Philosophy

This essay addresses the questions of whether the givenness of God is something possible, intelligible—and, if so, what such givenness might involve. In the interest of situating these questions in historical context, I first summarize Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Habermas’s respective accounts of the relationship between belief in God and philosophical knowledge. I then further situate critical philosophy’s appropriation of God by way of a discussion of how some of this appropriation’s fiercest critics—existentialists such as Sartre, Shestov, and Kierkegaard—
object to its gambit of using God to serve moral and cultural goals even as it denies God’s actual existence. Though this objection is a salient one, it leaves something to be desired. For although the existentialists may demonstrate what is misguided about the philosophers’ God, they do not have anything especially compelling to say about whether or how God can be given experientially. I address this aporia by
exploiting what I take to be a happy intersection between the phenomenological conception of the saturated phenomenon and two moods—agape love and ecstatic
joy—the mystical tradition frequently attributes to the nature of divine givenness. I argue that, when mystical experience is situated within the framework of saturated
phenomena rather than within the Kantian enclosures of phenomenality, two intriguing possibilities emerge. First, it seems plausible that the religious experience of the mystic can, in principle, involve the very givenness of God that Kant and his heirs denied to be possible. Second, though phenomenology has yet to provide a complete positive portrait of the religious life, the mystical tradition emerges as a legitimate, invaluable source with which such a phenomenological portrait might begin.

In this essay, I argue that genuine responsibility and ethical self-understanding are possible without narrative—or, at least, that narrative is not always sufficient. In §2, I introduce and clarify a distinction between our ontological subjectivity and everyday practical identity—one made famous by Heidegger and Sartre. On the basis of this distinction, in §3 I argue that narrative is unable to ground ethical choice and decision. For, although acting in light of practical identities is something we do, it cannot wholly capture what it is to be who we are. Irrespective of whatever worldly projects and identities we press into, something about our subjectivity always remains unchanged. Narrative identity, which trades merely on practical identity, thus obscures this ontological dimension of life wherein human action, decision, choice, and responsibility truly originate. By way of conclusion, in §4, I briefly examine depictions of the narrative life found within the authorships of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Voltaire, illustrating how self-narrative at times invites self-deception and annuls responsibility. A life of genuine responsibility demands more than what the most candid and best intentioned of self-narratives can supply us. Living the good life, I shall intimate, is thus not something that involves mere narrative. It depends, rather, on inwardness.

Traditionally, phenomenology has understood the self in light of intentionality and
hence the world. However, contemporary French phenomenology—as represented here by Jean-Luc Marion—contends that this view of subjectivity is open to challenge: our mode of existence is not simply one of Bbeing-in the-world.^ I develop this claim by examining Marion’s reformulation of the reduction. Here, the phenomenon of vanity is key. I first present Husserl’s and Heidegger’s own formulations of the reduction.
Following Marion, I show that the blow of vanity neutralizes both, by undercutting
the respective questions to which they respond. For, in response to vanity’s own
question—"What’s the use?"—neither the transcendental nor ontological reductions
have a reply. Vanity consequently renders the Heideggerian distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity existentially moot. To establish this, I evaluate how
existing interpretations of authenticity overlook the phenomenon of vanity. Phenomenology, I urge in conclusion, should shift its attention to the horizons opened by
Marion’s erotic reduction.

What is it to live in the presence of God, to recognize that our most intimate mode of existence is not one of being-in-the-world? In six phenomenological studies surmounting the division between philosophy and theology, this book takes up that question, exploring in turn our relation to others, the world, and ourselves.

According to a well-known distinction we owe to Husserl and popularized by Merleau-Ponty, there is an important difference between the ‘objective body’ and the ‘lived body’. The first is the body as an object of inquiry thematized in biology, physiology, psychology, and medicine. The latter, in contrast, is not just another entity in the world, but instead the transcendental condition that explains why we stand open to a world to begin with. This lived body, in short, is a function of my power to act and move within the surrounding environment it at once opens and organizes. However, the French phenomenologist Michel Henry contends that this distinction between the objective and lived bodies, though important, nevertheless does not unveil the deepest level of embodiment. It fails, he says, to thematize what he calls the ‘flesh’. The flesh, Henry argues, is the foundational site in which we are revealed to ourselves in the pure subjectivity of an unworldly affectivity. At the same time, this fleshly immanence is the site in which God is revealed. Writing of this flesh in which we experience ourselves as begotten by God’s own self-revelation in us, Henry says this: ‘Before thought, thus before phenomenology and theology alike (before philosophy or any theoretical discipline), a Revelation is at work, which owes them nothing but which they all equally assume’. I first investigate this dimension of unworldly embodiment. I then examine how traditional philosophical and theological understandings of the relationship between embodiment and revelation distort both by ignoring the flesh that underpins them. The flesh is thus the site of Arch-Revelation: an originary site of revelation in which I experience God in a pure affectivity prior to the mediation of any worldly social or discursive praxis. It is, in short, where the Word is made flesh (John 1:14).

This book consists of ten essays. In it, I advance a critique of modern subjectivity through a phenomenological interpretation of biblical texts and works of art. The work takes its methodological cue from a thesis we owe most notably to Jean-Louis Chrétien’s recent treatment of the modern novel and subjectivity in Conscience et Roman, I: la conscience au grand jour and Conscience et Roman II: la conscience à mi-voix: for us today, the most intimate mode of self-existence is thought to be epitomized by the interior monologue of the self with itself, a relationship which in principle veils nothing from the intruding gaze of the author or reader. Nothing is hidden, for all is laid bare. Against this view that removes any hidden dimension from the searching gaze of others, the book highlights an interiority whose intimacy is due to our always already being exposed, not to a human gaze that knows the secrets of the heart, but to a word prior to any human observation: the Word of God. In analyzing this dimension of vulnerability—a depths Chrétien has said requires a “cardiognosie” worthy of God—I call upon the paintings of Bellini, Rembrandt, Osbert, Ossawa Tanner, Pissarro, Caravaggio, Kandinsky, Poussin, Rodin, and Hopper among others. A chapter prospectus is available upon request.

This book is an introduction to French phenomenology in the post-1945 period. While many of phenomenology’s greatest figures—Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty—worked in the early twentieth century, Steven DeLay introduces and assesses the creative and important turn phenomenology has taken since. DeLay presents a clear and rigorous introduction to the work of relatively unfamiliar and underexplored philosophers, including Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean-Luc Marion and others.

After an introduction setting out the crucial Husserlian and Heideggerian background to French phenomenology, DeLay explores Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy, Henry’s material phenomenology, Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, Lacoste’s phenomenology of liturgical man, Chrétien’s phenomenology of the call, Claude Romano’s evential hermeneutics, and Emmanuel Falque’s phenomenology of the borderlands. Starting with the reception of Husserl and Heidegger in France, DeLay explains how this phenomenological thought challenges boundaries between philosophy and theology. Taking stock of its promise in light of the legacy it has transformed, DeLay concludes with a summary of the field’s relevance to theology and analytic philosophy, and indicates what the future holds for phenomenology.

Phenomenology in France: A Philosophical and Theological Introduction is an excellent resource for all students and scholars of phenomenology and continental philosophy, and will also be useful to those in related disciplines such as theology, literature and French studies.