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The Saturated Phenomenon

1996; DePaul University; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5840/philtoday199640137

2329-8596

Jean-Luc Marion,

Study and Philosophy of Religion

What comes into the world without troubling merits neither consideration nor patience. Rene Char I field of could simply be defined as what excludes or, in the best case, subjugates. Such a constant antagonism cannot be reduced to any given ideological opposition or any given anecdotal prejudice. In fact, it rests upon perfectly reasonable ground: the philosophy of religion, if there were one, would have to describe, produce, and constitute phenomena, it would then find itself confronted with a disastrous alternative: either it would be a question of phenomena that are objectively definable but lose their religious specificity, or it would be a question of phenomena that are specifically religious but cannot be described objectively. A phenomenon that is religious in the strict sense-belonging to the domain of a philosophy of religion distinct from the sociology, the history, and the psychology of religion-would have to render visible what nevertheless could not be objectivized. religious phenomenon thus amounts to an impossible phenomenon, or at least it marks the limit starting from which the phenomenon is in general no longer possible. Thus, the religious phenomenon poses the question of the general possibility of the phenomenon, more than of the possibility of religion. Once this boundary is acknowledged, there nevertheless remain several ways of understanding it. Religion could not strike the possibility of the phenomenon in general with impossibility if the very possibility of the phenomenon were not defined: when does it become impossible to speak of a phenomenon, and according to what criteria of phenomenality? But the possibility of the phenomenon-and therefore the possibility of declaring a phenomenon impossible, that is, invisible--could not in its turn be determined without also establishing the terms of possibility taken in itself. By subjecting the phenomenon to the jurisdiction of possibility, in fact brings fully to light its own definition of bare possibility. question concerning the possibility of the phenomenon implies the question of the phenomenon of possibility. Or better, when the rational scope of a is measured according to the extent of what it renders possible, that scope will be measured also according to the extent of what it renders visible-according to the possibility of phenomenality in it. According to whether it is accepted or rejected, the religious phenomenon would thus become a privileged index of the possibility of phenomenality. To start out, I will rely on Kant. In Kant, the metaphysical definition of possibility is stated as follows: That which agrees with the of experience, that is, with the of intuition and of concepts, is possible [mit den formalen Bedingungen der Erfahrung . . . uberkommt]. What is surprising here has to do with the intimate tie Kant establishes between possibility and phenomenality: possibility results explicitly from the of among those is intuition, which indicates that experience takes the form of a phenomenality-that experience has a form (formal conditions) precisely because it experiences sensible forms of appearance. Here, therefore, possibility depends on phenomenality. Would it be necessary to conclude from this that the phenomenon imposes its possibility, instead of being subject to the thereof? Not at all, because the possible does not agree with the object of experience but with its formal conditions: possibility does not follow from the phenomenon, but from the set for any phenomenon. A requirement therefore is imposed on possibility, just as Kant indicates a little bit later: The postulate of the possibility of things requires (fordert) that the concept of things should agree with the of an experience in general. access of the phenomenon to its own manifestation must submit to the requirement of possibility; but possibility itself depends on the formal of experience; how then, in the last instance, are these formal conditions established that determine phenomenality and possibility together? …