7 No-Trump: Catholic Realism, Phenomenology, Object-Oriented Philosophy and the 4-Suited Fourfold

Catholic Realism traces itself through the theological thought of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, through transcendental Thomism and back to the Angelic Doctor himself. Deeply rooted in the Incarnation, Catholic Realism rests in the goodness of the reality of creation, the goodness of the cosmos and upon the fundamental trust in God's judgment that matter is good. As would any philosophical realism, Catholic Realism understands the origin of a world before the emergence of the human creature, and the priority of 'objects' to human consciousness. God did not divide Creation between man and the universe, but saw that all of creation was good, before the man was, and after. The extinction of man negates nothing of the truth of the goodness of non-human creation. That reality is the reality of everything. God is no 'correlationist.' Catholic Realism, not a philosophy unto itself, but more posture toward the real, seeks Truth wherever it resides, and in whatever system of thought that addresses truth comprehensively.

It is no accident that phenomenology, as the philosophy of experience, the philosophy of the experiencing object or entity, has entered the Catholic imagination with such power and grace. Phenomenology offers the kind of realism discussed here a footing, a language and a method for understanding the love for things, for objects, and for how such objects interact with that special instance of objects, consciousness. It provides a way to explain how things declare themselves in their real presence, their reality, and how such presences and realities appear to human real presence and actuality.

Anthony Steinbock, Jean-Luc Marion and Graham Harman each in his own manner offer intense critiques of the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. Steinbock's 'generative' phenomenology of 'vertical experience' emerges from his rhizomatic critique of Husserliana; Jean-Luc Marion's critique of Both Husserl and Heidegger results in the discoveries of the saturated phenomenon, negative certainty and a phenomenology of givenness; Graham Harman's relentless and magnanimous critique of Husserl and Heidegger's results in something other than phenomenology properly so called, in what he calls object-oriented philosophy---a 'speculative' realism.

Harman's The Quadruple Object (Zero Books: Winchester, 2011) provides a succinct critique of both Husserl and Heidegger, whom Harman identifies as object-oriented idealist, and object-oriented realist, respectively. In fact, his project appropriates Husserl's 'intentional object' and Heidegger's real-present object (through an elegant critique of the 'tool analysis') into his own 'sensual' and 'real' objects, respectively (26; 35ff). Though he identifies a certain 'realist flavor' (20) to the work of the pioneering thinkers, Harman maintains that phenomenology remains 'idealist to the core' because, in his view, it does not adequately, if at all, address real objects (139). Instead of this inherent idealism, Harman wants to offer a metaphysics with refreshed categories, and he succeeds beyond his own intent; for what seems to emerge from his thought is the very 'inverted' metaphysics that so far has eluded Marion, that inversion of metaphysics that reverses the analogia entis from 'below' to 'above.' Indeed, Harman's metaphysics seems to be the metaphysics of absence that the postmodern turn has posited, like a hypothetical particle, but has not yet identified or elucidated.

Harman's metaphysics of objects presents a robust philosophy of the tensions between real and sensual objects and their real and sensual qualities, and it holds out the promise of being productive and advancing truth. In a series of ingenious diagrams depicting the interactions among objects and qualities, he lands upon the delightful analogy of a deck of cards. As an amateur cardist myself, I was certainly prepare to be delighted. Harman designates each suit ontographically (124ff.): there are always 10 permutations (4 tensions, 3 each of radiations and junctions; p.114) in a field of four basic poles of reality (78). In Harman's system of card-counting, there is no trump, no privilege of one suit over another: his ontography has a flat ontology. Despite all the counting and interacting of suits in the play of this realism, I take Harman at his word that we cannot count into his deck a reduction to mathematics. Harman's polarities play out not only in the fourfold structure of the quadruple object, but in the fourfold of his resurrection of Heidegger's Das Geviert: no longer earth, sky, gods and mortals, no longer 'something at all' and 'something specific' as event and as occurrence (87-91) but now space, time, essence and eidos, which now constitute the four tensions of the four poles of reality (99ff.).

Obviously, a complete analysis of Harman's system cannot occupy this piece. I offer it, though, as a productive system that seeks to unveil the truth of reality. The very uncontainability of the essences of real objects, and their indolent withdrawal from experience, suggests a sympathy to the saturation of phenomena and givenness as Marion describes it, and even Steinbock's verticality, though verticality describes 'vertical' experiences. Steinbock's rigorous descriptions of the tensions between the moral emotions, and even mystical experience, and their qualities also seems at home in the speculative realism of the quadruple/fourfold object as the center of Harman's project. Because Catholic Realism commands the most comprehensive account of truth that all these post-Husserlian, post-Heideggerian philosophies of reality offer, it should not surprise that Catholicism has gravitated in this general direction.

Marion's description of the disappearing object (181-88) as it follows from his own 'tool analysis'(197-200) in Negative Certainties reflects the phenomenality of two real objects approaching one another as described by Harman. The mutual withdrawal of each polarity is 'known' as withdrawal even if its 'content' remains unarticulated. Such 'knowledge' has a negative certainty as it plays out in counter-experience. Similarly, the moral emotions that play out against the question of pride in Steinbeck's work also play out as the interface of 'real objects' in their withdrawal. Indeed, the generativity of both Steinbeck's verticality and Marion's saturation and phenomenology of givenness stand (favorably) against the generativity of Harman's fourfold, even as they stand against his indictment of the false, inadequate, less than 'full blown' realism of phenomenology in general. Harman has not yet accounted for phenomenologies that describe phenomena that side-step noema and noesis---generative phenomenologies of givenness and verticality. For in these phenomenologies the objects on either side of the phenomenological moment are real, and give themselves to themselves prior to any other kind of givenness; and they give to themselves their own selves, each their own Myself in a way that is anterior to any givenness of or to an 'other.' In short, Marion's 'third reduction' has postulated a truly autonomous phenomenal object, whose self-sufficient givenness prefigures the inexhaustibility of phenomenality that Harman jealously guards.

Self-givenness supplies real objects with the autonomy of their very nature, their very essence. No other self is required for this self-givenness. No reception validates such a robust givenness; instead, the givenness of things is simply and purely given into reality, regardless of any real or sensual qualities that might inhere in such a moment. That there might be a special kind of object in the vicinity that might experience the reality of another object as a counter-experience of its withdrawal, is an interesting phenomenon in and of itself, but does not distort any reality of any qualities or essences (e.g., withdrawal). 

While Catholic Realism, at least in the hands of the discourse of this blog, places a premium on relationality as anterior to the being of a self, it can withstand the reification of such relation as the birth of another object within which objects, real and sensual, interact in a knowledge verified by negative certainty. Such a realism does not restrict saturation to real, withdrawing objects. Sensual objects, as they enter consciousness, have a saturation all their own. Yet the generativity, the productivity of all object oriented philosophies, whether phenomenologies of verticality, or of givenness and saturation and negative certainty, or the counter-experience of the speculation of the tensions, radiations and junctions of a fourfold structure of reality, find great favor in the special kind of realism I have called Catholic Realism. Whether the objects are real or sensual, whether they withdraw or find presence, whether they take the form of the sacraments, liturgies, morality, social justice, solidarity, subsidiarity, whether we can know them with positive or negative certainty, they either come before us as they present or as they withdraw in a vibrant reality. An example might suffice to illustrate the problems confronted by Catholic Realism.

The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist no longer finds adequate representation in a metaphysics of transubstantiation. Instead, the reality of the Eucharistic presence finds its better accounting in the saturated phenomenon, givenness, vertical experience, and in the tension between real and sensual objects and their qualities. Only among such approaches can the claims made for the Real Presence by Catholic Realism find full expression; for Christ in the Eucharist is no mere impanation or consubstantiation, but in the event of a real and sensual object in tension with its real and sensual accidents, and in the space, time, essence and eidos at play in this reality. Speculatively, the Eucharistic experience involves the withdrawal of the real object into the saturated phenomenon recollected in a counter-experience, which is none other that the stark confrontation with sacramentality itself, further enfolded in the verticality of love and hope.

Only the onslaught of an idolatrous materialism, the materialism of empiricism, scientism and naturalism, threatens to reduce all of reality to its own narrow gaze. Catholic Realism asks then this question: since such a materialism is inimical to all object-oriented philosophies, whether generative phenomenology or generative speculative realism, is the enemy of my enemy my friend? Catholic Realism seeks no synthesis of the object-oriented philosophies. If it asks Harman for real objects, he will respond in spades and a robust metaphysics; if it asks Marion for an account of the icon, or the idol or the flesh, he will respond with the saturated phenomenon and his philosophy of givenness; if it asks Steinbock for an account of hope, he will respond with the verticality of the self, the Myself and the tensions between these and pride, and their qualities. It might turn out that any one of these approaches to the Truth is ill-suited to the task; but in its self-understanding and self-givenness, the realism that inheres in Catholicism knows that it plays on the field of facticity and finitude, and play this hand at no-trump.

Of Principles and Phenomena

"...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 as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there" (E. Husserl,  Ideas I, 44).





Another anthem for phenomenology might be "back to Husserl himself." His 'principle of principles' (as he described above) marks the points of departure for the deployment of the phenomenological method. Anyone wishing to comment coherently on the movements within phenomenology, especially within the 'new' phenomenology, does well to begin in Husserl's governing principle as it opens upon putting experience at hand. One does even better if one states one's own understanding of the principle, and restates it as an interpretation of it.

If I may restate and interpret, the 'principle' admonishes the excursions of method to have faith in the knowledge that what presents itself within the intuition 'writes' itself into consciousness with its 'own hand,' as it were, without or at least prior to any conceptual framework: nothing intercedes for phenomena as they enter consciousness. What is there is the thing itself, unencumbered by a traversal through an extraneous conceptual space that imprints a signature of its having been there before its arrival in the consciousness. Consciousness therefore only needs to traverse itself to lead itself back to the thing itself.

Having a handle on the principle assists in determining if an application of the method has violated it, as, for example,  Dominique Janicaud charges Jean-Luc Marion and others of doing (see his Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn"). I am uncertain if Janicaud is a maximalist Husserlian, as perhaps Eugen Fink seems to be; but if there is something worth protecting in Husserl's thought, something worth keeping from a contamination, it must be the principle itself. Fink himself protects Husserl's project from misunderstanding and at the same time suggests that what awaits the effective phenomenologist (one who deploys the method successfully) is nothing short of phenomenal (as in, 'he played a phenomenal game,' or 'the performance was phenomenal,' or 'it was a phenomenal film'). Nothing short of conversion or transformation awaits over the Husserlian rainbow (see Ronald Bruzina's Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928-1938, Yale, 2004; and, of course, Eugen Fink's own Sixth Cartesian Meditation: the Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, trans. R. Bruzina, Indiana, 1995).

How ironic then is Marion's work, work accused of violating the principle of principles and lacking 'rigor', which proves the method (a special case of the exception[al] proving the rule), demonstrates how the method really can get at the very possibility of conversion and transformation. What should trouble us more is the principle's not-so-subtle post-Cartesian appeal to certainty, or at least confidence; Marion has rehabilitated both the principle and Descartes in this regard. In any event, nothing in Marion's work, especially The Erotic Phenomenon and In the Self's Place, eludes 'rigor;' in fact, the former work can be viewed as overwrought, and both viewed certainly as vigorous and exhaustive (if not exhausting).

The principle, nonetheless, provides a basis for moving into this new phenomenology of givenness. I have described the maneuver of this graduated method as the phenomenological moment in part to remind me that the method defies causality---the moment is a moment of simultaneity---and in part to remind me to resist the temptation to think the reduction as the result of a sequential process of 'epoche' followed by the 'reduction proper.' Despite Husserlian 'givenness' rooting itself in the mathematical, in the given of geometrical proof, Marion's givenness leads back to the fecundity of such 'originary' givenness and deconstructs it, leading the way to his third reduction.   

Hence, the phenomenological moment is a busy place, whether sonorous or cacophonous. The horizonal element of the principle which sets the limits at which the thing presents itself also sets the tone (the stage?) for the moment itself, where the thing, consciousness, and the horizon intersect upon the 'ground' of the moment, which is none other than a shape-shifting 'self,' or better, shape-shifting 'selves.' At the risk of participating in the seemingly endless talk sometimes construed as a meta-discourse of 'phenomenology', let me remind myself of why the method tends to work in productive and fascinating ways. While phenomenology 'proves' nothing and only points to possibility, its effects can have profound critical implications, especially for the critical approach generally employed in this blog.

The stakes are high: reality itself. The moment of method recreates the world. So long as we dot our "I's" and cross our "gazes" we should be OK and live to commit phenomenology another day. We should also bear in mind that temporal and spatial markers [I underline some of these below] are merely a convention in phenomenology, much like the trope of its presenting itself in the first person singular---all convention, all Darstellung, all stage-craft. All the world's a stage.

The enactment of the method begins as the thing surprises consciousness into a consciousness of 'something.' That consciousness is a consciousness of a self, and that self is a self in the flesh, and that flesh rests in its finitude and immanence. The very boredom (how's that for an electrified term in this business) of the natural attitude, the attitude that accepts the science of reality as, for example, a clockwork (choose a metaphor for the scientific worldview), an acceptance of the clockwork in all its magnificence and awe, breaks off---boredom experiences a disturbance, even astonishment, at a thing presenting itself, appearing in view, within a gaze. What gaze? When did consciousness get a gaze? The thing awakens the gaze resting dormant---waiting to be born---in consciousness---the intention born of the thing.

What next? What happens next is boredom already collapsed upon consciousness's [t]race leading back through itself to the thing that comes into view. The world of the self has just gotten a bit bigger, stretched out by the space cut by the thing itself; the thing births an enlarged self, a self become through a becoming, a turning toward, a conversion to the thing by the thing. The collapse of the natural attitude, boring as such, comprises the epoche which brings into relief what has just collapsed it: the reduction proper and the thing itself. To separate the two into sequential occurrences would be tantamout to tweezing out rhythm and time from pitch and tonality in music. Let's not do it.

Cacophony or symphony? If experience forms the self, then the epistemological problem presents fully formed. "We are our experiences." "We learn through experience." Certainly these are not difficult notions. Truth is, phenomenology, when its not masquerading as its own meta-discourse, happens every day to everybody. We are 'everyday' phenomenologists, just as we are everyday mystics (as Karl Rahner would have it, referring to Christians who otherwise would be nothing at all), who experience something.

It's a place to start, a place for me to remember that I said this and was going someplace with it. Perhaps it is a place to start again, restart, from where I viewed this through a parallax view, or through the Lacanian registers and the role of 'lack.' In a modified version here, Lack constitutes the self in the flesh and its opening upon the immediacy of the thing fulfilling the intuition. The loss/lack within the self experiencing itself (as itself) and the world through the epoche, points to a fall into the reduction, a 'leading back,' which inheres in the growth of consciousness, and therefore recreates it. In the play of the Real (the condition of the absence of intercession for the thing, its immediacy of presentation), the method enacts, in the Imaginary order, something actually going on in the ineffable Real.  Lack is loss, but loss as a space for something to enter, not merely consciousness, but of becoming.

Polarity in the Phenomenological Moment: An Uneven Laterality of Phenomenality

If givenness, as the sole horizon of phenomena, drives the phenomenological moment, then the relationality between the given and the gifted provides a certain polarity that drives the very reduction that allows the given to show itself. The secondary literature on Marion's work often identifies either pole in the moment, and still more often marks an unevenness or asymmetry of the privilege enjoyed by the given and the receiving consciousness, the pure call (the gift) and the receiver (the gifted).


Though it is probably impossible to retrieve Husserl's noema and noesis, buried as they are in 100 years of critical sediment, they still might illuminate the polarity within the Marion's phenomenological moment. Despite Marion's apparent dissatisfaction with these terms because of their ultimate inadequacy, noema seem to belong to the given itself, and noesis to the gifted. In particular, noema embraces the self of the given within its essence---its act of meaning, and noesis embraces the self of the gifted, within its gaze of seeing---its mode of knowing. If we avoid becoming too dogmatic here, too structuralist, too dialectical, hold too hard to the correspondence between the two terms, or their tension, we might find an oscillation within the polarity in this moment---its inherent sidedness---where the given enters the intuition and the crosshairs of the intention.


To maintain the integrity of the unconditionality of the given giving itself, giving must remain anterior to showing. Giving then is the dynamic of showing---what it is doing to the consciousness. Showing is the revealing of a surface that appears within the gaze of the recipient whose response constitutes the kinetics of either ignoring or receiving---giving of the self to the call. The reduction to givenness allows for an oscillating play in which noema presents meaning and essence to the receptive noeisis through the gaze; for noema constitutes the self of the given, which through giving, shows itself in the noesis of the receiving self of the gifted. Both selves on either side of the phenomenological moment 'do' something to the other: the dynamic side of the given unconditionally calls the self on the other side, which in turn gives itself to what is shown through the kinetic gaze which either ignores or responds.


'Phenomeno-dynamics' maintains the initiative of givenness, while 'phenomeno-kinetics' maintains a limitless response to the gift without compromising its initiative. It might turn out that noema and noesis are simply probes that identify a polarity in the phenomenological moment and leave us with these ideas of phenomenodynamics and phenomenokinetics, which ensures the integrity of an (asymmetric) laterality that marks phenomenality itself. Perhaps we should avoid speaking of polarity and begin to speak of a constitutive laterality if that really turns out to be a distinction that makes a difference.