Steven DeLay

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.

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.

The conscience is central to human nature and our understanding of that nature. What is its source and function? Historically, it has been conceived in many ways, whether as an innate faculty responsible for our capacity to know right from wrong, as the voice of divine guidance, as ontological hallmark of our individuality, as the internalization of society's restrictive pressures and prejudices. That it has been the subject of this rich philosophical reception arouses many questions. What does the capacity to draw moral judgments reveal about our human condition, both as individuals whose actions are laid bare before God, but also as social and political beings responsible to and for others? From Plato to Kant and Fichte, from Rousseau and Mill to Nietzsche and Freud, or from Heidegger to the Prophets and Apostles, this book traces the history of the concept of conscience, highlighting how the capacity to hear and follow one's conscience forms the heart of man.

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.

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.

In the preface to the English translation of The Metamorphosis of Finitude, Emmanuel Falque characteristically observes, “It has at last become possible, at least in certain places and in certain circumstances, to describe oneself as 'at the same time' philosopher and theologian, and to take on due responsibility for such a claim.” That approach, notably, is at work in Crossing the Rubicon. This essay focuses on his account of the body, exploring the fluid interface between philosophy and theology. If it is the thought of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty that originally conceptualized the lived body, it is Falque who has radicalized its associated notion of the “I can.” For him, the body is not only what opens a perceptual world, but also, and no less so, what opens us to the revelation of God in Christ. A recognition of this experiential fact is of great methodological import. Since to insist on any supposed strict division between philosophy and theology would be to distort the respect in which the body is as much open to God as it is to the world, holding to an inviolable division between them is to ignore the things themselves concerning the body. Hence, to do so is to desert the cause of phenomenology. By highlighting the role of grace in the mortal body, while simultaneously indicating the glorified one to come, Falque thereby transcends commonplace divisions of intellectual labor. To trace the transformation from a life of the flesh to life in the spirit, in short, is to see that the grace of God is the power at work within us.

What and how is the work of art? This essay considers Heidegger’s venerable question by way of a related one: what exactly is the essence of the painting? On way to critiquing the Heideggerian conception of the work of art as what discloses a world, I present Michel Henry’s competing aesthetic theory. According to Henry, the artwork’s task is not to disclose the exteriority of the world, but rather to express the interiority of life’s pathos—what he calls transcendental self-affectivity. To clarify Henry’s view, I examine his analysis of the abstract painting of Kandinsky. After doing so, I illustrate the significance of Kandinsky’s abstractionism, by showing how the representational paintings of Paul Signac, Andrew Harrison, Alphonse Osbert, and Henry Ossawa Tanner attempt to express the invisibility of subjectivity. Next, I reveal how Heidegger’s characterization of the work of art in terms of world-disclosure overlooks the work’s task of exalting life. In closing, I accordingly suggest that Henry’s view of painting—one that locates its essence in Life rather than the world—not only presents a competing account to the Heideggerian view of the origin of the work of art worthy of our attention, but one that explains how and why art can contribute to overcoming our age’s nihilism.

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.

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.

The world, perhaps essentially, is a place of violence. What sense can be made of that statement? In response, I provide a phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of violence by contrasting it with three related forms of peace: the peace with self, the peace with others, and the peace with God. I then conclude with some remarks concerning what it might mean to resist the violence of the world.

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).