An Early Lenten Reflection: Hiding and Seeking

When they heard the sound of the LORD God walking about in the garden at the breezy time of the day, the man and his wife hid themselves from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. The LORD God then called to the man and asked him: Where are you? He answered, “I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid.” Then God asked: Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat? The man replied, “The woman whom you put here with me—she gave me fruit from the tree, so I ate it.” The LORD God then asked the woman: What is this you have done? The woman answered, “The snake tricked me, so I ate it.” [Gen. 3:8-13, NAB]










The simplicity of the action in the story of the Fall of the Human Creature provides a relationality of seeking, hiding, being seen, being accused,  and even accusing, despite all the finger-pointing every which way. Whatever Michaelangelo intended in his painting of the creation of man, the fingers of the man and God are pointed in accusation toward each other.

'Where are you?' The man does not respond with the hineni of the Patriarchs, the 'here I am' that formulates the responsible response to the call. Instead, the man, in fear, shame and even guilt, conceals himself. When put to the test of an honest response, the man points at the women in a vain attempt to defray his guilt, and at God, for 'put[ting] her here with me.' Not to be outdone in buck-passing, the woman points to the snake. As that great philosopher-theologian, Flip Wilson, has concluded, the devil made them do it. No one in Genesis 3 seems to own anything they do. Well, perhaps things are not as bad as all that.

In his The Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Pr., 2014), Anthony Steinbock has identified this hiding from God as the 'paradigm of shame,' and he rightly states that 'hiding' signifies the injury in the relationship between the human and the divine. However, it is the very discovery of nakedness (punning on the Hebrew 'arum/'eyrom cunning/nakedness), and shame that also confirms that the general orientation to God has not been abrogated; for that orientation is the source of the moral emotions experience by the man and the woman. God, in his orientation toward the man, seeks the human; the human, in their orientation toward God, seek God, despite the change in the relationship.

At the heart of shame before God is the change in heart, called by some 'repentance,' the metanoia that holds out the possibility of healing the injured relationship with God. Indeed, once the emotion of shame experienced by the man and the woman becomes attached to an 'act,' an accomplishment that comprises a transgression against the 'other' (in this case, God), the emotional structure becomes more complex to includes guilt, which, in its consideration and fundamental orientation to and of the 'other,' opens upon the possibility of change, both in the meaning of the past action/transgression, and its future status.

"Make straight the path of the Lord" [John 1.23; Isaiah 40:3].

God takes no path to the human; his unconditional call is already there. Only the human needs to tend her garden, keep its paths open and direct, letting nothing hide or impede any progress upon them. No thicket, no forest, shall cast a shadow upon the path. The changing heart is a most wonderful and creative gardener. And while every day is a day for metanoia, Lent provides a place in the liturgical life of the Church that magnifies the seeking of the human and the divine. This movement of liturgy invites the human person into a personhood constituted by responsibility toward the other, and the interpersonal space of the self given to the Myself (which is the good to myself for me). This movement is oriented 'up', into the verticality not only of religious experience but of moral experience as well.

Making 'straight the path' is a kind of phenomenological reduction, where the self sets all things aside so that it may appear before the "Other." The textures of pride collapse, leaving only an authentic self giving itself to the Myself, effacing all counterfeit claims that feed such pride, which Steinbock identifies as the "poverty" of the recipient of givenness. Such a self, standing free and clear, has a richness about it, a plasticity that can open upon idolatry (suppressing givenness, squeezing it into a place where it cannot be contained) or upon a lack that receives what has given itself. This "lack" is not the flat 'lack 'of Lacanian psychoanalysis that seeks any fulfillment, any occlusion by any signifier that happens to be floating by. This lack seeks not occlusion but a different kind of fulfillment where the self gives itself to Myself as oriented to the other, to 'revelation' and the metanoia the ensues when  the human self positions itself before holiness.

Nostos: A Phenomenology of Baseball and the Play of Verticality

Just in case you missed it, Baseball is the Great American Pastime; if we didn't know it before, we certainly knew it after Ken Burns' Baseball.

Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd;
Just buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don't care if I never get back.
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don't win, it's a shame.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,
At the old ball game.

The first person to ever 'steal home' was not even a ball player, though he would have made a great manager: Odysseus. It took him 20 years to get back home, only to find his home defended by the visiting team; and the only way he can finally get home, is to steal it back again. In the process he drives home at least 2 points, one through the ax-heads, the other through Antinous's  throat, the locus of his usurpations. For Odysseus, these are all ecological matters, but to return to baseball, it's just part of the game.

Baseball is based on home, based on home base, based on a diamond-shaped field of 3 other bases, which need to be traversed prior to arrival at home. Putting aside the adolescent sexual metaphor of getting to 'first base,' and Elaine Benes' warning Keith Hernandez that she's not 'waving him in,' or Woody Allen's classic schtick about thinking of baseball to defer the moment of ecstasy, we can safely say that, for the most part, baseball is not really, or at least not just, about sex. Baseball is about nostos, and it enacts the epic journey of the hero returning to where he started, through trials and tribulations; and, in its fanfare for the common man, provides structures and patterns of human experience.

Come to think of it, perhaps baseball really is about sex, but 'sex' as generation and generativity, about the navigation of homeworld and alienworld, and the constitution of the lifeworld. Baseball entails home teams and visiting teams, about playing 'at home' or 'on the road;'  about playing in one's 'own house' or at someone else's 'own house.' We root for the 'home team' and, presumably having left our own homes to get to the home field, the matter is so grave that we 'don't care if we ever get back' (something Odysseus could never say). Baseball is alienating for fans and players alike.

When a batter comes 'up to the plate' he stands very near home, oscillating over the base. The game invites him to leave the environing region of home through the trial of a 'pitch,' a projectile aimed at home but sometimes at the batter's head: baseball is a dangerous endeavor and being 'safe' is never guaranteed. If the batter gets the better part of the pitch, the battle is joined and the journey begins; if the pitch gets the better of the batter the batter is out, and retired to the dugout.

The home field is filled by 9 visitors, invaders really, who have pitched their tent for a few days, and who dedicate their play against the home team's desire to generate 'runs' or points that increase their score by crossing the threshold of home, home plate. Scoring is about reduplication, a generativity of returning home that increases the mass of home itself. Home is defended by increasing the home team's score and limiting the visitors' victories, their crossing the threshold of a home not their own. Each alien transgression of home is an assault, a diminution, an idolatrous delimitation of the home team, the home crowd, the homeworld.

Of course there would be no game were it not for competition, the engagement with the alien, the visitor[s]. Therein lies the threat to verticality: in baseball terms, the coming together of the team and the fans in the generativity of 'scoring' and 'winning.' There is no generativity apart from the creative tension between home and alien: teams can play all the 'practice games' they want, but growth in stature, fecundity in competitive and comparative standings, occurs only with respect to the alien. Sameness---intramural sport--- generates no real points, scores or statures. The threat to verticality is embedded in the inherent 'hospitality' of the game.  It is constitutive of baseball, as lifeworld, to play out on the co-constitutive and co-relative interface of the homeworld and alienworld. After all, in any game of baseball, the visitors come up to the plate as well.

When the NY Yankees host the Boston Red Sox, the pregnancy of hospitality starts the 'game' before the actual game begins. Sport-talk happens, on the parts of the players and the fans. In this example the Yankees are home, and the Red Sox are  'on the road.' Ya gotta love this 'on the road' business: everyone in baseball understands the metaphorical character of the phrase. No one familiar with the game thinks play will occur on some interstate highway. 'On the road' and 'away' euphemistically refer to a game to be played on alien territory. This state of affairs reminds us of the enemy attack on the homeland or homefront (to use a WWII expression) as I have recently discussed in Grendel's visits to Heorot. The Red Sox dedicate themselves to committing what Anthony Steinbock has dubbed 'idolatry' (as I alluded above), which manifests as the denial of the Yankees' achieving 'verticality': a fecundity of scoring, of generativity.

Baseball understands the centrality of the 'other' and its relation to the 'self,' or to use Steinbock's wonderful term, the Myself. Co-constitutive, co-relative play of the homeworld and alienworld makes baseball more than a game symbolic of the acquisition of private property, of adding someone else's home to 'my home;' that doesn't happen in baseball,  even if the standing of the Myself is competitively portrayed in scoring and statistics. For baseball, hospitality is always generative, 'for the love of the game.' The threat to verticality, played out as idolatry of competition, of defensive play, is constitutive of baseball, whose rules are laid down on the horizontal but played out always pointing to the vertical.

Beginning with Ken Burns' Baseball was no mere gratuitous reference. I began there because Burns' documentary, along with other kinds of films, such as Field of Dreams, The Natural, Pride of the Yankees, For the Love of the Game, underscores the importance of Baseball to the American imagination, its culture and values, and Baseball's reach into the experience of actual persons. The penetration of baseball-talk into everyday life speaks to the experience of Americans as Baseball itself has been woven into the fabric of Americana. Baseball language has legal ramifications, such as in the '3 strikes and you're out' rule; it has business ramifications as well, as when, after a boardroom meeting, Harry says to Sally, 'hey you really hit that one out of the park;' or when, after a business lunch Bill says to Susan, 'you really hit a homerun.' In business or politics people 'strike out' all the time, or something really comes 'out of left field.' Indeed, many people's failures are expressed as such persons being sent 'back to the bullpen.'

Baseball, in common parlance, bespeaks the navigations of the homeworld and alienworld, and traversals of territories. Threats to verticality---suppression or delimitation of any social, political, commercial, moral, ecological, religious orientation other than the status quo, the horizontal axis of monochromic, totalized closed-off existence---enter experience as perturbations in the co-constitution and co-relativity of home and alien. Moral and ecological phenomena, and other phenomena of home-coming, cut across the plane of the natural attitude, and point off the horizontal toward an intersecting plane at angles ever so acute, but always poised for vertical flight.

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.'

Monsters on the Frontier: The Denial of Liminality and the Restoration of the Lifeworld by Baptism

As I traverse "Terrain and Territory" in Anthony Steinbock's fascinating and difficult study of phenomenology, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After Husserl (Northwestern, 1995), I allow my favorite monster from literature to intrude upon the landscape: Grendel, who famously appears in the Old English epic poem, Beowulf. Of course, Steinbock's presentation of the 'homeworld' and 'alienworld' and his adoption of these Husserlian ideas within his project of 'generative phenomenology' sets the stage for Grendel's entrance within the 'lifeworld' of the Danes.

Grendel, of Cain's kin and the 'shadow-walker,' hates the sounds of 'joy,' the celebrations within Heorot, Hrothgar's hall, where this king of the Danes gathered with his retainers in the evening. Joy, singing and even inebriation continue until the monster stopped all that with nocturnal murder. What kind of being but a monster could rage against joy? Why does joy and song enrage such a creature? Another nickname for the monster holds a clue: mearcstapa, the 'border-stepper.'



Grendel, whose name suggests both 'ground' and 'border' (consider Mod. Ger. Grenzen) or 'frontier,' crosses from the fens he holds fast to Hrothgar's mead-hall, without ever stepping into liminality.  He personifies the limit, yet never stands at the border of two world, as the 'hero on the beach' often does in Old English poetry (the hero at the border of two worlds is thematic in the Anglo-Saxon poetic record). As a shadow consigned to the lineage of Cain, Grendel can never cross over the outer limit, never become the brave one, sporting a glinting light, near the edge. He remains alien to his enemies and to himself: regenerativity (or generativity) is off limits to him: even in victory he stands alone in Heorot, sterile and the stranger. He is never at home.

As Kenneth P. Quinn has noted in his The Use of Baptismal Liturgy in three Old English Poems, the imagery of the outer limits or edges in Beowulf conjures the liminality of the baptismal font and its liturgy. Liminality, as ontological status, is something denied to Grendel through his proscription, but open to all others, presumably even to the drunken 'thanes' celebrating in Heorot. As the 'mark-stepper' Grendel is denied baptism, the play of 'homeworld' and 'alienworld' is denied its authentic relationality. For Grendel, the 'lifeworld' never reaches perfection (in the sense of completion or fulfillment), and he remains condemned to reign over the limits with no hope for liminality.

Enraged at what is possible for the revelers in the mead-hall, Grendel acts out what is impossible for him; in a mockery of a liturgy of new creation and the baptismal font, which he can never approach, he destroys what is created and celebrated in the scop's (the singer of tales) song of creation, which he cannot endure. Steinbock's delightful discussion (HB, 208-19) of 'narrative' and the role of the 'narrator' in the 'homeworld' provokes an interpretation of a dimension to Grendel's wrath: the scop, as 'narrator 'of cultural narratives, weaves not only tales of history but also of the social virtues and values. In this sense, the teller of tales re-invents the fabric of the lifeworld. The scop, then, continually weaves a world which Grendel can 'visit' but never enter.

The monster reigns over Heorot for 12 years until Beowulf turns the laughter in his heart to fear. Grendel, ripped apart from his own hand and shoulder, his very grip on Heorot, and eventually beheaded in death, rests disjointed and hewn apart whence he came, underscoring his separations in life, denied as he was a co-constituted and co-relative 'homeworld' and 'alienworld.'

The hero's eventual epic descent to the depths of Grendel's mother's lair restores the traversal of water as new life, as he secures victory over evil. The balance of 'alienworld' and 'homeworld' is also restored. Heorot is made whole again, and enjoys an integration of worlds denied its attacker. The baptism of regeneration is for some, but not for those others conscripted into the line of Cain.

A Tree Grows in Palestine: Figs Among Grapes in Luke 13

My previous post, intended as a brief demonstration of a phenomenological approach to reading the parables, left too much unsaid, and did not exhaust the possibilities of the parabolic elements. We can begin, again, but this time, go a bit further into the richness of phenomenality.

A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, “See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” He replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” ’ [Luke 13:6-9, NRSV]

13:6  ἔλεγεν δὲ ταύτην τὴν παραβολήν συκῆν εἶχέν τις πεφυτευμένην ἐν τῷ ἀμπελῶνι αὐτοῦ καὶ ἦλθεν ζητῶν καρπὸν ἐν αὐτῇ καὶ οὐχ εὗρεν


13:7  εἶπεν δὲ πρὸς τὸν ἀμπελουργόν ἰδοὺ τρία ἔτη ἀφ’ οὗ ἔρχομαι ζητῶν καρπὸν ἐν τῇ συκῇ ταύτῃ καὶ οὐχ εὑρίσκω ἔκκοψον οὖν αὐτήν ἱνατί καὶ τὴν γῆν καταργεῖ


13:8  ὁ δὲ ἀποκριθεὶς λέγει αὐτῷ κύριε ἄφες αὐτὴν καὶ τοῦτο τὸ ἔτος ἕως ὅτου σκάψω περὶ αὐτὴν καὶ βάλω

13:9  κἂν μὲν ποιήσῃ καρπὸν εἰς τὸ μέλλον εἰ δὲ μή γε ἐκκόψεις αὐτήν

The archeological evidence suggests that in Palestine at the time of Jesus both fig trees and grape vines grew, sometimes together, on terraced slopes. This parable speaks of a single fig tree planted in a man's vineyard. The man comes to the vineyard to gather figs, which he expects to discover on his tree. We learn that he has sought his discovery of the figs on this tree for 3 years, but to no avail. He orders the vineyard-worker to cut down the tree because it wastes the earth, parasitically taking without yielding the man's 'due.' The vineyard-worker asks the man to pardon the tree, to defer its destruction for another year, through which he will till and fertilize the earth. If the tree bears fruit, good; if not, the worker extends an invitation to the man to cut it down at that time.

The previous analysis noted that the man and the gardener/vineyard-worker each embodies a certain state of the self. The immediate context of this parable is the discussion of those who perish seemingly in willy-nilly occurrences, and Jesus's teaching that the deaths do not result from sin, but from horrific aleatory forces. The context runs in confluence with the natural attitude toward human suffering and sin (Luke 13:1-6 and cf. John 9). The man, citing a waste of the soil, accuses the fig tree (this fig tree [ συκῇ ταύτῃ  ]) of denying fruitfulness, and wishes to execute a version of justice, presumably a justice of the earth/soil. Such justice digs its roots in the expectation of reciprocity within a clear economy of exchange. An investment of money, time or figs, expects a predictable, grammatical return. This is the structure of expectation in the natural attitude.

 The natural attitude here also pretends to a certain ecology, taking an interest in the well-being of the earth (soil). The man is heavily invested in the productivity of the land as well: part of his investment must prepare the land to give up its yield every season; but he will cut his losses as he sees fit. The natural attitude here even allows for the protection of time: that the soil is complicit with the man's time, three years of it, three years of unproductive, waste of soil and time. Time and soil must yield in the natural attitude, and the parasitic fig tree, for its betrayal of time and soil, must become 'nothing:' "Cut it down," as the lives under 'Pilate' and the 'tower of Siloam' were cut down. The natural attitude has its own way of restoring balance to nature, and limiting exposure to a poor return.

The vineyard-worker certainly sympathizes with the man's natural attitude, but the man, who presumably did not deposit and sow (cf. Luke 19:12-27 for a topsy-turvy play of the attitudes), knows nothing of a particular way of the soil. The gardener, on the other hand, has his hand in the soil, and experiences the earth and time, and the fig tree's being in time, in a phenomenological attitude. He understands the past, but looks with another kind of expectation of the future with a certain 'hope.' The economy of giving and yielding in the natural attitude collapses, and the fig tree appears as it is in itself, as Argos appears to Odysseus, who collapses time and space that his dog might appear as he is in himself (The Odyssey, Bk. 17; emphasis mine):

As they were speaking, a dog that had been lying asleep raised his head and pricked up his ears. This was Argos, whom Odysseus had bred before setting out for Troy, but he had never had any enjoyment from him. In the old days he used to be taken out by the young men when they went hunting wild goats, or deer, or hares, but now that his master was gone he was lying neglected on the heaps of mule and cow dung that lay in front of the stable doors till the men should come and draw it away to manure the great close; and he was full of fleas. As soon as he saw Odysseus standing there, he dropped his ears and wagged his tail, but he could not get close up to his master. When Odysseus saw the dog on the other side of the yard, dashed a tear from his eyes without Eumaeus seeing it, and said:

'Eumaeus, what a noble hound that is over yonder on the manure heap: his build is splendid; is he as fine a fellow as he looks, or is he only one of those dogs that come begging about a table, and are kept merely for show?'

Open to the givenness of the young tree, as Odysseus opens upon the essence of his beloved dog, the gardener chooses to nourish the soil (Odysseus nourishes memory, the past made present)---he sees not the depletion of the earth by parasitism, but a transformation the land, that, when nourished (cared for, perhaps even loved?), might feed the tree, so that the tree will flourish, and bear fruit in the next year. The 'gardener' redeems the soil, the fig tree and time, transfiguring them. The man, his patience taxed beyond the economy of his vineyard, closes himself off to the future, which he suffers through the anticipation of figs. He closes himself off to the redemption and transfiguration possible in what is far more visible in the gardener's attitude, whose view of the future anticipates, without anxiety, the bearing of fruit. Anxiety forecloses on hope and a change of heart: metanoia; anxiety forecloses upon a future different than the present.

The possibility of change is 'cut down' in the natural attitude displayed in the parable. Hope, future, faith root in the tilled earth of possibility. Threatened by its very otherness, as figs among grapes, possibility lurks within what is discoverable, visible to some, invisible to others. The man and the gardener are at once particular states of their very selves, or even a particular self in particular moments. The parable offers two ways of being in the world, neither is privileged, though if one were a fig tree, the gardener has the 'better part.' Like Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42), the man and the gardener are the same self in different attitudes whose oscillations bear sweet fruit.

The Parables, The Natural Attitude and a Fig Tree that Didn't Do Nothin' to Nobody

My critique of John Caputo's reading of 'sheep and goats' pericope (Matt. 25) centers on his decision to remain in the natural attitude and identify ecclesial power in the economy of exchange of reward and punishment suggested in the parable. Such a reading subverts his theology of the event and the weakness of God, and defies St. Paul's own exploration of the inadequacy of the analogia entis in 1 Corinthians, where Paul derails the univocity of power: "the weakness of God is stronger than human strength" [NAB, 1 Cor. 1:25]. The vacating of power in Paul obviously plays into Caputo's 'weak theology,' yet in the Folly of God and in his Belfast presentation (linked above), Caputo locates the abuse of God and man in the destruction of the gift and of innocence. A paradoxical sovereignty of God serves a weak theology far better than a univocity of power: this thing between God and the creature fares better when the creator of everything is not the master of the world.


 Most, if not all, of the parables, understood as perlocutionary acts, present states of the self rather than states of affairs: they present the event stirring within phenomenological 'selves,' rather than personified binary oppositions, or systematic dualisms, or the strife of good and evil. The parables invite today's readers into the fold of Jesus's interlocutors, even his interloque, the hearer of the parables' call, those engaged and accused by the presentation of the parables. The reader, the one in the position to receive what is given in the parable, remains in freedom, in either the natural or phenomenological attitude; but the parables only 'work' for today's reader in the latter, as the former attitude lets all hell break loose (as Caputo is fond of saying). That sad state of affairs has had its run, and Jesus had vociferously condemned it in accusing those who hold the kingdom of God hostage against man (Matt. 23).


Let the teacher teach. Were Jesus preaching and teaching an economy of retribution, he would have presented no threat to the established order, and the body of his teachings would not have the radical stink about it. But his teachings, especially those within the parables, do indeed cense their aromas in an amorphous version of Jacob's ladder.


A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, “See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” He replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” ’ [Luke 13:6-9, NRSV]




The man and the gardener each embodies a certain state of the self. The immediate context of this parable is the discussion of those who perish seemingly in willy-nilly occurrences, and Jesus's teaching that the deaths do not result from sin, but from horrific aleatory forces. The context runs in confluence with the natural attitude toward human suffering and sin (Luke 13:1-6 and cf. John 9). The man, citing a waste of the soil, accuses the fig tree of denying fruitfulness, and wishes to execute a version of justice, presumably a justice of the soil. The natural attitude here even pretends to a certain ecology, taking an interest in the well-being of the land (soil). The natural attitude here even allows for the protection of time: that the soil is complicit with the man's time, three years of it, three years of unproductive, waste of soil and time. Time and soil must yield in the natural attitude, and the parasitic fig tree, for its betrayal of time and soil, must become 'nothing:' "Cut it down," as the lives under 'Pilate' and the 'tower of Siloam' were cut down. The natural attitude has its own way of restoring balance to nature.


The 'gardener,' and we always pay attention to gardens and gardeners in the New Testament, certainly sympathizes with the man's natural attitude, but the man, who presumably did not deposit and sow (cf. Luke 19:12-27 for a topsy-turvy play of the attitudes), knows nothing of the way of the soil. The gardener, on the other hand, has his hand in the soil, and experiences the soil and time in a phenomenological attitude. The economy of giving and yielding in the natural attitude collapses in the gardener's experience, and the fig tree appears as it is in itself. Open to the givenness of the young tree, the gardener chooses to nourish the soil, to transform the land, that it might feed the tree, so that the tree will flourish, and bear fruit in the next year. The gardener redeems the soil, the fig tree and time.


The gardener ain't no phenomenological 'phool', pie-in-the-sky cock-eyed optimist. He is a realist, and will deploy the natural attitude if it turns out that the fig tree is no good, and not destined to bear fruit, even if he is privy to the way of fig trees which perhaps give fruit in the fourth leaf, as the vine gives wine in the fourth leaf. This is a fig tree in a vineyard, after all. Today's reader of the parable sits next to Jesus's interlocutors as the parable unfolds. The man and the gardener are at once states of their very selves. The parable offers two ways of being in the world, neither is privileged, though if one were a fig tree, the gardener has the 'better part.' Like Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42), the man and the gardener are the same self in different attitudes whose oscillations bear sweet fruit.

Shinings: A brief note on Manifestations, or Appearances

Levi Bryant's blue cup perhaps best illustrates profane 'local' manifestations of objects. Beginning in the materiality of the
 cup whose essence shines forth from its substance or 'powers' in various contexts, the thing might show itself as itself through the evanescent mode of manifestation. Moreover, Bryant's notion of physical intentionality lends itself to distinguishing the substance and existence of objects that can make an appearance, yet it is distinctly unclear that things that possess 'virtual proper being' need to be existent actualities at all; but to clarify the possible phenomenological dimension of powers and manifestations, we might note that the 'powers' reflect the givenness of things, and the 'manifestations' to their intentionality (in the case of simple objects, their physical intentionality). However, the converse can also be the case, where powers reflect intentionality and manifestations reflect givenness, or better, the degrees of givenness: the latter case might especially highlight the phenomenality of the 'moment' when the thing appearing is potentially a recipient of the other (the crossed gaze).

In this regard, the asymmetrical laterality of the phenomenological moment plays off the phenomenality on either side of the 'moment.' Of course, Levi's general hostility to unbridled phenomenality resists a phenomenological reading of his essentially metaphysical analysis, but if we do not reduce the substance of the thing to its 'manifestations' as he eschews and decries, we need not torture his thesis. Nonetheless, we can agree with him that "the irreducibility of objects to their local manifestations also entails that objects contain within them a reserve or excess."

This very "reserve of excess" inform the dynamics of givenness in phenomenology. This "breaking of the regimes" of the intuition underscores the manner in which some phenomena (all phenomena?) might overwhelm intentionality with their essential uncontainability. These realities in no way disable us from speaking about them, or, certainly experiencing them methodologically within the epoche and reduction. Givenness itself guards against the belittling of objects/things to their local manifestations: but here we must part company from Levi's terminology. the reduction to givenness is beyond substance and powers, beyond metaphysics, or better, otherwise than metaphysics, despite the obvious flirtation with a robust metaphysics in this brief note.

Of Principles and Phenomena II: The Drama of Phenomenology and Violations of the 4th Wall

Art seems generically and ambiguously involved with sacred and profane...it is always inauthentic vis-a -is the purity of the ritual and vis-a-vis a thorough-going realism. This generic impurity is the best clue to its nature.
    A Kafka parable may help us to define more closely art's mixed essence:

Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned on beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony.

Profanation enters the inner sanctum, and become part of the holy. From a purist or ritual point of view there is contamination. The sense that the holy is contaminated is one of the views that emerges from Kafka's work as a whole. Not the death of God, but his impurity...Does not every system have its necessary and permitted profanations?

Geoffrey Hartman, "Struturalism: The Anglo-American Adventure," in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann, (NY: Anchor, 1970), p. 157.



"Does not every system have its necessary and permitted profanations?" Hartman's prescient and startling remarks on the invasion of the profane into the sacred, nearly 50 years old, cut both ways with a decisive double edge in this discussion of the emergence of the new phenomenology. Hartman could hardly have known what was just beyond the horizon of structuralism when his piece first appeared in Yale French Studies in 1966. The Derridean storm, just forming off the coast of the Anatomy of Criticism, had only whispered a breeze in its advent; Being Given slumbered in the deep structure of the first reduction.

As I have suggested in my previous piece, the phenomenological method,  this new phenomenology, plays out on the stage of a consciousness of a self, whose finitude rests in immanence. If I may continue with the metaphor of an enacted drama, I would characterize Janicaud's (and many other's) critique of the new phenomenology as a description of violations of the '4th wall.' The Husserlian phenomenological inner sanctum is a closed space, not without a certain plasticity of course, but closed off in an inviolable integrity so robust that any infraction, any 'profanation,' would constitute an insurmountable transgression that results in not a renewal, but pure novelty.

4th wall violations in modern drama, either on an actual stage or in film, are common techniques and enhance dramatic effect, even when they shock and disorient with their hyperreal or surreal effects on both the drama and the audience. In my sense of them, such violations are not particularly modern, and one might argue that they have their antecedents in the Greek chorus and the soliloquy. Are such violations then always extraneous disruptions, or do they enter the drama and open it up to whatever is beyond the wall? And what of the violations that leap from the stage or screen into another 'real' space, such as "3-D" effects, or a character walking of the stage or screen into a surprised audience, such as Tom Baxter's escape from black-and-white into Cecelia's colorful world in The Purple Rose of Cairo?

The new phenomenology authentically addresses the phenomenality of any and all things that present in and of themselves. The effect of this address authenticates the method's account of such unusual phenomena while leaving the authentication of the thing 'open.' This openness itself addresses all kinds of openings, in the method and in the thing. The possibilities are endless on either side of the phenomenological moment, the given and the recipient.

This very respect for porosity and excess characterizes the deconstructive gesture in general. In-breakings and out-breakings move with Kafka's leopards. The new phenomenology of givenness can formulate a description of such feline motions in a way the offerings in the un-transgressed Husserlian chalice cannot. Classical phenomenology remains reluctant to chase after in-breakings, such as the in-breaking of the divine into history in the Incarnation, or of the in-breaking of the event in Scripture, the release of the event in the Word of God or the name of God. Is the right of such phenomena to appear suppressed, or do such rights not exist at all? What is forbidden?

Whether or not Hartman's observations of art and criticism apply to the phenomenological method in any illuminating way remains an open question, and only time will tell if phenomenology, properly understood, can accommodate Kafka's cats as the deconstructive gesture has accommodated Derrida's cat. Phenomenology's 4th walls of Husserlian givenness and immanence either evolve into the new phenomenology or they do not, but a phenomenology of givenness is not woven de novo from some novel fiber; it traces itself to a method and a principle. And while the phenomenal moment may already prefigure a hermeneutic according to the given, the utility of phenomenology as a critical approach is plastic enough to explore the possibility of the saturated phenomenon through a productive porosity of method and the thing that gives itself.

Method and its object enjoy a perennial and perhaps even an incestuous relationship, criticism and art a reverberating intertextuality where horizons interface in vague chiasmus. I therefore begin and end with Hartman, who has won the last word: "literature and myth are not mere accretions to a central mystery but involved in its very nature. They penetrate and become part of the structure of the sacred event...[a]lways flanked by its dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography" (op. cit., 158).

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.

Sacred Flesh and Profane Body: Falque on the Site of Phenomenality

Falque identifies the flesh as the site of transformation in his The Metamorphosis of Finitude, and in the process, sacralizes the flesh and medicalizes the body. The 'traces' or stigmata of finitude that remain in the flesh notwithstanding, the body is open in a way the flesh is not to alteration. "My flesh is that through which I experience my own body phenomenologically, and not the simple biological and molecular substratum that can be cured, or repaired, or modified" (MF, 136), or, in other words, medicalized. And yet none of this formulation denies "an insistence on the "resurrection of the flesh" (Leib) as a summing up of the lived experience of our bodies" nor does it "imply a denial of the reality of the substantial and material body in the Christian incarnation...It remains the case, however, ...that a total identification of the biological body with the resurrected body...leads to major aberrations" (137).

Aberrations indeed.

What is born of the flesh is flesh (Jn. 3:6). The flesh is born "to a world 'already there'---which I could naturally believe was there before me but which I have to recognize phenomenologically was born only along with me" (129). This birth does not enter the memory (past made present) of the one being born, though the event itself can be certified, witnessed, a birth certificate signed and issued by the physician (or just as commonly, by the professional midwife). Part of the business of medicine is to certify transitions of the body: as a physician, I have completed birth and death certificates, but I do not certify who has been born into finitude, or reborn into finitude metamorphosed. "What is true of birth, in the obscurity of the act of being born for the one who is born, is true also of the mystery of the act of being reborn for the one who is reborn" (129). What, then, precisely, is medicalized? The witnessing gaze of medicine 'sees' only the body, and it is a gaze of power, of science and knowing (see Foucault). The flesh, sacralized into phenomenality, and therefore into its manifestation (see below).

Nonetheless, as Falque argues, "I need witnesses of my flesh, for my birth certificate, but also for my rebirth (baptism and resurrection" (131). Only by such witness does my flesh have an 'origin' and only in this origin and this witness can one find the "clarity of giving birth"  which "can be claimed analogically for rebirth and resurrection." Falque's notion of 'analogy' is nothing if it is not charged. It seems at times that Falque, after taking Marion to task for his attempt to invert the metaphysical impulse that moves from the finite to the infinite analogically (analogy from 'below'), that is, by shifting to the side of the infinite as it analogically moves to the finite (analogy from 'above'), he inverts the inversion. And it really seems to be an inversion, and not a subversion, of Marion's novel inversion, which seems to have to happen prior to the implementation of Falque's stratagem.

Still, medicine, seeing the body only, wants to 'hear' from the flesh. The distinction between symptoms and signs, what the patients subjectively experiences and what the medical gaze accesses, respectively, rests in relation among the self, subjectivity and the flesh. When the flesh cannot speak, only a witnessing gaze is in play. In the case of birth, the gaze alone certifies the event. This medicalization of the body allows the flesh to appear in itself and by itself, albeit in a glass dimly.

Of birth certificates and death certificates, of births and deaths, either certificate will do: births are deaths and deaths are births. Being born and reborn remain distinctly other matters. When we are resurrected, we are resurrected 'in' the Resurrected One, who shows himself of himself and of his own initiative. "The initiative of his appearance guarantees me against my own fantasies, insomuch as I receive him there and when I don't expect him: That is to say, the apparition comes from him rather than through me. Thus he is the phenomenon---exactly as phenomenon is defined" (146). Such guarantees against fantasies underscore "the real existence of this object" that presents to consciousness (146). "When the body withdraws and the flesh becomes manifest, it is then that he shows himself" (145). The phenomenological method that elucidates the phenomenality of the body and of the flesh, also causes the withdrawal of the medicalization of the body, and allows the flesh to 'speak' in its own voice. The medical gaze recedes into its witness and certifications, as it is unable to grasp what the flesh communicates; it does not, finally, hear the voice of the flesh apart from its gaze of the body: it hears only through the gaze. The natural attitude simply will not suffice in the moment of the metamorphosis of finitude.

Medically un-certifiable, un-see-able rebirth, "[t]he resurrection is not simply the manifestation, or the appearance, of another mode of presence of the flesh. It is also a disqualification, or rather a withdrawal, of the substantiality of the body" (144). With respect to the resurrected Christ and the empty tomb tradition, "[t]he objectivity of the disappearance (of the body) signals, then, the disappearance of objectivity (of all reified bodies in the resurrection)". And along with such disappearances, whether on the road to Emmaus, in the delivery room or prior to delivery to the morgue, the medical gaze and all its medicalizations, that it itself visits or that which is visited upon it, is itself perhaps reborn into objectiveness (Gegenstandlichkeit, nach Husserl), which then might make an appearance in the phenomenological moment.

Emmanuel Falque certainly passes for a Catholic, but The Metamorphosis of Finitude will not be receiving the imprimatur or nihil obstat any time soon. He might turn out to be one of those radical theologians John Caputo has insisted into existence; the phenomenology of the resurrection is a theopoetics par excellence, and quite possibly haunts the Catholic tradition with rattling chains of a monadological panentheism. There is great beauty in the spiritual suffering in the Father through the suffering of the Son in the flesh, yet this can be construed as 'making of God' in the image of Husserl. The consciousness of God, on His side of the Resurrection, sleeps in Falque's phenomenology and somnambulates the divine perichoresis: God is Unconscious, to resurrect Jacques Lacan through Tad DeLay's treatise of that title on the psychoanalytic of religio-politics. The Father must be waked as he is [cata]Falque'd, so that we can see if he stays dead, or if this death of God is the death of a conceptual idol (31); so we can see if God awakens from the Mitternachtslied's 'deep dream' of the Symbolic order to insist on his existence. In the meantime, God rests in the Real, calling all finitude to himself, into metamorphosis, into a new heaven and a new earth,within a new God and a new human, in a world transformed.