Breached Horizons

The Philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion

Rachel Bath, Antonio Calcagno, Kathryn Lawson, Steve G. Lofts

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786605351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

This volume is a guide to the legacy of the philosophical work of Jean-Luc Marion. A leading phenomenologist and philosopher of religion, Marion’s work addresses questions on the nature and knowledge of God, love, consciousness, art, psychology, and spirituality. Here, leading Marion scholars explain the development of his key concepts, while critically mining the philosopher’s ideas for relevant implications and applications to contemporary issues in various fields of study, including philosophy, theology, art, psychology and literature. The first volume to cover Marion’s wider corpus, this book opens with an original essay by Marion himself, and goes on to present a comprehensive view of Marion’s ideas. Though largely anchored in philosophy, the essays are interdisciplinary and explore the various questions central to Marion’s work, including the visibility and invisibility of God, the constitutive force of the horizon of consciousness, the gift and givenness, eroticism and love, art and painting, psychology, literature, memory, iconography, and spirituality.

Chapter 1

How Marion Gives Himself

Kevin Hart

It is a pleasure and an honor to introduce Jean-Luc Marion: an honor because he is one of the most eminent living philosophers, and a pleasure because he and I have been friends for a good number of years. Yet the task of introducing him, to say a little about his life and works, is not an easy one. In modern philosophy, especially in phenomenology, we often hew to a genre that gives a negative slant to the sort of thing I have been asked to do. We all remember the story of Martin Heidegger beginning a series of lectures on Aristotle in 1924 by telling his students, “Aristotle was born, worked, and died,” and perhaps we also recall Maurice Blanchot in L’Écriture du désastre (1980), doubtless reflecting on Heidegger’s line and taking it further, noting, “The writer, his biography: he died; lived and died.”¹ If this erasure of life were not enough to depress us all, there is Maurice Merleau-Ponty who finds himself truly able to speak of Husserl only when he has become “transcendental” and when he is “disencumbered of his life.”² And there is also Jacques Derrida, whose entire work might be understood as saying, again and again, that even in the midst of life we are always and already mourning the Other and indeed ourselves: the proper name and the signature do nothing but bear witness to a death that is to come. The structure of life is survival in the sense that only a trace remains.³

If one does not follow this rather dismal pattern of speaking of a philosopher’s “life and works” by annulling the life and even granting priority to death, there is always another genre that waits just behind it, offering considerable reassurance to the one who must speak: the venerable academic form of laudate, which invariably and rightly comes only after eminence has been achieved and which, even when delivered with the very best of intentions, details the writings of the person to be honored as essentially complete, as if the scholar being praised might say, as Paul once did to Timothy, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”⁴ The person assigned the task of introducing the renowned scholar thereby does not do what is strictly asked of him or her, namely, lead the scholar in so that his or her work may be discussed but rather, with an expansive smile, leads him very clearly out. In effect a laudate says that the scholar’s books have become a nest from which he or she is soon to take flight, and that before long his readers and admirers will be free to settle themselves in that same nest as comfortably as they can. There is always a recess deep in a scholar’s mind where we agree, secretly or not, with Schleiermacher’s view that our task is to understand an author’s texts even better than he or she has done.⁵ And some people can be so eager to begin the job of improving on the eminent scholar’s self-understanding that his or her empirical presence is no more than an annoying impediment to their work.

I wish to resist the usual genres that suggest themselves, and take my cue from something else that Heidegger said when lecturing on Aristotle: “Life is a how.”⁶ This unassuming remark abides at the foundation of all phenomenology, no matter to which school or faction of it one belongs. The great irruption in thought that is phenomenology is at heart a very simple one. It consists of acknowledging the authority of the two great questions that have dominated Western thought—“What?” and “Why?”—and then shifting to a third question that has been sidelined, “How?” In the morning of our philosophical lives, when we first read Plato or Aristotle, we are often blinded by the sheer force and power of those first two questions. We relish how Plato’s Socrates discomposes his interlocutors in Athens by persistently asking, “What is …?,” and we see just how far he can get in sticking to that question. And we also follow, with admiration, Aristotle when, in considering logic or being or the generation of animals, he asks the question “Why?” and in doing so initiates so much of the spirit of science that shapes our world today. Yet Husserl taught us to attend to a third question, one that does not deny the necessity of the first two but that opens up an infinite, new realm of investigation: how things give themselves to us and how we receive them. (Gegenstände im Wie is Husserl’s memorable expression, penned sometime over the period 1905–1910.⁷) It is Husserl who draws our attention to the transcendental aspect of consciousness, to how we constitute phenomena—make them present to ourselves—in particular ways; and it is Husserl, we also need to recall, who stresses that this consciousness is embodied. Phenomena not only have a genitive aspect, a manifestation of, but also a dative aspect, a manifestation to.⁸ With great patience, Husserl draws our attention to the many ways in which phenomena give themselves to us: in perception, to be sure, yet also in thought, anticipation, memory, phantasy, schematization, and so on.

So when the young Heidegger begins teaching and writing he too is guided by the question “How?” He follows Husserl, in the sixth of the Logical Investigations (1900–1901), in seeing how being is given, namely, in categorial intuition, and he develops the idea when Husserl loses faith in it. Indeed, Heidegger proposes a stripped-down phenomenology, one without eidetic vision and ever more finely distinguished reductions. Husserl had already shown that there is no firm line between subject and object, since the intentional structure of consciousness crosses that line perpetually. It is one of Heidegger’s achievements that he deformalizes this insight, demotes the theoretical role of the gaze, and speaks instead of coping in the world. He insists that there is no division between psychic and bodily acts. As he says, “The primary being-there-function of bodiliness secures the ground for the full being of human beings.”⁹ With the rethinking of the subject by way of Dasein, that structure of doors and windows (as Jean-Yves Lacoste observes so well), Heidegger also rethinks the very nature of phenomenality.¹⁰ It is a pity that “phenomenality” is such an ugly word, since it names something very beautiful: the movement of self-manifestation, which is never without a “how.” With Heidegger, no longer is phenomenality a matter of something shared between the transcendent and the immanent, as it is for Husserl, but it is entirely coordinate with the phenomenon itself. For as we are told in Sein und Zeit (1927) the word “phenomenology” means “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.”¹¹ It follows from Heidegger’s revision of phenomenology that reduction can be no more than a movement from beings to being; and accordingly τὰ ϕαινóμενα are τὰ ὄντα when the latter answer to the question “How?” instead of to the questions “What?” and “Why?”¹²

Now Marion has learned a great deal from both Husserl and Heidegger, including how to disagree with each of them in such a way as to open phenomenology in fresh directions. He learned, for one thing, to prize Heidegger’s rethinking of phenomenality; and he learned, for another thing, not to allow being to be the inevitable endpoint of the reduction. If he appears, in his first writings, as a thoroughgoing Heideggerian, setting the thinker’s insights against his conclusions, so that God is not viewed through the lens of “being,” no matter how it is conceived, he comes, by the time of Reduction and Givenness (1989), to learn true radicalism from Husserl, especially from the author of The Idea of Phenomenology (1907). He learns to recognize the authentic heritage of phenomenology as the study of absolute givenness, which is prior to both beings and being. This brief reflection gives us a preliminary sense of how to ask the question “How?” of Marion: How does he negotiate the heritage of phenomenology and, in particular, how does he read, balance, and offset its greatest two practitioners, Husserl and Heidegger? I shall come back to these questions in a moment, but before I turn to them I want to point out something else about the outbreak of phenomenology at the start of the past century.

We think, correctly, that phenomenology opened up new paths for thought in the twentieth century and continues to do the same in our own day. Perhaps we also think—correctly again, I would say—that phenomenology is remarkable for its flexibility, almost its elasticity. It has an impressive ability to remake and relaunch itself from unsuspected positions; and it is noteworthy that it is so flexible that later practitioners can jettison concepts and protocols that were central to its founder. Heidegger reformulates reduction, and perhaps was never a true believer in it in any case; Merleau-Ponty thinks that reduction must be partial; Henry rethinks phenomenology so thoroughly that the essence of manifestation is to be found in non-intentional ὕλη, thereby rendering transcendental reduction no more than eidetic reduction; and Levinas regards reduction as antiphenomenological, a matter of theory rather than attention to the concrete phenomenon.¹³ Yet at the same time that phenomenology opened new paths into the future it also, as it were, set ripples going in the past. Heidegger begins to read Aristotle in the 1920s, and when he does so, he finds that the Stagirite is talking of phenomena; he looks into medieval mysticism and elucidates it by way of phenomenology; and he begins to read the letters of Paul and uses the new philosophy to do so. Phenomenology did not at first call for a hermeneutics; it already was one.

Of course, the ripples that Heidegger started to detect in ancient Greece could be found outside philosophy itself. Soon it became possible to recognize that painters and poets were also doing phenomenology, and perhaps doing it better than the philosophers. If you really want to see in what ways life is a how, read Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson or Gerard Manley Hopkins, or look at canvases by Bruegel the Elder, Poussin, Cézanne, or listen for a while to Bach, Hayden, or Son House. Philosophers are drawn to the theory of phenomenology, while poets and painters and singers are attracted to doing it, at least in part, usually without having had the slightest tuition on how to do so. Or, if you prefer, philosophers seek to fill the logical space of reasons while poets and painters populate the formal space of experience. Assuredly, in order to discern that orientation one has to approach the painters and poets and musicians in a phenomenological manner. Phenomenology is not done just the once, and it is not only ever done on that which has never before been subject to the gaze. It is a great merit of Marion that not only has he engaged with the theory of phenomenology but he also has paid close attention to the visual arts as sites where phenomenality is most intense as well as to one of the most piercing narratives that the West has produced, Augustine’s Confessions.

I promised to return to the questions of how Marion negotiates the heritage of phenomenology and, in particular, the diverse patrimonies of Husserl and Heidegger. The first thing that needs to be said is that Marion took many years of preparation before asking the question “How?” He started out as a historian of philosophy, specializing in seventeenth-century French philosophy, primarily Descartes and Pascal, and he has never let that thread fall from his hands. One of his most recent works is Sur la pensée passive de Descartes (2013), and it is testimony that he remains one of the most exacting and vibrant scholars of Descartes alive today. Even in his early scholarly work, however, he was already informed by Heidegger’s account of metaphysics as having an ontotheological constitution; and so we find Descartes read through a Heideggerian lens so as to expose a theology that was never actually written by the French philosopher and to see how metaphysics, as diagnosed by Heidegger, structured Descartes’ notions of God and the soul, and how Pascal gives us a clue how to escape from those notions.

We also find, over the same early period, Marion engaging in Christian theology from a phenomenological perspective. Unlike many young French philosophers, including Catholic philosophers, Marion gave himself a rigorous schooling in the Fathers, both Eastern and Western, and their writings—spiritual as well as dogmatic—informed his early essays in theology. Much of what goes on in his early writing is nicely condensed in the very title of one of his books: Dieu sans l’être (1982). It is translated as God without Being, which is inevitable in English; but it also means “God without having to be God”: God is free to determine himself how he wishes, as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite indicates at the very end of the Mystical Theology. God is free to give himself to us as love, and is not obliged to come into focus through the lens of being, whether it be the “being of beings” or even what Heidegger came to call Seyn, a non-metaphysical understanding of being. At the same time, if one listens closely, Dieu sans l’être means “God without letters,” in other words “God outside the text.” The homophone was to provoke a sharp reaction from Derrida in his account of apophatic theology, “Comment ne pas parler,” which Marion was to rejoin in later work, “Au nom ou comment le taire.”¹⁴ The reception of Marion in the English-speaking world started, for the most part, as a reception of Derrida and Marion in dialogue with one another.

“Life is a how,” says Heidegger; but we know that Heidegger always seeks to determine life as being; and Marion’s work comes into focus when we see him resisting this very move. For him, it is the divine life without reference to being that is primary; and in a later work, Le phénomène érotique (2003), it is love without being that draws his attention. Now Marion is certainly not saying that God does not exist or that there is no such thing as love. On the contrary, he affirms that God is and that there is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Abbreviations of Primary Works by Jean-Luc Marion
• Editor’s Introduction: Traversing the Beyond with Jean-Luc Marion
• 1 How Marion Gives Himself
• 2 The Question of the Reduction
• Part I: Reflections on the Past
• Part II: Present Openings
• Part III: Breaching Future Horizons
• Index
• About the Contributors