Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time

Selected Essays, Volume 1

David Tracy

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226584508
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

David Tracy is widely considered one of the most important religious thinkers in North America, known for his pluralistic vision and disciplinary breadth. His first book in more than twenty years reflects Tracy's range and erudition, collecting essays from the 1980s to 2018 into a two-volume work that will be greeted with joy by his admirers and praise from new readers.In the first volume, Fragments, Tracy gathers his most important essays on broad theological questions, beginning with the problem of suffering across Greek tragedy, Christianity, and Buddhism. The volume goes on to address the Infinite, and the many attempts to categorize and name it by Plato, Aristotle, Rilke, Heidegger, and others. In the remaining essays, he reflects on questions of the invisible, contemplation, hermeneutics, and public theology. Throughout, Tracy evokes the potential of fragments (understood both as concepts and events) to shatter closed systems and open us to difference and Infinity. Covering science, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and non-Western religious traditions, Tracy provides in Fragments a guide for any open reader to rethink our fragmenting contemporary culture.

Part 1

THE EXISTENTIAL SITUATION OF OUR TIME

Chapter 1

FRAGMENTS

The Spiritual Situation of Our Time

MODERNITY AND THE DISCONTENTS

If postmodernity is to avoid the essentialism it hopes to rout, it must first admit that there is no such phenomenon as postmodernity. There are only postmodernities. If modernity is to escape the trap of totalization it has unintentionally set for itself, not only must it demand modernity as political democratic pluralism (the Enlightenment’s signal achievement and still unfinished project), but also admit that there is a plurality of modernities.

By this shift to the plural for modernity, I do not refer only to the obvious differences between the forms of Western modernity and other forms of modernization, especially in Asia. To understand our cultural situation rightly, one must expand the cultural horizons, including the philosophical and religious horizons, of the contemporary Western discussion beyond a Western sense of centeredness and a Western sense of its own pluralism toward a new global sense of polycentrism. For there is no longer a Western cultural center with margins. There are many centers now, of which the West is merely one. Moreover, once one drops the Western grand narrative, the continuities in that narrative begin to dissolve. To observe that necessary disillusion, recall the now-familiar postmodernity versus modernity debate. What can this contemporary debate—a debate on two essentialisms—now mean? It is not only that within Western culture itself there are now several postmodernities. There are also several modernities. Indeed, one can find in what is often named postmodernity, as well as in the classical model of modernity itself—classical Enlightenment modernity, which repressed the more flexible, more open, more fragmented culture of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries—elements of that creative period of early modernity before the reified model of the Enlightenment became the model of modernity (Blumenberg 1983; Dupré 1993).

Most forms of postmodernity are explosions of once-forgotten, marginalized, and repressed realities in Enlightenment modernity: the Other, the different, and above all, in this essay, the fragments that disallow any totality system by demanding attention to the Other, especially the different and the marginal Other. These repressed elements were clearly far less marginal in early modernity, that too-seldom-studied singularity in most debates on modernity. The key phenomenon provoking new study is religion. Clearly, it is time to reopen an otherwise exhausted debate on religion and modernity. It may well be, as several contemporary phenomenologists claim, that religion is the nonreductive saturated phenomenon par excellence. Indeed, I am convinced that this is the case.

And yet, even before that contemporary case can be made, it may be necessary to clear the decks of some further cultural debris. Religion has always been the unassimilable (as distinct from conquered and colonized) Other of Enlightenment modernity. Any saturated form of the religious phenomenon had to be marginalized by the Enlightenment. It could not fit what counted as rational. Other developments in Western culture fought this marginality of religion: the Romantic discovery of symbols and archaic rituals; the Western interest in Hindu excessive forms for the sacred and the Buddhist insistence on formlessness; the discovery (by Scholem and others) of fragments of the divine in Kabbalah and in rabbinic exegesis that undid the pretension that Judaism is simply a modern ethical monotheism; and—against the backdrop of the Enlightenment—Levinas’s recovery in Jewish prophetic discourse of the ethics of the Other, not the self, as first philosophy.

All of these religious phenomena, as distinct from the Enlightenment’s notion of rational religion, are clearly Other to the demands for intellectual closure in what will be allowed to count as rational in many forms of classical modernity. Why otherwise the bizarre parade since the late seventeenth century of the modern ways of naming God? That series of “isms” for naming God invented in modern philosophical and theological thought had very little if anything to do with God as a religious phenomenon and religion as a saturated, sacred phenomenon. Those isms were intended rationally to control the discussion of the ultimate religious Other in any radically monotheistic reflection on God. But can the question of God really be controlled as a religious question by the modern discussion of deism, pantheism, modern atheism, modern theism (Buckley 1987), or even, in the best achievement of modern Western religious thought, of panentheism from Bruno to Hegel to Whitehead?

Even before the categories of the Other and the different became such central philosophical, cultural, ethical, and religious categories for many, Western thinkers sensed the temptation to reduce all reality to more of the same (Foucault), or at best to the similar, which too often served as an ever more tattered codpiece for more of the same: the onto-theo-phallo-logical system of Western classical modernity. First sensing this totalization of Enlightenment thought, the German Romantics, especially the Schlegels, privileged the metaphor fragments over any totality and interpreted religion in its richer symbols and mythical forms, rather than the Enlightenment “isms” for God, especially deism. But beyond the early Romantic groping after fragments that helped to challenge the stranglehold of every modern totality system lay the two greatest unveilers of modernity’s secret dream to be the logos of its own onto-theology: namely, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Is there anyone better than Kierkegaard at exposing the bizarre drive to totality of all modern, rationalist idealist systems and of Christendom alike? What Kierkegaard showed was that Christendom as a triumphant totality system could not and cannot survive any true experiment with authentic Christian living. Indeed, Kierkegaard will do almost literally anything to break through the reified ice of Enlightenment and Christendom alike. He will write under pseudonyms (there is no Kierkegaard; there are only Johannes Climacus, Judge William, the Seducer, Don Juan, et al.). Kierkegaard will forge a new indirect discourse for the sacred to undo any claim to adequacy of direct discourse in the idealist version of totality. He will try any genre—diaries, music, exercises, dialogues, edifying discourses, narratives. He will try anything except a system. Kierkegaard’s famous charge to Hegelian systems applies to all modern rational systems. If only Hegel had written the words “A Thought Experiment” at the beginning of all his books, then Kierkegaard would be the first, he says, to honor Hegel as the greatest of the modern philosophers. But Hegel of course did not.

Kierkegaard’s paradoxically anti-Christian double, Nietzsche, plays the same fragmentation role for both Christendom and Enlightenment modernity alike, but now with a hammer. When Nietzsche’s hammer is too blunt a tool against Christianity and against Enlightenment modernity, he too will try any form, any genre, any intellectual strategy to break out of the modern system. Nietzsche forged style after style, from his early essays to the quasi-gospel genre of Thus Spake Zarathustra, to genealogical analysis through aphorisms piled upon aphorisms, to fragments juxtaposed with fragments, in an increasingly desperate attempt to recover not merely the controlled rhetoric of Aristotle’s Topics, but also the out-of-control rhetoric of the tropes careening with joy (not despair) at the very edge of the modern abyss. Nietzsche, while clearly dialectical in his own understanding of difference, is not of one mind. He is clearly dialectically anti-Christian, and also clearly interested in and fascinated by the saturated, othering phenomenon of religion itself. Indeed, Nietzsche was far more creative regarding religion and its saturation quality than many of its Romantic defenders. Religion, like Nietzsche himself, does not fit the modern totality system. It should not. For religion is something and somewhere else. At the very least, religion is, as William James named it, a disclosure of something more—more than classical modernity considered not merely not actual (a relatively easy argument), but not even possible. Religion, as in Kant, was never a “condition of the possibility of reality.” Religion did not need a fourth critique but only the brilliant postcritical study, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. The contemporary argument on religion is not finally about actuality, or even whatever is rendered possible by modern standards. The basic argument on religion, as Levinas made clear, is about the possibility of impossibility.

But one need not stay with either the new or old Kierkegaard or Nietzsche to feel their fragmenting force anew. It becomes clearer and clearer that a dominant metaphor for twentieth-century Western thought, both early and late, both radical and conservative, both modern and postmodern, is the metaphor of fragments. Fragments are our spiritual situation. And that is not so bad a place to be. It is with fragments that radical conservative critics may join postmodern critics, that theological and antitheological critics may finally listen to one another. After the welcome collapse of the religious certainties of all modern totality systems, all see fragments as a sign of hope, perhaps (with Walter Benjamin and Simone Weil) the only signs of hope for redemption.

FRAGMENTS: THE NEOCONSERVATIVES

There are three kinds of contemporary thinkers for whom the category fragments is crucial: the first, the radical conservatives, see fragments with regret and nostalgia, as all that is left of what was once a unified culture; the second, the radical postmodernists, see fragments as part of their love of extremes and as thereby emancipatory toward and transformative of the deadening hand of the reigning totality system, the rationality of modern onto-theology; and the third group, of whom Walter Benjamin and Simone Weil are the most suggestive in the early twentieth century, see fragments theologically as saturated and auratic bearers of infinity and sacred hope, fragmentary of genuine hope in some redemption, however undefined. It is with Benjamin and Weil that I wish to ally myself. And yet, when speaking of this surprising alliance of three such disparate groups, there remains much to learn from the first two sets of thinkers, the radical conservatives (who are usually countermodernists) and the radical postmodernists.

It is often difficult for postmodern thinkers to allow for the strange similarity in the midst of vast differences between the countermodernists and themselves. The differences are real and clear for all to see: Who can combine Leo Strauss and Lyotard, despite the sometimes surprising analogies in their critiques of modernity? Who can think of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Julia Kristeva together? Surely they are entirely different and yet possess surprising similarity in their analyses of the narrowness of modern methods and rationalities. All these thinkers, in very different ways, make appeals to classic texts and movements as intense fragments set loose to undo the reign of modern systems.

Or consider perhaps the most curious case of all, T. S. Eliot.1 This once singularly important conservative critic was, for a while, a kind of Emersonian sage of much of Anglophone literary criticism and cultural reflection. In one of the most remarkable and too-seldom-reflected-upon collapses of influence in our time, the reputation of Eliot as critic and thinker is now in tatters. In many ways, Eliot’s world is a world well lost. For it is now clear that Eliot’s earlier anti-Semitism has marred beyond retrieval some of his works of cultural high criticism. This is so especially, but not solely, in the case of his notorious essays After Strange Gods and even in some of the imagery of his early poetry. Moreover, the very bitterness surfacing in Eliot’s form of nostalgia for a lost unity can seem to suggest a certain meanness of spirit lurking just below the surface of many of his essays. Of course, one still reads and will always read Eliot’s brilliant individual literary essays on Dante or the metaphysical poets as distinct from his rejection of everything about the Romantics. However, Eliot’s prose, save for such essays on individual literary works, is now on the whole best left unread. But Eliot’s poetry is an entirely different matter. That poetry endures as one of the greatest testaments to the fragmented character of our times.

This is not only true of Eliot’s early The Waste Land. That poem, exemplary for all of us, whether we are countermodern or postmodern, stands as one of the signal witnesses of a civilization and a personal sensibility now in fragments and seeking for other fragments to shore up against our ruin. Even more significant in terms of the importance of the fragment for Eliot’s poetry is his explicit Christian poetry, especially his Four Quartets, the most misread and misinterpreted great poem of our times. If the Christian vision of Quartets were to be read through the beclouded lens of Eliot’s own more conservative essays defending at times something like a new Christendom, then all the Quartets would disclose is a fragile orthodox Christian world become a new nostalgic synthesis disguised to replace the fragmented world he portrayed in Waste Land: C. S. Lewis set to verse, perhaps. But the poetry should be read, and better heard, as nontotalizing but oddly moving and partially harmonizing fragments of music. Indeed, the musical structure of Eliot’s Quartets is the best example in all his poetry of his famed auditory imagination. That musical structure is not the structure of a closed harmony of a great Beethoven symphony, but far more like the fragmentary structure of Beethoven’s Quartets. The fact that the fragments never fully harmonize in Quartets is stunning. For example, less explicitly but far more pervasively and subtly than in Waste Land, Eliot uses in Quartets an Eastern, especially East Asian Buddhist, sensibility to disclose a new meaning for fragments. These Buddhist moments occur not in single, explicit quotation, as in the fire sermon of Waste Land, but rather as a leitmotif interweaving and undoing any attempts at full harmonization. Indeed, even the Christian motif of incarnation in the wondrous and moving Christian passage of the “Third Quartet” becomes, after all, fragmentary—that is, hints and guesses for the imagination.

Quartets should always be read with Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses in mind. For Eliot, Joyce better than anyone (even the author of Waste Land) understood modern history as a vast chaos and confusion, a nightmare from which we are attempting to awake. But Eliot could not and would not move with Joyce into the sheer play of language and difference in Finnegans Wake, that favorite text of postmodernists. Eliot moved beyond Waste Land, to be sure, and beyond his own and Joyce’s earlier attempts at signifying fragments in a negative way, in Ulysses for Joyce, in Ash Wednesday for Eliot. Greek and Jew became opposites and met in a new myth of Ulysses for Joyce; Christianity properly rethought is where Greek and Jew finally meet for Eliot.

In Quartets, unlike his more influential essays, Eliot’s Christianity is not conventional at all. Indeed, a good deal of the major imagery is Buddhist rather than Christian (Kearns 1987): the central image of the entire poem, “the impersonal still point,” which grounds and yet, Buddhist-like, does not ground the poem; the ever more refined and more fragmentarily musical and more Buddhist sense of how the mind can be modified in its very ability to perceive at all by closely directed yet not tense, stoic attention to experience, including any experience in reading the poem itself; such close attention to the fragments of meaning become like the no-sense, not-nonsense, of the great Zen koans. Any careful reading, like Eliot’s own in his recording, can render problematic any commonsense or ontological, perhaps more exactly, onto-theological categories by destabilizing all Western ideas. As Cleo McNelly Kearns argues, the syntax of Quartets, more subtly but just as insistently as the syntax of Waste Land, continually breaks down and renders ambiguous and polyvalent, perhaps even overdetermined, the subject, verb, object pattern by which the English language is usually spoken. In Quartets, identity becomes either the “they” of the masses in history, or the “it happens” of Buddhist emptiness and fullness in the great pool imagery of the “First Quartet,” or the “it gives” Christian incarnational imagery of the “Third Quartet.” Saturated fragments all. Both sets of images, B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• Part 1: The Existential Situation of Our Time
• Part 2: Hermeneutics
• Part 3: Publicness and Public Theology
• Part 4: Religion, Theology, and Dialogue
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES
• INDEX OF NAMES
• INDEX OF SUBJECTS