Ontotheological Turnings?

The Decentering of the Modern Subject in Recent French Phenomenology

Joeri Schrijvers

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781438438955
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

This incisive work examines questions of ontotheology and their relation to the so-called "theological turn" of recent French phenomenology. Joeri Schrijvers explores and critiques the decentering of the subject attempted by Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste, and Emmanuel Levinas, three philosophers who, inspired by their readings of Heidegger, attempt to overturn the active and autonomous subject. In his consideration of each thinker, Schrijvers shows that a simple reversal of the subject-object distinction has been achieved, but no true decentering of the subject. For Lacoste, the subject becomes God's intention; for Marion, the subject becomes the object and objective of givenness; and for Levinas, the subject is without secrets, like an object, before a greater Other. Critiquing the axioms and assumptions of contemporary philosophy, Schrijvers argues that there is no overcoming ontotheology. He ultimately proposes a more phenomenological and existential approach, a presencing of the invisible, to address the concerns of ontotheology.

Chapter 1

Some Notes on a French Debate

Introducing Ontotheology

Thinkers such as Levinas, Marion, and Lacoste are all trying to understand what the word God might mean in the contemporary world once that which was understood by this term previously has been proclaimed dead. Indeed, it seems that the God that passed away is brought to life again in what has been called “the theological turn of French phenomenology.”¹ Lacoste, Marion, and Levinas, then, try to think God as other than the ‘God’ of ontotheology.

Although the term ontotheology was first used by Kant, the concept and the problem thereof stems from Heidegger. According to Heidegger, ontotheology first and foremost concerns philosophy. Broadly speaking, Heidegger criticized philosophy's tendency to talk about God too hastily and too easily. Philosophy's task is to think ‘being’ and not God. For Heidegger, ontotheology and metaphysics are essentially a forgetting of being, concerned merely with beings. Therefore, philosophy cannot open up to the ‘ontological difference’ between being and beings; it prefers controllable, foreseeable, and ‘present-at-hand’ objects. Objects lend themselves easily to the reckoning and calculations required for technology's mastery over being. It is in this sense that we encounter in our God talk the same, univocal primacy of beings or objects. In general, the ontotheological endeavor seeks an ultimate reason that can account for the totality of beings. Its point of departure—beings—forbids that ontotheology encounters anything other, at the end of the chain of beings, than a being. Proceeding from the finite to the infinite, ontotheology's obsession with objects decides in advance how God will enter the philosophical discourse. This ‘God’ is often modeled after causal theories—as much as each house requires an architect as its cause, the totality of beings requires a ‘prima causa,’ a First Being. God is an instrument used, by philosophy, to found finitude, to give reasons for the totality of beings. God, in the ontotheological way of thinking, must be a foundation or the explanation of the totality of beings. God cannot be anything else than that instance that saves the finite system from its own contingency and incoherency. And yes, this is what we all call “God” or, rather, this is what we used to call God.

The modern subject is, if not the instigator then at least the heir of all ontotheologies. Marion, Lacoste, and Levinas all frame their thought around that which might counter the subject's reckoning with beings and objects (respectively ‘givenness’ for Marion, ‘liturgy’ for Lacoste, and ‘the other’ for Levinas). The ‘modern’ subject, mainly identified in the works of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl proclaims itself to be—or at least that is the way it came to be perceived—the center of the world, the ‘master and possessor of nature.’ Human beings, in modernity, were thought of as free, autonomous, and active agents. To be sure, such an Enlightenment was a liberation in a manifold of ways, but it is not my task to repeat those here. The fact remains that many philosophers criticize this portrayal of the human being as an autonomous agent, since such autonomy is deemed to be responsible for many problems contemporary societies are facing. I will offer some indications as to the kinds of problems these might be in the next section. All of the authors I have chosen as this work's privileged interlocutors—Levinas, Marion, Lacoste, and, through them, Heidegger—insist on giving an account of the human being as a more passive, affective instance. Heidegger, for instance, criticizes the ‘world-less ego’ as it comes to us from the philosophical tradition starting with Descartes. Human beings, according to Heidegger, are already in a world. It is this fact of finding oneself in a world with others that is the proper topic of philosophical reflection. Levinas and Marion, for reasons which will become obvious shortly, primarily target the transcendental ‘Ich denke’ of Kant. ‘Le Je pense transcendental,’ Levinas says, does not speak; it is the word of, really, no one.² The human being is not to be found in this way. Marion, then, contends that it would be better to substitute the ‘Ich denke’ for an ‘I feel’ (‘je sens’), and Lacoste will outline the human being as a radically passive being.

The decentering of subjectivity is thus for the most part a confrontation with transcendental and idealist philosophy. That is why much of the debate has turned upon the critique of ‘representation.’ The ego cogito of Descartes indeed represents itself as a thinking substance, and Kant is famous for, among many other things of course, the ‘Ich Denke muss alle Vorstellungen begeleiten.’ But why, precisely, critique representations? Because, in the very epistemological operation of the subject representing an object, this object is put under the guard of the subject and is submitted to the subject's power to know and represent in the manner it thinks appropriate. For Heidegger, this means that the subject-object distinction rages through our contemporary technological cultures to such an extent that human beings tend to lose the ability to encounter being and beings in another way than as a represented object.³ Levinas would agree but considers the main victim of such a violent reduction the other human being, who, when represented through a subject, loses his or her uniqueness and becomes merely ‘one amongst many,’ a genus of a species. Marion sees in this reduction to object-ness an alienation of the phenomenon itself and tries to liberate phenomenality from its representational constraints by evoking the possibility of a phenomenon showing itself of itself. Lacoste's liturgical experience seeks, first and foremost, to liberate our experience of God from all of these ‘modern’ constraints.

All of these authors thus agree that the power of this autonomous subject must be broken. However, on closer inspection, we find these thinkers time and again returning to the subject-object distinction. The question of this work, then, is whether a simple reversal of the subject-object distinction suffices to break out of the ontotheological scheme.

The Present and Our Obsession with Objects

Heidegger, in his commentary on Aristotle's Physics, spoke of “the spell of modern man's way of Being,” which, for him, was an “addict[ion] to thinking of beings as objects and allowing the being of beings to be exhausted in the objectivity of the object.”⁴ In Being and Time, Heidegger refused a long-standing tradition that saw beings merely as representations or as objects. Our being-in-the-world, Heidegger says, hardly encounters objects at all. For this reason he draws a distinction between objects, which are present-at-hand, and tools or equipment, which are ready-to-hand. Although Heidegger uses a hammer as an example of equipment that is ready-to-hand, beings which are ready-to-hand cannot be reduced to what we usually see as a tool.⁵ The distinction between ready-to-hand and present-at-hand is simple: When one is playing the guitar, one doesn't reflect on the chords and on the corresponding finger settings. Heidegger would say that while playing the guitar, one is involved in a caring relationship toward things that are ready-to-hand. The guitar only becomes an object—present-at-hand—when one, while playing, reflects on these settings. However, if one does this—and this is Heidegger's point—one can no longer play the guitar: the guitar has become an object, present-at-hand, and loses the self-evident character that is intended for things ready-to-hand.

Many of Levinas' own themes echo those of Heidegger. Levinas was mainly concerned with the problem of encountering the other as other. However, every other I meet in the public space is an other that I need and use as a means to my own ends. When I buy my train ticket, I do not see the other as other, I see him or her as the one who is going to give me the ticket that I need to get on the train. Levinas says that in this way, the other person is reduced to my representation of him or her, to that which he or she can do and mean for me. Every representation, every image, is, according to Levinas, instrumental and only an expression of humanity's will to power.

Both for Heidegger and Levinas, the question is how to escape the self-evident manner with which knowledge proceeds. Whereas Heidegger asks how we can trace the being of beings (and so re-open the question of being), Levinas wonders if an encounter with the other as other, and not merely with the other as what he or she can mean ‘for me,’ is possible at all. Marion expresses a similar concern but does so with regard to our knowledge of God. In his book God without Being, he distinguishes between the idol and the icon (GWB, 7–24). The first is very close to what I am describing here as an object. The idol is, according to Marion, an image of God. God is reduced to that which human beings can know, represent, or experience of God. God is, in this case, modeled after our own image and, in and through this image, tied to finite conditions of appearing. However, if God is truly God, Marion argues, the mode of God's epiphany should be unconditional and thus not restricted to the limits set forward by any mode of (human) knowledge whatsoever.

But, what precisely is an object? Consider the following example. When I look at a dinner table, I evidently see only one side of it. That I, however, still see the table as a table, that is, as consisting of a plateau with four legs, arises from the fact that I constitute the table. Constitution is Husserl's term and refers to a mental act that somehow adds to the perception of one leg the three others in order to secure the unity of the table. Constitution occurs with almost every object human beings perceive. (Think of a cube, the dark side of the moon, etc.). However, suppose that I walk around the table and discover that what I constituted as a brown table is, in fact, partially green. One of the legs can be, for instance, colored green. This does not alter my constitution of the table as a table in a significant way. Marion concludes that our knowledge, experience, and representations are, in one way or another, exercising a will to power, or, in his terms: the unseen of an object—the green leg of the table—always has the rank of a preseen (BG, 186; IE, 35–36). Though I may not have seen that the table has one green leg, I still constitute the table as a plateau with four legs. An object therefore can only be unknown, not unknowable. Everything that one wants to know of an object can be known, and it is in this sense that, once again, knowledge is power. Objects are transparent; they have no secrets.

How, then, can we encounter the unknowable? And how, if everything that we see is always ‘preseen,’ can we see (or experience or know) the invisible God? How, turning to Levinas again, can we see the other as other, and not only as what he or she can mean ‘for me’? Or, to use Heidegger's terminology, how do we know being if we only encounter beings? How can we experience God if, as Marion tells us, every (idolatrous) experience of God is like an invisible mirror (GWB, 11–14)? For Marion indeed, human experience of God is like a mirror in that human beings want to experience or see God but, in fact, see only the image they themselves have made of God. Human experience of God is then also like an invisible mirror in that people like to forget that the God they worship is only a God made after their own likeness. Let us have a brief look at the answers these French philosophers provide.

Jean-Yves Lacoste: The Experience of Faith

One can interpret Lacoste's work as expounding a common belief: the church is one of the few places where one can recover one's breath, a place of peace and quiet amidst the rat race of modern society. For Lacoste, modernity is characterized by the expansion of technology to the point of (the possibility) of the destruction of the world: modernity and technology are essentially a logic of appropriation. Technology's appropriation of the world is knowledge put to the service of power.⁶ Lacoste proposes to advance ‘liturgy’ or faith to counter technology's threat to the world. For liturgy transgresses the world and offers to the realms of the means and ends of technology, the excess and surplus of a preoccupation with God that serves, at least in the world that is ours, no direct end: over and against the utility and the costs and benefit analyses of the world stands the gratuity and the uselessness of liturgy, a place where one can learn anew that not all things are at the service of and available to the logic of appropriation, productivity, and efficacy of the modern world.

Lacoste tries to give a philosophical description of the weal and the woe of an ordinary believer who is liturgically in the midst of the world. A believer, Lacoste argues, has to reckon with a nonexperience. One has to take this nonexperience quite literally. When a believer directs his attention to God in prayer or by participating in the Eucharist, it seems that nothing is happening. Indeed, neither ecstasy nor the blinding spiritual force of a celestine prophecy usually occurs. While believers express a desire to know God or to dwell in God's kingdom, they find themselves in an often tiresome church. If nothing happens, faith is first and foremost a nonexperience.

Lacoste conceives of this nonexperience as a passive encounter with God in which the believer imitates Christ's passivity and obedience toward the will of God. Therefore, the nonexperience of faith is ascetic in that the believer must renounce every desire to appropriate God, to experience God at will (cf. Lk. 22:42). However, Lacoste goes on to describe this ascetic passivity of the believer in terms of object-ness or objectivity, an objectivity, moreover, that is akin to that of the thing; one can say that the believer is in the hands of God as clay is in the hands of the potter (EA, 156). Catherine Pickstock therefore rightly remarks: “For Lacoste, our bodiedness is a sign of our fundamental objectivity in relation to God, more important than any notion of subjective desire, which implies that undergoing a relationship with God is more fundamental than desiring it.”⁷

But if Lacoste's answer to our age's obsessions with objects is to reverse the terms of subject-object—if, in other words, human beings no longer see God as the object of their own imagination, but if it is God who turns human beings into objects—are we then not once again caught in the web of the problem that we want to resolve? Is not this God in turn, who treats believers as mere things, a bit too much like the subject that can only deal with that which it encounters as objects?

Jean-Luc Marion: Experiencing the Given

A striking parallel to this reversal of the subject-object distinction can be observed in the works of Marion. In Being Given, Marion tries to develop an account of the phenomenon as it gives itself by and of itself, without any interference from a human agent. With its intentions and desires, the modern subject, Marion argues, distorts that which gives itself. One can understand this interpretation of subjectivity in the way in which an accused criminal would narrate the story of the crime he or she has committed. Indeed, it is unlikely that the criminal will relate his or her offence as it really happened. On the contrary, the criminal will distort what happened in order to tell the event of the crime to his own benefit. One cannot expect that the narrative of the crime, related by the criminal, gives an account of the crime as it was in and by itself. The criminal will most often reduce the crime to such an extent that it makes him or her, in one way or another, look good.

To avoid such an interference, Marion tries to describe phenomena as they give themselves, or in his terms, as their ‘selves,’ to human beings. However, to receive such a givenness, Marion argues, the modern subject is turned into the “clerk” (IE, 26) or recorder of that which is given. All intentions and desires of the subject must be subordinated to the gift of the phenomena. How is this possible? How does one encounter the given as it gives itself or its self? Marion's answer is that the phenomena already give themselves before any perturbation or interference of a subject can occur. This gift is an appeal one cannot not hear, in the same way that the crime has already been committed when the cr...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Some Notes on a French Debate
• Chapter Two: Phenomenology, Liturgy, and Metaphysics: Jean-Yves Lacoste
• Chapter Three: From the Subject to the ‘Adonné’: Jean-Luc Marion
• Chapter Four: On Miracles and Metaphysics: From Marion to Levinas
• Chapter Five: Levinas: Substituting the Subject for Responsibility
• Chapter Six: Intermediary Conclusions and the Question concerning Ontotheology
• Chapter Seven: “And There Shall Be No More Boredom”: Problems with Overcoming Metaphysics
• Chapter Eight: Marion and Levinas on Metaphysics
• Conclusion: Toward a Phenomenology of the Invisible
• Notes