Phenomenality and Christianity
2007; Routledge; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09697250701309569
ISSN1469-2899
Autores Tópico(s)Biblical Studies and Interpretation
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes notes The author would like to thank Jean-Yves Lacoste and Michael A. Signer for comments on an earlier version of this essay. 1 See Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004). See also Heidegger, "Phenomenology and Theology" in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). In "The Problem of Sin in Luther" Heidegger maintains "The object of theology is God," a view he reversed three years later. See Heidegger, "The Problem of Sin in Luther" in Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to "Being and Time" and Beyond, ed. John van Buren (Albany: State U of New York P, 2002) 105. 2 See Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1972); Otto Gründler, Elemente zu einer Religionsphilosophie auf phänomenologischer Grundlage (Munich: Kösel, 1922); Kurt Stavenhagen, Absolute Stellungnahme: Eine ontologische Untersuchung über das Wesen der Religion (Erlangen: Verlag der Philosophischen Akadamie, 1925); and Jean Hering, Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse: Étude sur la théorie de la connaissance religieuse (Paris: Alcan, 1926). Also see Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973) 292–95. 3 The earliest use of "phenomenology" in religion that I have been able to find occurs in Pierre Daniël Chantepie de la Saussaye's "Phänomenologischer Theil" which appeared in his Sammlung Theologischer Lehrbücher: Religionsgeschichte (Freiburg i. B: Mohr (Siebeck), 1887–89), Erster Band, sects. 9–27. Studies written after Husserl, although without mentioning him, include Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford UP, 1958); and Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology, 2 vols., trans. J.E. Turner and Hans H. Penner (New York: Harper, 1963). Otto's book was originally published in German in 1917, and van der Leeuw's in 1933. 4 The distinction between reconstructive and essential phenomenology is Scheler's. See his On the Eternal in Man 18, 161. 5 See Robert Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P, 1994); and Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skeban (New York: Fordham UP, 2004). 6 See Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Hill, 1969); and, among many other later works, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). 7 See Jean-Louis Chrétien, "Wounded Speech" in The Ark of Speech, trans. Andrew Brown (London: Routledge, 2004); and The Call and the Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport (New York: Fordham UP, 2004). 8 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (Boston: Kluwer, 1983), sect. 58. 9 Van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation II: 683. 10 See Marion, "The Breakthrough and the Broadening," Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1998). I leave aside Marion's earlier work, partly phenomenological and partly theological, in which he seeks to approach God without using the language of being. See God without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, foreword David Tracy (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991); and The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. and intro. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham UP, 2001). 11 Heidegger, "On the Essence and Concept of 'Phusis' in Aristotle's Physics B," trans. Thomas Sheehan, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeil (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 192. 12 See Marion, Reduction and Givenness 192–98. 13 Marion, Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002) 19; emphasis in original. On the importance of giving itself, see Being Given 131. 14 See Marion, "The Voice without Name: Homage to Levinas," The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jeffrey Bloechl (New York: Fordham UP, 2000) 224. It is unclear exactly how to weight the influence of Barth on Marion, although some influence, perhaps by way of Hans Urs von Balthasar, is evident. 15 See Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham UP, 2002) 26, 50. 16 See Marion, Being Given, sect. 24. 17 See Jacques Derrida's remarks in "On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion" in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999) 60–61, 66–67. See also Dominique Janicaud, "The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology" in Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn": The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak et al . (New York: Fordham UP, 2000) 50–69; and Phenomenology "Wide Open": After the French Debate, trans. Charles N. Cabral (New York: Fordham UP, 2005) 5–10. Hering anticipated Janicaud's concerns when he noted that phenomenology might well be abused for religious reasons. See his Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse 73–74. Marion rejects the criticism in Being Given 5, 234. The source of the initial claim would seem to be Marion's talk of God coming to us as a divine gift. See his God without Being: Hors Texte, trans. Thomaas A. Carlson, foreword David Tracy (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991) 3. 18 Marion, Being Given 5. 19 Ibid. 115. 20 Ibid. 5, trans. slightly altered. In the second edition of Étant donné (1998), Marion writes "Révélation" in both sentences and not "révélation" in the second. 21 Avery Dulles proposes several senses of "revelation": as doctrine, as history, as inner experience, as dialectical presence, and as new awareness. Revelation as inner experience and as new awareness might not have any significant public dimension until proclaimed. See his Models of Revelation (New York: Doubleday, 1983), part I. 22 See Marion, "Le Possible et la révélation" in Le Visible et le révélé (Paris: Cerf, 2005) 14. The essay first appeared in 1992, and it is here that the notion of the saturated phenomenon is announced. 23 Marion, Being Given 215. Counter-experience is not restricted to divine revelation, however; it occurs whenever there is a saturated phenomenon. See Marion's essay "The Banality of Saturation" in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 2006). For Blanchot's sense of experience, see my The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004), chapter 5. 24 See Marion, Being Given 235; Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, 1049b; and Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), para. 7, 63 (38), para. 31, 183 (144). 25 See Henry, "Quatre principes de la phénoménologie," Phénoménologie de la vie, 4 vols., I: De la phénoménologie (Paris: PUF, 2003); and Marion, Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002). 26 See, in particular, Henry's books I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emmanuel (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003); Incarnation: Une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Seuil, 2000); and Paroles du Christ (Paris: Seuil, 2002). The heavy emphasis on the Johannine Christ in the first of the trilogy is relaxed somewhat by the third. 27 See Henry, Paroles du Christ 8, 127. See also "Material Phenomenology and Language (or, Pathos and Language)," trans. Leonard Lawlor, Continental Philosophy Review 32 (1999): 343–65. 28 For a quite extreme example, see John C. O'Neil, Who Did Jesus Think He Was? (Leiden: Brill, 1995). It should be noted that Henry does not hesitate to talk in phenomenological terms of the binatarian life of the Father and the Son. See I am the Truth 92. 29 See Henry, Incarnation 37; and I am the Truth 23. 30 Heidegger, Being and Time 58. 31 See Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003) 80. It must be noted that Henry tends to overstate the newness of non-intentional phenomenology. While Henry's originality is not to be doubted, one can see the beginnings of non-intentional phenomenology in Husserl. See, in particular, his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), Collected Works, IV, trans. John Barnett Brough (Boston: Kluwer, 1991), sect. 39; and Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Syntheses: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, Collected Works, IX, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Boston: Kluwer, 2001), sect. 23. 32 Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931), Collected Works, VI, trans. and ed. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Boston: Kluwer, 1997) 218. See also Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981) 131. 33 See Henry, "Phénoménologie de la vie," De la phénoménologie 61. 34 See Henry, I am the Truth 10. 35 Henry originally argued that religion is concerned with "the immediate consciousness of Being." His later reflections on Christianity do not use the language of Being at all. See his The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973) 405. 36 Consider the following passage, for example, taken from Fichte's fifth lecture of his The Doctrine of Religion: "God enters into us in his actual, true, and immediate LIFE; or, to express it more strictly, we ourselves are this his immediate Life. But we are not conscious of this immediate Divine Life …" The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, trans. William Smith, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1873) II: 459. 37 Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite states, "the divine life beyond every life gives life and subsistence to life itself," The Divine Names and Mystical Theology, trans. John D. Jones (Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 1980) 173. 38 See Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979) 40. At his first meeting of Le Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française Levinas ventured to say, in the discussion following Edmond Fleg's paper, that Judaism is not a religion. See "Sens de l'histoire juive" in La Conscience juive (Paris: PUF, 1962) no. 1, 15–16. When Levinas decides to use the word "religion," as he does in a study of Rosenzweig read at the second meeting of the Colloque in 1959, he uses it in the prescriptive sense of devotion to the other person. Religion, for Rosenzweig and as accepted by Levinas, "is totally different from [the view of religion] that secularism combats." "'Between Two Words'" in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990) 187. See, in particular, the discussion following this paper in La Conscience juive no. 1, 148. 39 See Levinas, "The Ruin of Representation" in Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1998) 121. See also Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. A.C. Rancurello, D.B. Terrell and L.L. McAlister, 2nd ed., intro. Peter Simons (London: Routledge, 1995) 198. 40 See Descartes's "Meditations on First Philosophy" in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972) I: 166. See also Levinas, "Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity" in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1987) 54. 41 See Berdyaev's comments in Jean Wahl, Existence humaine et transcendance (Neuchatel: Éditions de la Bacconière, 1944) 129; Levinas, Totality and Infinity 48; Descartes, "Meditation III" in The Philosophical Works of Descartes I: 166. 42 See Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F.L. Pogson (London: Macmillan, 1950). 43 Levinas, Otherwise than Being 88. 44 Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. and intro. Robert Chandler (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006) 407–08. 45 See Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics," Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978) 111. 46 See Levinas, Otherwise than Being 160, 163. 47 For Levinas, liberalism would require an a priori commitment to the equality of all persons, and would therefore be inconsistent with a primary affirmation of the transcendence of the other person. This is not to say, of course, that Levinas does not recognize the value of liberalism in Western societies. 48 As Derrida remarks in a parenthetical comment, Levinas's ethics are "nothing less than Schelerian." See his "Violence and Metaphysics" 98. Does this mean that, for Derrida, Scheler also concerns himself with an "Ethics of Ethics" or that Levinas does adopt a first-order moral position from time to time? Derrida does not say. Levinas talks of giving the other priority over the self as the sole "absolute value" in "Philosophy, Justice, and Love," trans. Michael B. Smith, in Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001) 170. I allude in the passage in the body of the text to Max Scheler's introductory remarks on non-formal ethics of values in his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values 6–7. 49 See Levinas, "Reality has Weight," trans. Alin Cristian and Bettina Bergo, Is it Righteous to Be? 163. See also Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H.J. Paton (New York: Harper, 1964) 96. 50 See Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. and introd. Simon Kaplan (Atlanta: Scholars, 1995). A covert influence of Moses Mendelsshon, especially his Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum (1783), is also possible. 51 See Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998). 52 See Levinas, Otherwise than Being 149. 53 Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind xi. 54 See Levinas, Otherwise than Being, chapter 5, 1, 2; and "Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony," Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996). 55 See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, trans. and intro. Garrett Green (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978), sect. 13. In one respect Levinas is closer to Fichte than to Kant. Unlike Kant, Fichte offers no re-description of Christianity by way of practice, belief and church, and one finds no similar attempt to re-describe the whole of Judaism on the basis of Levinas's model of revelation. 56 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2005) 18. See Levinas's comments in "Philosophy, Justice, and Love" 173. 57 See Levinas, "Revelation in the Jewish Tradition," Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) 149–50. 58 On the distinction between happening and occurring, see Derrida, "A Witness Forever" in Nowhere without No: In Memory of Maurice Blanchot, ed. Kevin Hart (Sydney: Vagabond, 2003) 48. 59 See Levinas, "Prayer without Demand" in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) 227–34. 60 Harold Bloom has performed the great service of making the writings of the Jahwist strange for us once again. See his The Book of J (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), which contains a retranslation of the Jahwist texts by David Rosenberg. 61 See Levinas, "Foreword" in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) x. Deontologizing, as I am using the word here, differs from demythologizing to the extent that, on Levinas's understanding, the saying inexorably leads to the said, the realm of ontology, even though the said can be unsaid. 62 In the "Foreword" to Beyond the Verse Levinas identifies Descartes's infinite with God. Elsewhere, though, he distinguishes the structure of transcendence it bespeaks from God. 63 René Descartes, "Reply to Objections, V" in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970) II: 218. 64 Henry could cite, however, Matthew 10.39, Mark 9.43 and Luke 12.23 and 14.26. 65 On the relations between Henry and Gnosticism, see Jad Hatem, Le savoir et les viscères de l'être: Sur le gnosticisme et Michel Henry (Paris: L'Hamattan, 2004). 66 See Joseph Donceel, ed., A Maréchal Reader (New York: Herder, 1970) 156. 67 See Marion, In Excess 52. 68 Aquinas, In duodecim libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis Expositio, ed. M.R. Cathala and R.M. Spiazzi (Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1964), cap. 1, lect. 10 [167], 48. 69 Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978) 125; emphasis in original. 70 See Marion, In Excess 52. 71 Marion, Being Given 265. Marlène Zarader is mistaken to suggest that Marion contradicts himself in his account of the filter. See her "Phenomenality and Transcendence" in Transcendence in Philosophy and Religion, ed. James E. Faulconer (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003) 114. 72 It would, of course, be quite possible to imagine l'advenant as a Christian, even though the project is not one that interests Romano. See Claude Romano's discussion of events that open new possibilities for l'advenant and reset the world for him or her in his L'Événement et le monde, 2nd ed. (Paris: PUF, 1999) 45, 55. 73 See St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, I, q. 13 art. 7, c; I, q. 28, art. 1, ad 3; I, q. 45 art. 3; and On the Power of God, trans. Lawrence Shapcote (1932; rpt. Eugene, OR: Wipf, 2004), I, q. iii, iii. Also see De veritate, q. 4, art. 5, c. 74 See Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P, 1982), chapters 2, 3. See also David Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), chapters 1, 14. 75 Levinas also points out that God is other than the other person. See "God and Philosophy" in Of God Who Comes to Mind 69. 76 See Harvey K. McArthur and Robert M. Johnson (eds.), They Also Taught in Parables: Rabbinic Parables from the First Centuries of the Christian Era (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990).
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