The Surface of the Deep 9781935790808, 9781888570700

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The Surface of the Deep

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Clayton Crocke� and Jeffrey Robbins, Series Editors This series publishes original works dealing with cu�ing-edge theoretical ideas in the field of religious studies and theology. A focused, interdisciplinary approach to religion is encouraged, an approach that will develop concepts and images in transformative ways, through engagement with disciplines and approaches such as Continental philosophy, semiotics, cultural studies, feminism, anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, and the media. Manuscript submissions are invited that emphasize originality and creativity, rigorous scholarship, and an ability to communicate complex concepts with clarity and expressiveness. Younger scholars, especially, are encourahged to submit their work to this series. Proposals should be directed to Clayton Crocke�, Series Editor, The Davies Group Publishers, PO Box 440140, Aurora, Colorado, 80044-0140. Carl A. Raschke, The End of Theology Theresa Sanders, Body and Belief: Why the body of Jesus cannot heal Gabriel Vahanian, Anonymous God Charles E. Winquist, The Surface of the Deep

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The Surface of the Deep

Charles E. Winquist

A volume in the series Contemporary Religious Thought Clayton Crocke� and Jeffrey W. Robbins, Series Editors

The Davies Group, Publishers

Aurora, Colorado

iv | The Surface of the Deep The Surface of the Deep ©2003, The Charles E. Winquist estate. All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the express written permission of the publisher, and the holder of copyright. Submit all inquiries and requests to the publisher. Address all requests to: The Davies Group, Publishers PO Box 440140 Aurora CO 80044-0140 USA Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Winquist, Charles E., 1944The surface of the deep / Charles E. Winquist. p. cm. -- (Contemporary religious thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-888570-70-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Philosophical theology. I. Title. II. Series. BT40 .W55 2003 230’.01--dc21 2002154363

Cover art is from an original painting by Delynne Lorentzen ([email protected]) and appears by permission.

Printed in the United States of America Published 2003. The Davies Group Publishers, Aurora CO 80044-0140 1234567890

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As my thinking matured I began to understand that I had theologically apprenticed myself to a cow. I think cows are secular but I don’t know that for sure or even what it means to make such a claim. My experience with cows is limited but has been significant. That is, my knowledge of cows is very limited. My meeting with a cow was singular. I met my cow at a fork in the road. I had a tendency to textualize experience and then philosophically elaborate the text . . . Charles E. Winquist

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For Logan Garrett Shapiro and Erika Davis Shapiro

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Contents

Foreword Preface

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Part 1 A Preliminary Problematic Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Introduction 1 An Epistemological Conception of the Transcendental Imagination 17 Transcendental Ontology 39 An Ontological Conception of the Transcendental Imagination 55 The Development of a Hermeneutical Theology

Part II Theoretical Elaborations Chapter 6 ` Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14

The Surface of the Deep: Deconstruction in the Study of Religion 91 The Theological Becoming of Metaphysics The Silence of the Real: Theology at the End of the Century 119 Theology and the Pedagogy of the Sacred Person, Subjectivity, Self 155 The Ambiguous Gift of Desire 171 Thinking Religion 181 Materiality and Theoretical Reflection Postmodern Secular Theology 199

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Part III Theological Filiations Chapter 15 Paul Tillich and Theology Beside Itself 213 Chapter 16 Paul Tillich and Untimely History 225 Chapter 17 Langdon Gilkey: Theology, Symbolism and Language 235 Chapter 18 Analogy, Apology and the Imaginative Pluralism of David Tracy 249 Chapter 19 Jacques Derrida and the Study of Religion 263 Chapter 20 Julia Kristeva and Amatory Discourse 271 Chapter 21 Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil 279 Chapter 22 Jacques Lacan and Theology 287

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Foreword

The Surface of the Deep is Charles Winquist’s final book and serves as the culmination of his work. Professor Winquist worked on The Surface of the Deep until shortly before his death on April 4, 2002. His intention was to provide a republication of his first book, The Transcendental Imagination, along with other essays written over the course of the last decade, in order to demonstrate how his theology had developed from its beginnings. This was to function as platform and prolegomenon to his future work. Deeply indebted to Paul Tillich’s philosophical theology of culture, Winquist also radicalized Tillich’s thought by completing the break with ecclesiastical theology. Like Tillich, Winquist worked on the edge of the most influential and important academic, philosophical, and theoretical discourses. At the same time, Winquist never lost touch with human and religious experience, and was always sensitive to the constraints of and on theological thinking. Winquist developed a sophisticated methodology that situated theology in relation to the study of religion and within a thoroughly secular culture. Theology was a discourse formation that functioned to fissure other discourses by pushing them to their limits and interrogating them as to their sense and practicability. The fundamental accomplishment of Professor Winquist’s work is the location of desire at the heart of theology. After Winquist, theology must reference itself in terms of desire. To paraphrase St. Augustine, the question “what do I desire when I desire God?” says at least as much about one’s own desire as it does about God — desire is implicated within every theological formulation. In books like Epiphanies of Darkness and Desiring Theology Winquist demonstrated an uncanny ability to probe profound and difficult questions about human thinking and living without sacrificing the complexities of signification to the natural desires for certainty, simplicity and security. Any serious theology must acknowledge its status as a desiring theology, which affirms both the epistemological and ontological distance and complicity between desire and its object, as well as the duplicitous substitutions that may take place. Charles Winquist avoided any easy answers, and he always recognized the possibility of things being otherwise, but his insistence on framing epistemological questions opened up theology to its otherness, and it can never be the same. We can choose not to ask Winquist’s questions, and we can wish that we had not asked

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them if by chance or dare we do raise them, but we cannot do so without risk of naïveté. The Surface of the Deep invites readers to participate in Winquist’s ongoing transformation of theological thinking by working through the essays that follow. Part One, A Preliminary Problematic, consists of the text of The Transcendental Imagination, published originally in 1972. The transcendental imagination is Kant’s alternate title for the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding, which performs the crucial task of mediating sensory intuitions and concepts within a temporal subjective framework in the Critique of Pure Reason. Winquist reads Kant under the pressure of Bernard Lonergan’s theology of Insight, and then expands or ontologizes the Kantian transcendental imagination, by way of Heidegger and Whitehead, in order to establish a basis or subject for theological reflection. Part Two, Theological Elaborations, collects essays written by Winquist over the course of the last twelve years that carry forth his thinking and creatively re-envision new horizons for theological exploration. These chapters alternate between more explicitly philosophical and theological pieces, and more methodological reflections on the study of religion. “The Surface of the Deep” (Chapter 6) provides the image of thought for the title, and introduces the shift from a metaphorics of depth to a complexity inscribed along the surface of thinking. “The Theological Becoming of Metaphysics” (Chapter 7) and “The Silence of the Real” (Chapter 8) together articulate a new agenda and sensibility for theology as a discipline and as a discourse. These two chapters, in particular, represent the cutting edge of Winquist’s theological vision, for it is here that Winquist’s theological challenge is issued most directly. “Theology and the Pedagogy of the Sacred” (Chapter 9) constitutes an important intervention into the academic study of religion by engaging theoretical insights of historians of religions and aligning them with contemporary philosophical issues. This project is continued in “Thinking Religion” (Chapter 12) and “Materiality and Theoretical Reflection” (Chapter 13). “Person, Subjectivity, Self ” and “The Ambiguous Gift of Desire” (Chapters 10 and 11) probe the epistemological foundations of subjectivity and human desire and suggest tools for grappling with their extreme complexity and ambiguity. Finally, “Postmodern Secular Theology” (Chapter 14) constitutes Winquist’s most recent articulation of an agenda for contemporary theological thinking by way of an encounter with John D. Caputo’s rereading of Derrida. The last section of the book, Part Three, Theological Filiations, consists of more topical essays that deal mainly with a particular thinker. In accordance with Tillich’s supreme influence, there are two essays on Tillich

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(Chapters 15 and 16) followed by encounters with influential theologians such as Langdon Gilkey and David Tracy (Chapters 17 and 18) as well as important theorists like Derrida, Kristeva, Arendt and Lacan (Chapters 1922). Even when expositing the thought of another, Winquist always brings his unique language and perspective to bear on the material, which pressures the other’s thought such that it becomes a fruitful encounter, issuing in a creative becoming. The editors would like to acknowledge everyone who has helped to make the publication of this book possible, including Charlie’s friends, colleagues, students and teachers. In particular, we would like to thank Carl Raschke for contributing the Preface, Delynne Lorentzen for providing a cover illustration that was enthusiastically approved by the author, and Ben Stahlberg for compiling the index. We gratefully acknowledge the support and advice of Heidi Winquist, his daughter. Finally, we want to thank Keith Davies, for his friendship with the author, his ongoing dedication to Professor Winquist’s work, and his integrity, care and concern as a publisher. Jeffrey W. Robbins and Clayton Crockett October, 2002

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Preface | xiii

Preface

To think intensely what remains concealed in the depths of thought is to think theologically. At the same time, theological thinking demands that the thinker attain a “transcendental” angle of vision, a “profounder” sight, or sensitivity, that enables him or her, as it did with Kant, to signify the integrity of cognition, the full architecture of thought which the Kantian critical philosophy dubbed the “unity of apperception.” This peculiar attitude—the “transcendental” standpoint in Kant’s sense of the word—has nothing to do with the “transcendent” posture of theology or metaphysics. Such a perspective remains wholly immanent; it remains inscribed within the geometry of surfaces. It constitutes a “superficial” type of depth perception. If, after Einstein, the phenomenal world can no longer be construed as a structure of sensible givens, but a perceptual aporia that follows from the curvature of space and time, it is therefore appropriate in the post-Kantian, as well as the “post-modern”, context to talk about a strange design for the perceptual ensemble as a whole. Giles Deleuze, the prophet of this new “cosmography”, sought to capture what is going on in this new setting. He spoke of a “plane of immanence” from where, and upon which, all semantic lines of force converge. Deleuze points the way toward a new “critical philosophy” that reinscribes the transcendental as an interior dimension of experience itself. One may call it the “curvature” whereby the conceptual folds into the empirical. An immanentist theology, though never named, is the hidden agenda that we find in Deleuze’s writings. Charles Winquist’s work, which stretches over more than two decades, anticipates the growing impact of Deleuze. For Winquist, the “theological” is something we are always forced to name, because the discourse of the Enlightenment had made such a peculiar labor difficult, if not impossible. The theological, however, does not belong within any “metaphysics” of language or experience. It has its own semiotic content. The theological remains the unexplored and hidden space of representation. It is a kind of “metalanguage” that entwines all languages. The “religious” or the “sacred” are not prior representations upon which theology somehow begins to reflect. They are both derivative from an originary kind of thought that is deep “across” the surface of all thought. It is the thought of something the Greeks knew as theos, as the moment of “divinity” from which thinking emerges. The sacred, the religious, the theological—all these terms are transcendental markers of thought, which constantly surges toward an overflow of

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itself. The deep cannot be probed, or disclosed. It can only be skimmed in its myriad “rhizomic” ruptures and outpourings. But such a “superficial” reckoning yields an entire topography that was heretofore indiscernible—a terrain of fissures, striations, and porous abrasions, a grand texture of indeterminacy. The surface of the deep is a mottled surface. It is stippled with “transcendental” inferences and interpolations, which bend back upon and interfuse with themselves. They persist at the surface. Winquist’s sense of the transcendental surpasses any “Copernican revolution” in thinking. It is not about a redefinition of the center, or a tropification of the subject, as happens in postmodernism. For Winquist, the transcendental does not locate the “mind” or “experience.” It breaches every epistemological rampart and penetrates all dark matter within the vast universe of signification and desire. Winquist in his preoccupation with the “theological” discovered what Kant, and Kantianism, could never acknowledge, what Nietzsche and later the phenomenological movement of the twentieth century could not adequately articulate, what even post-structuralism failed to identify or appreciate. The notion of a deep surface is essentially the turning of Kant’s Third Critique on its haunches. It is a thorough re-appropriation of Kant’s transcendental esthetic, not as a propadeutic to a “transcendental logic,” but as a way of thinking through what thought and consciousness are all about from the beginning. Thinking the depths of thinking itself is what the “transcendental” truly connotes. Thinking the depths of thinking, however, is only possible to the extent that the surface of thinking—the encyclopedic interchange of grammar, inference, syntax, semantic ambiguity, and reference—becomes transparent. Surface transparency reveals the darkness behind the luminous play of language. Winquist describes these “epiphanies of darkness” as the theological spectrum. The theological spectrum is to thinking what infrared frequencies are to the band of visible color. It is in this “netherworld” of meaning that we find the theological, or religious, the “connative” and connotative fatefully interlaced. The darkness is what we wind up pondering when we undertake to “deconstruct” the text of theology, Winquist tells us. As Winquist shows, theology is itself a mode of deconstruction, and deconstruction is a mode of theology. Unlike many of his theological contemporaries, Winquist was never quite seduced by the siren strains of the early Derrida. The surface of the deep remains deep. The now waning theological obsession with the signs of secular culture was always a danger of which Winquist warned. Theology is concerned with the sacrum, not the saeculum. Yet the sacred is not

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entirely set apart from the secular. The sacred is its murky marrow. The deconstructive task of theology is to strip away the intricate simulacra of clarity that infest modern philosophy and religious reflection. We have all awakened from the dream of Descartes. The logic of dreams, as Freud proposed, must incite the logic of consciousness. Or, as Lacan suggested, the oneiric unconscious is structured like a language. Winquist’s interest in Lacan in his later years betrayed this latest undertaking of a new kind of “transcendental logic,” the logic of the imaginative and figural. Winquist was not at all subtle. Such a logic is a “theo-logic.” To think according to this logic is to think theologically. Yet theological thinking in this sense is only possible because theology as a “disciplined” discourse is no longer possible. Theology of course can no longer be conceived as the queen of the sciences, nor as a science at all. Nor is theology a “specialty” of thought. It is a thought that has learned to think what is unthought within the thought of itself. Theology can now be thought only in this unthought fashion because theology as a domain of thought has come to an end. We think at the “end of theology.” How does one, therefore, understand theology at the “end of theology?” Theology comes to an “end” in the thinking of what is decidedly theological, because the theological project constitutes the deeper implications of thinking as a whole. The end of theology is a thinking of what lies deep beneath the surface of theology. However, this depth can only be thought through disclosure of the aleatory and differential code of language as it leaps and pirouettes on the “theatrical” surface of world. The world “as is” does not withdraw behind language, as it does for Heidegger. It is interspersed within language. But its immanence is expressed through those modes of signification that have not attained the clairvoyance of concepts. Theological thinking is wholly indeterminate, in contrast with the formal structure of reasoning and predication. It is the veiled countenance of all signifying praxis, a nocturnal rendezvous with the syntax of desire. Thinking can be regarded as theological insofar as it is conscious of its own deep desideratum. At the same time the desire of theology in the writings of Winquist is not for God, as it was for Augustine. The desire of theology is strangely and epochally self-referential. It can only be so when God has died, when the highest thought has become for us, in Nietzsche’s words, the “most abysmal” thought of which thinking is capable. What is desired is deeper than what we can otherwise confabulate, or imagine. Yet it is not a depth to which we can ever descend. Theological thinking is forever and strategically apposite to the “other” of thinking that is the object of traditional theology.

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The theological thinker is a “nomad wandering over the surface of the deep.” The nomadic character of theology arises from its insatiable thirst for collation, for an encounter with what Winquist terms the “aporetic” sign, which demarcates the desert region where the theological thought becomes as yet thinkable. The aporetic sign is a kind of promise made to our theological Abraham. The theological thinker forever sojourns in sight of the promised rich land. Yet this sign in its very character remains impassable. That is why the “age of the sign,” as Derrida has noted, is inherently theological. The chain of signifiers presents us with an insoluble aporia, a very last sign that lightens into a trace. The aporetic sign is “eschatological” in this sense, and in this sense alone. It is like a mist that sinks into the very stones over which it wafts. It is a sign that is co-extensive with the plane of immanence. It is the sign that signifies the fullness of corporeality from which signifying praxis is empowered. It is the sign named desire. Theology thinks the aporetic sign in the measure that it thinks itself in terms of what Lacan terms the “deconstruction of the drive.” Theological thinking is the deep thinking of the desire that surfaces as the thought of God. The aporia is the cataclysm whereby the quest for height, for a theological Jenseits, leads us to stumble upon the fractured surface of the deep. In the breach we are confronted with the theological desire itself, with the sign that wells up as the cry of silence, which is the end of all theology. Theology desires the end of theology, since all desire in the final analysis is for what shatters every strategy of thinking. If theology ultimately seeks the “name of the father,” as Lacan tells us, a “desiring theology” calls out for the nom de mere. This curious name of silence is inscribed on the very façade of representation, which we know as the world’s “nomenclature.” It is the Platonic chora, which Derrida in writing at the end of philosophy finds as the immanent misrule of language, which makes the emancipating role of deconstruction feasible. It is the name that Nietzsche could hardly utter, the name which discloses the deep surface of language as the underside of the same surface, as the Heidegerrian “will to will,” as desire. The aporetic sign is a negation of thought, a Derridean “cut” that makes a double cut. Theology heretofore has allowed thought to make a cut in but one direction — toward the dazzling Platonic sun. But there is also a second incision that severs the surface and leads “downward.” It is a way that philosophy and theology after the death of God has taken. It is a way that can either reveal once and for all the nihilism of thinking, as Nietzsche prophesied, or “suffer” the burden of Western thinking as the via crucis of philosophy itself. Theology has come to an end because it has finally taken that long, painful, and humiliating walk. Theology can only begin to think,

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as faith can only begin to walk, when it has authentically thought what Hegel named the “Golgotha of Absolute Spirit.” Heretofore theology—even “Christian” theology—has refused to think this thought. It continues to wander over the surface of what remains thinkable. It has not discovered what lingers deep—deep inside the surface of the deep. With the work of Winquist theology can now call out for both its end and its ultimate return. Can theology now take its Emmaus walk? Can theologians now begin to say maranatha? Carl A Raschke Wings of the Eagle, Oklahoma October 2002

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Acknowledgments

“A Preliminary Problematic” was first published as The Transcendental Imagination: An Essay in Philosophical Theology. Martinus Nijhoff, 1972. Copyright reassigned to Charles E. Winquist by Kluwer Academic Publishers. “The Surface of the Deep: Deconstruction in the Study of Religion” was first published in The Whirlwind in Culture: Frontiers in Theology (1988), edited by Musser and Price, and is reprinted with permission. “The Theological Becoming of Metaphysics” was first published as “The Becoming of Metaphysics” in The Otherness of God (1998), edited by Orrin Summerell and is reprinted by permission of the University Press of Virginia. “The Silence of the Real: Theology at the End of the Century” was first published in Theology at the End of the Century: A Dialogue on the Postmodern with Thomas J. J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, Charles E. Winquist, and Robert P. Scharlemann (1990), edited by Robert P. Scharlemann and is reprinted by permission of the University Press of Virginia. “Theology and the Pedagogy of the Sacred” was first published in The Sacred and Its Scholars (1996), edited by Thomas A. Idinopolus and Edward A. Yonan and is reprinted by permission of E. J. Brill. “Person, Subjectivity, Self ” was first published as “Person” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies (1998), edited by Mark C. Taylor and is reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. “The Ambiguous Gift of Desire” was first published in The Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory, Volume 1, Number 1, 1999. “Thinking Religion” was first published in What is Religion: Origins, Definitions, Explanations (1998), edited by Thomas Idinopulos and Brian Wilson and is reprinted by permission of E. J. Brill. “Materiality and Theoretical Reflection” was first published in The Religious (2001), edited by John D. Caputo and is reprinted by permission of Blackwell. “Postmodern Secular Theology” was first published in Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought (2001), edited by Clayton Crockett and is reprinted by permission of Routledge.

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“Paul Tillich and Theology Beside Itself ” was first published as “Theology Beside Itself ” in The Theological Paradox (1995), edited by Gert Hummel and is reprinted by permission of Walter de Gruyter. “Paul Tillich and Untimely History” was first published as “Untimely History” in Truth and History: A Dialogue with Paul Tillich (1998), edited by Gert Hummel and is reprinted by permission of Walter de Gruyter. “Langdon Gilkey: Theology, Symbolism and Language” was first published as “Theology, Symbolism and Language in the Thought of Langdon Gilkey” in The Theology of Langdon Gilkey (1999), edited by Kyle A. Pasewark and Jeff B. Pool and is reprinted by permission of Mercer University Press. “Analogy, Apology and the Imaginative Pluralism of David Tracy” was first published in The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume LVI, Number 2. Summer 1988, and is reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. “Jacques Derrida and the Study of Religion” was first published in Religious Studies Review, Volume 16, Number 1. January 1990, and is reprinted by permission of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion. “Julia Kristeva and Amatory Discourse” was first delivered as a lecture at the Brock Philosophical Society, Brock University, Ontario, Canada, in November 1997. “Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil” was first delivered as the Arthur C. Wickenden Lecture, Miami University of Ohio, in March 1994. “Jacques Lacan and Theology” was first published in Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (1998), edited by Phillip Blond and is reprinted by permission of Routledge.

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Chapter 1

Part I A Preliminary Problematic

Introduction

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Chapter 1

Introduction

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Chapter 1 Introduction

The Current Dilemma Contemporary religious thought is deeply influenced by the secularization of modern culture. This means that religious language is not anchored in the everyday conversations of ordinary men. Instead, religious language, theological or mythological, seems obscure and alien to our cultural experience. The concept of a secular or profane world belongs to the recent history of man and forces upon the theologian or historian of religions the task of revalorizing myths, symbols, rituals, and religious languages of past cultures if his work is to be significant in the contemporary situation. Mircea Eliade claims that because desacralization pervades the entire experience of modern nonreligious man, it is difficult to understand the existential character of religious experience in the life of archaic man.1 We can extend this claim and assert that it is very difficult for the contemporary theologian or historian of religions to understand the existential dimensions of religious experience in our recent past. Such an awareness has prompted Michael Novak to claim that “Those who believe in God are now the chief bearers of the tradition of dissent.”2 He feels that it is our task to undertake an essay in “revisionary metaphysics” proposing a language for expressing experiences about which today’s philosophers are silent.3 Even if we do not envision as part of our responsibility the construct of a revisionary metaphysics, we must recognize the need for a serious investigation into the significance of religious language, since a symptom of our secular culture is the emptiness of religious language. On the surface of our cultural experience it has become increasingly difficult to locate any dimensions of transcendence that will lend content to religious language.4 Thus, before religious studies can be considered as a relevant discipline within our cultural situation, it must recognize and constructively respond to the importance of secularity and the consequent impoverishment of religious language.5 This inquiry is properly transcendental. We are asking about the possibility of religious discourse and this is a necessary prolegomenon to the constructive use of religious language.

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The disintegration of religious discourse can be viewed from within a theological perspective or examined by the historian of religions. In either situation it is the foremost problem facing a contemporary student of western religions. From within Christianity we hear theologians requiring of their discipline that it speak apologetically to every generation.6 Theology must be continually aware of the shape of man’s self-understanding in the generation to which it is speaking. This is the basis of Paul Tillich’s method of correlation. Theology is responsible for correlating the message of the Christian gospel with the questions implied in our cultural and existential situations.7 If the spirit that shapes the cultural life of our epoch is predominately secular, then theology must define its task in relationship to the problems of belief and unbelief that belong to secularism.8 Since the language of self-awareness within a secular milieu does not in itself imply dimensions of ultimacy, it becomes the apologetic task of the theologian to revalorize a language of transcendence. This does not mean that the theologian should become a philologist. In fact, the linguistic turn in recent philosophy creates serious problems for the theologian in our secular age. For example, Ludwig Wittgenstein would deny that there is a single essence to language that could help the theologian come to an understanding of his task.9 We need to turn to the concrete experience of using language to understand its scope and significance. He claims that when a child learns his native language, it is very clear that the meaning of the child’s words lies in their use.10 The importance of Wittgenstein’s statement for our inquiry is that before we can meaningfully talk about religious language we will have to locate the uses of such a language in the realm of the secular. This does not mean that we will simply do an analysis of the secular uses of language. In fact, we find ourselves turning away from the silence of ordinary language when seeking dimensions of transcendence.11 We are seeking possibilities for the development of a new language that embraces and revalorizes our past theologies as well as speaking to contemporary man. It seems strange that so many theologians have embraced secularization as a liberating force rather than understanding it as a threat to the theological task. The secular world makes no distinction between secularization and secularism.12 Bernard Meland focuses on some of the dangers of secularization in The Realities of Faith. For our problem of secularization is not simply a matter of conceiving the world within or without the transcendent vision. It is

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a question of being responsive to realities within experience that evoke in man a sense of his relation to something ultimate or significant, be it truth or goodness, or some dimension of value inherent in himself, that lights up his existence with meaning beyond the terms of physical realities. In defining secularization as a pathology in the social process affecting taste and judgment, following from a truncation of the human experience in that ideal and spiritual values are disregarded or denied to man, one is not so apt to interpret its meaning within a single point of view or philosophy. Instead one will see that it is a condition and response within human existence that disregards all intrinsic meaning as this applies to man, and thus deprives him of dignity or of a personal destiny.13 The theologian sacrifices a responsiveness to the wholeness of man if he uncritically adopts secularism, and yet his work is irrelevant if he ignores the presence of secularism in our culture. We must agree with Langdon Gilkey that the expression of the gospel must be in categories that are meaningful in our culture; but, we must not completely capitulate to any cultural Geist.14 Part of the theologian’s task is to understand the meaning of meaning and its relationship to language. Antecedent to the development of a systematic theology, the theologian must wrestle with a transcendental examination of the possibility of theology. The shape of this task is not clear. Because of the secularization of our culture we must seek a freshness in language and insight. Rather than surrender to nihilism, we must be bold and willing to try new methods in theology. We must be willing to face the pluralisms found in our secular experience. Bernard Lonergan has said: “Our time is a time for profound and far reaching creativity.”15 This could mean that we must turn toward a constructive inquiry seeking new images and patterns of understanding that can wrench from the dark reaches of the human subject our experiences of ultimacy. We cannot limit ourselves to a phenomenology of religions, for the secular experience of our culture is not rich with patterns of religious meaning. Michael Novak even claims that we have a civilization to build. The hard work through which we can recover human values has begun. He says that the point of life is that it is a time to build.16 As part of this reconstruction of human values, we will seek to understand the ontological significance of language.17 We are particularly concerned with the recovery of religious language. The interest in a holistic

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conception of man is widespread, and we will seek to use a diversity of philosophical and theological positions in our investigation of language. We will try to avoid a mere eclecticism. There is a convergence of ideas in transcendental neoscholasticism and recent hermeneutical theologies that gives our inquiry a direction. It is a basic concern with the relationship between knowing and being that unifies our thoughts. For example, Bernard Lonergan when reflecting on the importance of his past work says: “I was led in Insight to affirm that our natural intellectual desire to know was a natural intellectual desire to know being.”18 In recent hermeneutical theologies it is not uncommon to focus on ontological questions. Ray Hart, when introducing his book Unfinished Man and the Imagination, says: Talk of revelation in fundamental theology will be talk that is carried forward, in so far as it touches ontological matters, in the language of fundamental ontology. The problematic in revelation is the problematic of man in his ontologically emergent manhood.19 It is this concern with being in the act of knowing and in the use of language that will tie together the many suggestions that we will examine. We will necessarily be living on several boundaries: the boundary between the secular and the religious, the boundary between philosophy and theology, the boundary between empirical realities and ideal possibilities, the boundary between the act and the content of knowing. Through a dialectic of possibilities (using the suggestions of Kant, Lonergan, Heidegger, and Whitehead) we will seek a creative interpretation of the meaning of religious language. Philosophical Theology As we begin the constructive theological task of revalorizing religious language, we need to refashion our conception of philosophical theology. We have already affirmed that theology is deeply rooted in the language of its cultural situation, and that an understanding of the theological task requires that we seriously question the meaning of language in all of its dimensions. This is part of the theological enterprise.20 We have also said that within the attempt to assess the scope and ontological significance of his inquiry and the language that he uses, the theologian must be willing to cross the boundary line that separates theology from philosophy. If the theologian is to understand himself and is concerned with presenting his theology apolo-

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getically in the secular world, he must first ask the transcendental question as to the possibility of theology. What is the ontological significance of the theological task? What is the significance of theological language? If theology remains naive as to the nature of its being, a discussion of its meaning is limited to the concrete manifestations of theological inquiry, which are only historical evidence of its ontological possibility, rather than being a discussion of the ontological possibilities in which the concrete manifestations of theology are grounded. We need a philosophical theology that is not concerned with the construction of a contemporary natural theology, but that is committed to the task of providing a transcendental critique of theology. This critique will seek to disclose the ontological ground and the ontological meaning of doing theology. The philosophical theologian must construct a transcendental philosophy that will provide principles that are regulative of the scope and significance of the act of theological understanding but that are not determinative of the content of that understanding. It would be a mistake for the philosophical theologian to try to substitute philosophical concepts for theological concepts in the development of a systematic theology when the question that he asks is about the possibility and not the content of theology. It is important when we enter into a critique of the theological task and seek to understand the theological use of language that we see the dialectical distinction that can be made between the act and content of understanding. Our inquiry is primarily about the being of the act of understanding and the significance of language as a constitutive element of this act. Of course, in contemporary theology, many theologians feel that the content of theology is concerned with the meaning of being.21 It appears that in a transcendental critique of theology we are asking about the being of the question of being.22 To Heidegger, the question of being is the primordial question of philosophy that, if this is an acceptable formulation, would imply that even in a transcendental critique of theology the justification of philosophical inquiry rests in the disclosure of being.23 Philosophical theology asks an extraordinary question about an extraordinary question; and, although at first it does not appear to be available to ordinary inquiry, this question will find resonance in the more general question concerning the ontological significance of the knowing act. In framing the basic question essential for philosophical theology we must acknowledge that epistemological inquiry is not simply a discussion of the rational. Even the question as to the being of a question is asked out of the context of a dramatic pattern of experience. The organic wholeness of this pattern requires that we do not dissolve the significance of the non-ra-

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tional by focusing solely upon our rational sensibilities.24 If we don’t realize that epistemological inquiry is deeply entrenched in a dynamic life pattern, then our discussion will be reduced to idle talk and consequently destroy the authentic relationship between knowing and being that we seek to understand.25 When we ask the transcendental question as to whether there are structures of experiencing, inquiry, and reflection that make knowledge possible, we must be careful not to limit the scope of our inquiry to one pattern of understanding and lose the nuances of meaning that accompany the whole of our experience. Our critique has a responsibility to every variety of occasion.26 But, how can we be responsible to the pluralistic character of our experience when there is no single dimension of meaning accepted as normative in every science and in every community? Crucial to our inquiry is the breakdown of classical Newtonian physics and the emergence of a totally new conception of science.27 We must also seriously consider the development of new methods in the growth of the social sciences. A transcendental critique cannot be limited to inquiry into classical forms of intelligibility. It must examine all structures that mediate meaning to be complete. We are not free to turn to the objective formulations of a single science or to the patterns of usage in the ordinary language of a particular community as the key to opening a transcendental critique of the act of knowing. We must develop an ontology of knowing by turning to the questioning questioner and there look for the structures of knowing and experiencing. This conception of philosophical theology as transcendental inquiry is not clearly represented in contemporary theology. I will, therefore, outline the structure of our argument so that we can better understand the use of several philosophical positions in the development of our basic theme. The Structure of a Transcendental Critique of Theology We are seeking to understand the creative power of the knowing act. We will begin by looking at the conception of the transcendental imagination as the possibility for originating knowledge in the framework of an epistemological critique. This concern is not without precedent. With the intent of informing our own effort, we will examine the paradigmatic work of Immanuel Kant in his construction of a transcendental critique.28 Kant limited his critique to classical forms of intelligibility, such as those found in Newtonian physics, and it will be necessary for us to expand the conception of a transcendental critique to include non-classical dimensions of understanding that complement Kant’s inquiry. More precisely, it will be

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through a complementary relationship to Fr. Bernard Lonergan’s work on insight that we will seek to expand Kant’s understanding of the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding into a modern conception of the transcendental imagination. We will try to demonstrate that the expansion of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic beyond an exclusive concern with classical forms of intelligibility requires a reformulation of the schematism into a conception of the transcendental imagination that can account for the heuristic structures of empirical method. As in the Kantian critique, we will appeal to the transcendental unity of apperception as the principle of intelligibility behind a transcendental deduction. We will emphasize that the unity of experience emergent from our pluralistic world is achieved through the act of knowing. In this context the act of knowing is a very broad concept not limited to an intellectual pattern of experience. Within intellectual patterns of experience this unity could be achieved through statistical as well as with classical methods. There is a pluralism present in the intellectual patterns of experience and we are not even going to limit ourselves to the intellectual pattern of experience. There are also dimensions of meaning present in dramatic, biological, or aesthetic patterns of experience to which our inquiry is responsible. There are many heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination that can generate an intelligible unity that we can identify with the transcendental unity of apperception. In Chapter 2 we will reformulate the Kantian conception of the transcendental imagination and seek for a unity in our pluralistic world by unfolding the nature of the relationship between the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination and Lonergan’s conception of a pure unrestricted desire to know. Once we have done away with the exclusive appeal to classical forms of intelligibility, we need a principle, such as Lonergan’s conception of the pure desire to know, that can transcend the scope of a single pattern of intelligibility. This unifying principle for the development of our transcendental critique depends upon the continuity that is found residing in our self-affirmation coposited with the act of knowing. Corresponding to this reformulation of the conception of the transcendental imagination is a new conception of being. The phenomenal world, the content of the act of knowing, is proportionate to the limitations of form imposed by the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. These anticipations of unified experience come to a fulfillment when the world appears as a whole by being subsumed under these forms. This means that there is a radical disjunction between being as it appears to us

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in the context of the knowing act, and the being to which the knowing act stands in relation. In order to understand the reality of the knowing act, we must find some access to being that is not proportionate to the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. We must transcend the content of understanding and disclose the structures that make understanding possible. Lonergan proposes a solution to the problem of the separation between knowing and being that is not fully acceptable for our critique. However, it is very helpful to examine his solution because it brings into relief the dialectical relationship between the content and act of knowing. The reason that we cannot fully accept Lonergan’s solution, although it is very suggestive, is that he depends exclusively upon intellectual patterns of experience as the key to transcendent knowledge. We need an analysis of the dialectical relationship between the content and the act of knowing that is not restricted to a single type of experience. We will then turn in Chapter 3 to the need for a transcendental analysis of the act of knowing and focus on the conception of an ontology of knowing. In this transitional chapter, our question becomes, “What are the structures of being that make possible the act of knowing?” The concrete experience to which we will appeal as an available ground for entering into an investigation of this problem is the act of questioning the locus of the starting point for the development of an ontology. As is demonstrated by Emerich Coreth, to question our ability to question is contradictory, and, therefore, the questionability of existence offers a firm footing as we step closer to the actual question as to what are the structures constitutive of an ontology of knowing. By trying to determine the transcendental conditions for questioning, an example of the act of knowing, we are seeking a horizon under which we can determine the structures of knowing in general. We will try to demonstrate that the concrete experience of the questionability of existence implies the existence of internal relations as a transcendental condition for this act. It will become our task to understand the significance of the transcendental imagination as it functions in a world that is most adequately described through a doctrine of internal relations. In this difficult task we will appeal to Heidegger’s conception of Dasein to illuminate the significance of the transcendental imagination as an element constitutive of the act of knowing. We will examine several Heideggerian metaphors because we have already recognized the opacity of the knowing act to the content of the understanding and need a guide to start us on the path toward a transcendental ontology. Heidegger’s analysis of

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the Kantian critique is a useful paradigm for understanding the movement from epistemology to transcendental (fundamental) ontology. Heidegger, through the use of vivid images, makes important demands upon a contemporary understanding of the act of knowing that will illuminate our basic project. He does not restrict himself to an intellectual pattern of experience, and his insights bear heavily upon our attempt to understand the organic character of man’s primordial noetic striving. We will listen carefully to Heidegger’s analysis of what is called thinking; but, we will keep in mind that our actual analysis must be different because of Heidegger’s deep fixation in the classical heuristic structures of the Kantian critique. Even if we fully accepted Heidegger’s analysis, our work would not be complete because of his shocking assertion that, in both philosophical and unphilosophical manifestations of the knowing act, we are not yet thinking. The object of thinking has withdrawn from us; and, in his analysis, concrete manifestations of meaning are opaque to their ontological ground. Even with these limitations, an examination of his thought is fruitful for our endeavor. As was suggested, of great importance for us are the insights that he develops in his ontological interpretation of the Kantian critique. Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is an important model for us to consider as we seek to develop an ontological interpretation of our reformulated conception of the transcendental imagination.29 We also confront in some of Heidegger’s later writings the theme that language is the mode for man’s appearance in being. This theme has been emphasized in recent hermeneutical theology and it needs to be refashioned by us so that it corresponds to our reformulation of the ontological conception of the transcendental imagination. This means that the ontological significance of language will be a central theme in our enlarged conception of the function of the transcendental imagination. As with Lonergan, Heidegger’s work affirms that the content of the known is transcended in its dialectical relationship with the act of knowing. What we need is an ontology of knowing that is capable of illuminating the ontological significance of language but that does not sacrifice a pluralistic conception of experience. There are now two dialectical tensions to which we must be responsive as we shape an ontology of knowing. Because of the dialectical relationship between the content and the act of knowing we are able to move from an epistemological critique to a transcendental ontology. When we actually begin to shape ontological categories, we must also be aware of the dialectical relationship between concrete manifestations of the knowing act and their ontological ground. The Copernican revolution that Heidegger sees

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in Kant’s critical philosophy is that ontic knowledge must conform to ontological knowledge. Of course, this means that if our ontological categories are to be viable for contemporary understanding, they must be large enough to explain the pluralistic dimensions of meaning found in contemporary experience. As we begin Chapter 4 we shall try to fashion methodological principles of coherence and adequacy that do not violate our emphasis on the pluralism of experience. If our critique is adequate, we should be able to subsume ontic manifestations of meaning under our ontological categories. As we begin to develop our ontology of knowing it will become clear that many of our primary notions are thoroughly developed in Alfred North Whitehead’s organismic philosophy. For this reason the fourth chapter carefully examines those aspects of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism that bear upon an ontology of knowing. However, since our inquiry is not cosmological in its scope, but is exclusively grounded in the self-understanding of the questioning questioner, our use of Whitehead will be limited to those categories that can be affirmed in a transcendental critique. Through a transcendental critique of the dialectical act of knowing we will fashion principles of coherence and adequacy. This does not mean that we will limit ourselves to a transcendental method in the development of a fundamental ontology. All that we have claimed is that the basic principles of our inquiry will be determined by a transcendental critique. For example, it is the fundamental conception of reality as a social process established by a transcendental understanding of the dialectical relationship between the content and the act of knowing that will lead us into Whitehead’s categorical scheme. This means that, in our search for a more adequate conception of the act of knowing, we will transform our intuition about the focus of a transcendental critique into a root affirmation in which is grounded a speculative philosophy. After we have investigated the problems of developing an adequate methodology, we will try to use these insights in the shaping of a transcendental ontology. First, through our expanded method, we will determine the basic elements in a monadic theory of nature. We will then move to a more speculative position and try to evaluate the meaning of these basic elements for the interpretation of higher phases of experience. Our special concern will be with the ontological significance of language and the unfolding of the act of knowing. When our inquiry becomes sufficiently sophisticated, we will seek to determine the locus and ontological significance of the transcendental imagination. We will then try to understand the relationship between the

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appearance of man and the nature of the transcendental imagination. How does the transcendental imagination determine patterns of meaning in nonintellectual patterns of experience? How does the transcendental imagination determine patterns of meaning in intellectual patterns of experience? We will try to assess the meaning of the transcendental imagination as a basic ontological element in man’s creative passage through history. A very disturbing problem arises in the development of our inquiry. Our concept of language is different from Whitehead’s concept of language even though we agree on the basic elements in a theory of nature. We shall try to determine why our analysis is different from Whitehead’s analysis of language; and, also ask if the differences are too serious to actually see a basic unity between the two points of view. We will appeal to our insight into the dialectical relationship between ontic and ontological knowledge developed in our transcendental critique to understand this problem. We will then arrive at a theory of understanding that affirms that language has ontological significance. We will claim that the fullness of human experience is grounded in the speaking and hearing of a language because it is through language that man makes his appearance in the world. We will also try to show that it is through language that man moves toward the boundaries of human experience. The conception of language that is developed in Chapter 4, deeply rooted in an ontology of knowing, will then provide important prolegomena for the understanding of the theological task. In Chapter 5 we will briefly examine the nature of the theological task and the centrality of the hermeneutical question as it relates to an ontology of knowing. When we follow the development of hermeneutical theology from Schleiermacher to recent essays, we can note a growing alliance with the philosophy of Heidegger. But, we have called into question the adequacy of Heidegger’s understanding of language. When we expanded the conception of the transcendental imagination, we, in fact, challenged the Kantian influence in Heidegger’s understanding of the act of knowing. This means that we will have to challenge the use of Heidegger in the intellectual framework of recent hermeneutical theology and provide different principles for the conceptualization of the hermeneutical task. We will seek to determine the regulative principles for understanding the hermeneutical task that is implied in our ontology of knowing. In general, by determining the horizon under which religious understanding manifests itself, we can better appreciate the significance of theological understanding.

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Notes 1. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), p. 13. 2. Michael Novak, Belief and Unbelief (New York: New American Library, 1967), p. 16. 3. Ibid., p. 40. Novak refers to P. F. Strawson’s concept of a “revisionary metaphysics.” 4. Langdon Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God Language (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 13. 5. Ibid., p. 10. 6. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (3 vols. ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953-64), I, 3. 7. Ibid., pp. 8, 31, 59-64. 8. For an excellent description of our cultural spirit see Gilkey, Chapter II. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), p. 31. 10. Ibid., pp. 4-6. 11. See Novak, Belief and Unbelief, p. 68. 12. See Gilkey’s discussion of Harvey Cox and F. Gogarten; Gilkey, p. 26. 13. Bernard Meland, The Realities of Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 63. 14. Gilkey, p. 36. 15. Bernard Lonergan, Collection (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), p. 251. 16. Michael Novak, A Time to Build (New York: MacMillan, 1964), p. 3. 17. The term ontological as distinguished from the term ontic will be used to denote a structural consideration so that it correlates with Tillich’s definition of ontology. “It (ontology) is an analysis of those structures of being that we encounter in every meeting with reality.” Systematic Theology, I, 20. Ontic here refers to beings or the concrete manifestations of reality. 18. Lonergan, Collection, p. 157. 19. Ray L. Hart, Unfinished Man and the Imagination (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), p. 15. 20. Tillich, I, 21. 21. This theme is explicitly developed by Tillich and is an important part of the work of other theologians. See Tillich, I, 22; Carlos Cirne-Lima, Personal Faith (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965); Emerich Coreth, Metaphysics, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968). Other theologians such as Bernard Lonergan ask the question of being, but in another context. He is seeking an insight into insight, but raises the question of being as he focuses on transcendent knowledge.

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

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Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), Chapter XIX. Cirne-Lima, p. 17. For a further expansion of this theme see Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co. Inc., 1961), pp. 1-27. Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), p. 19. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. ii. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: New American Library, 1933), p. 227. See T. S. Kuhn, The Structures of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Stephen Toulmin, The Philosophy of Science (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1953); N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959); Dudley Shapere, Philosophical Problems of Natural Science (New York: MacMillan, 1965), for an emerging idealistic conception of science. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason (New York: St. Martins Press, 1965), part I. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1962).

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An Epistemological Conception of the Transcendental Imagination | 17

Chapter 2 An Epistemological Conception of the Transcendental Imagination

Kant and the Notion of the A Priori A notion that is central in the development of an ontology of knowing is the epistemological conception of the transcendental imagination. To understand the significance of the transcendental imagination, the mind would have to have an immediate knowledge of itself as it contributes to the total act of knowing.1 We are talking about the same kind of reality to which Saint Augustine refers when he asks of his reader that he turn inwardly and there discover an inner word, “a verbum prior to the use of any language.”2 Augustine suggests through a poetic image the notion of the transcendental imagination, which we will seek to understand through a transcendental critique. We will seek to understand the implications of Immanuel Kant’s insight that although all knowledge begins with experience, this is not identical with the claim that all knowledge is dependent upon experience.3 I am concerned with what the inner word brings to knowledge and with the ontological significance of this act. We will expand Kant’s schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding, which suggests the notion of the transcendental imagination, by using Bernard Lonergan’s conception of the heuristic structures of empirical method. Kant and Lonergan both conceive of an insight, a supervening act of understanding, to be an apprehension of relations giving meaning to the manifold of experience.4 The basic question that unifies the various elements of our transcendental critique is implied in this concept of an insight. What are the structures or elements in our thinking that make possible the unification of a manifold of intuition? (An intuition is an immediate relationship to objects given in knowing.)5 More specifically, we are concerned with what the inner word or transcendental imagination brings to the unification of this manifold. The unification of a manifold, the oneness of a manyness, seems paradoxical, and yet understanding exhibits this property in the unity expressed by our ability to say “I think.” What is surprising is that this assertion ac-

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companies the pluralism characteristic of conscious experience. This is an insight from Kant since asking about the possibility for the transcendental unity of apperception is the organizational question that lies behind the deduction of the categories in the “Transcendental Analytic” of the Critique of Pure Reason.6 Before we examine Kant’s transcendental deduction, we need to determine the locus of the inner word. We are referring to the inner word as a symbolic expression for the transcendental imagination. The term transcendental signifies knowledge about the a priori structures and possibilities involved in the knowing act.7 In the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason Kant says that because we realize that to say all knowledge begins with experience does not mean that there must be a causal relationship between experience and knowledge, we can posit the possibility that there exists a knowledge that is independent of experience, knowledge a priori.8 Since there is no separation in the order of appearance between a priori and a posteriori knowledge, we must seek a criterion to distinguish between them that is not dependent upon an empirical determination.9 David Hume, in awakening Kant to the seriousness of this question, had already shown that knowledge a posteriori possesses neither necessity nor universality.10 Therefore, if Kant can show that there is any judgment that possesses necessity or universality, then it must find its seat in our faculty of a priori knowledge.11 Kant seeks this a priori knowledge in both sensibility and understanding. The basic and simple forms of a priori representation are found in our sensibility as constituting the conditions under which objects are given to us and to which concepts ultimately conform. For this reason the beginning of Kant’s transcendental philosophy is a transcendental aesthetic. In the manifold of appearance, the matter of such appearances can be said to be a posteriori, but the form that allows the manifold to be ordered is a priori.12 That the forms, space and time, are necessary for experience seems very clear to Kant. He says, “By means of outer sense, a property of our mind, we represent to ourselves objects as outside of us, and all without exception in space.”13 For an object to appear without spatial properties is inconceivable; and, therefore, we can say with necessity and universality that if an object has a place in the manifold of appearance, then it has spatial properties. This concept of space is a heuristic structure of the transcendental imagination, and it is not an empirical concept.14 Space underlies all outer intuitions; we cannot represent to ourselves the absence of space.15 Space is brought to experience as an a priori intuition that makes the experi-

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ence possible. Space is a form that is not necessarily inherent to things-inthemselves. Space is descriptive of a major structural element imposed on experience by the transcendental imagination. In this way it is regulative of objective appearances. Time has the same status as space in the framework of the transcendental aesthetic; however, it appears to have a more important role in defining the horizon under which understanding is unified. Time is the form of inner sense. It is the intuition of ourselves in relationship to the manifold of appearances. Since all appearances are appearances to the inner state, they all belong to time; that is, time is the a priori condition of an appearance to the self.16 As with space, there is no empirical representation of time. Time is a heuristic character of the transcendental imagination. The transcendental imagination settles in advance that appearances will fill the empty forms of space and time. What an object may be prior to its appearance through these heuristic structures is unknown to us.17 In the discussion of direct intuition we have anticipated the forms that are necessary for the manifold of appearances to be brought into a more complex unity through judgment and reflective understanding since intuition is not the only form of knowing. We also have a knowledge of concepts.l8 Understanding complements sensibility by producing representations from itself.19 In Kant’s classical notion of the understanding he claims that concepts rest on functions that are the formal unity of an act of bringing various representations under one representation. All judgments are functions giving unity to the manifold of representations.20 There is an original synthetic unity of apperception that accompanies the manifold of appearances and makes understanding as a mediate function possible. This unity makes it possible for us to say “I think.” This original synthetic unity of apperception is the supreme principle for the possibility of understanding. It is also the ground for a transcendental deduction of the invariant heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. These heuristic structures regulate ontic manifestations of experience.21 The synthesis of the manifold is a result of the power of the imagination to generate temporal determinations that allow us to intuit the “I think” of the inner sense. These temporal images are generated for all objects by the transcendental imagination.22 The logic of the transcendental analytic appears more clearly to us when we begin with time as the form of inner sense and then see that the categories are derived from an analysis of temporality and the correspond-

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ing need for principles of ontic determination under a temporal horizon so that the world of appearances can become intelligible.23 These categories are rules for the unification of inner sense, and they are imposed upon consciousness by the activity of the transcendental imagination.24 Since time itself cannot be perceived, the categories are necessary to connect objects in time a priori.25 In order to subsume these objects under the categories, the object must in some way be homogeneous with the concept.26 Since the appearance of an object is sensible and the concepts are intellectual, there must be a form generated by the transcendental imagination that is homogeneous with both concept and appearance. Kant calls this representation the transcendental schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding.27 The possibility for subsuming appearances under the concepts rests with the production of schemata by the transcendental imagination. The schema is the procedure of the imagination in providing an image for a concept. Schemata must underlie all of our concepts if they are to be relevant to the realm of empirical experience. The schema of each concept transcendentally determines the temporality of representations in the manifold of appearances. These time determinations give unity to the inner sense that accompanies judgments necessary for full reflective participation in the manifold of appearances. Through the schematism of the transcendental imagination the ontological possibility for the appearance of an empirical (ontic) world is constituted. This schematism is the primordial conceptualization needed for our beingin-the-world.28 The Kantian conception of the transcendental imagination can be understood as an important attempt to secure ontological rather than ontic knowledge. Kant has clearly seen the heuristic structure of consciousness, and he demonstrated this awareness through the notion of the transcendental imagination. What we find as not acceptable to modern thought in his critique is his view that the forms of sensibility and the concepts of understanding that he has derived represent the only heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination that can have an empirical application. Kant examined only classical heuristic structures while modern thought has also accepted statistical and genetic heuristic structures as constituting an intelligible unity in which we can ground the transcendental unity of apperception. That Kant’s thought is descriptive of classical heuristic structures is clearly shown by his understanding of time as it is developed in the “System of the Principles of Pure Understanding.” But, we should first examine the notion of a classical heuristic structure in general. By now it should be clear

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that we are using the term heuristic because the transcendental imagination brings to an insight a form to be filled; and, while prescinding from the empirical content that will fill the form, it works out the procedure defining the general properties or schemata that are the conditions for being-in-the world. By the term classical we are merely placing a heuristic structure in a typological grouping characterized by the thought of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.29 Classical heuristic structures anticipate that the intelligibility of the world will be presented as a systematic unity under the horizon of an inclusive formal condition that is invariant through transformations of reference frames.30 When we actually examine classical scientific thought, we see that the first step in generalization is to let the sought unknown be “the nature of….”31 The classical inquirer then notes that because similars are understood in the same way, the “nature of…” must be the same for any similar set of data.32 Before the appearance of Galilean physics, understanding of the unknown was thought to rest in classifications derived from the experience of sensible similarity. But, particularly after Galileo, the unknown was thought to be intelligible, and an insight satisfied the desire to know only if the data in a manifold of appearances were functionally related to each other under an invariant form. Obviously the power of Kant’s critique rests in the insight that the invariant form is produced by the transcendental imagination and that the formal character of the intelligible world is proportionate to the structures of the knowing act. The formal character of the intelligible world is not necessarily isomorphic with being-in-itself. The problem with the Kantian critique and any ontology developed from its insights is that there are manifestations of meaning in our concrete experience that have punctured the horizon that he established on the basis of ontological knowledge as to the formal character of the transcendental imagination. In particular, what has been called into question by our concrete experiences is the notion that temporality is the only formal determinate of the inner sense. I am suggesting that the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination and their determinate character upon the inner sense be understood not through their relationship to temporality, but through their relationship to an unrestricted desire to know, which is itself a manifestation of a primordial resolve toward being. To illustrate the implications of establishing temporality as a formal condition for being-in-the-world, we need to look at the “analogies of experience” under the “Principles of Pure Understanding” in the Critique of Pure Reason.33 Each of the analogies lays claim to an ontological limitation that

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has been now contradicted by an ontic manifestation in the larger dimensions of our experience of being-in-the-world. The principle behind the analogies is that experience is possible only when a necessary connection between appearances manifested in that experience is made determinate.34 The function that is unknown is always a time determination. This allows for the unity of apperception by providing the form for inner sense. Kant thought that there were three modes in which time could be made determinate: duration, succession, and co-existence.35 Corresponding to each mode is an analogy for the time determination. The first analogy used for time as duration is: “in all changes of appearance substance is permanent.”36 He says that time must be seen against the background of a permanent substratum. Substances are the substrata for all time determinations.37 If we had only a bare succession, existence would never have any magnitude or duration.38 Kant sees duration as a magnitude marked off against a substratum. This is a reduction of the concept of duration to a spatial imagery characteristic of Newtonian mechanics. The question that we must present to Kant is whether this spatialization of time, which is considered to be an a priori necessity, is commensurable with our experience of time in the immediacy of consciousness as well as in reflective moments? The first analogy does not explain the flexibility we note in our psychic experience of duration or in modern scientific models of temporality. Our actual experience violates the boundaries of experience established by Kant’s first analogy. If Kant were correct, time would be experienced as a quantitative multiplicity. But, except on a superficial level in ordinary experience, we do not perceive duration quantitatively. Pure duration experienced in the immediacy of consciousness or in the flexibility of the dream experience seldom presents itself with a clear quantitative ordering. More often, pure duration appears in a succession of qualitative feelings that permeate each other. Bergson has said that when we refer to our deep psychic feelings the meaning of duration is grounded in the felt experience of a qualitative multiplicity rather than as the markings on a homogeneous receptacle.39 As we continue to awaken our sensibilities to the depths of experience given in the ambiguities of our immediate consciousness, in the confusion of our dreams, and in the pale gestures and parapraxes of everyday life, we experience the demand to reinterpret or even invent meanings that displace the simple ordering of experience against a homogeneous substratum. The structures in which our concrete experiences are grounded are larger than

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the principles through which Kant defined the scope of the transcendental imagination.40 Another problem with the first analogy is that the concept of substance on which Kant’s understanding of duration is dependent is called into question by modern physics. The principle of inertia imposes upon this substratum a character of isolation that is challenged by the general theory of relativity. The principle of inertia places substance in “simple location” so that in principle this substance can be totally understood without making reference to any other region of space or to any other duration of time since this substances has essential relations only with the occurrence of a force applied directly to it.41 Although an inertial coordinate system has an abstract meaning and is a possible construct of the imagination, can we say that it is regulative of our ontic experience? No, a classical physicist would be forced to admit that an inertial coordinate system and the principles that attend it cannot be referred to any concrete frame of reference.42 If an inertial coordinate system does not exist in any available frame of reference, we must look to a different set of heuristic structures to unify the manifold of our experience. The gravitational equations of the general theory of relativity are structural laws that describe changes of a gravitational field rather than mechanical laws that connect the motion of a body here and now with the simultaneous action of a body at a distance. The old law of gravity tried to preserve the mechanical pattern in which the principle of inertia is a normative concept. The new equations disclose a new pattern for physical principles in which the notion of a field of activity replaces the notion of substance in simple location.43 Looking at the second and third analogies we again turn to physics for concrete examples of the inadequacy of Kant’s conception of time. The second and third analogies fix the meaning of before and after (succession) as well as that of simultaneity. The second analogy claims that all changes take place in conformity with the law of cause and effect.44 The notion of causation implies that a cause is prior to its effect and thereby determines a time sequence fixing the meaning of before and after. This analogy is required so that our inner sense can have synthetic unity.45 The third analogy, the principle of community, determines the meaning of coexistence or simultaneity. If two occasions can be intelligibly presented to consciousness so that they can follow one another reciprocally, they are simultaneous with one another.46 All three of the analogies are the formal conditions for experience in the Kantian conception of the transcendental imagination. The fact that in modern physics

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our understanding conforms to larger patterns of intelligibility than are sanctioned by the second and third analogies again forces us to seek a larger horizon under which we can understand the meaning of the transcendental imagination in its contribution to experience. The scientific community has learned to live with the creative tensions of a scientific revolution that came after the work of Kant. If we were restricted to classical heuristic structures, the affirmations of modern physics would make the world seem out of joint. With the emergence of the special theory of relativity, words such as before, after, and simultaneous no longer have an absolute meaning independent of particular coordinate systems. Einstein claimed that we have to understand the meaning of the sentence: “Two events that are simultaneous in one coordinate system may not be simultaneous in another system.”48 Obviously this demand requires that we abandon the second and third analogies of Kant’s principles as regulative of appearances and constitutive of intelligibility. In trying to understand the concrete intelligibility of space and time, it is necessary that we abandon the classical notion of invariance and turn to statistical heuristic notions. It was clearly shown by the special theory of relativity that there are a multiplicity of reference frames; and, that if we are to seek invariance in our expression of classical laws as we move among reference frames, then we need transformation equations. The creation of an invariant transformation is an abstract formulation of a higher order than concrete observation. Therefore, the invariance of a transformation equation (expression) is the property of the expression in relation to various reference frames and says nothing about the concrete intelligibility of space and times.49 Invariance is a property of abstraction; and a statement that refers only to a particular event in space and time is not abstract. When we return from invariant expressions that possess abstract intelligibility to concrete extensions and actual durations, we find that although the abstract can apply to the concrete, it is applied differently in different temporal-spatial orientations.50 There is no classical form that can functionally synthesize the manifold of concrete experiences of space and time into a meaningful unity. What is required is that we use statistical heuristic structures and accept the notion of emergent probability as a principle of intelligibility. This will give unity to the manifold of concrete appearances, and it will make the experience of the “I think” possible.51 This inclusion of emergent probability as a principle of intelligibility alters the notion of coherence upon which our transcendental deduction is based. The connectedness of events that is manifest in the transcendental unity of apperception can be represented through the notion of probability

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as well as through the establishment of functional relationships that are invariant under a single form. The expansion of our philosophical method is sanctioned by this more inclusive conception of unity. Not only must we reconsider basic concepts that have grown out of Kant’s transcendental deduction, but we must also realize that we are never free to return to an exclusively classical understanding of the world. The Invariant Heuristic Structure of the Transcendental Imagination We are now in the position to reformulate the concept of the transcendental imagination. We seek a conception that is not encapsulated in the classical notion of temporality. Kant’s analysis of knowing has been very suggestive, but it is incomplete. Kant’s analysis is incomplete because there are meaningful experiences that form a residue that is closed to classical thought. The elements in this residue do not fit into the pattern of intelligibility made determinate by classical expectations. For this reason we seek complementary heuristic structures that will bring the empirical residue of classical thought into a full and intelligible relief.52 A classical heuristic structure is expressed through a systematic process of realization. A systematic process is directed toward a single intelligibility under the invariance of a generic or functional form.53 The unity of apperception depends upon the regulation of experience by such a form. A systematic process is the expression of one idea, and the complexity of the system is a measure of the incommensurability of this idea with the medium available for its expression.54 Any occasion that cannot be placed into a meaningful relationship under the basic form of the system is denied intelligibility and placed in a residue. If we seek to illuminate the residue, we must complement systematic thought with non-systematic process. In a non-systematic process we start with any random situation and allow for the process to unfold according to the sequence of situations presented in it rather than seek for a repetition of a single form. A non-systematic process clings to concrete situations, and it does not admit the existence of residual unintelligible situations. The shift in mentality from systematic to non-systematic processes corresponds to a shift from classical heuristic structures of method to statistical heuristic structures of method. A statistical investigation is an attempt to give intelligibility to a coincidental manifold that exists in the empirical residue left from an investigation using classical heuristic structures. Statistical heuristic structures also give a synthetic unity to the transcendental

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imagination, but they do so by grounding the “I think” in the notion of an emergent probability. The formal unity of a statistical insight is the discovery of a probability relationship from which concrete situations manifest only a random variation.55 The probability relationship is the intelligibility of the empirical residue, and through its unity the meaning of these dim occurrences is brought into consciousness. The notion of probability belongs to a transcendental aesthetic and the principles that it imposes upon our experience of beingin-the-world to a transcendental deduction. The fact that probability can be a sufficient formal condition for the unity of an insight leads us to a broadened conception of the transcendental imagination. No invariant character of the transcendental imagination can be abstracted from any particular set of heuristic structures and be thought of as a normative horizon under which the functioning of the transcendental imagination can be unified. What does appear to be a normative characteristic of the transcendental imagination is that whatever schemata are produced for the unification of consciousness, these structures have a heuristic character and determine in advance the meaning of intelligibility and produce the empty forms under which concrete situations will be subsumed. Through the complementary use of classical, statistical, or any other heuristic structures generated out of the transcendental imagination, we are able to expand our intelligible experience of being-in-the-world. Since there is more than one set of heuristic structures, the world also has a complementary manifestation because even our broadened conception of the transcendental imagination suggests the existence of an epistemological a priori. The heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination determine in advance the formal character of the content to be known.56 What this means is that the being that is known is proportionately isomorphic with the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination that produce the unity of any particular concrete situations given in consciousness. As we became critically aware of the function of the transcendental imagination, it becomes clearer that there is a disjunction between knowing and being. A Correspondent Notion of Being Lonergan notes that our notion of being, which is itself a heuristic notion, must have its foundation in the dynamic orientation of the pure desire to know.57 The pure desire to know is the existential situation out of which the self is oriented through the functioning of the transcendental imagination. The pure desire to know is prior to and more fundamental than any

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heuristic structures under which the manifestations of reality are subsumed. Lonergan’s notion of being as the complete set of answers to the complete set of questions is an unrestricted notion that cannot be realized under any set of conditioned heuristic structures belonging to our transcendental imagination.58 What this means is that if we decide to work toward an understanding of the being that manifests itself as the content of the known, then we have prescinded from the question of the nature of reality itself. The notion of being that is available to ordinary discourse is a notion of proportionate being. The proportion is determined by a structural isomorphism with the formal heuristic character of the transcendental imagination since these structures provide the formal principles for the unity of any given concrete situation.59 This is a basic confrontation with the Kantian problem. The being that we know is regulated by the heuristic structures present in the knowing process. The transcendental imagination supplies an empty form and intelligible thought culminates in the filling of that form. The form will condition the appearance of being even if the real is not isomorphic with the heuristic structures of knowing. If reality is identical with the realm of proportionate being, we cannot know that such an identity exists because we do know that the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination will shape our knowledge even if nothing is actually distorted by these formal requirements. The discovery of the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination through a transcendental critique is analogous to the discovery that all of our visual images have been filtered through a red filter. The knowledge that we are looking through a red filter casts an ambiguity around all visual experiences. If a man appears to us in a red shirt, is he really wearing a red shirt, or is he wearing a white shirt and only the red component of the white light passes through the red filter? It may be that reality is identical with the realm of proportionate being just as in the Kantian system the ding an sich may be identical with the ding für uns; but, whether such an identity exists cannot be known since to know something is to know it as it is subsumed under heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. This is the critical insight and problem associated with the disclosure that the transcendental imagination will invariantly possess a heuristic structure.

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A Protest Against Obscurantism Lonergan contrasts his work with that of Kant because he feels that the Kantian understanding of the implications of the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding is actually a flight from understanding. The Kantian theory leaves us no possibility for intellectually penetrating into the reality behind the categories. On the cognitive level there is a permanent disjunction between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. Kant leaves himself open to the charge of obscurantism. It should be clear to the student of Lonergan’s Insight that in my development of the concept of the transcendental imagination I have used some of Lonergan’s insights in a Kantian fashion. Consequently I am open to the same type of criticism that Lonergan directs toward Kant if we conclude our discussion of knowing with the development of an epistemological conception of the transcendental imagination.60 Therefore, before we actually turn to the development of an ontological conception of the transcendental imagination, we need to look at Lonergan’s objection to the Kantian critique. The Kantian question that we have used to give direction to our inquiry asked for the a priori conditions needed for the objective appearance of being. Lonergan asks for the conditions that make possible an unconditional judgment. There is some ambiguity as to the nature of the disjunction between our concerns, but our responses to the general problem of the disjunction between knowing and being are importantly different. The Encounter of Thomism and Kantianism Lonergan thinks that the idea of a permanent disjunction between knowing and being is a scotosis of the intellect that violates man’s primordial noetic striving. Clearly he is standing in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas and it is through the insights of this tradition as further developed in a movement emanating from the work of Joseph Maréchal that he directs his criticisms at the notion of a permanent separation between knowing and being. Part of this Thomistic contribution to our inquiry is Lonergan’s clear understanding of the dynamic element in knowing. In Thomistic thought, conceptualization comes at the end of a process of reasoning.6l For the Thomist, Kant’s idea of a direct intuition would be an oversimplification. In Aristotelian and Thomistic theories about knowing, knowing is an act, a perfection, a coming to an identity, rather than just a confrontation with external realities.62 In the construction of an epistemology, this tradition focuses upon the dynamic character of the act of

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knowing as well as on the content of the known. One can anticipate that in a dialogue with Kantian thought the Thomist will be concerned with the a priori conditions that ground the dynamic act of knowing as well as those conditions that regulate the content of knowing. This is clearly stated in the work of Joseph Maréchal. Maréchal claims that it is only when we underestimate the role that active finality plays in the constitution of an object of experience that we can affirm a radical phenomenalism.63 The problem with Kant according to Maréchal was that he separated the theoretical order from the practical order and sacrificed consideration of the dynamic elements in the act of knowing when considering the foundations of speculative thought.64 But, Maréchal sought for this dynamic character in the act of knowing as though he were seeking to find an elementary logical operation. He thought that an object is present to consciousness only when there is a judgment that affirmed the being of the object.65 The transcendental conditions sought for in the analysis of knowledge as act were thought to be the conditions for a judgment. In constructing a bridge between knowing and being, Lonergan knowingly adopts an intellectual pattern of experience rather than an aesthetic, practical, mystical, or dramatic pattern of experience, and he focuses upon the affirmation that takes place in judgment.66 The dynamic act in which he seeks to find a ground that is more fundamental than the disjunction between knowing and being is rooted in our experience of a primordial noetic striving that finds its fulfillment in insight and judgment.67 An intellectual pattern of experience is representative of reflective understanding. It is in the insights and judgments of reflective understanding that the affirmation of being finds its locus. The general form of a judgment involves a transformation from a conditioned proposition to an unconditional affirmation through the disclosure and fulfillment of the conditions found associated with the original proposition.68 The basic affirmation that Lonergan seeks to demonstrate in his natural theology is that human knowledge is not confined to the realm of proportionate being. The thrust of our pure desire to know is toward a realm of transcendent being.69 The key to his argument is that he defines being in relationship to the dynamic act of knowing rather than confining his reflections to the content of the known. In review, being is the objective of the pure desire to know. The desire to know is a noetic striving that moves the cognitional process from sensations and imagination to the affirmation of an insight.70 This desire has a transcendent character since its range exceeds the range of the known.

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Although (when we are discussing the content of an insight) this notion of being remains proportionate to the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination, it is itself an unrestricted heuristic structure that requires the complete set of answers to the complete set of questions for its fulfillment. Being is anything that can be known through intelligence and judgment. The unifying ground for this definition of being is the notion of intelligibility developed in our understanding of the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. The question that remains is: what are the necessary conditions that make an intelligible affirmation of the identity between the real and being possible? If “explicit metaphysics is the conception, affirmation, and implementation of the integral heuristic structure of proportionate being,” then, since proportionate being is defined as the objective of our pure desire to know, explicit metaphysics involves self-understanding.71 The conditions for the affirmation of being involve a personally oriented dialectical movement from a latent to an explicit metaphysics. This dialectic, which is used more explicitly by Blondel and Coreth, is between the content of the known and the fullness of the act of knowing. In Blondel’s development of this notion, conceptualization is always transcended by the demands of our noetic striving and for this reason there is always required a second conceptualization. The unity of the dialectic is a unity resident in the act rather than in the content of knowing.72 The metaphysical elements of this dialectic are potency, form, and act. Potency is the component of proportionate being to be known through an intellectually complete pattern of experience; form is the component of proportionate being signified by a fullness of relations that exist within the manifold of proportionate being; and act signifies the component of proportionate being known through the unconditional affirmation of a judgment. These three constitute a unity that Lonergan calls the knowing form.73 (Lonergan’s distinction between central and conjugate forms is not of particular importance for our discussion.) The reason for a dialectic is obvious. A dialectic maintains a continuity with the isomorphism established between knowing and proportionate being and it opens the possibility for transcendental knowledge. Reality itself requires that every conceptualization be transcended unless it embodies a natural finality that no proportionate affirmation can possess. The notion of proportionate being is based on an isomorphism with our noetic striving; and, since the processes of knowing are moving toward an objective that is defined by the pure desire to know that always transcends the realm of completed knowledge, the reality of proportionate being has a dynamic

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orientation toward a completeness that it does not possess. Natural finality is the objective component of the parallel between an incomplete knowing directed toward a fuller knowing and an incomplete being moving toward a fuller being.74 Accordingly, any judgment affirming the notion of being must include this element of natural finality. Lonergan is in agreement with Maréchal that, because the notion of natural finality attends the affirmation of being, the unconditional affirmation of the unconditional is a necessary condition for intelligibility.75 Even to speak of proportionate being, we must consider the meaning of affirming the unconditional that is a turning to the question of transcendent knowledge. Transcendent Knowledge If we focus only upon the intellectual patterns of experience, we can use Lonergan’s argument that transcendent knowledge is a necessary part of living intelligently in an intelligible world. In this context it may even be said that the leap over the disjunction between knowing and being is pragmatically justified. Lonergan claims that, in intellectual patterns of experience, transcendence is simply the raising of further questions.76 In intellectual patterns of experience the asking as to whether insight is limited to the realm of proportionate being or if it can penetrate into the realm of transcendent being is an act of transcendence. The source for this transcendence is man’s unrestricted desire to know.77 The notion of transcendent being rooted in man’s noetic striving can only be clearly defined through an unrestricted act of the understanding since it is an unrestricted notion. We can understand this notion only according to an analogy of proportion grounded in our experience of natural finality as it is evidenced in the realm of proportionate being. Lonergan proceeds to the notion of God, which is an extrapolation from our restricted acts of understanding using this analogy of proportion. The important question is whether this extrapolation, the notion of transcendent being, is just an object of thought, a projection of the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination; or, is it identical with the real? In the argument for the existence of God, God is defined as the primary intelligible that is identical with an unrestricted act of the understanding; thus, in effect, Lonergan affirms that there is an identity between being and the reality. The argument is If the real is completely intelligible, God exists. But the real is completely intelligible. Therefore God exists.79

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The real as completely intelligible is identical with the notion of being, which is defined as the complete set of answers to the complete set of questions. This definition of being implies the notion of complete intelligibility. Thus, there is no distinction between Lonergan’s definition of being and his definition of the real. Being is the object of thought and affirmation in judgment and the real is also the object of thought and affirmation in judgment. To accept this position, he claims, is to accept one’s own intelligence and reasonableness.80 A key argument is that if being is intelligible, and if what is apart from being is nothing, then, what is apart from intelligibility is nothing. If the real or existence, therefore, is a mere matter of fact, it is nothing.81 In the affirmation of the self we experience the real as something. Thus to stand behind our own experience of self-affirmation, we are led to affirm transcendent being. There is much merit in Lonergan’s carefully worked out solution, but we can call into question his exclusive use of intellectual patterns of experience in the argument for the availability of transcendent being. Does this distort our understanding of the pluralism we find in our experience of the world? Is there no affirmation of the self in the flexibility of our dreams, in the vagaries of the subconscious, or in the hallucinations of drunkenness or drugs? Is it not significant to understand the relationship of transcendent being to nonintellectual patterns of experience when Lonergan places emphasis on the importance of these diverse patterns of experience?82 It seems that in an explicit sense Lonergan has fallen into the error that is behind the paralogisms of the psychological idea, the antinomies of the cosmological idea, and the assertion of the theological idea of pure reason.83 The dialectical illusion that lies behind these problems is the mistake of making the subjective conditions of our thinking objective conditions of objects in themselves.84 Lonergan defines the notion of being as the objective of the pure desire to know and posits an isomorphism between the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination and the realm of proportionate being; Kant’s dialectical illusion is a definitive part of Lonergan’s epistemology. The failure of Lonergan’s solution to the problem of a disjunction between knowing and being is that he overestimates the power of reason and improperly extends its use to the realm of transcendent being. Such confidence is undermined by Lonergan’s own quest for larger dimensions of meaning and by all the literature and philosophy that have loosed the irrational furies of human existence in the affirmation of life.85 Lonergan has pointed toward the bridge by which we can overcome the separation between knowing and being, even though we do not accept his

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solution to this problem as being wholly adequate. Lonergan has pointed out very clearly that knowing is an act. This is a valuable insight. However, through his definition of being and the use of analogy he has confused the act of knowing with the content of knowing. By limiting himself to intellectual patterns of experience it is very easy to fall into a dialectical illusion. As a result Lonergan has reduced the act of knowing to the content of the known, which is always conditioned by the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. The notion of transcendent being is larger in scope than the notion of proportionate being, but it does not introduce new dimensions of meaning into the understanding of our existence. We still need a transcendental analysis of the dynamic act of knowing in order to determine our relationship to being. We need a more fundamental beginning so that our solution will lie deeper than the distinction between the rational and the irrational. Our solution lies in an ontology of knowing. Through a concern with an ontological solution to the problem of a separation between knowing and being we can differentiate Lonergan’s work from other students of Maréchal. When we ask explicitly ontological questions we move closer to Rahner, Coreth, or Lotz. To go beneath the distinction between the rational and the irrational, we must turn to the question of being itself. It is Lonergan who has led us to this question. To paraphrase Emerich Coreth’s statement about Immanuel Kant, we can say that Lonergan has demonstrated once and for all that metaphysics is impossible without a return to being.86 When we add to this theme Rahner’s insistence that “Knowing is the subjectivity of being itself,” we can understand why it is necessary to see the complexity of elements in the act of knowing as developed in Lonergan’s epistemology.87 Lonergan’s study of human understanding has provided us with the basic elements needed in an ontology of knowing. We are now confronted with the hermeneutical problem of shifting these insights from the epistemological idiom into ontological understanding. A contemporary and adequate conception of the transcendental imagination requires the insights of Lonergan’s reconstruction of critical philosophy because he investigates nonclassical and classical structures of intelligibility. This is why we began with Lonergan rather than Rahner. It is interesting to note Otto Muck’s comparison of their work. Rahner has worked out a philosophical anthropology broad enough to serve as the foundation for a fundamental theology. Lonergan, finally, moves from the reflection on the act of knowledge to a systematic foundation and thorough development of the

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theory of knowledge, the philosophy of science, ontology, cosmology, natural theology, ethics, and fundamental theology.88 Lonergan has developed a broad base for an inquiry into being; but, he is unwilling to subsume epistemological considerations under ontological considerations. This does not mean that he avoids the question of being. Lonergan asks the question of being in the context of a discussion of transcendent knowledge. But, to grasp the pluralistic dimensions of meaning resident within our experience, we need to get below the separation between subject and object. Our experience is not limited to intellectual patterns. Lonergan’s approach is not ontological. We do not see the influence of Heidegger in Lonergan’s work. We can compare his work with those theologians that have been influenced by Heidegger to see how a fundamentally ontological concern would establish a different sense of priorities in the development of self-understanding. Lonergan would not agree with Tillich that: Epistemology, the knowledge of knowing, is a part of ontology, the knowledge of being, for knowing is an event within the totality of events. Every epistemological assertion is implicitly ontological.89 Lonergan does not agree with Rahner’s approach in Spirit in the World : …the concern of the book (Spirit in the World) is not the critique of knowledge, but the metaphysics of knowledge.90 He (man) himself is insofar as he asks about being, that he himself exists as a question about being.91 He would not agree with Coreth: The ultimate aim of our questioning is thus the act of being.92 Hence we have squarely landed into metaphysics. Every question ultimately aims at being as such, at that which causes being to be, at the act of being.93 In a criticism of Coreth’s work, Lonergan has said: The fact is, of course, that while I consider Fr. Coreth’s metaphysics as a sound and brilliant achievement, I should not equate metaphysics with the total and basic horizon. Metaphysics as about being, equates with the objective pole of that horizon; but metaphysics, as science, does not equate with the subjective pole.94

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Lonergan is afraid that limiting human inquiry to metaphysical methods will destroy the diversity of intellectual patterns in our experience. To preserve the richness of possibilities in the subjective pole of our intellectual life, he resists any form of reductionism. Our dilemma is that Lonergan resists subsuming epistemological inquiry under metaphysical methods because he does not want to truncate our intellectual experience; and at the same time, we want to turn to metaphysical inquiry so that we are not limited to intellectual patterns of experience. We agree with Tillich, Rahner, and Coreth that we need an ontology to understand all the dimensions of knowing. Joseph Donceel responds to this problem in his introduction to the English edition of Coreth’s Metaphysics when he says: Fr. Lonergan claims that the method of metaphysics is only “one among many” that is quite true. He wishes it to be “considered from a total viewpoint.” But is such a total viewpoint not the viewpoint of being? There is no viewpoint that is more total than this one. Hence the method of metaphysics must be considered by metaphysics. Metaphysics must justify its own method.95 Not only does Donceel claim that metaphysics gives us a total viewpoint but that metaphysics must consider and justify its own method. This is our task.

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Notes 1. Bernard Lonergan, Verbum, Word and Idea in Aquinas (South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), p. XIII. 2. Ibid., p. X. 3. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, p. 41. 4. Lonergan, Insight, p. X; Kant, Critique, pp. 105-106, 155, 208. 5. Kant, Critique, p. 65. 6. Robert Paul Wolff, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 101. 7. Kant, Critique, p. 96. 8. Ibid., pp. 41-43. 9. Ibid., p. 43. 10. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1955), section V, part I. 11. Kant, Critique, p. 62. 12. Ibid., p. 66. 13. Ibid., p. 67. 14. Ibid., p. 68. 15. Ibid., p. 68. 16. Ibid., p. 77. 17. Ibid., p. 82. 18. Ibid., p. 126. 19. Ibid., p. 93. 20. Ibid., p. 105. 21. Ibid., pp. 151-155. 22. Ibid., p. 183. 23. Wolff, p. 209. 24. Ibid., p. 208. 25. Kant, Critique, p. 207. 26. Ibid., p. 180. 27. Ibid., pp. 180-181. 28. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 114. 29. Lonergan, Insight, p. 45. 30. Ibid., pp. 40, 47. 31. Ibid., p. 37. 32. Ibid., p. 37. 33. Kant, Critique, pp. 208-239. 34. Ibid., p. 205. 35. Ibid., p. 209. 36. Ibid., p. 212. 37. Ibid., pp. 213, 217.

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38. Ibid., p. 24. 39. See Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), Chapter II. 40. Bernard Lonergan, Collection (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), p. 265. 41. See Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Mentor Books, New American Library, 1925). 42. Albert Einstein and Leopold Infield, Evolution of Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), pp. 209-210. 43. Ibid., pp. 236-237. 44. Kant, Critique, p. 218. 45. Ibid., p. 219. 46. Ibid., p. 233. 47. Kuhn, pp. 79-82. 48. Einstein and Infield, p. 179. 49. Lonergan, Insight, p. 148. 50. Ibid., p. 171. 51. Ibid., pp. 170-171. 52. Ibid., p. 25. 53. Ibid., p. 48. 54. See Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp. 107-129. 55. Lonergan, Insight, pp. 63-65. 56. Ibid., pp. 104-105. 57. Ibid., pp. 348, 356. 58. Ibid., p. 350. 59. Ibid., p. 391. 60. Ibid., pp. 337-342. 61. Lonergan, Verbum, p. 37. 62. Ibid., p. 183. 63. Otto Muck, The Transcendental Method (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), p. 42. 64. Joseph Maréchal Le Point de Départ de la Métaphysique, 5 vols. (Brussels: L’Edition Universelle, 1949), V, 511; also see his discussion of Fichte and later German Idealism in Vol. IV; also, Muck, p. 72. 65. Ibid., V, 508. 66. Lonergan, Insight, p. 385. 67. Muck, p. 255. 68. Lonergan, Insight, pp. 280-281. 69. Ibid., p. 635. 70. Ibid., p. 348. 71. Ibid., pp. 391, 396-397.

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72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

See Coreth, Metaphysics, p. 49, for a discussion of a transcendental dialectic. Lonergan, Insight, p. 432. Ibid., p. 445. Maréchal, Vol. V, pp. 538-549. Lonergan, Insight, p. 635. Ibid., p. 636. Ibid., pp. 658, 672-673. Ibid., p. 672. Ibid., p. 673. Ibid., p. 652. Ibid.; See “The Subjective Field of Common Sense,” pp. 181-206. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Press, 1950), pp. 80-98; Critique, pp. 398-531. Kant, Prolegomena, p. 96. Lonergan, Collection, pp. 252-267; William Barrett, Irrational Man (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1958), “The Place of the Furies,” pp. 267-280. Coreth in his Metaphysics says: “Kant has demonstrated once and for all that metaphysics is impossible without a return to being.”, p. 24. Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), p. 69. Muck, p. 246. Tillich, Vol. I, p. 71. Rahner, p. liii. Ibid., p. 57. Coreth, p. 62. Ibid., p. 63. Lonergan, Collection, p. 219. Coreth, p. 12.

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Chapter 3 Transcendental Ontology

A Radical Beginning A transcendental analysis of the act of knowing asks the question as to what the structures of being are that make knowing possible. We must develop an ontology that is critically aware of the functioning of the transcendental imagination. What is the point of departure for this ontology? We must have a starting point that is unconditional but yet remains responsive to the many dimensions of meaning found in our experience. Our starting point must be available and meaningful in any pattern of experience. Actually, the question about a starting point is unreal as soon as it is asked. This is our starting point. By calling into question the question about a starting point, we have affirmed the questionability of existence and we have established a horizon under which our reflections can take place. It would be contradictory to question the possibility of questioning.l This unconditional act provides the initial possibility for the construction of an ontology of knowing.2 Affirming the questionability of existence is not tied to any particular pattern of experience or to any particular form of expression. The questionability of existence, which is central to our transcendental critique, is also manifested in the general cultural drift toward a sense of emptiness as evidenced in existential literature. We are not restricting ourselves to an intellectual pattern of experience. Our immediate task is to make the transition from the question of a starting point for ontology to a disclosure of the structures of being that make knowing possible. What does it mean to bring being into question (even if this is only questioning the being of the question of a starting point for ontology)? As far as our search for a beginning is concerned, the asking of the question as to a starting point for ontology has made available for philosophical inquiry a concrete experience to be used in locating the transcendental conditions necessary for questioning itself. Such a transcendental condition is anything that creates the possibility for the act of questioning.3 The conditions that we are now seeking to understand are not the regulative principles determining the formal character of objective appearances

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to consciousness, but ontological principles that determine the shape of the act of knowing. This does not mean that there is an exclusive disjunction between these sets of principles. They may be identical. However, we are seeking to develop an ontology of knowing and we cannot begin by restricting ourselves to the content of the known. My intention is to show that the transcendental conditions for questioning form a horizon under which we can then seek to determine the ontological structures of knowing in general. Internal Relations and the Thrownness of Dasein As early as Plato’s Meno philosophers were clearly aware that when we ask a question we do not know the answer to the question for then the question would be useless, but yet we know something about the object of the question or else we would not know what question to ask.4 It is clear that a relationship to the object of the question must exist as a transcendental condition of the question and of questioning in general.5 This relationship, since it is a transcendental condition for the act of questioning, is ontologically descriptive of the act itself. We might prefer to say that the relationship is internal to the being of the questioning act, and it is not an accidental or external relationship. To merely acknowledge the existence of internal relations does not give us much insight into the act of questioning. We do not know whether these relationships have a vector quality. Or, does their ontological character have any significance for things or objects in the world? How do these relationships appear in our conscious experience? To what philosophical method can we appeal for an unfolding of the significance of the questionability of existence? Because we have recognized that the transcendental imagination has a heuristic structure, we cannot return to the naiveté of a precritical metaphysics. We have turned to an ontology of knowing because of our critical understanding of the function of the transcendental imagination. Since even a transcendental inquiry is conditioned by the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination, it has become necessary to illuminate the possibilities of a dialectical relationship in which the being of the act of knowing always transcends and thereby judges the adequacy of the content of a philosophical statement about the nature of knowing. We need a philosophical position that will unify and illuminate our experience of self-affirmation co-posited with any knowing act and the questionability of existence as a starting point for ontology. The principles

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of intelligibility lying behind a transcendental inquiry into our acts of knowing are deeply rooted in the existential reality of the knowing act. We are seeking a philosophical position that does not violate the wholeness of the dialectical relationship between the content of knowing and knowing as an act of being. We are even willing to begin with a series of philosophical metaphors if they will help to unlock our insight into our relatedness with the world that was implied in the affirmation as to the questionability of existence. Of course, as we develop an ontology of knowing we cannot forget the insights from our transcendental inquiry. To avoid dialectical illusions we must remember that the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination are regulative of the formal presentation of objective understanding. This means that the act of questioning involves an anticipation of the known that will regulate its formal presentation to consciousness. Our conception of the transcendental imagination suggests the notion of a basic intentionality in our conscious experience.6 As we seek to illuminate our relationship to that which is to be known, we are drawn toward Heidegger’s imagery and understanding in which thinking involves a being inclined toward what in itself is to be thought about.7 We must consider very seriously his claim that we are called into thinking; and, we must decide whether he has disclosed the horizon under which we are to seek the structures of knowing. We appeal to Heidegger’s imagery because we acknowledge that the knowing act as regulated by the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination is opaque to being. We need to understand the ontological significance of knowing. Heidegger’s ideas will expand the dimensions of meaning to which an ontology of knowing is responsible and suggest a direction for the growth of our inquiry. Heidegger’s work is related to Kant’s critical philosophy in such a way that it offers itself as a paradigm for our attempt to overcome the separation between knowing and being implied in our expanded notion of the transcendental imagination. Our starting point is very simple, the questionability of existence that cannot be questioned without contradiction. We did not begin with a particular object of questioning so that our inquiry would not be limited to one dimension. The scope of what is questionable is itself unlimited since every boundary that is assigned can be called into question.8 The questionable includes everything. The question as to the meaning of questionability is about everything. This question can be no less than the question of being itself. What this means is that to question presupposes a relationship to being itself. This relationship is a transcendental condition for our being in the world. Being is an issue for man.9

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As a transcendental condition of questioning, we can affirm that man is an entity whose being is a being directed toward being. The being to which man relates himself is his existence.l0 It is our task to determine how knowing belongs to existence. What is the existential significance of the act of knowing? This is the starting point for an ontology of knowing. Heidegger has referred to man, an entity whose relationship to being includes inquiry into being, as Dasein.11 It is in the existential analysis of Dasein that fundamental ontology finds its meaning.12 It is in the analysis of Dasein that we find the meaning of the act of knowing since this mode of being is the transcendental condition for the questionability of existence. Dasein as a mode of being was co-affirmed in our interpretation of the questionability of existence as the starting point for ontology. The heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination suggest the character of the relationship between being and the inquiry into being. Inquiry is an ontological act that defines the character of Dasein. Our beginning is quite modest. Being-in-the-world is an essential structure of Dasein. Nothing more than this is given by starting with the questionability of existence. Nothing less than the affirmation of our being-in-the-world can be acceptable for our starting point. Man is a being whose being is characterized by an undeniable thrust toward what is.13 This is part of the facticity of Dasein. Dasein is in the world in such a way that self-understanding involves the being of those entities that it encounters within its world.14 We can begin to understand why we can talk about a being toward as well as a being in the world. We can talk about man’s relation toward the world because essentially man is being-in-theworld.15 Dasein’s being toward the world is manifested as concern. It is in noting the facticity of Dasein, which involves a being delivered over to existence, that Heidegger introduces the notion of thrownness.16 We cannot ignore this suggestion because it involves a projection of Dasein’s ownmost potentiality for being as delivered into the there. This relates to the concept of understanding in which Dasein projects its being upon possibilities in the future.17 Basically, the notion of thrownness illuminates the ontological significance of the giveness of Dasein as a mode of being that incorporates a potentiality for being. When talking about conscience as the call of care, Heidegger describes the facticity of Dasein. Yet every Dasein exists factically. It is not a free floating selfprojection; but its character is determined by thrownness as a fact of the entity that it is; and, as so determined, it has in each

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case already been delivered over to existence, and it constantly so remains. As something thrown, Dasein has been thrown into existence. It exists as an entity that has to be as it is and as it can be. The thrownness of this entity belongs to the disclosedness of the “there” and reveals itself constantly in its current state of mind. This state-of-mind brings Dasein, more or less explicitly and authentically, face to face with the fact “that it is, and that it has to be something with a potentiality-for-Being as the entity that it is.”18 Because Dasein has a facticity, the world becomes an increasingly important concept for understanding man’s being. Heidegger says: Dasein gets dragged along in thrownness; that is to say, as something that has been thrown into the world, it loses itself in the “world” in its factical submission to that with which it is to concern itself.19 This concern with being thrown into the world reveals Dasein’s potentiality-for-being as being-in-the-world.20 It focuses upon the historical nature of Dasein. If we were to continue with Heidegger’s inquiry into thrownness, we would see that this concept of givenness requires temporality for its ontological possibility.21 Temporality would become the horizon under which we would interpret Dasein. However, it is this assertion that we have called into question. What is important for our inquiry in Heidegger’s notion of thrownness is the dynamic requirement that it places on the concept of our internal relatedness with the world. Heidegger has shown that, even in man’s most unphilosophical state, man seeks to understand himself through the steady disclosure of his proximal relationship to beings in the world.22 The letting-be-seen of the relationship of man to the world is the truth that is sought in man’s quest for identity. Various dimensions of meaning correspond to the types of letting-be-seen that characterize man’s movement toward self-understanding. With Heidegger we do not restrict ourselves to an intellectual pattern of experience. No matter what pattern of experience we focus upon, truth is the disclosure of man’s being-in-the-world. In both philosophical and unphilosophical states, truth as unconcealment is an act of being and not simply an appendage to being.23 This unconcealment is an act and can be achieved only through work.24 In continuing the development of Heidegger’s imag-

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ery as it is related to our transcendental critique, we must seek the ontological conditions that make possible unconcealment. How is unconcealment related to our being-thrown-into-world in both philosophical and unphilosophical states? Unconcealment in an Unphilosophical State of Knowing Even without a critical awareness of what he is doing, man has sought to understand himself and fix his identity through the disclosure of his proximal relationship to the world.25 Truth involves the freedom of letting be that which is, although being-in-the-world is often clothed in various masks of hiddenness or forgetfulness.26 We will first look at this struggle in an unphilosophical state and hope that this will inform our investigation of the more philosophical inquiry that takes place in the formal questioning of the structure of reality. In the everydayness of experience there is an announcing of the structure of man’s being-in-the-world and in this announcement rests our first glimpse of knowing as an ontological act. Because of the internality of relations, knowing in both reflective and prereflective states resides in the disclosure of man’s connectedness with the world. This connectedness is regulated by the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination so that the state of man’s being involves an anticipation of being in the future. This anticipation of being is felt in the anxiety of being thrown toward the world. This thrownness is also characteristic of the primal noetic striving that transcends the limiting character of the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. Our primordial noetic striving is part of the facticity of Dasein. This suggests that for Dasein knowing is a descriptive characteristic of its mode of being. Inquiry gives to man his essential character.27 The question of the meaning of existence is part of existence and must even manifest itself in unphilosophical experience. This nearness to hand of being is central to the problem of discovering its manifestations. Because being is necessary, it does not possess the clarity and distinctness of unnecessary and readily variable characters of experience.28 Knowing is not an appendage to man’s being; for as man is the origin of knowledge, knowing is the origin of man in his essential attitude toward the world.29 Already it should be clear that the unity of the act of knowing is an ontological rather than an ontic unity, for inquiry itself is necessarily ontological. We are turning toward the heart of man’s being rather than toward peripheral notions about knowledge as though it were merely result of curiosity.

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Since the relationship of man to the world is of an essential or internal nature, an understanding of man’s being-in involves the notion of a world and the entities that exist within that world. In fact, a pre-ontological understanding of being usually focuses upon the question of the being of beings in the world.30 This is the recognition in the unphilosophical state that access to reality lies in the relationship of man to his being-in-the-world. Since this approach is pre-ontological, the affirmation that man is a social reality is often tacit and the attention of the inquirer is freed to focus upon entities in the world. As a science narrows its focus to objective entities in the world, it is not strange for it to become forgetful of the ontological significance of being-in-the-world. The world manifests itself ontically as the content of the known; and, since the world is the content of the act of knowing, its manifestations must be subsumed under the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. The structures that condition the appearance of the world are existentially descriptive of existence. We can talk about the world that appears to man as an ontological element formally determinative of man’s posture toward reality. The world cannot be reduced to a prop in the drama of life unless we become forgetful of its ontological significance. Heidegger applauds the unique role of the world as a formative element by speaking of the world in its worldhood. The worldhood of the world is an ontological concept grounded in the notion of a functioning transcendental imagination. The worldhood of the world is an existentiale or existential a priori determinative of the character of man’s being-in.31 The world is not an objective reality from which man is essentially disjoined. The world is formed under what Kant called the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding, and it is from these schemata that it gains its unity, or worldhood. To know the world as understood through its worldhood is an act of self-knowledge in an unphilosophical state. This is our most available concrete manifestation of knowledge as an act. A discussion of the world is not outside the scope of transcendental inquiry in which we are seeking the ground of knowing as an act. A typology descriptive of various appearances of the world would be indicative of the range of possible modalities for the knowing act in an unphilosophical state. Objects in the world merely reflect the transcendental imagination. When we talk about beings (Seiendes) that are in the world, it should be clear that we are referring to concrete events and not about an ontological structure. These concrete beings are ontic realizations for which there are a multiplicity of possibilities.

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Thus, the unity of our understanding cannot be sought in the world itself. The world is pluralistic. Actually, the unity of the act of understanding lies in an ontological ground. But, since we want to preserve the pluralism of the world and a diversity of experiences, we will not yet turn to the idea of an ontological ground. What I am saying is that the notion of an ontological ground, although of profound significance for understanding the ontological unity of the knowing act, obscures the unity of the unphilosophical act of knowing, which is on the ontic level. The world in its worldhood is opaque to its ontological ground. In the unphilosophical act of understanding, being is given as meaningful through our feelings of care and concern. Man’s being-in-the-world always involves a doing with things and manifests itself as concern (Besorgan).32 This statement affirms that the meaning of things rests in their functional relations to us. Thus, the search for meaning has a classical heuristic structure. This prepares us for the stronger assertion that the being of Dasein is care (Sorge).33 The importance of this interpretation is that it reinforces Heidegger’s assertion that temporality is the horizon under which ontic realizations find their unity. The objects that make up this world as constituted under the worldhood of the world are not merely things. They are equipment and are encountered in our concern for the world.34 Equipment has as part of its meaning a reference toward something. When we experience our being as a being equipped, we experience our being as a being-toward something. Even in the unphilosophical state that we are describing, self-knowledge is the experience of being-toward grounded in a being-in-the-world. Seeing the world as equipment involves a self-knowledge of the structure of man’s being, and we work to see things as equipment in the attempt to realize ourselves as being-in-the-world. Equipment lets us reside as directed toward the object of our concern. Equipment is referred to the self as a readiness-to-hand. 35 It presents itself as the mechanism through which Dasein in an unphilosophical state understands itself as being-inthe-world. To be more explicit, equipment is for the mobilization of work, and work is a reference to the world. Man comes to know himself as directed toward the world when he reflects upon the character of his work. When work encounters resistance, man’s being thrown against the world is felt strongly. The attempt to challenge ourselves involves a confrontation with our being-thrown-into-the-world, and this illuminates the reality of the self as a knowing entity.

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This shows how the knowing act is descriptive of Dasein even in an unphilosophical state. The sense of reality that attends hard work is an awareness of the structures of self-realization as well as an awareness of the other as a resistant force. The worldhood of the world as made determinate through work is the existentiale or formal element under which a being carves out its individuality. Our attitude toward this world is that of concern, for the world is a central element in the realization of the self. In the analysis of the unphilosophical act of knowing, Heidegger has not provided a set of images that adequately overcomes the separation between knowing and being. His notion of an existentiale or an existential a priori requires a concept identical with or analogous to that of the transcendental imagination as its ground. We are not able to get behind our thrownness; the world remains opaque; and, our essential unity with being is obscured.36 We are still seeking that which is nearest at hand. What is the meaning of knowing as an ontological act? Unconcealment in the Philosophical State of Knowing In Heidegger’s analysis, the meaning of existence is not transparent to work as a mode of reflection. The disclosure of meaning is still the concern of philosophy.37 For knowing to be a meaningful act, we must examine its manifestation in the philosophical state. We must move from the unphilosophical act of knowing because the disclosure of existence as being-toward in work is structurally illuminating, but the meaning of our being-in-theworld remains opaque. We must now become involved in Heidegger’s haunting question, “What is called thinking?”38 What is shocking is Heidegger’s claim that even in the philosophical state we are not yet thinking.39 We have not yet had a frontal confrontation with that which is the essential objective of our thinking. Through the use of vivid metaphor he extends the ontic dimensions of thinking, and he prescinds from the question of the ontological unity of the thinking act. The first interpretation that we are inclined to assign to this problem is that we have failed to stretch our efforts far enough to grasp the essential objective of thinking.40 If this were a correct interpretation, it would seem that our responsibility is to work harder and extend the range of our thinking. This solution is far too simple. What is thought-provoking in our age, according to Heidegger, is that the object of thinking has withdrawn from us. This withdrawal is an event

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in that man, as he grasps at the real, feels his separation from that which concerns him most.41 The tragic meaning of this experience of withdrawal is that we have been drawn toward that which is not available. The structure of the act of knowing is relational but the character of this relation is confused by the experience of a withdrawal. Man in his essential nature is pointing toward that which withdraws.42 We cannot grasp the meaning of our being-in-theworld because we cannot find a ground that will unify the act of knowing and render it intelligible. The object toward which man is thrown cannot be thought of as the ground that unifies the act of being thrown since it has withdrawn from us. What is so perplexing is that the being of thinking is so close at hand. As we ask the question as to the nature of thinking, we are already underway. We need to sense very carefully the meaning of our being on this path.43 Heidegger thinks that the reason for our questioning lies in the reception of a primordial call to thinking. We are addressed by that which is to be the object of thought.44 Our attention is turned toward language since to be underway requires that we are hearers of the address that is a call to thinking. Language is a clue to the meaning of our being underway on the path of thinking. However, we cannot turn to the ontic manifestations of language for understanding because we have allowed our language to become worn out. We must understand how language is used ontologically because the ontic use of language betrays a forgetfulness of its primordial significance. Heidegger is afraid that we see language as if it were “buckets and kegs from which we scoop a content that is there” or “wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak.”45 In the misuse of our language, what we have forgotten, and what our language has forgotten in its common employment, is that it is in language that we come to be underway on the path of thinking. That is to say, “It is in words and language that things first come into being and are.”46 There are several important ideas that lie behind Heidegger’s suggestions that language is an ontological element, and that it is in language that being becomes available to us. He collapses several traditional distinctions associated with the doctrine of being including the distinctions between being and appearance and between being and thinking.47 Being is not set against appearance in the way in which we would distinguish between the authentic and the unauthentic.48 Through an analysis of meanings belonging to the use of a language (the modes of Schein)

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he concludes that the essential meaning of appearance rests in the act of appearing.49 By appearing, something comes into our presence. It has the character of a standing there. This notion of appearance corresponds with his linguistic analysis of the Greek word Physis as a primary word for being. “Physis is the process of a-rising, of emerging from the hidden, whereby the hidden is first made to stand.”50 This fundamental conception of being corresponds to what is meant by appearing. To appear is to come into being; and, to withdraw from appearance is what is meant by non-being.51 This understanding of the relationship between being and appearing prepares us for an ontological interpretation of thinking. Thinking is not simply something that places us over against being or a being that is the object of our consciousness. In thinking we try to re-present something before us.52 Thinking involves a gathering through which beings come to stand before us. Thinking is an act of being; and, language, a basic element in thinking, provides possibilities for things to come into being. “Language is the primordial poetry in which a people speaks being.”53 When writing about Hölderlin, Heidegger said that when language is poesy, it is the most dangerous of all possessions because it is language that creates the possibility for confusion in existence.54 It is in conversation that the being of man is founded; it is here that man is underway by appearing in the world. The danger that language can fail to appear in its genuine significance is a threat to the affirmation of man’s being. As a primordial event, the speaking of language was poetry.55 The essence of language is grounded in the essence of poetry. For Heidegger, the essential nature of this primal telling can only be unveiled by the tale of that which we are letting-lie-before-us.56 The tragic character to this suggestion is that what is thought-provoking in our age is that which we would let lie before us has withdrawn, and our language has become bankrupt.57 Therefore, the unity of the act of knowing cannot be found in the content of the ontic manifestations of a forgetful language. Even when we return with Heidegger to the beginnings of Greek philosophy in an attempt to remember the primordial significance of language, our experience lies in a yearning for a harmony with the wisdom of language as exemplified in the experience of Heraclitus and Parmenides.58 Heraclitus felt a poetic harmony with the wisdom that “all is one” or that “all being is in Being.”59 This sounds meaningless to us, and it is an offense to us that this is the shock upon which Greek thinking rests. With the emptying of language, it became the task of the few to try to preserve this wisdom. What was a harmony with this wisdom was transformed into

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an erotic yearning for this wisdom.60 We are striving for this wisdom that is lost because the object of our thinking has withdrawn from us. We are not able to return to early philosophy and find the unity behind the act of knowing in its primordial and poetic wisdom. What is clear in our discussion of Heidegger’s understanding of philosophical and unphilosophical acts of knowing is that the being of the act of knowing involves a thrownness-into-the-world, and that the objective of this movement does not illuminate or unify the movement because it has withdrawn. We are left with this conception of thrownness as a structural clue to the ontological meaning of the act of knowing. There are several problems that direct our inquiry beyond the suggestion that the being of the act of knowing involves a thrownness-into-theworld. First, we need to explain what we mean when we say that the being of something lies in its relationships. Ontologically, we have only said that Heidegger’s analysis lends itself to a doctrine of internal relations in that the pattern of relationships constitutes the being of the act of knowing. Such a suggestion has some disadvantages. A doctrine of internal relations usually solves the problem of how one event participates in the reality of another event. The communication of feeling and the ability to know have their ontological justification in the conception of internal relations. However, a problem with opting for a doctrine of internal relations is insuring the separateness that is experienced in the awareness of individual identities. We must find some ground for the discrimination between patterns of relationships to maintain a pluralism. The world presents to us the experience of plural realities for which our understanding of man’s being-in-theworld is held accountable. The transcendental conditions for the appearance of the objective world to man should in principle be able to explain the separative character of human experience. The principle notion on which we have relied to explain the character of transcendental conditions is the conception of the transcendental imagination. The transcendental imagination must be the ground for the transcendental unity of apperception, and it must also serve as the ground or explanation for our individual identities. These questions are ontological and epistemological. Our notion of understanding requires an ontology of knowing. We are not simply seeking the limits of conscious reflection or the principles that regulate the relationship of consciousness to the objective appearance of the empirical world. We have recognized that the problem of the disjunction between knowing and being is actually resolved in the being that we are as we call being into question.

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We must inquire as to the extent that the transcendental imagination contributes to the formal structure of our being-in-the-world and its relationship to ontological knowledge. Heidegger says that the transcendental imagination is the foundation of ontological knowledge because it is an ontological condition that is required for the realization of the self as a knowing being.61 The transcendental imagination has this ontological significance because it is through its heuristic structures that Dasein is essentially a being-in-the-world. If in the actual development of an ontology of knowing we can demonstrate that the transcendental imagination contributes to the structuring of our being-in-the-world, then the transcendental imagination is the ground of our transcendence. Our freedom is in the formation of schemata that determine the limits of our knowledge and the worldhood of our world. The schematism is a primordial language that allows us to stand in the world. The production of schemata constitutes the original act of our being. This means that the transcendental imagination provides the conditions that make it possible for us to say “I think” and “I am.”62 This assertion as to the ontological significance of the transcendental imagination implies that that which gives unity to the structures of the transcendental imagination is not only the horizon for our understanding, but also constitutes the meaning of our being-in-the-world by determining the horizon under which the objective world appears to us. Our being emerges as we stand in relationship to this world. In both Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics it is very clear that for Heidegger this horizon is understood to be temporality. He argues this point from his understanding of the formal unity of the transcendental imagination and his phenomenological description of our relationship to objects as concern and to our existence in community as care.63 We have already shown that Kant sees temporality as a condition for the inner sense that is necessary for the transcendental unity of apperception.64 Heidegger accepts this analysis as being ontological knowledge to which ontic knowledge must conform. The Kantian endeavor clearly revealed that the possibility for any kind of metaphysics is restricted by the limiting structures of the transcendental imagination.65 This means that even a fundamental ontology is shaped by the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. This is why Heidegger asserts that the goal of fundamental ontology is the interpretation of Dasein as temporality.66 This is a recognition of the primacy of the structures of the transcendental imagination. Both ontic

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and ontological knowledge need temporality for a unified manifestation. In fact, the aim of Being and Time is the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for the understanding of any manifestation of being.67 We can say that the care-structure in which temporality is realized lies before every attitude and situation of Dasein.68 Care is existentially a priori; temporality as a product of the transcendental imagination is existentially a priori. We can see why Heidegger claims that the meaning of Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” is that ontic truth must conform to ontological truth.69 His fundamental ontology is thoroughly rooted in the notion of the transcendental imagination and particularly in Kant’s rendering of this notion. This means that if we reject Kant’s interpretation of the transcendental imagination, then we must question Heidegger’s interpretation of Dasein. We are still in need of a fundamental ontology, but we need an ontology that is based on a broader interpretation of the nature of the transcendental imagination. We need a fundamental ontology because man is the being whose being is an issue for him. The act of knowing is essential for man’s being. We have examined Heidegger’s suggestions in our attempt to resolve the problem of a disjunction between knowing and being because he sees that a conception of being-in-the-world and an awareness of the facticity of Dasein (a thrownness) are part of the affirmation of the questionability of existence. In this example the content of the known is transcendend in its dialectical relationship with the act of knowing. Heidegger realizes that man is not encapsulated in the structures of knowing because this act is an act of being and transcends the immediacy of a single appearance of the concrete by participating (conceived as a thrownness) in the possibilities for being in the future. In seeking a unity for the act of knowing we have again returned to the notion of the transcendental imagination. We have finally affirmed that the being of the act of knowing is determined by the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. Thus, an analysis of Dasein finds its unity in the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. We part with Heidegger because of his suggestion that temporality is the single determination of the unity of the transcendental imagination. We need a new set of categories to understand the ontological conception of the transcendental imagination implied in a shift from the exclusive use of classical heuristic methods to the complementary use of classical and nonclassical heuristic methods. However, we must continue to try to develop a fundamental ontology because that which we are seeking is present to us in that which we are.

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Notes 1. Coreth, Metaphysics, pp. 45-68. 2. Rahner, Spirit in the World, p. 59: “This need to question is the only point of departure for the metaphysical question that has its foundation in itself.” 3. Coreth, Metaphysics, p. 51. 4. Plato, Meno (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), p. 36. 5. See Coreth, Metaphysics, pp. 53-64. However, I will not go as far as Coreth and call this preknowledge. 6. See J. P. Sartre; The Transcendence of the Ego (New York: Noonday Press, 1957) especially pp. 38-39, for a development of the notion of intentionality. 7. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 4. 8. Coreth, Metaphysics, p. 61. 9. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 32. 10. Ibid., p. 32. 11. Ibid., p. 27. 12. Ibid., p. 34; Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 244247. 13. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, p. 149. 14. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 82. 15. Ibid., p. 84. 16. Ibid., p. 174. 17. Ibid., p. 188. 18. Ibid., p. 321. 19. Ibid., p. 400. 20. Ibid., p. 435. 21. Ibid., p. 437. 22. Ibid., p. 36. 23. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 87. 24. Ibid., p. 160. 25. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 36. 26. Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949), p. 310. 27. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 27. 28. Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958), p. VII. 29. Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main, 1963), p. 7; What I have said parallels Heidegger’s discussion of the reciprocal relationship of the artist with his work.

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69

Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 33. Ibid., pp. 92-93. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 434. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p. 67. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, especially pp. 28-32. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 9. Martin Heidegger, What Is Philosophy (New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1956), p. 21. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, p. 167. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 11; What is Called Thinking, p. 130. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p11. Ibid., pp. 83-163. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., pp. 86-87. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 144. Heidegger, Existence and Being, p. 275. Ibid., p. 284. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, p. 202. Ibid., pp. 7-9. Heidegger, What Is Philosophy, pp. 45-53. Ibid., pp. 47, 49. Ibid., pp. 51, 55. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 134, 162. Ibid., pp. 114, 153. Ibid., pp. 247, 251; Being and Time, pp.1, 38-48, 237-238. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, see chapter 11. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 247. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 1. Ibid., p. 238. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 22.

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Chapter 4 An Ontological Conception of the Transcendental Imagination

The Expansion of Our Method Through transcendental inquiry, in which we sought the conditions for knowing as an act, we have come to the understanding that the ultimate datum for the development of a fundamental ontology is that the act of knowing is a being-in-the-world. The notion of being that is implicitly affirmed in this understanding of act is the supreme heuristic notion for the development of our inquiry into the ontological significance of knowing. Our understanding of this notion of being must be greatly enlarged so that the manifold of our experience can find its proper conceptual unity, and so that the act of knowing can find its proper ontological valuation. Before we can begin to unveil the character of being resident in the act of knowing, we need to preface our inquiry with some methodological considerations. The principles of our method must be expanded beyond the scope of a transcendental deduction without becoming forgetful of the transcendental significance of our inquiry. There is no simple decision as to the correct method that should be adopted in our inquiry. We have often affirmed that many important areas of our experience are only dim and vague presences that must be wrested into consciousness by a free play of the imagination.l We have not been able clearly to discriminate a boundary in consciousness beyond which all that is dark is unimportant. Quite the contrary is true. The complexity of human experience has often forced us to understand ourselves thematically through the manifestations of historical experience rather than in clear ontological categories.2 We have at once both an appeal for understanding the totality of experience that would require the freedom of speculative philosophy directed toward the development of ontological categories, and the need for the development of a phenomenology of experience that would not sacrifice the nuances of historical (ontic) existence. What this means is that although the primary focus of our inquiry is on the ontological significance of language as expressed in an ontology of knowing, we must become responsive to several dialectical tensions. The first of these tensions, the dialectical relationship between the content and

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the act of knowing, has been the basic notion that has made possible the movement beyond Kant. The second tension, the dialectical relationship between ontological and ontic knowledge, will judge the adequacy of our understanding since we have already claimed that ontic knowledge conforms to ontological knowledge. Since we are seeking ontological knowledge, and since we are not going to restrict ourselves to purely phenomenological descriptions, we need a principle of intelligibility that is expressive of being as a supreme heuristic notion and that will allow us to make synthetic judgments about reality. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the meaning of intelligibility lies in the apprehension of the relatedness of things as found in the transcendental unity of apperception that is grounded in the functioning of the transcendental imagination.3 Our inquiry has led us to affirm that the transcendental unity of apperception is an ontological and epistemological notion since the act of knowing is a fundamental relatedness with the world. As an ontological notion the transcendental unity of apperception is descriptive of the constructive function of the act of knowing through which man comes into being.4 This appears to be an inversion of Kant’s insights into the function of reason that will require a reformulation of the conception of the transcendental imagination.5 The transcendental unity of apperception, when used as an ontological description, suggests the notion of internal relations. The methodological implications of this ontological affirmation is that we must seek a coherence in our reflections so that the categories by which we understand the nature of being-in-the-world presuppose each other and are empty of meaning if placed in isolation.6 However, we are not limiting our understanding of interrelatedness to functional or generic relationships. The complementary use of the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination demand that we also include the statistical relationships evidenced in the unity of an emergent probability or even the relationships that are illuminated in nonintellectual patterns of experience. To complement this notion of coherence we are also borrowing from Whitehead his notion of adequacy, which demands that there be no ontic characters of our experience that cannot be interpreted under the horizon of our ontological understanding. Of course this notion of adequacy simply corresponds to Heidegger’s interpretation of the Kantian Copernican Revolution. We are passing from the limited area of a transcendental deduction onto speculative philosophy as we call for a freeplay of the imagination controlled only by the principles of coherence and adequacy. In order to

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find a creative application for the categories that we are seeking (an application beyond their immediate origin in self-consciousness), we have in fact adopted a method of descriptive generalization.7 The basic notion from which any generalization must grow is that the reality of knowing is intentional and is experienced in the affirmation of the questioning act as a being in relation with the world. The social character of this act allows us to affirm that the basic occasions of our experience have a communal nature. We have no grounds for limiting actual occasions of experience to this notion, but the basic matrix out of which our speculation proceeds must at least include this notion. The categories that we adopt to interpret the nature of the act of knowing must not violate our experience of reality as lodged in various nexus of interrelatedness. It seems very clear that the reality of the self-affirming act of knowing is the unification of a diversity of prehensions (feelings) in an emergent nexus, and that this nexus is the ontic-ontological unity of apperception. Before we proceed further it should be noted that we have introduced several notions into our discussion that are thoroughly developed by Alfred North Whitehead in his essay in cosmology, Process and Reality.8 Because these notions are very important for the development of an ontology of knowing, we will look carefully at Whitehead’s categorical scheme; however, since the scope of our inquiry is limited to a fundamental ontology, we will be very selective in our discussion of his categories.9 Our ontology of knowing is rooted in the unity of self-understanding. The heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination provide the conditions for the unity of experience and define the character of our beingin-the-world. The intelligibility of the categories that we use to unveil an ontology of knowing is determined by these heuristic structures. Therefore, the categories that we adopt from Whitehead’s cosmology have, in this inquiry, application only to a fundamental ontology. The fundamental conception of reality as a social process, which is basic for our affirmation that knowing is an act of being in relationship to the world, is expressed in Whitehead’s categorical scheme by the notions of actual entities or occasions, prehensions, and nexus.l0 These are part of the eight categories of existence: (1) actual entities, (2) prehensions, (3) nexus, (4) subjective forms, (5) eternal objects, (6) propositions, (7) multiplicities, and (8) contrasts.ll Actual entities and eternal objects are the most significant of these categories since the rest of the categories explain how these types of entities stand in relationship to each other as reality actualizes itself in the advance from their disjunction to their conjunction in the emergence of a novel entity.12

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We experience the meaning of these categories in the unity of the act of knowing in that diverse feelings come together into a new reality. This means that the being of the act of knowing, an occasion whose character was determined by our transcendental critique, is the unified ground for the establishment of categories of explanation in an ontology of knowing. This notion of reality involving actual entities, prehensions, and nexus appeals to the concreteness of our experience of self-affirmation.13 The shift from a transcendental critique to the philosophy of organism is certainly not a turning from the immediacy of human experience. The commitment to the primacy of the act of knowing is maintained. However, there are differences in the use of images through which we can interpret the meaning of the knowing act. For example, the image of beingthrown-into-the-world as descriptive of the facticity of Dasein is a questionable construct in the philosophy of organism. This would seem to require a substantive view of the subject. In Kantian philosophy the subject shapes the world, but in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism the subject emerges out of the world. With Kant, subjectivity is transformed into objectivity; with Whitehead, objectivity is transformed into subjectivity. Thus, in the philosophy of organism the notion of being-thrown-into is not immediately satisfactory. However, the image of being-thrown is not without precedent in the philosophy of organism, for Whitehead refers to the emergent entities that constitute reality as superjects rather than as subjects.14 Without this suggestion we could not adopt his categories as explicative of our relationship to the world experienced under the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. The concept of the transcendental imagination requires an openness to the future. Basically, we have affirmed that reality is experienced relationally. There is no knowledge of reality except as it is manifest through these internal relations. Our transcendental critique also claims that the unity of this experience depends upon the determinations of the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. The basic facts of experience that have led us to speculative philosophy require that we do not forget the significance of the transcendental imagination in the creativity whereby disjunctive diversities are conjoined in a new being. The notion of an actual entity is complex, and when we shift from an epistemological imagery to an ontological imagery, the unity of apperception, the oneness of a manyness, becomes a growing together of feelings. It is meaningful to talk about reality, at the least the reality of the act of knowing, as a concrescence of diverse feelings.

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Our transcendental philosophy is metaphysical as well as critical. In our search for a larger understanding we have transformed our intuition as to the starting point for metaphysics into a root affirmation to be used in the development of a speculative philosophy. We must examine several of Whitehead’s ideas to see whether his categories can be used to explain the unity of the act of knowing and still remain cognizant of the functioning of the transcendental imagination. A post-critical philosophy cannot be an uncritical philosophy. Actual occasions or actual entities are the final realities of existence.15 If we can use Whitehead’s categories, we will search for the actual occasions that unveil the meaning of the act of knowing. Whitehead’s ontological principle is that the reason and explanation for anything rests in the composite nature of definite actual entities.16 The reason that I have insisted that we question adopting Whitehead’s notions is that, although his categories seem to explain and agree with the insight that we are internally related with the world, his method is not transcendental. Often he sought speculatively to expand thematic developments in our historical experience. But, this careful listening to the nuances of diverse manifestations of meaning is crucial if our ontological understanding is to inform us in the diversity of our experiences of our heritage in being. Whitehead saw in the growth of history a calling into question of all notions of reality in which substance is a basic category of existence or explanation. That this is a cultural phenomenon much larger than the scope of the individual sciences is clearly revealed in the growth of various field theories.17 The Newtonian conception of reality as matter or substance existing in an inertial coordinate system became anamolous to experience in philosophy, literature, and eventually science.18 The meaning of the principle of inertia (an object that is in uniform rectilinear motion will tend to remain in uniform rectilinear motion unless acted upon by an outside force) is that the only relationships that are ontologically significant are those that are constituted through directly applied physical force. Against the Newtonian conception of reality, Whitehead hears Bishop Berkeley’s radically empirical protest that there is no immaculate perception devoid of a sense of relations; he hears Wordsworth’s and Shelly’s protests that there is a brooding presence of the hills or an organic unity to nature full of beauty and color that violate the limits of experience as determined by the notion of substance in simple location; he sees in the nineteenth century the growth of an electromagnetic field theory in the work of Clerk

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Maxwell, an organismic character to chemistry evidenced in Mendeleev’s periodic law, organism on the infinitesimal level with the work of Louis Pasteur, and the need for an ecological understanding of biological experience with the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution.l9 In relativity theory at the turn of the century, space and time are defined in terms of the endurance of a pattern of aspects whose unity is the reality of an occasion.20 It is these emergent themes that informed his view of reality and forces us to expand the notion of social reality developed in our transcendental critique. Basic Elements in a Monadic Theory of Nature Whitehead’s understanding of actual occasions is monadic.21 Each entity is the determination in a particular mode of the received feelings of every other entity in the world. When we define a prehension as a primary feeling, then we can talk about actuality, a nexus of actual entities, as a nexus of prehensive unifications. An alternative statement would be to refer to reality as consisting only of the diverse concrescences of feelings.22 An analysis of reality rests in an understanding of this growing together of prehensions. We need to introduce the realm of eternal objects to understand the complexity of the monadic actual entity. Reality emerges when a relationship is established between these two fundamental types of entities.23 Other names for the eternal objects as a category of existence are (1) pure potentials for the specific determination of fact, or (2) forms of definiteness.24 The term eternal objects is a way of talking about patterns for the interconnectedness of prehensions. When these patterns come to realization we say that they constitute the determination of an actual entity. These pure potentials for the determination of specific facts ingress into the becoming of an actual occasion and constitute the definiteness of that occasion.25 The definiteness of the occasion gives expression to a selection of eternal objects.26 Particular forms are not restricted to any particular actual occasions but are the possibility for any occasion in which these forms can be made determinate. I am acknowledging that although our knowledge of an eternal object is dependent upon an actual entity, the eternal object is not ontologically dependent upon that particular actual entity or emergent from it.27 The actual occasion completes its becoming when it renders fully determinate one complex feeling in which it is bonded to every other entity according to the formal character of the eternal objects that ingressed into the process of concretion. Whitehead calls this complete determination the satisfaction of the actual entity.28

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This emergent unity is the being of the becoming and constitutes the reality of every other future being as a potential for its becoming. It is prehended negatively or positively as part as the environment constitutive of all other future becomings.29 The outline of an actual occasion that we have sketched is that of a dipolar process of becoming. An actual occasion is what it is because of its prehensions of the world. It is a social reality. But, its determinateness or satisfaction depends upon the ingression of eternal objects, the pure potentials for the determination of specific facts.30 This is why actual entities and eternal objects have a certain finality among the categories of existence.31 We should note that eternal objects are singular in their determination. Moreover, it is obvious that if colors, scents, geometrical forms, etc. are examples of eternal objects, then the satisfaction of an actual occasion involves a complex of eternal objects made determinate in the concretion of that actual occasion.32 The selection of such a complex of eternal objects is explained by the concept of the subjective aim. The subjective aim permeates the becoming of an occasion and it is satisfied when its complex subjective form is made fully determinate. The complex of eternal objects constituting the character of the subjective form is determined or selected by the mental pole of the occasion.33 Our problems have multiplied. We must find an explanation for the selection of the eternal objects that make up the subjective form. We must also understand what it means for the subjective aim to find satisfaction in the world when the subjective form has been made fully determinate. When the subjective form is made determinate in the concretion of an actual occasion, there is no more becoming. The occasion is over. The world is a world of perpetual perishing. How do we explain the emergence and continuity of identity throughout various phases of becoming? To understand the nature of creative passage in higher phases of experience we must expand our conception of nexus. We cannot even understand a simple occurrence of motion without the conception of a nexus. An actual entity never moves; its process of becoming is terminated in its satisfaction.34 To grasp the experience of man using these categories requires that we seriously investigate the elements that explain the structure and dynamics of nexus of creative passage.35 Nexus, Creative Passage, and Higher Phases of Experience Actual occasions and eternal objects are the most fundamental types of realities, and it is through the understanding of their diverse integrations

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that we can come to an understanding of the complex realities of our higher phases of experience. The actual occasion is described as the superject of a process of prehensive unification; and, as an objective datum in the world, it is then prehended in the becoming of other actual occasions. The perishing of actual occasions is their birth into various nexus that are objective data for a primary phase in the becoming of future occasions. Every entity in the nexus has its objective reality fixed by all other members of the nexus. The satisfaction of the subjective aim emergent as the superject transcends the immediate perishing of the occasion as it is prehended by the other members of the nexus. If within a nexus there is a common form present in all of the included actual entities, then Whitehead refers to this nexus as a society.36 The nexus is a survival factor for the growing complexity of experience in the actual world. A complex nexus also contributes to the intensity of satisfaction in the actual occasions that constitute higher experience because of the ordered complexity of contrasts that exist in the nexus as the data for prehension.37 When these contrasts are concretized in higher experience through the concretization of an actual occasion, the intensity of satisfaction becomes a real part of the nexus of which the actual occasion is a member. If diversity and contrast are necessary for the intensity of a complex satisfaction, then the nexus that is the ground for higher phases of experience cannot be unspecialized. An unspecialized society does not provide the conditions for novelty and through the perishing of actual entities would decay or even disappear. Without a novel referent to the future, the nexus could not be the datum for the becoming of new actual entities. For a nexus to provide the conditions for creative passage, it must be ordered so that there is a oneness of a manyness that is a mating of intensity with survival.38 Whitehead sees two ways in which structured societies have responded to this need, and the differences between them is an explanation of the differences between living and non-living matter.39 Non-living matter arises through the elicitation of a massive average objectification of the nexus in accordance with the category of transmutation that says that the subject or emerging superject of a prehensive unification can transmute the datum of conceptual feelings that are derived from the simple physical feelings of the actual occasions in the nexus into characteristics of some nexus that contains the original actual entities as some of its members. This nexus is then felt as the objective datum of the prehensions.40 There is a great loss of intensity because the unity of the prehensive experience is simply that of a transmuted conceptual feeling rather than that of possible contrasts derived from the diversity of the original nexus.

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A living society is characterized by the creation of conceptual novelty.41 In accordance with the categories of conceptual reversion and transmutation, novelty that is present in the environment is received into explicit feeling under subjective forms that unify the complex experiences proper to the actual occasions in the nexus without abandoning their resident pluralism.42 In a living society there is the conceptual valuation (a derivate conceptual feeling whose datum is the eternal object that ingressed into the becoming of the occasion) of each actual entity in the nexus, and there is also the secondary origination of conceptual feeling through the category of reversion according to which data are felt that are not one of the ingressing eternal objects in the first phase of concrescence but are possible predication patterns for the satisfaction of the prehended entity by their relevance to the subjective aim of the prehended entity while not having been realized in the actual satisfaction of its becoming.43 The higher phases of experience, particularly the emergence of consciousness, are rooted in nexus that are living societies. We need to understand the complex nature of nexus of the organic type. The nexus of which an actual occasion is a member is for that occasion the first signification for the notion of an actual world.44 The objectification of this nexus is identical with the complete unity of the objective datum prehended by the subject of feelings in its satisfaction as a superject. Our earlier notion of the worldhood of the world is in this context associated with the awareness of the world as being created in the realization of an actual entity. Every nexus when concretized in the latter phases of a prehensive unification becomes a historical event and an unalterable fact. The nexus is an actual world given its worldhood in the reality of any actual occasion that belongs to it. The determination of the nexus as a historical event in the reality of an actual occasion occurs only in the satisfaction of the becoming of that occasion. The elements of the nexus in the first phase of concrescence are felt under the abstraction of eternal objects as the objective datum of the subjective form. This subjective form determines how the subject of the becoming feels the objective datum of the nexus.45 The first phase in the concrescence of an actual entity is a multiplicity of physical feelings.46 As the phase advances there is a growth of feelings associated with the evolution of the subjective forms through various integrations, eliminations, and new determinations.47 The subjective form determines the qualitative pattern of physical feelings through the selection of eternal objects for ingression into the concrescence, and regulates the intensity with which these feelings contribute to the becoming of an actual entity.48

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As we have already mentioned, the subjective form in complete abstraction would be a complex eternal object.49 When we are talking about the concrete, there is always an integration of physical and conceptual prehensions. A conceptual feeling is the feeling of an eternal object in its capacity for the determination of process.50 The subjective form of a conceptual feeling is the valuation of an eternal object. It regulates the quantitative intensity of the eternal object as a determinate of feeling in a concrescence. Since the subjective form determines how the objective datum of a nexus, physical and conceptual feelings, is felt, it is an ontological element. Without the subjective form the actual occasion would have no way of coming to a satisfaction, and the nexus would never have a historical reality that could then be transmitted and endure in the creative passage of our higher phases of experience. What are the transcendental conditions for the creation of subjective forms? Whitehead’s ontological principle requires that our explanation involve actual entities and their diverse integrations into new actual entities. We must understand how the notion of the transcendental imagination can function as the ontological explanation of the subjective forms. There are two reasons for suggesting that a relationship exists between the transcendental imagination and subjective forms: (1) Whitehead claims that consciousness is a subjective form, and (2) consciousness, a fundamental mode of being-in-the-world, is rooted in the transcendental imagination. If the transcendental imagination is the ground and possibility for the creation of subjective forms, and if the notion of the world for any entity is the nexus whose objectification under subjective forms constitutes the complete unity of the objective datum for a concrescence, then being-inthe-world is determined by the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination.51 As a nexus is concretized in the reality of an actual occasion, the worldhood of the world enters reality as a historical event constitutive of future events in the world. The reality of the world as constituted in an event depends upon the passage of those feelings unified in the satisfaction of the event into the becoming of other events in the various nexus of which the given event is an element. To understand the higher phases of experience we must understand the nature of process evidenced in the continuity of creative passage. We must understand how the integrations of our physical and conceptual feelings envelop the past and stand toward the future. The conception of a nexus must be expanded so that we can understand the meaning of identity for a canalized personality existing through the existential durations marking the lives of occasions that have perished in their satisfaction.

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We must get beyond our elementary sense experience as the norm for our speculation. We must conjoin a sense of coherence with the ontological principle: “The reasons for things are always to be found in the composite nature of definite actual entities.”52 In defining the elements necessary for an ontology of knowing, we revert back to our previous insight that the act of knowing is a basic relatedness with the world. We called into question the use of Heidegger’s image of being-thrown-into-the-world in trying to understand the most elementary occasions of reality and found that there was a precedent for this language in Whitehead’s conception of the subjective aim. But, when examining only the elementary forms of reality it seemed more important to emphasize that reality is a social event and that any notion of being that does not explain the internality of relations is inadequate. As we turn our inquiry to the higher and more complex phases of experience, and without losing sight of actual entities as prehensive unifications, we must evaluate the fact that our imagery about higher phases of experience uniformly suggests a direction to the becoming of the knowing act. We are thrown into the world, and the actuality of the world lies in the satisfaction of the actual entity that is yet to be realized. Our being-throwninto-the-world has a heuristic character and its ontological explanation is dependent upon a fact in the historical future toward which it is thrust. In the beginning of the becoming of an actual entity there must be the conceptual feeling of a subjective aim in order for there to be harmony throughout all phases of process in the concretizing of an occasion.53 The subjective aim is the indeterminate presence of the superject in the primary phase of becoming. The subjective aim is realized through contrasts present in the evolution of subjective forms necessary for its final determination in the satisfaction of the entity. Its functional meaning is that it explains the categorical obligation that the diversity of feelings present in the incomplete phases of becoming of an actual entity are compatible by reason of the unity of their subject.54 This is Whitehead’s category of subjective unity. Another expression of this obligation would be that the diversity of feelings included in an incomplete phase of the becoming of an actual entity are present because of the subjective aim of the entity. The origination of feelings, which are always both conceptual and physical, is through the creation of subjective forms necessary for the realization of the subjective aim in the emergent superject.55 The prehensions involved in the realization of the superject would not be felt as they are if it were not for subjective forms. We can begin to see an important correlation between subjective forms and the

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heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination. When we affirm the concreteness of the act of knowing, the unity of apperception that is rooted in the transcendental imagination is importantly like the unity of prehensions that is rooted in the reality of the subjective aim. Subjective unity is grounded in the subjective aim; but, in what complex of occasions do we find an ontological explanation for the subjective aim? In what complex of occasions do we find an ontological explanation for the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination? Certainly our explanation, if it is an explanation of the unity of the act of knowing, must involve the integration of physical and conceptual prehensions, actual entities and eternal objects, since actual entities are always the only reasons that are acceptable for ontological explanation.56 The actual entity, even in transcendental philosophy, is the only reality available to us. The categories of existence that we will use ontologically to explain the reality of the transcendental imagination in addition to those already mentioned are propositions and contrasts. A proposition is a hybrid prehension integrating actual entities physically felt with possibilities conceptually prehended.57 This is a loose definition of a proposition because it does not determine the origin of the actual entities physically felt as the subject of the proposition or the eternal objects conceptually felt as the predicative pattern of the proposition. The conception of the proposition denotes the logical possibility for the integration of conceptual and physical feelings into a datum for feeling not yet realized in the giveness of a nexus.58 The functional significance of the proposition is that it is a lure for feeling in the world.59 Through the establishment and integration of predication patterns with the actual entities in a nexus, propositions illuminate the possibilities for satisfying the becoming of an occasion. The logical subject of a proposition is always found in a real nexus of actual occasions so that it can be relevently felt as a lure for feeling. This means that propositions, because of their hybrid structure, are always grounded in a real nexus of actual occasions that provides the physical feelings for the propositions. The diverse origin of the conceptual feelings constitutive of predication patterns in propositions cannot be simply located; however, we can affirm that the eternal objects that are the data for such feelings have ingressed into the becoming of some satisfied occasions in order to be available for the proposition. It is Whitehead’s category of conceptual valuation, which says that there is derived from each physical feeling a conceptual feeling whose datum is the complex eternal object, that made determinate the nature of the entity physically prehended.60 Of course, this means that both aspects of a proposition are exemplified in actual entities; and that in its transcendence

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of “whatever is,” a proposition is thoroughly rooted in actuality and does not violate the demands of the ontological principle. The proposition transcends “that which is” when through the origination of its predicative pattern it illuminates the possibility for the ingression of eternal objects into the nexus objectively felt as the logical subject of the proposition that are more complex than the eternal objects that have brought the actuality of this nexus into being as a historical event. The possibility for creativity in conceptual origination is rooted in the categories of transmutation and conceptual reversion. Both of these categories are already involved in the historical determination of a nexus. In the subjective forms necessary for becoming, eternal objects are placed into a pattern and are intensively regulated. In the selective process of becoming many eternal objects that could have ingressed and made determinate the character of the superject do not. These rejected eternal objects form a penumbral complex of possibilities associated with the actual concretion, an umbral realization. When actual occasions are prehended physically, the conceptual valuation of these occasions can include conceptual reversions that are the conceptual feelings of eternal objects that could have been relevantly ingressed into the becoming of the actual occasions but were not and that now stand in contrast to the eternal objects that did make determinate the prehended actual occasions. These contrasting eternal objects belong to the penumbral complex of possibilities associated with the realization of an event. When a proposition has established a contrast between “that which is” and the penumbral complex of possibilities, we are conscious.61 Consciousness is the way that we feel a nexus of actual occasions in contrast to a predicative pattern imaginatively derived through transformation and conceptual reversion.62 Consciousness, which is a propositional feeling, is a lure for the realization of a more complex feeling in the future through the ingression of the complex eternal object that is felt in contrast to the determinations of the past.63 If the proposition does not involve a contrast, it is merely the physical purpose of an actual occasion that does not involve consciousness. In this instance, the conceptual feeling is integrated with the physical feeling from which it is derived.64 Such a purpose gives a continuity through passage, but this is not sufficient for creative passage into a more intense feeling. In an intellectual or conscious feeling, the proposition that is felt is in contrast to the determinate character of the members of the nexus that form its subject.65 Contrasts reach beyond physical purposes into the possibilities of the transcendent future.

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Even the consciousness of sense perceptions has no other root than the proposition. Our sense perceptions come into consciousness only when the subjects of a proposition, the entities physically prehended, provided a conceptual valuation that is in relevant contrast to the predicative pattern of the proposition.66 Our most simple experiences of color and form have clarity in consciousness only when they are in contrast to other colors and forms that belong to the penumbral complex of eternal objects that circumscribe the actual determinants of the concrete entity prehended. Confusions and distortions of our conceptual experience enter into consciousness when the subject-superject produces for the actual entities that it prehends, a predicative pattern originating in a process of reversion derived from the conceptual valuation of its own past canalized nexus of physical feelings, or when it reverts or transmutes feelings in the nexus to which the prehended entities belong.67 In relationship to the nexus from which the subject of the proposition is derived, we can say that the predicative pattern is imaginatively derived and it is not a physical purpose in the nexus. The proposition becomes a transcendental judgment applied to the nexus that is physically felt as the subject of the proposition. In a judgment, the predicative pattern can originate in a physical recollection of the subject-superject and not from a conceptual valuation derived from the physical feelings of the actual entity or entities that are the subject of the proposition. The judgments of consciousness have their efficacy rooted in the imaginative possibilities of the propositional structure. The propositions that explain consciousness are lures for passage into real occasions determined by imaginative predicative patterns.68 A proposition transcends the immediate, and it gives continuity to the creative emergence of an actual entity with past occasions. The proposition is open to the future. Its predicative patterns are the heuristic structures that determine the realization of events. Propositions are the heuristic structures that determine the possibilities for consciousness. The Ontological Meaning of the Transcendental Imagination The transcendental imagination finds its ontological locus in a complex of propositions. Its heuristic structure resides in the lure of these propositions into the transcendent future. As the possibility for consciousness, the propositional structure meets the formal demand that the world of our experience be felt under contrast. If the transcendental imagination has a propositional structure, there is no limit to its complexity since propositions provide the possibilities for contrast to be added onto contrast. A proposi-

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tional structure is open to the future and unrestricted in its possibility for increasing complexity. There is a parallel with the unrestricted dimensions of Lonergan’s pure desire to know. Man’s source of transcendence is ontologically grounded in the conception of the transcendental imagination as a complex of propositions. This conception of the transcendental imagination explains the possibilities for consciousness and the nature of our identity through creative passage. It is only in the transcendental imagination that a synthesis between actuality and potentiality involves an ontologically significant generic contrast. It is the transcendental imagination that, using conceptual reversions, facilitates passage onto the latter phases of process in the becoming of an actual entity.69 The transcendental imagination is not bounded by the particularity of physical feelings or the historical reality of nexus.70 Adjustment that allows for the increasing or decreasing complexity and intensity of feelings is always possible for the transcendental imagination is a posturing toward the future. It is free toward the future. Its heuristic significance is determined by the imaginative character of the predication patterns of its propositions and not the already determined characters of the nexus whose objective data are the subjects of its propositions. Through the transcendental imagination we are freely thrown-toward-the-world whose “worldhood” is dependent upon the predication patterns of the propositions in the transcendental imagination. To understand the character of our thrownness we need to relate the propositional structure of the transcendental imagination to Whitehead’s conception of the subjective aim. In this context it appears that the transcendental imagination has as its aim a valuation toward an increasing order. We are in danger of losing the Whiteheadian orientation unless we can affirm that in our experience of the givenness of reality, a complex ordering of things for the increased intensity of feelings is the thrust of existence. Lonergan has resolved this question, however, through the co-affirmation of self and the primordial drive toward increased intelligibility. This means that the ontological elements constitutive of conscious experience come together in an ontic realization through propositions in a thrust toward increased order. The foundation of this order is unclear to consciousness since it transcends the concreteness of the historical nexus that are the subjects of the propositions comprising the transcendental imagination. We can refer to the foundations of this order as a dimension of ultimacy in our experience, or, with Whitehead, as the primordial nature of God.

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It is clear that in the initial phase of concrescence there is an impasse.71 The groping toward the fulfillment of feeling coheres with the ontological structures of experience but it is not explained by them. The valuation toward an increasing order in the subjective aim is at the very heart of our experience; however, to understand the subjective aim it is necessary to appeal to the primordial nature of God. The scope of possibilities in the primordial nature of God always transcends the achievements of objective understanding. In this sense every actual occasion contains a mystery that transcends the range of understanding. This mystery is inherited and compounded by every becoming that prehends the actual occasions present as objective data in the subject of its propositions. There is a life history of transcendence in the passage of actualities for that the conceptions of the transcendental imagination, the subjective aim, and the primordial nature of God become important explanatory principles. Language and the Transcendental Imagination The transcendental imagination, a complex of propositions, is the possibility for consciousness and is not emergent from consciousness. This means that propositions on the ontological level can only be analogous to propositions in language on the ontic level of knowledge. However, language is a primordial ontic derivation from the transcendental imagination and is our only historical access to ontological elements and the mystery of transcendence. As an ontological element, language (propositions) is the possibility for creative passage. It is the way that things come into being. As historical, language is a manifestation of being in the world. Whitehead’s understanding of language does not explicitly account for the dialectic between its ontological character and its ontic appearances. Although he sees metaphysical propositions as the possibility for conscious experience, language is usually discussed only as an ontic phenomenon on the periphery of conscious experience. There is very little predilection in his metaphysical analysis leading toward the development of a hermeneutical philosophy. Whitehead’s analysis of language is on the ontic level, and for this reason he tried to penetrate behind language to its presuppositions.72 In a variety of contexts he develops a polemic against any naive doctrine of an identity between language and thinking. In Adventures of Ideas he says that, “Language was developed in response to the excitements of practical actions. It is concerned with the prominent facts.”73 He notes that on

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the ontic level language is elliptical and fragmentary, and it marks only an advance beyond “ape mentality.”74 This attack directed against the efficacy of language on the ontic level forces Whitehead to penetrate beneath the ordinary usage of words. His whole conception of language places it not at the ground of concreteness but in the elements of experience that lend themselves to a high degree of abstraction.75 Language enters into a historical being-there as the present production of past sense experiences that can be abstracted from the nexus of their origin.76 Language enriches the passage into higher phases of experience as an ontic embellishment. It is not understood as a transcendental condition of ontological significance. Language only makes a reference to being and it is a tool of the understanding because of its abstract character. On this level language disjoins man from the concreteness of his experience, and it is for the convenience of those who seek clarity and distinctness as the marks of understanding.77 Part of the reason why Whitehead seeks to get behind language in the development of his metaphysics rather than lay the ground for a hermeneutical philosophy is that his understanding of language does not find its locus in a discussion of the higher phases of experience but in a more elementary discussion of the perception of the external world.78 Language, words, on the ontic level of discourse, are symbols that have a dual reference to (1) the definitions of their meanings that are on the level of words, and (2) the nexus of actual occasions that are the objective data of the physical prehensions to that the meanings of the words refer.79 A symbol points to the meaning of the prehensive act and it is not the creative ground for this act.80 In Whitehead’s conception of the relationship between a symbol and the prehensive act he is concerned with the ontic manifestations of language and not the significance of propositions that have metaphysical or ontological value. He says that language relates to the differentiation between the prehensive modes of causal efficacy and presentational immediacy as they define the character of our perceptual experience. The basic perceptual act is a positive physical prehension that conditions the becoming of the subject-superject. This fundamental relatedness is referred to as causal efficacy.81 When, through the elicitation of contrasts in propositions, the concreteness of an actual entity is attenuated, our relatedness to this entity or nexus of occasions is in the mode of presentational immediacy. It is the contrast achieved through transmutations or conceptual reversions originating in either the physical recollection of the emergent subjectsuperject or from a conceptual valuation of the objective datum of the

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nexus prehended that is clearly illuminated in the conscious experience of presentational immediacy. Language, human symbolism, originates in the reciprocating relationships that can exist between causal efficacy and presentational immediacy.82 Both schemes of presentation refer to the same nexus of occasions as the objective datum that is felt as either a positive physical prehension or as a subject of a propositional feeling. The junction of these schemata is ontologically indeterminate and is dependent only upon a free symbolic transference through language.83 A word or combination of words, through their reference to the nexus whose objective datum is the subject of the proposition to which they belong, gives importance to certain conceptual elements associated with this nexus by illuminating them in a contrast. This act precipitates feelings that condition the determinate character of the emergent subject-superject and thereby enters into the world as a historical fact whose physical prehension would be in the mode of causal efficacy.84 Language promotes the growth of feeling. Language arouses into the consciousness of a prehending subject physical feelings that are the logical subjects of a proposition and physical feelings that are the basis for physical recollection. Then, through conceptual valuation, reversion, and transmutation, a predicative pattern is derived from the physical recollection that can be integrated with the physical feeling of a nexus as a propositional feeling. This is the efficacy of language.85 Through a symbolic reference, the physical recollection of the prehending subject is disclosed as an originative ground of the predicative patterns assigned in propositions to the nexus physically prehended. This promotion of feeling clears the way for the imaginative freedom of propositional feelings in which are grounded consciousness and the higher phases of experience. Whitehead has not given language a chance to unveil its own significance when he despairs over its fragmentariness on the ontic level. It is in language that a true dialectic exists between ontic realities and ontological acts. The ontological analogue to language, the propositional structure, is the possibility for consciousness and language on the ontic level. The ontic manifestations of language draw attention to the physical recollection of the prehending subject as the creative ground for the passage of our experience of the actual world into a more intense and satisfactory nexus that will itself have a historical being-there. The ontic use of language contributes to the disclosure of the imaginative root for the ontological acts of creative passage. As these new possibilities are concretized and manifest in language, there is again a dialectical need for further passage hastened by the feelings aroused

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by language. The meaning of our language consists in the relationships made possible between conceptual feelings that are synthesized into a predicative pattern and the nexus whose objective datum will be the subject of a proposition using the predicative pattern. Nexus are integrated with conceptual possibilities relevant for the future. The depth of meaning found in language is in direct relationship to the comprehensiveness of the subject and predicative pattern of the propositions in which the language is grounded. When the transcendent character of the subjective aim, concretized in the world through the reality of the transcendental imagination, is the subject of a new proposition, our language has been religious and the feeling of the proposition is the feeling of a dependence on a transcendent reality. It seems clear that when Whitehead’s understanding of language is carried beyond his perceptual analysis into the corresponding metaphysical analysis implied in his discussion of the higher phases of experience, his philosophy is a prolegomenon to the study of hermeneutical theology. Whitehead’s polemic concerning the ontic rendering of language needs to be refashioned in relationship to an ontology of knowing. The matrix for the shaping of an ontological understanding of language has been Whitehead’s organismic notion of being and the corresponding determination of the transcendental conditions requisite for higher phases of human experience. Language can no longer be seen as a convenience for abstraction. Language is the way that man comes into the world and stands as a historical reality.86 An Ontological Conception of Language and the Appearance of Man Whitehead would agree that the significance of language lies in the fact that it is necessary for the appearance of man.87 In our inquiry, our conception of man is rooted in the fact that in our immediate experience of selfhood we have affirmed that we are thrown-into-the-world. Reality is experienced as being internally related. Thus, any element that conditions the character of a relationship is ontologically significant. Since language determines the character of man’s relationship to the future and shapes the patterns by which he enters into the world in the future, we can say that language is ontologically significant and marks the appearance of man. It is language that allows the concrete to exceed itself in creative passage by illuminating the importance of physical recollection that contributes to the predication patterns of the transcendental imagination.

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The reality of higher experience is co-affirmed with the reality of selfconsciousness, and, since self-consciousness requires a propositional contrast for its emergence, we have posited the structural possibilities for the reality of the transcendental imagination. We can use the conception of the transcendental imagination as an explanatory principle that is grounded in the experience of self-affirmation. The conception of the transcendental imagination gives us insight into the ontological importance of language. Language is not accidentally or peripherally related to man’s being. There is no being for man that can escape a connectedness with the rest of the world, and there is no appearance of man without the reality of language. It is the being of being of man that is at stake in a discussion of language. This means that the development of a language, poetically or philosophically, is an act of being that is constitutive of the reality of man and not just descriptive of that reality. Language participates in the reality of the emergent subject-superject and has a symbolical character.88 Language opens up a level of existence that is not available to perceptual experience alone. By giving importance to the physical recollection of the subject-superject, man’s historical existence becomes a creative ground for free passage into the future instead of being experienced only determinately through the nexus of occasions felt as the objective datum of a physical prehension. However, the claim that language has ontological significance is not identical with the claim that the linguistic content of the act of knowing is identical with the reality to which it refers. Language participates in the creation of a new being, but it does not necessarily describe that being. Although language and knowing are not disjoined from reality, we are not ready to embrace an epistemological realism. The affirmation of our inquiry is that knowing is a creative act, and it is not merely descriptive of an external world. Its connection with reality depends upon the emergent subject-superject. We are still faced with the problem of developing general hermeneutical principles by which we can penetrate through the ontic manifestations of language to the mystery of being. Although we have seen that language has ontological significance and that it is the key to understanding the particularity of our passage into history, our task has only been defined and not completed. Because language has ontological significance, the development of a hermeneutical theology has associated with it the urgency of an ultimate concern. We risk our being when we do not seek to unveil the meaning of our language. Any thinking that is less than hermeneutical is a withdrawal from the fullness of human experience.

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Because of these demands, we must again assess the significance of philosophical and theological inquiry. We must look at the ontic manifestations of language and ask how we can develop a theology that is truly hermeneutical. We must be willing to abandon any notions ascribed to the nature of thinking that in reality violate our ontological analysis of thinking and preclude a creative interpretation of the meaning of language on the ontic level. We must come to understand our task so that theology can be truly responsive to the questions implied in an existential analysis of the human situation.

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Notes 1. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p. VIII. 2. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Mentor Books, New American Library, 1933), pp. 166-167. 3. Alfred North Whitehead: An Anthology, ed. by F. S. C. Northrop and M. W. Gross (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 166. 4. See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), p. 236; Whitehead thinks that the first full and explicit introduction of the concept that an act of experience has a constructive functioning was part of Kant’s greatness. 5. Ibid., pp. 135-136; Whitehead interprets the philosophy of organism as the inversion of Kant’s philosophy. This is one reason why Whitehead’s categories are helpful in understanding the ontological meaning of the transcendental imagination. 6. Ibid., p. 5; I have paraphrased Whitehead. 7. Ibid., p. 8. 8. Ibid., p. 8. 9. Ibid., pp. 27-45. 10. Ibid., p. 27. 11. Ibid., pp. 31-33. 12. Ibid., pp. 32-33, 37. 13. Ibid., p. 27; Whitehead also notes that the awareness of our body (certainly a part of the experience of self-affirmation) is the foundation for our concept of the connexity of the world. Modes of Thought, p. 227. 14. Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 135-136. 15. Ibid., pp. 27-28. 16. Ibid., p. 28. 17. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Mentor Books, New American Library, 1925), p. 93. 18. Ibid., chapters 4-7. 19. Ibid., chapters 4-6. 20. Ibid., pp. 111-112. 21. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 124. 22. Ibid., p. 35. 23. Ibid., p. 37. 24. Ibid., p. 32. 25. Ibid., p. 34. 26. Ibid., p. 69. 27. Ibid., p. 70. 28. Ibid., p. 71. 29. Ibid., p. 71.

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

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Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 33. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 97. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 108. Ibid., p. 113. Meland, The Realities of Faith, pp. 187-208. Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp, 50-51. Whitehead says: “A nexus enjoys ‘social order’ where (i) there is a common element of form illustrated in the definiteness of each of its included actual entities, and (ii) this common element of form arises in each member of the nexus by reasons of the conditions imposed upon it by its prehensions of some other members of the nexus, and (iii) these prehensions impose that condition of reproduction by reason of their inclusion of positive feelings of that common form.” Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., pp. 154ff. Ibid., pp. 40, 154. Ibid., p. 156. Ibid., pp. 39-40. Ibid., pp. 39-40. Ibid., p. 351. Ibid., P. 354. Ibid., p. 363. Ibid., p. 359. Ibid., p. 356. Ibid., p. 356. Ibid., p. 366. Ibid., p. 351. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 341. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 342. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 282. Ibid., p. 395. Ibid., p. 395. Ibid., p. 379. Ibid., p. 399. Ibid., p. 399. Ibid., p. 402. Ibid., p. 406.

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65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

Ibid., p. 407. Ibid., p. 410. Ibid., p. 412. Ibid., p. 416. Ibid., p. 425. Ibid., p. 425. Ibid., pp. 373-374. Whitehead, Modes and Thought, p. VII. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 166. Ibid., p. 227. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p. 48. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., pp. 54-55. See Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism (New York: Capricorn Books, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959). Ibid., pp. 10-13. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., pp. 30-31. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 277. Ibid., p. 403. See Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. ii. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p. 57: “Its (this lecture) final conclusion respecting human nature is that the mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written, ‘He gave them speech, and they became souls.’” See Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), p. 42, for a discussion of symbolism.

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Chapter 5 The Development of a Hermeneutical Theology

The Centrality of the Hermeneutical Question For the Growth of Theology The meaning and interpretation of language is a problem for which the theologian is responsible in his presentation of the Christian message to the modern consciousness. The centrality of the hermeneutical question for the growth of theology is illuminated by the insights of an ontology of knowing in their relationship to Paul Tillich’s statement that the formal criteria of theology are (1) the object of theological activity is that which concerns us ultimately, and (2) the locus of our ultimate concern is determined by that which has the power of threatening or saving our being for us.1 If we accept Tillich’s demand that theology be responsive to the existential realities of the situation in which it is present, then because of our affirmation that language is an ontological element constitutive of man’s being in its passage into historical reality, we must also realize that a proper concern of theology is the meaning and interpretation of language. The ontological significance of language is not only a proper concern of theology, but an understanding of its function is urgently needed for a self-understanding of the meaning of theology. Tillich asserts that theology is concerned with the meaning of being for us and that this is how the theologian asks the question of being.2 In the framework of an ontology of knowing we can see that language is a primordial ontic derivation from the transcendental imagination. It is our only historical access to ontological elements and to the experience of transcendence. To understand the meaning of being or to penetrate into the structures of being involves a speaking and hearing of language. This relationship between the hermeneutical task and the elements in an ontology of knowing characterize the emphasis placed on hermeneutical theology by men like Heinrich Ott and Hans Georg Gadamer.3 Ott asserts very strongly that theology by its very nature is hermeneutical.4 This assertion does not simply rest on the understanding of an ontology of knowing. The theologian, if he is to preach the kerygma, must be able to translate the meaning of the kerygma from its statement in the primitive church into a statement that is equally significant for our contemporary situation. With-

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out ever raising the question of ontology, the theologian must be concerned with the hermeneutical questions associated with the cultural distance between primitive Christianity and our age.5 Hermeneutical thinking asks questions about the translation of a text, an idea, or a whole religious or philosophical theme.6 This question of translation is a question about the understanding of an idea. Have we grasped the significance of the language that is used in all of its dimensions? Does our translation of ideas achieve the same level of intelligibility and resolve the pure desire to know that initiated inquiry? When we talk about understanding we are talking about an ontological act of creative passage that has a dialectical relationship with the content of the known. Before we can say that we have translated the kerygma into a contemporary idiom, we must be able to affirm that through this understanding we are involved in an act of knowing that possesses the same transforming power as did the understanding of the kerygma in the primitive church. This is why, in recent hermeneutical studies, Schleiermacher’s lectures on hermeneutics have been seen as a turning away from the traditional philologically oriented approach to the hermeneutical task.7 He saw hermeneutics as a science of understanding that required an existential appropriation of the position of the speaker that is more than a surface interpretation of a text. The hermeneutical problem was transformed into the attempt to understand the manifestation of the universal within the realization of the individual. In this thinking, if we can understand the structure of human existence, we can overcome the problem of translation from one time period into another or even overcome the separation that exists between individuals that are contemporary with each other.8 Schleiermacher even suggests that the science of hermeneutics will assist a person in his everyday social conversation by allowing us to penetrate deeper into the reality of the other. Thus, the science of hermeneutics had ethical as well as philological significance for Schleiermacher.9 The importance of Schleiermacher’s work for our inquiry is not in the particularities of his analysis of understanding, but in his broad realization that a hermeneutical theology must be a science of understanding that is larger and more penetrating than a discipline that looks only at the philological interpretation of a given religious text. Hermeneutical theology has grown in the direction suggested by Schleiermacher, and it is for this newer tradition that an ontology of knowing is particularly significant. A more recent example of a turning toward the understanding of the structures of human existence as the path for the development of a

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hermeneutical theology is found in the work of Rudolph Bultmann. He is very sensitive to the theme that the structures of human existence are characterized by our standing toward the questionability of existence. To understand a text is to understand it as one who questions. It is the very structure of our relationship to the world that makes the translation and understanding of a thought possible.l0 This means that the problem of hermeneutical theology cannot be separated from the development of a fundamental ontology. As was mentioned earlier, this relationship between theology and ontology is clearly evident in the work of Ott and Gadamer. In their work, hermeneutics is a basic unveiling of the ontological structures of the act of knowing.11 Understanding is an act of experience that takes place under the horizon of a particular historical context, and the interpretation of an idea involves the unfolding of the ontological elements that define this horizon. Ott expresses this theme by claiming that understanding is the function of the whole man. Understanding requires a disclosure of the ontological structures of humanity as a historical being-there. The horizon for understanding in hermeneutical theology is not defined by the text under consideration. It can be disclosed only by showing what existential elements belong to its situation. The questions of concrete meanings find intelligibility in their conformation to the ontological structures regulative of our existence.12 Gadamer’s approach to the reality of our working under horizons appears to be more contextual than Ott’s analysis would suggest. He says that we bring a horizon to a situation, and as we confront a text from the past and seek to understand it, there is a “fusing of horizons” that forms a new single horizon under which the act of understanding completes itself.13 The horizon under which the theologian works is not rigid. It moves or evolves. In the act of understanding our horizon can change.14 Understanding takes place as a new horizon forms. Gadamer would continue to say that the ontic manifestations of the act of knowing through which a new horizon is formed are marked by the interpreter’s creation of a new language.15 What is important in these emerging conceptions of the hermeneutical task is that the dynamics of the act of knowing are acknowledged as integral to the understanding of a religious text, idea, or theme. The dynamic element in our noetic striving is thought to be as important or perhaps even more important than the objects of knowing. The insights of an ontology of knowing rooted in a transcendental critique should be seen as prolegomena to the future growth of this type of ontological hermeneutics since the structures disclosed in an ontology of knowing imply a horizon that tran-

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scends the ontic characteristics of any particular situation. The awareness of this horizon conditions the understanding of the interpretative act to which hermeneutical theology is responsible. The Immediacy of the Historical We have affirmed that the horizon under which we can understand our historical being-in-the-world is a transcendental reality. Such an awareness of transcendence is integral to our understanding of language as an ontological element in our passage toward a historical realization. This means that we cannot simply appeal to Gadamer’s understanding of the fusing of ontic horizons in an interpretative act as an unfolding of the significance of knowing. The idea of forming new horizons is meaningful only when we are referring to a phenomenological description of the ontic manifestations of an ontological act. The horizon that seems to appear in the historical manifestation of an idea through language is not the ontological horizon under which the act of knowing is completed. The horizon that we are viewing in the description of an ontic manifestation of a creative act is the finite modality or pattern of aspects that is realized in the concrescence of feelings determinative of the being of that act. This is the horizon that limits the content of the act of knowing. This horizon is transcended in the dialectical passage into the dynamic act of knowing. As we reflect on our discussion of language as an ontological element, we realize that the hermeneutical theologian must examine the horizon under which the act of knowing realizes itself if he is to understand an idea in all of its existential dimensions. The fusing of particular modalities to form a new pattern of aspects (an ontic horizon) is possible because the act of knowing takes place under a single transcendent horizon. Understanding the meaning of the transcendental imagination is the key to understanding both ontic and ontological horizons. It is through the transcendental imagination that we are thrown into the world, and therefore it is through the transcendental imagination that our historical identity is determined. The transcendental imagination, because of its heuristic structure, is the ontological mechanism for creative passage, but it also shapes or gives form to the content of our understanding. As we have said, the transcendental imagination has a propositional structure. It makes possible the hybrid feeling of a contrast between “that which is” and “that which can be.” The encounter with an idea belonging to the traditions of the past involves a contrast with predicative patterns that lure toward a passage into the future seeking new historical realizations. The

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encounter with past traditions is always conditioned by the reality of the lure toward the future as determined by the complex of propositions in the transcendental imagination. We can form new ontic horizons because the theological use of language is symbolic. It is an element participating in the reality of the emergent subject-superject. The significance of listening to the past speaking of a language is that it contributes to the physical recollection of the emerging subject-superject; it nuances and enlarges the predication patterns of the complex of propositions referred to as the transcendental imagination. This use of language opens up levels of existence, larger patterns of aspects for the concrescence of feelings that are not available to our immediate perceptual experience alone. The past acquires an existential immediacy as it contributes to the predication patterns belonging to the transcendental imagination. We form new ontic horizons as the processes of becoming complete themselves through the ingressions of new patterns for feeling. Understanding is an experience of the reality of an idea that is determinative of our passage toward the future through the complex of propositions resident in the transcendental imagination. The ontological dimensions of a past tradition are realized in our present understanding because of the ontological significance of language. However, locating the existential meaning of new ontic horizons does not answer the question of the correspondence of the language of the past as an ontologically determinative element with the significance of that same language in the present. How can we achieve a fusing of modalities so that our present acts of understanding have an important continuity with the past understanding of an idea or a theme? All that we have shown is that the existential demands of a past idea have an immediate significance for our passage into the future as a subject-superject. What can give unity to the interpretation of an idea with its expression in the past? We are seeking for this unity in an ontological horizon and not in a congruency of the ontic modalities expressed in the realization of ideas. Such a congruency would be impossible because the heuristic structures of the transcendental imagination are expressive of the contrasts that are necessary for conscious experience. The Horizon of Religious Understanding As we move toward the boundaries of understanding we encounter a single horizon that transcends the immediacies of our ontic situation. We stated in Chapter 4 that the depth of meaning found in language is in di-

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rect relationship to the comprehensiveness of the subjects and predicative patterns that constitute the propositions in the transcendental imagination in its thrust toward creative passage. The thrust toward increased order is what unifies the complex of propositions in the transcendental imagination. This basic intentionality has a history since the complex of propositions in the transcendental imagination are concretized in the satisfaction of the becoming of the occasion in that they are felt. But, the foundations of this order always transcend the concreteness of the historical nexus that have become the subjects of propositions in the becoming of new occasions. There is a surd character to history. The mystery of the transcendent realm of possibilities becomes the horizon under which all ontological acts are unified. When we prehend the religious traditions of the past, we find the possibility for a similarity of feeling or understanding in the reality of the horizon under which both past and present ontological acts find their completion. Traditions, language, or ideas are religious even if they are only the ontic characters marking the concretization of the transcendent nature of the transcendental imagination. The experience of the primordial nature of God is found in the subjective aim of propositions in the transcendental imagination, and it is personal and of immediate existential importance. The feelings of transcendence become a lure that makes a demand on our passage into the future. The understanding of religious language is an act in which our relationships to the nexus felt as the subjects of propositions in the transcendental imagination are shaped by an ultimate concern. To be meaningful, religious language must also be related to nexus of actual occasions. Religious language and the feelings of transcendence are deeply involved in our being-in-the-world. This is why it appears that there can be no understanding or translation of religious ideas that does not involve the historical realization of a religious community. The Task of Theology We have reached the conclusion that when man moves to the boundaries of his experience he there finds a dimension of ultimacy that, although it remains a surd and transcends the context of understanding, is a determinative factor in the ontological act of knowing by providing the ground for the patterns of feeling that shape our communal experience. This means that man is homo religiosus. To experience the fullness of human possibilities is to be a religious man and belong to a religious community. What does this mean for our understanding of the theological task?

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The assertion that man is homo religiosus is not the foundation for the development of a natural theology. Our critique has been transcendental and it has provided certain regulative principles for the understanding of religious thought in general. We have sought to unfold the heuristic structure of the transcendental imagination and understand their meaning for the theological task. Our inquiry has been about the possibility of theological understanding and religious thought in general; it has not been about the content of that thinking. This means that the conclusions that are drawn from a transcendental ontology for the understanding of theology are only regulative and not constitutive of the content of theological understanding. We have located an element of transcendence in the act of knowing, but we have not determined the ontic character of its manifestation in our concrete experience. Such a determination would properly belong to the phenomenology of religion and not to a transcendental critique of theological understanding except as the act of understanding is itself intrinsic to the manifestation of the sacred in a religious community. To understand the theological task let us review some of the regulative principles that can be derived from an ontology of knowing. The first is that theological understanding is always an ontological event that shapes our being-in-the-world. The importance of theological truth is not decided by the determination as to whether it corresponds to events in our religious past, but the importance of religious truth is decided by whether it provides the conditions for a creative passage toward a theonomous community. The task of theology has been distorted if we understand it to be the establishment of an objective science about God, faith, doctrine, or any other religious phenomenon. Religious language is symbolic because it participates in the determination of the emergent subject-superject. It is part of the becoming of the reality to which it refers. The meaning of theological understanding belongs to the being of the occasion for which it is a constitutive part. Theological understanding is a metaphysical event of religious significance for which the value cannot be assessed by an intellectual critique alone. Perhaps this will be clearer when we examine the second regulative principle for the understanding of theology. There is a feeling of ultimacy associated with the ontic manifestation of our dependence upon a transcendent reality conceived as the horizon under which the act of knowing finds its satisfaction. This is an elucidation of our earlier statement that when we relate to the propositions in the transcendental imagination as ontological elements shaping the character of our existence we feel a dependence upon the primordial nature of God in which is rooted our basic thrust toward an increasing order needed for the

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satisfaction of the processes that constitute our existence. This is a feeling of teleological dependence and it is the primal signification for the word God in the manifestation of the sacred through our experience of the knowing act.16 Theological activity reflects the dialectic between the object of knowing and the act of knowing. Theology is concerned with the appearance of the sacred in our experience and is itself a phenomenon representative of the appearance of the sacred or a dimension of ultimacy in our experience. Theology makes use of the phenomenology of religion and is also an object of the phenomenology of religion. Theology can be a religious phenomenon when the surd root of the directedness of the transcendental imagination is brought into relief as an ontic characteristic in the realization of the object of our desire to know. Theology never completes itself since the capacity for the ontic manifestations of the ultimate is never exhausted by its appearance in finite modalities. Part of the task of theology is to bring dimensions of the ultimate into an unconcealment for every generation. Our transcendental inquiry has also shown that theology must be concerned with the appearance of ultimacy in secondary revelations.17 I am referring to the problems associated with the translation of a theological event from its original context into the contemporary situation. The possibility for continuity between the contemporary situation and the original revelatory event in a meaningful translation and interpretation of religious language is grounded in the structural unity of ontological acts as formed under a single horizon. The ontological significance of such understanding is always in the immediate act through which new forms or patterns of relationship ingress into the becoming of the occasion. The concrete exceeds itself as it contributes to our creative passage into the future. By examining the language and traditions of a religious community, we illuminate possibilities for new patterns of feeling in the physical recollection of the nexus of events that did not ingress into the satisfaction of these events. These multiple eternal objects belong to a penumbral complex of conceptual prehensions surrounding the concreteness of these events. This use of language opens up levels of experience and a future concreteness that could not be available to an objective understanding of an objective past. The interpretation of the language of our past traditions constitutes secondary revelation because of its dependence on a physical recollection; but, it is also primary revelation in the sense that the creative passage grounded in a physical recollection takes place under the single transcendent horizon common to the intentionality of all ontological acts. The emphasis on secondary revelation is important because through a physical recollection we expand the scope of the predicative patterns available for use in the complex

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of propositions comprising the transcendental imagination. It is primarily through its concern with secondary revelation that theology draws dimensions of ultimacy toward a disclosure in the contemporary situation. There is a third regulative principle that asserts that the theological task is always personal and existential. What is at stake in the theological use of language is our existence. The depth of our experience depends upon the use of language as it contributes to the predication patterns of propositions in the transcendental imagination. These predication patterns determine the shape of our being-in-the-world and the character or pattern of our relationships in the world contributes to our emergence as individuals. A corollary to the third regulative principle is that theology is always centered in a religious community. Theology contributes to the ontological determination of actual occasions that are prehended by other actual occasions in the various nexus in which they are members. In the more personal language associated with higher phases of experience we can say that a theological realization makes an existential demand upon the community to which it speaks. This is the significance of theology outside of itself. When we acknowledge the validity of a doctrine of internal relations we imply that theology or any act of knowing must have significance outside of itself and that part of its meaning is in the reality of the community to which it speaks. The reality of theological understanding is larger than the nexus of actual occasions that mark its appearance and give it an organic unity. These occasions are prehended by occasions in other nexus. They provide the objective datum for the subjects of new propositions and through conceptual valuation, reversion, and transmutation they provide predication patterns for these propositions that shape the future of emerging realities. Theology has ontological significance for the individual and for the community. Conclusion The considerations that we have made are only prolegomena to the study and development of a hermeneutical theology. The regulative principles are not exhaustive of the implications that can be drawn from a transcendental ontology. They were emphasized because it seems important that the theologian be aware that his study is not an objective description of religious traditions; but, theology is deeply rooted in the reality of his own becoming. The ambiguity and poetic uncertainty of theological understanding should

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not be an occasion for despair. It is by freely moving toward a horizon that always transcends our understanding that meaningful understanding dialectically enters into our concrete experience. We have not been able to derive normative principles for the interpretation of the content of religious language because the objective content of understanding is always transcended by the act of knowing that takes place under the horizon of a transcendent reality. The adequacy of theological activity is judged by the fullness of the event that it brings to historical realization.

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Notes 1. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I, pp. 13-14. 2. Ibid., p. 22. 3. Heinrich Ott, Theology and Preaching (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1965), p. 13; Heinz Kimmerle, “Hermeneutical Theory or Ontological Hermeneutics,” History and Hermeneutic, edited by Wolfhart Pannenberg et al. (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 113. 4. Heinrich Ott, “Language and Understanding,” New Theology No. 4, edited by Martin Marty and Dean Peerman (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 126. 5. Pannenberg, History and Hermeneutic, “Hermeneutics and Universal History,” p. 122. 6. Ott, “Language and Understanding,” p. 131. 7. Pannenberg, pp. 107, 127. 8. Ibid., pp. 109-110. 9. Richard Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), p. 79. 10. Pannenberg, pp. 111, 130. 11. Ibid., p. 113. 12. Ott, “Language and Understanding,” p. 132. 13. Pannenberg, p. 137. 14. Ibid., pp. 139-140; H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzilge einer philosophischen Hemeneutik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1960), pp. 258, 335. 15. Pannenberg, p. 142. 16. This is not the same as Schleiermacher’s conception of the feeling of absolute dependence, but the awareness of this feeling has a similar role in the development of theological understanding. 17. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I, p. 126. Tillich calls what we have referred to as secondary revelation, a dependent revelation. “The history of revelation indicates that there is a difference between original and dependent revelations. This is a consequence of the correlative character of revelation. An original revelation is a revelation that occurs in a constellation that did not exist before. This miracle and this ecstasy are joined for the first time. Both sides are original. In a dependent revelation the miracle and its reception together form the giving side, while the receiving side changes as new individuals and groups enter the same correlation of revelation.”

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Part II Theoretical Elaborations

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Chapter 6 The Surface of the Deep: Deconstruction in the Study of Religion

Is there in experience any transcendent dimension for which religious or theological language is necessary and in relation to which it makes sense? The theological debate has moved from the question of the character of God to the more radical question of God’s reality, and from the question of the nature and form of religious language to the more radical question of its possibility as a mode of meaningful discourse. Langdon Gilkey1 In some it is their deprivations that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths. The former need their philosophy, whether it be as prop, sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation. For the latter it is merely a beautiful luxury—in the best cases, the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude that eventually has to inscribe itself in cosmic letters on the heaven of concepts. Friedrich Nietzsche2 Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity. Friedrich Nietzsche3 Anyone whose goal is “something Higher” must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo?… It is the voice of the emptiness below us that tempts and lures us; it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves. Milan Kundera4

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The desire for depth, certainty, foundations, and beginnings has discovered in its own fulfillment a surface of uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. As a result, postmodernist theories of discourse have abandoned traditions of self-certainty and have accepted responsibility for their erring ways. The journey into selfhood is now understood to be a wayward pilgrimage. If the study of religion is to be part of the journey into selfhood, it must range over the surface of deep traditions and make clearings for otherness in experience. This is a deconstructive task. The deconstruction of discourse importantly resembles the transcendental critique of Immanuel Kant when he posed the question as to what are the conditions that make objective knowledge possible. It is not, however, objective knowledge but discourse itself that is interrogated and turned on its own possibilities. Contemporary religious thought in general, theology in particular, and speculative philosophy have shared in a collective semantic anxiety about the meaningfulness and significance of their discourses. A suspicion has surfaced within the academic community of theologians that the theological use of language is a play of signifiers without any determined or determinable reference outside of its own play. This is not immediately a problem for the allied disciplines in the field of the study of religion when their discourse is properly understood to be historical, sociological, anthropological, or phenomenological. They appear to have an object for their study even when that object is the history of theological discourse. If theology could be contained, talk of deconstruction in the study of religion could be resisted and silenced. But theology is not only an object to be studied. There is also a theological exigency in thinking because of the desire for depth, certainty, and foundations in all discursive disciplines. Theology and the study of religions become vertiginous disciplines unless an artificial restriction prohibits the entertainment of radical ideas. Theological concepts such as Nirvana, that than which nothing greater can be conceived, the Atman-Brahman synthesis, Allah as Lord of the Worlds, or creation out of nothing too much populate the religious world to isolate the foundational problems of theology. “The voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude that eventually has to inscribe itself in cosmic letters on the heaven of concepts” marks the desire for a vertical intrusion and transformation of dreary ordinariness revealing a height or a depth of experience that is heavy with being. In the secular and academic world, temples have become museums, pilgrimages have become vacations, and rituals have become mannerisms. They are to be studied and

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justify research grants but they do not orient us to the cosmos. The worlds of theological necessity are sharply contrasted with our own world that Milan Kundera has characterized with the title The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The objective phenomena that present themselves before the eye of the student of religion are sites of lack, loss, and desire. The proclamation of the death of God by the nineteenth-century philosophers Hegel and Nietzsche and by the twentieth-century theologians Altizer, Hamilton, and Rubenstein, as well as the development of a deconstructionist a/theology express a lack of reference and a loss of significance. This lack and loss are the conditions for a felt desire. Theological eros ranges over the otherness of culture seeking a home for this homeless desire. Desire posits an otherness. What is desired is what the experience of the self is not. The secular self that we have come to know in the confidence of rational inquiry is most importantly a being toward death. The vale of our soulmaking is a valley of death.5 The autonomy that we have come to value is also an aloneness in a world that is real only in as much as it presents itself as contingent, relative, and transient.6 We live in the negative implications of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence which means, as Milan Kundera states, “that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its honor, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.”7 Who thinks about the horror of the genocide of the Armenians? Dachau is a memorial. The ditch of blood is now a row of flowers. The grandeur, the beauty, the horror, the abjection of history float unbearably lightly in the theater of memory. The substitutive reality of the memory image is a presence that reveals the absence of substantive reality in mind. Presence of mind is an epiphenomenon of imaginal lightness that follows the trace of reality. Mind is present always in passing. We can’t bolt down the conceptual furniture of secular understanding. A unified field theory has eluded our grasp. Principles of incompleteness, indeterminateness, and uncertainty complement the darkening turn of enlightenment rationality when David Hume could not find a simple sense experience of necessary connection and declared that the whole world of a posteriori synthetic judgments could be only probable. Seams in the modernism of enlightenment rationalism were beginning to show. A suspicion that language cannot be a mirror of nature was introduced that was to be deepened by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—the evangelists of suspicion. The conscious center of rationalism could not hold in descriptions of experience that focused on ideology, the unconscious, and the will to

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power. There simply is no identifiable ground on which to stand and build totalizing or holistic systems from minimal empirical affirmations. There is also no purity of consciousness free from the possibilities of displacement, disguise, and ideologically stereotyped symbolizations that can be reflected on itself as a foundation for phenomenological description. We can have faith in the intelligibility of experience and we can experiment in order to discover the truth, but our deepest problem is that we can’t get outside of ourselves. We are situated in the contingency of the given. The blind forces of our material world reveal no purpose in themselves. The order of things is the production of a text. We are the makers of meaning and therein resides the deepest problem. We know the world in alienation. This alienation has been described philosophically by Jacques Derrida as the inscription of identity in difference. We defer reality and thereby make it differ from itself to be part of a semiotic system governed by rules of syntax and the lexicon. The word “dog” does not materially resemble a dog but we know a dog by thinking it in a language. As Jacques Lacan has pointed out, it is in the mirror stage that we can take a reflection of ourselves, what we are not, assign our name to the image, and know ourselves semiotically. Identity is in difference. This substitution at the origin of self-understanding is an alienation of ourselves. The experience of self is an experience of lack and loss. The irony of the search for the self is that its achievements are metaphorical substitutions and further complexifications of our alienation. Desire is not satisfied but intensified. Desire is for the otherness of what we know. When Alphonso Lingis writes about his descent into the ocean and the rapture of the deep, he is writing about the desire for the other and for our alterity. When one descends into the deep, regresses to the depths, the eye detached from the grasping hand, the mobilizing posture, is detached from its look, moved now by its own voluptuous desire. The voluptuous eye does not seek to comprehend the unity in the surface dispersion of shapes, to penetrate to the substance beneath the chromatic appearances, to comprehensively apprise itself of the functions and relationships; it caresses, is caressed by the surface effects of an alien domain. It is seeking the invisible. The invis-ible that the eroticized eye seeks is no longer the substances, the principles, the causes of the alien; it is the alien look.8 Lingis, like Nietzsche and in the tradition of Nietzsche, seeks the surface of the deep—out of profundity. He also knows that this seeking is a work

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about which he traveled across several continents with an anthropological and philosophical eye. He looked outwardly in order to release the alien look that could look inwardly. The pilgrimage of his thinking was a journey into exotic worlds that few of us will directly experience; but the erotic root driving his cultural and geographical wanderings is the desire and accompanying vertigo in the face of the other that is all of our experience. It is desire that experientially constitutes the significance of otherness and also leaves us unfulfilled and insecure. We seek the gaze of the other and seek to overcome the gaze of the other, and this oxymoronic state of affairs is our dilemma and dissatisfaction. We, ironically, seek the gaze of the “Tiger! Tiger! burning bright” not “In the forests of the night” but in a zoo. Our culture is a zoo story, and although we see the tiger, we don’t see the tiger. Only if we go into the forests of the night is the tiger truly other. Only there is the tiger experienced as fate and destiny and not as an interesting distraction from an ordinary afternoon. It is my suspicion that we are tired of ordinary afternoons and we are at the same time afraid of tigers. We want our lives to be deep, but we don’t want to know the deep or live on the surface of the deep. The fascination with the mysterious depths of eastern cultures, psychoanalysis, or quantum mechanics and particle physics pulls us toward foundational concepts that, when fully valenced for ordinary understanding of life and culture, would change and challenge our understanding of mastery and wholeness. Indeterminacy, incompleteness, uncertainty, nothingness, and the order of the nonrealized are characteristics of the face of otherness that shows itself at the extremities of foundational thinking. For example, civilization and its discontents are implications of psychoanalytic understanding of dream work. It is the implicated world and implicated self-understanding that usually leads us to compartmentalize master concepts and develop pragmatic competencies that obscure the importance of these root ideas for the revolution of radical thinking. We blunt the imagination with a belief in a hidden order of things that is neither experienced nor capable of being experienced if what we do experience at the extremities of thinking is any measure of the credibility of consciousness. This notion of an order of things at once both hidden and good has no experiential credibility except as an ideological prefiguration begging the question of its own belief. This hidden order of things is the production of a text that can serve as a prop, sedative, medicine, or center of redemption as long as it does not convolute at its extremities and reveal itself as a discursive mask. Thinking the concept of the hidden order of things is a false consciousness of the deep because it

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is consciousness only of a belief in the deep. It never has to go beyond itself and meet the gaze of the other. Its thinking always stops short of that which transcends it and of that which comprises its transcendental conditions. Unless an unrestricted interrogative concept is instantiated in the development of a discursive discipline, the notion of humanness can be defined so that its inclusive range falls far short of the range of human experience. The deep then is a metaphorical evocation of the ideological prefiguration of the human. Thought references itself, and the otherness of thought becomes both anomalous and abject. It falls outside the order of things and is glimpsed only as a shadow or disappearing trace. There may be an awareness of a forgetfulness but not an awareness of what is forgotten. One of the more poignant examples of a critique of a deep forgetting is James Hillman’s critique of humanism’s psychology: Humanism’s psychology starts off by forgiving and forgetting. Its very use of the word “human” forgets what it means. By making it mean “humane” the shadow in the word is forgiven. But the human touch is also the hand that holds the flamethrower and tosses the grenade. Correctly speaking, to humanize means not just loving and forgetting: it means as well torturing and vengeance and every cravenness history will not let us forgive.9 If we ideologically prefigure forgiveness, we can forget the whole history of political abjection, death camps, racism, sexism, and the systematic violence of economic colonialism, and we can fashion a holistic image of the human that is the terminus of our growth. Here even the growth metaphor is seriously attenuated so that our growth is the growth of a toddler learning to walk and not the growth into the decrepitude of advanced old age where we can no longer walk. Growth is arrested somewhere in the realm of yuppie self-realization. The inevitability of disease, decrepitude, and death as the terminal point in the trajectory of growth would appear to be an anomalous recognition for the industry of growth seminars and in the consciousness raising of humanism’s psychology. We seem to forget that although death may be the otherness of life it is an essential part of our humanness. It is our finitude and our fate. It is the emptiness that is also our vertigo tempting us to go deep. It is the desire to fall into the deep, Freud’s death instinct, that makes us uneasy with humanism’s metaphors of attenuated growth. We know we have not yet drawn close enough to the human enigma. We are given life, but without necessity and without infinity. The infinity of semiotic replica-

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tion floats without anchorage in the human enigma that is flush with its finite animality. Desire is not the desire for a closed system, but it is the desire for the other and the otherness of self. Thus, the language of desire is a mixed discourse that is always incomplete, always indeterminate, always less than a total presence. Desire in language is a duplicity. It is inside and outside the order of thinking. It is object and abject. Desire is the enigma of our humanness that challenges concepts of totality, totalizing thinking, and totalitarian praxis. It is the animal revolt against the repression of nature. Desire in language is the vertical intrusion and transformation of dreary ordinariness from below. This return of the repressed is the whirl-wind of vitality that is named in religious traditions and then unnamed as our secular consciousness has invalidated the warrant for traditional theological thinking. No simple name is credible; but the problematics of desire are no less impertinent in our settlement with the givenness of reality now than when we could reference goddesses or gods. Can there be a naming of the whirlwind that is not a substitutive dissipation of its vitality? It is clear that any forms of literalism are a disguise of the duplex complexity of the manifestation of desire in language. It is not new thoughts or new names that are needed. What is needed is a new way of thinking that can entertain desire in its purview without reducing it to itself. The new way of thinking is not an objectivism. Straight historical studies are blind to the ideological exclusion of desire and the general tropics of discourse. The problem is no less intense than when Gilkey stated in 1969 that “[We] shall challenge the secular understanding of secular existence… on its failure to provide symbolic forms capable of thematizing the actual character of its own life.”10 The difference is that now the problem appears to be less a need for a formal symbol system than for the articulation of textual strategies that accept responsibility in its own reflexivity for the repression of otherness. These are textual strategies that do not compensate for loss by a fascination with exotica but work through themselves toward the significance of otherness. Desire references what discourse is not, but it is only known discursively. The problematic of desire in language is to acknowledge extralinguistic reference within an internal play of linguistic signification. It is here that we can discern a new warrant for theological thinking and place its importance within the study of religion. Theological thinking is relevant because it is other than ordinary discourse and is itself a discourse that can display the otherness of its semantic achievement. What this means is that historically the fundament in theology has been unrestricted—God, ultimate reality, Brahman, and other unrestricted formulations—and even

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though an objective and descriptive literalism is no longer credible, the definition of theology as a discursive discipline includes responsibility for unrestricted inquiry. Notions of “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” violate intelligible closure to achievements of understanding within any language game. We could characterize theology as a deconstructive agent and theological thinking as a deconstructive act within the prison house of language. If it is important, it is here that we can define the focus of its importance. A postmodern theology is not defined by the object of its inquiry. What was in the center of theological thinking and why theology was itself in the center of intellectual inquiry is now marked by a lack and a loss. Mark Taylor’s a/theology outlines the deconstruction of theology as a progressive series of losses beginning with the death of God and proceeding through declarations of the disappearance of the self, the end of history, and the closure of the book. All of these moves rooted in the fulfillment of the Hegelian project are for theology a radical ascesis, a self-denial of its traditional subject matter. Through internal necessity theology moved into the margins of intellectual life, which was of course coincident with its valuation by the secular public. Theology harbors no secret knowledge and has no access to a hidden order of things. It has become like a nomad wandering over the surface of the deep. But what it did not surrender in its self-denial was its unrestricted interrogative form. Its conceptual formulations instantiate a radical negativity simply by being thought. Questions about what we take seriously without any reservation may not have answers, but they transgress the boundaries of any claims to totality or closure. Theology is textual production in which the author is written into the work as a theologian by implicating the text in the exigencies of the unrestricted scope of theological inquiry. The surface of the ordinary world looks different in the context of unrestricted questioning. We still will be reading a text but the text will be marked and sometimes remarked by fissures wrought by limiting questions, poetic indirections, and figures of brokenness. From its marginal position theological in-verbalization and inscription will be a supplement to ordinary thinking. We might even think of theology as a supplementary evaluation of the otherness that is present only by its absence in the textual articulation of experience. It is in its postmodern articulation a method of hesitation on the surface, the fold, the skin, and the appearance of reality so that there can be an acute recognition of our being there in the world. There is in this recognition a consent to an otherness of reality—a primal sense of nature—that is always in danger of being repressed and exploited by systems of thinking.

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Theological defamiliarization can be understood as an ethical experiment in letting things be in their otherness. It works against the conformation of the natural to the idealization of intellectual systems. It is in particular a lever of intervention from within language that prevents systems of totalization from pretending closure. Totalitarian praxis is denied its ideal justification. The surface of the deep is the surface of life. To be superficial out of profundity is to work against repression and oppression. It all has to do with dogs rather than the word “dog,” trees rather than the word “tree,” love rather than the word “love.” When the student asks the Zen master, “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the west?,” the reply is, “The cypress tree standing in the garden.”11 Huston Smith calls this “divine ordinariness.”12 This releasement before things subverts the spirit of an age that still trades in enlightenment coinage. Again, consider this comment on Nietzsche from Milan Kundera: Another image also comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman’s very eyes, put his arms around the horse’s neck and burst into tears. That took place in 1889, where Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture had broad implication. Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse for Descartes.… And that is the Nietzsche I love.13 And that is the Nietzsche from whom a deconstruction in the study of religion is theologically warranted. The Cartesian captivity in the subject recognized by Nietzsche has been a repression of the body and animality in general. The “deep” became a subjective idealization without reference to its own surface in the experience of otherness. Nietzsche’s suspicion that philosophy has been an unconscious disguise of physiological needs and an interpretation and misunderstanding of the body, is a suspicion that what is at stake in all philosophizing is not “truth.” The “bold insanities of metaphysics” are a concealed misunderstanding of physiological needs.14 The body and the whole range of correlate animal experiences are known as text, and through the closure of the text in totalizing concepts is the repression of otherness effected. We are able to make adjustments in language to deny the otherness of otherness.

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Language can be a tool of familiarity that is forgetful of its own metaphorical achievement. When otherness is constituted metaphorically as a presence in language, it is no longer itself. Otherness remains unthought. What is thought is the fiction of language. Otherness can be controlled in language so that it is thought in the language of contingency, relativity, and autonomy while at the same time no longer being contingent, relative, and autonomous. The rules of syntax can guarantee a conventional familiarity in the truth of a fiction. The ironic vision of Nietzsche that sees the commitment to truth as an obligation to lie is itself the warrant for a deconstruction of claims of truth. The confidence in enlightenment strategies wavers in this challenge to the commitment to truth. The search for a transcendent dimension justifying the theological use of language may still be thought of as a search for theological truth, but the strategies for theological text production are radically revised. The radical question about the reality of God called for by Gilkey in Naming the Whirlwind leads not to a renewal of God-language but to a deconstruction of God-language. Language can cover up its forgetfulness unless there is a commitment to subvert the closure of language from within language. The trajectory of the theological use of language is not the representation of God. It is instead, as Scharlemann has suggested in “The Being of God When God Is Not Being God,” the instantiation of a radical negativity that marks the otherness of the subject or object of discourse.15 When the word “God” is allowed to function in a radical defamiliarization of the subject and object of discourse, the strategy of theological thinking is reflexive. Language subverts itself in this dialectical release of language to its otherness. Theology is then both in and out of language even though “the referent of theological meaning is given in and as language.”16 In this revision of the theological task, systematic theology can never come to completion and foundational theology is not a meta-analysis. Theology cannot stand outside of itself to envision its radical possibilities. Foundational theology is radical theology. It is reflexive. It turns on itself. Its radical possibilities are an achievement of its internal subversion. It cannot become a system because it works against the completeness of a system. Theological thinking is an ongoing experiment. It may be an experiment with the truth, but it is more importantly an experiment of desire. Theology, with its radical conceptuality, implicates desire in the full range of textual achievements. Its relevance is far reaching when it enacts its radical possibilities. It does range over the surface of deep religious and cultural traditions. Entertaining the possibility of naming the whirlwind is ironically a deconstruction in the study of religion.

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Notes 1. Langdon Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 13. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), pp. 33-34. 3. Ibid., p. 38. 4. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 50-60. 5. See James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. ix-x. 6. Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind, pp. 38-71. 7. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 3. 8. Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), p. 13. 9. Hillman, Re- Visioning Psychology, p. 186. 10. Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind, p. 250. 11. Huston Smith, The Religions of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), p. 150. 12. Ibid., p. 151. 13. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 290. 14. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, pp. 34-35. 15. Robert Scharlemann, “The Being of God When God Is Not Being God,” in Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1982), p. 102. 16. Ibid., p. 104.

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Chapter 7 The Theological Becoming of Metaphysics

Sometimes we see an elephant, and sometimes we do not. Alfred North Whitehead Philosophy must operate under conditions of rationality that it has not chosen. Jürgen Habermas The privilege of “first” philosophy has been relegated to a secondariness of thought in the wake of modernity and subsequent formulations of postmodernity. There are discernable themes in the shifting epochal arrangements of the history of thought that account for this apparent demotion of the place of metaphysical thinking but the notation and citing of these themes does not remove the responsibility of each generation to interrogate the meaning and status of the governing concepts and master tropes within its discursive practices. There is a “Cartesian” moment where thinking would be at “fault” if it did not assess its own meaning even if that task is understood as profoundly circumscribed by the limitations of consciousness and the inadequacies of language. Sometimes we need to account for a “triumph of the obvious over philosophy” in the “insistent importance in the details of our phenomenal life in the phenomenal world.”1 This is not a nostalgia for the obvious and is clearly to be distinguished from a philosophical wager for some form of precritical realism. What is being called to account is that philosophical thinking is a discursive practice among other discursive practices that intersect and pressure each other. What its contribution is to the intertextual formation of the life-world is the self-assigned task of this inquiry. This interrogation will take place in the simple contextual awareness that “[s]ometimes we see an elephant, and sometimes we do not.”2 This insistence is to counter fashionable obscurantisms that sometimes, disguised as subtleties, accompany the development of philosophical thinking when it cathects its formulations and authorizations with too much importance resulting in the loss of the importance of the details that constitute the empiricity of our thinking. Important insights into the need for a postmetaphysical thinking or into the displacement of subjectivity in postcritical philosophy

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have sometimes been reduced to silly formulae that ignore or violate the pragmatics of philosophical discourse. Philosophical thinking is a discursive practice among other discursive practices and its relationship with these other practices is practical as well as theoretical. Philosophy does not simply choose the conditions of its own thinking although it can always interrogate these conditions. There are thematic changes and new arrangements in thinking that affect every disciplinary discourse. Many of the changes and breaks, particularly from enlightenment traditions, took place outside of any identifiable “proper” domain of philosophy but they have greatly affected it. History, politics, economics, literature, the visual and musical arts have all changed what it means to think about thinking in “modernity” even when they themselves do not account for changes and emergent themes. There can be shifting epochs and emergent themes that sometimes overlap, are often implicated in each other and sometimes appear to contradict each other in the assessment of modernity. “Postmodernity” appears to be a fluid figuration that attaches its “post” prefix to anything that is deracinating fixed determinations from its past. Jürgen Habermas in assessing the shifting “horizon of modernity” notes four themes that mark the break with tradition and he labels these themes: “postmetaphysical thinking, the linguistic turn, situating reason, and reversing the primacy of theory over practice.”3 He also notes epochal shifts in the history of philosophy moving along a line of emphases from philosophies of being to philosophies of consciousness to philosophies of language.4 The shift to philosophies of language, in diverse ways, encompasses the themes of postmetaphysical thinking, the linguistic turn, situating reason, and reversing the primacy of theory over practice. These themes receive different evaluation and emphasis when we compare and contrast phenomenology, analytic/postanalytic philosophies, marxist/postmarxist philosophies, structuralism/poststructuralism and the new pragmatisms and empiricisms. However, these themes describe the conditions of rationality and irrationality under which philosophy must understand its identity and meaning at the present time. This is simply the acknowledgment of the importance of these themes. Philosophy is situated, textually and intertextually, in language and is itself a discursive practice. This is postmetaphysical thinking that is implicated in the becoming of metaphysics. There is no pure, atopic, foundation for philosophical thinking. It is a practice that must account for its own valuation. It is in a mix of discourses but it cannot ask of other disciplines to justify its meaning. It must determine its own sense of importance within this mix.

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We may desire to think metaphysically but we can no longer justify metaphysics in a traditional framework. It no longer seems possible or at least credible that the conditions of rationality in which philosophy defines its identity and meaning can coincide with a notion of “Wisdom” that would understand “truth” as a knowledge of first principles or with a knowledge of essences or primordial ideas. When “Platonism” or “Aristotleanism” diversely but also synecdochally represent quests for origins, metaphysics appears as a quixotic gesture of longing for immortality, infinity, and unconditionality. The nineteenth century exfoliation of enlightenment problematics makes it clear as we now have passed through the twentieth century that the conditions of rationality and irrationality in which philosophy works are a “reversal of Platonism.” The name Nietzsche is most readily associated with the “reversal of Platonism” because he understood thinking generally to be within a tropics of discourse and truth explicitly to be a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.”5 But, the wound to “Wisdom” had already been inflicted by Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant and other philosophers of the “age of reason” in developing philosophies of consciousness. Being and truth became so implicated in practices of thinking, speaking, and writing that they cannot be thought of outside of these practices. Within the general tropics of discourse the formulation “the reversal of Platonism” is itself a turn or a trope. It is not as much a specific philosophical argument against Plato, although Gilles Deleuze has made explicit such an argument, as it is the recognition of an ambience in new arrangements for thinking that relinquish the hierarchies of Being over beings and Idea/copy over phantasm/simulacra. Quoting from Deleuze: “So ‘to reverse Platonism’ means to make the simulacra rise and to affirm their rights among icons and copies…The simulacrum is not a degraded copy…It is not enough to invoke a model of the Other, for no model can resist the vertigo of the simulacrum.”6 It doesn’t matter what words we use, Being, beings, Idea, copy, representation; thinking is textual and there is no thinking other than thinking. The “reversal of Platonism” is the recognition that we are always already in a world of simulacra. It is not surprising that the philosophies of consciousness and the philosophies of language have a nominalist accent in understanding individual words. There are no words in themselves that have a privileged status. Their meaning is in their use in the arrangements of any specific discourse. This does not mean that, because words are nominal, all thinking is the same. We think in differential sign series that sometimes diverge from each other and sometimes converge or intersect. Diverse arrangements or asso-

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ciations of signs mark differences and can also simulate sameness. When we think, read, or listen, we notice that the arrangements of simulacra have the power of producing textual and intertextual effects. The force and vivacity of thinking is measured by these effects in emergent textual productions. Thinking is complicated by thinking next to arrangements other than itself. Within subjectivity, differing arrangements can intensify, interfere or mark each other metonymically. The valuation, which affirms the rights and place of simulacra in thinking, significantly alters what is meant by metaphysical thinking. The desire to know can be affirmed but it is affirmed without the prejudice that what will be known will be or even approximate Being, first principles or essences. The dominant tropes of metaphysical thinking that mark tendencies in the elaboration of specific thinking arrangements [sense, causation, creativity, necessity, essence, intuition, et.al.] compete for dominance in the intensification of effects as these specific arrangements contact each other. The power of an arrangement is its effects on subsequent discursive formations. Metaphysics never ceases to be the becoming of metaphysics. The becoming of metaphysics is not the overcoming of metaphysics. The overcoming of metaphysics is a seductive trope or configuration within the becoming of metaphysics that is a gesture of longing for completion through an annulment of the finite conditions of thinking. Configurations of finality or totality, the unconcealment of Being or the revelation of God, mark aporetic spaces in a discourse and have effects on its further articulation but do not bring it to a halt. The introduction of incommensurable formulations, thinking the absurd, are strategic moves that must be assessed but they are not other than thinking. Deracination, defamiliarization, or valuations of irrationality are tendencies within specific arrangements of thinking. The emergent formulations resulting from these processes are always themselves simulacra. The life-world includes thinking. Thinking simulates the life-world. In its reflexivity, thinking simulates itself. With these recognitions, it would seem that instead of talking about the becoming or overcoming of metaphysics that we should talk about abandoning metaphysics. Such a negative valuation, however, is only credible if metaphysical thinking makes pretentious and always disappointing claims to having access to a reality, first principles, or Being that it does not have. Its thinking and all thinking are always in the world of simulacra. Unless our goal is the cessation of thinking itself, we need not abandon metaphysical thinking but, instead, we need to analyze and assess its meaning. What is the becoming of metaphysics? We need to ask this question with the recognition that we are already thinking before thinking folds on itself

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in a philosophical moment and then try to understand what is the peculiar status of metaphysical thinking. What does it mean to have the capacity to fold thinking on itself in complex figurations that are sometimes called metaphysical ideas? I think that there is an advantage to beginning modestly even though we expect that a particular line of thinking may eventuate in elaborate formulations. We can start with an commitment to what are clear and distinct ideas in our experience without giving these ideas any special status other than that they appear clear and distinct. We can value the effects of Enlightenment interrogations of experience without, in a retrograde movement, privileging any particular formulations as the truth. Constantin Boundas in his introduction to Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity writes about the importance of Hume for Deleuze even though Deleuze cannot simply be thought of as a Humean philosopher.7 What is important is that reading Hume had an effect on Deleuze that gave his own thinking a bent toward empiricism. When we read Deleuze we see that there is a Hume-effects series in Deleuze’s thinking. There is also a Spinoza-effects series, a Leibniz-effects series, and a Kant-effects series in Deleuze’s thought. We are no longer the same after we have read and thought about a major philosopher. We have to think their problems even if we have to think them in terms or under conditions that are other than their thinking. The questions of the Enlightenment haven’t gone away even when philosophies of language have further complicated their basic epistemological issues. We are thinking and we can think about thinking as we speak and write. It is an obvious tautology that when we think about thinking we are already thinking. But, what appears to be so obvious is also problematic. Reflexive thinking is a secondary process. There is no outside of experience. We are always already in language and we are always already in a habit of subjectivity. What we recognize is that there are tendencies of mind that repeat themselves and have formed habits that we know as subjectivity. Deleuze writing about Hume says: “We are habits, nothing but habits—the habit of saying ‘I.’”8 We say “I” in the ordinariness or “vulgarity” of consciousness before subjectivity is able to fold on itself. The “I” is an exterior effect of mind. “The mind is not subject; it is subjected.”9 The postmodern loss of the subject is simply a further recognition of the deferral of the subject from conceiving of a faculty of mind to a habit of subjectivity. The construct of imaginative interiority of the subject is now understood as a folded exteriority. This is part of the meaning of intentionality of consciousness and the primacy of the phenomenality of perception in the assessment of experience. We need to note that what is confusing in the phenomeno-

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logical formulation that consciousness takes an object are the grammatical implications of the transitive verb. We can resist these implications. For example, Hume is much more modest. The object is the surface effect. We cannot say anything more about the object without an idea of causality that we only know in the habit of thinking. Boundas is right when he writes that Deleuze understands Hume’s empiricism not as a philosophy of the senses but as a philosophy of the imagination.10 The sensuous surface of conscious experience is a multiplicity of images, effects, or simulacra. The emphasis on simple sense impressions is a regulative principle to keep thinking bound to the phenomenality of consciousness, bound to the imagination. The acquisition and actualization of language capabilities in the habit of subjectivity appears to be a social augmentation that is in conformity with human nature. The status of the phenomenal surface of consciousness is not changed. What is always missing is the necessary connexion of causation that is always only a probable association based on repetition. The logic of sense resides in the possible arrangements of images and sign substitutes. We are talking about custom in the general use of language but custom is not everything. There appears to be a motility in systems of arrangement that are other than custom. Custom repeats itself in the legitimation of thinking but does not exhaust the meaning of legitimation. The implication of reading Hume is that since we do not have a simple idea of necessary connexion that corresponds with a simple sense impression giving access to certainty, legitimation is a function of intensity. In lieu of a ground, in lieu of an outside of experience, experience judges itself within the habit of subjectivity. What makes the difference? Why do we say “yes” to certain arrangements over against others? In Hume, it is the, by now, cliched formulation of the combination of force with vivacity, “the force and liveliness of the perception, which constitutes the first act of the judgment.”11 Hume is subtle enough to see the mix of imagination, memory and the senses in the habit that we know as subjectivity. We say “yes” when through original presentation, through memory or imaginative construction, the simulacra of experience present themselves with enough force and vivacity to require assent. We are subject to the fluxes and forces that surround us but we are also able to intensify consciousness in repetitions and contrasting arrangements. What may be thought of as the contestation of faculties has no other legitimation than the possibilities for variegated display in the phenomenality of consciousness. We can witness to these differences, say “yes” to experience and at the same

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time realize that all we have done is say “yes” to a specific experience in its presentational arrangement. Why do we think the complexity of new arrangements? We are disappointed when thinking does not satisfy us with the intensity of a display to which we can say “yes.” The pathos of thinking seeks to confirm its own authenticity through the intensification of its process. Thinking is not satisfied when it realizes less than the eros of its own telos. Hume’s minimalism, because it is not fixed in a metaphysics that prevents the becoming of metaphysics, opens to the imagination. Thinking is not authorized outside of itself. It is authorized by its own intensity. There is an aesthetic valuation, a matter of taste, that is the arbiter of assent. He writes that: “Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy…When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence.”12 Hume’s skepticism in the philosophy of consciousness is cathartic. It levels the field for the differential play of thinking and language usage. Nothing is privileged except the intensity of experience itself. The obscurantism of cleverness in language is confronted with the demand for surface effects. We must ask: Is our thinking more intense and satisfying? This is the question we can bring to both metaphysics and theology since they can only be heuristic complexifications within the habit of subjectivity. However they articulate themselves, their effects will be manifest in the phenomenality of experience. They can have their own aesthetic intensity but they also work beside themselves metonymically pressuring adjacent discourses. Hume has taught us to think in terms of effects. One question that we can ask that is particularly important for the understanding of a disciplinary consciousness of a field such as theology is: How does a thinking discourse effect thinking discourses that are other than itself? This question is important and is enfranchised by a Humean understanding of thinking but it is secondary. Thinking first needs to know how it can affect itself. That is, we need to ask how within the habit of subjectivity we can turn thinking on itself? Can there be a secondariness of thinking that meaningfully disrupts custom in the originariness of thinking? The “becoming of metaphysics” is a formulation to value this possibility. It is an intensity of thinking, not truth, that is the primary intentionality of thinking. Seeing an elephant can be intense. Sometimes we see an elephant. Sometimes we see many elephants and sometimes we do not. This is important but our seeing elephants doesn’t necessarily tell us about elephants. We witness to our seeing elephants. We

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always reference experience. Hume’s minimalism binds us to experience. If there is a Hume-effects series, it is a constant pressure to stay with experience and think the possibilities for thinking as they manifest themselves experientially. Everything has to be within experience. Formulations of otherness, the otherness of God, persons or the otherness of the multiplicity of nature, have to be within experience or they are diminished in importance. What is important is what can be imported into experience. Thinking the possibilities for thinking is different after reading Hume. What I am suggesting is that Hume can be read in “a certain way” so that his skepticism liberates us from the constraints and ambience of positivism. The denial that there is a simple sense impression of necessary connexion in any cause-effect series is at the same time a denial of any prejudgmental privilege to any “certain way” of thinking that precludes other ways of thinking. Hume leaves us only with the certainty of association through resemblance and contiguity. We are left in a world of simulacra that is thought otherwise only through tendencies in the habit of subjectivity. The idea of necessary connexion is a result of habit that is necessary and, ironically, the idea of what is necessary is neither fixed nor necessary. Again, we acknowledge that experience witnesses only to thinking as an assemblage and arrangement of impressions, images, and signs that is authorized by its force and vivacity. Assent in thinking is a consequence of aesthetic intensity that in its least complex achievement can be the result of simple repetition or constant conjunction. Assent, however, is not simply a function of repetition. It also can be obtained through the intensity of complex contrasts in any particular arrangement. This means that assent is not truth. It is the power of an arrangement to affect subsequent discursive formations. Thinking is an always incomplete process that is understood and evaluated in its processional development. Force and vivacity are known only in series-effects. The meaning of an arrangement is its expressivity; that is, its dissemination. Thinking knows itself as deferred in differential series of surface effects. This is why there is special emphasis on textuality in philosophies of language. The text is the body that is marked and known through surface-effects. The understanding that the idea of necessary connexion is itself a surface effect of expressivity in the habit of subjectivity means that we cannot use this idea to guarantee a referentiality that is other than textual or intertextual referentiality. Thinking need not despair of itself. This lack of a guarantee does not mean that we cannot think. It does not mean that we cannot think about thinking. It does not mean that we cannot think about the world. We are

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already thinking about thinking and thinking about the world. The lack of a guarantee simply qualifies the meaning of certainty. Certainty is a tropic configuration better understood as the intense familiarization of habit, and, as such, easily can be confused with safety. Thinking as a synthetic process experiences the intensity of its achievement in surface-effects but it cannot guarantee its importance or ascertain the truth of its text. Metaphysics can do nothing to make thinking certain of itself. It is itself an uncertain experiment, as is all thinking. Critical philosophies of consciousness and language have brought us to this recognition. The question in the context of critical philosophical thinking is whether we also want to be about metaphysical thinking that cannot be anything more than the becoming of metaphysics. What I have been saying is that Hume certainly opens the possibility that the habit of subjectivity can conform to itself. Repetition has a force and vivacity that simulates certainty. We must acknowledge that thinking can delimit the range of its engagement, deny its reflexivity, and repeat itself to convince itself that the world is a “clean well-lighted” place. However, in contrast, the exigency of mind that risks the becoming of metaphysics risks the familiarity of habit from within the habit of subjectivity. At first the choice between thinking conformity and thinking experimentally appears to be a choice between safety and adventure. It is not that simple. For example, thinking that is conformed to not thinking the heterogeneities of experience, to not thinking realities in most of our experience that are as uncommon as elephants, is perplexed when it sees an elephant. There are no safe texts. We have to ask, wherever we are in our thinking, whether we want to develop strategies for thinking the heterogeneities and multiplicities of experience even when they do not conform to the habit of subjectivity as we now know it. The becoming of metaphysical thinking can be understood as such a strategy. We are too often disappointed when thinking is not complex enough to be interesting, when it provides little aesthetic satisfaction, and when it does not experience the force that issues forth in its own matter-of-factness. Thinking can be disappointing when its scope is too easily restricted by an anomalous periphery to the process itself, leaving a penumbral residue of unintelligibility. Allowing for the becoming of metaphysics is the unwillingness simply to dismiss the strategic capacity for speculative thinking because we critically have judged that in the complexity of its processes its products can be no more than simulacra or “tropical” knowledge of a phenomenal world. Speculative philosophy does not have to make claims for knowledge it can-

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not obtain, but it can make demands that thinking explore the capabilities of its own process. It can disrupt the diminishment of the process when formal constraints deny apprehension of what is available and otherwise obvious in the phenomenality of experience. I am suggesting that speculative philosophy, the becoming of metaphysics, can be, after critical thinking, understood as a tendency within the habit of subjectivity that can be valued experimentally so that it resists totalization. Its notions are then understood as the heuristic complications of a process and not as absolute reflections of an exterior reality. What we have is a tendency to fold the phenomenal presentation of exterior reality into a more complex interior occasion. Its achievement is a mediated interiority expressed textually and containing traces of physical purposes both as conditions of its possibility and as the material force of its achievement in its effect on future formations. Subjectivity is thus a formal mediation of the past into the future that is marked in its own discourse and by future effects in discourse. Subjectivity is a hybrid habit. This is its complexity. The intensity of experience, which is a measure of force and vivacity, is a combination of the materiality of matters-of-fact, the materiality of the text as an augmentation to matters-of-fact, and the vividness of contrast in their formal togetherness. There is always a third, a new text. To deny the becoming of metaphysics would be to deny the vividness of contrast in the emergence of a new text. Then, force and vivacity would be a simple function of repetition and not creativity or novelty. It is possible that thinking would succumb to boredom without novelty and creativity differentially manifesting themselves in an emergent textuality. The other in and of thinking would be excluded by the imagined safety of conformal repetition. We have to think out of the habit of subjectivity or recognize in Julia Kristeva’s alternative formulation that the subject is always already “in process/on trial.”13 The becoming of metaphysics is a valuation of intensity. It is the articulation of a demand and the valuative claim that there are possibilities for thinking with a differential complexity. The trial of the subject in process is that it be able to textually inscribe itself with a satisfying intensity. What is on trial is whether we can think without continuing disappointment. The notion of the becoming of metaphysics is a strategic formulation to access the heterogeneity of otherness with the postcritical awareness that the hypostasis of metaphysical concepts would be a denial of the becoming that is affirmed. The becoming of metaphysics is a strategic demand for texturing a text so that it does not close on itself. This is explicitly a rhetorical

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practice that acknowledges that thinking is always an arrangement in the realm of simulacra. What needs to recognized is that the metaphysical exigency in thinking is first of all a demand or claim on the inclusiveness of selection and assemblage in preparation for the specific arrangements of argumentation. Metaphysical claims on thinking have many precedents in western philosophy but they have to be rethought under the conditions of rationality and irrationality in which we find ourselves. There are conventional uses of language and there are existing texts. Much postmodern philosophy is a thinking that is a reading, a rereading, and a misreading of the already existing textual tradition. There will be preferred texts because of our taste and not because of a claim to truth. Every thinker will have to ask where he or she can best think the complexity of hybrid subjectivity. There are no texts that are specifically privileged in themselves when we try to think the subject in process/on trial. We read and rethink a tradition because of its adequacy and efficacy in the resonance with our personal thinking history. There are no safe texts but we are able to invest our own thinking particularly in those traditions that demand of us an inclusivity, a variegated sense of reality, and in texts that witness to their own fissurability when we value intensity more than safety. As a valuation of intensity, the becoming of metaphysics is closely allied with theological thinking. The relationship between the heterogenous materiality of the other of thinking and the ideality of thinking itself, in a dialectical process, is particularly evident when we introduce theological configurations into the mix. The notion of the becoming of metaphysics enfranchises the strategic use of the Anselmian formulation of “that then which nothing greater can be conceived” or any of its variations in diverse traditions of theological thinking. What is enfranchised is a surd formulation or what Robert Scharlemann refers to as an instantiation of radical negativity.14 Extreme formulations of “God” intrude upon the habit of subjectivity witnessing to the unfinished imagination in its complicity with what is other than itself. Saying yes to the becoming of metaphysics is saying that thinking can turn on itself in a convoluted folding that is both a wound and an opening to what is other than its inscriptive markings. The strategic use of extreme theological formulations is particularly important because these are formulations that demand of the ideality of thinking that it acknowledge its incompleteness. The aporetic sign, the aporetic moment, mark in their impassability that thinking is a dialectical process that can never be closed and always has a future in its investment with the other of thinking.

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The “other of God” in extreme formulation can be used in the becoming of metaphysics as a trope to turn discourse back on the heterogeneity of its sources. The reversal of Platonism is a reversal of theological apophaticism. Instead of proceeding through a cloud of unknowing negating existence to a knowledge of God, formulations of divinity help us break the fantasies of completeness in totalitarian thought and return to the heterology and empiricity of what it means to be thinking. Theological formulations can be employed in the becoming of metaphysics to say “yes” to the experience of being unfinished women and men. The invocation of extreme formulations of the other is the possibility for knowing that we are never self-contained in our thinking. We know that our lives are unfinished and because we have this knowledge, we can say without bitterness and disappointment that the world is the case. There is no simple closure. Not only do we sometimes see an elephant and sometimes we do not. Sometimes we are loved and sometimes we are not. Sometimes our lives are meaningful and sometimes they are not. We hope because the possibilities for thinking metaphysically and theologically are possibilities for thinking. We are not able to say “no” to thinking because we know that we have never exhausted what it means to say “yes.”

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Notes 1. Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 60. 2. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Corrected Edition (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 4. 3. Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), p. 6. 4. Ibid., p.12. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense” in The Portable Nietzsche ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1954, 1976), p. 46. 6. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 262. 7. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), Translator’s Introduction. 8. Ibid., p. x. 9. Ibid., p. 31. 10. Ibid., p. 7. 11. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature ed. L.A.Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1896, 1928), p. 86. 12. Ibid., p. 103. 13. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) p.105. 14. Robert Scharlemann, “The Being of God when God is not Being God,” in Deconstruction and Theology, Thomas J. J. Altizer et.al. (New York, Crossroad, 1982), p. 102.

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Chapter 8 The Silence of the Real: Theology at the End of the Century

…never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and of the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless. Frederic Jameson1 Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness—that means cynically and with innocence. Friedrich Nietzsche2

Nietzsche’s posthumous voice at the beginning of the twentieth century is a challenge to any assessment of the condition and future of theology at the end of the twentieth century. When the great metaphysical preoccupations seem remote and pointless, it would appear that the choice articulated by Nietzsche has been a choice of silence that brings in its wake the silence of God and the silence of the real. The sense of an ending that has brought with it a silence is not just an ending but it is also a turning. The end of the century is also the turn of the century. The ending brings us to silence, but a turning that acknowledges that ending can be a turning into the silence that is a new speech and a new thinking. It is the turn that interests me, a tropism toward the darkness of the unthought. It is a turn we find in Ray Hart’s and David Miller’s imaginal theologies, Mark Taylor’s and Carl Raschke’s deconstructive theologies, Jacques Derrida’s and Julia Kristeva’s deconstructive philosophies, Michel Foucault’s genealogical histories and Jacques Lacan’s revision of psychoanalytic theory. Precursor figures are as diverse as Georges Bataille, Stephane Mallarme, Gertrude Stein and Friedrich Hölderlin; but, certainly three that stand out and have been labeled by Paul Ricoeur as masters of a hermeneutics of suspicion are Freud, Nietzsche and Marx. What does it mean to think in this tradition? Understanding the possibilities for theological thinking at the end and turn of the twentieth century is in large measure an accounting for the

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subversion of enlightenment and modernist understandings of the self by the sustained critique of subjectivity in Marxist, Nietzschean, and Freudian traditions of thought since the nineteenth century. The legacy of suspicion from the nineteenth century has contributed to an epistemic shift that has significantly altered the rules of discursive formation and practice so that the definitions and tasks of fundamental, systematic and practical theology must be rethought. To think after Freud, Nietzsche and Marx and to think in their tradition of suspicion is a characteristic of what has come to be called postmodernism. This is not so much an historical location or period but it is a way of thinking. It is a thinking in a certain way that I want to suggest is governed more by metonymical constellations than by a metaphorical constitution. It is a textual production that resembles more the work of a bricoleur than an archaeologist. What I am suggesting is that language has coagulated around figures of discourse in conceptual formations in ways that have problematized traditional understandings of the tasks of epistemology and correlatively foundational theology. In particular it is the concept of the self and what was thought to be a self-evident subjectivity that have themselves become subject to interrogations so that they are no longer a referential ground for intelligibility. Historical formations, positivities and empiricities conflict with each other and make experience incommensurable with any unified subtext of meaning when examined in the force of the traditions of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. That is, in the force of criticism, what we at one time thought to be self-evident grounds for thinking can in new configurations of discourse appear to be secondary formations. It is in fact theories of discursive formation following from what appear to be the dada of twentieth century cultural achievements and the convolutions of modern history that have radicalized the readings of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud that takes us not to the roots but to an uprooting of rational meaning. The vertical fantasy of digging down for deeper meanings is constantly subverted and converted into a horizontal display of multiplicities and arrangements of increasing complexification. It is the pressure of the display of the multiplicities that denies the privileging of logocentricism and with it the positive and negative legacies of the ontotheological tradition. This includes the western humanism of which this tradition was its host. Even without a sophisticated and radical rereading of the hermeneutics of suspicion, the shifts of sensitivity and the visibilities that fill our experiences mark a semiotic turn in understanding that forces attentiveness to the productions of discourse. For example, whenever we think about what is

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real and important we are thinking at an intersection of psychological and religious discourses and generally within a tropics of discourse. There is an obvious nonliterality to the intersubjective talk of intimacy, love and eroticism that would analogously apply to talk of ultimacy if it were to find a place in our secular culture. When I call my love “pumpkin” I am not using words literally. When I call ultimate reality “God” I am not using words literally. And, it is also clear that what is sought is not a metaphorical likeness as much as an interruption of the discourse, a defamiliarization that makes this talk not ordinary talk. Placing a “pumpkin” or a “God” in the discourse alters the general economy of the discourse. The play of signifiers shifts its meaning with the metonymic troping of the discourse without changing any of the other words. Metonymy alters the differential play or intratextual referencing. The more powerful the trope the more significant is the alteration of the economy of the discourse. Examples of pumpkins and other figurations of intimacy may appear too silly or obvious when we are talking about a numinosum in extreme discourses; but, they illustrate a strategy in textual production that is not radically different from some postmodern strategies in psychological, theological and philosophical text production. The copula is can be used for a simple juxtaposition of signifiers as well as for establishing a metaphorical likeness. The transgression of ordinary language by the introduction of an unassimilable trope alters the economy of the discourse without making a literal or metaphysical claim. One of the strange tropes, a catachresis, is the reification of what is adjectival in normal usage into a thing that can only be a thing when it is a signifier in a text. The adjectival noun resists assimilation into the differential play of other signifiers and yet changes the discourse because it means what other signifiers are not. Examples of these reified adjectives in the histories of psychology, philosophy and theology are easy to find. The true, the good and the beautiful complement from classical philosophy the unconscious from depth psychologies and the real from Lacanian psychologies. These formulations instantiate a silence within the general economy of discourse. That is, although there are aggregations of language around these formulations, they are not resolved by or dissolved into the surrounding language. One of the most explicit expressions of an unassimilable trope is in Lacan’s reading of Freud where there is a profound silence of the real. This real is not a metaphor because that would give it voice. This real is a metonym that changes other voices. The difference may seem strained or too subtle but I think we can locate the importance for theology of these formulations if we further attend to Lacan’s notion of the order of the real.

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A turn to Jacques Lacan is a return to Freud and most importantly a return to what is unassimilable in Freud. It is Lacan’s understanding of the subversion of the subject in Freud that has severe implications for theories of theological discourse and is an exemplary radical rereading of the hermeneutics of suspicion that now characterizes the turn that is also the end of the century. The move in Lacan is a move behind the adaptive strategies of Americanized ego-psychologies to originary wounds where the “it” of the unconscious is marked. In fact, in the many radical rereadings of the hermeneutics of suspicion there are many “its” that mark resistance to assimilation in strategies of hermeneutical restoration of the ontotheological tradition. What we first notice when we narrow our focus by turning to Lacan and the secondary literature about the work and life of Lacan is that everyone has trouble reading Lacan. Muller and Richardson “call Lacan’s writings a rebus…Lacan not only explicates the unconscious but strives to imitate it.”3 We have no simple understanding of “Who is speaking?” when we read Lacan. We do not simply interrogate the text but we are interrogated by the text. This belongs to style. Lacan is teaching style. Jane Gallop suggests that Lacan’s Ecrits are writerly texts “written not to be read.”4 The reader is implicated in a perpetual struggle of production. It is not a benign agon. The rebus is not a parlor game puzzle that is to be undone or put together. In reading Lacan we assume our inevitable castration in language.5 Lacan’s style is “the man to whom one addresses oneself ” and as Gallop suggests, “The violence of Lacan’s style is its capacity to make the reader feel nonidentical with herself as a reader. . .to make the reader feel inadequate to her role as ‘the man to whom Lacan addresses himself,’ that is, inadequate to Lacan’s style.”6 Lacan develops a style of analytical discourse that fixates a concept of the subversion of the subject that is at the same time an oxymoronic requirement for slippage in speech and writing leaving cuts, gaps, and spaces on the recording surface of experience. Reading Lacan is a lesson in Lacanian reading. A Lacanian reading is not a search for hidden significations but is an insistence on the letter of the text in the specific dialectic of text production. It would be a shallow misreading of Lacan to begin to search for hidden symbolic meanings in a literary text or for specific Lacanian concepts in a theological text. The real loss in a theological assimilation of Lacanian concepts would be the loss of the loss we experience in Lacanian discourse. When theological concepts are used to mirror rather than interrogate reality, the unrestricted scope of these concepts can transumptively relocate figurations of lack on a surface that seems to fill in the lack. For example, Lacan’s formula for atheism, “God is unconscious,” can be psycho-

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logically tamed if it is relocated from the Freudian unassimilable “it” into a confident discourse of theological consciousness raising. Here, there would be a falling back on a specular figure of wholeness so that when the “it” of the unconscious God is remarked in symbolic discourse, it has been or could have been transposed into a different discursive situation that is not Lacanian. This possible scenario is better understood by examining Lacan’s notions of orders of the imaginary, symbolic and real and their relationships to the mirror stage. Sometime in that interval of infancy between six and eighteen months, the child is able to recognize its own image in a mirror. The mirror stage is an identification and marks a transformation of the subject when the subject assumes an image. As Lacan says, “the I is precipitated in a primordial form.”7 A substitution occurs. The love of the image of the whole body is substituted for the autoerotic relationship to the partial objects of the fragmented body. The subject is separated from the primacy of perception of the fragmented body in the reflection of the primordial image of the whole body. The mirror image can be thought of as a referential fantasy or imago for a transcendental unity of apperception that is outside of the subject. This unification and totalization of form is virtual and alienated. The mirror image cannot be touched. Only the mirror can be touched. The image can be indexed only on an imaginary register. The mirror image is the reflection of a projection and as such is the privileged experience of structuring projections. The subject transcends and loses the molecular multiplicity of the subject. There is an imaginary mastery in the naming and idealistic unification of the image. The mirror is a surface and the image can be unified and total and have no depth. The surface of the mirror is a recording surface that lacks depth, lacks organs, lacks being. It is in the mirror stage that the subject is reified as an image outside of intersubjective structures that are themselves a play of differences. Lacan’s order of the imaginary becomes a realm where the play of differences is covered over by mirroring.8 This appears to be a heuristic qualification to help explain how a tendency toward idealization can have empirical credibility. As Gallop says, “Lacan’s writings contain an implicit ethical imperative to break the mirror, an imperative to disrupt the imaginary in order to reach the symbolic.”9 She goes on to suggest that the symbolic can only be reached as a tear in the fabric of the imaginary.10 The move to the symbolic register is through the imaginary. When the imaginary is understood to be imaginary and not an empirical refuge, it is then located in a discursive situation that is intersubjective and differential. The imaginary experience is linked to the symbolic order as soon as it is given over to discourse. What is

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imaginary has voice in the symbolic order if it is to be anything other than a mute repetition of its scene of origination. The identification of the imaginary order with the mirror stage and the accession to the symbolic can be understood as a strategy for differentiating language and symbolic discourse from a mimetic function. The goal of thinking is not an adaptation to the order of the real because the domain of the real is outside of the representation of the subject, be it through the imaginary ego or through the representational play of the symbolic. The truth of the subject is found in the locus of the Other. This claim only makes sense if we see how Lacan understands differential play in the symbolic order. It is here that we also see the originality of Lacan’s use of linguistics to articulate his return to what is unassimilable in Freud. Lacan accepts the Saussurian distinction between the signifier and the signified. Meaning is made determinate in the interrelationship and play of differences between signifiers. The signified is itself in a web of signification that is always a play of signifiers. Unlike Saussure, Lacan emphasizes the bar separating the signifiers from the signified in the Saussurian algorithm. The circle or ellipse that embraces and unifies the Saussurian algorithmic expression of the barred relationship between signifier and signified is erased. The signified is absent in the present play of signifiers. There is no mimetic reference to the real. The bar is an aporia. Identity is in difference. The symbolic order is the possibility for deferral and difference. This is what it means to represent an identity. This means that the Lacanian algorithm is a formula of separateness that does not admit of a reciprocity between the signifiers and the signified. This has a remarkable implication for the representation of the Freudian unconscious. “The unconscious is structured like a language.”11 We are never conscious of the unconscious as unconscious. It can only be known in an overdeterminate structure of language manifested symptomatically. The unconscious must be structured like a language, a play of signifiers, to have the referential motility that characterizes its formations. This is in Freud’s language a consideration of representability. Lacan says that the linguistic structure “assures us that there is, beneath the term unconscious, something definable, accessible and objectifiable.”12 This is not the Freudian unconscious but it does designate that it is in the symbolic order that we will encounter the unconscious. It will be in the symbolic order that the written or spoken sentence will stumble. There will be gaps and as Lacan understands Freud, “the discovery” is in these gaps.13 What is discovered is not what is present. What is discovered is an absence. Quoting from Lacan, “the reality of the unconscious…is not an

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ambiguity of acts, future knowledge that is already known not to be known, but lacuna, cut, rupture inscribed in a certain lack.”14 The unconscious is what is unthought in thinking. It is where the fabric of the text gapes. It is in the sensuality of the trace—in what appears through what disappears. We might say that Lacan’s return to Freud is a return of the repressed. We are back to the “it” of the unconscious and “it” is anticonceptual and thus unassimilable. It resides in a domain that is always other. Repression delineates a domain of otherness. There is a possible trap in this language that could lead to a theological misreading of Lacan. When Lacan talks about a grand Other, there is a temptation to objectify the other and name it God. It is then too easy to fill in the gap that is the importance of otherness. Lacan is concerned about the subject. The Other is an object of the interrogation of the subject—“Who is speaking?” The interrogation of the Other reveals a lack. The Other is barred as the subject is barred. There is an otherness that represents what the grand Other lacks. In the phenomenality of the representation of desire the lack is the petite other of partial objects—an anus, a nipple, faeces, the gaze, the phoneme, the nothing.15 These petite objects do not represent a whole; they are what escapes the subject. They are the lack in the grand Other. They are the lack in the Other that constitutes the subject as subject. The limit of the unconscious is the concept of lack.16 One cannot build positive sciences of psychology or theology on this notion of the Other—on this notion of the unconscious. Lacan indirectly teaches theology that it will not be a phenomenology describing otherness. Such a theology would be a catalogue of partial objects marking a lack, a loss and constituting a desire. A theology responsive to Lacan will be a theology of desire unless it delimits its own interrogative structure. That is, what we encounter in Lacan that is immediately relevant for a theory of theological discourse is that its speech will always speak a lack and that the domain of its discourse is barred so that the otherness of reality does not belong to description but to desire. Theology must develop strategies of desire in language. We have returned to the question of style, which is where we began our discussion of Lacan because to think Lacan is to think style. What we need is an articulation of textual strategies that accept responsibility in their own reflexivity for the repression of otherness. These are textual strategies that do not compensate for loss by a fascination with exotica but work through themselves toward the significance of otherness. Desire references what discourse is not but it—the extratextual reference—is only known discursively. The problematic of desire in language is

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to acknowledge extralinguistic reference and yet stay within an internal play of linguistic signification. What Lacan has articulated in the rereading of Freud that brings us to strategies of desire is both the need for and repression of the other of language that now problematically occupies the once confident place of subject/object relations in the framework of understanding. It is this dismantling of the subject that is so important in assessing where we are in understanding the possibilities for theological thinking. Lacan signals an epistemic shift that is larger than psychoanalysis or any other single discipline. The dismantling of the subject is indexed in all of the human sciences in these closing and turning times of the twentieth century. What has been broken in the dismantling and general displacement of the subject is the supposed unity of apperception. We do not have an intuitive experience of an I or subject behind statements. On the surface of a text, which is our immediate experience of a text, statements are multiplicities. We cannot assume a silent unity behind the statements although we may observe regularities between and among statements. We can construct diagrams, grids and other abstract machines on the surface of the text, which is a work of interpretation, and then reference these constructs as a subjectivity in the text. When this is a conscious operation thinking is not haunted by a ghost in the machine but is identified with the machine. That is, the subject experiences as it is experienced in its constructedness. The carrying this experience over from the realm of the imaginary into the realm of the symbolic is making conscious the differential play that is constitutive of subjectivity. The experience of the subject in the mirror of the imaginary realm can obscure the multiplicity of subjectivities in the unity and opacity of a single image. In the symbolic or semiotic realm, the dispersion of subjectivity in language “that dispossesses it while multiplying it within the space created by its absence” is a tensive construction that can give meaning to subjectivity but it will never be a singular meaning.17 It is much more obvious in the symbolic realm that subjectivity is derivative than it is in reflections of the imaginary. That is, displacement of the subject through dispersion is much more obvious in the symbolic realm. This is one of the reasons for beginning a discussion of the present theological task with a discussion of Lacan. The problematic of the subject is implicated in the reading of Lacan because of his distinction between the imaginary and symbolic realms that does not allow for retreat behind the opacity of images in referencing subjectivity. He also continues to pressure the discourse by not identifying the real with either the imaginary or the symbolic. The differential play in the realm of the symbolic that constitutes

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the meanings of subjectivity and intelligibility and the quasi-transcendental rules that govern this discursive achievement do not at the same time constitute or exhaust the realm of the real. The problematic of the subject in Lacan parallels Foucault’s insight that “[m]an, in the analytic of finitude, is a strange empirico-transcendental doublet, since he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible.”18 It might first appear that this is a return to the Cartesian cogito but in both Lacan and Foucault the doubling in the cogito does not give sovereignty to the subject but instead problematizes it by imbedding the “I think” in the otherness of what is not thought. The implication of the “I am” in the “I think” is a displacement of subjectivity from a realm of pure thought into a nexus of relations and set of operations that do not themselves imply consciousness and if known to consciousness may be known only in their symptomatic presentation. The “I think” is not an illumination of the “I am”; but, instead, the “I am” is a darkening marking of the density and complexity of the “I think” so that the “I think” of the cogito is a co-assertion of the unthought. This unthought density of the human doublet has been part of the human enigma since the assertion of the cogito but since the hermeneutics of suspicion in the nineteenth century it has insistently accompanied thought into the twentieth century. An analytic of finitude is now not credible unless it acknowledges forces of alienation, unconscious processes, the will to power or other expressions of that which is other than pure reason. In Foucault’s language: “Man has not been able to describe himself as a configuration in the episteme without thought at the same time discovering both in itself and outside itself, at its borders yet also in its very warp and woof, an element of darkness, an apparently inert density in which it is embedded, an unthought which it contains entirely, yet in which it is also caught.”19 The further implication of this claim is that “discourse is not the majestic unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined.”20 Both the self of the subject and the discourse of the subject are thought in such a way that is implicated in what the subject is not. Subjectification is a process that goes outside the discourse of the self as is evidenced in the discontinuities of discourse. This going outside would be unintelligible if it were not that the human subject is a “transcendental-empirico” doublet. The outside is also an inside. This claim is not at the same time a claim for a substantial self. The constitution of the subject is a textual production that has the peculiar

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characteristic of turning in on itself. Gilles Deleuze describes this process in relation to the interaction of forces. “The most general formula of the relation to oneself is the affect of self by self, or folded force. Subjectivation is created by folding.”21 This folding includes the materiality of the body, the bending of lines of intersection of surrounding forces so that the outside has an interiority. Inside and outside contrast in a differential play of contrasts constituting the meanings of both consciousness and subjectivity without ceasing to be themselves. “These folds are eminently variable, and moreover have different rhythms whose variations constitute irreducible modes of subjectivation. They operate ‘beneath the codes and rules’ of knowledge and power and are apt to unfold and merge with them, but not without new foldings being created in the process.”22 In this description the subject is a derivation of the outside. The unity of apperception is a variable product of external multiplicities. This means that there is a variable and heterological infrastructure for the folds of knowledge. There may be regularities across diverse domains of discursive practices and the indexing of these regularities gives us a general sense of knowledge with a thematic stability but not a structural certainty. These regularities may have a quasi-transcendental status. That is, they may be the product of a transcendental inquiry into the conditions that make knowledge possible. But, the status of transcendental inquiry is interrogative and not descriptive. The discovery of rules for the formation of discursive understanding are specific to an interrogation of a specific discourse and are not universal a priori forms of sensibility or categories of understanding. There is nothing about the specific fold of transcendental interrogation that implies universal application. Its inside is always the folding of a specific outside. The conditions of possibility are material and historical. There is no inside or outside that is a proper domain for a meta-discourse. Meta-discourses are themselves folds implicated in both the insides and outsides of specific discourses, implicated in the other in and of language. Transcendental inquiry does not yield a foundation for discursive practices but it is a complication in the inscription of subjectivity in the formation of a new discourse. That we do not have this foundation or even a meaning of subjectivity that is invariant across different domains of discourse alters the status of foundational theology as an inquiry from which we could draw criteria for the evaluation of systematic theological formulations to a preliminary interrogation that problematizes theological text production in any of its specialties. Foundational theology cannot establish itself as privileged in relationship to the other theological specialties because it too is fully implicated in

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the formation of discourse of which it is but another fold. The subjectivity that it interrogates is its own production although that production is an operation within a nexus of forces and already existing textual manifestations that are constitutive elements in the fold of interrogation. In foundational theology there is no return to a point of reference that is criteriological for the further development of knowledge. There is no centering around a subject that can unify diverse discourses. There is the formation of a nomad subjectivity, however, that is neither exclusively female or male, white or black, east or west in its multiple manifestations; but, is instead socially located in the specificity of its situation of origin. That is, transcendental interrogation is a subjectification of textual experience on a heterological base that is situation specific. The logocentrism that is a subjective fold of the ontotheological tradition is denied universal application in the formation of religious discourses. The possibilities for nomad subjectivity pressures discourses to convolute in further complications of the enigma of the human doublet by revealing the constitutive function of language and the quasi-transcendental status of rules for the formation of discourse. Language usage itself has to be rethought in terms of what is unthought in the production of multiple subjectivities. This does not mean that we can think what does not give itself to thought or think outside of the folds of textuality. What it does mean is that there are no epistemologically pure formal conditions for knowledge. What it does mean is “that the forms of human consciousness and the mechanisms of human psychology are not timeless and everywhere essentially the same, but rather situation specific and historically produced.”23 Nomad subjectivity is the product of specific and heterogeneous forces that are known only in a differential folding that is nonidentical with the situational nexus of forces that are the conditions of its possibility. There is no interpretive subject outside of this complex that can work its will to exhaust or master the forces that constitute its appearance. The inscription of the subject is an enfolding so that it is never able to be an outside controlling agency. Nor is it an inside controlling agency independent of the outside since it is constituted as a fold of what is exterior and other than itself. What we are here describing is thinking as an activity or practice that is fundamentally materialistic. There is a deep resonance with Karl Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach in which Marx is critiquing Feuerbach’s materialism. “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism [that of Feuerbach included] is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.”24 This sensuous human activity works with what

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is at hand. Its production is a bricolage that is manifest in the materiality of a text. The loss of the single subject and the production of nomad subjectivities is incorrigible to the hermeneutic restoration of the ontotheological tradition. The alogic of rhetorical figurations materially privileges itself through insistent multiplication over patterns of theoretical unification. That is, discourse is pressured by its own production of subjectivities to subvert hegemonic unification in a single pattern of subjectivity, whether that pattern be divine or an essential definition of the human. This decentering of subjectivity is an epistemic shift of major proportions. In trying to understand the scope and importance of this shift Mikhail Bakhtin describes the authentic environment of utterance as dialogized heteroglossia. He then says: “It is necessary that heteroglossia wash over a culture’s awareness of itself and its language, penetrate to its core, relativize the primary language system underlying its ideology and literature and deprive it of its naive absence of conflict.”25 The one thing that the ontotheological tradition cannot do and still be itself is to relativize its primary language system. For example, the commitment to first principles is set adrift by the heterological infrastructure of nomad subjectivities or Bakhtin’s understanding of discourse in an environment of dialogized heteroglossia. This does not mean that one cannot be about the task of forming “first principles”; but, it does mean that those principles are not going to function as first principles have been traditionally understood to function. They will have no privilege inside of language and no reality outside of language. They are a particular fold or specific turn of language and therefore function in the general tropology that we know as language. They, along with other philosophical and theological formulations, are figures of speech subject to rhetorical analysis. Certain figurations will dominate a discourse by pressuring the differential play of textual and intertextual referencing in the complex of knowledge and power. Their assimilation into a discursive practice requires a more complex folding that alters the already existing economy of the discourse. Since what is known is already a mixture of force and figuration, a new folding is a sensuous operation displaying new differential intensities in the articulation of meaning. The authentication of meaning is not a process of reference but is a production that is self-authenticating through the intensities of its own achievement. Production includes processes of textual and intertextual referencing as elements of productivity but these processes do not then stand independently of the production in judgment of its formative

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achievement. The power of the discourse resides in the complex of forces that are only visible in the multiplicity of folds that are differential contrasts between inside and outside held in conflictual tension only as the outside is folded inside. The forces are not the visibilities. It is the fold that is visible. Whatever we know will be a surface. Every domain of discourse and knowledge will have folds and curvatures marking its surface specific to its achievements. Descriptive analysis of a discursive domain will be topographical and transcendental analysis will be tropological. That is, we can describe the folds as visibilities in the surface manifestations of experience and also inquire into the formative turns or tropes that have variegated the surface. The assessment of the state of any discursive discipline is subject to this twofold analysis and at the same time we always have to understand that the analysis is changing the surface and altering the practice it is analyzing. There is no frozen or stable surface and there is no way of bracketing analysis so that it is not implicated in the formation, reformation and deformation of the surfaces of understanding. When we explicitly turn to an analysis and assessment of theology we must realize that this turn is itself a folding and that the theological use of language in both description and interrogation is tropological. We cannot turn to theology without fully implicating our inquiry in the heterological infrastructures of nomad subjectivities and at the same time the textual surfaces of the ontotheological tradition. The topographical and tropological analyses will conflict and tensively interact with each other. The task will not be unlike that described by Rodolphe Gasche in The Tain of the Mirror. “The deconstructive undoing of the greatest totality, the totality of ontotheology, faithfully repeats this totality in its totality while simultaneously making it tremble, making it insecure in its most assured evidences.”26 Theology has traditionally been a discourse of extremities. Perhaps more than in any other discourse the formulation of basic concepts [Allah as Lord of the worlds, that than which nothing greater can be conceived, ultimate concern, the complete set of answers to the complete set of questions, the Brahman, absolute nothingness, the instantiation of a radical negativity, history as apocalypse] is a movement toward a totalization that when it turns on itself reveals those traits of discourse writ large that mark its heterological infrastructure. We can read any theology against the grain of its movement toward totalization and recover an agenda for theological thinking in our time. In this way theology can subvert itself and at the same time assert its importance as a radical discursive practice. The agenda of radical theological thinking will not be identical with the agenda of traditional theology although it will make no less of a claim

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on thinking in the general economy of discursive practices. Setting the agenda among the various theological specialties has often been the task of foundational theology so that the interrogation and revaluation of concepts in foundational theology has implications for systematic and practical theology. In fact, it is the accounting for the epistemic shift in foundational theology that suggests a reading against the grain of totalization in systematic theologies. To explicate this point we could look at any of the fuller expressions of traditional theology and thereby better understand the transformation of the theological agenda in radical theology. I would suggest, however, that it is in the reading of theologies that are self-conscious of their functional specialties and self-conscious of their relationship to philosophy that we can most readily articulate or easily access the implications of the epistemic shift in foundational theology. Using this criteria, obvious candidates from the twentieth century for exemplary readings against the grain of totalization would be process theologies, existential theologies and transcendental neo-scholastic theologies. And among these theologies there is no single theology that is more explicitly aware of its indebtedness to the ontotheological tradition of nineteenth century German idealism and general mortgage to the autonomous subject of Cartesianism than is the theology of Paul Tillich. There is also a profound indebtedness in much contemporary theology to Paul Tillich’s theology even when it is not explicitly acknowledged. It was his method of correlation that reinforced a tradition of making theology answerable to secular culture and opened the possibilities for a proliferation of secular theologies and conflicts of interpretations that have contributed to the interrogation of theological foundations. Reading Tillich against the grain of totalization is an extension of reading Tillich from the perspective of his own understanding of the protestant principle. Another important reason for choosing to look at Tillich in setting the agenda for theology is that in his later work he was clearly trying to assess the importance of the history of world religions for theology.27 He addressed the concreteness and specificity of religions and recognized that the “concrete spirit” of religions abides in a tension between their particular manifestations and qualifications of ultimacy. That tension is marked on the surface of his own thought and I think that it marks an important heterological fold in his discourse that is consistent with his understanding of ultimate concern. It is his understanding of ultimate concern that pressures his discourse to wander outside of the containment of the western ontotheological tradition and makes it even possible to ask about the importance of the history of world religions.

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In his earlier systematic theological investigations it is his use of the concept of being and its possibly tensive relationship with the claims of an ultimate concern that surface in an interrogation of the discursive practices of foundational theology or in the encounter with nonwestern traditions. In Volume II of Systematic Theology, Tillich describes and summarizes the importance of introducing the concept of being into theology: When a doctrine of God is initiated by defining God as being-itself, the philosophical concept of being is introduced into systematic theology. This was so in the earliest period of Christian theology and has been so in the whole history of Christian thought. It appears in the present system in three places: in the doctrine of God, where God is called being as being or the ground and the power of being; in the doctrine of man, where the distinction is carried through between man’s essential and his existential being; and, finally, in the doctrine of the Christ, where he is called the manifestation of the New Being, the actualization of which is the work of the divine Spirit.28 The reader of Tillich can look at any of these three places to see the implications of framing a systematic theology in the ontotheological tradition and then what it means to deny that tradition its privilege. The first serious challenge to the privilege of this tradition in protestant theology in the twentieth century was the restatement of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God. The force of this challenge, which should have led to a major revision of the theological agenda, except in the ongoing work of Altizer, was dissipated in a too easy accommodation with notions of secularism and celebrations of the secular city. Perhaps we are still in the situation of Nietzsche’s madman who after proclaiming the death of God said: “I have come too early…my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men.”29 We are still not ready for the most explicit challenge to the power of the ontotheological tradition, the challenge to the doctrine of God. When the great metaphysical preoccupations seem “so utterly remote and pointless,” a proclamation of this scale is greeted with silence and condemned to a silent efficacy. But, the problematizing of the subject in the human sciences also is a serious challenge to the power of the ontotheological tradition and it slips into our discourse like a Trojan horse. The subversive power of constituted nomad subjectivities is very clear when they undermine the distinction between essential and existential being in what Tillich calls the “doctrine of

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man.” The identification of God with being-itself is systematically interwoven with the understanding of fallen humanity and the meaning of human freedom. The deracination of any one of these concepts has implications for understanding the others. Tillich’s understanding of freedom requires a unified subject. In a discussion of Pelagian moral freedom and Manichaean tragic destiny he asserts that: “Freedom is not the freedom of indeterminacy. That would make every moral decision an accident, unrelated to the person who acts. But freedom is the possibility of a total and centered act of the personality, an act in which all the drives and influences which constitute the destiny of man are brought into the centered unity of a decision.”30 The deconstruction of the subject that we examined in the work of Lacan would in this context be a destruction of the self. Tillich even describes evil as the structure of self-destruction or the loss of the self. “Self-loss as the first and basic mark of evil is the loss of one’s determining center…Self-loss is the loss of one’s determining center, the disintegration of the unity of the person.”31 The idiom for this description is psychological but the explanatory structural frame is ontological. The subject is an intentional agent that gives meaning to the concept of the self. Tillich describes the basic structure of finite being as a polarity of self and world. “Only man has a completely centered self and a structured universe to which he belongs and at which he is able to look at the same time.”32 There is a dismantling of the Tillichian self in the assertion that the truth of the subject is found in the locus of the Other. The force of this claim against the formulation of the Tillichian subject is somewhat obscured by Tillich’s powerful descriptions of the self under the conditions of existential estrangement. That is, in these descriptions it appears that Tillich has a real grasp on the dispersion of subjectivity but we have to remember that this is the description of a fallen human condition. The Tillichian self that is subverted by our reflections on Lacan is the self of essential being. This is not an unimportant distinction because it is the relationship between essential and existential being that is so deeply rooted in the ontotheological tradition. “The transition from essence to existence is the original fact. It is not the first fact in a temporal sense or a fact beside or before others, but it is what gives validity to every fact. It is the actual in every fact.”33 We are not talking about the residue of an older tradition in Tillich’s thinking that can be ignored. The transition from essence to existence is the scene of origination for an understanding of the human subject and definition of the self. The scene of the fall may occupy a similar place in the analytic of finitude

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to Derrida’s scene of writing, but its articulation leads to a very different understanding of the human subject. As Tillich notes: “The difficulty is that the state of essential being is not an actual stage of human development that can be known directly or indirectly. The essential nature of man is present in all stages of his development, although in existential distortion.”34 This essential nature has potentiality but not actuality. It has no place and it has no time. It is inaccessible in itself. In a metaphorics of the inaccessible, Tillich refers to this essential being of the human as a state of dreaming innocence. What is the status of this state of dreaming innocence in theological discursive practices? Since Tillich has not developed a critical theory of discursive formations we are imposing a question on his systematic investigations that is shifting the discourse to a different register of intelligibility. The meaning of “dreaming innocence” is not referential in the specificities of place and time. It does not function in the same way as other concepts, but anticipates an intelligibility that will be known only as it is other than itself in distortion through existential realization that is in place and time. The question is whether we can accord any originary status to “dreaming innocence” as an expression of essential being. Is the original fact the transition from essence to existence or is the concept of essential being already in the imaginary and symbolic registers and secondary to a more original scene of folding? On the level of phenomenological description we cannot talk of essential being. There is, however, a tension between the witness of estrangement and the witness of communities of faith to the New Being in Jesus as the Christ. “The appearance of the New Being under the conditions of existence, yet judging and conquering them, is the paradox of the Christian message.”35 Tillich says that this paradox is a new reality. This paradox can be marked in a phenomenological description, but it is not explained by it or contained within it. Tillich goes outside of phenomenology for an explanation and the explanatory concepts that frame the descriptive tension are ontological. The importance of claiming that the transition from essence to existence is the original fact is that it gives precedence to and justifies ontological explanation. It is the ontological framing of the discourse that gives the fall universal applicability to descriptions of finite being rather than the force of the phenomenological description of estrangement. The ontological framework of explanation eases the conceptual tension between the witnesses to estrangement and the New Being in Jesus as the Christ. But, the ontological framework entails an essential subject that is subverted by transcendental interrogations that generate nomad subjectivities.

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Ontological explanation serves the paradox of the Christian witness in Tillich’s theology but that witness is not its foundation. Tillich formulates his ontological categories out of the context of a transcendental inquiry. It is the philosophical frame that is specifically embedded in the ontotheological tradition. He defines philosophy in terms that are Kantian and transcendental even though the use of philosophy is ontological. “The question regarding the character of the general structures that make experience possible is always the same. It is the philosophical question.”36 Although these structures are defined as ontological and function as structures of reality as a whole they are discovered and marked on an epistemological register through a critical analysis of experience. “Ontological concepts are a priori in the strict sense of the word.”37 In talking about finitude and explanatory categories he claims that these categories are ontological but also says that “[c]ategories are the forms in which the mind grasps and shapes reality.”38 There is a tension in these definitions. Subjective reason grasps and shapes reality but it is reality as such that “is the structure which makes reality a whole and therefore a potential object of knowledge.”39 There is a conflicting primacy between epistemological and ontological claims concerning the formal manifestations of reality. This conflict suggests a transversal reflexivity that implicates the formation of epistemological and ontological concepts in each other. There is a folding in Tillich’s own expression of this relationship. “Self-relatedness is implied in every experience. There is something that ‘has’ and something that is ‘had’ and the two are one.”40 In its grasping and shaping subjective reason constructs ontological concepts; but, “the truth of all ontological concepts is their power of expressing that which makes the subject-object structure possible. They constitute this structure; they are not controlled by it.”41 The subject constitutes the structure by which it is constituted. There is an undecidability about priorities in this formulation. The autonomy and priority of subjectivity are subverted by its own achievement and the autonomy and priority of ontological structures are subverted by being an achievement of subjective reflection. Transcendental interrogations as they are understood by Tillich traverse the domains of epistemology and ontology. In whatever domain we begin to question conditions of possibility we soon discover that the determinations of identity are in the other domain. There is no determinate standpoint that is not implicated in what is other than itself. There is no epistemologi-

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cal or ontological description or frame that is self authenticating. There is incompleteness and indeterminateness in the discursive practices of these disciplines because they are not pure. The absence of closure means that neither ontology nor epistemology can assert a universal privilege in the formation of other discursive practices. They are themselves heterological discourses that when viewed together may appear to approximate a totality; but, there is also a sense in which they subvert each other by their individual claims to primacy. We do not have either in the language of ontology or in the language of epistemology universal formulations that can liberate thinking from bondage to the specific scenes of their origination because they are never complete in themselves and thereby free from those scenes. The claims to universality would require a transcendence of the heterological infrastructures in the formation of the discourses if they are to be a credible claims. The impurity of origination introduces an element of doubt. The doubt raises the question as to where to locate the claims to universality that arise out of a specific and impure transcendental interrogation. The foundational categories of Tillich’s theology are neither purely epistemological nor purely ontological. They, like many of Tillich’s concepts, are on a boundary. I think that this is a very special boundary that can be better thought of as a frame. They constitute in their expression a materiality, spacing, thickness and double-edged quality of a frame. The function of the frame is to mark a contrast between the inside and the outside or between a figure and its ground. The double edges of a frame introduce an ambiguity in its functioning. If we talk about framing a discourse, from the inside of that discourse the internal edge of the frame is the point of contrast between the figure and ground, inside and outside, so that the frame belongs to the ground or outside. From the outside of a discourse the external edge of the frame is the point of contrast between the figure and ground, inside and outside, so that the materiality and structure of the frame appear to be internal to the specific figures of discourse. If in the ontotheological tradition there is a subject of the transcendental unity of apperception that is delineated in the language of essential being and structures of essential being that in the analytic of finitude are grounded in the transcendental unity of apperception and that in combination they frame a theological discourse, from the outside of the frame it would appear that this theological discourse is implicated in essential being without ever being explicitly ontological and from the inside it would appear that this discourse is grounded in the structure of being without ever being explicitly

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ontological. There would always be a pressure on the discourse to become explicitly ontological because of the presence of an uncanny trace of the absence of being in the actual figures of theological discourse. The pressure would be toward closure in the totalization of the discourse. The framing of a discourse does have specific location in the formation of the discourse. But, because it is not part of the actual figures of discourse it seems to be no place and in no time. Its specificity is erased in the reciprocity of perspectives from outside and inside domains of discourse. This is the sleight of hand that occurs in shifting back and forth between ontological and epistemological interrogations. To read theology against the grain of totalization is to attend to the absences that reveal the presence of a frame and thereby denaturalize its effect on the discourse it frames. Framing is part of the folding of discourses. The frame could only appear to isolate discourses. But, discourses are instead always a heterological weaving so that the fabric of a discourse should have irregularities, seams and tears as traces of alterity. This means that there should even be fissures in dominant theological figurations revealing lines of force or traces of alterity that witness to their heterological origins. As we noted earlier, in all of the peregrinations of Tillich’s theology, it is being that “remains the content, the mystery and eternal aporia of thinking.”42 When the frame of theological discourse is the ontotheological tradition we have some understanding of why being is both a content and mystery of thinking. It does not function as a descriptor in the discourse except to locate the aporia of thinking. It is in his doctrine of God that Tillich inserts the concept of beingitself without any qualifications. “The statement that God is being-itself is a nonsymbolic statement. It does not point beyond itself. It means what it says directly and properly.”43 What is interesting is that this statement in itself without any reference beyond itself doesn’t mean anything. Tillich himself also says that “after this has been said, nothing else can be said about God as God which is not symbolic.”44 The talk of God as being-itself is denied entry into the differential play of discursive formations. As soon as we move to the symbolic register talk of God as God is silenced. In the symbolic register the naming of the “living God” transgresses the concept of God as a pure identity of being as being. Tillich says that “God is a symbol for God.”45 He talks of the God above God and of God as the ground of being. In all of these formulations the concept of God ceases to be identical with itself—identical with being-itself. The nonsymbolic statement that “God is being-itself ” can, of course, only reside in the symbolic register. It

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is a formulation that, as it is stated, cannot be assimilated into a differential play and in this sense is a violation of the symbolic register. It would appear that under the pressure of the unassimilable concept of God as being-itself, Tillich has formulated a number of nonconceptual concepts that then populate his theological discourse. These nonconceptual concepts do not function to establish identities. Their presence in a discourse denies privilege to the copula of being. Thus, it might first appear that the “is” of “being” functions metaphorically following patterns of analogy and establishing likenesses between dissimilars. This solution is too easy because although it would allow for the continuation of God-talk, the God that is talked about would not be God as God or function as mystery and aporia in violation of the homogeneity of the symbolic order. Populating a discourse with nonconceptual concepts is a troping of the discourse but the dominant trope in this formation is not metaphor. There is a radically disjunctive and wholly other claim on a discourse in the formulation of God as being-itself. In fact, all of the derivative dominant God concepts in Tillich’s discourse function so radically that their juxtaposition in discourse is metonymical rather than properly metaphorical. They do not establish likenesses between dissimilars as approximations of identity. The use of “is” in the symbols of God establish nonidentities. This is an oxymoronic state of affairs when Tillich also claims that “God is being-itself.” What I am suggesting is that since Tillich’s own radical formulations for God work against the nonsymbolic or metaphorical privileging of the “is” in the establishment or approximation of identities, his use of the “is” is more closely associated in practice with forcing a metonymical alignment of the ordinary with formulations and qualifications of ultimate concern. The nonsymbolic use of the “is” is an aporia that allows theology to go nowhere and the metaphorical “is” is a diminution of the force of figurations of ultimacy in the formations of discourses. A metonymical use of “is” marks a space of juxtaposition for nonconceptual concepts or other figurations of ultimacy. These forced juxtapositions would pressure the discourse and alter its general economy. The discourse would then be implicated in ultimacy manifested through transformations of the ordinary. The discourse would then meet Tillich’s first formal criterion for theology. “The object of theology is what concerns us ultimately. Only those propositions are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of ultimate concern for us.”46 Even if the discourse is not ontological it can be theological through strategies of metonymical pressuring. This means that even when we read Tillich against the grain of totalizing movements in his theology it is still possible to stay within the theological domain.

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A new agenda for theology that is both in and at the end of twentieth century surfaces in this reading of Tillich that is not just a modification of Tillich. When Tillich’s exemplary investment in the ontotheological tradition is turned on itself we have a fairly clear reading of how the theological agenda must be revised if we are to account for both the proliferation of nomad subjectivities and the desire for totalization in the closure of the symbolic order. First, the dismantling of the centered and unified subject means that theological subjectivity is constituted as it is written into and dispersed throughout the theological text. Foundational theology is not an inquiry that is outside of the discursive practices of theology but is an interrogation of those practices. Its principles are the quasi-transcendental rules for the formation of discourses and disclose not an ontological structure to subjectivity but a heterological infrastructure for multiple subjectivities. Second, the deconstruction of constituted subjectivities denaturalizes the ontotheological frame of theological discourse. The frame is a materialistic fold in a specific nexus of forces relative to its social and intellectual location. The frame would not be the ontotheological tradition if the fold of consciousness were not located in a western intellectual, social, and political context. But, even in this tradition that which is inside the frame is implicated in the other of that which was outside and is now nonidentical with itself because of the fold. There is always an excess that has an undecidable quality. Third, the traces of the other in the formulation of dominant theological concepts will manifest themselves in fissures, gaps, paradoxes and incongruities on the surfaces of their expressions. These markings index the incompleteness of the movement toward totalization and in this sense violate or transgress any law of closure in the symbolic order. Fourth, a new agenda for theology is ironic. Extreme formulations that populate theological discourse convolute within the symbolic order so that they are instantiations of a transversal negativity implicating the other of the unthought and unrealized. That is, these formulations and figurations of ultimacy make demands upon textual and intertextual referencing that cannot be met. Lonergan’s “the complete set of answers to the complete set of questions” and “unrestricted desire to know,” Anselm’s “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” Tracy’s use of the formulation “always already, not yet,” and Tillich’s identification with God as being-itself all have a functional affinity with Scharlemann’s understanding of instantiations of radical negativity. They are a mystery and aporia in the symbolic order. There is an irony in the theological agenda

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when it accepts as its task an analysis of “the being of God when God is not being God.”47 Fifth, theology is text production. There is no special privilege to its discursive formations that comes from outside of the text production. The theological exigencies inscribed within its texts are effects of the metonymical placing of extreme formulations throughout the texts. The differential play of reference witnesses to that which is other than the text through the incompleteness that is the result of the placement of these formulations. Theological texts are not selfcontained because of their internal undecidability. Sixth, theology is a social text. It subjectifications are material folds in specific social and historical locations. Its efficacy is in the pressure of its formulations upon ordinary usage and reference when they are metonymically forced into a discourse. The pressure of figurations of ultimacy on the pragmatics of discourse is a transvaluation of the ordinary. Theology is a social text that makes a claim upon the economy of forces and received texts that constitute its specificity through the particularity of its fold. Formulations and figurations of ultimacy when metonymically placed in a textual practice can fold the already existing folds of received texts. In this sense a theological analysis introduces an incommensurability into discursive practices that is an internal trace of the other in the subjective fold of discourse. Theological practice even when framed by the ontotheological tradition can be aligned with the critique of logocentrism if its formulations are understood as metonymical strategies. There is an affinity with Derrida’s claim that: “Deconstruction is always deeply concerned with the ‘other’ of language....The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the ‘other’ and the ‘other of language’.”48 When deconstruction is part of the theological agenda the challenge is always to deconstruct the greatest totality and this means, as Gasche has suggested, repeating the totality while making it tremble. Theology has a deconstructive agenda and deconstruction has a theological agenda. Deconstruction cannot repeat the totality of the ontotheological tradition in its totality without becoming implicated in theological exigencies in the formation of its discourse. Theology in the articulation of its strategies can make a further move. Not only can theology in its deconstructive moment make the totality tremble, make it insecure in its most assured evidences; but, it can sustain the trembling as it folds its own interrogation into the textual and intertextual referencing of the symbolic order. The theological agenda is in its double folding a cultural agenda.

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Notes 1. Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. xviii. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale )New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 3. 3. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, Lacan and Language: A Reader’s Guide to Ecrits (New York: International Universities Press, 1982), p. 3. 4. Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1985), p. 46. 5. Ibid., p. 20. 6. Ibid., p. 117 7. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 2. 8. Gallop, p. 59. 9. Ibid., p. 59. 10. Ibid., p. 60. 11. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton 1978), p. 20. 12. Ibid., p. 21. 13. Ibid., p. 25. 14. Ibid., p. 153. 15. Ibid., p. 315. 16. Ibid., p. 26. 17. See Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 42. 18. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 318. 19. Ibid., p.326. 20. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 55. 21. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 104. 22. Ibid., pp. 104-105. 23. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 152. 24. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” in The German Ideology: Part One with Selections from Parts Two and Three and Supplementary Texts, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1985), p. 121. 25. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 368.

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26. Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 180. 27. See Paul Tillich, The Future of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), and Christianity and the Encounter with World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). 28. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology 3 Vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1957, 1963), Vol. II, p. 10. 29. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1974), p. 182. 30. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. II, pp. 42-43. 31. Ibid., p. 61. 32. Ibid., p. 60. 33. Ibid., p. 36. 34. Ibid., p. 33. 35. Ibid., p. 92. 36. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 19. 37. Ibid., p. 166. 38. Ibid., p. 192. 39. Ibid., p. 18. 40. Ibid., p. 169. 41. Ibid., p. 169. 42. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 11. 43. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 238. 44. Ibid., p. 239. 45. Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), p. 46. 46. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I, p. 12. 47. See Robert Scharlemann, “The Being of God When God Is Not Being God” in Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co.,1982), pp. 79-108. 48. Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984), p. 123.

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Chapter 9 Theology and the Pedagogy of the Sacred

The field of the study of religion resides in the aura of the complexity and ambiguity of a necessary question of its own formulation. Are there primary religious data? Or, alternatively, what is the sacred? Does the study of religion have a subject or an object that is peculiarly its own? Is there any difference between a sacred rock or a sacred tree and an ordinary rock or an ordinary tree? Is there any difference between a sacred text and an ordinary text? The answer to these questions depends on how religion is imagined in the field of the study of religion. In recent publications within the history of religions there are the minimalist assertions of Jonathan Z. Smith that “there is no data for religion” followed by the claim that “religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study.”1 The primary expertise of the historian of religions is self-consciousness.2 And, in what might appear to be a more elaborate claim, Lawrence E. Sullivan, in his magisterial study of South American religions, writes: The brunt of the blame for misconstruing South American religions should not fall on the last generation of ethnographers, who filed mountains of reliable field reports based on clearly identifiable premises. The fault lies rather with philosophers, historians, and interpreters, who shrink from their vocation to reflect on the full dimensions of human experience in the contemporary world.3 Both Smith and Sullivan seem to suggest that when there is a fault in the study of religion it is the failure of self-consciousness, the failure to reflect on the full dimensions of human experience. Before or alongside of the study of religion as the collecting of data, the study of religion is also the self-consciousness of imagination in the imagining of religion. What has characterized the imagining of religion in the founding and funding of the study of religion? This question acknowledges the obvious possibility that there is a history to the study of religion, a history to the history of religions as an academic study that is not coincident with the history of religions. Adding to the complexity of the question of what characterizes the imagining of religion in the study of religion is that the study in question has been increasingly acknowledged as a secular study.

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That is, the canon of principles for the legitimation of its insights and arguments is secular. Its legitimating authorities are academic rather than religious institutions. Self-consciousness in the study of religion is secular consciousness. To crawl back through the genealogical labyrinth of the study of religion is not to go back to the origins of religions or religious thinking. It is to go back to a thinking about religion that is markedly secular by addressing itself to the “any person” audience of academics that are not necessarily initiates into specific religious communities. There is simply no revelatory privilege given to any interpretation or interpretive scheme in the secular study and history of religions. This is not the same as saying that there have been no privileged ideas or terms in the study of religion even when these ideas and terms are always subject to evaluative interrogation. If we read back into some of the arguably primary documents in the history of the contemporary study of religion by Rudolph Otto, Max Müller, Emile Durkheim, Joachim Wach, Geradus van der Leeuw or Mircea Eliade we find a privileging and confluence, sometimes identification, of ideas or terms such as the sacred, the holy, power, numen, reality, ultimate reality and being. Perhaps the most important but also most criticized and even censored privileging and identification of terms in these earlier works was the identification of the sacred or the holy with being. Otto’s phenomenological descriptions of a “creature-consciousness” that has an object outside of itself leads to speculation that “falls back upon ontological terms to achieve its end.”4 The “element of the tremendum, originally apprehended as ‘plentitude of power’, becomes transmuted into ‘plenitude of being’.”5 This connection is further developed by Eliade. His basic notion of the manifestation of the sacred, a hierophany, is thought in ontological language. “Ontophany and hierophany meet.”6 “The sacred is saturated with being.”7 Religion is a thirst for being. [M]yth is bound up with ontology; it speaks only of realities, of what really happened, of what was fully manifested. Obviously these realities are sacred realities, for it is the sacred that is pre-eminently the real.8 And, it is the connection of the sacred with absolute reality or ultimate reality that makes orientation possible.9 In an interview with Claude-Henri Rocquet we hear how existentially important it is for Eliade to make this identification.

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What seems to me totally impossible, at all events, is to imagine how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world.… Consciousness of a real and meaningful world is intimately linked with the discovery of the sacred.10 This is an existential claim and it is threatening. I think this is why some less adventurous scholars have turned away from Eliade without ever thinking through the profundity of his work. He knew and wrote in his journal that “[t]o the degree that you understand a religious fact…you change, you are modified—and this change is the equivalent of a step forward in the process of self-liberation.”11 Even if a contemporary scholar does not accept Eliade’s specific understanding and interpretation of religious phenomena, scholarship cannot conflate this disagreement with a dismissal of Eliade’s demand for significance and meaning in the study of religion. Scholarship cannot retreat from the interrogation of meaning without trivializing itself. The refusal to minimalize that demand for meaning can and has coexisted with minimalized definitions of religion and even the sacred. For example, Charles Long defines religion as an orientation to reality. He, however, does not stop with this minimal and easily accessible definition of religion. He writes: “For my purposes, religion will mean orientation—orientation in the ultimate sense, that is, how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world.”12 The importance of meaning and the meaning of importance are implicated in his understanding of religion as an orientation to reality. Sullivan writes within the same tradition of scholarship that “[m]eaning is the omnipresent but always problematic context of existence.”13 The sacred appears to be a demand within the context of meaning for ultimate significance. The force of this claim is general and methodological. It is not so much a claim about specific temples, rituals, texts, animals or bowls as it is a claim about the thinking about temples, rituals, texts, animals or bowls when they are said to be sacred. We are still working within the confines of the creations of “the scholar’s study.”14 The question that the student of religion finds unresolved is whether the thinking that thinks about ultimacy is necessarily a thinking about being. Is the study of religion wed to ontology? Too often this question has been confused with the question as to whether the study of religion is wed to theology. Students of religion that recoil from any relationship with theology are often at a loss as to how to deal with the claim that the sacred has something to do with meaning and ultimacy because this language has been

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bound to theology and, from Aristotle forward, to the western ontotheological tradition. That is, when the study of religion refuses the language of theology, it refuses the language of its own reflexivity. Maybe it can think about sacred bowls but it cannot think about thinking about sacred bowls. It cannot say that a bowl is sacred except by saying that someone else has said that it is sacred. This noncritical self-consciousness is a first order naïveté. The epistemological and linguistic milieu of theological self-reflexivity is not clearly distinguishable from the self-reflexive milieu for general studies in religion. They are both reflecting languages and/or formulations of extremity in their traffic with sacred meanings. And, in a further complication, theological texts are an object of any comprehensive study of religion. The study of religion reflects theology in its own self-reflexivity. To abjure theology is to commit the study of religion to a double blindness. It becomes blind to its own subjectivity and to theology as a possible object of its subjectivity. There may be a willingness to dismiss theology as an object of the study of religion because to some it appears to be over-studied in biased institutional contexts; but, the study of religion cannot dismiss the problematic of its own subjectivity when it addresses questions of meaning and ultimacy without being critically naïve. Critical incredulity is an important tool for the student of religion and it needs to be epistemologically elaborated so that this student has some insight into the status of words and concepts that populate worlds of religious objects, rituals and texts. There needs to be ways to receive and interpret fissures, gaps, discrepancies or descriptive incongruities amidst the data used in the study of religion without turning the study itself into nonsense. Jonathan Z. Smith, in a discussion of northern bear hunting rituals, shows how important it is to maintain critical awareness and a capacity for incredulity. Ethnographic descriptions of bear hunting rituals among the Yakuts suggest that a Nanay hunter upon encountering a bear recites poems of praise to the bear calling it forward to a type of bear suicide so that the hunter can disclaim responsibility for the kill.15 The critical incredulity of the student of religion is the methodological tool for revealing the incongruity between the ritual ideology of the hunt and the actual behavior of hunters. Ritual etiquette is at variance with the realistic exigencies of bear hunting. What is important in this incongruity? What is the status of the language of the ritual etiquette? Herein lies the problem of meaning. It is in the meaning of the gap that we can begin to understand that there are “animals which are both ‘good to eat’ and

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‘good to think’.”16 If we do not understand the notion of what is “good to think,” the study of religion is no more than indiscriminate and accidental ethnography. What is “good to think?” In the bear hunting ritual it is the ritual that “provides a focusing lens on the ordinary hunt which allows its full significance to be perceived” so that “the hunter can relate himself properly to animals.”17 In the ritual thinking, contingency is factored out. Thinking is idealized and thereby essentialized. This appears to be a thinking that is a thinking without disappointment. We think with the right relationship to animals, each other, the world in its actualities and possibilities. The record of religion in culture, even in its most elementary forms, witnesses to the human capacity to think beyond the incongruity or gap between the positivities and possibilities of reality. This claim is not the same as a claim that this thinking is itself without fissures, gaps and incongruities. The progression beyond one series of fissures may at the same time be a regression into another fissured reality. The layered complexity of thinking is best approached in the study of religion when thinking studies thinking, when theology is the object of the study of religion especially in the reflexivity of both. What I am suggesting is that we momentarily maximize the problematic of thinking in the study of religion by minimizing its focus to theology. We narrow the focus to enlarge the complexity of the problem. The register of interrogation becomes a fine rather than coarse-grained surface of inscription for both the subject and object of thinking in this experiment. There is also a homology between the subject and object of thinking about thinking that does not exist in thinking about bowls or bears. Maybe we can more clearly locate what in thinking comes to designate the sacred by taking thinking as the object of the inquiry. That is, making theology the object of the study of religion for the purpose of interrogating the conditions of possibility for the thinking that is the study of religion is not intended to privilege theology in the study of religion. Instead, it is an attempt to place the subject and object of the study of religion in a contrasting relationship that might better help us see how the thinking that is the study of religion comes to designate the sacred. We might better be able to assess the complexity of the herm-eneutical problem that arises when there is a discrepancy between the conditions of rationality that govern the study of religion in contrast to the conditions under which rituals, bowls or texts originally were thought to be sacred. With a text, thinking is contrasted with thinking. It may be easier to discern internal traces as to why a sacred text is other than a nonsacred text than it

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is to see why a sacred bowl is other than a nonsacred bowl. That is, there may be, although not necessarily, a finer differentiation between the uses of words than between the uses of bowls. In any case, the interrogation of difference is a legitimate inquiry whenever a differential claim is made between secular and sacred objects, which can be as diverse as ritual bowls, material texts, ritual practices or textual practices. In fact, as Eliade claims, “anything man has ever handled, felt, come in contact with or loved can become a hierophany.”18 This includes texts. When a theological text is an object for the study of religion we are talking about two texts. There is the theological text and there is the text that is about the theological text. There is a text that comes out of the theologian’s study qua theologian and there is a text that comes out of the scholar’s study qua scholar and the question is yet undecided how they are different or other from each other. When is textual construction theological and when is it not theological? Is theology sacred? Are the study of religion and its textual productions sacred? These questions do not go away even if we are committed to Sullivan”s prescription and proscription of “‘Seeking an End to the Primary Text’ or ‘Putting an End to the Text as Primary.’”19 Even if there were to be agreement among scholars that meaning can be an “a priori given in the cultural situation through primordial appearance, revelation or spontaneous insight,” the meaning in the interpretative work of the scholar’s textual production is a construction.20 Re-marking meaning or making it remarkable is a construction.21 The thing-in-itself or act-in-itself cannot in-itself authenticate its sacrality. The otherness of sacrality is the otherness of a relationship. This statement, however, is not saying that there is nothing internal to an act or object that more readily implicates itself in the otherness of relationships than the internal character of other acts or objects. Certainly one of the lessons of deconstructive criticism is to attend to the other in and of language. It appears in the history of religions that the demand for articulating the otherness of relationships is more lucid with certain acts and certain objects at certain times. This is a demand for interpretation or the re-marking of meaning. Times change and with the change of times thinking must sometimes operate under conditions of rationality that it has not chosen. For example, as Jürgen Habermas has suggested, there have been along the trajectory of western philosophy epochal shifts in emphases from philosophies of being to philosophies of consciousness to philosophies of language.22 In the Age of Reason, being can only be thought in its subjugation to the immediate

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experience of consciousness. In the twentieth century, the subject of consciousness has been complicated and displaced by the privileging of the semiotic conditions for its constructed representability and can be thought only in relationship to language. The status of the notion of being is first transformed epistemologically and then linguistically. In the present secular milieu, theology and the study of religion can and do talk about the word being and the name of God. These words are at least traces of the ontotheological tradition in the thinking at the end of the twentieth century. They are within the traditional discourse of theology; and, they are within and other than the familiar discourse of secular culture including the discourse of the study of religion and the discourse of secular theology. In fact, the other of God and the other of being have been re-marked and are thus remarkable in secular thinking. Secular thinking marking words, concepts and other formulations of extremity gives an indexical presence to what is other and unthought within itself. In his Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich clearly articulates two formal criteria for theological thinking: “The object of theology is what concerns us ultimately,” and “Only those statements are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us.”23These are formal or quasi-transcendental conditions for theological thinking and text production. This is a restricted or modest claim that is not translatable into a strong notion of a religious a priori conditioning knowledge of the sacred. This claim cannot in itself justify Tillich’s absolute concept of a nonsymbolic identification of God with being-itself.24 It should also be clear that the first criterion does not imply the second criterion. The demand for thinking that which concerns us ultimately is within the scope of the secular capacity to think formulations of extremity such as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Claims about the metaphysical status or being of these formulations are beyond the immediate experience of subjectivity and its representability in secular consciousness. This means that concepts or words such as God, being or the sacred must be subjectively interpreted and linguistically re-marked to be thought under the conditions of secular rationality. They can be thought but they are thought differently in philosophies of consciousness and language than they are thought in philosophies of being. It is not beings but concepts and words that are being thought. The world of secular thinking is a culture or cultivation of simulacra. Tillich’s criteria for thinking theologically, implicating ultimacy and being in each other, are not unlike what Otto and Eliade were cited as saying about the study of the history of religions. The problem is also

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the same. The demand for ultimacy is within the scope of secular thinking but identifying the being of being or the being of beings is not. The identification of being with the sacred is particularly problematic because of the inability to think being other than as a conscious trope in discourse. The textuality of scholarship can only simulate an experience or thinking that is nontextual or textual with internal textual claims to a nontextual referentiality. That any texts or bowls are re-markable in a new textual production says something about the creative possibilities of thinking that may or may not say anything about the texts or bowls that are implicated in that thinking. The force of the shift to secular consciousness is a strategic shift from thinking universals, essences, generalizations as the objective data of thinking to thinking particulars, existents, empiricities as that data. Generalization is then a subjective datum or achievement. With this strategic shift new tactics are required to think essential concepts so that even the meaning of essence is transformed. Secularity is a reversal of Platonism so that being is an imaginal realm of phantasms when entertained in philosophies of consciousness and language. When it is a word in its own phantasmatic realm it is a tropic figuration for saying what it is not. In this sense it is a metonym and not a metaphor in discourse. Imaginative thinking can be contiguous to reality without authenticating a likeness to reality. Secular thinking may have to abandon notions of congruity or isomorphism and adopt tactics of juxtaposition and approximation. By thinking what it is not, secular thinking, when thinking about the sacred, must allow for a nonidentity between thinking and what is thought. Tillich’s nonsymbolic identification of God with being-itself and Eliade’s understanding of religion as a thirst for being are noncoincident or nonidentical with secular critical self-consciousness. Secular theology and the secular study of religion are alike in the critical problem of the relationship of self-consciousness to the thinking of being qua being that is outside of its capacity. Even if secular thinking were to use Aristotelian categories they would be epistemologically qualified and nonliteral. What we learn from thinking about secular theology is the importance of a double textuality. The credibility of the text of critical self-consciousness is set along side of its texts of imaginative extremity that are either inherited from tradition or are its own imaginative constructions. Theology beside itself is a tactic for thinking what it is not, a tactic for thinking the importance of the other of the unthought. Theology beside itself thinks the unthought metonymically. It is the openness for the other within the constraints of secular self-consciousness. Theological texts of critical con-

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sciousness are orientations to the otherness of texts of extremity. The texts of extremity do not need to be compromised by translation into secular consciousness when secular consciousness can arrange to set itself beside what it is not. It is now the context rather than the content that meets Tillich’s criteria for theological thinking. This is an insight from secular theology that can be applied to the study and pedagogy of the sacred. The critical self-consciousness of the study of religion can think itself into a context of the sacred. It can place itself next to rituals, artifacts and even texts of sacrality. What we talked about as the theological doubling of the text is in the study of religion the more general doubling of the meaning of otherness. In the critical self-consciousness of the study of religion there can be recognized the otherness of the texts or reports of activities that are themselves orientations to otherness. Eliade’s demand for significance and meaning in the study of religion and Charles Long’s demand for a coming to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world can be reconciled with a critical self-consciousness as this selfconsciousness thinks beside itself in the context of religious experience. This means that, like theology, the study of religion must be able to think itself so that it can tactically think what is other than itself. The study of religion must be critical so that it can become postcritical. The study of religion must be critical so that it can talk about the talk of a real and meaningful world.

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Notes 1. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) p. xi. 2. Ibid., p. xi. 3. Lawrence E. Sullivan, Icanchu’s Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1988) pp. 3-4. 4. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958) pp. 10, 21. 5. Ibid., p. 21. 6. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961) p. 117. 7. Ibid., p. 12. 8. Ibid., p. 95. 9. Ibid., p. 30. 10. Mircea Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) p. 153. 11. Mircea Eliade, No Souvenirs: Journal, 1957-1969 trans. Fred H. Johnson, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) p. 310. 12. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, Colorado: The Davies Group Publishers, 1999), p. 7. 13. Sullivan, op. cit. p.616. 14. see note 1. 15. Smith, op. cit. p.59. 16. Ibid., pp. 62-65. 17. Ibid., p. 65. 18. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion trans. Rosemary Sheed (Cleveland: World Publishing Co. Meridian Books, 1963), p. 11. 19. Lawrence E. Sullivan, “Seeking an End to the Primary Text” or “Putting an End to the Text as Primary,” Beyond the Classics?: Essays in Religious Studies and Liberal Education, eds. Frank R. Reynolds and Sheryl L. Burkholt (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990). 20. Ibid., p. 46. 21. Ibid., p. 58. 22. Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), p. 12. 23. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 12, 14. 24. Ibid., p. 238.

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Chapter 10 Person, Subjectivity, Self

Toute métaphysique est à la première personne du singulier. Toute poésie aussi. Louis Aragon

The word or concept, person, in ordinary usage is familiar and not ambiguous because of its close association with the indexical presence of the word I. We think we know what we mean when we say I and that this I is a person, which, in turn, gives a substantial meaning to the word person. There is in the study of religion, because of this certitude of a substantial meaning, a sense that if we talk of the person, persons or people that our study is concrete and real in a way that theoretical reflection is not. This naiveté or nostalgic positivism is, of course, a choice to be forgetful of the etymology of the word and genealogy of the concept person and its complexification through notions of self and subjectivity. The word person is derived from the Latin persona, mask, which many scholars think is from personare, to sound through. The long -o-, however, creates some difficulties in this derivation [see OED]. When the concept of person is thought in relation to the etymology of the word, it carries associations of both masking and sounding through. The person is not a simple I. Grammatical simplicity is pressured by an ontological complexity in the antique understanding of person. It is a commonplace in scholarship to recognize that words, ideas or concepts are imbedded in historical and cultural settings and can be neither isolated or abstracted without being misplaced nor be translated without accounting for the transformation or difference of the cultural milieu into which the word is rendered or onto which it is inscribed. It is especially important to keep the problematic of cultural translation in mind when a word is as important and as familiar as person. What is particularly difficult is that important words, words that orient thinking, can function differently and take on different meanings when there is an epochal shift within culture of what is meant by intelligibility and reality. In the Western philosophical tradition, the shifts in dominance from philosophies of being to philosophies of consciousness to philosophies of language correspond to

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such epochal shifts that entail transformations of the meaning of meaning itself. The referentiality and materiality of meaning are differently located so that the ability to think intelligibly the person, the self or the I of experience is significantly altered. As we explore the history of Western philosophy, it is ambiguous whether the person or self is rooted in the I think, is rooted in the I that is thought, or involves some combination of both. Is it a notion of being, consciousness, or language that makes intelligible the experience of reality? These are not, of course, exclusive options in thinking but can be characterized as dominances and alternatives in any particular grammar of assent. When do we say yes, I understand, or yes, I know? It is especially important in the study of religion to know that the yes I say in the late twentieth century may not be the same yes that was said in the first century. This, however, does not preclude the possibility that a twentieth century yes can be a yes to a first century yes. In the Christological and Trinitarian controversies during the third to fifth centuries of Christian theological thinking, the intertwining of the questions of person and being is expressed in extremis and provides an important contrast with thinking questions of personal identity in later periods dominated by philosophies of consciousness and language. In this early period of Christian theology, the two themes of masking and sounding through are thought in the context of the central affirmation of incarnation. The formulae for understanding personhood are explicitly theological and only secondarily psychological. Theologically, the essential meaning of person is in its application to the three hypostases of the Trinity. In the third century, Tertullian claimed that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost were three personae of one and the same substance. Since Jesus as the Christ, God incarnate, is fully human and fully divine, there is within history the realized possibility of the ecstasis of the person with the oneness of the Logos. The self-communication of God in the Trinity must be proper to God as the absolutely unoriginate origin of the plenitude of being itself. In the personae of the Trinity, this being is communicated and yet undiminished. What sounds through the Trinitarian personae is the Logos of being. If the Trinitarian formulation is paradigmatic of communicative salvation, it would also appear that the authentication of the person is in the transcendence of finitude through the union with God, the original plenitude of being. The finite person, in other words, is not a self-sufficient reality. The person is the persona, mask or hypostasis of a reality that sounds through it. It may be oversimplified but not inaccurate to say that the person of philosophies of being is a metaphysical I. It is a notion that is incomplete

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in-itself. The recognition of its completeness is always elsewhere in a realm of essences or in the purity of being or in the presence of being. The person of Western antiquity and the middle ages is profoundly different from the self of philosophies of consciousness that emerge in the Reformation and in the Age of Reason. Although less specifically philosophical than their predecessors and successors, the reformers shifted the authorization of Christian experience from an institutional base to the experience of the individual. Reformation themes such as sola scriptura, sola fides, sola gratia and the priesthood of all believers theologically enfranchise a concept of an experienced self that is consciously reflexive. In the Reformation what is reflected in this reflexivity is not simply the consciousness of consciousness but the consciousness of guilt. Luther and Calvin bring consciousness to a mindfulness of freedom but also to a recognition of human misery. Paradoxically, the Reformation enfranchises the concept of the self by putting the self into question. Calvin begins his Institutes of the Christian Religion [1559] by explicitly claiming that there is no knowledge of God or self unless there is a knowledge of both. To look upon oneself is to turn thinking to a contemplation of God and it is the knowledge of God that convinces us of our “unrighteousness, foulness, folly, and impurity.”1 The Reformation valued the concept of the self in a soteriological problematic whereas with the Age of Reason, the self comes to be understood primarily within an epistemological problematic. There is no one event or thinker that can be definitively identified with an epochal epistemic shift in a culture. It is convenient, however, to read Descartes’ Meditations on the First Philosophy [1641] as synecdochically emblematic of the epistemic shift initiating the Age of Reason. The heuristic use of radical doubt to clear away any uncertainties was, as Descartes suggested, a removal from below of the foundation of the whole edifice of thinking and belief. This deracination meant that thinking had no recourse to notions of being other than itself or to those given within itself. What Descartes discovered is that when thinking is radical enough in the employment of methodical doubt, it can suspend judgment on all existence and any specific formulations of being. The philosophy of being is bracketed in and by the darkness of doubt. In its awakening, doubt suppresses the appeal of the self beyond itself. Within this framework, the point of reference for the determination of meaning is consciousness, the I thinking, rather than being. Being is methodologically subordinate to consciousness when thinking incorporates its capacity for radical doubting. This doubting, which is a thinking, is also a consciousness of thinking. Descartes can affirm that he is not

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nothing because he is conscious of being something in and through the very act of consciousness itself. The “proposition I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me, or conceived in my mind.”2 I think and I am are affirmed together. Since being is not known as independent of thinking, it is known in the being of the self. The being of the self is known as subjectivity. Accordingly, the problem of the person is the problem of the subject. Even the metaphysical I is now thought in the first person singular. The importance of this shift can be thought in the transmogrification of transcendent concepts of philosophies of being into transcendental concepts in the development of Enlightenment philosophies of consciousness. This move might be conceived of as a disfiguration, for all thinking has to think and justify itself on a plane of immanence. Transcendence is reinscribed as a formulation of immanence. There are numerous formulations of minimal units of intelligibility during the Enlightenment that are restricted to a plane of immanence. Locke’s idea is such a minimal and aporetic formulation that we cannot get behind or beyond. Berkeley further radicalizes a rational empirical vision when he proclaims that experience will only allow us to affirm that esse is percipi. Essence is bound to the immanence of perception. There is no justification for talk about a concrete realm of essences or concrete realm of things independent of experience. This is an epistemological constraint recognizing subjectivity as the arbiter of meaning and not an ontological constraint. This epistemological shift leaves no justification for talk of a pure subjectivity. This is clear in Descartes’ third Meditation and is further developed and problematized by Hume and Kant. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason [1781, 1787] is as emblematic of the close of the Enlightenment project as Descartes’ Meditations is emblematic of the opening of the Age of Reason. The notion of a pure subjectivity is immediately compromised by the quality and range of subjective experience and by the interrogation of the conditions that make subjective consciousness possible. The impurity of the self noted by the Reformers in a quest for salvation is noted by Enlightenment philosophers in a quest for knowledge. Consciousness can be reflexive but its reflexivity is an after-effect. Consciousness is conscious of something before it can be conscious of itself. Thinking is implicated in an otherness that is constitutive of its presentment. The status of concepts of otherness in the processes of thinking is not immediately self-evident. In the mediated reality of thinking, it is not clear whether the experience of otherness is an experience of what is transcendent of the self or is an experience of what is transcendental to consciousness.

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A problem to be recognized is that the beginning of an epistemological interrogation is not a pure beginning but is a beginning in a middle. Techniques like Descartes’ radical doubt can only simulate a pure beginning. Descartes only works toward a beginning as he ends his first evening of meditation. In most cases, a radical bracketing or suspension of judgment is actually a methodological sleight-of-hand rather than a suspension of belief. The cogito of Descartes’ second night of meditation acknowledges that we never really stop thinking the I think. Saying “I” of the I think appears to be a habit. This is an insight of David Hume. There are tendencies of mind that repeat themselves and have formed habits that we know as subjectivity. We say “I” in the ordinariness or vulgarity of consciousness before consciousness is able to fold on itself and think of itself as a subject. We are always already in language and are always already in the habit of subjectivity before constructing a notion of the self as subjectivity. Hume’s investigation of the laws of association on which we base complex ideas does not yield an immediate experience of a necessary connection in a nexus of a subjective and objective world. It is repetition and the constant conjunction of saying the “I” with phenomenal presentation of experience that gives force and vivacity to a probable assertion that there is an I that thinks a world. The Humean world is an immanent world of surface effects whose foldings constitute the objective subject. Kant’s transcendental questioning of the conditions that make knowledge of an object possible is not an unreasonable step beyond Hume’s modest notion of a habit of subjectivity. Kantian idealism, like Berkeleyan idealism, is first of all a radical empiricism. The emergent concept of self is a qualification of empiricism. The importance of this observation emerges when it is recognized that the self is unavoidably implicated in an alterity. Thus, alterity will be immanently experienced rather than transcendentally augmented as philosophers of being insist. When the constitution of identity is thought through categories that are transcendental and hence transcendent and inaccessible in any directly objective way, there is transformation in the notion of the person-self and its complex relationship with otherness. Transcendence in thinking does not guarantee a relationship to any transcendent reality. Kant’s active faculties of thought, imagination, understanding and reason, most importantly reference the processes of thinking and thereby compromise the meaning of external referentiality. Transcendental inquiry in an empirical frame develops a formal aesthetic that reveals the constructedness or phenomenality of the world and the constructedness of the subject in the knowing of the world. Just as there is no easy access to a world of things-in-themselves, there is no easy access

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to a pure subjectivity behind the identity of a person. The notions of a pure and true world or pure and true self are suspended in the suspicion that the processes constitutive of the phenomenality of experience are themselves complex and impure. Experiential intuition is compromised by the formal conditions of its possibility and the transcendental unity of apperception is conditioned by the heterology of forces and things known a posteriori although contributing to the constitution of this unity. The transcendental unity of apperception is not a substance but a ghostly substrata known only in the after-effects of thinking. We are able to exercise the habit of saying “I” and “I think” even when what is thought is diverse and fragmented. The subject experienced in the transcendental unity of apperception, which is itself an effect of a differential series of active formal processes, can then be asserted as the basic meaning of the person in an epistemological construct. This self or person of pure reason was certainly not satisfying to Kant. There is a legitimate and illegitimate employment of the active faculties and what is clear is that only phenomena can be subject to the faculties of knowledge. The dreams of the imagination, the transcendental employment of understanding to things-in-themselves, and the speculative illusions of reason all neglect the limits of thinking revealed in his critique. The subject can be known as object only in the phenomenality of experience. Kant sought to resolve the attenuation of the meaning of the self and the inaccessibility of the thing-in-itself in pure reason by turning to practical reason. Reason has a practical as well as a speculative interest. As a thing-initself and not an object understood, the self can be thought of as spontaneous and free. Reason can legislate the faculty of desire, which is an act of the will. That is, the faculty of desire finds its determination in itself as will and not as an object or content of thought. When pure practical reason is uncontaminated by sensible interest, it can direct the will to think a logical absolute defining a moral action as an action whose maxim can be conceived without contradiction. The moral law is a pure form of universal legislation; it is reason in its extreme accomplishment. The freedom that can will a categorical imperative is legislative and not sensible. This freedom of the will is a thing-in-itself being a thing-in-itself instead of being reduced to a knowing of a thing-in-itself. The relationship between pure and practical reason is always problematic. It in some ways reinscribes the problem of the Critique of Pure Reason by separating suprasensible nature from sensible nature, the noumenal from the phenomenal worlds. Kant wants to fill the abyss separating these worlds. He thought the suprasensible will could influence the sensible world. The

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suprasensible world must have sensible effects. The moral law would be empty and collapse if there were no conditions by which the faculty of desire could legislate over objects. Kant does not and perhaps cannot establish an objective accord between the faculties of knowledge and desire. It is almost as if he believes in the efficacy of the reason of will in the sensible world, which is not knowable to the reason of understanding the sensible world. In an odd way the suprasensible is the unknowable substratum of the sensible. This reality can only be felt. Through forcing one to think, feeling is an intuition for which no concept is adequate. The Kantian person-self is not less than rational but more than rational. The faculties of the self are known representationally as knowing, desiring and feeling. Their accord is their discord in as much as they complement each other by pointing to an otherness that is profoundly manifest in their differences. They jointly refute the fullness of the phenomenality of the world. That there is always something other about the self when it is interrogated transcendentally opened a door to suspicions and problems deeper than Kant even thought. Kant gave articulate expression to what Calvin called the fallibility of thinking; but, Calvin also wrote of the perversity of the intellect that, in the wake of Kant, was given diverse and perplexing expression by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Illusion can be more than error or the illegitimate use of reason. It can be cunning distortion arising out of the ideologies of class interests, the weakness of resentment or the vagaries of desire. The hermeneutics of suspicion announces a new sensibility that alters what we can mean by a person. The problematics of representation identified with the shift from philosophies of being to philosophies of consciousness certainly are not resolved by a new shift to philosophies of language but instead are co-mingled with a problematics of communication. Representation is complicated by the recognition of the materiality of its expression. What we learned from Kant is that objective knowledge is not intuitively immediate and what we learned from Marx, Nietzsche and Freud is that many of the mediating conditions for the expression of knowledge are not disinterested elements or a neutral substratum. Thinking is marked on a plane of immanence that is not a tabula rasa. The self of the Enlightenment lost its innocence in the nineteenth century. It appears that the infrastructure of consciousness is heterological and not pure a priori forms. Kant’s critical philosophy could never come to a simple closure. The notions of subject and person associated with the bedrock of the I think are too often paralogistic arguments confusing a substantial identity with processes of subjectivity. His own notion of the sublime

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was a notion of experience that was more than the understanding, a notion of an intuition to which no concept is adequate. The formal determinations of the a priori are not adequate to the experience of the sublime and perhaps not adequate for a broad range of experiences. The inability to achieve closure anywhere in the experience of consciousness opens a very large door to other complexifications of experience. It is at least possible, and even probable after the critiques of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, that there are, if not other transcendental structures, at least quasi-transcendental structures that suggest that illusion is less benign than error. Kant, using the criteria of apodictic certainty and universality to identify and understand the a priori structures and procedures of thinking, curiously and perhaps unwittingly undid the confidence and sense of certainty that characterizes the spirit of the Enlightenment; by deracinating and regulating reason, he became a direct benefactor to the nineteenth century hermeneutics of suspicion. The Kantian problematic separating representation and referentiality was reinscribed in the troubled awarenesses of the philosophies of language. The Nietzschean understanding of all philosophy as interpretation and truth as metaphorical, followed by the positivistic inability to reduce language usage to the univocity of a perfect dictionary, heralded the coming of a new sensibility sometimes now characterized as postmodern. The move to philosophies of language became a move to a culture of signs or simulacra. According to Paul Ricoeur, “for Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, the fundamental category of consciousness is the relation hidden-shown or, if you prefer, simulated-manifested.”3 This binary tension was not resolved by the reduced empiricism or refined logic of positivistic sensibilities. Incompleteness, undecidability, indeterminancy, contingency, relativity, and the overdetermination of meaning are terms more indexical of the reflexivity of consciousness thinking about its use of language in language than are clarity, distinctness and univocity. From a traditional perspective, postmodernism speaks a language, as Mark C. Taylor writes, “of irrevocable loss and incurable fault.”4 Taylor further extends these characteristics of postmodernism by thematically amplifying the noted rift in thinking and saying that a postmodern a/theological agenda must address: [1]the death of God, [2] the disappearance of the self, [3] the end of history, and [4] the closure of the book.5 These themes implicate each other and any one of them can be a starting point for assessing the epochal shift that is the shift to philosophies of language or more generally postmodernism. It is the disappearance of the self that is most immediately related to our subject, person. More precisely, it is the definition of self as subjectivity

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that is obscured by the notion of the disappearance of the self. The problem is that the person as a self is dispersed and disseminated over a range of experience that is not subsumable under the transcendental unity of apperception. There are experiences that mark discontinuities or ruptures in our thinking in which the ruptures can be thought as wounds but not thought in themselves. I can think about there being a fissure but I do not think the fissure itself. What is present to consciousness is an absence or a deformation so that what is present is in fact absent. The subject is subjected to what it is not and does not control. The assault on the adequacy of modern conceptions of the self can all be seen as a minimum Nietzschean thematic; but, it was with the development of psychoanalysis by Freud that these themes entered the mainstream of culture. It is Freud who brought a not fully assimilable It to the thinking of the self that thickly overdetermined the meaning of self or person for the twentieth century. (The Marxist critique is probably too much compromised by the political need for a scientific materialism to get a clear sense of the epistemological and linguistic dilemma of a postmodern sensibility). Although there is very little in the Freudian corpus that suggests that he thought he was addressing an epistemological problem in philosophical language, he reinscribed the Kantian critique with guile and cunning. The Freudian subject constructs a world and a self without innocence. It is not the self of pure practical reason that is enunciated in the faculty of desire. It is, instead, the polymorphously perverse child of the body that pressures the formation of ego consciousness in diverse and sometimes distorted representational schemes that have to be accounted for in the presentment of the world and the self. The displaced subject of postmodernism in philosophies of language involves a reversal of Enlightenment notions of referentiality that is as radical as the moves that gave primacy to the self as subjectivity from Descartes to Kant. The I think of the cogito is not an adequate container for the increasingly complex I am that emerges from the legacy of the nineteenth century hermeneutics of suspicion. The dependence of rationality for a linguistic exfoliation in its expression subjects the subject to all of the ambiguities of language in its primary metaphoricity and in its overdetermination in a venue that is not always or fully conscious. There is no return to a singular concept of being or any univocal understanding of language subordinate to a notion of being. Instead, the subject is disseminated beyond itself in realities that are not under its control even though the primary reference of experience remains in the notion of the self as subject. The postmodern person is an amalgam of the person of philosophies of being and philosophies

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of consciousness without either the transcendent unity of being or the transcendental unity of apperception in consciousness. Who is this person? It is not the person of psychoanalytic adaptations to ego psychology or object relations theory. It now appears that Freud’s work was more important in marking a cultural epistemic shift than in providing a viable psychotherapeutic model for the twentieth century. The various attempts to present psychoanalysis as a science have too often obscured Freud’s troubling discovery or construction of a notion of a dynamic unconscious implicating the experience of the person in both primary and secondary processes of thinking. The identity of the self as subjectivity is now only part of the human story. After Nietzsche and Marx it is obvious that there are social and linguistic formations that are known subjectively but do not derive from subjectivity. However, with Freud there is a psychological urgency to recognizing that there are processes contributing to the being there of the self, processes that are other than those of subjective consciousness. From as early as Freud’s “Project” of 1895, there is a recognition of what Ricoeur calls a nonhermeneutic state of the system.6 Freud’s first topography of systems conscious/preconscious and unconscious introduces relations of force or an energetics that marks discourses of meaning that are not identical with the representation of meanings. The questions of meaning and force collide or coincide in the psychic representation of force. A biological reality is thought in the language of psychic reality. What goes on in the primary work that brings a drive to differential psychic representation is known not in itself but only as a trace, after-effect or symptom in the secondariness of conscious thinking. The forces that Freud introduces into the equation of becoming conscious are not the procedural action of the schematism for the universal or necessary formal conditions or considerations introduced by Kant and knowable through a transcendental critique. The paradigm for interpretation that Freud thought would usher in the twentieth century was not an explicitly epistemological critique but was instead his self-analysis articulated in The Interpretation of Dreams. [1900] Formal considerations are only a part of the model introduced by Freud. Freud inserts formulations of thinking about thinking in the darkness of desire. The dream is a “royal road” into the unconscious because in the dream the stratagems of desire are writ large and are at least analogically exemplary of the formation of culture, including religion. It is not so much the dream but the “dream-work” that complicates or deepens the epistemological crises of postmodernism. The separations of the phenomenality of experience are complicated beyond the demand to account for the formalization of spatial and temporal determinations by the possibility of disguise.

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There are psychological as well as transcendental illusions. The “dreamwork” adds to the Kantian problematic of considerations of representability the possibilities of displacement, condensation and secondary revision as procedures for making manifest a content to be known. The “dream-work” is an architectonic elaboration of what we know as a language of desire. In Freud, “The entire drama of dreams is…generalized to the dimensions of a universal poetics…[A]rt, morality and religion are analogous figures or variants of the oneiric mask.”7 Psychoanalysis may be thought of as an epistemology of the darkness of desire, which transforms the hermeneutics of culture in general and the assessment of the person within culture in particular. It is the organic complex of the person that always makes the idealization of meaning in consciousness suspect. The force of desire is not so much a problem of valuation within conscious deliberation as it is a problem because of its inaccessibility and inassessability in conditioning the presentations that come to consciousness. Some of the work of desire is already done by the time we have the privileged moments of consciousness. Consciousness, therefore, cannot tell the tale of its origination. Nor can it immediately witness to the forces of desire in its own originating meaning. The meaning that consciousness knows is a deferred meaning. Its presentment is secondary. A complicating factor in assessing the importance of Freud’s understanding for a twentieth century conception of person or self is that the cultural implications of his basic insights were too dark or nihilistic for those who followed in the wake of his thinking. Civilization and Its Discontents is uncompromising in maintaining a tension in the middle of any human pursuit of happiness. The Freudian promise of transforming “hysterical misery into common unhappiness” is not a sufficient palliative for many people.8 The goal of a well-adjusted personality became a therapeutic desideratum allied with demands of the ego that were sometimes forgetful of the importance of Freud’s emphasis on the It to the unconscious. [Es is translated as id in common practice but it is closer to Freud’s meaning.] In the rejection of the abjection of the real, psychoanalytic thinking became increasingly and curiously forgetful of Freud. What is forgotten, we might now say, is what is most postmodern and theological about Freud in his challenge to the completeness and adequacy of a refined modern philosophical notion of a pure subject and its capacities for intuition, understanding, and reason. The return to Freud is a theme that is most notable in French discussions of psychoanalysis and is particularly associated with the work of Jacques Lacan. His understanding of the subversion of the subject, or what

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we have earlier called “the disappearance of the self,” is a recognition of originary wounds where Freud marked the It of the unconscious. Lacan returns to what in Freud’s understanding of the unconscious is inassimilable in consciousness. However, Lacan does not make a simple return to Freud. Rather, he uses the linguistic theory of Saussure and poststructuralist philosophical theory for an interpretation that he understands as a return to Freud. In one of his most remarkable formulations he claims that the Freudian “unconscious is structured like a language.”9 With this suggestion, the importance of psychoanalysis is immediately extended into discussions of language, discourse theory, textuality and text production. Psychoanalysis is interpreted postmodernly thereby giving its character to what is meant by postmodern discourse. Lacan’s words are not Freud’s words in some very important ways. Freud’s two topographies, first the systems preconscious/conscious and unconscious and later the id, ego and superego are replaced or subordinated to a topography of orders of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. The real includes the unconscious or “the order of the unrealized.”10 The infantile dynamic focuses especially on a “mirror stage” that ironically is a specific refutation of the ideal of thinking being a mirror of nature. During the mirror stage, sometime in the interval of infancy between six and eighteen months, the reflected image of the whole body is substituted for the I, which was primordially precipitated in the autoerotic relationship to the partial objects of the fragmented body. The image of the I is separated from the subjective primacy of perception of the fragmented body. The I-image can only be indexed on an imaginary register. What is lost is the body and with it the intentional molecular multiplicity of the subject. In Lacan’s understanding, there is no simple epistemological or psychological access to the order of the real. There is no thinking that can contain the real. The imaginary I is a substitution for the I that is disseminated throughout the polymorphously erotic body of infancy and constitutes a fundamental loss of the real. The body of the imaginary I is a body without organs. That is, the body of the imaginary is a body that is not an organism. For these reasons, there is, Jane Gallop notes, an implicit imperative in Lacan’s writings “to break the mirror, an imperative to disrupt the imaginary in order to reach the symbolic.”11 The symbolic order is an order of discourse in which we move from imaginary wholes to a differential sign system. The differential play in the symbolic order is closely akin to what Saussure described as the determination of meaning in the interrelationship and play of differences between signifiers. Lacan accepts Saussure’s distinction between signifiers and the signified but emphasizes the bar separating

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the signifiers from the signified. The signified is absent in the present play of signifiers and thus there is no mimetic reference to the real. The bar in the Saussurian algorithm is for Lacan an aporia so that identity is absolutely only in difference. As Freud clearly stated, we can only know the unconscious as it manifests itself in consciousness. For Lacan this occurs in the symbolic order. But, since the unconscious is what is unthought in thinking, it can manifest itself in the symbolic order only through lacuna, fissures, gaps and deformations. The unconscious inscribes a lack in the symbolic order. It manifests itself in language but is both anticonceptual and inassimilable. In this way it is the other of language in language. The immediate problem for the study of religion implied by this line of analysis is that this is not an other that can be thought. The concept of the person is implicated in an other that is not the other that is thought theologically in articulations instantiating the negativity of the Wholly Other for consciousness or in the more ethnological thinking about the others of other cultures. Lacan’s unthinkable other is the other of the work of the imagination, which functions analogously to Freud’s dream-work, bringing things [experiences] into consciousness and making it possible to think them in consciousness through the differential possibilities of discursive formations. This is how we know what we do not know in the phenomenality of mind. Lacanian alterity implies an ignorance that echoes in the insistent question: “Who is speaking?” Not knowing how to answer the question “Who is speaking?” with any sense of confidence—since thinking and speaking have become such a complex affair as we pass through philosophies of being to philosophies of consciousness to philosophies of language—is a problem if we are trying to understand ourselves or understand someone else. While the notion of person is obviously an existential and psychological issue, it also poses a methodological problem for thinking theologically and for the study of religion. Who is speaking or writing in theological text production? Who is speaking or writing in studies of religion in which there is also the question of the identities of voices of witnessing within the traditions being studied? These questions do not imply a simple loss of the subject or disappearance of the self. There are ideas that are thought, there are books that are written and there are feelings that are felt. The I is complex and may be displaced in its complexification but there is still an existential or felt significance in being able to say “I think” or “I feel.” We can still say “I think” even when we question “who is speaking.” What is lost or displaced is the notion of a pure subject as the referential correlative of the I think. The I think of

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the cogito has always been impure because it has always been implicated in the complexity of the I am. In a simple formulation the Cartesian subject is compromised by Gertrude Stein’s I am I because my little dog knows me. Being complicates thinking and little dogs complicate being. The ancient themes of “masking and sounding through” associated with the notion of the persona are reinscribed in the contemporary moment with added ambiguities or difficulties in the concepts or notions of self, subject, person, or I. The mask is not singular but is the all-pervasive culture of the simulacra elaborated by Nietzsche in the tropic transformation of all discourse and deeply psychologized by Freud in the elaboration of the “dream-work” as constitutive processes in the making of all culture. What sounds through is not a clarion call of being to being, but, a cacophony of voices including all the little things and little histories marked by diverse interests and the vagaries of desire. As we go forward in trying to understand culture and religion, the notion or concept of the person is not simply a problem or solution to the difficulties of problems in thinking culture. The I think insists on its importance in any equations of thought that formulate orientations to reality. At the same time the I am insists on its presence and complexity within these same equations. Cultural and religious studies have to define themselves within the tension of this double insistence. There are some obvious pragmatic responses to this recognition. Kant, through the power of his own criticisms, saw that in their highest expressions there was a discord among the faculties of knowing, desiring and feeling. The practical question is whether there can be an accord in the midst of this discord. Can there be a complementarity of thinking strategies or heuristic arrangements that access the diverse empiricities that complicate the definition of the person? The cathartic power of radical postmodern criticism in writing unreadable texts, forcing recognition of the opaque materiality of texts, or giving a carnivalesque crazing to the surface of thinking in the valuation of an errant thinking all contribute to a style of noncontainment of thinking without silencing its voice. Thinking instantiates an experience of the person even when it is not the pure thinking of philosophies of consciousness or even when it is not a response to the call of being with or without angelic and other complicated mediators in philosophies of being. The genealogical legacy of the concept of person means that thinking cannot exclusively fixate its interrogation on either the importance of “masking” or “sounding through” without trivializing its own capacities. It would be a mistake to construct a margin of safety by too narrowly defining

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the parameters of what thinking cannot think just as it would be a mistake to let thinking uncritically ignore its finite limitations. Who is speaking? In the philosophies of being this was most commonly a theological question with psychological shadows. In the philosophies of consciousness this was most commonly an epistemological question that cast shadows internal to its own interrogations always threatening the containing power of its self-imposed boundaries. In the philosophies of language this is most commonly a linguistic and psychological question with unrecognized theological shadows. The concept of person in all of its limitations and complications enfranchises a theological exigency in thinking. The concept of person implicates philosophies of being, consciousness, and language in soteriological questions even when they modestly prescind from these questions. It is a concept that has a history of not being contained. It insinuates itself on the other side of any provisionally defined boundaries and is itself the explicit or shadowed presence of the theological question of what makes a life significant. The continual presence of this concept is the richness of a trace of the other in and of any discipline of language.

References Calvin, Jean. 1960. Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press. Descartes, Rene. 1960. Discourse on Method and Meditations translated by Laurence J. Lafleur. Indianapolis: The Liberal Arts Press. Gallop, Jane. 1985. Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation translated by Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press. Taylor, Mark. 1984. Erring: A Postmodern A/theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), p. 37. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations trans. Laurence J. LaFleur (Indianapolis: The Liberal Arts Press, 1960), p. 79. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 33. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 6. Ibid., pp. 19-97. Ricoeur, p. 69. Ibid., p. 162. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962),. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: Book XI trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 20. Ibid., p. 22. Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 59.

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Chapter 11 The Ambiguous Gift of Desire

The world is all that is the case. Ludwig Wittgenstein What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you live and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will return to you.”… Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” Friedrich Nietzsche The statement that God is being-itself is a nonsymbolic statement. Paul Tillich

I want to think about a gift, a bent, a capacity, a leaning, and a power within the always already given of consciousness. I want to think about desire as an ambiguous gift, as the ambiguity of the given of consciousness. The originariness of consciousness at the beginning of what we know as thinking, at what we know as the capacity for reflexivity, is not itself a witness to the origin of consciousness. Whatever image of thought we will be working with will be a belated achievement of thinking. The memory of my first thoughts and my first words have been erased, forgotten or eroded in the consciousness that I now know. The epigrams of Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Tillich have a discordant resonance with each other as they make sense of the experience of consciousness. The demand that I experience in the wake of their voices is to think and speak on a plane of immanence. Yes, the world is the case; yes, there will be nothing new in it; and, yes, nonsymbolically the only proposition that I can say of God is that God is being-itself. Nonsymbolically, neither God nor being-itself can be mystified to say anything other that what I

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experience as the world that is the case. We do not begin with mystification. We begin with consciousness. We begin with objective consciousness. That is, in our noncontroversial experience, we know consciousness as consciousness takes an object. I know of no meaningful distinction between image and object in the theater of consciousness before consciousness folds on itself. In its primary manifestation, what we mean by the real is what we mean by consciousness. Problematizing consciousness and problematizing the real is a work or achievement within consciousness although in the phenomenality of experience it is not necessarily a highly complex work or achievement. In our very ordinary experience consciousness manifests a capacity for an after-thinking. It can fold on itself. Consciousness can take its past thinking as an object of its present thinking. This seems to be an obvious capacity not unlike the capacity to choose to raise one’s arm. We witness these capacities even if we do not understand them. To whatever we bear witness in our experience, the plane of consciousness in that witness is a plane of immanence. The insistence that thinking even in figures of transcendence is inscribed on a plane of immanence is not an attempt to be reductive. It is instead a simple hesitancy that recognizes that thinking can lose itself in its capacity for complexification before it has assessed what is given in what we might call presentment of mind. There is a presence to mind, or consciousness, that in its presence can be simple. I can see a tree and I can think the image of a dog. I can do all of this without an understanding of neurophysiology, theories of representation or theories of cultural politics. There is a certain obviousness and incorrigibility about being able to see a tree or think a dog. Not only do these experiences insist on themselves but my thinking resists the imposition of any theory that says that I can’t see a tree or think a dog when the phenomenality of my experience includes a specifically perceived tree and a specifically imagined dog. There is a certain self-authenticating credibility about the affirmation that what is present to consciousness is present to consciousness. To say that I am conscious is not to say anything about the unconscious, what is not yet conscious, any “dark precursor” to consciousness, or the ontological status of images, concepts or words.1 I am conscious of a world and I do not know what this world is; and, I am conscious of being conscious and I do not know what the I is that is conscious of being conscious. In the givenness of consciousness of the world I do not know the structure of the world or the infrastructure of the consciousness knowing the world. I am conscious and, because of what I do not know in the immediacy of the experience of being conscious, I am problematically conscious.

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I am interrogatively conscious and in this sense transcendentally conscious. That is, consciousness can interrogate the conditions of its own possibility. Consciousness can be consciousness of such an interrogative possibility just as it can see a tree and think a dog. Consciousness as a given may not be valued as a gift but it does have a certain serendipitous incorrigibility in its presentment. In the simplest manifestation of conscious phenomenality, a thereness of mind or thereness of the world, it doesn’t tell the tale of its genealogy. This is why we do not have confidence in first philosophy as an independent and unique thinking about being, consciousness, or language. The originariness of our thinking that is an always already experience is not identical with its origin. The thinking of being qua being, the cogito, or a grammatology are all elaborations or complexifications that if willed are willed as an after-thinking of the given phenomenality of consciousness. If we are radically and skeptically empirical and admit as consciousness only what is given as consciousness, empiricism begins to look like a Berkeleyan idealism where we are only enfranchised to say that esse is percipi and quickly slip into the cul de sac of Santayana’s solipsism of the present moment.2 What is evident is that thinkers of idealism or solipsism never stay with the minimalism of their thinking by their own engaging in practices aimed at the refutation of idealism [Kant] or in evoking God [Berkeley] or animal faith [Santayana] within the processes of thinking. At the end of the twentieth century it is clear that if philosophy has traversed the trajectory from philosophies of being to philosophies of consciousness to philosophies of language that the basic concepts in these philosophies such as being, subjectivity, archewriting are themselves aporetic formulations or are intimately intertwined with aporetic formulations such as God, the transcendental imagination or différance that mark rifts, undecidabilities, incompleteness or indeterminacy on any plane of immanence. Thinking can secondarily formulate first principles that are not in themselves first principles. This recognition is a catharsis. Ironically, radical thinking regularly deracinates itself. It makes its own texts insecure by pushing them to the limits of their determinateness. Yes, it makes sense for Tillich in the rigorousness of his analysis of the existential situation to say that “[t]he statement that God is being-itself is a nonsymbolic statement.”3 On a plane of immanence this is saying that God is dead. On a plane of immanence the procedure of the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding is a displacement or loss of the self and différance is the closure of the book and the beginning of writing as an endless play of signifying. What we have witnessed and called postmodern philosophy and theology are deconstructionist writings

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of the death of God as the unbearable lightness of being qua being and in the wake of the death of God the experience of the displacement of the subject or loss of the unified self.4 It is possible that we are too far removed from the explanatory power of philosophies of being to be deeply troubled by the death of God; but, most of us are still troubled by the displacement of subjectivity or loss of a unified self that is an ungrounding of truth and meaning. It is hard to give up the little woman or little man of interiority making sense out of watching the theater of the play of phenomenal images and thus to think of the theater itself as the interiority of thinking. It is hard to think of sense or meaning as appearances functionally rooted in contingent relationships of disparate forces. It is hard to think of singularities clustered in multiplicities constituting empiricities in the phenomenality of appearance that we cannot get behind because they are themselves the conditions of what is given as consciousness. It is hard to give up an image of thinking that simulates the reflexivity of thinking without ever being able to confirm the identity of the image with the thinking of which it is its belated or deferred effect. All of these recognitions are based on evidence within thinking that its phenomenal manifestations are subverted or transcended by its own capacities to construct figurations of a primary process as a condition for the secondary manifestation that we know as the first meaning of thinking. That is, consciousness subverts itself with its capacity to think the idea of the unconscious or not yet conscious as a response to understand the presence of anomalous parapraxes in the psychopathology of everyday life. A concept like the unconscious is the achievement of an alogical negative fissuring of the phenomenal display of experience. There can also be a transcendence of consciousness that fissures its phenomenal display by its capacity to complexify its phenomenal display into configurations of meaning that are not commensurate with its own logic. Whitehead’s causal efficacy is a necessary condition for presentational immediacy but it is never contained within its explanatory presence. Deleuze’s “dark precursor” for a logic of sense is already a part of reality that is a condition for understanding and not its result. Although, paradoxically, the concept is a result of the thinking that we call understanding. The given of consciousness is not only the simple given of the phenomenality of present images. This given includes also a given capacity, gift, or bent to complexify itself in configurations of extremity, reflexivities, folds, tropes and nonconcepts. That we can think theologically, cosmologically or metaphysically is ascertained by the fact of thinking theologically, cosmologically or metaphysically.

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This gift, capacity or bent is an exigency of thinking that in its extreme expression is theological. We are capable of thinking the notion of “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” When this capacity is experienced as a need we can name it desire. Desire is an ambiguous gift. The capacity to formulate and think a term of the ontological argument secures an affirmation of the existence of such a capacity to think. It marks or remarks a desire for ultimacy. It is a formal achievement of thinking. It does not secure a content for thinking. There is a distinction between the formal and material infrastructure of thinking. Thinking the concept of “that than which nothing greater can be thought” does not provide an image. It is, as Tillich understood, a nonsymbolic concept. To have an ultimate concern says much about what it means to be consciously human. But, it does not in-itself provide an object or tell us about the object of the ultimate concern. Desire is an ambiguous gift because it is an unfinished reality. Desire cannot guarantee its satisfaction. Desire is an ambiguous gift of the givenness of consciousness because, although it is an elaboration of this given, it is itself hard to think. Desire is a gift within the given that is unlike the clarity and distinctness of the phenomenality of experience that is presentationally immediate. Desire hints that the image of thought that resolves itself into identities and has dominated so much of the western philosophical tradition is not adequate. The image is prephilosophical and has always troubled philosophy by being able to be troubled by philosophy. The image is probably generated alongside a faithful habit or habit of faith rather than being the result of the analysis of the phenomenality of experience. In the dialectic of fictional exfoliations of Nietzschean philosophy, Milan Kundera names this habit of faith a categorical agreement with being. Behind all the European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being.5 He calls the aesthetic ideal of this agreement kitsch. “[K]itsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.”6 It excludes from its paradise any excitement, bodily stains or excrement, and desire. The problem with an image of a categorical agreement with being is that it requires a philosophy of identity to realize itself and identity is analytically

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troubled by the need for third form [Plato], phantasms [The Aristotelian tradition] or a transcendental imagination [Kant]. It always seems to be the third that is a hybrid and not pure. It appears that whenever we rigorously think about thinking that identities are surface effects of differences. Identity is among simulacra. What drops out of sight is the generation of the image, the thickness of the body and the dark precursor of sense or the complex realm of formal possibility imbedded in the materiality of the world that is the case. To think only about identities is to be bound to a surface simplicity. In this clean well-lighted place thinking is too easily trivialized. There is neither depth nor an equivalent surface complexity. We lose meaning philosophically and affect psychologically. This thinking is not enough. It is kitsch because it is a moral abstraction. It is a moral abstraction that is challenged by the aesthetic capacity for thinking to reflexively complexify itself. It is a moral abstraction that denies its genealogy. It is a forgetfulness that forgets its forgetfulness. As we have been taught by Deleuze, Nietzsche’s introduction of sense and value into philosophical thinking would make us suspicious of any epistemology that is dependent upon a moral abstraction no matter how good it makes us feel. The gift of desire that comes with the givenness of consciousness is the felt capacity to ingress into the thinking process the experience of whatever we call the thirdness of form so that the process repeats life but always with a difference. Anything less than a thinking about thinking that can express its own creativity is a thinking that will be disappointing. In the experience of its productive secondariness, thinking needs to be able to value the creativity of its productive imagination. To be responsive to its own desire, thinking needs to be able to value those products that can function heuristically and often relativistically in its further complexification and satisfaction. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that “[t]he thought which is born in thought, the act of thinking which is neither given by innateness nor presupposed by reminiscence but engendered in its genitality, is a thought without image.”7 Those who read Deleuze know that in this quote it is a particular image that Deleuze is rejecting, an image of thinking sameness, an image of a categorical agreement with being. It is the becoming of thinking, the making of arrangements or rhizomorphiclike assemblages that better expresses thought born in the always already of thinking.8 We need different concepts to think thinking in its genitality or desire.9 All of this emphasis on thinking out of thinking can mislead us back to Descartes’ cogito. I think that this would be a mistake because it is possible

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to caricature Descartes and read his Meditations as a reinscription of the image of thinking as a categorical agreement with being. The Meditations can be read as a creation story. Descartes’ radical doubt is a method of exclusion and forgetfulness. We can forget all of the mess of existence that is not clear and distinctly certain. The self is created as a pure subjectivity and that which is other is brought back through the capacity of a pure subjectivity to think a reality that is more than itself. Under the aegis of a constructed pure subjectivity Descartes can be about the naming of the other. Descartes can name God, the animals or the world. Here, the categorical agreement with being is an agreement with the being or I am of the cogito. Locke complicated the discussion with the aporetic notion of the idea but kept the cogito pure with the notion of the tabula rasa. Berkeley understood that it never made sense to think of the mind as a tabula rasa. The thickness of experience was always too complex of an affair that when reduced to its simplest expression is the relatedness of esse is percipi and not a blank slate that has itself never been experienced. Thinking has a capacity to fold its exteriority into an interiority through formulations of extremity that are the complexifications of reflexivity as a secondary process. There is no subjectivity that can be separated from objectivity in a radical skeptical empiricism. There are only arrangements or associations. When arrangements contract through repetitions we have a habit and that habit is as Hume suggests what we mean by subjectivity when we are unable to establish subjectivity in a causal nexus. Hume is, as Boundas suggests in his reading of Deleuze’s study of Hume, a philosopher of the imagination.10 Hume is the mediating imaginative link between Berkeley’s unconstrained empirical idealism and Kant’s strict transcendental idealism. Kant’s unity of apperception is a Humean habit. This claim is a viable construction when we read backward from Deleuze into Hume and forward from Hume to Kant. The most important implication of Hume’s denial that there is any simple sense impression of a necessary connexion is that it is at the same time a denial of privilege to any “certain way” of thinking that excludes other ways of thinking. Hume invokes taste and sentiment in philosophy and reintroduces desire in giving assent to any particular arguments or arrangements in thinking. “I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence.”11 Thinking is the becoming of habits that have consequences. Thinking that has intensity or force and vivacity is selfauthenticating. Criteria for assent in thinking fall back on thinking itself. This in no way means that thinking is simply willful. The originariness of thinking is experienced as fully contingent and not as fully relative. I am always already thinking. My capacity to complicate that thinking is a given

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capacity within what is already given. A taste for Plato or Kant or Derrida does not privilege these philosophers on their own terms. It instead imports a systematicity, functional or dysfunctional, into an already existing processional nexus. To newly read or think a philosopher’s work is to augment the heterogeneity of the consciousness that is already at work. It is not unlike the importing of new sensations by traveling to new places. The materiality of thinking in spoken or written language imposes on the sensory experience of consciousness as does the materiality of a Gothic cathedral. It doesn’t make sense to say that a cathedral is true and that an airport is untrue or that a horse is true and a cow is untrue. We distinguish these experiences based on their differences and intensities and our tastes. We also do this in our thinking about thinking. Desire seeks intensity in thinking as its satisfaction. Its ambiguity as a gift is that without satisfaction it is a restlessness; and, moves or strategies in thinking to increase intensity can disrupt a secure habit of subjectivity. Arrangements are subject to disordering. Desire is a vectored gift. It moves thinking into difference and not sameness. There is no repetition without difference. There is no movement of sameness. The gift of desire is the language of a trope for acknowledging that the given of consciousness is givenness of a movement. There is no sameness in the phenomenality of conscious experience. Sameness is a construction from familiarity and similarity read back onto the forgetfulness of past conscious experiences. We may desire the security of constructions of sameness in movements of consciousness because of the shadowing sense of a possible disordering; but, this desire conflicts with the self-authenticating desire for intensity. Ironically, the security of sameness can diminish the consciousness that it is trying to secure. The problem with trying to justify or privilege any particular constructions of consciousness is that, as given, there is no inside or outside of consciousness to which consciousness can appeal. Consciousness as a recurrent vectored phenomena can activate new vectors by folding and complexifying itself but then what is still given is consciousness.12 We don’t seem to be able to say anything other than that consciousness is feeling and its measure is its own force and vivacity. Psychologically we experience a diminishment of consciousness when we think and speak without affect and aesthetically we experience a diminishment of consciousness in the blurring of contrast. On all levels, philosophically, psychologically or neurophysiologically, consciousness is manifest or given in a hybrid construction of heterogenous realities or forces. There is always some configuration of a contrast between a figure and a ground or a contrast between two actualities or between actu-

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alities and possibilities. These distinctions are primarily variations on coarse and fine grained descriptive analyses of what we know as the phenomenality of consciousness. The question we face in whatever is the moment of our thinking is not whether we accept the privileged given of consciousness and desire as a gift of possible complexification within that given. We have no choice. The question is what we do with consciousness and its manifest possibilities as given. Can we say yes to what is the case? I think we can only say yes if we realize that desire is bound to the experience of difference. Of course, we can secondarily know and talk about desire as a tropological figuration in the language of difference. And, since the only languages we know are languages of difference, desire can only be reinforced and intensified in its expression. The question of yes or no to the gift of desire is practically a question of whether we in the linguistic elaboration or folding of consciousness will enfranchise or banish the language of desire. I am not talking about words. Words by themselves can pornographically isolate desire from its entailments and risks. Desire is an affair of complexity. It is the freedom of consciousness to augment itself by cathecting its primary process of coming to representation by attending to the heterogenous world of its contextuality, by importing and entertaining the systematicity of order in language and the systematicity of thinking other than itself and by the capacity of consciousness to fold reflexively on itself in the generation of a new order. The question is whether we will strategically and tactically implement desire in what we call and know as thinking. That is, are we willing to say yes to desire by experimentally developing strategies and tactics within our discursive and thinking practices to constantly intertwine the given of actuality with the given of possibility? If we say yes, there are no safe texts. There is no identity to which we can return. The eternal recurrence of the same is the repetition of difference. The courage to say yes resides in the desiring knowledge that we can never exhaust what it means to say yes. In that moment of thinking courage, maybe we understand Nietzsche when he says to his demon: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”13

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Notes 1. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 120. 2. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Indianapolis: The Liberals Arts Press, 1957), p. 24, and George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith, (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 13-20. 3. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Vol. I.( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 238. 4. For an interweaving of concepts of the death of God, the loss of self, the end of history and the closure of the book see Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology. 5. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 238. 6. Ibid., p. 248. 7. Deleuze, p. 167. 8. Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), Chpt. One, Introduction: Rhizome. pp. 3-25. 9. Cf. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 147-148. 10. Translator’s introduction to Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 7. 11. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (London: Oxford University Press, 1896), p. 103. 12. Cf. Paul M. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 101 and Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), pp. 241-243. 13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), pp. 273-274.

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Chapter 12 Thinking Religion

…while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious—there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. Jonathan Z. Smith1 For my purposes, religion will mean orientation—orientation in the ultimate sense, that is, how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world. Charles H. Long2 Probity The field of the study of religion does not have clearly defined boundaries or methodologies that are universally acceptable or applied. Instead, the field has emerged out of a complex of related disciplines primarily from the human sciences that through their diverse applications have made the field responsible to a wide range of phenomena. There is no simple agreement as to what should be studied as religious phenomena or whether there are methods of interrogation that are specific to the field. The dissolution or relativizing of dominant religious and philosophical ideologies through the globalization of the field is a dispersion of formal unities that had at one time been unexamined and considered self-evident. In a postcolonial world the natural attitude is denaturalized and is now representative of specific cultures, classes and interests. The field of religion presents itself as a heterogeneous field of incorrigibles, positivities, empiricities and multiplicities without a unifying discipline that we can fall back upon for orientation and familiarity. Students of religion must now ask whether they can endure the phenomenality of experience without the protection of a theological pretext? We may need an ideology critique before we can probe the matter hidden in the data or repressed through a methodological voluntarism. The only claim that is self-evident is that the data of consciousness is the data of consciousness.

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We certainly need an on-going critique of our own thinking if that thinking is the production of the sense of religion. This is why J. Z. Smith argues that for the student of religion, “self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise, his foremost object of study.”3 We need to hesitate before accepting easy definitions of our interpretive work or easy definitions of religion because the field of data as a whole resists assimilation into all but the most minimal definitions. We must be both tentative and heuristic. To maintain a probity in thought we should make the heuristic assumption that our speeches on religion are addressed to its cultured despisers. That is, we may have to think under conditions not of our own choosing if we want to avoid begging the question of the meaning of religion. It would appear that in the contemporary period the conditions of intelligibility are secular and fully inscribed on a plane of immanence. References to transcendence must at least be indexed on a plane of immanence. Even if the world is not all that is the case it is the world that we know. Anything that is other will have to be other in the world if it is to be knowable. Theology in this context is a self-consciousness or a thinking about thinking that is not in any way artificially restricted. Theology is in this context a thinking religion. In other words, the expertise in self-consciousness that Smith demands of the student of religion is a consciousness of consciousness, a thinking about thinking. It would thus appear that the first interrogation of the meaning of religion is epistemological. We have to access and assess the epistemic status or function of the figurations that we use in the assemblage of data that we are calling religious. We have to decide why we are calling any particular datum religious. This designation is a product of our thinking. If we start in the scholar’s study and in this case the study of Charles H. Long, the minimal definition of religion is orientation but this minimal definition is conditioned by the unconditional formulation of orientation in the ultimate sense. The logic of thinking about religion is a logic of ultimate sense. If we accept the word logic as a notation for gathering and assemblage, the words that stand out as unexplained are ultimate and sense. They may be imbricated in such a way that they will have to be thought together. That is, it may be that the logic of sense is implicated in what is meant by ultimacy. This would have to be determined by deciding whether there is a meaning to sense that is more than our conscious rationality and this would have to be decided within the domain of that conscious rationality. Can consciousness designate a realm that is other than itself and does that realm have any affinity with what consciousness designates as ultimacy? As we learned from neo-orthodoxy and its talk of God, ultimacy has to do with what is wholly other from ordinariness. I am suggesting that we can

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only know this as an epistemic rather than a metaphysical consideration. We stay within the realm of the ordinary to talk about what it is not. We cannot escape from the realm of sense. Thinking religion is about thinking even if it includes talk of God. There are certain points of intersection between the study of religion, philosophy and theology and they all have to do with what is meant by thinking. This is an inheritance of the Age of Reason or, more specifically, the Enlightenment. If Descartes’ cogito is emblematic of a shift to philosophies of consciousness from philosophies of being, the field of religion studies and the disciplines that contribute to the field are still very much, even after the hermeneutics of suspicion, the linguistic turn in philosophy and deconstructive postmodernism, indebted to the attitude of the Enlightenment in the making of sense. As J. Z. Smith very clearly writes, “the academic study of religion is a child of the Enlightenment. This intellectual heritage is revealed in the notion of generic religion as opposed to historical believing communities...[R]eligion was domesticated; it was transformed from pathos to ethos...It was this impulse, this domestication, that made possible the entrance of religious studies into the secular academy. But the price of this entry, to reverse the Steppenwolf formula, is the use of our mind.”4 The generic concept of religion is not innocent of the genealogy of its origination in the Enlightenment. All was not clear and distinct in Enlightenment thinking. There were precursor shadows in Enlightenment epistemologies that are not terribly unlike problematics that have come to mark postmodern sensibilities. There was never a simple empiricism that could ground a simple correspondence theory of truth. Descartes’ reason was complicated by the division of ideas into those that are innate, adventitious, or factitious. Locke’s Ideas are incorrigibles that like his predecessor Duns Scotus’s haecceities or, now, Gilles Deleuze’s singularities, are points of emission rather than points or things that one can get under, around, or behind. Bishop Berkeley’s radically empirical claim that “esse is percipi” exfoliated into a theological idealism. David Hume acknowledges that the idea of necessary connexion required for causal explanation is the result of the habit of a belief associated with the probable intelligibility of the experience of constant conjunction. Kant inscribed and reinscribed processes, which Derrida now calls différance, and he called the transcendental imagination or schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding, into the First and Third Critiques, fissuring the phenomenal from the noumenal world and generating a notion of the sublime which cannot be sublated under epistemic categories or assimilated into objective discourse.

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It appears that critical philosophy has subverted a simplistic understanding of thinking and a fortiori a simplistic understanding of thinking religion. We cannot understand religion without understanding thinking. Paradoxically, it may be that postcritical thinking needs to invent more refined and exact concepts to be distributed across experience to understand the inexactness of thinking experiences. Marking the Field Wherever we are we are always in the middle of culture. That is, we begin in the middle and crawl back through the culture as we constitute a sense of a beginning or crawl forward in constituting the sense of an ending. These beginnings or endings are fictive productions of heuristic strategies since we are in fact always in the middle. First principles or beginnings are always belated and endings or purposes are afterthoughts, that is, thoughts after the ending. We are still in the middle and I think we need a method that does not resist staying in the middle. Peregrinations, wanderings, erring, the carnivalesque are possible images for a nomadic thinking that does not become ideologically rooted in a simplistic notion of Enlightenment truth. In Epiphanies of Darkness I suggested an image drawn from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for rethinking the sense of a root so that we are no longer supporting a system but are instead experimenting with the soil of cultures in their diversity, intractability and heterogeneity.5 Their image is of a rhizome. A rhizome that matures underground and becomes more substantial when its stems spread underground in starts, false starts and blockages. The rhizome is elaboration in itself. Stems reach out that can intertwine other stems. Lines stop\start, intersect, and we have different modalities for argument and thinking. The field of the study of religion, in contrast to some of its contained and intersecting disciplines, is a field of rhizomorphic experimentation. There may be times when this is a stroll; but, I certainly do not want to preclude rigor from this field of experimentation. There are other times when thinking is a vigorous interrogation. New and rigorous concepts can be created and exacting questions can be formulated as part of the on-going experiment. The spreading of the rhizome from its starting point of growth can be the work of description but in my own work it is primarily a work of interrogation. The question, a refracted and minimalized question from theology, that I most often ask in the introduction to religions and cultures is: “How does this culture, peoples or individuals thematize and articulate

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what is real and important for them?” The question is not value neutral but the theological turn does not become vastly intrusive or sometimes even evident until the question is radicalized into formulations such as “What do we take seriously without any reservation?” or “What is that than which nothing greater can be thought?” or “What is our ultimate concern?” Cultures or religions have not always radicalized this question but they do give evidence of some hierarchical structure or else we cannot approach them in the study of religion. A culture’s or community’s sense of what is real and important does not exhaust religious meaning but the interrogation of these values at least give us a place to start. If religion is not implicated in a sense of importance then there is the question of why we would be interested in it all. The word that keeps appearing and also subverts the minimalism I am trying to describe is sense. There has been mentioned the sense of a beginning, the sense of an ending, the sense of importance, the sense of reality and orientation in an ultimate sense. What insists on itself is the notion of sense. And, in every case I am talking about the production of sense that entails a logic of sense.6 Giving sense to meaning is more than a signifying practice although it is implicated in signifying practices. Deleuze notes four dimensions to propositional thinking—denotation, manifestation, signification, and sense.7 Sense is what he calls “the expressed of the proposition…an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition.”8 Sense does not exist without a proposition but neither is it identical with it. Following Husserl, Deleuze writes that “[s]ense is that which is expressed.”9 It is the event that is always already possible. It is not that sense exists and we find it. Thinking is making sense. It is an event that is implicated in denotation, manifestation and signification. Its sense is in excess of the signifying practice. Deleuze refers to sense as extra-being, aliquid.10 It is not that we get behind, around, or below the proposition. There is a singularity to sense. There is a certain impassibility to sense that is implicated in its genesis. Transcendental criticism that attends to sense replaces the old metaphysical Essences with sense and becomes properly genealogical in its method. What is striking is that sense as expression-event is a becoming that is located on surfaces. The transcendental field is a surface for a genealogical interrogation that asks after the conditions that make thinking possible. The plane of immanence is unrestricted and thus the surface is what is profound. The metaphor of depth gives way to complexity, the complexity of surface arrangements, appearances, phantasms. The logic of sense is a re-

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versal of Platonism. Concepts of extremity are not held captive by a notion of transcendence. God must be fully incarnate and thus fully secular. Thus, “it is our epoch which has discovered theology.”11 Thinking the surface can be theological although we don’t always recognize it as theological. Even thinking religion doesn’t always recognize when it is theological. Problematizing the Field: Surfaces and Objects I am certainly suggesting that work within the field of the study of religion will require interrogative strategies and that we will try to develop heuristic structures to anticipate the intelligibility and sense of the experience under question. There is alongside of this work another characteristic of our studies that I want to bring to some accounting. That is that the nature of the surfaces and sometimes objects or practices of religious experience approached through the criteria of what is valued as real and important within a culture are often those surfaces, objects or practices that defamiliarize us with the ordinariness of our experiences. Not only do we interrogate what we have gathered as data but the adequacy of our interpretations and orientations is itself interrogated by the data. The surface of experience, the plane of immanence, is highly variegated. It is populated by heterogenous singularities and other constructs, expressivities, that make sense and implicate thinking beyond its immediate perspective and particularity. Parables and paradoxes, myths and legends, texts and rituals, buildings and beliefs, all populate this surface along with the rest of what we call the world. Julia Kristeva draws particular attention to certain beliefs, doxa, that are part of the formulations within the habit of thinking that resist symbolization and resist assimilation into what Lacanians would call the symbolic realm. If these beliefs are in the modality of certainty she calls them protodoxa. “The fundamental protodoxa is obviously Being, the irreducible archontic position.”12 These protodoxic modalities of belief are singularities that are not themselves assimilable into the rest of the habit of thinking but yet are a condition for thinking. When Paul Tillich writes that God is Being-itself is he saying that God is a protodoxic modality of belief within Christian thought? Is the brahman a protodoxic modality of belief in Indian spirituality? If her formulation makes sense then there is a sense in which protodoxic modalities of belief don’t make sense. In the study of religion there may be a “staggering amount of data” that can be understood as protodoxa. That is, this data can resist interpretation and understanding. Its simple presence theologically complicates the secular world. Sometimes there are

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fissures or discrepancies in the material that suggest to us that maybe something else is going on other than what we are seeing or other than the witness that is presented to us. A form of skepticism that is not a nihilism can be a respect for the data. Problematizing the Field: Frames and Subjects One of the most important shifts facing the study of religion is the rejection of the ontotheological frame for the hermeneutical process within the field. What is being rejected is the possibility of finding a first, an irreducible principle, upon which everything is based and from which everything can be derived. If this rejection is credible and compelling then what is radically changed is the status of “foundational” concepts in the formation of discursive practices. This does not mean that we cannot speak of subjectivity, objectivity, ontology, or even God; but, it does mean that these concepts have been defamiliarized when shifted into a differential frame that is other than the ontotheological tradition. In particular, we cannot begin by granting special privilege to discursive formations that reside outside of the specific text production of our inquiry and are not subject to the genealogical analysis that can come by reflecting the text back on itself. The death of God, the closure of the book, the end of history and the dismantling of a centered and unified subject are not desiderata of postmodern thought but are the problematic of this thinking. We cannot will away the historical and cultural witness of our time although we can always challenge the adequacy of interpretive formulations of where we stand. We can question whether we are making sense. Has too much importance been assigned to the loss of the unified subject or the disassembling of other fundamental concepts? Certainly, if it can be otherwise. What is at stake in this question is whether there is an epistemological framework that can both authenticate itself and be used to restore or rehabilitate the speculative thinking of the ontotheological tradition. If not and there is no proper domain for metadiscourses, then we are always working in a hermeneutics of suspicion. There is a problem of representation—the secondariness of primary presentation. The legacy of the nineteenth century traditions of suspicion is the radicalization of Kant through Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. The phenomenality of experience is not innocent.

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Strategies I do not think that we can go on with business us usual and write monumental history as if the problem of representation were not a serious historiographical problem with diverse manifestations and implications. We have failed to grasp the conditions under which we think if we seek for an essence rather than a sense of religious particularities. But, we have also failed to grasp the conditions under which we think if we prescind from thinking the transformational impact of protodoxic modalities on the ordinariness of life. We have to experiment with thinking. A possible model of descriptive sensibility is the evenly hovering attention of psychoanalysis with attention to trifles, incongruities, resistances. Attention to the structures of everyday life or Foucault’s genealogical analyses are moves toward a radical empiricism. These are all moves that are reading against the grain of the totalization of principles of explanation or interpretations. We have to respect the data by making accommodations to theory hard for ourselves. A different type of strategy is the fashioning of levers of intervention. This is always an experimental work that is itself a text production that is also parasitic on an existing text or corpus of texts. Forcing the juxtaposition of dissimilar figurations or the elaboration of unassimilable ideas is a metonymical strategy that changes the tone of a discursive practice without necessarily changing any of the elements in the discourse. The emphasis here is on style, rhetoric and the theatrics of theological reflection bearing on the study of religion. I want to suggest that what we need is a complementarity of strategies both of description and intervention just as we need diversity in the selection of what is to be studied and how our interests are defined. This is an affirmation not of relativism but of minimalism. The irony is that there is a richness to the minimalist affirmation. The trifles, the little things begin to matter. We can try to make sense with style, make things more beautiful. The field of religion must take as its responsibility and as part of its theological task the enduring of the phenomenality of experience.

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Notes 1. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. xi. 2. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, Colorado: The Davies Group Publishers, 1999), p. 7. 3. Smith, p. xi. 4. Smith, p. 104. 5. Charles E. Winquist, Epiphanies of Darkness: Deconstruction in Theology (Aurora, Colorado: The Davies Group Publishers, 1999), p. xvii. 6. I will be referring particularly to the work of Gilles Deleuze in thinking the notion of a logic of sense. See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 7. Ibid., pp. 12-19. 8. Ibid., p. 19. 9. Ibid., p. 20. 10. Ibid., p. 31. 11. Ibid., p. 281. 12. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p.35.

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Chapter 13 Materiality and Theoretical Reflection

In her poignant novella The Malady of Death, Marguerite Duras writes, “You ask how loving can happen—the emotion of loving. She answers: perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe.…Never through an act of will…It can come from anything, from the flight of a night bird, from a sleep, from a dream of sleep, from the approach of death, from a word, from a crime, of itself, from oneself, often without knowing how.”1 The complicated and intimate experience of love is not radically unlike what we mean by religion. Something happens. Our orientation to reality is shifted, slips or is transformed. This is not just an intellectual process that can be willed. It is more like the “flight of a night bird.” It is not just the flight of a night bird. This flight, this bird, has to be thought. That is, the materiality of the flight of the night bird has to be thought in the supplementary material textualization of discourse. The lapse in the logic of the universe is a lapse in the logic of discourse. There are multiple material contingencies. We are always in some place at some time. There is stuff wherever we are. There is usually consciousness wherever and whenever we are, even when it is a dream. In the discourses of love the lapses are epiphanies and in the discourses of religion the lapses are hierophanies. They are not always distinguishable from each other. We might think of the contingencies of our place and time as a gift. The world gives. It gives itself. And, unless there is a credible experience that suggests otherwise, we have to begin with Wittgenstein’s assertion that “The world is all that is the case.”2 This claim does not challenge Charles Long’s minimalist definition of religion as an orientation to reality in an ultimate sense.3 Is there a logic of sense? Is there a logic of ultimate sense? Do baskets make sense? Do trees make sense? Do crucified bodies make sense? Is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” ultimate? Is the Tao ultimate? Is the brahman ultimate? These are all questions that deserve answers or at least further interrogation when it is no longer credible to think only in the missionary and colonial logics of the western ontotheological tradition. Indic spirituality, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and many extra-literate traditions do not make sense in the sense of the Abrahamic traditions of the Mediterranean.

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What I am outlining is a kind of peculiar monism or univocity of meaning in experience. There are baskets, stones and cities that are complex material networks and there is the materiality of supplementary textualities that is part of the experience of our thinking perceptions of the world of our place. Some materialities are visible and some are hidden. Murray Gell-Mann, an elementary particle physicist, distinguishes between coarse and fined grained interrogations and analyses of experience in his book The Quark and the Jaguar.4 There is a world of elementary particles that we do not see. And, there are Jaguars that we can see. One is not more real than the other. Elementary particles are relevant for understanding Jaguars but particle analysis alone does not allow us to understand Jaguars. There need to be complementary analyses to grasp sense, and especially if we are dealing with extreme formulations of ultimate sense. Sometimes there is a silence of the real that troubles us. It is not unlike those uncomfortable moments in an important conversation when you or a loved one cannot speak. The reality that is other is sometimes beside itself. Naguib Mafouz, a secular Muslim Egyptian Nobel prize laureate, fashioned a short novella, The Beggar, in which Omar is a beggar for meaning. In the midst of Omar’s dissolute nights he would regularly return to the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx. “Omar’s sphinx and pyramids taunt him and his community with their unrelenting silence.”5 The Secret of the Sphinx remains a secret. Victor Taylor in his book Para/Inquiry writes that “the silence of the sphinx conjures up romantic expectations of receiving an answer to the ageless question ‘why do we live?’”6 He draws attention to a painting of Elihu Vedder from the 1863 “Question of the Sphinx” that depicts a man with his ear pressed up against the lips of the sphinx yearning to hear a sacred secret or answer; and, also to Mark Tansey’s 1985 painting “Secret of the Sphinx (Homage to Elihu Vedder)” where a man kneels before the sphinx with a recording device pressed against the lips of the sphinx. Technology now mediates the silence. The particular listening technology is a supplement that resolves nothing. Yet, Mafouz, Vedder, and Tansey are also mediators. Listening to the silence of the sphinx in a novella or in oil on canvas does say something about human experience. The sphinx is other than us, which is part of our fantasy, and it is other than itself, which is part of its secret. I do not think that there is any question that we have to account for the visible materialities, and it would be naïve to privilege some expressions of material culture over others. As Mircea Eliade demonstrated so clearly, anything can be hierophanous. There is a ‘this’ and a ‘thatness’ to the empiricities that populate our world whose singularity is diminished

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by universalizing categories. What is tricky is that meta-analyses have their own material reality, but they are not the same as the matter under interrogation. We need to account for this multiplicity in our experience. There is no master system but there are instead networks where systems intersect each other, sometimes are imported into each other, complicating each other, and sometimes issuing forth in new systemization. Idealisms and some empiricisms deny the material complexity of thinking. In contrast to poor thinking, I want to suggest that the rigorous empirico-idealism of Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy is both a problem and a paradigm for our contemporary interrogations of religion and culture. Kant’s transcendental method was rooted in David Hume’s empiricism, albeit augmented by Cartesianism, Aristotelianism and Medieval Scholasticism. The Critique of Pure Reason opens with the claim that “All knowledge begins with experience.” We have knowledge of objects, objective knowledge. We have the capacity to ask, we have the real experience of asking, “What are the conditions that makes this knowledge possible?” There is no assurance or guarantee of satisfactory answers. Legend tells us that Kant never ventured beyond Königsburg. His sense of the material world of objects was the classical world of Newtonian physics. His transcendental aesthetic is a straightforward rendering of the formal necessity for space as a condition for the presentation of any object and for time as a condition for the unity of apperception. The notion of necessity means that these are not a priori forms, forms that are not derived from experience but are instead conditions for experience. He learned from Hume that we have no experience of necessary connexion but that thinking causality is a subjective habit. The problem is that to think the world is to phenomenalize it. We live with material objects but do not know them in themselves. Our thinking is an in-itself material supplement to what appears as phenomenal objects. There is no denial of reference but what is referred to in the world is represented so that it can be thought. Even thinking the reality of one’s own thinking is representation and in this sense a substitution. This is not just a technical exercise in philosophy. Kant thought that reason could over-extend its competence and in paralogisms, antinomies and dialectical illusions falsify understanding. Existentially, to know the world is to be alienated from it. Kant seemed to be worried more about the arrogance of reason than guile and deceit. But, he opened a door by articulating a problematic that was later complicated by what Paul Ricoeur labeled the hermeneutics of suspicion of the nineteenth century, the work of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Guile, deceit, distortion and stereotyped

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symbolization entered the discussion of the conditions that make knowledge possible. The rigorous transcendental conditions were supplemented by quasi-transcendental conditions. The receptive matrix of thinking was more than the form of a transcendental aesthetic. It is less innocent. Theoretical reflection is not standing just in relationship to visible materialities but also to hidden materialities. Karl Marx inverts Hegel and confronted the world of nineteenth century thinking with the hidden materialities of history. There are political and economic realities rooted in modes of production that create class consciousness and special interests with attendant ideologies. The task of thinking is not to disambiguate language but to understand the complexity of discourse through ideology critique. Material interests gets mixed in with the formality of representing the material world. Nietzsche thinks the hidden materiality of language. Truth changes its meaning. He writes in Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense that “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.”7 These are tropes of substitution. Truth is a lie. Truth is textual and thereby text production. The word dog is not a dog, but to know a dog, a differential process, I have to name the animal, or let Adam name the animals and then borrow his dictionary. Truth is the simulacrum that is achieved by the relationality of differences. The traditional way of saying this is that the identity is in difference, which means that it is not self-sameness. Your identity is always to some extent who you are not. We can understand Omar seeking out the sphinx because it is the other of himself. Because the sphinx is silent, the truth of the lie is our theoretical reflection. Can this supplementarity be a complementarity in experience and understanding? The third hidden materiality associated with the hermeneutics of suspicion is Freud’s understanding of the body. Bodies are visible. They have hides but the primary processes of the it (id) of the unconscious is not visible. Drives, sexual and aggressive, manifest themselves in disguise and distortion. Even if we do not accept psychoanalytical psychotherapy, Kant’s epistemological problem is darkened and further complicated. This is particularly evident in the work of the French Freudians Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. Lacan makes a distinction between realms of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The matter of things is most evidently expressed by the notion of the Real that is interestingly inaccessible to ordinary thinking. It is a figuration for a materiality that we do not know. The imaginary is the first access to the achievement of consciousness. There is a sensate experience of images. Within this realm, the first embryonic possession of these images is

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referred to as the mirror stage. A child, usually between 12 and 18 months of age, identifies with its image in a mirror. This image is a substitution, a reversal, and a falsification. The image is a body without organs. The image of the I is not the reality of the I who thinks and feels; but, this image can be introduced into diverse semiotic systems that constitute the realm of the symbolic. The mirror stage is the semiotization of the child’s body. It then makes sense to say as Lacan says that the unconscious is structured like a language. This restates the Freudian insight that the unconscious is never known as unconscious but only as it marks consciousness. We might say that the Real is a hermeneutic of disfiguration of symptoms in the symbolic realm. Julia Kristeva in Revolution and Poetic Language nuances Lacan’s three realms by referring to the Real as a Chora, a semiotic chora. She takes this term chora from Plato’s Timeus, where it there functions as an aporetic marking for place or site. For Kristeva, it is not commensurate with the order of the symbolic. She attaches the adjective semiotic to this figuration of place to acknowledge that is does have an order, relational patterns, a complex sense. DNA is not English or Chinese, but it does have an order. Her understanding of the human subject as a subject in process/on trial is an understanding of multiple distributed processes that are temporally coincident. Some are visible and some are hidden. No single system of sense is whole or complete. Although DNA is not English or Chinese, English and Chinese are systematics that import themselves into the making of mind. Recently two Pandas came from Beijing to Zoo Atlanta. As simple as the Panda mind might be in its knowledge of Chinese it was obvious that essential words such as “sit” or “bamboo” had to be spoken in Chinese to accommodate these visitors from China. Place and system [the semiotic chora], New York, Beijing, London, New Orleans, the Internet constitute sense in parallel relationalities with bodies and histories. What is the sense of place that is non-identical with the grammar, syntactical structures, and lexicon of English? We demand of graduate students that they learn multiple languages and that demand should be extended to learn the sense of multiple places. The problem is to access these multiple meanings of sense, multiple logics of sense. How does the symbolic realm acknowledge and consent to its incompleteness? How do we surrender to the fantasy of a perfect dictionary? Can we accentuate the positivity and negativity of any symbolic system at the same time? This is Kristeva’s revolution in poetic language. Poetic language is a negation that is transversally related to the Real or semiotic chora. It marks the trace of the other in and

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of language. It can be likened to the many extreme formulations in determinable traditional religions such as the Taoist legend that Lao Tsu’s mother was impregnated by a shooting star. This is incommensurable with the sense of ordinary discourse. Its importance is that it is what ordinary discourse is not. It is an undecidability in the logic of the symbolic. The symbolic is unsettled by the other of the real. In his recent writing, Jacques Derrida, without attribution to Kristeva, also uses Plato’s Khôra to fathom a more profound and material sense of sense. Kristeva’s semiotic chora tends to be biological and understood in relationship to the psychological symbolic. Derrida’s Khôra resonates in a metaphysical or anti-metaphysical realm. It is almost as if he has become a theologian of a religion without religion, at least a traditional religion, although he uses the language and thematics of traditional religions in these recent works. His life-long interest in the other in and of language was first marked by the re-inscription of the Kantian problematic by his aporetic nonconcept différance and now by his metaphysical aporetic nonconcept Khôra. Khôra is a metaphysical place of what is epistemologically impossible. It marks something older and prior to what has taken place in visible symbolic elaborations. Khôra is a “a nameless name for the desert of différance.”8 The Kantian problematic is haunted by its metaphysical traces in the thought of Derrida. What was an epistemological problem is now the logic of the impossible. John Caputo describes the shift as finding expression in the prayers and tears of Derrida. Derrida, referring to his original name, Jackie, returns to the constitutional faith of his mother as he attends to her death. In this new thinking, there is a profound coherence with his earlier formulation of différance as a condition of the possibility of thinking. The Khôra is no more accessible than the nonconcept différance but it suggests in tonality the material matrix of the being of our thinking in the world. It is a place and not a procedure. The procedure is différance. These hidden materialities bring us back to the importance of visible materialities. The philosopher is closely allied with the historian of religion and analyst of culture. The visible materialities give us something to think about, to interrogate. Fine grained analysis reinforces the importance of coarse grained analysis. Coarse grained analysis has to attend to fissures, gaps, and disfigurations in its own elaborations marked by the insights of fine grained analyses. It needs to be understood in the logic of sense that ultimacy drifts. It can express itself here and there, in the marketplace and in back alleys, in vociferous voices proclaiming a kerygma and in silence. The strategies for a complementary supplementarity are diverse and multiple.

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We are back to where we started—a lapse in the logic of the universe. Can we say yes to the flight of a nightbird, the jouisance in a smile, the silence of the sphinx? My grandchildren’s preschool in Boulder, Colorado is named Make a Mess and Make Believe. Within the context of this essay, we could restate the name as negate the pretension of the completeness of any thinking and enfranchise the pragmatics of theoretical reflection. To make a mess and make believe is a strategy for accessing the possible ultimate sense in an orientation to reality that gives definition to religion. We make a mess to understand that the stuff of reality is complex and shows itself when carefully observed as a mess of heterogenous singularities. We make believe because of the incorrigible exigency of mind that makes sense of what we experience. The study of religion is most importantly an experiment in being human. We think the other to think ourselves.

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Notes 1. Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Press, 1986), pp. 49-50. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus trans. D.F. Bears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922, 1961), p. 7. 3. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, Colorado: The Davies Group Publishers, 1999), p. 7. 4. Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1994). 5. Victor E. Taylor, Para/Inquiry: Postmodern Religion and Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 33. 6. Ibid., p. 31. 7. The Portable Nietzsche edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1954, 1968), p. 46. 8. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 40.

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Chapter 14 Postmodern Secular Theology

I want to assess the possibilities, and then reflect on the meaning, of the development of a postmodern secular theology. I especially want to think about theology as a way of thinking. Theology sometimes has had to think under conditions not of its own choosing. In its western cultural expression and in its close alliance, since Aristotle, with first philosophy or wisdom it has generally followed a trajectory of epochal transformations from philosophies of Being to philosophies of consciousness to philosophies of language. This last transformation has been further complicated by the explosive expansion of information technologies and parallel developments in the neurosciences. The notion of postmodern theology does not entail a specific agenda but is more importantly a thinking theologically that accounts for the conditions under which we think that are themselves indexical marks of the postmodern condition. Postmodernity cannot be simply dated and the postmodern is not synonymous with the contemporary. There are instead distinctive traits of a postmodern sensibility that call for theological understanding and thereby characterize the meaning and possibilities for postmodern theological thinking. It is the image rather than the object of thought that has been radically reconfigured. The publication of The Alchemy of the Word,1 Deconstruction and Theology,2 and especially Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology,3 brought the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida into the arena of theological discourse. The shaping influence of Derrida was soon augmented by attention to other, mostly French, theoreticians such as Jacques Lacan, Jean Francois Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Theology also had to rethink its achievements in relationship to their precursor figures Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud to better understand the meaning of the postmodern condition. Together, these precursor figures loosely constituted a movement that Paul Ricoeur labeled the hermeneutics of suspicion. They plumbed hidden forces that have disrupted an easy alliance with Enlightenment consciousness which was marked by clear and distinct ideas authenticated by expressions of force and vivacity. The ideality of consciousness was subverted or at least displaced by the materiality of history [Marx], the materiality of the body [Freud], and the materiality of language. [Nietzsche]

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The nineteenth century extended the Kantian problematic separating the phenomenality of experience from the noumenality of reality by focusing on quasi-transcendental structures as conditions for thinking that complemented Kant’s more limited transcendental interrogation of the conditions that make possible objective knowledge. The ideological structures of class consciousness, the psychoanalytic formulation of the unconscious, and the general metaphoricity of all language usage as substitutive structures make self-consciousness problematic in a way that is implicated in a new and radical thinking. Theology itself took a radical turn in the 1960s that in some ways was a catching-up with the hermeneutics of suspicion but was not yet what can be called postmodern theology. This radical theology was almost synonymous with the “death of God” theologies of Thomas J. J. Altizer, William Hamilton, Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Van Buren, and Richard Rubenstein. There was a linguistic turn in theological thinking and the radical question was whether theology was possible as a mode of meaningful discourse. The declaration of the death of God had different meanings among these radical theologians but there were common implications of their diverse discourses. A challenge to the hegemony of neoorthodoxy was clearly announced. History and society were understood as thoroughly secular. The human subject was privileged as the agent within theological discourse. Theology was a textual reality. And, most importantly, God is dead. It wasn’t long before it was recognized that there were important resonances between this radical theology and the appearance on the North American scene of Derrida’s deconstructive postmodernism. Taylor’s publication of Erring was a manifesto for a deconstructionist postmodern a\theology deeply influenced by radical theology and Derrida. He claims early in his argument that “deconstruction is the ‘hermeneutic’ of the death of God.”4 This parallels Raschke’s claim that “[d]econstruction…is in the final analysis the death of God put into writing.” 5 In what appears to be an oxymoronic formulation, the death of God is celebrated as a possibility for a new theological thinking. The deconstructionist critique of the ontotheological notion of presence allows theology to think itself otherwise. This “otherwise” is a valuation of “otherness” or the “other” that implicates the proclamation of the death of God in other senses of irrevocable loss and incurable fault as outlined by Taylor. Implicated in the loss of supreme authorship and total presence are the displacement of the self, the end of history as a paradigm of explanation, and the closure of the book of encyclopedic proportions.

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The God who died is the God of classical theism: a primal origin, an ultimate end, transcendent and eternal. This God is thoroughly implicated in an ontotheological understanding of total presence. The humanistic atheism of radical theology was a writing large of the privileging of the conscious subject over the supreme authorship of God that began with the turn from philosophies of Being to the philosophies of consciousness emblematically associated with Descartes and the beginnings of the Enlightenment. As the Enlightenment matured it soon became clear that, with the loss of total presence of a supreme authorship, the self experienced its own profound displacement first with the Kantian fissure of the phenomenality of experience from the noumenality of things-in-themselves and secondly with the articulation of hidden material forces through the hermeneutics of suspicion further distorting representations of the phenomenal world. Absolute self-identity and self-sameness expressed in “I am that I am” gave way to identity in difference marked by otherness. Without a supreme Logos present to consciousness the telos of history and the authoritative completeness the book were subverted. A postmodern theology has had to rethink its warrant without authority from outside its own productive formulations. That is, theology is a textual production that is always in the middle of existing discourses and there is always an outside of its achievements but postmodern antifoundationalism leaves it without special privilege. It makes a place of its own through strategies and tactics within a cacophony of diverse textual voices. There are secular and what has recently been identified as postsecular postmodern theologies. In each case there are diverse strategies and tactics. There are more differences than similarities among neo-evangelical postmodern theologies, radical orthodoxy, and secular deconstructive theologies. What is similar is the acknowledgment or recognition of an epistemological problematic that is not resolvable by using straightforward Enlightenment categories. Reason is challenged. In neo-evangelical theologies revelation and scripture is privileged, which is in contrast to radical orthodoxy that rejects a reason/revelation duality. Radical orthodoxy appears more Catholic than Protestant as its seeks to recover and deepen the epistemic framework of the analogy of being with a knowing participation in reality. Generally, neo-evangelical theologies and radical orthodoxy understand secular deconstructive theologies as nihilistic. This accusation of nihilism coincides or conflates with the apprehension of epistemological undecidability that is characteristic of a postmodern sensibility. The postmodern denial of a master narrative refuses the privileging of any particular revelations or metaphysical formulations that reside

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outside of the textuality of experience. A secular theology begins with an assertion that there is no special exemption from the conditions that make possible any discursive practices. The traits of a postmodern theory of discourse are preliminary markers for defining a postmodern theological agenda. Aside from the proclamation that “God is dead,” traditional theology has been undermined by the dismantling of the centered and unified subject. Theological subjectivity is constituted as it is written and dispersed throughout the theological text. Theology is text production and the deconstruction of constituted subjectivities denaturalizes the ontotheological frame of theological discourse. The frame is instead a materialistic fold in a specific nexus of forces relative to its social and intellectual location. Because of this folding the inside is implicated in an outside so that the achievement of thinking is nonidentical with itself. There is an undecidable excess in theological thinking. Theology thinks not the “other” but traces of the “other.” These traces manifest themselves in fissures, gaps, paradoxes, and incongruities on the surfaces of theological expressions. They transgress or violate any law of closure within a symbolic order. Postmodern theologies work against the totalization of thinking also by attending to extreme formulations, even in traditional theologies, that convolute the discourse of any symbolic order instantiating a radical negativity that marks an “other” within and of language. That is, postmodern theological analyses seek incommensurabilities within discursive practices that are internal traces of the “other” in the subjective fold of discourse. The “other” includes those forces that are not included in the expressivity of representational economies of ordinary discourses. In this sense, postmodern theology is a commitment to an extraordinary discourse. There is sometimes a longing for primordial realities or primary processes that can only be marked on textual surfaces by aporetic formulations that refuse assimilation within a continuum of existing discursive practices. What is important is what the discourse is not even if this is marked inside of the discourse. These aporetic formulations facilitate a negative theology that could possibly be a clearing for apophatic disclosure or could simply be a negation of meaning within a discursive practice. It is not always clear what is valued by deconstructive theologies about an aporia, an impassable passage. Is it that it is a passage, or that it is impassable? Negative theologies emphasize impassability but there are other strategies that emphasize passage even when they articulate themselves in figurations of rupture, fissure or gap. Deconstructive postmodernism is parasitic in that it works with already existing texts. It can choose to work within the textuality of traditional

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theology. It is a common strategy in postmodern thinking to critically intervene in already existing textual practices. There is the awareness that the text could always have been otherwise. This thread of criticism is particularly evident when feminists read patriarchal texts and in Marxist ideological critiques. The text is read to be problematized, fissured, and opened to the excluded other. Derrida in his readings of the western philosophical tradition is a clear and even paradigmatic witness to this strategy. Derrida taught how to read in extremis, to read against the grain of a text locating lines of fissure, undecidables of meaning and forces of disruption. Deconstructive critique is a reading technology that implicates its own thinking in the “other” of language. This first strategy makes existing texts unsafe. There are also writing technologies that generate texts that highlight their fissured surfaces, disfigured language, disorder, and incompleteness. For example, Derrida in his experimental and playful texts generated a loose weave through graphic displacements, mixed genres, and complex intertextual referencing. This second strategy is the work of the bricoleur. It is a work of assemblage amenable to an erring consciousness. The dominant trope is metonymy rather than metaphor. Ideas, images, words and phrases are ungrounded so that their placement is fully contingent. There are no established meanings because new contiguities or metonymical displacements contest fixed meanings and defer closure of any text. Experimental assemblage can be the dispersal, dissemination, and dissimulation of what might have been settled meanings. A variation of this second strategy is less playful but is the engagement in the creation of new concepts that resist textual closure. These second strategies generate texts that are unsafe. A third strategy is recognition of what is already paradoxical or parabolic in existing theological or religious texts and practices. The theologian attends to points of reversal in narratives, notes aporetic formulations of extremity in traditional theologies or sacred texts and attends to discrepancies or incongruities between ritual practices and the lives of their practitioners. Recognition is not intervention or creation but it is a tool of scholarship that helps postmodern theology understand a continuity between its own agenda and the historical traditions from which it draws textual materials to be rethought. A recent theme in postmodern philosophical and theological thinking has been the return of religion but it is a religion without religion. This is not so much a strategy as a sophisticated recognition of deconstructive traits as well as incorrigibilities in fin de siècle cultural and political experience. In Derrida’s development we see a series of metonymical displacements of aporetic tropes from différance to khôra. John Caputo reads this situation as a

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passion for God, saving the name of God, a capacity to think religion without a forgetfulness of the conditions of a postmodern sensibility. With Derrida deconstruction carries negative theology, even atheism, into the fold of faith. In its latest turn postmodern theology implicates itself in a logic of the impossible. Beyond all philosophemes it is argued that the khôra has left its trace in language. A passion is articulated to save the name or names of the wholly other even if this is a theology of God who is not being God. This recent shift in deconstructive philosophical and theological thinking could be emblematically entitled Jacques, Jackie, Jack because it has to do with names and saving a name, some names or the name. Jacques Derrida was, according to his confession, named Jackie and the distinguished religious philosopher John D. Caputo is known to many of his friends and colleagues as Jack. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion is a remarkable book that can guide our reflections in a rethinking of the secular postmodern theological agenda.6 In a first serious reading it is a book that needs to be marked because it makes startling claims about Derrida’s faith and it needs in reflection to be re-marked to help assess who is speaking, Jacques, Jackie or Jack or a combination of the three. There is in this mix another name that is wholly other, unspeakable but nevertheless spoken of as God in some determinable religions. But, since this is a book about religion without religion there may also be understandings without speaking, without knowing and without seeing. Derrida’s claim that he has been read less and less well over twenty years can be understood in the failure to understand his religion without religion.[xxviii] It is not simply that his readers are fallible but there is a perverse resistance to understanding Jackie Derrida along side of Jacques Derrida. Derrida speaks of his mother’s knowledge that the constancy of God in his life was called by other names and that he has an “absolved, absolutely private language” in which he speaks of God all the time. [xvii, xviii] Derrida does not think of this God as an object of theological analysis. The God of Jackie “is given only in praying and weeping.” [288] He distrusts the word theology because of its embeddedness in the western ontotheological tradition and its associations with totalizations, dogmatisms, and institutionalization. [289] The privilege that western consciousness has given to seeing is transformed by the abocular counter-tradition of blindness. This is not a blindness that abhors the light but is instead an understanding of eyes that are “organs not of sight but of passion. Derrida is interested in eyes that are clouded by tears of mourning, tears of impassioned imploring.” [327] These are eyes that some readers of Derrida would prefer to be blind rather than be filled with tears. Jackie problematizes deconstructive scholasticism

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with a passion for meanings that are not determinable by close readings of texts. Maybe saving the name of Jackie, a task accepted by Jack Caputo, is also a saving of the text that is more than a scholarly exercise sanctioned by professional philosophers. Prayers and tears can smudge the ink on a curriculum vitae and Caputo is arguing if this is our concern then we are one of those that have been misreading Derrida for twenty years. Part of what has been misread is the meaning of epistemic undecidability that is inscribed in Derrida’s earliest writings. Of particular importance is Derrida’s concept of différance which has sometimes been understood as a master trope constantly challenged by Derrida’s metonymical substitutions while always returning as a fundamental expression of an epistemological aporia. One of the questions we will have to ask as we move from différance to hymen to spur…to khôra is whether anything important has changed. Has this slippage meant that the early enthusiasm for Derrida as a negative theologian, a charge denied by Derrida, has taken on a new theological or a/theological significance? Caputo entitles his first chapter and strongly asserts that “God is not différance.” It is, perhaps, more strongly asserted if we say that différance is not God, not even a hidden God. Caputo writes that “it would be a serious misunderstanding to think that différance is a master name, the secret hidden name of Being beyond Being, the hidden name of a presence so pure that it cannot itself appear and be present except by means of the imperfect traces of itself that it leaves behind as it withdraws from the world seated on a cloud of unknowing.”[9] Derrida’s différance is not a simple passage way into an apophatic negative theology. It is instead an aporetic formulation, an impassable passage, that delimits knowing. Différance is not a Heideggerian clearing but is a rift or fissure that has a close kinship with the Kantian schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding or transcendental imagination. “Différance does not love you or even know you are there....différance could care less.” [169] Like the Kantian schematism, différance is a procedure, a transitive process, anterior to the representational economy we know as the world. Différance is a condition of possibility for the appearing and differential naming of the world. It is an epistemic reality that lets us name the animals, name ourselves, name the Gods and Goddesses. Différance is a condition of possibility for difference. Caputo, like Rodolphe Gasché, thinks of Derrida’s différance as a quasi-transcendental formulation to contrast it with a constrained Kantian transcendental interrogation of the conditions that make objective knowledge possible. In Derrida, the Kantian problematic is written large so that it can include the meaning of prayers and tears. We see in

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The Truth in Painting that Derrida knew that the problematic of the Kantian first Critique was reinscribed in the third Critique and that we cannot circumvent différance by turning to faculties of desire or feeling.7 Caputo argues that Derrida’s deconstructive thinking is not a negative theology but it shares the passion of negative theology for the impossible. [3] It also needs to be noted that if his thinking is not a negative theology this does not mean it is not theological even if he steps back from the word theology. Theology is not simply an ontotheological doctrine of presence. Perhaps Derrida’s religion without religion is accompanied by a theology without theology. Throughout his text, Caputo rightly keeps bringing us back to différance as the key to resituating faith and negative theology so that it is not the apophaticism that is traditionally the engine and hope of negative theology. Deconstruction unsettles all assurances of the same and in this sense delimits simplistic metaphysical claims of theology. That is, deconstruction resituates metaphysical theories so that they are no longer theories of presence and thereby resituates theologies that are metaphysical. Deconstruction denies hyperessentialism in what has appeared and in what will come to appear. “The deconstruction of theology (positive or negative) consists in allowing différance its say or sway, allowing différance to inscribe and exceed negative theology without return. The deconstruction of theology re-commits theology to the grammatological flux from whence negative theology would take its leave.” [11] The notion of the impossible can shatter or fissure conventional discourse, mark its incommensurability, but it cannot be understood as nonlinguistic. Wordlessness is inscribed in language. Discourse can be unsettled and made unsafe but it is still discourse. This does not mean that there is not an “other” in and of language. Derridean deconstruction does not deny reference. It complicates it. There is no naked contact or immediate presence of Being or beings. As Aquinas and Avicenna so clearly understood well before Derridean deconstruction, women and men do not have angelic knowledge. Our knowledge of the impossible is a knowledge of traces. These traces of the other, possibly a wholly other or even an infinitely other, are the aura of representations and substitutions that let us think. We know that the image dog is not a dog and that the word dog is not a dog. Reference is complicated and unsettled but not denied. There is an always already, not yet, quality to the impossible in discourse. Discourse trembles when it speaks through indirection of what cannot be spoken. Its thinking can apprehend but not comprehend its own extreme formulations such as Anselm’s “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” Tillich’s “ultimate concern,” Barth’s “wholly other,” the

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brahman, Allah as lord of the worlds, the Tao or even the prosaic expression of Lonergan’s God as “the complete set of answers to the complete set of questions.” These can all be likened to Derrida’s name of the impossible, the incoming of the tout autre. [22] Derrida’s formulation, like those of his predecessors, is an open-ended, indeterminable, disseminative undecidability within discourse. The word and the world are made strange. There are no reductive closures or closures that disguise themselves as totalizations. The notion of a clean well lighted place is a transitory fiction that gives way to a sense of the uncanny in our thought or experience. In traditional language, Derrida’s theological thinking, even when it comes forward in disguise, is messianic and eschatological, marked by an apocalyptic tone, rather than apophatic. What is to come will not come in a clearing because what always precedes the thought of Being is différance. What comes will come in the clutter and cacophony of marketplace discourse even if the element of undecidability makes us think of the market as a desert. We are always already in the middle of discourse, an economy of representations. What this possibility of the impossible, when spoken, makes strange is the marketplace itself. In a hyperbolic formulation, the kingdom of God is at hand but this doesn’t makes sense because we have erased the name of god, cannot speak the name of God and do not know how to save the name of God. Derrida sets for himself the task of saving the name of God and Caputo brings this forward as a profound exigency in Derrida’s thinking. Jack hears the voice of Jackie that is feared by some of the followers of Jacques. Even the marketplace of ideas that define various postmodernisms is made strange by the pressure of theological formulations. This is all premature unless we are first about saving the name of God that cannot be spoken or written. This is a God who can be likened to Jean Luc Marion’s “God without Being” or Robert Scharlemann’s “the being of God when God is not being God.” Saving the name of God is an instantiation of a radical negativity. The name of God is spoken and crossed out so that it can be spoken otherwise. Différance is not God but if the name of God is spoken it is because of différance. Is there a way or a place where we can unsay what has been said so that there can be maintained a notion, without knowledge, of a God without Being whose name can be saved? This appears to be nonsense unless there can be a nonconceptual formulation that names such a way or place. This would have be a nonconcept likened to différance but not différance. Following Plato and perhaps Julia Kristeva, Derrida names this place khôra. This name is a trope of negativity

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that is neither being nor non-being. [35] “Khôra has no meaning or essence, no identity to fall back upon…In short, the khôra is tout autre, very.” [36] He posits what we have not experienced except as the notion of an unheard trace that calls us into language. The name is an aporia. Caputo asserts that the desert khôra is for Derrida a nameless name for the desert of différance. [40] What comes forth from this desert is the name of God as the wholly other which cannot be the private property of any determinable faith. It is a not knowing and the not knowing is itself the trace of what is coming forth that never comes. Caputo writes that “[f ]or Derrida, the trace is the element of undecidability, the formlessness in which determinate forms are inscribed, a desert place within which determinate decisions—theological or atheological—are made, each checked and confused by the other, each movement disturbed by a countermovement, so that we do not know what is taking place; in the desert one never knows whether what is coming is an oasis or a mirage.” [57] Undecidability makes evey text, every thinking, unsafe. The trace is an experience of unknowing that leaves us all a little lost. We are not secure in our scholarship or in any determinable faiths. While referring to Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Caputo asserts that deconstruction believes in the ghosts of chance events. [124] Thinking is a throw of the dice. There is nothing philosopically, theologically or politically correct in the place of the khôra and yet all thinking is philosophical, theological and political. The trace always suffers becoming philosophical, theological, and political as it is marked and referenced in representational economies. Because of profound undecidability, the trace also can suffer becoming tree, becoming cow, becoming dog, becoming river, becoming woman, becoming man as it is marked and referenced in representational economies. And so, God created the world. These becomings on a plane of immanence suggest a coming that Caputo links to the secret of the khôra and différance. He writes that “[v]iens is rather a certain Ur-affirmation, older and lighter than any determinate word or deed, that silently and invisibly tears open lived time and ordinary language, that renders them always already structurally open to what is coming, that prohibits (pas!) closure while soliciting transcendence (le pas). The viens is the order, or disorder, of messianic time, of venir and avenir, that disturbs the order of presence, that hollows it out, so that what is coming does not, never did, never can, correspond to presence and presence cannot close over.” [86] Clearly, Derrida shares a passion with negative theology for the impossible but what this passion engenders in Derrida’s thinking is messianism rather than mysticism. What is coming is factually unknown and structurally unknowable. This is the “absolute secret.” [101]

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This coming, incoming, is an invention, inter-vention of the wholly other. The “absolute secret” is an originary experience that sets writing, thinking, in motion accompanied by passion and sparks. This is a given that is a gift. “The gift, one might say, is how things ‘come,’ how the impossible happens.” [160] This gift does not reside within a representational economy. There is no knowledge of a giver, no credit, and no debt. The impossible is incompossible within an economic structure. This should be obvious if the place of giving is khôra and the giving is différance. The gift is known only in the trace of unknowing. The trace is the mark of epistemic undecidability that denies credit, debt, and obligation. This deconstructive anti-foundationalism is freedom for an ethical and political decidability. Obligation is a de facto obligation to our freedom and not part of a foundational contract. Caputo writes that “[i]f deconstruction were a theory, it would be a theory that nothing is safe, pure, clean, uncontaminated, monochromatic, unambiguous;…[d]econstruction is an exploration of as many ‘instants’ of undecidability as it has time (as it is given time) to study…it always tends to say that the undecidability is permanent, that undecidability precedes, follows, and permeates the decision, that the undecidability is first, last, and always, but that decisions must be made and indecision broken.” [225] There is a faith that is a known unknowing, a trace. “Our life is a tissue of faith, of little beliefs and credulities, minima credibilia, of taking one another’s word, of assumptions and presuppositions which, if they form a rich enough and elaborate enough network, may just see us through the day and then, if they are still more complex and subtle enough, might well see us through the week.” [312] Life is making arrangements or assemblages, the satisfaction of which involves a measure of their complexity. This appears to be an aesthetic justification of existence but it is not quite that simple because of Derridean messianism. That which comes, but never arrives, disrupts, fissures and enflames all of our arrangements. “We never get out from under the textuality and structural undecidability of our lives.” [313] What is coming never comes because what we understand with Kantian sensibilities, the meaning of différance, is that whatever comes is other than the wholly other or it cannot come. There is in Derrida’s project a deferral of the parousia. “The whole idea of deconstruction is to deprive ousia of its prestige, to expose the present to what is not present, to keep it open to what is to come.” [245] Theological formulations of extremity, names of the wholly other, pressure ordinariness, disrupt its flow, distort its meanings, function as a lure to what is not yet, without ever coming to presence. Derridean brokenness is a hopefulness. It is possible to say a Nietzschean yes,

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a Derridean oui oui, to life, to language, and to that from which language arises and accompanies language. We can say yes to what we can name and to that which we cannot name but which is the possibility for naming what we can name. Derrida articulates a theological empiricism rather than a theological mysticism. His “oui is not so much a word as a silent companion to words, a quasi-word which provides words with their element and force.” [256] His empiricism is an empiricism with a secret. This brings us face to face with the question why do we want to save the name of what will always remain a secret. Clearly most of us want fire and sparks in our lives. We don’t want the everydayness of life to be trivialized. Maybe we didn’t know that this intensity will include prayers and tears. This acknowledgment is one of the special contributions of Caputo. He has the capacity to hear, when he reads Derrida, that there is always something more or other than the text. We can liken the khôra to a place but it is not a place to live. Neither khôra nor différance come to full presence. They are conditions of possibility, quasi-transcendentals, and make their mark on the ordinariness of life. They are the extra-ordinary of the ordinary, the general structure of the possibility for religious meaning. The other in the phenomenality of our world is implicated in the wholly other to be what it is. Derrida’s and Caputo’s worlds are saturated in a divine ordinariness. The paradox of religion without religion is lodged in its ordinariness. “[T]he knight of faith extraordinaire is an an exemplar of the ordinary.” [208] What is exceptional is recognition that every other is implicated in the wholly other, every possible world is implicated in the impossible. The knight of faith lives the passion for the impossible. “Faith is a passion of unknowing.” [311] It is a passion for unknowing in the midst of what we know. The kingdom of God, a formulation available to us if we have saved the name of God, tout autre, is a place of singularities, empiricities and heterologies. We can say yes to the ordinary because the ordinary is now extraordinary.

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Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Carl A. Raschke, The Alchemy of the Word: Language and the End of Theology (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979); republished as The End of Theology (Aurora, Colorado: The Davies Group Publishers, 2000). Thomas J. J. Altizer, editor, Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroads, 1982). Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Ibid., p. 6. Deconstruction and Theology, p. 3. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). All future textual references will be a citation of page numbers from Caputo’s book in the body of this article.

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Part III Theological Filiations

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Chapter 15 Paul Tillich and Theology Beside Itself Desiring Theology In 1948 Paul Tillich published a sermon entitled “The Depth of Existence” in which he wrote, “that the truth which does not disappoint dwells below the surfaces in the depth.”1 In 1990 [ET1991] Milan Kundera in his novel Immortality elaborates upon a singular gesture that he calls the gesture of longing for immortality.2 In the more than forty years between Tillich’s sermon and Kundera’s novel the philosophical frame of Tillich’s theology has been questioned and challenged by postmodern theories of discourse formation and deconstructive philosophies. There have been important cultural, social, and political reconfigurations in the world. Technology has significantly changed the meanings of communication and information. However, the desire for a thinking that does not disappoint persists. Even in the “postmodern” world there remains the gesture of longing for immortality. In the cognitive realm I think this is a desire for thinking theologically. There is a theological exigency in thinking that cannot be dismissed or come to resolution because of the enigma of the finite human condition. We want our lives to be meaningful and significant. Looking back at the theology of Paul Tillich could be an exercise in nostalgia. It could be a desire to think in a context where it is easy to use words with traditional theological meanings—[God, spirit, soul, grace, Being, et. al.]. This would be weak reading of Tillich because at the center of his thinking is genuine mystery and unresolvable paradox. There needs to a strong reading of Tillich, what Harold Bloom sometimes calls a misreading, to rethink his theology under conditions of rationality and irrationality that are not simply of our choosing but are conditions of our time.3 A strong reading of Tillich will necessarily acknowledge his recognition that “[a] theology which does not deal seriously with the criticism of religion by secular thought…would be ‘a-kairos’…missing the demand of the historical moment.”4 A strong reading of Tillich would seek the truth that does not disappoint in his thinking, which would mean, in his formulation, the truth that is correlative with the questions implied in an analysis of the human situation. Tillich’s theology cannot simply be thought of as Platonism. His thinking is deeply informed by the Western philosophical tradition whose basic

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categories and distinctions were generated in a Platonic framework even when in opposition to Plato. Distinctions between essence and existence, idea and copy, form and matter, reality and appearance hierarchically populate his thinking although both the distinctions and the hierarchy are often subverted in the complexity of his analyses. It is this complexity that renders ambiguous the relationship between the subversion and sublation of concepts and allows for at least two different readings of Tillich. Part of the stigma of finitude in his thinking is the implicated epistemological undecidability in the theory of symbolism as to whether religious symbols “force the infinite down to finitude and [/or] the finite up to infinity” [ST 1:240]. Tillich does not treat this as an either/or option but it can be argued that his second formulation is in the spirit of Platonism and the first is a reversal of Platonism. I mention this distinction because one of the ways of characterizing what is being called “postmodernity” is the synecdochal formulation—“the reversal of Platonism.” This formulation, associated with the philosophy of Nietzsche and now so very present in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, affirms the rights of simulacra in thinking. There is no privileged point of view, not that of the author or subject, not that of history, not that of being. The legacy of the hermeneutics of suspicion is that secondary process thinking is simulation. There is no privileging of the idea over the copy or essence over existence. The paradox is that at the same time thinking is a making of meaning its significance is the unfounding of itself. It is in this context that Deleuze makes what appears to be the outrageous claim, a claim that needs to be thought beside the theological achievement of Paul Tillich, that “it is our epoch which has discovered theology. One no longer needs to believe in God. We seek rather the ‘structure,’ that is, the form which may be filled with beliefs, but the structure has no need to be filled in order to be called ‘theological.’ Theology is now the science of nonexisting entities, the manner in which these entities—divine or antidivine, Christ or Antichrist—animate language and make for it this glorious body which is divided into disjunctions.”5 Can we find a thinking that does not disappoint in a science of nonexisting entities? Can a thinking that multiplies simulations, or to use a formulation of Noëlle Vahanian, a thinking which is a “practical desire to no end,” be satisfying?6 Reason and Paradox Tillich is very clear that systematic theology has a rational character. He is committed to rationality and cognitive responsibility in his thinking.

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However, his understanding of rationality is not simple. He makes distinctions between ontological and technical reason [ST 1:72] and, within the technical use of reason, he distinguishes among the functions of semantic, logical and methodological rationality. [ST 1:53-58] But, it is not among these distinctions that we find the paradox of the Christian message in relation to reason. Reason can be ecstatic. “Ecstatic reason is reason grasped by an ultimate concern. Reason is overpowered, invaded, shaken by the ultimate concern.” [ST 1:53] The paradox is that reason in ecstasy is not a destruction of the rational structure of mind. [ST 1:116] The recognition of the possibility for reason to become ecstatic is formalized into a demand or what Tillich calls the first formal criterion for theological thinking. “The object of theology is what concerns us ultimately. Only those propositions are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of ultimate concern for us.” [ST 1:12] This criterion is a lever of intervention for any discourse becoming theological. It defines the relationship of theology to philosophy or any of the human sciences. It is a criterion governing the meaning of a theology of culture. Theology is theology in the ecstasis of reason. A further complication of the paradox in theology is the second formal criterion for theological thinking. “Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being. Only those statements are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us.” [ST 1:14] These criteria are, as Tillich clearly states, formal. They are rules governing the formation of theological discourse. Their application places us right in the middle of discourse analysis and importantly links Tillich to the deconstructive philosophies that have generally ignored his work. He has complicated what it means to construct or deconstruct theology. The becoming theological of a discourse includes traces of what is other than itself without ceasing to be itself under the finite conditions of mind. Discourse is itself, outside of itself, beside itself, when it is the living of an ultimate concern. Mystery There are not only paradoxes but also two senses of mystery in Tillich’s theology. First, there is the genuine mystery of being. “The genuine mystery appears when reason is driven beyond itself to its ‘ground and abyss,’ to the fact that ‘being is and nonbeing is not’ (Parmenides), to the original fact (Ur-Tatsache) that there is something and not nothing.” [ST 1:110] The

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mystery is that it could have been otherwise but it is not. The world is the case. Tillich later writes: “For ‘being’ remains the content, the mystery, and the eternal aporia of thinking.” [ST 2:11] The original fact of being is impassable and so it is impossible to referentially think behind it or through it. Thinking the fact of being in distinction from the structure of being must be a different type of thinking. For Tillich, this will be a theological thinking that will always be symbolic. There is a singularity to this original fact. The exfoliation of meaning are secondary lines of flight that never get behind the mystery of their nonoriginal origin. There is no warrant for thinking that the fact of being is the ground of being. Thinking the mystery of being is not crawling back through the labyrinth of experience or history to a primal ground or primal beginning. The mystery of time like the mystery of thinking is that we are already in it. Thinking is within a habit of subjectivity [Hume] that Tillich fully understands as problematized by Kantian considerations of its a priori conditions of possibility. Being will always remain the “eternal aporia of thinking.” Thinking philosophically or theologically about the meaning and significance of being will require strategic considerations for a new thinking that does not evade the recognition of an epistemological undecidability that accompanies genuine mystery. Thinking is under the stigma and within the enigma of finitude. Tillich’s first strategic move is definitional. God is being-itself. He qualifies this definition. “The statement that God is being-itself is a nonsymbolic statement. It does not point beyond itself.” [ST 1:238] This is a mystery constructed within discourse. It is a surd formulation. The second strategic move is the recognition and assertion that “after this has been said, nothing else can be said about God as God which is not symbolic.” [ST 1:239] The fundamental and singular nonsymbolic statement about God is thus incommensurable with other discourses. It does not point beyond itself and nothing else can be said of this statement that is of the same discursive status. It does not make sense to think of the statement that God is being-itself as general or universal because there is nothing we can do with it except assert it. Theological thinking has to become something else. By virtue of the absurd definition of God, theology must speak and write symbolically if it is to say more than one thing. “Purity of heart” may be to will one thing, but to think what it wills requires a multiple and symbolic elaboration. Not only is there something rather than nothing. The something is experienced as more than one thing. If theology is to matter in the world of experience it needs to go beyond its singular literal moment.

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Theology Beside Itself In Dynamics of Faith, Tillich offers what at first appears to be a rather simple understanding of the meaning and function of symbols in theological thinking. He distinguishes between symbols and signs. They have a shared characteristic. They both point beyond themselves. The difference is that “signs do not participate in the reality to which they point, while symbols do.”7 Neither the symbol nor the sign are literal because they point to something else, but the symbol is more than this. Part of the complexity of understanding theological thinking is to understand what it means for any specific discourse to participate in a reality that is more than itself and other than itself. What yet has to be thought is the notion of participation. It is at this point that the paradox of theological thinking is brought to bear on the relationship between theology with philosophy or any of the human sciences that are contiguous with theological reflection. Tillich’s method of correlation is the first explicit expression or clue as to what it means to understand the symbolic function as it works in theological thinking. An answering theology is perhaps more importantly, at least in its strategic development, an asking theology. The question that will not go away is how to overcome radical doubt and the feeling of meaninglessness. What is always ambiguous in the gesture of longing for immortality? I think that we will see that the ambiguity is always contained in the force of the question itself as it is pressured by the first criterion for theological thinking that only those propositions are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of ultimate concern for us. The formulation of what it means to think theologically pressures the gesture more than the gesture pressures theology. Are any gestures or is any thinking adequate to the demand that this is that than which nothing greater can be thought? Can we take this moment seriously without any reservation? Tillich is setting an agenda for theological thinking. Tillich enlists philosophy and the human sciences in a task that is theological even when they are not themselves theological. Simply stated, the method of correlation says that “[t]heology formulates the questions implied in human existence, and theology formulates the answers implied in divine self-manifestation under the guidance of the questions implied in human existence.… The answers implied in the event of revelation are meaningful only in so far as they are in correlation with questions concerning the whole of existence, with existential questions.” [ST 1:61] This is a little misleading because it is not theology qua theology that formulates the questions. The questions are formulated in the analyses and

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articulations of the human situation by philosophy, the arts, psychoanalysis and the other human sciences. The only claim that is theological in the formulation of questions is that its own criteria pressure the analyses and articulations of the secular disciplines. Tillich repeatedly affirms that one the great achievements of these secular disciplines in the twentieth century is the recovery of the meaning of anxiety in the human state of estrangement and the description of this state in terms of restlessness, emptiness, and meaninglessness. [ST 1:191, 2:63] The only theological agenda that matters is written by the analysis of the human situation. Answers are meaningless without questions. Theology is not identical with philosophy or any of the human sciences but it does not simply wait for a report on the human condition to which it responds any more than it waits for reports from biblical scholars on the authenticity of the Jesus “sayings” tradition in the New Testament. The complicated relationship between theology and secular disciplines is that theology is beside itself. It positions itself next to the secular disciplines and pressures them with the demand of its own criteria and with the aporetic mystery of its own extreme formulation that God is being-itself. It juxtaposes the simulacra of its classical discourses with the representational economies of contemporary disciplines mixing primary and secondary processes of both in an emergent textuality. The ultimate concern of theology conspires with the secular disciplines to make serious the ontological shock of possible nonbeing in the twentieth century anxiety of meaninglessness. “Infinity is a demand, not a thing [ST 1:190]…Finitude in awareness is anxiety.” [ST 1:191] It is a mistake to understand Tillich’s understanding of symbolism as an extension of metaphor or analogy. The participation motif in symbolism has more of the character of a metonymn. We participate in what we are in our thinking as it is placed beside what we think. The theological demand that corresponds with infinity as a demand is that the object of theological thinking is what concerns us ultimately. This is the theological pressure and demand on philosophy and the human sciences as it juxtaposes its interrogation of life, its demand for ultimacy, with their analyses of life. Theology beside itself is an arrangement for meaning and significance in the secular world. The arrangement is an intervention in analysis and not a guarantee of meaning. It is a pressure for deepening or complexifying the question of meaning. Theology invests its concern for ultimacy in the analyses and articulations of the human situation. It is concern that gives meaning to the notion of participation. There is a being in our thinking, sometimes expressed as concern, that is more than any specific content. That being is

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a doing or becoming so that every content is always more than itself and expresses less than itself. The notion of symbolism is a valuation of this complex nexus of relationships. When theology understands itself as beside itself, it is a valuing of the world in which thinking the world is existentially part of the world. The Paradox of Blessedness Cognitive mystery and paradox never come to a simple resolution in Tillich’s theology because we are never able to think outside of the conditions of human existence. When he turns in his Systematic Theology to a discussion of life and the spirit it almost appears that he reverses his insistence on the ineradicable finite conditions of existence in affirming a notion of salvation that is unambiguous. Symbols of eternal life, the kingdom of God, and ultimate judgment are identified with a final conquest of life’s ambiguities. However, we need to remember that these are symbols of the quest for unambiguous life. He spends many pages telling us what these concepts do not mean. He works against literalism, supernaturalism, and magic. The message of the New Being is always received within the conditions of finitude. There is no revelatory super-knowledge that annuls what it means to be human. The final paradox and the most important paradox has to do not just with knowledge but with salvation. He asks: “What can I do to overcome radical doubt and the feeling of meaninglessness]?” [ST 3:228] He answers by saying that “the seriousness of despair in which the question is asked is itself the answer . . . This is the way in which the experience of the New Being as paradox can be applied to the cognitive function.” [ST 3:228] The paradox is that the power of the existential seriousness of despair is the power to affirm life in spite of despair. Despair is a participation in the power of life. In The Courage to Be he writes: “The hidden pleasure produced by despair witnesses to the paradoxical character of self-negation. The negative lives from the positive it negates.”8 We are blessed even in our despair. Life is a paradox because we think in our finitude. The paradox of meaning is that meaninglessness is meaningful in our despair. “The act of accepting meaninglessness is itself a meaningful act. It is an act of faith.”9 Tillich defines eternal blessedness as the eternal conquest of the negative. There is always the negative. “Without an element of negativity neither life nor blessedness can be imagined [ST 3:404].” The feeling of blessedness is united with unhappiness, despair and condemnation. In his sermon “You Are Accepted,” Tillich writes, “Grace strikes us when we are in great

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pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life.”10 To be blessed requires the courage to be united with the power of grace or acceptance. Blessedness requires a full articulation of the negative so that the negative can be known as the negative. The method of correlation under the pressure of the first formal criterion for theological thinking is a negative theology. To restrict thinking in its theological moment to the object of ultimate concern is such a radical formulation that there is nothing that can reveal itself outside of the context of its negativity. If Tillich’s theology can be thought of as a negative theology, it is a negative theology in a peculiar way. It is paradoxically a negative theology that is saying “yes” to life in its finite condition. His negative theology is a reversal of apophaticism. Instead of negating the world and ascending through a cloud of unknowing to a beatific vision of God, Tillich begins with a formal demand and surd formulation of God that through interrogation and knowing opens to us a beatific vision of the world. The world can be a spiritual community in which “there is the seriousness of those who seek to experience the ultimate in being and meaning through every cultural form and task.” [ST 3:161] Tillich brings to ordinariness the seriousness of an ultimate concern. It is not so much that theology must speak of ordinariness as it is transforming the experience of ordinariness by being always beside itself in its creative engagement with the world. The world doesn’t have to be more than it is to be meaningful. The seriousness that Tillich brings to the world is the seriousness of existential despair. In this despair, Tillich affirms that God is present. [ST 3:228] The world is divinely ordinary. This is a gospel. It is good news that life can be lived meaningfully under the conditions of finite existence and that there is meaning in meaninglessness and despair. Tillich always understood his thinking to be on a boundary. His theological formulations are an attempt to keep the boundary in mind and to be able to more fully value the world because it is in mind. The persistence of paradox and mystery in our most important thinking is our fate. Perhaps to use the language of his personal experience, it is a boundary fate. He also writes autobiographically, that “[t]he man[sic] who stands on many boundaries experiences the unrest, insecurity, and inner limitation of existence in many forms. He[sic] knows the impossibility of attaining serenity, security, and perfection.”11 Thinking theologically after Tillich is an unsettling act. It necessarily risks meaninglessness by asking the question of meaning in the con-

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text of ultimate concern. It cannot do less than this and still be theology. Ordinariness is no longer simply ordinariness. Ordinariness is itself no longer a settled matter. That is, it can no longer be thought simply as ordinariness. It is intertwined with a necessary negativity in order to be thought and at the same time intertwined with the power of its being a matter of fact. Theology makes us think the world under the pressure of that than which nothing greater can be conceived. What concerns us ultimately? What thinking doesn’t disappoint us? The paradox that Tillich keeps in front of us, the paradox we are within, is that we have the courage to be because we look into the abyss to say yes to life. The courage to be is lived and thought in the ironic necessity of saying yes to divine ordinariness.

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Notes 1. Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), p. 53. 2. Milan Kundera, Immortality trans. Peter Kussi (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991). 3. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) and A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) for his understanding of strong readings and misreadings in understanding the relationship between texts. 4. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology 3 Vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1957, 1963), Vol. III, p. 6. 5. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 281. 6. Noëlle Vahanian, “The Practical Desire to No End” (Paper delivered at the Eastern International Region of the American Academy of Religion, Montreal Canada, April 1994). 7. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), p. 42. 8. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 176. 9. Ibid, p. 176. 10. Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, p. 161. 11. Paul Tillich, On the Boundary: An Autobiographical Sketch (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966), p. 97.

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Chapter 16 Paul Tillich and Untimely History

…I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely—that is to say, acting, counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come. Friedrich Nietzsche1 But, of course, Paul Tillich would never have become a historian of religions nor, as a matter of fact, a historian of anything else. He was interested in the existential meaning of history—Geschichte, not Historie. Mircea Eliade2 Untimely history is an oxymoronic formulation trying to grasp the importance and the reality of the opening epigrams as they describe the thinking and person of Paul Tillich and his relationship to history. Although he develops a theology of history, he is not a historian and it appears as though his relationship to history is untimely. He thought counter to his time, acted on his time, and, I think now it is a common judgment, his thinking acted for the benefit of a time to come. Truth for Tillich is always existential truth and therefore to understand truth and history is to understand how existential truth is lived in history. Historical truth is a practice as well as theory and it is this thinking as a practice that I want to try to understand within the systematicity of Tillich’s theology. My attention will be focused more on the architecture of Tillich’s theology than on explicitly historical-political writings such as The Religious Situation3 or The Socialist Decision.4 My attention will be focused more on the epistemological and ontological formulations in the first volume of Systematic Theology than on the theology of history in the third volume of Systematic Theology.5 That is, in this particular essay, I am more interested in how Tillich’s thinking is implicated in history and acts upon history than how he thinks about history. There are several questions that shadow this turn of my attention. How is Tillich’s understanding of ontology related to what he might call at the end of his life a theology of the “Religion of the Concrete Spirit?”6 How does Tillich’s understanding of ontology relate to being in a way that is dif-

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ferent from Heidegger’s understanding of ontology when they are in many ways very similar? I think that this latter question has and had theological, political and historical importance. There is a tension in Tillich’s thinking between becoming universal and remaining particular, between the abstract and concrete, that binds him to history and to what and who are individual in history. It appears that he is able to think in such a way that the demand of the ultimate other is always intertwined with the demand of the particular other. What he understands to be the truth of Christian theology lies in “the tension between the absolutely concrete and the absolutely universal.” [ST 1:17-17] An ultimate concern is an existential concern. It has a place. Life is not elsewhere or nowhere. The somewhere of living is over against a negative apophatic theology. There is an epistemological negativity in Tillich’s thinking but it does not translate into a negative theology. What is sometimes referred to as “the Protestant Principle” is a refusal of idolatry and not a negation of the world or history. Tillich is within a tradition of what Kant calls ontotheology and this is why it is important that unlike many other ontotheologians, Tillich’s ontotheological position is not a negative theology. Kevin Hart’s definition of ontotheology certainly resonates with some of Tillich’s thinking. “[I]n onto-theology God is defined in terms of being: first of all, as the highest being, endowed with every reality; then as the original being, underived from anything else; and ultimately as the being of all beings, the ground of all that is.”7 Tillich does identify God with being-itself. He even says that this is the only nonsymbolic proposition that we can state about God. [ST 1: 238] Does this mean that we cannot know the God of ontotheology? Is this identification of God with being-itself the beginning of mysticism? Is it the task of theology to pass through a cloud of unknowing denying existence to achieve an unspeakable knowledge of God? Is theological thinking the making of a clearing or the listening for the call of a wordless word? Tillich would say no to all of these questions. There is something incorrigibly concrete in his theology. It would probably be a mistake to say that he has an empirical bent to his thinking because of the history of this term; but, it would not be a mistake to recognize the demand for an experiential accounting in everything that he means by thinking. Existential thinking is always marked on a plane of immanence even when what is being thought is in figurations of transcendence. The method that insists on the immanence of experiential meaning he calls the method of correlation. Tillich’s theology is an answering theology. “It answers the questions implied in the ‘situation’ in the power of the eternal message and with the means provided by the situation whose questions it answers.” [ST 1:6]

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Theology must begin with a twofold analysis and twofold recognition of the questions implied in the situation and the means provided by the situation. Theological thinking, like any other thinking, is subject to conditions not of its own choosing and to proceed it must interrogate and come to some understanding of those conditions. This is why theology always has a task for our time, whatever time that may be. There is no pure, atopic, foundation for the philosophical thinking that is a first task of theological thinking anymore than there is an atopic revelation of an eternal message. Theology is situated. In Tillich’s My Search for Absolutes there is a poignant and acute recognition of this reality that is more than a formal recognition. “We are not scholars according to the pattern of our teachers at the end of the nineteenth century. We were forced into history in a way which made the analysis of history and of its contents most difficult.”8 The history into which Tillich was forced, and we are forced, is political and intellectual. Philosophies or theologies that cannot speak to or in the midst of the horrors of the twentieth century, war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, ecological disaster, are simply not serious. They cannot be a thinking that meets Tillich’s first formal criterion for theological thinking: “The object of theology is what concerns us ultimately.” [ST 1:12] Only a fully negative theology could be forgetful of the Armenian genocide or Nazi holocaust and still claim to think that which concerns us ultimately. Only if only nothing matters can theology be unsituated. It is a strange thinking if being is formally separated from beings so that beings no longer matter. If being is wholly other, life in any important measure is elsewhere. In the opening of Tillich’s theological inquiry there is a profound tension that will need to be thought through if we are to understand him as a thinker in history. The formal demands that he places on theology in the interrogation of the experiential human situation can overwhelm what is interrogated and begin to look like a negative theology if not carefully assessed. In addition to the first formal criterion for theological thinking there is a second: “Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being.” [ST 1:14] Theology is not about preliminary concerns as preliminary concerns. There are, however, three possible relationships between preliminary concerns and that which concerns us ultimately. “The first is mutual indifference, the second is a relation in which a preliminary concern is elevated to ultimacy, and the third is one in which a preliminary concern becomes the vehicle of the ultimate concern without claiming ultimacy for itself.” [ST 1:13] Much attention has been focused on the second of these relationships as idolatrous and an understanding of this relationship gives a critical principle to the analysis of quasi-religious political movements.

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The third relationship is complicated and it is not always easy to locate in Tillich’s method of correlation. To be human is to be concerned about being and meaning. This does not require a special revelation. “‘To be or not to be’ in this sense is a matter of ultimate, unconditional, total and infinite concern.” [ST 1:14] We are thinking theologically whenever we ask the question of being and meaning. Theology risks being driven beyond the boundary line of the theological circle in its opening interrogations of the human situation. “Being human means asking the questions of one’s own being and living under the impact of the answers given to this question … he [sic] has become aware of the fact that he himself is the door to the deeper levels of reality, that in his own existence he has the only possible approach to existence itself.” [ST 1: 62] This is problematic because Tillich also says, “the concept of true being is the result of disappointed expectations in our encounter with reality.” [ST 1:101] In the interrogation of reality we think theologically and then again desire to think theologically out of the disappointment with our interrogation of reality. The theological question does not appear to be enough. Tillich boldly states, “God is the answer to the question implied in being.” [ST 1:163] We have to live under the impact of this answer. What does this mean? It certainly is not a simple answer because with equal boldness Tillich also says that “[t]he being of God is being-itself ” and that “[t]he statement that God is being-itself is a nonsymbolic statement” and that “after this has been said, nothing else can be said about God as God which is not symbolic.” [ST 1:235, 238-239] Deepening this problematic is Tillich’s statement in Love, Power and Justice that “[e]verything we say about being-itself, the ground and abyss of being, must be symbolic.”9 The logic of the answer does not appear to be commensurable with the logic of the question. If nothing can be said nonsymbolically of God except that God is being-itself and, if nothing can be said nonsymbolically about being-itself, it would appear that nonsymbolic thinking must affirm with Wittgenstein at the beginning and end of the Tractatus that “[t]he world is all that is the case” and that “[w]hat we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”10 Nonsymbolically being is silent, which theologically can also be construed to mean that, on a nonsymbolic register, God is dead. Nonsymbolically, theology can formulate a question but not an answer. If theology is to speak, it speaks in the thickness of symbolic life. The formal criteria for theological thinking do not mean that theology will speak being but it does mean that theology will speak under the claim of the power of being in the thickness of the world that is the case. It will think

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in the mystery that there is something and not nothing. The manifestation of this mystery is in the world of something, in history. It is symbolic thinking in the ecstatic grasp of infinitude as “finitude transcending itself without any a priori limit.” Here, “[i]nfinity is a demand, not a thing.” “Infinity is a directing concept, not a constituting concept.” [ST 1:190-191] Theology attends to the demand or pressure articulated in religious symbols. He writes of religious symbols that “[t]hey force the infinite down to finitude and the finite up to infinity.” [ST 1:240] The religious symbol is not a trope of denial. It functions metonymically more than metaphorically in the dissemination of meaning on the interrogative side of the method of correlation and gives some sense of the meaning of divine ordinariness. Questions alone do not satisfy Tillich and it is not enough to say that God, being-itself, is the answer to the question of being-itself. Tillich is a Christian theologian. The symbolic richness of the theological answer is specifically revelatory and substantially Christian. There are elements of contingency and singularity in Tillich’s thinking as a Christian theologian. When he speaks of revelation he says: “Revelation occurs or it does not occur; but it certainly does not occur ‘generally.’ It is not a structural element of reality.” [ST 1:138] Something has to happen. “The event on which Christianity is based is not derived from experience; it is given in history.” [ST 1:42] What is given is a reality of reconciliation, creativity, meaning and hope. What is given is not an understanding of being derived from the question of being in rigorous interrogation of the human situation. What is given is a New Being. “Where is this New Being manifest? … In Jesus the Christ.” [ST 1:49] This is the material norm of Christian systematic theology. This is the paradox of Christianity and its good news. It happens or it does not happen and for the Christian it has happened. There is a self-authenticating cognition of faith within history that is not the prerogative of structural analysis. It is contingent on being a hearer of the word. This cognition implied in faith “is qualitatively different from the cognition involved in the technical, scholarly work of the theologian. It has a completely existential, self-determining, and self-surrendering character and belongs to the faith of even the intellectually most primitive believer. Whoever participates in the New Being participates also in its truth.” [ST 1:53] Living under the impact of the truth of the New Being is the experience of the infinite in and through the finite. Beings cannot be dismissed. History cannot be dismissed. With the reception of the New Being there is an infinite demand that resides in the thickness of finite experience. Ultimate concern is an ethical imperative. It makes sense to

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think of Tillich’s positive Christian theology as ethically and politically responsible. There, however, is a legacy in Tillich’s thinking that doesn’t always eventuate in a positive Christian theology. Tillich himself often talked and wrote of living on boundaries. He even thought of the boundary as the best place for acquiring knowledge.11 Among the many boundaries he describes in autobiographical reflections are boundaries between philosophy and theology and between religion and culture. These boundaries have increasingly become a boundary between the sacred and the secular. When Tillich wrote in Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality that “[t]he man [sic] who asks the question of ultimate reality and the man [sic] who is in state of faith are equal with respect to the unconditional character of their concern,” he may have even unwittingly enfranchised the development of secular theologies that lean toward the secular side of the boundaries that circumscribe traditional theological circles.12 He enfranchises theology in the asking of the question of ultimate reality. And, in a post-Christian era, it is not surprising that there are people who ask the question of ultimate reality who have not experienced the contingent singularity of an encounter with the New Being. The courage to ask the question of ultimate reality and the courage to live in doubt are theologically and religiously significant acts. Reason can be grasped by an ultimate concern even without special revelation. In fact, the method of correlation is meaningful because we can theologically interrogate our experience independently of any special revelation. An answer without a question floats and may even symbolically express ultimacy but it is not a matter of concern, ultimate concern. Tillich’s theological questions resonated more deeply for many theological students in the second half of the twentieth century than his Christian answers. A theology developed that spoke of the death of God while remaining theological. Langdon Gilkey, in writing of his own experience of being influenced by Tillich and by American radical theology, has written that “[i]ronically, Tillich of all people was widely credited with being the spiritual grandfather of this theological new birth.”13 Thomas J. J. Altizer claimed Tillich not as a grandfather but as a father. “Among twentieth-century theologians, it was Tillich alone who made possible a way to a truly contemporary theology.… Certainly, Tillich is the modern father of radical theology.”14 Altizer also said that he resists and opposes Tillich’s conclusions as is evident in the development of his own theology. So, what did Tillich father? The importance of his theological thinking is more than the achievements of his own theology. Tillich gives credibility to theological thinking.

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He gives credibility to a theology that is situated in history and in the world. He gives credibility to thinking in the thick specificity of symbolic life. He gives credibility to a theology of the religion of the concrete spirit. Secular theology learned from Tillich the power of what we might call an ontological interrogative-effects series. All arrangements of thinking are pressured and sometimes troubled by the question of ultimate reality. All arrangements of thinking are unsafe, incomplete or unfinished when juxtaposed with interrogations of formulations of “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Tillich’s first formal criterion for theological thinking deconstructs the totalizing claims of any arrangements of thinking that are less than theological and any theological thinking that is not a matter of ultimate concern. Tillich’s second formal criterion for theological thinking means that theology has to do with life. We cannot speak of God nonsymbolically except to say that God is being-itself and we cannot speak nonsymbolically of being-itself. To speak of being at all is always to live in the symbolic tension of the relationship between beings and being. Theological thinking is the capacity to say yes to life in its incompleteness and inexhaustability. This yes is at the same time a no to totalizing metaphors that deny the dynamics of faith. Thinking is always an experiment and inscribing within this experiment an ontological interrogative-effects series is keeping the experiment open to what is other than itself. The other of thinking is a risk to thinking but is also the possibility for thinking. Tillich understood this in his formulations of the courage to be. He was able to think the God of theism and also think the demand of the other that is beyond the God of theism. Tillich was a parent of radical theology because he was willing to take the threat of meaninglessness into the meaning of theological thinking. Theology under this condition is unsafe but there is also a meaning in the act of accepting meaninglessness. Meaninglessness is always along side of meaningfulness and accompanied by it. We always experience something rather than nothing. We experience the power of being in the world of beings even if we do not understand it. The legacy of Paul Tillich’s theology that was affirmed by radical theologies is that the world is the venue for theological thinking. Theology is situated. It is not a nihilism. Tillich thought that “[t]he courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”15 I don’t know if this God ever appeared to Tillich. He believed in this God. He believed in the power of being-itself. He affirmed the courage to be and the courage to be is a courage to be in the world. The courage to be, with or without the appearance of the God above the God of theism, alters the being of our thinking

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in the world. The yes of courage means that the world can be thought as divinely ordinary and for some as divinely extraordinary. God is being-itself and there is something rather than nothing. Secular theology makes sense. There is an agenda for theology with or without special revelation. Tillich’s God beyond God may be read as the modest avowal that our courage does not come from the nothingness of disbelief but rather from the concreteness of our innermost pathos to believe, in the shimmer, if no more than that, of a possible intimacy with being.

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Notes 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 60. 2. Mircea Eliade, “Paul Tillich and the History of Religions” in Paul Tillich, The Future of Religions ed. Jerald Brauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 33. 3. Paul Tillich, The Religious Situation trans. H. Richard Niebuhr (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1932). 4. Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision trans. Franklin Sherman (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977),. 5. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3Vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1957, 1963). 6. Paul Tillich, The Future of Religions, p. 87. 7. Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 76. 8. Paul Tillich, My Search for Absolutes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), p. 54. 9. Paul Tillich, Love, Power and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 109. 10. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, pp. 7, 151. 11. Paul Tillich, On the Boundary: An Autobiographical Sketch (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966), p. 13. 12. Paul Tillich, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 58. 13. Langdon Gilkey, Gilkey on Tillich (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1990), p. xii. 14. Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), p. 10. 15. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 190.

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Chapter 17 Langdon Gilkey: Theology, Symbolism and Language

What have Athens and Jerusalem to do with one another? Or the Academy and the Church? Tertullian, De præscriptione hæreticorum

The theology of Langdon Gilkey has to do with both Athens and Jerusalem and also with the Academy and the Church. I do not think it would be an exaggeration to claim that Langdon Gilkey and Gabriel Vahanian are the only two major theologians who have consistently sought, since the nineteen sixties, to develop fully secular theologies that are deeply rooted in the traditions of Athens and Jerusalem, the Academy and the Church.1 Gilkey has written that “any current theology…that does not recognize and seek reflectively to deal with this presence of secularity, of doubt, of skepticism, and so of a sense of the meaninglessness of religious language inside the Church as well as outside, and so inside the theologian and believer, is so far irrelevant to our present situation.”2 More recently, Vahanian has written that “[w]ith the secular, theology recovers its integrity and becomes at last autonomous.”3 He alludes to a religious authority no less than Jesus whose parabolic preaching likens the kingdom of God to what goes on in the world, in the sæcula sæculorum.4 What is the image of theological thinking that is either operating or implied in these statements? I am not suggesting that Gilkey and Vahanian are saying the same thing theologically. But, their works posit an important question. What does it mean for Christian theologians to give an epistemological priority to the secular spirit and yet not fall into a simple-minded atheistic secularism? It would seem in both of their works that what is intelligible is fully inscribed on a plane of immanence. Intelligibility means inscription on a plane of immanence. But, intelligibility is not co-extensive with reality. Even within a theological circle of thinking, there are affects that elude or are more than propositional sense. Not only can theological thinking formulate limit questions that reach beyond its own sensibilities, but also there are felt realities that can challenge the adequacy of any particular formulations or thematizations.

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I do not want to fixate reflections on the theologies of Gilkey and Vahanian in the work of the nineteen-sixties; but, at that time Vahanian was writing the death of God in his work and Gilkey was grappling with the meaning of theological thinking that could write the death of God. I mention them together because they both affirmed the secular and continued to write Christian theology after the death of God. This was a time for negotiating an image and meaning for theological thinking that neither abandoned theology nor retreated into an evangelical orthodoxy. What I think is now clear is that the death of God movement marked a crisis in theological traditions coming out of both Athens and Jerusalem. The voice of Nietzsche’s madman was being heard. Theology had to learn how to think itself in ways that understood the exigencies of a gay science. Nietzsche’s notion of a gay science deracinates the Greek metaphysical tradition and Judeo-Christian historical and revelatory traditions. I think one way to misread Gilkey’s theology is to oversimplify Tillich’s method of correlation and apply it to Gilkey so that the metaphysical/ philosophical tradition raises questions about the human situation that can be answered by Christian revelations and symbol systems. What is important in his diverse publications is that he reads these theological traditions in their integrity. Although it is Aristotle who equates first philosophy, the science of being qua being, wisdom and theology, Gilkey refers back to Anaximander’s move to the limits of intelligibility in a notion of a primordial undifferentiated stuff to see the genius of Greek theological thinking as it then comes forward in complexes of ontological and epistemological questions and concepts that are especially visible in the distillations of the crises of epistemology in the transcendental philosophy of Kant. Gilkey reads the history of philosophy with the sensibilities of a transcendental interrogation. What are the conditions that make knowledge possible? This can be a general philosophical question but Gilkey also asks a specific theological question. What are the conditions that make theological knowledge possible? The answer will not be simply metaphysical because in the trajectory of what we have conveniently called the Greek tradition, the declaration of the end of metaphysics by Nietzsche and Heidegger or the closure of the ontotheological tradition of a philosophy of presence in deconstructionist thought parallels the death of God in Judeo-Christian theologies. Theology as a science of being qua being is as hard to sustain in the positivist spirit of the twentieth century as are historical theologies of proclamation and revelation. It is the epistemic dominance of the secular that makes this era post-metaphysical and post-Christian. This is not the same as saying that this era is unmeta-

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physical or unchristian. The theological streams flowing from Athens and Jerusalem are just thought differently. Thinking thinks itself differently because of the tremendous development of the physical sciences and technology, because of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and because of a history of abjection that has characterized so much of the twentieth century. The shift is ethical and moral, epistemic and linguistic. I think that the most important issue in Gilkey’s Naming the Whirlwind is the definition and assessment of contemporary images for thinking theologically. As a question this issue is not fully resolved and reappears with different appropriations in Gilkey’s subsequent works. As he wrote: “The theological debate has moved from the question of the character of God to the more radical question of his reality, and from the question of the nature and form of religious language to the more radical question of its possibility as a mode of meaningful discourse.” [Naming: 13] Or, the “current questions concern more the meaning than the validity of theological discourse.” [Naming: 13] The image of thinking, and this includes theological thinking, is only secondarily philosophical or epistemological. Thinking is always involved in negotiations and in a book by this title Gilles Deleuze has written: “[t]he image of thought is what philosophy as it were presupposes; it precedes philosophy, not a nonphilosophical understanding this time but a prephilosophical understanding…It’s the image of thought that guides the creation of concepts.”5 What is very complicated in reading Gilkey’s theology is that the prephilosophical image of thought has to do with both Athens and Jerusalem. It is as if there are two images and thus two trajectories that form a double helix coiling around each, resonating with each other, intersecting each other in specific historical moments, but never resolving their doubleness in a durable fusion. There is wisdom that is philosophy and there is revelation that is theology. In both trajectories there is the creation of concepts. Both trajectories confront the secular with their own characteristic losses, metaphysics and God. Gilkey doesn’t rescue Athens with a neo-orthodox or neo-evangelical reaction, nor does he rescue Jerusalem by sacrificing Christ to a humanistic Jesus. He instead addresses the secular and increasingly makes explicit a concept of secular theology. It is the secular that is the realm of the logos. My referencing Vahanian in writing about Gilkey is to help clarify the meaning of the secular for it is Vahanian that confronted theology with the secular as a fundamental epistemic transformation and not as a problem or inconvenience for theological thinking. Vahanian never equated the death of God with atheism, or thought of atheism as a condition for the secular meaning

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of Christianity, for he realized that the secular is not contrasted with the sacred. It is the profane that is contrasted with the sacred. The secular replaces the sacred epistemically in the determination of conditions for thinking intelligibility and reality. The secular is the transcendental ground for thinking ultimate reality. These are the circumstances in which Gilkey images theological thinking and creates theological concepts.6 Following the double trajectory of Gilkey’s theology he writes that “the loss of metaphysics in philosophy and the loss of God-language in theology are alike symptoms of what we shall call the ‘radical secularity’ of our culture.” [Naming: 14] The question for theology, whether it has roots in Athens or Jerusalem, is if it can be a meaningful discourse. “What ‘meaninglessness’ implies, we submit, is a sense of the total disrelation of a given set of concepts or a language game to experience and to life.” [Naming: 18] Gilkey equates the secular with the cultural spirit, Geist, of our time marked by the characteristics of contingency, relativism, transience, and autonomy. The gods are dead. Familiar structures of coherence, order and value have vanished. “Darwin and Nietzsche, Russell and Freud, not Marx and Kierkegaard, are the real fathers of the present Geist.” [Naming: 71] It is this secular spirit that is the deepest background of the theological ferment of the late twentieth-century. Experienced reality is marked by these secular characteristics and the question for theology is whether its talk has anything to do with this reality. Does theology have anything to do with the stuff of life? If not, can it be a matter of ultimate concern? This is a matter of the definition of faith and a matter of the assessment of the possibility for theological thinking. Gilkey is very much aware that we cannot beg the question of God-language in a secular age. Traditional or “recognized methods of theological construction…presuppose precisely those affirmations which that [secular] age finds it impossible to grant.” [Naming: 231] Gilkey deliberately goes outside “the walls of the Church into the broad arena of the world, where our own deepest attitudes about what is real and true are formed.” [Naming: 232] What he called in Shantung Compound the wisdom of the household budget is in fact a variation of theological exigency for thinking in a fully secular milieu. Theology cannot be unrelated to life and be a matter of ultimate concern. Gilkey sees that the theological task or at least the prolegomenon to theological thinking is the development of a hermeneutic of secular experience. “Our task, then, is to investigate in the broad range of secular experience what function and use, and therefore what meaningfulness and intelligibility, the realm of discourse called ‘religious language’ may have.” [Naming: 234] What is fascinating is that in this secular prolegomenon

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the loss of God, the silence of the sacred, and the end of metaphysics tell us about dimensions of ultimacy. “One of the most striking things about human existence in this epoch is that we notice this relation to an unconditioned as much by its absence as by its presence.” [Naming: 309; see also p. 301] It appears that the secular prolegomenon is not simply a prolegomenon. It is itself a modality of theological thinking. The language of the death of God is God-language. The thinking of the end of metaphysics is a metaphysical thinking. The prolegomenon is an empirical rather than apophatic negative theology. “A secular prolegomenon to theology, therefore, is one which begins in our ordinary experience of being in the world and elicits hermeneutically the meanings for religious language and its symbolic forms latent within that experience.” [Naming: 260] Absence can be as important as presence in these experiences. Limits or limit-questions tell us much about the quality and meaning of experience. We might not know much about the sea by mapping the shore of an island but we know something of what the island is not and what the sea is not. Gilkey understands that theological exigencies in thinking are such that the range of what we can ask can exceed the range of what we can answer. This is a real experience on a plane of immanence within the secular domain. “To us, the modality of our secular existence—in terms of both the positive and the negative character of the tone of our modern being in the world and so of our felt meanings and resultant behavior—is out of relation to the symbolic forms of its self-understanding.” [Naming: 249] Gilkey challenges the adequacy but not the necessity of secular theology or a secular understanding of existence “on its failure to provide symbolic forms capable of thematizing the actual character of its own life.” [Naming: 250] He says that the “unalterable requirement” of the secular mood for any relevant theological thinking is that it “be related to this worldly life, evident within it, and creative for it.” [Naming: 250] It increasingly appears that the challenge to secular thinking based on its failure to thematize and articulate the complexities and ambiguities of actual living is that it recognize within itself a theological exigency. In 1969 Gilkey sees traces of ultimacy within secular experience as a nonsecular interloper but he paradoxically defines and locates this interloper within the language and space of the secular. In the midst of the ordinary relative realities of worldly life we meet a presupposition or presuppositions that are limits, demands or ultimate questions. Gilkey thinks of these traces of ultimacy, whether marked by presence or absence, as being different in kind from ordinary worldly experiences but I fail to see why they should be thought of as nonsecular. They manifest themselves on a plane of secular immanence. The capacity

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for thinking to formulate extreme expressions of ultimacy or limit questions is not a counter-instance to Wittgenstein’s famous opening sentence of the Tractatus that “[t]he world is all that is the case.”7 There is even nothing in Anselm’s formulation of that than which nothing greater can be conceived that is not within the formulative capacity of secular thinking. Again, I want to assert that what Gilkey calls a secular prolegomenon to theology is itself theological thinking.22 It may not be easily identified with Christian theology or with an Aristotelian metaphysical theology; but, it is a worldly theological thinking. It is a matter of ultimate concern. This assertion does not beg the theological questions of metaphysical or revelatory theologies. It stays within the world that is the case. “A secular prolegomenon to theology [italics mine], therefore, is one which begins in our ordinary experience of being in the world and elicits hermeneutically the meanings for religious language and its symbolic forms latent within that experience…We must begin as best we can with the concrete character of secular experience and defend religious experience only in terms of what we find there.” [Naming: 260-261] That we can do this is a witness to the possibilities for a secular theology. The exclusive language of—only—keeps theology honest to what is actually experienced but it in no way forces experience to be less than what it is. Gilkey is claiming that there is an experience of ultimacy that belongs to ordinary experience. Even if it is on a boundary there is always an inside as well as an outside to a boundary. Gilkey understands meaning functionally and pragmatically. Linguistic symbols have meaning and use, including a religious meaning and use, only if they “thematize some significant area of common, ordinary experience; and conversely if they do so function, then ipso facto they have, or can have, significant meanings in the life of even a secular age.” [Naming: 272] He appeals to felt immediate experience and avoids a linguistic positivism by acknowledging that these experiences require a hermeneutic of experience to be elucidated. The basic unit of intelligibility is more than the word or the sentence if we are to grasp the affect in experience. He clearly recognizes that eliminating meaning from meaning does violence to the integrity of experience. The repression of meaning is a methodological and a psychological pathology. There is no pure speech and there can be no pure logic for speech. There are also no metaphysical assumptions that Gilkey can make that are outside of the impure and entangled voices of secular discourse in the development of his prolegomenon. Just as he has no simple access from within secular experience to revelation he has no access to a pure ontology. He says that his analysis in the secular prolegomenon will be ontic rather

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than ontological. It will search for the relation of words to lived experience. It is his belief that there is a “latent but pervasive and immensely significant dimension of ultimacy and sacrality which forms the continual horizon of man’s being in the world…[W]e shall, therefore, conduct an ‘ontic’ analysis, hoping to uncover the sacral dimension in man’s secular life, the shape or character of the horizon of our existence as this is directly apprehended and experienced in our actual life.” [Naming: 280-281] This ontic analysis is not a specific methodology as much as it is a strategy for uncovering dimensions of ultimacy within the secular. I am not sure there is any gain in calling such dimensions sacred and thereby segregating them from the integrated experiences in which they were discerned. I would like, at least tentatively, to characterize the Gilkey strategy for thinking within the secular as metonymical. That is, he posits formulations of religious traditions, questions of ultimacy and other limiting questions next to and within the fluxes and flows of ordinary experience. This forced metonymical pressure unsettles and defamiliarizes the ordinariness of experience and denies its thinking any simple closure. It is then the ordinary that is a witness to the extraordinary. The ordinary is intensified in its openness. The ordinary is no longer only ordinary and certainly is not dreary or drab. The becoming of the future is indeterminate because of the conceptual valuations and reversions that mark its emergence. Gilkey’s strategy can enfranchise a transvaluation of values and a yes to the meaning of secular life as it fissures the ordinary with new possibilities for the actualization of the ordinary/extraordinary. A secular theology has a certain grasp on what might be called, in the language of Huston Smith, a divine ordinariness. The juxtaposition of theological formulations of extremity can create interference patterns that fissure ordinary discourse and ordinary expectations within experience. They can mark a void or create a hope for a coherence of meaning within the ordinary. In theological thinking we experience ourselves as unfinished women and men. Gilkey suggests that the secular spirit is in tension with actual existence and out of relation to the symbolic forms of its self-understanding. Fissuring the surface of discursive practices opens experience to the intensity of its actuality.10 It is on the level of felt existence that secular thinking has failed to articulate and thematize the character of its own life. “It is on this basis that we shall argue that religious discourse is meaningful in the midst of secular life.” [Naming: 250] What is strange is that it may be the experience of meaninglessness that is meaningful. It may be the death of God, the loss of God, or the silence of what had been sacred that reveals to us dimensions of ultimacy in the secular realm. “[O]ur experience reveals as often as not the absence of God

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and so a sense of loss, of a Void where we are looking for something; but it is a special kind of a Void and a loss which, like our experience of sacrality, participates in the general character of this region of experience…Here we experience our own ultimate incapability.” [Naming: 301-302] It is here that we experience an anxiety about the absence in secular life of symbols or other constructs that concern our identity, values, and destiny. It is here that our love of life is challenged existentially. Gilkey says that without consistent and profound religious symbolism secular experience is blind. “Its joys are left uncelebrated and so unexperienced, and its terrors uncomprehended and so unconquered.” [Naming: 306] If there is a promise to secular theology it is that it will enable us to “begin to notice, to see, and to feel the immense creativity of the ‘given’ in life, those aspects of our being which neither we nor anyone else can create and yet which are the foundation of all that we are and love.” [Naming: 311] There is terror and the threat of meaninglessness in the secular world filled with contingencies. There can be an unbearable lightness to being. But, Gilkey also indexes common aspects of our secular experience that are positive: a deep joy in living, the pulsating vitality and strength of life, awe at the wonder and beauty of life. There is a positive creativity in the given. There is something rather than nothing. And, there is always the threat of non-being. Secular theology lives in this tension. The problem has been set before us. The felt actuality of reality is incommensurate with the ability to give expression to its depth and complexity. But, “men [and women] must think and conceive what they feel if they are to vividly apprehend it, fully to appropriate it, and especially if they are communally to share and perpetuate it.” [Naming: 419] We desire to think theologically but we are not free to choose the conditions, mood or tonality of dominant experiences that determine how we think. In our time we have to think in relation, with or against, the dominant figurations of the secular spirit: contingency, relativity, transience, and autonomy. Gilkey never lost sight of the epistemic problematic he defined in Naming the Whirlwind. It explicitly resurfaces in his studies of religion and science but it is also strategically interwoven into his specifically Christian theological studies. The image of theological thinking as a double helix now has a slightly different meaning than the heuristic formulation I used to introduce Gilkey’s theology. Gilkey now writes a secular theology, which he calls a prolegomenon, that can co-exist and coil around the interpretation of religious or theological classics of Athens or Jerusalem pressuring the experiences of meaning but not violating the integrity of either secular

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or traditional thinking. Theology is a practice or symbolic activity. It is an activity that gives form to definite regions of our life world.11 It is a thinking that is specifically located and therefore perspectival. As with science, the truth of theology is a symbolic perspective on the real.12 “[T]he role of symbols is crucial; the expression of what is known appears in metaphors, models, and analogies rather than in literal, univocal descriptions.” [Nature: 31] The mechanisms for action are tropic figurations within textual productions. In the coiling of traditional and secular thinking each thinking has a perspective on the other that can contribute to its own development. Gilkey’s strategy for thinking allows him to talk of different levels of meaning and truth. There can be what he calls the historical and the eidetic meaning of traditional symbols. [Reaping: 140] These are not enough. Meaning must be related to the life world existentially and reflectively. However, it is possible for these meanings to co-exist on different textual trajectories. The eidetic meanings derived from the Bible and the historical Christian traditions “give ‘Christian’ form to our understanding of God, of ourselves, our world, our history, and our future.” [Reaping: 143] The reflective meanings derived from a secular theology give immediate relevance to thinking in the life world. They pressure and complement each other perspectively. The eidetic meanings of Christian theology and its retention of mythology allows ultimacy to “be expressed in determinate and not merely in negative terms.”10 This contrasts with secular theologies that are fundamentally negative theologies. Gilkey can recognize dimensions of ultimacy in the experience and proclamation of the death of God and at the same time recognize the human capacity to symbolically express dimensions of ultimacy in a determinate language.11 Gilkey’s understanding of the secular is deeply founded in his understanding of the Enlightenment and its epistemic entailments. He entitles a chapter in his recent book on science and religion, “Whatever happened to Immanuel Kant?” The Kantian problematic or maze is very important to him. It does not hover in the background of his thinking as it might in many of the popular contemporary cosmological reflections of some scientists.12 It is always front and center in his thinking. He realizes that the Kantian problematic is no less a problem for cosmology that it is for theology and metaphysics. Brushing aside philosophical problems by accepting a “cultural atmosphere” that embraces the “plausibility structures of positivism” is a sleight-of -hand that is too obvious in an interrogative framework of unrestricted questioning to be a matter of ultimate concern. [Nature: 45] Gilkey discerns the internal meaning of external relations that is an experiential confrontation with Kant’s first Critique. He writes that

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“[t]he common methodological thread that guides Whitehead, Tillich and Santayana out of the subjectivity of the Kantian maze is the notion of ‘participation’…The process manifests itself in us, as well as in those objects ‘outside’ of us…In us, ‘being’ comes to self-awareness and self-consciousness [Tillich]; prehensions change to apprehensions, consciousness, and intellection [Whitehead]; the rush of matter becomes the awareness of spirit [Santayana].” [Nature: 71] It is this internal relatedness that is meaning, the self-consciousness of meaning. It is the constitutive character of thinking, philosophically, theologically or scientifically, and not an accident or by-product of thinking. “Self-awareness, knowledge of the subject from the inside of her own experiencing, reflecting and judging—that is, from the inside of her knowing and the meanings she knows—is as constitutive of science as are sensations and measurements.” [Nature: 38] The self-awareness in cognitive participation is self-authenticating. You would have to decide against yourself, diminish the intensity of your feelings and generally make yourself littler if you choose not to reflexively think the felt qualities of your own experience. Gilkey has a confidence in life that makes this decision untenable but not inconceivable. It is possible to be victims of our own thinking. Our thinking is a participation in nature. This is our nature and Gilkey will affirm that nature, as life, is a realm of meanings. “[T]he cosmos , as providing the conditions of life, is indirectly such a realm; its order over eons of radical change, a puzzle; and its itinerary toward our world of explicit meanings over almost endless improbabilities, an astonishment.” [Nature: 134] In understanding nature we can speak of traces of the sacred: power, life and order. Gilkey emphasizes that in nature or the silence of the cosmos we only have traces of meaning and value. All is not well. “Throughout experience, natural and historical, these traces of value seem to become continually submerged by some antithetical force; for power wanes; life is wounded and dies, vanishes; and order becomes threatening disorder.” [Nature: 135] It is the polarity between meaning and its negation, good and evil, that poses the most profound questions of religion and theology. What is evidently real is that we are finite and we will die. How we think and stand in relation to the power of life and its negation is a elementary definition of religion. That we think and stand in relation to the power of life and its negation is the peculiar nature of the privilege of consciousness. This thinking is a natural theology or as Aristotle suggests, first philosophy and wisdom. For Gilkey, there is, problematically, an unfinished quality to any natural theology. “The effort of natural theology to understand and articulate

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the whole of experience, it seems to me, never represents the initiating source of ‘religious knowledge;’ hence this effort cannot function as the final criterion of this knowledge.” [Nature: 194] The locus of “religious knowledge,” knowledge of God, is historical and existential. Here Gilkey is deeply Christian in his affirmation of a religious knowledge. “The important knowledge of God is not philosophical; it is ‘religious,’ that is, it is on the one hand existential and on the other communicated through symbols to the community that acknowledges the most fundamental disclosure and witnesses to that knowledge.” [Nature: 194] He affirms the singularity of an event or events of disclosure to which there can be witnesses. Gilkey affirms the reality of a God who acts in history. He affirms covenanted communities that have a special clarity in the knowledge of a God who acts in history. “If in nature the divine power, life, and order or law are disclosed through dim traces, and if the divine redemptive is revealed only in ambiguous hints in and through the tragedy of suffering and death, it is in the life of the peoples of God that all this is disclosed in much greater certainty, clarity, and power.” [Nature: 195] The historical disclosure of God intensifies the traces of the divine in nature so that they become “genuine signs of the power, of the order, and of the will of God.” [Nature: 195] What was called a prolegomenon in Naming the Whirlwind and in his later work a natural theology is thought by Gilkey to be very important but not the vital center of Christian theology. It is important because it expands and deepens our knowledge of the self and the world. The traces of God appear at the limits of our finite analyses. There are limit questions to which Gilkey says that he believes that “God remains the sole reasonable answer.” [Nature: 201] It does appear, however, that God is a credible word in our theological thinking because of the historical manifestation of God. If there is not a credible historical witness to the manifestation of God in history then theology will be left only with traces of the divine. There is a tension in Gilkey’s theology for which I cannot find a simple resolution. His detailed articulation of the secular spirit makes some of us hesitate with a certain incredulity when we are hearers of the word of Christian proclamation. The recognition of contingency in secular thinking applies to the disclosure of God as well as all the other singularities of experience. I have experienced a revelation of God or I haven’t. I have to be at the right place, perhaps in the right community, at the right time. It is possible that there can be an aesthetic justification for thinking in a Christian symbolic framework even without a historical justification. It may be, and I think this is consonant with Gilkey’s theology, that thinking the

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Christian symbol system next to a secular inquiry can intensify the traces of the divine within the ordinary and in this way bring about assent to the Christian God now reinscribed on the secular plane of immanence. “As John Calvin put it, when one puts on the spectacles of Scripture, the signs of God in creation are seen truly for what they are.” [Nature: 195] What is seen is the creation. The legacy of Gilkey’s theology is that he has established the credibility of a secular frame for thinking theologically that at the same time allows a thinker to attend to the particular singularities of experience even when this is a witness to the manifestation of an incarnate God. Within this secular frame the death of God can be addressed next to the manifestation of God. Gilkey enfranchised the language of an ultimate concern within the domain of the secular spirit. There are traces of ultimacy even in a realm that is contingent, relative, transient, and autonomous. If there are special revelations within the realm of the world these are singularities that can be celebrated and enhanced or missed. Gilkey shows that there is an urgency to thinking theologically as an expression of our humanness. Gilkey’s Christian theology is a gift and not a necessity.

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Notes 1. Robert Scharlemann clearly works in both traditions but it would be difficult to understand his work as fully secular. Thomas J. J. Altizer’s apocalypticism defies restriction to a plane of immanence. Mark C. Taylor and myself are clearly outside of the Church. 2. Langdon Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1969), p. 10 (cited hereafter as Naming). 3. Gabriel Vahanian, “The Denatured Nature of Ethics: In Praise of the Secular,” Philosophie de la religion entre ethique et ontologie, (Biblioteca dell’ Archivo Filosofia, CEDAM, 1996), p. 514. 4. Vahanian, p. 514. 5. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 148. 6. In Naming the Whirlwind Gilkey equates Vahanian’s position with an untroubled neo-orthodoxy (p. 27), but also refers to his excellent descriptions of the secular spirit (p. 70). I think now it is clear that the biblical dimensions of Vahanian’s theology are understood in a profoundly secular milieu. It is with the secular that theology recovers its integrity. (Vahanian 1996, p. 514). 7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 7. 8. My claim is a conscious misreading of Gilkey’s text in Naming, p. 413: “This has been an ontic prolegomenon to theological discourse, not an example of theological discourse.” I am arguing that secular theology is not Christian theology but it is theological because of the interrogative theological exigency it embodies. 9. Gilkey is deeply informed by Whitehead’s understanding of the value and intensity of the actual in the primary mode of causal efficacy and the diminishment of intensity in the secondarily conscious mode of presentational immediacy. Causal efficacy is the primary mode of feeling. 10. Langdon Gilkey, Reaping the Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of History (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976), p. 144 (cited hereafter as Reaping). 11. Langdon Gilkey, Nature, Reality, and the Sacred: The Nexus of Science and Religion (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1993), p. 18 (cited hereafter as Nature). 12. Langdon Gilkey, Religion and the Scientific Future (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 116. 13. See both Reaping and Langdon Gilkey, Message and Existence: An Introduction to Christian Theology (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979) for

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examples of theological writings that give a determinate form to ultimacy and yet can co-exist with the epistemic undecidability and indeterminancy of his writings on the secular and the scientific worlds. 14. Gilkey cites Pagels, Sagan, Weinberg, Dawkins, Barrow and Tipler. Nature, p. 44.

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Chapter 18 Analogy, Apology and the Imaginative Pluralism of David Tracy

… when all is said and done, one finds that he can authentically abandon neither his faith in the modern experiment nor his faith in the God of Jesus Christ. David Tracy1 The theme of David Tracy’s book, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope, is conversation. This is his theme because of his claim that “there is no intellectual, cultural, or religious tradition of interpretation that does not ultimately live by the quality of its conversation.”2 It is not enough that the conversation be polite and friendly, because what is at stake is the life of the tradition that allows for and enters into the conversation. To examine the quality of a conversation, to assess its importance, is in part to understand what difference it has made in the interpretive tradition. Does it matter that we have been party to a conversation? The notion of conversation as a desideratum within theological inquiry is not new with Pluralism and Ambiguity in Tracy’s work. For Tracy, the need for conversation is linked with pluralism and he has throughout his work steadfastly addressed the claims of pluralism on theology. In an earlier book he said that his “fundamental aim is to suggest how the strategy of an analogical imagination may serve as a horizon for the genuine conversation open to all in our pluralistic present.”3 There is clearly more than one strategy that interests Tracy. There are theological strategies to open conversation and conversation is itself a strategy to open theology to the pluralism of its diverse publics. There are “hard rules” in Tracy’s notion of theological conversation. First, he acknowledges that “the fundamental loyalty of the theologian qua theologian is to that morality of scientific knowledge which he shares with his colleagues, the philosophers, historians, and social scientists.” [BRO: 7] There can be no covert appeal to belief that exempts the theologian from critical thinking and rigorous inquiry. Secondly, serious conversation is selfexposure to all of the fundamental questions residing in our contemporary situation. [AI: 448] Tracy says, “to be human is to act reflectively, to decide deliberately, to understand intelligently, to experience fully.” [PA: 9] This

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means that theological conversation will involve risk, conflict and argumentation if we respect its possibilities. We risk our present understanding, [PA: 103] and if we think that a claim is true and meaningful or even only probable we need to say this is what we think and argue why others should agree with us [PA: 99]. The hard rules of conversation are variations on Lonergan’s transcendental imperatives: “Be attentive, be intelligent, be responsible, be loving, and, if necessary, change.” [PA: 19] As Tracy notes, conversation is a game [PA: 18] and the hard rules are thus the rules of a game even when referred to as transcendental imperatives. It is a game of questioning involving texts and interpreters. There are already players, that is, contemporary interpreters who are regularly part of Tracy’s conversation, and there are also classic texts in the Christian tradition that are regularly part of the conversation. The rules would be empty without specific players and texts. It makes a difference whether the texts are biblical or secular, and whether the players are Lonergan and Ricoeur or Bataille and Derrida. Part of what is intriguing about Tracy’s project for a conversational game is that the game is already underway and yet he is always willing to receive new participants, players and texts. This openness, however, is qualified by the fact that the game is already underway and it is not clear if the new players can change the rules. There is an ambiguity in these texts on ambiguity and pluralism as to whether the rules of formation that govern the conversation can themselves be problematized and questioned. On the one hand, the force of questioning that drives the conversation is not unlike Lonergan’s unrestricted desire to know. There seems to be nothing that cannot be called into question. On the other hand there are specific formulations of truth as manifestation, and belief in belief that seem to make further questioning irrelevant. For example in affirming the possibility for knowledge itself, Tracy says: “On any particular issue, we can know when we have no further relevant questions. It is possible, therefore, to know when we know enough.” [PA: 61] What are the criteria for having exhausted relevant questions? Can other players ask questions when we are exhausted? The notion of truth as manifestation within the broad phenomenology of experience and subsequently delineated through the transcendental and metaphysical categories of fundamental theology is basic to the movement of Tracy’s work. “Truth manifests itself, and we recognize its rightness.” [PA: 28]. This is a claim of experience available to anyone who listens to music, reads classic texts, or finds oneself in love. They know “that truth as manifestation is real. And, it does suffice.” [PA: 29] Truth is authenticated by the power of its own disclosure. The complex interaction that provides a scene

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or site for disclosure is conversation. Conversation includes, as suggested above, such diverse experiences as talking, reading, listening, and loving. In the definition of a classic it is the force of recognition that accompanies these activities that makes any of their components candidates for classic status. That is, certain texts, persons, images, events, and even gestures are privileged when in our experience we say: “This is important! This does make and will demand a difference!” [AI: 115-114] This affirmation that “truth, in its primordial sense, is manifestation” [PA: 29] binds truth and power on an elementary level of phenomenological description. Tracy examines the importance of this truth/power complex on two different registers. The first reflects a valuation of the world of experience and a trust in certain limit-concepts that ground and to a certain extent idealize and universalize the dignity of the human project. “Without such a truth, life is indeed nasty, brutish, and short.” [PA: 29] It is the “giftedness of reality” and experiences of love and joy that warrant a trust that is not reducible to other trusts. [PA: 87] It is this trust bound to the “giftedness of reality” that allows us to go forward with our lives and is the incentive for further theological investigation. The “giftedness of reality” is not a marginal affirmation for Tracy. It is an experiential centerpiece and is available to those persons who accept the hard rules or transcendental imperatives of conversation in their diverse experiences. On a second register it is the development of fundamental theology that articulates the dynamism of this trust. Phenomenological reflection and description of this basic trust is understood in the reflexivity of the human subject. The phenomenological reflection of trust, wonder and giftedness is here importantly supplemented by a “focus upon the possible order, and, at the limit, the emerging harmony disclosed to reflection by concentration upon the disclosures provided by the focal meaning of a manifestation event and by reflection’s own manifestory dynamism towards that same event.” [AI: 413] It is the dynamism of cognitional self-transcendence that is coordinated with the “giftedness of reality” in the work of fundamental theology. Tracy here assumes responsibility through argumentation for his experiential assertion that truth is manifestation. Tracy is responsive to theology’s multiple publics and fundamental theology is particularly responsive to its academic public. “Fundamental theologies will be concerned principally to provide arguments that all reasonable persons, `religiously involved’ or not, can recognize as reasonable.”[AI: 57] This appears to be significantly different from Lonergan’s understanding of foundational theology in which an objectification of intellectual, moral, and religious conversion provides theology with its foundations.4 The “oth-

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er worldly falling in love” of religious conversion is in Tracy’s understanding not a sufficient warrant for fundamental theological truth. “In all arguments in fundamental theology…personal faith or beliefs may not serve as warrants or backings for publicly defended claims to truth.” [AI: 64] Tracy accepts three sets of criteria as rules governing this conversation: meaningfulness, meaning, and truth. [BRO: 71] He defines meaningfulness as a dimension of the disclosure of our experience as selves. Meaning is correlated with the demand for internal coherence. And, something is true “when transcendental or metaphysical analysis show its ‘adequacy to experience’ by explicating how a particular concept…functions as a fundamental ‘belief ’ or ‘condition of possibility’ of all our experience.” [BRO: 71] It is, in particular, this last criterion of truth that enables Tracy to make fundamental claims that are sometimes at variance with dominant trends in the academic philosophical community and that pass over into other theological specialties. Even if one does not preclude the possibilities for transcendental inquiry, one might be suspicious of the felicity of its peregrinations unless you already think you know where you are going. Tracy wants to avoid impressionistic claims in the academic conversation and, like an ace in the hole, “transcendental arguments on argument are useful to keep in mind, especially when the going gets tough.” [PA: 27] There are two moments in fundamental theology. The phenomenological moment is concerned with common human experience known throughout the larger community of inquiry. The transcendental moment interrogates the conditions for the possibility of common experience describing its abstract, universal, general and necessary features. [AI: 160] It is in the transcendental moment that the religious dimension of our experience and language is disclosed as a limit-to dimension or, as we might better say, “disclosive of the ‘limit-situation’ which is the human situation.” [AI: 160] Tracy claims that these transcendental analyses “warrant the authentic inquirer of the religious classics to enter the conversation where those fundamental questions of the meaning of existence are at stake.” [AI: 160] The conversation changes significantly at this point. Defining a limitsituation puts new demands on the conversation that Tracy understands as exigencies of the limit-situation. A moral or religious claim is enfranchised that at first complements but then alters the intellectual ferment of the conversation. That is, new rules accompany moral or religious claims and the conversation is formed in a significantly different way. The moral claim is very clearly expressed in Blessed Rage for Order. “The first and abiding issue for human beings is their faith or un-faith, commitment to value or failure to live a human life. A faith of this kind, as I have already suggested, is most

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immediately experienced in boundary-situations and peak experiences and most clearly mediated or expressed in the limit-language of an explicitly religious self-understanding.” [BRO: 187] The religious claims are more specific and, in spite of the openness to interreligious dialogue, Christian. Tracy does not make the claim that only believers can interpret religions; but, in the confidence of the transition through the limit-situations disclosed in the transcendental moment of fundamental theology to systematic theology, he does affirm the importance of belief for his own participation in the conversation. “I do believe in belief. I believe that faith in Ultimate Reality can make all the difference for a life of resistance, hope and action. I believe in God.” [PA: 110] This credo is enhanced by his portrait of the theologian where he claims that: “As Christian thinkers focus on the all pervasive reality of God, they focus on the person and work of Jesus Christ as their surest, indeed decisive representation of both the nature of the ultimate reality of God and the reality and possibilities of themselves.” [AI: 47] It is not common human experience but a specific memory that has entered the conversation and is decisive in its claim upon it. We are now not simply talking about a conflict of interpretations or competing ideas. “Christianity does not live by an idea, a principle, an axiom but by an event and a person—the event of Jesus Christ occurring now and grounded in none other than Jesus of Nazareth.” [AI: 427] It is the “dangerous memory of Jesus” that grounds the conversation “in the full event of Jesus Christ witnessed to by the church.” [AI: 427] Admitting this specific and dangerous memory as a ground marks a shift in genre so that the continuing conversation is really a different conversation from where we began. That is, testimony, witness, or confession is a different genre of discourse from what Tracy described as the phenomenological and transcendental moments of fundamental theology. The conversation appears to be discontinuous and certainly is not reversible. A christological witness cannot be relocated in fundamental theology without fundamental theology ceasing to be itself; and, the specific historical claims of the church’s memory are not subject to the general interrogation of transcendental inquiry. The oxymoronic formulation for the event of Jesus Christ, [AI: 429] “always already, not-yet,” resists empirical verification. It is a summary formula of confession making present what is absent. Tracy uses this same formulation in his understanding of grace; [AI: 446] and, in this usage, we can better see how it functions within his discourse. The always already, not-yet reality of grace, “when reflected upon, unfolds its fuller meaning

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into the ordered relationships of the God who is love, the world that is beloved and a self gifted and commanded to become loving.” [AI: 446] It is in the strength of this claim that the Christian can risk self-exposure to and in the contemporary situation. The order of discourse keeps being turned around and we have something akin to a hermeneutical circle. Fundamental theology enhances the credibility of confessional discourse as a worthwhile activity although it cannot provide a warrant for any specific confession. Confessional theology can provide an assurance that the theologian can risk self-exposure to the contemporary situation although it cannot provide a warrant for fundamental theology’s publicly defended claims to truth. Thinking itself here appears to be another event that is always already, not-yet. The horizon under which these discourses are fused in Tracy’s theology is a corollary manifestation of the concept of the analogical imagination. The analogical imagination is a notation for the development of a language or languages of ordered relationships articulating similarity in difference. There can be series of ordered relationships, including the relationship to the memory of Jesus, that are “established in and through reflection upon the self ’s primordial experience of its similarity-in-difference to the event.” [AI: 410] The analogical imagination as it functions here is a third order of discourse that is synthetic and tensional. It has a similarity in difference to both confessional and fundamental theologies. It is properly what Tracy understands to be systematic theology; and, although it is not first order confession, he does privilege a “hermeneutical fidelity to the Christ event itself.” [AI: 421] What remains in tension with this act of privileging is that the concept of the analogical imagination is the achievement of a transcendental interrogation of the conscious subject in the work of fundamental theology. Tracy must be able to sustain the credibility and the explanatory power of the concept of the analogical imagination if systematic theology is to be more than a elaborated confession of faith. Systematic theology is exposed to the risks of the contemporary situation because of its complicity with fundamental theology in the structuring of an analogical imagination for the articulation of similarity in difference. This means that what must be credible is the transcendental interrogation of the conscious subject; and, it is this philosophical work that has become problematized by the recognition in the contemporary situation that “claims to full self-presence in conscious thought, are illusions that cannot survive a study of language as a system of differential relations.” [PA: 59] As Tracy acknowledges, the invasion of the

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uncanny rhetoric of the tropes destabilizes any traditional understanding of the fundamental theological project. We are heirs to the suspicion of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. “They have robbed us of the last illusion of the Enlightenment—the illusion that if we are autonomously conscious and rational we need fear no further illusions… All the expressions of consciousness possess not only their manifest meanings but conceal and distort a series of latent, overdetermined meanings that demand new modes of analysis.” [AI: 346] The new modes of analysis must be fully implicated in an awareness of disguise, systematic distortions based on societal or personal interests, repression and resistance. “There can be no quick humanist recourse after Freud to suggesting that the ‘higher,’ value-laden, reflective, cultural possibilities of dialogue and conversation are necessarily adequate to interpreting every situation.” [AI: 348] The play of differences in the manifest content of discourse cannot be assumed to be innocently and straightforwardly a function of consciousness. The humanist conversation is under a cloud of suspicion independent of its specific philosophical, theological or political content. It is this suspicion that justifies what Tracy calls an interruptive detour through structuralist and poststructuralist studies of language. The question we might raise is whether this is a detour or new road [i.e., a new mode of analysis]? Referring to Jacques Derrida, Tracy says: “With his brilliant rococo theories, he seems to insinuate himself into all conversations…His maritime policy is to produce a rhetoric of radical destabilization to expose any pretensions to full self-presence, any self-congratulatory Western resting in an untroubled, alinguistic, self-present, grounding ego.” [PA: 59] The importance that Tracy assigns to Derrida is the exposure as illusory any hope that a full-presenced unity could be derived from studying language as systemic object. [PA: 60] This subordinates Derrida’s contribution to the conversation because Tracy claims that the full-presenced unity of meaning was already lost through hermeneutical studies of actual language use. Tracy then leaves the detour to return to the main road of his conversation by what might appear to some readers of Derrida as a remarkable claim that Derrida is less interested in texts than individual words within texts. [PA: 60] The move in the chapter where Derrida is discussed in some detail is, by Tracy’s account, a move from language as use, to language as system, to language as differential nonsystem, and then past Derrida to discourse. [PA: 61] What seems not to be part of this conversation is Derrida’s detailed reading of texts and the quasi-transcendental function of différance in the formation of discourse. Derrida is talking about the very opening of the space where

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theological discourse inscribes itself. The deracination of the subject present to itself is more than a concern with individual words in the articulation of a hermeneutical practice. Derrida and Tracy seem to have an importantly dissimilar understanding of the deconstructive critique of logocentricism. For example, Tracy says of Derrida that “his laughing rush to the de-centering words in every text may finally force him to find himself in an echo chamber of words alone—which, ironically, are all there is ‘outside the text.’” [PA: 60-61] In contrast, Derrida writes, “It is totally false to suggest that deconstruction is a suspension of reference. Deconstruction is always deeply concerned with the ‘other’ of language. I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentricism is above all else the search for the ‘other’ and the ‘other of language.’”5 Perhaps Tracy rejects the stylistics of Derrida’s writing and has prematurely closed the conversation because it would appear that Derrida could be an ally of Tracy in the assertion that: “Otherness has entered, and it is no longer outside us among the ‘others.’ The most radical otherness is within.” [PA: 78] This claim has immediate implications not just for a critique of culture but for the critique of subjectivity in the transcendental analysis of fundamental theology. The conversation with Derrida is on this register and not in the conflict of interpretations of religious or cultural texts. The displacement of the coherent self of rational and reflective philosophies will have manifestations in a general thematics of culture; but, it also alters the rules of formation and status of discursive practices so that a transcendental interrogation in fundamental theology will not give us a ground for the transition into systematic theology. This is not to say that the work of fundamental theology is unimportant or that a transition to systematic theology is impossible; but, it is saying that the concept of a ground cannot be privileged by reflective philosophy when the coherent self has been displaced. Fundamental theology may itself be a misnomer in a postmodern context unless we use the word fundamental only as a characterization of a mode of interrogation and not as a notation for grounds or first principles. In a postmodernist sensibility the mode of interrogation is not directed toward founding, building, centering, or stabilizing theories of truth and reality. This is a world open to epiphanies. Even in “moments of true manifestation in our conversation with the classics…these moments of recognition come to us now not as returns of the same but as unsettling

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acknowledgments of the other and the different become, at their best, the possible as the analogous.” [PA: 83] What is characteristic of postmodernist writings is that they are acts of resistance. “Resistance may be Nietzsche’s joyous affirmation of plurality itself, alive again in the unstable ironies of Barthes, de Man, and Derrida, alive as well in the encyclopedias become labyrinths of Borges” [PA: 83]. Resistance is a shift in strategy that is highly overdetermined in the recognition of the intractability of the “other” of the real and in a consent to the constitutive power of discourse. Thus, this resistance is even more than a shift in strategy. It marks a fundamental epistemic shift that challenges the meaning of representation in language. There are echoes of Nietzsche’s pronouncement that truth is “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymns, and anthropomorphisms.”6 There are also echoes of a religious sensibility in resistance. “At their best, religions resist modernity by resisting sanguine versions of error, rational consciousness, and the self.” [PA: 74] The Christian concept of sin, “a perverse denial of one’s finitude and a willful rejection of any dependence on Ultimate Reality,” [PA: 74] and the Buddhist concept of a primal ignorance, “primal avidya that constantly tempts us to believe in the powers of both ordinary consciousness and rationality,” [PA: 75] give a religious meaning to strategies of resistance. Here, religious thinking joins “secular postmodernity in resisting all earlier modern, liberal, or neoconservative contentment with the ordinary discourse on rationality and the self.” [PA: 84] Tracy sees a hope in the power of resistance in both its secular and religious manifestations that is closely tied to powers of negation. He refers to Jung, Eliade, and Scholem as masters of retrieval of the hidden and despised resources in religious traditions who “repeat over and over again, the routes of negation in all the spiritual traditions [that] await our entry to work their uncanny releasements upon us from the terrors of our own history.” [AI: 360] “We will cure ourselves of the deadly boredom which our bourgeoishumanist search for certitude has imposed upon us by disclosing the indeterminacy of every determinate meaning, the always-already, about-to-be, uncanny absence lurking in every present and past meaning.” [AI: 361] It is the sense of the uncanny, “the post religious, religious sense of our situation,” that must be kept alive. Resistance is a “fight against all temptations to canniness.” [AI: 362] This is a resistance against the leveling power of common denominators in the totalization of thought. “Conflict is our actuality. Conversation is our hope.” [AI: 363] But, when actuality is distorted, “conversation must yield for the moment to the techniques of

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liberation and suspicion classically expressed in Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger.” [AI: 363] The positive note in combining resistance and conversation is that “there may be some way to formulate our common hope and our uncommon experiences of the uncanny into the rubric of an analogical imagination.” [AI: 363] This positive note does not deny the negation within the interrogation of experience that is part of the development of the analogical imagination. This interrogation is “focused through the no in our common no-where, our sensed no-longer, not-yet at-home-ness in this time and place given to us.” [AI: 363] Affirmation will be in the face of the no. This is an uncanny affirmation and affirmation of the uncanny. The affirmation through negation appears to be an experiential dialectic in the configuration of the analogical imagination. “We recognize that uncanny affirmation only because we finally sense some reality, vague yet important, which we cannot name but which is, we sense, not of our own making…We recognize it because it is there in the first place. For that uncanny affirmation has alwaysalready been there in the not-yet and the no-longer of our not-at-home-ness in this contemporary situation.” [AI: 364] The conversation has taken an interesting turn. The religious classics and the secular literature of postmodernity in their witness to the uncanny, indeterminateness, undecidability, and presence that marks an absence have been understood to witness to an absence that comes to presence although as always already, not-yet. “There is no classic discourse on Ultimate Reality that can be understood as mastering its own speech.” [PA: 109] “In and through even the best speech for Ultimate Reality, greater obscurity eventually emerges to manifest a religious sense of that Reality as ultimate mystery.” [PA: 108] The turn is in the claim that it is obscurity that witnesses to the presence of Reality as ultimate mystery. Has the conversation come to an adequate closure? I think not, and I think Tracy would agree with this assessment. “The collaborative character of theology as a discipline should further ensure that no particular theological conversation be allowed to stop too soon, to announce relative adequacy too rapidly, to forget the fundamental inadequacy attendant upon any serious attempt to understand those kind of questions and those kind of responses.” [AI: 447] If the conversation is to continue it may have to be modulated to a different register where difference makes a difference. In engaging any serious work, part of the function of an interlocutor is to think what is unthought in the given text. The conversation must attend to those places where discourse cannot master its own speech.

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Michel Foucault in The Order of Things contrasts language usage and exegesis from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a definition of our present task and practice. “…now it is not a matter of rediscovering some primary word that has been buried in it [language], but of disturbing the words we speak, of denouncing the grammatical habits of our thinking, of dissipating the myths that animate our words, of rendering once more noisy and audible the element of silence that all discourse carries with it as it is spoken.”7 There is no room in this description for an undisturbed metalanguage or for an undisturbed language of faith. I quoted Foucault because, although there is little difference in the content of this description of contemporary discursive practices and what Tracy understands to be the risk and responsibility of conversation, the tone is different. The tone is transgressive. To risk exposure to the contemporary situation is different from developing strategies that disturb our words and denounce our grammatical habits. Exposure may be disturbing; but Foucault has announced a strategy of resistance that is more than entering a zone of vulnerability. Throughout this essay I have tried to respect and yet disturb Tracy’s words. There are figurations that are fissured in their formulation such as the always already, not-yet realities of grace or the Christ-event. There are other formulations that strain when juxtaposed with each other. The manifest power of obscurity is in a tensive relationship with the truth that manifests itself so that we recognize its rightness. The “giftedness of reality” is in a tensive relationship with our radical contingency and the terror of the “other” in its many manifestations. Within fundamental theology the displacement of the subject is in tensive relationship with the transcendental interrogation of subjectivity. And, perhaps most importantly, the key concept of the analogical imagination as an ordering of relationships articulating similarity in difference is in a tensive relationship with the more radical Heideggerian claim that identity is in difference and with Derrida’s understanding of différance. These are claims against which the fundamental theologian must risk exposure. Tracy has risked theological self-exposure in his many conversations with the classical texts of the tradition and of postmodernity. Has it made a difference? Yes and no. The analogical imagination has become richly textured with the subtleties and language of postmodernist discourse and yet able to resist the implications of a differential nonsystem of discursive play. A more perplexing question is whether it has been able to resist the temptation of canniness. This is a hard question to answer because it appears that the analogical imagination elaborates itself in service to a faith in a mani-

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festation of a truth that is other than itself and other than the temptation to canniness. These books are books of hope. They begin in the hope of authentic conversation and they end in a hope that has been developed and articulated in that conversation. But, it is always a hope that is intertwined with a faith that was always already part of the conversation. “As I suspect is obvious by now, my own hope is grounded in a Christian faith that revelations from God have occurred and that there are ways to authentic liberation.” [PA: 113]

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References 1. David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), p. 4. (cited hereafter as BRO). 2. David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), p. ix (cited hereafter as PA). 3. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1981), p. xii (cited hereafter as AI). 4. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 130. 5. Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other,” in Dialogues With Contemporary Continental Thinkers by Richard Kearney (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press), p. 123. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), p. 46. 7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 298.

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Deconstruction is always deeply concerned with the ‘other’ of language. I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the ‘other’ and the ‘other of language’. [Derrida interview with Richard Kearney] Western theology and the study of religion are both deeply implicated in the logocentric framework of the western philosophical tradition that has become the object of a radical deconstructionist critique. In particular, it has been the work of Jacques Derrida that has most recently problematized any easy alliance of theology and the study of religion with unquestioned logocentric assumptions and trajectories in their discursive practices. Derrida has made conscious the often unthought syntax of philosophical thinking that is itself the often unthought context for the study of religion. Whether we agree or disagree with Derrida’s analyses and readings of the tradition, studies in religion are subject to the interrogative force of his inquiry and can choose to be naive only by casting a shadow on their credibility. Derrida’s impact on English language studies in religion follows three waves of publication and subsequent English translations. Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference were published in 1967 [ET, 1973,1976,1978]; Disseminations, Positions, and Margins in Philosophy were published in 1972 [ET, 1981,1981,1982]; and, Glas, The Truth in Painting and The Post Card were published in 1974, 1978 and 1980. [ET, 1986, 1987, 1987] All of these works are difficult and require philosophically sophisticated readings and it is the lack of philosophical knowledge that has led to so many misreadings and clichéd understandings that are at best a caricature of Derrida’s thought, and more often a falsification of his positions in the growing secondary literature on deconstruction. The publications that are under the explicit focus of this review, sometimes thought of as his more “playful” or “literary” works, are particularly subject to misreading because of their nonconventional organization. However, I do agree with Rodolphe Gasche in his excellent book, The Tain of the

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Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, that “all the motifs of the earlier texts continue to inform and direct Derrida’s more ‘playful’ texts.”1 There are philosophical arguments in these texts even when they manifest themselves in nonsystematic differential play. What we must first account for in our reading of any of Derrida’s major texts is that Derrida is a careful reader and that reading Derrida is also reading Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl and Heidegger and sometimes reading them in juxtaposition with Bataille, Mallarme, Blanchot, Genet, Sollers, or other literary and visual artists. Derrida teaches us to read in extremis and to read carefully. It is in this reading that we discover the “other” and the “other of language.” That is, Derrida reads philosophy and literature without denying their internal tensions, inconsistencies and constitutive complexities. He is thereby able to locate and follow lines of force within the differential play of signifiers of the text to ruptures and gaps that witness to the originary trauma and undecidability of bringing force to textual experience. His readings resemble a transcendental interrogation of the conditions for the possibilities of discursive practices and textual productions. This is why Gasche properly refers to Derrida’s undecidables, arche-trace, différance, supplementarity, iterability, and re-mark, as quasitranscendental and as infrastructures of discourse. These undecidables are conditions, infrastructural syntheses that constitute philosophy’s mise en scene. They are themselves not concepts but mark the inscription of concepts within differential chains of signifiers that constitute their sense. Identity is in difference and it is the conditions that make possible this coming into difference that are interrogated in a deconstructive reading. What Derrida fundamentally disturbs is the philosophy of reflection with its notion of the self-grounded thinking subject. The signature of the self is decentered in the heterogeneity of conditions that constitute its possibility. Inscription is more than and other than intention. “The alterity that splits reflection from itself and thus makes it able to fold itself into itself— to reflect itself—is also what makes it, for structural reasons, incapable of closing upon itself. The very possibility of reflexivity is the subversion of its own source.”2 There will be traces of the “other” than the text even when they are repressed or under erasure that make possible the “double gesture” of deconstruction, a phase of reversal and appropriation of formative concepts and a phase of reinscription and displacement into the context of their infrastructural possibilities. Contrary to some criticisms of Derrida, the indeterminacy of undecidable traces in the text does not justify irresponsible interpretive play or gratuitous readings; nor is deconstruction a reconstructed “new criticism.”

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The locus of deconstruction is the given text and its reading maintains a fidelity with the text since “the interpretive efficiency of the infrastructures or signifying structures depends on their insistence within a given text or discourse.”3 In Positions, Derrida very clearly states that: “The incision of deconstruction, which is not a voluntary decision or an absolute beginning, does not take place just anywhere, or in an absolute elsewhere. An incision, precisely, it can be made only according to lines of force and forces of rupture that are localizable in the discourse to be deconstructed.”4 However, the articulation of this incision is not predetermined by the formal constraints of the text under examination. Derrida’s “more playful” texts carefully read the tradition but acknowledge the heterogeneity of context and text production by experimenting with syntax and organization. Fidelity to the text is also fidelity to its supplementarity. Glas, the first of the major experimental works to be published, confronts the reader with a strategic decision as to how it is to be read. Composed of two columns with parenthetical and grafted subtexts, one might suspect, for which there is some evidence, a complex orchestration that needs to be deciphered. There, however, is a warning inserted into the text to caution the reader against organizational unity: “one column here [ici]—let one think [to compensate] then the other one over there. The one shows when the other descends, but isn’t the level almost constant, almost only because you count for nothing in the time [mesure] of the two heterogeneous columns. No common measure at the very moment you think you are clutching/declutching, manipulating, orchestrating, making the liquid music rise or fall by playing the pedals, by making use of fags [en jouant des pedales]. The columns deceive and play with you, threaten to beat on each other without leaving you any issue.”5 The reader reads within a tension of readings of Hegel and Genet chiasmatically crossing between the Sa, an acronym for the savoir absolu of Hegel, and the ca, it, this and that, of Genet’s incorrigible heterogeneity of immediate experience. Glas, a death knell, is a study of Hegel’s Aufhebung. It is explicitly theological and christological by holding one of its columns close to the Hegelian achievement and profoundly secular by holding the other column close to Genet’s dark witness to the body of particularity. The reading of Hegel is uncompromising with revisionist accommodations that make the Hegelian project more easily assimilable in contemporary theology. “The deconstructive undoing of the greatest totality, the totality of onto-theology, faithfully repeats this totality in its totality while simultaneously making it tremble, making it insecure in its most assured evidences.”6

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Sublation and subversion are the warp and woof of Derrida’s textual fabric in Glas making it difficult to determine when to read the text ironically and parodically and when to read it straightforwardly. The one hand of his writing has as its object the morsel [G: 118] and the other hand writes the implications of the Hegelian Aufhebung in the ascent toward absolute knowledge, Sa. He follows the Hegelian trajectory into the heart of Christianity while in the adjacent column he works in and under Genet’s gluey textual veil of drool, spit and milk. [G: 67] Glas is not a text of moderation. To read Hegel seriously is to think “God’s infinite revelation revealing itself in its infinity.” [G: 212] “To claim to think absolute, true and revealed religion, and maintain, as Kant does, the limits of a finite subjectivity is to prohibit oneself from thinking what thinking is said to be, is not to think what one already thinks, is to chitchat—in the infidelity, idolatry, formalist abstraction of the understanding.” [G: 212] Derrida does not claim that Hegelianism is true Christianity or that Hegel can think “infinity” without fissuring his text, but he does claim that “…one must be certain that, for Hegel at least, no ontology is possible before the Gospel or outside it.” [G: 56] The preaching of love and its subjective interiorization is the paradigmatic expression of the Aufhebung. “If Sein cannot be what it is, cannot posit itself, become and unfold itself without traversing Christianity’s destiny, that is first because Sein must first determine itself as subjectivity. Being perhaps lets itself be re-covered and dissembled, bound or determined by subjectivity [Heidegger], but that is, for Hegel, in order to think itself. First in Christ.” [G: 57] Absolute religion precedes the Sa. “The immortality of the one who is God’s anointed, who is a being [Wesen] only as the son of God, this immortality, the glorious resurrection of his body, consists in letting itself be thought.” [G: 72] Hegel’s analysis of the family, particularly the holy family, is the conceptual matrix for absolute knowledge. “[T]he Christian holy mother is named Aufhebung…Aufhebung is the productive imagination.” [G: 203] The textual juxtaposition of this analysis with Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers does not mean that we can dismiss the overtly theological entailments of the reading of Hegel and attend only to the nonconventional format of Derrida’s text. The text has a context and a content. Language is “filled, fulfilled, filled in, accomplished, inflated, curved [galber], rounded by the sense that penetrates it.” [G: 253] Derrida’s readings of Hegel and Genet in Glas are lessons in the specificity of reading. These, however, are not lessons in constraint. Derrida’s readings are errant readings. They stray within texts and between texts and

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in this way reveal texts in their richness and complexity, incompleteness and otherness, including their religious and theological sensibilities. The Truth in Painting and The Post Card are not unlike Glas in their being serious readings of the philosophical tradition in a nonconventional style. The recurrent theme of The Truth in Painting is framing and Derrida’s stated strategy is to make a disturbance in the philosophy that dominates discourse on painting, to decrypt the linkage between the phonic and graphic traits, to analyze systems of duction [production, reproduction, reduction, etc.] and the desire for restitution of the truth in painting.7 An important question for this discourse on art and also an important question for the study of religion is: “What happens when a surplus value places itself en abyme?” [TP: 155] This question will insist upon itself in the interrogation of parergon, all that is neither in the work [ergon] nor outside of it. Derrida’s disturbance to philosophy is primarily through a reading of Kant’s third Critique and secondarily through the construction of a polylogue discussing a debate between Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro of a Van Gogh painting of unlaced shoes. The questions of the trait, the idiom of the trait [signature] and systems of duction are woven into discussions of Adami’s The Journey of the Drawing and Titus-Carmel’s The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin. All of the essays investigate the parerga of the discourse on art. They are discourses on art and also discourses on thinking. Derrida’ reading of the third Critique is a radical exercise in the purity of thinking that follows and seduces [TP: 49] the text and the problematics of the whole of the Kantian project to lines of fissure and expressions of absurdity. It is in an interlacing of the first two Critiques that “an abyss is established between the domain of the concept of nature, that is , the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, that is the supersensible, such that no passage is possible from one to the other.” [Kant quoted in TP: 36] The identification of art as a middle term to resolve the separation between mind and nature becomes in Derrida’s reading the deconstruction of a system of pure philosophy. The parergonal function of the analytic of concepts in the analytic of the beautiful mixes discourses and its framing effect of subjectivity can be effaced only by naturalizing the frame to infinity, placing it in the hands of God. [TP: 73] Only then could we have “the pureness which gives us the sense of beauty in general, the pure telos of beauty [as non-telos].” [TP: 100] This and other paradigmatic but parabolic formulations of pure beauty and the refusal of the pure sublime to adequate presentation confound resolution of the opposition of mind and nature. We have frames without works and it is the frames that are determined in their undecidability. It

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would appear that the truth in painting eludes the philosophical gesture that reduplicates itself. This comment applies to Derrida’s reading of Heidegger as well as Kant. Heidegger has paired “Van Gogh’s” unlaced shoes, “he has loaded these shoes, invested them, arraigned them, compulsively laced them around peasant ankles, when nothing in the picture expressly authorized this.” [TP: 338] Then, it is this pair of shoes “in this painting which opens to the truth of the being-product. But which opens to it in its unveiled-unveiling presence, letting itself be traversed—toward truth.” [TP: 325] In this parodic reading of Heidegger the movement toward truth does not bring us to the truth in painting. The desire for restitution is an onto-theological desire. Perhaps there is something “other” in the truth in painting. The Post Card is constructed of ‘envois’, essays and an interview. It is, among other movements, a reading of Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition. “You might read these envois as the preface to a book I have not written. It would have treated that which proceeds from the postes of every genre, to psychoanalysis.”8 This “unwritten book” is about delivery systems and the delivery of truth. “To post is to send by `counting’ with a halt, a relay, or a suspensive delay, the place of a mailman, the possibility of going astray and of forgetting.” [PC: 65] It is the “post” that brings us to an awareness of the materiality of the text to be delivered and the possibility of its loss without return. Derrida, however, does not write a history of the post, he writes of a postcard inverting the historical images of Socrates and Plato, or mixing up the names, while he, Derrida, mixes a personal correspondence with philosophical speculation. “A correspondence: this is still to say too much, or too little. Perhaps it was not one [but more or less] nor very correspondent. This still remains to be decided.” [PC: 3] The question of too much or too little, undecidable excess, is a focus of interrogation throughout this text. In a reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “How to gain access to the restance of Beyond…?” [PC: 261] is the dominant motif. The difficulty and necessity of translating an observation into a description, “… these trajectories—transitional, transcriptive, transpositional and transgressive, transferential trajectories—open the very field of speculation.” [PC: 382] In the prefixes of speculation, the trans or the Uber, we confront the return of the problematic of the Aufhebung and the displacement of subjectivity in the accession into the symbolic, the logic of the signifier. The Post Card, The Truth in Painting, and Glas keep bringing us back to the “other” and the “beyond” of the multiple manifestations of the desire for the savior absolu. Derrida writes that “what makes me write…would rep-

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resent in this respect only one offer. An offer on the scene in which attempts to occupy the place of the Sa…are multiplying, that is, simultaneously all the places, those of the seller, the buyer, and the auctioneer.” [PC: 521] “Who is writing? To whom? And to send, to destine, to dispatch what? To what address?” [PC: 5] Is this a scene of writing that demands and allows for a theological response? Even if Derrida’s writings have been misdirected into the study of religion, their arrival and presence pose questions of the delivery of the truth that are religious and theological.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 4. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 163. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 82. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. Richard Rand and John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), pp. 223-224 (cited hereafter as G). Gasche, p. 180. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 9, 11 (cited hereafter as TP). Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 3 (cited hereafter as PC).

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Chapter 20 Julia Kristeva and Amatory Discourse

In Tales of Love Julia Kristeva ponders the question of why the rabbis in Yabneh in the 1st century of the Common Era included “within the bosom of the sacred writings” the amatory discourse of the Song of Songs, a tropological writing of figurations expressing sexual love.1 She asks, “to what unconscious logic the Song of Songs could find its place in the Bible. How did a literally erotic text become sacred?” [TL: 95] She quotes Rabbi Akiba, “If the entire scriptures are holy, the Song of Songs is holier than the rest.” [TL: 88] What does she think is at stake in this decision? Is there something special about erotic discourse tied to divinity that says something very important about the human condition and about discourse in general? What is there about a “holy madness” that matters? It appears that what we have is Dionysus constrained by the law of the father protecting experience from “mystical effusiveness,” and giving Judaism “the unique trait of being the most erotic of abstractions, the most ideal of sensualities.” [TL: 99] Even with this appearance of constraint we have a text or a textual practice that makes the univocal exchange of information unstable and perhaps even unsafe. Amatory particularity and the intensity of affect in the language of love introduces uncertainty and undecidability in any discourse by transgressing the boundaries set by reductive rules seeking to secure clarity and distinctness at the price of the loss of force and vivacity. Without the vivid intensity of the language of the Song of Songs we can simply ask what it means to address someone I love as pumpkin or sweetheart. It is obvious that we are no longer under the constraints of the rules of a symbolic discourse that sets a premium on the univocity of meaning. “In order to become, for the other, more evocative of the experience that is germane to the loving subject—each bit of information is loaded with semantic polyvalence and thus becomes undecidable connotation.” [TL: 91] The speech of love is ordered in an original impulse in the semiotic chora but is a disordering factor in the order of the symbolic. But, these are concepts to which we will have to return. Now, it is enough to recognize that Kristeva understands the simple amorous enunciatory act as undecidable, allusive, blurred and yet capable of working its way into the signs and infrasigns of even ordinary discourse. [TL: 92] The language of love is the Trojan horse that can slip past the guardians of the law of the father. The problem is that

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the father too can love or at least has loved. The language is too attractive to be excluded from thought or even from sacred writ. The language of love disrupts ordinary discourse just as it disrupts ordinary lives. Kristeva writes that “amorous dialogue is tension and jouissance, repetition and infinity: not as communication but as incantation…[i]nvocation.” [TL: 93] An amatory discourse is a practice even if it is not fully conscious of its own status. This is the meaning of incantation and invocation. Tension and repetition may be its problematic. Jouissance and infinity are its reward. What does this mean? “[I]n amorous dialogue I open up to the other, I welcome him in my loving swoon, or else I absorb him in my exaltation. With those two motions, the premises of ecstasy (of one’s going out of oneself ) and of incarnation, insofar as it is the ideal becoming body, are set within the amorous incantation of the Song of Songs.” [TL: 94] Even if we are modest we can understand the gesture of transcendence, ecstasy, as a longing for the infinite. Jouissance is the thickness of the experience that is at the same time its self-authentication. Kristeva notes that this experience is not a description of Platonic love and I very much expect that it is not politically correct. It is not necessarily orgiastic but it is also not safe. Amatory discourse is always beset with a certain excess. It persists so that it resists any easy containment. Even in its ordinariness it can spill over into intimations or approximations of infinity. In the extraordinariness of the text of the Song of Songs this point is especially emphasized in allegorical interpretations of the rabbis. The amatory discourse is spiritualized. Kristeva asks: “Is not symbolic exegesis thereby a simple recognition of the rhetorical infinity—of the metaphorical proliferation—present at the foundations of amorous discourse?” [TL: 99] There is a peculiar and subtle democratization in the lover’s discourse that accompanies this recognition of a rhetorical infinity already at the foundation of the discourse. There is no inequality in an infinite reference. Kristeva claims that in the Song of Songs “a wife speaks” before her king, husband and God as an amorous loved one. [TL: 99] She is sovereign before her loved one. There is in this text a prototypical liberation of women as a subject. “Without being queen, she [the Shulamite] is sovereign through her love and the discourse that causes it to be.” [TL: 100] Kristeva claims that the Shulamite, “on account of her love, becomes the first Subject in the modern sense of the term. Divided. Sick and yet sovereign.” [TL: 100] The modern subject, in process/on trial, is inscribed by a revolution in poetic language as having a deep resonance with the speaking subject of the Song of Songs. Language in its formulations of extremity always bears witness to a finite process that is entangled with a rhetorical infinite that puts

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us on trial. Language fissures in the experience of the subject because there is always something other in and of language. This position is densely and rigorously argued in Kristeva’s doctoral dissertation that is edited and translated into English as Revolution in Poetic Language. It is here that we see clearly the linguistic architectural structure of the subject in process/on trial.2 In this work the subject is the Freudian modern subject or perhaps more accurately the Lacanian postmodern subject. although this claim too is inaccurate. Part of Kristeva’s genius is neologistic. There are new words or new uses for old words. There are new gatherings or arrangements for words and ideas. The explicit framework of much of her thinking is Lacanian and uses his distinctions between the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. But there is also a Marxist or materialist investment that augments and strains the Lacanian framework. Thinking with all of its entailments in language is a process or as she says a practice. It involves a process that pervades the body, a recognition that is often repressed in a capitalist society. It is an activity generating signifiance. [RPL: 13] What she calls signifiance is “an unlimited and unbounded generating process, the unceasing operation of the drives, toward, in, and through language; toward, in, and through the exchange system and its protagonists—the subject and his institutions.” [RPL: 17] This is a structuring and unstructuring process. A doing and undoing of meaning in which the subject is constituted as in process/on trial. There is no thing that is the subject. She designates within the signifying process two modalities, the semiotic and the symbolic. “The subject is always both semiotic and symbolic.” [RPL: 24] Kristeva’s symbolic is very close to Lacan’s symbolic. The semiotic, however, is a notion that has resonances with Lacan’s real and interestingly the order of the unrealized but is a notion particular to Kristeva’s thought. She borrows the term chora from Plato and links it to the semiotic modality in the formulation semiotic chora. In a way this is a location just as a village has a chora but more importantly it is a way designating a primary process that runs through the body where drives are cathected and participate in the signifying process constituting a subject. Her explicit definition of the chora is “a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.” [RPL: 25] This is a thick notion that includes the it of our material animality but is also implicated in our social locations and in the ecstasis of our symbolic spirituality. I think she clearly thinks on a plane of immanence where the world is all that is the case; but, it is not a reductive notion of immanence. Whatever

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we might mean by spirituality is here a complex nexus of relations that are always in process. We are always becoming woman or becoming man or becoming animal and we are always already woman, man and animal. The semiotic is often hidden by representation of the symbolic but it is always there. “The semiotic is articulated by flow and marks: facilitation, energy transfers, the cutting up of the corporeal and social continuum as well as that of signifying material, the establishment of a distinctiveness and its ordering in a pulsating chora, in a rhythmic but nonexpressive totality.” [RPL: 40] The semiotic chora is a quasi-transcendental notion. It precedes the symbolic, is continuous with it, and is the condition of its possibility. What is also important in a signifying practice is the recognition that the semiotic chora also exceeds the symbolic. There is a gain and a lack in coming to symbolic consciousness. The subject is always constituted in a lack. The lack is that which is other than the subject as the subject knows itself although this other belongs to the process of constituting the subject. The thinking process in which the subject is constituted is an appearing and disappearing, a showing and a hiding. The symbolic does not copy the semiotic. They are never congruent and yet they are always implicated in each other. To know thyself is to know thyself as divided or always fissured. Semiotic motility is the precondition for signification. [RPL: 48] As Lacan would note, this is the place of the Other. There can be no homogenous self. Thinking not only takes place in the space of heterogeneities but it itself is a heterogeneous process. The symbolic realm defines the phenomenality of what we know but not how we know it. In Kristeva the existential need for self-knowledge confronts an epistemic wound, which is in itself part of what it means to have self-knowledge. It is the wound that gives intensity and importance to the signifying process. It is the wound that is a space for the importing of drive intensity into the symbolic realm. Otherwise the symbolic realm can be no more than a play of signifiers. What is needed for satisfaction in thinking is a sense of importance. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva’s strategy is transgressive. She wants jouissance to flow into language. In Tales of Love, she sees the jouissance that is already within a lover’s discourse and all of the ambiguities and undecidabilities of the semiotization of the symbolic realm. In Revolution in Poetic Language, this is the function of art. We have some glimmering of what Nietzsche meant when he claimed that there is only an aesthetic justification for existence. Kristeva doesn’t settle for found art or found love. We make art. We make love. They require strategies and tactics. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva’s strategy is transgressive as it is in even later books such as Desire in Language or Powers of Horror. She

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values a negativity that she draws from Hegel and figures as an indissoluble relation between the ineffable mobility of the semiotic chora and particular differential determinations of the realm of the symbolic. This negativity is transversal. It intersects both the semiotic and the symbolic and thereby transgresses their boundaries. One of the ways we can practice a strategy that embraces this negativity is to entertain formulations of extremity that are never self- contained, such as Anselm’s formulation of “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” The Tales of Love is also such a writing and thinking process. Or, we could invest ourselves in the experimental writings of Derrida or Deleuze and Guatarri. Or we could entertain the spatial, temporal, grammatical, syntactical and or graphological displacements in writings of Kundera, Apollinaire, Robbe-Grillet, James Joyce et.al. We can steep ourselves in the heterogeneities of experience as a deliberate practice. In the radical criticism of Kristeva there is a catharsis. What is cleared away is the confidence in any single strategy that can make determinant the undecidable relationship of the semiotic chora to symbolic representation. What is given up is control—even any particular controlling strategy of Kristeva. The problem is how to make a text unsafe, which is an attempt to make it important. This is importing into the discourse the other of its specificity and sometimes even the other of discourse itself. There is a certain loss of control but a gain in control is often accompanied by a loss of importance. This makes me turn to what I fear is a shadowy theme. It appears that sometimes the loss of importance is compensated for by an overvaluation of the gain of security by thinking in what might appear to be a clean well-lighted place or least with the clean well-lighted places of familiar formulations. These can even be the radical but now familiar formulations or clichés of deconstructionist postmodernism. This can result in the formation of communities of cognitive exclusion to protect the familiar from intrusions of disconfirming experiences. It becomes the task of the community to dismiss certain kinds of thinking and to dismiss the people who talk about what we have excluded from our talk. In Powers of Horror it is very clear to Kristeva that this exclusion is at the same time a definition of abjection. Her program for Revolution in Poetic Language inscribes abjection within any society of control. If we admit that rigor and precision are desiderata for serious thinking, a clear agenda item for future thinking is how to become unfixed in precise thinking without dismissing it. Oxymoronically, can there be a post-critical strategy for thinking that is also critical? Can there be a chastened sense of possibility after the catharsis of radical criticism that does not repress aware-

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ness of the semiotic chora or deny the reality and importance of symbolic meaning? I want to make a minimal if not modest proposal. I do not think that pure imagination can provide forms or first principles to generate or authorize agreement about what is important in thinking. But, we do have a conceptual power that can imagine and a practical power that can effect thinking and so we can risk new strategies. We can experiment. We can think with guidance of new images of what is called thinking. In Kristeva’s thought there is some drift without a loss of intelligibility or rigor. My minimal proposal, which is characteristic of much of Kristeva’s work, is that the metonym rather than the metaphor be the dominant trope in making arrangements for thinking. The sense of metonymy that I am referencing is the allowing or the forcing of a next-to-ness or juxtaposition of differing discourses. Thinking diverse discourses in juxtaposition can pressure thinking and thicken it. What is benign in one discourse can intervene and disrupt another discourse. The conflicting quasi-transcendental rules for the formation of specific discourses can sometime interfere with each other and complexly triangulate in the emergence of a new discourse. For example, even in extreme formulations such as thinking of thinking as only an activity of language or of thinking of culture as only simulacra, there are aporetic formulations that do not bear witness to their genealogies. What are Plato’s third form, Aristotle’s phantasm, Schopenhauer’s will, Bergson’s intuition, Lacan’s real, Derrida’s différance, or Kristeva’s semiotic chora? These are singularities that we cannot get behind or around or pass through. But, they can be intersected in undecidable collisions. The importance of juxtaposing discourses is that different discourses enfranchise the presence of different singularities that can make the conjunction of discourses a little unsafe but also possibly fecund. Kristeva regularly turns to fecund but unstable discourses to access and assess the subject in process/on trial. The discourses of desire, love and even abjection resist containment and reference the real in such a way that her discourse has a theological resonance. That is, she works within discursive practices that defy restriction and yet reads these texts next to a theoretical discourse that has rigor, precision, and infinite extension. There is an entanglement of multiple voices that enrich and fracture each other. The experiences that she references overflow the boundaries of their symbolic representation. Thinking is never just a play for Kristeva. It is a carnival but a carnival is never just a carnival. There is nothing but the text but there is an other in and of the text. The symbolic realm is entangled with and never free from the semiotic chora. Its thickness is its entangle-

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ment with the semiotic chora. It is the significance of that other which is marked and remarked in the signifying of tales of love. Kristeva writes “in praise of love.” “If I emphasize love as a crucible of contradictions and misunderstandings—at the same time infinity of meaning and occultation of meaning…[t]he ordeal of love puts the univocity of language and its referential and communicative power to the test.” [TL: 2] I am suggesting that what we learn from Tales of Love is that Kristeva writes theologically in the ordinariness of our human experience and also in praise of an infinite signification without closure. We cannot restrict her discourse without it ceasing to be her discourse. We cannot confine the discourse to an easy resolution. We are subjects in process/on trial.

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Notes

1. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 88 (cited hereafter as TL). 2. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), (cited in the text as RPL).

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Chapter 21 Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil

Adolf Eichman was an ordinary man…The way he spoke and pleaded made everything chillingly clear, disgustingly banal…For me, there could be no common ground with him. We could not inhabit the same universe, nor be governed by the same laws. Elie Wiesel

Adolph Eichmann I was assigned a task for a lecture at Miami University of Ohio shortly after the release of the film Schindler’s List. I was asked to respond to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem not as an expert in Holocaust or post-Holocaust literature, and not as an historian or political scientist. My task was to reflect philosophically and theologically on the meaning of what might at first appear to be an audacious claim that the trial of Adolf Eichmann was a lesson in “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”1 What I first noticed is a discrepancy between the grave seriousness of the horrifying dimensions of what has come to be called a “crime against humanity” and what appears to be the ridiculous self-understanding of some of its perpetrators, notably Adolf Eichmann. The meaning of this discrepancy or gap needs to be thought, which is at the same time a thinking of the banality of evil. Explanations to the international community as to why Israel abducted Eichmann from Argentina set the stage for a show trial. Arendt quotes BenGurion: “We want to establish before the nations of the world how millions of people, because they happened to be Jews, and one million babies, because they happened to be Jewish babies, were murdered by the Nazis.” [Eichmann: 9] And, “It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial, and not the Nazi regime alone, but anti-Semitism throughout history.” [Eichmann: 19] It is an irony of the trial that the individual in the dock, Eichmann, synecdochically came to represent anti-Semitism throughout history. It is an

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ironic disclosure that a significant collaborator in a “crime against humanity” was such a little man. When Eichmann, a dissatisfied traveling salesman for an oil company considering joining a lodge of the Freemasons, was asked: “Why not join the SS?”—his response was “Why not.” [Eichmann: 33] He wanted to belong. He wanted an emotional lift. He wanted an opportunity to start a new career. His life could be lifted up, through clichéd thinking, into the world of a “Thousand-Year Reich, which lasted exactly twelve years and three months.” [Eichmann: 33] Arendt notes that “[t]he longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think.” [Eichmann: 49] “Language rules” in the Third Reich, catch phrases and clichéd formulations, which would ordinarily be called lies, aided his nonthinking discourse. One of the most damning statements of Arendt is that “He [Eichmann] was quite capable of sending millions of people to their death, but he was not capable of talking about it in the appropriate manner without being given his ‘language rule.’” [Eichmann: 145] It is questionable that Eichmann understood anything about the relationships between the formation of discourse, the formation of a world and his actions within that constituted world—a Nazi world. It is not that Eichmann did not think at all. He seemed to be unable to think critically and intervene in a totalized world of clichés. Surprisingly, Eichmann claimed to have read Kant and was even able to give an approximately correct definition of the categorical imperative. He derived an ethic of duty from the Critique of Practical Reason but had none of the critical apparatus from the Critique of Pure Reason or understanding of its problematic in a way that would have prevented him from iterating “a version of Kant ‘for the household use of the little man.’” [Eichmann: 136] The most ridiculous reformulation of the categorical imperative resonant with Eichmann’s thinking was by Hans Frank: “Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew your action, would approve it.” [Eichmann: 136] Nothing prevented a simple noncritical deontological ethic from being put in the service of the “final solution.” The inability to think critically is, I think, an important clue to the relationship “between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them.” [Eichmann: 54] The question of ethics does not lend itself to a simple solution. What is unthought and the nonthinking of the unthought is more difficult to access and assess than what is commonly understood on a continuum of ethics, law, and order. Milan Kundera, in his novel Immortality, reflecting on a situation of senseless death, comments that “[o]nly a rea-

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son deprived of reason can lead to such an unreasonable horror.”2 This is not the reason of the Latin ratio but is more akin to a ground or the German Grund. It is the hidden cause that has the nature of a metaphor or trope. It is often a turn from finitude and mortality that denies its own metaphoricity. This can be an insidious denial when it is subject to the lies of “language rules.” Kundera entitled an earlier novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being but in Immortality he has a character, Agnes, reflect that: “What is unbearable in life is not being but being one’s self.”3 I think it can be surmised that Adolph Eichmann, a fed-up traveling salesman, could not think the meaning of his mortality and he found that unbearable. He could not think his own finitude and was never able to think his own death. Arendt reports that even at the time of his execution he said: “After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.” [Eichmann: 252] She continues: “In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was “elated” and he forgot that this was his own funeral.” [Eichmann: 252] Kundera writes of the gesture of longing for immortality. “The purpose of…poetry is not to try to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.”4 Forget-me-not. This gesture wrapped in poetry, love letters, flowers or clichés is an ontological gesture. Although we may be beingstoward-death, few of us know how to be mortal. It is all too human to become obsessed with our image and to want to extend it into the thinking and memory of our acquaintances, a minor immortality, or extend it into the thinking and memory of those who did not know us personally, a great immortality.5 But, too often the ontic meanness of mortality intrudes on this gesture and what we are assured of is ridiculous immortality.6 We are unable to think the mortality that is our being and we are unable to mask it. Ridiculous immortality unveils the banality of the gesture. The coverup of finitude and death is ontological and ideological kitsch. The trial in Jerusalem assured Eichmann a place in the memory of those who did not know him personally. But, his immortality is not a great immortality. He will not be remembered in the clichéd words of his own funeral oratory. He will better be remembered in Hannah Arendt’s words, that the trouble was that Eichmann and many like him were “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” It is not his words but her words that index his place in world historical memory. Not, “gentlemen, we shall all meet again;” but, “we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race,

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can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.” [Eichmann: 279] A Crime Against Humanity Some of the controversy surrounding the publication and reception of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is that some of its basic arguments concerning both the banality of evil and the claim that the “final solution” was a crime against humanity diminishes the uniqueness and seriousness of the claim that the “final solution” was a crime against the Jewish people. She wrote: “Had the court in Jerusalem understood that there were distinctions between discrimination, expulsion, and genocide, it would immediately have become clear that the supreme crime it was confronted with, the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was a crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people, and that only the choice of victims, not the nature of the crime, could be derived from the long history of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism.” [Eichmann: 269] The multiplication and extension of the long history of anti-Jewish pogroms is not enough to understand the Holocaust. The Hitler regime introduced a new crime, and it is part of the “unmastered past” of this era that this crime is not fully understood. There is little doubt that Adolf Eichmann, in his general thoughtlessness, could not have understood the seriousness or even the concept of a “crime against humanity” of which he was one of its perpetrators. It does not make sense in a principled ethical scheme. There is something that is unthought and a new thinking is required. The Charter that established the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg gave it jurisdiction over three sorts of crimes: “crimes against peace,” “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity.” Arendt writes, “only the last, the crime against humanity was new and unprecedented.” [Eichmann: 255] This crime was unthought. What does it mean to violate humanity? It is not an extension of normal crimes or a series of inhuman acts. These crimes are all too familiar. There are evil people in the world who commit terrible crimes and perform what we might consider inhuman acts. This acknowledgement is not enough to account for the “final solution.” Arendt argues that the horror of Auschwitz “is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past.” [Eichmann: 267] The “final solution” is a crime that is different in essence or kind and not different only in the degree of seriousness or number of victims. A “crime against humanity” is a crime

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against the order of humankind, a crime against the human status itself. As she suggests, a “crime against humanity” voids the very meaning of the word “humanity.” [Eichmann: 269] Words do matter. To be able to subtitle a book that is concerned with the perpetrators of the horror of Auschwitz, A Report on the Banality of Evil, is to recognize that an unthinking remoteness from reality and an unthinking of the human status can have far more frightening consequences than intentionally evil acts. “He [Eichmann] was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.” [Eichmann: 287-288] There must be a thinking about the Holocaust but it will necessarily be a perplexed thinking. We will not be able to get beyond or beneath what is absurd. Elie Wiesel, writing as a survivor, says: “Well, at the risk of shocking you, I will tell you that as far as I am concerned, there is no such thing as Holocaust literature—there cannot be. Auschwitz negates all literature as it negates all theories and doctrines; to lock it into a philosophy means to restrict it…Auschwitz signifies death—total, absolute death—of man [sic] and of mankind [sic], of reason and of the heart, of language and of the senses. Auschwitz is the death of time, the end of creation; its mystery is doomed to stay whole, inviolate.”7 This is not a call to “unthinking” and certainly not to forgetfulness. Elie Wiesel is a witness. He is calling us to a thinking other than what we usually associate with ethical theory and philosophy. As a witness to the absurd he is closer to the wanderings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche than to the ethics of Kant; although, in his own tellings, it is the tales of those “souls on fire” in Hasidic literature that give us a thick and appreciable sense of the status of being human. The “crime against humanity” is a crime against this status. We have to be able to think the status of being human. The Nazi terror could have happened anywhere but it did not happen everywhere. We need to think this difference. The Danes, The Bulgarians, and the Italians resisted the logic of the “final solution.” As recently elaborated in a novel by Thomas Keneally and film directed by Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List, Oskar Schindler was able to resist and disable the efficacy of this logic.8 Names matter, and it especially mattered if it were a Jewish name on Schindler’s list. “[L]ife on the list was a feasible matter, while life off it was unutterable.”9 What mattered was the ability to construct an identity—to have a name and not a number. Having a name is also having a story. The human status can be realized only when the possibility for constructing an identity is assured. Being human is to be willful. That is, there must be a

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human space to exercise a certain will to power. Schindler’s factories were spaces where a certain identity was possible even when circumscribed by the Nazi terror. Naming can be elaborated so that it made all of the difference if you were a Bulgarian Jew or Italian Jew rather than if you were a Polish Jew or Greek Jew. The implementation of the “final solution” required an un-naming. The singularity of Jewish names and faces were obliterated by the generalizations of Nazi ideology. Numerical abstraction suppressed the specificity of human stories. It makes sense that Elie Wiesel does not theorize the Holocaust but tells stories. Words matter. The Nazi “language rules” were not simply a secret code euphemizing “crimes against humanity” and the hiding of a truth from the rest of the world. They were that; but they were also a gesture towards immortality, albeit what we now understand as a ridiculous immortality. The language of the “final solution” and the “Thousand-Year Reich” is apocalyptic and explicitly eschatological. A “final solution” is a denial of the eternal recurrence of the same—a denial of finitude. A “Thousand-Year Reich” is a millenarian sublation of little and ordinary lives into an absolute drama. Many “failed salesmen” [sic] could find meaning in a dialectic that made absolute and final the pathos of their ordinariness. Ordinariness, making the trains run on time, was a meaningful moment in a universal history with the apotheosis of the State and the Aryan race. I would not simplistically conclude that this was all that was going on; but this was going on. The “crime against humanity” was a denial of the finitude of the human status. By making death meaningful only in the universal/abstract it was made meaningless in the particular/concrete. The “final solution” annulled the specificity of conscience and consciousness. Theology Beside Itself What is the thinking, other than ethics and philosophy, to which Wiesel calls us in the recognition that Auschwitz negates all theories and doctrines? Can we elaborate any thinking that resists being put in service to totalizing thinking and totalitarian practices? Elie Wiesel writes essays but I think even more importantly, he tells stories. These stories, with the obvious exception of his autobiographical Night, are usually not about the Holocaust itself. He can tell stories that can be placed beside the silence of Auschwitz, the silence of God. He can tell stories that pressure our understanding of “humanity”—stories that make “unsafe” a too-easy understanding of the human condition. This is an ethical thinking, but an ethical thinking of a different kind. His writing is exemplary of what might better be called

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paraethics, an ethics beside itself.10 If there is a paraethical imperative it is to intervene into the discourses of the politics of identity and introduce the ambiguity and complexity of figurations of humanity that resist simplicity, exclusion and closure. Discourses can pressure and unsettle each other so that our humanity is always unfinished. There is always that which is other. The other is the unresolved mark of our finitude for which there can be no “final solution.” Freedom works against resolution and it is the betrayal of this freedom that is the Nazi betrayal of humanity. The mechanism of this betrayal is the specific horror of the Holocaust.

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Notes 1. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 252 (cited hereafter as Eichmann). 2. Milan Kundera, Immortality trans. Peter Kussi (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), p. 237. 3. Ibid., p.258. 4. Kundera, pp. 26-27. 5. Ibid., pp. 48-49. 6. Ibid., p. 50. 7. Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 233-234. 8. Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List (New York: Touchstone Books, 1993) and a Universal Picture (1993] directed by Steven Spielberg. 9. Keneally, pp. 295-296. 10. I first encountered the notion of “paraethics” in a seminar paper by Victor Taylor of the Humanities Doctoral Program at Syracuse University.

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Chapter 22 Jacques Lacan and Theology

Theological Discourse Thinking theologically is a complication in the study of religion that needs to be examined in both the analysis of religion and in the assessment of the possibilities for the study of religion. On a very basic level theological thinking is a practice akin to ritual practices, the veneration of saints, or the recitation of sacred texts. Like many other practices, it is a modality of religious experience that, without giving it special privilege, falls within the range of any phenomenologically based study of religion. It is, however, unlike other modalities of religious experience in that at least some of the conditions of its possibility are epistemically isomorphic with the conditions that make the study of religion possible. It is possible that the deracination of theology in a postmodern sensibility may have implications for the study of religion that are more far reaching than attention to theology alone would indicate. A veil of suspicion has obscured the meaning of theological discourse in the twentieth century and that veil itself must be analyzed as part of an assessment of the possibilities for theological thinking. Certainly theology has not been able to assume a realist epistemological base for its development for some time, but in American culture it was the radical theologies of the 1960s that first made it clear that theological judgments were suspect as adjudications of reality, that theological judgments lacked a clear domain of reference, and that theological interrogations have turned from traditional doctrinal questions to the question of theology’s own possibility as a meaningful discursive practice. There is a notable discrepancy between the descriptive and ostensive uses of language in most ordinary discourse and the extreme formulations of theological discourse. That than which nothing greater can be conceived, God as wholly other, Allah as Lord of the worlds, or Lao Tzu’s mother’s impregnation by a shooting star are not subject to the dominant empirical canons of verification or justification that have characterized the enlightenment project of modernity. Theology since the enlightenment can appear from a secular perspective as a vast quilt of reductio ad absurdum arguments convoluting in their own extreme formulations.

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Reading Lacan A turn to Jacques Lacan is a return to Freud and most importantly a return to what is unassimilable in Freud, which is the subversion of the modern Enlightenment subject. Lacan’s reading of Freud has a debt to surrealism.1 This reading might even be characterized as a “strong misreading” and this is its profundity. Elizabeth Grosz says that: “Lacan’s work is far from a dutiful commentary or secondary text on Freud’s primary texts. Lacan’s work is not parasitic on Freud’s, for it produces a certain Freud, a Freud perhaps more bold and threatening than the cautious Viennese analyst.”2 It is Lacan’s reading and understanding of the subversion of the subject in Freud that has severe implications for theories of psychological and theological discourse. It is a move behind the adaptive strategies of Americanized ego-psychologies to originary wounds where the “it” of the unconscious is marked. What we first notice when we turn to Lacan and the secondary literature about the work and life of Lacan is that everyone has trouble reading Lacan. Muller and Richardson “call Lacan’s writings a rebus…Lacan not only explicates the unconscious but strives to imitate it.”3 “Lacan cultivates a deliberate obscurity…Lacan works largely by indirection, circularity, ellipsis, humour, ridicule, and word-play.”4 We have no simple understanding of “Who is speaking?” when we read Lacan. We do not simply interrogate the text but we are interrogated by the text. This belongs to style. Lacan is teaching style. “Lacan’s style is deliberately provocative, stretching terms to the limits of coherence, creating a text that is difficult to enter and ultimately impossible to master.”5 Jane Gallop suggests that Lacan’s Ecrits are writerly texts “written not to be read.”6 The reader is implicated in a perpetual struggle of production. It is not a benign agon. The rebus is not a parlor game puzzle that is to be undone or put together. In reading Lacan we assume our inevitable castration in language.7 Lacan’s style is “the man to whom one addresses oneself ” and as Gallop suggests, “The violence of Lacan’s style is its capacity to make the reader feel nonidentical with herself as a reader…to make the reader feel inadequate to her role as ‘the man to whom Lacan addresses himself,’ that is, inadequate to Lacan’s style.”8 Lacan develops a style of analytical discourse that fixates a concept of the subversion of the subject that is at the same time an oxymoronic requirement for slippage in speech and writing leaving cuts, gaps, and spaces on the recording surface of experience. Reading Lacan is a lesson in Lacanian reading. A Lacanian reading is not a search for hidden significations but is an insistence on the letter of the text in the specific dialectic

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of text production. It would be a shallow misreading of Lacan to begin to search for hidden symbolic meanings in a literary text or for specific Lacanian concepts in a theological text. The real loss in a theological assimilation of Lacanian concepts would be the loss of the loss we experience in Lacanian discourse. When theological concepts are used to mirror rather than interrogate reality, the unrestricted scope of these concepts can transumptively relocate figurations of lack on a surface that seems to fill in the lack. For example, Lacan’s formula for atheism, “God is unconscious,” can be psychologically tamed and epistemologically neutered if it is relocated from the Freudian unassimilable “it” into a discourse assimilating it into the more familiar theological formulation of God as wholly other. Here, there could be a falling back on a specular figure of otherness and wholeness so that when the “it” of the unconscious God is remarked in symbolic discourse, it has been transposed into a different discursive situation that is not Lacanian. The formulation can lose its transgressive force within the discourse. Assimilation is the problem. Reading Lacan is reading what is unassimilable in reading Freud. Reading Freud In Ecrits, Lacan writes that “Freud’s discovery puts truth in question, and there is no one who is not personally concerned by the truth.”9 Putting “truth in question” is a theme in Lacan’s reading of Freud that is of particular importance for assessing the importance of Lacan and Freud in understanding the possibilities for theological discourse. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious unveils that there is a “secret” in our epistemic processes. It is not, however, a secret content or a secret knowledge that is to be deciphered by a proper hermeneutic. In commenting on a fundamental homology of interpretive procedure in Marx and Freud, Slavoj Žižek writes: “the ‘secret’ to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form [the form of commodities, the form of dreams] but, on the contrary, the ‘secret’ of this form itself.”10 The secret of the form is an epistemological wound and it is because of the infliction of this wound that Marx and Freud join Nietzsche in the circle of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Analyses of religion and theology from a Freudian or Lacanian perspective must begin with their detailing of the epistemological problem of the secret of the form and not with their more explicit analyses of religion and culture if we want to understand the radicality of the latter analyses. It is the epistemological problem that prevents easy assimilation into alternative frames of theological thinking.

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Paul Ricoeur points out in his study of Freud, “the exegesis of culture is simply an application of psychoanalysis by way of analogy with the interpretation of dreams and the neuroses.… Everything psychoanalysis says about art, morality, and religion is determined in two ways: first by the topographic-economic model which constitutes the Freudian ‘metapsychology,’ and second by the example of dreams, which furnish the first term of a series of analogues that can drawn out indefinitely, from the oneiric to the sublime.”11 The topographic-economic model and the dream-work in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams both present an epistemological aporia that is prior to and important for Freud’s interpretations of religion and culture. Freud never passes through this aporia [impassable passage] and in a very important way this aporia remains imbedded in his thought all the way to Civilization and Its Discontents. Ricoeur refers to Freud’s metapsychology as an adventure of reflection that leads to a wounded Cogito—“a Cogito that posits itself but does not possess itself: a Cogito that sees its original truth only in and through the avowal of the inadequacy, illusion, and lying of actual consciousness.”12 This wounded Cogito is implicit in Freud’s understanding of the dreamwork and exfoliated as an epistemological problem in the metapsychological studies. The delineation of the dream-work is Freud’s first full articulation of the problem of psychic representation as a disjunctive mixing of force and meaning. The rebus of the dream cannot be untangled by correlating latent dream thoughts with a manifest dream content. A work has occurred that has formally intertwined the dark forces of desire with the light of consciousness. The representation of the dream cannot be reduced to either its manifest content or deciphered latent dream thoughts. There are mechanisms of a primary process in which “desire attaches itself to the dream, it intercalates itself in the interspace between the latent thought and the manifest text…its only place is in the form of the ‘dream’: the real subject matter of the dream [the unconscious desire] articulates itself in the dreamwork.”13 The mechanisms of the dream-work [condensation, displacement, and representation] are forced substitutions that mark the making of a dream and are remarked in its secondary revision or conscious reflection. The epistemological aporia in Freud’s thought is the constant combinant disjunction of force and meaning in conscious representation. At the core of this problem is the primacy of the theory of drives or instincts. Freud himself has written that “[t]he theory of instincts is so to say our mythology.”14 The theory of the instincts is integral and not along side of a theory of consciousness. Ricoeur says that “[a]t a certain point the question of

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force and the question of meaning coincide; that point is where the instincts are indicated, are made manifest, are given in a psychical representative, that is, in something psychical that ‘stands for’ them; all the derivatives in consciousness are merely transformations of this psychical representative, of this primal ‘standing for.’”15 Freud calls this point Reprasentanz in contrast to Vorstellung. It is a process that involves the forces of primal repression and as Ricoeur suggests, this means that consciousness is always “in the mediate, in the already expressed, the already said.”16 The semantics of meaning is always implicated in the economics of force without ever being able to overcome force as a constituent element of the mediate domain of expression. The remainder of ideas is the realm of affect. “[A]ffects ‘represent’ instincts and instincts ‘represent’ the body ‘to the mind.’”17 The theory of affects marks the extreme point of distention between a semantics of meaning and an economics of force.18 In Lacan’s theoretical formulations this point of distention marks the surplus in the gap between the real and its symbolization. The Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real In the development of Freud’s thought we see the emergence of two topographies that function heuristically to articulate and differentiate the relationship between basic drives and psychic representation. The first topography is the distinction between the systems unconscious and preconscious/conscious. The second topography is a further development differentiating the id, the ego and the superego. It is in the interstices of these topographical differentiations where the work of psychic differentiation occurs—the making of dreams, the making of consciousness in its ordinary and pathological manifestations. The interstices are processional gaps where force is intercalated with meaning in constituting imaginary or symbolic representational economies. To accommodate insights from Saussurian linguistics, structuralism, and Freud’s two topographies, Lacan has developed a third topography differentiating domains of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. This third topography functions heuristically to emphasize the aporetic relationship between the systems unconscious and preconscious/conscious and understand ego and superego formations in relationship to the id. In Lacan’s early work the domain of the imaginary is understood in relationship to what he calls the mirror stage. Sometime in that interval of infancy between 6 and 18 months, the child is able to recognize its own image in a mirror. The mirror stage is an identification and marks a transforma-

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tion of the subject when the subject assumes an image. As Lacan says, “the I is precipitated in a primordial form.”19 A substitution occurs. The love of the image of the whole body is substituted for the autoerotic relationship to the partial objects of the fragmented body. The subject is separated from the primacy of perception of the fragmented body in the reflection of the primordial image of the whole body. The mirror image can be thought of as a referential fantasy, figural gestalt, or imago for a transcendental unity of apperception that is outside of the empirical subject. This unification and totalization of this idealized form of the I is virtual and alienated. The mirror image cannot be touched. Only the mirror can be touched. The image can be indexed only on an imaginary register. The mirror image is the reflection of a projection and as such is the privileged experience of structuring projections. The subject transcends and loses the molecular multiplicity of the subject. There is an imaginary mastery in the naming and idealistic unification of the image. The mirror is a surface and the image can be unified and total and have no depth. The surface of the mirror is a recording surface that lacks depth, lacks organs, lacks being. It is in the mirror stage that the subject is reified as an image outside of intersubjective structures that are themselves a play of differences. Lacan’s order of the imaginary becomes a realm where the play of differences [e.g. the interrelationship of the fragmented body with the [m]other] is covered over by mirroring.20 This appears to be a heuristic qualification to help explain how a tendency toward idealization can have empirical credibility. Empirical credibility is important because the mirror image substitutes for a lack in the relationship with the sometimes absent mother. The mirror image allows the child to be differentiated from the [m]other in this imaginary realm. The mirror image is a first stage of substitute differentiation. Julia Kristeva places primal repression in a pre-mirror stage and understands it as a condition for imaginary or figural representation.21 There is a loss and a lack in the mirror image. If Kristeva is correct we can better understand Gallop when she says, “Lacan’s writings contain an implicit ethical imperative to break the mirror, an imperative to disrupt the imaginary in order to reach the symbolic.”22 There will in Lacan’s later work be an imperative to disrupt the symbolic to keep open the gap between the real and its symbolization;23 but, at this time the move is toward the symbolic as a concatenation of the real to compensate for the lack in the imaginary. Gallop goes on to suggest that the symbolic can only be reached as a tear in the fabric of the imaginary.24 The move to the symbolic register is through the imaginary. When the imaginary is understood to be imaginary and no longer an em-

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pirical refuge, it is then located in a discursive situation that is symbolically intersubjective and differential. The imaginary experience is linked to the symbolic order as soon as it is given over to discourse. What is imaginary must have voice in the symbolic order if it is to be anything other than a mute repetition of its scene of origination. The identification of the imaginary order with the mirror stage and the accession to the symbolic can be understood as a strategy for differentiating language and symbolic discourse from a mimetic function. The goal of thinking is not an adaptation to the order of the real because the domain of the real is outside of the representation of the subject, be it through the imaginary ego or through the representational play of the symbolic. The truth of the subject is found in the locus of the Other. This claim only makes sense if we see how Lacan understands differential play in the symbolic order. It is here that we also see the originality of Lacan’s use of linguistics to articulate his return to what is unassimilable in Freud. Lacan accepts the Saussurian distinction between the signifier and the signified. Meaning is made determinate in the interrelationship and play of differences between signifiers. The signified is itself in a web of signification that is always a play of signifiers. Unlike Saussure, Lacan emphasizes the bar separating the signifiers from the signified in the Saussurian algorithm. The circle or ellipse that embraces and unifies the Saussurian algorithmic expression of the barred relationship between signifier and signified is erased. The signified is absent in the present play of signifiers. There is no mimetic reference to the real. The bar is an aporia. Symbolic identity is in difference. The symbolic order is the possibility for deferral and difference. This is what it means to represent an identity. This means that the Lacanian algorithm is a formula of separateness that does not admit of a reciprocity between the signifiers and the signified. This has a remarkable implication for the representation of the Freudian unconscious. “The unconscious is structured like a language.”25 We are never conscious of the unconscious as unconscious. It can only be known in an overdeterminate structure of language manifested symptomatically. The unconscious must be structured like a language, a play of signifiers, to have the referential motility that characterizes its formations. This is in Freud’s language a consideration of representability. Lacan says that the linguistic structure “assures us that there is, beneath the term unconscious, something definable, accessible and objectifiable.”26 This is not the Freudian unconscious but it does designate that it is in the symbolic order that we will encounter the unconscious. It will be in the symbolic order that the written or spoken sentence will stumble. There will be gaps and as Lacan understands

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Freud, “the discovery” is in these gaps.27 The imaginary and the symbolic speak their own lack. What is discovered is not what is present. What is discovered is an absence. Quoting from Lacan, “the reality of the unconscious…is not an ambiguity of acts, future knowledge that is already known not to be known, but lacuna, cut, rupture inscribed in a certain lack.”28 The unconscious is what is unthought in thinking. It is where the fabric of the text gapes. It is in the sensuality of the trace—in what appears through what disappears. We might say that Lacan’s return to Freud is a return of the repressed. We are back to the “it” of the unconscious and “it” is anticonceptual and thus unassimilable. It resides in a domain that is always other. Repression delineates a domain of otherness. There is a possible trap in this language that could lead to a theological misreading of Lacan. When Lacan talks about a grand Other, there is a temptation to objectify the other and name it God. It is then to easy to fill in the gap that is the importance of otherness. Lacan is concerned about the subject. The Other is an object of the interrogation of the subject—“Who is speaking?” Lacan refuses to comment explicitly on what he means by the grand Other.29 But, I think Žižek is correct when he identifies the grand Other with the symbolic order itself.30 In this sense the grand Other is somebody who is already presumed to know; but, the problem is that the interrogation of the Other reveals a lack. The Other is barred as the subject is barred. There is an otherness that represents what the grand Other lacks. In the phenomenality of the representation of desire the lack is the petite other of partial objects—an anus, a nipple, faeces, the gaze, the phoneme, the nothing.31 These petite objects do not represent a whole; they are what escapes the subject. They are the lack in the grand Other. They are the lack in the Other that constitutes the subject as subject. The limit of the unconscious is the concept of lack.32 The lack, the gap, the fissure paradoxically marks a surplus. Symbolization fissures because it cannot contain the real. Theology and Symbolic Transgression Žižek, in a discussion of the death instinct [drive] and the symbolic order notes that there are three periods in Lacan’s thinking about the function and importance of the symbolic order.33 In the first period the word is a death when reality is symbolized [imagined]. Analysis responds by seeking narrative integration of the word into the full speech of the symbolic. In the second period the symbolic realm itself wounds the subject, imposes a lack that must be accepted. In the third period the symbolic order is understood

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to have at its center an unassimilable reality. There is in this third period a shift in emphasis from the symbolic to the real. The strategic task is to keep open the gap between the real and its symbolization.34 The strategic task is to continually transgress the symbolic. Surprisingly, Lacan may have in this third period defined a task that is more readily aligned with the arts and even with theology than with psychotherapy as a professional practice. It is the gap the harbors the “secret” of the real and its quasi-transcendental relationship with psychic or conscious representations. It is in the gap that desire is intercalated with meaning. It is the gap that gives access to desire and thereby witnesses to the chora of the real. In this chapter I am particularly interested in what these claims about representational economies mean for theology and the study of religion. It should now be clear that a theology in the wake of Lacan will be a theology of desire. That is, what we encounter in Lacan that is immediately relevant for a theory of theological discourse is that its speech will always speak a lack and that the domain of its discourse is barred so that the otherness of reality does not belong to description but to desire. Theology must develop strategies of desire in language if it is to meaningfully speak of otherness. What we need is an articulation of textual strategies that accept responsibility in their own reflexivity for the representational repression of otherness that is at the same time, ironically, constituted in the otherness of reality. These are textual strategies that do not compensate for loss by a fascination with exotica but work through themselves toward the significance of otherness. Desire references what discursive representations are not - the extratextual reference—but, at the same time desire is itself only known discursively. The problematic of desire in language is to acknowledge extratextual reference and yet stay within an internal play of linguistic signification. It is here that we can discern a new warrant for theological thinking and place its importance within the study of religion. Theological thinking is relevant because it is other than ordinary discourse and is itself a discourse that can display the otherness of its semantic achievement. This is already part of the achievement of the theological tradition. Historically, the fundament in theology has been unrestricted—God, ultimate reality, Brahman and other metonymic intrusions of unconditional formulations—and even though an objective and descriptive literalism is no longer credible, the definition of theology as a discursive discipline includes responsibility for unrestricted inquiry. As we have already noted, notions of “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” violate intelligible closure to achieve-

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ments of understanding within the symbolic order. We could characterize theology as a deconstructive agent and theological thinking as a deconstructive act within the symbolic order. Questions about what we take seriously without any reservation may not have answers but they transgress the boundaries of semiotic captivity. A post-Lacanian theology would not be defined by the object of its inquiry. It is the form of inquiry, the form of interrogation, that instantiates a loss, constitutes knowledge of a lack, and fissures the completeness of symbolic expression. Theology harbors no secret knowledge and has no access to a hidden order of things. It does not provide knowledge in the symbolic order that other disciplines lack. This means that theology is textual production in which the author is written into the work as a theologian by implicating the text in the exigencies of the unrestricted scope of theological inquiry by juxtaposing within the text unconditional formulations or interrogations that cannot be contained within the scope of the symbolic order. They challenge the completeness of the symbolic order. We still will be reading a text but the text will be marked and sometimes remarked by fissures wrought by limiting questions, poetic indirections and figures of brokenness. Theological inverbalization and inscription will be a dangerous supplement to ordinary thinking. We might even think of theology as a supplementary valuation of the otherness that is present only by its absence in the textual articulation of experience within the symbolic order. It is in its postmodern articulation a strategy of hesitation on the surface, the fold, the skin and the appearance of reality so that there can be an acute recognition of the complexity of process in the emergence of our symbolically constructed worlds. There is in this recognition a consent to alterity—a primal sense of reality or numinosum—that is always in danger of being repressed and exploited by systems of thinking. Theological text production can be a negative dialectic within language that prevents the symbolic order from closing in on itself or tightening the weave of its differential play into a seamless fabric. This is important because language can cover up its forgetfulness unless there is a commitment to subvert the closure of language from within language. The trajectory of the theological use of language is to produce an extreme distention within the symbolic domain. The lesson of Lacan for the theologian is that systematic theology can never come to completion in the symbolic order and that foundational theology is not a meta-analysis. Theology cannot stand outside of itself to envision its radical possibilities. It is reflexively immanent. Its radical possibilities for discursive extremities are an achievement of its internal subver-

Chapter 22

Jacques Lacan and Theology | 297

sion. It cannot become a system because it works against the completeness of a system if it sustains its radical interrogative structure. Theological thinking is an ongoing experiment and a permanent critique. It may be an experiment with the truth but it is more importantly an experiment of desire. Theology with its radical conceptuality implicates desire in the full range of textual achievements. It would appear that theology can have a place even within postmodern discourse without being an a/theology. Theology continues to have a special role in its capacity to transgress any closure of the symbolic order. Theological interrogations are transgressions of the symbolic order that continually reference the depth of experience as the unthought darkness of desire. This reference to the unthought darkness of desire is how Lacanian thought “puts truth into question;” and, theology complements the Lacanian project by marking the domain of the symbolic with ineradicable gaps. Theology’s unrestricted interrogations show a dimension of the otherness of reality that does not belong to description but to desire. There are many implications of the Lacanian interrogation of “truth” for both theology and the study of religion that are more radical and more important than his explicit statements about religion. For example, the complexity of theological discourse as an act implicates the study of religion in this same complexity if its analyses are to be interpretively adequate to the object of its study. To exclude theology from the study of religion is to falsify the range of interrogations in the study of religion and deliberately skew the practices of some religious communities. To include theology is to include the problematic of the wounded Cogito in the study of religion’s own reflexivity. That is, there is no longer a credible second naiveté on which to build the study of religion as a purely descriptive science when theology is included as an object of study. The study of religion can no more think itself out of the aporia of representational consciousness than can theology. It cannot escape the unthought darkness of desire. That is, the study of religion is always already implicated in the problematic and in the exigencies of theological thinking. Lacan is asking “Who is speaking?” This is a question that must be asked by theologians and students of religion as well as by psychoanalysts and philosophers. It is the question that displaces simplistic notions of the subject and simplistic notions of thinking. After Lacan, we cannot avoid accounting for an epistemic wound in the dispersal and complexification of the subject.

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Notes 1. Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985 trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 26. 2. Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 9. 3. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, Lacan and Language: A Reader’s Guide to Ecrits (New York: International Universities Press, 1982), p. 3. 4. Grosz, pp. 13-14. 5. Grosz, p. 17. 6. Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 46. 7. Gallop, p. 20. 8. Gallop, p. 117. 9. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 118. 10. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), p. 11. 11. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation trans. Denis Savage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 153-54. 12. Ricoeur, p. 439. 13. Žižek, p. 13. 14. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 Vols. trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, from 1953), Vol. 22, p. 95. 15. Ricoeur, p. 135. 16. Ricoeur, pp. 140-41. 17. Ricoeur, p. 150. 18. See Ricoeur, p. 151. 19. Lacan, 1977, p. 2. 20. Gallop, p. 59. 21. Grosz, p. 158. 22. Gallop, p. 59. 23. Žižek, pp. 230-31. 24. Gallop, p. 60. 25. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 20. 26. Lacan, 1978, p. 21. 27. Lacan, 1978, p. 25. 28. Lacan, 1978, p. 153. 29. See his translator’s note in Lacan, 1978, p. 282.

Chapter 22

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Žižek, p. 133. Lacan, 1978, p. 315. Lacan, 1978, p. 26. Žižek, pp. 131-33. Žižek, pp. 230-31.

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300 | The Surface of the Deep

Index | 301

Index Adami, Valerio, The Journey of the Drawing, 267 Allah, 94, 131, 207, 287 Altizer, Thomas, J. J., 95, 133, 200, 230; Deconstruction and Theology, 199 Anaximander, 236 Anselm, 115, 140, 206, 240, 275, 287, 295 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 275 Apologetics, 4, 6, 7, 79, 80 Aquinas, Thomas, 28, 29, 206 Arendt, Hannah, 279-285; Eichmann in Jerusalem, 279, 282 Argentina, 279 Aristotle, 28, 148, 199, 236, 240, 244, 276; Aristotelianism, 107, 152, 176, 193 Atman, 84 Augustine, 17 Aushwitz, 282, 284 Avicenna, 206 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 130 Barth, Karl, 206 Barthes, Roland, 257 Bataille, Georges, 119, 250, 264 Being, 9,10, 39, 40-42, 116, 123, 146, 151, 157, 173; appearing, 48-52; being-in-the-world, 20, 21, 22, 26, 42-51, 55-58, 64, 65, 82, 84-87, 100; identification with holy or sacred, 146, 147,152; and knowledge 6-10, 12, 13, 17, 21, 26, 27, 28, 32, 33, 40- 52, 55- 58, 65, 74, 75, 79, 80-88, 107, 108, 136, 137; and language, 11, 12, 13, 48, 49, 55, 70, 73, 74, 75, 79, 80- 88, 107, 136, 137; Lonergan’s understanding of, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35; New in Christ, 135; toward death, 95, 281;

See also: God, Heidegger, Ontology, Theology, Tillich Ben-Gurion, David, 279 Bergson, Henri, 22, 276 Berkeley, George, 59, 107, 158, 159, 173, 177, 183 Blanchot, Maurice, 264 Bloom, Harold, 215 Borges, Jorge Louis, 257 Boundas, Constantin, 109, 110, 177 Brahman, 94, 99, 131, 186, 191, 207, 295 Buddhism, 191, 257 Bultman, Rudolph, 81 Calvin, John, 161, 246; Institutes of the Christian Religion, 157 Caputo, John D., 196, 203, 205-210; The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion, 204 Categories, Kant’s idea of, 18-20, 28, 56, 57, 159, 183 Christ, 135, 156, 220, 235, 237; as New Being, 229 Christianity, 4, 79, 80, 135, 136, 156, 157, 186, 217, 229, 230, 235, 236, 238, 240, 242, 243, 245, 246, 250, 253, 254, 257, 260, 266 Confucianism, 191 Copernican Revolution, in Kantian philosophy, 11-12 Coreth, Emerich, 10, 30, 33, 34; Metaphysics, 35 Dachau, 95 Dasein, 10, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 51, 52, 58 Darwin, Charles, 60, 238 de Man, Paul, 257 Deconstruction, 94-102 140, 150, 264, 265, 267; and theology, 94, 100-102,

302 | The Surface of the Deep 141, 199-210, 236, 256, 263, 265, 296 Deleuze, Gilles, 107, 110, 128, 174, 177, 183, 184, 185, 199, 275; body without organs, 166, 195, 215; Difference and Repetition, 176; Empiricism and Subjectivity, 109, 110; Negotiations, 237; on Nietzsche, 176; plane of immanence, 158, 161, 172, 173, 182, 185, 186, 226, 235, 239, 246, 275; and theology, 216 Derrida, Jacques, 96, 119, 135, 141, 178, 199, 200, 203- 210, 250, 255- 257, 263-269, 275; différance, 173, 196, 203- 210, 255, 259, 264, 276; Dissemination, 263; Glas, 265-268; grammatology, 173; Of Grammatology, 263; khora, 196, 203- 205, 207- 210; logocentrism, 120, 129, 141, 256, 262; Margins in Philosophy, 263; Positions, 263, 265; The Post Card, 263, 267, 268; Specters of Marx, 208; Speech and Phenomena, 263; The Truth in Painting, 206, 263, 267, 268; Writing and Difference, 263 Descartes, Réne, 101, 105, 107, 127, 132, 159, 163, 167, 168, 171, 176, 183, 193, 201; Meditations on First Philosophy, 157, 158, 177 Desire, 163,164, 165, 290, 291; for depth, 94, 95, 98; gift of, 171 - 179; in language, 99, 271-277; to know, 21, 26, 29, 30, 31, 69; theology of, 94-102, 125, 174, 175, 295, 296, 297; and Tillich, 215, 216; and will, 160, 161; See also: Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Lonergan, Kristeva, Subject, Theology, Unconscious Dionysus, 271 Donceel, Joseph, 35 Duns Scotus, John, 183 Duras, Marguerite, The Malady of Death, 191

Durkheim, Emile, 146 Eichmann, Adolf, 279-283, Einstein, Albert, 21, 24, Elephants, 111, 113, 116 Eliade, Mircea, 3, 146, 147, 150-153, 192, 257 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 129 Fold(s), 100, 108, 109, 115, 128-132, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 159, 172, 174, 178, 179, 202, 204, 296 Foucault, Michel, 119, 127, 188, 199; The Order of Things, 259 Frame/Framing, 133-138, 140, 187, 202, 246, 267, 289 Frank. Hans, 280 Freud, Sigmund, 95, 119-126, 161167, 187, 193, 195, 199, 238, 255, 258, 264, 273, 288, 289, 290, 293; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 268; Civilization and Its Discontents, 165, 290; death instinct, 98; dream work, 97, 164, 165; drive, 164; The Interpretation of Dreams, 164, 290 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 79; fusion of horizons, 81, 82 Galileo, 21 Gallop, Jane, 122, 123, 166, 288, 292 Gasché, Rodolphe, 205; The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, 131, 141, 263, 264 Gell-Mann, Murray, The Quark and the Jaguar, 192 Genet, Jean, 264-266; Our Lady of the Flowers, 266 German Idealism, 132 Gilkey, Langdon, 5, 99, 230, 235-246; Naming the Whirlwind, 102, 237, 242, 245; Shantung Compound, 238 God, 3, 84-86, 99, 102,108, 112, 116, 121, 125, 139, 151, 172, 177, 182, 183, 186, 201, 204-208,

Index | 303 243, 245, 253, 254, 260, 266, 267, 294, 295; as being itself, 138-140, 151, 152, 171, 172, 186, 187, 228, 231, 235, 243, 245, 246; death of, 133, 173, 174, 200-202, 226, 228, 230, 231, 236, 237, 239, 241, 243, 246; Lonergan’s argument for, 31; Lonergan’s understanding of, 31, 32, 207; silence of, 284; Tillich’s understanding of, 138, 139; as unconscious, 122, 123, 289; Whitehead’s understanding of, 69, 70, 85; See also: Being, Ontotheology, Theology, Tillich Grosz, Elizabeth, 288 Guattari, Félix, 184, 275 Habermas, Jürgen, 106, Hamilton, William, 95, 200 Hart, Kevin, 226 Hart, Ray L., 119; Unfinished Man and the Imagination, 6 Hegel, G.W.F., 95, 194, 264, 265, 262, 275 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 34, 51, 56, 205, 226, 236, 258, 259, 264, 267, 269; Being and Time, 51, 52; care, 42-46, 51, 52; being-inthe-world, 20- 22, 26, 42-51, 55-58, 64, 65, 82, 84-87, 100; Dasein, 10, 42-47, 51, 52; equipment, 46; language, 11, 13, 48, 49; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 11, 51; poetry, 49; thinking, 11, 41, 47, 48; throwness, 42- 44, 47, 50, 52, 58, 65, 69, 73, 82; truth, 43; worldhood, 45- 47, 63, 64, 69; See also: Being, Ontology, Ontotheology Heraclitus, 49 Hermeneutics, 187; and ontotheology, 130; theological, 6, 13, 74, 75, 7988; of suspicion, 119-122, 127, 193, 199, 216 Hillman, James, 98

History of Religions, 145, 146 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 49, 119 Homo religiosus, 84, 85 Hume, David, 18, 95, 107, 109-113, 159, 177, 183, 193, 218 Husserl, Edmund, 185, 264 Insight, Lonergan’s idea of, 6, 9, 29, 31; in relation to Kant, 17, 28 Israel, 279 Jesus Christ, 135, 156, 220, 235, 237, 253, 254, 259, 266; as New Being, 229 Joyce, James, 275 Judaism, 271 Jung, Carl, 257 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 8-10, 12, 13,1729, 41, 56, 58, 94, 107, 109, 136,159,160, 163, 164, 165, 168, 171, 176-178, 183, 187, 196, 200, 201, 205, 209, 218, 226, 236, 243, 264, 266- 268, 280, 283; categorical imperative, 160, 280; categories, 1820, 28, 56, 57, 159, 183; Critique of Judgment, 267; Critique of Practical Reason, 280; Critique of Pure Reason, 18, 21, 56, 158, 160, 193, 243, 280; idealism, 159; moral law, 160, 161; practical reason, 160; sublime, 161, 162, 183; See also: Ontotheology, Transcendental, Transcendental Imagination Keneally, Thomas, 283 Kerygma, 79, 80 Kierkegaard, Soren, 238, 283 Kristeva, Julia, 114, 119, 186, 194, 196, 199, 207, 271-277, 292; chora, 195, 273- 277; Desire in Language, 274; Powers of Horror, 274, 275; Revolution in Poetic Language, 195, 273-275; semiotic, 273- 276; symbolic, 273- 275; Tales of Love,

304 | The Surface of the Deep 271, 273-276; See also: Desire, Freud, Lacan, Unconscious Kundera, Milan, 101, 275; categorical agreement with being, 175, 177; Immortality, 215, 280, 281; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 95, 242, 281 Lacan, Jacques, 96, 119, 121-123, 125-127, 134, 165, 166, 194, 199, 273, 274, 288-297; Ecrits, 122, 289; imaginary, 123-126, 135, 166, 194, 291- 295; and language, 122, 166, 195; mirror stage, 96, 123, 124, 126, 166, 194, 195, 291, 292, 293; the real, 119, 121, 123, 124, 126, 166, 194, 195, 276, 291-295; symbolic, 122-124, 126, 135, 166, 167, 194, 291-297; See also: Freud, Kristeva, Unconscious Language(s), Gilkey’s understanding of, 235-246; Heidegger’s understanding of, 11, 13, 48, 49; metaphysics and, 105-116; ontological significance of, 5, 12, 13, 17, 55-75; and religious studies, 145-153, 181-188; theological, 94-102, 119-141, 199-210; and the unconscious, 124, 166, 195, 293; See also: Deconstruction, Derrida, Hermeneutics, Lacan, Kristeva, Textuality, Theology Leeuw, Gerardus van der, 146 Leibniz, G.W., 109 Lingis, Alphonso, 96 Locke, John, 158, 177 Logocentrism, 120, 129, 141, 256, 262 Lonergan, Bernard, 5, 6, 250, 251; desire to know, 29-31, 69, 140, 250; idea of insight 6, 8-11, 26-28, 30; objection to Kant, 28, 29, 32, 33; understanding of being, 26-35; understanding of God, 31, 32, 207;

Long, Charles, definition of religion, 147, 153, 182, 191 Luther, Martin, 157 Lyotard, Jean Francois, 199 Mafouz, Naguib, The Beggar, 192 Mallarme, Stephane, 119, 264 Maréchal, Joseph, 28, 29, 31, 33 Marion, Jean-Luc, 207 Marx, Karl, 95, 119, 120, 161, 162, 163, 164, 187, 193, 194, 199, 238, 255, 258, 273, 289; on Feuerbach, 129 Maxwell, Clerk, 59-60 Meland, Bernard, The Realities of Faith, 4, 5, Mendeleev, Dimitri, 60 Miller, David L., 119 Muck, Otto, 33 Muller, John P., 122, 288 Müller, Max, 146 Neoscholasticism, 6 Newton, Isaac, 21, 22, 59, 193 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 95, 96, 101, 102, 107, 119, 120, 161-164, 168, 171, 175, 176, 178, 187, 193, 199, 209, 215, 236, 238, 255, 257, 258, 274, 283, 289; death of God, 133; eternal recurrence, 95; Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense, 194; will to power, 95 Nihilism, 5, 165, 187, 201, 231 Nirvana, 94 Novak, Michael, 3, 5 Nuremberg, 282 Ontology, 6, 7, 8, 147,187; ground, 46, 51; and immortality, 280, 281; and knowledge, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 136, 137; Tillich’s understanding of, 34, 35, 79, 133, 136, 138, 225, 226, 227, 228; transcendental, 39-52,

Index | 305 55-75; language as an element of, 48; See also, Being, God, Heidegger, Ontotheology, Tillich Ontotheology, 120, 122, 129-134, 136-138, 140, 141, 148, 151, 187, 200-202, 204, 206, 226, 236, 265, 268; See also: Being, Heidegger, Kant, Ontology, Theology, Tillich Ott, Heinrich, 79, 81 Otto, Rudolph, 146, 151 Parmenides, 49 Pasteur, Louis, 60 Phenomenology, of religion, 5, 85, 86 Physics, 21, 22, 23, 24; Newtonian 8; particle, 97 Plato, 178, 196, 207, 264, 268; Meno, 40; Platonism, 107, 116, 152, 176, 186, 215, 216, 272; Timeus, 195 Pluralism, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 46, 50, 63, 249, 252, 253, 259 Radical Orthodoxy, 201 Rahner, Karl, 33, 35; Spirit in the World, 34 Raschke, Carl, 119, 200; The, Alchemy of the Word, 199 Reformation, 157 Relativity, the theory of, 23, 24, Religion, the academic study of, 94102,145-153, 181-188, 191-197, 287, 295-297 Richardson, William J., 122, 288 Ricoeur, Paul, 119, 162, 193, 199, 250, 290 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 275 Rocquet, Claude-Henri, 146 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 264 Rubenstein, Richard, 95, 200 Russell, Bertrand, 238 Santayana, George, 173, 244 Saussure, Ferdinand, 124, 166, 291, 293

Schapiro, Meyer, 267 Scharlemann, Robert, 102, 207; radical negativity, 115, 140, 207 Schematism, Kant’s idea of, 9, 17, 20, 21, 28, 45, 51, 173, 183, 205 Schindler’s List, 279 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 13, 80 Scholasticism, 193 Scholem, Gershom, 257 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 276 Science, a new conception, 8 Secular/Secularization, 3,4, 121, 132, 133, 145, 146, 151, 152, 186, 200, 201, 220, 230, 235-246, 265, 287 Shelley, Percy, 59 Simulacra, 107, 108, 110, 112, 115, 151, 168, 176, 194, 215, 220, 276 Smith, Huston, 101, 241 Smith, J.Z., 145, 148, 182, 183 Socrates, 268 Sollers, Philippe, 264 Song of Songs, 271, 272 Space, 18, 19, 24, 60, 193 Spinoza, Baruch, 109 Stein, Gertrude, 119, 168 Subject, 58, 94-98, 101, 109-116, 120131, 134-136, 140, 155-169, 187, 200, 244, 254, 259, 266, 272-276, 288-297 Sullivan, Lawrence E., 145, 147, 150 Tansey, Mark, 192 Tao/Taoism, 191, 196, 207, 287 Taylor, Mark C., 100, 119; a/theology, 100, 162; Erring, 199, 200 Taylor, Victor, Para/Inquiry, 192 Tertullian, 156 Text/Textuality, 96-102, 105-108, 112-116, 120-131, 140, 141, 145, 147-153, 166, 168, 179, 181, 201-210, 250, 255, 256, 259, 263269, 271 –277, 287, 288, 289, 292-297; See also: Deconstruction, Derrida

306 | The Surface of the Deep Theology, 4-7, 121, 122, 125, 129, 131, 137, 138, 186, 265; the academic study of, 147-151, 181-184, 188, 237, 251, 252, 287, 295-297; and confession, 253, 254; and conversation, 249260; contemporary, 8, 84; and deconstruction, 94, 100-102, 141, 199-210, 217, 236, 256, 263, 265, 296; and desire, 94-102, 125, 174, 175, 295- 297; exigency of, 94, 215; and Freud, 165; hermeneutical, 6, 13, 74, 75, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 87; and irony, 140; natural, 7, 29, 85; negative, 204206, 226, 239, 243; philosophical 6, 7, 8; practical, 119, 132; secular, 132, 151-153, 199-210, 230-232, 235-243, 246; systematic, 102, 120, 128, 132, 133, 254, 256, 296; task of, 84- 88, 120, 126, 131, 132, 139, 141, 217, 227, 228, 229, 236, 238-244, 295- 297; as text production, 100-102, 141, 201203, 296 Tillich, Paul, 132, 215-223, 225232, 244; Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, 230; The Courage to Be, 221; Dynamics of Faith, 219; on freedom, 134, 135; God as being-itself, 138140, 151, 152, 171, 172, 186, 218, 220, 226, 228, 229, 231, 232; and history, 225-232; Love, Power, and Justice, 228; method of correlation, 4,132, 219, 220, 221, 226-229, 236; My Search for Absolutes, 227; on ontology, 34, 35, 79, 133, 136, 138, 225-228; protestant principle, 132, 226; The Religious Situation, 225; The Socialist Decision, 225; Systematic Theology, 133, 151, 221, 225; ultimate concern, 74, 79, 84, 131-

133, 139, 153, 175, 185, 206, 217, 219, 220, 222, 223, 226-231, 238, 240, 243, 246 Time, 18-24, 43, 46, 51, 52, 60, 135, 138, 193 Titus-Carmel, Gerard, The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin, 267 Totalization, 101, 114, 131, 132, 138140, 188, 204, 231, 257, 265, 280, 284, 292 Tracy, David, 140, 249-260; analogical imagination, 254, 258, 259; Blessed Rage for Order, 252; Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, and Hope, 249 Trancendental, aesthetic, 17, 18,193;critique, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 27, 58, 60, 81, 85, 94, 159, 185;critique of theology, 7, 8, 85;inquiry, 3, 7, 8, 40, 41, 45, 55, 86,128, 135, 136, 137, 159, 236, 252, 254; unity of apperception, 18-20, 50, 56, 66, 123, 137, 160, 163, 292; See also: Categories, Kant, Schematism, Transcendental Imagination Transcendental Imagination, 8-13, 17-20, 23-28, 30, 33, 39- 45, 47, 50- 52, 56- 59, 64, 66, 68, 69, 70, 73, 74, 79, 82-87, 176, 183, 205; See also, Categories, Derrida, Kant, Schematism, Transcendental, Whitehead Translation, 80, 81, 86 Trinity, 156 Unconscious, 95, 121, 122, 125, 164166, 167, 172, 194, 288-297; God is, 122, 123, 289; like a language, 124, 166, 195, 293 Van Buren, Paul, 200 Vahanian, Gabriel, 200, 235-237 Vahanian, Noëlle, 216

Index | 307 Van Gogh, Vincent, 267, 268 Vedder, Elihu, 192 Whitehead, Alfred North, 6, 12, 13,174, 244; actual occasion(s), 5767, 84, 87; adequacy, 56; categorical scheme, 57, 61; eternal object(s), 57, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66- 68, 86;history, 59, 63, 65, 67, 69- 72; language, 7073; nexus, 57-64, 66- 69, 71-74, 84, 86, 87;philosophy of organism, 57, 58; prehension(s), 57, 60- 68, 70-72, 86, 87, 244; Process and Reality, 57, ; subjective aim, 61-70, 73; subjective form, 57, 60- 66 ; substance, 58, 59; superject, 58, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 71, 72, 74, 83, 85 Wach, Joachim, 146 Wiesel, Elie, 283, 284; Night, 284 Winquist, Charles, Epiphanies of Darkness, 184 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4, 171, 191; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 228, 240 Wordsworth, William, 59 World religions, 132 Zen, 101 Žižek, Slavoj, 289, 294