Showing posts with label Heidegger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heidegger. Show all posts

Sunday, February 04, 2024

Preamble to a Phenomenology of Congregational Life

Oftentimes we don't know what we have lost until we don't have it. 

The phenomenological movement attempted to uncover the fundamental meaning of the entities, properties, and relations in which we find ourselves, in which we dwell. The idea is simple enough. We are always already within a world of meaning prior to any explicit philosophical reflection upon this world. The man at work in his workshop knows how to get around in the shop; he knows what things he needs in order to make the things he wants to make. He "knows" these things pre-reflectively. He probably has not stopped to do an explicit ontological inventory of items in his shop and the properties each has that allow them to be related to each other.  Rather he just walks his shop and gets what he needs when he needs them. 

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1985-1980),  Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) and a host of other thinkers were interested in getting to the immediate meaning of things, to their sense prior to explicit investigation. Husserl, in particular, was interested in what Frege (1848 - 1925) called Sinn, the mode of presentation of objects in the world, the that by virtue of which objects could be picked out in the world and referred to. Frege famously said that names had both sense and reference. Names refer when the sense of the name picks out an existing object.  Just because a name does not refer does not mean it has no meaning. After all, the name could have referred were there to be an object that satisfied the Sinn of the name. 

Frege's famous example was the Morning Star and Evening Star. Astronomers for centuries were able to identify the Morning Star as Morning Star and the Evening Star as Evening Star without knowing that the Morning Star is the Evening Star. The modes of presentation of Morning Star and Evening star differ, but there is identity in that to which they refer: Venus.  Accordingly, the name Morning Star refers to Venus as it presents itself as the Morning Star while the name Evening Star  refers to Venus as it presents itself as Evening Star.  Within a more comprehensive theory we identify the Morning Star and Evening Star.  So what is this world of sense by and through which we believe we have made reference to the world? 

Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) spoke in terms of the manifest and scientific images of the world.  He espoused a scientific naturalism that nonetheless sought to save the appearances.  In Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, Sellars characterizes the manifest image of the world as "the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world," it is the framework in and through which we ordinarily observe and explain our world.  (See Willem deVries, "Wilfrid Sellars," in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.). Persons and the things meaningful to persons is what has center stage in the manifest image of the world.  

The scientific image of the world is deeper; it is that which we hold ultimately is the case despite how things appear. Sellars famously adjusted Protagoras' statement to "science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not" ("Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind).  The scientific image states what is the case, while the manifest image states what appears to be the case. Importantly, the manifest image is not merely an error.  It is a description of the place in which humans find themselves phenomenally prior to theory and experiment and the reality of how things stand in themselves.  

While Sellars held that what ultimately exists is that to which oue best scientific theories appeal in explanation and prediction, he understood that we do not and cannot live our lives merely within the conceptual categories of scientific naturalism. While neither Husserl nor Heidegger in anyway denigrate the activity of scientific theory-formation and confirmation, they really were interested in the world as it appears to and for consciousness.  (Heidegger despised the term consciousness for many reasons, but I will use it nonetheless in this context.). Husserl was so interested in what immediately appears to and for consciousness that he advocated a suspension of thinking in terms of our natural attitude of what there really is, and bid us to hold in abeyance questions of what there ultimately is apart from us and concentrate on that which is present to consciousness. His phenomenological reduction advocates that we again encounter the things themselves that give themselves to consciousness, before pressing on to the question of whether those things are real, whether they somehow track with that which ultimately is.  

Husserl believe that returning to die Sache Selbst of immediacy allow us to ground science even the more deeply. Heidegger wanted to examine the objects of our intentional acts within the meaningful context in which they dealt in order to get clarity about the nature of the world we immediately inhabit.  

While both he and Husserl were interested in the Umwelt in which we find ourselves, Husserl could never find a way ultimately out of his own transcendental image of things.  For Husserl, the transcendental ego exists as that which reaches out through its intentional "ego rays" to objects in meaningfully encounters.  Heidegger, however, had no time for such metaphysics.  What is given to consciousness is being-in-the-world.  Instead of an isolated ego related to its world of intentional objects, there is already the unitary phenomenon of hat which is phenomenologically prior to an ego and that which the ego intends. Husserl's transcendental ego becomes Heidegger's Dasein, the unitary being-in-the-world phenomenon that is clearly present in ways that a transcendental ego cannot be. 

Heidegger's emphasis was on the immediacy of that which shows itself as itself in the Lichtung (lighting up) of Dasein itself. Dasein is the "there-being" that in its being is always interested in being.  While Husserl's project was epistemological, Heidegger's became ontological. What are all those things that are, that in relating themselves to us, make us the kind of beings that have worlds?  

We are always already in a world and what it is to be me is to have a world of a definite contour. The manifest image of things, according to Heidegger, has been passed over in the history of philosophy.  It has not been deeply explored because our attention has always been drawn away from the immediacy of our life in the world to the question of what lies "present-at-hand" to us beyond that image.  We have been traditionally interested in the world of the Vorhandsein, the world of beings that are. But in concentrating on this, we have lost what is before our eyes. We have lost the very meaningful context in which we already live in all of our inquiry.  

Sellars understand that we cannot do without the manifest image of things, but he believes what ultimately is cannot be given by what phenomenally stands close by. We need to move to the deeper structural explanation of that surface the manifest image reveals.  Heidegger, however, wants us to follow Husserl and attend deeply and passionately to that which displays itself to us in all we think and do. Heidegger's interest in the immediacy of the world and the universal structures of immediacy that ground that world gives him quite a different orientation from Sellars. They latter was interested in science, but the former in religion. 

Heidegger's work at Marburg was filled with religious interest. Accordingly, Husserl had designated Heidegger to be his student that could apply the phenomenological method to religious experience and religion as such. What is the world of religion, and what are the deeper structures of religious experience and meaning as such that make possible any religious world?  Heidegger is accordingly interested in the facticity of religious life, the meaningful structures within which religious people operate and find themselves. Heidegger famously tried to understand the experience of the early Christian as being-to-the-parousia, an idea he later adjusted to Sein zum Tode, being-unto-death.  

All of this is is preamble for the topic to which I allude in the title: A phenomenology of congregational living. What is it to live congregationally?  In our penchant to treat congregational life using the tools of the social sciences we may shortchange what it is to be congregationally. Clearly, we could seek to understand congregational growth and decline by appealing to general sociological principles indexed for our particular historical-cultural standpoint. This can be extremely enlightening, of course.  But in the effort to explain and predict congregational processes, we may lose what shows itself as itself.  Were we to attend to the be-ing of congregational life we might find in the manifest image the world itself in which religions lives and moves, the world in which we finally find meaning, a salvific meaning allowing us to live unto the future.  What I am suggesting here, inter alia, that it is in the manifest image of things that we find meaning, purpose and ultimately hope.  

While the body dies and scientific naturalism finds no basis upon which survival of death is possible -- or maybe even conceivable -- within the manifest image, God is close at hand. Christ saves us and brings us into his house of many rooms. Our fundamental experience of being-in-the-world is not one where meaning is absent and must be constructed.  Our fundamental experience is filled with meaning for we are beings who in our be-ing find the question of be-ing at issue for us. As Heidegger says, the ontic superiority of Dasein is found in its ontological constitution.  As Augustine said, "our heart is not at rest until it finds its rest in you, O Lord." A thick description of the facticity of Christian being-in-the-world reveals what that life is like, and holds open the possibility that that life which is ontologically possible can be my life or your life. 

As the embers of western Christianity begin to smolder, it is important for us to know what it was for men and women to have lived this extraordinary life.  For many of us, the living of Christian life is always a living of that life within the Christian congregation.  We can perhaps remember what it was and how it was decades ago, and we can compare that living to living today.  Where was the axes of meaning then and now? What has changed? How was it that we could once recoil at the thought of touching the sky while now such touching is simply business as usual?   

In the next post I will try my hand at examining the facticity of congregational living. Perhaps we will be granted ontological insight into the preciousness of being-as-communion in Lutheran congregational life. 

Sunday, March 05, 2023

Worlds and Difference: Theology in an Ecstatic Age?

I. When the World Was What it Was

Once upon a time in the west we believed that there was a world that existed apart from us.  There were many versions of how this was so, but the paradigm was clear: Entities and the properties that they instance are what they are apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) spoke of primary substances as the basic building blocks of the world. These substances have properties that are either present in them or can be said of them.  Those properties that are present in the primary substances are called accidents.  They inhere in primary substances, and constitute the way that the substances can be modified.  Accidents are always parasitic on substances; they cannot obtain other than being in a primary substance.  Aristotle identified nine accidents that primary substances could have: quantity, quality, relation, habit (state), time, location, position, action and passion.  

Primary substances and their nine accidents constitute the ten categories Aristotle discusses in his book, The Categories.  The important point is that the accidents do not individuate one substance from another.  Rather, individuation of substances happens at an ontological level prior to accidents.  Substances come already individuated, and these already individuated substances sustain accidents that that modify it; they constitute at any time how the substance is being the substance that it is. 

For Aristotle, however, substances are more than their mere accidental properties.  Certain things can be said of these primary substances, and that which can be said of primary substances are not accidental to these substances.  For instance, 'man' can be said of Socrates, and the predication of 'man' to 'Socrates' is not an accident of Socrates, because while Socrates could presumably be Socrates and not have his snub nose, Socrates cannot be Socrates without being a man.  In The Categories, Aristotle asserts that the secondary substance man is said of the primary substance Socrates.  This said of relation concerns what is essential to Socrates, that without which Socrates could not be Socrates.  

Secondary substances in Aristotle are clearly a reworking of Plato's notion of the forms.  For Plato, the form man is instantiated at the location of Socrates and is accordingly that which is known when one knows Socrates as a man.  Plato famously gives ontological priority to the forms (universals) over the concrete particulars that instantiate them. Aristotle's secondary substances, however, do not have the ontological priority Plato had given to the forms. For Aristotle, concrete primary substances are more real than the abstract secondary substances that can be said of them.  Accordingly, the world for Aristotle is comprised of concrete primary substances having essential properties by virtue of the said of relation and accidental properties by virtue of the present in relation. 

This basic way of seeing the world in terms of substances and properties was firmly in place by the thirteenth century with its so-called "rediscovery of Aristotle", and it survived throughout the Reformation and the trajectories of theological development arising immediately from it. The idea of substances possessing properties formed the basic metaphysical background on which both the physical world and the world of the divine rested.  While it was always problematic in the theological tradition simply to think of God as a substance having properties, the idea that God is some thing existing on its own apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language seemed clear enough.  While it might stretch language to call God a 'substance', God nevertheless does, like any substance, exist on its own and is individuated in itself. Accordingly, the world comes ready-made, both with respect to primary physical substances and the most important entity of all: God. Things are what they are apart from human beings.  The ontological order is thus independent from the human epistemological activity of knowing it.  

Aristotle and the tradition prior to the Enlightenment was thus realist with respect to its understanding of substances and the properties they might have.  This realism extended to the notion of causality as well.  Aristotle famously gave a four-fold analysis of causality, citing a material, formal, efficient and final cause for why a substance can give up some of its properties while assuming new ones.  The idea is that any substance is what it is by virtue of it being "formed matter," or "actualized potentiality."  Any object that is, is what it is by virtue of its individuating form which makes it a particular substance.  Aristotle's hylomorphism claims that all substances are constituted by particular actualizations of that which could have been actualized in a different ways.  A substance's nature constitutes the whatness by virtue of which an object is that which it is.  

Change happens in two basic ways. If one substance is to cease and another substance begin, there must be a change in that substance's form.  If a substance is to be modified some of its accidental properties must cease and others must rise.  In both instances, the substances already posses the possibility of these transformations.  What is needed is an efficient cause to collapse the possibility of this transformation into a determinate actualization.  The substance water is potentially ice, but this potentiality is actualized when. temperatures reach a particular level.  

Aristotle, however, saw the universe teleologically, and thus added a fourth cause to the material, formal and efficient causes.  Trajectories of transformation must ultimately be explained in terms of purpose or final cause. The final cause of the acorn is an oak tree, and this cause operates in selecting among efficient causes to actualize substances in particular ways over time. The point of all of this is that Aristotle saw causality as built into the nature of things.  For him, both substances and the causal connections in which they are ingredient have a determinate trajectory apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  

While the language of substances, properties and causality seemed suited for conceiving the natural world, medieval thinkers knew that problems arose in using the Aristotelian categories to understand the divine.  God clearly exists apart from us, but His having of properties is not like our having of properties, and any changes that might be attributed to Him cannot be the result of external efficient causality.  

Of course, the tradition held that the perfection of God entailed his immutability.  Were God to change, God would need to move from one state to another. But if God is perfect, God cannot move from one state to another because either God would have to move from a state of lesser perfection to a state of perfection -- and thus not be perfect -- or move from a state of perfection to a state of lesser perfection -- and thus not be perfect. 

 Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) following much of the tradition famously argued for the divine simplicity of God by claiming property-talk of God does not pick out in God some properties that God may or may not have, but such talk merely is a way of characterizing, picking out, or referring to the divinely simple substance that is God.  Accordingly, 'God is good' cannot mean that the substance God has the property of goodness, but is a picking out of some being without parts, a being of which one might attribute goodness merely analogically.  Whatever God is in se, God is more like a being to which we might customarily attribute goodness than to a being to which we might customarily attribute evil.  

When it came to Christology in the age of when the world was what it was, Christ had to be understood to be some kind of substance or person who had its own principle of individuality and who is what He is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  Such a person has natures or batches of properties, some of which are essential and some accidental for Christ being the person He is.  The Trinity and incarnation must be understood realistically.  Just as the world is what it is apart from us, so is Christ and his Trinitarian and incarnational relationships what they are apart from us.  Human salvation too must be understood realistically.  The believer is a person who is who she is, and Christ who is who He is apart from her (and us) effects a transformation of the believer (either intrinsically or extrinsically) such that the properties that the person has are themselves changed.  All of this could be talked about through Aristotelian notions of causality.  On the basis of a final cause, there is an efficient cause that collapses potentiality into actuality; indeterminate matter is formed.  Accordingly, the real ontic unity of theosis must be understood metaphysically.  There are properties of believer and properties of Christ such that parts of the believer change and the believer is not that which the believer once was.  

Since what I am attempting here is merely a sketch of that time when the world was what it was, I will not develop further here a fully metaphysical Christology except to say that Christology had to be understood metaphysically at this time.  This is not to say that this metaphysical understanding was all that there was to Christology.  The relation of sin, justification, faith, and regeneration is complex, and, as Luther taught us, metaphysical categories strain to express the reality of God and his relationship to us.  

II. When the World was What it was For Us 

Kant (1724-1804) famously argued that we have no immediate experience to thing-in-themselves, but only things in so far as they already are for us.  Kant argued that the realm of the thing-in-itself was supersensible because no human senses could put us into touch with this realm.  Knowledge of the world we experience proceeds, for Kant, through our encounter with objects already constituted by us. Conception without perception if void and perception without conception is blind.  

Kant's solution to the problem that had beset Descartes (1596-1650) and had become acute in the British empiricists -- the problem of the external world -- was that while we do not have immediate access to the external world apart from us, we do encounter the external world as already organized by us.  This means inter alia the the "externality of the world," the contour of the world as it is presumably apart from us is already a product of us.  We have mediated access to the external world. Accordingly, when we know the external world, we know our representation (organization) of it. While the realm of experience may be a "joint product" of mind and external world, we only have access to that which is already organized by the mind.  Accordingly, knowing the other -- the otherness of the world -- is to know ourselves profoundly, for we are the ones organizing the world of experience.   

Kant inaugurated the tradition of transcendental reflection: What are the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience itself? Kant argued plausibly that the contingency of the world is grounded both in the necessary structures by which we organize percepts in space and time and those necessary concepts that function as rules by which the manifold of perception is united. 

After Kant the world was not the same. The world does not come as it is in itself, a world so metaphysically regular that we can find general categories by which to comprehend it, rather the world comes bearing the marks of the determining judgments of the human understanding by which objects take on the general features they do.  Famously, the world is not in itself an arena in which self-determining substances are what they are while being causally connected one to the other.  Rather the world reflects the very order we put upon it.  Just as we are autonomous with respect to morality, so are we with respect to the external world. We are the law-makers of each realm!  Since we are law-makers of the moral and worldly, we gain insight into ourselves when we know the world.  Knowing the other happens only in and through knowing ourselves, our capacities and proclivities of organization.  While the world apart from us -- the supersensible realm -- remains hidden in itself, we know something about it by examining the capacities we have to reflect it. 

Kant, and not Fichte, was in many ways the author of German idealism.  Kant knew that the world was reflected in our activity of reflecting upon our own reflecting.  The transcendental world is not like the old world-in-itself.  In the transcendental world, we find not things in the world, but rather things as they show themselves in their aboutness of the world in us.  While the older Aristotelian way of thinking posits primary substances existing on their own, Kant's objects are those by concepts of which the manifold of experience is united.  Transcendental questions don't deal with the world, but the conditions by which the world is the world.  To explore the transcendental horizon is to dig deeper than the world in order to find those structures which make the world possible.  The world as world is made possible by that transcendental unity of apperception by and through which the world in its particularity is birthed.  

The story after Kant is so well known that it scarcely needs repeating.  Fichte denied the cut between the world in itself and the world for us, and thus ridded philosophy of that which cannot be accessed and is not needed to explain the particularity of the world.  Accordingly, when it comes to the world, the spade does not need to stop somewhere in some dull non-conscious things existing somewhere outside us waiting to be known.  For Fichte, all that is necessary is that one thinks, and in one's thinking the world in its particularity is born.  

Fichte's take on Kant motivated subsequent thinkers like Shelling and Hegel to reflect upon their acts of reflection,  an act they called "speculation" from the Latin word for mirror, speculum.  To reflect on reflecting is no longer to access things, but to reflect on those conditions by and through which things are organized before us.   

Kant, Fichte, Shelling and Hegel together constitute a trajectory of thinking that denies the immediacy of the world.  The world is not what it is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and there can be no immediate apprehension of it.  Instead our apprehension of the world is mediated by the particularity of our perceptual and conceptual organizing activity.  But while all of these thinkers knew that knowing the world is mediated by the particularity of that by which the world is known -- the human epistemic apparatus --- they nonetheless followed Descartes in assuming that they can directly know themselves.  We have access to our own ideas, after all!  While our ideas or "representations" constitute a screen through which the world is known, there is no screen at all between us and our ideas.   

Descartes had argued that while I can conceive of a scenario in which my seeming knowledge of the world is not genuine knowledge, I cannot conceive of a scenario in which my seeming knowledge of myself is not genuine knowledge. Since the condition of doubt is that there exists one who doubts, the condition for doubting the immediacy of the world is the immediacy of the self doubting.  While critical thought can dislodge the immediacy of the world in its doubting the world, it cannot dislodge the immediacy of the self as the transcendental condition for the possibility of doubting the world. 

Accordingly, while Kant is wary of trusting that the world really is in se what it appears to be pro nobis, he seemingly gives transcendental reflection a complete pass.  There is a transcendental unity of apperception that makes possible the unity of our experience, and while we can legitimately question whether the unity of our experience rests upon how the world might be apart from us, we cannot question what the transcendental unity of apperception might be apart from our apprehension of it.  Clearly, the game has changed. There is no longer a world that is what it is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  Human beings give natural laws to the order of nature.  However, the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such are what they are apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  In transcendental reflection we reach an arena of objectivity. While the world is mediately known, we have an immediate apprehension in transcendental reflection of that by which the world is mediately known. 

By the time of Hegel (1770-1831), however, problems with this picture are emerging.  Hegel knew that the categories by which the world is known are not simply objectively present and ready for the fateful gaze of transcendental reflection. They are not simply "shot from the pistol," but are themselves dynamic and in play historically.  Hegel recognized that the subject's grasp of its own self through its categories were at issue if one could not explain how the dynamism of the categories is itself objective.  Accordingly, Hegel's move to absolute knowledge is a move by which the immediacy of the categories could be restored.  

If knowledge is at all to be possible, there must be a perspective that gets to the thing itself.  If this is not the world, then it must be those transcendental conditions by which the world becomes world.  Since the immediacy of those transcendental conditions cannot be vouchsafed any longer by the subject, these conditions must be guaranteed by the Absolute that "takes up" all conditioned finite perspectives, whose taking up itself is necessary for the writing of books about the "taking up."  The Absolute Idea unfolds through concepts allowing the grasping of transcendental content, a historically mediated grasping that grants an immediacy to that which would otherwise remain wholly mediated. 

Notice that as the world became what it is for us, the world of as it is for us was true both of the manifest image of the world as well as its scientific image (Sellars). The manifest image of the world is clearly not the world as it is in itself. The scientific image which tries to explain those mechanisms by virtue of which the world is manifest, however, is often assumed to be what ultimately is the case.  However, it is clear that if there is no immediate access to the world in itself as the manifest world, there can be no such access to the world in itself as the scientific world of mechanisms by virtue of which the world is manifest.  The scientific world with all of its objective structures is a world that cannot be more immediate than the manifest world.  Accordingly, it is a world for us.  The manifest image of the world and the scientific image of it do not deal with the world as it is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. Simply put, the world bears the marks of that for whom it is a world.  

Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had theological aspirations, of course.  While much has been written about the the changed metaphysical climate after Kant, not as much has been written about the relevance of this changed climate for theology.  If we cannot know the supersensible world -- if the very notion of the supersensuous drives us beyond the bounds of all possible experience -- we cannot also know any regions of that supersensuous realm, e.g., theology.  Kant, of course, recognized this and claimed that he "had done away with knowledge of God to make room for faith." 

Kant had argued that the categories of substance and causality cannot apply to objects outside the realm of the phenomena.  This means, inter alia, that one cannot apply 'substance' or 'causality' to God.  God cannot be a substance bearing causal relations to other substances because there are no precepts being united to organize experience into one in which there are gods.  Gods do not exist in the phenomenal, and there are no metaphysical arguments showing conclusively that God must exist.  One might believe in the realm of the supersensible, but one cannot ever know those supersensible substances putatively causally connected to other supersensible entities or entities in the world.  

While knowing the external world occurs when we know the ways we have organized that external world -- when we know ourselves properly! -- knowing the supersensible world is not possible even though we are again thinking about our thinking.  Thinking about our thinking with regard to the phenomenal gives discrete knowable experience.  Thinking about our thinking with regard to the noumenal does not issue in any knowable experience, but rather can only put us in touch with our way of thinking.  Theology does not give experience, but it does constitute a way of thinking.  

So how must Christology proceed on the other side of Kant?  Given that we have no epistemic right to claim that we know the divine/human constitution -- nor the causality through which the divine person in Jesus of Nazereth effects salavation -- what do we do when doing theology and thinking our philosophy rightly?  What ought be the ways forward in Christology on the other side of Kant? What does theology become when its world is a world that is only for us?  

Since concepts are rules of possible syntheses, relating concepts in Christology must be a relating of ways in which such syntheses might relate to each other.  What can "two natures in one person" mean in the non-metaphysics of post-Kantian reflection?  After all, to speak of divine and human nature is to speak of that which lies beyond human experience.  Add the notion of 'person' to the mix and we are talking about the ordering of our ideas and not about the synthesis of experience.  Our ideas do not constitute experience, but they are important in how we must think aspects of our experience.  

Kant famously saw Christology as flowing from morality, and understood that human beings are unavoidably in the middle of moral life, even though moral life is not one of experience. There will be much more exploration of this in later posts, but for now we must continue our story beyond when the world was what is was for us to when the world turned ceased to be for us at all.  We must examine what happens when the world becomes worldless.  

III. Beyond the World as it was For Us

When the world was what it was, the world was in itself what it was.  The trajectory of thinking inaugurated by Kant gave a world no longer in itself, but a world now merely for us.  When the world was in itself, the world was known in its immediacy.  When the world became what it is for us, the world was known in its mediacy.  Both the in itself and the for itself of the world nonetheless presupposes that there was an immediacy to that by which the world is known in itself and for itself.  

Transcendental reflection that had dislodged the immediacy of the world nonetheless presupposed its immediate graspability. While Hegel increasingly realized that no Archimedean standpoint for transcendental reflection existed, his creative attempt to understand the various limited standpoints of transcendental reflection as manifestations of an unconditioned Absolute transcendental perspective that yet united the limited, conditioned, historically-mediated acts of transcendental reflection, kept at bay for a time the dawning realization that our acts of reflection are mediated as well, that is to say, there is no immediate access to ourselves.  Our putative privileged access to the contents of our own mind is a chimera.  While Descartes was often deluded about his access to the external world, we thinkers after Kant have been deluded about our access to our own thinking.  

The age that dawned after the age of the world as it is for us, is an age that increasingly took seriously that by virtue of which we thought we knew ourselves: it took seriously the language by and through which we thought we had found ourselves. This attention to language occurred both in the Anglo-American and the Continental expressions of philosophy, though in different ways.  The story here is complex and filled with surprising turns in trajectory.  Simply put, the twentieth century was an age that increasingly came to recognize that our capacities of self-representation are dependent upon others in surprising ways: our concepts, language and values are not our possessions by which we can objectively explore both the world and our own exploration of the world, but are themselves historically-conditioned social products.  

The words we use we did not create, and the concepts by which we think, we have learned from others -- mostly through the words that we did not create.  Every act of thinking employs concepts that have been bequeathed to us by tradition.  The days of thinking of language as a "tool kit" to grasp the objectivity of meaning are long gone.  We know too much.  Our so-called transcendental horizon is not the "unvarnished good news" that Quine once called the "myth of the given."  Just as there is no givenness to experience apart from our historically-conditioned conceptuality by and through which such experience arises, there is no givenness either to transcendental structures of reflection.  Transcendental reflection cannot escape the historicity of experience itself, a historicity that grasps the impossibility of reflecting objectively upon the conditions of reflection itself.  Just as "looks red" presupposes "is red" (Sellars), so does the apprehension of transcendental structures presuppose the conceptuality of such structures, a conceptuality given through language socially.  

Heidegger (1889-1976) famously uncovered the living and breathing ontology through and by which human beings make and live meaning.  We are creatures of meaning embedded within worlds of meaning that we did not construct. We who in our being ask the question of the meaning of being, necessarily ask the question within the historically messy process of the history of being.  Ultimately, Heidegger claimed, our takes on being are themselves a working out of be-ing as it is in and through our thinking.  But, for Heidegger, this Be-ing in its history is no Absolute that can in Hegelian fashion "take up" various understandings of be-ing and somehow come to itself deeply in its own thinking.  The history of Be-ing cannot be the God of the tradition of the Absolute of Hegel, this Be-ing in its history is nowhere and no place, and it cannot be accessed by itself.  It is deeply and necessarily so hidden that Heidegger in speaking it must use the language of "the last God."  

We live in the world beyond the world as it was for us.  This world is not in itself, not for itself, and definitely not in and for itself.  This world is, in fact, worldless.  It is a world suspicious of meta-narratives (Lyotard), of comprehensive attempts to find in the world discrete trajectories of rationality or progress.  

Once there was the a world that really was in itself.  After the death of this world, there was a self that really was in itself.  Post-modernity is the celebration of both the death of the world and the self, a celebration that must be in a certain sense ecstatic because there is no longer a self-possessed self through and by which the self can clearly conceive and pronounce its own death.   Our current time is an age where the screens have overwhelmed the capacity of either the world or the self to manifest themselves clearly upon them. We are without foundations; it is turtles all the way down.  

Living beyond the world in itself is difficult for theology.  God understood along the lines of world or self, could be a God that is still somehow understood.  But when the self lives ecstatically on the basis of concepts and language that are not its own, then there are no places any longer for God to lay His head.  After all, God is by definition incapable of ecstatic existence.  God cannot be carried along or constituted upon differential fields that somehow account for intermittent manifestations of identity.  If anything is, it would seem, God is.  There are no parts to God.  God is that identity by and through which all difference is ultimately understood.  

So what does one do with Christology in an age beyond the age of the world for us?  In our age where all immediacy is blocked, everything that seemingly is, is dependent upon something that it is not.  Just as the identity of the world turned out to be dependent upon that which is different from the world -- its putative transcendental structures -- and the identity of the self turned out to be dependent upon that which is different from the self -- the concepts and language of historically-conditioned social communities -- so too do our fleeting perspectives arising out of particular historically-conditioned social communities find a deeper difference out of which language and thought emerges, a difference that is Other than the historically-conditioned linguistically bequeathed by culture and tradition, a difference that must ultimately be Other than the world and all its putative foundations.  We are very close now to the beginnings of our tradition, a tradition claiming that out of nothing comes something.  

What is needed is to think Christology radically after not only the deconstruction of onto-theology (Heidegger), but the de-structuring itself of that deconstruction.  Thinking Christology beyond the phenomenological presencing that putatively once gave rise to onto-theology, is to bring into focus clearly the Abyss that is either unsupported and provides no support, or unsupported that provides support, or somehow itself supported.  What is Christ in such a situation, and what could a real ontic unity between Christ and the Christian be? But the development of these ideas must await another time.  What is needed is a Christology in a time when the world is not.  

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

The Paradox of Transcendental Reflection

I first read the Critique of Pure Reason seriously over four decades ago. Like many novices reading Kant, I was impressed by the epistemological distinction between the a priori and a posteriori and the semantic distinction between synthetic and analytic judgments. Kant’s question intrigued me: By what right do we claim truth in synthetic a priori judgments? What justifies the assertion that deep reflection allows for an advancement of knowledge about the ultimate features of reality?

Kant claimed that a true analytical judgment is one where the meaning of the predicate is included in the meaning of the subject, while a true synthetic judgment is one wherein the meaning of the predicate is not so included. A synthetic judgment is thus “ampliative,” that is, to say that “all bachelors are happy” is to make an assertion that cannot be known to be true simply by thinking deeply about what the word ‘batchelor’ means.

As is well-known, Kant criticized traditional metaphysics by showing that its claim to extend knowledge “beyond the realm of possible experience” was chimerical. In the absence of intuition – that which is “given” through sensation – concepts simply relate to other concepts analytically or semantically. Since no intuitions “fall under” the concept ‘God’, we cannot know that ‘God loves human beings’, unless, of course, we are able to claim this to be merely an analytical truth, that is, that the concept of ‘God’ includes as part of its very meaning ‘loving human beings’. Putative metaphysical judgments that turn out to be analytical in this way are, for Kant, “regulative judgments.” While incapable of miming the ontological contour of the supersensible world, they are useful in ordering our supersensible concepts, and thus our thinking about the supersensible world. Kant thought his analytic/synthetic distinction exhaustive. Either judgments are analytic or synthetic; tertium non datur.

In reading the metaphysical and transcendental deductions of the Critique, I was struck by the oddity of what Kant was writing and what I was doing in reading. Kant was offering arguments about how it is that knowledge consists in the application of concepts to intuitions such that there is a “synthesis of the manifold of sensation.” I thought that what he wrote was plausible and was even able to grant that what he said was likely true. But with this an uncomfortable argument seems to emerge.

Let us regard as true the Kantian statement, ‘an object is that by concept of which the manifold of sensation is united’. If this statement is true, it must be true either analytically or synthetically. But clearly it is not an analytic truth for no amount of simple reflection upon ‘object’ allows one to conclude by meaning alone the concept ‘that by concept of which the manifold of sensation is united’. Therefore, it must be true synthetically.

But now the discomfort becomes acute because it is unclear what sensible intuitions must be united to make true the judgment ‘an object is that by concept of which the manifold of sensation is united’. Synthetic judgments for Kant are true a posteriori except for arithmetic and geometry which make direct appeal to the pure forms of sensibility. But neither sensibility nor its pure forms are synthesized in judging true the proposition, ‘an object is that by concept of which the manifold of sensation is united’. Accordingly, the sentence seems to be left without justification, and with it a great many of the statements Kant employs in his discussion of the transcendental unity of apperception.

Clearly, I had stumbled upon the paradox of transcendental reflection. Kant asks his readers in the Critique of Pure Reason, “What are the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such?” After claiming that all propositions are either analytic or synthetic and that synthetic a priori metaphysical judgments are problematic in extending knowledge beyond the realm of possible experience, he writes hundreds of pages in which he is seemingly using synthetic a priori judgments justifying these claims. Kant’s transcendental reflection apparently did not have to follow the same justificatory practices with respect to knowledge and truth that our reflections on the nature of things must follow. When reflecting upon the conditions of our knowledge of the nature of things, we no longer need to play by the same rules as we do when reflecting simply upon the nature of things.

Transcendental reflection, our thinking about how we think things, is exempt from the rules it prescribes to our thinking of things. Kant had perhaps “done away with knowledge of God to make room for faith,” but in doing so he created a cottage industry for philosophers. They who could not with justification lay out the truth conditions of ‘God created the universe’ -- there are no intuitions united either under the concept ‘God’ or the concept ‘created the universe -- could now claim truly this statement: ‘The judgment that ‘God created the universe’ cannot be regarded as true because there are no sensations falling under ‘God’ and ‘creating of the universe’. While clearly this proposition is a priori, we need no longer worry if it is synthetic or analytic. It is a statement within the field of transcendental reflection after all, and while such reflection sets the rules for meaning and truth for other provinces, like the Politburo of the old Soviet Union, it is wholly exempt from the rules that it prescribes for others.

The problem of transcendental reflection is a problem of grounds: What legitimates claims of transcendental truth? Why can we not ask with sense whether the statement ‘truths divide exhaustively between the analytic and synthetic’ is itself an analytic or synthetic statement? After noticing that true judgments are both “clear and distinct,” Descartes argued that clarity and distinctness form the very criteria of truth. Analogously, we might argue that reflections that philosophers regard as true that do not meet the truth criteria of what they prescribe are transcendental. Accordingly, the claim that we can say truly that there are conditions that do not apply to what is said truly actually constitutes the very criteria of the transcendental.

The problem of the transcendental standpoint and the truths discerned in occupying it has often been overlooked or ignored. The verificationist criterion of meaning asserted that only those propositions are meaningful that are comprised of tautologies or can be checked up upon in experience. But clearly, the statement that ‘only those propositions are meaningful that are comprised of tautologies or can be checked up upon in experience’ is neither a tautology nor can it be checked up upon in experience. Faced with the inability to say with truth the material conclusion of their argument, some retreated to regarding the statement as neither true nor false, but merely a proposal. Of course, this begs the questions of why one would be motivated to adopt the proposal in the first place.

The twentieth century, though often increasingly wary of transcendental reflection, has nonetheless had difficulty avoiding it. After laying out the conditions making possible propositions of sense, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus points out that none of the propositions he has written can be regarded as either true or false. They are like a ladder one climbs that can be thrown away upon reaching the summit. Such propositions might be elucidations, but they themselves have no truth conditions. Wittgenstein famously says that while saying what cannot be said, he nonetheless hopes in this saying that something might be shown. While one cannot state the conditions for the meaningfulness of propositions meaningfully, one can nonetheless show in one’s saying how to use propositions meaningfully. Wittgenstein notes sadly that the most important things of life cannot be said.

Wittgenstein knew that Russell’s paradox had spelled doom to Frege’s logicist program. That program depended upon the unrestricted use of the axiom of comprehension within set theory, the notion that any set of conditions clearly demarcate and distinguish sets from one another. Set theorists make extensive use of sets that have sets as their own members. Given the axiom of comprehension, this condition should uniquely determine sets, that is, for all sets, either they have sets as members of themselves or they don’t have sets as members of themselves: tertium non datur.

Russell then asked us to consider those everyday sets that don’t have sets as members of themselves, e.g., the set of elephants has as its members elephants, not sets of elephants. He directs us to consider the collection or set of all of sets that are not members of themselves. Now since we can ask with sense whether a set is a member of itself or not a member of itself, and tertium non datur, we can ask with sense whether the set of sets that are not members of themselves is itself a member of itself or is itself not a member of itself. A little reflection shows that if the set of all sets is a member of itself, that is, is a member of the set of all sets that is not a member of itself, then it itself must not be a member of itself. Conversely, if the set of all sets that are not a member of themselves is not a member of itself, then it must be a member of itself. That this paradox was not allowed in logic shows that somehow logic was not going to be regarded as a case of transcendental reflection, for it itself must obey its own rules!

That logic must obey its own rules is assumed in the celebrated Incompleteness proof of Gödel. He showed that paradox arises on the assertion that all known mathematical truths (tautologies) can be derived from a finite set of axioms. By ingeniously semantically encoding information into the syntax of arithmetic, it can be proven that there will always be a provable true proposition G from some axiom set that states that it itself cannot be proven on the basis of that axiom set. Adding a new axiom will not solve this problem because a statement can be proved stating that it cannot be proved on the basis of the new axiom set. While logicians carefully distinguish their metalanguage from the object languages about which the metalanguage speaks, they do not countenance theorems in the metalanguage contradicting those of their object languages.

Paradox dooms logic, but not transcendental reflection! How else can we explain the rise of phenomenology with all its fanfare and hopes? Reading the texts of Husserl, Heidegger and others brings us again into the orbit of the transcendentality that Kant had birthed, and Fichte, Shelling, Hegel and others so effectively exploited.

The phenomenological tradition of such reflection differs from the Neo-Kantian tradition in that while the latter is engaged with the principles by which knowledge is legitimately had, the former utilizes evidence Husserl realized that truth is itself not something that can be accounted for on naturalistic assumptions, and thus argued that so-called natural truths must rest upon non-natural grounds. Accordingly, the very grounds of the truth of metaphysical truths must be non-metaphysically investigated. One must go zu den Sachen selbst and bracket questions of metaphysics and the natural world in order to apprehend those grounds upon which the natural world and metaphysics rests. These grounds, thought Husserl, were to be found in the direct apperception of that which is immediately given to consciousness.

But phenomenological reflection proved to be no easy task, and reflection on “the things themselves” was soon seen to involve reflecting upon many other things, some of which were not so unambiguously evidence. In fact, the criterion by which to evaluate the nature and strength of evidence was not clearly something one could simply “see” evidentially. Marshaling evidence and relating that evidence to philosophical problems seems to involve principled transcendental reflection. Husserl knew this, and by the publication of Ideas in 1913 adopted the position of transcendental idealism that he once wished to bracket. Transcendental reflection demonstrated the necessity of a transcendental ego related noetically to the Sinn-world of noematic content. This transcendental ego could not be examined phenomenologically without presupposing that very ego under investigation. The problem was that transcendental reflection seemed to require a transcendental ego that was, by definition, not amenable to phenomenological investigation.

It is at this stage that Heidegger enters our story, penning Sein und Zeit and striving mightily therein to avoid the paradoxes to which Husserl’s hidden transcendental ego fell prey. By re- thinking what a transcendental ego really is, Heidegger was able to avert the problem of how the transcendental ego can direct itself upon its world. For Heidegger, the occult ego of Husserl became Being-in-the-world, Dasein. The ego is already embedded in its world and it is this embeddedness. With this step Heidegger would try to do something nobody had yet succeeded in accomplishing. Heidegger wanted phenomenologically not only to access those beings in the world that constitutes the basic experience and structure of Dasein, but he wanted to examine the conditions for the intelligibility of phenomenologically accessible beings in the world; he wanted to coax out of hiding those worldly conditions making possible beings in the world. His interest was in the be-ing (“to-beness”) resident within the horizon of the world itself. He claimed that his investigation was ontological, that it had to do with be-ing, that is, it concerned not primarily beings, but those conditions of intelligibility that made possible the intelligibility of beings as such. 

But Heidegger’s work in Sein und Zeit was beset by transcendental paradox as well. His pointing out of different ways of being seems at times to leave out the very possibility of a way of being doing the pointing. Take, for instance, his distinction between Vorhandensein (present-at-hand be-ing) and Zuhandensein (ready-to-hand be-ing). This distinction is fundamental for Heidegger. Objects appear to us either as “present-at-hand” or “ready-to-hand”, either as objects having properties or as equipment to be used in our everyday pragmatic concerns. But what is the being of the one who distinguishes be-ing-present-at-hand from be-ing-ready-to-hand? Is the distinction between the objective and pragmatic an objective or pragmatic distinction? If neither, then should Heidegger not have distinguished some other category beyond the objective and pragmatic?

Heidegger’s detailed analysis of the be-ing of Dasein in Sein und Zeit seems to push towards theoretical comprehension, a present-at-hand description of those fundamental structures that are not in themselves present-at-hand. But this is exactly what transcendental reflection does: It attempts a theoretical description of a province of being that cannot be theoretically described.  Transcendental phenomenology perhaps has made the most valiant attempt to grant explicit truth conditions for statements of the transcendental. Clearly, Husserl was attempting in his formal ontology to escape the paradox of transcendental reflection.  But as mentioned before, the hope that there could be a stable province of being impassible to its own investigation was quickly extinguished by Heidegger's insight that knowing being is itself an activity of being, that at the foundation of being, there is be-ing, and that there is be-ing all the way down, as it were.  

The paradox of transcendental reflection are encountered by a being, who in its be-ing, has be-ing at issue for it. Such reflection and paradox can sometimes be brought to the surface by the Geisteswissenschaften, who realize profoundly that the Naturwissenschaften proceed so successfully because they exclude what to the human spirit is central: We are not who we are and can never not be who we are.  Difference rules the first set of disciplines and identity the second. 

So what is deeper in human experience, the geistliche paradoci of transcendental reflection, or the tidy coherency of  natural science? 

Sunday, October 02, 2022

Theology and Metaphysics

Theology and philosophy have always been deeply related, though each has often tried to disown the other.  The ways in which they have related to each other are often overlooked by those believing they already know what the relationship is or ought to be.  

We hear much these days about the destruction of the history of onto-theology.  Theology, we are told, must move forward without the help of metaphysics.  The story is that metaphysics is bad, that metaphyscis is, in the words of one Christian theologian, "death dealing."  But why the rancor against metaphysics?  

The story of the exclusion of metaphysics from theology is a long and complicated one, a story whose tellers carry presuppositions about which they are often unaware.  I tell the story in the following paragraphs.   

Once upon a time 2,400 years ago, Greek philosophers, thinking deeply about things, recognized that there were certain problems connected with knowing the world and our way around in that world.  If everything that is, is in process (Heraclitus), then how could it be that there is anything stable in the world to know.  If one can never step into the same river twice -- that is, if the matter of the river is alway changing -- then how can one speak meaningfully about a river at all? But we do speak meaningfully about rivers.  Thus, there must be something stable about which we speak when we talk about things in the world, especially when we talk about how things in the world change.  It seems that the condition for the possibility of change is that there is something stable and enduring to which change might be attributed.  After all, it is the same sheep in the field, though this ewe no longer has wool.  

I marvel at the work of Plato and Aristotle in their attempt to give an account of how knowledge is possible and how change is possible.  Plato, of course, advocated that there must be some stable and enduring forms which we know and about which our talk is about.  The form sheep, instantiated in this object before me, allows me to speak truly the statement, 'this sheep has lost its wool.'  

Aristotle gave us a metaphysics of primary substances, accidents and secondary substances that allowed us to make sense of our world.  There are basic unities called substances, of which certain can be "said of", and of which certain things are "present in."  The primary substance is this sheep, and the whiteness of its wool is "present in" this sheep.  However, 'sheep' can be 'said of' this sheep, and so can 'mammal' and 'animal'.  

Plato and Aristotle knew that before we can go about clearly investigating the natural world around us, and the complexity of ourselves, we needed language to do that investigating, language presupposing categories by which anything as such is know, and through which anything as such is.  A world in which there is only becoming would be a world unknown to us.  What was needed is the logos, the permanent possibilities by and through which things become.  

Christian theology found the work of Plato and Aristotle very handy when it came to talk about the divine.  Just as becoming needed forms by which the becoming my be and be known, it seemedthat God  was in need of such forms as well.  Without such forms, it would seem we could no more utter a word about God as we might utter a word about ceaseless becoming.   

But talk about God appears quite different than talk about the world of becoming all around us.  After all, we can see, hear, touch, smell and taste the world around us, but this seems not to be true of the divine.  God is supersensible; the divine is beyond all sensible finite being.  Categories by which we might know the world are categories we use when talking about God.  Metaphysics is born again in its attempt to take the categories that apply to the temporal and finite and use them to speak of the eternal and infinite. This seems quite reasonable because the categories themselves in their universal applicability seem to suggest the eternal, immutable and infinite.  The categories are not themselves comprised of the material becomings to which they apply.  If they were so comprised, they would not be categories, and the problem of stability and change would come back upon us again in full force.  

Medieval thinkers knew their metaphysics, and realized that reason itself dictates the use of metaphysical categories if there was to be anything stable about God and his mighty deeds that they human mind might know and that human language might speak.  Seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers often divided on where to put their attention, with Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz arguing passionately that rationality itself connects to the forms by which reality is grasped, a connecting that concerns the supersensible.  These great "continental rationalists" thought that proper application of reason could eventuate in knowledge of the supersensible, and ultimately through this, knowledge of the sensible itself could occur.  

Christian theology from the fourth century onward had linked itself arm and arm with the metaphysical.  And why not?  God as the eternal, immutable, impassible, infinite being is a denizen -- one might say the paradigmatic denizen -- of the realm of the supersensible itself.  No matter how large the field of the supersensible, God fills it, and even, at times, seems to strain against the borders.  After all, God as "that which none greater can be thought" must occupy the highest region of Being, though one must allow that God could at any time go to live in another realm entirely. 

God as the highest being quite naturally assumed the Grund (ground) role within all of being. While all beings in the supersensible have some reason to be that appeals to something outside themselves, God's raison d'etre must be included within Himself alone.  God is the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover, the necessary being grounding all contingency, the perfection of the medieval transcendentals of goodness, beauty and truth, and that by virtue of which the world has a consistency and stability allowing for human life.  

God as the ineffable, impassible, uncaused causer is the condition for His own actuality as well as the actuality of the world as such.  Why is there being and not nothing?  There is being because there is God and God is the one activity of being in all activities of being and the highest being.  Because there is God, there is metaphysical and physical order.  God has more being than His angels, who have more being than human beings, who themselves have more being than the animals, plants and minerals.  The "Great Chain of Being" determines the hierarchy of being, and every being on that hierarchy.  

The metaphysical realm of the supersensible is closed to all human sensing, but not to human thinking.  One can know something about supersensible hierarchies through reason, and through the reason-transcending showings of the supersensibe to human beings.  In the tradition, revelation stands on the side of reason and not on the side of the empirical.  Revelation and reason deal with the eternal verities, while the senses concern the temporal.  The first deal with Plato's realm of Being, the second with his realm of Becoming.  

Kant famously argued that the traditional province of human thinking, the realm of metaphysics itself, was epistemically inaccessible to human thinking. What can be known are those determinate perceptions (intuitions) that have been synthesized by our concepts into determinate objects of experience.  Human thinking as such could proceed in orders of conditioned and that which conditions, but such thinking does not access the supersensible it itself.  It does not carve the beast of reality at its joints. Such thinking is regulative; it is how human beings must think something, but there is no justified reason to think that how we must think something is the way that the supersensible thing to be thought is.  The transcendental subreption occurs when we confuse the necessity of our thinking with any necessity that the thing thought might have. 

With one fell swoop, Kant seemingly broke up the 14 century long marriage between theology and metaphysics.  "Doing away with knowledge to make room for faith" sounded good to many people in the day, but the pesky problem since the time of Kant has concerned what exactly does one have faith in?  

Fichte, Shelling, Coleridge, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and many others scavenged about for ways to think God beyond traditional supersensible formulations.  Perhaps one might think God as the whence of the human feeling of absolute dependence.  Perhaps God is found in the dynamism of the ego as it creates and surpasses the forms by which the world is known.  Perhaps God can be identified as the human effort to know the world through history, a knowing that is absolute when all that has been and can be known is known, a knowing that is simultaneously God reaching complete self-consciousness. 

But metaphysical ways die hard, and the post-metaphysical ways to think God suddenly seemed to be thinking God all over again through a new type of metaphysics. To think God as the transcendental field allowing knowledge to happen as a "laying out" or interpretation of God simply moves that which ultimately is from the prohibited traditional metaphysical transcendent to the newly permitted transcendentally unconditioned.  As that which ultimately conditions all knowledge, God is now thought as unconditioned conditioned, a step away from the uncaused causer, as it were, but a step that appeared to many to be not far enough.  

So it was the young Heidegger, reading the young Luther, who came to the conclusion that all of metaphysics, transcendent or transcendental, merely occludes that be-ing which is closest to us and in which we unavoidably dwell.  Heidegger declared that metaphysics is a practice in the "forgetfulness" of being because metaphysics simply lays out ultimate things with putative objectivity (present-at-hand being) while occluding the (ready-to-hand) practical fields of being in which human ultimately dwell.  Later Heidegger develops a radical critique of the "onto-theological tradition" of thinking God through derivative categories that ignore the factic life of Christians living always already ahead of themselves in anticipating the Second Coming of Christ.  One might say that onto-theology is the problem that has beset Christianity from its beginning and continually derails theology, which itself must ultimately concern human existence as they are "placed" or as the "find themselves" before God.  

This is the story of the great divorce between theology and metaphysics, a story that leaves Christian theology in the uncomfortable position of having to say something about God without using metaphysical categories.  But what can we say about God without metaphysical categories?  Although many books deal with this topic, It is actually quite difficult to answer this question.  If we don't talk about God then don't we fall into the black hole of apophatic theology?  This will be my topic in a later post.

Monday, May 09, 2022

Luther and Heidegger: Modeling the Destruction of Metaphysics

The International Luther Congress beckons this summer and I am thinking about doing something on Luther and Heidegger in the seminar on Luther and Philosophy. I am old enough now to remember Luther Congresses 35 years ago and more where this topic was not of deep interest. Having written a dissertation on Luther's theological semantics, I was from my first Luther Congress interested in these matters, and remember being introduced to the Finnish work in this area in Oslo in 1988. 


The following is the abstract for my paper on Luther and Heidegger this Sumer.  The seminar headed by Jennifer Hockenbery asks participants to relate Luther to the philosophical tradition through consideration of the notion of freedom. 

________


Much has been written about Heidegger’s indebtedness to Luther (along with Paul and Augustine) in the development of central themes of Being and Time e.g., death, fallenness, guilt, sin, freedom, etc. Heidegger breaks here with Husserl and western philosophy’s dream to frame a consistent and coherent theory adequate and applicable to all the facts, both physical and metaphysical. In the early 1920s Heidegger was interested in the phenomenology of Christian life, what it was to-be-unto-the-Parousia. He discerned in Luther a friend in uncovering the meaning of factical Christian existence, that primordial self-understanding from, and through which, any talk of theological “facts” can emerge.  


But the parallels between Luther’s critique of late medieval Scholasticism and Heidegger’s critique of Catholic theology in his time -- both are interested in the destructionof the abstract metaphysical in favor of the phenomenology of concrete lived existence – can occlude what profoundly differentiates the two approaches: Luther’s “Christian being” cannot be conceived apart from an encounter with the Other, an encounter that cannot be interpreted either as Zuhandensein or Vorhandensein. One must not confuse the experientia of Luther’s theologian with the experience of the peasant or particle physicist. The phenomenological ontological approach “laying bare” the being-in-the-world of both occludes the “stand on being” assumed in the approach itself, an approach that itself finally must stand before God


In this paper, I review the research into Luther and Heidegger with an eye toward towards an appropriation of the start differences between them, particularly with respect to the question of freedom. What is constructive here is my employment of model theory to show the truth-conditions of the sentences used in the analysis. Clarity on the semantics of sets of sentences about Luther’s experientia, Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology of Christian life, and the enterprise of their comparison provides greater precision and accuracy in evaluating the differences in their respective projects. 

_________


I have for some time thought that theologians should know the basics of model theory so that they might gain greater clarity into their own theological and ontological assertions. I will endeavor to provide a brief introduction to model theory in this summer's paper, and use it to clarify the difference between Luther and the early Heidegger's project of disclosing the primordial factic life of the Christian prior to the making and evaluation of abstract theological assertions.  

Monday, April 04, 2022

Transcendental Reflection and the Divine Other

I

Transcendental reflection investigates those conditions necessary for there to be the kind of experience that we have. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) famously inquired into the "transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such," finding that pure priori forms of sensibility and pure a priori concepts of the understanding are both necessary to deliver the world as it is: one filled with objects having properties causally related to one another. Without these, the universality and necessity of Newtonian physics could not obtain.  

Kant inaugurated a type of thinking that has in many respects dominated theology for the last couple of hundred years.  Kant argued that in order to have a unity to experience there must be a transcendental unity of apperception, a unifying activity that is itself possible to reflect upon. In writing the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant was thinking about his own thinking, about the way that thinking grants unity to experience.  His thinking about thinking was neither an empirical thinking, a thinking of mathematics or geometry, nor a thinking about the ultimate nature of things as Leibniz and Wolff would have thought.  It was a reflective thinking that offered insight into how the unity of experience is possible, a thinking that sought the truth of this unity of experience.  It was not a metaphysical thinking of the transcendent, but a transcendental thinking that brought into the light of day those structures employed but not noticed, a thinking that sought a hermeneutical retrieval of that which is closest to us but remains unnoticed. 

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were convinced of the profundity of Kant's project which reflected upon, and ultimately coaxed into the open, those transcendental structures making experience possible. A transcendental unity of apperception did not commit one to Descartes' "thinking substance'; such a unity of thinking that did not entail old school metaphysics. Fichte and followers followed Kant's lead after pointing out that the good philosopher could not sustain his famous distinction between things as they are in themselves and things as they appear for us. 

If thinking is that which unites our experience, then why must such thinking be turned back by a putative thing-in-itself? This too could be thought, and thinking this actually dissolves problematic dualisms. Of course, there is something one bumps up against in experience (Anstoss), but such a bumping does not entail that that what is bumped is of a wholly disparate ontological lineage.  Perhaps nature which, as Kant pointed out, is already the result of the synthesizing activity of the transcendental unity of apperception, is not a joint product of something out there and our synthesis.  Perhaps it simply is the result of our synthesis, a synthesis that does not have to hook to the disparate, but can simply connect to itself in appropriate ways.  And so it is that the I posits the very world with which it must deal, the world that it can know, the world that serves as the backdrop to the moral life and all the loftiest of the human heart.  

Transcendental reflection is born in the security of the transcendental unity of apperception, a security that finally cannot admit the Other, for to admit that is to destroy the very grounds upon which transcendental reflection is based.  To posit the Other is to return to the problematic between things as they appear and things in themselves; it is to bark up the Kantian tree and return to an aporia once thought solved and vanquished.  Thinkers in the Kantian tradition knew that this could not be progress.  After the Kantian critique of old-style metaphysics, the security of the transcendental provided a felicitous place for the narrative of God and His incursion into history to took place.  

II

At the risk of oversimplification, I claim that in the days prior to Kant, the days running from the Old Testament prophets through Plato and Aristotle to the steppes of the Enlightenment, the alterity or otherness of God was simply taken for granted by the Church and society generally. Although one could not know the nature of God, the regnant assumption was that God did have a nature that was not dependent upon human awareness, perception, conception or language.  God's being did not depend upon human being, particularly not upon human thinking.  

The story of how Neoplatonic thought forms gradually gave way to Aristotelian categories is important to tell, however, for our present purposes, I will just remark that both types of thinking generally assumed that the Being of God is externally related to human being.  Whether God is regarded as being itself or as the highest being, the tradition acknowledged that God is causally related to the universe.  God's creation of the universe is a causing of the universe to be. Without God's act of creation, the universe would not have being.  Divine power is needed to bring being out of non-being.  Accordingly, the theological tradition was generally committed to the reality of God apart from human being -- the thesis of theological realism -- and the possibility of causal connections between God and the universe -- the thesis of theophysical causation.  

At the dawn of the Reformation, there were a number of differing theological schools that read Augustine, Plato and especially Aristotle in different ways, ways that reflected differing philosophical positions on the ontology of universals and the relationship of these universals to particulars.  While it is an oversimplification to say that Aristotle had become the philosopher of the Christian tradition, many theological traditions assumed with him that there were basic things in the world (substances) and that these substances had properties, some of which were necessary for the substance itself, and some which were accidental to the substance, that is, some of which could either be had by the substance or not possessed by it  without changing the being of the substance. God's creation was a creation of substances with properties.  These substances were the effects of God's creativity activity.  Adam and Eve were individual substances bearing the kind-identifying properties of being both rational and animal. The contour of Adam and Eve's particularity was due to the contingent properties each possessed.  

All of this is important for Christology. That God is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself meant that the particular entity Christ had both divine and human properties and that Christ had causal power.  The miracle stories suggest all of this, of course.  The being (or substance) Jesus caused it to be the case that 5,000 men (plus women and children) were fed with two fish and five loaves of bread. This being caused it to be true that the man Lazereth was no longer dead.  

Christ was the God-man, He is the second person of the Trinity that had assumed human flesh.  The Second Person eternally existed; there was never a time when Christ was not.  This means inter alia that Christ is simply other than any human who might think, love or trust in Him.  Christ is not a category of human thinking, but a name for a being that exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception or language.  To say that Christ is externally related to anybody ether accepting or rejecting him is to assume that Christ is other that anybody either accepting or rejecting Him.  

When it came time for Enlightenment rationalists to do theology, it was very natural to do it in a metaphysical key. God who is other than worldly being or human thinking must ultimately be seen as the sine qua non of the created order. The principle of sufficient reason claiming that for anything that is there must be some reason why it is, when applied to the universe seemed to point univocally to God.  

One might claim that the time before Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was a "pre-critical" time where the primary objects of religious thought and experience were not yet dissolved into the fog of rational doubt.  Reason, properly applied in discovering many truths fully consonant with the Bible, attested to the same reality as the Holy Scriptures themselves.  

While Kant himself seemed to leave room for there to be a God that is other than human thinking, this God could not be known, and accordingly, the enterprise of rational theology had to be profoundly rethought. The idealist tradition following Kant wished to think God within the security of transcendental subjectivity. Reason had found a place for God that could protect God from the contingencies of the other.  When one thinks about it, the post-Kantian theological tradition can be read in part as an attempt to rescue theology from Lessing's "broad ugly ditch."  Clearly, this theological tradition could insulate the "necessary truths of reason" from the "accidental truths of history."  

III

Martin Heidegger knew the tradition well, understood Kant, and had read Martin Luther.  In the Freiburg lectures from 1919-23, Heidegger shows himself increasingly dissatisfied with a thinking in theology that leaves out the life of the one thinking.  Heidegger's early attraction to Martin Luther (and fueled by Kierkegaard) was his attempt to find a way out from the security of the transcendental project.  For Luther, death was part of the very life of the theologian, an experienced life.  Luther famously uttered "experiential macht die Theologum".  There is nothing secure about finitude, about the life of the believer beset with "sin, death and the power of the devil."  The reality of all three is part of the experience out of which and in which theology is done.  Theological thinking must always be tied to the Otherness of God and the divine project of the salvation of the sinner.  It is a bold thinking of infinite things done by flesh-and-blood finite human beings whose thinking always happens under the Cross.  

Human thinking can never be wholly secure, because the otherness of sin, death and devil is always already besetting it. Such thinking is ecstatic, it is a thinking that is "outside oneself" because it is a thinking in the light of the Cross, a thinking that is a trusting in a Savior that is not a projection of one's own being, not an aspect of the nobility of human being with its cultivated intellectual and moral virtues, not a thinking that is grounded in reason.  Luther, who lived 250 years prior to the heyday of transcendental reflection, already knew that such reflection, if possible, could not end in human salvation.  To be saved is to be saved by that which is other than oneself.  Salvation happens in a world of flesh-and-blood believers dying and sinning.  Thirty-year old Martin Heidegger understood that if theology is to be a serious discourse, this discourse must not hide what is basic to the theologian: The theologian in her now is always already running ahead of herself in encountering that possibility of their being no more possibilities.  The theologian in her now is always already living death, sin and the power of the devil.  This triumvirate does not allow for calm, calculating thinking on the wonders of the grace-filled life.  Life is filled with death.  Our lives, like Christ's life, are lived in the shadow of our crucifixion.  We are now the not that we shall once be when we are no longer being the one for whom the not of the future is no longer.  

Heidegger wanted to bring reflection upon ultimate things back to the phenomenological-ontological-existential ground from which all metaphysical reflection arises. He wanted to call us back from the forgetfulness of this ground, a forgetfulness of being which gives rise both to our absorption in the world and our flights into metaphysical abstraction.  Heidegger's reading of Luther buttressed his conviction that it was time for philosophy to rediscover again the one for whom philosophy means, the one who in its being, has be-ing at issue for it.  With Heidegger, the spector of the Other comes into sight.  We are in our be-ing, beings for whom and by whom the question of being and meaning arise.  This questioning of be-ing by that being who cares about be-ing, is a questioning that opens to the Other of being, a questioning done over the pit of non-being, a questioning that itself is the conduit of the presencing of the absence of being.  Death, after all, cannot be taken up into the life of being; it is the boundary of being that establishes the conditions of being itself.  

IV

But the early Heidegger did not get to the Other.  His project remained curiously within the province of transcendental thinking and subjectivity.  Laying out (interpreting) the existential-phenomenological-ontological roots of our reflection upon being is at some level a continuation of transcendental subjectivity. In our thinking, we think Dasein which is open to its Other, but we can only think this alterity as part of the transcendental existential-ontological conditions for the possibility of ontic engagement with an Other, an Other that may for Dasein have profound existentiell significance.  No longer does the transcendental thinker lay out the unity of the categories of human thinking by which the world is known, now this thinker is engaged in highlighting the unity of the existential structures themselves by which and through which the unity of care is possible, a caring that grounds any thinking in the first place.  

The problem is clearly seen in Heidegger's treatment of other Daseins.  They are Mitsein for Dasein who can have Fuersorge for them, but they themselves in their otherness from Dasein cannot be be in themselves other.  The early Heidegger is simply unable to bring the world into focus.  He can and does get to the world from a certain position in the world, but cannot get to the world itself.  Being cannot ultimately be refracted by considering profoundly being as it is da (there).  What gets thought when considering Da-sein is Dasein, not Sein.  Ironically, Heidegger finds himself in the position of Leibniz.  One has a take on the world within any monad, but monads are windowless, and the world itself can only be reconstructed as describable above the fray of the monadic descriptions themselves.  To get to that world, one needs theological commitments not presenting themselves within the metaphysics of the monad.  

So wither comes the Other?  Can it be brought into focus beyond the security of the transcendental project?  Did Levinas accomplish its encounter with the face? Can phenomenological encounter ground the Other?  Can it give a basis for a radical theological of the Cross where one finds oneself living without metaphysical and ontological nets, as it were?  Can alterity be thought of ontically in the way of those of the Reformation, as an otherness of being toward being?  Must we finally admit that it can only be shown and never said, but that in its showing that we discern the real ontological position of human beings eviscerated by sin, death and the power of the devil as they live their lives in the shadows of the hidden divine.  The Theology of the Cross is about showing, but not about a metaphysics of presence.  Showing here cannot be said without the said Showing turning into such a presence. Wittgenstein knew that showing happens in words, but not in truth-claims. To say what can only be shown is to turn preaching into a dogmatics that must always miss the glimpse of Divine alterity.  

Bringing this Other into the open will demand an overturning of the very identity that has grounded the security of our theology of glory project of transcendental reflection.  At the end of the day, human beings cannot save themselves.  Salvation demands an overturning of the ontological of identity, an identity that has closed the clearing of the divine other, a clearing that finds in God's traces its own footsteps. At stake is the fundamental question: Can otherness show itself as what it is, or must if always show itself as what it is for us.  At stake is the fundamental question of the Garden: Did God really say?