The Appearing of God by Jean-Yves Lacoste

The Appearing of God Reviews

• 
  Chungsoo Lee

  The title of the book, La phénoménalité de Dieu (2008), could well have been translated as how it sounds: The Phenomenality of God. Here, the issue is God beyond the phenomenality of being. But by the word "beyond" I am using here, Lacoste would not be as radical or severe as Levinas in the notion of transcendence associated with the word "beyond." Lacoste is closer, very close indeed, to Marion with the idea of "beyond"--the Levinas's word I am imposing here on both of them--than to Levinas. After all, both Marion and Lacoste are Catholic, Levinas an orthodox Jew. The former are concerned with the Incarnate Word that becomes flesh as the Revelation; whereas the latter must conceive "incarnation" (
  Otherwise than Being Or Beyond Essence 109, 111) in terms of the fulfillment of the Law, as ethics. This difference makes all the difference between them and between Christianity and Judaism.
  Before laying out his theological (and liturgical) philosophy in the last chapter (Chapter 9), Lacoste patiently labors through Kierkegaard (chapter 1), Husserl (chapters 2-3), and Heidegger (chapter 5), finding the methods and the openings in (and also delimiting) phenomenology in order to philosophize beyond philosophy (i.e., to do theology); and before doing his own philosophic theology (chapter 9), he does his own original phenomenology (chapters 6-8). Rather than starting with being (as in Heidegger), Lacoste starts with "giving," or "the gift." He says: "to be, is to be gift" (144). His phenomenology of gift (chapter 7 "Giving and Promising") is not Heidegger's, Derrida's, or Marion's. (The latter two are never mentioned, surprisingly.) It is his own, unique, and is something that needs to be meditated on with care and sustained attention, which cannot be done here.
  
  In Husserl, Lacoste finds a path toward transcendence that Husserl himself opened (in his 1905-6 lecture on the theory of knowledge, focusing on perception--some 7 years before publishing Ideas I) but did not tread any further. In Heidegger, he finds the honesty of (de)limiting his "original ontology" strictly to the question of being, especially after making the decisive turn to Aristotle away from Pauline eschatology early on during the Marburg period before publishing
  Being and Time in 1927. Lacoste's rather dry but rigorous analysis of "gift," "promise," and "the given" is, as already said, as original as it is profound. It offers an alternative to Husserl's and Heidegger's ontology, an alternative to reducing all questions to the matter of consciousness or of being. He is a reliable authority on Husserl and Heidegger, just like and on par with Jean-Luc Marion. There are many jams to be found in the text in which he offers penetrating insights into the two towering figures of phenomenology. But I find Lacoste too obsequious to Husserl and Heidegger. He labors carefully-too carefully perhaps-to develop his own analyses, as if not to upset them for deviating from them even by little. If Levinas (whom he mentions several times) launches attacks on them with bold assertions in hyperbole and subversions, Lacoste, on the contrary, ever so gently tread through the labyrinths of their texts until he finds the legitimate exits to venture into the realm of transcendence beyond phenomenology or ontology. It is as if Lacoste seeks the grand masters' permission to do theology, as if theology needed their blessings. Why such obsequiousness? Must theology seek permission from philosophy to move beyond it? Is philosophy still the queen science?
  
  For Lacoste, theology does and must go beyond philosophy without becoming irrational or non philosophical. It is commendable that he does not give up the scientific rigor of philosophy in doing theology. But he builds or tries to build theology based on and from philosophy. Is that possible? His own text shows that the transition from philosophy to theology is abrupt and inevitably so. This is evident at least in two areas: on the topic of love and that of the gift, the two topics that constitute the major themes in the book. Lacoste applies the first in his transition to theology; he unfortunately does not with respect to the second--at least in this book.
  
  As is widely known, there is no mention of love in
  Being and Time (BT), except in the footnote 5 of § 29 (
  Martin Heidegger: Sein Und Zeit (SZ) 139) where Heidegger quotes Pascal (from Pensées) who in turn quotes Augustine (from Contra Faustum). Augustine says with respect to all truths: "one does not enter into truth except through charity" (as quoted in 93). Pascal limits this saying only to the "divine things" and says: "... in speaking of human things it is said that we must know before we love... but in speaking of divine things the saints [including Augustine] say that we must love if we are to know ..." (as quoted in 92-93). (See also Marion's
  In the Self's Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, 123, where he also discusses the same passage of Pascal in relation to Heidegger.) Love appears in yet another place in BT: in the footnote 4 of § 40 (SZ 190) where Heidegger speaks of "faith, sin, love, and repentance" as being discussed in Christian theology "ontically and even (though within very narrow limits) ontologically" (BT in Macquarrie trans. 492). With exception to these two footnotes love is not mentioned in BT. The reason is clear: Befindlichkeit, the fundamental structure of dasein's existence appropriate for disclosure of being, as in anxiety, cannot be associated with particular modes of affection, such as love, hatred, faith, sin, etc. Nonetheless, Lacoste will exploit these two footnotes in order to advance his hypotheses: "Without making caritas the equivalent of Befindlichkeit we can suggest that caritas is the appropriate form of affection engaged specially with the things of God" (107). This is admittedly a daring thesis; because, as shall be shown, Heidegger sets up "an impenetrable boundary between philosophy and theology" (105). Nonetheless, Lacoste wants to use the notion of affection that Heidegger associates with the term Befindlichkeit in order to advance his theological hypothesis about knowing God through love. Lacoste wants to build theology on a philosophical footing, despite Heidegger's recalcitrant texts against such endeavor.
  
  There are formidable obstacles Lacoste must overcome. First, although "Befindlichkeit appears for the first time in BT as a translation of Augustine's affectio" ["affect"] (96; SZ § 29, 134), one cannot "infer caritas (love) from affectio" as no "dictionary will authorize [it]" (96). Second, "Befindlichkeit [says Heidegger] is a basic existential way in which Dasein is its 'there' (SZ 139). Love, which is "not an affection but a particular 'tonality' (Stimmung)" (97), does not reveal "truth" about Dasein's existence, as anxiety does. In Heidegger's obstinate focus on the question of being that requires understanding of Dasein's fundamental existence (existential), all these particular and ontic modes of existence (existentiel) gets ignored. As Lacoste recognizes, "[a]ffection is existential, charity belongs to particular existences; no interaction between them seems possible" (108). Third, the rigorous distinction between the ontic/existentiel and the ontological/existential (i.e., the ontological difference) has consequences for theology. Philosophy, according to Heidegger, cannot venture into theology, not because it is incapable but unwilling. Lacoste cites two texts of Heidegger in this vein:

  God is not really disclosed except by self-revelation, but philosophy lacks the necessary organ to listen to that revelation. Philosophy is gott-los [godless], which is not to say that there is no God, but that the matter is not clear, neither side has scored" (Gesamtausgabe (GA) 23:77 Geschichte der Philosophie von Thomas v. Aquin bis Kant (1926-27), as quoted by Lacoste on page 98)

  Another quote Lacoste cites comes from the footnote 56 to Heidegger's published lecture, "On the Essence of Ground" (1928), where Heidegger states:

  "the ontological interpretation of existence as being-in-the-world [in BT] draws neither negative nor positive conclusions on the possibility of being-for-God" (Wegmarken, GA 9:159, fn. 56 / Pathmarks, 371, fn. 62; as quoted on page 99).

  Heidegger goes on to say, however, which Lacoste omits surprisingly: "Presumably... the elucidation of transcendence first achieves an adequate concept of Dasein, and with respect to this being it can then be asked how things stand ontologically concerning the relation of Dasein to God" (
  Pathmarks 371, n.62). Here Heidegger leaves a sufficient room for analyzing the "ontological" mode of Dasein's existence in its relation to God, even though, he says, it could come only after having accomplished the fundamental ontology of dasein in its relation to being. Still it is puzzling why Lacoste does not capitalize on this point but insists instead (but correctly) that in Heidegger

  God has no place in the world, to be sure. Philosophy and world are mutually defining, philosophy as an enterprise without interest in God, the world as site of an experience that never encounters God on its path, i.e., existence (111).

  Heidegger's stubborn demarkation between philosophy and theology continues to the rest of his career, including in his 1943 lecture on Nietzsche where he writes: "Man can never be set in God's place because the essence of man never attains the essential realm of God" (
  Off the Beaten Track 190). Of course, the later Heidegger's references to the gods, the mortals, the earth, and the sky (the fourfold) remains thoroughly atheistic and thus could not be associated with God of philosophers, let alone with the biblical God. Lacoste summarizes, then: "Heidegger holds to the purism of the Marburg texts, the project of a philosophy 'uncontaminated by God,' with no room for a God who has nothing to contribute to an interest in being" (99). (Incidentally, countering Heidegger, Levinas offers (a theological?) ethics and says: "to hear a God not contaminated by Being is a human possibility no less important and no less precarious than to bring Being out of the oblivion in which it is said to have fallen in metaphysics and in onto-theology" (
  Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, xlii). For Heidegger theology belongs not to one of the regional ontologies subsumed under the "original" or "fundamental ontology" (as in Husserl) but rather to a realm of revelation, for which, as already cited, "philosophy lacks the necessary organ to listen [to it]" (GA 23:77). Philosophy does not oppose theology (Nietzsche) or sublates it to itself (Hegel) but simply is uninterested in it, because " attention to God stands in the way of attention to being" (102). Thus, Lacoste writes: "one of the most ambitious projects in the history of philosophy [BT] is conditioned by a reductive self-limitation" (104) that excludes by fiat the question of God and many other pertinent topics such as art, to name only one.
  
  [To continue below in "Comments" section.]