Especially in various circles of current European thought, the readings of Husserl by Jean-Luc Marion are becoming of more and more interest. Marion’s work appears to be the latest in what Dominique Janicaud has diagnosed as “the theological turn” from Husserlian phenomenology. (1) His main thesis does not seek to confront Husserl’s phenomenology with a theology of exteriority so much as it seeks to re-read Husserl’s phenomenology as a propaedeutic for a revealed theology. I see this direction in phenomenology as dangerous because it leads phenomenology into something that the latter sought to overcome. It introduces phenomenology to a justification for a religious dogmatism that is antithetical to the possibility of pluralism, and religious pluralism in particular. As James K. Smith says, it even “colonizes being.”(2)
My contention is not only that such a treatment of phenomenology ends in a bad state of affairs but also that in fact the Husserlian analyses of the temporal being of consciousness should be read — and indeed can be read — with a view towards pre-empting this trend and reeling it back in, away from theology. Where Marion reads a thesis of “donation” into phenomenality that “would reverse the condition of a horizon (by surpassing it, instead of being inscribed within it),” (3) Husserl at least implicitly denies this reading by positing originary givenness in the context of a logos that is wrought with a multiformity underneath thought and thus, as a non-object, that is insuperable. With this in mind, the lesson derived from Husserl’s phenomenology could very well be the potential for an onto-pluralism that is not only the precondition of thought but that also reveals the wrong-headedness of a univocal metaphysico-theology.
Husserl’s thought, according to Marion, opens up an avenue for the possibility of an advent, and in that sense it calls for a reversal of the Heideggerian treatment of phenomenology in favour of a non-ontological, non-representational nature of Christly love. This is made possible, Marion thinks, by a ‘negative phenomenology’ that is significant precisely for its sense of passivity which defies any apophantic discourse and representation. Insofar as he argues that the noetic-noematic correlation can be immediately transgressed by a hyperbolic ek-stasis, characterizing a total dominance over the subject, there breaks into phenomenology a diktat so forcible that it is not contestable but abruptly moral. It is indeed true that, as Marion says, Husserl transforms the problem of a “logical idol,” i.e., the problem of a wholly calculative, rational thinking, into the problem of an original self-givenness that forces a broadened meaning of the term “evidence.” But, according to Marion, this eventually also means that “intentionality is inverted” and that experience is hereby submitted “to the presence of a call” (4) because now givenness “gives life to the reduction as much as to evidence, since it alone gives charge over phenomenality.” (5) Which is to say: because of the transformation of thought in Husserl to include the lived and non-thought, his phenomenology apparently shows that horizonality is not merely something which could potentially be reduced. It therefore allows us to see a possibility for “auto-manifestation,” i.e., the “possibility of the impossibility,” (6) a non-anthropomorphized and unrestricted access to the being itself that could “give itself as a self.” (7) Although Marion is clear that phenomenology does not prove it, by giving us this notion of an “unconditioned horizon” phenomenology nevertheless creates the possibility of a theophanical revelation of Being.
This unconditioned horizon relies on the assertion that in Husserl there is a transgression of all possible knowing. What phenomenology succeeds in revealing is thus a specifically post-metaphysical characteristic of the phenomenon that would come to us as a total absence. Such a treatment of Husserl reads horizonality as having a “before,” something in which philosophical discourse takes place, and an “after,” something beyond which there can no longer be philosophical discourse. If the after is called religious by Marion, it is because he thinks the field of religion as exclusive from philosophy (8) and because, in the Scholastic tradition, he wants to make the hard distinction between the “God of the philosophers” and the “God of the theologians” (Pascal). Phenomenology, oddly, introduces us to the latter.
But if Heidegger is right that “any true phenomenological chronology has nothing to do with the order or success and the science of established dates,” (9) this should lead us to doubt the validity of Marion’s treatment. Although of course Husserl did not foresee a treatment of his thought such as Marion’s, Heidegger’s reading of him here speaks of a ground of consciousness that tacitly pre-empts it. Husserl should see no need to posit an exteriority that transgresses this essential correlation: the Vorvergangenheit of the being of consciousness, I want to say, even disallows the thought of an exteriority that is pure absence because it is not absent and present in exact diametrical measure but both absensing and presencing itself at once; there is no complete presence just as there is no complete absence.
This is seen in Husserl’s notion of the living-present (lebendige Gegenwort) of the temporal being of consciousness that needs to be made true in the sense that it must await veri-fication. We will understand something, according to this thesis, only on the basis of what has already-been, in which case there is a retroactive movement of truth. Whatever is true is in constant movement, and the movement it makes is towards the archaic. It is thus more proper to say that in Husserl truth has a “temporal fringe” in which the primordial production of experiences cannot be situated on a time axis of earlier or later but rather in the context of an “anterior past” (Vorvergangenheit): “this now apprehension is, as it were, the head attached to the comet’s tail of retentions relating to the earlier now points of the motion.” (10) Husserl’s concern is so thoroughly with the birth or originating of an understanding in being that he denies the potential for anything that does not belong to that very process. Instead of thwarting its possibility, for Husserl thought is bound to an always already ongoing relation. In which case he affirms Heraclites’ saying that “the upward and downward paths are the same,” (11) where the downward path is complex of being that perpetually re-asserts itself anew. For instance, in order to cause aspects of my environment to be given to me, I have to constantly adjust my living-body (kinesis) to perceive (aesthesis) things qua indissoluble unities. Thus, indispensable to the definition of my cogitations is my ability to move about in the midst of a complex of being that offers itself up in a variety of ways.
If we can also read the transformation of a notion of evidence in this light, then the following theses about religious experience, I contend, can be understood with a new clarity about pluralism. Of a theologico-metaphysics, Husserl writes in the Cartesian Meditations that it is undermined: truth, he writes, “has gained a new significance” because it now excludes “every naïve metaphysics that operates with absurd things in themselves” by providing a distinct opening into the investigation of “ethico-religious problems.” (12) Phenomenology can even break open an investigation of the “problem-motivates that inwardly drive the old tradition into the wrong line of inquiry and the wrong method.” (13) Just what these “motivates” are according to Husserl is not quite clarified until a lecture given in the 1930’s: they are certain “horizons of knowledge and feeling” so that any phenomenology of religious experience is really a matter pertaining to “Existenz.” (14) If Husserl is employing the term in the sense that Karl Jaspers employs it, phenomenology can include an exposition of what Jaspers calls “limit situations,” e.g., death, sorrow, anxiety, etc., which, because they transgress intentionality, are not initially begun with pure reflexivity.
The question of a human relation to the theophany is thereby transformed by phenomenology into an inquiry in which the question grounds itself not on theology but on certain meta-noetical and factical modes of being in which the world is always already meaningful for the human when that human reflexively or intuitively turns to it. When we bring these comments connection with the above paragraph, the consequent Husserlian position is not merely that there are inner, temporal motivations of the religious life but also that these motivations are premised on a certain understanding of the present of consciousness which allows for a more sophisticated pluralism of the religious life. After all, here we have a temporal ground of consciousness that relies neither on a claim to the absolute nor on a naively relativistic understanding of thought. What we seem to encounter in Husserl is a rejection of absolutes that is not, on the other hand, a rejection of all understandings of grounds.
Notes
(1) Janicaud, D., “The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn,” The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).
(2) Smith, James K.A., “Liberating religion from theology: Marion and Heidegger on the possibility of a phenomenology of religion” in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 46 (1999).
(3) Marion, J.-L., Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness, translated by J. L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 107.
(4) Ibid., p. 267.
(5) Ibid., p. 21.
(6) Ibid., p. 218.
(7) Ibid., p. 219.
(8) Marion, J.-L., “The Saturated Phenomenon,” translated by Thomas A. Carlson, in Philosophy Today 40 (1996), p. 103.
(9) Heidegger, M., Gesamtausgabe 21 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978)
(10) PCT, p. 32
(11) Dastur, F., Telling Time: sketch of a phenomenological chrono-logy (London: The Anthlone Press, 2000), pp. 21-22.
(12) Husserl, E., Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, translated by Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), p. 156.
(13) Idid.
(14) Husserl, E., Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, translated by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 180-181.