Ian Alexander Moore: Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement, SUNY Press, 2019

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SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
Ian Alexander Moore
SUNY Press
2019
Hardback $95.00
352

Michael N. Forster, Kristin Gjesdal (Eds.): The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics, Cambridge University Press, 2019

The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics Book Cover The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics
Cambridge Companions to Philosophy
Michael N. Forster, Kristin Gjesdal (Eds.)
Cambridge University Press
2019
Paperback £ 22.99
432

Stefan Orth, Peter Reifenberg (Hrsg.): Hermeneutik der Anerkennung: Philosophische und theologische Anknüpfungen an Paul Ricœur, Karl Alber Verlag, 2018

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Stefan Orth, Peter Reifenberg (Hrsg.)
Karl Alber Verlag
2018
Paperback 29,00 €
192

Jean-Yves Lacoste: The Appearing of God, Oxford University Press, 2018

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Jean-Yves Lacoste. Translated by Oliver O'Donovan
Oxford University Press
2018
Hardback £50.00
224

Brian A. Butcher: Liturgical Theology after Schmemann: An Orthodox Reading of Paul Ricoeur, Fordham University Press, 2018

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Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought
Brian A. Butcher. Foreword by Andrew Louth
Fordham University Press
2018
Paperback $45.00
336

Kate Kirkpatrick: Sartre on Sin: Between Being and Nothingness

Sartre on Sin: Between Being and Nothingness Book Cover Sartre on Sin: Between Being and Nothingness
Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs
Kate Kirkpatrick
Oxford University Press
2017
Hardcover £65.00
288

Reviewed by: Joeri Schrijvers (Independent Scholar)

Kate Kirkpatrick’s Sartre on Sin broaches a difficult topic; the relation between Sartre and theology. It does so, more specifically, through one of theology’s most difficult topics, the question of sin. The volume consists of an introduction and three main parts. Kirkpatrick’s work is informative and makes for a good ‘dossier’ for anyone who wants to read up on Sartre’s stance toward theology. Having not read Sartre in a long while and unaware of any links of his theoretical links with theology, I found helpful to read Kirkpatrick’s Sartre and Theology at the same time.[i]

Sartre was aware that a certain type of God was dead and the second part of the book demonstrates that he was informed when dismissing that concept of God. It is Kirkpatrick’s merit to show how theological debates informed Sartre’s education in philosophy and literature. Furthermore, she demonstrates how these debates are echoed in the works of Racine, Voltaire and Victor Hugo.

The book shows “a level of theological sophistication that is underexplored in Sartre scholarship” (2017a: 17). Kirkpatrick extrapolates certain themes within Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and then shows how these themes make for a “realized eschatology of damnation” (2017a:181) by focusing on a number of ‘unrealizables’, including inadequate knowledge of the self, others and the world. Kirkpatrick almost exclusively focuses on what she calls a pessimistic reading of Sartre—one of the reasons why her reading focusses mainly on Being and Nothingness.

Kirkpatrick concludes that Sartre takes from Jansenist pessimism and, later in his life, from Kierkegaardian despair, the figure of a “tragic refusal” (2017a: 83). For Calvinism and Jansenism, the nothingness of nature is such that humanity qua being is dependent upon God (as a creator or maybe even in a creatio continua). For Sartre, “the human exists in a tensive state between being and nothingness” (2017a:60). However, “while there exists a nothingness of nature and (arguably) of sin, there is no nothing of grace” (ibid.). Sartre accepts the disease, one might say, but “rejects [the] cure” (2017a: 61). He refuses the grace that cures the pains of the tension between being and nothingness – an assessment Kirkpatrick shares with Gabriel Marcel (2017b: 157). Kirkpatrick finds in Sartre not a determinism of grace (as Jansenists and Calvinists would have it) but a “determinism of nothingness” (2017a: 162). In other words, our endeavors are bound to fail and will lead to nothing whether we seek knowledge of the self or of others. Theologically, Sartre shares with Pelagius the view that the human being is able to seek transcendence but, unlike Pelagius, nothingness is that into which we try and transcend. Whereas, for Pelagius, the perfectibility of human beings unfolds through their own doing, for Sartre, this freedom is now directionless. Beings can do whatever they want, whenever they want though not with whomever they want (Sartre’s limit on freedom is determined by others and the world).

One of the best parts of Kirkpatrick’s book concerns her insistence that philosophy should be lived. It is through this lens that she reads The Transcendence of the Ego. Here, Sartre lays bare the gap between the cogito and reflective consciousness arguing that the first is constituted by, as much as it would be constitutive of, the self, others and world. If the transcendental ego itself is constituted (rather than constituting) then it seems no more than a side-effect of being-in-the-world. Consequently, one can see in Sartre a further decentering of Descartes’ cogito. Whereas Cartesians tell us that this cogito can only be certain of itself when it thinks and as long as it thinks, theologians of the seventeenth century undermine this certainty by insisting on the nihilism of sin (cf. 2017a: 59, ‘he did not discover that he was but rather he was lacking’). For Sartre, between being (‘in itself’) and reflective consciousness (‘for itself’) a cleavage exists that cannot be bridged. This gap is a nothingness that creeps into being (ontologically), into what we can know (epistemologically) and into what we can do with and for others (ethically). Consequently, this gap between reflective consciousness and the ego is a perpetual ‘filling-in-the-blank’—human being becomes the being “by which nothingness arrives in the world” (BN 47). However, a human being knows such a négatité—the absence at the heart of being—in and through anxiety, which reveals the freedom for human beings “to become other than we are” (2017b: 95). Anxiety and freedom thus reveal a non-being and an indetermination of the self. Anxiety is a fear and trembling before the fact that things can always be different than they presently are. However, according to Sartre, we flee from this anxiety.

Kirkpatrick recalls that this nothingness (or lack of being) is a nothingness of sin, a nothingness stripped of God and grace. There’s no overcoming this lack (2017a: 102/BN 67). In many respects Kirkpatrick follows Judith Wolfe’s analysis in Heidegger’s Eschatology, where she describes Being and Time as an ‘eschatology without eschaton’. However, whereas Heidegger’s eschatology was a bit utopist, Sartre’s tends towards dystopia. Kirkpatrick concludes that “to be free is to be between being and nothingness” (2017a:102). Intriguingly, Descartes still claims, on basis of the Augustinian-Bérullian tradition that Kirkpatrick traces, that humans are ‘between God and nothingness’ (2017b: 54).

Since, for Sartre, human being is between facticity and transcendence, it is the conclusion that Kirkpatrick does not draw that seems to me to be more important. Whereas, in classical theology, sin cannot be conceived as an entity in the sense that it has no real being and, therefore, must be understood in terms of its relation to grace, its presence (in the world and in being) cannot be looked at otherwise than as the disruption of the balance between sin and faith. Where there is sin, grace is not. If there is grace, there is no sin. In Kierkegaard, sin shows itself in a double way: first, in not wanting to be oneself; secondly, in too much wanting to be oneself (elucidated in pride). For Kierkegaard, faith navigates this tension by allowing for a self that wants its self just as God wants this self (Cf. 2017a: 81-87). However, if Sartre can be conceived as a secular translation of theology’s account of sin (cf. 2017a: 113, quoting Robert Solomon), and if sin is a thoroughly relational term, then it in the (dis)order and unbalance of facticity and transcendence that we need to look.

For Sartre, faith cannot navigate the tension between facticity and transcendence. On the one hand, there is the flight from freedom through bad faith. On the other hand, because of freedom, there is transcendence towards the world. Sartre, Kirkpatrick notes, mentions that there is a “valid coordination” (BN 79) between these two aspects. Yet such a coordination is of a peculiar kind, and it is one that can never be ascertained and assured by a certain idea of God and theology. Kirkpatrick argues that, because Sartre opts for an autonomous subject (2017a:177-81), it must be an account of sin (an absence of a relation with God). However, it seems that, for Sartre, existence is far from non-relational; it is just that, because of its being stripped from grace—a secular translation of sin—a just and faithful way of coordinating facticity and transcendence is never a (phenomenological) given. Where Kirkpatrick sees Sartre’s subject as a conscious turning away from relation(s) and veering towards an autonomous monad—a ‘walled city’ (2017a: 222)—and for this reason she discerns a phenomenology of sin, I think something else is going on: not the absence of relation, but the perpetual missing out on each other, the failing of relationality in its very act.

Kirkpatrick does not explore this coordination between facticity and transcendence in Sartre. The only ‘valid’ coordination, for her, seems to be theological in nature. Yet what Sartre wanted to point to was precisely the absence and the lack of the assurance that theology could provide. It is not that there is no coordination ‘between being and nothingness’, it is that no one knows just how to balance these coordinates. Whereas theology, in a sense, always brings the tension to a halt, Sartre wanted to keep his eyes on the very existence and presence of this conflict. Sartre’s trouble with theology, then, was perhaps not so much with sin, but rather with grace and how theology conceives it as the privatio peccatum—the end of sin and the end of tension.

How are the gaps between the ego and reflective consciousness and between transcendence and facticity lived? Kirkpatrick’s fifth chapter explores this gap on an epistemological and anthropological level. The self is but a presence to itself (2017a: 118). On the one hand, the self is a longing for the identity of an en-soi (which can simply be what it is). On the other hand, it is a consciousness of the perpetual escape of such an identity (we are conscious of the fact that we always are in relation towards what we are not). For this reason, the self exists as its own non-coincidence (it is what it is not, perpetually). Sartre writes that the self posits this identity as a unity and as a “synthesis of multiplicity” (BN 184). In short, the self believes that there is a recognizable ego underlying its diverse experiences. The self reaches for identity but knows that it cannot obtain one.

Kirkpatrick points out that this non-coinciding relationship with oneself is the source of “suffering”, that is, an understanding of oneself as a contingent and unjustifiable factum (2017a: 121-22). This epistemology gives way to ontology. For Sartre, “lack is […] an element of the real. But it is important that this lack is not lived neutrally, as a brute fact among brute facts. Rather, [it] is an experience of failure (échec), of missing the mark” (2017a: 128). In other words, the self has to be this lack-of-being while being-in-the-world-with-others. However, in my opinion, the world and others make for more obvious adversaries than ‘being’ or ‘consciousness’. This problematizes Kirkpatrick’s interpretation, a problem hinted at when she considers the worumwillen of the self in Sartre. The self suffers from not having a self. As Sartre claims, “the self haunts the heart of the for-itself as that for which the for-itself is” (BN 117-8). Consciousness, Kirkpatrick concludes, is haunted by the desire “to be meaningful” (2017a: 129). With such meaningfulness, I suggest, the self comes across something that is not of its own making, something present in the world and in others that, in more than one sense, is granted and given to the self (with a special kind of facticity, one that disrupts Sartre’s neat distinction between the for-itself and the in-itself).

The sixth chapter turns on the question of being-with-others. Kirkpatrick explains that “while the distance between consciousness and the ego arises on account of time, the distance between consciousness and the other arises on account of space: Sartre attributes the separation of consciousness to the separation of bodies (BN 255)” (2017a: 139). Elaborating, she claims that “when alone, I can see the fissure between the self-knowing (consciousness) and the self-known (intentional object of consciousness)” (2017a: 143/2017b: 91). As a result of this fissure, we can know something pertaining to the world but the instance of knowing remains in the dark about itself. Kirkpatrick argues that “the self-known is always indeterminate, because it is always subject to the freedom of others” (2017a: 143). The intentional object of the other leaves me and my being, in a way, at the mercy of the other. Consequently, the intentional object of consciousness is something that I cannot master—“the other reveals something I cannot learn on my own, which is how I really am” (2017a: 153.

It is in this context that Sartre discusses the Book of Genesis and the concepts of shame and nakedness. The shame we feel before the other is described as an “original fall” (BN 312). Karsten Harries notes the Christian overtones in Sartre’s work and queries whether Sartre’s philosophy is not excessively burdened by an uncritically assumed Christian inheritance (Cf. 2017a: 153). The questions that would need to be posed are whether Sartre’s references make for an inheritance (as something acknowledged) and in what sense such an inheritance can be considered to be a burden. Kirkpatrick does not address such questions. She does claim, however, that with guilt, and after God’s departing, “there is no true being to be neglected” (ibid.). For Kirkpatrick, the body becomes “both warrior and warzone in the fight for my identity[;] it is both active agent and passive site. [I]n the face of objectification, one can either give in (in bad faith) or fight back” (2017a: 155 and 159). This tension and conflict is one between identifying and being identified, between defining as and being defined as.

The problem is that Kirkpatrick does not consider the fact that the other exists in a perceptual relationship with the subject. Furthermore, as much as others reveal themselves to me as the image I have of them, they have but an image of me. One might legitimately wonder whether this presence-to-self (as it concerns the other) might not limit intersubjective objectification. After all, there is little reason to assume that if the other knows that he or she is incapable of obtaining a definitive self, he or she can define me once and for all. If the presence-to-self needs to be extrapolated to the consciousness of the other, then perhaps what is going on here is not so much a battle and a war but a perpetual ‘missing out’ on each other, an overreaching that comes with suffering and conflict.

Chapter seven focuses on Sartre’s account of freedom as “anti-theodicy” (2017a: 13). Contra Leibniz, Sartre argues that freedom is not sufficient reason to explain the presence of evil in the world. In this context, Kirkpatrick argues that Sartre offers no proper account of freedom. A case can, of course, be made that Sartre did not insist on the notion of responsibility until Existentialism is a Humanism. Kirkpatrick is clear, however, that she does adopt an “optimistic reading” (2017a: 178) of Sartre, one that would focus on responsibility, authenticity and salvation through art. The reasons for adopting a pessimistic reading are unexplained, but it is clear that Sartre’s footnotes on salvation through art and ethics do not convince her (2017a: 127 and 160).

Kirkpatrick admits that Sartre’s discussions regarding the limits of freedom as they concern the other might “mitigate the charges of radical voluntarism” (2017a: 177). However, she goes on to claim that “the other limits my freedom only insofar…as I let her” (ibid.). Kirkpatrick concludes, in ways similar to Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, that Sartre’s ‘determinism of nothingness’ resembles Calvinist predestination but she insists that such determinism is not arbitrary (like grace in Protestantism) but egalitarian—we all have an equal share in this tragic existence and all of us are ‘condemned to freedom’. That said, Kirkpatrick acknowledges that this account of tragedy is but one component of Sartre’s ontology of freedom. The stress on tragedy “[misses] an important component: namely that it is an account of refusal, an anti-theodicy” (2017a: 190). The utmost freedom is “to refuse God and the good” (ibid.). We refuse God because God can put an end to freedom and so submit to the tyranny of freedom and its concomitant ‘determinism’.

That Sartre was acutely aware of the death of God is evident from his review of Georges Bataille’s Inner Experience with which the fourth part of Kirkpatrick’s monograph begins. Here, Sartre speaks of a mute God that remains as a corpse (Cf. 2017a: 201). Kirkpatrick focuses on Sartre’s view of love in a “loveless” world where relationality is but a ruse. The aim is to demonstrate how Sartre “might […] inform contemporary hamartiology, arguing that […] theological categories […] cannot be known merely conceptually, but must be acknowledged personally” (ibid.). This happens, Kirkpatrick concludes, in a situation of “original optimism [entailed by] the Christian doctrine of sin” (ibid.).

In Augustine, sin is but a “disordered love” (2017a: 203), a love that, to resort to Kierkegaard, focuses too much or too little on the self. The ‘proper’ love of self, others and world, in theology, is of course ordered by God. For Sartre, love promises more than it can actually offer, even when the other whom I love might for a while “save my facticity” (BN 392/2017a: 207) and justify my existence. Love, then is “deceptive” (2017a: 207) and entails a self-love that demands of the other a complete surrender or objectification—Sartre’s thought that love easily gives way to sadism and masochism is well-known. Kirkpatrick reminds us that “all love is ultimately reducible to amour-propre” (2017a: 205). We should in effect consider “how theological Sartre’s ‘unrealizables’ are” (2017a: 204). What Sartre offers is more than just a suspicion about theology—e.g. unmasking some aspect of neighborly love as one more instance of self-love—he shows us a loveless world that is abandoned by God (2017a: 209).

According to Kirkpatrick, if the Jansenists temptation was to despair over grace, the Sartrean temptation is, in despair over sin, to refuse (2017a: 212). For classical theology, sin and evil are to be understood on a scale, admitting of degrees, and are always balanced within the broader horizon of God and goodness. For Sartre, the presence of evil negates the idea of God. Kirkpatrick’s concludes that Sartre “explicitly inverts the imago Dei, embracing instead the fallen human desire to be sicut Deus”. Furthermore, “his psychological description of unrealizables can be read as affective consequences of God’s absence” (2017a: 211). However, one might question whether this conclusion is a matter of theology at all. After all, Sartre may well be describing the consequences of God’s death without drawing any theological conclusions. One could claim that this desire to be ‘like God’ is, for Sartre, phenomenological commonsense. What matters for theology is precisely Sartre’s insistence on the failure of love and the concomitant need to think of God otherwise than the assurance that our relationships of love will succeed. The death of God, for Sartre as for theologians, ought to mean that what has died is precisely the God that serves to remedy, and is instrumental to, our own failures.

Kirkpatrick ends with an interesting rapprochement between phenomenology and theology. For a philosopher who does not acknowledge the least possibility of ‘salvation in Christ’ (2017a: 2014), what function does theology serve? According to Kirkpatrick, theologians either believe that it is through revelation that we know what sin is or they believe that it is sin that puts us on the path to salvation. For those that believe the latter, lived experience with sin might shed light on revelation. A particular understanding of phenomenology will aid theology here. Far from presenting a survey of inner experiences, phenomenology tends to interpret our experience in the world. In this regard, recognition serves as a criterion of correctness for description—if no one really knew what Heidegger meant when writing on angst, for instance, it is unlikely that Sein und Zeit would have been such a success (Cf. 2017a: 217). Theology seems to allude to such a criterion when it speaks of the difference between ‘knowledge’ and ‘acknowledging’—I might know everything there is to know about sin in classical theology, for instance, without ever acknowledging any sins of my own (Cf. 2017a: 220). It is for this reason that Kirkpatrick focuses on Sartre’s literary legacy. She claims that his “use of narrative […] was undergirded by a conviction that […] precision concerning individuals can only [occur] when individuals are considered in […] their situated, lived experiences” (2017a: 219). Kirkpatrick argues that Sartre’s notion of ‘the unrealizable’ can be interpreted within the context of this relationship between knowledge and acknowledgement (2017a: 220-221).

For Kirkpatrick, “to refuse anything that comes ‘from without’ (BN 463) is to refuse the gaze of love” (2017a: 221). Although not everything that comes ‘from without’ should be confused with a gaze of love, it is remarkable that Sartre should not consider the fact that the other’s point of view might be at least as valid as our own. Kirkpatrick neglects the fact that this immunization against otherness, this attempt at a ‘walled city’, is itself a ‘useless passion’. What matters is that, for Sartre, there is a multiplicity of others. It is not the case that one is either a free, autonomous subject or ‘condemned’ by the other. Amidst a multitude of viewpoints, one should still try to assert oneself in the world. For Sartre, the point is that no one can step outside of their situation, a situation that always concerns a “multiplicity of consciences”. This “antinomian character” of the totality of beings-in-the-world is “irreducible” and obeys no laws that would oversee it. Consequently, it is impossible to “take a point of view on this totality, that is to say, to consider it from the outside”.[ii] I am always and already engaged, immersed and absorbed by the world and being-with-others. Furthermore, there is no ‘God’s eye point of view’ of this being-with-others.

Kirkpatrick’s sympathizes with Beauvoir, who is “closer to the Christian position [where the] self is invited to a life of intersubjective co-creativity. It is an invitation to know that we are both constituted by and constitutive of the others in our lives, and to acknowledge our co-constitution in humility, love and mercy” (2017a: 222 and 224). It is toward such love and mercy that Kirkpatrick gestures in the final chapter of her book. She asserts that it is theology that is able to offer us a “rightly ordered self” (2017a: 225). This theology is developed through two provocations: the first is that Sartre is right in stating that optimism, considering the state of the world, is irrational and that optimism is justified only if God exists; the second extends her interpretation of Sartre as a Westphalian ‘master of suspicion’—an “atheism ‘for edification’” (2017a: 212)—by questioning how love is to be set in order. For Kirkpatrick, one must first “recognize—and acknowledge—our own failures in love” (2017a: 234). Kierkegaardian ‘edification’ turns out to be “self-examination” (2017a: 235). She argues for a position between néantisme (nothing is any good) and Pelagianism (an overconfident claim toward self-assertion). Identification with facticity entails a passivity that would reject all responsibility while identification with transcendence entails an oversight of our thrownness in determinate situations with determinate others. Humility and love require both activity and passivity: a “personal transformation [which] takes into account the situatedness of our convictions and the importance of our conduct in relation to them” (2017a: 238). Such an autonomy from within heteronomy warrants the optimism that “failures don’t have the last word” (2017a: 241). Kirkpatrick’s hope is that the reality of sin might give way to an intellectual climate that “hold[s] open the possibility of taking religious points of view seriously” (2017a: 233). However, Kirkpatrick stops short of dealing with those questions that attracted me to this book in the first place, such as, “if we find recognizable descendants of […] sin in some of the twentieth century’s most prominent philosophers: why?” (2017a: 233, her italics).

Kirkpatrick is to be commended for the conversation she establishes between philosophy and theology. She makes a strong case for interpreting Sartre as ‘phenomenologist of fallenness’. One learns in her other book that the great theologians that responded to Sartre—Barth, Tillich, Wojtyla and Yannaras—agree upon one thing: that Sartre’s account of self-alienation stands in clear opposition to the Christian stress on relationality (Cf. 2017b: 136, 142, 173 and 181). Yet the trouble for theology, then and now, is that this does not seem entirely correct and its praise for relationality is premature. If Sartre was describing the failure of relationality in the very act of relating to self, others and world, then one is left wondering, whether and how theology could respond to such a situation.


[i] Kate Kirkpatrick, Sartre and Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017b). The work under review will be referred to in the text as (2017a). References to Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (London: Routledge: 2003), the editions which Kirkpatrick uses, will be given in the text.

[ii] Sartre, L’être et le néant, p. 349.

Richard Schaeffler: Phänomenologie der Religion: Grundzüge ihrer Fragestellungen, Alber Verlag, 2018

Phänomenologie der Religion: Grundzüge ihrer Fragestellungen Book Cover Phänomenologie der Religion: Grundzüge ihrer Fragestellungen
Richard Schaeffler
Alber Verlag
2018
Paperback 34,00 €
216

B. Keith Putt (Ed.): The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings, Indiana University Press, 2017

The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings Book Cover The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings
B. Keith Putt (Ed.)
Indiana University Press
2017
Hardback $100.00
504

Jean-Luc Marion, Dan Arbib: The Rigor of Things, Fordham University Press, 2017

The Rigor of Things: Conversations with Dan Arbib Book Cover The Rigor of Things: Conversations with Dan Arbib
Jean-Luc Marion, Dan Arbib. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner, Foreword by David Tracy
Fordham University Press
2017
Paperback $32.00

Emmanuel Falque: Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology

Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology Book Cover Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology
Perspectives in Continental Philosophy
Emmanuel Falque, Translated by Reuben Shank, Introduction by Matthew Farley
Fordham University Press
2016
Paperback $28.00
216

Reviewed by: Owen Earnshaw (Durham University)

This remarkable book deals with the border between philosophy and theology and asks a question that Stephen Mulhall (2001) also poses at the end of his book Inheritance and Originality and leaves unanswered, namely, “[C]an philosophy acknowledge religion and still have faith in itself?” Falque argues very much in the affirmative and a repeated slogan of the text is “the more we theologize, the better we philosophise”, that is, philosophy finds its rightful place when it engages with theology and then returns to its own land of ‘the human per se’. In this book Falque is dealing mainly with the theological ‘turn’ in French phenomenology and what we are to make of it, but it will be of interest in this review to see if his arguments hold for the wider terrain of philosophy.

He starts out reviewing hermeneutics and its relation to phenomenology and examines how Ricoeur and Levinas both allow their confessional faith to help determine their hermeneutic approach; Protestant faith’s reliance on scripture alone for Ricoeur and Judaism’s trace of God in the letter of scripture for Levinas. In contrast to these approaches Falque puts forward his own Catholic hermeneutic of the body and the voice, which highlights that in the liturgy the Word of God nourishes the faithful both in the aspect of Scripture and in the Eucharist. This leads to the idea that phenomenology should engage with lived experience and the Catholic hermeneutic that he has expounded allows us to do this by making us aware of the body that speaks (the original form of the text) and should allow us to appropriate the text or be appropriated by the text in a bodily way that he calls ‘intercorporeality’. He then moves on to an analysis of what faith is and states that there is a common human faith in the reality of the world that he calls ‘philosophical faith’ that we attempt to suspend in Descartes method of doubt or in the phenomenological reduction and argues that confessional faith must be a transformation of this faith rather than a further step on from this faith. This is based on the theological foundation that God became man to transform humanity not to supercede it. Confessional faith is a transformation of the natural trust in the world all humanity shares. This leads on to the idea that philosophers who have taken the decision to believe need to produce not so much a philosophy of religion but rather a philosophy of religious experience as he claims Kierkegaard, Edith Stein and Simone Weil all worked on. This involves elucidating the reasons from within the faith that led to their decision ‘while not renouncing philosophy, conceive its activity quite otherwise’ (Falque 2016: 104). Falque then carries out such a philosophical investigation by looking at the choice of believing and concludes that it involves community, that I believe through a ‘we’. The next part looks at the relation between Theology and Philosophy and the final section is called ‘finally theology’ and reiterates Aquinas’ phrase that ‘philosophy is the servant of theology’. At this point I will quote Falque to make his position clear:

Finitude, or the human per se…are indeed starting points for philosophy and under the jurisdiction of the philosopher. But only as this finitude is then rejoined and transformed in the recited and assumed act of the Resurrection, is it made known that we were actually within the realm of true humanity and thus of philosophy-not of divinity concealed under the cover of humanity –that is, theology…This position can be summarized as the principle of ‘the philosopher before all else’ which should be adopted today not against theology but, on the contrary, for it, in order to dwell otherwise and situated within it. (Falque 2016: 148-149)

In what follows I shall look at Falque’s contestation that philosophy can be transformed by a confessional faith and still remain philosophy.

‘First live then philosophize’

The first point we shall look at is how a confessional faith can impact on the work of a philosopher. Mulhall (1994) in Faith and Reason gives a Wittgensteinian take on the limits of philosophy’s foraging into the territory of theology and I shall quote it at length in order to contrast it with Falque’s position:

Is there really room here for an exercise of reason that is not an employment of it on one side or another of the existential choice with which Christianity faces us?

Only if the following distinction can be made and observed: the distinction between a description and a defence of (or an attack upon) a form of life. For what can then follow is a distribution of duties, a division of intellectual labour. On this understanding, philosophy can spell out the features of the forms of life that face one another across the divide between religious and other modes of existence, and bring us to see how each will inevitably appear to the other…But it neither can, nor should, attempt to engage in those arguments with, let alone to make that choice for, its readers.  The latter is always an error; the former is the business of edification, engagement, substantive discussion. It is, of course, neither an intellectually nor an ethically illegitimate enterprise – it is a perfectly valid use to which reason might be put, and forms a central part of any individual’s life; but it is not a philosophical use of reason, and it should form no part of a philosopher’s life qua philosopher. A philosopher should never forget that she is a human being, but not everything that a human being may do should be done in philosophy’s name. As Climacus might say, philosophy is not an edifying business. (Mulhall 1994: 76-77)

What seems to be missing here, and what Falque is very much aware of is that philosophy is never done in a vacuum. To take a hermeneutic approach for a moment, there is always, as Heidegger (1962) states, a fore-concept before the analysis begins and this is then where the enquiry starts from. If this is the case then the most intellectually honest way of proceeding is to make this fore-conception transparent. And so if you are philosophizing from the standpoint of someone with a confessional faith it is best if this faith is given an airing at the start to make the reader aware of the type of human life you envision and are trying to elucidate. Falque makes this point by looking at the Protestant hermeneutics of Ricoeur and the Judaic hermeneutics of Levinas before positing his own Catholic hermeneutic and what this allows us to see is how a confessional faith can help to make salient certain aspects of the philosophical enterprise that may be obscured from a primarily secular starting point. The life a person leads undoubtedly permeates their philosophy and although philosophy should be solely based on reason, the experiential ‘content’ given through a lived faith and the motivation, in terms of the mission of the philosopher will transform the subject matter and methodologies employed.  This does not mean the resulting philosophy will necessarily be edificatory, but rather certain evidence, premises, topics and intuitions will have salience above others in the work of a philosopher with a confessional faith and this will not invalidate the philosophy by itself, but a self-aware philosopher would do well to make transparent how her faith informs her practice.

‘The more we theologize, the better we philosophise’

To make clear how a faith can inform a philosophical practice I would like to set out one particular practice in philosophy that is evident in philosophers such as Cavell, Mulhall, Wittgenstein and arguably Falque and argue that it is a legitimate philosophical practice. This practice might be called ‘transfiguring the ordinary’ and I will present a version of it developed elsewhere (Earnshaw 2011). A quote from Simone Weil sums up a way of understanding the interconnection of philosophy, ethics and aesthetics focused on the everyday:

The beautiful: that which we do not want to change. The good: not to want to change it, in fact (non-intervention). The true: not to want to change it in one’s mind (by means of illusion).  The good — not to want to change what? My place, my importance in the world, limited by my body and by the existence of other souls, my equals (Weil 2004: 38).

The experience of beauty is of something that strikes us in such a way that we do not want to change it; the apprehension of it as beautiful just is seeing the object of our attention as perfect just as it is. Such an experience is articulated in McCarthy’s book The Road:

He remembered waking once on such a night to the clatter of crabs in the pan where he’d left steakbones from the night before. Faint coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind. Lying under such a myriad of stars. The seas black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different (McCarthy 2007: 234).

Here the character describes an experience through which he is willing to affirm the whole world as it is. In such experiences we are able to ‘see’ the world as ‘good’, as God is said to have done in Genesis. These experiences allow us to affirm that there is a value to life and living, and, indeed, we are able to affirm the value of our own existence because it is only due to the fact that we exist that this consummation experience (of perceiving the goodness of the world) is possible.

So what is it about ourselves that leads us to want to escape the real and live in fantasy? One line of thought (developed by Cavell in The Claim of Reason (1979)) is that we become entangled in philosophical problems (in the widest sense) because of the tendency for humans to want to overcome what they see as the limitations of finitude. This is one way of understanding what Weil is responding to in the quote above when she talks about the true as not wanting to change the world by means of illusion. The work of philosophy can then be understood as getting the person to see that the facts about our lives that can seem like obstacles or limitations should instead be perceived as limits to our lives. Their overcoming does not make any sense as they are the conditions for the possibility of the intelligibility of the world and other people. Scepticism can be seen as a desire to know the world in a more secure way than through our human faculties, as if there were a means of arriving at a more direct access to the world than through our everyday procedures for finding things out and to other people than through the means provided by language. Ordinary language philosophy tackles scepticism by reminding us of ‘what we say when’ in order to bring the conditions for knowledge of the world and others to the fore. However, this can seem like a very deflationary account of what is possible for philosophy.  Wittgenstein sums this feeling up when he says:

Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble) (Wittgenstein 1963: §118).

If ‘the destruction of anything interesting’ is all this methodology of philosophy can achieve, why should it claim any of our attention? Wittgenstein’s answer is that ‘the aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity’ (Wittgenstein 1963: §129). The disappointment we feel at the humble task of philosophy is a hankering after the facility and seeming profundity found in fantasy. In order for us to see ‘the aspect of things most important for us’ it is necessary to find ways of exalting in the ordinary and recovering the hidden beauty therein.

One way of tackling this problem of familiarity can be found in art, but also in religion. In Catholicism, the sacraments involve taking some everyday activity and relating it to the divine. For instance, in the sacrament of Communion the value of sharing a meal is celebrated with all the related values of family and friendship. In Confession the process of repairing a relationship is connected with our relation to the divine. In all religions the life of the community is understood as bound up with the eternal. In this way everyday practices are transfigured and thereby their value as part of a life is re-presented (reflected back to the community) in a new light and reaffirmed. This reaffirming of the everyday is found in Wittgenstein’s philosophy where we are invited to pay careful attention to our life with words and how this is inextricably bound up with our form of life (thereby taking our anxieties about language and showing how they express anxieties about our lives). Wittgenstein’s writings focus our attention on the conditions of the human relationship to the world and others, and help us to recognise that the wish for depth in our understanding of things is inherently empty. Such a recognition is one way in which we can overcome artificial craving to go beyond the everyday. The words of this philosopher allow the familiar to become strange and enticing and thereby reignite our interest in the ordinary. Through the ordering of his words the ordinary is transfigured and our poor substitute fantasies can be left behind for a time.

The idea that ‘transfiguring the ordinary’ is a respectable aim of philosophy is given backing in the writings of Victor Shklovsky who takes the methodology of art as involving what he calls an ‘enstrangement’ of objects and forms of life. I will quote at length from Shklovsky’s book and then comment briefly afterwards:

If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual, it also becomes automatic. So eventually all of our skills and experiences function unconsciously – automatically. If someone were to compare the sensation of holding a pen in his hand or speaking a foreign tongue for the first time with the sensation of performing this same operation for the ten thousandth time, then he would no doubt agree with us. It is this process of automatization that explains the laws of our prose speech with its fragmentary phrases and half-articulated words…If the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it’s as if this life had never been.

And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By ‘enstranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious. (Shklovsky 1991: 5-6).

It is by creating a space in our workaday activity (by making the task ‘harder’ than it might normally be) that can release us from ‘enslavement’ to habitual practices. This disruption enables us to carry out projects in ways that interweave spontaneity into the rhythm of the task we are engaged in. This practice in philosophy of trying to ‘transfigure the ordinary’ for the reader can be seen as a practice adopted from a perspective of a confessional faith without overstepping the boundaries of the ‘human per se’. I believe this is what Falque is aiming towards and if it seems an important practice is worth defending.

Conclusion: ‘I am first of all a philosopher and want to remain one’

Mixing theology and philosophy can be seen as a path inherent with dangers that may mean that others convict you of not doing philosophy at all. Crossing the Rubicon is an important book in that Falque attempts to cross the stream between these two disciplines to eventually return and know philosophy better.  It would seem his crossing is successful and that he does remain a philosopher in the end and I have tried to outline the practice within philosophy that he follows that has confessional roots but conforms to the boundaries of philosophy. The book is a testament to being honest about your motivations and trying to find a way to carry on in a discipline bound by the ‘human per se’ while being inspired by the divine and highlights an overwhelming need in philosophy for the recognition and the acknowledgement of the personal as an necessary partner of the rational.

References

Cavell, S. 1979. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Earnshaw, O. 2011. Recovering the Voice of Insanity: A Phenomenology of Delusions. (Doctoral dissertation). Available at: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3225/

Falque, E. 2016. Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology. trans. R. Shank. New York: Fordham University Press.

Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time. trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson.  Oxford: Blackwell.

McCarthy, C. 2007. The Road. London: Pan Mcmillan Ltd.

Mulhall, S. 1994. Faith and Reason. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.

Mulhall, S. 2001. Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard. Oxford: OUP.

Shklovsky, V. 1991. Theory of Prose. trans. B. Sher. London: Dalkey Archive Press.

Weil, S. 2004. The Notebooks of Simone Weil. trans. A. Wills. London: Routledge.

Wittgenstein, L. 1963. Philosophical Investigations. trans. G.E.M. Anscombe.  Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.