Some Notes Toward Resolving the Problems of Finitude, Excess, Givenness and Phenomenological Realism with Special Attention to Conrad-Martius, Marion, Steinbock

We are inherently localized, embodied, and chronologically bound receivers who do not occupy an absolute standpoint or command any horizon, though we are prisoners of the horizon of finitude.¹ Far from being an obstacle that cuts us off from reality, however, this finitude is the very condition that allows reality to manifest as reality. If human being were infinite, or if an encounter could fully synthesize and exhaust an entity in a single glance, the world would lose its independent depth and flatten into a mere product of consciousness. Finitude is our direct, unmediated exposure to a world that exceeds us, and human receptivity operates through a unified, formal relation: the self and the Myself.

By synthesizing Anthony J. Steinbock’s conceptual framework across Phenomenology and Mysticism (2007), Moral Emotions (2014), and Knowing by Heart (2021), we uncover a radical reorientation of phenomenological givenness away from a horizontal, self-constituting ego toward an evocative, vertical reception of personhood. For Steinbock, the illusion of the autonomous, self-grounding ego—the categorical "Self"—is shattered through the evidence of the heart. This occurs either via the disruptive feedback loops of interpersonal moral emotions like shame and humility, or through the vertical, non-presentational breakthroughs of the Holy. Rather than generating its own identity, the ego is dispossessed of its sovereign claims and "given over to the Myself:" an irreducibly unique, vocational singularity. Crucially, as articulated in his foundational prequel Knowing by Heart, this shift from a self-enclosed identity to a relational personhood is structurally predicated on the movement of loving and the primary ontological condition of being beloved within both interpersonal and vertical axes.

The reception of Steinbock's work often misreads such intersections as regional descriptions confined to exceptional mystical or affective states; this note redresses that distortion by demonstrating its radical, foundational necessity. The structural relatedness of the self and the Myself is not triggered by the arrival of the exceptional; it is already really real before the phenomenalization of reality. It is the permanent, ontological architecture of finite human being.

This non-objectifying, relational account of the receiving person offers a compelling bridge to the phenomenological realism of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, particularly regarding her concepts of substantial essence (Seinsform) and the ontological grounding of the soul. Just as Steinbock insists that the "Myself" cannot be conceptually fabricated or horizontally constituted by the ego but must be evoked and received from an external, transcendent source, Conrad-Martius (Metaphysical Conversations, "The Soul") posits that the human spirit possesses an ontological depth rooted in a trans-subjective reality. Her realism counters any idealist reduction of the ego by anchoring personal essence in a fundamental, cosmic, and divinely open Sein (Being). When aligned, Steinbock’s affective, vocational "Myself"—awakened by the external address of love—complements Conrad-Martius’s structural realism, where the singular soul is not a self-positing consciousness but a real entity dynamically unfolding in response to the foundational grounding of reality itself.

Neither term holds priority over the other; the self and the Myself are co-primordial. When an entity bearing an unexhausted depth phenomenalizes, the event of manifestation does not shatter the subject, but actively delivers the situated instance of the self over to the Myself. This delivery does not place an observer adjacent to an alien object across an epistemic gulf. Rather, it grounds the subject entirely inside the phenomenon. To undergo an experience is to be structurally situated within the self-giving movement of the real.

Crucially, to be situated inside the phenomenon is to own the encounter with structural necessity. This ownership marks the non-interchangeable singularity of the receptive axis. Because this formal structure is an ontologically prior, unified pairing within the individual receiver, there is a strict phenomenological impossibility of transference, overlap, or hybridity between distinct sites of reception. One locus of reception cannot inhabit or usurp the primordiality of another. A situated instance cannot bypass its own structural condition to occupy a foreign site of givenness. Even in the face of an overwhelming, unconditioned excess, the architecture of reception remains structurally inviolable and untranslatable.

While the situated self records the chronological completion of an event, the Myself endures as the structural condition across which the unexhausted actuality continues to exert its presence. This ongoing registration constitutes the definitive evidence of the entity’s "self-carriage" (Selbsträgerschaft). As Conrad-Martius notes in her foundational analysis of real entities, a real thing stands and grounds itself independently, maintaining a self-carrying structure through its bodily presence (Leibhaftigkeit). If a thing were merely a sense-content constituted by intentional acts, its manifestation would terminate concurrently with the completion of the act. The fact that the phenomenon continues to give itself beyond temporal closure demonstrates that the entity draws from an autonomous, trans-temporal depth of being. Because the subject is inside the phenomenon, this enduring pressure is registered not as an external collision, but as the lived weight of our finitude: an exposure to an actuality that continues to bear itself into presence independently of our glance.

The Phenomenological Sufficiency of Aletheia

The aim of a realist phenomenology is not to contest theology’s right to describe divine Revelation (apokalypsis), nor to criticize Jean-Luc Marion’s profound theological reflections on the matter. Rather, the task is strictly methodological: to ask whether the phenomenon of excess genuinely compels phenomenology to abandon the limits of aletheia (unconcealment) in the first place.

When Marion traces the saturated phenomenon to its highest power--to Revelation--he concludes that the sheer overload of intuition disrupts the very horizons of worldly appearing, necessitating a descriptive transition (perhaps even transformation) from aletheia to apokalypsis—an arrival that can only be accounted for as coming from an absolute "elsewhere." This move is entirely legitimate within theological discourse. However, if taken as a mandatory phenomenological prescription, it assumes that worldly phenomenality is intrinsically too weak, flat, or impoverished to host excess under its own terms.

It is precisely this assumption that the combined Steinbockian-Martian framework allows us gently to reconsider:

1. Real, Concrete, Worldly Being

Conrad-Martius approaches reality not by looking toward a theological elsewhere, but by investigating the rigorous ontological constitution of nature, biology, and physical being. In her analysis, a real thing does not hover as an impoverished sense-content dependent on human constitution; it possesses an autonomous self-carriage and an unexhausted substantial kernel. Because the real entity bears its bodily presence into appearance under its own momentum, its manifestation naturally carries a dense reserve of being. When an experience continues to give itself past temporal closure, we need not interpret this persistence as an otherworldly breach into our horizon. It is simply the enduring, immanent actuality of the thing itself continuing to exert its presence. The worldly phenomenon already possesses sufficient ontological depth to account for the excess.

2. The Sufficiency of Finite Reception

Similarly, when the subject encounters an unconditioned excess, the first-person perspective does not need to be broken, replaced, or supernaturally transfigured to survive the encounter. Through the co-primordial pairing of the self and the Myself, human receptivity is already structurally proportioned to receive an actuality that outstrips its immediate profile. The delivery of the self over to the Myself grounds the subject inside the phenomenon, securing an absolute, non-interchangeable ownership of the experience.

The transformation from aletheia to apokalypsis is not an inescapable requirement for describing excess, the eternal or the infinite; it is an option that arises only when one assumes the world lacks the depth to give, and the human receiver lacks the formal structure to bear, that very excess. By recognizing that a thing is Real inasmuch as it phenomenalizes, we discover that the condition of human finitude—situated within a self-carrying, manifest world—remains fully capable of hosting the mystery of givenness without ever having to leave phenomenology behind.

The Saturated Impasse

For all Jean-Luc Marion’s immense accomplishments in expanding the horizons of phenomenology, contemporary scholarship still struggles to rigorously describe the phenomenon of excess. This difficulty persists, in large part, because standard phenomenological and ontological frameworks remain fundamentally uncomfortable with the structural mechanics of an ego that functions primarily as a recipient rather than a constituting ego. In attempting to depose the sovereign Cartesian or Husserlian ego, Marion introduces the concept of the adonné—the "gifted" or "interpellated" one—wherein the traditional direction of intentionality is reversed: the phenomenon strikes and constitutes the subject.

However, simply reversing the subject-object relationship fails to escape that traditional binary. If the ego is reduced to a purely passive screen upon which an unconditioned intuition is projected, the lived reality of that experience risks a paradoxical evaporation. If there is no stable, pre-given architecture within the self already equipped to receive the excess, the excess becomes structurally un-experienceable. Marion’s framework presents excess as a quantitative overload of intuition that blinds or crushes the subject from the outside, resulting in a form of structural trauma. To ensure that this bedazzlement results in manifestation rather than the total annihilation of the witness, in his Revelation Comes From Elsewhere, Marion chooses to cross the methodological border into theology, adopting apokalypsis to retroactively stabilize a shattered subject and assure that God is really real.

This essay has proposed that the transition from aletheia to apokalypsis is unnecessary to account for excess, for the infinite. The impasse between Marion's framework and the lived reality of unconditioned experience stems from a systemic resistance to what Anthony Steinbock has illuminated as the structural relatedness of the self to the Myself as an irreducible structure of phenomenality. By developing Steinbock's discoveries alongside the realism presented in Hedwig Conrad-Martius’s Realontologie, I suggest that phenomena already possesses sufficient ontological density to give, and the human receiver already possesses the formal structure to bear, the full weight of excess.

The Absolute Ownership of Experience

Crucially, to be situated inside the phenomenon is to own the encounter with structural necessity. To have an experience is to declare, by virtue of formal architecture suggested here, that this is my experience. Under this realist framework, ownership does not denote subjective mastery, psychological interiority, or an egoistic center of power; it marks the non-interchangeable singularity of the receptive axis.

Because this formal structure is an ontologically prior, unified pairing within the individual receiver, there is a strict phenomenological impossibility of structural transference, overlap, or hybridity between distinct sites of reception. One locus of reception cannot inhabit or usurp the primordiality of another. A situated instance cannot bypass its own structural condition to occupy a foreign site of givenness. Even in the face of an overwhelming, unconditioned excess, the architecture of reception remains structurally inviolable and untranslatable.

This structural closure ensures that even when we are entirely immersed inside a massive, overwhelming phenomenon, our perspective remains indivisibly, safely, and primordially our own. We can never inhabit or absorb the primordiality of another’s experience, because the pairing of the self and the Myself is non-transferable. We are "there" for the experience precisely because our innermost center has been anchored and altered by an actuality that transcends us. The delivery of the self to the Myself is the singular, non-dual event of realist givenness: the exact point where our finite receptivity meets the enduring presence of the thing in itself.

The Realontological Prequel: Self-Carriage and Bodily Presence

To understand how an experience can be owned absolutely while containing an unexhausted excess, we must shift the center of gravity away from human consciousness and give it back to the world. The deployment of several principles of Hedwig Conrad-Martius’s Realontologie has facilitated this move. Conrad-Martius anchors a sound phenomenology in the rigor of a robust realism, establishing that a thing is Real inasmuch as it phenomenalizes: so much reality, so much phenomenality, to coin a phrase.

Central to her realism is the understanding that a real entity possesses an autonomous "self-carrying" (Selbstträgerschaft). The real is really real before any moment of giving itself; it possesses a "prequel" of givenness that secures its total autonomy from the human spectator. It does not hover as a merely constituted sense-content hanging around, waiting for an intentional gaze to grant it permission to exist. Rather, it bears its bodily presence (Leibhaftigkeit) into appearance under its own momentum, carrying an ontological weight and a self-carrying actuality.

The concept of Leibhaftigkeit is thus liberated from reduction to a mere mode of consciousness and concretized into an objective mode of being. The appearance is driven by the thing's own self-carrying actuality, meaning that the manifestation carries a dense, fulfilled concreteness that consciousness cannot master or neatly contain. The real entity gives its actual being, but because it draws from a substantial kernel that contains an autonomous atemporal depth, it never exhausts its entire depth in a single act of manifestation. The phenomenon is the manifest presence of the essence itself, completely respecting the fact that the thing maintains its own transcendent, self-contained domain.

The Mechanics of Trans-Temporal Imprint and the Resolving of the Aporia

The deployment of Selbstträgerschaft and Leibhaftigkeit provides the precise functional mechanics required to solve a daunting aporia that paralyzes mainstream phenomenology: the inability to reconcile temporal closure with ongoing continuation. Mainstream models treat an experience as a chronologically bounded box; when the intentional act concludes, the phenomenon is assumed to vanish into a dead memory or sedimented retention.

The framework offered here dissolves this box model by demonstrating that the functional mechanics of realist givenness operate through an ontological transmission of weight and duration rather than cognitive synthesis. The mechanics unfold across a continuous temporal reality:

1. When an intentional act reaches its limit, the situated self records the chronological completion and closure of the event. The clock moves past the hour, and the horizontal window of attention closes.

2. Because the real entity’s self-carriage is anchored in an autonomous depth, its ontological genesis does not terminate concurrently with our attention. The thing continues its self-carrying existence outside our intentional gaze.

3. Because the subject was integrated *inside the phenomenon* through the co-primordial delivery of the self to the Myself, the Myself remains permanently exposed to this ongoing reality.

The phenomenon "continues to give itself beyond temporal closure" because the unmanifest reserve of the thing continues to leave its real-time, objective ontological imprint upon the enduring structure of the Myself. The continuation is not a passive psychological memory fading away; it is the active, live vibration of an unexhausted reality still pressing its weight into the permanent clearing of the Myself. We do not recollect a dead past; we bear witness to the persistent, living weight of an actuality that refuses to be bracketed.

The Phenomenological Sufficiency of Aletheia

By laying bare these mechanics, we can establish the definitive phenomenological sufficiency of aletheia over Marion’s apokalypsis. The aim of this realist enclosure is not to contest theology’s right to describe divine Revelation, nor to fault Marion's genius in writing theologically about the absolute. Rather, the claim is strictly methodological: the transformation from aletheia to apokalypsis is simply unnecessary to account for the phenomenon of excess.

Some of Marion’s saturated phenomena must "come from elsewhere" because his system occasionally treats the worldly object as a flat, passive container of constituted sense-contents. If a worldly object is assumed to lack the capacity to hold excess, then excess must drop from a supernatural sky. Furthermore, because he occasionally views the human ego as a flat, horizontal site of receptive synthesis, the entry of excess can only be registered as a violent, subversive trauma that requires an absolute, theological horizon to survive.

This integration of Steinbock and Conrad-Martius demonstrates that the world we inhabit is already ontologically dense enough to provide excess, and human being is already structurally proportioned to host it. Because the co-primordial pairing of the self and the Myself is already really real before the phenomenalization of reality, human being possesses a built-in, unconditioned architecture for reception. The sudden weight of manifestation delivers the self to the Myself, immersing the subject safely inside the phenomenon. Because worldly entities possess a substantial kernel packed with a self-carrying, trans-temporal depth, the "more" of the phenomenon is an intrinsic property of the world itself. The unsaid of experience is securely anchored within aletheia as the structural, unexhausted depth of the thing itself.

The transformation from aletheia to apokalypsis is an option that arises only when one assumes that the world lacks the depth to give, and the human receiver lacks the formal structure to bear, the weight of reality.

The Fulfillment of Finitude

To conclude that a thing is Real inasmuch as it phenomenalizes is to restore to phenomenology a confidence in the self-carrying actuality of the world. The historical troubles surrounding the ontological difference need no longer compel us to choose between an impoverished, subject-dependent idealism and a radical, traumatic exteriority that flees into theology. Excess is not an anomalous disruption of our horizons; it is the definitive signature of a real world and its real inhabitants bearing their unexhausted reality into an equally real, finite and lived experience.

Ultimately, this realist turn redefines the meaning of human finitude. Finitude is not a cognitive lack, a failure of the senses before a transcendent Giver. It is the condition of human being: our permanent, open exposure to a self-carrying reality that we did not construct but are fully structured to host. We are under no structural requirement to leave the immanent terrain of phenomenology behind. By holding fast to the co-primordiality of our receptive axis of self and Myself, and to the independent gravity of the thing itself, we fulfill the deepest mandate of early phenomenology: to stand before the world as it genuinely gives itself from itself, bearing witness to an unexhausted reality that is already, primordially, our own.



Note

¹ This positioning of finitude as the condition of human being from which subjectivity follows marks a quiet but decisive alignment with Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein. To understand human being as "being-there" (Dasein) is to recognize that we are always already delivered over to an existential and temporal clearing we did not construct. However, our model departs from early fundamental ontology by insisting that this clearing is not a solitary existential structure, but a receptive capacity permanently occupied and pressured by the Selbsträgerschaft of real, worldly entities. For a different account of such structural asymmetry, see also Levinas (Totality and Infinity), where alterity functions as an interpersonal ethical trauma rather than an objective cosmological structure of scale. Similarly, this model departs from the standard Husserlian retentive-protentive schema, which reduces past givenness to the internal subjective mechanics of memory rather than an ongoing, objective pressure of the real entity itself.

Some Books in Dialogue, but First, Habermas in the Vertical Turn

As usual, I am late to the party, but grateful nonetheless for Amazon's analytics of my purchases and browsing there. I recently came across Habermas's and Ratzinger's The Dialectic of Secularization (Ignatius, 2007) and was stunned to find Habermas moving toward an authentic communication between secular reason and religious thought. In part responding to the stagnation of European liberal democracies and the disillusionment of citizens as expressed as a growing apathy toward the democratic process, Habermas seems to be continuing his exploration of religion and theology as a voice otherwise absent in the discourse of the post-secular, post-metaphysical 'lifeworld,' and taking it to the unexpected terrain of legitimation. So long as that voice, it would seem, offers something distinctly absent and wanting in secular rationality, its presence at the table of reasonable conversation is welcome. Indeed, in what was to me a startling movement of ideas in his Between Naturalism and Religion (Polity Pr., 2008), I find that Habermas's program is not merely pragmatic and post-secular, but also generative, alive and on the move.

Well that sounds so much like a turn toward verticality, as that idea has floated in this blog but certainly as enunciated in the recent works of Anthony Steinbock, especially in his Phenomenology and Mysticism. In his critique of the 'vertical' element of the 1st generation of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, Habermas had found a pessimistic messianism, for example, in the thought of Adorno and Horkheimer. Eduardo Mendieta has assembled a cross-section of Habermas' essays from the 1980s through the late 90s that traces the initial sojourn into this arena, in Religion and Rationality (Polity Pr., 2002), and the intimations of a theological 'turn.' How far down that turn goes remains to be seen, yet Habermas seems open to a real depth; but with a proviso: he has recently suggested, in light of his critique of Rawls (and Rorty), that religious language and its 'truth contents' that enter into the public sphere should be translated into a 'generally acceptable language' prior to their presentation to the bar of the democratic secular apparatus (The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, NY: Columbia Univ.Pr., 2011, 25).

I make these observations not to rehabilitate Habermas for a religious audience, but to underscore the vibrancy of one of the 2oth century's most interesting thinkers, one whose thought has not come to rest in the past, but actively engages the 21st century; and to underscore the relative deafness of many of the thinkers so central lately to this blog toward Habermas's transformations. Habermas, after all, is no stranger to Husserl and other phenomenological thinkers, and while his work is not of a phenomenological flavor, it does indeed speak of a lifeworld, and implicitly, how the homeworld and alienworld might interact to co-create the lifeworld and invigorate the level of discourse and value the experiences of all potential political participants. Habermas might not himself have moved off the horizontal plane, but he seems to have positioned himself toward the vertical realm by de-limiting what is proper to the public sphere.

I offer this post as something of a prolegomena to placing God, the Flesh and the Other (2014), In Excess (2002), and Phenomenology and Mysticism (2009)in a broad dialogue that would not be tone deaf to the social imaginaries as they appear in Marion and Steinbock, but also in Habermas and Falque. I will not chide our phenomenologists for their shyness toward Habermas, which I interpret as an uncertainty toward his place in the discourse of theology and phenomenology. I will simply keep Habermas 'out there,' poised to jump in,  similar to our engagement with Agamben not too long ago.

I am placing these books and their authors in dialogue because I seem them in such a dialogue already. Steinbock's discussion of "Individuation" in P&M and its far-reaching implications for the self, givenness, redemption, the flesh, has its resonances with Marion's discussion of the flesh, and with Falque's discussion of the flesh, haecceity, singularity and his presentation of Tertullian, Irenaeus and Duns Scotus.

I will be fleshing all this out in a subsequent post, but for now, I simply want to draw attention to the problem of individuation, especially as Steinbock dispassionately and painstakingly explicates it. Because Steinbock has remained within an orthodoxy of Husserlian phenomenology, despite bringing the founder's thought into a more robust 'generativity,' he still must confront the problem of essences, which leads him to distinguish individuation from 'individualization'. While this maneuver, remarkably, does no violence to his presentation of individuation per se, it does proffer a certain distrust of givenness, and in particular, a phenomenology of givenness. Steinbock distrusts, too, as does Merleau-Ponty, just how complete the 'reduction' can become. Both thinkers are therefore 'stuck' in Husserl's 'givenness' which translates in Steinbock's work as a necessary distance between 'verticality' and the 'saturated phenomenon,' and as a description of the inadequacy of the latter. So long as the description of verticality and individuation remains tied to even a muted Cartesian metaphysics, this version of generative phenomenology will maintain a jaundiced eye upon a full-blown phenomenology of givenness as Marion's oeuvre strongly evidences.

Falque's GFO struck me as another version of P&M, even if just superficially as doing for Irenaeus and others what Steinbock has done for his mystics. Both works accomplish remarkable feats of philosophy, but they are also marked by a suspicion towards Marion, his saturated phenomenon, his overplaying the anti-metaphysics card, and his description of givenness. But make no mistake about it, the language through which the 'truth content' of religion and religious language enters the public sphere is the language of phenomenology.

In my next post, I will be keeping Habermas's work in the natural attitude, while I look at the general swerve moving through some of the thought of Steinbock, Falque and Marion as suggested above.

A Case of Case: A Thought on A Grammar of Relations and the Verticality of Experience

As you no doubt recall, the nominative case is case of the subject, the accusative the case of the direct object, the dative the case of the indirect object, and the genitive the case of the multiplicities in subjects and objects (direct or indirect). There are special cases for these cases, but let it suffice for now to note these four. In phenomenology, and in post-structuralist approaches in general, the accusative gets some attention. It is the case of the "I" called, or called out, pointed to, seen, and even, of course, accused.

A little confession: I still like Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film always struck me as a fairly obvious allegory of the theophany on Mount Sinai, and the calling of a people to an encounter with the divine. As you no doubt recall, the film depicts an alien visitation, a 'scheduled' visitation, on Devils Tower, the first declared national monument in the US. The aliens have sent a thought, a mental image to whomever can receive it, and the receivers are moved to all sorts of behaviors, mostly artistic endeavors that represent the mental image, which is of the famous monument in Wyoming. Roy Neary, the troubled protagonist in the film, is driven nearly insane by the image in his mind until he makes the visual connection between his sculpture of Devils Tower and its appearance on TV. He goes to Wyoming to learn if it's all real.

Just as Roy is called, we are all potentially open to an anonymous call, a call that pulls us into a relationality with something. Roy is driven by his accusation toward an image, a voice. Is Roy Neary a mystic? There is a wonderful scene in the film in which the communication between human and alien, a musical dialogue, a tonal conversation, takes place in a crescendo of notes. At first, single tones are played on a keyboard, and then a particular melody. finally the alien craft responds and answers the musical provocation, by completing the musical phrase. Then the music becomes increasingly complex, and the human keyboardist struggles to keep up, as the complexity emerging from the alien taxes his abilities. Finally, the alien takes over, and the keyboard is shown playing itself, being played by the alien, as the fantastic communication continues.

A theme shared by mystical traditions of monotheistic faiths is a graduated experience of the divine. This theme is magnificently described in Anthony Steinbock's Phenomenology and Mysticism (Indiana Univ. Pr.: Bloomington, 2007) and these comments are indebted to his presentation there. Whether Neary is a mystic or not is really not the point: what is important is that the accusative case is not only the case of being called, seen, or accused, but also of being chosen. I read the musical dialogue in Close Encounters as the gradations of verticality as one moves from the natural, human-directed efforts to ascend into a new relationality, toward the divine, where divinity itself directs the ascent---where the keyboard plays itself, where something other than the human takes over and lifts the human toward itself in a very close encounter. 

Neary, like some of the mystics in the monotheistic traditions, is accused, called, seen and chosen. He acts in his world (as St. Teresa of Avila, Rabbi Dov Baer and Ruzbihan Baqli do in theirs) as part of his hineni, his 'here I am.' Perhaps 'everyday mystics' are potentially open to the kind of gradual (which is not to say hierarchical) approach to the divine insistence. Accusation and chosen-ness is the case of a grammar of relationality that releases the event of religious verticality. The less we try, so it seems, the more effortless our approach to the divine becomes, because we are seen, not because of our own will to be seen, but because the givenness of another will takes over, brings us over to another place. The shifting of grammatical cases plays out as 'subjects' become 'objects' and objects and subjects become multiples, in countless encounters as we find status before and after the Word, that is, the 'verb.'