This “in-the-face-of” can be inexpressibly concrete and singular. But in attempting to name it, we can only generate myths and metaphors like Nameless, Inexpressible, Secret or Ineffable, expressions that testify to what they cannot say and cancel themselves out as expressions, leaving only a trace indicating what cannot be represented or characterized or expressed. This is to understand apophasis in essentially performative terms. Certain performances of language can hint at what it cannot articulate but somehow shows in the very cancelation of expression, or of attempted expression. It is language’s faculty for unbecoming (from Meister Eckhart’s “entwerdende”) that is the clue to its designating, or rather adumbrating, what cannot be said, the other of everything that is anything and so can be said. That is indeed how recent interpreters have instructed us to understand apophatic discourse. Stephen Katz observes that apophatic discourse actually does something different from what it says. For the terms used to deny expressibility are themselves laden with descriptive value. He concludes that apophasis is generally only an abstract, programmatic position that mystical discourse in practice belies, or at least qualifies (Katz, 1992) But precisely this inconsistency has been recognized as the cunning of apophatic discourse, its distinctive character and strategy, by other interpreters. The ineluctable disjunction between what is said and what is concretely realized in practice is exactly what apophatic discourses mean to focus attention on and illuminate. Michael Sells defines apophasis as a “meaning event” in which language unsays itself. His readings of apophatic texts aim to show how they can “perform (rather than assert) a referential openness” (Sells, 1994).5 Mystical union is imitated in language that effaces grammatical distinctions between subject and object and thereby collapses or displaces reference. We have arrived, in some strains of our culture, at a predominantly apophatic phase that repeats moments of this loosely coherent “tradition” reaching back to the Neoplatonists. Apophasis tends to emerge at a late stage in the development of 4 For the theory of the trace, see especially Levinas, (1967). My descriptions are obviously indebted also to numerous discussions of the trace by Derrida. 5 See also conclusion.

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an historical cycle of thought and culture, when critical faculties are prodigious and creative faculties appear somewhat atrophied by comparison. Creation and criticism, of course, elicit each other and are often inextricably interwoven. Nevertheless, the weight of tradition is most acutely sensed at a stage where philosophy is often essentially about philosophizing itself and self-criticism accompanies its every act. Yet the characteristic emphasis of negative theological thinking is to turn this introversion inside out. The very emptiness of the self-reflexive concentration of thought and discourse in our late age issues in a turn towards the unsayable Other of thought and discourse and discloses their inexhaustible richness as indicators of what no thought or discourse can fathom. Such is the provocation of apophasis in its very emptiness (of articulable concepts), which evokes everything, its very silence suggesting all. Discourse shows itself to be empty not of content but only of conceptual purchase on absolute reality, while at the same time it is let loose to express in crazy ways all that it could never properly say. This phase turns out to be exceptionally fecund in the invention of discourse reflecting from different angles, and in its very disintegration as discourse, upon what cannot be said. This openness to apophasis, especially to some of its mystical and religious tendencies is, of course, far from uncontested in philosophy today. Some postmodern thought can best be understood primarily as the denial of the tradition of negative theology that has been traced here from its Neoplatonic matrices. Much philosophy since the Enlightenment has understood itself as anti-theology and therefore equally as against every form of negative theology, which is seen as a sly effort to recuperate the myth or lie of God that is viewed as nevertheless doomed by rights and without appeal. Progressive politics and a revolutionary ideology have been posed as intrinsically antithetical to theology in any form whatsoever. Of course, this denial of its discourse is exactly what apophasis expects and invites. Being contradicted is not so much a denial as a confirmation of its vision of the necessary inadequacy of any discourse whatsoever, including its own. Nevertheless, the intent of such attacks is to take an attitude opposed to the sort of philosophy of the unsayable that is here in question. It will be instructive to consider at least one line of thought that understands itself as attacking negative theology for being still a theology and therefore, presumptively, the enemy of free philosophical thinking. In order to develop this assessment of apophasis as crucial to the situation of philosophy today, I would like to respond to one thinker who has taken just the opposite tack from me in interpreting the whole tradition of negative theology. I will respond specifically to Jean-Luc Nancy’s masterful and provocative essay “Des lieux divins” (“Of Divine Places”). Nancy’s essay appeared originally as a contribution to a collection of essays written by 36 of France’s leading thinkers in philosophy, theology and literature on the question “What is God?”6 Addressing this public of mixed professions, Nancy transposes the question concerning the essence of God into a question of the “place” of the divine, thereby making it possible to broach the question of God in a de-essentialized form. He is interested in how divinity, emptied of all content, becomes no more than a place, a topos. As a recipient of attributions, divinity itself 6 “Des lieux divins,” in Qu’est-ce que Dieu? Hommage à l’abbé Daniel Coppieters de Gibson (1929– 1983) (pp. 541–553). Bruxelles: Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1985, The essay has also appeared more than once in book form, for example, Des lieux divins (Toulouse: Mauvezin, 1987). It is translated into English by Peter Connor as “Of Divine Places” in The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 110–125, though I translate citations directly from the French myself.

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has no characteristics and is nothing but a place of pure receptivity. This might be thought to put divinity in a place of peculiar power, but Nancy interprets it as bearing only the opposite significance: he wishes to depotentiate theology and render God not just dead but, much more radically and devastatingly, irrelevant.7 Nancy acutely analyzes monotheism as consisting essentially in an identification of divinity with Being, or rather with “the excellency of Being” in which all Being is one (“L’idée de l’excellence de l’existence dans l’être-un fait l’essence du monothéisme,” sec. 1, p. 254). But he rejects the idea that Being or its unity can in any way be God. For Nancy, Being is not at all, but only beings, and so, by the same token, the monotheistic God is not. Of course, the whole tradition of negative theology also insists that God is Nothing just as much as—or more than—he is Being, since he is rather beyond Being. But for Nancy there is nothing whatsoever besides beings. He even chooses to consider beings, not Being or the beyond of Being, as divine, and thus to concern himself not with God but rather with a god or the god. He does not allow these terms any genuine theological content as attempts to conceptualize a divinity transcending beings, since for him there can be no such thing; neither does he accord them any ontological import as designating what somehow conditions beings. The powers, if any, of a god or the god are none other than those pertaining to just one more kind of beings. Nancy is above all concerned to deny theology its privilege as the discourse par excellence on the Other, the Infinite, the infinitely other. In our age, he maintains, there is nothing to say about God that cannot just as well be said about things like love, poetry, the “event,” etc. D’accord. But it is (and always was) what cannot be said about these subjects, or about any subject, that is most important about them. And the word “God”—with its perhaps annoyingly pretentious aura of something supernatural or transcendent—marks this difference. Though possessed of no determinate, sayable content, the name “God” is evidently not a normal subject like the presumably familiar subjects Nancy evokes as coextensive, and in fact as coinciding with everything that God can possibly be. For Nancy there is really no problem about the concept of God, for there is for him no God that exceeds conceptualization, as there is for Pseudo-Dionysius and the whole tradition in his wake. What Nancy really wants to deny, like Hegel before him, is what cannot be said. This is not just to deny that what cannot be said, the ineffable, is anything. That much was conceded and in fact insisted upon from Plotinus to PseudoDionysius, Maimonides, Eckhart, etc. Nancy’s point, rather, is to deny any special meaning and pertinence to language about God. In Nancy’s view—using Hölderlin’s phrase—the names of the gods are lacking, that is, lacking in gods to name. The gods that were previously manifest to preceding civilizations are no longer present or even extant. Modern Western civilization, reason, secularization, and even the Christian religion itself have done the gods to death, as was clearly proclaimed by Hegel and Nietzsche. Thus Nancy describes the contemporary situation as one of extreme deprivation of all possibility of naming God. God is no longer even a distinct theme of discourse; theology has been dissolved into ontology, anthropology, cosmology, etc. The unnameability of God consequently takes on quite different motivations from those of 7 I restrict myself to discussing Nancy’s position in this essay. The argument of Nancy (2005), volume 1, La Déclosion, is new and in crucial ways reverses his thinking about theology. Here Christianity turns out to be eminently a negative theology that carries out its own deconstruction of itself and of Western tradition. It is the agent rather than only the object of deconstruction. I completely agree with Nancy’s outlook here and will treat it separately.

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the divine transcendence evoked by negative theologies. God is not unnameable for lack of an adequate concept of divinity or due to divine transcendence beyond the reach of language. It is rather that to name God, even by address in prayer, cannot be serious, sincere or even meaningful. The very function of addressing, whether directed to the divine or to anyone else, has become impossible. Indeed all names that things or persons can be called have some vestigial remnants of divinity in them, and therefore the very gesture of appellation or address in general has become impossible today, according to Nancy. Nancy rightly admonishes that the extreme destitution, the lack of plenitude and presence experienced everywhere in modernity, should not arbitrarily be called God in a gesture simply of interpreting every negative as infinitely positive. But he seems deliberately to miss the point that it is what is not being called anything, or being said at all, that is the place of the divine—to use his own eloquent idiom. The talk of “God” in radical negative theologies attempts to call up this anonymous, unnameable place. Nancy is aggressively anti-theological. He proposes in effect an anti-theology, a philosophy of the finitude of being as absolute and final (sec. 29). He scorns and deplores the idea of a return of the religious, that he admits to be much touted about today, as ridiculous. For him, echoing Hegel (though not perhaps in a sense faithful to Hegel’s meaning), the death of God is the final thought of philosophy: “The death of God is the final thought of philosophy, which proposes it as the end of religion: it is the thought towards which the Occident (which in this respect excludes neither Islam nor Buddhism) will not have ceased to tend” [“La mort de Dieu est la pensée finale de la philosophie, qui la propose ainsi comme fin à la religion: c’est la pensée à laquelle l’Occident (qui n’exclut, à ce titre, ni l’Islam ni le bouddhisme) n’aura pas cessé de tendre,” p. 561]. Nancy keeps saying what is no longer possible for us as belated Westerners (“au coeur de notre expérience, au coeur de notre tardive nécessité occidentale,” etc., p. 552) and legislates what is a legitimate stance for “la pensée,” at least for thought in general today. But by what right is he speaking for us all? This could perhaps have been plausible for Hegel, but how can such a “we” be persuasive, let alone meaningful today in the age of shattered subjectity? Surely a “we” that is “singular plural” (Nancy’s “singulier pluriel”) should not rule out the possibility of others who think differently. Nancy practically ventriloquizes Hegel, but without Hegel’s respect for religion. When Nancy denounces all talk of a “return of the religious” as ridiculous, he asserts in polemical and even dogmatic terms the death of God as “irrefutable and non-displaceable” (“cet événement irréfutable et indéplaçeable, qui a d’avance rendu dérisoires tous les ‘retours du religieux,”’ p. 553). But how can any thought be final? Is not the very life of thinking in constant displacements of every achieved formulation? This indeed has been the irresistible lesson of French post-structuralist styles of thinking like his own. With respect to religion, however, Nancy bears down blindly to resist it. His essay in certain moments evinces a deep and personal familiarity with Roman Catholicism and the Latin liturgy. But when he speaks with a voice affected by this heritage, it is as if he has not overcome it sufficiently to permit him to reach an objective stance towards it.8 Nancy writes as if he had the right description of the abyss of unknowing—so rich in tradition—as a purely human lack, a fragmentation of the human subject that is only 8 Nancy reverts constantly to this matrix, for example, Nancy (2000, 2003).

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mendaciously “baptized” in the name of an unknowable God. A more open tack is taken by Thomas A. Carlson in the programmatic statement of his book Indiscretion, proposing to leave open the question, which Nancy perhaps over-zealously decides, of the identity or distinctness of the divine and the human. This is the question of whether negative discourse about God is or is not another vocabulary for expressing what can also be articulated in terms of human finitude. I argue here that this question can be answered—or, better, suspended and kept open—insofar as one can signal a point at which the negative logic of Being-toward-God within classic apophatic and mystical forms of language and representation reveals a strikingly forceful analogy to the negative logic of Being-toward-death in contemporary (Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian) discourse on human finitude. In and through the development of this ‘apophatic analogy,’ the work moves toward a point of ‘indiscretion’ at which the negativity of the divine and of the human, of the theological and the thanatological, can (and do) prove to be neither distinct nor identical—but bound in the radical indeterminacy that haunts the experience of all language and representation regarding an ineffable God and/or an impossible death (Carlson, 1999). The refusal of binary, oppositional logic and the proposal to read the strikingly forceful analogies between Being-toward-God in premodern apophatic discourses, signally Pseudo-Dionysius’s, and Being-toward-death in post-Hegelian and postmodern discourses on human finitude has guided Carlson’s work in this area along a more Derridean line. Whereas Nancy takes a trenchently anti-theological stance, Derrida has been twisting away from such oppositional stances, conspicuously in his deconstructive engagements with negative theology (See especially Derrida, 1993) Mark C. Taylor, too, has explored in innovative ways the space that opens for theology in the very tearing of its text, in the insurmountable check to its discourse. This happens in the face of “Altarity,” the wholly or Holy Other, “das ganz Andere,” as marked by the surplus (“Überschuss”) of the religious beyond all conceptual or even moral meaning. This is the order of significance inaccessible to reason and speech that was characterized as numinous or uncanny or even monstrous (“ungeheuer”) by Rudolf Ott in Das Heilige (Taylor, 1987, 1900). Nancy uses many of the same critical and deconstructive insights that animate negative theology and its contemporary interpreters, but he pursues them with opposite ends and purposes, taking these theological ends and purposes to be what most need to be deconstructed and disposed of. Were these ends and purposes articulated or articulable, were negative theology a positive doctrine rather than negation even of itself, one could be in agreement with him. What negative theology is becomes moot once we admit that it has no essence or even that its “essence” or pseudo-essence is to refuse every essence. What differentiates Nancy’s viewpoint from the one developed in this essay is the attitude we take towards this tradition of negative theology—whether we resist and resent it, or gratefully receive and willingly work with it. These choices are about us—and about our acknowledgments towards traditions that exist and that inform us. Christianity is Nancy’s own spiritual heritage and cultural matrix, so it is natural that he should struggle to overcome it. Nevertheless, the result is that, with great insight and acuteness, Nancy is insisting on the impossibility of what has proved itself, as we have just seen, to be a perennial possibility of thinking from age to age. Jean-Luc Nancy’s refusal of Christianity along with all theologies, including negative theologies, is not a philosophical necessity so much as a personal choice and

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perhaps exigency. Many other thinkers sharing fundamental convictions and compulsions in common with him enthusiastically embrace elements of this and other religious traditions. Even the refusal is a continuation of dialogue with what proves an indispensable adversary for as long as the discussion goes on. As in Blanchot’s infinite conversation, the reference to theology has never really been erased so long as it is in the process of being erased (Blanchot, 1969).9 The declared intent to forget theology and so to cease to be conditioned by it is contradicted by the very discourse that declares this intent. Just this sort of recursive significance of discourse, beyond its explicitly stated intent, must be taken with the utmost seriousness by both apostles of apophasis and their denigrators. The larger burden of Nancy’s essay is an extremely penetrating analysis of religions and their conceptualizations of God. Yet the method remains purely conceptual. It is a method perfectly appropriate to philosophy, but it cannot begin to sound the depths of theology, much less of religion. It remains willfully blind to the possible revivals of religion that have been witnessed recently, and in fact right within the movements styled “postmodern.” Indeed a host of thinkers and scholars, notably many working within the ambit of Derrida and deconstruction, have given ear to precisely the return of the religious that Nancy refuses to hear anything about. Such interest has found a certain forum, for example, in the series of conferences organized by John Caputo at Villanova University and in a slew of publications dealing with “the postmodern return of God” (Caputo & Scanlon, 1999; Caputo, Scanlon, & Dooley, 2001; Scharlemann, 1992; Summerell, 1998; Ward, 1977, 2001). A parallel investment of the postmodern in the rediscovery of the religious has been fostered in Italy by, among others, Gianni Vattimo, Massimo Cacciari, Vincenzo Vittiello.10 Giorgio Agamben, moreover, sharing many of the same points of reference in postmodern thinking, is acutely receptive to the apophatic dimension. Agamben has linked his speculations in an apophatic mode explicitly with the Neoplatonic negative theological tradition of Damascius by beginning a recent book with a reconsideration of this largely forgotten philosopher. (Agamben, 2002) There is similarly a very active effort of Dutch philosophers of religion to read contemporary thought against the background of traditions of negative theology. (Bulhof & Laurens ten Kate, 2000). Hent de Vries’s thinking in the wake of Derrida takes its decisive impulse from the need to explain the return to religion. The adieu or goodbye to God and religion in modern times is at the same time, and perhaps even before all times, a movement commending oneself, or those one addresses, “to God,” “à Dieu” (Hent de Vries, 1999). De Vries interprets the philosophies of Adorno and Levinas as minimal negative theologies, and suggests how a variety of other modern thinkers and writers can likewise be reassessed through these optics (Hent de Vries, 1989). My own view is that apophatic or negative theology has held in keeping the keys to the perennial vitality of philosophical thinking that does not define and then exhaust arbitarily laid down, heuristic limits for its thinking. The willingness to let go of all definitions, to negate all its own formulations, opens thought to what is moving within it, beyond or beneath the definitive grasp of words and concepts. Philosophy at this level is not merely cognitive but shades into and merges with other dimensions, affective 9 Derrida speaks of Nancy’s “interminable ‘deconstruction of Christianity”’ (“interminable ‘déconstruction du christianisme”’) in Derrida & Spire (2002). 10 See, for example, Almanacco di filosofia, MicroMega 2 (2000) and the journal Filosofia, edited by Gianni Vattimo, from the 1990’s through 2001.

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and connative, of human being and experience. In the ancient world, notably among the Neoplatonists, philosophy was understood as a spiritual exercise involving all the faculties of human intellection and sensibility and praxis (Hadot, 2002). Damascius presents the ripest fruit of the philosophical reflection of the Hellenistic Age. Some would say over-ripe. I have exalted as a perennial and necessary development in philosophy, by nature critical and critical especially of itself, the phase of hypercritical and even self-crippling reflection that makes a virtue of self-destruction, recognizing in the self-subversion of discourse an unveiling, or at least an indicating, of a radical Other to all discourse. But this might also be deplored as the fall from grace of the genuine philosophical spirit and inspiration that first dawned in archaic and classical Greece. In this latter historical perspective, philosophy in its classical form would have observed the just measures of reason, but would have turned grotesque over time. Hellenistic forms of art with their overemphasis and distortion of nature may be seen analogously as illustrative of what happens in thinking that similarly foresakes the measure of nature, stretching ideas to extremes where they are no longer plausible. Such thinking would be held to overstep the limits within which it is really useful and creative. There must be truth in this assessment, too, if we consider the widespread, perennial appreciation for classical models of thought and art and their periodically reasserting themselves as incomparably to be preferred to all others. Yet such views too prove always to be passing. So we also need to understand why thinking analogous rather to Hellenistic forms of conceptual mannerism has such a prominent place and appeal repeatedly throughout the history of philosophy and again in philosophy today. This is crucial to the task of understanding the predicament of thought at the present. We can thereby better see postmodern thought in historical perspective, and perhaps move beyond it. The point here is not so much to argue over what is the right paradigm for thinking as to feel out the furthest potential of each framework, including our own, so as to be able to carry it further or surpass it. Accordingly, I want to acknowledge the limits of Neoplatonic thought as it can be represented in a contemporary context: the positive metaphysical program does not have the same direct claim upon us as it did upon late antiquity and as the apophatic underpinnings of such thought still do for us. The philosophy of the unsayable advanced in these pages may come across as an apology for metaphysical and mystical currents of thinking valorized for their appeal to critical reason and more broadly to “philosophy” as the love of wisdom. The revaluation of Neoplatonism as philosophical critique turning in metaphysical and mystical directions is only exemplary of similar reassessments that could be made of philosophies thinking beyond the limits of word and reason in almost every age. I have sketched out some nodal points for a history of such thinking in On What Cannot Be Said (Franke forthcoming). Much more work has been done, particularly by John Milbank, in bringing out theological undercurrents submerged beneath dominant rational paradigms of the Enlightenment in thinkers like Vico, Hamann, and Herder (Milbank, 1997). The thrust of such philosophies of the unsayable is not to undermine reason, but rather the contrary. Recognition of the limits of reason as logos or word restores reason to its proper place at the center of intellectual illumination and yet surrounded at the same time by the circumambient penumbra of what it ignores and cannot penetrate. Its light shines within and even thanks to this darkness (again Denken proves to be Danken). Indeed rational critique has proved essential to discovering the philosophy of the unsayable in Neoplatonism, as well as in every subsequent avatar

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of apophatic thought. Reason has constantly been called forth by the call of this Other that it cannot comprehend. The eminently rational philosophies of Aristotle or Hegel are not dismissed or diminished in the perspective of a philosophy of the unsayable. Quite the opposite. But just as both these thinkers showed unprecedented understanding for their own predecessors, their philosophies too, for all their fully systematic articulation, are to be viewed in the end as indispensable moments within the whole movement of thought that irrepressibly forges beyond thought itself, beyond any determinate formulation of thinking in speech, beyond anything that can be said. References Agamben, G. (2002). Idea Bella prosa. Macerata: Quodlibet, pp. 9–12. Armstrong, A. H. (1979). Plotinus’s doctrine of the infinite and its significance for christian thought. In Plotinian and christian studies, vol. 47. London: Varoriurn Reprints. Armstrong, A. H. (1979). Negative theology. In Plotinian and christian studies, p. XXIV: 178. Armstrong, A. H. (1979). The escape of the one: An investigation of some possibilities of apophatic theology imperfectly realised in the West. In Plotinian and christian studies, p. XXIIII: 87. Aubenque, P. (1971). Plotin et le dépassement de l’ontologie grecque classique. In P. Maxime Schuhl & P. Hadot (Eds.), Le Néopolatonisme, Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Benjamin, W. (1977) Über die Sprache überhaupt and über die Sprache des Menschen (1916). In Gesammelte Schriften. II, I (pp. 140–157). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, translated by Jephcott, E. (1978). On language as such and on the language of man. In Reflections: essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings (pp. 314–332). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Blanchot, M. (1969). Comment découvrir l’obscur? In L ’Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 57–69, translated by Hanson, S. (1993). How to discover the obscure? In The infinite conversation (pp. 40–48). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Blanchot, M. (1969). L ’Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard. Bulhof, I. N., & Laurens ten Kate (Eds.) (2000). Flight of the Gods: Philosophical perspectives on negative theology, New York: Fordham University Press. Caputo, J. D., Scanlon, M. J., & Dooley, M. (Eds.) (2001). Questioning God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Caputo, J. D., & Scanlon, M. J. (Eds.) (1999) God, the gift, and postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 12. Carlson, T. A. (1999) Indiscretion: Finitude and the naming of God. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 4–5. Combés, J. (1996). La théologie aporétique de Damascius. In Études néoplatoniciennes, 2nd ed. rev., Grenoble: Jérome Millon Connor, P. (1991). Of divine places, In The inoperative community (pp. 110–125). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Damascius (1966). Traité des Premiers Principes, vol. I: De L’Ineffable et de 1’Un, Leendert Gerrit Westerink (Ed.), translated by Combès, J. vol. I 21 (pp. 8–10) Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Davies, O., & Turner, D. (Eds.) (2002) Silence and the word: Negative theology and incarnation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Derrida, J (1993) Sauf le nom (pp. 15–21, 38–65). Paris: Galilée, translated as “Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum)” in Derrida, J. (1995), Thomas Dutoit (Ed.), On the name. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J., & Spire, A. (2002). Au-delà des apparences. Latresne, Bordeaux: Le Bord de 1’eau, p. 53. Dillon, J. M. (1997). Damascius on the ineffable. In The great tradition: Further studies in the development of platonism and early christianity. London: Variorum Editions. Franke, W. (forthcoming) On what cannot be said. Apophatic Discourses in philosophy, religion, literature, and the arts. Vol. I: Classic Formulations. Vol. II: Modern and Contemporary Transformations. University of Notre Dame Press. Hadot, P. (2002). Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique. Paris: Albin Michel. Heiser, J. H. (1991). Plotinus and the Apeiron of Plato’s Parmenides. Thomist, 55, 80. Hent de Vries (1989). Theologie im Pianissimo: Zur Aktualitcit der Denlguren Adornos and Levinas. Kampen, Netherlands: J.H. Kok. English translation by Hale, G. (forthcoming). Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas. Fordham University Press.

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Hent de Vries (1999). Philosophy and the turn to religion. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 27. Katz, S. (1992). Mystical speech and mystical meaning. In S. Katz (Ed.), Mysticism and language. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 33. Kenney, J. P. (1991). Mystical monotheism. Hannover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England. Kenney, J. P. (1993). The critical value of negative theology. Harvard Theological Review, 86, 439–553. Levinas (1967). La Trace de l’Autre and Énigme et phénoméne. In En découvrant 1’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Vrin. Milbank, J. (1977). The word made strange: theology, language, culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Nancy (2000) Corpus. Paris: Métailié. Nancy (2003) Noli me tangere: Essai sur la levée du corps. Paris: Bayard. Nancy (2005). Déconstruction du christianisme, vol. 1. Paris: Galilée. Sara Rappe (2000) Reading neoplatonism. Non-discursive thinking in the texts ofPlotinus, Proclus, and Damascius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scharlemann, R. P. (Ed.), (1992). Negation and theology. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Sells, M. (1994). Mystical languages of unsaying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 8. Summerell, O. F. (Ed.) (1998). The otherness of God. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Taylor, M. C. (1987) Altarity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, M. C. (1990). Tears. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990, p. 106. Trouillard, J. (August, 1961). Valeur critique de la mystique Plotinienne. Revue philosophique de Louvain, 59, 431–444. Turner, D. (1995). The darkness of God: Negativity in christian mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 34. Ward, G. (Ed.) (1997). The postmodern God: A theological reader. Boston: Blackwell. Ward, G. (Ed.) (2001). The Blackwell companion to postmodern theology. Oxford: Blackwell. Williams, J. P. (2000). Denying divinity: Apophasis in the patristic christian and Soto Zen Buddhist traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 8. Wittgenstein, L. (1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.522, translated by C. K. Ogden (1992) with introduction by Bertrand Russell. London: Routledge.

Int J Philos Relig (2006) 60:77–97 DOI 10.1007/s11153-006-0011-8 O R I G I NA L PA P E R

From “ghost in the machine” to “spiritual automaton”: Philosophical meditation in Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Levinas Hent de Vries

Received: 15 December 2005 / Accepted: 23 February 2006 / Published online: 10 November 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Abstract This essay discusses Stanley Cavell’s remarkable interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought against the background of his own ongoing engagement with Wittgenstein, Austin, and the problem of other minds. This unlikely debate, the only extensive discussion of Levinas by Cavell in his long philosophical career sofar, focuses on their different reception of Descartes’s idea of the infinite. The essay proposes to read both thinkers against the background of Wittgenstein’s model of philosophical meditation and raises the question as to whether Cavell and Levinas do not indirectly shed light on the early modern motif of the spiritual automaton. Keywords Wittgenstein · Cavell · Levinas · Philosophical meditation · Skepticism · Other minds · Spiritual automaton “skepticism with respect to other minds cannot be skeptical enough”—Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason In his remarkable interpretations of Wittgenstein and skepticism, Stanley Cavell has investigated the genres of confession and meditation—more precisely, of “philosophical meditation.” He has suggested that, in the historical development of skepticism regarding other human minds, such practices have culminated in a modern understanding of “the problem of the other” as “a replacement of the problem of God”(Cavell, 1979, p. 489). Such “philosophical meditation,” he argues, has moved toward—but is not fully identical with—the function that religion and theology, in their argumentative styles, idiom, imagery, and rhetoric, have historically played and, indeed, continue to play. Cavell takes meditation to express a deeply metaphysical and existential concern that is too often glossed over, forgotten, repressed, or sublimated in the scientific, epistemological, and moral discourses of modernity, although modern artworks and aesthetics are often an exception to this rule. Cavell writes, “the

H. de Vries (B) Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Doelenstraat, 1012 CP Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

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subject of self-knowledge, both as a phenomenon and as a source of philosophical knowledge, has been blocked or denied in modern philosophy.” Yet, paradoxically, precisely a conception and practice of self-knowledge as revealed in “meditation” is “necessary to philosophical advance” (p. 146). In this paper I will examine in what sense this is so. An observation Cavell makes about his own sources of inspiration, first Austin’s lectures at Harvard, then a rereading of Wittgenstein, indicates that “philosophical meditation” is intrinsically related to “confession” (as it is to “prophecy” and “conversion,” though I will leave those aside for now): the moment I felt that something about ordinary language philosophy was giving me a voice in philosophy, I knew that the something was the idea of a return of voice to philosophy. . ., as if what philosophy meant by logic demanded, in the name of rationality, the repression of voice (hence of confession, hence of autobiography). Thus when in my second paper, the first in response to reading Wittgenstein. . . I identified the Investigations as a form and work of confession, I set words out that I am following to this moment1 In what sense, I would like to ask, does Cavell’s own subsequent work, well beyond its continued glossing of Wittgenstein’s later oeuvre—somewhat surprisingly, he never addresses the earlier or latest writings, such as the Tractatus or Über Gewissheit (On Certainty)—follow the “form and work of confession”? How, exactly, does it relate to the model of “philosophical meditation” that is analyzed and pursued in The Claim of Reason? A further reason for discussing Cavell in these broadly theological—or, as we will see, “spiritual”—terms has to do with his stunningly original interpretation of the skeptical exercise as formulated in Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy. Indeed, the discussion of “philosophical meditation” in The Claim of Reason takes its point of departure less from Augustine’s Confessions (as Cavell had in the earlier paper) than from Descartes’s Meditations. In Descartes’s argument, rhetoric, and imaginary, he finds a guiding thread to the concerns of “modern” thinking as a whole—including “secularization” and its reflex, “Romanticism.” This is so even—or especially—where modernity’s philosophical project gets bogged down in the minutiae of epistemology. (This, Cavell argues, it does from the start. Pace Richard Rorty’s critical appraisal of The Claim of Reason in Consequences of Pragmatism, the resulting predicament cannot simply be avoided and has literary and artistic, indeed, even visual ramifications.) As a “scene of instruction,” the Cartesian meditations, in their attempt to establish the principles of mathematical physics together with two proofs for the existence of God, have wider— metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic—repercussions as well. A telling example, Cavell suggests, can be found in the “idea of the Infinite” as received— and displaced—in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, from Totalité et Infini (Totality and Infinity) on (Levinas, 1961, 1969). After introducing Cavell’s early assessment of Wittgenstein’s method, I will discuss “philosophical meditation” in The Claim of Reason, then examine how, in a recent essay by Cavell, meditation is put to contrasting and complementary uses in Descartes and Levinas. Interestingly, the historical filiation from Augustine through Descartes to Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Cavell will in consequence shed light on the questions of kinship and community—their non-naturalist “naturalness” and literary fictionality, their tragedy and comedy—as well. 1 Cavell (1994) is referring to his 1962 essay “The availability of wittgenstein’s later philosophy,” later included in Cavell (2002).

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The confessional “style” In the concluding section of his pivotal “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” Cavell addresses the question of the “literary style” of the Philosophical Investigations. Noting that Wittgenstein explicitly says he will not propound theses in this work, Cavell remarks: “he does not report, he does not write up results. Nobody would forge a style so personal who had not wanted and needed to find the right expression for his thought. The German dissertation and the British essay—our most common modern options for writing philosophy—would not work; his is not a system and he is not a spectator”(Cavell, 2002, p. 70). Beyond responding to a “lack of the existing terms of criticism,” Wittgenstein, Cavell suggests, adopts his peculiar “literary style” because it provides him with a “method for self-knowledge” (ibid.) It is this pursuit of “self-knowledge,” this quest for selfhood, that Cavell will bring out so forcefully in The Claim of Reason. Indeed, I am convinced that the “form” of Wittgenstein’s “work” allows—and the form of Cavell’s own book enables—Cavell to claim nothing beyond this; no thesis, no system, no report, no result is put forward in either the Philosophical Investigations or The Claim of Reason. On the contrary, in both works a combination of argumentative rigor and idiosyncratic wit testifies to a confessional genre whose proper features can be appreciated only by those who “are able and willing to meditate seriously” with the author, as Descartes, in his Meditations, urges in the Preface to his readers, not in order to “withdraw their mind from the senses and from all preconceived opinions,” but by way of a return to the “ordinary,” the “common,” and the “low,” as Cavell envisions via Emerson and Thoreau. How are we to understand this “method” or “literary style”? And how will a modern “skeptical recital” of the Cartesian meditation, especially as it involves the question “concerning other minds,” modify its various—and, as we shall learn, often self-contradictory—“claims”? Cavell characterizes Wittgenstein’s philosophical genre via telling historical parallels: “In its defense of truth against sophistry, philosophy has employed the same literary genres as theology in its defense of the faith: against intellectual competition, Dogmatics; against Dogmatics, the Confession; in both, the Dialogue. Inaccessible to the dogmatics of philosophical criticism, Wittgenstein chose confession and recast its dialogue”(Cavell, 2002, pp. 70, 71). In this passage, “dogmatics” refers to the theology of Adolph von Harnack, as well as to Karl Barth’s revolt against the culture of Protestantism for which it stands. “Confession,” of course, alludes to Augustine, whose scene of the instruction in language is invoked and criticized starting with the very first paragraph of the Philosophical Investigations. The “dialogue” Cavell invokes is that between “the voice of temptation” and “the voice of correctness,” which alternate and are the real “antagonists” throughout Wittgenstein’s “philosophical album” (to cite the designation Wittgenstein himself uses in the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations) (Cavell, 2002, p. 71). More important here than the question of style per se (and its fascination) is the fact that confession expresses—or, rather, elicits—a “method of self-knowledge” whose aims are neither those of science or epistemic certainty, nor those of morality, religion, art, or aesthetic pleasure: “In confession you do not explain or justify, but describe how it is with you. And confession, unlike dogma, is not to be believed but tested, and accepted or rejected. Nor is it the occasion for accusation, except of yourself, and by implication those who find themselves in you”(Cavell, 2002, p. 71).

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In this sense, Cavell concludes, Wittgenstein’s writing is also “deeply practical and negative, the way Freud’s is”; its critical mode prepares a way of life, not a better theory of it. Cavell continues: And like Freud’s therapy, it wishes to prevent understanding which is unaccompanied by inner change. Both of them are intent upon unmasking the defeat of our real need in the face of self-impositions which we have not assessed. . ., or fantasies (“pictures”) which we cannot escape. . . In both, such misfortune is betrayed in the incongruence between what is said and what is meant or expressed; for both, the self is concealed in assertion and action and revealed in temptation and wish (Cavell, 2002, p. 72)2 . These remarks are reminiscent of the tradition of spirititual exercises outlined by Pierre Hadot, whose early essays on Wittgenstein as a “philosopher of language,” published in Critique in 1960, introduced this thinker to the French reading public (as, some thirty years earlier, Levinas had introduced Husserl and Heidegger). This notion of spiritual exercises seems to have become a whole new venue of research (not least in Hadot’s own subsequent work), one anticipated but not exhausted by Michel Foucault’s work on the motif of the “care of the self,” starting from its ancient Greek and Hellenistic sources. Hadot, in interviews with Arnold Davidson published as La philosophie comme manière de vivre, has insisted on the importance of Wittgenstein’s “vision of language” (cf. pp. 168ff.) for the elaboration of his own conception of philosophy as a “way of life,” an exercise, rather than as a theory, a contemplation, a praxis, or even an aesthetics. The writings that make up the tradition of spiritual exercises, to the extent that they have not been subject to a philological violence that erases the lectio difficilior, glossing over the “apparent incoherence of the philosophical authors of Antiquity,” consist in meditations in which self-transformation—indeed, conversion—is the implied, if not always professed, aim (Hadot, 2004, p. 11). Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games,” Hadot says, enables him to articulate in what sense the principal occupation of these authors was not to inform their readers about an ordered grouping [agencement] of concepts, but to form [former] them.. . . One must therefore resituate the philosophical discourses, with their language games, within the form of life that they engendered, that is to say, within a concrete personal or social situation, within the praxis that conditioned them or in light of the effect that they sought to produce. To this end, I began talking of “spiritual exercise,” an expression that was perhaps unfortunate, but which enabled me to designate an activity, almost always of a discursive nature, whether rational or imaginative, aimed at modifying, in oneself or others, a way of living and of viewing the world (Hadot, 2004). Hadot’s central insight brings out a surprising trait in Cavell, who, like Wittgenstein, understands philosophy to be “the criticism a culture produces of itself,” a “selfscrutiny” that is “not moralistic” but, in an altogether novel sense, made “methodical” (pp. 175–176). It is not difficult to see an at once historical and systematic link between the tradition that defines “philosophy as a way of life” and everything Cavell has to say about “moral perfectionism.” I am thinking not so much of Hadot’s comments on Thoreau (at a conference at the École Normale Supérieure devoted to Cavell) as of the ways 2 Cavell (2002) refers to paragraphs 108 and 115 of the Investigations.

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in which the traditional concept of the examined life undergoes a radical rethinking in Cavell’s relentless interrogation of “the philosopher’s [not, as Bunyan would have said, the pilgrim’s] progress” (p. 136). If philosophy’s “arrogation of voice” cannot be identified with those of science, literature, or psychoanalysis, then, Cavell writes, an “ancient answer” to why this is so is that “philosophy begins with, say, in the Socratic ambition, and may at any time encounter, an aspiration toward the therapeutic, a sense of itself as guiding the soul, or self, from self-imprisonment toward the light or the instinct of freedom” (Cavell, 1994, p. 4). Here I do not have time to explore moral perfectionism in its proper Cavellian context, that is to say, in its dependence on the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, its debate with John Rawls, and its reinterpretation of contractual theories of natural right. Instead, I will read Cavell’s many literal references to philosophy as a “way of life,” in The Claim of Reason and elsewhere, against the backdrop of Hadot’s central idea, as well as in light of Cavell’s episodic references to “religion” and the ways the theological and existential problem of God finds an echo, translation, and continuation in the question of non-epistemic certainty concerning the other or, as Cavell says with Austin, the “other mind” (of which, as in Levinas, there is always more than one, if only because in the face of the one other—my neighbor, the stranger— virtually all other others call out for my responsibility, as well). I am thinking less of Cavell’s stunning modification of Wittgenstein’s phrase “The body is the best picture of the human soul” into the “crucified body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul” (which, we should add, remains a picture nonetheless, and nothing more; p. 430) than of the fact that the whole discussion of skepticism with respect to other minds, as differentiated from skepticism concerning material objects in the external world, hinges on the possibility—perhaps the necessity—of allowing oneself virtually or potentially to view “[a]nother’s mind as God” (p. 97). By slightly extending Cavell’s argumentation, one could demonstrate that this figure regulates the relationship between the self and all other others, whether animate or inanimate, natural or artificial, human or not—that is to say, “the difference between human beings and non-human beings or human non-beings” (p. 417), or “the difference between things and beings,” which, Cavell adds parenthetically, is “the difference” (p. 468). But is it? All along, I will argue that Cavell’s work, instead of being a reflection upon our humanity and finitude (as most interpreters, and often Cavell himself, have claimed), charts the grounds of a certain in- or anhumanity, as well as infinity, in a far more challenging way. In this, Cavell proves to be a truly Levinasian thinker, albeit it with certain reservations (ones that are entirely legitimate, not so much in terms of Levinas’s own philosophy, but insofar as they result from an immanent critique of its presuppositions, as I have argued elsewhere (de Vries, 2005). How, then, would invoking the other mind—or, more broadly, any other (whether mind, body, physical object, or material sign)—as “God” convey and acknowledge this other mind’s (or, for that matter, any other’s) significance? Moreover, is my relationship to my own self any different from the fundamental difference that the reference to God—as in reading “another’s mind as God”—suggests? If “knowing oneself,” Cavell writes, means acquiring “the ability to make oneself an other to oneself, to learn of oneself something one did not already know. . . [a] sensible axiom of the knowledge of other persons would be this: that one can see others only to the extent that one can take oneself as an other” (p. 459). Would this not mean: as other as God, as just and yet another “God,” or replacement and (to cite Derrida’s technical term)

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nonsynonymous substitution for what was once and still must be considered to be the one and only God? Such an organizing idea of God, whether heuristic or merely strategically employed, functions in various ways. One, as indicated, is the skepticism concerning other minds. If “another’s mind” absolves itself, like God—but thus is also authoritative, strangely present, all too present, virtually omnipresent—then we are confronted with what Cavell calls the “worry, if it is a real one, that there may at any human place be things that one cannot tell from human beings” (p. 416). We might be dealing, in fact, with, well, God: with angels, animals, puppets, golems, zombies, mutants, androids, replicants, cyborgs, automata, machines—in short, with an uncertainty that is only human and to which the denial of humanity (calling such worries and doubts, say, “unnatural”) would be a human, an all too human, response. One feels, Cavell writes, that “One who knows better than I would have to be free of human nature. God, for example” (ibid.). Here, the sub specie aeterni would be the negative (or, if you like, positive) foil against which human finitude assumes its specific profile, its perils and chances. But then, since we humans tend to make a leap of faith all the time anyway, relying on an altogether different type of “knowledge”—namely, acknowledgment— which leaves the ultimate non-availability of others intact even as it calls out and affirms their presence, we adopt a godlike perspective sub specie aeterni wherever we choose not to fall into the skeptical trap. This brings me to a different use of the idea of God, according to Cavell—this time, as it were, an immanent rather than a transcendent one. That is “transcendental logic” as a condition intrinsic to finite human experience as such. We find an example of this, Cavell writes, in Kant’s critiques, which strive “to show the possibility of knowledge, i.e., to show that knowledge is limited not in the sense that there are things beyond its reach but that there are human capacities and responsibilities and desires which reveal the world but which are not exhausted in the capacity of knowing things. This is something his Idea of God is meant to show: that I have, and must have if I am a rational creature, a relation to reality which is not that of knowing” (p. 54). Yet another way of naming God is as a reference (albeit it one among several) to all those instances that no longer or, perhaps, do not yet fit our modes of inhabiting our world, “like the way God or love or responsibility or beauty do not exist in our world; we have not mastered, or we have forgotten, or we have distorted, or learned through fragmented models, the forms of life which could make utterances like ‘God exists’ or ‘God is dead’ or ‘I love you’ or ‘I cannot do otherwise’ or ‘Beauty is but the beginning of terror’ bear all the weight they could carry, express all they could take from us” (pp. 172–173). Here God is but a functional equivalent and—as, again, Derrida would say—a “non-synonymous substitution” for love, beauty, existential resoluteness, and the like, perhaps the example par excellence, but an example nonetheless, which is to say, both less and more than the transcendental condition of exemplarity as such. In this motif, Cavell suggests that we must and ought to avoid the practical assumption, let alone the theoretical postulation, of an in principle available, expressive, or intact someone (or something?) for which “the other”—ultimately (or is it provisionally?) figured and, as Wittgenstein would say, pictured by “God”—could stand when called upon by me, or when calling upon me and for my responsiveness alone. Paradoxically, like God—and this must mean as God, just as God (is)—I am a hapax legomenon, appearing as I now am only once in the texture of worldly events, the exemplary, indeed, sole “example” of my “kind.” Theoretical knowledge, moral perfection, and aesthetic judgment all require that the other—that is, whatever is external

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to the orbit of our phenomenal horizon (first material objects and then other minds, or is it the other way around? Can these truly be distinguished, as Cavell also claims?)— remain separate, in need of my “call” or “acknowledgment.” The world is not so much “my representation” (as Schopenhauer famously states, in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [The World as Will and Representation]) as it is, literally and figuratively, “my call.” In other words: “The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is not to be known, but acknowledged” (Cavell, 2002, p. 234). Other minds are not so much known by me—through, say, analogical appresentation, as Husserl claims in the fifth of his Cartesianische Meditationen (Cartesian Meditations)—as “called upon,” and above all welcomed and/or denied in their calling upon me. This possible welcoming, or “annihilation,” as Levinas terms it, transforms the “I,” as Cavell says, into the very “scandal” around which skepticism, at least in its modern variety, revolves. Yet, as Cavell puts it, in a phrase that could have been written by Levinas: “my power comes to an end in the face of the other’s separateness from me” (p. 122). Does this mean that skepticism comes to an end here, too? Or is one, with respect to other minds never skeptical enough? (As Cavell says, “skepticism with respect to other minds cannot be skeptical enough”; p. 426.) For one thing—and here a further, now negative, characterization of the term or name God comes into play—skepticism can also be seen as the vain attempt to adopt a God’s eye point of view, a “view from nowhere”(Nagel, 1989). Seen from this vantage point, the skeptic fails to make explicit the position or situatedness from which he speaks. When we adopt the skeptic’s perspective, we pretend to assume an impersonal stance, one that cannot be claimed by (finite) humans: “It is as though we try to get the world to provide answers in a way which is independent of our responsibility for claiming something to be so (to get God to tell us what we must do in a way which is independent of our responsibility for choice); and we fix the world so that it can do this” (p. 216). Does an appeal to our “acceptance” of the world and “acknowledgment” of other minds—making them both our call and our calling—enable us to escape the skeptical stance, with its idolatrous usurpation of (rather than nonsynonymous substitution for) God’s place? Not quite. As Espen Hammer points out, in Cavell’s view, paradoxically, the shortest (or, indeed, any) way out of skepticism leads straight (back) into it: “What the skeptic seeks is a relation to the world in which the individual is no longer accountable—an absolute presence beyond the vicissitudes of having to establish a connection between what I say and the object before me. So to think there is a solution to skepticism is to give in to it”(Hammer, 2002, p. 57). This indeed makes unavoidable the God’s eye point of view, or at least the risk of an idolatrous usurpation of God’s place. Even the least assuming call–acceptance or acknowledgment, avoiding the skeptical stance—is a leap of faith, which in its very claim and proclamation risks the worst. Hence its horror.

Philosophical meditation The mental, indeed, spiritual exercise of philosophical meditation, which Cavell analyzes in depth in The Claim of Reason, follows a procedure that, as in Wittgenstein, results not in formulating theses but in making—and acknowledging—different sorts of claims. Cavell makes two related observations. First, he emphasizes that the traditional philosopher, who generalizes a particular doubt concerning a particular (more precisely, “generic”) object into a totalizing claim

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that the world as such is not accessible to certain knowledge without further support— for example, from the divine—faces a peculiar “dilemma”: “he ‘must,’ and ‘cannot,’ mean what he says” (p. 225); he expresses a view that is “at once inevitable for the human being and a denial of the human” (p. xxi). Indeed, skepticism’s “work” consists in “removing our access to context, to the before and the after, the ins and outs, of an expression”(Cavell, 1994, p. 112). This “erasure of context in philosophy” (ibid.), while existentially induced and amplified in “meditation,” is methodologically—and, inevitably, theoretically—exaggerated by the “skeptical recital,” especially in its Cartesian orientation. The traditional epistemologist, of whom Descartes in the Meditations is at once the principal representative and the nemesis, evokes, dramatizes, and on the whole mistakes for a theoretical position the uncanny “experience” of “seeing ourselves as outside the world as a whole,” of “looking at the world as one object (‘outside of us’)” (pp. 236–238). The “experience” that the traditional skeptic—along with all those who seek to refute him—tends to misdiagnose as a theoretical claim (i.e., a hypothesis or thesis) expresses the “feeling” of being “sealed off from objects, enclosed within my own experience” or, in the “comparable” experience of “persons,” of “feeling them to be closed off from me (within, as it were, their own experience)” (p. 161). We don’t know, Cavell writes, nor do we need to know whether the experience of the world “dropping out” from under us—or of us dropping out of the world we thought (or didn’t know) we shared with others (by going mad, being driven into exile, choosing rebellion)—is the end result, the theoretical conclusion or “moral,” of the skeptical investigation, or whether this feeling of the world’s (or lifeworld’s) “distance” or “inaccessibility” might not be, on the contrary, the skeptical operation’s very beginning, its “initiation” (p. 145). It would need “further work,” Cavell writes, to determine what to make of this “circling of the experience,” which suggests that “phenomenologically the form of the skeptical investigation is, after the fact, that of having confirmed our worst fear for knowledge” (ibid.). But the non-knowledge this fear expresses, Cavell insists, may not be the worst thing at all: “Then the question of skepticism (or of its possibility) becomes. . . : what makes just this particular fear possible?” (ibid.) It may well result from unreasonable expectations concerning the very nature and range of epistemic claims as such. But what, exactly, could put those expectations—or those claims—into doubt? And what, if only momentarily, can put to rest this doubt—with its characteristic unrest and “horror” (pp. 418–419), expressed nowhere more tangibly than in the “necessary reflexiveness of spiritual torture” (p. 493) that we find in tragedy? There is no simple answer to this question, nor does there need to be one. The central question discussed by Cavell in his treatment of the Cartesian mental experiment is simply this: “How does the philosopher’s meditation begin; what prompts it?” (p. 136). In other words, how should we understand the “initiating experience, the fearful surmise, the wonder” (p. 161) that brings it about in singular ways? The skeptic, Cavell writes, “possesses a conceptual scheme (i.e., our conceptual scheme—what other is lived?), but in the resolve and the intensity of his meditation he discovers that he must relinquish, with moans of delirious terror, the basis of its employment” (p. 47). Or again: “The skeptic insinuates that there are possibilities to which the claim of certainty shuts its eyes; or: whose eyes the claim of certainty shuts. It is the voice, or an intimation of the voice, of intellectual conscience” (p. 431). This brings me to my second claim, namely, that “the sense which makes confessions possible” (p. 109) can only be made in a confessional mode, in a confessional

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style—that is to say, not in a “declamatory” but in a “proclamatory” way. Meditations—such as “expecting the Kingdom of God” or “beatitude” and its contraries “corruption (or envy? sloth? charity?)”—represent or, rather, express “states of the soul” (p. 98), albeit a “soul muddled” (p. 180). In consequence, like the ways in which ordinary language philosophers remind us of “statements of initiation,” philosophical meditations “cannot be countered by evidence because they are not supported by evidence” (p. 179). In them, the traditional epistemologist (i.e., the skeptic as well as his foundationalist or modestly realist critic), like the ordinary language philosopher, “is not claiming something as true of the world, for which he is prepared to offer a basis—such statements are not synthetic; he is claiming something as true of himself (of his ‘world’ . . .) for which he is offering himself, the details of his feeling and conduct, as authority” (p. 179). Again, this is not to claim that skeptical investigation or meditative proclamation are immune to defeat or that they do not defeat themselves, like performative contradictions, which, as modern reason knows—and as Husserl states in so many words in Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations)—demonstrate in actu what they deny in thesi. On the contrary, the possibility of failure necessarily inheres in them. But the response to this predicament will just be a further proclamation. In Cavell’s words: “We may, of course, be wrong about what we say and do or will say and do. But that failure is not one which can be corrected with a more favorable position of observation or a full mastery in the recognition of objects; it requires a new look at oneself and a fuller realization of what one is doing or feeling” (p. 179). Hence, the internal dynamic of the skeptic’s operation, and thus of all philosophical meditation, in the end also resembles the one traditionally and paradoxically described as religious belief, that is to say, as “faith (which may begin by seeing something that will knock you off a horse, and in which the goal and the position coincide)” (p. 98). Descartes’s meditation, rather than propounding theoretical propositions—or theses—claims a different thought, acknowledges existence. In proving the existence of God, he approves existence tout court, his own to begin with. There is a pressing need to do so, given that it is the sole thing that is not in doubt. Cavell asks: Has such a one never felt his or her existence slighted, presented to blindness; never felt like insisting upon it, declaring it? Descartes’s insistence on it, I mean his proof of it, just depends on declaring it; anyway asserting it, anyway silently. It would truly have been ludicrous of him to have tried giving it out as a piece of information! My thought here is this: When Wittgenstein presents himself to us as denying or slighting our existence, our inner life, we may be prompted to respond to this apparent denial with a parabolic gesture of insistence upon our existence. The parable is to teach not just the fact of my existence, but the fact that to possess it I must declare it, as if taking it upon myself. Before this, there are no others for me. (p. 462). But at this point a Levinasian—and alternatively Cartesian—objection emerges: Would the reverse not be true as well? Is the very possibility of (and need for) acknowledgment not precisely opened up and provoked by the existence of an other, of virtually or potentially all others (whether human or not, one would have to add, making one further inference that neither Levinas, Descartes, nor Cavell seems willing to face, even though their writings, when pushed to their logical extreme, allow no other option).

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Cavell between Descartes and Levinas In a recent engagement with Levinas, Cavell limits himself to Levinas’s reception, in Totality and Infinity and “God and Philosophy”(Levinas, 1986, 1998) of the Cartesian motif of the idea of the Infinite. Totality and Infinity, Levinas’s “essay on exteriority” is the first systematic treatment of his ethical-metaphysical philosophy of the other—of the other human, not as an “other mind” but as a “neighbor.” Taking a somewhat arbitrary cue from Wittgenstein’s observation, in Philosophical Investigations (para 286), that in responding to someone who feels pain in his hand “one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into his face,” Cavell picks up on Levinas and on Levinas’s central argument, a reinterpretation of Descartes’s Third Meditation. He disagrees with it in ways that invite revision in the light of Levinas’s later, more direct and consistent treatment of the perennial problem of “skepticism and reason,” in a chapter of that name in Autrement qu’être (Otherwise than Being), which Cavell chooses to ignore. In fact, the argument of Otherwise than Being, whose subtitle adds a distinctive—un-Cavellian—direction beyond Essence (Levinas, 1974), is the foil against which a full comparison between Cavell and Levinas should be undertaken. I will not attempt this here, but will only spell out some preliminary considerations in such a virtual dialogue. In “What is the Scandal of Scepticism? Moments in Schopenhauer and Levinas,” first presented as a lecture in Amsterdam in 20003 , Cavell turns to Levinas’s views on the metaphysical—rather than merely axiological, let alone empirical—primacy of the Other (l’autre, l’Autrui, autrui, Autrui, both capitalized and in lower case) and its apparent confirmation in Descartes’s invocation of the “otherwise inexplicable presence in him of the idea of an infinite being” (PDT 144). Descartes’s Third Meditation is important, Levinas stresses, not because “the proofs of God’s existence” matter, but because this thought that thus thinks more than it could have produced signals an asymmetry testifying to “the breakup of consciousness,” a “devastation of thought,” a “trauma of awakening”—in other words, “the monstrosity of the Infinite put in me” (Levinas, 1998, pp. 64–66, English, trans. modified/106–110 French), which reveals the formal structure—more precisely, the very de-structuring—of my relationship to a finite human being whose claims come to me from an exterior dimension of height. Furthermore, in the “face” of this singular other we face all finite others; which is another way of saying that in the face of this other—and all other, finite others—the infinite Other leaves its trace. Cavell is torn between fascination and hesitation in response to this seemingly similar invocation of Descartes’s meditation on the motif of the idea of God as a trope 3 The pairing of Levinas with Schopenhauer (whose statement “The World is my representation” is cited centrally in both p. 185 and 1994) might at first seem surprising. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will and its correlative escape route in an ethics of resignation and compassion is arguably at the furthest remove from the metaphysics of evasion, of infinitizing desire, and the otherwise than Being toward which Levinas moves with increasing radicality. Yet similarly, in Cavell’s genealogy of what he terms “this new yet unapproachable America” (Cavell, 1989), and elsewhere the route from Emersonian transcendentalism and moral perfectionism runs through—or, more specifically, up to—the Nietzschean affirmation of a certain “will,” not to its Schopenhauerian denial and its corollary, metaphysical pessimism. For an interpretation of Schopenhauer’s views on these matters, see my “Zum Begriff der Allegorie in Schopenhauers Religionsphilosophie” (de Vries, 1991) . On Cavell’s This New Yet Unapproachable America, see my “Stanley Cavell: Filosoof van het gewone,” the introduction to its Dutch translation (de Vries, 1998). Quotes from this lecture will be cited from its publication as Cavell (2005) and will be given in the text with the abbreviation PDT.

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for the (modern) problem of the other, of other minds. Mindful of his own earlier reference, in The Claim of Reason, to the “other mind” as “a replacement of God,” he writes: I evidently had there derived something like an opposite conclusion, or moral, from the passage in Descartes, in connection with the finite other, from the conclusion or moral that Levinas draws. Where Levinas finds in Descartes’s proof the opening to the finite other, I have been struck by the fact that these others—the existence of what Descartes there calls “men similar to myself”—are in that passage not revealed but instead passed by. Descartes specifically claims that, unlike the case of God, where the idea of such a being is beyond the power of a finite creature to create, the idea of a finite other creature is, by contrast, fully within the compass of such a creature’s power to create. But I have expressed my lack of conviction in this casual claim, since given Descartes’s view of the essential separation of body and mind, however intimate the relation between them which he knows from his own case, what, given his demand for proofs (of his existence, and that of God, and of the external world of things), is his proof that the human bodies he perceives as he perceives other things, are each related with that particular intimacy to a mind, one which he does not perceive? The idea of that other (finite) mind is not said by him—it is implicitly denied by him—to be irresistibly forced upon him. Can Levinas be understood to have supplied Descartes with such a proof? (PDT 145) It should be noted, first, that Cavell’s claim is not fully accurate, since Descartes does in fact claim that we “know” the existence of bodies—in the plural—given that we “know” how either to seek out or to avoid them. But such forms of “knowledge” are not based on clear and distinct ideas, and hence, by Cartesian standards, constitute no knowledge at all. Moreover, such “knowledge” does not convey epistemic certainty—or, for that matter, moral (Kant would say, ethico-theological) or existential “certainty”—concerning the presence of minds inside these sought for or avoided bodies. Second, it should be stressed that Levinas, while providing a transcendental argument of sorts, does not aim to prove the existence of others—whether bodies or minds or both. The formal structure of the Cartesian idea of the Infinite can only be attested to, in ways that are singular and intractable and that require more “proof” as the testimony deepens. The relation to the other—that is to say, to the neighbor, the stranger, the widow, children, proletarians, indeed, all those who in a state of ontologico-empirical deprivation come to me from a metaphysico-religious dimension and teach me what I know not, disturbing and inverting my conatus essendi, my very perseverance in Being—adopts an infinitizing mode in which the other absolves itself from the very relation that seeks and desires, or avoids and annihilates, it. Absolving itself, the other becomes ‘itself’ (the) absolute (i.e., Other). How does Cavell’s modernism, in its thinking of finitude—that is, of the truth and moral of skepticism, especially concerning “other minds”—respond to this infinitizing gesture and the paradox of its ever more absolute Referent and Requisite? The answer is subtle and puzzling. Establishing a further link between the two alternative (or are they complementary?) readings of Descartes’s Meditation and the concluding pages of The Claim of Reason, Cavell writes:

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Levinas’s idea is that my openness to the other—to a region “beyond” my narcissism—requires a violence associated with the infinite having been put into me: he speaks of this intervention or aggression in images of trauma, breakup, monstrosity, devastation. This event creates as it were an outside to my existence, hence an isolated, singular inside. Now when I say, in response to Descartes’s Third Meditation proof, that in Shakespearean tragedy (immediately in connection with Othello) this traumatic effect of the recognition of the existence of God is replaced by the idea of a finite other, violence and some sense of an infinite nevertheless remain. But in originating now in the face of a finite other, violence and infinitude cannot be thought to arise from a comparison of myself with the other but from a recognition that this particular other, this creature among all the creatures of the earth similar to me, is also, or rather is therefore, absolutely different, separate from me, I would say, wholly other, endlessly other, the one I single out before whom I am I, eternally singled out. It is the unbearable certainty of this separation to which the torture of skepticism over Desdemona’s faithfulness is preferable. (PDT 145, my italics) Let’s leave aside that, for Levinas, the “unbearable” separation is not even a “certainty.” Things are, in fact, increasingly worse, as Levinas works out with ever more consistent rigor between Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being: the other/Other is more and more seen as an “an-archical” Referent and Requisite and less and less as the αρχη or primum intelligibele from which the first book starts out. I will simply note that, for Cavell, Levinas’s adoption of the Cartesian idea becomes the foil against which the flight—as well as the “truth” and “moral”—of skepticism gains its specific, uniquely modern profile. In this passage, absolute difference, the separation of “the wholly other, endlessly other” before whom I am “eternally singled out” is, in its structural infinity, nonetheless characterized as finite. The theological or metaphysical idea of the Infinite is “replaced” by a “finite other,” yet “some sense of an infinite nevertheless remains.” One is reminded of Derrida’s dictum “La différance infinie est finie,” a statement that, as his later discussions of negative theology make strikingly clear (Derrida, 1987, 1989), can be seen as in principle reversable. Such reversal might, Derrida points out, be unavoidable, even though it is not thereby necessary. One may not want to choose to describe the analytical distinction of other minds via the idea of the Infinite, as replacements for God, but one cannot prevent this structural analogy and functional equivalent from playing its revelatory, now illuminating, then confusing, historical and systematic role in the life of individuals, communities, kin groups, and so on. Cavell invokes Levinas for three reasons. First is the fact that Levinas, in the words of The Claim of Reason, seeks “to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the universe” (p. 470), whereas Descartes seems to pass over finite others—though, as we have seen, not their bodies—in silence. Levinas would thus seem to provide an answer that Cavell, in the early work, finds lacking in the Cartesian Meditations. If Descartes’s “motive” is “to find what is beyond doubt, viz., to know beyond doubt that he is not alone in the world (third Meditation),” one must ask “why it is Descartes does not try to defeat that possibility of isolation in what would seem. . . the most direct and the surest way, by locating the existence of one other finite being” (p. 482). This avenue might seem especially promising under the (modern? secular?) conditions in which, Cavell confesses in his autobiographical exercise, A Pitch of Philosophy, “for the likes of me, certainty in relation to the presence

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of the idea of God—Descartes’s solution—was not an option of seriousness”(Cavell, 1994, 115, cf. pp. 451, 482). Where “seriousness” is de rigueur (but is it an option?), where matters of philosophical meditation, notably the question of other minds, are at issue, religion, like magic, superstition, mythology, mysticism, and so on must be kept at bay. But is this connection so obvious? How does “seriousness,” in Cavell’s sense, relate to “certainty” in Descartes—or, say, Gewissheit in Heidegger and Wittgenstein? Indeed, does “seriousness” exhaust the meaning of answerability, that is, responsibility, to the world and to others? The second reason for addressing Levinas’s work in a retrospective assessment of The Claim of Reason has to do with a certain assessment of “passivity”(Cavell, 2001). As Cavell phrases it in his recent Cities of Words, what he has said, in The Claim of Reason and elsewhere, about skepticism with respect to the other can be related to Levinas’s claims for the other. Levinas requires our recognition of the other to be taken in passiveness, a way of saying that we are subject to the other and, contrariwise, that the other is presented to us in an accusatory mode, as if reflecting our inability to recognize him or her. As if the alternative to passiveness—receptiveness—is rejection, which I take as a certain kind of confirmation of the intuition I have expressed in saying that skepticism with respect to the other, the failure of a proof of the existence of the other, is not a discovery but an annihilation (Cavell, 2004). This is another way of saying, as Cavell does in his lecture on Levinas, that modern skepticism concerning “another’s mind” is “not a generalized intellectual lack, but a stance I take in the face of the other’s opacity and the demand the other’s expression places upon me; I call skepticism my denial and annihilation of the other” (PDT 150). This negation is of the other’s “soul,” but it is “spiritual” precisely in that it is, paradoxically, “epitomized into what happens to the other’s body” (PDT 150). Again, the recognition of “men similar to myself,” to cite Descartes’s phrase, is not based upon some analogical appresentation of alter egos but upon the “idea of another body as having a unique relation to its mind in that special-substantial way that [Descartes] asserts is not like the way a ship is related to its pilot” (p. 482). And yet Descartes “must be far surer that other human bodies go with minds than any sureness he can extract by inferring from another body’s behavior alone. After all, the body has essentially nothing to do with the soul!” (p. 482). To escape this predicament of being merely a “ghost in the machine”—as Gilbert Ryle famously quibbed in The Concept of Mind—and hence of reducing the soul to a mirroring or “spectral machine,” Descartes must rely on “his sense of himself as composed of his contrary natures (of what he means by mind and body, the one characterized in opposition to the other, each essentially what the other is not” (p. 482). This conception of a “double nature” is the very idea of “incarnation, the mysterious meeting of heaven and earth,” which is now seen not only as occurring—again, as a hapax legomenon—in the “figure of Christ” but, in a parallel way, “in each individual human being” (p. 483). From this, Cavell says, we “may conclude that the human problem in recognizing other human beings is the problem of recognizing another to be Christ to oneself” (an insight, he adds, that casts new light on the strange “charge,” made first by Pascal—and, incidentally, repudiated by Levinas—that Descartes “proves the existence at best of a philosopher’s God”; p. 483).

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Here, however, Cavell begins to hesitate. His third reason for engaging Levinas is to mark a certain limit—or should we say finitude?—in the passivity thus evoked. In the Amsterdam lecture Cavell professes an “uncertainty” as to whether there is not just as much (or more) reason to speak of “infinite responsibility for myself, together, let us say, with finite responsibility for the claims of the existence of the other upon me, claims perhaps of gratitude or sympathy or protection or duty or debt or love” (PDT 144). True enough, he continues: “In an extreme situation I may put the other’s life (not just her or his wishes or needs) ahead of mine, answerable to or for them without limit. But why is the existence of a finite other not sufficient to create the reality of such claims upon me?” (PDT 144). Levinas’s answer would, of course, have been not only that these claims are restricted and hence betrayed when we attempt to govern and respond to them according to given criteria, rules, principles, maxims, or norms but, further, that no standard whatsoever could measure them or their fulfillment. Cavell recasts the Levinasian asymmetry between self and other. Responding to Levinas’s evocation of the “face” and “face-to-face” as at once the “temptation to murder” and its absolute prohibition, Cavell writes: If I sought a solution to the skeptical problem of the acknowledgment of the other, in the form, say, of an answer to the question “How can I trust the basis upon which I grant the existence of the other?” I feel I could not do better than to respond “You shall not kill.” But in the everyday ways in which denial occurs in my life with the other—in a momentary irritation, or a recurrent grudge, in an unexpected rush of resentment, in a hard glance, in a dishonest attestation, in the telling of a tale, in the believing of a tale, in a false silence, in a fear of engulfment, in a fantasy of solitude or of self-destruction—the problem is to recognize myself as denying another, to understand that I carry chaos in myself. Here is the scandal of skepticism with respect to the existence of others; I am the scandal. (PDT 151) We are reminded of a crucial passage in The Claim of Reason where Cavell claims that an inescapable conclusion imposes itself in the final analysis of the problem of criteria—of calling a thing by its name, and attributing humanity and soul to sentient beings who, for all we know, might be organic machines, “hats and coats which could conceal automatons,” as Descartes muses at the end of the Second Meditation. Descartes continues, “I judge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind”(Descartes, 1996, p. 21). In a different tonality, Cavell likewise claims that, ultimately, “I am the philosophical problem. I am. It is in me that the circuit of communication is cut; I am the stone on which the wheel breaks” (p. 83). The skeptics’ philosophical “erasure” of our “access to context,” Cavell observes, “may be seen as part of philosophy’s denial of my powerlessness (over the world, over others, over myself, over language) by demanding that all power seem to originate with me, in isolation. And contrariwise, it may be seen as philosophy’s denial of my power (such as it may be) by sublimizing the power of the world, or say nature”(Cavell, 1994, p. 113). My suspicion concerning belief in the world might well be a refusal to accept its mighty and inescapable presence, a flight for lack of a place in—and hence for—the world. Of course, Cavell acknowledges, regardless of the prevalence of the “I,” of my call, my judgment, one could still describe the very “miracle of moving out of oneself” as requiring—or revealing—the idea of God, as Levinas, following Descartes, suggests.

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In other words, the very “investment of a certain kind in a particular finite other, one in which you suffer the other’s separation, perhaps by allowing that the other knows who you are, perhaps by forgiving her or him for not knowing,” might thus still be called “equivalent to the idea of God” (PDT 151). But to say so, Cavell confesses, would “require philosophical and religious responsibilities I do not know are mine” (PDT 151). It thus remains remarkable that philosophical and religious orientations “so apparently different” as Cavell’s own and those of Descartes and Levinas have nonetheless “led to phenomenological coincidences so precise” (PDT 152). This, I think, is another way of saying that they testify to a philosophical meditation—indeed, a spiritual exercise—that cuts across historical schools of thought and demonstrates that the problem of human finitude (the problem of other minds and other bodies “as God” and as “incarnated” as, so to speak, spiritual machines, spiritual automates) eludes the “descriptive fallacies” that enclose us within the skeptical circle, just as it yields the need for an in principle infinite, indeed infinitizing, response, which reiterated confession and conversion alone can offer the other—which is also to say, the self. In this precise sense—and not just with reference to the world, in his reception of Emerson and Thoreau—Cavell’s thinking is “a philosophy of. . . the human as stranger, and so take[s] on an interest in strangeness, beginning no doubt with the strangeness of oneself”4 . But then Cavell is, as he says, merely “experimenting, in responding to a sense of investment in, or by, another, with the idea of replacing God by a human other” (PDT 146). While he shares Levinas’s view that Descartes’s attempted theoretical proof of God’s existence “does not now (for me? in our age?) appear to be a credible intellectual option” (ibid.), in The Claim of Reason he nonetheless takes what Descartes calls the “whole force” (p. 483) of such ontological proof in what seems, at least at first glance, a different direction. In retrospect, enriched by his confrontation with Levinas’s alternative reading, Cavell extrapolates from Descartes’s claim “that I recognize that it would not be possible for my nature to be what it is, possessing the idea of God, unless God really existed” to think “comparably” of “Othello in relation to his idea of his bride, of Macbeth in relation to his idea of his wife, of Hamlet in relation to his idea of his mother, of Leontes in relation to his idea of his newborn daughter” (PDT 146). At stake in the “proof” of the other’s existence (whether that of God or another human being)—especially in the Shakespearean cases, where an “extravagant intimacy” is at issue—is “a problem not of establishing connection with the other, but of achieving, or suffering, separation from the other, individuation with respect to the one upon whom my nature is staked” (PDT 146). What Levinas calls passivity—more precisely, says Cavell, “passiveness beyond passiveness”—is thus a “mourning for the loss of a fantasied union,” which, paradoxically (“Perhaps,” Cavell says, unwittingly echoing the peut-être that punctuates Levinas’s Otherwise than Being), marks “the moment of being known, exposed” (PDT 146). Shakespeare’s tragic heroes thus constitute what, in the epistemological idiom of Parts I and II of The Claim of Reason, whose model Cavell follows in his inquiry into other minds in Part IV, is called a “best case” of knowledge, here a “best case of acknowledgment” (PDT 146): “This case is the finite figure who for me represents otherness as such, the existence of mind or spirit altogether, shattering as it were what appears as a prior, say original, narcissism”

4 Cavell (1994) on the motif of “the stranger,” see p. 427.

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(PDT 146). This immediately raises a further question: Could God, being the Infinite, the infinite Other, ever represent such a “case”? Cavell seems to think this is not so: (God, the infinite as other, distinctly does not function as representative. What is more, it is not clear that God so much as constitutes company for the finite, namely proving to it that it is not alone in the world, which Descartes declares as the stake of his proof. In Genesis, God creates an helpmeet for Adam because “it is not good that the man should be alone,” evidently not thinking of the Godhead as a candidate for this role. (PDT 147) But was God not invoked to figure the other—“another’s mind”—as infinite? And does thinking “the infinite as other” not come down to the same? The force of Descartes’s argument, in Cavell’s earlier reading, is not that “I could not have produced the idea I have of God, for it can have come from nothing less than God himself” (p. 483). Its “necessity” lies elsewhere, namely, in the insight that “without the presence of this idea in myself, and (hence) the presence of the fact of which it is the imprint, my own nature would necessarily not be what it is” (p. 483). Descartes’s meditations are thus “about the finding of self-knowledge after all; of the knowledge of a human self by a human self” (p. 483). They circle around the fact that “the integrity of my (human, finite) existence may depend on the fact and on the idea of another being’s existence, and on the possibility of proving that existence; an existence conceived from my very dependence and incompleteness, hence conceived as perfect, and conceived as producing me “in some sense, in [its] own image” (p. 483). The shift from actively producing a theoretical argument for our knowledge of the other’s (or Other’s) existence to the more passive sense of being produced—or known—by the other adds an important element to the analysis. Again, the parallelism with the finite and infinite o/Other is not farfetched. Indeed, Cavell asks: Where is the logical gain in moving from the question whether I know another to the question whether I am known by or to another?—If there is no logical loss, then the gain of the question would lie in its posing more accurately what it is we really want to know of others. And it would account for the intermittent emptiness in attempts to prove, or disprove, our knowledge of the existence of others. Proofs for God’s existence, and criticisms of these proofs, are apt to be empty intermittently for people whose conviction is that they are known by God, or to God, or not. (p. 443). But the same must hold for “proofs” of the existence of human others—or other minds. We are just as apt to take such proofs to be “empty” when we are acknowledged by others—or acknowledge them—or not. The mode of theoretical inquiry and the appeal to its criteria (or, perhaps, to criteria tout court) is of no avail where others—human or divine—are concerned. That calls for an altogether different style, one that is prophetic, confessional, meditative, and, indeed, spiritual. This is not an irrational operation but, if anything, the very claim—and repeated reclaiming—of reason: “acknowledgment ‘goes beyond’ knowledge, not in order, or as a feat, of cognition, but in the call upon me to express the knowledge at its core, to recognize what I know, to do something in the light of it, apart from which this knowledge remains without expression, hence perhaps without possession” (p. 428). Such expressions of knowledge retain the affirmation of something negative—some constitutive lack—as well: “acknowledgment of another calls for recognition of the other’s specific

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relation to oneself, and. . . this entails the revelation of oneself as having denied or distorted that relation” (ibid.). One can—one must—always have taken the other for a possible other, whether human or not, principally, if not practically, ignoring the difference—“the difference”—between the two. Indeed, Cavell writes, the other “can present me with no mark or feature on the basis of which I can settle my attitude. I have to acknowledge humanity in the other, and the basis of it seems to lie in me” (p. 433)5 . By the same token, “no one can settle a moral conflict in the way umpires settle conflicts”: this, Cavell writes, “is essential to the form of life we call morality” (p. 296). In consequence, there is a parallel between Descartes’s conception of the “will” and Cavell’s understanding of judgment and proclamation, both of which effectively make the world and things “my call,” just as acknowledgment expresses my responsiveness to the call placed upon me by (all?) others. Furthermore, though it is hard to ignore the resemblance between Descartes’s concern with “indifference” and Cavell’s notion of “avoidance,” there is no doubt that, for the latter, it is no longer in every respect “clear by the natural light that the perception of the intellect should always precede the determination of the will”(Descartes, 1996, p. 40). My response to my being the scandal cannot be one of argument—or even reason—alone.

Concluding remarks In conclusion, three reservations might seem to counter my sketch of Cavell’s—and perhaps Wittgenstein’s—adoption of the meditative model and its intrinsic relation to the legacy of confession, conversion, prophecy, spiritual exercise, and, indeed, kinship. First, is skepticism, in all its historical, philosophical, and literary variety, the most adequate expression, indication, name, or term for identifying the standing threat of doubt concerning the world of external objects and separate others, whose “truth” and “moral” Cavell brings out so forcefully in his reading of Wittgenstein, Descartes, and Levinas? Are we dealing here with a tragic possibility or even fatality inherent in human existence (but not in any other)? Do we touch here upon the central feature of finitude or, rather, upon a possibility (if we insist on using this ontological, somewhat Heideggerian term) that testifies to the ongoing, renewed, or, perhaps, under modern conditions, increased relevance of some “infinity,” a “possibility” that is no longer exclusively mine or ours? Is there any difference between these two interpretations? Such related questions would force us to tackle what I suspect is a certain residual humanism in Cavell and Wittgenstein, as in Heidegger and so many others who follow in their footsteps (on “the Human,” see pp. 206–207). It is “residual” because it is unnecessary and, indeed, inconsistent, given that Cavell himself declares, “animals are also our others” (p. 412). Philosophically and, perhaps, phenomenologically speaking, non-living sentient beings somehow must be, as well. In a more general sense, Cavell insists throughout that I cannot—and should not—too quickly shrug off my responsibility to distinguish the living from the non-living (including the not yet or no longer living, i.e., the unborn and the dead). Given that he writes, “the issue of other minds is not settled by whether or not we take the human body as a machine” (p. 414), we 5 Here we find reiterated a disagreement, begun in Cavell (1991) with Saul Kripke, who, in his alternative interpretation of Wittgenstein’s conception of rules, takes the opposite view. As Hammer puts it: “Kripke leaves out the ‘I”’ (Hammer, 2002, p. 27).

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may surmise that this indeterminacy—perhaps undecidability—might extend to other aspects and categories of our being and our world, and, for all we know, to other beings and to other (possible) worlds. How could this uncertainty—this lack and irrelevance of theoretical certainty—not include the question whether or not our minds are mere computational functions of our brains, whether hooked up to a mainframe or in a “vat,” fed with input by a “matrix,” and so on, or whether or not the unborn and the dead might already or still count as persons, whether or not the ontological status of angels, golems, zombies, mutants, androids, automata, or machines should worry us beyond “the thought of movies” and the literary fictions they inform? When we “see a humanish something of a certain height and age and gender and color and physiognomy, emitting vocables in a certain style” (p. 443), we have no empirical, epistemic, or moral certainty that our senses and intuitions do not fool us and that another mind is really “there,” “inside,” “on the face of it.” As Hammer nicely comments, “for all I know, the human-like others could appear to my senses as they now do and I could be the only human in existence”(Hammer, 2002, p. 60). Indeed, taking this argument one step further, even this certainty might prove an illusion. For all I know, even I myself could turn out to be “a humanish something,” nothing more. As in the chilling parable Cavell narrates, I might—while having these musings about others being automata (or not), being appalled at the prospect of seeing them opened up to confirm or disprove my worst fears (but what possibility would be more frightening?)—find myself, in turn, snapped open only to discover. . . In all we hope and try, this might be our greatest horror. But then, Cavell asks: What is the nature of the worry, if it is a real one, that there may at any human place [i.e., at the place of other bodies, other minds, including my own] be things that one cannot tell from human beings? Is it a blow to one’s intellectual pride, as in the case of skepticism about the existence of material objects? Or is it an embarrassment of one’s humanity? What would this embarrassment be?” (p. 416) One wonders, therefore, how the emphasis on the human, on human forms of life— or even on life as such—squares with Cavell’s musings, especially in Part IV of The Claim of Reason, about the historical name of “God,” whose place may have come to be occupied by the other, by the problem of other minds. There he writes concurrently (and, perhaps not accidentally) about the many insufficient interpretations of the Cartesian “ghost in the machine” (p. 364), as well as about the automaton, whose meaning we have not even begun to fathom. Indeed, Cavell’s idea of a non-epistemic attribution, based on acknowledgment, of sentience or life and humanity to beings (rather than things)—an attribution and, indeed, attestation always exposed to the threat of skepticism—offers an alternative to, for example, the Bergsonian dualism between the “free activity” of a profound I in its very duration, on the one hand, and the “conscient automatism [automatisme conscient]” of all its further determinations and objectivations, on the other. Cavell likewise provides a distinct answer to the problematic that Gilles Deleuze distills from the confrontation between Spinoza and Leibniz, namely, that of the “spiritual automaton.” Deleuze cites the Treatise on the Correction of the Understanding, in which Spinoza identifies his view with “what the ancients said, i.e., that true knowledge proceeds from cause to effect—except that so far as I know they never conceived the soul (as we do here) as acting to certain laws, like a spiritual automaton.” Deleuze then adds: “‘Spiritual automaton’ means first of all that an idea, being

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of a mode of thought, has its (efficient and formal) cause nowhere but in the attribute of Thought”(Deleuze, 1992, p. 115). With this terminology we could, perhaps, also capture Cavell’s hesitation between two possible perspectives on the human: the distinction yet interchangeability of the human and the non-human, that is to say, the non-living or mechanical (suggesting that the “I” is also a being and a thing, just as it is finite and somehow infinite, a self as well as an other, as other as “another’s mind” and hence as other as “God”). Furthermore, the expression “spiritual automaton” allows us to surmise that acceptance of things in the world and acknowledgment of other minds—my call and calling—hinge on thoughtfulness, seriousness, judgment. Indeed, any claim is an attribute of “Thought” alone, as Spinoza says. Yet this “Thought” is no longer conceived as standing in opposition to “passiveness” (which, as we have seen, any call and calling must presuppose—with an decidedly anti-Spinozian twist, i.e., inverting any conatus), though with the exclusion of thoughtlessness, lack of seriousness, avoidance, annihilation. Speaking, with and beyond Spinoza, of a “spiritual automaton” finally connotes a certain spontaneity, indeed, naturalness. Not only can “I” often not not respond, most often, Cavell assumes, the “I” responds in tune (“attuned,” in Übereinstimmung) with its world and with others (and itself?). This sense of automaticity implies that the proclamation of a claim follows (by) its own account, does “what comes naturally,” if not matter of factly then at least as a fact—the very substance and, as it were, the singular mattering—of life. Such automaticity may open different ways. Still in the Cartesian register, Cavell writes: “suppose my identity with my body is something that exists only in my affirmation of my body. (As friendship may exist only in loyalty to it.) Then the question is: What would the body become under affirmation? What would become of me? Perhaps I would know myself as, take myself for, a kind of machine; perhaps as a universe” (p. 494). There is a risk—and a chance, even a promise—involved in both attributions, in both projections. But then Cavell seems to hesitate between two historical and systematic possibilities, two extremes that, perhaps, constitute not alternatives—as if one ought (and could) opt for just one—but rather mutually exclusive and inclusive polarities of existence, as we humans know it so far. On the one hand, Cavell redescribes the problem of other minds in terms of acknowledging the idea of God, of the Infinite, in part as Descartes—and, in his footsteps, Levinas—had suggested: “human separation,” Cavell writes, “can be accepted, and granted, or not. Like the separation from God; everything we are not” (p. 496). On the other hand, he expresses concern that to invest the new referent (the other or other mind) with all the traditional and (theo)logical weight of the old risks overloading finite beings with infinite, inhuman, and ultimately monstrous expectations: As long as God exists, I am not alone. And couldn’t the other suffer the fate of God? . . . I wish to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the universe. This requiress understanding the philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God. This descent, or ascent, of the problem of the other is the key way I can grasp the alternative process of secularization called romanticism. And it may explain why the process of humanization can become a monstrous undertaking, placing infinite demand upon finite resources. (p. 470)

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This leads me to the second reservation that could be levelled against my interpretation. It is true that powerful commentators on Cavell’s work—I am thinking of Stephen Mulhall and, more recently, Espen Hammer—have pointed to the many passages in which Cavell’s philosophical and aesthetic “modernity” takes critical issue with Christianity, allowing at best for a “Romantic” and fundamentally “secular” view of all the concepts mentioned above (prophecy, confession, conversion, meditation). They single out ways in which Cavell has been increasingly receptive to the intellectual heritage of the American transcendentalism of Thoreau and Emerson, as it inflects the longer tradition of moral perfectionism with quasi-religious motifs and motivations of its own. Not only does Cavell’s The Senses of Walden antedate the publication of The Claim of Reason, and hence the philosophical meditation that interests us here, but it is in the later book that we find the surmise that the problem of other minds comes to substitute for—and, I would suggest, modify, deepen, and radicalize—the problem for which the name (or names) of God and hence the Cartesian idea of the infinite stands. This link between the two expressions or articulations of otherness as now infinite then finite—as infinitely signifying and significant for finiteness, but also as a finiteness that yields an in principle infinite response—may not be obvious in all respects. One wonders why both Levinas and Cavell insist on keeping the reference to this Cartesian motif and interpret it in alternative, parallel yet complementary, ways. The reason for this attachment may not be theoretical, after all, but expressive of a mode of philosophical thinking whose qualities and style are first of all meditative, to be conveyed in the genre of prophecy, confession, or conversion—and their spiritual and near automatic exercise—alone. In Cavell’s own words: “the greater the attachment to a concept (as to a person, or to a god), the harder it may be to explain either the attachment or the concept; or perhaps it should be said that everything one does is, or could be, the only explanation of it” (p. 6). This brings me to my final point. Does this—freely Cavellian and, admittedly, unorthodox Levinasian—reading help us to think questions of kinship and community in plausible novel ways? If the scandal of skepticism revolves around the “I,” can anything other than some non-idealist subjectivism—if not solipsism and egotism, then at least individualism and narcissism—result? Would “we” be any the worse off for that? For Levinas and Cavell, kinship would be my call; it is in the reiterated, neither given nor merely arbitrary—non-naturalist yet strangely “natural”—acknowledgment of conversation, community, commerce, and so on that “my” (indeed, “our”) society is established, maintained, renewed, or refused. Likewise, my individual identity— whether private, spiritual, or sexual—within or with respect to this society is “my call,” as well. Heidegger would agree: it is from afar, in the distance from which the call of my conscience comes to me, that the I—Dasein, in its triple Umwelt and In-der-Weltsein, its Mitwelt and Mitsein, and its Selbstwelt and Selbstsein—calls itself (up to and out from itself). I Yet it is important also to remember that Cavell writes: “the problem of other minds is a problem of human history (the problem of modern human history; the modern problem of human history); that the problem is lived, and that this life has an origin and a progress. The idea is that the problem of the other is discovered through telling its history” (p. 468). This means what Wittgenstein would have called its “Naturgeschichte [natural history],” its genealogies, filiations, family resemblances, and, indeed, kinships.

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References Cavell, S. (1979). The claim of reason: wittgenstein, skepticism, morality, and tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavell, S. (1989). This new yet unapproachable America: Essays after emerson after Wittgenstein. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press. Cavell, S. (1991). Conditions handsome and unhandsome: The constitution of emersonian perfectionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cavell, S. (1994). A pitch of philosophy: Autobiographical exercises. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (2002). The availability of wittgenstein’s later philosophy. In: Must we mean what we say? A book of essays (updated edn., pp. 44–72). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavell, S. (2001). La passion. In: J. Benoist et al. (Eds.), Quelle philosophie pour le xxie siècle?: L’organon du nouveau siècle (pp. 333–386). Paris: Gallimard and Centre Pompidou. Cavell, S. (2004). Cities of light: Pedagogical letters on a register of the moral life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (2005). What is the scandal of skepticism? Philosophy the day after tomorrow (pp. 132–154). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Deleuze, G. (1968). Spinoza et le problème de l’expression. Paris: Minuit. [Deleuze, G. (1992). Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza. New York: Zone Books (Translated by M. Joughin)]. Derrida, J. (1987). Comment ne pas parler: Dénégations. In: Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (pp. 535– 596). Paris: Galilée. Derrida, J. (1989). How to avoid speaking: Denials. In S. Budick & W. Iser (Eds.), Languages of the unsayable: the play of negativity in literature and literary theory (pp. 3–70). New York: Columbia University Press. (Translated by K. Frieden). Descartes, R. (1996). In: J. Cottingham (Ed.), Meditations on first philosophy: with selections from the objections and replies (revised edn.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadot, P. (2004). Wittgenstein et les limites du langage. Paris: Vrin. Hammer, E. (2002). Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, subjectivity, and the ordinary. Cambridge: Polity Press. Levinas, E. (1961). Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff [Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press]. Translated by A. Lingis. Levinas, E. (1974). Autrement qu’être, ou au-delà de l’essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff [Levinas, E. (1981). Otherwise than being, or beyond essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff] (Translated by A. Lingis). Levinas, E. (1986). Dieu et philosophie. In: De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (pp. 93–127). Paris: Vrin. Levinas, E. (1998). God and philosophy. In: Of God who comes to mind (pp. 55–78). Stanford: Stanford University Press (Translated by B. Bergo). Nagel, T. (1989). The view from nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. Vries, H. de (1991). Zum Begriff der Allegorie in Schopenhauers Religionsphilosophie In: W. Schirmacher (Ed.), Schopenhauer, Nietzsche und die Kunst, Schopenhauer-Studien (pp. 187–197). Vienna. Vries, H. de (1998). Introduction. In: Dit nieuwe maar onbereikbare America: Emerson na Wittgenstein (pp. 7–27). Parrèsia: Amsterdam (Translated by F. van Zetten). Vries, H. de (2005). Minimal theologies: Critiques of secular reason in Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Int J Philos Relig (2006) 60:99–116 DOI 10.1007/s11153-006-0010-9 O R I G I NA L PA P E R

Naming the Unnameable God: Levinas, Derrida, and Marion Anselm K. Min

Received: 3 September 2006 / Accepted: 3 September 2006 / Published online: 10 November 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Abstract In this essay I present the postmodern phenomenological approach of Levinas, Derrida, and Marion to the problem of naming the unnameable God. For Levinas, God is never experienced directly but only as a third person whose infinity is testified to in the infinity of responsibility to the hungry. For Derrida, God remains the unnameable “wholly other” accessible only as the indeterminate term of pure reference in prayer. For Marion, God remains the object of “de-nomination” through praise. In all three, the problem of naming the unnameable God is necessarily linked to how we relate to fellow human beings, to the hungry in Levinas, justice in Derrida, and charity in Marion. I also reflect on the merits and adequacy of phenomenology as such for speaking of divine transcendence. Keywords Derrida · French postmodernism · Levinas · Marion · Naming God · Philosophy of religion · Prayer Speaking of God has always been problematic. Assuming that the God one speaks of is truly God, not a projection or a mere concept of the human mind, the problem has been how to avoid sheer kataphasis and sheer apophasis, speaking of God in the same way we speak of our ordinary human experience and reducing God to an object among other objects in our empirical world, and never speaking of God at all because of the fear of such reduction and leaving God simply an unknowable X. The first is indeed dangerous. We invent God in our own images and abuse God in the many real and ideological battles we fight with other human groups. The second is no less dangerous, especially in the case of Christianity whose central message is that the transcendent, inaccessible God has come close to us in the humanity of Jesus. Sheer silence about God also means sheer irrelevance of God for human existence; it rules out not only our ideological abuse of God but also God’s own initiative to

A. K. Min (B) The School of Religion, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA 91711, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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address humanity in its struggle for transcendence. It rules out all theology, philosophical or systematic. Is it possible, then, to speak of God in a way that both preserves God’s irreducible transcendence and allows God’s initiative to address us in the only language we know, the human language? In this essay I propose to examine the recent attempts to deal with this classical issue among three French postmodernist phenomenologists, Levinas, Derrida, and Marion.1 All three share the rejection of “metaphysics” as “ontotheology,” but each also has his own unique approach. I propose to present their respective approaches in the first three sections, discuss their internal debates, especially between Derrida and Marion, in the fourth section, and provide a brief reflection on the merits and limits of a purely phenomenological approach to the problem of naming the unnameable God in the concluding section. Given the limitations of space I will have to be very brief and remain focused on the essentials. Levinas: finding the unnameable God in the hungry2 Levinas’s approach to God begins with Heidegger’s critique of traditional metaphysics as onto-theo-logy. For Heidegger, ontotheology understands God in terms of being but, forgetting the ontological difference between being and beings, understands being itself in terms of beings, which leads it to understand God as the cause or ground of beings and therefore as a supreme being. Such a conception of being and God is ultimately a product of the will to power, and leads to the crisis of science and technology and the “death of God.” For Heidegger we must overcome metaphysics and learn to think being without beings or think being as such. For Levinas, however, the mistake of ontotheology is not in taking being for God but in taking God for being as though being were the ultimate source of meaning and intelligibility. Unlike Heidegger, Levinas regards being itself as a product of intentionality, consciousness, knowledge, representation, and disclosure, all of which presuppose the equality, proportion, correlation, and identity between subject and object, noesis and noema, thought and the world, and which therefore reduce the object to the unity and identity of the subject, to a presence in a consciousness and therefore in principle relative to the subject. To think is always to reduce to the synthetic unity of the constitutive consciousness, transcendental or empirical. Likewise, all meaning is reduced to that of experience and the subjective conditions of the possibility of experience under which things must appear, manifest or show themselves. Ontotheology presupposes coincidence between thinking and being, situates even God in the processes of being in the world and conceives of God as simply the being par excellence, i.e., the “supreme” being, conceived and thematized on the model of entities in the world and reduced to a function of human subjectivity. What goes “beyond being” in its true transcendence has not been thinkable in the history of Western philosophy, which has been the history of the destruction of transcendence. Even in phenomenology including that of Husserl and Heidegger there has been no 1 For a general introduction to the treatment of the problem of God in Levinas, Derrida, and Marion, see Horner (2001). For a more critical, controversial introduction, see the essays by Philip Blond, Graham Ward, and Kevin Hart dealing with Levinas, Marion, and Derrida respectively in Blond (1998). 2 The best source for Levinas’ attempt to overcome ontotheology is found in Emmanuel Levinas (2000, “God and Onto-Theo-Logy”) and (1998, “The Idea of God”). I use the abbreviation, GDT, in the body of the text.

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true “shaking” of intentional, representational consciousness as a privileged mode of access to reality (GDT, pp. 211–212). The issue, then, is how to think God in a non-ontotheological way, without reference to being or beings, or beyond being altogether. Is another model of meaning and intelligibility possible? For Levinas, the way out of ontotheology is the way of ethics. Only in ethics do we encounter a reality which we cannot contain, thematize, represent, or in any case reduce to our own subjectivity and which is, therefore, truly transcendent, dis-proportionate and resistant to our own constitutive, domineering consciousness, capable of rupturing the immanence and identity of the subject and overturning its sovereignty and spontaneity. This reality is the reality of the Other [Autrui], whom I can encounter only in a relationship of the “face to face,” a relationship beyond all theory, thematization, manifestation, disclosure, or vision. As neighbour the Other is near to me in such a way that it besieges and obsesses me, making me responsible for it and indeed rendering me irreplaceable and unique in that responsibility, questioning my self-identity without measure. Irreducible to a content of my knowledge, the Other remains a reality which is more than I can think or equal, deposing and decentering me instead. It is through this experience of the infinity and transcendence of the human Other that the “glory of the Infinite” rises (GDT, p. 162). For Levinas, it is especially the encounter of a particular kind of Other, the hungry, that shakes up our ordinary ontotheological consciousness in its complacency, closure, and arrogance, break the circle of immanence that imprisons us in mystification, deception, and ideology, and open a break or fissure in the “epic of being” in the direction of the beyond where an “other” mode of transcendence can appear (GDT, p. 169). As privation par excellence, as “the great frankness of matter,” hunger is deaf to every reassuring ideology and every equilibrium. It is “a hunger that no music appeases, and that secularizes all that romantic eternity,” a privation “despairing of this privation itself.” It is “an appeal without reason or oration; neither aiming nor thematization. . . a preorational prayer, a demand as mendicancy, a question without a given, a question that is not even the posing of this very question, a question beyond, . . . an oscillation between death and God.” A question without response, it is “a question about God and to God” (GDT, p. 170). The glory of the Infinite cannot “appear” in itself. To appear means to become an object of representational consciousness, a presence to a constituting consciousness, and an item within a horizon or totality relative to a synthesizing consciousness. The only thing we can do, therefore, is to bear witness to the infinity of the Infinite in the only way that does not bring it back to being, that is, in the ethical relationship with the neighbor, the sole manner, for Levinas, in which an otherwise than being can signify. The only model of transcendence in the world is that of the Other. To think of God non-ontotheologically is to take the nearness of the neighbor and God together, which alone keeps God from reduction to immanence. The glory of the Infinite lies in the excess over the present, the impossibility of adequation, not in representation but in the form of responsibility for the neighbor. The Infinite is revealed in being witnessed to but without appearing, without showing itself as Infinite, only in the “surplus” in the exigency of responsibility for the Other. It is through this witnessing that the Infinite surpasses the finite and comes to pass. This is the “intrigue,” not experience, of the Infinite in which I am involved without being able to merely contemplate and reduce it. In the responsibility it imposes this intrigue attaches us to the Infinite, which, however, also detaches itself from us in its infinity. Thus, the intrigue attaches us to

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the absolute without relativizing it, without reducing it to an object of experience and thematization. Here God distances himself in the guise of a third person. Illeity refers to this way of detaching itself within the relationship of attachment. The true Infinite is revealed and accessible only as illeity, neither as a thou of unmediated dialogue nor as an object of thematization, but only as “a way of concerning me without entering into conjunction with me” (GDT, p. 285)3 or as “the non-phenomenality of the Other who affects me beyond representation, unbeknownst to me and like a thief” (GDT, p. 201). For Levinas, the disruption of the unity and synthesis of the I think is always the proper sign of true transcendence, and it is the unsurpassable contribution of Descartes that his analysis of the idea of the infinite provides exactly such disruption and such sign of transcendence. The idea of God is a cogitatum of cogitatio, but this formal, subjective reality breaks apart by the objective content of the infinite signified by the idea. The content explodes the structure of all representational, synthetic thought, breaks with all identities of being and thought, and relativizes the primordiality of intentionality. The idea of God is something placed in us and undergone by us, not something thought by us through the negation of the finite, and our waking or insomnia lies in this incomparable passivity, the intrigue of the infinite in us. The form of the cogito is interrupted by the content it cannot contain. Thus the idea of the Infinite signifies with a meaning prior to presence, an an-archy, signifying within the trace, neither exhausting itself in showing itself nor deriving its meaning from manifestation. Levinas construes this idea of the infinite in us as the deepest exigency of our existence (GDT, pp. 213–218). How is transcendence as a relation thinkable if it must exclude the copresence and contemporaneity of the two terms? Doesn’t the desire for the infinite, then, restore the contemporaneity of the desirable and the desiring even though this desire is neither vision nor aiming? Is the transcendence of the desirable possible beyond interestedness and erotic love in which the I think reconstitutes presence? For Levinas, it is possible through the infinite placed in me, through the “more” that devastates and awakens the less. “Affected by the infinite, the I cannot go to an end it can equal. The approach increases the distance and enjoyment is only the increase of hunger. The desired one thus remains transcendent to desire. It is in this reversal of terms that transcendence, or the dis-inter-restedness of desire, comes to pass” (GDT, p. 222). The desirable, because infinite, remains separated even within desire, near yet different, “holy.” This simultaneity of nearness and distance is possible, however, only if the desirable commands me to what is undesirable, only if he commands me to the undesirable par excellence, the other person. For Levinas, illeity denotes this way that the infinite has of referring, in the midst of its own desirability, to the nondesirable nearness. This involves extraordinary reversals: the goodness of the Good inspires the movement to itself only by setting it aside from the Good as desirable and turning it to the other. We can move to the Good only by going through the movement to the other. There is no unmediated, direct access to the Good. “The desirable separates itself from the relation to desire it called forth, and, through this separation or this holiness, the desirable remains a third person, a He at the base of the Thou. He does not fill me with good but compels me to goodness, better than the good to be received” (GDT, p. 223). For Levinas, it is only the concrete responsibility to the other that can transmute transcendental subjectivity into subjection to the other and effects “an 3 Ibid., p. 285.

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opening of a self absolutely exposed and sobered from the ecstasy of intentionality” (GDT, p. 223), and it is, therefore, only through the mediation of this human other that our relation with the Infinite will be one of love without eros and maintain both distance and nearness. Without the human other, the Infinite other is reduced to an object of eros and nearness. It is this referral of the desirable to the nondesirable that tears God out of the objectivity of presence and out of being. He is no longer an object or an interlocutor in a dialogue. His distancing or transcendence turns into my responsibility. Thus understood, for Levinas, “God is not simply the first other but other than the other, other otherwise, other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other person, prior to the ethical compulsion to the neighbor” (GDT, p. 224). Not an object, God is “transcendent to the point of absence, to the point of the confusion in which the substitution for the neighbor grows in nobility and in which the transcendence of the infinite is raised to its glory” (GDT, p. 224). Of this God who is “other otherwise,” we cannot predicate ontotheological names. We can only refer to him as a “he” whose infinity can only be testified to in the infinity of the responsibility to the human other. Derrida: reference without a referent Derrida shares Levinas’s rejection of ontotheology but approaches the question of naming the unnameable God by focusing more explicitly on the potential of negative theology as such. There are two phases in Derrida’s relationship with the tradition of negative theology. In his earlier works in the 60s and 70s he would reject negative theology as the culmination of the very ontotheology he would dismiss in the name of difference. This rejection, however, was not a simple rejection. He had been haunted by the promises of negative theology ever since, to which he has been returning in his more recent works since the 90s, retrieving and translating its deconstructionist potentialities, so much so that negative theology has now become as much a part of Derridean deconstruction as have been such key notions as difference, khora, the trace, writing, the messianic, and justice. For the earlier Derrida, negative theology falls short in four ways. First, negative theology still remains within the predicative or judicative space of discourse in its strictly propositional form, privileging not only the indestructible unity of the word and but also the authority of the name, that is, within the horizon of the metaphysics of presence. Second, for all its criticisms of the shortcomings of human language, beyond all its negations, even beyond being, even beyond the alternatives of theism and atheism, negative theology still affirms some hyperessential reality, again becoming a metaphysics of presence in a more refined form. This “ontological wager of hyperessentiality” (DNT, p. 78)4 is operative in both Dionysius and Eckhart. Negative theology is not only negative but also, deep down, affirmative, in fact hyperaffirmative. It only deconstructs the grammatical anthropomorphism of ordinary language and its phenomenal negativity, ultimately transmuting negation into the affirmation of a supreme being, however incommensurable it might be to the being of all that is. Third, as long as one speaks in the element of logic and ontotheological grammar, there is an irrepressible movement on the part of negative theology to ontotheologically reappropriate the hyperessential. For Derrida, this movement is irrepressible, 4 Coward and Foshay (1992). I use the abbreviation, DNT, in the body of the text.

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but its ultimate failure is just as necessary. Fourth, and finally, the apophatic voyage often contains the promise, the possibility of an intuition of the hyperessential presence. It may be the vision of a dark light, but it still promises the immediacy of a presence, the possibility of union with God. The act of unknowing still claims to be a genuine “vision” and a genuine “knowledge.” This movement towards the presence of vision and knowledge does not contain “the principle of its interruption” (DNT, p. 81). Even at this earlier stage, however, Derrida was haunted by the possibility that “perhaps there is within it [negative theology], hidden, restless, diverse, and itself heterogeneous, a voluminous and nebulous multiplicity of potentials to which the single expression ‘negative theology’ yet remains inadequate” (DNT, p. 82). The later stage of his relationship, then, consists in exploring these diverse potentials of negative theology, its many sides, manifest and hidden, positive and negative, and in short “deconstructing” negative theology precisely for the sake of its promise for deconstruction. For Derrida negative theology hides a certain boldness which is also self-contradictory and ambiguous. Its boldness consists in “going further than is reasonably permitted. . . .passing to the limit, then crossing a frontier, including that of a community, thus of a sociopolitical, institutional, ecclesial reason or raison d’etre” (ON, p. 36)5 . As the “voiceless voice” that speaks of God who (is) but beyond being, negative theology resembles a profession of atheism, but it is also an atheism that contains the most intense yearning for God. It sounds negative but hides a positive affirmation. As theology it contains “the most insatiable desire of God,” but as apophatic, it rejects all anthropotheomorphic forms of desire. To go toward the absolute other involves “the extreme tension of a desire that tries thereby to renounce its own proper momentum, its own movement of appropriation” (ON, p. 37). One may also ask what the desire of God means. Does the desire come from God in us, from God for us, or from us for God? Since no relation to self can be sure of preceding this desire, this relation to the other, all reflection on the self as well as on the idea or name of God is caught in the genealogy of this genitive. Likewise, if atheism testifies to the desire of God, in whose presence does it do this? Who speaks to whom? (ON, p. 37) For Derrida, we can ask the same question of the discourse of negative theology itself. To whom is this discourse addressed? Who is its addressee? As in Dionysius, negative theology exists only as a performative discourse, only as a prayer, an address, an apostrophe (to God), a confession, a testimony that involves “a singular movement of the soul,” “a conversion of existence that accords itself to, in order to reveal in its very night, the most secret secret,” a conversion toward the other in order to turn (it) toward God, an address to God already implying the possibility and necessity of the post-scriptum of fraternal love. Negative theology is not reducible to an act of cognitive reason, to informing, teaching, making known, revealing, or unveiling. It is a “stranger to knowing, thus to every determination or to every predicative attribution” (ON, pp. 38–40). As a language that also questions the very possibility of language, negative theology means (to say) very little, almost nothing, but also “perhaps something other than something,” which accounts for its “inexhaustible” exhaustion. Where does this inexhaustibility lie? As a logical discourse negative theology lends itself to formalization, which then can be mechanically repeated, falsified, and exposed to forgery and counterfeit. This, however, is the very “vocation” of negative theology whose statement 5 Derrida (1995, p. 36). I use the abbreviation, ON, in the body of the text.

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“empties itself by definition, of all intuitive plenitude.” It is the very “kenosis of discourse” (ON, p. 50). As such, apophatic statements represent the moment of “crisis” in the Husserlian sense of the empty intuition. By the same token, by revealing the necessity of such a crisis and denouncing the pitfalls of intuitive consciousness and phenomenology, apophatic statements “destabilize” the self-evidence of phenomenological, ontological, and transcendental critiques. Emptiness is essential and necessary to them. Such statements guard against this emptiness through the moment of prayer or the hymn, but this protective moment remains “structurally exterior” to negative theology as such. The evaluation of the quality of negative theology as events depends on the relation that articulates this emptiness on the plenitude of a prayer or an attribution (theo-logical or onto-logical) denegated. The criterion of negative theology lies in the measure of the relation stretched between emptiness and denegated positivity (ON, p. 51). Negative theology is possible only as an event and takes place in the course of prayer. For Derrida, it is toward this prayer of negative theology that all prayers ultimately strain themselves. It “asks nothing, all the while asking more than everything. It asks God to give himself rather than gifts” (ON, p. 56). God is interpreted as gift or desire of giving, and prayer is this interpretation, the very “body” of this interpretation, the in and on where the event takes place, like the khora, body without body, the place of everything. This location “displaces and disorganizes all our onto-topological prejudices, in particular the objective science of space” (ON, p. 56). It is the “desert” found in us, not the space in which subjects and objects are found. The event of prayer takes place on the edge of the lips passed over by words that carry themselves toward God. These words of prayer “are carried [portes], both exported and deported, by a movement of ference (transference, reference, difference) toward God. They name God, speak of him, speak him, speak to him, let him speak in them, let themselves be carried by him, make (themselves) a reference to just what the name supposes to name beyond itself, the nameable beyond the name, the unnameable nameable” (ON, p. 58). The language of prayer, then, is opened by this ference yet also speaks the inadequation of the reference, the insufficiency or the lapse of knowing. Such an inadequation reveals the absence of a common measure between the opening, openness, revelation or knowledge and a certain “absolute secret, nonprovisional, heterogeneous to all manifestation” (ON, p. 59). This secret is not the reserve of potential knowing, a potential manifestation. The language of abnegation is negative not only because it is not the language of descriptive predication and indicative proposition simply affected with a negation but also because it denounces as much as it renounces. It denounces, enjoining, prescribes overflowing this insufficiency, mandates doing the impossible, necessitates going there where one cannot go, “toward the name, toward the beyond of the name in the name” (ON, p. 59). Here then is the chance of a genuine decision, that always passes through “the madness of the undecidable and the impossible” (ON, p. 59), the decision to go where it is impossible to go. The language of negative theology thus contains a normative denunciation, “this sweet rage against language, this jealous anger of language within itself and against itself,” a passion that leaves the mark of a scar or a wound in that place where the impossible takes place. The event takes place at the edge of language where there is nothing but reference, and it is in the question whether the referent—everything save the name—is or is not indispensable that all history of negative theology plays itself out. Every authentic statement of negative theology must bear the trace of the wound, the stigmata of its

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own proper inadequation, of its own proper disproportion, of its hubris countersigned (ON, pp. 60–61). In the classical tradition apophasis has always represented a sort of paradoxical hyperbole. Hyperbole names the movement of transcendence that carries or transports beyond being or beingness epekeina tes ousias. This excessive movement, this hyperbole announces in the double sense of signaling an open possibility and provoking the opening of the possibility. Its event, therefore, is at once revealing and producing. Its event announces what comes and makes come what will come in all the movements in hyper, ultra, au-dela, beyond, ueber, which will precipitate discourse or, first of all, existence. This precipitation is their passion. This hyperbolic movement precipitates not only beyond being or God insofar as he is the supreme being but “beyond God even as name, as naming, named, or nameable, insofar as reference is made there to some thing.” This “beyond” is not a place but a movement of transcendence that surpasses God himself, being, essence, the proper or the self-same. The movement “radically dissociates being and knowing, existence and knowledge.” It fractures the cogito as it cracks even the analogy between God and creatures. The “analogy does not repair, or reconcile, but aggravates the dissociation” (ON, pp. 63–67). In effect, then, for Derrida negative theology is more than a thesis or a claim within theology; it is a movement, a passion, a desire of transcendence beyond all being, essence, identity, or anything that can be called “some thing,’ a movement of reference without a particular referent. As such, negative theology constitutes an essential part of deconstruction itself applicable to all areas of life. It embodies not only a subversive critique of all claims to identity, unity, and presence but also the most intense yearning—behind such a critique—for a life freed from all enslaving ideologies and fulfilled beyond all expectation, a yearning and a hope for a life of truth and justice, for the “messianic” without a messiah. Negative theology “launches or carries negativity as the principle of auto-destruction in the heart of each thesis; in any event, this theology suspends every thesis, all belief, all doxa” (ON, p. 67). As “a movement of internal rebellion,” it entails “the interruption of a sort of social contract, the one that gives right to the State, the nation, more generally to the philosophical community as rational and logocentric community” (ON, p. 67). Derrida goes so far as to say that “I trust no text that is not in some way contaminated with negative theology, and even among those texts that apparently do not have, want, or believe they have any relation with theology in general. Negative theology is everywhere, but it is never by itself. In that way it also belongs, without fulfilling, to the space of the philosophical or ontotheological promise that it seems to break: to record. . . the referential transcendence of language: to say God such as he is, beyond his images, beyond this idol that being can still be, beyond what is said, seen, or known of him; to respond to the true name of God, to the name to which God responds and corresponds beyond the name that we know him by or hear. It is to this end that the negative procedure refuses, denies, rejects all the inadequate attributions. It does so in the name of a way of truth and in order to hear the name of a just voice” (ON, p. 69).6 In short, for Derrida, the naming of God, who cannot be named either positively or negatively at the level of predication, is possible only as negative theology in its self-transcending, self-negating movement as prayer to an other whose name remains forever unspecified, or as pure reference without a referent and only as a move6 Ibid., p. 69. For a critical appreciation of Derrida as a whole, Min (2004, pp. 30–88).

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ment of referential transcendence inherent in all human struggles for authenticity and justice. Marion: naming the unnameable God through praise Marion also shares with Levinas and Derrida the critical dismissal of ontotheology and the language of predication based on ontotheology as inappropriate to the discourse on God. With both he agrees that the God of ontotheology is only an idol; the much touted “death of God” was in fact the “twilight of idols.” Marion also agrees with them that we have to go beyond the language of predication and find a mode of reference to God that will preserve the true transcendence of God. It is also precisely here that Marion shows his differences from both. Levinas hardly refers to the tradition of negative theology, while Derrida deconstructs and explores the tradition of negative theology for all its potential for the service of deconstruction and justice with emphasis on the self-transcending and self-negating dynamics of negative theology. Marion, on the other hand, explores the Dionysian tradition for the positive content of its negations and advocates not pure prayer but prayer precisely as praise, from the perspective of a Trinitarian theology of the gift. How, then, do we go about thinking the “unthinkable” God precisely in her “unthinkability,” God as an “unknown” God who is “ab-solute” and released from any thinkable relation to anything other than itself and incomprehensible in terms of the concepts that measures and are measured by the world? What is a non-conceptual, non-representational approach to God? Here it is no longer a question of speaking a transcendent “object,” even a “supreme” “personal” being, as long as it is still one among other objects and subject to the conditions of worldly objectivity, but identifying the hermeneutic horizon itself for describing the simultaneous separation and intimacy, incommensurability and communion, withdrawal and closeness that characterizes God’s relation to the world, for which Marion uses the phenomenological term, “distance.” Distance does not mean spatial distance or spatial absence, nor does it belong to the world of objects at all. It is not a concept or a signifier. It is the absolutely anterior and exterior horizon for the transcendental relation between God and the world of objects, a metalanguage that describes God’s intimate alterity and constitutive asymmetry with which God is related to the world. How, then, do we identify and distinguish this distance and withdrawal of God from the mere absence of the gods? What is the true form of the unsayable of distance? How do we say the unsayable in its twofold character as a supreme nonbeing and as a hyperbolic separation? Distance is both “a censure and a condition” and requires one to “think the doubly unthinkable according to excess (supremacy over beings in general) and according to lack (withdrawal as insistence, without being)” (ID, p. 140).7 How think distance without reducing it to an object or a supreme being, without an ontic treatment of God within a system of objective predication, and without even letting the supreme being state a predication about itself by itself (reference to Barth?)? How is a discourse of distance on its own terms possible? How speak of God while maintaining precisely God’s unthinkability as a condition of its own authenticity? (ID, pp. 45–46, 140–141).8 7 Marion (2001, p. 140). I use the abbreviation, ID, in the body of the text. 8 Ibid., pp. 140–41; see also Marion (1991, pp. 45–46).

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Here Marion, along with Levinas and Derrida, dismisses predicative language as language unacceptable to distance. Predicative language categorically attributes a predicate to a subject and crosses the distance between subject and predicate; the predicate exhausts the subject. Categorical, predicative language thus eliminates whatever distance or excess the object may have through appropriation. The claim to appropriate the subject through one’s own predicative language and achieve adequacy between subject and predicate is inherent in the very nature of all predicative language, which, therefore, is simply unacceptable as the language or discourse of distance. The impossibility of predicating anything of God or attaining God as a referent that would verify a proposition still harbors the regret that such predication would be desirable. For Marion, such a regret harbors idolatry, the reduction of God to an entity in the world. We must go beyond the predicative, propositional use of language altogether and find a qualitatively different use. Here Marion picks up on Dionysius’s turn from the saying of predicative language to “praise” or from discourse to prayer. Praise is neither true nor false. Marion goes beyond the alternatives of either saying or keeping silence. Even if one cannot say, it does not follow that one must be silent. A discourse of praise remains an alternative to saying and silence. It conjoins the rigor of a precise language and the assurance that it maintains and travels through distance. It maintains distance because it praises the Requisite, the object of prayerful request, as anonymous and outside every name. Anonymity is not a question of a negative predication, less an inverted category than an inversion of the category, not the simple absence of names but the name of absence. Distance opens up, and the name of the absent gives itself to be believed. Names fail only to betray the distraction of possible meanings, and the abdication of meaning gives to be thought “the sense-less direction of an excessive signification” and “the excrescence of signification over possible statements and meanings” (ID, p. 185). The Requisite is anonymous not only because no name can remove that anonymity but more because anonymity itself becomes a name through excess. Anonymity does not make the signification it avoids disappear but designates it as strictly anonymous, which in turn introduces the play of the icon—of the invisible. The anonymous leaves us without a name, speechless, and in astonishment, ensuring the direction toward distance. Here (non-predicative) signification and (predicative) meaning grow in inverse proportion. The impoverishment of meaning alone acknowledges the depth of signification of anonymity as anonymity. By renouncing the category and its affirmation in favor of a “praise as . . .” finally set off against any meaningful adequation of the predicate to the subject, language highlights distance and the iconic depth of language emerges. Signification achieves unspeakably the pertinence that meaning acknowledges not ensuring. It is this transfer of pertinence that properly announces distance. “The same distance that masks the excess of signification (anonymity) provokes the excess of meaning and the multiplication of names” (ID, p. 186). Because anonymous, one and the same meaning-lessness [in-sense] gives rise to an infinity of praises—thus distance, now ensured of its irreducibility, can be endlessly traversed. Anonymity and polyonymy go together. Marion presents praise as the appropriate language of distance by exploring its “as” structure. Typically, a human being, x, praises the Requisite, as y, e.g., good, beautiful, lord, etc. The “as” here does not mean either “as if” or a categorical predication that identifies the Requisite. It only indicates the “relation” under which x aims at the Requisite. Y here presupposes distance and refers back first to x. Each x or reques-

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tant aims at the Requisite under the relation in which the latter remains immanent in the former (interior intimo meo) without claiming to categorically predicate y of the Requisite. That is, the y aims at the Requisite, but describes the requestant x, although y relates itself to the Requisite in that it is this relation that constitutes the only stake of the statement. Praise corresponds to this nonpredicative reserve of “as.” Praise describes the requestant, not the Requisite, while aiming at the Requisite. The “as” announces a relation of request between x and the Requisite under a certain relation y. A statement is made, but it is not a purely objective statement that may be true or false. It is made always within a metalanguage that implicates the speaker in the very determination of the statement. The “as” indicates that the request (“I praise you, Lord, as beauty”) springs from the requestant in order to target or aim at a third point beyond the speaker and the statement, a point “infinitely” beyond the segment of the line that these two can determine. The self-implication does not presuppose any subjective reduction but “takes up the subjectivity of the speaker within the unsurpassable aim of the Requisite” (ID, p. 188). The speaker thus speaks in distance. Marion insists, however, that this discourse of praise is not simply identical with the performative use of language. There are two reasons for this. One is that the performative presupposes a minimal qualification of the speaker as the author of the performative statement. Only lovers can say “I love you,” only the police officer “I arrest you.” But who will ensure a qualification of every requestant according to the infinity of names that support praise? It is also clear that the performance of the request depends on more than the requestant, who cannot make the request except in that which commands and precedes it, in the anterior distance, the Requisite. In short, the authorization of performance must come from the Requisite as such, who summons the requestant to make the request insofar as it exceeds all predication and performance of all statements. In the case of the performance of praise, the performer receives his qualification, previously, not from himself but from that at which his statement aims without predicating anything of it. As an anterior gift, it is distance that qualifies the requestant. This investment by distance disqualifies both the subjectivist reduction of the language of praise and its assimilation to a simple performative. The second reason for distinguishing between the discourse of praise and simple performative use of language is that the performative treats language as a practice, as an act, without saying or stating anything. It marries, sells, loves, arrests, etc., and terminates outside of a statement. When words make things, they do not state any meaning; they speak not in order to say anything but in order to act. The discourse of praise, on the other hand, maintains the propositional statement, although referred to the act of praising. If the statement disappeared in the performance, the aim would relate no name to the Requisite. Praise does not attempt to resolve the statement into a fact. Praise indeed functions as a performative, but as a performative that elaborates gifts with words, not make things with words. Praise performs all the more, the more radically it sets the statement outside of the one stating. Instead of reabsorbing the statement within the performance by the speaker, praise absorbs the speaker in the performance of the gift through the statement. Praise is ecstatic in this sense. Discourse of praise, then, plays beyond any performative, the three terms, the propositional statement, the requestant, and the Requisite, remain irreducible to one another. The discourse of praise, then, is possible only because there are other legitimate uses of language in addition to the verification of truth and falsity. As for Wittgenstein, so for Marion propositions can function without any of their significations being

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attested by empirical or quasi-empirical verifications. The language of praise utilizes unverifiable significations but delivers an intelligible meaning through the intention and the “forms of life.” The usage of praise is not founded in the empirical verification of the Requisite but in the quasi-liturgical form of life that establishes it in distance, for a request, in the manner of a requestant. Truth value is not the only source of the validity of propositions. Praise is neither true nor false, nor even contradictory. It answers to other uses each of which has irreducibly its own language game (ID, pp. 189–195).

Derrida and Marion: pure address or praise? What about “pure prayer” vs. “praise”? Does the invocation of the unnameable God require “pure prayer” in the sense of a pure address to an indeterminate addressee as Derrida insists, or “praise” in the sense of a prayer addressed to God determinate enough to command praise as Marion does? Why the struggle between indeterminacy and determinacy of the addressee? For the deconstructionist Derrida always concerned over the danger of the tyranny of the same and ideological manipulation, it is a matter of crucial importance to make sure that apophasis does not say “just anything” in its passage to excellence or eminence, and to prevent apophasis from “manipulating” its negations. It is the experience of prayer that provides this insurance and prevention. Here the role of prayer is not introductory or secondary but essential. Prayer “adjusts discursive asceticism, the passage through the desert of discourse, the apparent referential vacuity which will only avoid empty deliria and prattling, by addressing itself from the start to the other, to you. But to you as ‘hyperessential and more than divine Trinity”’ (DNT, p. 110). There are, however, two traits that Derrida finds it necessary to distinguish in the experience of prayer. One trait is that it is an address to the other as other, even God. Prayer at least means the act of addressing oneself to the other as other, asking, supplicating, searching out, no matter what. The “pure” prayer “demands only that the other hear it, receive it, be present to it, be the other as such, a gift, call, and even cause of prayer” (DNT, p. 110). This purity of invocation (“no matter what”) is characteristic of prayer as a discourse that is not predicative, theoretical, or constative. It is a pure “speaking to,” not a “speaking of,” a pure “apostrophe” without further determination. The other trait of prayer is that of praise or encomium. In Dionysius, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Marion these two traits are inseparable. For Derrida, they are neither identical nor inseparable. To be sure, neither pure prayer nor praise is a mode of constative predication; both are performative. For Derrida, however, pure prayer or prayer “in itself” “implies nothing other than the supplicating address to the other, perhaps beyond all supplication and giving, to give the promise of His presence as other, and finally the transcendence of His otherness itself, even without any other determination.” On the other hand, praise, although not a simple attributive or predicative speech, “nevertheless preserves an irreducible relationship to the attribution.” For Derrida, praise “qualifies God and determines prayer, determines the other, Him to whom it addresses itself, refers, invoking Him even as the source of prayer.” No longer “the pure address of the prayer to the other, praise contains a “movement of determination” which determines God as “Trinitarian” and “hyperessential” and thus distinguishes the Christian from all other kinds of

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prayer (DNY, p. 110). To reject this distinction between pure prayer and praise, for Derrida, is to reject the essential quality of prayer to every non-Christian prayer. For Derrida, this Christian attempt to express the real transcendence of God by means of a movement of determination results, as Marion insists, in the multiplication of voices and discourses, but this is precisely where the danger lies. In the multiplication of predicates, however carefully chosen and qualified, “a predicate can always conceal another predicate,” and “the voice of an utterance can conceal another,” introducing into the discourse “the subtlety, but also the conflicts, the relations of power, even the aporias of a politics of doctrine: I want to say: a politics of initiation or teaching in general, and of an institutional politics of interpretation” (DNT, p. 113).9 Derrida, then, is opposed to praise because it introduces determining predicates which then can be abused as justification of the persecution of the other, the whole point of deconstruction. Marion is right in interpreting Derrida as deconstructing praise as “a disguised form of predication” (IN, p. 23).10 Marion’s response to Derrida is twofold. First, by elaborating an interpretation of Dionysius already given in his early work, The Idol and Distance, Marion classifies three ways of referring to something, “affirmation,” “negation,” and “beyond every affirmation and negation.” Affirmations and negations are simply contraries of each other and at the same level, the level of truth and falsity. The third way is played out simply beyond the field of truth and falsity, no longer interested in affirming anything, not even in the guise of negation, as Derrida accuses negative theology of doing. Dionysius is quite explicit about this. It is no longer a question of naming God nor a question of not naming God but simply of “de-nominating him—in the twofold sense that this term can have: to name (to name in view of . . ., to nominate), but with something close to a negation, and consequently also to undo him from all nomination” (IN, p. 27). This is a purely pragmatic function of language, that of referring to something without the predicative intention of either affirming or denying something about something. For Dionysius, the name of aitia or cause has this denominating function. For Marion, Dionysius’ mystical theology, misnamed “negative” theology, cannot be accused of introducing affirmation in the guise of negation; it simply transcends both affirmation and negation. For Marion, this third way is a “saturated” phenomenon. Every phenomenon is defined by the inescapable duality of appearing to and what appears and therefore also signification and fulfillment, intention and intuition, and noesis and noema. There are three possibilities we can envision of the relationships between the terms. When the intention finds itself confirmed by the intuition, this equality defines adequation and therefore the evidence of truth, the way of kataphasis. On the other hand, the intention can exceed all intuitive fulfillment, in which case the phenomenon is incapable of delivering objective knowledge on account of a lack, the way of apophasis. These two ways operate within the horizon of predication. There is a third possibility: the intention, concept, or signification can never reach adequation with the intuition or fulfillment, not because intuition is lacking but because that intuition exceeds what the concept can receive, expose, and comprehend. The object here remains incomprehensible in the strict sense not because of any deficiency in the giving intuition as in the second case but because of “its surplus which neither concept, signification, 9 Ibid., 113. 10 Marion (1999a). For this essay, I use the abbreviation, IN, in the body of the text. On Derrida’s

fear of anything “determinate,” see Min (2004, pp. 31–34, 38–40).

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nor intention can foresee, organize, or contain.” “The excess of intuition overcomes, submerges, exceeds, in short saturates, the measure of each and every concept. What is given disqualifies every concept.” It is the excess, not deficiency, which here undoes knowledge and predication altogether. For Marion, then, “God remains incomprehensible, not imperceptible—without adequate concept, not without giving intuition.” The proliferation of names may suggest that the concepts are still there, but it also calls attention to the insufficiency of the very concepts it puts in play and “constantly subverts” them (IN, p. 40). The multiplication of concepts does not, as Derrida seems to fear, convert praise into a disguised form of predication. Denomination goes beyond all predication and nomination. For Marion, the Name “is not said, it calls,” in the most terrifying of all calls (IN, p. 42). Is the excess of the giving intuition plausible in the case of God, who, it seems, can never be given intuitively? Here, Marion sides with Levinas that it is the very requirement proper to the phenomenality of God to contradict the conditions for the possibility of experiencing objects by way of paradox, the paradox of being given while contradicting the conditions of such givenness. Furthermore, the excess of intuition can be accomplished in the form of stupor and terror imposed by the incomprehensibility due to excess and testifying to that excess. Likewise, for Marion, the very fact of our obsession with God by way of invocation, discussion, and even denial when we all admit we have no concept of God, the fact that the question of God dwells within us so deeply in these and other ways, is an indication of the fascinating presence of an intuition of God whose concept we clearly lack (IN, p. 41). It is this excess of intuition, nourished through prayer, liturgy, and ecclesial life but without the appropriate words, concepts, and significations capable of adequately articulating it, that makes pluralism of theology inherent in the notion of revelation.11 Against Derrida’s critique that praise is disguised predication—after all, praise applies titles to God, Marion raises two objections. One is that Derrida assumes that dedicating a name to someone as in praise necessarily implies identifying him with his essence and thus subjecting him to a metaphysics of presence. The fact, however, is that “proper” names are not really proper and that they never freeze individuals in their essences, and that their function is not the metaphysical one of defining and fixing an individual in presence but the factual, pragmatic one of referring to them. Assuming that praise attributes a name to God, it is not meant to name him properly or essentially but only to mark his absence, anonymity, and withdrawal—exactly as every name dissimulates every individual, whom it merely indicates without ever manifesting. Marion’s second objection to Derrida is that it is not possible to accomplish prayer pure and simple, without naming, at least in the sense of aiming at. Can one really pray without naming, however imperfectly, the identity of the person to whom one is praying? Is prayer possible without invoking the one to whom one prays? Is prayer possible without at least “de-nominating” the addressee? This third way, without any predicative intention of either affirming or denying, has the sole pragmatic function of “aiming in the direction of . . .., of relating to . . ., of comporting oneself towards. . ., of reckoning with. . .––in short of dealing with. . .” (IN, p. 30). Prayer definitively transgresses the predicative, nominative, and therefore metaphysical sense of language. Derrida’s response to Marion’s critique is that Derrida’s treatment of negative theology in Sauf le nom, presented earlier in this essay, already agrees with Marion 11 Marion (1999b, p. 69).

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on the third way of de-nomination beyond position and negation as the appropriate way and on the performative, pragmatic, liturgical function of theological language. Derrida insists, however, that there are still outstanding issues with Marion on the question of prayer and praise. In his penetrating commentary on the exchange between Marion and Derrida, Caputo points out that for Marion praise implies “pure reference and no meaning,” while for Derrida, praise cannot be a matter of pure reference and no meaning because we do not praise just anything but only something that is praiseworthy in a “significant” if not predicative way. This question, however, may be just as applicable to Derrida’s own notion of the “messianic” understood as free from apophantic determinability. Ultimately, for Caputo, and I think he is right here, the difference between Marion and Derrida on naming the unnameable God is a political difference. Derrida’s main concern in the discourse on the name of God is prophetic justice, and is “more concerned with the ethico-politics of hospitality than with mystical or negative theology.” This means that for Marion, the name of God is enacted in “praise and liturgy,” while for Derrida, it is enacted in “peace and justice.”12 Concluding reflections All three thinkers under review agree that the God of ontotheology is an idol to be rejected, that there is no way of direct, predicative reference to God, and that we have to go beyond the language of predication to some mode of testimony and invocation. For Levinas, the naming of the unnameable God is not a matter of a direct invocation of a divine Thou but a matter of bearing witness to the infinite alterity of God through the mediation of care for the hungry and poor human others of this world. Without this mediation our relation to the unnameable God remains inauthentic. Derrida also links the authenticity of our relation to the unnameable God to acts of historical transcendence toward a fullness of truth and justice. Marion does not specifically refer to any particular socio-political relevance of our relation to the unnameable God, not because he is indifferent to politics but because he sees all life as involved in the Trinitarian and christologically mediated process of giving and loving (ID, pp. 162–180). In all three, how we speak of God is inseparable from how we treat our fellow human beings. The question of naming the unnameable God is not only a theological but also a political question. This is an important point. Given the massive historical abuse of the name of God for ideological purposes and the colossal human suffering in its wake, it is understandable and plausible that Levinas and Derrida insist on justice to the suffering other as condition of the authenticity of our praxis of divine names. While justice and liturgy are not mutually reducible, it is also critical to recognize that the liturgical address to God, without the discipline of the praxis of justice, can lapse into sentimental aestheticism without historical efficacy, mere transcendence without historical challenge, while the practice of justice, without prayer, may be deprived of the essential support of its most compelling symbol of transcendence. Prayer needs the test of its authenticity through justice, and justice in its self-transcending ideality (Derrida) 12

For John D. Caputo’s perceptive comparison of Marion and Derrida, see his essay in Caputo (1999). The quotations are from p. 200.

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needs transcendent justification through prayer. In this sense, Levinas, Derrida, and Marion are mutually complementary. The preceding discussions, especially the debate over pure prayer vs. praise, also remind us of the critical importance of maintaining tension between the positive and the negative in our language about God. Not speaking about God at all may prevent us from falling into the idolatry of reducing God to a projection of human ideologies and interests, but it also spells the end of all (theistic) religion and theology. What we need to do is to maintain a tension between the positive and the negative in our necessary reference to the unnameable God. This is especially important in the case of Christianity, which believes in a God who is both incomprehensible in her absolute transcendence and accessible to humanity in her incarnation. More than any other religion, Christianity has to speak of God because God has spoken to us in the Son in the language of humanity, but also has to speak of God in such a way that it does not reduce God to another object in the world even if it is the highest or most exalted object. The danger of reducing God to another familiar object of our worldly experience is a constant reality and threat in so much of theology and church life, often exploding into public life in the form of fundamentalism. In this sense, the concentrated critique of the God of ontotheology by the three thinkers is well taken and must be taken seriously even by those who may not go all the way with them. It is their special merit to remind us that God is always greater than our concept of God, that we are always tempted to abuse our concept as a weapon against others, and that we can speak of God as God only when we speak with an irreducible sense of dissatisfaction, insufficiency, and uncertainty.13 The preceding discussion also raises a question about the merits and adequacy of phenomenology as phenomenology in dealing with the question of divine transcendence. On the one hand, I count it as a merit of phenomenology to try to provide a lived experiential content for divine transcendence and bring that transcendence closer to our experience precisely in its transcendence. Levinas speaks of the infinity of the infinite other as well as of the infinity of the human other that interrupts and devastates the arrogance and sovereignty of constitutive consciousness and subjectivity. Derrida speaks of the “emptiness” of intuition, the “desertification of language,” and the “kenosis of discourse” in relation to the “wholly other,” and Marion of the “excess” of intuition and the terror and torpor that overwhelms us in our experience of the incomprehensible God. These thinkers may emphasize different aspects of our experience of the divine, but all of them try to understand divine transcendence precisely in relation to human experience and human subjectivity. In that sense they contribute to the richness of the human experience of the unnameable God. It is plausible to believe that those are authentic aspects of our human experience of divine transcendence. On the other hand, their common attack on ontotheology and insistence on phenomenology as the only way of preserving divine transcendence raise questions about the adequacy of phenomenology to account for divine transcendence by itself. However one may conceive phenomenology, and whether or not one holds to the concept of “horizon” and “conditions for the possibility of experience” as essential to phenomenology, it is essential to phenomenology to bring things into the realm of human experience, describe them in terms of its essential structures (e.g., noesis/noema, 13 See especially Kevin Hart, “Jacques Derrida: The God Effect,” in Blond (1998, p. 278); also Min (2007).

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intention/fulfillment), and in any event consider things only in relation to lived human experience and by the same token discount things as irrelevant insofar as they are outside of that experience. A tendency to humanize things and put human experience and human subjectivity at the center of reality is inherent in all phenomenology. Insofar as phenomenology claims to be the only access to reality, it is essentially homocentric. It does not help in this regard to say that all three authors seek to overcome precisely the absolutism of human subjectivity in their common critique of the will to power and ontotheology as its specific product. This only reinforces two further concerns. The first concern is that negation of human subjectivity as the only mark of authentic relation to the unnameable God still harbors a central preoccupation with the human subject and thus remains homocentric. Whether one insists on exalted human subjectivity as in ontotheology or on ruptured and ovewhelmed human subjectivity as in our three thinkers, it is still human subjectivity that operates as the criterion of the authenticity of our relation to God. Our three thinkers remain just as homocentric in their negation of human subjectivity as is ontotheology in its affirmation of human subjectivity. Don’t we need emancipation from homocentrism altogether in order to truly release the real transcendence of God? As long as we continue to measure God’s real otherness by how God transcends, negates, surprises, or even loves us, we still determine God within our narrow human horizon. If the service of human desires and ideologies does not manifest God’s transcendence, the mere rejection and contradiction of such desires and ideologies is not going to do so either. If God is more than our desires and ideologies, she is also more than their mere negation. The other concern is whether it does justice to divine transcendence to conceive it only in opposition and contradiction to human subjectivity, a question also raised in the context of Barth’s insistence on the absolute sovereignty of God. This question has been answered by Hegel and Rahner among others who say that it is a sure way of compromising divine transcendence because it makes transcendence both relative to (the negation of ) human subjectivity and a finite being limited by another finite being. It also introduces a hostile dualism in the relation between God and human beings and subjects itself to all the criticisms such a dualism has evoked in modern thought.14 These concerns raise the much more fundamental issue about the adequacy of phenomenology to account for divine transcendence by itself. The transcendence of God experienced in the infinite responsibility to a human other (Levinas), in the excess of intuition (Marion) or in its emptiness (Derrida) is simply not identical with divine transcendence in its full reality. Such lived experience only raises the further question, What is there about the reality of God such that human beings can experience her in those ways? We cannot claim that God is infinite and incomprehensible because we experience her that way. We only experience God that way because God is that way in her own right. The measure of God’s transcendence must be sought on her own terms, on who she is, not merely on what she does or does not do to human beings. The horizon of the transcendent God transcends the horizon of humanity and indeed all created things. Lived human experience as such cannot be the adequate source of our knowledge of divine transcendence. Lived experience is itself a function of our existence in the 14 For a critique of Levinas as a latter-day Manichean for his extreme dualism of God and the world and his relentless emphasis on the contradiction between them, see Emmanuel Levinas: God and Phenomenology, in Bond (1998, 195–228).

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cosmos where our existence is itself that of one among other existents, not the privileged center of the universe. What we need, therefore, is a mode of knowing that goes beyond the phenomenological analysis of our lived experience and its essences and is capable of surveying the whole of the universe in its structure and dynamics so as to both recognize the proper place of humanity in the larger scheme of things and marvel at the transcendence of the creator who is larger than the universe, which is larger than human history, which is larger than our lived experience. It is a mode of knowing that is truly contemplative, interested in knowing the world for its own sake, not in exploiting its mysteries and resources, truly receptive and unitive in seeking harmony and communion with reality which it has not created, not aggressive or confrontational, and truly self-transcendent in seeking to know all that can be known in its structure and dynamism. Such a mode of knowing has an ancient name, theoretical or contemplative intellect, used and appealed to by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. Perhaps it is high time that we had retrieved something of this contemplative intellect for our time for God’s sake? The choice is not between phenomenology and ontotheology. The way of contemplative intellect remains a third option.15

References Blond, P. (Ed.). (1998). Post-secular philosophy: Between philosophy and theology. London: Routledge. Caputo, J. D. (1999). Apostles of the impossible: On God and the gift in Derrida and Marion. In J. D. Caputo, & M. J. Scanlon (Eds.), God, the gift, and postmodernism (pp. 185–222). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Coward, H., & Foshay, T. (Eds.). (1992). Derrida and negative theology. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Derrida, J. (1995). On the name. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Horner, R. (2001). Rethinking God as gift: Marion, Derrida, and the limits of phenomenology. New York: Fordham University Press. Levinas, E. (1998). Of God who comes to mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinas, E. (2000). God, death, and time, trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marion, J.-L. (1991). God without being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marion, J.-L. (1999a). In the name: How to avoid speaking of ‘negative theology. In J. D. Caputo, & M. J. Scanlon (Eds.), God, the gift, and postmodernism (p. 23). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marion, J.-L. (1999b). On the gift: A discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion. In J. D. Caputo, & M. J. Scanlon (Eds.), God, the gift, and postmodernism (p. 69). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marion, J.-L. (2001). The idol and distrance: Five studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson. New York: Fordham University Press, p. 140. Min, A. K. (2004). The solidarity of others in a divided world: A postmodern theology after postmodernism. New York: T & T Clark International. Min, A. K. (2005). Paths to the triune God: An encounter between Aquinas and recent theologies. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 307–337. Min, A. K. (2007). Speaking of the unspeakable God: The dilemmas of the Christian discourse about God. In D. Z. Phillips (Ed.), Whose God? Which tradition? London: Ashgate.

15 I make this plea for the retrieval of the contemplative intellect for our time in my 2005.

Int J Philos Relig (2006) 60:117–137 DOI 10.1007/s11153-006-0009-2 O R I G I NA L PA P E R

Vision and voice: Phenomenology and theology in the work of Jean-Luc Marion Merold Westphal

Received: 20 December 2005/ Accepted: 23 February 2006 / Published online: 29 November 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Abstract The kind of phenomenology that can be useful to theology will be a hermeneutical phenomenology, one that takes us beyond the Cartesian/Husserlian ideal of presuppositionless intuition. It will also be a phenomenology of inverse intentionality, one in which the constituting subject is constituted by the look and the voice of another. In light of these suggestions, the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion is defended against three critiques, namely that it compromises the boundary between phenomenology and theology, that the theology it serves is a bad one to boot, and that it has an inadequate account of the subject. At the heart of this defense is Marion’s clear distinction between phenomenology as a description of possible experience, and theology as the claim that a certain kind of experience, namely revelation or epiphany, is not merely actual but veridical. Phenomenology says, If revelation occurs it will be in the form of a saturated phenomenon. Theology says, for example, the burning bush was an epiphany, or Jesus Christ is a revelation. The attentive reader should have no trouble distinguishing Marion’s phenomenological analyses, which should be persuasive to believer and unbeliever alike, from his theological claims. Marion’s account of the subject falls under the heading of inverse intentionality, and there are hints that vision is aufgehoben in the voice. The seer is first of all the one seen, but above all the one addressed, called forth into response-able being. Keywords Hegel · Hermeneutics · Husserl · Intentionality · Kierkegaard · Marion · Phenomenology · Ricoeur · Theology · Transcendence Hegel says two quite different things about sex. On the one hand, in marriage “physical passion sinks to the level of a physical moment, destined to vanish in its very satisfaction.”1 In other words, “the sensuous moment, the one proper to phys-

1 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, ¶163.

M.Westphal (B) Philosophy Department, Fordham University, New York, NY 10458, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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ical life, is put into its ethical place as something only consequential and accidental . . . [Marriage is] the ethical aspect of love, the higher aspect which restrains purely sensual impulse and puts it in the background.”2 On the other hand, in marriage sex is elevated, “the natural sexual union . . . is changed into a union on the level of spirit, into self-conscious love.”3 One hears the full ambivalence of this account in a single phrase when Hegel calls sex “the external embodiment of the ethical bond.”4 If one emphasizes that it is merely the external embodiment of the ethical bond, one reiterates the notion that sex is put in its place, which is the background. But if one emphasizes that it is the external embodiment of the ethical bond, one calls attention to its elevation, its transformation, its quasi-sacramental character. This is a classic Hegelian Aufhebung. What we start out with is negated in its self-sufficient autonomy; but it is not abolished or abandoned. It is rather relativized by being recontextualized, thereby extending it the privilege of participating in something greater than itself, a whole to which it belongs but of which it is not the organizing principle. In the language of Kierkegaard’s Johannes de Silentio this is a teleological suspension of the lower in the higher. The higher is the telos of the lower, its proper home.5 The idea of philosophy as ancilla theologiae has the same Hegelian/Kierkegaardian structure. It goes back at least to Philo. It was taken over by Christians in the patristic period and became a medieval commonplace.6 Philosophy, by itself a merely natural wisdom, is allowed a kind of supernatural vocation when it puts itself in the service of theology saying, as it were, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). In the case of Christian theology, this word is a logos whose origin is Jerusalem rather than Athens,
8 ∈ / (∼ =H ϑ ∼ = ¬ϑ∀ ∼ =¬ (the word of the cross), which is a 6 < ∗∀8 ∼ =< (offense, stumbling block) in its own home town of Jerusalem and simply foolishness in Athens.7 Under conditions of modernity, philosophy has been much more likely to reaffirm its Athenian autonomy than to utter this me voici, and phenomenology has been no exception. Husserl’s project can be described as the effort to spell out how a phenomenological philosophy, so far from being the handmaid of anything, can itself be the queen of the sciences; and Heidegger, while affirming the autonomy and independence of theology out of one side of his mouth, insists out of the other side that it is the prerogative of phenomenology to correct it.8 So it is not entirely surprising that the discovery of a “theological turn” in contemporary phenomenology should raise questions. ‘Raise questions’ may sound like an attempt at British understatement in the light of the apoplectic cries of outrage that have greeted the “theological turn” in certain quarters. But there are at least two reasons for speaking this way. First, the objection that phenomenology is first violated and then, as usually happens in cases of seduction, abandoned in any attempt to make it useful to theology is a legitimate issue that deserves calm consideration. Second, from the theological side there are at least 2 Philosophy of Right, ¶164 and 164R (= Remark or Anmerkung), emphasis added. 3 Philosophy of Right, ¶161. In the process “the consciousness of the parties is crystalized out of its

physical and subjective mode and lifted to the thought of what is substantive.” ¶164R. 4 Philosophy of Right, ¶164. 5 Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Problem I. 6 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, 1, 4. 7 1 Cor. 1:18–25. See Jean-Luc Marion’s discussion in Marion (2001). 8 See “Phenomenology and Theology” in Pathmarks, and the title essay of Westphal (1999/2001).

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two questions deserving careful attention: what sort of service might phenomenology render to theology, and what sort of phenomenology can be of such theological use?

Hermeneutical phenomenology and reversed intentionality I shall begin by putting my cards on the table in relation to this latter question. The kind of phenomenology I think might be of use to theology will be, in the first instance, hermeneutical phenomenology. This move beyond the original Husserlian project is already made by Heidegger,9 Merleau-Ponty,10 and Gadamer.11 It can be argued that in works like Experience and Judgment and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, it happens in Husserl’s own reluctant “departure from Cartesianism.”12 In two ways this is already an abandonment of the ideal of phenomenology as rigorous science. First, it goes beyond the famous principle of principles of Ideas I: “that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak in its ‘personal’ actuality) offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply a what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.”(Husserl, 1983, Section 24, p.44) Probably no philosopher under Cartesian inspiration has ever succeeded to this degree in giving us the opposite of a clear and distinct idea. But at least this much seems clear: transcendental phenomenology, in the attempt to be rigorous science, will rest on intuition. But in place of intuition, hermeneutical phenomenology finds interpretation: not simply seeing but seeing-as. As we are reminded by Wittgenstein’s use of Jastrow’s duck-rabbit (Wittegenstein, 1958, p.194) in seeing-as what is given depends on what is taken, and the “object out there” does not unilaterally dictate how this giving-taking shall turn out.13 Or, to put it a bit differently, Sinngebung is not creation ex nihilo, but it is nevertheless creative. Second, interpretation takes place within the hermeneutical circle. My judgments, my seeings-as, my takings are conditioned by horizons of contingent opacity in which I am embedded either as embodied consciousness or as wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein and which I can never render fully transparent to myself, much less ground in pure intuition. I am always playing, as it were, with borrowed money. There is no originary presence, because whatever I find to be present to me has come to be so through the mediation of what is prior to its presencing. The hermeneutical turn involves “the dispossession of consciousness as the place and origin of meaning,” as Ricoeur puts it (Ricoeur, 1970, p.494). In two corollaries to this theorem, he further specifies the nature of hermeneutical phenomenology. First, on the assumption that ”reflection, in principle, requires something like interpreta9 In Being and Time, especially pp.13, 31–33. 10 In The Phenomenology of Perception and especially in the title essay of The Primacy of Perception

and Other Essays. 11 In Truth and Method. 12 See Husserl (1981). “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics” Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Translated by. John B. Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 101, Ricoeur writes, “what hermeneutics has ruined is not phenomenology but one of its interpretations, namely its idealistic interpretation by Husserl himself”. 13 As Ricoeur puts it, pointing to the conflict of interpretations, “The deciphering of enigmas is not a science, either in the Platonic, Hegelian, or modern sense of the word ‘science’. (Ricoeur, 1970, p.42).

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tion . . . one can then justify, also in principle, the detour through the contingency of cultures, through an incurably equivocal language, and through the conflict of interpretations” (p.42)14 This detour, simply put, is the detour through the text, be it the Freudian corpus in Freud and Philosophy or the symbols and myths of confession in The Symbolism of Evil. In what Ricoeur calls the “deregionalization” of hermeneutics, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer take hermeneutics beyond Schleiermacher’s generalized theory of text interpretation. Its scope is much broader than the realm of texts in the literal sense of the term.(Ricoeur, 1981) Now Ricoeur reminds us that it still includes the interpretation of texts and that this not only involves a detour but also that it is not a temporary path to intuition but a permanent journey through the conflict of interpretations. I speak of this as a corollary rather then a new theorem because it follows so quickly and easily from the basic insight of the hermeneutical turn. The dispossession of consciousness as the fons et origo of meaning means that my seeings-as, my construals, my interpretations are always guided, behind my back, as it were, by prior interpretations which already structure different aspects, bodily and historical, of my being-in-theworld. But if, willy nilly and beyond all possibility of “purification”, all my acts of Sinngebung are “contaminated” by construals over which I have not presided, why should I not deliberately turn to texts, as repositories of other interpretations by other interpreters, in my attempt to understand the things themselves? Why not see if I can learn something, since I am not in any case an autonomous and self-sufficient source of meaning and truth? Why not speak of “the gift of meaning from the symbol” which “gives rise to thought”?(Ricoeur, 1967b, p.348). This does not mean simply turning over the task of interpretation to others, to texts and the traditions from which they emanate. In opening phenomenological investigation to religious texts, for example, one allows the believing soul to speak. “The philosopher adopts provisionally the motivations and intentions of the believing soul. He does not ‘feel’ them in their first naïveté; he ‘re-feels’ them in a neutralized mode, in the mode of ‘as if.’ It is in this sense that phenomenology is a re-enactment in sympathetic imagination” (Ricoeur, 1967b, p.19). The phenomenological gesture creates a unique space “which is no longer religious experience and which is not yet philosophy,”(p.4) Nor is it theology, for sympathetic imagination is one thing; assertion and commitment are another. The second corollary, while leaving this sympathy in place, qualifies it. The second dispossession of consciousness that belongs to the hermeneutical phenomenology I have in mind is called the hermeneutics of suspicion. The believing soul is like a witness in a trial. After sympathetic questioning from an attorney for one side, the witness is subjected to cross examination, anything but sympathetic, by an attorney for the other side. As Ricoeur has made clear in Freud and Philosophy, the hermeneutics of suspicion is highly relevant to matters religious, but in presenting Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the masters of the school of suspicion (Ricoeur, 1970, p.422, 424). he fails to mention that the believing soul can be just as strongly motivated as the atheist to develop a critique of idols and to invoke sin as an epistemological category.15 14 In “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” Ricoeur writes, “In contrast to the tradition of the cogito and to the pretension of the subject to know itself by immediate intuition, it must be said that we understand ourselves only by the long detour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works. Ricoeur (1981, p.143)” Cf. “What is a Text: Explanation and Understanding,” op. cit., p. 158. 15 I have argued this in Westphal (1990, 1998).

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But, it can be objected, isn’t the hermeneutics of suspicion an anti-phenomenology? That is how Ricoeur describes the energetics of the Freudian topography.16 But the displacement and dispossession of immediate consciousness by the hermeneutical turn already taken already means, “We must really lose hold of consciousness and its pretension of ruling over meaning . . . reflection, in order to get at the root of desire, must let itself be dispossessed of the conscious meaning of discourse and displaced to another place of meaning”(Ricoeur, 1970, p.422, 424). Once we have done this, “the antiphenomenology of the Freudian topography and energetics can function as a moment of reflection.” The “‘wound’ and ‘humiliation’ which psychoanalysis inflicts on our self-love” is but an extension, a radical one to be sure, of the “wound” and “humiliation” already experienced in the hermeneutical turn as such. To the detour of the text is added the detour of the subtext. In addition to being a hermeneutical phenomenology in the several dimensions just described, the phenomenology I think might be useful to theology will interpret human experience not just in terms of its intentionality but also, and perhaps above all, in terms of the beyond of intentionality,17 which we might also call inverted or reversed intentionality. Perhaps its first phenomenological appearance was in Sartre’s analysis of the Look.18 Intersubjectivity does not have the noesis-noema structure; it arises not when a consciousness encounters an object which it somehow construes to be another subjectivity, but in the experience of being looked at. The intentional arrows do not go out from the subject in an act of Sinngebung or constitution; rather they are experienced as coming from another subject and conferring meaning on the first subject from without. Ricoeur suggests that this attempt to get beyond intentionality so as to free phenomenology from the limitations of representation and objectification is less of a problem for a possible phenomenology of religion than the problem already described as the detour through cultures and texts.19 But perhaps it depends on the question one wishes to address. I will argue that if the task is to thematize transcendence, it will be the other way around. Derrida suggests this when he says we can only thematize the mysterium tremendum in terms of “the dissymmetry that exists between the divine regard that sees me, and myself, who doesn’t see what is looking at me.” This gaze involves an epistemic decentering that “tends to undo both seeing and knowing. . . (Derrida, 1995) Moreover, Derrida finds an ethical significance to the epistemic transcendence. He locates the birth of the responsible self at the point where it can “freely subject itself to the wholly and infinite other that sees without being seen,” and he not only links this to the religious but specifically also to transcendence (Derrida, 1995, pp. 2, 27, 40. cf. pp. 27, 91). Ricoeur himself links the move to the beyond of intentionality to the call/response structure of religion and the question of obedience which it raises. In doing so he agrees with Derrida in linking inverted intentionality to the thematizing of transcendence in relation to responsibility.20 The reasons I think this kind of phenomenology is most likely to be of use to theology are both philosophical and theological. Philosophically, I think it is at once the most defensible and the most fecund way of developing the original “breakthrough”, 16 See, for example, Ricoeur (1970, pp. 117–122). 17 Ricoeur uses this phrase, perhaps thinking of Levinas’ essay, (Levinas, 1983). See “Experience and

Language in Religious Discourse,” Janicaud et al.(2000, p. 129). (Henceforth PTT). 18 In Being and Nothingness, Part Three, Chapter One, Section IV. 19 “Experience and Language,” p. 129. 20 “Experience and Language in Religious Discourse,” pp. 127–129.

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even if one is not doing phenomenology of religion. Theologically, I think there is a nice fit between such a phenomenology and the kind of theology that interests me. Although not argued from theological sources and norms, the hermeneutical turn, including the immersion in the circle of preunderstanding and the detour of the text, can be read as a hermeneutics of finitude that reflects the doctrine of creation. It reminds us that we are not God and cannot view the world from an absolute and unmediated (that is, divine) point of view. Similarly, the hermeneutics of suspicion can be read as reflecting the doctrine of the fall, as already suggested in the notion of sin as an epistemological category. Finally, the reversal of intentionality and the heteronomy it contains seems to me utterly essential in trying to think divine transcendence and human responsibility together, a point to which I shall return. Marion on phenomenology and theology in the light of three critiques The idea of a phenomenology of religion, of an inquiry into the possible phenomenality of the numinous21 or of the possible appearance within experience of that which is by definition beyond experience(Levinas, 1969, p.23)—in other words, the idea of a phenomenology that might be of service to theology has raised questions, evoked objections, even provoked cries of outrage, especially in relation to the “theological turn” in French phenomenology.22 While I shall argue that the cries of outrage are quite unfounded, I believe the questions and objections are worthy of serious discussion. So I turn to three objectors and a single target, Jean-Luc Marion, whose phenomenology I find to be both powerful and theologically significant. Graham Ward accuses Marion of “uncritical dogmatism” because the ”postmodern site [in which Ward places Marion’s phenomenological project] is used to draw attention to an a priori gift, la donation [the givenness of Reduction and Givenness], but then Marion proceeds to a naming of the giver (as God) . . .” Or again, the infinity signified by the icon “has been, so far at least, the product of a phenomenological reduction similar to Levinas’s. But Marion wishes to name the source of this infinite summons God the Father. . .” But now, “Nothing and no one is what or who they are phenomenologically . . . such naming can only take place according to the logic of a discourse quite different from that of phenomenology; i.e. a theological discourse . . . The advent [of the infinite] then is not phenomenology’s manifestation (die Offenbarkeit) but the ‘irreducible heteronomy’ of revelation (die Offenbarung)”(Ward, 1998, pp. 229, 230, 233, 234). But isn’t this exactly what the theologian is supposed to do, to name the ultimate and infinite source of givenness? Marion tells us that he works “within the framework of a phenomenology that is pushed to its utmost possibilities.”23 But he also tells us that he is a theologian who admits “the insurpassable primacy of Christian revela21 A phenomenology of religion seeks to describe (not evaluate or explain) the believing soul as “subject” in relation the holy or the sacred as the “object”. See Westphal (1984) God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University). The hermeneutics of retrieval enacted in this text, letting the believing soul speak, is paired with the hermeneutics of suspicion in Suspicion and Faith, where the believing soul is cross examined. See footnote 15 above. 22 PTT is the English translation of two works, the first being The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology by Dominique Janicaud. 23 “Preface to the English Edition” of God without being, Translated by. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. xxii. Elsewhere Marion describes phenomenology as “pushing reason to its limit . . .” See Marion (1997, p.291).

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tion.”24 It would seem that Ward has failed to make this distinction and is complaining that a discourse that presents itself as phenomenological is on closer inspection disguised theology. But this won’t quite work, for twice he distinguishes himself between Marion’s theological and his philosophical work. In one of these passages he complains that Marion’s “theological work . . . is separated from his philosophical work . . . [that] his God beyond Being is substantiated in the self-authenticating discourse of biblical revelation.”25 But once again, isn’t this exactly as it should be? Shouldn’t the theologian draw on the sources and norms of the community and tradition to which (in this case) he belongs, to express and reflect on the faith of the community (fides quae creditur) from the standpoint of faith (fides qua creditur)? Wouldn’t it be uncritical dogmatism to insist that theology restrict its discourse to what philosophy permits, especially a phenomenological philosophy? Isn’t such a restriction the very essence of onto-theology which, for the sake of its own theorizing, eliminates the religious significance of God?26 It becomes increasingly clear that Ward’s protest is not THAT there is a move from phenomenology to theology but WHAT this move involves. Ward does not like Marion’s “Conservative-Catholic” theology, with its appeal to biblical and ecclesiastical authority.27 Fair enough. I have theological disagreements with Marion as well, though I’m not sure his theology should be described as “dogmatic”, “uncritical”, and “illicit” because it differs from mine. The point to notice is this: while Ward sees Marion putting his phenomenology in the service of a theology he, Ward, dislikes intensely, his critique is entirely theological. He does not suggest, much less argue, that phenomeology cannot or should not in general be put in the service of theology, nor does he suggest, much less, argue that by putting his phenomenology in the service of a “Conservative-Catholic” theology, Marion has compromised the authenticity of his phenomenological work. He has reminded us to keep the distinction between the two projects in mind and to pay notice carefully which of the two is the target of any given critique. By contrast, the critique of Marléne Zarader is directed at Marion’s phenomenology as such. She has no problem with the ”strategy” of developing a phenomenology out of theological interests. Marion announces it openly. To do justice phenomenologically to the possibility of the revelation of Christ is not, for him, a heavy-handed move, since all his previous work consisted precisely in redefining phenomenality in such a way as not to exclude this possibility. In other words, if the phenomenon is always, and in its very essence an excess, if what is given by it is always a radical alterity that 24 In the Translator’s Introduction to this text, Tom Carlson begins by calling attention to the difference between Marion as theologian and as phenomenologist. See p. xi. But in his detailed examination of the relation between the phenomenology and the theology he finds the relation to be “not entirely stable.” The major reason for the “ambiguity” he finds, however, seems to be that Marion does not restrict his theory to the limits of his phenomenology, that as theologian he seeks, with Pseudo-Dionysius, to name the Unnameable on the basis of Scripture in a way not available to the phenomenologist. But that is not the blur the line between phenomenology and theology but, to repeat, simply to do what the theologian is supposed to do. See Carlson (1999). 25 “Theological Project,” p. 237. The other passage is at p. 229. 26 Onto-theology, as Heidegger develops the notion, is not merely the affirmation of a highest being who is the key to the meaning of the whole of being. It is the subordination of God-talk to the rules and regulations of philosophy’s project. See Westphal (1999). 27 “Theological Project,” p. 230. Cf. 233–237.

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imposes itself on me and lays claim to me, then nothing excludes the possibility that it might give also and first of all this Other exemplar who is Christ. (11)28 It is well to notice the three references to ‘possibility’ in this passage. They make clear that Zarader misstates the issue when she asks whether phenomenology can “affirm” or “verify” transcendence. She is more precise when she speaks of phenomenology “opening itself to some transcendence” (1), but it would be more in keeping with Marion’s work and her own account of it to speak of a phenomenology that seeks to remain open to the possibility of transcendence. Zarader recognizes that the phenomenology to which this task is set must go “beyond what canonical phenomenology has recognized as the conditions of the possibility of experience itself.” If transcendence is to be preserved in its appearing it will have to be “irreducible to any object (which is always the correlate of an envisioning) as well as to any subject (which is always the giver of meaning)” (7). In other words, it will have to go beyond the noesis-noema structure of intentionality as Husserl conceived it (as well as its transformation by Heidegger into the Dasein-beings relation).29 Zarader suggests that Heidegger provides to Marion (and Levinas) the paradigm for this double move. On the side of the object, his phenomenology of the Nothing in What is Metaphysics? points to a phenomenon that is not a constituted, noematic correlate of a noetic act of meaning bestowal. On the side of the subject, his later account of Gelassenheit embodies the necessary passivity to replace constitution with reception. For if the desired alterity is not to be destroyed, “I must not lay hold of it, but let it lay hold of me” (8). One could hardly ask for a nicer formula for reverse intentionality. For Marion the new “object” is the saturated phenomenon and the new subject is the “interloqué” (der Angesprochene, the one called up short),30 a subject “expropriated” and “dispossessed” (10). Is this still a genuinely phenomenological project? Zarader’s short answer is that Marion requires a phenomenology that “does without the double category of the object and the subject” (12) and that this might well work for the object but not for the subject. We must follow the twists and turns of this reply, remembering that it is the constituted object and the constituting subject of classical phenomenology that must, in the first instance, be surpassed. Thus, when she says that the new phenomenology must have an object “emptied of all subsistence as well as all consistency” (11), we must ask for a more precise formulation. For it is not clear that noematic correlates of noetic acts have a monopoly on subsistence and consistency. But we need not press this point, since Zarader, following Heidegger and Bernet, is prepared to grant the possibility of “intentionality without object”31 and to focus her critique, not on the saturated phenomenon but on the interloqué. 28 “Phenomenality and Transcendence,” Translated by Ralph, John, and Nathaniel Hancock, a paper to be published in a volume edited by James Faulconer. Page number in the text are to the typescript of the English translation. Italics added. 29 While I am focusing only on Marion, Zarader’s analysis is meant to apply to both Levinas and Marion and nicely highlights the Levinasian character of Marion’s move beyond intentionality. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas regularly links Heidegger to Husserl by denying that “disclosure” as presented in Being and Time is basic to human experience. For an earlier version of this move see Levinas (1996). 30 Following Heidegger, Marion himself gives the German version. See Marian 1991 and in Marion 1998, (p. 200.) The English translation is suggested by Zarader’s translators. 31 The phrase is Bernet’s in La vie du subjet (Bernet, p. 327).

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At this point we do well to recall two ways in which Zarader herself specifies the “passivity” of the subject needed by (Heidegger, Levinas, and ) Marion. It must not be the constituting subject who is the giver of meaning (7); in relation to the alterity which is its ultimate concern, “I must not lay hold of it, but it must lay hold of me” (8). What is called for is not the abolition of the subject altogether but the teleological suspension of the I that lays hold in the me that is laid hold of. When we are told that this subject is “emptied of all power and of all initiative” (11), this corresponds to the other formulas if we take it to mean that neither the subject’s acts of Sinngebung nor the horizons within which these occur can be the conditions of the possibility of the experience in question, the procrustean bed which a certain phenomenology requires all God-talk to fit. What is called for is not “experience without subject” but experience without a certain kind of subject. So the objection that we are dealing with an attempt “to be done with subjectivity” which has nevertheless “not been able to avoid smuggling it in through the back door” is wide of its target. Zarader tells us as much herself when she reminds us in the very next paragraph that for the sake of “unconditioned givenness” Marion must shake free of the subject “understood as a constituting subject” (14). I find no argument that that subject has been smuggled in through the back door. Nor are there grounds to join Janicaud in complaining that “to turn around or reverse the subject is obviously not at all to suppress it, but quite to the contrary to maintain it” so that “the promised dismissal [dispossession] has not taken place” (14). Zarader insists that “subjectivity may well be redefined, but it remains the living nerve of every phenomenological project” (13). For there never was a promise to dismiss or dispossess the subject as such. Marion redefines subjectivity so as to avoid placing a priori restrictions on what can be given.32 If one replies that one prefers to restrict the name ‘phenomenology’ to projects where subjectivity is at most dispossessed by the hermeneutical turn but not by the reversal of intentionality, Marion can reply, “Fine. We are all free to stipulate the meanings we give to various terms, but wouldn’t it be more faithful to the original spirit of phenomenology to apply the term especially to projects aimed at getting to the things themselves by removing all a priori restrictions on givenness, for example, the restriction that nothing can be given outside the horizon of constituted objectivity?” Which brings us to the loudest complaint of all against the “theological turn” of French phenomenology, that of Janicaud. He has in mind the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Michel Henry. He does not wish to ban theology, but he does not want it to pose as phenomenology. So while he acknowledges a “fecundity” in the work of French phenomenologists with religious interests, he finds it to be a “rupture with immanent phenomenology.”33 In their work “phenomenology has been taken hostage by a theology that does not want to say its name” (43). He wishes to force this “expropriation” (33) and “seizure” (61) of phenomenology out of the closet. Although Janicaud raises serious and legitimate questions, the shrillness of his intemperate rhetoric sometimes makes it hard to hear them. Given the theological swerve, “The dice are loaded and choices made; faith rises majestically in the 32 See the nice summary of the restrictions he finds in Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology in Marion (1998, pp. 203–205). 33 “The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology,” in PTT, pp. 16–17. Subsequent references to Janicaud in the text are to this work.

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background. The reader, confronted by the blade of the absolute, finds him- or herself in the position of a catechumen who has no other choice than to penetrate the holy words and lofty dogmas . . . here theology is restored with its parade of capital letters . . . Is this not but incantation, initiation?” (27). In response to any questions, the only response is “Take it or leave it” (28). In this tone of voice Janicaud sounds more like a televangelist calling sinners to repentance than a philosopher inviting thinkers to a serious discussion. But he has his philosophical moments, to which we turn. (1) His first complaint is that in the theological turn the ideal of rigorous science (34–36) and the closely linked notion of the philosopher as neutral are abandoned (47–48, 50, 68, 94, 96). Phenomenological vision is to be the view from nowhere in particular. The first thing is to notice that Janicaud is not in a particularly good position to make the point against the theological turn. For his own account of French phenomenology before the turn shows that rigorous and neutral science were abandoned from the start. He recognizes the atheism in the background (or foreground) of the work of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Dufrenne, but doesn’t berate them for their lack of rigorous neutrality. And he recognizes that in the work of Sartre and MerleauPonty Husserl is “used and abused” more than “respected”, by thinkers for whom “the authority [of Husserl] is at once welcomed and rejected” (20–21). What is more, the hermeneutical turn away from strict scienticity already occurs in Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur. In spite of the fact that the latter raises the question whether God might be “the most radical subject,” Janicaud gives him a pass because his “methodological scruples led him to multiply the hermeneutical precautions prior to any passage from phenomenology to theology” (23). In other words, he kept the boundary clear. But Janicaud does not accuse these philosophers of having the dice loaded and treating their readers as catechumens. Janicaud is aware of the problem. He knows that phenomenology is “less a school than an abundance of heresies” (96) and that as early as Heidegger in Marburg the neo-Cartesian project was “contested from within” (90). So he writes That the destiny of phenomenology escaped the intentions of its founder is neither surprising nor scandalous; every heritage knows such misadventures. The philosophical fecundity of a mode of thought is not, moreover, measured by the strict respect accorded to its orthodoxy–quite the contrary! But phenomenologists’ [sic] creative ardor has perhaps made them neglect what there was to respect in the Husserlian concern for rigor, and a specific rigor at that. The risk was a methodological slacking off, of which we have noted several of the effects in following the theological turn of French phenomenology. ‘(91) Janicaud’s solution is bold. He affirms that it is not necessary for all philosophy to be rigorous science (87), which means that it need not all be phenomenology (90, 99). Like theology, philosophy that abandons this element of Husserlian orthodoxy can be a legitimate and fruitful enterprise, but we should not call it phenomenology. If we ask where the line is to be drawn, the answer is clear. He claims that “maintaining phenomenology in methodological limits, clearly defined and assumed, without losing sight of the ideal and constraints of scientificity, will facilitate the task of hermeneutics (or another mode of ‘thought’ finer still) in taking up those fundamental questions which, overflowing the phenomenal field, give rise to philosophical thought no less” (34). Janicaud is willing to bite the bullet. While refusing to limit fecundity to orthodoxy, he is willing to restrict the term ‘phenomenology’ to this element of the Husserlian credo. One need not take the theological turn to abandon phenomenology;

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it is enough to take the hermeneutical turn to transgress the boundaries of the phenomenal field. It is not just Levinas and the youths corrupted by this new Socrates who are to be excommunicated from the phenomenological church, but thinkers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur as well.34 Merely to mention these three together is to notice that the hermeneutical turn is not governed by any theological agenda. It would be easy to dismiss all this as an arbitrary and personal terminological preference. To show that it has more philosophical bite than that it would be necessary to return to those questions we earlier set aside about the appropriateness of defining even a philosophical sub-discipline in terms of rigor and neutrality as Husserl presented them. It is one thing to remind us that Husserl, in spite of his own doubts, never abandoned this conception of phenomenology (91). It is quite another to show that his persistence has better philosophical warrant than his doubts. Given the virtually unanimous abandonment this ideal by his successors in the phenomenological tradition and the widespread critique of its basic idea in other twentieth century philosophical traditions, this is a formidable task. Until he has undertaken it and accomplished it with some success, Janicaud’s terminological preference remains just that. We can, nevertheless, ask how it stands with Marion in relation to this particular critique, whatever its legitimacy. So far as I can see, he doesn’t fly the flag of rigorous science nor overtly espouse the hermeneutical turn. Perhaps this critique doesn’t engage him head on. Still, we can give two answers to the question just posed: If it could be shown that Marion’s phenomenological work has de facto taken the hermeneutical turn and is interpretation, caught up in the hermeneutical circle, rather than pure intuition, he would find himself within the phenomenological mainstream, excluded (in diverse and impressive company) from the purists who have become something of a sect.35 Even without explicit claims to scientific rigor, there is a limited neutrality claim implicit in his analysis of the saturated phenomenon and the pure form of the call, namely that he does not expect the persuasiveness of his descriptions to be a function of the reader’s theology but expects both those with theologies different from his own and unbelievers to recognize the phenomena to which he points. (2) Janicaud’s second complaint is that the theological turn involves abandonment of the phenomenological reduction (the epoché, the suspension of the natural standpoint and the bracketing of the world as fact). He sees this in the “categorical affirmation of the primacy of the idea of infinity” (25), the “unconditioned affirmation of Transcendence” (26). He writes, “The suspension of the natural attitude ought not to lead to a flight to another world” (35) which is nothing but a restoration of metaphysica specialis (65) and ipso facto “strict treason of the reduction” (27).36 34 It was Janicaud who with the notion of heresy introduced the religious metaphor I’m developing here. While there’s something right about it, we must not lose track of that fact that he neither wishes to stamp out or deny legitimacy to either theology or non-phenomenological philosophy, so long as they do not purport to be phenomenology. 35 Although Marion recognizes that the “breakthrough” of Logical Investigations involves a decisive return to intuition, he refuses to identify the two and points to a move beyond intuition in Husserl. While this is not the hermeneutical turn as such, the idea that neither signification nor givenness are tied to intuition leaves open a space for such a turn. See Marion (1998, pp.6–35). 36 Most of this critique is directed at Levinas and it is worth noting that while there may very well be an “unconditional affirmation of Transcendence” in his work, it is located in the face and voice of

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Phenomenology ought to be “a space of possible truths” (94, emphasis added) so as to preserve the axiom: “Phenomenology and Theology Make Two” (99). Marion, as it turns out, couldn’t agree more. Phenomenology cannot be the categorical affirmation of Transcendence and ought not be a relapse into metaphysica specialis. Rather, it should be “a space of possible truths.” He argues that his phenomenology is not metaphysica specialis for three reasons, of which the second and third are most important in relation to phenomenology. The God who might appear in or as a saturated phenomenon is not the metaphysical God as ground of phenomena, nor is there any movement from phenomena as given to God as their giver.37 Marion’s theology is not onto-theology.38 The God who might appear in or as a saturated phenomenon is not unconditionally affirmed. Phenomenology can only present such an experience of God as a possibility . . . Its phenomenological analysis therefore has no bearing except on its representation, its ‘essence,’ and not directly on its being-as-given. The intuitive accomplishment of this being-as-given demands, more than phenomenological analysis, the real experience of its donation – which brings us back to revealed theology. Between phenomenology and theology the frontier passes between revelation as possibility and revelation as historicity.”39 Unlike phenomenology, and “the possibility it concedes to God” (Marion (1997, p. 280). emphasis added), and like revealed theology, metaphysics does not restrict itself to essence and possibility. With reference to the pure form of the call, which, as we have seen, renders the subject the interloqué, we can recall Ward’s claim that Marion passes from phenomenologist to theologian when “wishes to name the source of this infinite summons God the Father . . .” Indeed, and Heidegger is also a kind of theologian when he names the caller first as Dasein itself and then as Being, just as Levinas is a theologian when he names the caller as the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. But as a phenomenologist, Marion declines to answer the question, “Who or what claims the interloqué?”, rejecting the illusory presupposition that it is necessary to name the instance that claims in order to suffer its convocation. Now, following the order of a strict phenomenological description, the reverse happens: I recognize myself as interloqué well before having consciousness or knowledge . . . of what leaves me interloqué. The imprecision, the indecision, and indeed the confusion of the claiming instance the Other, the neighbor whom I encounter in the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. To be sure, the Other bears the trace of God, but what this means is far from clear. But one thing is sure. This God is not, as Janicaud claims when he speaks of treason, “the God of the biblical tradition” (27). When Levinas says that “it is only man who could be absolutely foreign to me,”, and “[God] is neither object nor interlocutor,” it is clear that he is not talking about “the God of the biblical tradition.” See Levinas (1969, p.73; 1998, p.69) emphasis added. 37 See “The Saturated Phenomenon” in PTT, pp. 180–181 and Marion (1997, pp. 287–291). 38 See, for example, “The Marches of Metaphysics” in Marion (2001) and Westphal (1991). 39 Marion, 1997, p.293 “In the Name,” p. 39, where Marion writes of the saturated phenomenon, “We have said ‘to conceive its formal possibility’ and nothing more than this possibility, since phenomenology cannot, and therefore must not, venture to make any decisions about the actuality of such a phenomenon – this is a question entirely beyond its scope. Phenomenology is to make decisions only about the type of phenomenality which would render this phenomenon thinkable”.

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attests much rather that in the beginning is found the pure form of the call as such.”(Marion, 1998, p. 202)40 Janicaud finds the pure form of the call as such to be “a rather dry mystical night” and suspects it is too pure to Marion as well. After citing part of the passage immediately above, he asks, “When we read, ‘Listen, Israel, Jahweh our God, Jahweh alone,’ we no longer doubt the nature of the call” (63). So let us look at the place where Marion cites Deuteronomy 6:4. He is referring to a passage where Heidegger distinguishes from his own analysis of the Anspruch des Seins, the experience of the Christian, “who as a ‘child of God’ hears and accepts the call of the Father in Christ.”41 It is Heidegger who calls attention to a naming different from his own. Marion’s point is quite simple. There are multiple possibilities for naming the caller, all of which must be distinguished from the pure form of the call as such. Adding Levinas and the face of the neighbor to the list of possible namings, he notes that while the Jewish and Christian namings are importantly different there is also a “unique word from which they both issue: ‘Listen, Israel, Jahweh our God, Jahweh alone.”’ Then, as if anticipating Janicaud’s mistaken assumption that simply by citing a biblical passage one becomes a theologian, he adds, “It is obviously not a question here of invoking revealed authority in order to broaden the field of phenomenology . . .”(Marion, 1998) Marion is not naming the caller in his own name, on the basis of some religious tradition or authority. In this context, for him as for Heidegger it is a question of possibility rather than legitimacy. Guided by Ricoeur’s notion of the detour of the text, we might at this point give a comparative, hermeneutical phenomenology of three experiences of the call, Heideggerian, Levinasian, and Christian. Although it would not purport to be rigorous science, this would still be phenomenology in terms of the epoché. Marion’s option, by contrast, is to look for something of an eidetic intuition, an account of a structural element common to the various specific possibilities. One would have thought that Janicaud might welcome the purity of the pure form of the call, a distinctly Husserlian moment in Marion’s work. One is puzzled to read that in the theological turn, “The eidetic is abandoned” (96). (3) Perhaps the reason is that the eidos in question is not the eidos of a constituted object, of the noematic correlate of the subject’s Sinngebung. Perhaps, in other words, the problem is that we are beyond intentionality in the precise sense of dealing with a reversed intentionality, the focus of Janicaud’s third complaint. If this reversal already takes place in the phenomenology of the saturated phenomenon,42 and of the icon, in which the gaze of the believing soul finds itself “more radically looked at,”43 it is especially conspicuous in the phenomenology of the call. Marion develops this theme in dialogue with such Heideggerian texts as the 1943 Postscript to “What is Metaphysics?” and the 1946 “Letter on Humanism”44 in which Dasein, no longer free simply to call itself, becomes der Angesprochene in the presence of the Anspruch des Seins. Janicaud, who describes the Levinasian form of the move beyond intentionality as “metaphysical incantation” (46–47), dismisses Heidegger’s attempt to free himself from intentionality and constitution as part of the Kehre that “was conditioned by his quest for the Sacred, through his reinterpretation of Hölderlin” (29–31). He seems to 40 In a virtually identical passage in “L’Interloqué,” p. 244, Marion italicizes ‘confusion’. 41 Quoted from “Letter on Humanism” (see Pathmarks, p. 244), cited in Marion. (1998, p. 196). 42 See Section 7 of “The Saturated Phenomenon”. 43 God Without Being, p. 22. See pp. 19–22. 44 Both texts are to be found in Pathmarks.

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have forgotten the reversal of intentionality in Sartre’s analysis of the Look, which no one has accused of being theologically motivated, and to have overlooked the fact, noted above, that Derrida, whom he does not include in the theological turn, acknowledges that any attempt to thematize the mysterium tremendum will need to be in terms of an other “that sees without being seen.”(Derrida, 1995). Here once again we find Janicaud setting forth as critique the criterion that Marion professes as his norm. In favorably contrasting the later work of Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible with that of Levinas in Totality and Infinity, he says that the former “excludes nothing, but opens our regard to the depth of the world” (27, emphasis added). Perhaps he excludes nothing, but he surely omits description of an experience people undeniably have, namely of not being free agents with reference to their deepest self-identity and self-choice, but rather of being somehow responsible to something greater than or other than themselves, which is precisely what the pure form of the call and its reversed intentionality are all about. The point, however, is the criterion set forth by Janicaud, which he later sets forth in his own name. When talking about phenomenology as “a space of possible truths,” he specifies its domain as “the open field . . . of the entire human experience” (94–95). It is precisely in order to be open to the full range of human experience that Marion invokes what he calls the third reduction in which both the intentional, constituting I and Dasein are replaced by the interloqué “as an auditor preceded and instituted by the call,” unconstrained by the horizon of objectivity or of Being (Marion, 1998, p. 204). He repeatedly insists that the goal is to be open to all forms of experience, phenomenality, givenness, without restriction, condition, limit, or restraint.45 The rule is simple: “It is forbidden to forbid!”(Marion, 1997, p. 289)46 But in that case one must not define phenomenology in such a way as to preclude the possibility of an experience in which alterity precedes intentionality, in which the “autarchy of the subject discovers itself initially wounded by the fact that a call has already struck and undone it.” In this loss of autarchy, the subject does not “dissolve in indifference, nor disappear in indistinction” (as Zarader had feared), but finds itself called upon to “respond” and “decide” (Marion, 1991; 1998, pp. 201–202). It is more me than I. “I experience an interpellated me, but, literally, I experiences a me orphaned of any transcendental and constitutive I; I experience myself means that the I . . . experiences itself as . . . called upon in the accusative–interpellated as suspect and not as subject . . .” What shall we call this event? “The disaster of the I, that is, the sole overcoming of the subject, [which] only occurs with the claim . . . We shall designate this me as the ‘interloqué’ (Angesprochene).” (Marion, 1991). If this phenomenology pushed to its limits in the reversal of intentionality seems like a death of phenomenology, it is because the experience it seeks to describe seems like a death of the subject. But if the autonomous, autarchic subject that sees before being seen and speaks before being spoken to is not the only way in which we can be given to ourselves, we must be methodologically agile enough to develop a phenomenology that does not forbid a priori the cluster of experiences here lumped together under the rubric ‘reversed intentionality’ and the moral and religious lives that grow 45 See Marion (1998, pp. 1, 33, 204), Marion (1997, pp. 291–292); “The Saturated Phenomenon,” p. 180–185, and God Without Being, p. 45. 46 See footnote 21. Marion adds, “That which shows itself justifies itself by this fact alone.” Not as truth, of course, nor as fact, but precisely as phenomenon.

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out of them. Otherwise we will be in danger of preserving the self at the cost of its responsibility.

Phenomenology and transcendence The potential usefulness of this phenomenology to theology obviously relates to the theme of transcendence. I turn now to explore that specific connection.. A brief detour of the text is my point of departure, the story of Moses at the burning bush. While he was shepherding in the wilderness the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which your are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. (Exodus 3:2–6) It is possible to see in this story a dialectic of the visible and the voice. As long as the burning bush is only seen we have anomaly but not epiphany. The bush is a “great sight” that evokes curiosity but not worship. But God takes advantage of having gotten Moses’ attention by speaking to him, and that changes everything. Four things strike me about God’s speech, each of which highlights a slightly different aspect of the reversed intentionality that (re)constitutes Moses when God appears not as First Cause but as First Speaker, First Sinngeber. First, Moses is named, not the namer, and in being named he becomes the interloqué, the Angesprochene, the one put in question, claimed, called up short. In a call and response situation, he can only respond, me voici. Second, God speaks the language of categorical imperatives. Not being a phenomenologist, God is not restricted to the pure form of the call but can give it very specific content. Keep your distance! Take off your shoes! Nor does this content derive either from the self-legislation of pure practical reason or the face of the widow, orphan, or stranger. Third, in grounding the imperative in an indicative, This is holy ground!, God ceases to be an anomaly within the horizon of Moses’ experience and becomes the creator of an entirely new horizon which engulfs Moses and his a priori anticipations of experience. If the death of God is like a “sponge to wipe away the entire horizon,” both a sunset and a “new dawn” that opens the new horizon of an “open sea,”47 the presence of God changes the world as the wherein of human experience just as drastically (just as the first two moments have changed the who of experience). Finally, God not only defines Moses, his task, and his situation: God defines God. The ultimate ground of the entire discourse is the self-identification of God. This ground is not the ultima ratio of a metaphysics governed by the principle of sufficient reason. It is neither the intent nor the result of God’s self-identification to enable 47 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Sections 125 and 343.

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Moses to explain everything or to replace mystery with transparency. Moses understands this. He does not sit down to write a book but hides his face.48 In the burning bush the Invisible becomes visible, the Numinous takes on phenomenality. But Moses is able to recognize the presence of the mysterium tremendum only when the visible becomes voice, not as sound, to be sure, but as speech act.49 Perhaps this story, so understood, can be a hermeneutical key for reading Marion’s phenomenology. For he has, it seems to me, three different phenomenological themes, that reduce to two. His analysis of the idol/icon distinction and of the saturated phenomenon are governed by the dialectic of visibility and invisibility.50 I shall not attempt to give anything like an adequate summary of his brilliant descriptions. At present we need only to notice the following: Marion notices and often adopts the Husserlian principle, “To understand is ultimately to see. To speak of something in order to make it visible” (Marion, 1997, p. 285; 1998, p.33). Like Husserl, and following a tradition that goes back at least to Plato, Marion uses ‘seeing’ as a metaphor for what the intellect does with its concepts, and does not restrict it to its literal, sensible meaning. Also like Husserl, he uses the term ‘intuition’ to signify seeings of both sense and intellect. As a theologian Marion identifies with the mainstream Christian tradition that affirms the incomprehensibility of God. He writes, “For the one we comprehend would always remain less than and below the one we do not comprehend. Incomprehensibility therefore belongs to the formal definition of God, since comprehending him would put him on the same level as a finite mind–ours– . . . As soon as one tries to catch sight of God, the relation must be inverted– knowledge holds only if comprehension ceases.”51 As a phenomenologist, but mindful of this theological theme, Marion describes the icon and the saturated phenomenon as the possibility that what is present either to sense or to intellect presents itself as pointing beyond itself to what cannot be grasped or encompassed by either sense or intellect, image or concept.

48 On the theological significance of God’s self-identification, see Zimmerli (1982). 49 To understand this story we need not know nor even have a theory about the form that

Moses’ “hearing” took and whether, for example, our microphones might have detected any sounds. Wolferstroff. (1995), Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that divine discourse resides not in the locutionary acts that may be associated with it, but in the illocutionary acts that in some manner or other are performed, assertions, commands, promises, etc. 50 “Idol” and ‘icon’ are theological terms and Marion’s analysis occurs primarily in two of his theological works, Idol and Distance and God Without Being. But it is not difficult to extract a phenomenological dimension in the distinction between the way in which any image or concept can be taken as a resting place or as a trace which points beyond itself to what is not and never has been present. See God Without Being, pp. 7–9, and compare Derrida, who takes all “signs” to be “icons” in the sense of being traces and Levinas, who takes the face to be the trace of a call that comes from a time immemorial. On the distinction between idol and icon, it is also useful to compare the analysis given by St. John of the Cross. Speaking of icons, he writes, “On seeing the image they should not allow their senses to become absorbed in it . . . They should pay no attention to these accidents; they should not dwell on the image but immediately raise the mind to what is represented.” By contrast, “anyone who does not feel this freedom of spirit in these objects and sensible delights, but finds that the will pauses in and feeds on them, suffers harm from them and ought to turn from their use.” St. John of the (Cross, 1991, pp. 336, 311. Cf. pp. 310 and 331). 51 “In the Name,” p. 37. Emphasis added. Marion proceeds to quote from Augustine’s sermon 117, “For if you comprehend it, it is not God . . .”.

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As already indicated, this takes place within a discourse about the visible and invisible.52 Marion’s other phenomenology is that of the pure form of the call, and its scene is quite obviously that of the voice (as claim, as speech act). The question is how these two are related, the phenomenologies of vision and of the voice. My reading of the story of the burning bush emphasizes the reversed intentionality involved when the voice of another calls me. But we have already noticed this reversal in the icon, in which the gaze of the believing soul “is lost in the invisible gaze that visibly envisages him” with an intention that “issues from infinity.”53 In this respect there is a deep similarity. But they are different as well. On the scene of vision, this reversal echoes the Sartrean Look and the Derridean gaze that “sees without being seen,” while within range of the voice, the reversal means being claimed, commanded, put in question, even accused as suspect. There are hints, largely left undeveloped, that these two do not just sit side by side in Marion’s thought. While on a textual detour, developing the pure form of the call out of Heidegger’s notion of the Anspruch des Seins, he writes, “Dasein no longer passes from itself to Being as a phenomenon so much as it suffers the insistent summons of a phenomenon that it has not yet seen or known” (Marion, 1998, p. 185, emphasis altered) This suggests that invisibility is a necessary condition of the voice, that an insistent summons could only originate in the inwardness of a subject, literal or metaphorical, which exceeds the grasp of any image or concept we may form of it. Any attempt to repair this damage, as it is bound to appear to an intellectualist rationalism, would require reversing the reversal of intentionality, thereby neutralizing the caller and the call. If theology says on the basis of its scripture and tradition that “incomprehensibility belongs to formal definition of God,” phenomenology links the pure form of the call, whatever its specific name, to an incomprehensible origin or source. A stronger link between the phenomenologies of vision and of voice, to me at least, is found in another passage, where Marion says that “nothing manages to give itself as a phenomenon if a response does not give itself over to it as an originary claim,”(Marion, 1998, p. 198). Now it is the voice and its claim that is the necessary condition for the phenomenon and its visibility (and invisibility, if it should be an icon or saturated phenomenon). There is something Levinasian about this move. One recalls Section I.C. of Totality and Infinity, entitled “Truth and Justice” and whose third part is entitled “Truth Presupposes Justice. “Insisting that the claim of the Other is the horizon for consciousness, the concept, and correspondence is a dramatic way of making ethics into first philosophy. A similar shift occurs when Levinas says, “The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse . . . This presence, affirmed in the presence of the image as the focus of the gaze that is fixed on you, is said.” And what does the face say? “You shall not commit murder” (Levinas, 1969, pp. 66, 199) The visible face is able to be the face of the Other only as the appearing of the invisible voice that commands. I like to think of this as the Aufhebung or teleological suspension of vision in the voice, a continuously recurring event throughout Totality and Infinity. Vision has its telos

52 Ward cites passages from the discussion of the icon in Ward (1991) that highlight the centrality of this grid. See “Theological Project,” pp. 231–232. 53 God without Being, p. 20.

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outside itself and can be itself only by surpassing itself to be recontextualized in a domain whose organizing principle it is not. There is a hint of such a teleological suspension in the passage where phenomenality and givenness as such are placed within the horizon of the claim. Does this hint find any further textual support. I think so, and call attention to two passages, both of which relate to the saturated phenomenon. This latter cannot be viewed as an object constituted by the “I”, which rather “experiences itself as constituted by it . . . in space, the saturated phenomenon engulfs it with its intuitive flood; in time it precedes it through an interpellation that is always already there . . . It is clear that on the basis of the saturated phenomenon we meet here with what we have thematized elsewhere under the name of the subject on its last appeal–the interloqué.”54 Here we have not only the reverse intentionality in which the constituting “I” is preceded and superceded by the constituted “me”; we also have the dialectical paradox of visibility/invisibility transformed through transplantation in the vicinity of the voice. In another place, Marion concludes his discussion of the saturated phenomenon, defined in terms of the excess of intuition over any conceptual comprehension that would be the adequation of the intellect and its “object”, with a short discussion entitled “The Vocative Name.” If the faithful must not say the Name, “it is not simply because it surpasses all names, passes beyond all essence and all presence.” In other words, the images and concepts that name or signify God and in this way make God visible by (re)presenting God, are understood to signify in their very naming that God is the Unnameable and that the One thereby rendered visible is profoundly Invisible. But the “it is not simply” tells us that this is not the whole story, perhaps not even the most important part of it. “The Name–it has to be dwelt in without saying it, but by letting it say, name, and call us. The Name is not said, it calls.”55 Beyond predication, whether on the via affirmativa (visibility) or the via negativa (invisibility), there is dwelling, which turns out to be attentive and obedient listening to the voice. Although Marion does not thematize these hints in any detail, he does provide a compelling phenomenological justification for the teleological suspension (Aufhebung, recontextualization) of vision in the voice. That, it seems to me, is what his theory of the three reductions is all about. Somewhat like Kierkegaard’s three spheres of existence, where the first finds its telos outside itself in the second and the second, in turn, finds its telos outside itself in the third, the three reductions present a teleological account of three possible subjectivities, three possible answers to the question, Who am I? The transcendental ego of Descartes, Kant, and Husserl has its telos in Heidegger’s Dasein, which in turn has its telos in the interloqué. But in relation to the icon and the saturated phenomenon, I am in this third mode of subjectivity only if and when, beyond seeing them, I find myself addressed by them. It is only when, as Levinas puts it, “the face speaks”(Levinas, 1969, p.66) that the icon and the saturated phenomenon become visibles that point beyond themselves to what is invisible. We can formulate the three reductions thus: theory (constituted objectivity, Vorhandenheit) is in the service of practice (concernful dealings, Zuhandenheit) and both are in the service of responsibility. The phenomenology of the pure form of the call signifies the possible experience of responsibility without naming the caller. Phenomenology does not distinguish between seeing our thinking and acting, our sciences and our technologies as responsible to family, or (linguistic-ethnic) tribe, or class, or country, 54 “The Saturated Phenomenon,” pp. 208–211. 55 “In the Name,” pp. 41–42.

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or Reason, or Being, or God. Theology tells us that our ultimate responsibility is to God and that all our other loyalties are but relative. To Americans, it suggests that we pledge allegiance to the flag with fingers crossed. I want to conclude by suggesting how the phenomenology we’ve been exploring can be useful to theology in its attempt to think the transcendence of God. In my telling of the story of the burning bush, it was only through the voice that the visible became, not merely a curiosity, but the face of God from which Moses hid his own face. This suggests that vision (theory, conceptuality, even theology) is Janus faced, that it might but might not be epiphany, the immanence of the Transcendent. Theology might be the onto-theology in which Transcendence is idolatrously sacrificed to intelligibility as mastery and possession. It will be helpful here to distinguish three modes of divine transcendence. The mode I see as an analogue of the burning bush as curiosity is what I call cosmological transcendence. Pantheists make God and the world mutually implicative. On the emanation model, there cannot be the heat and light without the fire, but by the same token there cannot be the fire without the heat and light. Theists insist on a stronger transcendence. God and the world are not merely distinguishable but separable. There cannot be the world without God, but there can be God without the world. The difference between these two accounts may well be important in some context. I, for one, think it is. But in and of themselves, these two theories of divine transcendence are but competing onto-theologies,56 each of which claims to be a better explanation of the world than the other. Heidegger is right in suggesting these competing versions of God as causa sui and ultima ratio are, by themselves, arrogant attempts to tie theology to the procrustean project of philosophy and as such are devoid of religious significance. A second form of theology talk gives us epistemic transcendence. This is the incomprehensibility thesis that we encounter in the icon and the saturated phenomenon. Both signify the inadequacy (non-adaequatio) of human language, pictorial or conceptual, to grasp God. The visible always signifies the invisible of which it is a trace. But once again, this does not necessarily take us beyond disengaged onto-theological theorizing. The astrophysicist, the cosmologist, or the philosopher of science might well conclude that there is no ultimate theory of the physical universe that would be its perfect mirror, that theories are at best models and metaphors, and that what they signify remains and will remain ultimately mysterious. The theologian’s incomprehensibility thesis may not be all that different from such scientific discourse, an acknowledgment of epistemic finitude in which nothing sacred shines through, no matter how “religious” the language. Like the scientist’s world, this theologian’s God remains an unsolved puzzle, a mere, if possibly maddening curiosity, the analog of a mathematical equation that is known (or at least believed) to have no solution. Thus far, there is precious little religion here, and this theology will not be of much interest to the preacher or the liturgist. The bush is burning, but Moses keeps coming closer. How totally everything is changed if epistemic transcendence is teleologically suspended in ethical transcendence. God’s incomprehensibility is now seen as the necessary condition for God’s being the one who calls us to responsibility. In turn the address that claims us is the necessary condition for the peculiar dialectic of visibility and invisibility we find in the icon and saturated phenomenon. When the voice that speaks to us in such phenomena is taken to be the voice of God, the self that hears

56 For my understanding of what Heidegger means by ‘onto-theology’, see Westphal (1999/2001).

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is taken beyond the secularity and irresponsibility of the transcendental ego and of Dasein. In short, Marion’s phenomenology can be of use to theology by reminding it that its account of divine transcendence must culminate in a God who speaks, a performer of such speech acts as commands and promises. I say “reminding” advisedly. Phenomenology is not dictating to theology, nor correcting its work, as if theology required its imprimatur. Theology has its own reasons for thinking of God this way, and phenomenology plays but a maieutic role. God is transcendent not merely by being “outside” the cosmos” nor “outside” our cognitive horizons. God is transcendent by being a project other than our individual and collective projects and by calling, commanding, and inviting us to join in that project, to obey its law, to accept its forgiveness, to work and to pray for that kingdom. I conclude with excerpts from three letters written by Van Gogh during the last years of life. I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our coloring. I would like to make portraits that, a century later, might appear to people of the time like apparitions. Accordingly, I don’t try to do that by the way of photographic resemblance, but by . . . using as a means of expression and exaltation of character our science and modern taste for color . . . Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily, in order to express myself more forcibly.57 Color was a matter of great importance to Van Gogh, a frequent theme of his letters. Toward the end his use of color did indeed become more arbitrary and his paintings, both portraits and landscapes increasingly seem to anticipate the Fauves and German expressionists who were to follow. His use of color is clearly a more and more desperate attempt to render the invisible visible. When it comes to the portraits, I like to think he was trying to paint the voice.

References 1. Bernet, R. (1994). La vie du subjet. Paris: PUF. 2. Carlson, T. A. (1999). Indiscretion: finitude and the naming of god (pp. 203–214). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 3. Derrida, J. (1995). The gift of death (pp. 54–56). Chicago: University of Chicago Press [Translated by D. Wills]. 4. Heidegger, M. (1998). Phenomenology and theology. In W. McNeill (Ed.), Pathmarks. New York: Cambridge University Press. 5. Husserl, E. (1981). Husserl’s departure from Cartesianism. In L. Landgrebe & D. Welton (Eds.), The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: six essays. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 6. Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy: first book. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (Translated by F. Kersten]. 7. Janicaud, D., Courtine, J.-F., Chrétien, J.-L., Henry, M., Marion, J.-L. & Ricoeur, P. (2000). Phenomenology and the “theological turn:” The French debate. New York: Fordham University Press. 8. John of the Cross, St. (1991). The collected works of St. John of the Cross. Washington, DC: ICS Publications [Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D. 57 These passages are to be found in Keyes et al. (2000). The first appears on pp. 49, 130, and 136; the second on pp. 123, 206, and 229; the third on p. 219.

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9. Keyes, G. S., Dorn, R., Rishel, J. J., Sachs, K., Shackelford, G. T. M., Soth, L., & Sund, J. (2000). Van Gogh face to face: the portraits. New York: Thames and Hudson. 10. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press [Translated by A. Lingis]. 11. Levinas, E. (1983). Beyond intentionality. In A. Montefiore (Ed.), Philosophy in France today. New York: Cambridge University Press. 12. Levinas, E. (1996). Is ontology fundamental? In A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), Basic philosophical writings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 13. Levinas, E. (1998). God and philosophy. In Of god who comes to mind. Stanford: Stanford University Press [Translated by B. Bergo]. 15. Marion, J.-L. (1991) L’Interloqué (pp. 242–243). In Cadava, E., Conner, P. & Nancy, J.-L. (Eds.) Who comes after the Subject? New York: Routledge. 15. Marion, J.-L. (1997). Metaphysics and phenomenology: a summary for theologians. In G. Ward (Ed.), The postmodern god. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 16. Marion, J.-L. (2001). The idol and distance (pp. 19–20). New York: Fordham University Press [Translated by Thomas A. Carlson]. 17. Marion, J.-L. (1998). Reduction and givenness: investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press [Translated by Thomas A. Carlson]. 18. Ricoeur, P. (1967a). Husserl: an analysis of his phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press [Translated by Edward Gl. Ballard & Lester E Embree]. 19. Ricoeur, P. (1967b). The symbolism of evil. New York: Harper and Row [Translated by E. Buchanan]. 20. Ricoeur, P. (1981). The task of Hermeneutics. In Hermeneutics and the human sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 21. Ricoeur, P.(1970). Freud and philosophy: an essay on interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press [Translated by D. Savage]. 22. Ward, G. (1998). The theological project of Jean-Luc Marion. In Blond, P. (Ed.), Post-secular philosophy. New York: Routledge. 23. Ward, G. (1991). La Croisée du visible. Paris: La Difference. 24. Westphal, M. (1999). In God, the gift, and postmodernism. J. D. Caputo & M. J. Scanlon (Eds.), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 25. Westphal, M. (1984). God, guilt, and death: an existential phenomenology of religion (pp. 1–12). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 26. Westphal, M. (1990). Taking St. Paul seriously: sin as an epistemological category. In T. P. Flint (Ed.), Christian philosophy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 27. Westphal, M. (1998). Suspicion and faith: the religious uses of modern atheism. New York: Fordham University Press. 28. Westphal, M. (1999/2001). Overcoming onto-theology (pp. 154–161). New York: Fordham University Press & University Press. 29. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell [Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe]. 30. Wolterstorff, N. (1995). Divine discourse: philosophical reflections on the claim that god speaks. New York: Cambridge. 31. Zimmerli, W. (1982). I am Yahweh. Atlanta: John Knox Press [Translated by Douglas W. Stott].

Int J Philos Relig (2006) 60:139–148 DOI 10.1007/s11153-006-9102-9 O R I G I NA L PA P E R

Suffering and transcendence Eugene Thomas Long

Received: 15 December 2005 / Accepted: 20 January 2006 / Published online: 10 November 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Abstract This essay explores the experience of suffering in order to see to what extent it can be understood within the context of the human condition without diverting the reality of suffering or denying the meaning of human existence and divine reality. Particular attention is given to describing and interpreting what I call the transcendent dimensions of suffering with the intent of showing that in the experience of suffereing persons come up against the limits of what can be accounted for in ordinary terms and point towards transcendent reality. In religious faith the transcendent dimensions of suffering may be understood to come together with other transcendent dimensions of experience in a more distinctive or focused encounter with transcendent reality. The conception of God that is suggested by the transcendent dimensions of suffering, however, differs from the model of God in western theism as an absolutely transcendent, all powerful, immutable and impassible being. Keywords Evil · Suffering · Theodicy · God · Faith · Other · Being · Creation · Experience

Introduction In beginning this essay I should say that I do not have any special wisdom to offer philosophers or theologians concerned with traditional theism and the traditional problem of evil. I do briefly explore the experience of suffering in order to see to what extent it can be understood in the context of the human condition without diverting the reality of suffering or denying the meaning of human existence and divine reality. More specifically, I will describe and interpret what I call the transcendent dimensions of suffering with the intent of showing that in the experience of suffering we come up

E. T. Long (B) University of South Carolina, Philosophy Department, SC 29208 Columbia, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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against the limits of what can be accounted for in ordinary terms and point towards transcendent reality. In religious faith the transcendent dimensions of suffering may be understood to come together with other transcendent dimensions of experience in a more distinctive or focused encounter with transcendent reality. The conception of God that is suggested by the transcendent dimensions of suffering, however, differs from the dominant model of God in western theism as an absolutely transcendent, all powerful, immutable and impassible being. Much of the renewed interest in the traditional problem of evil in recent Anglo-American philosophy of religion is, as I understand it, related to the so-called evidential argument in which critics of traditional theism argue that at least some suffering cannot be adequately accounted for in traditional theistic belief. In defending the rationality of belief in traditional theism against such critics, some theists have extended the notion of defense to include efforts to provide theodicies or reasonable accounts of why an all powerful and all benevolent God allows evil in the world. At the root of many of these arguments is the belief either that evil is useful or necessary to a greater good or that eventually, whether in time or eternity, evil will be overcome or transformed by a greater good. In response non-theists have argued that some evils are so destructive of any conception that humans might have of the good that no future good could be reasonably held to adequately account for such evil. Here many continental philosophers and theologians, including some who consider themselves to be theists in the broader sense, seem to stand closer to the non-theists than the traditional theists. That is, to the extent that they retain any hope for reconciling belief in God with evil they argue that traditional theodicies are often partners in subverting or desensitizing the reality of gratuitous or unjustified evil and that they tend to justify God at the expense of the suffering of human and other beings. From this perspective any religious alternative to traditional religious theodicies, it seems, must begin from the claim that at least some experiences of actual suffering are so destructive that no future good can outweigh them, that such suffering is part and parcel of our being in the world, and must then try to show, as I suggested above, that such suffering need not deny the meaning of existence or divine reality.

Experience of suffering The experience of suffering confronts us as a boundary, a limit to our ordinary experience of ourselves as beings in the world in relation to other persons and things where being and becoming seem closely linked. We are aware of ourselves not as fixed essences, but as unfinished, in process of becoming. Yet, as Emmanuel Mournier has said, this is not the becoming of mere vital impulsion. Our way of being is best understood in terms of possible ways of being. We may share much in common with others and we would not be who we are independently of our histories and our relations with others. Yet in some sense we also seem to transcend or go beyond these boundaries. We are both fact and possibility, Heidegger would say. Our being is something to be achieved; it is something to be gained or lost. In this sense we appear to be different at least in degree from other beings in the universe.1 As beings of potentiality, beings on the way, we are always transcending, moving into new possibilities of being. We 1 Heidegger himself distinguishes between human being-in-the-world as world-forming in contrast to what he calls the worldlessness of the rock and the animal’s poverty in the world (Heidegger, 1995, 185ff).

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are temporal beings. We exist in the present involved in the heritage of what has been. However, we also exist in the future that is coming towards us. Our being is such that in the present we recollect the past and anticipate the future. We are becoming as persons in relation to other persons and things and as entangled in the history of humankind. Our transcending or becoming, however, comes up against many boundaries along the way which set limits to our transcending or becoming. One of the most significant boundaries is found in suffering. Suffering, as John Macquarrie and Emmanuel Levinas have argued in somewhat related ways, stands over against our transcending, our acting.2 By contrast with the process of becoming in which we act to realize some state of affairs that we desire and through which we find meaning in existence, the experience of suffering appears to be the opposite of activity. It is a boundary, a tragic element in human experience which sets limits to our process of becoming and raises the question of the meaning of human existence. Suffering may bring us up against our finiteness and may clear our being in the world of the gods of self-deification as well as a religion in which suffering is purchased at the price of greater rewards. In its more limited form the experience of suffering may be accommodated into our human becoming. We may be led to say, for example, that although we would not have sought suffering we are better persons for having undergone the experience of suffering. Here we find at the experiential level the truth of traditional theodicies in both secular and religious forms that argue that humans are not ready-made but are the result of a long process of self-transcending, of soul-making to use traditional language. If experiences of suffering were always of the kind mentioned above, the problem of evil would not be such a mystery for humankind. In some cases, however, suffering seems to be other than can be accommodated within the context of soul-making. Such suffering is often referred to as gratuitous or unjustified, suffering which by most reasonable accounts appears to be useless. Perhaps one might argue that all suffering is useless or senseless, but at least this appears to be the case with gratuitous suffering. Gratuitous suffering appears to be qualitatively different from the kind of suffering that we are often able to accommodate into our way of being in the world. Such suffering is non-integratable or non-justifiable as Levinas argues. (Levinas, 1998, p. 173) I have reference to the kind of suffering associated with such natural events as the Lisbon earthquake and recent events in southeast Asia and the Gulf area of the United States as well as the kind of intolerable suffering found uniquely in Auschwitz. Describing the victims of Auschwitz, Hans Jonas writes “Dehumanization by utter degradation and deprivation preceded their dying, no glimmer of dignity was left to the freights bound for the final solution, hardly a trace of it was found in the surviving skeleton specters of the liberated camps.” (Jonas, 1996) In such cases it seems to make little sense to speak of persons choosing to bear their suffering or justifying their suffering in relation to some future human or eternal good. To be sure, some persons, perhaps the majority who survive, make their way through life in spite of such suffering. But such suffering seems to have no purpose in terms that can be meaningfully appropriated in human terms. It is what might be called an experience of emptiness, of nullity, perhaps one might say of the absence of the gods, whether secular or religious. Whatever events follow, Ground Zero remains a void. Levinas writes: Suffering is surely a given in consciousness, a certain “psychological content,” like the lived experience of colour, of sound, of contact, or like any sensation. 2 See Macquarrie (1982, 222–232); Levinas (1998, 2001).

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But in this “content” itself, it is in-spite-of-consciousness, unassumable. It is unassumable and “unassumability.” “Unassumability” does not result from the excessive intensity of a sensation, from some sort of quantitative “too much,” surpassing the measure of our sensibility and our means of grasping and holding. It results from an excess, a “too much” which is inscribed in a sensorial content, penetrating as suffering the dimensions of meaning which seem to be opened and grafted on to it. (Levinas, 2001, pp. 371–372) When Levinas speaks of the end of theodicy he means the failure of efforts both secular and religious to reconcile us to senseless suffering, the failure to grasp suffering in a rational whole. The focus of much of the discussion of evil and suffering in recent continental philosophy is not suffering as such but senseless suffering, suffering which is held to contradict any human value or purpose and elude integration within any rational or coherent order. Many continental philosophers argue with regard to such suffering that theodicies which seek to justify or explain such evil fail. At times one reads that it is obscene or even evil to attempt to reconcile such evil with some kind of benevolent or cosmological purpose, it being argued that efforts to explain suffering and evil add to the suffering. At the root of these objections is both a moral protest against efforts to explain suffering in the face of those who suffer and a rejection of a philosophical approach (whether idealist or analytic) which seeks to assimilate evil into a rational metaphysics that purports to make sense of the senseless. At times there is more hyperbole in these discussions than I would prefer. It does not seem unreasonable , for example, that some philosophers would attempt to deal with the evidential problem of evil within the well defined limits of what is called traditional theism and logical argument, particularly given the widely accepted theory of fallibilism. Further, some who speak of the end of theodicy appear themselves to be developing what might be called alternative forms of explanation. The problem for these philosophers may not be theodicy as such, but rather the aim of some theodicies to explain evil in ways that are intended to bring reassurance or show the usefulness of gratuitous suffering to those who are suffering, either by arguing that suffering contributes to our being a better person or by appealing to a sense of goodness that seems to have little connection with any kind of goodness that we can conceive as historical beings. Some objections to traditional theodicies voiced by continental philosophers, I believe, are rooted in what might be called transcendent dimensions of the experience of human suffering. We may be able to understand why someone might differ with us on such deep moral issues as the death penalty, but gratuitous suffering evokes a deep silence or a moral outrage which is absolute and uncompromising and challenges the more rationalistic efforts to respond to the issues raised by such experiences. We find in such experiences, whether suffered on our own or vicariously, an absolutely certain condemnation, a deep sense of being undeserved, an “absolute no” which seems to transcend all relative human and cultural boundaries. It is an experience of absolute condemnation that can see no usefulness for such suffering either in this life or another. This experience of “absolute no” is an example of what I have elsewhere called transcendent dimensions of ordinary experience, experiences of “ultimacy” which seem to bring one up against the limits of what can be accounted for in ordinary terms and point beyond these limits to a wider range of being.3 3 See Long (1992, 1998).

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Even if we are able to avoid useless suffering directly in our lives we can hardly avoid the suffering of others. Indeed, this may be the most difficult suffering to bear. The innocent suffering of children, of persons undergoing the most tragic events in life, even of animals, interrupts the order of our lives and calls forth our love and compassion for others. We seem to be called not only to condemn the suffering of the other, but also to be called to a kind of giving of oneself in the face of the suffering of the other. We seem to be summoned to a higher standard of being, to a responsiveness to the other that appears to transcend any calculated obligation that we or another individual may lay upon us. This summons may be mediated through our relations with others and through our particular histories and cultures. Yet none of these relations seem adequate to fully account for it. The otherness of this calling seems to be written into the texture of our being in the world. Indeed, this calling and our being are so closely connected that the violation of one seems at the same time a violation of the other. If there is an empirical basis for hope to be found in suffering perhaps it is here. The experience of gratuitous evil whether in ourselves or in others links us to other beings and evokes a sense of the precariousness of existence, a kind of threat or nothingness that is a given ingredient of our being in the world. This precariousness of being is part and parcel of what it means to be, and if we are to deal with the problem of suffering we have to begin by accepting the precariousness of existence, including the senselessness of at least some forms of suffering. It is part of our givenness, part of the created order to put it in religious terms. The problem of suffering, of course, is not limited to the religious and some may seek meaning in attitudes of patient acceptance, constructive activity or heroic defiance. Indeed, some continental philosophers, both religious and non-religious, argue that in face of the unreality of religious and secular explanations, we should turn from the theoretical to the practical, from explanation to action. Nevertheless, evil and suffering raise ontological questions within the context of particular historical religious traditions that seem to call for philosophers to deal with the doctrines and narratives of those traditions. This does not mean that we should give up our suspicion of appeals to authority and dogmatically held beliefs or, as Louis Dupré has argued, that philosophers of religion must be dependent upon the religious authorities of text and tradition. It does mean that religious experience as formed and shaped within the religious traditions may provide resources for critical philosophical reflection on the religious problem of suffering. 4

Being and creation In western theism in general and in the Christian tradition in particular, the religious problem of suffering is closely connected with the doctrine of creation. The experience of suffering whether by the self or vicariously brings us to an awareness of our finitude and our sense of dependence. And it is the narrative of creation, of the relation of creature to creator, that seeks to articulate this experience of dependency. If, however, we understand the dependent relation between creature and creator in terms of a purely causal relation between an external creator and creation we miss the more inclusive relationship between creator and creation that seems central to the 4 See Dupré (1990); Long (1992). Dupré’s learned critique of traditional theodicy and call for a more inclusive model has been influential in my effort to think through this issue.

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theological understanding of creation. This point is made in different but related ways by philosophers and theologians in the phenomenological, personalist and process traditions. I will here try to illustrate it with particular reference to the work of John Macquarrie, who emphasizes the existential or better perhaps the existential-ontological understanding of creation.5 From the existential point of view the doctrine of creation has less to do with the question, how did the world begin, and more to do with the question, what does it mean to be a creature, or perhaps better, how does one understand his or her being in the world. Traditional theism thinks of God as another being, albeit the greatest being, a kind of metaphysical being without a body who creates the world, sustains it and intervenes in the world when necessary. The world owes its origin and within limits its governance to the sovereign will of the greatest being who somehow stands outside of and apart from the world, largely unaffected by it, but who may act upon it to bring about some desired end. It is fair to say that historically speaking this has been the dominant theological model of God. There is clearly a basis for talking about God in this way in the Biblical literature where God is often portrayed as making or producing the beings of the world in a sense analogous to that of a factory worker producing a product. This model of God, however, tends to remove God from the world which is essentially the product of God and makes God less than ultimate for we still have to ask about the being of God. It also raises particular issues for the problem of evil and suffering. Given the external and causal relation between creator and creation and the power and willingness of God to intervene on occasion to bring about some desired end, it is difficult to deal with the problem of suffering without thinking of God’s goodness in ways that seem to have little in common with our human conceptions of goodness. As Hans Jonas has argued, efforts to reconcile divine omnipotence and divine goodness often come at the price of complete divine inscrutability (Jonas, 1996, p. 139). The model of God as a kind of transcendent self-sufficient monarch who makes or produces appears, as I said above, to come at the expense of the closeness or affinity between creator and creation. This has led some theologians to argue that the making of God is more analogous to the making of an artist in which, for example, the painter may be said in some sense to put himself or herself into the painting. This may provide a useful correction to the model of making, but this model also seems to have its limitations because it seems to lack the sense of on-going involvement (providence) in creation. Macquarrie himself suggests that in order to grasp the immanence of God, the model of making should be held in tension with the model of emanation which also has a long history in Christian theology. Of course the model of emanation has its limitations. It seems, for example, to make all entities part of God and to call into question the idea of a universe freely created by God. Macquarrie’s point, however, is not that we should reject the model of making, which he agrees has been the dominant model, in favour of the model of emanation as a tool for interpreting the Biblical narratives. Rather, he argues, the model of making needs to be held in tension with the model of emanation, each in some sense correcting the other, in order to more fully elucidate the experience of both the transcendence and immanence of the divine. His aim is to combine the transcendence of Being as going-out or letting-be and the immanence of Being as present and manifest in beings.

5 See Macquarrie (1997).

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I cannot here deal adequately with the question of competing models for talking about God and God’s relation to creation. My main point has been to suggest that the image of God as a being who is related to other beings as the efficient cause and who stands apart from creation, untouched by the suffering of his creatures is not the only available model in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and that it has been challenged in related ways by what might be called more organic models for talking of the relation of Being and beings or God and world. Macquarrie’s so-called dialectical theism is indebted to Martin Heidegger and his discussion of the relation of Being and beings. Macquarrie speaks of God as “holy Being”, an expression which he uses to assign a two-fold meaning to the word “God”, an ontological meaning in the sense that it denotes Being and an existential meaning in so far as it indicates an attitude of commitment to or faith or trust in Being, a trust that Being is not alien or neutral in relation to us (Macquarrie, 1997, p. 121). Religious faith, we might say, is an attitude of discernment and commitment in which Being is experienced as the enabling, the giving of being. On Macquarrie’s account , following Heidegger, Being is the transcendens, the condition that there may be any beings at all. Yet Being is not a being and Being remains incomparable or mysterious in relation to all categories that we use to speak of beings or properties or classes of beings.6 This does not mean for Macquarrie, however, that Being or holy Being is a mere blank incomprehensible. Being is the condition that there may be any beings, the letting-be, or perhaps better, the grace, the giving, the loving of being. Being transcends every particular being and yet in letting-be may be said to participate in or be manifest in every being, albeit in some beings more fully than others. On this view the doctrine of creation has less to do with how particular beings come to be and more to do with what it means to be a creature and how this affects our understanding of our being in the world. Macquarrie uses this understanding of the relation between Being and beings to help illuminate the idea of creatio ex nihilo. This idea presumably was used to distinguish the idea of creation from the idea of making or producing one thing out of another thing. It emphasizes the fact that any particular thing stands between Being or holy Being and nothing. Beings depend upon Being in the sense that any particular being is in so far as it participates in Being. Perhaps one might put the point somewhat differently saying that although beings are in some sense independent entities, they are not beings in addition to holy Being, but in their being are wholly dependent upon Being. This means that nullity or nothingness is an essential part of being a creature, something that is reflected in the mood of anxiety, in our awareness of the precariousness of existence, that at any point beings might not be. And human beings, who might be said to exemplify the widest range of Being among beings, may be said to experience this nullity or nothingness in a unique way in the suffering of self and others. Macquarrie’s understanding of Being and beings also helps illuminate the sense of risk involved in creatio ex nihilo, that in creation Being transcends or goes beyond, involving itself in the risk of the temporal order of possibility and change in which 6 I suspect that Macquarrie would say that he goes part of the way with such a thinker as Jean-Luc Marion who speaks of God beyond Being. The problem, however, is that in seeking to remove Godtalk from Being in any sense Marion appears in the end to be able to speak of God only in the context of religious faith and even more specifically in the context of the Eucharist as mediated by the Bishops. This seems to mean that we cannot speak “about” God, that we can only speak “of” God from within faith.

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the unity of Being and beings is constantly threatened. If we understand creation in this manner we might say that the creating or letting-be of Being makes possible an infinitely fuller and richer Being than would be the case if Being remained closed within itself. It also means, however, that Being exposes itself to the threat of the multiplicity and fragmentary nature of creation, to the risk of beings failing to realize the fullest possibilities of being.7 It is in this context that Christian faith speaks of the letting-being of Being as the love of God. Love apart from vulnerability makes little sense. Creation is good in the sense that it makes possible an infinitely richer reality than would be possible had Being remained closed in itself. But it also means that Being is not sheltered from exposure to risk in the way that a timeless contemplator of absolute perfection would be. On this account God’s excess of benevolence may be said to overcome in God the kind of diminishment that may occur in human experience, but in participating in human suffering God presumably is not immutable.

Being and the experience of suffering It should be clear by now that I am not convinced that we ought to sever all connections between philosophy and theology or ontology and ethics, as some continental philosophers and theologians seem to argue. Although I cannot discuss the matter here, I suspect that many of these efforts are rooted in what appears to be Heidegger’s sharp distinction between faith and knowledge and theology and philosophy, a distinction that is likely rooted in the views of Karl Barth that he learned in his early days at Marburg. I have selected Macquarrie’s discussion of the idea of creation in part because he himself adopts a more contemplative, perhaps one might say dialogical, approach to thinking of being that begins from self and other and is always subject to revision. He takes seriously the alterity of the other, but separates neither the theoretical from the practical nor being from the ideal. He is also able to retain the possibility of communicating beyond the limits of the more immediate and concrete symbols of religious traditions while avoiding some of the problems associated with so-called onto-theology. To put this in another way, he helps open up the possibility of taking account of recent discussions of an ethic of responsibility while focusing less on the disruption of being and more on the reconsideration of being. Like Hans Jonas’ myth of the suffering, caring and limited God, Macquarrie’s discussion of creation provides a religious context for helping us understand our human responsibility for the suffering of others.8 Nevertheless, my intent is not to bind what I have tried to say about suffering and transcendence to Macquarrie’s particular understanding of God. I do want to suggest that his view of holy being or something similar to it is more compatible with our experience of suffering than the God of so-called traditional theism. 7 For Macquarrie’s discussion of creatio ex nihilo see Principles of Christian Theology, pp. 214-216. For some interesting parallels with Jonas’ discussion of creatio ex nihilo, see Mortality and Morality, pp. 140–143. 8 Hans Jonas offers an interesting alternative to Macquarrie’s philosophical theology and I suspect that Macquarrie would say that he agrees in part with Jonas’ effort to overcome what Jonas takes to be a dualism of self and physis in Heidegger as well as Jonas’ effort to provide an ontological ground for an ethic of responsibility. Several chapters in Jonas, Mortality and Morality, including 4, 6 and 8 are relevant to this discussion.

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Having turned briefly aside from my main purpose, I want to return to what I said earlier about the transcendent dimensions of human suffering. I suggested that in the experience of senseless suffering we confront our finitude, our nullity, but that we may also find a solidarity with others that points to an absolutely certain condemnation of suffering and a calling forth of our love and compassion for others which at times at least seems to transcend the dimensions of any morality of mere calculation. The suffering of other beings seems to call us to put our own being at risk, so to speak, to suffer with others, to become actively involved in relieving the suffering of others where we can, and to change those conditions that bring about senseless suffering. It is this experience that Levinas captures so well in his talk of responsibility and the ethical. This does not mean, however, that we can ignore the ontological, for the experience of the infinite other is not limited to the ethical. Religious apprehension may both include and transcend the moral dimensions of experience and it appears to be more diverse than moral experience. Surely not all will recognize in their own experience what I have called the transcendent dimensions of human experience, and some may recognize something like what I have called the transcendent dimensions of experience without discerning anything like holy being or divine reality. Perhaps, apart from what might be called a religious attitude or religious interest, talk of transcendent reality can only be a mindless activity. Some persons, however, may find within the experience of suffering evidences of or pointers to a wider range of reality which is understood to be in some sense fulfilling of life and the ground of belief in the meaning and worth of existence. Perhaps here we are speaking of something similar to what Karl Jaspers called philosophical faith, “the fulfilling and moving element in the depths of man, in which man is linked, above and beyond himself, with the origin of his being.”9 To the extent, however, that there is evidence of a transcendent or wider range of reality, it does not appear to be evidence of a wholly transcendent, all powerful and impassible entity, but of one who in our suffering in the world calls us to the nullity of our being, to share in the suffering of others, and to create new possibilities for good. A God who encounters us in our suffering cannot be the absolute monarch removed from the suffering of the world, but must participate in that suffering calling persons back so to speak to the excess of benevolence that is experienced in the giving of creation, the risk of creation. If divine reality is understood in somewhat the way that has been described above, religious believers need not divert their attention from the senseless suffering of the world on the grounds that such suffering is somehow necessary to a greater good or that it will be transformed or overcome in the future by a greater good. Rather, persons are called not only to condemn such evil and suffer with those who suffer, but also to assume responsibility for working for new possibilities for good. Human suffering on this account is at one and the same time an experience of emptiness or nullity and the giving or loving of Being, the on-going creative activity or providence of divine reality. Perhaps one might say that the giving, the calling of beings to their fullest being in relation to others is the essence of divine reality, that divine reality is in this giving.10 In this giving of Being in reaction to the suffering of beings in the world, the person of religious faith may find hope or perhaps even redemption of a kind. 9 Nihilism on Jaspers’ account is the opposite pole to philosophical faith and exists only in relation to a possible, albeit denied faith. 10 Further discussion of this can be found in Long, (1992); Clarke and Long, (1984).

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But if one uses such words as redemption in this context it must be closer to what Louis Dupré has in mind when he writes: “Rather than using the term ‘redemption’ to make suffering and evil vanish into an invisible realm of goodness, the Christian philosopher ought to show what the ordinary faithful have always maintained, namely that in his redemptive action God reacts to real suffering and real evil.” (Dupré, 1990 p. 412). To this one might add, and calls the faithful to react to real suffering and real evil. To put this in another way, the capacity of divine reality to put itself at risk, to absorb or transform suffering, to love, is closely linked to the call to human beings to suffer with others, to love and to be freely involved in relieving suffering and changing those conditions that bring about such suffering where they can. Religious faith in this more particular sense is realized in that experience in which the various transcendent dimensions of experience come together in a distinctive and more focused discernment and commitment to sacred or holy reality. References Dupré, L. (1990). Evil—A religious mystery: A plea for a more inclusive model of theodicy. Faith and Philosophy, 7(3), 261–280. Dupré, L. (1992). Theodicy: The case for a theologically inclusive model of Philosophy. In E.T. Long (Ed.), Prospects for natural theology (pp. 221–238). Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. Heidegger, M. (1995). The fundamental concepts of metaphysics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jaspers, K. (1953). The origin and goal of history (p. 215). London: Routledge and kegan paul. Jonas, H. (1996). Mortality and Morality: A Search for the good after Auschwitz (p.133). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Long, E. T. (Ed.) (1992a). Experience and natural theology. Prospects for natural theology. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America. Long, E. T. (1992b). Religious pluralism and the ground of religious faith. In J. Harris (Ed.), Logic, God and metaphysics (pp. 87–98). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Long, E. T. (1984). God and temporality: A Heideggerian view. In B. Clarke, E. Long (Eds.), God and temporalily (pp. 121–133). New york: Paragon House Publishers. Long, E. T. (1998) Quest for transcendence. The Review of Metaphysics, 52, 3–19. Levinas, E. (1998). Transcendence and evil. In P. Nemo (Ed.), Job and the excess of evil, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (2001). Useless Suffering. In M. Larrimore (Ed.), The problem of evil (pp. 371–374). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Macquarrie, J. (1997). Principles of Christian theology (2nd ed.) (pp. 211–233). New york: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Macquarrie, J. (1982). In search of humanity. London: SCM Press.

Int J Philos Relig (2006) 60:149–156 DOI 10.1007/s11153-006-0008-3 O R I G I NA L PA P E R

Otherness and the problem of evil: How does that which is other become evil? Calvin O. Schrag

Received: 3 November 2005 / Accepted: 23 February 2006 / Published online: 6 September 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B. V. 2006

Abstract In seeking to answer the question “How does that which is other become evil?” the author provides a discussion of four entwined aspects of the issue at stake: (1) difficulty in achieving clarity on the grammar of evil; (2) genocide as a striking illustration of otherness becoming evil; (3) the challenge of postnationalism as a resource for dealing with otherness in the socio-political arena; and (4) the ethicoreligious dimension as it relates to the wider problem of evil. Keywords Genocide · Theodicy · Postnationalism · Alienation · Dialogue · Communication · Friendship · Love · The gift · Rhetoric · Messianicity · Radical evil The topic for discussion today is clearly not of recent times. It has, however, been very much in the news of late, both in the classrooms and seminars of academe and in the political and religious print of the public press. The topic is “The Problem of Evil”. We all know that the problem of evil is a very big problem that has been with us for some time. It is a problem that bristles with semantic, psychological, political, ethical, religious, and metaphysical quandaries. Yet, in our variegated disciplines, professions, and walks of life we are called upon to address the problem. And to address the problem of evil is to endeavor to understand it, to comprehend what is meant by evil, and in some manner to explain its source or origin. But addressing the problem of evil also requires that we solicit resources to eradicate evil—abolish, annihilate, root it out—or at least mitigate it. But what if perchance one butts up against an impossibility in both of these requirements—an impossibility of comprehending evil and an impossibility of eradicating it? How then would it stand with such an impossibility? How would the impossible itself impact upon our thought, our discourse, and our action? To address this formidable issue, I have chosen as the title for my remarks, “Otherness and the Problem of Evil”. I will attempt to consolidate my reflections on certain aspects of the matter at stake by: (1) seeking some clarity on the grammar

C. O. Schrag (B) Department of philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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of evil; (2) proceeding to a brief discussion of genocide as a striking illustration of “otherness” becoming evil; (3) moving then to the challenge of postnationalism as a socio-political resource for abridging the evils of genocide; and (4) concluding with some ethico-religious reflections on the topic.

The grammar of evil The grammar of evil, it soon becomes evident, is not all that easy to sort out. A common recommendation for achieving clarity about the meaning of a word or concept is to consult a reliable dictionary. Surely Webster’s International Dictionary is of such a kind. However, even it does not leave us with a straightforward answer to the question “What is evil?” Evil, we are told, is that which is not morally good; wicked; sinful; offensive; painful; foul; uncomfortable; disagreeable; unpleasant; wrathful; malignant; causing or tending to cause harm; calamity; disaster; misfortune—and I suspect all of the above in a variety of combinations. To be sure, listing the manifold indicators of evil may do for starters, getting the conversation going, but one needs to proceed with an effort to somehow take up the slack in this somewhat bewildering polysemy of lexical signifiers. And of course the taking up of slack in the manifold senses of concepts and phrases is something that we as philosophers are supposed to do. And indeed the new Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy is helpful in this regard by marking out a distinction between “natural evils” and “moral evils”. Natural evils have to do with disruptive forces in nature which have the capability of raising havoc within even the realm of inanimate nature. Earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods are the most commonly referenced illustrations of this sort of natural evil. Indeed, during the early modern period the Lisbon earthquake of 1775 was singled out as the paradigmatic illustration of natural evil. But natural evils also encompass forms of non-human animate or living substances. Poisonous snakes, sharks, ferocious beasts, and even bed bugs are sometimes used as examples. This would situate the occurrence of evil prior to the emergence of the human species itself, in “the land before time”, where tyrannosaurus rex may well have been judged to be evil by his victims—or in the current evolutionary stage in which the gazelle is likely inclined to view the lion as the archetype of evil. But there is another form of evil—moral evil, which is the result of malignant acts performed by human beings who apparently are able to do otherwise. During the twentieth century the Holocaust quickly became the paradigmatic instance of moral evil. Truth to tell, the widespread occurrence of so called natural and moral evil quickly became a pesky problem for any metaphysics of theism with its proclamation of a deity who is at once omnipotent and omnibenevolent. This problem, generally defined as the problem of theodicy, sought for a justification of the occurrence of evil in conjunct with the belief in the existence of a deity that is at once all good and all powerful. Within such a theistic framework it would appear that to account for the existence of evil one would need to qualify either God’s omnipotence or his omnibenevolence. Various proposals have been offered to answer this perplexing problem. It is not in the purview of my current project to review and critically evaluate these different proposals. This is a very big problem for any metaphysics of theism, and I prefer not to enter the fray at this juncture—only to suggest that there might be some merit in experimenting with a possible dissolution of the problem itself by deconstructing the metaphysical/cosmological construct of God as a cosmic architect and overlord,

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endowed with superhuman qualities of virtue and will. But the effort to dissolve this particular problem is not part of my agendum today. I have much smaller fish to fry relating to the problem of evil. My question is: “How does that which is other become evil?” In pursuing this question I am restricting myself to what generally flies under the flag of “moral evil”. For starters, what is needed is a preliminary clarification of certain operative terms in the discourse on otherness as it relates to the upsurge of evil. That which is other is somehow separate or different from a given object, person, event, or state of affairs. Separateness and difference, at least on one level, can be understood to be roughly equivalent. Now it is the lot of our terrestrial finitude, our condition as finite creatures, to be separate from other entities in the world (such as external objects and other selves), and within a theological perspective (at least within some theological perspectives) to be separate from God—and particularly so if God is understood to be infinite, uncreated, and unconditioned in contrast to our created and conditioned finite existence. But the otherness of finitude as separateness and difference is not—at least not yet—alienation or estrangement. Estrangement as a coefficient of otherness, otherness under the conditions of estrangement, the other as stranger or alien, provides the mark of the separateness of finitude somehow gone wrong.

The evil of genocide Now in pursuing the meaning of otherness as it slides into an intensification of alienation or estrangement one encounters a more foreboding and menacing posture of otherness. This is otherness as the intrusion of evil—and in some cases evil understood as unmitigated and rotten to the core, inviting aggressive measures for its removal. When this otherness as unmitigated evil defines an alien group, the stage is set for the horrors of genocide. To be sure, genocide, it might be said, is only one instance or expression of evil, but it should not be all that difficult to achieve agreement that it is one of the more salient expressions of evil in the history of humankind and reached a frightening level during the recent century. The mindset that occasions genocide is rooted in the belief that the “other group” constitutes such a threat to one’s personal, social, and national interests that it needs to be dealt with in a decisive and bold manner. The other is deemed to be intrinsically repugnant and unassimilable, not only to be kept at a distance as an outcast group of untouchables but veritably to be annihilated. It is precisely such a demonization of the other that opens the floodgates to genocide, a perspective on the otherness of the other that requires that the other be exterminated like a virus infecting an alien corporate body. The perpetrators of genocide are bent upon the systematic and unrelenting persecution of a group of persons simply because they are members of that group, including men, women, and children. The group is “the others” who are to be exterminated indiscriminately. However, the twisted logic of genocide prescribes not only the annihilation of the other but in truth the annihilation of all memory of him/ her/them. This involves not only silencing the witnesses of the annihilated and the narratives by the witnesses, but also all narratives about the witnesses, auguring in the direction of a veritable erasing of all traces of those who have been victimized. Plainly enough, the negation of the other as other, projecting a veritable deletion of the other from the memory bank of history, reaches its most intense expression in the indiscriminate and merciless murder of genocide. Subject to a mania of purification,

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the perpetrators of genocide seek to safeguard the purity of their form of life by excising the polluted way of life of the other. Professor Bruce Wilshire captures this purification mania that underwrites much of the motivation of genocide when he reports: “All members of the alien group must be killed or incapacitated because each carries the germ of the alien world-experience: each threatens to poison and undermine the only world in which the home group has learned to live” (Wilshire, 2005). The other as unmitigated evil is seen as a germ that threatens to infect one’s lifeworld and needs to be uprooted and all traces of the existence of the same destroyed. The other as individual or group—and for the perpetrator of genocide there is no distinction between the two—is to be ferreted out, isolated, and annihilated so as to ensure the purity and safety of those who feel threatened. There are, of course, the classic cases of genocide—the Nazi perpetration of horrors that culminated in the Holocaust; the systemic maneuvers to exterminate pockets of native American Indians; the policy of the Serbs to eradicate the Muslims; the designs of Pol Pot and the killing fields of Cambodia. But there are other examples of genocide that have received less attention but equally illustrate a mindset that the members of an alien group are somehow irremediably evil and need to be extirpated. Now in confronting this expression of evil in its most radical form of genocide and its modulated varieties one needs to proceed with a requisite humility and acknowledgment of irremovable limits to human understanding. Indeed evil in its most radical form remains on the edge of human comprehensibility. Kant never quite got to this in his somewhat sanitized version of “radical evil”, which in the end was not all that radical because he kept evil within the bounds of a “propensity to evil” resident in an innately good will. Jürgen Habermas gets closer to what is at issue in talk about “radical evil” when he prefaces his discussion of Auschwitz as “reflection on the incomprehensible”. But reflect we must, and we need to do so with the lights and resources that we possess; and this involves thought experiments on how best to deal with this virulent form of evil that has become a part of our history. How can we keep otherness form sliding into a signifier of a radical evil that impedes our very powers of comprehension? Let us begin with a more general observation. Any achievement of understanding and communicating with those who do not share our beliefs and practices is made possible by the gift of language, bequeathed to us mortals as homo loquens and homo narrans, speaking and narrating animals, who constitute ourselves in our discourse and our narratives as we make our way about in the world. As we live amongst the differences that punctuate the tensions between our lifeworld and the lifeworld of the other, it is the resource of language, dialogue, and communication that holds out hope for a possible convergence amidst ethnic, racial, political, and religious differences. And here we do have something important to learn from our Greek predecessors and particularly from their contributions to the positive role of rhetoric. It is of course Aristotle who quickly comes to mind with his notion of political-deliberative rhetoric, which, unlike forensics as a formal technique for winning points in a staged debate, is oriented toward deliberation and action designed to enhance the good for the wider polis. The difficult task, however, is addressing the specific relevance and implications of the resources and limitations of our communicative endeavors in dealing with genocide as an intensification of moral evil. And even more specifically, what modifications in our domestic and international affairs are required to provide a kind of sheet anchor against the demonization of the other as “evil empire”, “the Great Satan”, or the “axis of evil” ? How can such a demonization of the other, which stands on the brink of the

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inhumanity of genocide, so visible both in our distant and recent past, be avoided? How can a transversal understanding and communication that strives to learn from differences as it works out policies of cooperation, respecting the integrity of otherness on matters of culturally based beliefs and practices, be achieved? In pursuing these timely and difficult questions/issues it may behoove us to do some thoughtexperimenting with alternative forms of socio-political organization. And such is part of the thought experiment that I wish to pursue—or begin to pursue—in my brief observations today.

The challenge of postnationalism Might it be that the modern nation-state ontology which has been with us since the historic Treaty of Westphalia and which has conditioned us all to find our corporate identities in nation-making characteristics of common ethnic origins, language, culture, religion, and forms of government, has outworn its usefulness for the present age? The international configuration of nation-states, dividing socio-political collective associations into homogenous enclaves of common origins and shared history has fostered an exclusionary cultural mindset which at times can be fueled to incite various forms of genocide. The inhabitants of the various nation-states view their identity as somehow constituted by their allegiances to a socio-political way of life that is marked off from the lifeworld of other nation-states. When this national identity becomes intensified and rigid, the space that marks off national identities can become a breeding ground for the evils of genocide. In more recent times there has been considerable discussion on the possible demise of the nation-state as a model for international politics. Samuel Huntington, for example, in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, defines the contemporary international scene as one in which conflicts of nation-states are being replaced by what he has named “the clash of civilizations” (Huntington, 1996). To be sure, the meaning of “civilization” may be as perplexing as is the meaning of “nationalism”. And it soon becomes evident that Huntington’s neat classification of nine contemporary civilizations is not without its arbitrariness. But be that as it may, his focus on the associated complexes of civilizations as cultural units as distinct from nation-states has direct relevance for any project of overcoming nation-state identities, inviting a shift away from “inter-national” to “post-national” politics. Clearly, the path to such a postnational politics is not without its obstacles, requiring both a measure of philosophical imagination and realistic political analysis. And it is precisely such a paradigm shift that Jürgen Habermas proposes in his recent quite remarkable work, The Postnational Constellation (Habermas, 2001). Now the consequences of such a move in the direction of postnational identity and postnational political configurations would if not totally eradicate a nation-state based identity at least provide a mitigation of such. The other would no longer be deemed evil because of alien nation-making characteristics, such as geographical boundaries, common language, similarity of ethnic origins, and associated cultural practices. Yet, profound as the move to a postnational constellation of the political might be, curtailing the motives of a nation-state based genocide, the threat of the evil of genocide is not as such displaced. Even in a postnational world one would have to deal with clashes of civilizations or cultures which themselves could ignite the fires of class hatred in which the other as other is demonized as the evil one. So more radical

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measures are required, and here both our philosophical and religious resources approach a kind of ultimate challenge. This challenge provides us with a possible opening to a transpolitical resolution to our problem of evil, beyond the economy of politically legislated distributive justice, auguring in the direction of a veritable surmounting of the friend/ enemy dichotomy with its intermittent invitations to a demonization of the other . Even if the clash of national identities and ideologies were to be overcome, the clash between friends and alleged enemies would remain in force. The enemy becomes the demonized other. It is thus that an extension of our thought experiment is required, inviting reflection on a possible move to an ethico-religious content and measure which might in some way inform our socio-political aspirations, seeking to overcome the nation-state ontology with the help of a dismantling of the friend/enemy dichotomy.

Friends and enemies We are aided in this extension of our thought experiment, seeking a more radical resolution to the demonization of the other, by Jacques Derrida’s ruminations on a Politics of Friendship and Søren Kierkegaard’s unparalleled classic treatise Works of Love. Derrida expands the reach of friendship beyond the confines that have traditionally Søren been assigned to it. He does this by developing an internal connection between friendship and the gift. In the traditional literature on the topic, friendship is understood to function within a restricted economy of exchange relations. To establish a friendship is to expect something in return. Within such an economy one cannot be a friend with everyone. In developing his notion of friendship Aristotle remained within such an economy. For Aristotle friendship requires an interaction and exchange with equals, borne by relations of symmetry and reciprocity. You desire to find something in the comportment of your friend that will enhance your own self-realization. Admittedly, such a take on friendship can well contribute to a postnational democracy based on a distributive justice informed by equality and reciprocity. And indeed such is necessary and clearly desirable in any politics of friendship; but the peculiar and decisive trait of the more radical politics of friendship recommended by Derrida is a self transcendence that proceeds beyond itself as a politically informed constellation of justice that simply assigns to each the requirement of returning the same. This procession beyond politically informed constellations of justice as equality and reciprocity, beyond the limited notion of friendship which keeps the dichotomy of friend verses enemy intact, is a move to the notion of the gift, genuinely understood as a thinking and a giving without expectation of return, transcending all economies of exchange relations, approaching its crest and culmination in the gift of love. The aneconomic gift of love at once transforms the restricted notion of friendship into a universal fraternity and sorority and sets the condition for the requirement to love even one’s enemies. We are told, writes Derrida: “One is worthy of the eternal father only by loving one’s enemy as one’s neighbor or as oneself.” Plainly enough, the gift of love thusly construed, transcends all economies of distribution and allotment, requiring that we “think the dissymmetry of a gift without exchange, therefore an infinite one—infinitely disproportionate, in any case, however modest it may be, from the vantage point of terrestrial finitude.”(Derrida, 1997). At this juncture we are straightway reminded of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (which may well have informed Derrida’s ruminations on friendship). In this masterful work Kierkegaard undertakes a sustained hermeneutic on the Biblical commandment

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“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”. Kierkegaard clearly recognizes that the enemy is also one’s neighbor, and that the quality of love at issue extends beyond the friend/enemy dichotomy. My enemy also is an/other, a neighbor, someone who is “near-by” either in proximate or distant space, and whose presence solicits my love as much as does my friend. “Therefore the one who truly loves the neighbor loves also his enemy. The distinction friend or enemy is difference in the object of love, but love for the neighbor has the object that is without difference. The neighbor is the utterly unrecognizable dissimilarity between persons or is the eternal equality before God—the enemy, too, has this equality” (Kierkegaard, 1995, pp. 67–68). This love of the enemy as one’s neighbor, Kierkegaard continues, is a love “without requirement of any reward… It has no reward, not even that of being loved.” (pp. 130–131). It is readily apparent that Kierekgaard’s take on love of neighbor, extending to the enemy, unconditional without expectation of a reward, is very much Derrida’s “dissymmetry of a gift without exchange … infinitely disproportionate from the vantage point of terrestrial finitude”. Truth to tell, in Kierkegaard’s and Derrida’s reflections on the gift of love, as infinite and unconditional, we are veritably placed in a region robustly transcendent to the frailities and fractures of the economy of our earth bound existence. And this, as Derrida is quick to point out, renders the performance of the gift an impossibility. On this point Kierkegaard also appears to be in accord with Derrida. Given Kierkegaard’s profound sensitivities to the ambiguities of human motivation which inveigh against the purity of a self-sacrifice that sets no requirement of any reward, the gift of unconditional love, erasing the distinction between friend and enemy, remains an impossibility due to the foibles of the human condition. So it would appear that the resolution of the problem of the evil of genocide, with its demonization of the other as enemy, remains an impossibility within a Derridean politics of friendship, which as Derrida emphasizes is always not yet here, situated within the time of promise, projected into the future. Such also would seem to be the case in Kierkegaard’s explication of agap¯e, an unconditional love that underwrites the impossible task to love even one’s enemy. But situating the resolution to the problem of evil as an “impossibility” within an aneconomic space of the future as the time of promise does not in any way erase the power of the possible. It is through the impossible, understood at once as s quasi-transcendental condition and an ethico-religious existential imperative, that we inform and vitalize that which is possible. Plainly enough, the impossibility that is at issue here is of a quite distinctive sort. It is not to be confused with an ideal as a regulative principle that guides the enablement of distributive justice within the political economy of civil society—although clearly it does not sever its tie with the call for justice. The enablement of justice with its ideals in a struggle for human rights and fairness in human relations retains its obligatory force. Through the ingression of the ideals of justice we order our everyday lives and our political engagements, and all this advances the move toward a transcendence of national identities. But here we are still working with a limited notion of transcendence, a kind of transcendence-within-immanence—a transcendence within the relations of distribution and exchange among administrative, legislative, and juridical principles. The impossibility of the gift that sublates the friend/enemy dichotomy is of a more robust transcendence. Overcoming the nation-state ontology in the interests of justice for a cosmopolitan citizenry is a matter of calculative planning within the socio-political domain. Responding to the impossibility of the gift in overcoming the

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friend/enemy dichotomy is a matter of hoping rather than planning—hoping as a feature of the ethico-religious dimension rather than calculative planning . To be sure, there is an orientation to the future in both cases, fueled by a dissatisfaction with the present—the present injustices and the present hatred for one’s enemies. However, the mark of hope for the impossible beckons us beyond the socio-political sphere of existence to the ethico-religious dimension. This move to the landscape of the religious, however, is not to be confused with the embrace of an institutionalized religion, with its exclusionary dogmas and doctrines. Paul Tillich already called our attention to this important difference in his distinction between “the religious” as a state of ultimate concern on the vertical dimension and “religion” as an institutional configuration of preliminary concern on the horizontal dimension (Tillirich, 1976). This distinction also appears to be at issue in Derrida’s paradoxically articulated hope for a “religion without religion”, messianicity without messianism—a messianicity that provides the opening to the future as the time of promise in which all distributive justice is crowned with the infinite disproportion of the gift without expectation of return (Derrida, 1998). And this is clearly the message of Kierkegaard in his Works of Love, from which we learn that the unconditional love of neighbor, which binds together a working or acting with a hoping or anticipating, extends also to our enemies for they too share the space of our neighborhood. It is this message of the gift as unconditional love, always on the horizon and edge of our finite capabilities, that provides the source, content, and measure of our fitting response to the occurrence of evil. And if we continue to talk about the Deity in our preoccupation with the problem of evil, as we are wont to do—whether it be natural or moral evil—let us search for the Deity not in the causal conditions within the shifting of fault lines below the surface of the earth or in the inexplicable motivations to commit genocide, but rather in the call to a fitting response to the occurrences of evil in the world of nature and the travail of human history. God is in the responses to human misery, not in the ineluctable causes of human misery.

References Wilshire, B. (2005). Get ‘em all: genocide, terrorism, righteous communities (p. xiv). New York: Lexington Books. Huntington, S. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Habermas, J. (2001). The postnational constellation: political essays (M. pensky, trans.). Cambridge: The MIT Press. Derrida, J. (1997). The politics of friendship (pp. 285–286). (G. Collins, Trans.). New York: Verso Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1995). Works of love (pp. 67–68). (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tillich, P. (1976). “The lost dimension in religion.” In W. B. Williamson, (Ed.), Decisions in the Philosophy of Religion (pp. 41–47). Columbus: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company. Derrida, J. (1998). “Faith and knowledge.” In J. Derrida & G. Vattimo (Eds.), Religion (p. 17). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Int J Philos Relig (2006) 60:157–168 DOI 10.1007/s11153-006-0007-4 O R I G I NA L PA P E R

Repentance and forgiveness: the undoing of time Edith Wyschogrod

Received 14 December 2005 / Accepted 23 February 2006 / Published online: 17 November 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Abstract Mass death resulting from war, starvation, and disease as well as the vicissitudes of extreme poverty and enforced sexual servitude are recognizably pandemic ills of the contemporary world. In light of their magnitude, are repentance, regret for the harms inflicted upon others or oneself, and forgiveness, proferring the erasure of the guilt of those who have inflicted these harms, rendered nugatory? Jacques Derrida claims that forgiveness is intrinsically rather than circumstantially or historically impossible. Forgiveness, trapped in a paradox, is possible only if there is such a thing as the unforgivable. “Thus, forgiveness, if there is such a thing,” can only exist as exempt from the law of the possible. Does this claim not open the way for hopelessness and despair? More troubling for Derrida is his concession that forgiveness may be necessary in the realm of the political and juridical. If so, is not the purity of the impossibility of forgiveness so crucial for him, contaminated? In pointing to some of the difficulties in Derrida’s position, I shall appeal to Vladimir Jankelevitch’s distinction between the unforgivable and the inexcusable. I shall also consider the significance of repentance in the theological ethics of Emmanuel Levinas and Max Scheler. Forgiveness, I conclude, is vacuous without expiation, a position that can be helpfully understood in the context of Judaism’s analysis of purification and acquittal in the Day of Atonement liturgy. I argue that what disappears is Derrida’s assurance of the impossibility of forgiveness, a disappearance that allows for hope. Keywords Repentance · Fault · Acquittal · Forgiveness · Confession · Defilement · Trace · Purity The extermination of persons on an unprecedented scale as the result of war, starvation and disease, the vicissitudes of extreme poverty and enforced sexual servitude among the ills pandemic in the contemporary world have been seen as requiring new interpretations of forgiveness and repentance. “It is only against radical evil that

E. Wyschogrod (B) 522 West End Ave, #9c 10024 New York e-mail: [email protected]

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forgiveness can measure itself,” Derrida (2001) maintains. Given the magnitude of these infractions, can repentance and forgiveness suffice? Are repentance, construed as the victimizer’s acknowledgement of and regret for the harms inflicted upon others and or him/herself, and forgiveness viewed as the victim’s offer to lift the burden of the guilt that accrues to the victimizer who has inflicted these harms, not rendered nugatory by the scale and character of these infractions? “Did forgiveness die in the death camps?” Derrida (2001) asks. I shall argue that repentance and forgiveness are linked insofar as they are driven by the same question of impossibility that derives from the magnitude of the ills mentioned. Derrida writes in regard to these ills that forgiveness is trapped in a logical aporia: “There is only forgiveness, if there is such a thing, of the un-forgiveable. Thus forgiveness if it is possible, if there is such a thing, is not possible, it does not exist as possible. It only exists by exempting itself from the law of the possible” (Derrida, 2001, p. 48). Yet contemporary catastrophe is the exemplification rather than the support upon which the impossibility of forgiveness rests in that for Derrida impossibility is intrinsic to the meaning of forgiveness itself. What is reconcilable by other means does not need to be forgiven. While Derrida’s position provides an entering wedge for the discussion to follow, I shall attempt to pinpoint some of its difficulties by turning to a distinction proposed by Vladimir Jankelevitch between acts that are unforgiveable and those that are inexcusable. Excusability allows for the ascription of innocence or guilt contingent upon factual findings and, as such, belongs to the realm of justice (Yankelevitch, 2005). Alluding to the necessity for redemption, for the criminal’s repentance and remorse as giving meaning to forgiveness, he concedes that forgiveness “annihilates the having-been and having-done” thereby overcoming what could not be overcome. Yet, there remains that which is inexpugnable. Thus, he writes, “Pleading ‘Out damned spot’ . . .. the accursed stain of having done is indelible” (p. 164). I shall examine the outcome of each of these positions by turning to Judaism’s understanding of the double meaning of atonement both as acquittal, the juridical remission of sins and of purification or catharsis, its affirmation of both liability and defilement (Peli, 1984).1 Ricoeur’s account of forgiveness will be discussed in the light of its symbolic adumbrations of the role of defilement in repentance. Finally I hope to track the aporias of forgiveness to their theological ground as depicted in Emmanuel Levinas’ account of hyperbolic responsibility and of the trace or track of transcendence.

Acquittal and renewal Acquittal is generally thought to involve a plaintiff, a defendant, one who judges and an act of judgment that is in accordance with juridical rules and socially sanctioned 1 Using extensive citation as well as paraphrase and commentary, this work conveys in writing the oral sin and repentance discourses of Joseph Dov Soloveichik, traditional Talmudist and philosopher of religion. Because Peli’s book is devoted exclusively to the problem of repentance from a traditional standpoint, its exposition does not attempt to trace or to support any specified philosophical position. Largely exegetical, it helps bring to light a theological legacy to which Derrida alludes. Some brief remarks on repentance by Soloveichik can be found in Peli (1983) Emmanuel Levinas’ talmudic exegeses presuppose that “Religious experience, at least for the Talmud, can only be primarily a moral experience.” Thus he claims that “God appears to human consciousness clothed in values and this clothing is not foreign to his nature.” He concludes that see Levinas, (1990). The power to illuminate the issues they address and their significance for Levinas’ thought is not being contested but the theological legacy alluded to by Derrida emerges more clearly in the absence of this agenda.

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moral norms applied to a concrete situation. Acquittal is not a gift of exoneration bestowed upon oneself or upon another but rather a freeing of the accused in what is declared to be the absence of guilt. For Derrida, a juridical decision cannot be a gift of exoneration bestowed upon oneself or another but rather a freeing of the accused in what is declared to be the absence of guilt. It belongs rather to the sphere of exchange. But the gift itself is not exempt from contamination by relations of exchange, of giving and giving back, since we always already belong to the sphere of economy, inhabit an oikonomia. The declared impossibility of forgiveness is reflected in its self-annulling character and in the self-annulling character of the gift from which forgiveness is indissociable. “For there to be a gift there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift or debt. If the other gives me back, or owes me” or must return what I have given there will in fact have been no gift (Derrida, 1991). If the other is placed in my debt, the gift turns sour, or worse, hurtful. Forgiveness then becomes a relation of power, the establishment of sovereignty of self over another or over itself: “If I am conscious that I forgive, then I not only recognize myself but I thank myself, or I am waiting for the other to thank me, which is already the inscription of forgiveness into an economy of exchange and hence the annihilation of forgiveness”. (Derrida, 2001, p. 53) Derrida’s position brings to light a difficulty that he does not address, that of creating a mystique of sin and forgiveness, an aporia intrinsic to the logic of repentance itself. For there to be gift rather than exchange, what is bestowed must always be in excess of what can be returned. Because for him, as we have seen, the gift rewards the giver in that she/he acquires merit even if unintentionally, a gift qua gift is impossible. Moreover, if merit is interpreted as a species of profit, the acquisition of merit can become a disincentive to those who are motivated by pure giving thereby discouraging giving. Even more likely, if merit unintentionally acquired through the giving of forgiveness is not viewed as a disincentive but rather as a favorable concomitant of giving, it can be argued that an increase of sin generates an increase of merit. The Talmud acknowledges this difficulty stating “Where penitents stand even the perfectly righteous cannot stand.” (Berakhot 34b). In sum, if merit is acquired through repentance, an increase in sin can have the unanticipated consequence of bringing an increase in merit thereby encouraging sin. (Peli, 1984, p.217).2 Interrogating the relation of forgiveness to the gift gives rise to further perplexities. Questioning the primordiality of the gift, Derrida reverses the order of gift and forgiveness arguing instead that the impossibility of forgiveness is prior to the impossibility of the gift. Thus “[f]ar from being a modification or a secondary complication or a complication that arises out of the gift, forgiveness may be its first and final truth…. Before the gift, forgiveness” (Derrida, 2001, p. 48). Thus the significations of forgiveness do not issue from the meaning of the gift but are their preconditions. Although driven by the dream of unconditional forgiveness, of a pure gift that demands no return, Derrida cannot avoid acknowledging the necessity for conditional, political-juridical and psychological forgiveness. Does this concession not encroach upon his denial that expiation conceived as the erasure of fault, wiping the slate clean, is impossible? Is the yearning for expiation then not a futile gesture, even an open sesame for such psychological consequences as hopelessness and despair?

2 In the same vein, Max Scheler remarks: Repentance raises man above the state of innocence to a higher state of existence.” See Peli (1960).

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More, does Derrida’s acknowledgment of the necessity for conditional forgiveness not contaminate a certain gnostic purity that inheres in his conception of the impossible? If forgiveness lies beyond the possible, it lies outside the realm of empirical verification—did it happen—or rule-governed discourse—can it be deduced, both conditions required for the realization of making amends or expiation. Yet the inherent impossibility of expiation as lying beyond all possibility of forgiveness is, Derrida concedes, alien to the theological legacy from which it derives, one that prescribes both unconditional and conditional forgiveness generally contingent upon repentance. This heritage is not merely received but demands that one assume responsibility for its constant reinterpretation. “Nothing exceeds the heritage” (Derrida, 2001, p. 59). The difference between these modes of forgiveness is irreconcilable and constitutes, in Derrida’s terms, an excess that is embedded within the heritage itself. Embedded in this legacy, Derrida uncovers a fault requiring forgiveness that is intrinsic to all other faults, one for which forgiveness cannot be proffered. Perjury grounded in the act of promising precludes forgiveness in that any fault that necessitates forgiveness is already implicated in promissory relations, those that are indispensable for the establishment of justice. Because justice and law require a society of more than two persons, with the entry of the third, as Levinas had insisted, justice engenders perjury since the promise to one or the other of the parties to a conflict must be broken. “I must also ask forgiveness for being just…I always betray someone to be just. I always betray one for the other…Not only am I asking forgiveness for a perjury but I am always perjuring myself by forgiving…. For one is always doomed to forgive (thus abusively) in the name of another.” In sum perjury is always already inscribed in the structure of the oath “as if the oath were already a perjury” (Derrida, 2001, p.49). The release from oaths in regard to specifiable infractions is a key element in Judaism’s interpretation of atonement A basic distinction is made between oaths made in error and those made in full awareness of what is being promised. Thus 13th century exegete, Nachmanides held that if it could be shown that a vow thought to have been made in good faith was in fact made in error, there is then an “opening” for release so that release would pose no problem for what is called “the repentance of opening.” However, when one asks to be released from a vow on the basis of remorse, release is contingent upon a radical change of consciousness, a “repentance of remorse” (Peli, 1984, p. 190ff). Maimonides refers to sins requiring remorse as “sickness,” a state not to be confused with the contemporary understanding of mental illness but rather as one referring to moral deficiency. Like sickness, sin causes suffering. Revolted by turpitude, overwhelmed by the loss of purity and integrity, the sinner enters a state of mourning for lost innocence. Unlike Derrida’s parsing of the meaning of “the pledge”, oaths are not viewed as what could be seen as a transcendental condition for the understanding of forgiveness. Within the tradition, what can be seen as going proxy for the pledge is the irrevocability of the covenant between God and Israel as constituting the determining condition for repentance and forgiveness, to be sure, the covenant is at its inception contractual and thereafter inherited but remains ironclad. The Talmud stipulates that no subsequent oath made that would nullify the commandments is valid (pp. 215–216). Yankelevitch’s view of excusability provides an apt description of what Derrida denominates “conditional forgiveness,” that Derrida concedes may be necessary in actual social existence. Excusability or conditional forgiveness is relatively consistent with the Talmud’s view of “the repentance of opening.” Thus Yankelevitch

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contends, “the excuse denies the law of all-or-nothing which treats all sins as mortal sins, and the universal charity of forgiveness which, without discerning, treats them all as venial…. It forgives everyone for everything”. (Yankelevitch, 2005, p. 96). Unconditional forgiveness that specifies no possible modes of expiation remains vacuous. What is more, Derrida’s claim that forgiveness tout court is impossible could instead be reformulated as the impossibility of knowing whether one is forgiven, a claim that can be helpfully understood in the context of traditional Judaism’s interpretation of atonement as acquittal, (kapparah) the removal of liability for injustices committed and purification, (taharah) cleansing from the impurity of sin. “One knocks on the gates of forgiveness without knowing whether admission will be granted” (Peli, 1984, p. 78). In contradistinction to Derrida, what disappears is not possibility but rather the certitude that forgiveness has occurred or that repentance has erased or mitigated guilt thus allowing for hope, amelioration and self-amendment in place of a negative certainty of its impossibility. The claim that wrongs or sins cannot be expiated may, in addition, encourage the belief that there is no reason to avoid their repetition. Thus Maimonides astutely argues that if the individual who is overcome by desire or anger believes “that this fracture can never be remedied, he would persist in his error and sometimes perhaps disobey even more because of the fact that he believes no stratagem remains at his disposal” (Maimonoides, 1963). For Maimonides, praxes, bodily actions, can constitute acts of contrition. On specific ritual occasions repentance can be fulfilled through performance: Thus the precept mandating taking four species on the Feast of Tabernacles so that when one takes a palm branch in hand as prescribed, “one performs the precept and fulfills it at the same time”. Similarly the enactment of the sacrifice of the Paschal Lamb at the feast of Passover (seder) sparks the recollection of the sacrificial rite originally performed in the Temple in Jerusalem (Peli, 1984, p. 70). Practice gives proof of obedience. Doing before hearing, as Levinas often points out, is a fulfilling of the promise to carry out the terms of what has been contracted at Sinai. Even closer to Derrida’s notion of the pledge is that of the oath “as that which is forever sworn,” pledged for all time, and refers to each and every Israelite in every generation, “until the end of time” (p. 216). In accordance with the notion that repentance may have been insufficient to expunge guilt or to earn forgiveness, the liturgy of the Day of Atonement demands the pursuit not only of acquittal (kapparah) but also of purification (taharah), each being “a direct response and a remedy for the ontological effects of sin” (Peli, 1984, p. 49). In conformity with kapparah, a legal concept, absolution is understood as the withdrawal of a legal penalty thereby eliminating the need for punishment. A medieval commentator is said to have noted that when the term kapparah is used in the context of sin it connotes, “wiping away and removal,” to which Soloveitchik added that “a barrier is set up through which punishment may not pass. By means of teshuvah (repentance) and kapparah (acquittal) man puts a protective covering between himself and the punishment for his sin” (pp. 50–51). For the acquittal of sin, remorse suffices. However remorse is a necessary but not yet a sufficient condition for a complete return to the penitent’s status prior to the commission of sin. For such a reversion, the penitent must turn away from temptation so that “he is reborn,” or in Maimonides words, “becomes another person” a transformation that requires purification (p. 59).

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Purity Not only does purification require remorse and the behavioral changes necessary for acquittal but remorse must be accompanied by a separate act of confession. There can be no cheap grace. Purity is not to be construed as a possession easily acquired but as generating an ongoing need for absolution, “The sinner must abandon his sin, remove it from his thoughts and resolve in his heart never to repeat it again. That he call him who knows all hidden things to witness that he will never return to this sin again. And he must confess with words, with his lips and give voice to these matter which he has resolved in his heart” (Peli, 1984 p. 91). Confession, like contrition is in Judaism’s view a precept that is mandated. Thus, as Paul Ricoeur to whose work I shall recur in greater detail, remarks: “Through confession the consciousness of fault is brought into the light of speech; through confession man remains speech, even in the experience of his own absurdity, suffering and anguish” (Ricoeur, 1967). The language of confession is not in essence that of predication but of solicitation. In requesting forgiveness the penitent adjures, “I beseech Thee oh God,” so that God, the addressee, is asked to heed the entreaties of the suppliant (Peli, 1984, p. 77). The pronoun “Thee” entreats and as such cannot be a referring term but is rather an activity of language, a “carrying toward God.” In what could serve as a succinct summation of the proscriptions surrounding the tetragrammaton, the unpronouncable name of God in Hebrew, for which Hashem (the name) substitutes, Derrida writes: those who use “the name God, speak of him, speak him, speak to him, let him speak in them . . . a reference to just what the name supposes to name beyond itself . . . the unnameable name . . .. as if it was necessary to lose the name in order to save what bears the name or that toward which one goes through the name” (Derrida, 1995). Although the name Hashem is not unpronounceable, it holds critical theological significations. When connected with the taking of oaths, Hashem is used formulaically as bearing witness to the sincerity of the pledge of self-amendment. The very mention of the name of God is taken to constitute an oath (pp. 212–213). The request for acquittal is a request for release from an oath solicited in “thy name”. Is this traditional avoidance of the name a covert expression of negative theology that refuses to circumscribe transcendence by substituting the language of personal address for that of assertion? For Derrida the unsayability of the name means that no theological text remains uncontaminated by negative theology (Derrida, 1995, p. 69) Although the inadequacy of referential language is conceded there remains an effort to “say God such as he is, beyond his images, beyond this idol that being can still be, beyond what is said seen or known of him, to the name to which God responds . . . beyond the name that we know him by” so that one is caught up willy-nilly in the space of ontotheology (p. 69). God as an absent presence is not foreign to the theological legacy to which Derrida frequently alludes but almost never cites. Thus he does not consider the relation between God as the addressee of prayer, and the penitent evoked in subtle linguistic distinctions found in the liturgy of the Day of Atonement. The penitent does not depict but beseeches God pleading that he/she has transgressed and repents before God. In Hebrew, the dative preposition “to” preceding a noun or pronoun can mean either “before” or “against,” a distinction of considerable theological significance. When “to” means “against” it signifies injury done to one or more other human beings. However, transgressing the boundaries between human and divine, “against” can apply to harm done to the Shekhinah, an emanation of the divine presence, even

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if the transcendent and infinite God is beyond harm. The term “before” can mean “while” and since there is never a time when one is not standing before God, one transgresses while one is before him. “Before” does not however entail proximity in that sin opens a distance between man and God, a distance that repentance diminishes (Peli, 1984, pp. 81–84). To be sure, sin is profoundly contaminating, so that even God who “dwells with [Israel] in the midst of its impurity” is through the Shekhinah not exempt from such harm. Yet no matter how deep the immersion in sin, God remains with the sinner. “God is there after man sins. He remains hidden in the inner recesses of the heart of even the worst evildoer,” until the sinner repents (p. 86). In turning to the term “before,” Paul Ricoeur without alluding to this text captures its significations in the context of sin. “The category that dominates the notion of sin is the category of “before” God.” However “before” expresses not the alterity of God in front of whom one stands but rather the reality of brit or covenant that connects God and Israel. Sin is the violation of that covenant (Ricoeur, 1967, p. 50) Sin as an impurity that contaminates is helpfully explored in Paul Ricoeur’s account of defilement seen as the prior condition in the constitution of guilt. Thus he writes, “Dread of the impure and rites of purification are in the background of all our feelings and all our behavior relating to fault (Ricoeur, 1967, p. 25) When the fear of defilement is expressed in language, dread acquires ethical meaning and as such is the very precondition for social existence. In what can be considered a Hegelian move, Ricoeur interprets both prohibition and confession as establishing consciousness of self. In its fear of proscription, consciousness opens itself to others and interrogates itself (p. 41). The inquiry into the meaning of one’s acts and suspicion of one’s intentions is expressed in and as confession (p. 41). In this transformation from the ineffability of affect to the formation of symbols, Ricoeur discerns a demythologizing tendency, language, as a system of symbols enter into narratives that, in turn, forms the content of subsequent philosophical analysis. By symbol, Ricoeur means “analogical meanings which are spontaneously formed and immediately significant, such as defilement, analogue of stain; sin analogue of deviation; guilt, analogue of accusation” (Ricoeur, p. 18). This claim is expressed operationally in the various ways in which acquittal and purification interact. Thus law appears to occupy an intermediate position in the discourse of sin in that it appears when the word of command detaches from the dialogical relation of calling so that it is understood as an imperative (p. 52). To be sure, Ricoeur holds that modernity has advanced beyond the fear of defilement and the wrath of interdiction but a sense of defilement has not been left behind. The experience of fault is now expressed in the language of a greater totality of meaning from which it emerged. “Our epoch holds in reserve the possibility of both emptying language by radically formalizing it and the possibility of filling it anew by renewing itself of the fullest meanings, . . . the ones most bound by the presence of the sacred” (p. 33). To begin anew one must do so in the dimension of thinking (p. 349). Far from endorsing a reductive rationality, for Ricoeur thinking refers to a contemporary hermeneutical strategy for posing questions (p. 351). This tension is implicit in the dilemma posed in the 12th century in Maimonides’gloss of the terms “to believe” (le’ha’amin) and “to know” (lei’da). Is belief to be taken as reflecting a more tentative commitment to a truth claim than “to know” where the latter is understood as philosophical understanding? As Soloveitchik, sees it, Maimonides’ dictum “to know that there is a God,” does not imply that each worshipper become a philosopher but rather that “to know” (l’eida) means

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constant and unremitting awareness of God’s existence, that allows for no inattention. There is however no proscription against inattentiveness in regard to belief. “I believe—but it may happen that I become distracted at times from the thing in which I believe. But in the term to know (lei’da) the reference is to a state of continuous awareness that the belief in should cause man to be in a state of perpetual affinity, of constant orientation towards God” (Peli, 1984, p. 131). Ricoeur’s discussion provides a compelling phenomenological account of defilement even if his view of defilement is one of understanding driven at least in part by the desire to adapt to contemporary norms of objective explanation. For Ricoeur, dread of defilement aims at more than stain or taint but at the core of human existence. Rituals that are intended to purify imply a prior taint or stain that must be cleansed but it is the diminution of one’s being that is at stake. With the transition from affect to symbol, dread does not disappear but changes its meaning (Ricoeur, 1967, p. 41).3 In a remarkable parallel, Judaism’s atonement ritual proclaims that the human being must seek cleansing on the Day of Atonement “in the same manner that he immerses himself in a ritual bath” withholding no part of himself, a key concern in ritual immersion (Peli, 1984, p. 55).

Traces of the other: from impurity to responsibility We have seen that Ricoeur laments the loss of the immediacy of experience of defilement but, far from advocating the return to a “first naivete,” he aims at a second naivete, a hearing again through interpretation. One can remember only from within a language in which one is already positioned. To be sure, understanding requires belief, but for him, belief is impossible without the language of understanding (Ricoeur, 1967, pp. 349–350).4 Ricoeur sees in Judaism’s view of repentance a transformative act, one that penetrates the heart of the individual while at the same time uncovering the communal dimension of sin. “The evil heart of each is also the ‘evil’ heart of all” (p. 241) Because repentance reveals the universality of evil in which all are implicated, individual repentance is eo ipso also a choice the individual makes for everyone. Although attributing the perception of the universality of humankind’s evil nature to to the narrative of the Fall. Ricoeur does not advocate a return to its extension in the theological concept of original sin. Thus he does not demand a contemporary reimmersion in the experience of original sin. 3 Although he does not abandon the notion of the symbol, in a later work Ricoeur expands upon this view arguing that what is meant by metaphor can serve as a paradigm in explaining how texts are to be understood. Metaphor is more than the simple substitution of one word for another The literal meaning of a word is already polysemic, that is, includes all of a word’s possible significations. Rather metaphors receive meanings in specific contexts. See his Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language and Interpretation, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press), pp.170–171. 4 Metaphor is more than the simple substitution of one word for another. For Ricoeur understanding as the emergence of meaning requires an interaction of semantic fields, “a semantic clash” that leads to logical absurdity that in turn opens the way for new meaning not drawn from antecedent meanings. At the same time, if meaning is to be reidentified and enter into language the clash requires explanation. This account plays a role in the relation between what is naively believed and symbolically transformed. See his Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, pp. 166–176. Levinas perceives a similar conflict in Talmudic interpretation, the point at which “a general principle can become its own opposite,” a tension he sees as a struggle between universal and particular. See Annette Aronowicz Introduction in Nine Talmudic Readings, p. xxx.

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It might be thought that the stress upon the universality of guilt in the philosophy of Levinas, like that in Ricoeur is haunted by the specter of original sin. What is common to all humans is not however taint but responsibility. “All men are responsible for the other and I more than anyone else” (Levinas, 1998). In contrast to Ricoeur’s account of the language of defilement as symbolic, for Levinas the language of ethics is not primarily predicative but is rather performative a language of command. One is always already commanded by the very existence of the other to be responsible for the other. The relation to the other, one of non-reciprocal and infinite responsibility, goes all the way down (Levinas, 1987). The Other as Other is what I myself am not (Levinas, 1987; Peperzak, 1997; Wyschogrod, 2000). Because the other is neither an object in the world nor the content of consciousness, my relation to the other is not contingent upon her/his characteristics but rather exists by virtue of her/his not being in any sense I. To be sure, obligation to another is the prior condition of ethical existence but Levinas maintains that the relation of duality is interrupted by the entry of the third who is also another but whose difference from myself and the first other initiates a plurality of others. With the advent of the third, Levinas contends, the demand for justice is born. And with it the necessity to weigh and compare, to question, to appeal to objectivity. In fact objectivity is founded on justice rather than the converse. Thus paradoxically, otherness of the other elicits objectivity, but objectivity is itself obscured by the very condition that has brought it forth. My responsibility to the other is not lived primordially as action but is seated in the passivity of obsession, my sense of being accused by the other. Accusation by the other is not a response to infractions committed against her/him but exists as an original liability for the other. “It is an accusation without foundation . . . prior to any movement of the will, an obsessional and persecuting accusation” (Levinas, 1981). My responsibility extends even to my persecutors so that the trauma of persecution shifts from anger at the persecutor to responsibility for her/him, from suffering to assuming the burden of expiation for the one who persecutes. Is Levinas not endorsing the view that per impossibile, not only do I repent and seek expiation for my trespasses but that there is expiation by proxy as it were? In so doing I have become a substitute for the other which is precisely the point of Levinas analysis. “The word I means here I am answering for everything and everyone” (p. 114) Am I not by virtue of the unfulfillability of this responsibility rendered guilty and thus requiring forgiveness even if I have done nothing and am the victim rather than the perpetrator of moral trespass? Levinas sees in the passivity of guilt and in the assumption of the burden of the other not a source of despair but a certain freedom or liberation. It can be argued that this freedom replicates the sense of release described as the outcome of the confession of guilt accompanying the ritual of repentance on the Day of Atonement. The sense of relief does not however in any way free one from the burden of unremitting responsibility for the other. Yet on what grounds, it might be asked, is the command of alterity to be preferred over an appeal to rationally ascertainable moral rules? Levinas maintains that the being of the other is revealed transhistorically and transculturally as the visage of the other, the human face. In its ethical significance, the face is not to be understood phenomenologically as the countenance that appears but rather as coming from elsewhere, not as what would count in Ricoeur’s terms as a symbol but rather as a disturbance in the order of the world. The other does not reveal her/his origin as the sign reveals what it signifies, but rather is manifested as an absence that cannot

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be made present. Thus even if the face as seen belongs to the world, it retains its otherness. How then does the face make its transcendence known? The beyond from which it derives, its ethical import appears as a trace that issues from an absolutely immemorial past, one that is impervious to memory. Levinas speaks of this past as eternity in the sense that it is an irreversible past that cannot be lived within the chronological ordering of everyday experience. Yet this beyond is a personal order taking on, he contends, the profile of a “He” (Levinas, 1974). Like the track of the prey that leads the hunter to its quarry, the significance of these tracks is discernible only to those who can read its meaning. The trace that issues from elsewhere is a disturbance that does not initiate an order but “is a movement that carries off the disturbance it brings (p. 208). The other is in the trace or track of the “He” that Levinas calls illeity that is approached in turning to the other who stands in the trace of illeity (p. 202).5 Although I do not deny the animal tracks followed by the hunter, the spuren described in the Holzwege of Heidegger helped to prepare the way for Levinas’ depiction of the trace. I should like to propose another notion of the trace that may have infiltrated Levinas’ thought. On this view, the trace has no discernible magnitude but signifies that which is beyond and greater than itself. This account of the trace to which Levinas does not refer is found in an interpretation of the laws regarding the commutation of sentences in the Code of Jewish Law, (Shulkhan Aruch). The “trace of something” (mashehu) can be of crucial significance in an act soliciting forgiveness. A trace or particle of that which is forbidden can contaminate something “a million times greater” (Peli, 1984, p. 274). Why, on the occasion of the Passover feast should a drop or particle of something such as a trace of leaven defile a vast amount of an unleavened substance that resembles it? “Why should the trace of a forbidden substance not lose its identity, be neutralized?” (p. 275) The same principle holds in the context of redemption. Just as a particle contaminate so a mere trace can redeem. As an example, a Talmudic passage comments on the command that a man set aside a portion of his crop for the priests. The passage seems to imply that a large contribution is demanded, yet, it is concluded that the offering of a single grain is considered sufficient to fulfill one’s obligation. The principle that governs this conclusion is that “one grain redeems the whole heap” (p. 276). A mere trace can commute a sentence. I should like to argue that although Levinas does not allude to this text, his account of the trace (dare one say “the particle in the heap”) as fulfilling my responsibility conforms to the principle that the trace mandates responsibility for all (the entire heap). In sum, the interruption of the world by the trace that comes from elsewhere, from an archaic past that can never be made present and for Levinas functions redemptively is in consonance with the Talmudic view that a mere trace restores the whole heap. I should like to propose that in conjunction with the trace that saves, the particle that contaminates can play a significant role in the implementation of repentance. If rectitude can be restored by repentance by offering the particle, the return of rectitude on that ground, may mask the ongoing necessity for the unrelenting acceptance of infinite responsibility for the other. Guilt can be expunged time after time after each infraction. But if a trace is also the small grain that can contaminate when it is allowed to fall into a larger whole, defilement does not disappear. Instead new meaning accrues 5 Considering this point in an essay on Levinas, Derrida writes, “He will not have been (a) presence but he will have made a gift by not disappearing.” See Derrida (1991).

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both to Levinas’ view of the trace and to Ricouer’s insistence that defilement ought not to disappear. The pride of rectitude does not supervene when the moral trespass of which one has been acquitted confers a sense of purity that occludes my relation to the trace of the other. The trace that contaminates is a reminder of that which has passed beyond but remains as trace.

In/conclusion In his account of forgiveness, Derrida insists that only that which is unforgivable actually requires forgiveness, that eo ipso forgiveness is impossible and can only be proferred as a gift for which no return can be made. The danger of passing over the catastrophic trespasses of contemporary existence by ruling out the possibility of forgiveness from the start is softened by Yankelevitch’s distinction between ascribing inexcusability to an infraction that is grounded in a judgment of its magnitude and forgiveness that lies outside all juridical categories. Judaic tradition recognizes this difference in distinguishing acquittal from purification. In the absence of this distinction, the impossibility of forgiveness, the belief that I cannot be forgiven, generates a sense of futility and destroys motivation for self-amendment. Ricoeur holds that defilement is ineradicable in contemporary existence but if it is to be experienced meaningfully in the context of contemporary modes of rationality it must be reexperienced symbolically through strategies of literary discourse, a recasting that dilutes its impact upon experience. At the same time, Ricoeur also calls attention to the power of repentance, a power that elevates beyond the level of prelapsarian innocence. On this view, repentance may lead to a mystique of sin, such that an increase of sin leads to an excess of goodness, a difficulty well-expressed in Max Scheler’s statement that “repentance even raises man above the state of innocence which, but for prior sin and subsequent repentance would have been unattainable.” In its effort to validate rites of purification, Judaic tradition struggles with this paradox. Thus it is said of the former sinner Resh Lakish after his career as thief, “What made him greater. Sin itself” (Peli, 1984, pp. 255–256). There is no exit, to borrow Sartre’s phrase, from the aporetic structure of repentance and forgiveness. However an expansion of Levinas’s notion of the trace, of the manner in which transcendence wends it way through human existence may provide a means for an expanded understanding of the temporalizaiotn of sin. The trace must be thought afresh, not in the manner of Heidegger’s spuren, but rather in consonance with the parsing of the trace in some traditional Judaic texts. The trace is “a particle in a heap” and can go proxy for the whole either to redeem or contaminate. For Levinas, time is freed from its subordination to the present in that the “He”of a past that can never be made present does not disappear but leaves a trace that will disrupt experience. I maintain that not only the redeeming other, but taint or defilement can be construed as a trace, that will disrupt the present. The trace is not to be understood as bringing forward past wrongdoings or as restoring the notion of original sin but rather, I conclude, as a reminder of a counterfacutality inherent in wrongdoing: “I could have done otherwise.” In the absence of the trace, the ethical import of that which had been done would disappear to be replaced by a spurious primordial innocence and a loss of the sense that I, more than anyone, am responsible for all the others.

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References 1. Derrida, J. (1991). Given time 1: counterfeit money (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, p. 14. 2. Derrida, J. (1991). At this very moment in this work. In R. Bernasconi, & S. Critchley (Eds.), Re-reading Levinas (p. 37). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 3. Derrida, J. (1995). On the name (D. Wood, J. P. Leavey Jr, & I. Mcleod, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 58. 4. Derrida, J. (2001). To forgive: the unforgivable and the imprescriptible. In J. D. Caputo, M. Dooley, & M. J. Scalon (Eds.), Questioning god (p.34). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 5. Levinas, E. (1974). En decouvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (3rd ed.). Paris: Vrin. p.199. 6. Levinas, E. (1981). Otherwise than being and beyond essence (A. Lingis, Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. p. 110. 7. Levinas, E. (1987). Time and the other (R. A. Cohen, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA. p. 108. 8. Levinas, E. (1990). Nine talmudic lectures (A. Aronowicz, Trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. p. 14. 9. Levinas, E. (1998). Entre nous: on thinking of the other (M. B. Smith, Trans.). New York: Columbia Unversity Press. p. 107. 10. Maimonoides, M. (1963). The guide of the perplexed (Vol. 2) (S. Pines, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 540. 11. Peli, P. H. (1960). On the eternal in man (B. Noble, Trans.). Hamden CN: SCM press Ltd. p. 63. 12. Peli, P. H. (1983). Halakhic man (L. Kaplan, Trans.). New York: Jewish Publications Society of America pp. 110–117 13. Peli, P. H. (1984). Soloveichik on repentance (p.49). New York: Paulist Press. 14. Peperzak, A. (1997). Beyond: the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (pp.104–109). Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press. 15. Ricoeur, P. (1967). The symbolism of evil (E. Buchnan, Trans.). New York: Harper and Row. p. 7. 16. Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the human science, essays on language and interpretation (J. B. Thompson, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 170–171. 17. Yankelevitch, V. (2005). Forgiveness (A. Kelley, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 94. 18. Wyschogrod, E (2000), Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics(2nd ed.) New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 158–170.

Int J Philos Relig (2006) 60:169–186 DOI 10.1007/s11153-006-0005-6 O R I G I NA L PA P E R

An end to evil? Philosophical and political reflections Fred Dallmayr

Received 29 January 2006 / Accepted 23 February 2006 / Published online: 17 November 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Abstract After a long period of neglect and complacency, the problem of evil has powerfully resurfaced in our time. Two events above all have triggered this resurgence: the atrocities of totalitarianism (summarized under the label of “Auschwitz”) and the debacle of September 11 and its aftermath. Following September 11, a “war on terror” has been unleashed and some writers have advocated an all-out assault on, and military victory over, evil. Taking issue with this proposal, the paper first of all examines the meaning of “evil” as articulated by philosophers and theologians through the centuries. Next, the focus is shifted to a particularly trenchant and innovative formulation which recognizes both the reality of evil and the importance of human freedom: Schelling’s famous treatise of 1809. Following, a review of several important readings of this text (from Heidegger to Richard Bernstein), the paper concludes by pleading in favor of moral pedagogy as an alternative to the agenda of military victory. Keywords Auschwitz · Bernstein R. · Heidegger M. · Human freedom · Jonas H. · Manichaeism · Radical evil · Schelling F.W.J. · Sufism · Theodicy · Vedanta · Zizek S. Things long ignored or repressed often return with a vengeance. Evil, or the problem of evil, is a case in point. Heirs to the Enlightenment and wedded to unlimited progress, Western societies in recent centuries have tended to sideline evil as a spook or else as the relic of a distant past. In the poignant words of Lance Morrow: “The children of the Enlightenment sometimes have an inadequate understanding of the possibilities of Endarkenment (Morrow 2003).” Two events in more recent times have disrupted this complacency and catapulted evil back into the limelight of attention. The first was the experience of totalitarianism, and especially the atrocities of the Nazi regime summarized under the label of “Auschwitz.” As Richard Bernstein writes, echoing Hannah Arendt: “What happened in the camps was the most extreme and radical

F. Dallmayr (B) University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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form of evil. ‘Auschwitz’ became a name that epitomized the entire Shoah, and came to symbolize other evils that have burst forth in the twentieth century (Bernstein 2002).” Following the second World War, the memory of these atrocities was kept alive in some quarters—but was counteracted by the rising tide of consumerism and the tendency of the culture industry to trivialize evil again or turn it into an underground “punk aesthetic.” Then came the second major jolt: September 11, the ensuing “war on terror” and the offensive against the “axis of evil.” To quote Morrow again: “There came a crack in history, September 11, 2001, and George W. Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’, and all that followed. The idea of evil regained some of its sinister prestige and seriousness (Morrow 2003).”1 In light of the enormous calamities of the past 100 years, it would be entirely vain— as well as foolish and dangerous—to ignore the reality of evil or to underestimate its power. There is simply no passable way back into trivial innocence. Once this is recognized, the central question becomes: how to deal with the acknowledged presence of evil in the world, that is, its presence both in ourselves and in others? In a recent book titled An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, David Frum and Richard Perle—both insiders in the American “beltway” of power—have proposed a solution to this question: the forced termination of evil. In their words: “We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win. . . There is no middle way for Americans. This book is a manual for victory (Frum and Richard 2003).” A victory over evil: certainly a tall order and an ambitious claim! Properly to assess this claim requires an answer to (at least) two prior questions. First: what is the nature of evil—especially radical evil—such that it can be decisively terminated or vanquished? And secondly: Is it a proper policy objective for the United States—a country dedicated to “freedom” and democracy—to pursue this terminal goal, or is this goal perhaps self-defeating? In the following I wish to explore these and some related questions. I first turn to the meaning of “evil” and discuss—in all brevity—how this meaning has been construed by philosophers and theologians through the centuries. I next focus on a famous construal which recognizes both the reality of evil and the importance of human freedom: Schelling’s treatise on “The Nature of Human Freedom.” Following a review of some trenchant readings of this treatise (from Heidegger to Bernstein) I return to the solution proposed by Frum and Perle and offer a counter-proposal.

Some theories of evil As philosophers and theologians have always acknowledged, “evil” is a staggering problem almost defying comprehension; some have treated it as utterly recalcitrant: a Sisyphan labor to extract sense from nonsense, meaning from the meaningless. Still, unwilling to admit defeat, philosophical and theological ingenuity has produced a plethora of formulations designed to shed light on the problem. In the present context, it cannot be my purpose to offer a comprehensive overview of these formulations; some rough typologies must suffice. In her book The Many Faces of Evil, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty provides a complex, six-fold typology of metaphysical–theological treatments of evil. In abbreviated form, the six types argue respectively: first, that 1 Regarding the trivialization of evil and its reduction to a “punk aesthetic” Morrow refers to Delbanco (1995).

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there is only divine goodness while evil is an illusion (what is often called “theodicy”); secondly, that there is some evil, but the latter is only a lesser degree or a “privation” of goodness (a view prominently associated with St. Augustine); thirdly, that good and evil are both real and permanently conflicting forces (what is called “Manichaeism”); fourthly, that human reason postulates a perfectly rational universe but acknowledges evil as a dilemma (a view ascribed to Kant); fifthly, that evil is real and the world is a mess (Schophenhauer); and sixthly, that good and evil are nothing in themselves but only social constructs (Hobbes and possibly Nietzsche).2 By contrast, Susan Neiman in her book Evil in Modern Thought makes do with only two major types: namely, arguments relying on “fire from heaven” and arguments bent on “condemning the architect.” Whereas the former are advanced by philosophers celebrating divine or rational “order” despite real-life experience to the contrary, the second are favored by an assortment of realists, pessimists, and cynics (Neiman 2004).3 From my own perspective, Rorty’s typology appears a bit cumbersome, while Neiman’s account seems overly parsimonious. Without claiming any kind of completeness or greater theoretical adequacy, I find it preferable (for my own purpose) to distinguish between three major approaches to the understanding of evil. (For good measure, I might be willing to add a fourth category reserved for skeptics, cynics, and immoralists. However, since the latter tend to dismiss the distinction between good and evil, their approach does not really constitute an alternative mode of understanding evil.) The three categories which, in my view, have traditionally dominated discussions of evil are these: radical monism, radical dualism, and a third category involving a spectrum ranging from modified monism to modified dualism.4 Radical monism holds that ultimate reality—being a reflection of the divine or a benevolent creator—is wholly good and perfect, whereas perceived imperfections are illusions or the result of ignorance. The theory is most famously associated with the name of Leibniz; but it can also be found in versions of Christian and neo-Platonic “gnosis,” in the work of the great Indian “Advaita” thinker Shankara, and in esoteric forms of Islamic Sufism. The prototype of radical dualism is Manichaeism, but it can also be found in versions of “gnosticism” and in extreme Puritan theories of pre-destination (with their radical opposition between the “elect” and the “damned”). The middle ground between monism and dualism is occupied by neo-Platonic and Christian thinkers ready to acknowledge evil but giving primacy to divine goodness. Thus, in treating evil as a mere “privation” of goodness, Augustine approximates the monist view; however, by insisting on the “fallenness” of human nature and the distinction between the heavenly and earthly cities, his theory slides toward Manichaean dualism. In a similar way, modern rationalists—like Descartes and Kant—steer an ambivalent course between rational insight and ignorance. On the one hand, they grant primacy to rational order; but on the other, their separation of mind from nature (Descartes) or “noumena” from “phenomena” (Kant) carries strong dualist overtones. Some examples may help to illustrate the preceding typology. In Western philosophy, the most famous example of radical monism is Leibniz’s Theodicy (of 1710). 2 Rorty (2001). I have slightly changed the numbering. 3 Neiman includes in the first category thinkers like Leibniz, Pope, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, and

in the second category thinkers like Pierre Bayle, Hume, Voltaire, and Schopenhauer. Because of their greater psychological nuances, she makes separate room for Nietzsche and Freud. 4 Readers familiar with Indian philosophy will detect in the above echoes of the main forms of Vedanta philosophy: Advaita Vedanta, Dvaita Vedanta, and Vishisthadvaita Vedanta. On this tradition see, e.g., Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1928); H. N. Raghavendracharya (1941).

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Seeking to absolve God from any complicity in the evils of the world, Leibniz presented these evils either as illusions or else as necessary instruments for the promotion of divine providence. As he wrote: “God wills order and the good; but it sometimes happens that what appears disorder in some part is actually order in the whole.” Regarding the evidence of evil or wicked human acts, the text turned matters around by portraying such acts as evidence of the divine plan of salvation or redemption: “The same wisdom which made God create man innocent, though liable to fall, also makes him re-create or redeem man when he falls; for God’s knowledge causes the future to be for him like the present.”5 Outside the Western confines, examples of monism can be found in several contexts. As indicated before, a prominent instance is the Indian philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, as articulated chiefly by Shankara (788– 820). According to this philosophy, all beings have their true reality in “brahman” while the assumption of separate existences testifies to ignorance (avidya). The goal of “Advaitins” is to realize the ultimate identity of selfhood, and all its actions, with divine essence (atman is brahman) (see e.g., Deussen 1906; also Organ 1980). Similar formulations can readily be detected in Islamic civilization, especially its more mystical or intuitive strands. Amélie Rorty refers to the great Persian philosopher and mystic Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), and especially to one of his writings titled (in free translation) “There is No Evil in Allah’s Perfect World (Rorty 2001, pp.54–55).” An even more fervent espousal of monism is the hallmark of forms of esoteric Sufism. In a bold text, bordering on heterodoxy, the “Great Sheikh” Ibn Arabi (1165–1246) proclaimed the ultimate unity of all things with divine reality without remainder or exception. As he stated: “Whoso ever knows himself” properly knows himself/herself as integral to divine-essence—leading to the conclusion that “thou art He without any limitations. And if you know thine existence thus, then thou knowest God; and if not, then not.”6 Radical dualism is traditionally associated chiefly with Manichaeism, the doctrine according to which there are two contending and roughly equally matched forces in the world, each guided by a separate ruler or master: God and the “prince of darkness.” Having originated in ancient Persia, the doctrine later was disseminated throughout the Middle East and came to form the backbone of Hellenistic “gnosticism” (where this term does not refer to “gnosis” or insight into the ultimate unity of all being but rather to knowledge of the conflictual division of the world resulting from “man’s” partaking of the “tree of knowledge”). Amélie Rorty provides passages from writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a Hellenistic devotee of gnosticism obsessed with the interminable warfare between goodness and evil, light and darkness. In the words of one such passage: “I say that there are demons who dwell with us here on earth, and others who dwell above us in the lower air, and others again whose abode is in the purest part of air. . . And the souls which have transgressed the rule of piety, when they depart from the body, are handed over to these demons, and are swept and hurled to and fro in those strata of the air which teem with fire and hail.”7 Without fully subscribing to equally matched forces, echoes of these gnostic teachings often surface in later Christian authors, especially during the Reformation 5 von Leibniz (1985); cited from Amélie Rorty, The Many Faces of Evil, pp. 159–162. As Leibniz adds (p. 164): “The permission of evils comes from a kind of moral necessity: God is constrained to this by his wisdom and his goodness; this necessity is happy.” 6 See Arabi (1976). For a fuller discussion see my (2004). 7 Hermes Trismegistus, Hermetica; cited from Rorty (2001, p. 25). On gnosticism compare, e.g., Jonas (1963) and (1934–35); also Pagels (1995), and (1979).

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and post-Reformation period. Thus, in his Paradise Lost, the Puritan John Milton gives ample room to the voice of “Satan” portrayed as the determined rebel and contender for ultimate control: “But of this be sure,/To do aught good never will be our task,/But ever to do ill our sole delight,/As being contrary to his high will/Whom we resist.”8 In some of his writings, Martin Luther moves even closer to the dualist doctrine. Thus, commenting on St. Paul’s letters to the Romans and the Galatians, he envisages a quasi-Manichaean combat raging in human Life: “These two captains or leaders, the flesh and the spirit, are one against another in your body, so that you cannot do what you would. . . But we credit Paul’s own words, wherein he confesses that he is sold under sin, that he is led captive of sin, that he has a law in his members rebelling against him, and that in the flesh he serveth the law of sin.”9 The middle ground between monism and dualism is occupied by positions which modify the dominant alternatives—sometimes significantly (though without abandoning their basic premises). St. Augustine (354–430) is usually credited with having introduced an important new dimension into discussions of good and evil: namely, the central role of human will. As he wrote in “The Problem of Free Choice”: “The mind becomes the slave of passion only through its own will.” Hence: “The will is the cause of sin,” and the latter cannot be attributed “to anything except to the sinner who wills it.” Yet, as one should note, willing the good and willing something evil for Augustine were not on an equal level (which would have landed him in Manichaeism). Rather, honoring the primacy of divine order, he viewed only good will (or a will oriented toward goodness) as a proper and efficient exercise of willing, whereas an evil will opted for something only characterized by negativity, privation or deficiency—and hence for something not truly real: “Vice cannot be in the highest good, and cannot be but in some good. Things solely good, therefore can in some circumstances exist; things solely evil, never.”10 Under completely changed circumstances—during the period of the European Enlightenment—Immanuel Kant renewed and radicalized Augustine’s focus on human will—though extricating this focus from its Christiantheological foil. Without subscribing to a divinely ordered universe, Kant treated “good will”—rooted in “noumenal freedom”—as the essence of human nature and morality. Good will for him meant behavior in accordance with the maxims stipulated by radical human freedom, while deviation from these maxims, that is, the choice of evil, meant an option for non-essence or a basic deficiency or vitiated conception of human nature. Distantly echoing St. Augustine, Kant writes in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone that the notion that “man is evil” can mean only that “he is conscious of the moral law [postulated by freedom] but has nevertheless adopted into his maxim the (occasional) deviation therefrom.” As for the reasons prompting the slide from moral freedom to evil—or the lapse from nature into sin—Kant declares them (with St. Augustine) to be ultimately “inscrutable (See Kant 1960).”11 8 John Milton, Paradise Lost; quoted from Rorty, (2001, p. 124). 9 Luther (1961); cited from Rorty, (2001, pp. 111–112). 10 St. Augustine, The City of God and “The Problem of Free Choice”; cited from Rorty, (2001, pp. 49, 52–53). In The City of God, the account of evil differs significantly from Luther’s incipient dualism (p. 51): “We must not attribute to the flesh all the vices of a wicked life, in case we thereby clear the devil of all those vices, for he has no flesh.” During the Reformation John Calvin closely followed St. Augustine’s teachings about evil as privation and also his opposition to Manichaeism. See Rorty(2001 pp. 121–122). 11 For an excellent discussion of Kant’s approach see the chapter “Radical Evil: Kant at War with Himself,” in Bernstein, (2002, pp. 11–45). For St. Augustine’s refusal to inquire behind the exercise of

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In my own view, the first major advance beyond traditional approaches to good and evil occurred in the immediate post-Enlightenment period, particularly in the work of a thinker whose ideas were both formed by the Enlightenment and pointed resolutely beyond it: Friedrich W. J. Schelling. In this respect I fully concur with Bernstein when he writes: “I see Schelling not as a transitional figure en route to Hegel, but rather as transitional figure in transforming our (very) understanding of the problem of evil (Bernstein 2002, p.80).” What is distinctive about Schelling is the fact that he affirmed the “reality” of evil, but without lapsing into Manichaeism, and that he affirmed the goodness of God, but without denying God’s complicity in the reality of evil. In conformity with Kant, he insisted on the centrality of human freedom in all issues having to do with good and evil; but, departing from Kant and the Enlightenment, he moved beyond anthropocentric “willing” by embedding the choice of good and evil in a larger ontological reality within which good and evil acquire significance in the first place. As Bernstein poignantly writes: “In his ‘higher realism’ Schelling seeks to avoid two extremes: absolute dualism and an undifferentiated homogeneous monism. . . He wants to avoid the consequence that there is an absolute duality of good and evil (that is how he understands Manichaeism), as well as those pseudo-solutions that reconcile good and evil by denying the reality of evil.” One such pseudo-solution is the Augustinian formula of ascribing pure goodness to God while absolving God from any complicity in evil by treating the latter as mere deficiency or privation. For Schelling, such a formula ignores that genuine “freedom is a power for evil (Bernstein 2002, pp.80, 85).”12 Schelling’s general opus is sprawling and stretches over several phases or periods. For present purposes, the most pertinent text is his study of 1809 entitled “Philosophical Inquires into the Nature of Human Freedom” (Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit). The text is subdivided into several parts or sections, some of them critical of earlier conceptions and others—the core of the text—offering an alternative conception of both human freedom and its relation to evil. By way of introduction, Schelling clears up some issues which might stand in the way of his inquiry: whether “freedom” can be meaningfully discussed without broader “systematic” considerations; whether “pantheism” (a topic hotly debated at the time) is necessarily hostile to freedom or only in some cases; and finally, whether and in what sense Spinoza’s system could be termed pantheistic and/or fatalistic. The mention of Spinoza opens a longer section of critical observations. For Schelling, Spinoza’s work is the episteme of an abstract monism (quite independently of the meaning of his pantheism). In his words: “This system is not fatalism just because it lets things be conceived in God; for, as we have shown, pantheism does not make formal freedom impossible.” Rather, the error of Spinoza’s system is due “not to the fact that he posits all things in God, but to the fact that they are mere things [or objects]”—that is, “to the abstract conception of the world and its creatures, indeed of the eternal Footnote 11 continued will, compare his statement: “If there were a cause of the will. . . what could precede the will and be its cause? Either it is the will itself, and nothing else than the will is the root; or it is not the will which is not sinful. Either the will itself is the original cause of sin, or no sin is the original cause of sin. . .. I do not know why you would wish to look for anything further.” See Rorty(2001, p. 53). 12 The final citation is taken from Schelling (1936). In the following I use Gutman’s translation; but I also consult, and constantly compare this translation with, the German original as found in Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände, ed. T. Buchheim (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1997).

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substance itself which is also a thing for him.” It was in opposition to the abstract objectivism of Spinoza that later Enlightenment “idealism” constituted a dramatic advance: namely, by energizing, revitalizing, and spiritualizing the monistic system. What emerged as the highest idealist principle was free will or will as “primordial being,” as “groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation.” Yet, no matter to what height it raised philosophy, idealism as a monism necessarily left out of account its other side: nature and unwilled being. In Schelling’s lapidary formulation: From this very fact it can be seen in advance that the most profound difficulties which lie in the concept of freedom will be as likely solvable through idealism, taken in itself, as through any other incomplete system. For idealism supplies only the most general conception of freedom, and a merely formal one at that. But the real and vital conception of freedom is that it is the possibility of good and evil (Bernstein 1936, pp. 22–24, 26).13 In discussing idealism, Schelling also reviews correctives introduced by some Enlightenment thinkers, including Fichte and Kant. Fichte’s decision to construe the highest pinnacle of philosophy as “subjective activity and freedom” seemed indeed to energize monism further, but failed entirely to show how the rest of the world (including nature and the realm of things) was rooted in “subjective activity.” In the case of Kant, freedom as “noumenal” capacity was defined as independence from or negation of nature and time—without any effort to move from negativity toward a “positive” notion of freedom (and evil). A similar limitation can be found in theories sublimating evil into goodness, or in accounts claiming that “evil is only a lesser degree of freedom,” that in the end “there is nothing at all positive,” and that the difference between actions is “a mere plus or minus of perfection.” In such accounts, Schelling objects, “no antithesis is established, and all evil disappears entirely.” Dissatisfied with this result, some thinkers throughout the ages have embraced antithesis and even radical dualism—a “solution,” however, which is equally and perhaps even more objectionable in its consequences. If one assumes, as one should—Schelling writes— that evil is a real force and that freedom is a “positive” power for good and evil, then the problem arises how “evil can come from God who is regarded as utter goodness.” The conclusion seems to impose itself that, if freedom is a power for evil, “it must have a root independent of God.” Compelled by this argument one may then be tempted “to throw oneself into the arms of dualism.” However, if really thought through as the doctrine of “two absolutely different and mutually independent principles,” then this dualism “is only a system of self-destruction [or self-diremption, Selbstzerreissung] and of the despair of reason (Bernstein 1936, pp.24–25, 27, 28).” Against the backdrop of these critical observations, Schelling delineates his own alternative conception—a conception which stresses difference without dualism, and unity without monistic sameness. The cornerstone of this conception is the distinction between two dimensions or senses of being: namely, actual existence (Existenz) and the basis or ground (Grund) of this existence. With regard to God, these two 13 A little later Schelling adds this passage which in effect “deconstructs” idealism and points way beyond it (p. 30): “The whole of modern European philosophy since its inception (with Descartes) has this common deficiency that nature does not exist for it and that it lacks a living basis. On this account Spinoza’s realism [objectivism] is as abstract as the idealism of Leibniz. Idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism is its body; only the two together constitute a living whole. Realism can never furnish the first principles but must be the basis and the instrument by which idealism realizes itself and takes on flesh and blood.” For a fuller discussion of Leibniz see pp. 45–46.

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dimensions are closely linked and even inseparable. “As there is nothing before or outside God,” Schelling writes, “he must contain within himself the ground of his existence.” This means that “the ground of his existence, though contained in God, in not God viewed as absolute, that is, insofar as he exists”; rather, it is only “the basis of his existence” or “nature in God”—which, to be sure, is “inseparable but yet distinguishable from him.” What emerges here is the notion of a “becoming God” or rather a becoming “in” God, of a steady self-manifestation or epiphany (provided this process is not viewed in terms of linear temporality). In things or beings apart from God, a similar process of becoming takes place, but in a different sense. Again, the distinction between “ground” and “existence” prevails. To be separate or distinguished from God, such beings have to undergo becoming in a different manner; yet, since nothing can really be “outside” of God, the conclusion is that “beings have their ground in that dimension of God which is not God himself (as existence), but only the ground of his existence.” This ground or nature in God, Schelling adds, is “the longing (Sehnsucht) which the eternal One feels to give birth to itself”; it is a longing that “seeks to give birth to God in his unfathomable unity, but to this extent has not yet the unity in itself.” In a passage profoundly challenging Enlightenment rationalism, the treatise continues: This is the incomprehensible basis of reality in things, the irreducible remainder which cannot be resolved into reason (Verstand) by the greatest exertion but always remains in the depths. Out of this which is non-rational (verstandlos), reason in the true sense is born. Without this preceding gloom, creation would have no reality; darkness is its necessary heritage. Only God—the existent himself—dwells in pure light; for he alone is self-born. . . (But) human beings are formed in their mother’s womb; and only out of the darkness of unreason (out of feeling, out of longing—that sublime mother of understanding) can clear thoughts grow.14 Given this grounding in dark nature, how does human growth or maturation occur? For Schelling, this process requires an “inner transmutation or sublimation (Verklärung) in light of what was originally the principle of darkness.” Considered by itself and apart from such transmutation, the dark ground can be described as the basic “self-will (Eigenwille) of creatures,” a self-will reduced to mere “craving or desire.” As such, this creaturely will stands opposed as mere particularity to the more universal or “primal” will seeking to be revealed in all creation. In human beings, there is indeed the possibility of such an entrenchment in particularity or a refusal to transform self-will; however, there is equally the possibility of transmutation and of the “elevation of the most abysmal center into light.” For Schelling, the distinctive quality of human beings consists precisely in the relation between darkness and light and in the possible perversion of this relation through self-will. As he writes: “In human beings we find the whole power of darkness and the whole force of light; in them dwell the deepest pit and the highest heaven.” Basically, human will is or can be construed as the latent seed of the eternal longing buried in the ground of God; it is “the divine spark of life, locked in the depths, which God unleashed when he determined to will nature.” In comparison with God, human beings are distinguished by the variable character of the relation between “ground” and “existence,” by the fact that darkness can vitiate the light. In Schelling’s formulation—which pinpoints 14 Schelling (1936, pp. 31–35) (translation occasionally slightly altered).

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the gist of his thesis: “If, now, the identity of the two principles were just as indissoluble in humans as it is in God, then there would be no difference—which means that God as existing spirit could not be revealed. Therefore, that unity which is indissoluble in God must be dissoluble in humans—and this constitutes the possibility of good and evil.”15 The remainder of Schelling’s treatise is devoted mainly to the further elaboration and clarification of his basic conception. The paths of good and evil, he notes, are indeed based on human choice (which entails ethical responsibility), but the choice itself responds to the structure of possibility (of good and evil). Self-will, we read, can “separate itself from light”; it may “as a particular will seek to be universal or what it can only be in its identity with the universal will.” If this happens, then there is a division of selfhood from light or a dissolution of the linkage of ground and existence. By contrast, if human self-will remains embedded in “central will” and if the “spirit of love” is allowed to rule, then self-will exists in a divine manner and condition. An important point re-emphasized in this context is the linkage of freedom with the possibility of real evil—a linkage which is denied by some (Enlightenment) doctrines which construe freedom as the rational mastery of desires and inclinations, and goodness (or good will) as a synonym of pure reason. For Schelling, these doctrines completely divorce good and evil from any kind of grounding—neglecting that freedom is not just an empty capacity but a response to the ground–existence nexus. Option for the good, in particular—far from reflecting arbitrary whim—means a responsiveness to divine existence and self-manifestation; to this extent it can also be called a “religious” disposition: “Genuine religiosity allows no choice between alternatives, no aequilibrium arbitrii, but only the highest commitment to the right, without any choice.” A final question raised in the text is whether there is a dimension antedating or presupposed by the distinction between ground and existence. Answering affirmatively, Schelling calls this dimension the “primal ground” (Urgrund), “un-ground” (Ungrund) or “absolute indifference”—where indifference does not mean sameness but a difference without duality or monism: “The un-ground divides itself into two equally eternal beginnings only in order that the two. . . should become one through love; that is, it divides itself only so that there may be life and love and personal existence.”16

Some interpretations of Schelling In introducing a recent collection of essays on Schelling, the editor presented his book as evidence “that after more than a century and a half of neglect, Schelling’s time has arrived” and that, in a manner of speaking, the latter is now “a contemporary Continental philosopher.” The statement is only partially correct. Actually, as the editor himself recognizes, neglect has prevailed mostly in the Anglo-American context and it is that same context that today witnesses “a bourgeoning Schelling renaissance (Wirth 2005)”. Almost 70 years ago, in 1936, Heidegger presented his famous lecture course on Schelling’s treatise on human freedom; and some 20 years later, Karl Jaspers and Walter Schulz revived interest in Schelling’s later philosophy,

15 Schelling (1936, pp. 38–39) (translation slightly altered). 16 Schelling (1936, pp. 40–41, 47, 71, 87, 89) (translation slightly altered).

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while Maurice Merleau-Ponty drew attention to Schelling’s natural philosophy.17 In the present context, it cannot possibly be my aim to present a survey of older and more recent interpretations. For the sake of brevity, I shall concentrate on a limited number of particularly prominent and insightful readings of Schelling’s text. As virtually all commentators agree, the most influential and seminal of these readings is Heidegger’s lecture course of 1936—which hence can serve as useful gateway to subsequent discussions. In this regard I follow Peter Warnek’s judicious advice when he writes: “Anyone who would give thoughtful attention to the historical timeliness of Schelling’s philosophical work today cannot rightfully neglect the contribution of Heidegger’s careful and subtle reading of Schelling’s difficult essay of 1809.” I also concur with his (somewhat bolder) claim that Schelling’s work “reveals itself only through an encounter with Heidegger, only at the limits of a Heideggerian reading (Warnek 2005).” In his lecture course, Heidegger makes no secret of the high esteem in which he holds his predecessor. Schelling, he states, “is the truly creative and most farreaching thinker of this whole age of German philosophy. He is it to such an extent that he drives German Idealism from within right past its own fundamental position (Heidegger 1989a).” The manner in which Schelling drives idealism beyond its foundations is through a decentering of its premises: particularly his effort to dislodge (at least partically) the cornerstone of the cogito, human subjectivity, and (more generally) “anthropocentrism.” In Heidegger’s view, this effort had profound repercussions on the notion of freedom. In modern Western thought, particularly its dominant ideology of “liberalism,” freedom has tended to be construed as a human property or faculty, that is, an attribute owned by humans. Following Schelling, Heidegger’s lectures at the very outset debunk this conception. This issue of human freedom, he writes, is usually treated under the rubric called the “problem of free will”; under this rubric one discusses whether human will is free or unfree and how the one or the other could be demonstrated. Basically freedom here signifies a “property of human beings” and one presumes somehow to know what “being human” means. “With this question of the freedom of the will, a question wrongly put and not even properly a question,” Heidegger counters sharply, “Schelling’s treatise has nothing whatever to do. For in Schelling freedom is not a human property or attribute, but the other way around: human Dasein figures as property of freedom.” What this means is that freedom is “the comprehensive and all-pervasive matrix in and through which human beings become human in the first place.” Still more boldly put—and this may well be a central thesis of Heidegger’s entire opus: “The essence (Wesen) of humans is grounded in freedom. But freedom itself is the hallmark of authentic Being as such, a hallmark transcending or transgressing every finite human existence. Insofar as humans are human, they must needs partake in this hallmark of Being.”18

17 Martin Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809) (Tübin-

gen: Max Niemeyer, 1971), trans. by Joan Stambaugh as Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985). Compare also Jaspers (1955); Schulz (1955/1975); Merleau-Ponty (1995). 18 Heidegger (1985, p.9) (translation slightly altered, especially to correct for gender bias). To underscore his point, Heidegger adds a memory aid (Merksatz): “Freedom not the attribute of humans, but humans the possession of freedom.” In light of this key sentence, it is altogether unintelligible how Benjamin S. Pryor can write that “Heidegger will gradually turn away from freedom as a preoccupation.” See Pryor, (2005, p. 231).

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Turning to Schelling’s conception of freedom as the possibility for good and evil, Heidegger accepts this formulation—but at the same time translates it into his own (ontological) terminology, thereby perhaps driving Schelling himself beyond his (still idealist) premises. In Schelling’s treatise, he notes, freedom is connected with the variable relation between two modes of being: “ground” and “existence” (where the former does not coincide with rational pre-supposition). While in that treatise, the relation is termed “difference” (Unterscheidung), Heidegger introduces for the same linkage the notion of a “juncture of being” or a joining of modes of being (Seynsfuge). Basically, the juncture reveals a mode of temporal becoming within being itself, that is, the unfolding of an embryonic latency into spiritual self-manifestation. In the case of God or the divine, Seynsfuge implies a move from the darkness of divine nature to full spiritual epiphany or self-disclosure (a move not to be confused with emanation). In Heidegger’s words: Schelling wants to accomplish precisely this: to conceive God’s self-development, that is, how God—not as an abstract concept but as living life—unfolds toward himself. A becoming God then? Indeed. If God is the most real of all beings, then he must undergo the greatest and most difficult becoming, and this unfolding must exhibit the farthest tension between its ‘whence’ (where-from) and its ‘wither’ (where-to). The wither or where-to is captured in Schelling’s language by the term “existence” construed as the full revealment or epiphany of the divine, while “ground” points to the stage of latent concealment and obscurity—a perspective clearly consonant with Heidegger’s notion of “aletheia” as revealment/concealment and also his linkage of becoming and being (or “being and time”). As the lecture course elaborates: “Existence (in Schelling) is understood from the outset as a move ‘out of oneself’, as an opening-up which, in opening and manifesting itself, precisely involves a coming into one’s own (zu sich selbst Kommen) and thus the possibility of ‘being’ oneself (Seyn).” With regard to God this means: “Seen as existence, God is the absolute God or simply God himself. Viewed as the ground of his existence, God is not yet actually himself; and yet: God ‘is’ also his ground.”19 As previously noted, the variable relation between ground and existence is the source of the capacity for good and evil, which in turn is the emblem of human freedom. For Schelling, divine becoming aims at progressive spiritualization or God’s revealment as spirit—a disclosure which require an otherness or a foil to testify to this process. This foil is humankind or human being as his counterpart, though distinct from God. As a creature, human beings are rooted in “nature” or the latency of divine becoming; at the same time they are the receptacle of divine light, the locus where God’s existence can become most fully apparent. This condition gives rise to conflicting possibilities: either a steady opening to divine existence, or else a perversion of the spiritual motif through withdrawal into self-will and ultimate obstinacy. In terms 19 Heidegger (1985, p. 109) (translation slightly altered). As one should note, “becoming” for Schelling and Heidegger does not involve a linear temporality and thus is far removed from historicism. In Heidegger’s words (p. 113): “One forgets to notice that in this ‘becoming’ that which becomes is already in the ground as ground. . .. God’s becoming cannot be serialized into phases in the succession of ordinary ‘time’; rather, in this becoming everything ‘is’ simultaneously. . .. This simultaneity of authentic temporality, this kairos, ‘is’ the essence of eternity—not the merely arrested presence or nunc stans.” In view of Heidegger’s extensive comments on God and the divine, it is perplexing how Joseph P. Lawrence can detect in his work a “new paganism” or a return to “the blind forces of pagan religiosity.” See Lawrence (2005, pp. 16–17).

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of Heidegger’s commentary: Dasein can remain faithful to Seynsfuge by following the divine spirit. But it can also pervert existence by arrogating or appropriating existence in an act of intellectual conceit; more radically still, it can seclude itself entirely in the opacity of its ground or nature. To the extent that both appropriation and seclusion involve self-enclosure, human self-will here rises in an act of rebellion against divine existence and its universal bond. In the words of the lecture course: “Since human self-will is still linked to spirit (as freedom), this will can in the breadth of human endeavor seek to put itself in the place of the universal will; thus, self-will can. . . as particular-separate selfishness pretend to be the ground of the whole. . .. This ability is the capacity for evil.” Repeating a point made at the beginning, what is involved here is not merely a problem of free will but a kind of ontological perversion. Basically, what happens is “the reversal of Seynsfuge into disjuncture or disjointedness (Ungefüge) whereby ground aggrandizes itself to absorb the place of existence.”20 What is crucial in Heidegger’s reading, in my view, is his resolute transgression of modern metaphysics centered in subjectivity and subjective will. As a consequence, ethical option (for good or evil) is not simply a free-standing choice but rather a mode of responsiveness to ways of being. For Heidegger, the capacity for good and evil is constitutive of the being of Dasein, reflecting its insertion in some form or other in Seynsfuge. “Humans alone,” he reiterates, “are capable of evil; but this capacity in not a human property or quality; rather, to be capable in this sense constitutes the being of humans.” Taken by itself, Dasein is neither good nor evil but capable of both. On the level of sheer possibility, it remains an “undecided being” hovering in “indecision” (Unentschiedenheit)—from which, however, it is propelled into the arena of decision by the need of self-realization. In Schelling’s treatise (as well as in Heidegger’s commentary), the transition from capability to living reality is guided neither by arbitrary whim nor by external compulsion but by a kind of inclination or bent (Hang) inclining human conduct in one way or another. In the case of evil, Schelling traces this bent to a “contraction of the ground” (Anziehen des Grundes), that is, to a self-enclosure of particularity which terminates indecision, but in such a way as to provoke divisiveness and disjuncture. On the other hand, goodness follows the attraction of spirit or existence, which in its most genuine form is the attraction of eros or love (Liebe). “Love,” Heidegger states, “is the original union of elements of which each might exist separately and yet does not so exist and cannot really be without the other.” However, love is not simply unity or identity but rather a unity in difference or a unity that lets otherness be—including the contraction of the ground and the resulting disjuncture. As he adds: “Love must condone the will of the ground, because otherwise love would annihilate itself. Only by letting the ground operate, love has that foil in or against which it can manifest its supremacy.”21 20 Heidegger (1985, pp. 141–143) (translation slightly altered). It is important to realize that for Heidegger (as for Schelling) evil, or the capacity for evil, is not simply a mode of privation or deficiency, but rather endowed with its own ontological potency. As he adds (p. 143): “Reversal and rebellion are nothing merely negative or nugatory, but rather involve the mobilization of nay-saying and nihilation into the dominant force.” 21 Heidegger (1985, pp. 147–149, 151). Toward the end of his commentary Heidegger adds these lines, containing a kind of post-metaphysical theodicy (p. 160): “God allows the oppositional will of the ground to operate in order to foster what love unifies and subordinates to itself for the glorification of the absolute. The will of love stands above the will of the ground and this predominance, this eternal decidedness—this love for itself as the essence of being—this decidedness is the innermost core of absolute freedom.” In view of this and similar passages, Jean-Luc Nancy accuses Heidegger’s account of harboring a new “ontodicy in which is preserved the possibility of a ‘safeguard’ or ‘shelter’ of

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Among more recent interpretations, Richard Bernstein’s reading stands out for its lucidity and its ability to situate Schelling’s legacy in broader intellectual networks. What attracts Bernstein to Schelling is primarily his recognition of the reality of evil— a recognition crucial “after Auschwitz”—and also (as indicated before) his ability to avoid the temptations of monism and dualism while insisting on the differentiated relationship between good and evil. Schelling, he writes, “seeks to develop a differentiated monism in which there is no ultimate divide between nature and spirit”—and, one might add, neither an ultimate divide nor an ultimate identity between good and evil. Turning to recent philosophical trends. Bernstein finds an affinity between Schelling’s position and contemporary modes of neo-naturalism, especially the “enriched non-reductive naturalism” advocated by John McDowell and others. With approval he cites McDowell’s suggestion that: “If we can rethink our conception of nature so as to make room for spontaneity. . . we shall by the same token be rethinking our conception of what it takes for a position to deserve to be called ‘naturalism’ (See McDowell 1994).” In the same context he portrays as “imaginative and provoca´ zek’s proposal—in his book The Indivisible Remainder—to establish tive” Slavoj Zi´ a linkage between Schelling’s philosophy and a non-dogmatic and spiritualized kind of “materialism (See Zizek 1996).” Relying on these and related recent initiatives, Bernstein on the whole concurs with Schelling’s complaint about the “common deficiency” of modern European philosophy—its sideling or disregard of nature—adding a cautionary warning against a widespread “dismissive attitude towards Schelling’s project of a philosophy of nature.” Prominently included among modern philosophers neglectful of nature is Immanuel Kant who—despite his attempt to “bridge the gap”— never (in Bernstein’s account) managed to establish a “continuity between nature and freedom,” between phenomenal and noumenal realms. In Schelling, by contrast, there is “no such gap” because it has given way to “sounder insight.” This does not mean that Schelling rejects human freedom or moral responsibility (emphasized by Kant); but the latter are inserted into a broader matrix and never divorced entirely from the dark ground of nature.22 In tracing philosophical repercussions and affinities, Bernstein’s reading also establishes connections with a number of perspectives not normally associated with Schelling’s legacy, especially with Nietzsche and Freud seen as the great protagonists of a “moral psychology of evil.” By insisting on the “material force” of evil, Schelling— for Bernstein—“anticipated” these two great protagonists and, in doing so, opened up new (depth psychological) “ways of questioning evil.” In the case of Nietzsche, it was especially the distinction between the good/bad and good/evil contrasts which disclosed evil as “closely associated with ressentiment.” In the case of Freud, the disclosure of unconscious or subconscious drives laid bare the profound “ambivalence” of the human psyche intimated by Schelling. Still more illuminating and intriguing Footnote 21 continued being.” See his (1998, p. 133). However, Nancy’s own account seems to endorse an empty decisionism where evil is no longer a perversion, and good and evil are equally free choices. Compare also Pryor in his (2005, pp. 226–233). 22 Bernstein (2002, pp. 82–83, 90, 92, 249 note 8). Given that, following Schelling, Heidegger likewise seeks to overcome the rift between nature and spirit or between being and morality (or “is” and “ought”), it is strange that, at another point (p. 187), Bernstein agrees with Levinas and others to the effect that “there is no place for ethics in Heidegger’s philosophy.” However, in the absence of a neat golf between “is” and “ought,” ethics clearly can no longer occupy a separate “place” from ontology. Heidegger’ critique of the reduction of freedom to the “problem of free will” points in the same direction.

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are Bernstein’s references to the philosophical-theological writings of Hans Jonas, and especially the latter’s speculations about a “becoming God” (clearly intimated in Schelling’s treatise). As Bernstein observes, God for Jonas was a “suffering” and “caring” God, but also (and most of all) a “becoming God.” In Jonas’s own words: “It is a God emerging in time instead of possessing a completed being that remains identical with itself throughout eternity.” In contrast to a certain Hellenic tradition which assigned priority to eternal being over becoming, Jonas privileged the temporal dimension, asserting that the concept of “divine becoming” can be better reconciled with the portrayal of God in the Hebrew Bible where God is affected and indeed altered by what human beings do (to each other and to the world). What this view of God’s dependence on humans—or of reciprocal dependence—implies is a revision of the conception of God as all-powerful or omnipotent (in the sense of worldly power). To quote Jonas again: But if God is to be intelligible in some manner and to some extent (and to this we must hold), then his goodness must be compatible with the existence of evil, and this it is only if he is not all-powerful. Only then can we uphold that he is intelligible and good, and there is yet evil in the world (Bernstein 2002, pp. 6, 95, 97, 196, 198).23

Politics and the “End to Evil” The topic of evil is not confined to philosophy books but looms large in both personal and political life. The notion of the “reality” of evil—stressed in preceding discussions—points precisely to this ominous presence. The twentieth century and the beginning of our own amply testify to the destructive potency of evil in the world. And the end is by no means in sight. Steady advances in weapons technology herald breakthroughs to previously unfathomed levels of devastation. In the words of Lance Morrow: “The globalization, democratization, and miniaturization of the instruments of [mass] destruction (nuclear weapons or their diabolical chemical-biological step brothers) mean a quantum leap in the delivery systems of evil.” In the new situation when virtually everyone—states as well as non-state actors—can acquire doomsday machines, destructiveness is both localized and globalized. Micro-evil and macro-evil, Morrow adds, come to achieve “an ominous reunion in any bid for the apocalyptic gesture. That is the real evil that is going around.” Simple-minded naïveté surely is not the appropriate stance to adopt at this point. In fact, given the danger of global destruction, it may be “catastrophic not to think clearly about evil, not to be aware of what it is capable of doing (Morrow 2003, pp.5, 17).” The question remains, however: what does it mean to “think clearly” about evil, both philosophically and politically? More specifically: what are the implications when “evil” is used as a political category? Recent history provides a pointer. As we all know, and as Morrow reminds as, President Bush soon after September 11 spoke of an “axis of evil” in application to some Islamic countries (plus North Korea)—a designation that was promptly reciprocated in some of these countries by talk about the “Satanic” West. In light of the above philosophical discussions, one may ask here: Which of the various “theories of evil” has the closest fit with this rhetoric? As it seems to me, 23 The citations are taken from Jonas (1996). As one will note, Jonas privileges becoming over being, whereas Heidegger’s reading reconciles becoming and being (or “being and time”).

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Manichaeism stands on the top of the list. As Morrow remarks: “George W. Bush and his critics use the word ‘evil’ in ways that suggest both sides are fighting the last war” (that is, Armageddon). The Manichaean streak is particularly pronounced in some American leaders. “President Bush,” he continues, “uses the word in an aggressively in-your-face born-again manner that takes its resonance from a long Judeao-Christian tradition of radical evil embodied in heroically diabolical figures.” Perhaps the closest parallel exists with some forms of radical Puritanism during the post-Reformation period. For Morrow, evil in Bush’s usage has “the perverse prestige of John Milton’s defiant Lucifer” where “evil emanates, implicitly, from a devilish intelligence with horns and a tail, an absolutely malevolent personality, God’s rival in the cosmos, condemned to lose the fight (eventually), but nonetheless powerful in the world.” Given the Manichaean imagery at work here, it is clear that there can be no truce or compromise in the ongoing struggle—seen as the “last war (Morrow 2003, pp. 15-16).” Susan Neiman reaches a similar conclusion on this point: “Each party to such conflicts insists with great conviction that its opponents’ actions are truly evil (while its own are merely expedient)”; obviously, there can be “no end of misery as long as each side is certain that the other embodies evil at its core (Neiman 2004, p. XV).”24 As noted before, Manichaeism involves the struggle of absolutely good against absolutely evil forces; hence, the notion of an “axis of evil” depends on the assumption of radical goodness on the other side. Lance Morrow is again on target when he writes about this assumption: “An evil kind of innocence—the ignorant innocence of the powerful—runs through the American story and reasserts itself from time to time in a certain obliviousness in, for example, the area of foreign policy.” This innocence is the result of a long history of isolationism and American “exceptionalism” spawning the image of the “city on a hill.” Despite the horrendous treatment of native Americans, despite the experience of slavery, and even despite Hiroshima, this self-imagine persists. “Americans need to feel virtuous,” Morrow states tersely, adding: The hardest possibility Americans have to confront about themselves is always the thought that they may be evil. That is the thing they find most difficult to face. If there comes a moment when John Wayne is evil, for example, the implications for Americans are intolerable; an entire edifice of American self-myth beings to disintegrate. To be sure, a dose of realism persuades most Americans that some (seemingly) evil acts need to be done—precisely in order to maintain goodness and innocence. In this regard, political leaders are likely to speak of “permissible evil,” that is, evil done for the sake of the greater good—a notion patterned on the view that God also allows evil (at least apparent evil) to occur in the world. At this juncture, Manichaeism slides over into theodicy, but a peculiar American-style theodicy. For, although God may permit evil to occur, Americans grant themselves the permission to commit evil acts—and, as Morrow observes, they have historically granted themselves “a considerable range of permissible evil (Morrow 2003, pp. 11, 131–132, 152).”25 24 As she adds tersely (p. xiv): “The Bush administration is busy making use of events that were undeniably evil to further partisan ends judged by much of the world to be a greater threat to a peaceful and just world order than any we have seen in decades. It’s not the first time that ‘evil’ has been part of a war cry; but whether or not the administration achieves all its goals in doing so, it will remain a classic example of the politicization of evil for many years.” 25 As Morrow adds (pp. 152–153): “The American acceptance of permissible evil arises from the nation’s immensely flattering conception of itself. Who is to blame a country of such virtue—divinely

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Apart from involving a struggle of good and evil forces, Manichaeism also implies the notion of the ultimate victory of one side and the utter destruction or eradication of the other side. This aspect brings me back to the issue raised at the beginning of these pages: the issue of a termination of evil by political force as advocated by Frum and Perle in their book An End to Evil. As previously indicated, their book proposes a “winning” strategy: an all-out warfare against evil with the ultimate goal of victory. Americans, they write, are “fighting to win”; and although the goal may still be in he future, the “end to evil” will be “brought into being by American armed might and defended by American might (Frum and Perle 2003, pp. 9, 279).”26 In terms of theories or conceptions of evil, this proposal clearly has a Manichaean cast, with some borrowings from theodicy—legacies which render it profoundly questionable if not pernicious. As an account of the role of evil in the world, Manichaeism has been emphatically denounced by philosophers and religious leaders at least since the time of St. Augustine; even moderate forms of metaphysical dualism have suffered a similar fate. Borrowings from theodicy do not help at all. At least since Auschwitz, theodicy-like arguments have lost most of their luster and appeal—and Americanstyle theodicy is no exception. In the blunt words of Bernstein: “After Auschwitz, it is obscene to continue to speak of evil and suffering as something to be justified by, or reconciled with, a benevolent cosmological scheme” (which permits apparent evil to happen. Bernstein 2002, p. 229). The proposal of a political or military “end to evil” becomes even more dubious when placed in the context of Schelling’s nuanced conception of evil. As indicated before, the notions of good and evil in Schelling’s thought are intimately linked with human freedom; in fact, freedom signifies precisely the possibility for good and evil. In light of these premises, extermination of evil by political or military force means also the termination of human freedom, including political freedom. This result—the conflation of “end to evil” and “end to freedom”—is a curious upshot of a strategy ostensibly aiming at the victory of “freedom” over non-freedom, that is, at the triumph of Western-style “enduring freedom” in the rest of the world. However, the defect of the proposal resides not only in its danger to freedom, but in its contamination of goodness with willful particularity—in this case, the particularity of “American military might.” As will be recalled, evil in Schelling’s account consists chiefly in selfglorification and the usurpation of “universal” goodness by particular self-will. Seen in this light, the triumph over evil through particular military might shades over into ´ zek in his commentary on Schelling offers the triumph of evil. On this point, Slavoj Zi´ some telling insights: “Evil” in its most elementary form is such a “short circuit” between the particular and the universal, such a presumption to believe that my words and deeds Footnote 25 continued. sponsored from its very origins—for certain inconsistencies and imperfections?. . . Who ‘permits’ permissible evil? In a nation sponsored by God, permissible evil means that no less an authority than God Himself permits it to be done—just as in the world at large, God who is all-good and all-powerful, permits evil to occur, creating in that apparent contradiction the conundrum of theodicy. George W. Bush’s rationale for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 rested crucially on the argument that it was a necessary evil” or at least a “permissible evil—permissible meaning that the Americans gave themselves permission for it, drawing upon their immense resources of divine approval, the trust fund that God gave them when they started out.” 26 The concluding chapter in their book is titled “A War for Liberty,” that is, liberty in the world at large.

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are directly words and deeds of the big Other (nation, culture, state, God), a presumption which “inverts” the proper relationship between the particular and the universal: when I proclaim myself the immediate “functionary of humanity” (or nation or culture), I thereby effectively accomplish the exact opposite of what I claim to be doing—that is, I degrade the universal dimension to which I refer (humanity, nation, state) to my own particularly. . .. The more I refer to the universal in order to legitimate my acts, the more effectively I abase it to a ´ zek 1996, pp. 64–65). means of my own self-assertion (Zi´ ´ zek’s comments, writing: In his study on Radical Evil, Richard Bernstein echoes Zi´ “Evil turns out to be not particularity as such but its erroneous, ‘perverted’ unity with the universal: not ‘egotism’ as such, but egotism in the guise of its opposite (Bernstein 2002, p.91).”27 With these words—one should note well—Bernstein does not mean to endorse evil, nor to deny that evil needs to be countered and combated wherever possible. The question is only how this should be done, or how we might contemplate an end to evil? My argument in these pages has been that this cannot be done along Manichaean lines through military might, that is, by arrogating to oneself all the goodness while assigning all the evil to one’s opponents. If Manichaeism (together with theodicy) is put aside, then the struggle against evil can only be a common struggle, a struggle where all particularities combine in the search for goodness. A first step along this road has to be an admission by all parties of our failings and imperfections, shunning self-glorification of any kind. The next step has to be a sincere willingness, on the side of all parties, to set aside conceit in favor of the search of a shared “good life.” For religious people—Christians and non-Christians alike—this search can only proceed with divine assistance or the help of divine grace. Yet, much room is also left for human effort and engagement, especially the fostering of good will through education and personal example. In terms of the notion of a “becoming God” formulated by Hans Jonas (but traceable to Schelling), God must assist humans in becoming properly human, while humans need to assist God to be properly God. Jonas quotes from the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman from the Netherlands who perished in Auschwitz in 1943: “I will always endeavor to help God as well as I can. . .. With every heartbeat it becomes clearer to me that you cannot help us, but that we must help you and defend up to the last your dwelling within us.”28

References 1. Arabi, I. (1976). “Whoso Knoweth Himself ...,” trans. T. H. Weir. Gloucestershire, UK: Beshara Press, pp. 4–5. 2. Bernstein, R. J. (2002). Radical evil: A philosophical interrogation. (p. 1). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 3. Dallmayr, F. (2004). A global spiritual resurgence? Some Christian and Islamic legacies. In Peace talks-Who will listen? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 80–82. 4. Delbanco, A. (1995). The death of Satan: How Americans lost the sense of evil. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 27 As he adds (p. 96): “Schelling’s conception of evil as a ‘spiritualized’ assertion of a perverted selfwill that glorifies itself, has delusion of omnipotence, and takes itself to be the expression of universal will is especially relevant for an understanding of twentieth-century totalitarianism and terrorism. Even in a post-totalitarian world, we witness the temptation of those who think that they can impose their particular self-will on others by claiming universality for it.” 28 Hillesum (1989); quoted in Jonas, Mortality and Morality, p. 192, and in Bernstein (2002, p. 199).

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5. Deussen, P. (1906). Outline of the Vedanta system of philosophy according to Shankara, trans. J. H. Woods and C. B. Runkel. New York: Grafton Press. 6. Frum D., & Perle, R. (2003). An end to evil: How to win the war on terror. New York: Random House, p. 9. 7. Heidegger, M. (1985). Schelling’s treatise on the essence of human freedom, trans. Stambaugh. Athens: Ohio University Press, p. 4. 8. Hillesum, E. (1989). An interrupted life: The diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–43. New York: Pantheon Books. 9. Jaspers, K. (1955). Schelling: Grösse and Verhängnis. Munich: Piper. 10. Jonas, H. (1934–1935). Gnosis and spätantiker Geist, 2 vols. Göttingen: Vanderhoek & Ruprecht. 11. Jonas, H. (1963). The gnostic religion. Boston: Beacon Press. 12. Jonas, H. (1996). The concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish voice. In Vogel, L. (Ed.), Mortality and morality: A search for God after Auschwitz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 137, 140. 13. Kant, I. (1960). Religion within the limits of reason alone, trans. T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson. New York: Harper Torchbooks, pp. 27, 33, 46, 56. 14. Lawrence, J. P. (2005). Philosophical Religion and quest for authenticity. In Wirth (Ed.), Schelling now. 15. Luther, M. (1961). Selections from his writings. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 16. McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 77. 17. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1995). La Nature: Notes de Cours du Collège de France, Séglard, D. (Ed.). 1956–1960; Paris: Editions du Seuil. 18. Morrow, L. (2003). Evil: An investigation. New York: Basic Books, p. 16. 19. Nancy, J. L. (1998). The experience of freedom. trans. B. McDonald Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 20. Neiman, S. (2004). Evil in modern thought: An alternative history of philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 11. 21. Organ, T. W. (1980). The Hindu quest for the perfection of man. Athens, OH: Ohio University, pp. 181–193. 22. Pagels, E. (1979). The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House. 23. Pagels, E. (1995). The origin of Satan. New York: Random House. 24. Pryor B. S. (2005) Giving way to... freedom: A note after Nancy and Schelling. In Wirth, J. M. (Ed.), Schelling now, p. 231. 25. Radhakrishnan, S. (1928). Vedanta according to Shankara and Ramanuja. London: Allen and Unwin. 26. Raghavendracharya, H. N. (1941). The Dvaita philosophy and its place in the Vedanta. Mysore: University of Mysore. 27. Rorty, A. O. (Ed.) (2001). The many faces of evil: Historical perspectives. London, New York: Routledge, pp. xiv-xv. 28. Schelling, F. W. J. (1936). Schelling: Of human freedom, trans. James Gutman. Chicago, IL: Open Court, p. 27. 29. Schulz, W. (1955/1975). Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings. Pfullingen: Neske. 30. von Leibniz, G. W. (1985). Theodicy: Essays on the goodness of God, the freedom of man and the origin of evil, trans. E. M. Huggard. La Salle, IL: Open Court. 31. Warnek, P. (2005). Reading Schelling after Heidegger. In Wirth, J. M. (Ed.), Schelling now. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 168–19. 32. Wirth, J. M. (2005). Introduction: Schelling now. In Wirth J. M. (Ed.), Schelling now: Contemporary readings. (p. 9). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ´ zek, S. (1996). The indivisible remainder: An essay on Schelling and related matters. London: 33. Zi´ Verso.

Int J Philos Relig (2006) 60:187–207 DOI 10.1007/s11153-006-0006-5 O R I G I NA L PA P E R

Salvaging and secularizing the semantic contents of religion: the limitations of Habermas’s postmetaphysical proposal Maeve Cooke

Received: 17 March 2006 / Accepted: 30 March 2006 / Published online: 16 November 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Abstract The article considers Jürgen Habermas’s views on the relationship between postmetaphysical philosophy and religion. It outlines Habermas’s shift from his earlier, apparently dismissive attitude towards religion to his presently more receptive stance. This more receptive stance is evident in his recent emphasis on critical engagement with the semantic contents of religion and may be characterized by two interrelated theses: (a) the view that religious contributions should be included in political deliberations in the informally organized public spheres of contemporary democracies, though translated into a secular language for the purposes of legislation and formal decision making and (b) the view that postmetaphysical philosophy should seek to salvage the semantic contents of religious traditions in order to supply the evocative images, exemplary figures, and inspirational narratives it needs for its social and political projects. With regard to (a), it argues that the translation requirement impairs the political autonomy of religious believers and other metaphysically inclined citizens, suggesting that this difficulty could be alleviated by making a distinction between epistemologically authoritarian and non-authoritarian religious beliefs. With regard to (b), it argues that the salvaging operation is not as straightforward as Habermas seems to suppose and that social and political philosophy may not be able to tap the semantic power of religious traditions without relying on metaphysical assumptions; it concludes that, here, too, a distinction between authoritarian and non-authoritarian approaches to knowledge and validity may be useful. Keywords Habermas · Religion · Postmetaphysical thinking · Public sphere · Semantic resource In a number of recent essays Jürgen Habermas examines the relationship between religion and philosophy, in particular, between religion and those modes of social and

M. Cooke (B) School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland e-mail: [email protected]

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political philosophy that are guided by what he calls a “postmetaphysical” impulse.1 In the present context, the most important feature of postmetaphysical thinking as understood by Habermas is its agnosticism with regard to the validity of religious beliefs. This agnosticism is based on the theses that philosophical truth claims—like the truth claims of science and universalist morality—must be capable of being supported publicly by reasons that everyone, everywhere could come to accept and that religious convictions are not capable of being supported publicly by such reasons. A second important feature of postmetaphysical thinking, closely related to the first, is its rejection of ideas of transcendence in a metaphysical, “otherworldly” sense; accordingly, the reference point for its claims to validity is not something beyond human practices and human history, but internal to them. This is not to say that postmetaphysical thinking rejects transcendent reasoning. To the contrary, it is crucial to Habermas’s project of a critical theory of society that postmetaphysical reason has a context-transcending power that enables it to call into question the specific practices, judgments, and standards of validity that prevail in any given sociocultural context at any particular time.2 Importantly, however, the source of its context-transcending power is not metaphysical but “innerworldly”; this is why Habermas describes the context-transcending power of postmetaphysical reason, which he claims is immanent to the communicative practices of everyday life, as “transcendence from within”.3 Given Habermas’s advocacy of postmetaphysical thinking, with its agnosticism regarding the truth of religious beliefs and its innerworldly character, one might expect him to be dismissive of religious language, religious teachings, and religious practices. In the early 1980s this appeared to be the case. In The Theory of Communicative Action, published in German in two volumes in 1981, Habermas presents the disenchantment and disempowering of the domain of the sacred as an unequivocal gain for humanity. (See, for example Habermas, 1987, p. 77). By the end of that decade, however, he occasionally acknowledges the—at least, temporary—importance of religion as a semantic resource for postmetaphysical philosophy. For example, in the concluding passage of a 1988 essay he remarks that even postmetaphysical thinking will be able “neither to replace nor to repress religion, so long as religious language is the bearer of a semantic content that is inspiring and even indispensable”; to be sure, he also hints that its indispensability might be the result of a deficiency in the explanatory force of philosophical language that might someday be overcome. (Habermas, 1992, p. 51.) Around this time, in a discussion with philosophers of religion and theologians, he displays similar signs of a cautious openness to the relevance of religion for postmetaphysical thinking: here he observes that the process of critical appropriation of the essential contents of the major religious traditions is still in train and that its results are hard to foresee (Habermas, 1991, p. 141). His willingness to allow for the continuing relevance of religion is coupled, however, with an insistence that postmetaphysical philosophy cannot engage with questions relating to the validation of religious truth claims: instead, postmetaphysical philosophy may make use of the semantic resources of religion only if it translates these contents into a neutralizing language and adopts an attitude of “methodological atheism” with regard to their validity. (pp. 136–139). 1 See Habermas (2003a, 2005a) For Habermas’s account of postmetaphysical thinking see Habermas (1992). 2 Habermas (1996). pp.1–9. See also Cooke (1994, 2006a). 3 Habermas (1991, pp.127–156) In Habermas (1996), he refers to the power of communicative reason as “innerworldly transcendence” (p. 5).

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Scattered remarks of this kind from his writings of the late 1980s herald a shift in Habermas’s position that is evident in a number of essays dealing with religion in relation to postmetaphysical thinking that have appeared in the past 5 years.1 The tone of these essays is noticeably less cautious concerning the question of the importance of religion as a semantic resource. Moreover, the change in tone is accompanied by a new call for the inclusion of contributions expressed in religious language in public debates in contemporary democracies. (See Habermas, 2005b). He now makes a plea for a post-secular, democratic, public sphere in which participants in discussion would be open to the cognitive contents of religious as well as non-religious contributions. This attitude of openness is required of citizens with, as he puts it, light metaphysical baggage, as well as of citizens who are metaphysically more heavily burdened. (See Habermas, 2005g, p. 270). secularly minded citizens are required to adopt a self-critical attitude towards the limits of secular rationality and strive to be open to the power of religious reasons; religiously minded citizens are required to acknowledge the secular basis of political authority and to accept the validity of core liberal democratic principles such as equality and liberty.4 Habermas mentions two reasons for his shift in position (Habermas, 2003b). The first is that recent developments in biotechnology (particularly in the field of genetic engineering) threaten an instrumentalization of human nature that fundamentally endangers our understanding of ourselves as members of the human species. They raise the question of whether this instrumentalization can be countered without the semantic resources of religious thinking. The second is that the terrorist attacks by fundamentalist Islamic militants from September 11th 2001 onwards indicate a widespread disenchantment with Western models of societal modernization. They raise the question of whether a process of modernization that is in danger of de-railing can be rescued with purely secular means. It seems, therefore, that Habermas’s new call for the inclusion of religious contributions in democratic deliberation is motivated in significant measure by societal developments that have led to a greater appreciation of the need for postmetaphysical thinking to draw on the semantic resources of the major religious traditions. Habermas hints at a further motivating factor when he distinguishes his new position from John Rawls’s view of the place of religion in democratic deliberation: the need to avoid a split between the identities of individual citizens as participants in political processes and their identities as religious believers. Like a number of other commentators (See for example, Cooke, 2000; McCarthy, 1994). Habermas sees this as a problem with Rawls’s approach. As is well known, in Rawls’s model of political liberalism, citizens are required to leave behind their religious worldviews when they engage in deliberation and decision-making in the public, political domain. Rawls argues that in a secular state, only those political decisions can be held to be legitimate that can be justified by reasons that are generally acceptable to all (“reasonable”), citizens (See Rawls, 1993), whether they be religious believers or non-believers and whatever particular religious convictions they may hold. This principle is central to Rawls’s argument in Political Liberalism. However, he modifies it in a subsequent essay by introducing a distinction between political discussions among politicians and officials concerned to formulate and justify laws and principles and political discussions in the public sphere. (Rawls, 1997). Whereas the principle applies strictly in the case of the former, he concedes 4 Habermas (2005a), pp. 10–12 and Habermas (2005b), pp. 142–144.

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that it may be relaxed in the case of the latter to allow, temporarily, for religious contributions. Thus, in political discussions in the public sphere, religious and other comprehensive doctrines, on condition that they are “reasonable”, may be introduced at any time, “provided that in due course proper political reasons—and not reasons solely given by comprehensive doctrines—are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support” (p. 784). Habermas points out that Rawls’s conception of public reason imposes an intolerable psychological burden on the inhabitants of liberal democratic orders, for it obliges them to divorce their identities as religious believers from their identities as democratic citizens. When they put on their citizens’ caps and engage in political discussions in the public domain, participants are required to distance themselves from the comprehensive doctrines that shape their identities and on which they draw in their deliberations in all non-public contexts. In consequence, a burdensome psychological split between the public and non-public components of identity seems inevitable. Habermas rebukes Rawls for overlooking the pivotal role that religion plays in the life of religious believers. He points out that, for religious believers, religious faith is not just a doctrine with a specific content, it constitutes a source of energy that nourishes and invigorates their entire lives (Habermas, 2005b, p. 133). Concerned to avoid a psychological burden of the sort Rawls imposes, Habermas calls for a democratic public sphere in which religious and non-religious contributions would be granted an equal hearing in discussions. To be sure, his shift in position regarding the inclusion of religious contributions in processes of democratic deliberation does not extend to the “official” political sphere of democratic legislation and decision-making in which, as for Rawls, only arguments formulated in a secular language are permissible. I come back to this point below. Habermas’s call for the inclusion of religious contributions in processes of democratic deliberation not only contrasts with Rawls’s model of political liberalism; it is new within the context of his own theory of law and democracy. In Between Facts and Norms, his major work in this area, first published in 1992, Habermas made no reference to the public discussion of religious convictions. Strikingly, in his discussion of the various types of public discourses that feed into democratic legislative and decision-making processes, religious discourses—or discourses in which religious contributions play a key role—are not mentioned (Habermas, 1996, pp. 157–168). This is particularly noteworthy in light of the fact that the book makes use of a conception of discourse that is considerably more generous than the one found in The Theory of Communicative Action. In that work, Habermas had restricted the category of discourse, understood as validity-oriented, public debate guided by idealizing suppositions regarding the conduct and outcome of the debate, to discussion of claims to validity that everyone, everywhere could accept for the same reasons (Habermas, 1984). Only discussions relating to truth and to universalist morality were deemed to fall into this category. In an essay first published in 1991, however, Habermas outlines a model of practical reason that allows for ethical-existential discourses (and, indeed, pragmatic discourses) in addition to moral ones (Habermas, 1993). By introducing the category of ethical-existential discourses, he expands the framework of his discourse theory to allow for validity-oriented, public debate on matters relating to what Charles Taylor calls “strong evaluations”: imperatives oriented towards a goal that is posited as good for a given individual but is not reducible to subjective purposes or preferences (p. 5). Between Facts and Norms goes even further by extending the category of ethical discourse to include public debates on shared strong

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evaluations: in such debates, referred to as ethical-political discourses, participants seek to clarify their collective goals and collective self-understandings (Habermas, 1996, pp. 96–97). Importantly, however, Habermas retains a sharp distinction between ethical discourses and moral discourses. In his account, moral discourses are concerned with the justification and application of norms that stipulate reciprocal rights and duties; they aim towards reaching universal agreement concerning the universalizability of interests (Habermas, 1991, p. 149). Ethical discourses, by contrast, involve the hermeneutical clarification of individual and collective self-understandings and clinical questions of a happy or “not-failed” life; they aim to provide advice concerning the correct conduct of life and the realization of personal or collective life-projects (Habermas, 1996, pp. 8–9); the orientation towards validity built into ethical discourses is construed as a concern to arrive at an outcome that is not universally valid but holds only “for me” or “for us” as members of a particular collective. (Habermas, 1991, p. 149). Habermas’s silence in Between Facts and Norms regarding public discussion of religious convictions may be connected with the fact that religious validity claims do not fit easily into either the category of moral discourses or the category of ethical discourses: indeed, they seem to undermine the categorial distinction between universal and non-universal validity claims on which his distinction between the two categories of discourse is based. For Habermas, universal validity claims are claims that could be accepted by everyone, everywhere for the same reasons5 evidently, he regards moral claims as being of this kind; theoretical and empirical truth claims, too, are deemed to belong in this category. Non-universal validity claims are claims that could win only local acceptance because they are tied to the particular perspective of an individual or collective; evidently, he regards ethical validity claims are being of this kind; aesthetic validity claims, too, are deemed to belong in this category. The case of aesthetic validity claims is especially relevant since Habermas appears to base their non-universality on a world-disclosing function that he also attributes to religious claims.6 Drawing on the writings of Albrecht Wellmer, Habermas links aesthetic validity claims to experiences that show us the world in a new way, potentially changing every aspect of our everyday life.7 This world-disclosing function creates problems so far as their universal acceptability is concerned. In order for aesthetic validity claims to be universally acceptable, everyone, everywhere would have had to have undergone a similar world-disclosing experience that resulted in their seeing the world in a similar new way. Furthermore, this similar experience would have to be translatable into a mutually intelligible language of justification. As I argued some years ago, the difficulties involved in meeting these conditions mean that aesthetic validity claims are unsuitable candidates for inclusion in Habermas’s category of universal validity claims.8 Since Habermas also 5 In the context of Habermas’s discourse theory, “universal acceptability” means, at a minimum, acceptance by all participants in an argumentative procedure (discourse) that satisfies certain demanding conditions such as inclusion of all relevant arguments, equal opportunity to exchange arguments, shared concern to find the single right answer, etc. 6 In Habermas (1991), pp. 146–147, Habermas explicitly compares religious and aesthetic validity claims with respect to their world-disclosing function. 7 See Habermas (1998). Here, Habermas cites Wellmer’s essay (1991). 8 Cooke (2001). Although I still regard my argument here as correct, I would now add that Habermas’s difficulties are caused in significant part by his view that universal agreement must be actually achievable. If we give up this view and, instead, interpret “universal acceptability” as a regulative idea that has an orienting force but is not achievable in actual human practices, then it becomes

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attributes a world-disclosing function to religious validity claims, it may be presumed that they, too, are unsuitable candidates. However, unlike aesthetic validity claims (as Habermas construes them9 ), religious validity claims do not fit readily into the category of non-universal validity claims either. To place them in this category would be to ignore their evident universal orientation: their reference to a truth that holds for everyone, everywhere.10 In sum, religious validity claims destabilize the very distinction between universal and non-universal validity claims. At no point has Habermas explicitly drawn this conclusion; nor has he acknowledged its implications for his discourse theory of democratic deliberation. He has, however, drawn attention to the dilemma it creates for theology that is sympathetic to postmetaphysical thinking (Habermas, 1991, pp. 128–148). In his discussion with philosophers of religion and theologians in the late 1980s he makes the point that however sympathetic theology may be to this kind of thinking, it cannot adopt the attitude of methodological atheism appropriate for postmetaphysical philosophy in its dealings with religious validity claims. If it is to be faithful to its own identity, theology is obliged to see the claims to validity raised for religious teachings as analogous to truth claims: as validity claims that are universal in reach, capable of being supported by reasons that everyone, everywhere could accept. If it were merely to “cite” religious experiences, leaving aside the question of their truth or lack of it, it would have to give up its claim to absolute validity: to a form of validity that transcends all merely local evaluative contexts (p. 140). Consequently, Habermas sees only two avenues open for a theology inclined towards postmetaphysical thinking. Either the “protestant” avenue of appeal to a source of religious insight independent of reason or the “enlightened catholic” avenue of appeal to an experiential basis tied to the language of a particular tradition and susceptible to evaluation only within this tradition. In the first case, theology severs the link between truth and argumentative justification, which is one of the fundamental premises of postmetaphysical thinking. In the second case, theology denies to religious arguments any claim to context-transcending validity, thereby calling into question the theological enterprise’s reference to truth. In other words, in Habermas’s work, at least up to and including Between Facts and Norms, religious and theological validity claims pose the problem that they assert universal validity for propositions and norms on which universal, discursively reached agreement seem unattainable in practice. This inhibits any rational discussion of their claims to validity in processes of democratic deliberation that accept the premises of postmetaphysical thinking. Ethical validity claims, by contrast, are deemed to be open to rational discussion, on the proviso that such discussion is confined to hermeneutic elucidation and interpretation and leaves aside their orientation towards validity in a universal sense.11 Habermas does not see this suspension of the question of ethiFootnote 8 continued considerably easier to accommodate validity claims with a world-disclosing function in Habermas’s schema of universal validity claims. See my discussion of regulative ideas in Cooke, 2006a. 9 Questions may justifiably be raised as regards Habermas’s characterization of aesthetic validity claims as non-universal. Certainly, his position is at odds with Immanuel Kant’s views on the universality of aesthetic judgments. See Kant (1987). 10 In Habermas (1991), Habermas shows signs of acknowledging this universal orientation. See my discussion in Cooke (2001b) pp. 235–236. 11 For an argument supporting the universality of ethical validity claims, see Cooke (2006a). As a general rule Habermas treats ethical validity claims as though they lacked any orientation towards validity in a universal sense. On occasion, however, he acknowledges their orientation towards something that

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cal truth as a problem since he takes for granted that the citizens of contemporary democracies, recognizing the plurality and intractability of ethical viewpoints, share his view that the truth content of strong evaluations is not open to public assessment and that they are not troubled by this. As indicated, two societal factors appear to have motivated Habermas to propose the inclusion of religious contributions in processes of democratic deliberation: the instrumentalization of human nature threatened by developments in biotechnology and the perceived emptiness of Western models of modernization. In both cases, he worries that postmetaphysical thinking lacks the semantic resources necessary for an adequate response. In addition, he is concerned to avoid the psychologically burdensome split between religious identity and political identity that he sees as an unwelcome by-product of Rawls’s approach to public reason. However, as we have seen, his theory of validity claims (at least up to and including Between Facts and Norms) is unable to accommodate public discussion of the truth content of religious contributions. Habermas’s recent proposal invites us to consider whether he has modified his theory in order to allow for this kind of discussion, in particular, whether he has redesigned his conceptual apparatus in order to permit thematization of the truth content of propositions and norms, whose claims to truth are tied to experiences of world-disclosure. Closer consideration of his proposal reveals that he has not redesigned his theory in this way. Instead, he endeavors to accommodate public discussion of religious validity claims within his existing conceptual apparatus by way of a distinction between validity claims, whose cognitive contents are open to critical assessment and validity claims, with whose cognitive contents postmetaphysical thinking must critically engage. This—implicit—distinction is evident, to begin with, in his restriction of public discussion of religious truth claims to informal processes of democratic deliberation. As indicated earlier, Habermas’s proposal for the inclusion of religious contributions in democratic deliberation is accompanied by a crucial qualification. Thematization of religious validity claims is held to be permissible only in the domains described by Habermas as the weak publics of civil society, which are concerned primarily with opinion-formation. In the model of law and politics presented in Between Facts and Norms, these weak publics are demarcated from the formally organized, public sphere of democratic legislation and decision-making, which comprises bodies such as the parliament and the judiciary; this sphere is concerned primarily with “will-formation and decision-making” (Habermas, 1996, pp. 304–308). The opinion-forming, weak publics and the will-forming, legislative and decision-making bodies are presented as distinct domains of public deliberation, although the importance of a permanent feedback relation between the two is emphasized. Contributions between the weak publics and the legislative and decision-making bodies are filtered by a range of political institutions and offices. His call for the inclusion of religious contributions in democratic deliberations relates solely to deliberations in the weak publics; in the legislative and decision-making bodies, by contrast, only secular reasons are permissible. In consequence, citizens who hold office in the legislative and decision-making bodies are required to formulate their contributions to discussions in secular terms. Secular reasons are reasons that are generally accessible: reasons that everyone accepts (or could Footnote 11 continued is held to be good unconditionally. See Habermas (1993), p. 5. He also hints at the universal moment inherent in ethical validity in Habermas (1992), p. 187.

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come to accept in a process of public argumentation).12 This gives rise to a need for translation: believers and non-believers must work together to translate the results of their discussions in the weak publics into a commonly accessible, secular language (Habermas, 2005b), pp.136–138. The translation requirement recalls Habermas’s earlier requirement of methodological atheism as the appropriate attitude for postmetaphysical thinking in its dealings with questions relating to the truth of religious validity claims. Common to both requirements is the view that religious validity claims cannot be formulated in a language that is generally accessible. Moreover, both are connected with the view that only generally accessible reasons are permissible in discursive processes of justification. As indicated above, “generally accessible” means potentially generally acceptable: reasons that participants in discourse could come to accept as valid following the unconstrained exchange of arguments as part of a cooperative search for truth; only such a view is compatible with Habermas’s emphasis on the transformative power of argumentation. This emphasis in particularly evident in his account of public deliberation on moral matters; here, the argumentative process is held to transform perceptions of interests, indeed, it is held to generate the “moral point of view”.13 Interestingly, however, he seems to abandon his commitment to the transformative power of argumentation when religious contributions are involved: the possibility that secularly minded citizens could come to see the validity of religious contributions appears to be excluded from the outset.14 A number of remarks lend support to this impression: on various occasions he refers to the reasonable expectation of a lack of agreement [Dissens] that accompanies participants in deliberations to which religious contributions are admitted—an expectation that contrasts strikingly with the expectation of a reasonable consensus that, up to now, has been a cornerstone of his discourse theories of truth, morality and even law and democracy.15 It is quite clear, therefore, that Habermas rules out the possibility of public assessment of the truth of religious validity claims. It is equally clear, however, that, by contrast with ethical validity claims, he does not want to confine public discussion of religious validity claims to elucidation and interpretation of their contents. This is evident, to begin with, in his explicit distinction between ethical discourses and religious discourses.16 The passage in question makes clear that he sees no need for public engagement with the cognitive contents of ethical convictions: no cooperative endeavor to tap the semantic potential of ethical convictions is required—each citizen (or group of citizens) must themselves find a way of translating their ethical convictions into a language that is acceptable to everyone. In the case of religious convictions, by contrast, a cooperative effort is necessary because such convictions constitute a semantic resource for all citizens, believers and non-believers. The contrast with ethical claims is also evident in his repeated insistence that secularly minded citizens (and postmetaphysical philosophy) must take seriously the “rational content” 12 In Habermas (2005b), Habermas makes quite clear that by “secular” reasons he means “generally accessible reasons” (see, for example, pp. 137–138). 13 Habermas makes this quite clear in Habermas (2003c). 14 I make this point in Cooke (2006a). 15 In his writings on religion and politics, Habermas repeatedly refers to the reasonable expectation of lack of agreement [Dissens]. See, for example, Habermas (2005a), p. 11, p. 146, p. 271, p. 249. 16 In a footnote to his essay on religion in the public sphere, Habermas (2005b), p. 138, Habermas makes an explicit distinction between ethical discourses and religious discourses.

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or the “cognitive content” of religious views.17 Since, as we know, taking seriously the cognitive content of religious convictions is not a matter of critical assessment of their claims to validity, we need to consider exactly what it entails. In attempting to ascertain what Habermas has in mind when he calls on secularly minded citizens to engage critically, in cooperation with their religiously minded fellow citizens, with the cognitive contents of religion, it is helpful to consider his view of how postmetaphysical philosophy can learn from the major religious traditions. He himself draws an explicit comparison between the willingness to learn that is required in each case (Habermas, 2005b, p. 138; 2005c, p. 255). He recommends that postmetaphysical philosophy open itself to the power of religious imagery and narratives with a view to seeing what it can salvage from these (bergen) for its own philosophical projects. As in the case of democratic deliberation, salvaging the cognitive content of religious traditions requires translation. Semantic contents count as cognitive if they can be translated into discourses in which only “public” reasons count: reasons that can be convincing beyond the boundaries of a particular community of faith. (Habermas, 2005c, p. 255). Passages such as this make clear that the envisaged critical engagement with the contents of religion is intended to produce images, intuitions, and insights that enrich the purely secular vocabulary of postmetaphysical thinking: it is not intended to cast light on the validity of religious truth claims. Examples he gives of successful secular translations reinforce the point. Marx’s idea of an emancipated society is mentioned as a secular translation of Kant’s idea of the Kingdom of God on Earth (Habermas, 2005c, p. 240), Hegel’s concepts of “positivity”, “alienation”, and “reification” are described as secular versions of concepts rooted in the JudaeoChristian tradition (p. 250) and Walter Benjamin’s idea of “anamnetic solidarity” is regarded as a secularization of an idea indebted to belief in the Last Judgment. (p. 250). Evidently, therefore, Habermas has not changed his mind regarding the philosophical evaluation of religious truth claims: as in his previous writings, philosophy and religion are deemed to constitute separate universes of validity.18 The main difference between his earlier and his present position regarding the relationship between philosophy and religion is a heightened appreciation of the semantic power of religious images, exemplary figures, and narratives; this heightened appreciation finds expression in the replacement in his recent writings of the earlier term “methodological atheism” by the word “agnosticism” (Habermas, 2005b, p. 147). Nor has he changed his mind with regard to public discussion of the truth contents of validity claims with a world-disclosing function; public discussion of such validity claims is deemed permissible only in processes of democratic deliberation in which not truth but meaning is at issue. Here, the main difference between his earlier and his present position is a new sense that it may be possible to extract meanings from religious contributions that are meanings not just for individual citizens or groups of citizens but for all citizens, believers and non-believers. In sum, by distinguishing critical engagement with the cognitive contents of religious contributions from critical assessment of the validity of these contents, Habermas seeks to enable social and political philosophy to retain its commitment to postmetaphysical thinking, while at the same time asserting a concep17 See Habermas (2005a), p. 11, pp. 145–146, p. 271, p. 255. 18 His distinction between philosophical validity and religious validity is also very clear: in line with his

earlier advocacy of methodological atheism, he continues to insist that philosophy and religion inhabit two separate universes so far as their conceptions of truth is concerned. See Habermas (2005a), p. 10 and especially the argument he develops in his essay on Kant in this collection: Habermas (2005c).

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tion of public reason that acknowledges the interconnection of political and religious identity and responding to the problem of semantic renewal. In my view, his strategy is, in the first case, unsuccessful and, in the second, unsatisfactory. As I now argue, the translation requirement reproduces the Rawlsian split between political and religious identity on the level of democratic legislation and decision-making, giving rise to a conception of political autonomy that is biased in favor of non-believers.19 With regard to the question of semantic renewal, I argue that Habermas has not made clear how the meanings “salvaged” from religious traditions can retain their semantic power within the framework of postmetaphysical thinking. 1. In calling for the inclusion of religious contributions in processes of democratic deliberation, Habermas seeks to maintain a unity between religious identity and political identity that is lacking in the Rawlsian model of public reason. This is certainly a step in the right direction. By allowing for public thematization of the commitments and convictions that shape the identities of religious believers his proposal helps to avoid the psychological difficulties resulting from the Rawlsian conception. To be sure there is still a split between political and religious identity on the level of the formally organized, democratic legislative and decision-making process. However, on this level, the split affects far fewer people since only citizens who assume official functions and positions in the formally organized public sphere must leave behind their identities as religious believers. Moreover, it is likely to be less burdensome for such citizens, since they may be expected to accept the need to abstract from their religious identities as the price to be paid for the privilege of holding political office. Nonetheless, even on the level of formally organized legislation and decision-making, the split between political and religious identities remains cause for concern. The problem is less the psychological burden it imposes than its negative impact on the political autonomy of religious believers. A conception of political autonomy as self-legislation through rational processes of collective will-formation is central to Habermas’s model of law and politics. The basic intuition guiding this conception, which takes its inspiration from Rousseau and Kant, is that citizens should be able to see themselves, at one and the same time, as addressees of the law and as its collective authors (Habermas, 1996, p. 20). As he puts it: “Citizens are politically autonomous only if they can view themselves jointly as authors of the laws to which they are subject as individual addressees” (Habermas, 1995). Also central to his conception is the connection between authorship and argumentation: citizens can see themselves as joint authors of the laws to which they are subject only if they can see these laws as valid for reasons that prove themselves to be generally acceptable in processes of rational argumentation.20 It is important to note that “general acceptability” is understood by Habermas in a cognitive sense (Habermas, 1996, p. 101): political autonomy is based on rational insight into the validity of laws and political decisions (p. 100). To be sure, under the complex conditions of 19 For convenience I have decided to stick with the terminology of “believer” and “non-believer” that is favored by Rawls and Habermas. However, it is inaccurate and may be misleading. My discussion in this article suggests that the relevant distinction is not between believers and non-believers but between citizens who are metaphysically inclined and those who are postmetaphysically inclined. 20 A further important element of Habermas’s conception is the claim that political (“public”) autonomy and individual (“private”) autonomy are co-original and carry equal weight. Elsewhere I argue that this “cooriginality thesis” can achieve its aims within Habermas’s theory only if private autonomy is given an ethical interpretation: if it is construed as the capacity of the human individual to develop and pursue her own conceptions of the good. See Cooke (1999).

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modern democracies, political autonomy is mediated by political representation and is, accordingly, satisfied only indirectly and approximately. Nonetheless, it functions as a regulative idea guiding citizens in their efforts to find the right laws and to make the right political decisions. The crucial question for our present purposes concerns the nature of the reasons on which the perceived validity of laws rests. If moral autonomy is the freedom to subject oneself to norms that are held to be valid for moral reasons and ethical autonomy is the freedom to pursue life-projects that are deemed worthwhile for ethical reasons, political autonomy must be the freedom to subject oneself to laws that are considered valid for political reasons.21 But what are political reasons? In Between Facts and Norms Habermas distances himself from his earlier writings in which he had conflated the domains of law and politics with the domain of morality and introduces a distinction between moral discourses and political discourses.22 On this new account, only moral reasons are allowed in moral discourse, whereas moral, ethical, and pragmatic reasons are permitted in political ones. These different types of reasons form a complex of practical validity claims that manifests the substantial unity of practical reason in democratic deliberation.23 Given Habermas’s recent remarks on the importance of religious discourses in democratic deliberation, it seems reasonable to suppose that religious reasons, too, are part of this complex. On the other hand, political validity is held to be governed by the democratic principle, which demands general acceptability: according to this principle, only those laws and policies are valid that could be accepted by everyone concerned in their capacity as participants in a rational discourse (Habermas, 1996, pp. 107–111). Evidently, there is a potential tension here between the plurality of types of reasons that are deemed appropriate in political discourses, the alleged lack of general acceptability of some of these types of reasons, and the posited link between political validity and general acceptability. Habermas defuses the tension by making ethical and religious neutrality a prerequisite of general acceptability: the reasons supporting the validity of laws and political decisions may contain no evaluative judgments as to the truth of ethical and religious worldviews; only such neutrality is deemed to be compatible with postmetaphysical thinking (Habermas, 2005d, p. 86). This is why he calls for the translation of religious and ethical contributions into a neutral, secular language.24 However, if reasons based on ethical and religious worldviews are ruled out as reasons for the acceptability of laws and political decisions, the resulting conception of political autonomy is biased in favor of citizens with postmetaphysical worldviews. Only such citizens can aspire towards self-legislation on the basis of rational insight. 21 Habermas insists on the distinction between moral autonomy and political autonomy. See Habermas (2005d). 22 In Habermas (1996), p. 168, Habermas presents a model of rational political will-formation in which ethical-political discourses feed into what he calls legal discourses. In his Postscript to that work, however, he acknowledges that this schema is misleading, for political questions usually require the simultaneous treatment of moral, ethical, and pragmatic aspects (p. 565, note 3). Since, in my view, the term “political discourse” best captures Habermas’s intuition, I use that term in the following. 23 Cf. Habermas’s critique of Robert Alexy’s alleged “moralization” of law in Habermas (1996), pp. 229–223. 24 We have seen that a cooperative translation effort is required in the case of religious validity claims, whereas responsibility for the translation of ethical worldviews is placed on the citizens who hold these worldviews.

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By contrast, citizens with what Habermas calls “heavy metaphysical baggage” are denied the possibility of attaching a cognitive sense to the laws and political decisions that they, in common with all other citizens, deem to be generally acceptable. This is because context-transcending validity, for them, has an unavoidable otherwordly aspect. At best they can regard the laws and political decisions in question as valid in the sense of congruent with the premises of postmetaphysical thinking, which they endorse, not because they are convinced of the rationality of its assumptions, but for pragmatic or strategic reasons; they cannot see the laws and decisions as valid for reasons that express their own, metaphysically based, views of validity. I develop this argument in Cooke (2006b). This implies that the regulative force of the idea of political autonomy, understood by Habermas as self-legislation based on rational insight, is significantly impaired for religious believers and for those who hold ethical worldviews of a metaphysical kind. I have suggested that the exclusion of religious reasons from political deliberation considerably weakens the regulative force of the idea of political autonomy for those who hold religious (and other metaphysical) worldviews, hindering them from seeing themselves as authors of the laws to which they are subject. This is a source of political and social disaffection. Furthermore, since those who hold postmetaphysical worldviews are able in principle to experience its full regulative force, a fundamental inequality is built into the political order that is a further source of disaffection. Habermas could avoid these problems by allowing for the inclusion of religious (and other metaphysical) contributions on all levels of democratic deliberation: not just in the informal, weak publics but also in the formally organized sphere of democratic legislation and decision-making. But, as we know, he vehemently rejects any such proposal, seeing it as “[violating] the principle that the powers of the state shall remain neutral in the face of competing world-views.”25 Certainly, the principle of neutrality should not be given up lightly. Like Habermas, I see the institutionalization of this principle as the result of historical learning processes—accompanied by much violence and suffering—in the course of which freedom of opinion has come to be recognized as a democratic right: I too regard the secular state as a historical achievement (Habermas, 2005e, p. 322). However—and here, too, I agree with Habermas—I regard historical learning processes as essentially open-ended, maintaining that historical experiences are always subject to argumentative reinterpretation in light of new situations that arise due to factors such as changed geopolitical constellations, technological innovations, and ecological developments. Thus, I see no contradiction between the view that the secularization and democratization of political authority is a historical achievement and the view that a critical reevaluation of the need for a principle of neutrality is necessary in the historical situation in which the inhabitants of liberal democracies currently find themselves. Habermas himself acknowledges a significant change in the current historical context when he refers to Germany and other liberal democracies as post-secular societies: societies that have adapted to the fact that religious communities continue to exist in a context of ongoing secularization (Habermas, 2003b, p. 104). He also, as we have seen, highlights two features of the changed context: the instrumentalization of human nature accompanying developments in biotechnology and the insecurity caused by terrorist attacks apparently motivated by rejection of the emptiness of Western models of modernization. 25 This is his criticism of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s argument in favor of allowing the use of religious reasons in political decision-making. See Habermas (2005b), p. 140, my translation.

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The new historical situation in which we currently find ourselves, together with the problems of disaffection and inequality resulting from the impaired political autonomy of religious (and other metaphysically inclined) believers, suggest that it is time to revisit the principle of state neutrality with regard to religious and ethical worldviews. To be sure, caution is required. Any attempt to reconsider the principle of neutrality must endeavor to hold onto the social, political, and intellectual advances that have resulted from the secularization and democratization of political authority. In my view, Habermas’s concept of communicative rationality, which ties validity to argumentation, expresses one of these advances: a “non-authoritarian” approach to questions of truth and knowledge (Cooke, 2005, 2006a). A non-authoritarian approach to truth and knowledge denies that knowledge of truth is available independently of the linguistic practices of human agents in historically specific, sociocultural contexts. In addition, it ties knowledge of truth to argumentative justification. This entails the capacity and willingness to support one’s validity claims with reasons in open-ended, inclusive, and fair processes of argumentation in which participants are motivated by the search for the single right answer. Thus, it rules out claims to have access to the right answer independently of the exchange of arguments with others. Importantly, however, it does not preclude religious or other forms of metaphysical thinking. In this regard, Habermas’s view of religious thinking is too indiscriminate: he fails to distinguish between religious beliefs that are epistemologically authoritarian and those that are not. The former claim to have knowledge of truth without mediation through language, in abstraction from history and context, and independently of argumentation; the latter acknowledge the influences of language, history, and context on our knowledge of truth and make such knowledge dependent on argumentative justification. This lack of discrimination is apparent, for example, when he characterizes belief as a form of knowledge that revokes the modern philosophical differentiation between truth and certainty.26 I find it more helpful to distinguish between two alternative ways of understanding the claims to truth of religious teachings. On the first understanding, the truth of the teachings is grounded in the certainty of religious experience; the certainty of the experience, and by extension the truth of the teachings, is unshakeable and hence immune to critical challenge. On the second understanding, by contrast, the truth of the teachings is merely supported by religious experiences; these count as evidence supporting claims to validity that must be subjected to critical interrogation in argumentation. In both cases, truth itself is conceived of in metaphysical terms: as unchanging and absolute. However, the interpretations differ in their views of what kind of knowledge of truth is available to human beings. In the first case, final knowledge is held to be available; this is what I refer to as an epistemologically authoritarian position. In the second case, only fallible knowledge is held to be available; this is what I refer to as an epistemologically non-authoritarian position. In short, a metaphysical understanding of truth does not imply epistemological authoritarianism. This leads me to suggest that it is not religious or other metaphysically based viewpoints that should be excluded from processes of democratic legislation and decision-making but viewpoints that are epistemologically authoritarian. Habermas might accept that religious belief is compatible with a distinction between the metaphysical, unchangeable, and absolute character of truth and the related 26 This is how I interpret his reference to the epistemic status of religious belief as “a de-differentiation of truth and certainty” (eine Entdifferenzierung von Wahrheit und Gewissheit). Habermas, (2002).

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concepts of unconditional validity that guide religious thinking and action and the fallible character of the knowledge of truth that is available to human beings. However, he might still object to the inclusion of any kind of religious contributions in democratic legislation and decision-making on the grounds that the justification of religious belief is a matter of revelation rather than argumentation. Presumably, his reference to the world-disclosing function of religion is to be understood in this vein. This view of the justification of religious validity claims is implicit in his characterization of religious and philosophical truth as two distinct universes of validity and in his call for critical engagement with the cognitive contents of religious contributions to democratic discussion as opposed to critical assessment of their claims to truth. On several occasions, moreover, he explicitly mentions the significance of revelation as the basis for religious conviction (Habermas, 2005c, p. 252). In discussing Kierkegaard, for example, he appears to accept his view that the “chasm between knowing and believing cannot be bridged by thought” (Habermas, 2003d, p. 10). If this is so, even a philosopher such as Kierkegaard, who accepts that our knowledge of God is limited by the finite nature of human cognition and, accordingly, may be described as epistemologically non-authoritarian, can see questions of religious truth as immune to argumentative interrogation and justification. However, here, too, there is a need for further distinction. Habermas’s view that the dependency of the truth of religious validity claims on revelation makes them immune to argumentative interrogation and justification is indicative of his tendency to conflate two issues: the ways in which we experience the force of religious truth (and, indeed, truth in general) and the ways in which the insights we acquire as a result of such experiences may be critically examined. Distinguishing the two opens the door for the argumentative interrogation and justification of religious validity claims. It enables us to see that an individual who has acquired her sense of the truth of religion by way of experiences of revelation (“world-disclosure”) is not therefore necessarily unable to provide reasons in support of her religious validity claims in argumentative exchanges with others. Habermas has only recently begun to move away from a position that made argumentation the privileged site for cognitive learning. This over-inflated view of argumentation was a corollary of his—now abandoned—constructivist account of truth and persists today in his constructivist account of moral validity (Habermas, 1973, 2003c). In these accounts, truth and justice are held to be constructed by way of the argumentative exchange of reasons under ideal justificatory conditions. His constructivist account commits him to the position that significant shifts in perception in relation to truth and justice come about by way of the intersubjective exchange of reasons. Such a view of cognitive learning is quite implausible. Shifts in perception, moral, religious, and otherwise, generally occur as a result of new experiences that are prompted by encounters with different cultures and different species, that arise out new lifesituations, that result from ecological and technological developments, and so on.27 Thus, we need to distinguish between the non-argumentative ways in which our sense of the truth of propositions, norms, and viewpoints is acquired and openness to argumentative interrogation of the validity of the propositions, norms, and viewpoints that are subsequently asserted. If we do so, we can see that revelation does not necessarily 27 Albrecht Wellmer makes this point with regard to revisions in collective moral matrices: these “do not as a rule take place only in the medium of argumentation, but under the pressure of a struggle for recognition and under the influence of new experiences. See A. Wellmer (1991b).

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rule out argumentation. Of course, the demonstration that revelation and argumentation are not incompatible does not yet say anything about the kinds of reasons that could be brought to bear in critical discussion of the truth of religious validity claims. The positive counterpart to my hitherto negative strategy calls for an account of the ways in which critics and proponents of religious beliefs could interrogate and justify the beliefs in questions. Elsewhere, I outline a model of practical reasoning that offers some hints as to what such an account would look like (Cooke, 2006a, chapter 6). I have suggested that the above distinction, together with the distinction between epistemologically authoritarian and epistemologically non-authoritarian religious beliefs, may help to dispel Habermas’s reluctance to allow for the critical assessment of the truth contents of religious validity claims in processes of democratic deliberation. The advantage of these distinctions is that they allow for the inclusion of reasons based on religious and other metaphysical worldviews in democratic legislation and decision-making without undermining the non-authoritarian impulse guiding modern processes of secularization and democratization. We might say: they make room for a post-secular state as the natural complement to a post-secular society.28 To be sure, my proposal to exclude epistemologically authoritarian contributions to the process of democratic legislation and decision-making could be seen as more stringent—and more difficult to implement—than Habermas’s proposal to exclude religious contributions. I agree that the difficulties in implementing my proposal need to be considered more carefully. However, I do not agree that its alleged stringency constitutes an objection. All political orders are based on certain exclusions and restrictions: the challenge for citizens of liberal democracies is not the elimination of all exclusions and restrictions but only those that do not stand up to critical interrogation in public processes of deliberation. My contention—admittedly, not argued in sufficient detail here—is that there are good reasons for excluding authoritarian modes of thinking and acting from democratic legislative and decision-making processes, but that a blanket exclusion of religious contributions is not justifiable in the present historical context. Elsewhere, I offer reasons in support of the first part of this contention (Cooke, 2006a, chapter 6). The second part is supported by the case I make above for including non-authoritarian religious contributions at all levels of democratic deliberation. I have suggested that doing so enables (non-authoritarian) religious believers to feel the full force of the regulative idea of political autonomy, thereby removing one significant cause of disaffection for religious believers and eradicating an inequality that currently exists between religious believers and nonbelievers. It may even help religious believers who hold authoritarian views of truth and knowledge to see that religious faith is not necessarily dependent on such views, encouraging the kind of non-authoritarian approach, not just to cognition but also to ethics and politics, that I see as a cornerstone of liberal democracy. 2. There is a second problem with Habermas’s proposal for a secular translation of the contents of religious traditions: he passes too easily over the difficulties involved in transposing images, figures, and narratives from a metaphysical framework into a postmetaphysical one, simply taking for granted that the transposed contents will retain a semantic power. We will recall that Habermas sees religion as an important source of semantic regeneration for postmetaphysical thinking in general, and for normative social and political theory in particular. I have already mentioned the external, societal factors 28 I make the case for a post-secular state in Cooke (2006b).

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that, in his view, make the need for semantic renewal particularly urgent in the current historical context; in addition, there is a factor internal to postmetaphysical thinking that contributes to this urgency: its formal approach to questions of the good life. In Habermas’s postmetaphysical account of ethics, this formal approach not only entails abstention from specific pronouncements regarding the content of the good life, it also implies handing over the responsibility for decisions regarding contents to the individuals and collectives concerned. Accordingly, it can be said to prioritize freedom over virtue or happiness, placing value on the ethical autonomy of individual subjects: on their freedom to develop and pursue their own conceptions of the good. This formal conception of ethics is connected with a formal conception of moral validity (“discourse ethics”), which makes the contents of moral norms and principles dependent on processes of moral discourse, and with formal conceptions of law and democracy, which makes the contents of laws and democratic decisions dependent on the deliberative procedures of citizens. However, the formal approach advocated by postmetaphysical thinking means that ethical, moral, and political theories cannot themselves supply participants in practical deliberations with the imaginative projections of the good life and the good society that are necessary to orient and to motivate practical deliberation about the proper goals of human action. It can be argued, therefore, that such theories must look outside of their own frameworks for alternative sources of meaning when the imaginative projections on which they traditionally relied no longer provide the required orientation and motivation. In the past Habermas has been taken to task for failing to take the question of semantic renewal in critical theory sufficiently seriously (See, for example, Kompridis, 1999; Smith, 1997). His remarks on salvaging the contents of religious traditions and making them fruitful for postmetaphysical thinking indicate that he is now clearly aware of the problem and concerned to respond to it. His heightened awareness of the importance of religion as a semantic resource is particularly evident in a recent essay on Kant’s struggle to give an account of the relationship between faith and knowledge. In this essay, he criticizes Kant’s tendency to offer a purely instrumental interpretation of positive religion. Against this, he points out that positive religion, with its vivid exemplary figures, its inspirational stories of the lives of the saints and prophets, its promises and miracles, and its suggestive images and edifying narratives, serves as a source of inspiration for the development of philosophical theories and concepts (Habermas, 2005c, pp. 231–235). He maintains that practical reason must stir our imaginations with the help of secularized versions of such images, figures, and narratives if it is to orient and motivate human beings to work collectively towards realizing a secular version of Kant’s Kingdom of God on Earth (pp. 230–231). However, here he seems to take for granted that the semantic contents of religious traditions will continue to have the power to orient and motivate our efforts to achieve a better society when released from their religious framework, maintaining that images of “not-failed forms of life” can inspire us and encourage us even without the certainty that God is waiting in the wings (p. 235). Against this too ready presumption, I suggest that the transposition of the semantic contents of religion into a postmetaphysical framework is not as simple as Habermas seems to suppose. This is due to the dependency of the power of religious images, figures, and narratives on metaphysical assumptions. If they are to retain their semantic power, therefore, the new postmetaphysical framework must supply equivalents for these assumptions. Habermas does not acknowledge this complication. Nor can any equivalents be extracted easily from his theory.

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The semantic power of religious contents depends above all on two kinds of metaphysical assumptions. The assumption (a) that religious images, figures, and narratives disclose forms of life that are valid in an unconditional sense and the assumption (b) that the intentional actions of human beings can bring them closer to achieving the disclosed forms of life. If postmetaphysical thinking is to be able to tap the power of the semantic contents of religion, it must supply equivalents for these assumptions. (a) Within a religious framework, validity in an unconditional sense (for shorthand, I shall refer to such validity as truth) refers to an otherworldly, transcendent object. The orienting and motivating power of religious images, figures, and narratives derives from their relation to this transcendent object. In transposing semantic contents from a religious framework to a postmetaphysical one, Habermas cannot simply jettison their reference to a otherworldly, transcendent object but must supply some postmetaphysical equivalent. As we know, it is the ambition of his postmetaphysical theory to offer an innerworldly interpretation of the unconditional: to rescue its sense without recourse to God or to an Absolute (Habermas, 2002, pp. 133–146). For this purpose, he proposes a deflationary interpretation that locates the transcending power of the unconditional in the forms of communication through which we reach understanding with one another about something in the world and about ourselves (Habermas, 2003d, pp. 9–10). The success of this undertaking depends in large measure on the ability of his reconstructive analyses of communicative practices (his “formal pragmatics”) to provide a secure foundation for conceptions of validity that dispense with metaphysical projections yet exert a context-transcending power. In recent years Habermas seems prepared to admit that formal pragmatics cannot on its own yield the required notions of contexttranscending conceptions of validity.29 However, he has not made clear which supplementary strategies are available to make good this deficiency.30 Until he does so, his theory cannot convincingly claim to offer an interpretation of validity in an unconditional sense (truth) that does not rely on metaphysical assumptions. Thus, one of the tasks confronting him if he is to account for the orienting and motivating power of secularized versions of religious images, figures, and narratives is to supply a postmetaphysical conception of truth. A further task is to give an account of the relationship between truth and the disclosed forms of life that avoids the objection of epistemological authoritarianism. I have asserted that we must posit some kind of relationship between the two terms if we are to make sense of the orienting and motivating power of images, figures, and narratives: we must be able to see the forms of life they disclose as representation of truth. But there are different ways of construing the relationship. One possibility is to see the disclosed forms of life as direct representation of truth, unmediated by language, history and context. The advantage of this is that it guarantees the unconditional validity of the disclosed form of life. The disadvantage is that it is epistemologically authoritarian, for it implies that human beings have access to final, unquestionable knowledge of truth. Another possibility is to see the disclosed forms of life as an indirect representation of truth. On this account, the disclosed form of life reveals something about truth, but what is revealed is mediated through language, history and context. Evidently, only an interpretation along these lines is congruent with the premises of postmetaphysical thinking. However, if Habermas is to offer this kind of interpretation of the relation between truth and what 29 See, for example, Habermas (2000). See also Habermas (2005f). 30 I argue this point in Cooke (2006a), esp. chapters 3, 5, and 7.

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is disclosed by way of images, figures, and narratives, he will have to reconsider his position with regard to the critical assessment of ethical validity claims. For, clearly, the disclosed forms of life amount to imaginative projections of ways of living one’s life and of social conditions that claim to be the best for human beings. Since they are construed, not as direct representations of truth, but as representations mediated by language, history, and context, no single projection is indisputably valid. This raises the question of how we should assess their claims to validity—a question that becomes increasingly urgent in historical contexts in which there are a plurality of competing visions of the good life and the good society (Habermas, 2005c, pp. 248–249). In other words, an epistemologically non-authoritarian account of the relationship between the disclosed forms of life and truth calls for an account of how ethical-existential and ethical-political validity claims can be assessed critically. But as we have seen, Habermas continues steadfastly to reject the possibility of the critical assessment of ethical validity claims. So long as he refuses to do so, however, he will be unable to account for the semantic power of the images, figures, and narratives he seeks to salvage from religious traditions. (b) The semantic power of religious images, figures, and narratives depends not only on the metaphysical assumption that the form of life they disclose represents truth; it relies on the additional assumption that the right kind of intentional action will bring human beings closer to achieving the disclosed forms of life. Without an assumption of this kind, human beings would have no rational motivation for endeavoring to achieve ways of living and social conditions that are closer to the disclosed images of the good life and the good society than other ones. In his essay on Kant, Habermas offers an insightful reading of Kant’s concept of rational belief that shows great sensitivity concerning the need for such an assumption (Habermas, 2005c). Kant posits the assumption of God’s presence in human history as a rational belief (Vernunftglaube) (pp. 222–232). Rational belief shares with philosophical knowledge a reference to convincing reasons, while it shares with religious faith an interest in the fulfillment of an existential hope (p. 230). The concept is introduced by Kant in response to a difficulty connected with his position that the moral law is inherently motivating, that observance of it is its own reward, and that there is no necessary connection between the happiness deserved by a morally worthy person and the actual happiness she enjoys in her life. This raises the problem of how to make sense of unjust suffering and, more generally, of the connection between moral action and moral consequences. Kant acknowledges that, as rational beings, we need to assume that God is at work in human history, since it cannot be a matter of indifference to reason whether suffering is unjust or just and whether morally good behavior leads to individual or collective happiness. Existentially, too, we need to make such an assumption in order to ward off the despair that looms when we encounter the phenomenon of unjust suffering and when evil seems to triumph over morally good action. In light of Habermas’s evident appreciation of the importance of such an assumption, it is strange that he does not acknowledge the need for an equivalent in his own critical social thinking.31 As in Kant’s moral theory, the question of the relation between moral action and its consequences does not arise in Habermas’s moral theory, since this theory is purely deontological: it confines itself to stipulat31 He merely comments that the intuition at the heart of Kant’s notion of rational belief reminds us that the morally good must be sought in the concrete good of forms of life that have been made better. See Habermas, (2005c), p. 235.

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ing what ought to be done from the point of view of a discursively reinterpreted version of Kant’s moral law. Nonetheless, his evident appreciation of the problem to which Kant responds with the notion of rational belief suggests awareness that there are rational and existential gaps in his own moral theory that call for remedy by an equivalent notion. Moreover, Habermas does not only offer a deontological moral theory; he also offers a critical social theory that is concerned to point toward emancipatory potentials in everyday communicative practices that human beings, by their actions, should attempt to realize. It is of course in the context of his critical social theory as a whole that he acknowledges the importance of images, figures, and narratives in orienting and motivating human beings to work together with the aim of achieving better forms of life. The question of the relation between action and consequences cannot be a matter of indifference to that theory. It seems, therefore, that Habermas needs something like Kant’s notion of rational belief, for without some such notion, he will be unable to make sense of the orienting and motivating power of the images, figures, and narratives that he seeks to salvage from religious tradition. However, congruence with the premises of postmetaphysical thinking requires him to develop a conception of rational belief that makes no reference to God or any other otherworldly, transcendent objects. Not only has he not made any attempt to do so, he has not, so far, acknowledged the need for a postmetaphysical equivalent for the notion of rational belief. My discussion has raised questions about Habermas’s proposal to salvage the contents of religious traditions for social and political philosophy within a framework that dispenses with metaphysical assumptions. On the political level, I expressed concern regarding his requirement that only contributions that have been translated into a postmetaphysical vocabulary may be considered in democratic processes of legislation and decision-making; my argument here is that a restriction of this kind results in the impaired autonomy of religious believers and that, in the case of many religious believers, this impairment cannot be justified in the present historical context; instead of a blanket exclusion of religious beliefs, therefore, I propose the exclusion of beliefs that are epistemologically authoritarian. I subsequently examined the ability of Habermas’s theory to transpose the semantic contents of religious traditions into a postmetaphysical framework without compromising the power of the images, figures, and narratives concerned; here, I argue that Habermas has not yet confronted the difficulties involved. Although I did not show that he is unable to resolve them, my suspicion is that this is the case. As I argue in Re-Presenting the Good Society,2 metaphysical assumptions are unavoidable in critical social thinking; however, their unavoidability does not have to be cause for concern. In this regard, too, the distinction between epistemologically authoritarian and non-authoritarian approaches is useful. Clearly, many traditional metaphysical theories contain elitist, absolutist, and ahistorical elements that lead to epistemological authoritarianism (Cooke, 2001, pp. 70–71); as such they are out of step with the conception of “situated rationality” integral to the self-understanding of contemporary social and political philosophy and should be rejected.32 But commitment to metaphysical assumptions does not lead inevitably to epistemological authoritarianism. Jettisoning the elitist, absolutist, and ahistorical elements of traditional modes of metaphysical thinking, we can endeavor to develop non-authoritarian modes; metaphysical thinking of this kind acknowledges that its guiding assumptions are mediated by language, history, and context and understands 32 I discuss the concept of situated rationality at some length in Cooke (2006a).

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them not as indisputable claims about the structures of the mind or the world, but as arguments that raise claims to validity that can be subjected to critical interrogation in open-ended, inclusive, and fair processes of public argumentation (Cooke, 2006a, chapter 6).

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