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

"...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.