The Ontological Priority of Law and Gospel: Why Reality is Not about Being Human

Intelligibility and the Ontological Priority of Law and Gospel

Modern theology habitually begins with the self. Law and Gospel are therefore read first as modes of human experience, as the ways in which God confronts consciousness. The Law accuses, the Gospel consoles. Within this horizon they function as psychological or existential dispositions, structures of address within the drama of conscience. There is truth here, but it is only a derivative truth.

What if this familiar orientation were reversed? What if Law and Gospel were not first about how human beings experience God, but about how reality itself is rendered intelligible before God? What if they name not anthropological postures, but ontological structures? What if they belong not merely to theology’s linguistic grammar, but to the grammar of being itself?

This is the wager of the reflection that follows.

The inquiry does not begin with salvation, piety, or the psychology of faith. It begins with intelligibility itself, with the question of what must be the case for finite being to be knowable at all. If intelligibility is real and not merely projected by human cognition, then it must exhibit distinct and irreducible modes. Finite being is intelligible either as grounded in itself or as grounded in another. There is no tertium quid.

This fundamental differentiation yields the primal metaphysical distinction between necessity and contingency. What is necessary is intelligible in virtue of itself. What is contingent is intelligible only by reference to another. Yet necessity and contingency cannot stand as isolated poles. Contingency must be intelligible as received rather than arbitrary, as given rather than brute. At this juncture possibility emerges, not as a merely logical modality, but as ontological openness, the teleological space within which being can be bestowed, received, and sustained.

Intelligibility therefore exhibits a twofold structure. There is intelligibility in se, in which being is measured by what it must be in virtue of itself, and intelligibility ab alio, in which being is constituted by what it receives from another. These are not optional perspectives. They are the only two ways in which finite being can stand as intelligible at all.

At this level, what theology will later name Law and Gospel are already operative as the two basic structures of intelligibility. Law names the mode of necessity, that which is self-measured and self-grounded. Gospel names the mode of donation, that which lives from another and by gift. These are not affective states, moral descriptions, or linguistic conventions. They are ontological modalities of intelligibility itself.

To collapse one into the other is not a minor theological error. To moralize the Gospel is to convert gift into requirement. To reduce the Law to description is to evacuate necessity of its binding force. In either case, the architecture of intelligibility is destroyed.

Only on this basis can Luther’s distinction be properly understood. The polarity of Law and Gospel is not a pastoral invention, nor a merely rhetorical contrast within preaching. It is a faithful theological articulation of a metaphysical differentiation already inscribed into being itself. The Word of Law and the Word of Gospel do not merely address human consciousness in different ways. They disclose different modes of being and therefore different structures of understanding. Human beings do not generate this polarity. They find themselves always already located within it.

The priority of Law and Gospel is therefore neither chronological nor epistemic. It is ontological. They name the two fundamental ways in which finite being stands before God, either under the intelligibility of self grounded necessity, which is Law, or under the intelligibility of gifted contingency, which is Gospel.

Theology does not invent this distinction. It confesses it. For when reality is pressed for intelligibility, it yields nothing else.

Law and Gospel Are Older Than We Are

The claim is simple to state and difficult to absorb. Law and Gospel are ontological before they are experiential. They do not arise from moral reflection, religious sentiment, or linguistic convention. They are not products of human awareness. They are conditions that make awareness itself possible. They name two real and irreducible ways in which intelligibility is given.

Law names the order of intelligibility grounded in itself. It designates the mode in which what is stands under necessity, coherence, and closure. In the Law, reality is intelligible as that which must be so. This is not moralism but metaphysics. It names the structure of being that is self measured, self contained, and internally determined. In this mode, being is intelligible because it conforms to its own necessity.

Gospel, by contrast, names the order of intelligibility grounded in another. It designates the mode in which what is stands as gift, as reception, as donation. In the Gospel, reality is intelligible not as what must be, but as what is given. This too is not sentiment but ontology. It names the structure by which being receives itself from beyond itself. In this mode, what is depends upon generosity rather than necessity, upon grace rather than self-sufficiency.

Law and Gospel are therefore not two competing interpretations of a neutral world. They are not alternative descriptions imposed upon the same reality. They are the two real modes in which reality itself can stand as intelligible. One names necessity. The other names gift. One is self-grounding. The other is received.

Human beings do not invent these structures. We discover and inhabit them. We find ourselves always already located within their tension, already addressed by their grammar. To exist at all is to dwell within the polarity of Law and Gospel, to live between the closure of necessity and the openness of donation.

To say that Law and Gospel are older than we are is to recognize that they belong to the constitution of creation itself. They are woven into the fabric of reality, into the rhythm of being’s self coherence and being’s givenness. They are not doctrines imposed upon the world from without. They are the world’s own ways of standing before God, the measure of what must be and the gift of what is.

Why Speak of Intelligibility at All?

A fair question arises at this point. In speaking of Law and Gospel, why turn to intelligibility at all? Why not remain with Scripture, proclamation, or experience? Why introduce a term that sounds abstract, philosophical, perhaps remote from the concrete life of faith?

The answer is unavoidable. Theology already presupposes intelligibility. The only question is whether this presupposition will be acknowledged or left unexamined. To speak of God, to confess Christ, to distinguish Law and Gospel, to proclaim grace, to discern truth from falsehood, already assumes that reality can be understood. Theology does not create intelligibility. It depends upon it. The task is therefore not to stipulate that the world is intelligible, but to ask what must be true of reality for theology to be possible at all.

Modern thought has trained us to assume that intelligibility is something we supply. Meaning is said to arise from the subject, from cognition, language, or social practice. When meaning becomes difficult to ground, it is psychologized, reduced to experience. Or it is linguisticized, reduced to use. Or it is proceduralized, reduced to rule following. Despite their differences, these strategies share a single conviction: intelligibility is derivative of human activity.

What if this conviction were mistaken? What if intelligibility were not the product of thought, but its precondition? What if intelligibility were ontologically prior to perception, judgment, language, and will? On this account, human understanding does not generate meaning but participates in it. We do not first think and then discover a meaningful world. We awaken within a world that already gives itself as capable of being understood.

For this reason, intelligibility must be addressed as such. If it is not, it will be quietly replaced by something else, by consciousness, discourse, power, or will. When this substitution occurs, theology is forced to speak of God within a framework that God did not give.

Once intelligibility is acknowledged as real and prior, several consequences follow.

First, Law and Gospel can no longer be treated as human reactions to divine address. They are not psychological responses but ontological orders. Law names intelligibility closed upon itself and grounded in necessity. Gospel names intelligibility opened as gift and grounded in another. They are not rhetorical tools of preaching but conditions that make preaching truthful.

Second, grace can be conceived without arbitrariness. Grace is not a rupture in an otherwise self-sufficient system. It is the manifestation of how reality itself is constituted, as reception rather than possession, as givenness rather than achievement. What metaphysics names possibility, theology encounters as the work of the Spirit.

Third, truth itself must be rethought. Truth is not merely the correspondence of language to fact. It is participation in the Logos through whom being and meaning coinhere. To inquire into intelligibility is to ask after the deepest grammar of truth.

In this light, the question of intelligibility is not a speculative luxury. It is a theological responsibility. It is the refusal to allow theology to borrow its foundations from accounts of reality that cannot sustain them. The move is bold because it reverses the settled habits of modern thought. Instead of asking how human beings make sense of God, it asks about the conditions under which anything can make sense at all.

When intelligibility is once again recognized as a real feature of creation, the Lutheran distinction between Law and Gospel is freed from the confines of psychology and proclamation. It appears instead as something far more basic: a differentiation woven into the very fabric of reality itself.

Why the Modern Turn Went Wrong

Much of modern thought has operated with a single, rarely questioned assumption: if intelligibility exists, it must be grounded in the subject. Kant’s so-called "Copernican Revolution" marks the decisive articulation of this conviction. When it became untenable to anchor meaning directly in the empirical self, Kant reconstituted the self as transcendental, assigning it the task of supplying the conditions under which anything could appear as meaningful at all. The move was extraordinary in its rigor and fertility. It yielded lasting insights into cognition, judgment, freedom, and normativity. Yet it carried a cost that has only gradually become visible.

Necessity was relocated into the structures of experience itself. What must be so was no longer a feature of reality but a function of the mind’s synthesizing activity. Contingency was displaced into the realm of practical reason. Teleology was retained only in attenuated form, as purposiveness without purpose. Nature no longer possessed an end of its own. Intelligibility ceased to be something reality had and became instead a heuristic imposed upon it. Meaning survived, but only as method.

The outcome of this shift was not atheism but anthropocentrism. Reality increasingly appeared as a mirror reflecting our own operations back to us. Theology, often without realizing it, absorbed this posture. Law and Gospel were reinterpreted as expressions of conscience, existential moods, or linguistic practices. The deeper question was quietly abandoned: What must reality itself be like for Law and Gospel to be true? Once that question falls away, theology becomes commentary on experience rather than confession of what is.

Luther stands on the far side of this modern reversal. For him, the human being is not an origin but a site. The spirit is not sovereign but inhabited. His unsettling image remains decisive: the human being is like a beast that is ridden, either by God or by the devil. This is not a piece of religious psychology. It is an ontological claim about how intelligibility is borne.

To live curvatus in se ipsum is not merely to feel guilt or anxiety. It is to exist under a false grounding, to live as though intelligibility could be secured by the self. The Law exposes this condition and kills precisely because it names what is. It strips away the illusion that being can justify itself from within.

To live by the Gospel is not to adopt a new affective posture or a more hopeful interpretation of existence. It is to be re-grounded in reality itself, to exist as gift rather than possession. The Gospel does not negate the Law. It relocates intelligibility. What was falsely assumed to be self-grounded is revealed to live from another.

At this point the governing metaphysical problem comes fully into view. How can necessity and contingency both be real without collapsing into determinism on the one hand or arbitrariness on the other? The answer is possibility, understood not as unrealized potential but as the ontological openness of intelligibility itself. Possibility names the space in which contingency can be received rather than forced, and necessity can give without coercion.

What metaphysics names possibility, theology encounters as grace. Grace arises necessarily from God, who is love, yet it is received contingently by creatures. This contingency is not a defect. It is the very form divine love takes in time. The Holy Spirit is not an addition to this structure but its living enactment, the divine act by which eternal necessity becomes temporal gift. Grace is not God’s response to us. It is the continual donation of reality itself anew.

This same structure extends into the nature of truth. Theology cannot rest content with defining truth as correspondence between propositions and an already settled world. That account presupposes what it cannot explain. Christian theology confesses something deeper. The Logos gives being and meaning together. Reality is intelligible because it is spoken.

Truth, therefore, is not merely descriptive. It is participatory. We do not stand outside the world and measure it. We are drawn into the act by which reality becomes intelligible at all. Law, Gospel, grace, and truth are not late theological overlays. They belong to the primal order of creation, to the rhythm by which being is both coherent and given.

None of this requires the rejection of modern philosophy, nor does it indulge nostalgia for a pre modern certainty. Kant’s detour was illuminating. Existentialism disclosed genuine anxiety. The linguistic turn taught us to attend to the density of speech. But the time has come to recover what these movements forgot. Reality does not depend on being human. Humanity depends on reality.

Law and Gospel do not arise from within us. They name the way the world itself stands before God. Only because this is so can preaching still kill and make alive, grace still arrive as surprise, and truth still exceed the mirror of our own reflection.

This is not an argument for demolition but an invitation. It is an invitation to leave the playground of self-enclosed thought and return to the open field of reality itself. At this point one may cautiously recover Luther’s language of the Left and Right Hands of God, provided it is properly understood. Law and Gospel are not two competing principles, nor are they reconciled by a higher synthesis. They arise from a single ground of intelligibility, the teleological space in which reality stands before God. As the Left and Right Hands are united in the one God without confusion of their work, so Law and Gospel are united in their ground without collapse of their modes. The unity is ontological, not dialectical. The distinction remains irreducible. The Law still kills. The Gospel still makes alive. And precisely because their unity does not neutralize their opposition, preaching can still strike reality itself rather than merely reflect our own thought back to us.

Disputatio XLVIIIa: De Lege et Evangelio ut Structuris Intelligibilitatis

 On Law and Gospel as Structures of Intelligibility

Quaeritur

Utrum distinctio inter Legem et Evangelium sit tantum ordo sermonis divini ad conscientiam humanam, an potius structura ontologica intelligibilitatis ipsius, prior omni perceptione, cognitione, et agentia humana; et utrum haec distinctio radicetur in ipso Logō, per quem omnia facta sunt.

Whether the distinction between Law and Gospel is merely an order of divine speech addressed to human consciousness, or rather an ontological structure of intelligibility itself, prior to all perception, cognition, and human agency; and whether this distinction is rooted in the Logos through whom all things are made.

Thesis

The distinction between Law and Gospel is not first a distinction within human consciousness, moral experience, or religious language, but a real differentiation within intelligibility itself. Law names intelligibility grounded in se, closure upon necessity; Gospel names intelligibility grounded in alio, openness as gift. Both precede human awareness and agency. The human subject does not constitute this distinction but inhabits it. Law and Gospel are thus not psychological states, existential possibilities, or homiletical strategies, but ontological structures grounded in the Logos, who is the unity of necessity and contingency without their collapse.

Locus Classicus

Lex iram operatur.
— Romans 4:15
“The law brings about wrath.”

Quod impossibile erat legi, in quo infirmabatur per carnem, Deus misit Filium suum.
— Romans 8:3
“What the law could not do, weakened as it was through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son.”

Πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο.
— John 1:3
“All things came to be through Him.”

Θεὸς γάρ ἐστιν ὁ ἐνεργῶν ἐν ὑμῖν καὶ τὸ θέλειν καὶ τὸ ἐνεργεῖν.
— Philippians 2:13
“For it is God who works in you both to will and to work.”

Homo est sicut iumentum, quod equitatur a Deo aut a diabolo.
— Martin Luther, paraphrasing De Servo Arbitrio
“The human being is like a beast that is ridden either by God or by the devil.”

These witnesses converge upon a single claim: Law and Gospel do not originate in human self-relation but in the way intelligibility itself is ordered and inhabited.

Explicatio

Modern theology has largely treated Law and Gospel as modes of address: words spoken to human subjects, experiences within conscience, or existential postures toward God. Such construals are not false, but they are secondary. They presuppose precisely what must be explained.

The distinction between Law and Gospel does not arise because human beings reflect upon themselves, experience guilt, or seek meaning. Rather, these phenomena arise because intelligibility itself is differentiated in a way that precedes all subjectivity.

Law names intelligibility as self-grounding. It is the structure in which what is stands under necessity, coherence, and closure. In Law, being is intelligible as that which must be so. This is not moralism. It is ontology. Law is the grammar of necessity.

Gospel names intelligibility as gift-grounded. It is the structure in which what is stands not by self-sufficiency but by donation. In Gospel, being is intelligible as received. This too is not sentiment. It is ontology. Gospel is the grammar of contingency redeemed.

These are not two interpretations of one neutral world. They are two real modes in which intelligibility itself is given. The human being does not generate them. The human being finds itself within them.

Here the anti-existentialist force of the claim must be stated without apology. Law and Gospel are not responses to anxiety, finitude, or absurdity. They are not horizons of meaning projected by a suffering subject. They are ontological realities that make suffering, finitude, and meaning possible at all.

The Enlightenment reversal, paradigmatically expressed in Kant, attempted to relocate these primal differentiations within the subject. The empirical subject was transmogrified into the transcendental subject and charged with supplying the conditions of intelligibility that creation itself already bore. Necessity was grounded in the algorithm of experience; contingency was relocated to practical reason. In the Critique of Judgment, teleology itself was reduced to purposiveness without purpose. Nature lost its end. Intelligibility became heuristic rather than real.

This was a brilliant detour. It was also a decisive displacement.

Reflective judgment did not recover ontology but replaced it with methodological reconciliation. The move was no longer “this is how reality is,” but “we might think of it this way.” The bomb had already fallen. The playgrounds of modern Europe were rearranged, not rebuilt.

Luther stands on the other side of this move. For him, the spirit is not an origin but a space of inhabitation. The human being is not a sovereign agent but a site of grounding. One is always ridden. The only question is by whom.

Thus curvatus in se ipsum is not a psychological pathology but an ontological posture: intelligibility falsely grounded in the self. And to be opened by the Gospel is not to adopt a new perspective but to be re-grounded in reality itself.

The Holy Spirit is not merely the subjective appropriation of this distinction. The Spirit is the divine act by which the openness of intelligibility is inhabited by God rather than by a false ground. What metaphysics names possibility, theology here names Spirit.

Law and Gospel are therefore not reconciled by dialectic, synthesis, or historical progress. They are united in the Logos, who is not an algorithm but living intelligibility itself, in whom necessity and contingency coincide without confusion.

This is not a return behind Kant but a movement beyond him. The Copernican Revolution was instructive. It is no longer determinative. It is time to return to serious work.

Objectiones

Ob. I. Law and Gospel arise only where there is conscience. Without human awareness, the distinction has no meaning.

Ob. II. To ontologize Law and Gospel risks collapsing theology into metaphysics and losing the evangelical character of proclamation.

Ob. III. This account reintroduces a Manichaean dualism by granting ontological reality to false grounding.

Ob. IV. Scripture treats Law and Gospel as words spoken in history, not as structures of being.

Responsiones

Ad I. Conscience presupposes intelligibility; intelligibility does not presuppose conscience. Law and Gospel become experienced in conscience because they are already real.

Ad II. Ontological grounding does not negate proclamation; it makes it intelligible. The Word does not create Law and Gospel but reveals and enacts them.

Ad III. False grounding is real but derivative. The devil is always God’s devil. There is no rival ground of being, only parasitic mis-inhabitation of intelligibility.

Ad IV. Scripture speaks historically because history is the arena in which ontological truth becomes manifest. The economy presupposes ontology.

Nota

The so-called “two hands of God” name the same differentiation here articulated as Law and Gospel. The left hand corresponds to intelligibility ordered by necessity; the right hand to intelligibility given as gift. These are not two divine wills but two modes of divine giving, unified in the Logos and enacted through the Spirit.

Determinatio

1. Law and Gospel are ontological structures of intelligibility, not human constructions.
2. Law names intelligibility grounded in itself and ordered by necessity.
3. Gospel names intelligibility grounded in another and received as gift.
4. Both precede human perception, cognition, language, and agency.
5. The human spirit inhabits this distinction; it does not generate it.
6. The Holy Spirit is the divine inhabitation of intelligibility as gift.
7. In the Logos, necessity and contingency are united without collapse.
8. Therefore, Law and Gospel belong to the very fabric of reality and find their unity not in the subject, but in God.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLIX

If Law and Gospel are structures of intelligibility, then creation itself must be ordered toward a final unity in which gift is not annulled by necessity nor freedom by law. The question of final cause now presses with full force.

Accordingly, we proceed to Disputationem XLIX: De Fine Creationis et Gloria Dei, wherein it shall be asked how the intelligibility differentiated as Law and Gospel is gathered into its ultimate end, and how the glory of God names the consummation of intelligibility itself.

Disputatio XLI: De Phenomenologia et Apparitione Entis

On Phenomenology and the Appearance of Being

Quaeritur

Utrum phaenomenologia, in doctrina sua de apparitione entis, patefaciat aditum ad veritatem ontologicam et theologicam, an potius concludat ens intra ambitum immanentiae conscientiae.

Whether phenomenology, in its doctrine of the appearance of being, opens a path to ontological and theological truth, or rather confines being within the immanent sphere of consciousness.

Thesis

The appearing of beings is not merely a psychological event or a representation before consciousness, but the ontological act through which being manifests itself. In the horizon of phenomenology rightly understood, the act of manifestation already presupposes participation in a transcendent Logos: the divine reason through which beings appear as intelligible.

Locus Classicus

“Was uns zunächst und zumeist begegnet, ist das Seiende im Ganzen.” — Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit §29.
(“What first and most of all encounters us is beings as a whole.”)

This sentence marks the turning point from phenomenology as method to phenomenology as ontology: the recognition that appearance is not a derivative mental state but the disclosure of beings themselves within the openness of Being.

Explicatio

Phenomenology arose as a protest against both empiricism and speculative idealism. Husserl’s cry to return “zu den Sachen selbst” called philosophy back from abstraction to the immediacy of what shows itself. In this return, being was no longer treated as a hidden substrate behind appearances, but as that which becomes manifest in appearing. As Heidegger explained in Section VII of Sein und Zeit, it is that which shows itself as itself. 

The key structure of this manifestation is intentionality, the directedness of consciousness toward its object. Yet intentionality itself presupposes the prior possibility that something may appear at all. Since this givenness is not created by the subject but received, the act of consciousness is receptive before it is constructive.

Thus, phenomenology, in its most radical sense, reveals that appearing is not a mere event within the subject but a participation in a more original disclosure of being. Every horizon of experience already implies the transcendence of what appears beyond it. The horizon of the world points to an infinite openness which no act of consciousness can totalize.

Theologically interpreted, this openness intimates the divine Logos, the principle of manifestation that both grounds and exceeds all finite givenness. In the shining of the phenomenon, theology perceives a trace of the Word through whom all things appear and by whom they are sustained in intelligibility.

Obiectiones

Ob I. Transcendental idealism holds that phenomenology, by its very method, brackets metaphysical commitments. But to posit a divine Logos as the source of appearing violates the neutrality of the phenomenological reduction and collapses philosophy into theology.

Ob II. Naturalistic empiricism claims that appearance is merely a function of perceptual mechanisms. The world “appears” only because the brain interprets sensory inputs, and thus there is no ontological act of showing, only causal processes.

Ob III. Confessional theology declares that revelation is not equivalent to appearance. God discloses Himself through Word and Spirit, not through the natural horizon of phenomenality. To identify divine revelation with appearing is to naturalize grace.

Ob IV. Existentialist atheism supposes that the horizon of appearance is bounded by finitude and death. Phenomenology uncovers not divine transcendence but the absence of God, the silence Nichts that defines human existence.

Responsiones

Ad 1. The phenomenological epoché suspends metaphysical assertions within the act of reflection, but it does not deny their ontological ground. To recognize that appearance implies givenness is not to violate the reduction, but to unfold its presupposition that what appears gives itself. The question of the giver is intrinsic to phenomenology’s logic and opens naturally toward theology.

Ad 2. The causal explanation of perception presupposes the very appearing it seeks to explain. Neural correlates describe how phenomena are processed, not how being becomes manifest. Empiricism can analyze conditions of sensation, but not the ontological event of manifestation itself.

Ad 3. While revelation exceeds phenomenology, it does not exclude it. Appearing is the analogical condition under which revelation becomes thinkable. Because the same Logos who speaks in Scripture also grounds the intelligibility of all phenomena, phenomenology, properly ordered, is a vestibule to theology.

Ad 4. The disclosure of finitude is itself an intimation of transcendence. The awareness of limit presupposes orientation toward the unlimited. Even the horizon of death testifies to the Being that grants all horizons, whose givenness endures beyond negation.

Nota

Phenomenology reopens the ontological question under the sign of appearing. Its most fruitful contribution to theology lies in showing that the world is not a closed system of object, but rather it is a field of manifestation. To appear is already to participate in a revealing act. By interpreting phenomenology in the light of faith, theology recognizes that this revealing act is not anonymous but personal. It is the act of the Word who “was made flesh and dwelt among us.”

In this sense, phenomenology becomes a philosophical propaedeutic to theology. It purifies the gaze so that the appearing of beings may again be seen as the trace of divine self-showing. While it neither proves God nor replaces revelation, it nonetheless restores the world to its capacity for epiphany.

Determinatio

Phenomenology, when pursued to its limits, discloses an ontology of manifestation that opens naturally toward the theology of the Word. The act of appearing (phainein) is not grounded in the subject’s synthesis but in the Logos that gathers being into visibility. Every phenomenon is thus a finite participation in divine intelligibility, an echo of the eternal self-showing of God. To behold the appearing of beings is, implicitly, to behold the shining of the Creator through them.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLII

Having discerned in phenomenology that appearing is not a closed immanence of consciousness but an ontological event of manifestation, we must now ask after the ground of this intelligibility itself. For if beings appear as intelligible, and if this appearing is not constituted by the subject, then reason must inquire into what renders appearance intelligible rather than opaque, meaningful rather than arbitrary.

Phenomenology shows that beings appear; it does not yet explain why there is intelligibility rather than mere givenness, nor why the intellect is proportioned to receive meaning rather than chaos. The question of manifestation thus presses beyond phenomenality toward its rational foundation.

This leads necessarily to the Principle of Sufficient Reason. If appearing is not accidental, if intelligibility is not brute fact, then there must be a sufficient ground why beings are manifest as they are, and why intellect is capable of receiving them as meaningful. The very possibility of phenomenological disclosure presupposes a participation of finite reason in a deeper order of rationality.

Therefore we proceed to Disputatio XLII: De Principio Sufficientis Rationis et Participatione Intellectus, wherein it shall be examined whether the principle that nothing is without reason expresses not merely a logical demand of thought, but the ontological participation of the human intellect in the Logos, the divine reason in whom all beings have both their ground and their intelligibility.

Disputatio XVI: De Lingua et Intentionalitate et Prooemium ad Partem II

Prooemium ad Partem II

De Lingua et Modeling Theologico

In the first part of these Disputationes, the inquiry was directed toward being: toward participation, causality, and the ontological conditions under which creatures exist and are ordered toward God. That inquiry established that intelligibility is not accidental to reality, nor imposed upon it by cognition, but belongs to the structure of being itself as grounded in the Logos.

The present part turns not away from ontology, but toward its articulation. Theology does not merely contemplate what is; it must speak. Yet speech is not a secondary operation added to being. Language is itself a mode of participation. If reality is ordered toward intelligibility, then language is the creaturely form in which that intelligibility may be received, borne, and confessed.

This turn therefore concerns neither linguistics as a technical discipline nor language as a social artifact. It concerns the ontological conditions under which language can mean at all, the structure of intentionality by which speech is about something, and the way finite discourse may inhabit an intelligible order that precedes it.

Accordingly, this part proceeds in three movements. First, it examines language and intentionality as grounded in objective intelligibility rather than in consciousness or convention. Second, it considers theological modeling as the disciplined articulation of meaning within that intelligible order. Third, it reflects upon the limits of modeling, not as failures of language, but as disclosures of transcendence.

Throughout, language will be treated not as expressive projection but as responsive participation. Theology speaks truly not because it masters its object, but because it is drawn into alignment with an intelligibility that precedes and exceeds all speech.

Nota Methodologica Generalis: De Limitatione Phenomenologiae

In these Disputationes, a strict distinction is maintained between ontological intelligibility and phenomenological disclosure.

Ontological intelligibility denotes the objective order of meaning by which beings are what they are and by which truth is possible at all. This intelligibility is grounded in the Logos and exists apart from human awareness, perception, language, or historical horizon. It is not constituted by acts of consciousness, nor does it depend upon conditions of manifestation.

Phenomenological accounts of disclosure, horizon, appearing, or worldhood concern the manner in which beings are encountered or understood by finite subjects. Such analyses may illuminate the structure of experience, but they do not ground intelligibility itself. Accordingly, phenomenological categories are not employed here to explicate the ontological conditions of meaning.

For this reason, distinctions such as being and beings, horizon and appearance, disclosure and withdrawal, though significant within phenomenological inquiry, are not used analogically to describe teleo-spaces or the Logos-grounded order of intelligibility. To do so would risk conflating the conditions of experience with the conditions of being.

Phenomenology may therefore appear in these disputations only diagnostically or critically, never as a positive source of metaphysical grounding. The task of these disputations is not to describe how meaning appears, but to inquire into what must be the case for meaning to exist at all.

On Language and Intentionality

Quaeritur

Utrum lingua humana intelligibilis sit non ex conscientia vel conventione humana, sed ex participatione in Logos, qui est intelligibilitas obiectiva rerum; et utrum intentionalitas sermonis non sit motus psychologicus, sed directio ontologica intra spatium teleologicum, quo significatio ipsa possibilis est.

Whether human language is intelligible not from human awareness or convention, but from participation in the Logos, who is the objective intelligibility of things; and whether intentionality in speech is not a psychological movement, but an ontological directedness within a teleological space in which signification itself is possible.

Thesis

Language does not generate meaning. It presupposes intelligibility.

The intentionality of speech is not grounded in consciousness, perception, or linguistic practice, but in participation in the Logos as the objective order of meaning. Human language is intelligible because it inhabits teleo-spaces of significance that precede all acts of speaking, thinking, or hearing. Intentionality is thus ontological before it is linguistic, and linguistic before it is psychological.

Locus Classicus

“In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum.”
John 1:4

Life is not added to intelligibility, nor intelligibility to life. The Logos is both the light by which things are intelligible and the ground in which meaning abides. Language participates in this light only because it is already there.

Explicatio

The modern account of language commonly begins from the subject. Words are treated as expressions of mental states, intentions as acts of consciousness, and meaning as a function of use, convention, or pragmatic success. Such accounts may describe how language functions within a community, but they cannot explain why language can mean at all. The present disputation proceeds otherwise.

Language is intelligible only because reality is intelligible. Meaning does not arise when a subject intends an object; intention itself is possible only because being is already ordered toward intelligibility. This order is not linguistic. It is not psychological. It is ontological.

Intentionality, properly understood, is not an inner aim or mental direction. It is the structure by which something can be about something. Such aboutness cannot be manufactured by signs, nor imposed by convention. It presupposes a space of possible significance in which reference, truth, and understanding may occur. This space is what has been named a teleo-space.

Teleo-spaces are not purposes imposed upon language. They are fields of intelligibility that draw language into meaningful articulation. They do not determine what must be said, but they make saying possible. They are not products of linguistic practice, but conditions of it.

Human language, therefore, does not create meaning but responds to it. Words are formed within a prior order of significance that precedes speech and exceeds it. To speak is to inhabit that order, however imperfectly.

The Logos is the objective ground of this order. The Logos is not a word among words, nor a concept among concepts, but the intelligibility in virtue of which anything can be meaningful at all. Language participates in the Logos not by resemblance, but by dependence. It means because reality is already ordered toward meaning.

Intentionality in speech is thus not subjective projection but ontological alignment. When speech intends truth, it does not impose sense upon the world but conforms itself to an intelligibility that precedes it. Falsehood arises not from the absence of the Logos, but from resistance to it.

The Spirit’s role is not to inject meaning into language from without, but to align finite speech with the intelligible order already given. The Spirit authorizes speech by restoring it to its proper orientation toward truth. In this way, language becomes capable of theological meaning not by elevation beyond creatureliness, but by faithful inhabitation of the teleo-spaces of intelligibility grounded in the Logos.

Objectiones

Ob I. If intelligibility exists apart from human awareness and language, then language becomes superfluous. Meaning would exist whether or not anyone speaks.

Ob II. If intentionality is ontological rather than psychological, then human responsibility for meaning is undermined. Speech would merely echo a prior order.

Ob III. To ground language in the Logos collapses the distinction between theology and philosophy, making linguistic theory dependent upon theological claims.

Responsiones

Ad I. Language is not superfluous but responsive. Meaning precedes speech, but speech is the mode by which meaning becomes communicable. The prior existence of intelligibility does not negate language; it grounds it.

Ad II. Ontological grounding does not eliminate responsibility. Participation is not compulsion. Human speech may conform to intelligibility or resist it. Responsibility arises precisely because meaning is given and not invented.

Ad III. The Logos is not introduced as a theological hypothesis but as the necessary name for objective intelligibility itself. Theology does not annex language theory; language theory, when pursued to its ground, opens onto theology.

Nota

This disputation corrects a fundamental error of modern linguistic thought: the assumption that meaning originates in the subject. Meaning originates in reality’s intelligible order.

Language is possible because the world is already ordered toward sense. Intentionality is possible because intelligibility precedes intention. The Logos is therefore not the conclusion of linguistic analysis but its presupposition.

Theological language does not differ from other language by possessing a special syntax or vocabulary, but by explicitly acknowledging the source of intelligibility in which all language already participates.

Determinatio

It is determined that:

1. Language presupposes intelligibility and does not generate it.
2. Intentionality is ontological before it is psychological.
3. Teleo-spaces of meaning precede linguistic practice.
4. The Logos is the objective ground of intelligibility.
5. The Spirit aligns finite speech with this ground without abolishing its finitude.

Transitus ad Disputationem XVII

If language does not originate meaning but responds to an intelligible order that precedes it, then theological discourse cannot be understood as mere description or representation. It must instead be understood as modeling: the disciplined construction of forms that allow intelligibility to appear without being exhausted.

This raises the decisive question of truth in theology. If language inhabits teleo-spaces rather than generating meaning, by what criterion are theological models true? Is truth correspondence, participation, manifestation, or something else?

We therefore proceed to Disputatio XVII: De Modeling et Veritate Theologica, in which the nature of theological truth is examined in light of the Logos as the ground of intelligibility and the Spirit as the author of faithful speech.

On Rabbits and Christology

The philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine schooled us on the indeterminacy of translation using the example of a tribesman speaking the unknown language Arunka employing the locution 'gavagai' whenever he saw what we might think is a rabbit.  But while we might think that 'gavagai' refers to the object rabbit, we can never know for sure what the tribesman is actually referring to when employing 'gavagai'.  There is, after all, an inscrutability of reference.  

I can imagine a culture, that does not individuate the world like my own does.  Perhaps the tribesman's culture actually has no rabbits, but does work the world up by thinking in terms of temporal rabbit stages.  Let S be a linguist from culture X and P be a tribesman from culture Y.  X sees the world as a place where there are unified rabbits while Y understands that the world is a place where there are rabbit parts, some detached and some undetached.  When P utters 'gavagai', P is referring to a set of undetached rabbit parts, but when S hears P utter 'gavagai', S thinks in terms of rabbits.  So what is there really?  Does the world come with rabbits as a basic ontological category, or is it a place where rabbit parts proliferate and where 'gavagai' refers to a collection or set of rabbit parts suitably ordered? 

Suppose Q from culture Z uses 'gavagai' only to talk about a set of temporal rabbit stages.  Culture Z is extremely time sensitive, and they "see" the world as a place where the temporal slices of things are ontologically primary. The linguist S hearing 'gavagai' could scarcely imagine that Q associates the term with a set of temporal slices of a particular kind. Again Q's culture finds temporal slices of things ontologically primary to the collections in which they are ingredient. So what is there really?  Does 'gavagai' properly refer to rabbits or to temporal rabbit stages?  Or does it rightfully refer to spatially extended, undetached rabbit parts?  

Mereology is concerned, of course, with the unities that parts comprise.  Culture X finds a unity in the rabbit which is made up of parts. But cultures Y and Z seem to find unities in the parts that comprise collections.  Our question really boils down to a question of what the proper unities there are of things, and if there are no such unities in themselves, what unities we seemingly commit ourselves to when experiencing and articulating the world. 

But there are other possibilities than those of P and Q and their cultures. What if R and his friends read so much Plato that they actually see the world as the "shadowy place" where the primary forms are dimly instantiated?  R and his culture U work the world up such that rabbithood has ontological priority over rabbits, over any concrete instantiation of that  rabbithood. But while we might say that rabbithood is instantiated in rabbits, culture U might simply say, "there is rabbitthood here."  Each and every time R uses 'gavagai', S uses 'gavagai', but they are not meaning the same thing in their using of the term.  S means rabbits, after all, while R means that rabbithood is present.  So what is there really?  Does the world come with rabbits pre-made, as it were, or is their existence ontological dependent upon something more basic: the form of rabbithood? Is the particular ontologically dependent upon the universal, or does the universal ultimately depend upon the particular?

Finally enter T of culture V who sees the world quite differently than the rest. Everything is made up of processes for the denizens of V.  Perhaps it is not the raindrops that a culture knows, but the entire process of raining.  Perhaps rain drops are ontologically dependent upon the event of rain. A fortiori, perhaps rabbits are mere distillations of rabbiting.  When T utters 'gavagai' she means that it is rabbiting.  What is there really?  Does 'gavagai' refer to rabbits, undetached rabbit parts, temporal rabbit stages, the form of rabbithood, or the event of rabbiting itself?  If people in cultures X, Y, Z, U and V use 'gavagai' in similar ways and on similar occasions, then how could we ever tell what S, P, Q, R and T really mean when employing the term?  Is there not an inscrutability of reference here? How can S ever really know what P, Q, R and T are referring to when they use 'gavagai' each and every time they are in the presence of what S assumes is a rabbit? 

Quine's indeterminacy thesis has been around for many decades. The statement of the thesis is consistent with reflection within the last seventy years on language and its relationship with the world. How does language anchor to the world?  What is the world?  Does it come as a set of self-identifying objects, properties or events?  Are there natural kinds, or do human beings gerrymander the world, imposing through their individuation their own ontological prejudices upon it?  Whose power is served by understanding the world to have rabbits at its deepest level rather than rabbithood?  Who is marginalized by seeing rabbiting instead of undetached rabbit parts?  If the world has no objective ontology, but rather receives the ontology of our prejudice, then does not ontology become a projection of our interest and power, specifically as pertains our race, sex, class, sexual orientation, etc.?  

Indeed. One might say that if the world has no ready made ontological structure, then the world is really worldless, for it becomes merely the field that the self projects.  Accordingly, the world cannot sustain an over and againstness with respect to the self to which it relates. Here, the self devours the world.  

But as the last hundred years of reflection has taught us: there is no privileged access to an objective self that can be full of itself. The self that is not full of itself, is itself a battle ground of different cultural, linguistic and conceptual ideologies.  The self is dispossessed, and the worldless world now finds itself in relation to a dispossessed self. The world and self each have lost their inseity, and must now be understood ecstatically. We now suspect that while the putative determinacy of the world rests upon the putative determinacy of the self, the putative determinacy of the self rests upon that which is not itself and can never be itself.  So in these late postmodern days there is ripening the realization that world and self, the original Dyad, has breathed illusion since the Beginning.  But I digress.  

It is important for theology to know the ontological contour of the land it must work. Theology must relate the kerygma to the concrete historical-cultural situation in which it finds itself.  Theology must concern itself with proclaiming and understanding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in a time of a worldless world and a dispossessed (self-less) self. Accordingly, it must understand how to do christology in this time of rabbits. 

Looking at christology in this time of the absence of presence of world and self -- this time of the indeterminacy of reference and translation -- it is clear that we are going to have to specify what we mean in ways we have never had to do before in the history of theology.  Because meaning is no longer "in the head" -- we have no immediate access to a cartesian self with pure intent -- we are only going to gain clarity as to what we mean by employing the tools of semantic modeling.  

Language is syntax and theory, and theory refers semantically to that which is not language.  There must be something that language is about if there is ever going to be the possibility of truth and objectivity.  If language is not to collapse into itself -- or into the black hole of the self -- it must specify something in the world that it means, something on the basis of which it is true or false.  As we have seen, that to which language refers can be expressed set-theoretically.  What is necessary is that we start with a domain of objects, and then define relation and function operators on this domain. In this way we, we provide the possibility of an extra-linguistic reference to language.  (At least this is the hope.  Clearly, if one holds that sets and operations are affairs of language, then we are thrust back into Derrida's position of language being an "infinite play of signifiers.). 

So what do we do with christology in a time of the relativity of rabbits?  Clearly, just as we are able to specify the salient differences between undeatached rabbit parts, temporal stages of rabbits, and the instantiation of rabbithood, we must be able to specify the differences in meanings of 'person', 'nature', 'happy exchange', 'justification' or 'theosis' when it comes to Christ.  But what are the conditions for the possibility of difference?  What makes if possible that "gavagai" could apply to such different things?  More to the point, what are the conditions for the possibility that differences of meaning of 'person' and 'nature' could obtain?  

Some theology proceeds, I think, on the assumption that if one can use language in the same way and in the same situations, then there is substantial agreement about meaning in that language.  If one can say, "it is true that Christ is one person in two natures," then do we have to say anything more about persons and natures?  Why provide some set-theoretic interpretation to theology theory, if "this game is played," that is, that the language of theology is used appropriately and consistently whether used by person S or P above?  

But this objection misses the point. That a game is consistently played does not entail that meaning is consistently had. In a time when an unbridgeable chasm has opened between what is intended and what is said, we have no choice but to provide the relevant models for christological language, pointing out that language's possible interpretations and evaluating those interpretations in terms of their overarching theological plausibility.  In this time of the worldless world and the self-less self, language itself must police itself such that the proclamation of the wording Word is pronounced with clarity.  

Doing christology in a time of rabbits demands we understand profoundly the challenges to christological reflection in the twenty first century. Our naivety is gone.  Even the stability of what Quine called "stimulus meaning" is seemingly absent for theology. While linguist S sees and understands the stability of P, Q, R, and T's occasions of uttering "gavagai' in the face of some experience which can be understood differently, what constitutes the stability in uttering 'person' christologically, an uttering that seemingly is not linked deeply to experience at all?  

There is ultimately no other choice here for finding stability in the occasions of use of 'person', than to locate that stability within the Bibical-historical tradition of the Christian community.  In this time of the worldless world, and self-less self, there can be only the linguistic event of the utterance of 'person' consistently and stably throughout the Christian tradition.  While Quine could speak of the stimulus meaning of 'gavagai' in a field of perception, christological reflection must locate a meaning of 'person' within the revelatory event of the Biblical-historical tradition itself.  Only when we can make sense of the stability of occasions of using 'person' can we begin the task of providing models for the interpretation of 'person' christologically.  

Clearly, there is a great deal of work that must be done.  However, the first step in moving forward is to no what direction is presupposed in the semantics of 'forward'.  Beginning with rabbits can help us in christology, but the path forward is not at all easy.  In fact, some of the way forward will not look like a path at all.  But this is how it must be if we are going to do christology in this time of rabbits.  

Levinas and the Transcendental Project

In anticipation of the Levinas readings course this summer at ILT's Christ School of Theology, I have written this brief summary below on some of Levinas' most salient themes. 

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) is surely one of the more important philosophers of the twentieth century.  He is thinker whose influence in many ways continues to grow. His readings of Husserl and Heidegger are profound for they point the way to "post-modernity" generally and Jacques Derrida in particular. So what is the fundamental insight that Levinas has? Why is he such an important thinker?  

There is much one could say here, but I think his fundamental significance rests upon his realization that the ethical relationship between self and other is irreducible, that is, that the ethical relation as primary. Levinas knew that the immediate, concrete relationship of responsibility between self and other is more fundamental than the self's subjectively-articulated theory about any putative relationship between the self and the other.  Levinas, the philosopher of ethics, understood profoundly that the reality of other  -- the other person -- is irreducible to subjective, transcendental structures or categories of the self.  

Accordingly, instead of ethics depending upon human reason and cognition, it is the other itself that brings the self into being, for it is the other itself that calls the self to responsibility and service. The other cannot be reduced to a congeries of concepts, it is not constituted by its placedness within an ethical theory. Rather, it confronts the self with a justice that transcend's the self's freedom. This other reveals itself to the self in a demand or call to responsibility, a demand or call to serve it as other. With this call to serve the other the self now locates itself with respect to itself and to other others. In so doing, the immediacy of the ethical thus grounds and motivates concerted reflection upon the other. 

All of this means that to become wholly who I am, to achieve self-determination, I must be called by the another into a responsibility for  that other. Accordingly, the other calls me out of self-isolation and into self-determination.  This self-determination includes the coming into being of discourse, the revelation of my separation from that which is other, and the founding of a common world that I share with the other. 

Levinas first and perhaps most important work appeared in French in 1961, and was soon translated as Totality and Infinity. In it Levinas shows how most traditional philosophy went about a "totalizing task" of trying to understand all of reality on the basis of a comprehensive system that humans might know. 'Totalizing' connotes control and possession, fundamental activities by and through which the controlling self tries to maintain its separation from all other things. The self always wants to be both complete and self-sufficient.  

But such totalizing strategies suppress and displace that upon which they themselves are founded. In the immediacy of our experience with the other we encounter traces of that which is not us. This otherness is not projected by a self-identical subject, but is rather a condition for our own efforts at self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction.  

For Levinas, the face of the Other is not a projection of the subject. It is rather that which is encountered, and in whose encounter the self is confronted by the givenness of a world that is not finally its own. It is only in this world -- a world that cannot be merely mine -- that true freedom can emerge. Were the world to be merely my projection, it would be impossible  to define what doing x over and against doing ~x could even mean. Specifying identity conditions for freedom in a world without essential limitation is not possible. Moral choices and moral freedom only make sense on the basis of an already-encountered other. The presence of the other in its vulnerability as Face calls me to service and responsibility; its presence calls me to freedom.  

The world common to the other and me can arise only if the other is truly other and not a projection of myself. The "exteriority" of this world calls into being my own interiority. The confrontation with the other's face calls me into differentiation from the world. The call of the other to serve the other calls forth language itself, language in and through which the world can be shared and communicated. 

Since the other is irreducible to my conceptualizations, it is other than the process of determination, finalization, and ultimately, finitization.  It is thus without bounds, and being without determinacy, must be admitted to be infinite. Accordingly, the other produces in me an idea of infinity, an infinity other that the determinacy of my conceptions of, or my trajectories of service towards, the other.  My obligation towards the other is primitive and has a phenomenological basis. I am always already confronted by an other, and always already called towards serving that other. The demand of the other is not the result of abstract do ut das ethical considerations within a constituted ethical theory, but is simply primordial. My obligation towards the other always proceeds and likely exceeds any obligation that other might have towards me.  

Levinas argues that the condition for the possibility of differentiation is indeed the difference of the other from me. While the difference of the other cannot be accounted for on the basis of the sameness of the self in its enjoyment, experience, knowledge, etc., the determinacy of the self can be conceived on the basis of the difference of the other. While the self and all of its activities are understood as a totality, the transcendence of the other is infinite. This other is no mere memory or projection of the self-- its "echoes" -- but is that by and through which the self can speak, that it can be concerned with justice, goodness and truth, that it itself is made precious by the irreplaceability of its ethical response to that other, an other that is finally a trace of the Divine itself. 

Levinas claims that ontology recapitulates ethics, that the specificity of being itself rests upon the prior ethical relation with the Other. To be in this way is to be for the Other. Accordingly, to be is to be called beyond being, to be other than being, to be unbounded by being and thus infinite. 

The primal ethical relationship between self and other cannot be understood from a position outside the relationship. This ethical relationship must be lived in the first person, a living that eschews totalization. The ecstatic nature of this relationship means that any attempt to understand it sociologically, politically, economically or historically is doomed to failure, for the relationship is itself irreducible.  The irreducibility of this relationship, and the supervenience of the cognitive and ontological upon it, entails that cognitive-ontological explanations themselves rest upon upon the ethical, for ultimately to explain to an other is to always already have an ethical relationship with that other.  

While Levinas' starting point might appear prima facie refreshing, it does produce disquiet for anyone engaged in the project of transcendental reflection. What if such reflection finally has ethical roots? What if meaning encountered in the self's relation to other is meaning that is not synthesized by the self? What if there is a Sinn to things that is not worked out on the basis of intentionality or language? What if the "traces" of the Divine are not the murmurings of our own heart, i.e., our own displaced alienations? What if being a self finally depends upon the immediate meaningfulness of that which is not a self?  

Levinas argues that difference ultimately precedes identity. But is this true? Discerning readers of Levinas must decide this for themselves.  

The Heideggerian Engine: A Glimpse Under the Hood

In four days I shall begin taking another group of students through Heidegger's epic book, Being and Time.  What should they know when beginning the journey?  What words of wisdom do I have as they embark?

I think that the best thing I might say is that reading Heidegger is not about imparting knowledge at all. It is not a book fundamentally about things, but a book that happens in its reading. One might say that it is a text that happens in the happening of reading itself. 

The philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is often thought to be exceedingly difficult to grasp. Heidegger is a philosopher using the language of the philosophical tradition, but using it in ways that many regard as strikingly idiosyncratic. Clearly, we all know what being is, or at least we thought we knew before reading Heidegger. In fact, prior to reading Heidegger we might be tempted to believe some explanation is occurring in the following: 

• X asks, "What is being?" 
• Y responds, "That which is."  

If we have read Plato and Aristotle, we perhaps are prone to contrast the realm of being somehow with that of becoming. Plato thought being was stable and eternal, the kind of thing that can be known as something discrete and definite.  Aristotle regarded primary substances as the locus classicus of being. There are things that are, that are stable enough to carry properties, sometimes contrary properties over time. This particular cat is now hungry and later is sated. Bill is in Florence and now in Athens. The United States once had 13 states and now has 50. This seems simple enough, but Heidegger exposes the complexity of such simplicity.  

As a boy on an Iowa farm, I went into the barn and experienced life with animals. I experienced animals eating, drinking, congregating and defecating. Often they would be curious or frightened by me. Their life was part of the life of my five-year-old self.  I had not yet come to regard these animals as having some being apart from their basic intelligibility to me in the little world in which I dwelt. 

I don't know when it happened exactly, but at some point I came to recognize the animals in my world as beings existing apart from me with particular properties that didn't depend upon me.  Heidegger would say that I now had fallen, that I had, in fact, adopted a pretty complex and ultimately unsupported view on things.  But I knew nothing then about the Verfallenheit in which I now found myself.  

My father taught me that steers and heifers had to achieve a certain rate of gain in order for their lives among us to be profitable to us.  After all, we were farming, and we had to cashflow the animals.  Somehow we needed the market price of our animals to be greater than the feed we fed them, plus the labor we expended upon them, plus the costs of medical treatment for them, and some percentage of the cost of barns, fences and feeding mechanisms, manure spreaders, tractors and all of the rest of it. 

Farm kids soon learn that different breeds of animals have different properties, e.g., temperaments, disease resistance, ease of birth, propensities to convert feed into weight gain. It is important in livestock husbandry that one knows the properties animals have apart from us because the very profitability of one's enterprise depends upon such knowledge. I learned many things on the farm about animals, machinery, tilling practices and efficiencies, mechanical qualities of machinery, and the nature of the greatest variable for successful farming: the weather.  

I learned about cold and warm fronts, low and high pressure systems, and the related possibilities of precipitation and storms when lows, highs and fronts were located in particular places and had particular qualities. I thought about the conditions leading to drought and the possibilities of those conditions manifesting themselves given the current macro conditions. I wanted to know about the processes of weather in themselves. I had adopted a view of things, in which things were the more real the less meaningful they were to me. 

Maybe all of this led me to want at an earlier time in my life to be a scientist, actually I dreamt of becoming a physicist. I was deeply intrigued about the in itself of things, and believed that mathematics could describe that in itself and predict future changes in it. I remember watching the Feynman Lectures on Physics in my Honors Physics class as a college freshman.  I was intrigued about special and general relativity, about cosmology, about the fundamental laws of nature that determine the very contour of the in itself.  

Perhaps all of this made my first reading of Heidegger difficult.  Although I did not know it, I was deeply committed to a substance ontology quite early in life.  I thought the world consisted of objects that somehow self-identify as the objects they are, and I believed that these self-identifying objects (substances) could possess modifications while still being the substances they were.  In other words, I believed that substances could contingently take on differing properties while remaining what they essentially were.  

Early on in life, I already bought the distinction between necessary essential properties and contingent accidental properties. There was something that made me who I was -- or so I thought -- and that which made me who I was continued to perform its function apart from whether I wore my hair long or short, or whether I even had hair.  

It seemed the most natural thing to me that the world would be what it is apart from me, and that my dealings with the world, particularly my knowing of it, did not change the world. The worldhood of the world was, accordingly, logically, ontologically and epistemically independent from my subjective apprehension of it -- or so I assumed. 

Accordingly, I was from a rather early age committed to the subject/object dichotomy.  As a knowing substance, I was that upon which the objectivity of the world manifested its effects.  The world was filled with substances being themselves, I was a substance being myself, and my substance was the subject in relationship to objects apart from me being substances in themselves.  As I said, all of this made my early reading of Heidegger difficult.  

What, after all, was Heidegger getting at in his phenomenological description of the world? Was he not finally describing the color, the projection of my subjectivity on the objects of a quite colorless world?  When I first read Heidegger I thought, "How can he escape idealism?  How can he not be committed to the assertion that the properties of my substance -- of the substance if one is an objective idealist -- are what they are, and that these properties determine the contour of the world so encountered?  Is this not simply another rerun of Kant's "Copernican Revolution?" 

But I will admit that I missed what was fundamental. By looking for something profoundly transcendental, I simply could not see what was before my eyes.  The mystique of Heidegger, the engine propelling his thinking, is nothing transcendental or profound at all. I could not see under the hood in those days, and had I seen I might have judged then that the car had no engine at all! 

I had to go back to my five-year-old self to see it, and those steps backwards did not seem to me to be steps forward at all.  I struggled with Heidegger's technical German vocabulary, hoping to find in his technical philosophical terms something foundantional, some ground upon which his philosophy was based. I searched for some deep ontological commitment or some fundamental presupposition that would explain what he was saying and why he was saying it. In all of this, I simply overlooked the fact that my five-year-old self would not have searched for, nor understood, what an ontological commitment or a fundamental presupposition even was.  

What Heidegger was inviting me to do in Being and Time was simply to look around me and notice everything I constantly overlooked and ignored. If there is any fundamental presupposition he has, it is simply this: Notice where you are and what you are doing. Even at five, I knew the way of the farm; I knew the smells, the rhythms, the places I could walk and the things I could do. These comprised my world, the world in which I found myself and the world in which I dwelt. I knew the way to the house, to the table, to my bedroom. When it rained I found myself under a roof, and when it snowed I wore my boots and mittens. String from mom's sewing box was that which made the barn cats excited. Barn hay was that in which new kittens were encountered.The rock on the barn ledge next to the milk cow was that by which ice in the pan was broken.  

How effortlessly I navigated the complexities of it all! I could "get around" on the farm; I knew how to deal with things. Of course, I did not abstractly know that there was a context that allowed my dealings, and I did not conceive that this context was part of my culture which itself was related to history.  My five-year-old self had neither read Dilthey nor Troeltsch -- I did not read much in those days -- so was unaware of the "historical problem" as a problem, but that did not matter.  I had agency, I could act and somehow my actions made sense in my farm world.  

My reading of Being and Time began to give me language to talk about my more primordial "gettings around" in the world, my facility to deal with the wholly meaningful world in which I found myself.  Heidegger taught me that human be-ing is that be-ing in and for which be-ing is at issue.  The word 'Dasein' even connotes this; I am being 'there' or 'here'.  Prior to any grown-up conception of the world in which I am a subject confronted by objects, I live a world of meaning and purpose.  It is only when reflecting on this world of meaning and purpose that I am aware of the clearing that is my being and the world's worldness all together. Heidegger calls all of this being-in-the-world, meaning that my be-ing, is a be-ing that already has a world. There is no world without be-ing in it, and there is no be-ing without a world to be in.  The 'in' is not a spatial term, but is what Heidegger terms an existential.  I am a being, who in my be-ing, is be-ing-in-the- world.  Accordingly, my being is being-in-the-world.  

Before I read Heidegger seriously, I had read books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the Crack in the Cosmic Egg.  It is probably the case that I never did understand exactly what it was to "overcome the subject-object dichotomy" recommended in those books because I simply already knew that there were subjects and objects.  How does one overcome that which is?  I had also read Eliade on Eastern religious traditions and knew that moksha and nirvana got us to places where we were no longer isolated subjects, but could somehow become simply a "drop in the cosmic ocean."  But none of this actually dislodged my own commitment to substance ontology. One might say that such a commitment only dies with violence.  These texts were not violent enough. 

But I see it, and Heidegger wants you to see it as well. He wants you to look under the hood of your commitments about being, to the be-ing that is be-ing in and through your commitments about being. Heidegger wants to give you an "a ha" experience, and the koan he chants is substance ontology itself. So what is the sound of one hand clapping? So how can an isolated subject build a bridge to the external world?  How indeed?  

Read Being and Time freshly by taking off your glasses of substance ontology. Look and see what it is to be.  To be is actually everything we do in the everyday.  We get around pretty well, and there must be some structure to this getting around. What are then the ontological possibilities of our being which allow any of our concretely actual gettings around in the world?  It is here, I admit, that the smell of the transcendental returns.  

Heidegger is a philosopher, after all, and his description of getting around in A-fashion or getting around in B-fashion finally must lead him to ask what is common to A-fashion getting around and B-fashion getting around.  In a faint echo of Kant who asked about the transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such, Heidegger asks about the ontological conditions which make possible the actuality of what he calls the ontic, the actual and concrete what is in which one deals in one's world.  What might it be to uncover the conditions for the possibility of any dealings, conditions which are endemic to experience as such, conditions which are deeper than person X or Y or fashion A or B?  

I will write more later, but for now simply enjoy reading Being and Time, my students, and be ready for adventure!