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?