Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander: November 2011

For the last 6 years bouts, hereabouts, off and on, and some, I have been studying the discipline of Phenomenology, and its roots, tracing it back through the centuries, I am certain that the silly nihilism of Nietzsche was a "parable" guided by the goofy Western notion of Being that Heidegger had jacked from Aristotle via Parmenides!

Greater still, I am certain that the remedy for the schism involving Religion and Science is at hand, and that “Phenomenology” will compose the convergence toward that unification!

Phenomenology is either a disciplinary field in philosophy. It studies the structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions. (It was also a movement in the history of philosophy.) It’s a method of investigation based on the idea that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness.

Beguilingly, Phenomenology has been practiced, with or without the name, for many centuries. When Hindu, Buddhist and Catholic philosophers reflected on states of consciousness achieved in a variety of meditative states, or even in Kenosis (see my paper on Flannery O’ Conner’s “Wise Blood” they all were also practicing phenomenology.

In this Facebook “Note” (That no one will ever in a million years read! But will help organize my mental library) I put forward that a Levinasian postmodern understanding of ethics is a hermeneutic that is authentically, (Emmanuel Levinas a solitary thinker who becomes universally influential, all those interested in Levinas and his thought, but also for anyone who wishes to better understand contemporary continental thought and its foundations and implications. Read Emmanuel Levinas: His Life And Legacy and “The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology”) rooted in the Spirit of Christ and as such is one that Catholics can and already have embraced!!!!!!!!!!!

For example, in studying Meister Eckhart and the Beguine mystics, Mechtild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete argues that Eckhart provided an apophatic ("un-saying") ethics in contrast to the action oriented and rule based moralities prevalent among his contemporaries. "Whereas the penitential system then emerging among the mendicant orders and Aquinas' rule- and virtue-based ethic insist that any human action can be evaluated according to a code or rule, Eckhart apophatically unsays ethical prescriptions, arguing that the just human being is the one who has detached him or herself from all creaturely things, including, presumably, humanly determined moral codes." The dogmatism and fundamentalism that has developed periodically in Christian history is a reactive movement against being open to the presence of the Other and has resulted in violence, wars and a mistrust of plurality.

These reactions turn the "saying" of our salvation history into the "said" of static formulations and totalizing systems. That such movements occurred within Christianity is ironic, as the New Testament, unlike the Old, does not attempt to legislate. As Walter Rauschenbusch points out, the New Testament is rather the expression of a Spirit that entered humanity and fashions our actions by the free compulsion of moral ideals. In our time we require new wineskins for the new wine of our age. In the Modern era the Church has been grappling with finding a philosophy that can serve as an adequate ancilla theoligiae.

While it is true that no one's system of philosophy has ever matched everybody's experience of reality, the need to move past some of the totalizing Rational systems of the Enlightenment is being felt with greater urgency!

LIFE IS A STATE OF MIND

There has been great openness to phenomenology in the Catholic Church due in large measure to Pope John Paul II's influence. This subject of natural law was "hugely important" in the assembly, a source said. "The eclipse of natural law in some Catholic moral thinking was a constant theme brought up by the bishops," National Catholic Reporter, but instead hopes to encourage a "serious dialogue between philosophers and theologians" in Catholic universities and other venues. Like The Bright Spot or The Echo, I so lost you way, way back!

The openness of the Church at this moment following the aggriomento of the Second Vatican Council requires a serious prophetic voice that can read the signs of the time. Such prophecy needs to be couched in theological and philosophical paradigms rooted in philosophical methods that assist us in facilitating the kind of Ignation humanism envisioned by philosophers like Maritain, supported by the Council and reflexive with contemporary experience. In Crossing the Threshold of Hope Pope John Paul II signals a reception to the currents of post-modern thought by forwarding Emmanuel Levinas as a philosopher of dialogue suggesting that we find ourselves with Levinas (A Jewish Scholar) very close to St. Thomas, but the path passes not so much through being and existence (classic metaphysics) as through people and their meeting each other through the "I" and the "Thou."

For Levinas it is precisely in the free ethical response to the other in the world that our selfhood emerges. The absolutely other (God) does not at all limit our freedom, it calls it to responsibility, founds it and justifies it. The "same" is a term that Levinas uses to refer to our intellectual thought systems that are disrupted and destabilized in the encounter with the Other. The Other, precisely because it is other and absolutely alterior, stands outside of our own self-same system "here below". This relationship with the other puts into question the spontaneity of one's destiny allowing for human change, resiliency and organic growth throughout life. This dynamic, the dynamic of revelation is not a harsh one. The phenomenological method brings us closer to the things themselves by positing direct experience of the other as prior to comprehension and language. Levinas writes, "The essential contribution to the new ontology can be seen in its opposition to classical intellectualism. To comprehend the tool is not to look at it but to know how to handle it. To comprehend our situation in reality is not to define it but to find ourselves in affective disposition. To comprehend being is to exist. All this indicates, it would seem. a rupture with the theoretical structure of Western thought. To think is no longer to contemplate but to commit oneself; to be engulfed by that which one thinks, to be involved. This is the dramatic event of being-in-the-world."

There is a hesitancy to enter into reflection on Ideal concepts in both Levinas and classic Catholic Modern theologians like George Tyrrell. Tyrrell noted, "When we say, 'first holiness and then truth' we are speaking of the truth of explicit understanding which is attained by after-reflection on that truth which is always implicit in holiness and quite inseparable from it." Levinas writes, " Ethics is not limited to preparing for the theoretical exercise of thought which would monopolize transcendence." In recent times the phenomenological method has found it's most well known Catholic theological expression in the voice of Karl Rahner!

Karl Rahner, however, was still close to the Heideggerian ontology criticized by Levinas when it came to his critique of the kind of Modernism current in Catholic circles in the early twentieth century. Rahner wrote "what is called "modernism" in the classical understanding lives by the conviction that the concept or reflection is something absolutely secondary in relation to the original self possession of existence in self-consciousness and freedom, so that reflection could also be dispensed with." Such a criticism might well be leveled against Levinas and the entire postmodern school. However, reflection is not dispensed with in either classic modernism, at least Tyrrell's form of Modernism nor in Levinas' reflection of ethics, and not being, as fundamental for metaphysics. What is "dispensed with" is reflection on ideal concepts, not original experience. In fact, as Oliver Davies comments on Levinas' later work Otherwise than Being, "The principal theme of Otherwise than Being can be summarized as an exploration of the relation between a non-ontological transcendence (or what Levinas calls "saying") and the realm of consciousness, representation and being (the "said"). Rahner clearly saw this problem when he wrote,

“The coming revelation of God, eschatology, the trace of the Other, is not the introduction of a teleological system nor the orientation of history. It is a response formed without image and without mediation. Meister Eckhart in one of his sermons says "The just person seeks nothing in their works. Those that seek something in their works or those who work because of a 'why' are (serfs and mercenaries). And so if you want to be transformed by and transformed into justice, have no [specific] intention in your works and form no 'why' in yourself, either in time or eternity, either reward or happiness, either this or that.

Such works are in fact, dead. Even if you form God within yourself, whatever works you performed for a purpose are all dead, and you ruin good works ... It is a characteristic of creatures that they make something out of something, while it is characteristic of God that he makes something out of nothing. Therefore if God is to make anything in you or with you, you must first have become nothing. Hence go into your own ground and work there, and the works you work there will all be living. This is why he says, "the just lives." Because he is just he works, and his works live." As Schurmann comments, "The just man no longer looks for support elsewhere; nor does he let his acts be determined by external precepts. If he strove for conformity with exterior laws, his acting would simply be legal. The just man who acts out of intimate assimilation with justice "is" just in the same way that the reflection of a beautiful face is beautiful; totally by another and yet totally in itself." For Eckhart the "desire for a land not of our birth, for a land foreign to every nature, which has not been our fatherland" as Levinas described metaphysical desire is characterized by a radical dissimilarity between God and creatures. "All creatures are mere nothingness. I do not say that they are small or anything at all: they are mere nothingness." This dissimilarity is absolute. God is completely alterior. Schurmann writes that from the history of doctrines, this entire theme of nothingness and dissimilarity can easily be traced back to the Saint Augustine. When Eckhart speaks of unglicheit, the country of dissimilarity he can claim either the authority of the regio dissimilitudinis in Augustine or that of the foreign land in the psalms. This dissimilarity does not lead to a fatal world-denying gnosis. Christianity has always had a place for Plato's Ideas while at the same time affirming the goodness of creation. Far from neglecting the world or seeing it in a dim-witted framework as so many neo-Platonist and Gnostics did, Eckhart saw creation as the utterance of God. "The Father speaks the Son from his entire power and speaks him in all things. All creatures are words of God. My mouth expresses and reveals God but the existence of a stone does the same and people often recognize more from the actions than from words.... All creatures may echo God in all their activities. It is, of course, just a small bit which they can reveal." In a similar fashion, Levinas sees the world as containing the trace of the other.

Dali's "Cross of Saint John Of The Cross"

Rahner articulated the demonstrability of a holistic interpretive understanding writing "In the fact that man raises analytic questions about himself and opens himself to the unlimited horizons of such questioning, he has already transcended himself and every conceivable element of such an analysis or of an empirical reconstruction of himself. In so doing this he is affirming himself as more than the sum of such analyzable components of his reality. Precisely this consciousness of himself, this confrontation with the totality of all his conditions, and this very being-conditioned show him to be more than the sum of his factors." We must bear in mind that subjectivity understood from a Levinasian perspective is not a private universe, a sealed interiority, but an unparalleled attention, a response to what is outside, the most outside of which is the other human being. Certainly God but additionally history also stands outside of us.

Although history ought not constitute the totality of understanding, we do need to stay connected to the living streams of our tradition. Traditio can be distinguished from traditum in that traditio is understood as the mode of transmission itself while traditum is the actual handing down of something from generation to generation. Traditio therefore can be understood in a phenomenological manner. Tradition curbs, trains and moulds one's own subjectivity. Michael Casey points out that tradition is assailed from both the left and the right. He writes, "The left attacks it because the past is identified with the forces of conservatism; it is understood, to use Margaret Mead's term, as 'coercive' rather than instrumental'. It imposes its own way of viewing situations and responding to them so that development is blocked. On the other hand, memory is rejected by the right because it is subversive to the status quo; memory knows another time. It relativizes the present and so can offer an alternative to current ideology--which may be why J.B. Mertz speaks about the 'dangerous memory of Jesus Christ.' In reference to interpretation of the Torah, Levinas writes: "What allows one to establish a difference between a personal originality brought to the Book and the pure play of amateurs' (or charlatans') illusions is a necessary reference of the subjective to the historical continuity of interpretation, is the tradition of commentaries that cannot be ignored under the pretext that inspiration come to you directly from the text. A "renewal" worthy of the name cannot circumvent these references, just as it cannot circumvent the reference to what is called the Oral Law." The Christian tradition approaches with similar reverence natural law. However, the interpretation of natural law in our day has its own limitations in terms of facilitating an Levinasian ethic that needs to be critiqued.

Natural law has produced a very act-centered morality, a kind of Catholic utilitarianism, when the historical role of Catholicism has always been to insist on the transcendence of the human person, on the belief that utility is not the ultimate criteria for human choices. Yet natural law's anthropology is so hyperteleological that the wonder before creation, and before one's fellow creatures, that is proper to the soul is lost, and the relationships that follow are diminished in their richness, their humaneness. Surely the most important thing to know about the human person from the story of Genesis is that we are created in the image and likeness of God, and it is that belief which, through the centuries, has been the surest bulwark against dehumanization." That notion needs to be amplified and can be assisted through Levinas' hermeneutic that it is not the last judgment, but each judgment in time wherein morality is found. One sees the emergence within science and medicine of the human person being understood holistically rather than mechanically or technologically. The removal of the ground of natural law, or the delightful "lapse of the ontological order", does create a sense of instability. However, it is precisely that instability which is necessary to shake us out of our complacency and call us into the world, the existential, in which we live; where the other meets our Desire. Morality, actually, living a just and happy life is the consummation of a life viewed through the optics of ethics. Ethics is not understood theoretically but in terms of a living, holistic response to life.

We require a fresh vocabulary to couch our experience. I have suggested in this essay that a phenomenological vocabulary rooted in a Celinean ethic, one such vocabulary, conception and methodology that can assist us.... ... ... Levinas concludes Totality and Infinity by writing that transcendence or goodness is produced as pluralism. "The work of justice and peace is not a political conception identified with the end of combats that cease for want of combatants, by the defeat of some and the victories of others, that is, with cemeteries or future universal empires. Peace must be my peace, in a relation that starts from an I and goes to the other, in desire and goodness, where the I both maintains itself and exists without egoism. It is conceived starting from an I assured of the convergence of morality and reality, that is, of an infinite time which through fecundity is its time." That time is, as it has always been--is now. Chronos!

Read,

Karl Rahner, Foundations of Catholic Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity,

And stop listening to Whacky “Evangelists”. We have something deep here, more then you can fathom, how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?

Question's

For whom do we take the time to write?

The Ek-stasy of the carnival:

Outside time, a transport. A time for play – not work or production, incalculable activity without ends, telos, death.

The economy of time is the first process to come under the control of capitalism. Marx, the Grundrisse.

Every one consumes.

“X” marks the spot.

A paradoxical time for the other in the primary process of desiring-production.

“Finally, we, the dead…”

… a striving, a-desiring, unconscious of death, ends, goals – a teleological suspension of the ethical.

That’s laughter: an uncontrollable seizure.

The sad clown. Kafka with his wicked sense of humour, rarely allowed himself to laugh aloud and he never spoke an excessive word.

K and the priest in the Trial. A guard stands at the door.

Death. The door is closing now…

all you had to do was ask the question.

Hamlet – a play, a tragedy: to be or not to be – that is the question.

Weighty questions of gravity, duty, existence.

The weight of the cross on Being, pressed down by the hand with an opposable thumb that holds the pen.

“If only I keep this little matter just lightly concealed with my hand…”

Man looked back towards his origins for the meaning of human existence and saw that way was blocked now – by an ape.

“Esteemed gentlemen of the academy! You have done me the honour of asking me to present a report to the academy concerning my past life as an ape. I regret to say that I find myself unable to comply with your request thus formulated…”

Build a burrow underground.