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?  


3 comments:

  1. Bill Powers8:26 PM

    I don't think it is the other that is at stake. It is pretty obvious that, no matter the unity of apperception, or a transcendental ego, no matter the apparatus of unity of experience, we cannot of this apparatus alone construct a world.

    Rather what is at stake is the character of the other. Naively, we might try to divide our apperceptions into a part contributed by our synthesizing apparatus and that by the world. What is clear, however, is that something is always given, and it is this givenness that is "passively" received by our "intuition." IOW, there is something primordially and pre-cognitively given.

    Were one to pursue something like Merleau-Ponty's chiasm, one might say that we are made for one another, us and the world, inextricably intertwined. Were this not in some sense true, no "communication" would be possible. An apparatus capable only of constructing peanut-butter sandwiches would have a hard time of it. Poorly put, but the point ought to be clear that there must be some kind of "coherent" dance between what the world gives and what we receive. Were we to merely meditate in our armchairs about this "constituted" world, much could go awry. But we don't. We are continuously, over countless experiences, engaging and testing our understanding of the world. We know what it is like for our constituted expectations to be confirmed and what it means for them to be disappointed.

    And yet I cannot say that even with all of this, our countless evidence and confirmation, whether we couldn't be wrong, deeply wrong about many aspects of the "real" world. This can only mean that what the world gives is insufficient for there to be a unique understanding, or that there are aspects of the world which escape all evidencing and experiencing.

    This latter would not surprise me. The very notion that there is a "world," by which we mean "one world," is clearly an astonishing inference, if we can regard it as one, since we my no means experience the "entire" world and all its possibilities, but merely a shred of it. And yet we all appear to presume this global unity, enduring over time and space.

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  2. Thank you for sharing this stimulating reflection. I've comments in three areas.

    First, since learning of it, I've never trusted Kant's "transcendental unity of apperception" as you have said it. For me, language is the vehicle transmitting unity. This gift is recognized, perhaps even honored, in Adam as God brought the things (creatures) of creation to Adam for his naming of them and they were called by whatever Adam named them but in all of them no mate was found for Adam (Ge. 2:19-20). This first human revealed the necessary skills of categorization and discernment: the creatures were placed in distinguishable categories with recognized boundaries between them. If a creature was one thing, it could not be another thing (later, I believe Aristotle would develop this as his law of non-contradiction?). The first human also had discernment in that none of these other creatures were suitable to a be a mate. As would later be exclaimed, "There was no 'bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh'" to any of them. The unity of our experience is mediated from outside of us and language is the mediator. True language teaches the unity of true experience. Language used to deceive or confuse not only truth but the foundation of our united experience.
    The relevance of this was driven home to me as I related to our grandson Eric. He struggles to overcome his autistic tendencies. In his pre-school and early school days, his idea of a joke was to insist on mis-categorizing something, insisting it was one thing when it was clearly something different. He would laugh contentedly as he challenged your perception all the while knowing his insistance was entirely misplaced. He had found humor in his little challenge of accepting the norms of conventional categorization.
    Humor itself is a way of contradicting the conventional categorizations in such a way that the conventions themselves are re-inforced. Humor ceases to exist wherever there is no longer left any conventional categories to be contradicted. And, humor ceases to exist wherever conventional categories are declared immune to contradiction. This, perhaps, is why we live in such a humorless culture right now. Nobody can take a joke.
    I've come to appreciate Tom Wolfe's book "The Kingdom of Speech." He advances the notion that speech mediates our experience and brings brings us to a unity of experience by revealing to us a tradition of mediated experiences. I think this directly contradicts Kant's "transcendental unity of apperception" which arises from within. When language mediates a tradition of experiences to us, that is an "ecstatic" from without transmission of unity.

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  3. Initial comment continued...


    Second, I want to give some thought to this "phenomenological encounter with the other." You wrote: "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?" I would say, "Yes, conditionally." If the phenomenological encounter were the events of Word and Sacrament ministry, then I would agree that such an encounter grounds a life without "metaphysical and ontological safety nets." What replaces them is something more certain than either and that is God's promise. We, who exist temporally, must anticipate the promise's fulfillment and so there exists a time (on our part) where the promise exists unfulfilled. But, God, who exists eternally, simply speaks what already exists for him in his present. The cross ultimately critiques and dismantles those metaphysical and ontological safety nets we've devised for ourselves in order to leave us with the one thing we have which endures forever, the Word of the Lord.
    This is beautifully said, "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." There is a wonderful complexity of expression here that invites one into its complexity where, upon entry, its simplicity is revealed. I like that. I am assuming that you're speaking of the boundary conditions to life defining life itself and categorizing it. The cross confronts us with the future "not" of our being, imposes that "not" upon us in the present, and so delivers us into an immediate death... the death of Christ into which we were baptized, making it our death as well.
    A bit of humor here, possibly... Our current VP attempts to imitate the complexity of language you're fond of Dennis. She, however, possesses not the rhetorical skills or the grammatical tools to communicate simplicity in comprehensible complexity as do you. She, rather, remains simply incomprehensible in her attempted complexity.

    Third, I assume you are not using the word "showing" in the sense of the "show me" state where seeing is believing when you say, " The Theology of the Cross is about showing, but not about a metaphysics of presence." I take it that you use "showing" as roughly equivalent to the semantic field of "revealing." This would reword the preceding quote, "The Theology of the Cross is about revealing, but not about a metaphysics of presence. Would it be appropriate to say that the Theology of the Cross reveals but does not explain? Proclamation is not the sort of saying that leads to dogmatics. Rather, it is the sort of speech that reveals both the reality of the Divine Otherness and the reality of the Holy Spirit worked faith in that one who is wholly other. With the proclamation of Jesus Christ, him crucified, and him alone handed over to be the life of dead sinners that the "ontological of identity, an identity that has closed the clearing of the divine other" has been overturned and a new reality established.

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