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Thursday, October 29, 2015

The Death of God and the Necessity of a New Phenomenology


God died at least twice, once on the Cross and at least once in the crosshairs of Altizer's (et al.) theology of the death of God. Perhaps in the last word, these are not two but simply the one death of the God who abandons the plaintive voices in the psalms and the God who does not arrive at the Cross to satisfy the sardonic and sadistic demands of the jeering crowd echoing the 22nd Psalm. The death of the God of being necessitates a phenomenology of a God without being, or at least one that might give an account of revelation. Jean-Luc Marion's project recognizes the death of this God, this ontotheological God, and strategizes just how a transition from theology to theology might occur; and, yes, even  how a phenomenology of the 'analogy of being' can move into a 'being of analogy'---an analogy from finitude (logos) to an analogy from infinity (theos).

What concerns me here is not so much the niceties of a pious development of a new phenomenology that somehow remains faithful to Husserl, but how religious phenomena can make an appearance in a similar way non-religious phenomena make their appearances. There should be a methodological continuity coursing through these kinds of experience. The genius of Marion's approach gives unprecedented priority (which is not to say privilege) to givenness. I wish to commit the great sin of conflating theology with phenomenology ( John Caputo, in his "Hyperbolization of Phenomenology" [in Kevin Hart's Counter-Experiences] has already charged Marion with just that intellectual, academic transgression---sin---and his argument is very sound on its own terms; so what the hell). I want to look at the givenness of revelation. I use the lower case 'r' here to underscore that my discussion will focus on the provisional character of the actuality of revelation (or simply the possibility of revelation) as opposed to the strictly theological actuality of Revelation (upper case 'R') in order to respect this crucial distinction that Marion maintains through the body of his work.

From time to time I float the idea of the 'hypostatic union' and I wish to examine that a bit more in this post. So, now, a little religion.

The disciples see Jesus for the very first time in the resurrection appearances, in which he is no mere Jesus of Nazareth, but the Christ. It is only in the experience of the risen Jesus that the Cross comes into focus, and it is from the Cross, the very blood and water issuing from the side of Christ, that Jesus can be constructed in the narrative novelty that we have come to call 'gospel.' A genre needed to arise that would 'contain' the good news that God had died. Mark, the likeliest candidate for the status of the 'first to write,' appropriates a political method of communication (the announcement of the sovereign) to communicate another kind of news of another kind of son of God; the evangelium takes on another kind of good.

I have always been fascinated that all four evangelists, despite their distinctive christologies, view the Cross through the kaleidoscope of the 22nd psalm. Of the four evangelists, only Luke sidesteps a direct quote from the 22nd Psalm. Mark and Matthew quote the line of abandonment (22:1); all four allude to the 'casting of the lots' for the garments, while John only quotes the incident directly (22:18). That all four evangelists appropriate the Psalm tells of the importance of this type of psalm in the psalter: the psalm of the deafness of God. Lamentation and complaint in these such psalms bring the holiness of God into relief: "yet you are holy and enthroned on the praise of Israel"(3). In these psalms, and of course in this 22nd psalm, the deafness of God is not a contradiction, but accepted as part of the mystery of holiness. For the evangelists, the resurrection has re-presented the psalter's holiness of God after the abandonment of the suffering servant. The difference is that for the psalmist the transition from plaintive abandonment to the holiness of God rests in hope for God to come; for the evangelists that hope is fulfilled in the event of the resurrection in an enactment of the mystery of holiness.


For our canonical evangelists, the content of the form characterizes the new genre and distinguishes it from its antecedent. Only the experience of the resurrection could power such memory. That power drives the making visible of Jesus, who until the resurrection, was invisible. Memory brings Jesus into focus, allowing him to appear in the flesh. Apart from  the resurrection, such memories could become lethal; dead messiahs must stay dead, which up to then, was the way of things. To remember a failed messiah, one whose fate and memory was forever sealed by Roman sovereignty, was not about resurrection but insurrection, which leads to more blood and the numbing boredom of the banality of crosses.

But this Cross inaugurated a kingdom unknown to contemporary sovereignty; it is the crux of memory, Eucharistic, liturgical, political, phenomenological. As I used to say back in my apologetics days, the gospels answer the question, "who was that masked man?" Not masked in the sense of persona, but in the sense of the hidden, the yet to be made unhidden, revealed, and true. The Gospels discover the truth of a God with us. It reminds us of something forgotten, something lost in memory. The river Lethe washes away memory, but aletheia, is the washing away of forgetfulness; it is the discovery of something once known: it is the truth.

The resurrection washes away what was forgotten about the resurrected one. So who did the masked man think he was? He was who memory of him says who he said he was. The gospels are the evangelists' discovery of Jesus within the memory jogged by the first Easter morning (allow me the anachronism's logical privilege). 'The Father and I are one' (John 10:30). The Johannine statement of the identity of the father with the son is the first theological formality of what would later emerge as the hypostatic union.

So what could the hypostatic union mean for us today? If the ontotheological God died with good riddance, then to what is Jesus united? He is fully human and fully divine united at the level of the single divine person of Christ Jesus. So here is my maneuever: substitute revelation or the revealed (aletheia) for divine in the Chalcedonian formula and see what makes an appearance. We are bracketing off 'divinity' so that ontotheology doesn't come in through the back door of the phenomenological moment of the saturated phenomenon of Christ, the union of the visible with the invisible in the visibility of Christ. The hypostatic union then sees in the single revealed person of Christ the unity of revelation with existent human flesh. "I and the Father are one" tells us that in the person of Christ a living Jesus understands himself to be in perfect relation to revelation as Revelation.

The hypostatic union understood in this way constructs theosis (an abbreviation of theopoeisis) as the approximation to Jesus' own self-understanding as being the one whose self is that self in perfect relation to the givenness of revelation. Theosis then can never mean the actually becoming 'divine' (it never meant this), but rather approaching asymptotically Jesus' reception of revelation as adonne receiving donation, but now writ as Revelation, the theology. The hypostatic union then is a crystallization of a phenomenological moment---the precipitating out of an existing entity from a saturated solution (the saturated phenomenon of the givenness of Revelation). But instead of a counter-experience of a saturated phenomenon, we have the crystallized, sui generis, God-man.

Caputo's critique looms large over this kind of formalization. He persuasively locates the phenomenological moment not in actual historical occurrences, but in the event harbored in the biblical narratives. He rightly distinguishes the experience of the first followers of The Way, from the experiences of the communities for whom our evangelists write. For the former, he posits a phenomenality of  [the Holy] Spirit; for the latter, he posits the event of faith released from the sacred narratives. Yet the horizons for each of these seemingly distinct experiences blur and transgress each other. Caputo could not articulate just how the Spirit was at work for the first disciples because he had not developed his memory-constituted hauntology of It Spooks. He might after all meet Marion in the mutuality of the 'pure call.'

The conviction the first disciples had of the resurrection was certainly of a different character than the convictions of faith experienced by the later communities united by their gospels, but they were not of a different order. The phenomena each group experienced was different, but not the phenomenality of the event. The Cross was already memory for the first disciples at the time of the resurrection. But the power of the gospel narratives to suspend time brings a phenomenological immediacy to both groups, and the discovery that issues forth from the Cross is an aletheia that is indistinguishable for either. Alethos anesti.




21 comments:

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    2. Though I usually mean 'event' the way Caputo has defined it in _The Weakness of God_ , Zizek's 'event' would work as well here, so think of his notion with which you are familiar. There are many (several?) events stirring in sacred texts. One could be the calling of a community into existence. Another could be justice, another still, love/agape. Not all events are all warm and fuzzy; some are things better left 'unreleased.' Violence can be stirring there as well.

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  2. Which are the historical occurrences of the biblical narratives, the first time they are written, the second? How about when they're copied in the scriptoria? Every printing of every bible?

    What's going on when people hearing the voice of God promulgate sacred violence? Now that's a phenomenality worth talking about.

    We need to remind ourselves that phenomenology speaks to possibility; not to actuality. Phenomenology has no apparatus to make claims about what is an actuality. In a similar vein, we should maintain a distinction between facticity and fact. I could be mistaken, but hasn't your comment confused or blurred these 2 terms? Fact and facticity play out very differently in the sands bloodied by ISIS than in the witch-hunts of the 17th or 20th centuries. So would, I think, a rigorous phenomenology.

    I did gently critique Caputo's analysis, which takes into consideration your concerns about a false choice (though Caputo never sets it up in has argument as a 'choice').

    I do not believe in witches (except for tomorrow); do you?

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    2. You've heard the adage, 'use the right tool for the job.' The right tool to answer the question you pose, that is, the right epistemological mode for answering 'why' one knows whether witches of the specific type you describe are actual, is rather simple empiricism.

      There are witches all over the place (Wiccan), but there really are no wicked witches of the west, unless they limit their 'being' to fairy tale narratives.

      So, there are, in fact, no fairy tale witches outside of fairy tales. If someone told me that they 'saw' a fairy tale witch doing fairy tale witch-things outside of fairy tales, I would have serious questions about the 'witness.' I do not 'believe' in such witches, for one reason, is because I do not trust the witness.

      You can substitute any number of fantastic figures for 'witches' in your question. Phenomenology is not the tool for that job. Unless, of course, the question is posed differently. Simple logic will suffice to answer your question. I do not believe in *your* witch because [s]he is illogical and incoherent. Such a figure is unlikely to enter my experience of the world outside of fiction or fantasy.

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  5. 'Possibility' in phenomenology is utterly free, whereas in propositional, mathematical logic it answers to 'conditions' such as falsifiability, the law of contradiction etc. Possibility in the new phenomenology is truly a priori, true and pure *idea* as distinct from 'concept.' For Kant we experience through concepts constituted by a transcendent subject; for Marion, we experience 'givenness,' which is not constituted, but prior to constitution. Metaphysics is overcome by phenomenology because it does not try to fit experience into concepts but instead, allows the given to fill intuition, which may or may not lend itself to the intention, which aims to grasp it in signification or *Begriff*. Our word 'concept' not longer rings of grasping, or gripping, with which *Begriff* is cognate (same Germanic root: grip/-*griff*). What gives itself is the essence of a thing, an idea, an *eidos*. This seems more Platonic than Aristotelian in its purity.

    Impossible possibility, or the possibility of the impossible are very much at work in phenomenology whereas they die the death of the law of contradiction in formal logic.

    Physics and metaphysics seem to solve some problems, but not others. For some people, using a hammer to twist the lid of a jar is worth a try; eventually another tool becomes more attractive after enough broken jars.

    In the consideration of the possibility of revelation (which seems really to be what we are talking about in these discussions), metaphysics is something of a hammer to the jar of revelation. Bad results. The jar must break. Phenomenology lets the jar be a jar and opens it up as a response to the idea of 'twisting' which hammers simply do not know or do.

    God is a broken jar only when metaphysical categories beat him to death. Ontotheology must break its god because it does not know of givenness. If we think God in categories of intellection, it is not God thought at all.

    Phenomenology's task is to give voice to possibility, which is anterior to constitution. You say well when you describe your approach in these matters, your natural attitude: "the premise that there are *actual* limits on *possibility*." Sometimes its best to imagine no such limits; so much more is permitted as possibility. Imagine an unconditioned possibility, one without limits set by (fill in the blank) prior to such an experience, possibility itself, *posse ipsum* of the mystics, perhaps.

    Can you imagine ideas that are not concepts? It's really not natural, but by bracketing off the natural attitude, the given can give itself on its very own terms its very self.

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  6. Your comments on measurement are helpful. Is there anything, any object or phenomenon that is 'incommensurate' or 'immense'? I would suggest that "when we sit down to study a score" the proper tool is more like a ruler than what we might find in phenomenology. Studying a score does not put before us a lived experience; it is simply the activity of investigation. Phenomenology asks what is going on in the experience of music; musicology asks what is going on in a score. Each of those tools is appropriately deployed in their tasks, their jobs.

    Monet's Haystacks series comes to mind. I would be doing 2 very different things when I study the series, or even the technique of a single painting; or when I experience the art. Is Monet himself exploring, that is, offering 'studies' of what Levi Bryant calls the local manifestations of objects? That would pose another task before me.

    When I come before "Haystacks: the effects of sun and snow" at the Met, I am alive in that moment, and want to experience my own experience of this work of art. If that is my task, my job, I want phenomenology to be the method/tool. If I want to contextualize the work within the series, or within Monet's life at Giverny, I better choose the tools of art history or art criticism.

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    4. I understand your point, but it's less about 'camps' than about some epistemological modes being better suited for some tasks over against others. Phenomenology is best thought of as a philosophy or philosophical method of *experience*.

      THAT a causal account is available is different from making it the only available account. Phenomenology is an alternative to metaphysics (or other metaphysical systems), one I think is better for some phenomena, but not necessarily for others. When the task is to describe experience, phenomenology tends to work better because it imposes no conditions under which things can appear. Causality is a concept that forces things to appear as they are constituted by a subject; that's all well and good as far as it goes. For some, that's just as far as things can get. Not so for a system that allows things to appear on their own terms, unconstituted except by its own givenness.

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  7. You implied that studying a score and experiencing the music were different: studying a score means examining it as a completely defined object using the classical tools of musical analysis (I learned the Longy method). You now say that studying a score is experiencing music. That's fine. Having done both, I cannot begin to understand how these 2 things are the same thing. Having done both, YOU can.

    Phenomenology can certainly access the experience of 'studying a score'. And that is what you apparently meant all along. Now who's playing the word games.

    The discussion is not advanced by this pseudo-deconstruction.

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  11. I think it best to conclude this particular comments section with simply stating that phenomenology is a philosophy of experience in the tradition of Husserl and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty with important antecedents in Hegel and Kant, though these last 2 are about something very different.

    The philosophical tradition has understood very well what each giant of phenomenology has accomplished. Marion stands in that tradition as a revolutionary, bringing phenomenology completely out from metaphysical constraints, finally freeing things to appear in themselves.

    Some philosophers see being, knowing and appearing as either identical or in terms of the other...terms. Whether this is a fatal blow to phenomenology in general remains to be seen. Either way, phenomenology marches on.

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