God and Phenomenology: Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste

By Joeri Schrijvers

God and Phenomenology: Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste provides a starting point for scholars who seek to familiarize themselves with the work of this French phenomenologist and theologian. Thirteen international scholars comment on Lacoste's work. In conclusion the volume offers an unpublished essay by Lacoste on the topic of eschatology.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste by Joeri Schrijvers and Martin Koci

Part I Critiques

1. "'Children of the World': A Note on Jean-Yves Lacoste," by Kevin Hart
2. "Lacoste on Appearing and Reduction," by Steven DeLay
3. "Reduction Without Appearance: The Non-Phenomenality of God," by Robert C. Reed
4. "Only Metaphysics Sustains Phenomenology," by John Milbank

Part II Commentaries

5. "Canonical Texts," by Oliver O'Donovan
6. "Reading Prayerfully Before God: Jean-Yves Lacoste's Treatment of Lectio Divina as an Instance of Existence Coram Deo," by Christina M. Gschwandtner
7. "Affection, Mood, and Poetry: Overcoming Mentalism,"
by Joseph Rivera
8. "Rejecting the Wrong Questions: Jean-Yves Lacoste's Resistance to a Philosophical-Theological Divide," by Stephanie Rumpza

Part III Explorations

9. "For the Love of Revelation: Open and Relational Theology in Light of Lacoste," by Jason W. Alvis
10. "Right Use, Right Thinking," by William C. Hackett
11. "The Beautiful Life of Faith: A Liturgical Reading of Fear and Trembling," by Amber Bowen
12. "In the Footsteps of Henri de Lubac and Gregory of Nyssa: Jean-Yves Lacoste on Human Becoming, Historical and Eternal," by Stephen E. Lewis
13. "Kenosis and Transcendence: Jean-Yves Lacoste and Soren Kierkegaard on the Phenomenality of God," by Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere

In Conclusion

14. "The Final Word: Prolegomena to Eschatology," by Jean-Yves Lacoste

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Dec 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666721881

Book preview

Introduction

Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste

Joeri Schrijvers and Martin Koci

Introducing Jean-Yves Lacoste

Jean-Yves Lacoste, a true phenomenologist, is one who keeps questions alive. His œuvre ranges from theological concerns to the vanguard of phenomenological thought. The title of this volume therefore sums up Lacoste’s thinking well: God and phenomenology. One of the aims of the volume is indeed to show that, when thinking with Lacoste, one sees that the more one does phenomenology, the less one is inclined to shy away from the question of God. This book is not exactly an introduction to Lacoste. Rather, the aim of the authors is to advance debates at the forefront of phenomenology and theology by thinking alongside Lacoste.

With this goal in mind, God and Phenomenology brings together scholars who have, each in their own way, interacted with the work of Lacoste and have engaged with the central tenets of his thinking, namely the question of God and of God’s appearance within phenomenology. Given his role as a priest, one could naturally expect his first work, Note sur le temps (1990), to address such central theological themes as the Eucharist and Christian hope. Nonetheless, even in this book the names of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger already appear prominently.

It is accurate to say that Lacoste’s fame increased with the publication of Expérience et Absolu: Questions disputes sur l’humanité de l’homme back in 1994, since it gave voice to a common experience of believers, namely that they have no experience whatsoever of God. God is neither visible to the eyes nor readily accessible to the senses. It is to this nonexperience of God that Lacoste’s phenomenology increasingly turns and its phenomenological portrayal satisfied even the fiercest critics of the theological turn, such as Dominique Janicaud. Few readers have noticed that, despite Janicaud’s attacks on any such theological turn of phenomenology, he actually applauds Lacoste’s modest attempt to give theology a voice within phenomenology. It is, perhaps, time to listen to what Janicaud argued in a footnote to his polemical piece. Commenting upon Heidegger’s stance in regard to the relationship between phenomenology and theology, in which the former is seen as a corrective to theological concepts once these are taken up in an existential phenomenological context, Janicaud argues the following: first, that theology in fact cannot dispense with phenomenology and, second, that Lacoste seems to have worked in this spirit. He defends and illustrates a theological mode of thought putting in place ‘a system of differences’ that while ‘phenomenologically inevident,’ is respectful of the finitude of being-in-the-world.

²

The reader is richly rewarded by engaging with the section of Lacoste’s Note sur le temps—a remarkable book, Janicaud further says—to which Janicaud refers. That section appears in the middle of the text, section 58 and is called the rope dancer. Nietzsche is nowhere to be seen. On the contrary, here the theologian is in effect dancing on ropes. Lacoste states that there is a real difference

³

between theological concepts, such as creation and the Kingdom, and being-in-the-world. This difference, then, is deemed both an ontological and an experiential matter. The world is not creation, nor is the world to be confused with the kingdom. Whatever one experiences within the world, it is not an experience of the creation or of the kingdom. Whatever feeling of dependence one for instance may have, a thorough theological mode of thought will need to say, as later Experience and the Absolute will do, that this feeling may prove this or that dependency—on the earth or on the family lineage, etc.—but not for that matter a dependence on a creator.

⁴

On the contrary, the nonexperience of the believer, experiencing the weight of the world more than anything else, will need to question even the feeling of dependence. There is no experience in the world that is not ultimately also an experience of very worldly things. The world is not simply creation but, similarly, creation is not a pious synonym of world.

⁵

It is not enough to feel or sense that the world is created. Yet to assume that the world might be anything other than the totality of being is to forget the play

⁶

that theological concepts introduce into our being-in-the-world. To be sure, theologians know that this play is serious, but the weight of the finite world is such that neither creation nor the kingdom are ever at our disposal; they are instead always at a distance, and it is first and foremost the world that we feel and experience. The play theology introduces into being-in-the-world is but a tension, an oscillation perhaps, and definitely not capable of manifesting a phenomenological non-ultimacy of the world.

⁷

The sage and the saint, Lacoste says, may very well manifest the good for the love of the good alone or a place of peace amidst the turmoil of the world, these places and these manifestations never allow an entire new world

⁸

to appear. Yet this doesn’t silence theology: if the world is evident to all of us to the extent that most of us cannot even imagine anything else, then the theological difference cannot but be a "taking away of the inevident [arrachement à l’inévidence]."

⁹

One is already here reminded of Heidegger, albeit that here, for Lacoste, it is not so much the unapparent that needs to be made apparent nor to turn the inevident into something evident but rather to show that the the logic of definitive realities are at work within the world, that they sketch

¹⁰

themselves there. Immediately, however, Lacoste interrupts himself—and it is this back and forth to which we welcome you in this introduction: we are nothing [that], nor do anything which could not be taken into account within the terms of the world and of being-in-the-world. The eschatological significations are also mundane significations.

¹¹

Lacoste then begins again and asks: how can we show the authenticity—the term is used twice on these two pages—of this attempt of theology to interfere within the experiences described in existential phenomenologies? Lacoste then turns to the language of proofs and evidence—terminology long used by theology too—which has become the language of the world to the extent that we know no other language. The excess of the human with regard to the . . . world would only be proven in the experience of a self that survives its death. And the excess with regard to the historical totality would only be proven if it would be given to ethics or to mysticism to effectively erect counter-histories that would be cut loose entirely from what constitutes history,

¹²

where the only aspect at work seems to be the negative.

Lacoste soberly continues: all this is evidently not the case. No one survives his or her own death in this world. [But] from this, it does not follow that every protestation of the human being in favor of its origins and its ultimate aim would be bereft of sense.

¹³

These protestations are a play, we’ve been told, albeit a play that follows the rules of the world. In fact, this play is the only possibility for those who want to call into question or even overturn these rules.

¹⁴

The mystic’s prayer does not do anything, but perhaps it does everything by refusing to exercise any historical causality. The mystic does not want to prove, influence, convince or even show anything. They do what they do for the love of God alone.

Or so the mystic tries to do. As we have seen, the rules of the world are not easily overturned and even the greatest of mystics might get bored with their prayers—a theme that becomes important in some of Lacoste’s later writings.

¹⁵

And so Lacoste is interrupted again: Faced with the transcendentality of the world, the play of the one who wants more than being-in-the-world . . . will always appear as an artifice.

¹⁶

However, the rhythm then quickens and Lacoste suddenly seems to be in haste. The prudent language of theological concepts is left behind and the name of God appears. Even if everything comes to us through the conditions of the world, and the experiences of creation and of the kingdom are no exception: the plenitude of the meaning [of this world] can only be manifested, if we are to believe the words of promise and of vocation received by God, when this world is invested and made restless by an absolute past and future.

¹⁷

Eschatological plenitude, the name of God—these are not words Lacoste uses easily or takes lightly. In fact, Lacoste’s essay in this volume once more attempts to offer only a sketch of what a final word might be. But this is perhaps the essence of Lacoste’s phenomenology: it turns to the place where our experiences begin, where something surprises us and gets noticed, making its presence felt and makes us aware that not all we experience needs to be evident. For these beginnings, there is no language more appropriate than the language of phenomenology, even (and perhaps especially) when applied to God. In order for these phenomena beginning to appear to become slightly more noticeable, it is perhaps fitting for us to start over, to get interrupted and then relaunch the path of thinking. Such is exactly what this introduction, which attempts to think along with Jean-Yves Lacoste, is designed to demonstrate. This back-and-forth between being-the-world and what Lacoste will call more than existence becomes even more obvious in the following paragraph giving Lacoste, the dancer on ropes, the final word:

Gravity exists for the rope dancer just as much as it does for me. It even exists a bit more for him or her, as it puts a life in danger. The dancer is in the world just in the way as I am in it. He or she doesn’t defy any law: he only ever proves these. Would one however say that his step is similar to mine, and that his art is but a confirmation of my ways? To his or her physical play with being-in-space corresponds the metaphysical play of the one who wants to manifest the [real] difference in which he or she finds him- or herself."

¹⁸

It is too much to say that this book invites the reader to become a rope dancer. However, it does invite you, in accord with Lacoste’s teaching, to notice that not everything that calls and pulls us is of the world alone. Perhaps the principal aim of this volume, with regard to the relationship between philosophy and theology, is to show that one need not incline or turn to one side or the other; instead, one should find oneself as if in the middle of a balance. This gathering of philosophy and theology, we believe, is precisely what the contributors have learned from Lacoste.

Lacoste readily concedes many things to Heidegger, but the idea that ontology serves as a correction of theology is perhaps not one of them. Yet in this spirit, Lacoste may well show that theological concepts, such as creation, sabbath, and final words, are potentially able to find a place within our being-in-the-world and thus be given a voice within existential phenomenology. This is what Lacoste’s thought aims to do and and the contributors to this volume (along with the likes of Janicaud—perhaps not in content but at least in form) wish to applaud.

Since Note sur le temps, Lacoste has published a wide variety of works, which makes it perhaps appropriate to comment on these two tenets, sides of a coin—perhaps: God and phenomenology. First, there is La phénoménalité de Dieu (2008), recently translated by one of our contributors, Oliver O’Donovan, as The Appearing of God (2018) and published with Oxford University Press. That book features in many of the essays in this volume. Yet the incentive for the volume primarily lies in the extremely fruitful period in Lacoste’s thinking between 2011 and 2018, with the publication of no less than four books. Lacoste’s phenomenological masterpiece, Être en danger (which appeared in 2011), offers an acute analysis of our contemporary situation. In our nihilistic era, in which calculation alone reigns, the things themselves are in danger. How should we express our sense of and desire for the things that exceed and disrupt the tireless quest for objectivity? In 2015, Lacoste moves to more theological terrain with the appearance of two books L’intuition sacramentelle and Recherches sur la parole. The first is a collection of essays that seeks to place theology (or find a place for theology) outside the metaphysics of presence. The second attempts to do justice to the event of speech, and of the Word, in our nihilistic age. When that book appeared, the English-speaking world had just seen the publication of Lacoste’s Richard Lectures of 2010 (given at the University of Virginia) with the appearance of From Theology to Theological Thinking in 2014. In 2018, Lacoste published Thèses sur la verité, which attempts an impressive recapitulation of everything he had written before. There he builds his phenomenology from the ground up, from the experiences of novelty and surprise to the poetic reduction, which some have termed the liturgical reduction.

In addition to these monographs, Lacoste is the editor of the landmark Encyclopedia of Christian Theology, a testament to his encyclopedic scholarship. That work is now in its third edition. All of this provides ample evidence that the time is ripe for a collection of essays that bring Lacoste’s phenomenology under closer scrutiny. This volume endeavors to do justice to Lacoste’s diverse works, which are well deserving of both commentary and critique. To this end, it gathers scholars from within the philosophical and theological fields that are acquainted with the writings of Lacoste and who want to honor the work of this original thinker.

As editors, we have situated the essays according to four rubrics: Critiques, Commentaries, Explorations, and Inspirations. The first part, Critiques, deals with essays that explicitly challenge Lacoste’s phenomenological work. Surprisingly, what receives the most critique is Lacoste’s notion of a spontaneous reduction, in which certain phenomena as it were impose their way of appearing on us, with little or no regard for their actual existence. The second part, Commentaries, focuses on interpretations of Lacoste’s less-familiar works. Here readers will find introductions to works that have not yet been translated. The essays in the part titled Explorations seek to bring Lacoste’s philosophy onto new terrain, be it that of the debates surrounding Open Theism or that of interreligious dialogue through a discussion of Advaita Vedanta. The fourth part, Inspirations, traces particular influences on Lacoste’s thought, with essays on his relation to Kierkegaard, Henri de Lubac, and Gregory of Nyssa.

I. Critiques

Kevin Hart’s essay, ‘Children of the World’: A Note on Jean-Yves Lacoste, opens with an amusing alternative history of phenomenology before examining Lacoste’s signature concept of a spontaneous reduction. Is it really the case that certain phenomena force a phenomenological reduction on us, rather than the ego willingly and consciously performing the reduction on the phenomenon? Hart prompts us to consider that the spontaneous reduction may not be as evident as Lacoste would have us believe. To consider what appears, to be led back to the how of appearances (their ways and modes of appearing) requires some training. One must be proficient in the skills needed to be able to read the phenomena that become legible and prompt us to see them as a thing itself. Hart’s critique also focuses on Lacoste’s concept of the irreducible: phenomena that cannot appear otherwise than what their appearance suggests. A God who does not actually exist would be, in more than one sense, unthinkable. In any case, for Lacoste, one cannot bracket the existence of God without doing some injustice to the phenomenality of the divine. Hart, however, concentrates more on Lacoste’s account of intersubjectivity in this regard: when face to face with the Other, why should we doubt and bracket the other’s very existence? Hart follows Lacoste in venturing to see whether or not such an intersubjective encounter (and the irreducibility presented there) might serve as a passageway to the phenomenality of revelation and of God.

Steven DeLay’s chapter, Lacoste on Appearing and Reduction, furthers these critiques of Lacoste’s treatment of the phenomenological reduction by comparing Lacoste’s account of the spontaneous reduction with the development of the Husserlian conception of the reduction, especially in regard to the aesthetic attitude or consciousness in which Husserl himself seems to have anticipated what Lacoste has in mind when speaking of a spontaneous reduction. On the other hand, the very fact that even in the natural attitude we sometimes dwell (or are forced to dwell) on how beings are rather than on the question of their existence, might demonstrate, as Lacoste has argued, that the difference between the natural attitude (or to speak with Heidegger: everyday existence) and the phenomenological attitude may not be as great as Husserl thought. As Hart before him, DeLay examines Lacoste’s twin concept of the irreducible, especially when it comes to the existence of God, in great detail. If some phenomena are not able to become true phenomena if we do not allow for their existence, and if indeed the phenomenon of God would fall under such a category (should it fall into any category at all), might our wonder about the being of these entities lead us, in these nihilistic times, to wonder about the being of God? Once again, Lacoste’s curious but admirable attempt to fuse Husserlian with Heideggerian phenomenology becomes an issue.

Robert C. Reed, in his chapter Reduction Without Appearance: The Non-Phenomenality of God, continues the focus on the same essay that concerns the two previous authors. This time, however, Lacoste’s understanding of the intersubjective encounter is brought into dialogue, not only in regard to Husserl but also Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the Other does not appear and cannot be brought nearly as easily into the orbit of phenomenology as Lacoste would have us believe. With Levinas, then, Reed pleads for an ethics that is truly prior to the phenomenological ontology Lacoste proposes. For this, Reed turns to Levinas’s intersubjective reduction, in which all consciousness, phenomenological or otherwise, is already a response to the presence of the Other. Reed concludes by comparing Levinas’s incessant ethical appeal to Lacoste’s phenomenology of pause and sabbath: could the appearing of God, even if it imparts grace, be a distraction from our duties toward our neighbors?

Concluding this section, John Milbank’s essay Only Metaphysics Sustains Phenomenology offers a poignant critique of Lacoste’s phenomenological stance, which is steeped in the transcendental tradition of Husserl and Heidegger. Milbank returns phenomenology to the hermeneutical, material, and even theological conditions of interpretation. He does so by returning to phenomenological traces in Maine de Biran, on the one hand, and by examining and questioning Lacoste’s alliance to the theology of de Lubac, on the other. Milbank attempts to go beyond phenomenology in more than one way using analogical metaphysics. He wonders how far, if at all, Lacoste would go along with this direction. For Milbank, metaphysics need not always and everywhere be equated with ontotheology but may genuinely point to an excess at the heart of all appearing.

II. Commentaries

Oliver O’Donovan’s essay, Canonical Texts focuses on Lacoste’s Recherches sur la parole (2015) and on the phenomenology of prayerful reading it presents. O’Donovan asks which texts can serve as canonical texts and whether these would differ from classics. What makes special texts special? Lacoste argues that the unforgettable classic reveals a way of life that exceeds the limits of time and place, thus showing future generations how to think, live and act. The theological question, however, for O’Donovan lies elsewhere. He asks: what makes a letter of, say, Saint Paul more than a classic? The classic might, at least for a while, show the world how to think, live, and act. Canonical texts might reveal to the world a voice from beyond this world. Such a voice, being a truth-event itself, sheds light on all other classic truth-events, while sharing with these latter events nonetheless an unfolding within history.

Christina M. Gschwandtner’s chapter, "Reading Prayerfully Before God: Jean-Yves Lacoste’s Treatment of Lectio Divina as an Instance of Existence Coram Deo," considers Lacoste’s Recherches sur la parole and how it extends Lacoste’s phenomenological studies of religious experience. This essay introduces an untranslated text of Lacoste to the readers of the volume. Reading the Scripture prayerfully, argues Lacoste, might be interpreted as the passageway to a spiritual life: it opens onto a word that cannot be contained by the world alone. One both believes and experiences oneself to be truly addressed by God. These clear anticipations of the poetic reduction in Lacoste’s later Thèses sur le vrai nonetheless allow Lacoste to elucidate the phenomenology of liturgical experience, and it is here that Gschwandtner’s questions arise. While Gschwandtner explores this extension of liturgical experience in Lacoste’s later works, she critiques a tension that perhaps has haunted the elaboration of liturgical existence since the publication of Experience and the Absolute. Is this liturgical experience an ontological description of religious existence valid for everyone at all times? Or is it, instead, the description of a particular very ontic experience of being before the divine, namely that of a Roman Catholic? Whereas Lacoste more often than not seems to suggest the former, Gschwandtner pays heed to the many different experiences even within the Christian world and asks what exactly this would mean for the interpretation of Lacoste’s liturgical experience.

In his essay Affection, Mood, and Poetry: Overcoming Mentalism, Joseph Rivera further elucidates Lacoste’s critique on the subject-object distinction that so pervades modernity by offering an intriguing reading of Lacoste’s Thèses sur le vrai. An overcoming of mentalism is surely present in Lacoste’s work. Rivera argues, along with Lacoste, that one finds a more subjective and personal approach to phenomena that most of us hold dear. Almost nothing is felt by the impersonal spectator who gazes away at the objects of science. On the contrary, in poetry and art we experience how phenomena show themselves and how human beings are always engaged by these appearances. Poets are, as Rivera reads Lacoste, phenomenalizers of truth. They show us how to see, feel and experience things; they give us the words for phenomena that we would otherwise lack. Utilizing Walt Whitman, Rivera extends Lacoste’s concept of the poetic reduction and hints at a reduction to the heart.

Stephanie Rumpza’s Rejecting the Wrong Questions: Jean-Yves Lacoste’s Resistance to a Philosophical-Theological Divide, explores Lacoste’s signature thesis: the rejection of a rigid distinction between philosophical and theological questions. If it is generally known what Lacoste’s position is, few have put much effort into exploring the why. In this chapter, Rumpza locates not one, but three grounds for rejecting this division, based on three borders that, by Lacoste’s evaluation, fail to hold: the historical, the phenomenological, and the pragmatic. From a historical perspective, Lacoste argues the strict separation of fields is relatively late and far from irrefutable. From a phenomenological perspective, the most significant of the reasons for Lacoste’s interest, we can observe that phenomena do not come already marked by disciplinary labels. Why then should a phenomenologist be bound to impose them on what shows itself to us? As Rumpza shows, this does not lead Lacoste to the rejection of distinctions, but a reframing of them. Finally, from a pragmatic perspective, the tasks belonging to each discipline share too much ground for a clean break. Rumpza ultimately concludes that rather than arguing for, or even against, a division of fields, Lacoste means to encourage us to pursue instead a more important work: that of restoring our relation to truth in an age of nihilism, using the very best of our thinking.

III. Explorations

Jason W. Alvis’s For the Love of Revelation: Rethinking Open and Relational Theology in light of Lacoste, seeks to situate Lacoste’s thinking in regard to Open Theism, a rethinking of theism that attempts to reconfigure the classic metaphysical attributes of the divine and, more specifically, the thought of revelation. Lacoste’s eschatology proves helpful here, as the prudence with which Lacoste describes all revealed things may serve as a caution to those theisms that run aground on the paradoxes of omniscience, omnipotence, and human freedom. Alvis finds Lacoste to be an unexpected ally for the critiques Open Theism launches against classical theism.

William C. Hackett’s chapter, "Right Use, Right Thinking," brings the work of Lacoste to the unfamiliar terrain of interreligious dialogue. If Gschwandtner argues that Lacoste’s phenomenology of liturgy is, in a sense, too Christian, Hackett seeks to bring Lacoste into dialogue with another religious tradition, namely Advaita Vedanta. His essay starts from the observation that Lacoste made in his underestimated Histoire de la théologie (2008) that, after Vatican II, it is no longer philosophy which serves as the privileged dialogue partner for theology. If theology truly speaks of salvation for all, it must also speak to the other intellectual and spiritual traditions of the world. In this dialogue with the Advaita Vedanta, Hackett shows how close (and also how far) Christian theology is at times from this venerable tradition. While doing so, Hackett explores a hidden gem of Lacoste’s writings, a brief essay on Jules Monchanin, himself a pioneer in interreligious dialogue.

IV. Inspirations

Amber Bowen traces the influence of Soren Kierkegaard on Lacoste’s philosophy in her essay "The Beautiful Life of Faith: A Liturgical Reading of Fear and Trembling." She reads Kierkegaard through the lens of Lacoste’s concept of liturgical experience to discover the extent to which liturgical existence does violence to our initial being-in-the-world. Yet, as Bowen argues, the liturgical transgression is no mere spectacle: although there is a real cost to wagering on a higher ultimacy than the ultimacy of the world, this does not mean that, liturgically, women and men stand forever outside the world. On the contrary, through an exploration of the appearance of the Kierkegaardian incognito in Lacoste’s works, Bowen shows that the distance liturgical existence takes from being-in-the-world is but a prelude to enjoy the gifts of this world with the greater freedom that comes from knowing that we live on borrowed time.

Stephen E. Lewis’s chapter, In the Footsteps of Henri de Lubac and Gregory of Nyssa: Jean-Yves Lacoste on Human Becoming, Historical and Eternal, explores Lacoste’s work on de Lubac in an early essay by Lacoste and in the more recent Être en Danger. The hypothesis of a pure nature is at the forefront: must we assume that a human being knows all there is to know about its being, its ends and its meaning, this side of death? Is it thinkable that the liturgical beyond overturns the stakes of its being? Lewis then ventures into the relation of Lacoste’s liturgical eschatology to the notion of epekstasis in Gregory of Nyssa. In Lacoste’s work too, Lewis argues, a desire can be found that aims beyond the world yet duly recognizes the earthly desires of men and women. Lewis intriguingly concludes with a thought of this intertwining between the eschatological and the historical.

Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere again draws our attention to the influence of Kierkegaard and Lacoste’s treatment of eschatology in his essay Kenosis and Transcendence: Jean-Yves Lacoste and Søren Kierkegaard on the Phenomenality of God. He deftly demonstrates that our anticipation of the eschaton can only be one in and with love, a notion in Lacoste that is only marginally present but surely deserves more attention: to the one that is in love, God appears as love. Cassidy-Deketelaere then proposes to call this mode of God’s appearing a kenotic appearing, a way of appearing that in effect returns to Kierkegaard’s incognito. Yet Cassidy-Deketelaere is quick to point out the consistency in Lacoste’s thought, a thinker of non-realization and non-experience if ever there were one, by showing how in the later works (those on anticipation and frustrated phenomenality), the echo of the earlier work can still be heard.

A new essay by Lacoste, The Final Word: Prolegomena to Eschatology, brings the volume to a close but opens up new avenues for work on Lacoste. Here Lacoste addresses the question of eschatology from within our very being-in-the-world, advancing themes, questions, and queries that many of the contributors also pose. How are we to imagine eschatology? How can we make sense of eschatology if works of art, despite their limited sense of fulfillment and enjoyment, appear to us as a never-ending works of interpretation? How should we speak of plenitude and fulfillment if the only final word available to us is finitude? What is the status, for instance, of the trace left by the logos of the cross, which is sketched only marginally and at the outskirts of the world? Can there be a possible fulfillment even if not a final word? Once again, Lacoste offers a sketch of how we might understand eschatology in a phenomenological manner.

Bibliography

Heidegger, Martin. Pathmarks. Translated by James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo, edited by William Mcneill,

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Janicaud, Dominique. The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology. In Phenomenology and the Theological Turn. The French Debate, translated by Bernhard G. Prusak, edited by Dominique Janicaud et al.,

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Lacoste, Jean-Yves. De la phénoménologie de l’Esprit à la montée du Carmel. Revue Thomiste

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———. Experience and the Absolute. Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Translated by Mark Raftery-Skehan. New York: Fordham University Press,

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———. Note sur le temps. Paris: PUF,

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2

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n

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. For Heidegger, see Pathmarks,

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3

. Lacoste, Note sur le temps,

124

.

4

. This theological mode of thought Janicaud detects might very well be a forerunner of what Lacoste later develops as theological thinking, see Janicaud, Theological Turn,

100

. For Lacoste’s critique of religious feeling, see Experience and the Absolute,

91

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.

Part I

Critiques

1

Children of the World

A Note on Jean-Yves Lacoste

Kevin Hart

The development of phenomenology bears an uncanny resemblance to a rather compressed history of Christianity. First, the gospel comes, the good news of transcendence made immanent, and its founder, Edmund Husserl, implores us to convert our gaze and be saved. To be sure, there have been major prophets before his advent (Descartes, Kant, Hegel) but now we have the truth among us. If we embrace this teaching, we shall experience a complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion, which then, however, over and above this, bears within itself the significance of the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to mankind as such.

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I have just quoted from the fourth of the gospels, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1954), although some believers prefer one or another of the other three: Logical Investigations (1900–1901), Ideas (1913) and Cartesian Meditations (1950). There is even a possible fifth gospel, Experience and Judgement (1948), which, although it is a very late composition, is rumored to contain the ipsissima verba of the master. No sooner has salvation been proclaimed than it is taken up, and perhaps redirected, by a potent disciple who, some whisper, might well have a mission of his own, Martin Heidegger. Perhaps the word had already been disseminated, the disciple suggests, and there had been a λόγος σπερματικός among the Greeks. Certain believers come to hold that even were all the gospels utterly lost the transformation of which Husserl spoke would be found intact and vivid in Being and Time (1927).

Inevitably, there arises a gnostic distortion, a gospel of the truth (Fink), which distracts some of the faithful. Rituals are quickly established in the community (distinctions between realist and idealist tendencies of the new teaching, fierce arguments about the status of the noema). There are disciples, old and new, who roundly declare that they have preserved the pure spirit of the master (Reinarch, Ingarden; Sokolowski, Zahavi). Individual teachings are proposed that, for a while, captivate many (Scheler, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty), but are finally seen to have sprouted on thin soil. A martyrdom occurs (Patočka); there is talk of a mystical theology (Walther); two of the steadfast are canonized (Stein, Wojtyła). Skepticism makes inroads (Adorno, Ortega y Gasset, Shestov), and deviant teachings flourish for a while (Derrida). A modernism informed by psychology emerges (Binswanger, Maldiney). There is intense debate over which of the founding teachings is the most important: intentionality, givenness, or reduction. Differences appear among the Fathers of the burgeoning faith: one seeks to redescribe the entire path of wisdom by way of ethics (Levinas). Another declares that the power of revelation belongs by right to what is revealed (Marion); yet another contends that it abides deep in the subject as a kind of imago dei (Henry). Loud cries of Reformation! are heard from time to time. The good news must be turned away from the corruption of idealism and restored to a concrete hermeneutic vocation (Ricœur). More, it must be returned to the visible world and its overzealous heretics cast into the outer darkness (Janicaud). Indeed, it needs to be amplified as a social gospel (Tran Duc Thao, Schultz) or at least become more worldly (Gurwitsch). All the while, fragmentary texts that have been found in carefully preserved scrolls are being edited (the Nachlass), precious portions of oral testimony are recovered (Cairns); and it is firmly hoped by strict observers of the new faith that, once the clerics have pored over them for long enough, all problems will dissolve, and we shall all enjoy eschatological blessedness.

If we wonder where Jean-Yves Lacoste comes in this story, we have only to read his remarkable essay Appearance without Reduction (2006).

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There he glancingly shows himself as another Karl Rahner, advocating an anonymous phenomenology that extends Aquinas’s notion of implicitum votum ecclesiae.

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There is no need always and explicitly to pursue ἐποχή or reduction, to lose the world as existence only to find it as phenomenon, for one can live implicitly, in the natural attitude, perfectly well and still regard oneself as a good philosopher of disclosure. The ascetic discipline, as Lacoste calls the passage from the natural to the phenomenological attitude, can be set aside so that we can all live without explicit confession, in the world even if not strictly of the world.

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No sooner have we apparently settled the matter than we find that Lacoste is not a Rahner—or is not simply so. For he is also a Rudolf Bultmann with a thoroughgoing program to ‘demythologize’ reduction.

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No spooks for him: Lacoste shakes off the mythical language in which the gospel had to be written, as a product of its age (Neo-Kantianism) and presents us with its life-changing κήρυγμα, namely, that whatever appears, is.

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Of course, the Jean-Yves Lacoste, priest and philosopher, who lives in Paris—not the essence of the man which we take, rightly or wrongly, to be in his books—is nothing like Karl Rahner or Rudolf Bultmann, even though in his own way he distrusts firm disciplinary lines separating philosophy and theology. His theological heritage is quite otherwise. He proposes a mere phenomenology in two directions at once, each stemming from a deflation of that most divisive of all Husserlian doctrines, the transcendental reduction: it is a philosophy that welcomes Weltkinder, we children of the world.

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For Lacoste, reduction occurs spontaneously in the natural outlook, and some of the most interesting phenomena are irreducible. Let us look closely at these two claims.

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Husserl regards the three volumes of Ideas to mark a decisive turn in phenomenology. Taken together, they are a full realization of the Cartesian reorientation of modern philosophy. Although the Logical Investigations had opened and broadened the field of inquiry, sharply distinguishing the project from empirical psychology (and especially from psychologism), it is only in Ideas that its ambitions became apparent. The first volume begins by distinguishing fact and essence and continues by identifying and detailing the general thesis of the natural attitude, namely, that our intentional rapports with the world assume a belief in the independent reality of what we experience. This thesis is to be suspended by ἐποχή, and it is in doing so that we can discern the region of pure consciousness. The suspension just named is recognized as insufficient, however. Another methodological step, reduction, is required for phenomena properly to show themselves, and this step must be universal in scope: the transcendental ego is retained procedurally only to the extent that it is co-ordinate with pure consciousness; all material-eidetic disciplines are bracketed, and so is the existence of God. Husserl is clear about the need to proceed in full awareness of the pressing difficulties that reduction imposes:

If the phenomenological domain were to exhibit itself in so immediately obvious a way as the domains of the natural attitude in regard to experience [Erfahrung], or if it were to afford itself via a mere transition from this to the eidetic attitude (as for example, the geometrical domain affords itself, starting out from empirical spatiality), then it would not require any cumbersome reductions with the corresponding, difficult considerations.

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Phenomena do not simply manifest themselves; they need to be nudged if they are to pass for us from the pre-given to the given, and this slight prodding usually occurs by way of identifying the general thesis, applying ἐποχή, and performing reduction; it is a pursuit that has an ordering of the real as its aim, which Husserl in his first maturity will distribute by way of a distinction between the real and the reell.

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It is an ordering which enables a rigorous description of the entire intentional content of what is sought. Reduction will render the one seeking to describe phenomena to be no more than a neutral observer. He or she will have put aside all worldly interests in what is being inspected, which is quite different from doubting the existence of what is viewed.

Considerable disappointment, skepticism, even outrage, has been directed to the operation of reduction. For Ingarden, it leads only to a fairy world, while for Fink it presupposes itself, and for Ricœur it leagues Husserl with the subjective idealism of Fichte.

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Rather than lead us down the garden path, though, reduction merely seeks to uncover the intelligible structures of reality, how a noetic act correlates with a noema, and stimulates a reflective or contemplative attitude to reality.

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It does not commit us to circular reasoning, Husserl thinks, for we can readily see that the world, which from the cradle to the grave we are told exists in and through itself, always just happens to offer itself as experiences that apply to one’s subjectivity, and this remarkable situation elicits the kind of investigation we call philosophical. Although it alerts us to ideal entities, it does not entertain a self-positing I.

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By contrast with these familiar objections, Lacoste’s case is not against reduction by dint of disbelieving that there is an "infinite realm of being of a new kind," or on purely logical grounds, or because of an aversion to idealism.

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His case is directed against the claim that reduction has a universal scope. More particularly, he maintains that reduction sometimes occurs implicitly, not as a self-conscious methodological step, within the natural perspective, and that some phenomena resist being reduced. So, on Lacoste’s analysis, reduction is extended in one direction while it is contracted in another.

Amplifying a varied Husserlian theme, spontaneity, Lacoste stipulates that spontaneous reduction [réduction spontanée] denotes the general disinterest in existence that a phenomenologist exhibits, and he takes this notion to give us reason not wholly to separate the natural and phenomenological attitudes.

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One consequence of this proposal is that perhaps we are all born philosophers of disclosure, we children of the world, able from infancy to begin distinguishing essences from facts without appealing to elaborate methodological considerations in order to do so. It has been so since humanity emerged, and we might look to El Castillo or Lascaux for evidence.

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Our ante-predicative experiences are of inestimable valuable, Lacoste reminds us, and it would be absurd for us not to believe in the existence of things and other people. Besides, the principle of all principles announced in Ideas 1 §24, asks us to accept all donating intuitions as legitimate sources of knowledge. Our task is to bring "to pure givenness the essences pertaining" to the facts of nature [my emphasis].

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Accordingly, Lacoste has reason to