Language, Desire and Theology: A Genealogy of the Will to Speak (Routledge Studies in Religion, 4)

Language, Desire, and Theology

This book develops a new theological approach to language in the light of contemporary critical theory. Informed by the contemporary discourses in continental philosophy of, among others, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva, the author engages with secular theological thought and provides detailed readings of several major theological and philosophical sources. These include Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Avicenna, Aquinas, Luther, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Camus. Focusing on the transient nature of language, Language, Desire, and Theology looks past the metaphysical fallacies that mark the history of Western culture, to present an interpretation of the history of Western thought and culture. Threading theological and philosophical expressions of desire together, Noëlle Vahanian reveals how such expressions have come to be. This book will be of interest to theologians and philosophers. Noëlle Vahanian holds the degree of PhD in Religion from Syracuse University. She now teaches philosophy at Lebanon Valley College, a small liberal arts institution in central Pennsylvania. Her work is concerned with the construction of a secular, religious space, at the intersection between philosophy and theology, determinism and creativity, the absurd and the other.

Routledge Studies in Religion 1. Judaism and Collective LifeSelf and community in the religious kibbutzAryei Fishman 2. Foucault, Christianity and Interfaith DialogueHenrique Pinto 3. Religious Conversion and IdentityThe semiotic analysis of textsMassimo Leone 4. Language, Desire, and TheologyA genealogy of the will to speakNoëlle Vahanian

Language, Desire, and Theology A genealogy of the will to speak

Noëlle Vahanian

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2003 Noëlle Vahanian All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data ISBN 0-203-38079-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-38697-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-29956-X (Print Edition)

For Jeffrey

Écrire. Je ne peux pas. Personne ne peut. Il faut le dire: on ne peut pas. Et on écrit. C’est l’inconnu qu’on porte en soi: écrire, c’est ça qui est atteint. C’est ça ou rien. On peut parler d’une maladie de l’écrit.

Marguerite Duras, Écrire

Contents

Preface

viii

Acknowledgments

xiv

Introduction

1

1

All men by nature desire to know

5

2

The condemnation

27

3

The subject, in theory

41

4

The right to speak

55

5

Who speaks?

73

6

Another tongue

91

Notes

97

Bibliography

105

Index

109

Preface

Language, Desire, and Theology looks at the life of the mind through the lenses of an author whose awareness of her being is invariably an awareness of coming to be and ceasing to be. For the intellectual, the philosopher, or the scholar, the life of the mind becomes the instrument, if not also the matter, for a life’s work. But the notion of a life’s work requires a view of time as something linear, with a single beginning and a final end, where one’s work is either in progress or completed. Instead of linking the creative or philosophic mind to the work of one life span, this book likens the life of the mind to a life of labor. There is an insistence to thoughts, and if a train can be followed, then good work ensues, but thoughts do not necessarily follow as does the intended effect of a freely determined cause. Thoughts wander. Focus is lost, or, in any case, it is never permanent. Hence, a mind labors if it is going to work. If it yields a life’s work, then the life of the mind is a life of labor. Yet, not many think of a philosopher’s life as a life of labor, and not many think of a philosopher’s work as a useful product for consumption. Already in early Greek philosophy, contemplation or theoretical study are most noble because they are least useful for staying alive. By comparison, guarding the cavemen’s campfire, while labor intensive, useful for survival, and a primordial responsibility, is far from being as useful and primordial as knowing how to start a fire. Labor is not of necessity useful, efficient, or productive, but it is always hard. Furthermore, the labor derived from children chained to the hand loom is not necessary to human welfare, though it is efficient and economic for the production of fine Persian rugs. It is the same with the labor produced by an illegal immigrant enslaved in a back alley sweat shop. Labor, even if it is productive, is not always necessary, though sometimes it is compulsory. When labor is not a choice, but compulsory, and when, also, it is neither necessary, nor productive, then the death camp is created. There are times, however, when labor is neither necessary nor obligatory for staying alive. Labor, then, is sometimes also a choice. It is, for instance, the choice of an individual with sufficient means and reasonable health to exercise the labor pertaining to the life of the mind. First, then, comes the freedom to choose the life of thinking. The necessity of laboring for a privileged life of the

ix

mind is always secondary. One labors over ideas rather than in the field because one has the luxury to do so and chooses to do so. One is free to stop and think so long as there is food on the table. This freedom to indulge in the satisfaction of the life of the mind is not synonymous with a gnostic, absolute freedom from the life of the body or from this finite world because it is demanding, it is labor intensive. To be free to think in no way dispenses with the constraints of having to do so in space and time, from a body, and through an organ. As self-evident as these last remarks may be, whenever the type of work in question is philosophic or creative, the importance of a life’s work is how it purports to more than contentment: posterity or ecstasy; otherwise put, a life’s work hopes to overcome or to give the feeling of having overcome those self-evident constraints of finitude. When such hope is not false and the feeling is as real as it is objectively intangible, the nature of thinking is, nevertheless, prohibitive of either. An author cannot think if she is dead and she cannot think if she feels outside of herself, one with the whole. In addition, either she is born with the ability to think or not, but she cannot cause herself her own ability to think. And she does not consciously control what comes to mind when it does. A thinker at work is like a woman in labor who cannot delegate her post, who cannot of her own initiative delay or provoke her labor and goes into it unlike she goes to work, giving birth to a life of its own which she does not make, though she makes it happen, still, not by herself. But Language, Desire, and Theology does not relocate or ground the life of the mind in some natural and original body, be that body a prison or a primal womb. To the contrary, by looking at the life of the mind as a life of labor, the thinker’s work properly becomes a function instead of an end. The function or work of the thinker is to serve her mind only to facilitate, improve, or extend its life of labor. The thinker’s work is distinguishable from the fruits of her labor. When the thinker fulfills her function, when the thinker’s work becomes the function that serves her mind, then her work stamps the fruits of her labor. Perhaps this stamp is a life’s work, but fruits are perishables either with or without a stamp. This book is the season’s harvest of one thinker’s labor, where that thinker’s work is only and at best in the service of her labor. Coming to be and ceasing to be, my being is not concealed by my work, but exposed by my explicit curiosity. Desire, source of this curiosity, is not taken for granted, it is not confused with a blind force that either succumbs to irascible appetites or voluntarily follows the voice of reason. What, therefore, is explicit about my curiosity is the questionable nature and aim of its driving force, namely, desire. With curiosity, it appears as if desire wants answers, explanations, reasons, or knowledge. Yet, it also appears as if desire wants mastery, absolute knowledge, divine illumination. It also appears as if desire wants what cannot be had, what can never be satisfied. Coming to be and ceasing to be, my curiosity mimics my being, as, in the field of words, desire resists complete expression, and, in life, curiosity, complete satisfaction.

x

To the best of my ability, I interpret the desire that awakens my curiosity by looking for answers, ratiocinating, making sense of words not written by me. But my words mean nothing to me if they do not resonate with the waves of my being. Thinking is a feeling that at times allows itself to be translated into a writing. Curiosity may drive thought to contemplation, but, without affect, without feeling, answers are never worth the effort to put them in writing, or written answers feel inconsequential. This work is truly another tongue. It is a tongue spoken from some indefinite one evolving in space and time, which would betray itself were my writing to ignore the rhythm of the life of a mind clearly embodied and alive. Language, Desire, and Theology listens to philosophical, theological, and creative modes of expression begotten across the history of a tradition. It listens to these various modes of expression with the ears of the lover of music, and it must, therefore, resist a passive acquiescence to established, timely or canonical explanations, conclusions, and interpretations. It must rebel against writing in disguise an illusory work of mastery. It shall repel the scholar’s gaze. Language, Desire, and Theology is a theology of language. Language is the body of ideas, the house of feelings, the sea where demons are drowned, and the temple where faith conquers reasonable doubt: language is theological.1 Language, however, is not eternal, immutable, purely intelligible. Transient, it, too, comes and ceases to be. This is a work written for the sake of what is theological about transience, which is what survives the obsolescence of the said by its virtue to let itself be repeated from one generation to the next, from word of mouth, by yet another. This is an ambitious work, it does more than one thing at once. It risks its own interpretation of a thematic history of Western thought in order to thread together theological and philosophical expressions of desire even though these may be ideologically incompatible, anachronistic, and, perhaps, intentionally or strongly misread.2 Nevertheless, this threading is a rational discourse, and genealogy, rather than logic or history, is its predominant style. To thread together, for instance, Aristotle’s human desire to know, Avicenna’s human experience of a lost angelic intellection, Luther’s freedom of the Christian to sin because faith is his only salvation, Schopenhauer’s will not to will in order to feel nothing, and Feuerbach’s transformation and dissolution of theology and philosophy into anthropology to rid man of his pathological desire to think only with his mind, to thread all these ideas, and more, together because they are philosophical and theological expressions does not create or impose between them a causal link, a necessary connection, a systematic historical progression, or an ontological substratum. It only, and more importantly, reveals how desire and its expression come to be and cease to be repeatedly towards a theology that is at least or at best always a theology of language. I do not believe, unlike Avicenna, presumably, that humans come from a series of fallen angels, each more estranged from its first principle than the previous. I do, however, encounter in his angelology, an author’s desire to express his desire most fully, to speak

xi

words that ring true. I encounter his longing for faith, or his metaphysical dream to overcome finitude. What makes this encounter possible, desirable, even important is a way of thinking that is a speaking. It is the speaking of an infinite desire in a finite world that knows no other world. It is the speaking of another tongue. From beginning to end, then, this work constantly labors to further its definition, understanding, and evaluation of a theology of language. At stake is the promise that another tongue, just another tongue, can be a theology for all who choose the labor of the life of the mind. It does not save, it does not transcend, it does not immortalize. Rather, it values as best it can coming to be and ceasing to be. If this work is not properly speaking the history of the theological moments and expressions offered by the Western philosophical quality of a tradition in thinking, and yet, if it is still a story, with a logic, then the author owes the reader a few words on method, on the hypothesis on which it is made to stand, on the premise on which the hypothesis rests. First, then, the premise: the history of Western epistemology, metaphysics, onto-theology, the history of Western thought to this day resembles a battlefield and an impossible quest for the meaning of existence. As such, this history is too often synonymous with a devaluation of existence. This history of Western thought does not, at the turn of the millennium, redeem, help or encourage the thinkers of the early twenty-first century. It deflates and depresses them, and Socrates must be rolling over in his grave, he who knew that he knew nothing, yet he who urged us to follow him as quickly as possible, he who urged us to philosophize to our death. Second, the hypothesis: the value placed on existence depends on the adequacy of modes of representation to integrate affects into concepts. Therefore, the value placed on existence gravely depends on the adequacy of our interpretations, our readings, our critiques of Western thought and its insufferable quest for knowledge and salvation. Third, the method: this work is a reevaluation of the value that Western thought places on existence, not in terms of its tangible, logical, and therefore, disappointing results, but in terms of its dreams, hopes, and intentions. The history of Western thought disappoints because its riddle is solved with its birth. The solution is as in the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx: “What is it that goes on four feet, three feet and two feet…and is most feeble when it walks on four?” It is “man—on all four as a baby, on two feet at maturity, on three as an old man with a stick” (Knox 1984:28). Man becomes the measure of all things and the value that the history of Western thought places on existence. Man, born of other men only to return from where he came, to naught, is the value that the history of Western thought places on existence. Man, tragic hero, is the answer that the history of Western ratiocination driven to its logical conclusion offers in response to the thinker’s desire to know happiness. Man, a life’s work, is what a thinker’s dreams, hopes, and efforts amount to within the history of Western

xii

thought. But, can the value that is placed on existence be assessed less for existence’s necessary end and contingent beginning, less for the human condition than for the hopes and intentions that move an existence from beginning to end? What has moved Western thought? What is the motive for thinking that the impossible is possible, for striving to know perfection while knowing fully that error is human? What happiness does a thinker desire to know when he already knows that his desire far surpasses his power? To reevaluate the value that Western thought places on existence is to read the works of Western thinkers for the merit of what they promise, not for the merit or lack thereof of their discoveries and results. From these last words on method, premise, and hypothesis, it is now surely clear to the reader that I am toying with the notion of the history of Western thought and with the notion of Western thought in a creative albeit generalizing manner. This, I do not try to conceal. This, I am approaching from where I am now in life, from outside, as one who once used to think herself too ignorant to give credence to her interpretations, as one who has sought to overcome her bias against an intellectual tradition from which she felt excluded, as one who now respects this tradition because she has allowed herself the freedom to respond to it with urgency and care, not always, if ever, with scholarly expertise. Also, I am claiming that the history of Western thought devalues existence, that all metaphysics are doomed to fail and disappoint, that apodictic certainty is nonexistent, that theology is speculative, that the Bible is a book before it is the Word of God only because that is how I relate to this history of Western thought. I know that there are many who would not agree with me. I also know that there are some who might resonate with me. I confess to being a bit Nietzschean, a bit postmodern, sometimes modern, romantic, and naive. I am always “sophomoric” because I only have one life to live, and would rather write something today than wait until a ripe old age to do it better. I write today so that tomorrow I can look back at my sophomoric self and value what I have come to be. When I write, I mean what I say. When I use images, I believe that they convey my thoughts and feelings. By now I might also seem pedantic, and I pedantically retort that young people usually are, but then, I also bite my tongue, because I do not want to be pedantic, seem pedantic, and write as though I think my words are the measure of truth. I write because I want my words to mean something to more than one ear. I believe that I can only take myself seriously as a thinker if my readers take me seriously as a thinker. In that, I am not a pretentious or bashful author, but I am young, and I am not a great scholar.

xiii

Finally, my first tongue is French, but I write as an author in English by choice. That is because English allows me to be authentic. English allows me to labor over what I am trying to say. English forces me to try to say what I mean to say. In English, I cannot as easily fall in love with the art of glossing over words as I might in French. In English, I am always aware of the temptation to do so. I ask my readers to forgive my bastard, eclectic style, my strange and various forms of address.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my editors at Routledge for their enthusiasm, their help, and their dedicated work. I am grateful to G.Chad Snyder, to Andrew Saldino, and to Clayton Crockett for their uncomplicated, genuine, and heart-felt praise. Their words are still with me today. I hope that this work may speak to them. I hope that I have heard them. I am grateful to my great friend Annabel Davis Holmes, and to my caring friends Judith Clark and Kathryn Lanier. All three have been the light of my sisterhood throughout my Syracuse years. All three give depth to my sisterhood. I am grateful to my husband, Jeffrey W.Robbins. He fell in love with me while I was writing what would become my first book. His trust, his advice, his help, his readiness to respond to my work every step of the way are invaluable. He is invaluable. I am grateful to my mother, Barbara Swanger Vahanian, to my father, Gabriel Vahanian, and to my brother, Paul-Michel. I am grateful to the late Charles E.Winquist. I would not have written this book without him. I would not have found my publisher without him. I would not have read Whitehead without him. This work is nothing but a footnote to his. N.V.

Introduction

Some may say that the interpretation of metaphysics put forth in the first chapter is too generous. Some may be so kind as to refer to it as a “strong misreading.” I prefer to call this interpretation of the metaphysical bent inherent to thinking, a forward look at the history of Western thought, or at the “retrograde movement of the true growth of truth,” to borrow the words of Henri Bergson (Bergson 1992: 11–29). A forward look at the history of Western thought that begins with metaphysics implies that a critique of Western thought, of metaphysics, is at its inception. The forward look at metaphysics is not independent from the disappointing experience of idealism and metaphysical illusions. Criticism—the quest of criticism—is a condition for theological language. It is its condition insofar as the formula for criticism is this, “it neither represents nor knows, but knows the representation” (Agamben 1993:xvii). Hence, sometimes it serves to play canny; it serves to curiously read metaphysics. Chapter 1 is an attempt to understand how existence, once it has become an object of study, can still be valued. Chapter 1 dares to suggest that who shall understand, and who shall relate the other in and of language, shall speak a theological language and shall wonder again, precisely because disbelief and disinterestedness devalue existence. Chapter 1 dares to suggest that the fool shall speak a theological language, because the fool does not believe that words can carry both the joy of existence and its weight, but she wishes that she could believe it. The fool who speaks is the fool “who executes the work,” because “today only the critic executes the work (in both senses)” (Barthes 1981:80). A forward look at metaphysics is an afterthought of its condemnation. Why, then, does chapter 2 not precede chapter 1? Because the critic also executes her work. She can only do so after she executes the work. There is a noteworthy difference between a critic who executes her work, and one who condemns a work she did not execute in the first place. The latter would have omitted chapter 1 altogether. The latter would not have felt the responsibility to understand what does not make proper sense. The former decided to ask if metaphysics, as a way of thinking, is an overstepping of reason to what, by culture, belongs to faith. But, the problem is not that reason is unaware that it has

2 INTRODUCTION

limits, rather, it is that reason is unable to know clearly and distinctly where its limits begin. This, indeed, is its danger, and why it makes sense to censor it. Yet, this condemnation has dramatic consequences for the will to speak a theological language in a secular world, because this condemnation is the cradle of existentialism. What is dramatic is the historical movement of Western thought. It is a course of ideas—of the same recurring eternal ideas—that, unlike the source of an idea (which is in it), has no end. The passage from myth to logic, which, for Nietzsche, indicates the birth of tragedy, is not the beginning of Western thought, it is the beginning of the history of Western thought. The passage from metaphysics to Reformation theology and Enlightenment philosophies is the end of history, because it is the beginning of the hermeneutics of the history of Western thought. Whereas Nietzsche asks the artist in the scholar to consider the value that his work places on life, Luther asks the scholar in the artist to consider the value that his work places on an invaluable life. Otherwise put, the will to speak is a rebellious “No!” It is iconoclastic and idolatrous, so that it works towards a theology of language. With both questions stated above held as conditions for the possibility of a theology of language, and with the ensuing paradoxical nature of this theology, chapter 3 is a strategic turning-point in the genealogy of the will to speak (it is a turning-point in the genealogy, in the unfolding of history, hence, I am not referring to a historical turning-point). The first chapters are illustrative of the approaches to its past that a theology of language might take. The question of the subject, in theory is a rhetorical question. Here, in the context of a genealogy of the will to speak, this rhetorical question allows for a heuristic overcoming of subjectivity, because any answer tacitly implies this overcoming. To speak of a heuristic overcoming of subjectivity is, in chapters 4 and 5, to look forward to the epistemological uncertainty that grounds the subject in the revolutionary process of subjectivity, and to look forward to heuristic definitions of the subject who speaks that incorporate Julia Kristeva’s concept of a subject in-process/on-trial, and Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of a subject/superject. The subject in-process/on-trial is, so to speak, how Kristeva materializes Hegel’s dialectic, without misplacing concreteness in the abstract idea of matter, and without turning the dialectical process of thinking into the product of historical materialism. The subject in-process/on-trial is free, it is in revolution, because of the negativity transversal to understanding. This transversal negativity is not the negative limit of the understanding—the Sublime, and it is not a logical operation that oversteps the limits of understanding—a dialectical illusion. It is a “semiotic movement, which moves through the symbolic, produces it, and continues to work on it from within” (see Kristeva 1984:117 and part 2). The subject/superject is the enlightened concept of the subject where a double Copernican revolution has occurred in that there is the Kantian notion that we construct our apprehensions, but reciprocally, objects as complex paradigms

INTRODUCTION

3

construct our subjectivity. Hence, as product of the world we are subject while as builders of this same world, we are superject (see Whitehead 1979). On trial, the superject who speaks may have a slip of the tongue, and betray her innermost fears with irretrievable theological mistakes in the interpretation of the history of Western thought. On trial, because she does not integrate affects into concepts, the subject only thinks about one thing: her want-of-feeling. The subject is in tension with the superject, because the subject’s affects are not integrated in the conceptual realm of the superject. The symbolic world that is the representation of the superject means nothing to the subject whose experience of the symbolic world is its void. Schopenhauer leads us to this critical moment in the life of the will to speak. His theological mistake is his mis-interpretation of the iconoclastic force that belongs to the will to speak. In his Word as Will and Representation (1969), he calls this force the “denial of the will-to-live,” as if the rebelliousness of an affected subject of desire against a superject—against the desire to conceptualize affects— could be denied without any consequences. In process, the speaking subject who traces the genealogy of the will to speak back to the ideas in the history of Western thought looks forward to her difficult freedom, this complex of deferral between a superject’s want-of-feeling for words and a subject’s feeling-of-want from words. Chapter 6 offers an allegorical account of such a subject’s will to speak. This subject must speak another tongue even though there is no way out of representation. Language, Desire, and Theology: A Genealogy of the Will to Speak argues that language is theological for anyone who dares to speak another tongue—for any fool who sets his face toward wisdom, because his eyes are on the ends of this earth. It is not an oxymoron. It is a promise.

4 INTRODUCTION

1 All men by nature desire to know

“All men by nature desire to know” is the first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. This desire to know is useful for survival, for practicalities, for comfort and security. Yet, if practical and empirical knowledge is desirable because it is useful, the usefulness of knowledge alone is not why all men by nature desire to know. Rather, it is the satisfaction; the joy and the delight in understanding that ignite the desire to know. Likewise, while it is useful to hear, to see, and to taste, the usefulness of sense-perception does not explain the desire to hear the voice of a loved one over the telephone, to see the sun shine, or to eat food that tastes good. Desire, by nature, is ignited in anticipation of a certain kind of joy. The first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is significant for the theologian insofar as it bluntly expresses a concern for pleasure and joy inthemselves. The factual or logical knowledge that may ensue from intellectual curiosity, whether useful or trivial, is distinguishable, in kind, from the pleasure and joy afforded by intellectual curiosity. Without the possibility of this distinction, one may easily view Aristotle’s Metaphysics as a purely scientific enterprise, or, in any case, as irrelevant to theological discourses which are grounded in faith and inspired by love. With the distinction, Aristotle’s Metaphysics becomes relevant to the theologian. It can be read as a theological inquiry.1 Still, one may very well ask what Aristotle’s quote, let alone his Metaphysics, has to do with language, desire, and theology, with a genealogy of the will to speak. This is a legitimate question, and my answer may be deemed unsatisfactory by some. One is not so lucky who expects results My answer is that this quote has everything to do with what is specifically theological about desire: that desire is for the infinite. The meta-narrative of this quote is implacably theological. It is a sentence without an object. It foretells of a desire that cannot be satiated. It bespeaks what it means to be human, imperfect, and mortal. One may argue, perhaps, that if human beings are curious by nature, then they are curious in the interest of nature itself, that human beings live and die to nurture nature, as means to a senseless cyclical end. But then, one would think that this senselessness of nature would sabotage itself, one would think that

6 ALL MEN BY NATURE DESIRE TO KNOW

this disappointing answer to the question “why are human beings by nature curious?” would even curtail the desire to survive. Sometimes it does. So what does the desire to know have to do with the will to speak? It is like the desire to eat, not for nutrition alone, but for the pleasure that comes from eating. One asks why, not to get an answer, but for the pleasure that comes from asking why. One asks why even though answers disappoint. One asks why for the sake of stating questions. Why is that so? Why, as I recently read in the local newspaper, are the shores of the New York Finger Lakes either privately owned or, if public, then subject to specific regulations such as a parking fee, or a camping fee, no alcoholic beverages, no pets in the water, no skinny dipping, and no trespassing after dusk? Why does the sun rise and set every day? Why are we here? Why? Mischievous, this human, albeit childlike, propensity for ceaseless questioning can quickly spiral downwards into the existential battlefield which is the core motivation behind the quest for knowledge. Once set in motion, questioning that is unceasing implies and cannot elude the question of faith. In the face of ignorance, to ceaselessly desire to know is a deep cry for reassurance, an angry cry for the world to start making sense, and a helpless cry for hope. No life-saving answer can rescue a helpless cry from despair. That is why wonder can withstand an awesome leap of faith. There are biologists and there are nuns, and each seeks the truth, each seeks reassurance, each seeks faith in a different way. The question is not who is right or wrong, whose way is more or less useful. The question concerns the worth of antagonizing hope or reassurance, whether they arise from cell research or from loving Jesus. For, in both cases, there is a measure of reason and a measure of faith. And in both cases, it is not the object (cells or Jesus) that makes life worthwhile, but the subject who expresses wonder even amidst lament. The subject who speaks chooses faith and reason because she does not want to desire, by nature, for the sake of a senseless nature. She desires, by nature, for the sake of speaking her infinite desire to know. Knowledge always requires an element of faith, even if that faith is no nobler a sentiment than the habitual trust in the truth-value of self-evidence. But then, what really constitutes what is called faith? Is it a habit, an impulse, a voluntary act? Furthermore, voluntary or involuntary, conscious decision or ignorant guess, when is faith make-believe? If, following Sartre, women and men are condemned to freedom, if the human condition is that freedom; then faith is, paradoxically, always, and at the same time, however, never make-believe. It is never make-believe in the same way that certain knowledge is always selfevident. It is always make-believe in the same way that any knowledge about reality is never identical, or one, with that reality. To antagonize and measure the biologist’s hope, which is found in the process of her research, with that of the nun, which is found in her passion for Christ, is as gratuitous an act as free will is not.

ALL MEN BY NATURE DESIRE TO KNOW

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One who wanders in wonder, and wonders in wandering When Platonic epistemology finds its way into the language of a Christian Augustine, and when five centuries later, Anselm’s arguments echo the PlatonicAugustinian being of Logos, questions pertaining to the limits of human knowledge are important because they are truly theological questions, not because they are philosophical questions. Both Augustine and Anselm are concerned with faith, but not because they seek rational grounds to justify natural human knowledge, rather, because they seek a refuge in the human interpretation of the being of God. When Aristotle’s Metaphysics appears in Latin translation, Aquinas writes a systematic Christian metaphysics. Avicenna, with earlier access to Aristotle in Arabic translation, writes his own Muslim metaphysics before Aquinas. Both medieval thinkers appropriate the Greek philosophy of Aristotle to better pursue the course of their respective enquiries on the order of the cosmos and the nature of its relationship to the Being of monotheism. And, when Scotus rejects both the dialectical and the analogical rapport of God and His creatures, his refutations are too powerful to leave any space for anything other than a univocal being. This is a God who speaks when faith speaks. This is a silent God when words lose the meaning of what makes them real to begin with. Augustine, Anselm, Avicenna, Aquinas, and Scotus appear in the genealogy of the will to speak. They belong to the medieval period in the history of the will to speak. For this reason, they are called medieval theologians. Of course, this is not necessarily true for the history of Western thought. Augustine is a figure of late antiquity. His death does, however, mark the beginning of the Dark Ages. Avicenna is a philosopher, a physician, and a poet. Nevertheless, he tries to bridge the human divide with the divine, and it is in this sense that he is also a theologian. As for Aquinas, his thought is at the juncture of medieval Latin Christianity and Renaissance intra-continental scholasticism. There is little ambiguity that he is a medieval theologian. Lastly, Scotus may read like a logician, but his concerns are unmistakably theological. Each medieval theologian carries the epistemological burden of a revealed Logos to its existential implications. He embodies the Logos. In questioning the possibility or the nature of the relation between the reasoned discourse of human beings and the Logos of God, the medieval theologian also reveals his existential questions: Who am I? Where am I going? What is the purpose of my journey? What is the meaning of my fragile human existence next to God’s? The medieval theologian cannot define his relation to the Logos in an isolated, epistemological system. He must embody the Logos, he wants to give it substance, he begins to sketch a kind of being that would be proper to the Logos, a being greater than nature, sovereign of all human beings, sovereign over the world. He, thus, begins to sketch what, by nature, he cannot naturally know. Already aware of the fallibility of nature, of his inability to fully control nature, the medieval theologian is now also aware of his inability to satisfy the

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desire to know God naturally. More precisely, he is now aware that his natural knowledge of God is incomplete. Nevertheless, he still tries to grasp the being of the Logos just so that he may speak to Him, to his being. In so doing, he embodies the Logos. He invokes the name of God—“God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”— and in so doing, he plunges into the world of the Word, into a secular new world order, a world that is neither profane, nor sacred. The medieval theologian circumscribes his natural desire to know God with his own making, with his own maker. Made human, he is formed of dust and he, therefore, sees his own masculine desire to know as being feminine as well.2 His natural desire to know God is circumscribed with his humanness. His humanness is circumscribed with the Word of God. He sees his theological desire as having a place in the cosmos, as having a purpose in the cosmos. Just as the value placed on the existence of the historic medieval lay person is commensurate with his consanguine birthrights and corresponding station (the amount of a dowry, a man’s worth in terms of land and possessions, a bastard’s rights to some compensation) (Ariès and Duby 1995: chs 1–2), the heuristic medieval theologian sees the existence of humankind in a hierarchy towards God, as worth less than God, as unhappy because ignorant of God. The heuristic medieval theologian’s quest for the knowledge of the being of God is not immune to what takes place in real medieval life. Instead, it is a hopeful cosmological continuation or reconfiguration of a rather static social stratification. If on the one hand, historically, indeed, only the man of letters or the cleric is capable and able to access theological works, on the other, heuristically, the epistemologies and cosmologies of the medieval theologian are democratic. For, it is the human intellect, not specifically a nobleman’s intellect or a clergyman’s intellect, that, through acts of ratiocination, acts of the imagination, and in language, can reach the universality and truth of the being of God. These metaphysics have nothing to do with gender, lineage, kinship, family, wealth, fortune—unless we are to believe that the powers to think, to imagine, and to speak are intrinsically determined in such ways. Closest to this type of hierarchical determination of status are angelologies, but here, all human beings belong to the same realm, and so, once again, it is how the angelic cosmos is construed and how the human soul and intellect are seen to interact with the Archangel Gabriel (the last angel in the hierarchy) that is a potential for access to the divine. Medieval theology is a response to real life, it is not simply the abstract and scholastic prowess of genius that we call metaphysics and that has been condemned for its supposed claims to absolutism. Medieval metaphysics is a way of thinking about life. And when it is often said that it appears more as a way out of this life because it construes another reality beyond ours, one has to understand that each metaphysician exerts a leap of faith in this life to be united to the divine. The metaphysician argues how the fallible and contingent human being, while remaining fallible and contingent, has access to the divine and the infinite. The metaphysician believes in the possibility of a union with God in this

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world. How this union is possible and what it means are the issues debated throughout the medieval period. Instead of saying that there is no link between the infinite and the finite, the particular and the universal, the contingent and the necessary, man and God, the metaphysician tries to explain on finite terms something which is beyond the grasp of the intellect, and which provokes its curiosity, namely the intellection of the infinite, the impassable, the eternal—that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Then, he has to prove this deity’s existence outside the mind, not just because the Church might burn him on the stake if he questions it, but because of his desire to know—his theological desire to understand the human predicament. Should there be no God outside the mind, how shall we understand and accept finitude? How shall we deal with our infinite desire in a finite world? It is quite possible to conceive of metaphysics as an attempt to live a life that can cope with disappointments, to live a real life. Metaphysics, then, becomes a strategy whereby a man’s intellect, his imagination, and his psyche are indissolubly invested in his devising a way to feel closer to God by allowing his humanity to exceed itself in the realm of speculation, imagination, and faith. This man’s metaphysic is not an escape from this world and a retreat to some other world. It is make-believe and it is not make-believe. It represents the power and the freedom of each and every human being to negotiate his or her natural desire to know in the face of the infinite. Creativity is this power and this freedom. He who doubts shall wander in wonder The dichotomy between agricultural and hunting societies is often invoked as a means to rationalize or interpret the religious significance of strange myths and magic rituals. Oedipus kills the Sphinx because she is a monster who threatens the city of Thebes. A cock is sacrificed to Asclepius by the sick people who sleep in his temple. The heart, liver, and blood of a sacrificial animal are burned at the altar so that soldiers receive from their gods protection against their enemy. Afghan men convene for the traditional game of beheading a goat, chasing it on horseback to compete for the honor. The chasse noble, better known as chasse à courre, is so called because the game is in the chase as much as it is in the kill. The art of the noble chase lies in bringing a prey to stand at bay of hunting dogs. The hunt is noble both because it is a real hunt (a chase) and because it is a superfluous hunt (a hunt for the sake of hunting). The art of the noble hunt thus points to the ordeal, as it were, of civility. In each case, the killing of animals marks the overcoming of life in the state of nature by an urban-agricultural way of life. The paleo-Siberian peoples are primarily hunting societies. In some bearhunting rituals, a hunter speaks poetry to the bear before the animal is killed. The bear is told that since it wishes to be killed, it must come out of its den and offer itself to the hunter’s weapon. In this way, the hunter is not responsible for initiating the kill, but responsible for facilitating the return of the bear’s spirit to its “Spiritual Owner.” “If our sense of incredulity is aroused,” writes Jonathan

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Z.Smith upon addressing this incredible bear-hunting ritual in his article “The Bare Facts of Ritual”, “we need, as historians of religion, to get up from the armchair and into the library long enough to check the sources” (Smith 1988:60– 1). Bluntly put, Smith is asking if we can believe that these hunters are as naive as their hunting rituals suggest. Do these hunting peoples believe that their rituals change the cruelty of nature where, as Whitehead would say, “life is robbery” (Whitehead 1979:105)? It turns out, Smith continues, that actual bear-hunts are carried out with traps, that it is only during the rituals that the killings are face-toface. Reality and ritual tell two very different stories, and thus rituals, concludes Smith, “express a realistic assessment of the fact that the world cannot be compelled” (Smith 1988:65). Likewise, can we believe that sacrificing a cock or that the “noble hunt” (a hunt for the sake of hunting) either overcome nature or adequately depict the relationship between nature and culture as one of overcoming? Can we believe that the expressions of overcoming and transcendence of the metaphysician are meant as realistic depictions of reality, of man’s relationship to God? Can we believe that the medieval theologian, heuristic or not, espouses his system without an inkling of doubt? If we can question and demolish his metaphysics by the sheer exercise of skepticism, can he not also do the same? Does he not also? He perfects or rejects interpretations of Aristotle or Plato. He attacks other medieval theologians’ systems on the ground that they are Aristotelian or Platonic, or unorthodox. He, in turn, systematically offers his own ingenious proof or proofs of the existence of God, more irrefutable than previous ones. Let us suggest that the medieval thinker, while he attacks or perfects another thinker, equally challenges his own thinking. As we meet his writings with a sense of incredulity, we, thus, remember to ask ourselves whether what compels the world is reason and knowledge, or our belief in the reason and knowledge with which we constitute its reality. If reason and knowledge warrant credibility while faith wards off skepticism, then, perhaps, we ought to meet with skepticism the credibility that we bestow on our reasoning and on our knowledge. If the medieval theologian bars skepticism with spurious reasons and dubious knowledge, then, perhaps, he too only meets these as we meet our reasons and our knowledge, with belief—but do we always? It is possible, dare I say, credible, that the medieval theologian meets his reason and his knowledge as we do, with incredulity. His texts, however, provide scant evidence of the medieval thinker’s sense of incredulity towards his own work and faith. Or, the absence thereof manifests the uncomfortable nearness of heathen despair. During the whole of the Middle Ages, a scourge worse than the plague that infested the castles, villas, and palaces of the cities of the world fell on the dwellings of spiritual life, penetrated the cells and cloisters of monasteries, the Thebaid of the hermits, the convents of recluses. Acedia (sloth), tristitia (sorrow), taedium vitae (weariness, loathing of life), and desidia (idleness) are the names the church fathers gave to the death this sin induced in the

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soul; and, although its desolate effigy occupies the fifth position in the lists of the Summae virtutum et vitiorum (Summa of virtues and vices), in the miniatures of manuscripts, and in the popular representations of the seven capital sins, an ancient hermeneutic tradition considered it the most lethal of the vices, the only one for which no pardon was possible. (Agamben 1993:3) Nowadays, the medical diagnosis of depression obviates the church fathers’ pronouncement of some “noonday demon” (Agamben 1993: 3), calling to heed instead the ancient chemical origins of melancholia, chiefly resulting, according to Hippocrates, from “the influence of black bile and phlegm on the brain” (Goodwin and Guze 1989:4–5). With skepticism and incredulity nearing the noonday demon’s loss of faith, the medieval theologian—because he is also a philosopher in the third sense of philosophy as defined by Aristotle—wrestles, more than with his contemporaries or his predecessors, with the plausibility of reason as well as with the place, the legitimate extent, and the necessity of faith. Medieval metaphysics, in a canonical history of ideas, belong to the period of debate between faith and reason. The period denotes and defines a historical paradigm. Yet, to say that medieval thinkers found the debate compelling out of sheer scholarly and disinterested pursuits seems presumptuous; it seems to insult more than their intelligence. At stake is the integrity of faith, for faith is not a calculated choice, it is not just a concept, and clearly, distinctly it is not conceptual in origin. How faith and reason weigh on existence makes them invaluable for existence. Metaphysics are debates between faith and reason because metaphysics are existential attempts and strategies to make real life meaningful in spite of a limited understanding, an inscrutable faith, and amidst ordinariness. I cannot help reading Anselm, Augustine, Avicenna, Aquinas, and Scotus without finding myself both incredulous and enchanted. Incredulous, I cannot blindly believe their metaphysics. Enchanted, because they offer an interpretation of reality that is ingenious, sometimes delightful, and imaginative. Anselm’s Proslogion, for instance, his speech made to another, cannot prove to this other that God exists. It is instead an argument for the existence of God which, briefly paraphrased, rests on the premise that since God is that than which nothing greater can be thought, He, therefore, cannot be thought not to exist. The other may understand the irrefutable ontological validity of the argument, but, only if she already believes in God. More precisely, God’s necessary existence must precede the idea, as its condition, that God is that than which nothing greater can be thought, because, indeed, the mere possibility of such an idea is a contradiction. Hence, either the idea of God is necessary because God exists and, as Descartes would argue, God causes us to have an idea of Him. Or the idea of God is merely possible, but that the idea is possible in no way validates the necessity of God’s existence unless the idea of, for instance, merely possible beautiful islands were equally a contradiction—and beautiful islands must necessarily exist (Copleston 1993:163). Anselm acknowledges both that there is

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a difference between a believer’s and an unbeliever’s understanding of God and that his argument cannot reconcile both understandings. It is hard to imagine that Anselm’s own struggle with his natural desire to know the infinite is not at the source of so clear and so intuitive an acknowledgment. It is hard to imagine that Anselm never needs to know that God exists by way of reason rather than by faith. Because faith fails us all at times. And there is no reason to believe that the medieval theologian, heuristic or historic, is immune to this failure. Anselm, who devotes his scholastic mind to religious faith, tentatively, experimentally, explores the power of reason to understand what hitherto belongs to the domain of faith. The irony, however, is that he becomes too comfortable with the power of his own reasoning to doubt the faith with which he seeks this understanding. In On the Free Will, Augustine holds a conversation with a certain Evodius. This conversation is not unlike a Socratic dialogue. Augustine probes and challenges Evodius in order to prove that God is, that all things are from God, and that free will is, thus, a gift from God, even though many err in vice and ignorance. But, is Evodius a student? Is he not, rather, the doubting, insidious voice of the noonday demon evoked by the smart, rhetorical tone of an otherwise curious and candid question? “Now explain to me, if you can, why God gave man free judgment of will, for obviously, if man did not receive free will, he would not be able to sin” (Augustine 1957:11 (Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 32, col. 1239–66) [My emphasis]). Augustine answers with some irony “Is it certain and known to you then that God gave man this which you think should not have been given” (Augustine 1957:11?) In other words, the defense, here, attacks the truth value of the prosecution’s grounds instead of the logic of its inference—are you certain, is it known to you that God gave man free will? To the demonic dubiousness that God Himself is the author of man’s capacity to judge and will, and hence, to the demonic suggestion that either there is no God, or God is not all powerful (and, then, He is no God), to this ultimate existential question about the nature and purpose of man, Augustine responds with the exact same weapon, the exact same question—is it God? Augustine can only undermine the smartness of Evodius’ question by undermining Evodius’ certainty, the certainty of his doubt: “can you really believe what you are doubting? Why don’t you first doubt what you believe?” What can you believe? What do you really know? This is methodological doubt before Descartes. And the response is quasi-Cartesian. Evodius is sure that he is something because he lives, and he can only be sure that he is because he lives, because he understands this. He believes because he understands that he believes, and he doubts because he understands that he believes that he doubts. If, then, experientially, belief precedes understanding, understanding, however, is the condition of plausibility of belief. Augustine quotes respectively Isaiah: “If ye will not believe, ye shall not understand” (7.9, sec. LXX) and Matthew: “Seek and ye shall find” (7.7).3 Otherwise put, if Evodius does not believe that God is

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the cause of free will, how can he understand sin, reward and punishment? If he does not believe that God gave us free will how can he understand the difference between good and evil, how can he know true good from false good? Yet, he shall not believe in justice lest he understands that God is the cause of free will. He shall not believe that man can judge good from evil unless he understands how God can be the cause of free will. So what happens to the fool who claims that there is no God (who does not understand how God can be the cause of free will)? If he is obstinate, and has no desire to learn your belief, then he is stupid, stubborn. Then he is a nihilist for whom truth deserving of the name is truth forever unattainable or nothing at all, nothing worthy of his belief. Or else he is a solipsist who only believes what he can understand, and then, who is he to understand anything at all? Some puny creature, destined to die, insignificant in time and space, and who— if he believes anything at all—believes himself to be the navel of the universe or a speck of dust, the measure of all things or the measure of no thing at all. The fool, if he is obstinate and has no desire to learn your belief, then he is no fool at all. Instead, he is lucky because he knows of nothing to learn. He has no desire to learn what he does not know because, in the first place, he does not desire to know. Lucky, he knows nothing and he does not even know that. If, however, the fool stubbornly claims that he cannot know God because God is beyond his grasp, then he cannot claim that there is no God at all or that he does not believe in God. This is like the freshman who says, “I can’t do philosophy” because he has never tried before. The fool who would claim or believe that there is no God because God is beyond his grasp still necessarily believes that there is something else to know. He necessarily believes in this something else—in some other. He only wishes he understood it. If the freshman does not like to feel stupid, the fool would like to think that he is wise, “and he would not have to wish it if there did not cling to his mind a notion of wisdom” (Augustine 1957:15.A, 57). Likewise, the fool cannot claim that he does not know God unless he has a notion of God. But if he has a notion of God, it is not God that he does not understand. The fool does not understand faith. Since he wishes to be wise, and since he has a notion of wisdom, the fool desperately seeks to understand faith. Which comes first, faith or understanding? The two seem to be caught in a hermeneutical circle; to understand is to interpret and to believe is to interpret. Which interpretation comes first? Or is belief always blind? But then, why not believe in just anything? Many would concur that Augustine is on the side of faith seeking understanding. But, Augustine’s fool seeks to understand faith. If the fool is not stubborn and stupid, he is not a lost cause; he is not lucky and happy. Augustine, I would contend, realizes that understanding can seek faith as much as faith can seek understanding. I would contend that Augustine’s dialogue betrays his internal debate between faith and understanding. In the light of this dialogue, the hermeneutical circle appears transcended: faith is not before understanding; understanding is not before faith, for there is neither faith without

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understanding, nor understanding without faith. If faith makes understanding possible, understanding makes faith plausible. The hermeneutical circle does not have a temporal beginning. It has an existential beginning, where interpretation is one act: Not one before the other, rather, no one without the other. The desire for happiness is just and justified. It is just because happiness is intrinsically good and because, in happiness, one knows what happiness is and believes that one is happy, without contradiction. One is happy, one knows it, one believes it: in one act. “In so far therefore as all men desire a happy life they do not err” (Augustine 1957:9.26, 40) because they desire wisdom. If men do not err when they desire what is just, there is justice, henceforth, an almighty judge, and foremost, happiness without contradiction, where in one act, one is happy, one knows it, and one believes it. Or is there only a notion of justice and wisdom? But you would have to be a fool to think that. You would have to doubt centuries of testimony, defends Evodius. You would have to be stupid and stubborn. You would have to have no imagination.4 For, neither faith nor understanding has any credibility apart from each other. It takes the power of the imagination to keep the hermeneutical circle out of the finitude of time and space and out of the dualism of mind and body. It takes the power of the imagination to establish a possible certainty in the intellection of the material world when the senses experience the world empirically, pragmatically, sensually, and only by approximation. The trick lies in a utopian move, in a reversal of the pedestrian obvious. Following the idolatrous and fatalistic human penchant to establish a realm of essences distinct from existence, the senses renounce their pedestrian ancestry to emulate the way the mind grasps immaterial concerns (without spatial, temporal, and finite mediation). Now the senses too can potentially intuit, without erring, the mediated material world. There is nothing obvious about this sensuous intuition without mediation of the material world. It takes the prowess of the imagination to reverse the pedestrian obvious. First, the ascetic mind (saved from carnal sin by Christ whose crucifixion and resurrection are God’s gift of an indwelling divine illumination) will have the power to plumb the depths of an otherwise dark and lost self and see in it the light, the truth, the eternal wisdom of God, emanation of the eternal forms in God’s mind. Second, the imagination will stipulate that the senses are merely capable of intuition by contiguity or association, if you will, merely because the truth dwells within the neighboring mind. Otherwise put, face to face with the demoralizing epistemological worthlessness of the imagination—a worthlessness for which the imagination is to blame and brought on by its own nostalgic, idolatrous, fatalistic, ready disposition to misplace the essence of its existence elsewhere while lamenting its bovine limitations—it takes the prowess of the imagination to explain how our a posteriori, fallible, empirical experience of the world does not condition the knowledge of this experience, and is not the source and the resource for the metaphysical reinterpretation of this experience. It takes more than blind belief

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or habit. It ironically takes an existential investment to assert the possibility of knowing being, origin, cause, and end of our contingent existence. It simply takes a finite mind to have a notion of unconditional happiness, a finite will to desire this unconditional happiness, and blind belief or inferential reasoning to deduce from its notion that unconditional happiness has a referent; a finite mind, however, can never know unconditional happiness without the incredible power and freedom of the imagination. Whereas a finite consciousness and a finite experience of dread, suffering, or ordinariness suffice to foment a desire for metaphysical happiness and to fathom metaphysical wisdom or absolute knowledge, it takes the imagination to truly believe that wisdom can transcend knowledge. No matter how hard he tries, the fool will never understand faith, because godlessness is in his heart (see Psalms 14.1; 53.1). He cannot find it in his heart to accept that there is a God. He lacks the power of the imagination to wholeheartedly believe in God, perhaps because, disheartened, he is all too familiar with the absence of good. Oddly enough, it also takes the power of the imagination to accept that there is no other world and to believe in this world alone. Thus, the fool is anyone who says in his heart that this world is hopeless whether or not he believes in another world, for the one who says in his heart “there is another world besides this ungodly world” is as much in want of wisdom and happiness as the other who says in his heart that there is no God. Perhaps Proverbs puts it best: Do not answer fools according to their folly, or you will be a fool yourself. Answer fools according to their folly, or they will be wise in their own eyes. (Proverbs 26.4–5) During my smarter years, I recall asking my father, whose first book was entitled The Death of God, if he believed in God, to which he replied something of the sort: “Of course, is God not a word in the dictionary?”5 A secular theologian, who believes in this world alone, sounds like a fool to any fool who tries to understand his belief, but cannot find it in her heart. Only then, as the foolishness of this answer, the foolishness of this hope in one world alone make themselves felt, may the fool learn to live with her own heart. Like a father speaks to his daughter, the secular theologian cannot answer a fool without becoming a fool himself. Yet, this is also how the secular theologian prevents the fool from fooling herself, it is also how a father speaks to his daughter so that she may address her natural desire to be happy in her world which knows of no other. This is a world where unconditional happiness is a ghost of the mind. This is the only world where, if it is impossible to live with a ghost, then it is possible to imagine this ghost into a dream. In this world, proving that God exists, as does the word God in a dictionary never proves what he is, or that he is. His ontological status can only be determined by the imagination, by trial and error,

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by His gift of free will to humanity. And so it is that the fool “whose eyes are on the ends of this earth” still “sets his face toward wisdom” (Proverbs 18.24). What does a wandering doubting fool wonder about? Some nine hundred years after Augustine, Thomas Aquinas develops an ingenious way to metaphysically reconcile free will with God’s Providence. In his Summa Theologica, he writes, “the will desires something of necessity” (Aquinas 1945: question 82, art. 1, 777). To argue his point he cites Augustine (“all desire happiness with one will”) whose words are by then as unquestionable as his authority. There are no exceptions: everyone who desires something desires something of necessity and desires happiness. Aquinas further argues that what belongs to human beings by necessity, their will, must be God-given because the existence of human beings is merely contingent, whereas God’s existence is necessary. The challenge to the understanding begins once Aquinas adds that the will “does not desire of necessity all things whatsoever it desires,” (Aquinas 1945: question 82, art. 2, 779) which means that the one will with which all desire happiness (and by extension God or the knowledge of God) is at the same time the will with which all can also desire an infinity of things without the God-given necessity to desire them, but in a voluntary and contingent way (and by extension the will can sin). These two points reveal an antagonism between the agency of free will and its necessary object or purpose. Aquinas asserts, as it were through habit of thought, that the necessary desire for happiness is God’s will, just as one naturally asserts that the ground is low. He asserts likewise: it is God’s will that all should be able to desire other things, but not of necessity, and it is equally God’s will that all be free to choose between what they desire of necessity and what they desire, but not of necessity. How can the will be free to decide what it wants and at the same time necessarily desire something? On the one hand, if it desires something of necessity, then, it is always wanting and always lacking. On the other, if it is free to decide what it wants, then, it never chooses want and lack. As he unravels the antagonisms of free will, Aquinas argues that God has granted human beings the free exercise of their will so that they may better know Him. In this, he demonstrates more than mere habit of thought, because his assertions pale in comparison with the greater power of his imagination to explain how the desire for happiness is commensurate with God’s Providence. The will must freely tend to what is good rather than evil, the intellect must be able to distinguish truth from error, but more complicated, there should be a rapport without contradiction between this will’s choice of an object, this intellect’s knowledge of it, and God. Now, it is easy to imagine why happiness should ensue from such a rapport without contradiction, but it is far less easy to imagine the human condition being agreed to it, unless through some conversion of the human condition whereby God were at once the end of both will and intellect. How should this be? Is it simply a matter of good will, good sense, and

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good faith? If it is a question of good will, good sense, and good faith, is there any simplicity to the matter? “Physics is basically good common sense, just use your good sense,”6 would lament a humorous High-School Physics teacher of mine who, desirous to motivate and encourage us, presumed that we all had bon sens when it came to understanding the basic dynamics of Physics. Today, common sense tells me that my teacher’s good spirits are what kept him repeating class after class, one disastrous test after another, that it only took bon sens to solve a Physics problem. He not only presumed that we all had good sense, he assumed it insofar as it would allow us to understand that which he assumed was both a good thing and good for us, Physics. He assumed as much, because all human beings desire happiness, and he assumed that happiness was exactly and ultimately that which had to be at once good for us, for all, and in itself. Substitute “God” for “Physics,” and this equivocal equation of good sense with common sense makes perfect sense. Paradoxically maintaining and denying an equation similar to that between good sense and common sense, Aquinas shows how it is thanks to their free will to desire happiness in many things that human beings may better know God. This, he is able to articulate quite convincingly, though after resting his argument on his assumption that “there are some things which have a necessary connection with happiness…by means of which man adheres to God, in Whom alone true happiness consists” (Aquinas 1945: question 82, art. 2, 779). Human beings pursue happiness through many things in a relative manner; yet, some of the things through which they seek happiness are not relative to the individual. Aquinas assumes and asserts that such things, which make all human beings happy, lead to God. Consequently and hypothetically, true happiness is attainable by all human beings, as now, in addition to possessing the common sense to seek happiness in many different things, all human beings must also have been given enough of the good sense to seek those things that are certain to bring true happiness. If these things could be identified with apodictic certainty, the will’s freedom would amount to one choice: true happiness or not. To call this “freedom” might be a stretch. But, “until through the certitude produced by seeing God the necessity of such a connection be shown [between certain things and happiness],” the will is free, “the will does not adhere to God of necessity” (ibid.). There must be a way to ascertain that good will is indeed truly such; good sense should prove adequate, except for the resulting implication that good sense should somehow have an insight into God’s mind. This implication is incongruent with a theological view (God is infinite, man is finite). The insight of a good sense must be an insight into some humanly intelligible thing. Moreover, this thing must also be sensible, since it is also the object of good will. Yet, this intelligible and sensible thing should also be really related to God; it should be something nobler than can be adhered to by a finite will alone, and it should be nobler than can be apprehended by a finite intellect alone. There is, therefore, a co-dependency between the will and the intellect, so that sometimes

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the will is a higher power than the intellect, and sometimes the intellect is higher than the will. Considered “absolutely,” explains Aquinas, the intellect is always higher than the will since “the act of the intellect consists in this— that the likeness of the thing understood is in the one who understands;” while considered “relatively,” he pursues, the will is higher than the intellect since “the act of the will consists in this—that the will is inclined to the thing itself as existing in itself. And therefore,” continues Aquinas, “the Philosopher says in Metaph. vi. that good and evil, which are objects of the will, are in things, but truth and error, which are objects of the intellect, are in the mind” (Aquinas 1945: question 82, art. 3, 780–1). In other words, when the will desires something not in the mind, but good, something more noble than what can be known by the human soul through common sense (sense and understanding), the will is higher, better, than common sense or the soul (“the love of God is better than the knowledge of God”), and when the intellect knows something not in things and true, something more noble than what can be had by a human will that freely senses between good and evil, common sense or the soul is higher, truer, than the will (“the knowledge of corporeal things is better than the love thereof”).7 Because the will can desire things that are good and of which the good is more noble than the soul or common sense, and because the intellect can know a truth that is not in things, and is, therefore, more noble than the will, a free will can be a good will, and common sense can be good sense. Because one may love God as other, on the one hand, and because one may know God as the conceptual content of one’s conceptual ground, on the other, relative to this other, the will’s love is more perfect than the intellect’s knowledge, but, unconditionally, as of God and in his likeness, the intellect is potentially perfect (an embodied soul can contain the likenesses of God’s effects: in this, it is potentially perfect, but it can never know the essence, God, of existence by analogy while still embodied). Aquinas articulates an epistemology of which the key principle is probability instead of certainty. This epistemology is a system, or part thereof, of a metaphysical—speculative—nature, but the system is dynamic, because it itself is allowed to speculate, so to speak. A domain of probability now formally frames epistemology, wherein, at last, lays the certainty, the assurance, of a potential rapport without contradiction between the will, the intellect, and God’s effects. From the standpoint of the thinking and willing subject, this rapport is quintessential, as I see it, to the virtue of what constitutes analogy in Aquinas (often recalled as “like knows like”). Aquinas suggests that sometimes the will is greater, and sometimes the intellect is greater. Virtually, then, both the absolute and the relative perspectives hold: the result is “virtual undecidability.” Considered virtually, undecidability answers whether the will or the intellect is a higher power, and whether the will desires some “what” that makes it happy of necessity or out of contingency. Virtual undecidability validates both the relative and the absolute consideration of the rapport between will, intellect, and God; in it resides the possibility of the

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convergence of the will’s desire for a good thing and the intellect’s knowledge of a true non-thing—of the good in the thing being the truth in the non-thing. If Aquinas, when he argues the existence of God, is careful to underscore that human beings cannot know the essence of God, he nevertheless establishes that God’s existence is both self-evident, insofar as, by definition, God’s essence is the same as His existence, and demonstrable, insofar as, also by definition, if there is an effect, then there is a pre-existing cause (Aquinas 1945: question 2, articles 1–2). We are absolutely in the likeness of God, relatively distinct from God, but virtually, God is all that exists which includes us. What, then, is the ontological status of the virtual? Say it is real, this means that virtual undecidability may be considered either absolutely or relatively: as essential or as an effect. If virtual undecidability is essential, then the source for the possibility of decidability is undecidability or divergence. One can decide whether the will or the intellect is a higher power, because this is not determined in essence (or pre-determined). Likewise on the contrary, if virtual undecidability is an effect (an effect of the actual), this does not contradict the possibility of a point of decidability. In the latter case, one re-determines what has lost determinacy: whether the will or the intellect is a higher power. The validity of the concept of virtual undecidability rests on the axiom that two divergent lines meet in one point. Hence, virtual undecidability is self-evident insofar as we all err or do not err. It is the why and how we err or do not err that is contingent, just as it is the when and where two divergent lines meet that is contingent. Either decidability is an effect of the actual, of essential undecidability, in which case decidability is simulacra: to determine the higher power of the two, the will or the intellect, is a simulacrum. Or decidability is a possibility of what is in essence: a fifty-fifty chance of making the right decision. As such, the determination of a higher power has no self-same origin, it is a “phantasm of the Same,” to quote Gilles Deleuze. In black and white, philosophies of Being (medieval theology, onto-theology) value the being in effect of undecidability, whereas philosophies of language (Age of Suspicion, existentialism, postmodernism) value the being in essence of undecidability. In black and white, analogy, as well as illumination and revelation, are metaphysical answers of medieval theologies, whereas repetition, Différance, erring, or Apocalypticism are (anti)metaphysical answers of philosophies of language. In black and white, there is a generally assumed historical genealogy from philosophies of being to philosophies of language. A theology of language, however, need be neither onto-theological, nor (anti)metaphysical if it is secular. Its secular answer is—neither analogy nor repetition—immanence, insofar as it collapses the realms of being and existence, of the sacred and the profane, into one secular age: neither does it long for a metaphysical being whose original essence has been lost, nor does it deplore the longing for an original essence which has turned out to be without being whatsoever. This is why, in the shaded area, the gray, and because the question for medieval theology is similar to that of

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a theology of language in that both bear the responsibility of decidability, analogy also holds the secular promise of a theology of language.8 In the gray, immanence is the secular answer to either theology. In the gray, where virtual undecidability implies possible decidability, the actualization of decidability—a conversion—is how “like knows like,” it is how man meets God and God meets man, it is how common sense is good sense. This conversion is how, not when, men can do what is good and right; therefore, this conversion is also how, not when, men err. Somehow, not in recognizable space and time, two disjointed realms reconcile such that, while undecidability is virtual, decidability nevertheless becomes possible. Perhaps the reconciliation of the finite and the infinite is a phantasm: some kind of intellection without content and perception without form. Perhaps conversion is this reconciliation of two realms as a phantasm. Yet, without this same phantasm which makes possible decidability there should be no actual analogy between the will, the intellect, and God, because “the first part of the process that moves from sense through understanding to essential definition” depends on an “Insight into phantasm” (Lonergan 1967:25). Without phantasm, there is no analogy, that is to say, there is no insight. Yet, in the gray of immanence, analogy defies logical consequence. Without insight into phantasm, there can be no conversion to phantasm. Without a conversion to phantasm, there can be no desire for the good in things out there higher than the truth in the mind and no desire for the truth in the mind nobler than the good in things out there. As Karl Rahner once put it “Being-present-tooneself and abstraction are intrinsically and essentially a knowing-some-thing-ofanother, and therefore are already in themselves a conversion to phantasm” (Rahner 1968: ch. 4, 238). It is equivalent to saying that an insight—the first part of the understanding process, the insight into phantasm, the insight that happiness is in God and necessary whenever the truth in the one who knows an object is the good in the object that one loves—is a conversion to phantasm, it is when the truth in the one who knows an object is the good in the object of one’s love. Otherwise put, a conversion to phantasm is how “Being-present-to-oneself” is “knowing-something-of-another,” while an insight into phantasm is when “Being-present-to-oneself” is “knowing-something-of-another.” This logic makes no sense from anyone’s armchair. Is it as false as asserting “if there is a cloud, then it rains,” when, in fact, what is always true is “if it rains, then there is a cloud.” Indeed, analogy as a rapport between God and creatures works irrationally, but it works logically nonetheless. It works, given the power to imagine that whenever there is a cloud it must rain—given the power to imagine this to be always true, even if experience indubitably reveals no necessary connection. Just as anyone, from his or her armchair, can imagine that the earth is flat (or why people once believed that it was), anyone can imagine that analogy always works, because experience is only ever at best highly probable. Otherwise put, either analogy never works, because there is no certainty that an insight into phantasm necessarily effects a conversion to phantasm (as there is no

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certainty that it will rain when it is cloudy). Or analogy always works, because the conversion to phantasm is always an insight into phantasm (clouds mean rain). There is something incredible in this conclusion. It is not as though Aquinas were at liberty to altogether eliminate any ambiguity in man’s rapport to God, for this would mean that the virtual itself is not real, and the issue, then, would not so much be that we cannot know God as God, but that there is no grace, no revelation, no God. Rather, if it is God’s will that human beings desire happiness, that some things make them happy of necessity, that they have free will, then an insight into phantasm is already a conversion to phantasm. What is incredible in this conclusion is that the power of the imagination, this human power to err, allows our heuristic medieval theologian to convert his impossible metaphysical transcendentalism between the finite and the infinite (that which is the condition for the notion of analogy) into a secular immanentism. This heuristic medieval theologian is a bit of a fool: he wants one thing and its opposite at once, he turns his eyes on the ends of this earth and sets his face toward wisdom. At the same time, he is also a man of understanding: the revelation of God’s grace is why he has eyes with which to see anything at all (Aquinas 1945: question 12, art. 13). It is why he sees that there is a God—a God whom, he says in his heart: “I could not see to see” (Dickinson 1979: poem 465). Aquinas, much indebted to Avicenna for his reading of Aristotle, together with most scholars of the period, sees as unorthodox Avicenna’s theory of creation, because it harkens back to Aristotle’s suggestions that the soul does not exist apart from a material body and that the movement of the universe is eternal. According to Avicenna, the world is both created and eternal: it has a beginning in time, but it is one world which is, thus, indivisible and continuous (see Wicken 1952:210). Yet, Aquinas, for his timely antipathy toward the association of matter or nature with anything spiritual, has a notion of analogy apparently more radical than that of Avicenna. Given His creatures and God whose being is His existence (given virtual, secular immanence), analogy in Aquinas is the transcendental psychic device that virtually allows creatures their spiritual dimension. Avicenna reverts to analogy, because he overtly suggests that the human soul is in itself only potentially able to know the truth and needs a spiritual guide (an angel whose matter is spiritual) to show it the right way. It is because his cosmology is unorthodox (it admits celestial bodies and terrestrial angels) that Avicenna’s analogy is not. All intellectual sciences—whether practical or speculative—are teleologically theological (soteriological) by virtue, on the one hand, of the terrestrial inter-connectedness between the artificial and the natural being of things that are, and on the other, of an analogical rapport of proportionality between terrestrial angels and the archangel Gabriel. For each science there is a subject matter the condition of which is investigated by that science. Subject matter is of two kinds: the one which depends for its being on our action, and the other which does not depend

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on its being for our action…thus intellectual sciences are of two kinds. The one which informs us of the condition of our action is named “practical science,” because its purpose is to inform us of what we should do in order to organize our affairs in this world properly and to insure that our affairs in the other world will be according to our hopes. The other informs us about the nature of being of objects so that our soul may find its own proper form and may be fortunate in the other worl… This science is named “speculative science.” (Avicenna 1973:11 [my emphasis]) The practical and speculative sciences are each divided into three additional sciences that further delineate a terrestrial order built along analogical associations.9 The intellectual sciences are understood— without any ambiguity —as a propaedeutic for the proper and hopeful organization of “our affairs” and the proper and fortunate formation of “our soul” in both this world and the other world. The ambiguity lies in determining the agency that earthly intellectual pursuits have on the other world. Do properly done actions and a properly formed soul in this world answer one’s hopes of fortune in the other world? How is it that if one is proper here, they will be happy there? And to complicate the matter, how is whatever is deemed proper (which can mean many things: suitable to a specific condition, naturally peculiar, conforming to good usage, modest, fine, good, becoming in appearance, thorough, belonging to oneself) ontologically related to and dependent on a world other than this world? For Avicenna, this question pertains to the subject matter of first philosophy which is being qua being and absolute being by contrast with being as it relates to matter and motion (Avicenna 1973:14). As with Aristotle, Avicenna admits that it is impossible to study being qua being and the absolute unless one can do so by way of an investigation into the causes belonging to the entire realm of being and unless one presupposes God to be the causal union of this entire realm of being. He names the part of first philosophy that recognizes God as “creator of all things, his unity, and the union of all things with him” and that investigates the unity of God, “metaphysical theology,” “The foundations of all other sciences are built upon this science” (ibid.). So far, Avicenna as a Muslim is as much of a Greek as the Christian that Aquinas allows himself to be. Avicenna is a Greek in that metaphysical theology as the Queen of all sciences is a science. He is a Muslim in that he recognizes without philosophical proof that God is the creator of all things. He believes what has been revealed to the Prophet Mohammed. For Aquinas, however, theology is a doctrine revealed by God because man cannot attain salvation through philosophical argumentation alone. As such, theology is a science that relies on faith in revelation: any created intellect can see the essence of God, but this essence is not seen through a likeness. (Aquinas 1945: question 12, articles 1–2). The point of contention, here, has to do with how the limits of the working powers of analogy are set by the ontological hierarchy of a cosmology. How do

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we know God, the Necessary Existent, whose essence is existence and who is present in things of which the existence is contingent when, as His effects, their essence is not in their existence, they do not exist of necessity? If both metaphysicians argue that we can see God, but not his essence, that the Necessary Existent has the greatest pleasure in that he is the greatest perceiver, he perceives being, himself, while intelligence only perceives the unchangeable. Avicenna as a Muslim is more of a Greek than Aquinas, because, according to him, we experience felicity naturally when we think of the Necessary Existent’s grandeur—even if due to our condition it cannot be the same felicity as that of the Necessary Existent (Avicenna 1973: article 37). On the contrary, Aquinas as a Christian writes that the knowledge we have of God by natural reason must be assisted by the revelation of grace (Aquinas 1945: question 12, art. 12). Avicenna, however, does not imply that we can naturally think of the Necessary Existent’s grandeur: he says that once we do think of it, felicity is natural. Whereas Aquinas insists on a God-given grace, Avicenna devises a transcendental pedagogy, a master-student relationship between the intellect and God, through the archangel Gabriel. Whereas analogy, in Aquinas, ultimately rests on grace, analogy, in Avicenna, rests on pedagogy (see Corbin 1960). If you are a good student your hopes will be answered. If you are a good Muslim, you will be fortunate. In Avicenna’s cosmos, angels emanate from God, the only Necessary Existent, and because God’s emanating essence is thought, these angels are intelligences. The first angel is an intelligence. As such, its being contains a dualism: as thought, its being is necessary, but as a thought, its being is contingent. This dualism forces the first angel into a three-fold intellection: first, he conceives his own principle and thus a second archangel is created; second, he realizes the necessity of his being for the creation of a second archangel, and thus an angel soul is created; last, he intelligizes the contingency of his being in itself, a shadow is cast and thus the matter of the first heaven is created. So it goes with the second archangel and so forth until the tenth archangel, Gabriel. By his time, the shadow from the matter of the nine heavens is too heavy to carry. Gabriel does not have the strength to continue the threefold intellection. He is overcome with sadness, and so the heavens are set in motion whereby he becomes the Active Intellect, actively nostalgic for a boundless perfection with divine unity. The syzygy with the Necessary Existent is broken. Weak and sad, the angel Gabriel actively conceives and creates a multiplicity of terrestrial angels or human souls who realize their necessary contingency, but not their principle nor the necessity of their being from the standpoint of their principle. The human soul feels estranged—from somewhere else. And it is in its estrangement, in its being a stranger to itself, that it understands that it is being transcended, that it becomes a guide and a savior. The human soul, by contemplating itself in its contemplation of the Active Intellect that estranges it from divine unity does like an angel soul contemplating the archangel that links it with divine unity.

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What is unorthodox about this angelology is that it presupposes the becoming terrestrial of an angel and the identity of this terrestrial angel with the human soul. Without Avicenna’s ingenuous derivation from an angelic threefold intellection of a terrestrial pedagogic angel, of a human exegesis of the soul, the intellection of the human soul’s alienation from divine unity is not enough to think this divine unity. It is not enough, because if it is not a pedagogical exegesis, this feeling of alienation cannot be analogical to the angel soul’s contemplation of the necessity of its principle, and thus, cannot yield to the fortune in thinking about the Necessary Existent’s grandeur. Hence, because the human soul is a terrestrial angel, the natural contemplation of God suffices to make men relatively happy in this life without the grace of the revelation of God. There is no question in either Aquinas or Avicenna that we can only know the essence of God when our soul leaves our body, that we cannot know this essence by analogy. But how we know God at all is the problem. If God is out there and we are here, how can we be both contingent and know God? Aquinas answers that we need His grace, for it is indeed unorthodox to imagine that the knowledge of God is natural if God is to be more than an idea in the mind. But it is possible to imagine that this knowledge is natural, because it is possible to imagine that the human soul is a terrestrial angel. It is possible to imagine that the other world is in this world and that this world is not the other world. To equate terrestrial angels with human souls is to push for a univocal notion of being. Terrestrial angels are human souls; their being is the same. Analogical pedagogy works because it depends on an unorthodox univocal relationship, on this paradoxical assumption that angels can both be terrestrial and celestial, that in their being terrestrial the human soul can be celestial. Men do say that “Curiosity killed the cat’: it keeps fools wandering and the wise meandering But there is no one better than Duns Scotus to close this hermeneutical circle, which the medieval theologian has existentially forced himself into by embodying the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with the philosophical being of the Greeks. Being is univocal for all, writes Duns Scotus; it is divided into the finite and the infinite. If it is not, then we have no knowledge of substance whatsoever. If being is not univocal we have no knowledge of substance whatsoever, because we have no quiddative concept of substance (Duns Scotus 1964a:7). If we had a quiddative concept of being, we could tell (taste) that the blessed bread of Communion changed into the flesh of Christ, and that the blessed wine of Communion turned into His blood. Hence, God is not only conceived in the concept of analogy, he is also conceived in some concept univocal to all (to Himself and to a creature) (ibid.). All men by nature desire to know because all men desire to be happy. And if men are to know and to be happy, it is because they can know God through a creature. They do not have to say that they know God through what he is not.

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They do not need to make a distinction between the knowledge of his existence and that of his essence (ibid.). They do not need a special illumination since being is univocal to God and to creatures. It is as if we were naturally illuminated (Duns Scotus 1964b:130–8). Witness what Scotus has done: he has not only brought the other world to this world, he has made this other world into our world. He has closed the hermeneutical circle with his notion of the univocity of being in the infinite and in the finite. He has saved us from a transcendental fatalism and condemned us to immanent freedom.

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2 The condemnation

Thomas Aquinas died on the seventh of March 1274. Stephen Tempier, bishop of Paris, marked the third anniversary of Aquinas’ death with the condemnation of a list of two hundred and nineteen of his theses suspected of heterodoxy. The infraction of speech Language: what exactly do we mean by this word? Etymologically derived from the Latin word lingua (tongue), language is not a tongue—not a mother tongue, not a lazy dialect, not, as the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure puts it, an abstract entity denoting “la somme des images verbales emmagasinées chez tous les individus” (the sum of the verbal images stored in all individuals) (Robert 1979: s.v. langue), and clearly not the organ of speech. Although language need not be verbal (body language, iconography, ideograms), verbal language is conditioned by a tongue and vocalized through speech. It is, thus, the “speaking of a tongue.” In this sense, the etymological derivation of language from lingua relays a necessary semantic dependence of language on lingua; language relates to the condition or to the act of being lingual. It transgresses and transcends the distinction between words and ideas, naming and identifying, speaking and thinking, sound and sense. Arguably, verbal language is logocentric, it privileges logos, but language’s affiliation with logos is bivalent, it is bound to combine with logos twice, once with a stereotypical Greek logos, reasoned speech, once with the Koine Greek logos of the Bible, the Word become flesh. On the one hand, then, language is logocentric insofar as words are testimony to the rational rather than to the instinctual nature of thought. To scream at the top of one’s lungs, on a mountaintop far away from the dos and don’ts of quotidian reality, might very well bring on hilarious laughter and freedom from care, but this non-verbal, non-rational, primal scream is at best a romanticized return to the spontaneity of instinct. On the other hand, language is also logocentric, because words give body to consciousness, to introspection, and to abstract reasoning. Actor Patrick McGoohan in the dated television series The Prisoner wakes up in a lovely

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bedroom that is not his, rises from bed to discover himself in a lovely townhouse that is not his either, within the lovely village of, he is told, The Village, where no place and no one has a proper name, where everyone is a number. While no one besides him seems troubled by this de-privatization and de-realization of persons, he angrily and often says, “I am not a number, I am a free man.” When verbal language is not logocentric in the transcendental sense, the particular is the general so that, in the instance of The Prisoner, there is no village but The Village, surnames are numbers, numbers name ranked citizens not individuals, territory is The Village Map, and, in general, the self-evidence of a human being’s existence is compromised (this is indeed what happens with the Cartesian dualism). In short, verbal language transgresses pure abstract reason and in this respect it founds and grounds the aporetic apparatus of objective knowledge, but verbal language also transcends what it transgresses as its rational basis rests on faith. Otherwise put, language is greater than the sum of its parts: it exceeds a referential tongue, because words are more than semaphores or indexes (this is a dog); it exceeds a spoken tongue, because words can be spoken to convey more than figures or representations of what they index (this is a dog—in a picture book). Language is greater than the sum of its parts, because words are invested with feelings, charged with emotions, paradigmatic, figurative, equivocal (as in dad’s smelly pipe). A spoken word expresses more than a blunt, straightforward, uncomplicated, isomorphism with that to which it points. For instance, the word Mommy means more than the dictionary definition of mother to a little boy lost in a grocery store as, panicked, afraid of abandonment, and sobbing, he repeats the same words “Mommy! Mommy! I want my mommy!” Similarly, the uttered word “Mother!” does not mean “mommy” to a teenage girl who wants to be left alone and would rather not be told what to do. The philosophical desideratum of our age reveals the current timeliness afforded by the realization that language is greater than the sum of its parts. This desideratum is an enlightened, but disillusioned predication about the longing for immortality hidden within the proleptic desire to know the infinite. Our age knows the limits of metaphysical speculation, it knows of absurdity-laden faith, and it also knows no end to desire other than ignorance, denial, or death. This is why the philosophical desideratum (or lack) of our age is to speak a language that is more than the sum of its parts, it is to speak the other in and of language. Indeed, this desideratum is only conceivable when one commits oneself to speaking in a tongue whereby language is free to be more than the sum of its parts, or else language becomes mere abstraction; and is a number. To speak the other in and of language, the unattainable, the unnamable, the unspeakable, to speak so as not to say nothing or to speak so as to say nothing with words, is nevertheless to speak in a specific tongue. Otherwise, the said eludes the unsaid, or what amounts to the same, the said has already been said, it is speech for speech’s sake, it is like a language that has lost its tongue—mere abstraction. To speak the other in and of language without risking one’s word,

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without leaving the comfort of the scholar’s armchair, and while hiding behind the edifices of culture only foments discourses that lament the loss of an object of want that has never existed anywhere else than as phantasms of the imagination. Such discourses seek comfort in the logorrhea of incessant lamentation, and vengefully condemn theology to death by dismissing the value of any theological existential import on charges of metaphysical heresy. To speak about the other in and of language without risking the limits of conventional reason is to speak about nothing with utmost seriousness.1 Medieval theology studies the being of God as Word, accordingly, it is theoretical and dialogical, it is of language. If the introspective desire to know finds joy in the study of a divine being, the ecstatic will to speak finds it in the discourse of a word-begotten language. Heuristic medieval theology is always a theology of language. It is a theology of language, not because of its fictional character, but because it seeks to speak the radical other, and it does so in a specific tongue. The question for any theology is thus always more than what to say about the other or how to speak this what? It is, foremost, in what tongue? Probability-wise there are as many tongues as it is possible to encode morphemes and phonemes, so that the tongue of theology is a technical and arbitrary choice. Nevertheless, since one’s proper tongue can only be proper if it is not solely proper to oneself, the tongue of theology is not proper to theology alone. Medieval theology speaks in a metaphysical tongue, but this metaphysical tongue does not belong to medieval theologians alone. Let it be that Avicenna wrote in Arabic and in Persian in response to the Greeks. Let it be that Avicenna and multiple Arabic versions of Greek texts were first translated into Hebrew by Spanish Jews and had to be so before Christian monks could translate them into Latin.2 Let it be that Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and most scholastics for many centuries wrote in Latin so that they could speak to each other in spite of all territorial linguistic barriers—so that they could speak seriously. So you have it that the language of medieval theology is a speaking in tongues—it speaks across borders—by virtue of its being spoken in a metaphysical tongue—the tongue beyond all others—the mother of all mother tongues. It is precisely because the language of metaphysics is spoken in a universal tongue, because metaphysics is multilingual, that medieval theology—in spite of its being written in Arabic, or Persian, or Latin—is democratic. It is for desiring mortals, by desiring mortals. Polytheist, monotheist, pantheistic, agnostic, even atheist, everybody can potentially speak the metaphysical tongue. Everybody who dreams of the absolute can make her dream come true by virtue of an imaginative reversal of the obvious. Everybody can understand that her dream is real, because it is impassable, it is impossible in actuality. Then again, everybody can kill, but not everybody does. Is it blasphemous to become too articulate and ingenious with the metaphysical tongue? Is poetic license only the poet’s right, because she is just a poet, a dreamer, a comedian, an artist? Is the Christian philosopher’s metaphysical tongue blasphemy, because it is a pilfering of the

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technique of the writer, the artist, the fool, who is always already tongue twisted? Does speaking the metaphysical tongue amount to the “Death of speech?” “Death of speech” is of course a metaphor here: before we speak of disappearance, we must think of a new situation for speech, of its subordination within a structure of which it will no longer be the archon. (Derrida 1976:8) There are two ways, as I see it, that metaphysics, or rather, speaking a metaphysical tongue amounts to the death of speech. First, the need for a transcending metaphysical tongue confirms the lack of immediacy— the mediated nature—inherent in desire, and more precisely, in the desire to know happiness which, arguably, is constitutive of the human. Second, want of transcendence alone does not create transcendence, it is not as though human beings speak and the world becomes one with God, and if I call out the name of a deceased friend, I am not marking his presence, or if I am marking a presence, it is none other than that of his felt absence. Want of transcendence transgresses the immediacy of any manifested order, of any spontaneous decree, and in so doing shows the true color of speech: there is nothing immaculate about the conception of speech. There is instead a will to speak. Speech does not rule, ground, or found language. But that it does so is perhaps the aim of metaphysics and, regardless, the widespread reduction of metaphysics to some sacerdotal utilitarianism for salvation—to soteriology—is the end of metaphysics. Rebuttal Metaphysics has a terrible reputation. As I write on its behalf (simply writing about it), I am well aware that I am not making many friends. To many who are steeped in the Catholic theological and scholastic tradition, I am undoubtedly someone who does not know her elbow from her armpit. Many others will see a “theological agenda” at work that is problematic for the study of religion, or that is fideistic and naive. But the multitude is no more inclined to abstract thinking than to collecting factuality for a living. The multitude by nature desires to know happiness in freedom. And freedom, if it not a pure abstraction or a birthright, is an image, a dream, a vision. Without it, there is no future and today’s joys are adumbrated by the gloom of tomorrow. Without vision, there is no metaphysics. Likewise, without vision, there is no condemnation of metaphysics and no reformation of the Catholic church. The motive behind the rendering democratic of the Bible and of religious language3 is the motive for the condemnation of the most democratic of all tongues: the metaphysical tongue. What lies at the bottom of the whole enterprise of Christian philosophy is the problematic realization of a schism between nature and culture. It is not merely, as Etienne Gilson suggests, that Christian philosophy addresses the question of being, while Greek philosophy only

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addresses the question of nature.4 It is that Christian philosophy is forced to start its quest for the knowledge of being with this primordial condition that being exists. The infinite being of God exists, whereas the infinite being of nature is. So it is one thing to seek the knowledge of that which infinitely is and another to seek a finite knowledge of He who infinitely Is. It is one thing to naturally seek a finite knowledge of the infinite and another to seek transcendence through this knowledge. Greek theology is a science: it is a technique that is not voiced; Nous has no spirit, no Word become flesh, it is pure intellect. Christian philosophy is an art: it is the vocal technique of speaking a tongue. There would not be a condemnation of medieval theology if in the first place He Who Is and that which is were not immune to the possible imaginary collaboration of faith and reason. And what is this imaginary collaboration, if it is not, to borrow Jacques Derrida’s words, the “trace,” as “arche” of the metaphysical tongue (Derrida 1976)? If not, how should I argue that medieval theology is and always has been a theology of language? If not, how should I dare to assert the necessity of an imaginary leap in order to have such oxymorons as the science of Greek theology or the art of Christian philosophy? Bear with me, fool that I am, as I insist that the historical genealogy of theology amounts to nothing else than a foolish mathematical theorem of summation: (1) where the only thing known is the variable a, any human being, (2) which being who for the matter of his humanness is attributed an instant value k, his universal and limited logic planted in a finite body thrown into a historical here and now, and (3) where this variable a and his instant value k can only co-exist by virtue of a constant c, a constant condemnation to freedom, to erring, to the imagination, a constant c that the philosopher writes in order to erase, and that the theologian speaks in order to voice. It is by virtue of this constant c, a “trace,” that the phrase “I am not a number, I am a free man” means more than the sum of its parts, that “I am not a wild cat, I am a free man” does not quite capture the difference between a number and an individual. It is by virtue of this constant trace that what God says and does, pilfered by the Christian philosopher—fool whose eyes are turned towards wisdom—amounts to a speaking in tongues, but it is also by virtue of this trace that the Word gives to this same Christian philosopher as the medieval theologian that he is—a man of reason who faces the products of this earth—a tongue with which to speak. The theorem can be paraphrased as follows: the sum of the same constant c multiplied by each possible variable a from the value of one to infinity is equal to this constant c times the sum of all variables from the value k of one to infinity (for example: , to infinity).5 So, the infinite sum of the product of freedom and a human being who thinks in a particular space and time is equal to the product of freedom and the infinite sum of all human beings and their respective thinking in a particular time and place.

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In mathematics, c can have any value, but in philosophy, the trace is Nous (intellect). It is that toward which the free citizen tends if he aspires to true happiness; it always comes first. It is number one. The number one, however, makes no difference in multiplication. Take away this property of multiplication, let there be no first intellect, no divine, immutable, intangible being, and you have no science of theology inherent in the historical genealogy of Western ontotheology. You have a senseful genealogy of which the summation is the result of historical, spatio-temporal, sociological, biological, genetic, unquestionably meaningless fatalistic determinism. Can anyone believe that free speech depends on this idea that the trace from one generation to the next is Nous? Do AfricanAmericans think it is by virtue of Nous that they became citizens? Is it by virtue of Nous that women vote? More importantly, is Nous Greek, is it a Greek idea? While the records of Western history may favor this claim, history, I believe, is much less an objective voice of reason than it is about who speaks the loudest. The Greeks seem to have done fairly well in that domain. So I will repeat what has been repeated, because Greek democracy is a membership club. Multiply this senseful genealogy by the Greek number one and you have a world that is all and always has been all that is the case—status quo, but you still have a genealogy that is a throw of the dice. If Darwinism speaks the loudest, Darwinism is not really in our genes, because genes are not ours to keep. In theology, the trace is the other. It has no value, it is invaluable, a trace under erasure as it is spoken. Take away the property of multiplication in summation and you have no theology of language inherent in the historical genealogy of Western onto-theology. You have no genealogy, just an infinite addition of disjunctive (and/or) arguments. As in: a cat is black or not black+if it rains, then there is a cloud+ If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal +(2+2=4)+this is not a pipe=the nonsense of logic, that its summation amounts to meaninglessness. But multiply this nonsense of logic with a question mark, with the other, and meaninglessness is not an answer, it is a question bequeathed to humanity. Now, if this constant had zero for a value, there would be nothing rather than something. To come to the point, what I mean is that without this constant c that gives us freedom to err or vision, the condemnation of metaphysics would not be possible. If this trace were not possibly both what is the same and alterity, we would have neither history nor genealogy, neither Ockham’s nominalism (where human knowledge is a throw of the dice and never the Same),6 nor Luther’s priesthood of all believers (where human knowledge can never surpass faith), neither Scotus’ being, univocally finite and infinite, nor Aquinas and Avicenna’s analogical parity between human intellects and God, the Necessary Existent, being in itself and eminent being (whether analogy in Aquinas affirms human knowledge as such, as complete by way of sensible intuition, or whether analogy in Avicenna is an estranging journey by way of an exegesis of the soul). We would have no point to contend, no reason to speak.

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But there is freedom: granted or wanting. There is the other in and of language, and there is the idea of the other—so that there may be vision—and tunnel vision too. Tunnel vision bars the multitude from speaking freely about abstractions or facts lest the multitude speaks only in abstractions or in facts. Tunnel vision is why Duns Scotus is reprimanded for arguing, by the sheer rational practice of his universal tongue, that being is univocally finite and infinite. What will people say? How dare he philosophically speak the metaphysical tongue? How can God and man speak the same tongue? How can God’s tongue contain all tongues— Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Danish, German —while you, John Duns the Scotsman, pretend to speak God’s universal tongue in Latin, in this particular, arbitrary, elitist, and dead tongue? How can you speak a dead tongue in the first place? In sixth grade it was customary in France to introduce pupils to Latin. But, realizing that Latin or Greek were no longer pressing prerequisites for a democratic education in one’s mother tongue, a learning technique moulded after the same modern techniques used to teach any foreign language in actual usage was implemented. The idea was that if it were possible to have us pupils speak Latin and converse with each other, we would enjoy it more: Latin would become our language, not just an antiquated, useless tongue. I recall having no desire to speak a tongue that had no firm land and no living people attached to it. Facing the same issue, Erasmus and Luther translate the Bible in an effort, it appears, to safeguard and enfranchise the will to speak theologically against the dead language of scholars. The language of medieval theologians, the language of medieval priests has no land and no people attached to it, it is not taught to all. Between the language of scholarship and the language of the common woman, there is a potential iconostasis: a disenfranchisement of the commoner, a pedestal and a locus of corruption for the scholar and the church. Behind both, the elaboration of complex metaphysical discourses and translations of sacred texts for contemporary use or for lay people, hides the same motive, and the same ailment, the same mistake, the same deafening of words and hardening of ideas, what Alfred North Whitehead terms “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (White-head 1979:7, 18). When Bishop Berkeley argues that the problem of universals is the man-made cause of skepticism, the source of skepticism is, again, the same mistake. It is the improper use of language when dealing with abstract generalizations of particular ideas (Berkeley 1982: introduction, paras 18–19). The improper use of language leads to the confusion of the question of what is real with the problematic existence of universal ideas (Berkeley 1982: part I, paras 16–20). The specific effect of this confusion is the belief in an unknowable, meaningless matter or substance, ground of being and being of hopelessness (Berkeley 1982: part I, paras 4–5). Whereas the geometrical definition of all possible triangles (a triangle is a threesided polygon) is a universal idea because it is obtained by abstracting the perception of particular triangles from the perception of triangles in general,7 substance and matter, precisely because they are obtained by abstracting the unequivocal particularity of beings from the equivocal generality of being, are

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not universals. If they were, our ideas of them would have no being for us, since, argues Berkeley, the being of an idea is that it be perceived (Berkeley 1982: part I, paras 1–3), while the being of substance and matter is inferred solely from the impossibility of the being (that is the perceiving) of the idea of substance and matter. We have no perception of an abstract idea, and no perception of the particular idea of a universal substance, we only have a dead idea—an idea without being—of substance and matter. It follows, by analogy, that if the essence of an idea is that it be perceived; the essence of language, the meaningfulness of a word is that it be spoken. The censoriousness of the censure Herein is exposed the logic of a Luther who writes “that reason is the Devil’s whore, and can do nothing but shame and disgrace everything which God says and does” (Ebeling 1972:144). But is it really reason that is responsible in this metaphysical pilfering of the Word? Have we not sufficiently seen how reason alone, confined to the limits of its analytical logic, systematically fails when it attempts to speak in its particular tongue the language of metaphysics? To the contrary, we have seen how a God-given free will, the Word, opens the door to speculation, to the imagination. We have seen how several medieval theologians, in their efforts to seek God by way of (natural) reason, by philosophical analysis, infallibly have recourse to an ingenious imaginative leap, to a reversal of the obvious, to some illogical stratagem—to something absurd and free. Luther does not condemn the imagination. Why not? It is the true culprit. Reason was seduced, enticed, by this possibility to go beyond its finite limits. Yet, Luther does not condemn the Devil. Why not? What measures can one take against the Devil? Pimp of a reason too loose to resist the immoral theatre of make-believe and phantasy. Reason alone is benign —it only goes so far. Reason is a whore because she falls for the Devil. He takes care of her natural desire to know. But then again, it is not easy on her, she has to sell her scientific infallibility and objectivity, her pure logic in a vacuum, her ethereal virtue. And in denial of her defiled virtue she often contracts hubris, this all-too-human transmitted disease. In a world that knows of no other, in the fool’s world, God is the Devil, the Word is the imagination. It does make sense, after all, that Luther condemns reason and not the Devil. For God, the Word is the father of reason in as much as he is the Devil, her pimp. But the fault is not God’s. It is reason who is driven by hubris to prostitute herself. It is reason who makes a Devil of God. So it goes that medieval theology, because it succeeds as an art, is condemned as a science, since it postures as a science. In Concerning Human Knowledge, Scotus turns Augustine on his head. Addressing the question: “Can any certain and unadulterated truth be known naturally in this life without the special illumination of the Uncreated Light?” Scotus initially cites Augustine to argue against such a possibility, while quoting Romans I.20 “For since the creation of

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the world, God’s attributes are clearly seen…being understood through the things that are made…” to the contrary (Duns Scotus 1964b:106). Scotus then proceeds to demonstrate that the opinion of Henry of Ghent, that truth cannot be known naturally, leads to skepticism, because Henry maintains that there are two exemplars by which truth can be judged, the one created, as the truth that is the universal in the thing, the other uncreated, as the idea of truth in the Divine mind. This uncreated exemplar (immutable, absolutely certain) validates man’s natural knowledge that it is not universal. If, however, man is able to grasp an uncreated exemplar, then his knowledge must also be universal (this is a consequence of Aristotle 1941: bk. XIII, ch. 10, 1087a 25, 911: “But evidently in a sense knowledge is universal, and in a sense it is not”). Augustine’s special illumination from without serves as the copula between both exemplars. Unfortunately, argues Scotus, this line of reasoning assumes that a lesser certainty (less perfect) concurring (through this special illumination, which is perfect) with an absolute certainty yields an absolute certainty. This is evidently illogical and implies that with or without a special illumination knowledge is forever uncertain (Henry’s concurrence through special illumination seems to be an attempt to save analogy. It adds an extraneous third term, but this third is only a copula: it connects an uncreated exemplar with a created exemplar, since as a “special illumination” that itself is perfect it cannot logically make both exemplars concur.) To reject this skepticism Scotus cites the principle of non-contradiction, the truth of probabilities, the self-evidence of necessary knowledge. These, he asserts, are all natural truths. He reinterprets the word “in” when Augustine writes that truths can be seen in eternal reasons as in an object. All the terms of the relation are known in that there is an essential univocal link, a natural illumination, condition for the possibility of the knowledge of an object (Duns Scotus 1964b: 130–8). What is Scotus doing as he rescues Augustinian illumination from the fire of the Thomists who question the logic and credibility behind the Neo-Platonic belief that a finite being contains the infinite? Is he posturing as a scientist or not? As a philosopher, he turns God into nature, and the question of the possibility of a natural knowledge of God into a science. But, as a theologian, he turns God into culture, and the question of a natural knowledge of God into an art. All in all, this is evidently a problem since “I Am Who Am” is, according to Scripture, a revealed name that the art of science or the science of art —cultural products of nature or natural products of culture—claim to know by faith and by reason alone. As a philosopher, Scotus’ God is known to man as an object outside the mind. As a theologian, Scotus’ God is known to man as an object of the mind. Faith allows the philosopher to hold God as an object outside the mind. Reason condemns the theologian to hold God as an object of the mind. The univocity of being is the agreement of a philosophical God outside the mind (the naming of God) and a theological God inside the mind (the Word of God). He means His name. He is immanent. He is secular. He is neither transcended nor

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revealed. And if by reason alone, when faith is lost—God is the effigy of man, He has no reality outside the mind, He is nominal, a figure of speech, a misplaced concreteness, an idea without a referent; by faith and by faith only, reason is the “Devil’s whore”—man is the effigy of God. Faith has the philosopher exclaim in the manner of Socrates “All I know is that I know nothing about God as an object outside the mind!” It is ironic that Luther’s sola Scriptura, sola fides as a condemnation of medieval theology is a Greek naturalization of Christian culture. Medieval theology, Christian philosophy, betrays the alterity of God because it relies both on faith and on reason and speaks this alterity. Greek philosophy is not soteriological, it is a pleasure principle that views narcissism as the essence of a heathen nature. The Greek philosopher is not born a sinner, he is born in sin. The medieval theologian is born a sinner, and so his Christian philosophy is born in sin—it seeks happiness with the holy word of God on the back seat of a heathen nature.8 To condemn reason as the Devil’s whore is to declare that Christian culture is born in sin. Get rid of the Greeks, and the Christian still has a chance to be saved! As Luther puts it in To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation: I dare say that any potter has more knowledge of nature than is written in [Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Concerning the Soul, and Ethics]. It grieves me to the quick that this damned, conceited, rascally heathen has deluded and made fools of so many of the best Christians with his misleading writings. God has sent him as a plague upon us on account of our sins. …Dear friend, I know what I am talking about. I know my Aristotle as you or the likes of you. I have lectured on him and been read without commentaries and notes, so Aristotle’s Logic lectured on him, and I understand him better than St. Thomas or Duns Scotus. I can boast about this and if necessary, I can prove it. It makes no difference to me that so many great minds have devoted their labor to him for so many centuries. Such objections do not disturb me as once they did, for it is plain as day that other errors have remained for even more centuries in the world and in the universities. (Luther 1970:93–4) No sinner or saint has the power to save the damned. That is why Luther does not have to boast about his understanding of Aristotle. The heathen are not the Chosen Children of the God of Israel, the Children that God may save from their original nature as sinners by His grace alone, the children whose Christian faith in their justification by grace alone is the democratic gift of a priesthood of all believers, and whose Christian freedom is the Anfechtung of having the Scriptures as their only authority. Give every German a Bible to till and keep and he will not dare to speak in tongues the metaphysical language of the one and only who can properly say “I Am Who Am.” Or will he anyway? Luther, can you really believe that Athens

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and Jerusalem have nothing to do with each other? Can you really do no other than believe from where you stand that the faith of the Christian can bypass the heathen natural desire to know happiness as this Christian sinner seeks a salvation that he fears and trembles because his faith has no power to attain? A tragic verdict The old maxim “history repeats itself” is of relevance here, for the heathen desire to know of the Greeks is an Apollonian desire, indicating the birth of the civilized man, who, like Oedipus, no longer needs to kill the Sphinx in order to overcome her as the obstacle that she is—an obstacle that stands between his union to the virginal beloved—key to accessing a throne. He, by reason alone, can solve the riddle that she sings with such a horrible voice, and gains a city, without having to endanger his existence, and without having to marry a king’s daughter. Oedipus, the hero, is a “a damned, conceited, rascally heathen” because he is the archetype of an Apollonian man of reason. But, of whom does he make a fool? Who is deluded? When he realizes that he does not have to risk his life to overcome an invincible monster, he fails to realize that this means he will risk his father’s life instead. Oedipus kills his own father, because he kills a vulnerable, decrepit, old man due for geriatric treatment who happens to be in the way of his ambitious journey to the kingdom of Thebes. Oedipus, man of reason, knows not to get into a fight with an opponent whose strength is obviously of monstrous proportions. By the same token, he knows when he can win a fight, and so he fights and he wins. Man of reason, he does not have to win the hand of a virginal bride from her father to gain a kingdom, he marries his own father’s wife out of love and gains a kingdom. Oedipus, deluded fool that you are, how could you possibly believe you could ever kill two birds with one stone? Oedipus thinks he can do no evil. He thinks he is justified by reason alone. He thinks that with his eyes turned toward wisdom he understands it. Man of reason, his god, Apollo, is his effigy. Hero, he prostitutes his reason while he sells his rights to faith (the faith that can save him, but may not do so) to the Devil and contracts this all-too-humanly transmitted disease: hubris. And with his hubris he decides to unveil the puzzle of his providence, and condemns himself to his downfall, demise, and exile. Deluded fool who thought he could understand with his eyes, he blinds himself and has to face the products of this earth. He ends up where no one can “see to see,” on the Ground of the Furies where he understands that there is nothing to see. But, blind fool, he does under stand this. He is not saved, he is not redeemed, he is a man who has reconciled his reason to his faith.9 This is the birth of tragedy: the end of a Dionysian faith without understanding; the end of an Apollonian reason without faith.10 Tragedy is like medieval theology. Mythology is like Christian philosophy. In a sense, the birth of tragedy signifies the “Death of speech,” the death of a mythological Christian

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philosophy, the death of a revealed God. Sophocles knew it was pure folly to want to sing with the voice of Dionysus, and sing only, like La Fontaine’s cricket who sings all summer and finds her belly empty in the winter. But he also knew that La Fontaine’s ant, who worked and worked, and worked, could, in the end, only work herself to death. Morality is not met by fairness in a world that knows of no other.11 Luther found his belly empty, and left it so. No more singing, no more summers. The mute cricket cannot even choose not to starve herself to death; she must continuously work so that she may better hear the silence of her faith. Thus no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the preceding generation, and if here one is not willing like the previous generations to stop with love but would go further, this is but idle and foolish talk. (Kierkegaard 1954:130) The moral of the story Juxtaposing Luther, The Prisoner, Sophocles, La Fontaine, and Kierkegaard is not an heretical anachronism. It is an historical anachronism, but it is not an anachronism of thought. To make matters a bit more giddy and explicit, let us introduce Schleiermacher who writes in 1799: The contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of finite things, in and through the Infinite, and of temporal things in and through the Eternal…[Religion] is an affection, a revelation of the Infinite in the finite, God being seen in it and it in God. (Schleiermacher 1955:28) Where is the battleground between faith and reason located? Which is the archenemy of men and women? What, in the end, is this Devil made of? I cannot help but think it as clear as day that the battle between faith and reason is not one between Athens and Jerusalem, although the battlefield is where Athens and Jerusalem meet and agree that the object of our desire is the infinite. The battle between faith and reason is a battle on the linguistic nature of religion: that Athens and Jerusalem meet is not in question, how they meet and agree is the question. How is language theological? How can a language speak the infinite in a finite tongue? What language actually offers women and men the best of all possible worlds? Luther leaves one hungry. But how is the expression of an unsatisfied desire for the infinite any more justified by the infinite than the expression of a desire for the infinite?

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La Fontaine leaves one hanging in an indifferent world, where morals are fables and “again and again the experience is repeated where he too who does not work gets the bread, and that he who sleeps gets it more abundantly than the man who works” (Kierkegaard 1954:38). The natural desire for the infinite has turned this infinite into a spiritless nature. Schleiermacher claims to attain the Infinite in and through the finite, but not by virtue of a metaphysic, a knowledge of the beyond. The pious feel the Infinite in and through the finite while they contemplate how rare a spirit the Infinite is in and through the finite. Hence, you attain the Infinite when you contemplate “a rare spirit […], which can, only when long regarded with fixed attention, be recognized as the object of your desire” (Schleiermacher 1955:19). This fixed gaze that sees nothing, allows you to surrender to an oceanic feeling of being one with the Whole. Schleiermacher short-circuits the plausibility of Duns Scotus’ recuperation of Augustine—that it is because being is univocal with the finite and the infinite that man can naturally know anything at all without the aid of a special illumination. The pious is a knight of resignation who aesthetically and emotionally vindicates a blind faith because reason acknowledges the impossibility of a knowledge of the Infinite (Kierkegaard 1954: Preliminary Expectoration). Sophocles reconciles faith to reason in the fate of the tragic hero who would rather die affirming his rise and fall, than resign himself to the coward content born of the self-pity and self-serving sorrow of the pious. But, Kierkegaard imagines a knight of faith whose reason is justified by virtue of the absurd paradox that faith is a suspension of the ethical without which no aesthetic justification is either possible or impossible. Faith is an ironic leap whereby reason is affirmed on its finite terms, and the infinite remains absolutely infinite in relationship to the reason of the individual. So either there is a paradox, that the individual as the individual stands in absolute relation to the absolute/or Abraham is lost. (Kierkegaard 1954:129) Athens meets Jerusalem. Is this meeting justified? Is this meeting an amoral and natural apologue? Is it a tragedy, an overcoming affirmation of fate? Is it the romantic embrace of an easy resignation to ignorance? Or do Athens and Jerusalem meet in irony? The question, that initially seems rather trivial, “what tongue does a theological language speak?” is the problem bequeathed by the meeting of Jerusalem and Athens. They meet, they come together in religion. That is not the question. That is not in question. There is only a problem. This problem is “how do we value this meeting?” No matter how this problem is solved, the justification of its solution remains. No matter in what tongue a free man speaks a theological language, he is held over by his word and consigned by it to secular faith. So, either his word also

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consigns him to the really real world that is this world, or it consigns him “to the hangman and to Hell”— literally or figuratively, because this world is not the really real world, or because one’s life in this world is short. But, if a man holds his tongue, then he is not free, he is held prisoner by his secret, by his silence— until, like an unsuspected criminal ridden with guilt, he willingly confesses the absurdity of his motive: For a moment I experienced all the pangs of suffocation—I became blind, and deaf, and giddy—and at this instant it was no mortal, I knew, that struck me violently with a broad and massive palm upon the back. At that blow the long imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul…. They say that I spoke with distinct enunciation, but with emphasis and passionate hurry, as if in dread of interruption before concluding the brief but pregnant sentences that consigned me to the hangman and to Hell. (Edgar Allan Poe, The Imp of the Perverse)

3 The subject, in theory

Knowledge is properly called knowledge, because it is not immediate, and the satisfaction of desire entails the knowledge or recognition by a desiring subject of a particular object of desire. The dynamics of desire, on the one hand, and the limitations of the intellect, on the other, not only preclude the satisfaction of the desire to know with the attainment of absolute truth, but also preclude the bliss that is said to accompany ignorance. The desire to know is a natural desire in that human beings are naturally free from blind instincts, but, as soon as a subject desires an object that cannot be possessed otherwise than as an object in consciousness—as soon as a subject desires immediate knowledge—the desire to know is also a desire to speak a theological language. How can anyone possibly speak a theological language given the paradoxical nature of the human condition —the nature of its freedom? How can anyone possibly speak a theological language given that these two consequences of human freedom— desire and intellect—negate each other: the former is the condition for the possibility of theological language, while the latter is the condition for the impossibility of justifying theological language? How can anyone speak a theological language, who is given the desire to do so, but never the certainty of having done so? Defining the problem How is speaking a theological tongue possible at all for a subject already constituted through experience? Any answer, here, is no more and no less an attempt to loosen up the heart of the problem, like a solvent chasing a solute— like boys who chase girls. The answer to this question cannot be the solution to the problem of the human condition, because the problem begets the question. The answer, however, implies that the problem has been dissolved. How can the problem be dissolved? This is now the question, and this, then, puts in question, not the validity of the initial question, but the efficacy, practicality, and appropriateness of the methods used for metaphysical enquiry. “I told myself,” writes Henri Bergson in his essay Retrograde Movement of the True Growth of Truth, “that metaphysical problems had perhaps been badly propounded, but that precisely for that reason it was no longer advisable to believe them ‘eternal,’ that is, insoluble” (Bergson 1992:17). Accordingly, Bergson suggests that the hardest

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part in solving a problem is in stating the question, in distinguishing true from false problems (Bergson 1992:51). Yet, if anyone here anticipates the next step to be short and easy (the restating of the problem) and the answer to be imminent (to the question concerning the subject who potentially speaks a theological language), Bergson is far from being the first to put pre-existing methods in question. On the contrary, starting with Aristotle, the question of method becomes a favorite preliminary step to philosophical and theological enquiry. While it is true that the scope of a method, its power and authority, and not the method itself, are what concern the scholastic philosopher, the theologian, and their critics, that method itself comes under scrutiny, suspicion, and revolution throughout the Age of Reason, it is also true that this apparent historical evolution of method derives from one way of looking at the horizon of possibility: looking back, looking down, looking forward, looking good. The fact remains that I cannot fully sweeten my lemonade unless I stir in the added sugar that has settled at the bottom of my glass. It is the same with method; its application alone does not fully dissolve a problem. This stands for yesterday, for today, and for tomorrow. Thus, every philosopher who devotes any time to method offers clues on how to dissolve a problem. René Descartes opens his 1644 Meditations on First Philosophy by recognizing that he has accepted “many false opinions for true” since and beginning with his childhood, and that, at least once in his life, he ought to rid himself of this cloud of uncertainty in order to build the certain foundations necessary to the true advance of knowledge (Descartes 1989:73). Although he has been aware of this for “several years,” he holds off his project until he reaches “an age so mature” that he would probably never become any wiser, and any more ready to withstand the unsettling of methodical doubt (Descartes 1989: 73). George Berkeley, in his introduction to his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), speaks of “those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers” as “owing to ourselves” and adds, “That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see” (Berkeley 1982:8). In his Treatise of Human Nature, and again in an introduction, David Hume observes how this putting into question of previous systems is a habitual, “usual,” “natural,” “easy” method of argumentation for any philosopher who propounds a new system, and who, for that matter, exhibits the same faults: “Principles taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced from them, want of coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole, these are every where to be met with in the systems of the most eminent philosophers, and seem to have drawn disgrace upon philosophy itself” (Hume 1992: xiii). Immanuel Kant, aghast at the “constant moving round the same spot” of philosophy, writes Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics itself prefaced with the remark that “it is absolutely necessary to pause a moment and, disregarding all that has been done, to propose the first preliminary question ‘Whether such a thing as metaphysics be at all possible?’” (Kant 1977:1–2).

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Opinions, clouds of dust, weak foundations, want of systematics and universality, false questions, philosophers invariably commence their magnum opus accusing a way of thinking for the impediment of the advance of philosophy. The reasons given by philosophers themselves for the stalled efforts of philosophy tend to indicate that the problem lies in the philosopher’s oversight. His concepts lack precision (see Bergson 1992:29), his ideas are nouns without a referent (see Berkeley 1982: introduction), the result he aspires to harbors syllogisms (see Bacon 1857–9a:41), his opinions are ill-founded. This shortsighted philosopher needs a better method, a way to correct his myopic vision. Decidedly, the philosopher’s dealing with his problem has a canny resemblance with the Buddha’s strategy. Nevertheless, Western philosophy has yet to bear its heroic philosopher king. No philosopher has found the once and for all method for absolute thinking. No philosopher has discovered and followed the right way to unfettered wisdom. No philosopher has perfectly demonstrated the true movement of truth. Hegel’s philosophy is a particular case, possibly an exception, especially from the viewpoint of the Young Hegelians. Although Hegel defines the movement of pure spirit en route towards absolute spirit via human consciousness and history, Hegel’s system integrates human wisdom as a moment, albeit a necessary one, towards absolute spirit. In so doing, Hegel’s solution is final. It puts an end to any human cause; it is the end of the human. If the aim of a philosophical method—to solve its incurable problem—is not a cure, it is not a prophylaxis either. What is absurd is absurd, and what is absurd, here, is the object of philosophy. All the sugar coating in the world cannot mask the taste of absurdity. Then again, every problem has its solution, so either there is a problem and a solution, or there is no problem and no solution. Either there is a method, a way of thinking, that solves (but does not cure) the implacable absurdity of the object of philosophy—a prosthetic device that can alleviate the disorienting surdity of the philosopher’s ear to his object. Or there is no problem at all, and the object of philosophy neither exists, nor is attainable. If there is a problem, then, either the philosopher goes round it, restricts his field of inquiry to logic—wears a surgical mask and gloves and lives in an airtight bubble, i.e., he himself does not really have a problem with the problem of philosophy, that he is making-up the difficulties he encounters. Or, the philosopher is stubborn. An imperfect creature, unable to think thinking other than as a thought, he nevertheless thinks about it without end. So it is, he goes mad, unless he is a foolish theologian. If there is no problem, philosophers are limited. Admitting the problem If the only “one truly serious philosophical problem” is the question of suicide (Camus 1991:3), the only viable response is to live with the problem. Stubborn, limited, or both, philosophers live for the problem that is philosophy. Albert

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Camus’ response is to stubbornly live with it. To stubbornly live with the problem that is philosophy is the stubborn philosopher’s solution to the serious philosophical problem that arises when the existence of the object of philosophy is in question. Should there be no problem, the response is also the limited and stubborn philosopher’s solution to his false problem. But it is always the response of a stubborn philosopher. Whether or not life is worth living, as a serious question, as the most important question for anyone not suicidal, is thus the philosophical problem born of a stubborn disposition for thinking without end. The philosopher for whom suicide is not a philosophical problem, let alone not the “one truly serious philosophical problem,” quibbles with his insatiable natural desire to know, but his response is not a solution to the problem insofar as he does not feel the necessity to affirm a link between the blind instinct of survival and the natural desire to know completely— insofar as he does not have the problem. This, to live with the problem of philosophy in question (the solution to the serious philosophical problem of suicide) is the answer given by all stubborn philosophers, whether they are philosophers because they are limited or in spite of being stubborn. To live with the problem of philosophy is my philosophical answer, but how to speak a theological language given the problem and its philosophical solution is the stubborn question, the problem, if not of a madman, then of a foolish theologian—a theologian in need of wisdom. Solution or capitulation? Anyone can speak a theological language who is stubborn enough to live with the absurdity of life. What is more, anyone should want to speak a theological language, were they stubborn enough to want to live while, with each moment of absurdity, made plainly aware of their limitations. It should, therefore, come as no surprise when philosophers investigate the limits of human understanding. It should come as no surprise either when the same philosophers, dumbfounded and rattled by the tenacity of their intellectual drive, pursue their enquiry in the hope of finding peace of mind in this world. “If by this inquiry into the nature of understanding,” explains John Locke, I can discover the powers thereof, …and where they fail us, I suppose it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop it when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities…If we can find out how far the understanding can extend its view, how far it has faculties to attain certainty, and in what cases it can only judge and guess, we may learn to content ourselves with what is attainable by us in this state. (Locke 1974:64–5)

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Is it true? Can the stubborn philosopher, upon the inevitable encounter of his brain with his skull, and satisfied that he has gone as far as he could, stop at that certainty? The father of modern philosophy did not stop at that certainty, because it was not satisfying in the least. A thinker who assumed that all human beings in possession of their intellectual faculties were naturally endowed with the ability to discern truth from error—with good sense, Descartes felt compelled to try his hand at a remedy against the misuse of reason, to propose his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason (see Descartes 1989:11). The first rule of the Cartesian method warns against judging anything too quickly and advises that assent ought to be given only to those ideas that are clear and distinct, only to those truths of which one is certain, of which the certainty is evident (Descartes 1989:21). To think without prejudice is to think clearly and distinctly from the ground up, beginning with the strictest, clearest, simplest truth, which ought never to be derived from “fatiguing” abstractions for the imagination or from “obscure” calculations that “embarrass” the mind (ibid.). While this method is indeed good common sense, its strict observation by any stubborn philosopher, Descartes included, proves far from practical or tolerable. One must think clearly and distinctly, beginning with what is clear and distinct—or clearly and distinctly thought. One must think nothing more than that which cannot be doubted—and build nothing more than that which cannot be doubted. So it is that Descartes, following his own method, comes to write his famous Meditations on the First Philosophy. He doubts as much as it is conceivable to doubt, namely, all that he conceives, including his own existence, until—one can almost hear his sigh of relief—it dawns upon him that whether or not his body is real, whether or not the world exists, whether or not he is the victim of a malignant deity, he, all the while, must be something, something that thinks, something that can doubt, imagine, or perceive. Descartes discovers that his own existence as, at the very least, a thinking substance is clearly and distinctly perceived, the simplest truth, and the easiest thing to know. Everything else of which one may be certain is not entirely grounded in the thinking thing. Everything else that is clear and distinct, and evident, is not a ground, not a fact, not a revelation. At best it is what one calls an insight, but the clearness and distinction of an insight mean that Descartes will not have to learn to be content with the discovery that his mind’s existence is the easiest thing to know and what he knows best. He will be satisfied that to perceive an object clearly and distinctly, with the same force and vivacity than the fact that he is a thinking substance, is evidence enough of its truth. Is it? Is any insight, because it is clear and distinct, and evident, as certain as the existence of the Cogito?

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Capitulation or revolution? First, then, it is insight that makes the difference between the tantalizing problem and the evident solution. Accordingly, insights seem to be the source of what Descartes named clear and distinct ideas and, on that showing, insight into insight would be the source of clear and distinct ideas. (Lonergan 1978:xi) An insight into insight, an act of reflective understanding, is just as much an insight as the acts of direct or introspective understanding (Lonergan 1978:279). Yet, it is a priori to those insights, it is their condition. It is also synthetic, it adds something to the synthetic and a priori components of those insights that add something to the given (Lonergan 1978:xi). Now, this transcendental work of a thing experienced as so simple and obvious is “virtually unconditioned” (Lonergan 1978:315). Otherwise put, the sum total of all that constitutes the given and all that is conditioned—thoughts, conceptions, considerations—is true when it is evident to the reflective understanding that this conditioned is “virtually unconditioned,” or when the sum total of the conditions under which a proposition stands are fulfilled, when the object is not an attribute of, but a condition for the subject. “All men are mortal” is a true proposition when all men are mortal. Nothing conditions this judgment “that all men are mortal when all men are mortal” other than the conditioned itself. The insight into insight is presupposed in the insight. Or, the proof is in the pudding: all men are mortals, but all mortals are not men. And, if most men would agree that all men are mortal, this conventional wisdom adds nothing to the truth of the proposition when the truth is owing to the conditional fulfillment of a proposition’s conditions: for instance, when all dogs are cats, “that all dogs are cats” is just as true a proposition, but then “all cats are dogs” ought to be just as true a proposition, and dog or cat, both are three-letter words; convention aside, either word easily could stand for the meaning of the other. To recapitulate what, as of yet, has been exposed of Lonergan’s solution to the problem posed by Descartes’ method, it suffices to say that an insight is a transcendental act of the understanding. Its direct and intuited presentation to the inquisitive subject is conditioned by an a priori act of reflective understanding, an act that is a priori not quite in the Kantian sense of apodictic and necessary, but in this, that it is virtually unconditioned. The question that follows like a shadow concerns the episteme of an act of reflective understanding. This is a familiar question: “What is the status of the virtual?” For Lonergan, however, that question is off-limits to the restricted human understanding. This is a question that only an unrestricted understanding, therefore an understanding that is superfluous—it has all the answers to all the questions, yesterday, now, and forever—may answer, but does not even ask. So it appears that Lonergan’s path

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to the solution to the problem of Cartesian doubt is a long detour back to Descartes’ ontological affirmation of his Cogito. Think, though, about the inconvenience of a road system that does not allow for any alternative routes. The road that Lonergan travels is not in the same condition as when Descartes left it. It has seen, so to speak, the Kantian rift between the noumenal and phenomenal realms. Now there is a transcendental imagination that mediates reality—in place of transcending it—whereby a subject constructs his object. An insight is not supposed to leave one in the fog, even if the way to this clear sight is fogged-over and beyond the limits of human understanding. After Kant’s scathing critique, Lonergan is forced to take a reconstructive detour to the simple “Yes, it is so” of the Cogito. Although an insight is in itself “so simple and obvious” and happens with relative frequency in the “moderately intelligent,” “I find it difficult,” remarks Lonergan, “to state in any brief and easy manner what the present book is about…” (Lonergan 1978:x). The book Insight is a mere seven hundred and forty eight pages. Like reconstructive surgery, Lonergan’s solution is a tactic employed to restore appearances to what they once upon a time were. Mind you, this reconstruction scars the plasticity of evidence. Its cosmetic purpose is questionable. A small nose may be more fashionable, but, the evidence of a nose-job is not. Then again, reconstructive surgery is, technically, not a cosmetic procedure. It is a restoration. Accordingly, an act of understanding is virtually unconditioned as it is born, without sensitive and inter-subjective interference, of the “detached,” “disinterested,” “unrestricted desire to know” (Lonergan 1978:685). When this desire is anthropomorphic, it needs to be morphologically restored to its amorphous immanence. Since error is as human as the gradual degeneration of skin elasticity, desire is anthropomorphic. Therefore, the condition of a virtually unconditioned act of understanding is, by necessity, an act of restricted understanding, “for there has to exist some illusion before [desire] can be either immanental or transcendental” (ibid.). And yet, desire is not itself restricted. Desire is not itself conditioned. Desire is not itself limited. Desire, whether solely a concept or not, is real to the understanding. Therefore, it is not nothing. If it is not nothing, it is something. If it is something, it is being, or else it is nothing. If it is being and unrestricted, desire is divine. Therefore, desire is not just a concept of the understanding and so it is the source of human transcendence. Desire is a concept of the understanding and so it is a virtual source of human transcendence. Desire is immanent and so an insight is a transcendental act of the understanding, it is an insight into insight. Lonergan’s solution to the problem of the Cartesian method is not just a long detour to the Cartesian affirmation that “I think, I am,” it is another way to speak the theological promise of desire without prostituting reason and without condemning the imagination. This way avoids turning a concept of thinking substance into the essence of a human being. As opposed to silencing the epistemic hiatus between “I think” and “I am,” the epistemic hiatus now functions as a real

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bridge between the “I think” and the “I am,” because the hiatus is the natural desire to know: everything thought is and exists, is true, is evident, is clear and distinct, if, and only if, it is conditioned by what is virtually unconditioned, namely, the immanent, detached, disinterested, and unrestricted desire to know completely. I think, I am, because I desire. The philosophical method, the way to the solution to the problem of metaphysics as a science, consists in this, that “the philosophers have been men of exceptional acumen and profundity” (Lonergan 1978: 386). They have been quick to perceive the limitations of previous philosophies, and they have profoundly felt the immanent desire to know completely. Philosophers are stubborn, rather than limited. Real solution, true dissolution Francis Bacon, who decries the peripatetic understanding of philosophers, argues to the contrary, “that men do not rightly understand either their store or their strength, but overrate the one and underrate the other” (Bacon 1857–9a:25). His fastidious empirical method of induction that relinquishes the affected mirror of the mind and its penchant for idolatry is an attempt to salvage “those true powers [of the mind], which, if it be supplied with the proper aids and can itself be content to wait upon nature instead of vainly affecting to overrule her, are within its reach” (Bacon 1857–9a:18). If Descartes is the protective father of modern philosophy with his insistence on restoring a virginal subjective method for thinking, Bacon is her knight in shining armour. He is the ambitious architect of modern empiricism, who wants the instauration of a rational thinking that antecedent efforts to restore to subjectivism have left barren. He wants to save philosophy from its self-destructive celibacy. The Great Instauration of philosophy, rather than the restoration of subjective and abstract thinking, is the solution to the absurd problem of uncertainty when philosophers admit the handicap of a human nature left to its own devices: it is because philosophers are limited by idols and false notions that, when realizing that nothing can be known metaphysically, “they go on to destroy the authorities of the senses and understanding; whereas I,“argues Bacon, “proceed to devise and supply helps for the same” (Bacon 1857–9b: bk. 1, aphorism 37, 75–6). Just because philosophers are limited by human nature does not imply that they are limited to seek the truth through its agency. There is another way. This way “derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried” (Bacon 1857–9b: bk. 1, aphorism 19, 71). True induction is this way. If we cannot even trust our judgment when we put two and two together, then we must let the facts speak for themselves, and stubbornly fight against our own bullish human nature and its penchant for idolatry. Somewhat less literal about the predicament of the fallen man, George Berkeley is an advocate of subjective thinking, but this, he insists, is a perceiving

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of lively ideas and not some spiritless abstract naming of material things, the nonthinking, and thus, unintelligible essence of which would indubitably lie forever out of reach. Now, in betwixt and between a strict subjectivism the premise of which is that the philosopher is not limited, provided he limits his knowledge to what the mind can know, and a strict objectivity the premise of which is that the mind is limited and so the philosopher must rely on the nature that informs the mind for the advance of knowledge, there is this remarkable philosophy of Berkeley: an empiricism of subjectivity. Berkeley offers enlightenment through the livening of clear and distinct ideas. He simply refuses to accept that the mind is limited by its human nature, even if its limitations are the result of a human nature that has strayed, because, after all, error is human. There is no general knowledge other than that obtained through the senses and gradually derived from them: truth is in the object, not in the subject who observes it. Bacon defines an empirical subject, whose senses form, so to speak, a membrane around objects, such that the burden of proof falls on the ability of understanding to justly grasp the objects that impress their particular form onto the membrane of the senses. Rather than to have the understanding abstract universals from the phantasms or from impressions left by the senses and stored by the imagination (as in the Aristotelian tradition), the faculty of the understanding must itself become a tight-fitted membrane around the intuited impressions before it can abstract universal axioms from them. But for this true way to the truth to really work, the understanding would have to function in a manner not unlike Lonergan’s insight into insight—like the reflective understanding—in that it would have to be a responsible and fair judge: it would have to empirically double-check its intuited findings, not to verify the senses, but to keep in check the subjective interference of the affected mirror of the mind in its intuition of sense impressions. What? Indeed, either the facts speak for themselves, and the understanding knows what it has learned from paying close attention, or there are no facts, there is only a world of things forever unintelligible to the world of ideas. To claim that Bacon’s method of induction functions like Lonergan’s insight into insight is not as farfetched as it may initially appear. Both the empirical method and the reflective method are heuristic ploys that bridge the seemingly incontrovertible obstacle of dualism. Both methods require the subject who wants to speak a theological language to take an extra linear leap in linear time. Both methods require that a non-linear leap be taken to think rightly in linear time. Both methods have already solved—or dissolved—the true philosophical problem, “All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards” (Camus 1991:3). All the rest, whether thinking is justified by an empirical or ideal subject, naturally or by a special illumination, by an insight into insight or by inductive observation, comes once the true philosophical problem has been solved—or dissolved. Take Descartes, for instance; his arguments for the existence of God and for the immortality of the soul come after his dialogical affirmation, as side

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effects of his treatment for ontological doubt. All the rest does nothing to convince of the contrary the one whose life has become too intolerable to be worth living—worth another thought, and comes afterwards, after one has decided to give life another thought. All the rest comes out of philosophical stubbornness. Or else, philosophers see no true philosophical problem, and all the rest attests to their limited mindedness. Otherwise explained, either there is no desire for the infinite, no epistemological uncertainty, no formal dualism between things in themselves and things for us, and whoever speaks always and already says precisely what she means, means exactly what she says, and knows immediately. Or, there is a formal dualism, and however tightly the membrane of the senses grasps an object, it only grasps that to which it is not permeable, and if it is impressed with what remains impermeable to itself, it only absorbs what it prefers to absorb. It is, to paraphrase Kant, that intuitions are blind without concepts, and that concepts are empty without intuitions. Notwithstanding how metaphysical, theological, or ontological arguments severely differ on the basis of epistemological disagreements, in themselves, these epistemological disagreements do no more than revolve around or spring forth from the nomenclature, schema, or bridge used to justify the apparent leap to consciousness, and to distinguish what constitutes any ordinary, but vague and improper sense of reality from what constitutes the unmistakable recognition of the face of the real. Indeed, the various methods for arriving at the truth all hinge on what their authors share in common, namely, that they are not convinced by reality such as it is. Whatever else they may be, skeptics, nihilists, solipsists, materialists, idealists, mystics, is symptomatic of their rapport with reality such as it is, and serves as a palliative response to the one true philosophical problem that they face. All the rest is a caprice. Such is at least what some thinkers imply. To name one, Duns Scotus. He solves the problem of dualism by proving its logical incontrovertibleness wherever logic is itself founded on the dualism of being and beings: Being can never be wholly transcended, whether by Aristotelian analogy, or by Platonic imitation. There is also Berkeley. Any respectful history of ideas has systematically labeled Berkeley an idealist for refuting the existence of unintelligent matter distinct from spirit and ungraspable by intelligent spirits. Then there is Spinoza, the atheist, Schleiermacher, the romantic, but only Jesus Christ is the incarnation of God. Duns Scotus, Berkeley, Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, the romantic, the mystic, such thinkers, by contrast with a Descartes, a Hume, or a Kant are all too convinced by reality such as it is, and their strongest reason for affirming this reality is not what they know of God, or of human nature, or how they know God or anything at all. Their strongest reason is hope. This is not a great expectation, make-believe, although it also belongs to the imp that grows into the gold we find on trees or to the grass that grows under your feet. A realist epistemology is

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the expression of the teleology of hope that works in between the meshes of temporal logic to fill the cup of life with reality. The only difference between Duns Scotus, Kierkegaard, and the mystic is that the first fills his cup to the top, the second fills half of it, and the last thinks his empty cup is full. It is a difference in degree. Epistemologies that are based on analogy, imitation, or dialectics are hopeless if they are understood in a temporal, logical, consistent way— if they stay clear of paradoxes. They work only to the extent that their author or follower invests some hope into it to fill in the gaps, and as long as that investment is not visible. Once highlighted, hope is like too much make-up: it shows and people take notice of its aesthetic and ethical flaws. Hegel’s dialectical struggle to a happy consciousness implies an artificial homogenizing of the otherwise heterogeneous categories of feeling and thinking into an absolute world spirit that happens to be Teutonic. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason is an oxymoron. Sometimes philosophers are limited, because they are stubborn skeptics. Can anyone know whether her incessant questioning and speculations are the unfortunate effects of being limited, or whether they are born of spirited stubbornness? David Hume, as he situates himself on the periphery of a spiritual subject, but inside the empirical subject, burns with the same question, so to speak: “Here then is the only expedient, from which we can hope for success in our philosophical researches, to leave the tedious lingering method, which we have hitherto followed, and instead of taking now and then a castle or a village on the frontier, to march up directly to the capital or center of these sciences [Logic, Morals, Criticism, Politics], to human nature itself…” (Hume 1992:xvi). Indeed, philosophers persist in the true quest for truth although good Christian reasons (good because these reasons are logical if a difference in kind is maintained between God and man) are put forth for the impassability of experience—as when Descartes and Berkeley observe, respectively: “for though the idea of substance be in my mind owing to this, that I myself am a substance, I should not, however, have the idea of an infinite substance, seeing I am a finite being, unless it were given me by some substance in reality infinite” (Descartes 1989:93); “Such is the nature of spirit or that which acts, that it cannot be of itself perceived, but only by the effects which it produces [though it must be owned at the same time, that we have some notion of…spirit…]” (Berkeley 1982: part I, paragraph 27, 34–5). Even when philosophers blatantly recognize the understanding’s limitations, when this recognition stands as the premise to their new philosophical system, still, they persist in the true quest for truth. Hume, who so badly wants to take on the capital, as he puts it, is no exception. He does not anticipate victory when he writes that “tho’ we must endeavour to render all our principles as universal as possible, by tracing our experiments to the utmost, and explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes, ‘tis still certain we cannot go beyond experience; and any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be

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rejected as presumptuous and chimerical” (Hume 1992:xvii). And Hume discovers that human nature is essentially grounded in the habit of belief. If Hume’s investigation of human nature is evidence that, philosopher or not, all human beings are stubborn and this is the source of the mind’s limitations, and this is how the mind is constituted by experience, this investigation is for that matter fastened to its empirical ground. No sooner are the fasteners loosened, and the mind takes off, retreats unto itself For the chief question is always this: —what and how much can the understanding and reason know apart from all experience? not: —how is the faculty of thought itself possible? The latter is, as it were, the search for the cause of a given effect, and to that extent is somewhat hypothetical in character (though, as I shall show elsewhere, it is not really so); and I would appear to be taking the liberty simply of expressing an opinion, in which case the reader would be free to express a different opinion. (Kant 1965:12) Of course, Kant, then, admits that what the understanding knows apart from all experience conditions the possibility of experience, the faculty of thought. Recapitulation and answer to the question When the paradigm for the question “how can anyone speak a theological language given the given?” is seen through the myopic lenses of historical evolution, when the question is asked out of the sentiment that, from the Greeks to this age, philosophy and theology have finally reached an age so mature as to admit that the dream of metaphysics is impossible, any attempt to give an answer is a retrograde movement stunting the illusory historical evolution of metaphysical method. Starting with the hypothesis that immediate knowledge defies analysis, and consequently, that immediate knowledge is this absurdity, that it is not self-authenticating otherwise than as a synthesis, the question concerning the possible speaker of a theological language appears as the crisis at the end of the historical unfolding of the Western onto-theological problematic, such that the impossibility of the dream of metaphysics seals its impassability. To deal with the dream’s impassability would, at this point, amount to speculating about the best probable subject who can speak a theological language as that subject who only wants what he knows he can never have: an isomorphism between thinking and being. Such a subject would still not offer a solution to the problem of the absurdity of the question, such an answer would not solve the absurdity within the question, it would, at best, offer somaticpsychological relief: the illusion of a dialectical feeling. Like history that moves forward by repeating itself, this subject, in theory would retrograde into the future, confusing what had come with what was gone, mistaking duration, the movement of time, with temporality, the linear and punctual representation of

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time (see Bergson 1992:27). His spatial progressive representation of the metaphysical question might have resulted in some amalgamation of phenomenology, idealism, romanticism, and empiricism, but, it would also have left looming in his heart the pending hurt of doubt. From a genealogical standpoint, there is a comforting and perhaps even gratifying interpretation of the unfolding of the problem of the absurd, or the infinite, or the subject. This interpretation, however, is not theological, it is strictly philosophical, it is explanatory of the history of thought, so that the theological question is three times redefined, first with being as its object, second with the subject as its object, and last, with language as its object. With each shift, there is a sense of getting closer to the real question, to the real thing from which our humanness implores an answer, but this impression is just that, a sense of intimacy with the real, with something rather than nothing. No matter how a speculative question is propounded, it always contains a certain absurdity. Asking how anyone can speak a theological language given the given is as riddled as asking how the faculty of thought is possible at all, and as disconcerting as asking how much a subject can know apart from experience. It amounts to searching for a method for rightly conducting thought that, however, produces just the opposite. Whether one seeks justification from God, or whether one seeks a subjective ground of certainty, whether one believes in the dream of metaphysics, or whether one knows it is just a dream, one is still living in the name of metaphysics, of a metaphysical reality, of universal truth: one is either blind or lost. What then is the true solution to the properly stated problem? According to Bergson, “What philosophy has lacked most of all is precision…The fact is that a self-contained (vrai) [philosophical] system is an assemblage of conceptions so abstract, and consequently so vast, that it might contain, aside from the real, all that is possible and even impossible” (Bergson 1992:11). An explanation should “fit tightly to its object” (ibid.). There should be no “crevice” in an explanation (ibid.). There should be no “pre-existing words” corresponding to an object and its explanation (Bergson 1992:29). What is true of the solution is its duration. It is true as long as it lasts. Here, then, we have no crevices, nothing purely possible, and nothing impossible. Here, then, a subject who can speak a theological language is a subject who is defined within the realm of the possible. Were it possible to state this problem outside of the realm of the possible, from beyond, then we would be able to say that to this problem, there is this solution. But, from the here and now, the question of the possible speaker has no possible solution. It has no solution that is only merely possible. “I think, I am, because I desire. Thus, before I can, I speak.” So it is that the women and men who may speak and do speak, can speak a theological language.

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4 The right to speak

But that thought that is isolated for itself, enclosed in itself, without senses, without and apart from man, is absolute subject that cannot and ought not be an object for others; for this very reason, however, it will also never find—despite all efforts—a transition to the object and to being; its likelihood is as small as that of a head separated from the body finding a transition by which it can get hold of an object, the reason being the means, that is, the organs, to do so are lacking. (Ludwig Feuerbach 1986: para. 51, 68) The theological body of the fundamental philosophical question The problem of suicide is the problem of philosophy, insofar as suicide remains a hypothesis. To live is the only solution to the problem, but it cannot be a solution, unless suicide is a hypothetical problem. It makes no sense to argue that life remains the solution to the problem of suicide when that problem is no longer hypothetical, which is when the problem of suicide is not the problem of philosophy. Life is not a hypothesis, such that, for the one who goes on living, suicide remains in hypothesis, which is how it is a purely philosophical problem. Life is not a hypothesis, and the one who commits suicide does nothing to solve the problem of philosophy, which is only hypothetical, because, for the one who commits suicide, life is the problem, life which is not a hypothesis, a hypothetical problem, a philosophical problem, but life which is the opposite of death. Death is the solution to the life that is a problem for not being a hypothesis. If the problem of suicide is a philosophical problem, that is, if one, by nature, desires to know whether or not life is worth living, then Camus is right, and that problem is not one among many, but the fundamental problem of philosophy (see Camus 1991:3). Nevertheless, method has been the object of many a philosopher’s opus, the subject of many another philosopher’s nemesis, and the pet peeve of philosophy, so it seems as though method, instead, were the be-all and end-all of

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philosophical enquiry. Strangely enough, the constant need for new methods, for better ways, for truer, clearer, more precise manners to address the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love, mimics the pathology of a neurosis. Just as certain conditions such as compulsions are symptomatic of and seek to mask another condition, such as repression or frustration, this constant need for a better method is the manifestation of a problem that has not been adequately identified. Since no philosopher ever entirely agrees with claimed solutions, but refuses to accept the impossibility thereof— because to every problem there is a solution—what transpires is that philosophers can, indeed, solve problems, but do not do so. The solution to the fundamental hypothetical problem of philosophy —to live— has seldom been unambiguously endorsed and spontaneously admitted as part and parcel of the solution to the philosopher’s non-hypothetical problem concerning method. Every time a philosopher grounds the logic of his argument in what he perceives to be a non-hypothetical problem, his results are frustrated, because life cannot solve a non-hypothetical problem. Life does not solve the problem of the philosopher who can speak a theological language, but does not. If the question of the preceding chapter proved absurd, it is because it begged for a hypothetical answer. This is perhaps just a matter of opinion, where I am of the opinion that faith cannot warrant any positive assertional judgment on the a priori status of reason, of the intellect, of experience, and of human nature proper. Then again, if I am wrong, not only is there a difference in kind between, on the one hand, theory, human experience, human nature, human will and, on the other, everything else, but also, there is merely a difference in degree between the human, theoretical free will to do what is good and to attain the truth, and the existence of the good, of truth, of God. If I am wrong, the difference between the human being and everything else is not simply that the former conceives the ideas of the good, the truth, and God, while the latter cannot, but, in addition, that truth and goodness are absolutely knowable and relatively attainable by the former alone, because absolute truth and goodness exist of necessity as God (this is what Aquinas argues, as already noted in the first chapter). Be that as it may, even if it is the case that the potential to realize truth and goodness belongs to the nature of the human, I cannot, either by way of reasoning alone, or by calling history as a witness, assert all at once that God exists, that God is good, and that God is truth. This is why I propose to try a different style of questioning, one that, immediately at least, does not necessarily beg for a hypothetical answer: of the many philosophers who could have spoken a theological language, I ask why did they not? Who may speak a theological language? Who is likely to do so? Who has retained the right to do so, been given the chance to do so? Who has no choice in the matter and must? Who wishes to do so, but cannot seem to do so?

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The theological thesis of the philosophical hypothesis There is nothing absurd unless there is a question, but a question does not necessitate the absurd. The risk posed by the question concerning who may speak a theological language is not the absurd born of the confrontation between one’s desire to speak as God speaks and one’s world, but the blind assumption that this absurd confrontation necessarily conditions the question, that there is a necessary connection between this absurd confrontation and this very question. To answer the question is to address the conditions for its answer, but if one of these is this absurd confrontation, then to answer the question is contingent upon maintaining that this same absurd confrontation only hypothetically conditions the question, for it would be nonsense to speak of a necessary connection between what is already absurd and what is not yet, between what is already meaningless and what still holds the promise of meaningfulness. In other words, the problem of theology—to speak or not to speak a theological language—is not the absurd that conditions it, but the hypothesis thereof. Otherwise, the question of suicide is not the fundamental problem of philosophy, and life is not the solution to the question of suicide. Otherwise, to go on living is to be a coward and to err with the emotional burden of not solving one’s problems when one can do so. To live in erring instead of solving one’s problem hardly constitutes a libidinal palliative to one’s problems. As a form of intellectual deflection, it is one where the sublimation of libidinal impulses is denied, where thought is a powerful deflection insofar as thought remains barren, hollow, and abstract. As a form of socialization, it is one where the delaying of instant gratification cannot yield substitute satisfactions, because socialization is in the service of life in general— it disseminates the problem. Finally, if to go on living were an attempt to alter consciousness, erring would intoxicate, but for that matter, it would only make life’s absurd insensitivity to the individual all the more unbearable. From living as though life were not a solution—when the problem of philosophy is misconstrued, and the philosopher who can speak a theological language does not—ensues a form of general frustration that calls to mind character rather than symptom neurosis. Otto Fenichel uses the term character neurosis when the nature of neurosis is not that of a symptom caused by something external and uncanny, “a something that disturbs the continuity of the personality and that is outside the realm of the conscious will,” but instead, when the nature of neurosis is a tantalizing deformation of the personality, as “one cannot say at what point the ‘personality’ ends and the symptom ‘begins’” (Fenichel 1972:18). A broken person falls to pieces. A broken person does not contain a contradiction or a paradox. A broken person is lost. When, in his Introductory Lectures, Sigmund Freud writes that “the goal of psycho-analysis is to transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness,” he strangely echoes Kierkegaard’s fear that either faith is a paradox, or Abraham is lost. That same echo can be heard in Civilization and Its Discontents:

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The programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not—indeed, we cannot—give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfillment by some means or other…There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved. (Freud 1961:34) Either the problem of philosophy is hypothetical, but the programme of the pleasure principle cannot be met, and so naturally one questions a philosopher’s preference not to speak a theological language. Or the problem of philosophy is a condition, the programme of the pleasure principle is still-born, and the philosopher knows to expect disappointment. He is, therefore, always already disappointed. To speak or not to speak a theological language is for him a question of honesty. The problem of speaking a theological language begins with the experience of the absurd. That it begins, however, with the experience of the absurd does not mean that it depends on this experience. Only if this dependence is at best probable, as a subdued Hume concludes of the knowledge of experience in his Treatise, does the philosopher both have the ability to solve his problem and the gift to do so. Kant’s question in his first critique holds a theological promise, but engrossed in his answer, Kant loses sight of the speculative limitations of his enquiry: But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience. For it may well be that even our empirical knowledge is made up of what we receive through impressions and of what our own faculty of knowledge (sensible impressions serving merely as the occasion) supplies from itself. If our faculty of knowledge makes any such addition, it may be that we are not in a position to distinguish it from the raw material, until with long practice of attention we have become skilled in separating it. (Kant 1965:41–2) That an object in the consciousness of a subject is an object on condition that it conforms to the subject, that all knowledge does not come from experience, is Kant’s most brilliant insight. His consequent deduction that the key to certainty is to separate the thing-in-itself from our subjective knowledge of the thing-forus is not. Is spaghetti a type of pasta, or is it a shape of pasta? Clearly, the semolina dough, alone, is not what makes spaghetti. Its form affects the texture and taste of the pasta, so that if I were to seek the taste of pure pasta, independent of its form—spaghetti or ziti—I would conclude, even with “long practice,” that I could never “become skilled in separating it“from any of its forms—spaghetti, ziti, or big lump of dough (ibid.). Indeed, my absurd confrontation with the world would be hopeless were I to lose all sense of

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perspective, that is, were I to lose perspective—were I to put my problem concerning the knowledge of pure pasta before the hypothesis that my experience of spaghetti, and of anything else, necessarily and indiscriminately reflect the subjective conditions for the possibility of any experience. This question concerning pure pasta would take away the significance of my taste for spaghetti, the validity of the knowledge that I prefer spaghetti over ziti. Thanks to Kant, what was a brilliant hypothetical problem, that all knowledge does not depend on experience, that my knowledge of pasta conforms to my knowledge of anything in general, that “our faculty of knowledge makes any such addition, …that we are not in a position to distinguish,” now becomes the condition for the possibility of empirical truth (ibid.). Since Kant refutes idealism, and since he believes that the subjective conditions for the possibility of knowledge are not merely a hypothetical problem, but the fundamental problem, he is left wounded by a barren reason, with an experience of knowledge as frustrating as his knowledge of experience. Kant is more preoccupied by the legitimacy of reason than he is with bringing depth back to experience—with the promise of speaking a theological language. The illusion of the synthesis Had Kant not refuted idealism, he would not have needed to speak a theological language. Arthur Schopenhauer came to this realization after faulting Kant for holding on to a material substratum: The world is my representation…If any truth can be expressed a priori, it is this; for it is the statement of that form of all possible and conceivable experience, a form that is more general than all others, than time, space, and causality, for all these presuppose it…The world is representation. …Kant’s first mistake was the neglect of this principle… (Schopenhauer 1969: bk. 1, para. 1, 3) What if the statement “all bodies are extended” were not true a priori ? According to Schopenhauer, if Kant’s noumenal world cannot become an object of representation, it is not because space and time are a subject’s formal conditions for experience, rather, it is because Kant’s noumenal world has no form whatsoever—it is not worldly, it is not intelligible, it is not sensible, it is not separable from an individual will. To Kant’s view that the subjective construction of an object is a mediation that forever keeps the thing-in-itself out of reach, Schopenhauer replies that this very idea of a thing-in-itself “is the phantom of a dream, and its acceptance is an ignis fatuus in philosophy” (Schopenhauer 1969: bk. 1, para. 1, 4). Schopenhauer’s critique comes from this, that, as Kant argues, space, time, and causality are indeed a priori, they are indeed necessary and independent of experience, and that, therefore, together they amount to what is sufficient for the

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possibility of any representation whatsoever. Otherwise, Kant need not have been so precise about the aim of these formal conditions: they are necessary conditions for the possibility of representation. If the world is my representation, then these three conditions, which constitute what Schopenhauer calls the “principle of sufficient reason,” suffice in themselves to produce a representation —sensible impressions not serving at all “as the occasion” (Kant 1965:41–2). Thanks to this astute distinction, Schopenhauer reestablishes the hypothetical nature of the problem of philosophy: although our faculty of knowledge “supplies from itself” our empirical knowledge by making it possible, it does not for that matter misrepresent the nature of what it represents (ibid.). In this respect and up to this point, he demonstrates a certain theological ingenuity, that is, he reverses the Kantian negative valuation of a knowledge that depends on the subject. Sadly enough, what could have been a theological affirmation of the will-tolive as a desire to think and to know, what insight could have shown the hypothetical nature of the problem of philosophy, is once again lost to the zeal of a philosopher intent on positing a problem that is not hypothetical—a problem to which life, for not being a hypothesis, can therefore not be the solution. Close to Berkeley in his critique of the abstract concept of a material essence forever out of reach of human knowledge, Schopenhauer refutes materialism— the abstract notion or phantasm that something exists while its essence is not that of an idea— and concludes: “The world is my will” (Schopenhauer 1969: bk. 1, para. 1, 4). Yet, Schopenhauer rejects Berkeley’s unambiguous celebration of the will— spirit—as the agency making life real and important—making lively ideas—such that, as Berkeley puts it, “to be is to be perceived.” For Schopenhauer, that the world is my representation is still a problem. It is a problem, because I will this world that is representation, but without my will there would be no world at all. Schopenhauer credits his serious and dedicated reading of Kant and Plato for his ability to discern the real problem of philosophy. This serious reading entails first, a reading of Plato into Kant, and second, a reading of Kant into Plato. This serious reading reveals the real problem of philosophy, the non-hypothetical problem, because it salvages the ideal of idealism. Schopenhauer’s reading of Plato into Kant stems from an intuitive act of synthesis. Kant distinguishes an analytic judgment from a synthetic judgment emphasizing how identity is an a priori for analysis, while synthetic judgments “add to the concept of the subject a predicate which has not been in any wise thought in it, and which no analysis could possibly extract from it; and they may therefore be entitled ampliative” (Kant 1965: introduction, section IV, 48). For Schopenhauer, the will “forms the in-itself of the world,” while Plato’s eternal Ideas are “definite grades of the objectification of that will” (Schopenhauer 1969: bk. 1, para. 31, 170). This recognition that the eternal Idea is an objectification of the in-itself—which is, however, not a thing, but the will—is synthetic, ampliative, and intuitive. Although the concept of the thing-in-itself is

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bound to the concept of the phenomenon that represents it, and the concept of the eternal Idea is bound to the image that imitates it, thing-in-itself and Idea are not bound-up together, unless it is true, it is the case, either that there is no substratum or that matter is intelligible. Schopenhauer asserts the former insofar as “the world is my will,” but his assertion is not an analytical judgment. As a reading of Plato into Kant, Schopenhauer’s synthetic intuition of a relatedness between Plato’s Idea and Kant’s thing-in-itself does not, therefore, add to the concept of the in-itself the predicate “which has not been in any wise thought in it” of the concept of matter. At the same time, and for the same reason, however, this reading does not add to the concept of the in-itself the predicate of the concept of an eternal Idea. Schopenhauer recants what is synthetic about his intuition, because he finds fault, on the one hand, with Kant’s use of his well defined thing-in-itself, and on the other, with Plato’s definition of his eternal Ideas: whereas Kant defined the thing-in-itself as a pure abstraction for us, but then reified the abstraction and gave it a phantom unintelligible, non-sensible existence, Plato gave his eternal Idea an intelligible existence independent of sensible experience. Only a reading of Kant into Plato, only a subtraction of Plato’s Idea from Kant’s thing-in-itself, can wisely explain the relatedness of the thing-in-itself with an Idea. The thing-in-itself is related to the idea, only because the Idea is subtracted from it: In order to deny these forms [the forms that lend their reality to the phenomenon], Kant has directly expressed them even in abstract terms, and has definitely deprived the thing-in-itself of time, space, and causality, as being mere forms of the phenomenon. On the other hand, Plato did not reach the highest expression, and only indirectly did he deprive his Ideas of those forms, in that he denied of the Ideas what is possible only through those forms, namely plurality of the homogeneous, origination and disappearance. (Schopenhauer 1969: bk. 3, para. 31, 172) Thus Schopenhauer admits that both the thing-in-itself and the Idea are not identical, yet omits their analytical difference: the thing-in-itself is something true (a substratum independent of experience) only as it exists informally, while the Idea is not truly something (truly eternal) if it only exists formally (as a copy). No one else, explains Schopenhauer, has “truly and earnestly reflected on the inner meaning and content of the teachings of the two great masters,” that is, no one else has denied either the possibility of a substratum independent of the phenomena, or the possibility of an intelligible realm whose reality is greater than and encompasses that of its sensible shadow, and on that very basis, no one else has been able to omit the analytical difference between both thinkers. If they had, concludes Schopenhauer, “they could not have failed long ago to discover how much the two great sages agree, and how the true significance, the aim, of

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both teachings is absolutely the same” (Schopenhauer 1969: bk. 3, para. 31, 173). The anti-thesis of disillusion The reasoning that sprang from the truism “the world is my representation,” and that began—so it seems—as an optimistic reinstatement of the hypothetical nature of the problem of philosophy, takes an unfortunate fatal turn. Schopenhauer’s synthetic intuition of an analytical distinction between the nonformal thing-in-itself and the metaformal eternal Idea—the only true and earnest reflection on Plato’s Ideas and Kant’s noumena—engenders a deterministic afterthought, to wit, the nihilism of the Schopenhauerian world, the world as nothing other than will and representation. This statement is true to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, it adds nothing to his perspective that does not inhere already. In his own words: On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is—nothing. (Schopenhauer 1969: bk. 4, para. 71, 411–12) Neither Kant nor Plato saw the complete annihilation of the human, free, and subjective will as a viable method for knowing reality, be that reality understood in terms of the thing-in-itself, or in terms of the Idea. This, that getting rid of the will is not an acceptable solution to the philosophical problem, and not the aim of both philosophers’ teachings to find a certain way to the truth, is the a priori concept to which both Kant’s thing-in-itself and Plato’s Idea belong, “as adding nothing…to the concept [of the necessary free will], but merely breaking it up into those constituent concepts that have all along been thought in it, although confusedly, and [that] can also be entitled explicative” (Kant 1965: introduction, section IV, 48). This formal cause, so to speak, and not the final aim of either Kant or Plato’s teaching, is how their teachings are absolutely the same and why these great sages agree. And this, not the final aim of their teachings, is the true significance of their teachings. They write for those who still will—at most because life is the condition of a solution, at least because suicide is a hypothetical problem. The Schopenhauerian perspective on the will—that without it there is no representation, that, therefore, the denial of this will is the solution to the quest for truth—reveals both a certain affliction and the source of this affliction. This perspective is an overt denial of the manifest (of representation), for this reason it expresses a refusal to wander in wonder, and thereby, it betrays a fear of spontaneous expressions, or at the very least, a discomfort with the givenness of

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representation, because the immediacy of what is present to consciousness is not a controlled after-thought. Moreover, Schopenhauer’s comparative reading of Plato and Kant’s teachings, his interpretation of the thing-in-itself as the will, and of the eternal Idea as the objectification of that will articulates his denial of the manifest. In identifying the thing-in-itself as the will, and the eternal Idea as the objectification of that will, Schopenhauer denies that immediate consciousness hides its origin and reveals its necessary contingency, that it—like a synthetic judgment—has not been in consciousness in any wise thought. This denial that the origin of thought rather than thoughts is what is fundamentally uncertain costs him what is a necessary condition for solving the problem of philosophy, because this uncertain origin is what makes hypothetical the problem of philosophy. If one were to translate the Schopenhauerian perspective into an ethic, it should be defined by the duty to deny the will, which in an extraordinary sense amounts to duty for duty’s sake. Following this ethic, Kierkegaard would conclude that Abraham is lost, since Abraham should have denied the passion that is his faith, as it could not have been the paradox that the individual is higher than the universal in virtue of a teleological suspension of the ethical. Following this ethic, the imperative of duty for duty’s sake, if it were categorical, would not be the command of a practical reason seeking the preservation of rational life. Kant would see that humanity—rational beings whose end they understand in unison to be their life as no less than rational beings—is not the real kingdom of ends. He would have to rethink the value of rational life. In effect, he would have to devalue rational life. Following this ethic, Plato would have to lose his head for dreaming of a day when philosophers would be kings. His rational tripartite soul aiming towards the Good, the Beautiful, and the Truth would serve as the model for all that is vain and in vain. Duty, for Schopenhauer, is the pursuit, the contemplation, of the negative knowledge of the objectivity of the will. The objectivity of the will—the once removed object of contemplation—is grounded in the will-to-live, but the contemplation of negative knowledge is not grounded in the will-to-live. Thus, this duty is not to be confused with the responsibility of a condemnation to freedom. For the same reason, this duty—the contemplation of the negative knowledge of the objectivity of the will—is not the imperative of duty felt in response to an awesome sublime. It is not to be confused with Kant’s empty categorical imperative of practical reason. Again, for the same reason, this duty— the contemplation of the negative knowledge of the objectivity of the will—is not the love of duty found in seeking virtue. It is not to be confused with Plato’s ascetic love of wisdom as a practice for dying and death. Albeit the contemplative stance begins, as does the will, “from the same source from which all goodness, affection, virtue, and nobility of character spring, there ultimately arises also what I call denial of the will-to-live” (Schopenhauer 1969: bk. 4, para. 68, 378). The contemplation of the negative knowledge of the objectivity of the will begins with the will-to-live, but depends on the denial of this will-to-

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live. The virtue of negative knowledge depends on the denial of the will-to-live. After having shifted the transcendental process of understanding into reverse, a genuine denial of the will-to-live parks it in neutral. Philosophers often give the impression that to pinpoint the short-comings of a philosophy, to highlight a mistake, or to redress a train of thought where other philosophers were misled gives them intense satisfaction. Nonetheless, these same mistakes or misguided answers give hope to those—philosophers included—who want to speak a theological language. The incompleteness of a system opens a window as, inside, the air was rarefying. This is why, in spite of the impassable incompleteness of Platonic recollection or of the Kantian transcendental imagination and practical reason, both philosophies stand up to the eternal blow of skepticism. Both philosophies seek faith. Both philosophies seek to establish a ground for trusting copies and the phenomena. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is remarkable in that it is an effort to overcome the hope for trust. Schopenhauer does not seek faith. Or, in any case, he wills that he should not will to have faith in representation. Schopenhauer could have averted the nihilism of his thought had he considered that a concept predicates of necessity the concept of its identity with itself, but not the concept of its identity with any other concept. He would then have realized that the will relates to the thing-in-itself and to the eternal Idea no more than that concept of self-same identity which both concepts as concepts contain by definition. He would truly have denied—eternity, causality, space, time, and finally identity—any form of representation: nothing would be impossible. Duns Scotus could have steered him away from this nihilism. Scotus’ teachings sustain a rigor of thought that most readers find too arduous to follow. It is hard to understand why Schopenhauer did not take him more seriously, or give his concept of the univocity of being more consideration. The univocity of being is a counter-argument against all analogical arguments, whether Thomistic or Aristotelian, but it is not for that matter an apologia of Platonic recollection by way of Augustinian illumination. Foremost, nominalism —the complete devaluation of representation, because of its arbitrariness—need not follow from thinking that being is univocal. Here, again, it is a question of definition—of defining the concept of univocal being. For Scotus, univocity versus analogy or illumination implies that being, object of the intellect, is common to all phenomena in some essential way, but that what all phenomena have in common is not being in some essential way, in quid, it is being as an object of the intellect (see Duns Scotus 1964a:5). Being is predicable of any concept (Scotus calls this the “primacy of commonness”) and being is also predicable of what pertains to (is predicable of) a concept (Scotus calls this the “primacy of virtuality”), this is why being is the first object of the intellect, and it is how being is univocal (ibid.). Although existence cannot be predicated of the concept of being any more than it can be predicated of any other concept, although existence may determine what a concept denotes, but not what it defines (that I hold one hundred dollars in my hand is not what defines one

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hundred dollars, or else I would not know what I had in my hand), being must nevertheless transcend being that is predicated of a finite object and being in essence—as the first object of the intellect. Thus, being is a transcendental—it exists—unless one denies, not just the truthfulness, but also the reality of experiences. Being exists as a transcendental, as that which is indifferent to the distinction between being as the first object of the intellect, common to all objects, and being that belongs to whatever adds definition to a finite object distinct from all other objects. The theology of Scotus can and has been the object of two contradictory critiques: the univocity of being leads to pantheism or to nominalism. Being that is univocal means that being is predicated of a finite object of the intellect (my dog is), being is predicated of an attribute pertaining to a finite object of the intellect (my dog’s fur is), and being is in essence the first object of the intellect. Pantheism, in this case, springs from the confusion of being that is univocal in these ways with the being of God, with God who exists. Being that is univocal does not allow for a distinction between what of being exists that is finite, and what of being exists that is infinite, because being that is univocal, if it does not exclude that whatever is may also exist, does not imply, necessitate, that whatever is also exists, and for that matter, being that is univocal says nothing at all about the kind of existence, whether it is infinite or finite, that whatever is may or may not have. Nominalism, here, comes from denying to being that is univocal its transcendental origination, thus denying of two things: the possibility of knowing anything about any existing external reality, because there is no assurance of its correspondence with the being of its concept, or the existence of anything whatsoever outside of, other than, the conceptual being of representation. While Scotus does not reduce knowledge to an isomorphism, and does measure the degree to which, or define the capacity in which, human knowledge adheres to God, he insists that the knowledge of God’s existence is attained without revelation, without divine illumination, without arguments by analogy. He defies the traditional views of both revealed theology and natural theology. Being is a transcendental, that is why being is the first object of the intellect, that is why being is univocal with respect to its twofold primacy (of commonness and of virtuality), that is why being can both be finite or infinite, that is why four is to eight what three is to six, that is also why eyes are to sight what ears are to hearing, and finally, that is why the individual or accident is in the likeness of the universal or substance. The concept of the univocity of being is how the theology of Scotus, unlike the philosophy of Schopenhauer, values and considers the hypothetical nature of the philosophical problem. Unlike the consequences of Schopenhauer’s concept of the will, the univocity of being implies that, regardless of the truthfulness of representations, life is not necessarily elsewhere. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer’s denial of the will-to-live is a genius insight into what triggers the theological desire to speak: through this concept, Schopenhauer expresses first, and foremost, a logic of despair and discontent. This is the logic

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behind a will-to-live that cannot be content once and for all, and of which the sorrowful objectification represents a senseless abyssal world. Only the will that has realized its contingent necessity, its finitude, denies the will-to-live. This denial is concomitant with the gradual realization that the world is my representation, that I am my own representation, and thus, that the stuff I call being is a representation of my representation of my being. The world exists, it is each time that I am, I exist, each time that I will the object of my representation. The world mirrors the will, it is the objectification of that will, it is mere representation, but we have no positive knowledge outside of representation. Otherwise put, knowledge is positive, because being is univocal to whatever we know, but we have no such positive knowledge of what is not a mere representation, of what exists that is not the objectification, the mirror, of our will. “If we no longer perceive the will in this mirror, we ask in vain in what direction it has turned, and then, because it no longer has any where and any when, we complain that it is lost in nothingness” (Schopenhauer 1969: bk. 4, para. 71, 409–10). The logic of discontent behind Schopenhauer’s denial of the will-to-live is found in Eastern religions—Schopenhauer freely refers to various forms of Buddhism—but, it also permeates Avicenna’s cosmology. In Avicenna, it explains the need for a soteriology. Because of our Schopenhauerian will-tolive, we cannot escape from this world, and from knowing nothingness other than as lack, other than as a something. We are like the Archangel Gabriel. He can intuit the principle of the Necessary Existent, we can contemplate the negative knowledge of the objectification of the will. He is saddened to realize his own contingency. He is weighed down by the accumulation of sorrow left by the other nine celestial-souls who also realized their contingency. We yearn for serenity, but we are still full of the will. He is unable to achieve a syzygy , instead, he emanates a plurality of human-souls. We are unable to find peace in nothingness, instead, we will the world as our will and our representation. The similarity stops here, because for Avicenna this restlessness marks the beginning of the soul’s journey into the Orient—the sovereignty of Light (Corbin 1960:27). Avicenna allegorizes what Schopenhauer silences. Avicenna wills to speak a theological language, because he can, because he may, whereas Schopenhauer, for the same reasons, will not speak a theological language. Instead, he reiterates that we have no positive knowledge of the experience that comes with the complete abolition of the will, and, precisely insofar as words reify the experience of negative knowledge, he withholds from giving any positive descriptions—ecstasy, illumination, rapture, Nirvana—of this experience (Schopenhauer 1969: bk. 4, para. 71, 410–12). The theological virtue of the denial of the will-to-live—a will plopped back in neutral from shifting its efforts towards understanding in reverse—is that it initiates the contemplative glance of a melancholy disposition. Denial of the willto-live, in this sense, is the psychological rationale of the will after its first heartbreak, after that day when for the first time it had to face a silent mirror. The world stopped making sense, because the will was forced into exile from its stage

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of primary—undomesticated and unsophisticated—narcissism. The will’s ego shrunk, struck by the resemblance of its puny reflection with non-being. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” Here, we choose to go on living, and the will-to-live responds to the real world. Kantian duty, Platonic virtue, and, if seen from an Occidental, unimaginative perspective, Avicenna’s journey of the soul into the Orient are responses to the real world, but the responses are symptomatic of a will-to-live in denial. As in the case of symptomneurosis, these symptoms or responses explain and make manageable the traumatic misery that an impertinent personality delivers. They are misericord to the bondage of free will. They grant miserly knowledge the wisdom of unhappiness. In these instances, the denial of the will-to-live disturbs the continuity of the personality, but it has not completely deformed the personality: it begins with the will-to-live, but it is not yet identical with it. This whimsical psycho-analysis of Plato, Avicenna, and Kant’s responses to the real world is not to be taken at face-value. Whether these responses are pathological symptoms of full blown neurosis, or whether they are palliative measures against the pathology of a neurosis, the wisdom of or in unhappiness that they advocate reveals the kind of character whose disposition it is to value the littleness of human wisdom. This is not where Schopenhauer’s denial of the will takes us. The contemplation of the negative knowledge of the objectivity of the will attaches no positive value to the littleness of human wisdom. It rather resents this human wisdom. This is the aspect that it has in common with existentialism. The existentialist will is condemned to freedom. The Schopenhauerian will is condemned to live. The existentialist knows that, as puny as it may be, even human wisdom is never fully attained. For her, there is no such character whose disposition is not subject to the mood swings of an economy of desire, whose mood does not fluctuate between the under-determined joys of sublimation, and the over determined sorrows of plain substitution: sometimes the blessing of a symptom, others a symptom for a curse. The existentialist chooses to go on living, and this, for her, means that she must affirm her condemnation to freedom. Such an affirmation requires a deformation of her personality so that this entire personality becomes entirely symptomatic. As existence precedes essence, so too the symptom precedes the personality, or, in Schopenhauerian language, the denial of the will-to-live becomes the condition for a will-to-live. The world is real and it is the existentialist’s representation, because it can only be real and her representation once it exists as her world, as the objectification of her will-tolive. Just like Nietzsche’s tight-rope walker risking a lame step between two towers, her will may be caught in the middle of experience. Just as the tight-rope walker voices his will-to-live by risking his life, her personality may be driven by its symptoms. But, the humanness that belongs to the symptom of middling in experience is not lost, it is not all-too-human. There is a loud jester, he mocks and trivializes the tight-rope walker’s very brave steps. The all-too-human crowd

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is struck by the jester’s “awe-inspiring voice,” and the tight-rope walker falls to the ground (Nietzsche 1976: part 1, para. 6, 131). Yet, this jester cannot take away the humanness of the existentialist. She willsto-live, but she denies the existence of this will independent of her own, she denies her will an essence outside of its representation. The jester, indifferent to the call of a vocation, vocalizes at the market. His loud performance is always a costumed rehearsal; he does his awesome singing-exercises. His costumed rehearsal compares with a knight of faith’s repetition in the way that a worn-out coin stands for the effigy it supports: the coin’s awesome market-value is indifferent to the effigy stamped on it. The jester is the idol of the market-place; to the crowd, the tight-rope walker, the knight of faith, in sum, the existentialist might as well look like any rubbed-off bust on any worn-out coin. To the Schopenhauerian sage, however, the jester and the tight-rope walker are merely the tin and the copper of the bronze plate. The personality of the Schopenhauerian sage appears to have been entirely deformed by his neurosis, he appears to suffer from character neurosis, but he does not, and his character is not altogether neurotic insofar as his character is not properly speaking a symptom of anything: the will is nothing, and the traumatic mirror-image of the world without the will is the will, it is nothing, thus, the willto-live does not cause its denial. The personality of the Schopenhauerian sage, whose character denies the will-to-live, has not been transformed by his traumatic experience of the will-to-live, because that will is in reality nothing at all. For the existentialist, however, the denial of the will-to-live brought on by the traumatic image of a world foreign to the will-to-live, of a world that is nothing without this will, of a world as representation, becomes the alter-ego of her will-to-live. As she discovers that her traumatized will-to-live is the reason and source of its own trauma, her misery goes from bad to worse. The world, alone, is not the cause of her misery. Her will-to-live is the cause of her misery, therefore, nothing, no objectification of the will, no other world, could ever adequately express her will-to-live. Now, contrary to the Schopenhauerian sage whose world is really nothing, the existentialist, albeit she has denied the will-tolive, still values as the objectification of her will-to-live a world that amounts to nothing. When Schopenhauer’s denial of the will-to-live would simply annihilate the value attributed to any objectification of the will, the existentialist sees the nothingness of a world as the objectification (the positive knowledge that the world’s nothingness is, nevertheless, something rather than not) of the objectification (the perception of the negative knowledge of nothing as the world’s nothingness) of the denial of the will-to-live (the negative knowledge that the world is really nothing). Whereas Schopenhauer considers the objectification of the denial of the will-to-live, the world as nothing, to be the problem of the necessary will-to-live, namely that which stands in between nothing and the world as nothing, the existentialist says “no” to— nothing. She prefers to keep the world, even as nothing else. For, as nothing, it is, yet again, just another world,

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but, as will and representation, it is hers. “That nothing is mine,” says the existentialist—and she will not trade it for the absolute tranquility of—nothing. What is the difference? What is the radical difference between willing willless-ness and the transformation “by the mere activity of consciousness” of “what was an invitation to death,” namely, the existentialist’s revolt, freedom, and passion, “into a rule of life” (Camus 1991:64)? In willing will-less-ness, man does not overcome his will-to-live. His denial of the will-to-live does not cancel the will, it merely allows the will to contemplate the negative knowledge of the world. In willing will-less-ness, man overcomes— and once again, this overcoming is, for most, only a contemplation of the overcoming—his world with all its stars and galaxies. If a complete overcoming of the world were attained, man would also overcome himself as will. Yet, even Schopenhauer admits that few are able to do so. Hence, the man who contemplates negative knowledge really only overcomes his world as his arbitrary representation, but not his world as his will. He still wants to know. While denying his world, he is in denial of the contradiction in himself. He is in denial of the failure of his will to deny itself as will. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star” (Nietzsche 1976: part 1, para. 5, 129). Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Camus alike are all involved in a struggle with that man who wants to overcome his world, because that man who wants to overcome his world has no chaos in the man that he still is. He is Nietzsche’s “last man” (ibid.). It is not just that the man who overcomes the world “will no longer give birth to a star,” it is that he “is no longer capable of despising himself” (ibid.). He is the man who kills God, but then takes God’s place, or else he would have been able to overcome himself as his world, and after him, as before him, there would be left nothing. Behold, “the last man lives longest” (ibid.). ‘But,” answers Camus, “it is bad to stop, …to go without contradiction, perhaps the most subtle of all spiritual forces. The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live” (Camus 1991:65). Still, that requires that, when Zarathustra tells us: “you still have chaos in yourselves,” “yes” be our reply (Nietzsche 1976: part 1, para. 5, 129). Why? Kierkegaard has the answer when he writes that the greatest man is Abraham, because he “expected the impossible”— he became great “by reason of his power whose strength is impotence,” “his wisdom whose secret is foolishness,” “his hope whose form is madness,” and “by reason of the love which is hatred of oneself” (Kierkegaard 1954:31). Are these fights against the “last man” fatalistic? Since the last man who wants to overcome his world cannot, and yet, whenever he tries, he becomes his own God, I argue that any fight against the last man is never fatalistic. The only fatalistic treatment of the problem of philosophy is the time when man overcomes nothing, not his world, not himself, not the will-to-live or its denial,

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not his idealism or his skepticism: that man is will-less, without power, without great passion, morbid, a still-life, not human enough. As close as the Schopenhauerian contemplation of the negative knowledge of the objectification of will may come to the existentialist’s own objectification of the denial of the will-to-live, the former’s solution is hypothetical, while the latter’s is not. The will-to-live is not, for Schopenhauer, a hypothetical problem; his solution can only be hypothetical, or idealistic. In a contemplative daze, he falls in love with nothing, but this kind of love is strictly Platonic. The existentialist solution—to live—is an affirmation of both, as they recur eternally, the objectification of the will-to-live and that of the denial of the will-to-live. Schopenhauer’s overcoming of the world as will and representation may be nihilistic, but it is not a fatalistic solution to the problem of philosophy. And this, which redeems the Schopenhauerian nihilist, the sage, is precisely Schopenhauer’s idealization of the nihilistic solution. What better way to demonstrate a Platonic love affair with nothing than to argue that suicide is not an overcoming of the world, because it is not a valuation born of the only possible freedom of a will condemned to freedom. Suicide is not a denial of the will-to-live. In this respect, we must bless this idealization of nihilism; it forces us to see it for what it is, a hypothetical solution, and it demonstrates once again how the problem of philosophy is a hypothesis. Or, what appears as the only radical solution to the will-to-live, namely suicide, is the mistaking of the denial of the will-to-live with a life sentence to an incontrovertible will. It is the mistaking of the denial of the will-to-live with, writes Schopenhauer, “the will’s strong affirmation” (Schopenhauer 1969: bk. 4, para. 69, 398). The last man does live longest, after all. Adverse resolution The true fatalistic treatment of the problem of philosophy is Ludwig Feuerbach’s resolution of the contradiction inherent to the necessity of idealism. This solution is certainly not nihilistic. If it has anything to do with the will as representation, it is more likely to turn solipsistic. This is a truly atheistic solution, and that is why it is also the only logical solution to the problem of philosophy. In the identity of the I and Thou, man does not kill God to take God’s place, he kills God and has no more faith, but he still has his reason mingled with his heart, and whatever happens, happens. Here we are not to “let it go” as Nietzsche suggests. Here, we do not have to let it be anymore, because “that which is dead in both body and soul can never return, not even as a ghost” (Feuerbach 1986: para. 52, 68). Being whole, mind and soul united in the flesh and blood of man, free from contradiction, is that not what all men by nature desire? Men desire to know and they desire happiness; that knowledge and happiness are infinite is really only a symptom of the contradictions in man between the atheism of his philosophy (his skepticism), and the theism of his theology (his faith). Feuerbach’s analysis of

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the problem of philosophy is an anthropomorphic analysis. In this respect, because this anthropomorphic analysis begins and comes from the thinking body —the whole man who is unable to reunite his reason with his faith—Feuerbach is able to address the problem of philosophy in the middle of experience. He is able to state the problem as the problem of experience—that it is a finite experience of the infinite— a problem which theology imagines and philosophy rationalizes. Feuerbach is the thought-police of theism in the flesh and blood of the anti-Christ. The problem, the cause of the inner conflict in man is the atheism of his finite human experience. Man is not God, experience is finite: How ridiculous it is, therefore, to wish to suppress the “atheism” of philosophy without suppressing at the same time the atheism of experience! …How ridiculous it is to believe that with consciousness, that is, the symptom of evil, the cause of evil is simultaneously abolished! (Feuerbach 1986: paragraph 16, 25) Otherwise put, it is ridiculous to wish to suppress the skepticism of a reason that has negated faith by way of the imagination, because this does nothing to change one’s experience of the world as a finite, contingent, and arbitrary place. To believe that the world is God’s creation in need of salvation, or to think of the world as a phenomenal realm, does not cure man from the atheism of his experience. In the former case, the problem for man is the dualism between God and finite beings, in the latter, it is the dualism between the mind and the body. In the former case, the body and the mind of man are finite, whereas God is infinite, and so, man is heartbroken. In the latter, the body is finite, whereas the mind is infinite, and so, man is still heart-broken. Feuerbach’s solution “is the complete and absolute dissolution, without any contradiction, of theology into anthropology,” it is “the dissolution of theology…in the whole being of man” (Feuerbach 1986: para. 52, 68). Does Feuerbach speak a theological language? Is his new philosophy that condemns the atheism of experience a secular theology? Is the logical solution to the problem of suicide the resolution of the contradiction of the necessity of idealism? Does this resolution fulfill the condition according to which we have established that the philosophical problem has a solution? No. This logical solution is absurd, not because it solves the problem, but because it resolves the condition for a solution. It abolishes the necessary disposition of all thinking towards idealism. Without idealism, there is no hypothetical problem: no necessary idealism, no contingent problem. Indeed, no problem period. If Feuerbach’s new philosophy is a secular theology, then philosophers are not stubborn, they are short-sighted, then theologians are madmen. In between empiricism and subjectivity, in between the attempt to kill the subject of subjectivity, and subjectivity, and the attempt to kill the object of subjectivity, there is this one radical alternative, this once and for all final solution: the decapitation of subjectivity. It kills both birds with one stone, both

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the subject and the object. It kills the human in man—at times his ghost in his machine. It kills the experience of existence that sometimes it really is. In short, it kills the experience that the world is all that is the case, not because the world is all that is the case, but because the experience that the world is not all that is the case is a “pathological” experience. The pathological experience of the world that is all that is the case as a world that is not all that is the case is the atheistic experience of an imaginary theistic world. Man does not overcome man, or man’s will, or man’s world. Man overcomes his alterity—what man is not—nothing. Answer to the question Who may not speak a theological language is who does not know how to do so with his heart and who does not have the freedom to imagine how to do so with his mind. It is whose “head is directed to the ground,” because his will has no heart and so the ground is “where the objects of [this heartless] will lie,” they lie there dead, under his nose, but it does not matter, it is all the same (Schopenhauer 1969: bk. 3, para. 33, 177). Who may not speak a theological language is who cannot, because he prefers not to. Who may speak a theological language is everyone else—every seeking heart and able mind—everyone else whose thought is not enclosed in itself, in withdrawal from this world—this world that amounts to nothing—everyone else whose body is extended in this world with all its stars and galaxies—in short, everyone else whose head is attached to their body, may speak a theological language.

5 Who speaks?

The heart knows its own bitterness,And no stranger shares its joy. Proverbs 14.10 The heart of the question A young woman wished to speak, so she began to write. A young woman wished to be heard, so she sought to give an account of the will to speak. A young woman wished to have something to say, so she chose to breathe—to breathe in words and thoughts. There was a time, before she wrote, when she spoke. There was a time, before she sought to understand the will to speak, when she was heard. There was a time, before she memorized the verbal images meant to designate her world, when she always had something to say. There was a time, before she had a self, before she knew shame and pride, when she cared beyond all boundaries. Her care was selfless, her language had no order, no logic, and no practical use; so her world had no limits, and she spoke. She spoke when she was selfless, at that stage—real or not—where the self is the other; where it knows itself only through the other, but that stage—real or not —is always short lived. The pains of hunger alone are enough to upset the feeling —if there ever was one—that the other is the self. The sound of the world’s fury, of an other’s rage, further precipitate the retreat of the self from this stage of selflessness, until there is a world from which one wants out; there is an other whose presence is wounding. Thereafter, a baby may not cry out of hunger, but to make the other go away—to wish it away. If that baby cries, it is precisely both because its care is real, while its hunger is not. It, therefore, cries because it wishes to speak. It cries because it wishes to be heard. It cries because it has chosen to breathe. The self becomes conscious of its nothingness, as it no longer feels the other as it feels itself. Thus, a young woman lost the other to her self. She shrunk and all that was other in and of her became other to her. She went from selflessness to loneliness.

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The ghost of philosophy has a theological heart The problem of philosophy has a theological solution. We must be forgiving of the problem; this in itself is the theological solution. It cannot be forgiven if we abandon it. It cannot be forgiven if we condemn it. We must, therefore, dare to speak it. We must give our Apollonian illusions the benefit of our Dionysian aspirations, and give birth to the real, so that our life is not a dream, and so that our dream is not an illusion. “Here is one more system of philosophy” (Santayana 1955:v). It too is faulty of eagerness, the kind that leads to its own collapse and distrust, but, more importantly, it too wills a reason to live. “If the reader is tempted to smile, I can assure him that I smile with him,” because my system wills a reason to live, and it is in this that it ought to make any one smile (ibid.). Men and women of experience, we have tampered with our luck; when we smile, it is because we have a reason to do so. That is reason enough to live. We know that the branch of philosophy Aristotle calls first philosophy asks the question of being as being, and thus, first philosophy cannot avoid toying with infinite formulations of being (i.e., things eternal, immovable substances, an unmoved mover); first philosophy is also called theology. It is not surprising that the love of knowledge and truth leads to God. Still, something specious happens on that path. The birth of tragedy is born on that path, whenever those whose birth as sinners marks the necessity of their alienation from eternal truth, and calls them to suspend the ethical in the name of faith; theirs is a peripatetic life of heroic aspirations and great expectations. Then again, the condemnation of this world is issued on that same path whenever what happens on that path to God is somewhat akin to what often takes place when a new president takes office and seeks endorsement: there is an amnesty of all those born sinners. Theirs is a pathetic life, life as a didactic propaedeutic to any future apocalypse. Somewhere in between the hope for a utopia—end of muddied waters and rocky mountains—and a fall for fate—because when all is reckoned it is best not to have been born at all, but second best is to go backwards to where heroes come from, or what is the same, to walk ahead, towards what all heroes come to —there is speed, movement, change, mass, no mass, energy, waves, collisions, and right now. Somehow in between utopian hope and heroic stoicism, there is duration, there are bodies that endure, that multiply and divide, there are millipedes, cockroaches, rats, cats, dogs, cows, things, words, tongues, and then, there is you—you as you come to the end of this sentence. We get something out of nothing so long as we are in between, which is where there is speed, duration, and flux. We get something out of nothing whichever waters we tread or battles we fight, so long as we keep on treading or fighting. Whereas, when we hope for heaven and embark on a soteriological adventure, we spend a lifetime waiting for the end of days, and we get nothing while we are not there yet. We get nothing, because any apocalyptic anticipation negates the virtue of an adventure, that an advent is a coming to something. Moreover, when

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we go on living as though our fate were sealed with our birth, then we come to nothing, repeatedly, until we finally come to nothing once and for all. We come to nothing, which we say is second best to never have been born at all, but we are long in coming. So, while we are in between, we may get something, we may get nothing, and we may come to nothing. In fact, while we are in between, what was something yesterday may be nothing tomorrow; what we came to yesterday may come to nothing, today. Only one thing is certain while we are in between: there is no necessity to what we do; what we do is what we may do; what we may do is what we can do. We can live with our eyes turned away from our world, and towards an end always ahead of our times. We can fraternize through the shared sentiment that all our lives, in the end, amount to nothing. We can; we have the ability to do so. We can; we may do so. We can; we will do so as long as we will to do so. We can, therefore, also will to breathe in all that is in between what we dream and what we dread—as long as we do not will to dream and to dread all that we may. That fatalism and idealism are within the power of any human being does not make them constitutive of that power in its entirety. If it is possible to be fatalistic or idealistic, then it ought to be possible not to be so. This is common sense. Of course, whether it is good sense is not what I can argue. What I can argue, however, is that Schopenhauer’s denial of the will-to-live is fatalistic and idealistic for as many reasons as Nietzsche’s will-to-power is not. On the one hand, Schopenhauer seeks bliss in the contemplation of the denial of the will, because he understands that the will is free to do whatever it is able to do, without discretion. He understands that the will can be compulsively impulsive. On the other hand, Nietzsche studies joy through the will-to-power, because Nietzsche shows reverence to, rather than contempt for, the indiscriminate freedom of the will. In a representational or aesthetic realm, any object can become an object of desire, precisely because the will desires an object of necessity. It is in this non-dogmatic sense (by contrast with an onto-theological sense) that such a will is now said to be free. The object of the will need not be real, or palpable, or even comprehensible. Yet, for that matter, the object of the will can also be real, palpable, and comprehensible. Thus, a subject wills, but what that subject wills, aside from being an object in the abstract sense, is rather arbitrary in a concrete sense. The extreme fatalism and idealism of the denial of the will-to-live betrays a passion for hate, for the hatred of and aversion to the impassable possibilities of desire. The will can hate its impassable possibilities; therefore, it can also love its impassability. The will-to-power asserts the will as a passion for life. It is love of fate. Heroes are doomed to fall, and sinners are condemned to faith, but this is not why one loves fate. This is not why one asserts the power of freedom. We all can get nothing out of life, or come to nothing; there is no joy either in loving or in hating that. Joy, here, is a matter of will. It is a matter of loving more than the indiscriminate possibilities of the will; it is a matter of loving the impassability of the will. This impassability makes possibilities: we are able not to get nothing or not to come to nothing. Who

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speaks a theological language can get something and come to something—while in between. The ghost in the machine Theology, the study of the infinite, is an aporia; it is a science of which the subject matter does not possess its objects. In the sense that existence cannot be predicated of an object in consciousness, there are no infinite objects. Infinite causes, principles, or substances may still exist, but they cannot be grasped in themselves; they can be grasped only in conjunction with the study of corporeal or natural objects. Now, insofar as the infinite is in and of language, this grasp of the infinite is born of desire, and to grasp the infinite means to speak a theological language. As soon as this infinite is reified, it cannot be grasped, either in itself or through an other. As soon as it is reified, this infinite has no bearing or no connection whatsoever with physical reality; this infinite is of another world, is ineffectual in this world, and cannot, therefore, be known in this world. The selfish world of a solipsistic fancy feeds off this otherworldly infinite, while a self that hollows out its present world—a self that withdraws— finds that the otherworldly infinite is absent from its wordless emptiness. Theology is an aporia, yet, within the Aristotelian corpus, the recurring question is whether or not Aristotle’s ontology is a theology. Any decent scholarship on the thought of Aristotle addresses this question, because, indeed, a definite answer either places Aristotle’s first philosophy on an equal footing with Plato’s rational philosophy, or makes a natural science, albeit a fundamentally theoretical science, of first philosophy.1 Definite answers have been given, and even when, noblesse oblige, the speculator retains the right of disclosure and his claim remains tentative. These definite answers are advanced for the sake of an argument. Often, one’s thought gains in precision and distinction at the expense of someone else’s serious work on Aristotle; one faults what one does not understand. One reads Aristotle selectively to match one’s presuppositions, training, and settled sense of order. One explains away structural inconsistencies by accusing translations, the fragmentation and historical spread of original works, or some oversight. Within the Aristotelian corpus, the argumentative drive behind both positions concerning the theological nature of Aristotle’s first philosophy forsakes what is profoundly theological about Aristotle’s metaphysics. If first philosophy is theology, because theology treats being when being has no being-for-us other than as a theoretical illusion, or because it treats of being as the real aside from its material representations, then Aristotle’s ontology is an epistemology writ large and (1) it belongs to our nature to seek its being in the illusion we have of it, so we are idealists, or (2) it belongs to our nature to naturalize the being of an idea, in which case we are cave-dwellers. If first philosophy is not theology, because there can be no rational study of the divine, then first philosophy is the most general science, but it is not the

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science of what is first. Aristotle’s ontology is the heuristic backbone of a scientific method for the study of nature. Either way, this conceptual split within the Aristotelian corpus censures theological language and desire. Either way, reason has no theological license. The corpus is severed into two branches, but each branch severs its study from all enquiries into the desire for theological language, such query proving a matter of faith. Each branch restricts its field of inquiry to the investigation of the being of beings: the universal being of the physical world. Philosophy, within the divided corpus, is the study of being qua being when being is one, and only one, of two causes: an intelligible first cause, or a physical cause. When first philosophy, as theology, is completely independent from natural philosophy, ontology becomes epistemology; it becomes the study of what is intelligible, and rational; it leaves to reason alone the question concerning the importance, the existence, the depth, the Being of the universal being of objective beings. Reason is alone, but it is not self-contained; its door is left ajar to the shimmer of God’s shadow cast over the image of a man in love with his reflection. When first philosophy is nothing other than natural philosophy, ontology becomes the study of the heuristic being of natural beings. This universal being is presumably something that all natural beings have in common, besides being as an intelligible concept. The presence of this being, the existence of this being, the depth of this being—the Being of the heuristic being of natural beings—is irrelevant. Theology is an aporia. Thus, when philosophy turns theology into a speculative and dogmatic science, reason eschews speaking a theological language, and when philosophy excludes theology, nature eschews the desire to speak. Aristotle’s Metaphysics bequeaths a serious problem to philosophy and theology. That is why there is an Aristotelian corpus. Yet, call it irony of fate, this serious question generates still-answers. Or at the least, it does so every time its treatment favors something in part questionable about the love of wisdom. For, is this love of wisdom not questionable when its object becomes the fought for prize of a victory over arguments and verbal contradictions? Where is the wisdom in barren solipsistic dogmatism? Where is it in the tin ticktock of a mechanical nature? The idol of the ghost According to Francis Bacon, philosophy is plagued by the most conceited form of idolatry; in the case of philosophy, the understanding is enthralled by its training; the mirror of the mind is affected by what Bacon names the Idols of the Theatre. These idols “are not innate, nor do they steal into the understanding secretly, but are plainly impressed and received into the mind from the play-books of philosophical systems” (Bacon 1857–9b: bk. 1, aphorism 61, 89). Through the

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“compact and elegant” mise-en-scène of his arguments, the idolatrous philosopher tells stories “more as one would wish them to be, than true stories out of history” (Bacon 1857–9b: bk. 1, aphorism 62, 90). Additionally, and here, more importantly, Bacon finds in Aristotle’s philosophy the “most conspicuous example” of Idols of the Theatre (Bacon 1857–9b: bk. 1, aphorism 63, 91). Is Aristotle responsible for starting the big fight within his own corpus? Did he stage the controversy over which his philosophy is the object? Idols of the Theatre are an acquired taste for mannerisms of thought; they are a bad habit. Inasmuch as Aristotle’s work lends itself to the perfection of these mannerisms, then, indeed, Aristotle is a “most conspicuous example” of this kind of idolatry. If this bad habit is not a spontaneous reflex of the understanding (since manners begin with experience), how does one become an idolatrous philosopher, and can one become a true philosopher? Otherwise put, whose manners are more likely to affect his understanding? Does the fool corrupt wisdom because he loves it in himself alone? Or does wisdom corrupt the fool to whom it has given a taste for love? ‘All men by nature desire to know,” but only the philosopher loves his nature more than what he knows of it, only the philosopher wants to want more than he wants to know. Unfortunately, the worm that corrupts the philosopher’s mind is in his heart in the same way that it is in the heart of anyone who begins to think. No philosopher is corrupt by nature, but the chances of his corruption are as great as is the risk that beginning to think “leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light” (Camus 1991:4–5). It is because he is an impostor and not because he is a philosopher that the philosopher’s mind is affected by Idols of the Theatre. Perhaps a philosopher can define the true philosopher. Perhaps Plato can do so. The true philosopher is a man of experience. He has faced the plentiful temptations that corrupt the passions. He is courageous, and all the more so because he is prudent and careful in all his ventures. He is old and immune to all vices when, finally, he becomes fit to teach. His hair is gray, his bones are weak, his life-story is like a storybook story. Perhaps Plato’s description is the most profound example of Socratic irony: we look forward to the meaninglessness of existence and the absurdity of reason, because that is where all our efforts end: with the last page of a storybook story. We know the end of the philosopher. He, too, is a man, he, too, is mortal. He tells us that his life is like a storybook story, because he knows that we like to hear stories. He knows that sooner or later life ends, that a life-long storybook story is what ends with each life, because it takes us each a lifetime to dream no more. Can we blame Plato for helping the youth aspire to grow older and wiser any more than we do parents for telling Santa Claus tales to their children? Francis Bacon certainly would. The true philosopher must tell truths out of history, and let go of his childish wishes. Weak or not, his bones will outlast his flesh. The wisdom that fills the hourglass is time lost. The advance of learning is

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arduous, and impossible to complete in a single lifetime and by one man alone. Bacon, the father of modern empiricism, takes Socratic irony seriously. Socrates feigned ignorance to make his followers realize how little human wisdom was worth. Bacon takes seriously this double irony, because two wrongs do not make a right. He gives Socratic wisdom a biblical beginning. It goes like this: The keeper of God’s wisdom was not content to be entrusted with the good of Eden. Mistaking his power for that of the Almighty, he ate the reaping fruits from the tree of knowledge instead of sowing their seeds. In the know, he became free to act rightly and wrongly, but he was still not great enough to know the difference; he fell from paradise. From then on, he would have to work from the bottom of the pyramid up, from parts to the whole; he would earn his life from the sweat of his brow tilling the earth. The privative work ethic of the empiricist is the fallen man’s chance to put himself right with God. Sisyphus was condemned to push his rock back up to its mountain-top, because his round rock could only roll downwards. At Camus’ request, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Camus 1991:123). Perhaps one must also imagine the fallen man happy. Sisyphus had been sent back from the dead to chastise his wife for not giving him a proper burial, but the lure of life was so great, he did not want to go back to the dead. Hence, the gods consigned him to the eternal fate that we know. If, on the one hand, Sisyphus deserves to be punished for having disobeyed the gods, on the other, he is guilty of wanting to live before he is guilty of disobeying the gods. From this end, the gods’ punishment is absurd, because the gods’ expectations are absurd: that brought back to life, a man should want to be buried. Sisyphus struggles, because he chose to go on living, not because he disobeyed the gods. Is it not the same with the fallen man? If Socratic irony knowingly leads reason to its absurd fate, guilt and shame turn this awareness of the absurd fate of reason into a duty. This absurd duty to work reason to its absurd fate is absolutely normal in its absurdity: why should the fall of man be a reasonable fall? This is an oxymoron. The ghost in the way of the machine is on the way to the heart There is a way which seems right to a man,But its end is the way to death. (Proverbs 14.12) There is a way which does not seem right to a man, and its end is the way to death. Aristotle’s treatment of being as being is a strange way of expressing a theological desire to speak to the other, because it seeks to know the other and possess it. When it seems right, sensible, and logical to get to know an other, before he becomes essential to one’s signifying process, it is also impossible to know the other completely without boxing him, silencing him, and losing him. Aristotle’s treatment of being as being would lead to a fateful atheism were it

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possible to know being as being, or to be that which is being-itself, but he is clear on that point: a man, philosopher or not, is still a man distinct from the divine. To a man, it does not seem right that he should ever be God, while it seems right that he ought to know who it is he wants to become. Aristotle’s question, the nature of being as being, is a contribution to the generation of life: it is his formulation of immortality. To a man, it seems like the right question to ask and like the wrong question to answer. In the hands of a vast Aristotelian corpus, this offspring of the philosopher is perpetually remembered in a new way, it is perpetually perishing to be born again. Scholars seem to remember, in the pseudo-Platonic sense, Aristotelian thought. They posit an idea behind Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and seek the one and only single copy of it, a true copy of an original, complete and permanent idea. In itself, though, the original idea is nothing other than the special effect of a real dialectical illusion. Here is what Kant has to say regarding the use and effect of dialectics: However various were the significations in which the ancients used “dialectic” as the title for a science or art, we can safely conclude from their actual employment of it that with them it was never anything else than the logic of illusion. It was a sophistical art of giving to ignorance, and indeed to intentional sophistries, the appearance of truth, by the device of imitating the methodical thoroughness which logic prescribes, and of using its “topic” to conceal the emptiness of its pretensions. (Kant 1965:99) In the spirit of his indignation, Kant subverts the intent behind the dialectical method of enquiry. He informs his readers that his efforts to define the limits of reason to the end of establishing a ground of certainty and to further the advance of learning, which aim is normally professed by dialectic, are a transcendental enquiry, and in this, he intends it to be a critique of dialectical illusion. Aristotle’s question is his formulation of immortality, but the kind of immortality it is—endless chatter and mere talk of logic of illusion, or transcendental critique and creative process—depends on how we recollect his offspring. In Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, and Aristophanes praise love much in the same way some scholars remember or recollect being as being. Love is a third term that is engineered like a bridge over a dry river. To get from the left bank to the right bank one simply needs to cross over the dry river bed, and both the bridge and the dry river bed are dealt with once, because they are always the same, the one above the other. Such a praise of love is akin in character to equating first philosophy with ontology. Philosophy without theology is positively analytical. It is love for the sake of a special kind of love: Pausanias’ heavenly love, the unbearably light motherless Aphrodite. Its epistemology is ontological; it seeks to know being as being. Yet, the

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epistemological activity of the philosopher is, at best, theoretical. It yields theories that seem right, but only in a realm of specular ideas. Like the pragmatic licensing of instinctual satisfactions by Eryximachus, the physician at the banquet—where to speak of common love turns the blisters of the barefooted commoner into thick calluses and common sense into a band-aid— philosophy, science of nature, next to theology and distinct from it, is analogical. Its epistemology is metaphysical; it seeks to know being as being through the knowledge of being as beings. The epistemological activity of the philosopher is covertly theological. The hermeneutical activity of the theologian is covertly ontological. Ontology seems right, but only to the man who loves to be fooled. Philosophy as theology is hermeneutical. Its epistemology is heuristic. The epistemological activity of the philosopher is not merely theoretical, it is aporetic and theological. The philosophical activity of the theologian is not strangely transcendent, it is othering and bittersweet. There is seemingly no way out of representation; there is one way only and it does not seem right. Aristophanes with his cosmogony of the appetitive human being envisions the simultaneity of a human being’s self-generated beginning and the teleological end of his striving through three genders. All men, all women, all androgynous beings are roundly content and wholly selfish. Indeed, the androgynous gender is an absolute necessity for the infinite completion of the originary wholeness of the human body. He’s the tickle, the one who stimulates the dialectical generation that turns one and its contrary into the same and its opposite, as though the sum of any two halves made one. Once we were whole, now we are half-empty. Alone we are two halves in need of each other; together the two become one. But who takes Aristophanes seriously? He’s a poet. He sounds wonderful, and he makes no sense. It is Diotima who effectively turns Plato on his head when she affirms that recollection is generation and immortality. Aristophanes’ aborted tickle with the androgynous type is born again, and this time, it transforms two contrary worlds alienated from each other—the one ideational, the other material, the one where pretty images are thought, and the other where the brute facticity of things is felt —into the real of two impassable worlds. Love is neither idea nor thing; it is the repetition and difference of both. It is our immortality, and our becoming. The question of being as being belongs to all realms of being: potential, virtual, actual, future, conditional, present and past. It should not come as a surprise that man, i.e. mortal, finite and conditioned by the limits of his consciousness, does not put an end to it. Indeed, he does not have the capacity to put an end to it without ending it all: the question and the self behind the question. Anyone who has tried to comprehend Aristotle’s Metaphysics has also tried to check the solutions at the end of the book, only to find that chapter missing. Werner Marx in his Introduction to Aristotle’s Theory of Being as Being gives an excellent account of the theory’s problematic interpretations, and of its inextricable implications for the nature of philosophical enquiry (Marx 1977). He

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suggests that the explicit ontology throughout the philosopher’s work is a twofold Ousiology. The one relationship of beings to being is called a Kath’ hen structure. Particular beings form a nexus; distinct particular things are unequivocally subsumed under one more general thing, just as the members of a group are of the same group, without each being the group or being the same. I am a woman, but not every woman is I. Socrates is a man, but man is merely a formal condition that allows Pluto, the dog, to be Socrates’ best friend, and Socrates to be Pluto’s master. The most general nexus is, of course, being. Nexuses are interdependent; this interdependence is formal, but it is also transcendental. Otherwise, what is scientifically unequivocal and unambiguous is no more, no less, at best, theoretical. Otherwise we all share in being, but this being is not real —it exists as a Platonic idea. A philosopher is a person who emulates pure, divine thought and thus, so to speak, immortalizes himself…The thinking of a philosopher, however, can become similar to, but never equal to God. As something human it remains distinct from the divine, for it can never become pure energia; it retains the character of potentiality, striving for fulfillment…As something human, philosophical thinking is twofold: noetically turned toward the Simple-One, yet at the same time referring to the Sensible-Composite in its manifold conditions and relationships. (Marx 1977:10–11) The enigma of transcendence necessarily implicates this Kath’ hen structure in the impassable onto-theological scheme of a mimetic logic of sameness. The Kath’ hen structure is what keeps the philosopher’s thinking distinct from God’s. It is also the dynamo that fuels the philosopher’s desire to think like God even though the possibility of this occurrence is always and forever in potentia. The Kath’ hen structure, however, does not turn being, the being of all beings into God, who exists. It turns God into a subject of speculation, a hypothetical unknown. A meaningless way of thinking clearly, without ambiguity, systematically about formalities of experience. The body of the ghost Aristotle cannot accept the idealism of Plato. He must sacrifice clarity and empirical truth to a kind of being (the Simple-One) that has meaning and is full, that is inherent and immanent, and different in all things whether or not they are of the same genera. He must sacrifice clarity as can be witnessed from the plethora of stammering comprehensive interpretations of his Metaphysics (for instance, the problematic relationship of chapters 1 and 2 of book III, the question of the study of being, to the first chapter of book VII, the study of being is primarily the study of substance).

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In On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle insists on a distinction between “alteration,” “the body, e.g., although persisting as the same body, is now healthy and now ill,” and “coming-to-be,” “when nothing perceptible persists in its identity as a substratum, and the thing changes as a whole (when e.g. the seed as a whole is converted into blood)” (Aristotle 1941b: bk. I, ch. 4). Today, this distinction may seem challenged by the scientific equation of matter and energy. For Aristotle, however, the distinction is based on observation alone, so that something changes as a whole when it is no longer identifiable, when the coming-to-be of a thing is the passing-away of a thing, and the passing-away of that thing is imperceptible; it is-not. Generation —coming-to-be—denotes a difference in kind rather than a difference in degree. Hence, if “‘matter’, in the most proper sense of the term, is to be identified with the substratum which is receptive of coming-to-be and passing-away,” the Simple-One is not a mere hypothesis, because the Simple-One is that one to which everything else refers, by virtue of referring to something rather than nothing (ibid.). Matter which has the capacity to be and not to be (as in coming to be and ceasing to be) is what stands in a hypothetical relationship to being-itself. It stands in a hypothetical relationship to the power of being which comes-to-be in passing away. It does not stand in a relationship with non-being. The formal Kath’ hen relationship of beings to being is exceeded by the realm of the possible. Marx calls this realm the pros hen-manifold—there is difference, there are singularities, there is potentiality, but there is not non-being. The Simple-One—primary being, being as being—stands in a hypothetical relationship with the pros hen-manifold, because it is not merely a hypothesis. It is not merely a hypothesis, because it is an aporia. Aristotle’s twofold Ousiology is transcendental, because it is aporetic; it defies onto-theology. The study of being as being has no transcendental value unless it is that aporetic science to which together the study of the unintelligible being of nature and the study of the insensible being of thinking point. To study infinite substances has no meaning apart from this one. This is the meaning of theology as first philosophy. Theology is the first science, because the aporia of being is primary. This aporia of being is necessary and universal, whether or not it is true that being as being exists. This aporia of being is primary, because the primary relationship of all beings is that their being is something rather than nothing. For if we add all that is, all that was, all that will be, and nothingness, we do not get nothingness. We get all that is, was, and will be, whether or not it truly is, truly was, or truly will be. By the same token, we do not get one self-same being, or we cannot know what we call one self-same being as one, same being. We have perhaps an intuitive concept of substance independent of our particular impressions or perceptions; however intuitive that concept may be, it is an indiscriminate concept. If we can derive that same concept by subtracting from any of our perceptions what makes them recognizable and distinguishable, what remains turns everything that was for us into a unified whole, but we cannot turn this

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unified whole into a distinct object of knowledge, unless we recognize that the self-same being that we have distinguished is an aporia. We do not get nothingness; we get something aporetic. This means that what is purely intelligible is not the true measure of what is really real. Likewise, there is more to reality than what the senses perceive, but what is more has nothing to do with the Truth, the Beautiful, or the Good. What is more is aporetic. It is usage in English to say “there are two alternatives to one single solution.” The French, however, speak of “one alternative, and one solution.” The latter construct the relationship of a one and its contrary, so that it is impossible for both to be true: if a child is stillborn, it is not alive. The former emphasize the oppositive relationship of what is beyond actuality as in the phrase “wanted dead or alive.” The opposite of being caught alive is to be caught dead, but one cannot be caught dead and alive. In either sense of the word alternative —that there is one or there is none, or that there are two, but only one solution—there is always at least one alternative whenever there is one solution. Being as being is simple, because it is irreducible: it is irreducible, because every problem has a solution: it is irreducible, because there is no solution unless any alternative is not a solution, and the only alternative to what is not a solution is the solution. Being as being is the Simple-One because the things that exist do not have the alternative not to exist: no one chooses to be born. Further, “to be” or “not to be” are two alternatives that are mutually exclusive, so that as long as both are potentially viable, only the former is always the case. It is pointlessly the case, it is a fait accompli. “To be” is simple, unequivocal, and absurd by virtue of the indiscriminate taste of formal logic. The heart of the ghost The simple and absurd ground of being, ironically by virtue of canceling the ideality of being, affirms its importance as the ground of meaning. It would appear, at first, that Aristotle’s theory of being as being turns Plato’s dialectical process of abstraction into an analogical process of synthesis only to repeat the inherent nostalgia pertaining to mimesis by transforming mimesis into the adhering incoherentness of analogy. Yet, something else happens instead, so that whatever is beyond the being of what is, of what is known, of what is not known, of what is not, of what is really real, of what is true, becomes, other than a redundant and unjustifiable beyond, a radical aporia. Paul Tillich argues that this radical aporia is God, because God is being-itself, the only non-symbolic symbol. “As being-itself God is beyond the contrast of essential and existential being…. Logically, being-itself is ‘before,’ ‘prior to,’ the split which characterizes finite being” (Tillich 1967: vol. 1, part 2, 236). Unless God is being-itself, God is dead. Unless nature and thought are preceded by being-itself —a non-symbolic symbol, a radical aporia, nothing is meaningful, thus nothing is true: there is no way out of Samsara.

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The analogia entis is not the property of a questionable natural theology which attempts to gain knowledge of God by drawing conclusions about the infinite from the finite. The analogia entis gives us our only justification of speaking at all about God. It is based on the fact that God must be understood as being-itself. (Tillich 1967: vol. 1, part 2, 239–40) This radical aporia that, from time immemorial, manifests itself whenever a philosopher tries to elucidate the question of being as being is how philosophy as Ousiology gains immortality. It is how ontology is theology without idolatry.2 It is how philosophical analysis markets God, a secular word in the dictionary while revealing that the death of God is really a monstracide, the theological overcoming of a maniacal anthropomorphism. Who Speaks? Who speaks beyond ideas and things? Who speaks without pointing to the utopian ideal of the Same? Not the idolatrous philosophers and their theatrical systems that reproduce reality on a stage where even a last curtain performance is a dress rehearsal. Idolatrous philosophers create a dialectical illusion of reality because they imitate being as being, and think about thinking; however, the thinking that they think about or the being that they imitate is as hypostatic as it is concrete, as sanguine as icons are sacred, as glorious as a gilded coat of arms produces noble blood, as just as the tain of the mirror is the ground of what it mirrors. Theoria, the activity that belongs to the philosopher and the object if which is episteme, the knowledge of being as being, is not productive of wisdom unless it is inspired by wisdom (see Marx 1954:10–12). First philosophy in lieu of theology is the theoretical science of being as being when philosophy’s eternal, immovable, inseparable substance eschews what is something rather than nothing. Or, first philosophy in lieu of theology is the theoretical science of being as nature, a compound substance of potential matter and separable forms dynamically moved and unintentionally emotive. Still, first philosophy in lieu of theology always produces a certain theoretical knowledge of theoretical objects. Its theoretical activity, however, is like a movie-kiss. It is an activity that short-circuits what Alfred North Whitehead calls causal-efficacy, because it restricts the thinking process to a realm of conceptual objects, objects without a concrete referent, by eliminating from feeling the world of presentational immediacy: what is present to consciousness.3 The theoretical world is formally conditioned by the subjective a priori, so it presents us with an experience that is possible. Since the theoretical world is an exclusive world, it is not potentially conditioned by apprehensions. This means that experience is void of actuality. It is not an event. It is an illusion. Who Speaks? Who speaks beyond ideas and things without replacing what is profoundly concrete with the superficial beauty of mere abstractions? Not the idolatrous philosopher. He turns the world of the senses into a placebo, a chickensoup for the theoretical world, and the theoretical world into the unbearable meaning of reality testing. He knows what is real by analogy, as abstractions, but

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he naturalizes his abstractions. What is real is now mere comprehensible nature; mere comprehensible nature, however, is a mere abstraction in disguise. Philosophical thought has made for itself difficulties by dealing exclusively in very abstract notions, such as those of mere awareness, mere private sensation, mere emotion, mere purpose, mere appearance, mere causation…. There can be no mere togetherness of such abstractions. The result is that philosophical discussion is enmeshed in the fallacy of “misplaced concreteness”. (Whitehead 1979:18) Mere comprehensible nature is enmeshed in a fallacy of this kind, because nature “is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought,” omitting what is abstract about these categories (Whitehead 1979:7). Idolatrous philosophers engage in fanciful abstractions. As soon as the fine line between speculation and reality is erased, as soon as concreteness is misplaced into abstractions, then philosophy as metaphysics (concerned with both knowledge and being) becomes a type of idolatrous theology. God and nature are one, but just as being as being is indifferent to beings, God is indifferent to the world. God is the idol of all idols. Representation has no end. This does not have the same implications for us, as the phrase “there is no way out of representation.” Representation has no end implies that the signifier never transgresses the signified. What is something rather than nothing means anything whatever. Who speaks? Recall Hume’s argument for a philosophy of human nature, that profound philosophy is useless, but obvious philosophy is superficial. To be pragmatic, we ought to content ourselves with the virtues of common-sense philosophy. Nevertheless, in order to be content with common sense, the obvious must also be profound and truly useless. At stake for an answer is, therefore, a kind of rapport between the world and language that is neither simply poetic and anomalous, nor simply natural and analogical. Grammar, unlike logic, is the first transcendental science that is a practical science. Pure logic (formal logic) describes the activity of thought when objects of thought have no natural being, when they are immaterial. Logic does not endorse a posteriori synthetic judgments. Grammar is, thus, the proper science of being when being is neither theoretical, nor natural, but theological. Grammar as grammar is the transcending schematism of the understanding. What, then, is grammar as grammar, and what kind of grammar transcends the real into words? Finally, is the notion of a transcendental grammar an oxymoron? The systematizing of language depends on the style of representation that is privileged, facilitated, rewarded or censured. Alphabetical writing depends largely on the convenience of conventional representation: signs are semiotic before they are semantic; letters signify guttural, labial, nasal, dental, in short, sounds that can be vocalized in one breath or less. Although various semiotic

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arrangements or vocables (words as units of sounds or letters rather than as units of meaning) become semantically charged before they become vocabulary, the mode of representation as a condition for the possibility of understanding and communication remains in the symbolic order, and requires that order be social, contractual, and a common-sense order. Conventional representation is clearly social, and obviously common sense. We ought to content ourselves with the virtues of conventional sensibility. This, though, is not all that is the case. It is almost as if linguistic socialization alienates the locutor from the speaker—the mouthed words from the voice. Julia Kristeva observes a correlation, not necessarily a causal relationship, between linguistic signs and social culture. She writes: On peut observer en effet que le type d’écriture idéogrammatique s’accompagne souvent d’un mode de production dit “asiatique” (grandes collectivites productrices et interdépendantes, gérées directement par un organisme central, sans unités isolées citadines et “démocratiques” au sens grec du terme); au niveau de la pensée scientifique ces sociétés développent une logique dialective correlative, anti-substantielle (telle la logique de la langue chinoise). Au contraire, l’alphabétisme grec a comme corrélat, au niveau sociologique, des unités de production isolées et fermées sur ellesmêmes, un développement de la conscience individuelle dans l’idéologie, une logique de non-contradiction dans la science (la logique aristotélicienne).4 (Kristeva 1981:98) How do conventional signs affect the idea and the nature of what they represent? Pictographs and ideograms are symbolic, because they signify something rather than nothing—something sacred—being— the unknown. On the one hand, then, whatever is and exists signifies something, especially when what is and exists is unfamiliar. “L’univers a signifié bien avant qu’on ne commence a savoir ce qu’il signifiait,” writes Claude Lévi-Strauss (quoted in Kristeva 1981:53). On the other hand, alphabetical writing is a symbolic type of representation (arbitrary and conventional) set in contrast to iconographic representation (a picture represents something inasmuch as it resembles what it represents) or signals (smoke signals fire), because a symbolic act begins with language and belongs to language (Kristeva 1981: 18–19). The immediacy (the presentational immediacy) of speech, of sounds uttered with intention, is the wake-up call of self-consciousness and the end of a first naïveté. Symbolism for the sake of symbolism is born in the art of rhetoric. “Rhetoric,” writes Roland Barthes in his essay From Work to Text, “taught writing (even though speeches and not texts were generally produced). It is significant that the advent of democracy reversed the order: (secondary) school now prides itself on teaching how to read (well), and not how to write” (Barthes 1981:79).

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Pictographs, icons or signs, despite their figurative and even abstract nature are, nonetheless, not scriptural. These signs represent something, even when they mark what is foreign about it. Hieroglyphs hollow-out the sacred. Scribes are secretaries of the divine: they transcribe. Letter writing and iconography are types of representation. The difference between the two is that alphabetical representation hollows-out the sacred if, and only if, God is in and of language, and the world is a secular world, whereas iconographic representation or hieroglyphs hollow-out the sacred, because the world reads like a cipher. Beginning to speak is beginning to write a script. It is becoming an actor; it is being involved in the mise-en-scène of representation. It is seeking pleasure by perfecting the delight of the senses through technological elaborations of aesthetic experiences, because, just like a cipher, the world in presentational immediacy does not read well. Instead, it puzzles, it frightens, and it overwhelms. If it is easy to conceive how the picture of a pipe can signify a pipe, and whatever characteristics the pipe as an object carries, it is also easy to conceive how the word pipe signifies a pipe, but a different kind of pipe. The conventional script of the lettering cannot convey characteristics that belong to the pipe in sight or in mind. The voicing of the word obviously carries the burden of proof, and involves the speaker in the labor of expression—of convincing—of being convinced —that representation is the representation of something knowable, evident, clear and distinct. Furthermore, when a word, written or spoken, evokes associations, these are easily—commonly—objectionable, they are freeassociations with little scientific credibility. Free associations are not necessary associations. As the source of the subject of enunciation is obfuscated by the physical distinctness of the speaker and his now obvious involvement in representation, it is a lot safer for a linguistic subject to privilege the conventional meanings (polysemic or not) of words and to snub the metaphorical and poetic disseminating force of representation. The subject of enunciation stands in the public eye. His office is public, but he comes to it as an individual who speaks for others, and about himself: he is in trial as soon as he begins to speak. Efforts to evaluate the symbolic function of words by attributing denotative and connotative meanings to a signifier only solidify the hierarchical privilege of conventional, democratic, representation and its high economic performance in the commodification of communication. Grammar is a theory of language when signs, such as letters, have no semantic character, and when the scission between the signifier and the signified is common law and common practice (when the scission born with the symbol, with language, is forgotten). We all forget the scission as soon as we start to speak (not merely to imitate sounds and make noises). When we start to speak, we learn how to read and write, but in school we are taught how to write well, with good grammar. Hence, when we read, we recognize what is well written (the conventions of representation). Anything else—not well written—is cryptic, loose, unlawful and unsafe. Anything else symptomatically returns by way of neurosis, because the subject

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swarming in a sea of words is alienated by the freedom of his speech: if he chooses to speak well, he is no longer affectively involved in representation. He prefers not to speak. If she chooses to say something, because she does not want to say nothing, she is always on trial for disrupting the safe order of unambiguous, impotent conventional symbols, and for claiming the justification of her existence as her right to speak, to be recognized, to be an actor involved in the symbolic production of what is real and important. Her resistance is futile. Free speech is a difficult freedom. It appears when the felt split between the world and language turns to the profound disarray in the absence of a logical final solution. Grammar as grammar becomes a battlefield for philosophical enquiry, and eventually, a strategy for marketing political power. Take the Roman grammarian Varron’s contribution to this development: by promoting the commodification of representation, he was able to negotiate the interests of the analogists and those of the anomalists through a merger between the valueless logic of analogy and the anomalous logic of mimesis. He did so with a normative theory of language, a theory of language that normalizes the criteria of reality (Kristeva 1981:119). Kristeva explains that “pour lui, la langue exprime la régularité du monde, mais elle-même possède des irrégularités” (ibid.).5 Grammar, after its inadequate postulation for a transcendental science, barely recovers the world it seeks to represent by granting a sense of normalcy to the estranging and ego-formative power of symbolic conventional usage. The answer to the question echoes from the heart of the ghost in the machine Who speaks after being forced into a conventional world? Who wants to live in a cave-like dwelling after having seen the moon, the stars and the sun? He was born a prisoner in a cave. But, he rebelled against the sense of normalcy that threatened his ordinary investments. One fine day he turned around—he turned within, so that he would no longer be in the cave. He was dazzled by the sun. Under the moon, he turned blue, because he saw his old cave, and the obscurity within. Everything inside was dark and small. Nostalgic, homesick, he became his own cave by enslaving his memories so they would never fault him and remain the same. But, it was not the same. Heavy with images of a home that no longer felt like home, he landed deep down in a cave-like dwelling, like a star shooting in deep space. Who is he? Some say he is a tragic philosopher: a hero for posterity. This, in my view, is how Plato’s Republic becomes immortal: not as an ideal to pursue, but, as an illusion to overcome, before illusory hopes take our last breath away. Friedrich Nietzsche refers to Kant as this type of tragic philosopher, hero for posterity: like a fox who finds a way out of his cage, but turns around (Nietzsche 1974: aphorism 335, 264). In The Supplement of the Copula, Jacques Derrida refers to Nietzsche in a similar way:

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Nietzsche classifies as liberation (or freedom of thought) the movement by which one breaks away from language and grammar, which previously governed the philosophical order. In this very traditional fashion he comes to define the law of language or the signifier as an “enslavement” from which we must extricate ourselves. At the most critical moment of his enterprise, at the “turning point,” he remains a philosopher—provisionally, as it were: “language is only slavery within the bounds of language. Language has within it, however, an illogical element, the metaphor. Its principal force brings about an identification of the non-identical; it is thus an operation of the imagination. It is on this that the existence of concepts, forms, etc., rests.” This movement is regularly repeated, and especially when Nietzsche analyzes the philosophical illusion of “truth” as subjection to an order of signs whose “arbitrariness” we forget. But by recalling the arbitrariness of the sign, has not philosophy always sought to posit the contingent and superficial exteriority of language to thought, the secondary nature of the sign in relation to the idea? Having a totally different aim, Nietzsche must resort to an analogous argument. (Derrida 1981:83–4) Derrida then cites a passage from On Truth and Falsity in their Ultra-moral Sense (from the 1911 Allen & Unwin edition of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche) where Nietzsche posits a necessary forgetfulness of the arbitrariness of words as signs in order to imagine that an idea as a word defines a truth external to the subject. By the same token, however, Nietzsche forces the genesis of language back into the problematic subjective limits of consciousness. The idea of a hard stone is a fabrication of language (words), but the realization of this fabrication points to the stone in-itself as an object that a subject cannot know. This stone in-itself—outside of language—is, nevertheless, something in thought—somehow in consciousness: “How should we dare, if truth with the genesis of language, if the point of view of certainty with the designations had alone been decisive; how indeed should we dare to say: the stone is hard; as if ‘hard’ was known to us otherwise; and not merely as an entirely subjective stimulus” (in Derrida 1981:84)! Our inference that the stone is more than just an object in consciousness—it is more than a mere word—is just that, an inference —a hypothesis, a thought, an idea. Who wants to live in a cave-like dwelling after having seen the moon, the stars, and the sun? He is not a twice-baked philosopher. He is not a grammarian. He is not a fool. He is out of luck and running out of time: language, now, comes as a gift, because it betrays who speaks whenever she chooses to remain silent, and it betrays who does not speak whenever everything has already been said by someone else.

6 Another tongue

Everyone may speak of a longing for the infinite. Everyone may speak the joy and the excitement that pave the way to the limits of reason and understanding. Everyone may speak to the imaginary visions within the sane walls of reason. Everyone may speak another tongue. Who wills to speak—to speak a language that exceeds the sum of its parts— may, at least, speak another tongue. The Greek philosopher, the medieval theologian, the idealist, the empiricist, the existentialist, and even the solipsist, will to speak a language that exceeds the sum of its parts. When they do, they each do so in another tongue. Not everyone wills to speak another tongue, and so not everyone does. This is why the Aristotelian corpus is split. Unfortunately, this is also why Aquinas was condemned before he was canonized. Unfortunately, not everyone sees the tongue of another as just another tongue. In the nineteenth century, Native American boys were forced en masse into boarding schools. The presumption was that the Indian in the boy made him a savage, and so, these little boys were forbidden to speak until they could do so in English. After all, this education was for their own good, because English could never be just another tongue. What better way, therefore, to expedite the assimilation process than to teach the boy to vilify what he sees in the mirror of his mind. During the Second World War, the United States army trained Cherokee Indians as code-talkers. Each code-talker was assigned a bodyguard to ensure that none would ever be captured—alive. The Japanese never broke the code. The Indian in the boy and the code made another tongue; a tongue that would be spoken so as to exceed the sum of its parts—but just another tongue. Language, Desire, and Theology is not an attempt to convert people to see language as I do. It calls forth a theology of language devoid of soteriological powers. It does not silence the other. It does not hide its incredulity in the face of the numerous metaphysical machinations that have seen the light of day. It contemplates the fate of thought on paper, stored and shelved, spread and lost around the world that is all that is the case. It knows the anger of a Job. It speaks the disorienting arbitrariness of being human in this world, that both being human and this world are in-themselves independent of, indifferent to, the

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freedom of one’s will. Whoever reads Language, Desire, and Theology is invited to speak the tongue of another for the sake of being another himself. Rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse, a theology of language is a speaking; not a knowing. Error is human. So too is the free will to speak. This theology of language is the promise that he who wills to speak, or that she who desires to give expression to her world and her being, in so doing, promise to experience the infinite in this world and in being human. This theology of language is a promise, nothing more, nothing less. It is a promise always already in the making, a promise that supports and encourages the revolution of its own making for its own sake. This is not an easy promise to make, for it is not an easy promise to keep. Hope fails us, at times. Despair takes over, at times. Meaninglessness means hopelessness in the world as representation, whenever representations feel ludicrous, redundant, pointless, and besides whatever the world is not. Sometimes, representations alienate us from our being. Coming to be and ceasing to be, one’s being is both an uncanny reservoir and a best friend. If we paint this being as a phantasm, we are only writing poetry. If we insist that this being is our own inner source of light, we are fideists without faith. When we curse it and call it a snake pit, we are pagans on the brink of insanity. We are useless skeptics if we give this being the status of a clean concept, for, immaculate, it shall automatically be off limits to consciousness. And we play doctor when, nostalgic about the Eden of primary narcissism, we theorize that a permeable neuron bridges together our egotistical consciousness and our repressed unconscious. Or we become Cartesian, we assert that this being is a thinking substance caught in a body, and that, whatever else we might be, this thinking being, without a doubt, is not a dream. This promise of a theology of language is not an easy promise to keep, for it not easy to make. Life is not a dream, that is indeed why we have nightmares. That is also why we dream about a sky full of angels, and discover ourselves in our own tears: we are a tear fallen from that sky full of angels; we have become strangers in a strange land. We speak, and our voices fade into the horizon, our words, our ideas, are not eternal. We must speak them, perceive them, remember them, and forget them. “But of Your Word nothing passes or comes into being, for it is truly immortal and eternal” (Augustine 1993: bk. 11, 215). I cannot understand this. My words are not even my own. My voice is not eternal. I cannot speak like God. My memory may store an infinite realm full of ideas, but my knowledge of these ideas is not infinite. What then? Who speaks when I open my mouth and stammer? My will? My desire? What does it speak? It speaks what it wants? But the will is free; it does not know what it wants—To live? —To have the power, the courage to be, to be able to love its freedom? — Is it lack or excess? —Death wish or Eros? The will wants to have it its way. It wants its freedom for itself, not in a finite body in an imperfect world, not stuck in an individual who is just an anonymous man of the crowd. Not a child who must behave and learn to ask for things the

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proper way. The will does not want to compromise its freedom, and be labeled like an actor stuck with one role. The will does not want to grow-up and old. The will wants immortality, and it will not be satisfied with anything else. In the middle, there was the will, and the will was mute, and deaf, and blind, and very much alive, and needy, and naively narcissistic. Then the will realized that it was mute, and deaf, and blind, because it was free to will. An allegory of the will to speak The genealogy of the will to speak is a tracing back of ideas in the history of Western thought that begins with the allegorical entry of a debutante in the society of representation. The debutante has great expectations. She has never seen the King in person. She pictures him perfect. She pictures him and her picture has the significance of an icon, it resembles what it signifies, because it resembles the King of her dreams. She took a picture of an image to carry her dream in her wallet, she did not think that her image was already always with her, that it was nowhere else. At her first appearance at the King’s court, she is too busy remembering what not to forget, so she does not see the King. At her second appearance, she sees the King, but she does not recognize him until she hears “Here comes the King!” and she thinks “Is that all there is to a King?” Disappointed, she decides never to go back to the King’s court, but they make her—the world makes her. The genealogy of the will to speak unfolds history every forward step the debutante risks into the society of representation. Because it killed her King—his matter—because it killed the matter of the image of which she took a picture— because it killed the real in the imaginary, the society of representation is her only home. It is all that she has left of her precious image. She takes a step forward and observes the world of which she is now a part. The King of the society of representation does not resemble one bit what he means, and he does not even point to what he means. But, her imaginary King does not matter anymore, he is an image, not a symbol. His matter has no symbolic referent. The genealogy of the will to speak unfolds history every forward step the debutante takes, because the course of history that represents her frustrates her desire to speak her story and to repeat history. Words signify her before she knows what they mean. Now she asks the questions that all women, who, by nature, desire to know, by culture, come to. “What do I want? Who am I? How do I know what I want? Where is the truth? What is thinking?” She learns how to write, and how to save her work. She learns how to preserve her ideas, like jam. She stores away everything she has become conscious of—just in case. She tries to get rid of all the unknown variables. She reasons with reason. She concludes that there truly is no way out of the society of representation. It is true, she knows it now for sure, because she knows that she cannot think of a reasonable way out of representation. She knows herself now. She knows herself as a self

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that knows nothing. She fell into her own ditch. She is nobody, she is left with wounds to scar. Nietzsche’s voice echoes in the pit of her stomach: “What is the value that scholarship places on existence?”1 She felt the echo in her stomach. She felt words. She felt something in her ditch. Nobody feels something unless they are somebody. Nobody feels anything unless anything is not nothing. The echo resonates again. The same echo, the same voice, the same words, but she hears something else. She hears: “How is the history of Western thought’s devaluation of ideas about existence—ideas themselves generated by Western thought—a valuation of existence?” The cultured despisers of the society of representation are parasites. They can only think about what they have lost, their reason-to-be is their lack. Their contempt is excessive. The cultured despisers of the society of representation live long lives. They invade, they take over, they swallow things whole, like snakes. The debutante does not want to sing the same song. She does not want to hate the world of representation, simply because she is unable to love it. She is stubborn that way. She wills to speak, so she rebels against any sort of affectivity towards the society of representation. Tracing a way back to the ideas of the history of Western thought is, thus, a rebellion against ideas, against symbolic reference. The will to speak rebels against its working conditions. It says “No!” to the necessary troping of desire if this troping represents the will to speak as lack. This rebellious “No!” looks like a denial of the will-to-live, but it is not a denial of the will-to-live, not yet, anyway. Rather, the rebellious “No!” is a melancholy desire for an unattainable object, for something that was never lost, but that feels like it was, or it is the Verleugnung (disavowal) of the fetishist who simultaneously perceives and denies the reality of the lost penis, or again, it is the fetishistic character of the exchange value of a commodity (see Agamben 1993:31; 42–3). The rebellious “No!” expresses a will to speak, because it does not deny the will to speak. The debutante affirms this will when she asks: “How shall I import matter to the logic of sense?” The rebellious “No!” is the impetus to desire this or that, and then, this rather than that, or nothing, an unnamable nothing, because any representation of the will to speak is idolatrous and iconoclastic. It is (1) iconoclastic, because words are symbols of the will, they do not satisfy the will; and it is (2) idolatrous, because symbols are dialectical: they traverse finite time and finite space to sublate feelings while remaining in the present as ghosts, as abstract ideas that misplace concreteness and that become hypostatic, for fear of gaining too much weight, too much importance (anorexia verbosa, if you will: a verbal want of appetite). Hence, the genealogy of the will to speak is an attack against the course of history, against the historical logic of the will to speak, because it goes against the grain of history. It begins with the debutante who wants to care about tomorrow and yesterday, because she is able to care about today, and not the

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reverse. This attack is against the course of history, not against history itself. This attack unfolds history, because it does not follow the course of history. This attack unfolds history, because it places no value on the course of history. Who speaks may not speak ill of the will to speak that inspires her words. Who speaks cannot speak ill of the ideas about existence that the history Western thought turns into ghost-stories. The question, here, is that of the value placed on existence. It is a haunting question to raise from which there is no way out. It is a haunting question. How shall one who speaks not devalue existence— not devalue the will to speak? How shall one value a desire to speak words that are eternal in spite of the voice who speaks them? The question is haunting: the rebellion of the will to speak is, therefore, never a denial of the will to speak. It cannot be. A denial of the will to speak is a regression to primary process thinking where there is no substitution of any kind with a secondary process. “There is no substitution of any kind” means that the subject who denies the will to speak is stupefied: the denied will to speak is in a catatonic stupor. But the rebellious “No!” is an avowal: it is a manifestation of the primary process—it seconds the primary process— that responds to its Gestalt. The manifestation of a response challenges the secondary process to do better, to think well what is good to think. It is the third that crowds the routinary processes of consciousness. Insofar as the entry of the debutante into the society of representation was a shock and not a smooth transition, she will always want to feel the integration of affects into concepts. She will always feel that three is a crowd. When this does not happen, she will no longer want to think, because she will still want to speak. When the demand for integration is too much and she is anxious, she will no longer be able to think—because she wants to speak. And when she feels the words that she speaks, medieval theologians make sense, by virtue of the absurdity of the leap into consciousness. This is how the genealogy of the will to speak unfolds history, rather than follows its course. And it is why the genealogy of the will to speak is a valuation of its history, and not a devaluation of the course of its history. It begins with a debutante who, like a little girl who prefers her imaginary world, because the real world is a symbolic world, screams, loud as she can, every single day on her way to school “I am too little to go to school!” This genealogy of the will to speak speaks a theological language insofar as it promises, in another tongue, to unfold the history of the will to speak; it promises to look forward to the will to speak. Language is theological for anyone who dares to speak another tongue—for any fool who sets his face toward wisdom, because his eyes are on the ends of this earth. This is not an oxymoron. This is a promise.

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Notes

Preface 1 See, for instance, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology by Graham Ward who strongly suggests that “language is always and ineradicably theological” (Ward 1998:9); No Other God by Gabriel Vahanian who explains how, according to biblical thought, “what gives meaning to a word is its sacramental power” to make “phenomena and their realities inalienable as well as irreducible” (Vahanian 1966:37). Both authors complicate the classical theological perspective on human language, where “The name of any being…is the only means by which the human spirit can conceive something about a being that is absent. God is absent” (Weil 1973: 217). Not to be confused with John Macquarrie’s notion that myth is the pretheological language of religion in his Principles of Christian Theology (Macquarrie 1977). 2 Harold Bloom, in reference to his work entitled The Anxiety of Influence, argues that “any strong literary work creatively misreads and therefore misinterprets a precursor text or texts.” An original literary work offers a strong misreading of precursor texts, while unoriginal thought represents a weak reading or a straightforward and unambiguous interpretation of a precursor text. The former, the misreading of texts, causes the author to fear that he cannot escape from the influences of precursor texts but to desire to do so, and it is also what causes texts to have external historical relations to each other. The latter, weak reading of texts, is the result of an established external historical relations of texts and of an author’s uncomplicated internal psychic relation with his muses (Bloom 1995:7–8).

1 All men by nature desire to know 1 In book six of his Metaphysics, Aristotle adds a theological sense to the empirical sense of first philosophy as the science concerned with the existence, the nature, the being of what is most general about things that are. By first philosophy, Aristotle also means the most theoretical science, the science that deals with what can be known with most certainty: what is necessary, universal, eternal, and immovable. He writes: “There must, then, be three theoretical philosophies, mathematics, physics, and what we may call theology, since it is obvious that if the

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divine is present anywhere, it is present in things of this sort [causes immovable, eternal and separable]” (Aristotle 1941a: bk. VI, ch. 1, 779). Here it is clear that Aristotle equates the branch of philosophy that treats of the eternal, the immovable, of the first causes with theology. The distinction that we make today between philosophy and theology is a regrettable double error. There is the misunderstanding among many in the field of religious studies that metaphysics (as a branch of theology) treats of first causes in the purely divine sense, when, in fact, as we read Aristotle, we discover that there can be no study of the beyond without a study of what is. Vice versa, there are many in philosophical studies who dismiss Aristotle’s theological bent, and for whom metaphysics is the general study of being (for instance: as categories of thought or as logical forms of reality). In religious studies, theology and metaphysics often carry such pejorative connotations or restrictive meanings that their appearance on resumés guarantees a rejection letter. Seminaries have necessary religious affiliations and have little regard for non-dogmatic theological enquiry. In short, everywhere, even in religion, theology and philosophy are kept separate, as though their subject matter was necessarily and always clearly and distinctly different. There is a difference between Athens and Jerusalem, but that difference is not between philosophy and theology. It is a mistake to separate theology and philosophy. 2 To say that medieval theologians saw man’s desire to know as human, and therefore, as also a woman’s desire can be interpreted in the following sexist way: because this desire is also feminine it can only be human, where the assumption is that man became human because of woman. I beg to differ in that the word human is akin both to homo (man) and humus (soil). “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1.1). “Then God said, ‘Let us make man/ humankind in our image, according to our likeness’” (Genesis 1.26). “So God created man/humankind in his image; in the image of God he created him/them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1.27). “And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth” (Genesis 1.26). In Genesis 1, there is no ambiguity: man is created in, after the image of God, where God is male and female. So here it is that the man in the human is male and female before it is of the soil, when it is in the image of God. In Genesis 2, “God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2.7), before God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to man” (Genesis 2.18, 21– 2). Here man is of the soil and human before woman is. Hence, when man is not “brought forth from the earth,” but from God, when man is homo and not humus, man is male and female, he is in the image of God. And when man is formed “of dust from the ground,” when he is humus, and of flesh, he is alone and God judges that man alone needs woman in order to sustain life and care for life in the Garden of Eden, man alone cannot till and keep the Garden of Eden insofar as man alone cannot create another man. Man of the soil is merely male; man in the image of God is male and female. So man’s desire to know is hu(mus)man(homo) in that, first it is homo: male and female and in the image of God, and second, it is of the soil and made of flesh before it can also be woman’s desire.

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But, you might object that the reason man desires to know is because woman ate of the Tree of Knowledge (beguiled, however, by the serpent —consequently cursed…above all wild animals by God Himself—that she did not, and could not know as an enemy because God had kept her from the knowledge of good and evil), and so man did as well, and so both became mortal and wanting. So you could say all men desire to know because of women, but you cannot say that man’s desire to know is human because of woman. Man’s desire to know is human because man, and the woman born out of his rib, before they desire to know anything at all, are both of the soil, made of flesh, and male and female in the image of God. You may, thus, blame woman as the cause of the existence of this desire, but the origin of this desire is human: it is male and female and made of soil —it is essentially in the image of God and ignorant of Good and Evil. To see man’s desire to know as a human desire is to see that this desire is not a curse, but a blessing. It is tantamount to saying that, even born a sinner, man’s desire to know is beyond good and evil, male and female, of the soil and of flesh. If it were not for Eve who tempted Adam and condemned human beings to mortality, this human desire (or desire for the human) would not be. So when theology says that the desire to know is human it chooses to accept and affirm this desire and to take responsibility for this desire. It does so, or else it resents this desire and fatalistically lives forever in nostalgia of its immortal humanity. Can you not see that, without woman, either the Garden of Eden could not have been tilled and kept, thus it would have died, or men would have forgotten that they had lost it, men would never have known that once they were male and female and immortal? Is it not better to have known and lost once, than to have known once and lost forever? But, if you argue that women do not desire to know because they are not human, since they are born of a rib and of flesh, then you must also argue that the human being is no man at all, in that he is not in the image of God, both feminine and masculine. Ergo, either you read Genesis 1 as incompatible with Genesis 2, and man is not a human being, or you read Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 as compatible with each other, and the human is formed of dust, is feminine and masculine. But “all men are mortal and all men desire to know,” so Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 must be compatible! 3 In book two, chapters 5 and 6 of On the Free Will, Augustine places reason in the category of that which is, that which lives and that which understands. Reason judges the interior sense which is and lives but does not understand. The interior sense judges all five senses and these bodily senses perceive what merely is (see Augustine 1957:16–17 and the appendix in Oates 1948:823–4). 4 While the faculty of the imagination is associated with the synthetic power of the intellect (the ability to see basic resemblances in things over against their differences), the imagination, category of the understanding, transcendental modality of thought between intuition and concept or mediating channel between appearances and truth, is a “mixture” of sensation and belief that produces images and yields them to the faculty of the mind where they are deciphered, dismembered, disrobed of any materiality so that what is true or ideal about them is abstracted from them. When the imagination is viewed as a faculty it is a necessary function for the attainment of the truth and for judging of what is false. To have no imagination, in this case, is to be lacking in judgment, to be a fool. When the imagination is viewed as a mixed category, the truth is visible once elements are

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5 6

7

8

9

distinguished. To have no imagination, in this case, is to think empty universals, but feel blind individuals. Gabriel Vahanian, the author’s father: conversation we had circa 1992. “La physique ça n’est rien que du bon sens, vous n’avez rien qu’à utiliser votre bon sens.” Note that the literal translation of bon sens is good sense, not common sense. Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (1972) lists common-sense (also common sense) under the letter C and defines it as ordinary good sense, but compounds good sense (listed under the word sense) with sound sense; seeming, therefore, to indicate that we all necessarily share in common an ordinary good sense which is sound, yet also leading to this humbling and yet also perplexing realization that good sense may be too sound to be common—it may be too sound (infallible) to be accessible to all, but it may also be too sound (profound) to be the same good sense for all. The petit Robert 1: dictionnaire de la langue française (1979) under the word sens does make a distinction between bon sens and sens commun (although, by the tour de force use of a parenthesis it furtively states the equivalence—understand, the equivocal equation—of the latter with the former); my teacher and the Robert & Collins: dictionnaire français-anglais, anglais-français (1987) unequivocally equate both meanings by implying that the capacity to judge well without experiential knowledge is not only common to all, it is also the same for all. The conflation of common sense with the soul is logical here since, for Aquinas who adheres to an Aristotelian analogical epistemology, the soul is where the likeness of things is understood. Common sense, while it belongs to all and is the same for all, is only ordinary good sense; it only goes so far. Likewise, all carry a soul, but the soul does not contain all the things that it understands; it only contains an analogical understanding of such things, it does not contain these things in themselves. It too, then, only goes so far. Analogy in Aquinas has been the object of many a reputable scholar, so I should like to stress that my reading of analogy in Aquinas is strictly interpretive, and a working through of the notion with a scope altogether different from either that of traditional theological expositions, or that of analytic philosophy. Foremost, I am interested in Aquinas’ novel use of the word analogy to define a rapport between a necessary term and a contingent term (God and creatures). The rapport of analogy between God and creatures cannot be understood, according to Aquinas, as a rapport between two terms by virtue of a common third (A is like B in that A is to C in a similar way that B is to C. Or, the rapport between A and B is like the rapport between C and D). At the same time, however, and still according to Aquinas, the rapport is not univocal (A is A), not equivocal (A is not B), and not metaphorical (A is like B). For a succinct and clear exposition of analogy in Aquinas, see, for instance, Copleston 1993: ch. 35. Practical science+Speculative science=Intellectual science. There are three practical sciences “to insure that our affairs in the other world will be according to our hopes” (Avicenna 1973:11). (1) The science of public management of which there are two kinds: The nature of religious laws and the nature of the science of politics. (2) The science of the household which deals with three associations: Between husband and wife, between father and child, and between master and slave. (3) The science of the self of which there are three kinds: Civic management, Household management, and Management of the self.

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There are also three speculative sciences, “so that our souls…may be fortunate in the other world” (ibid.). (1) First philosophy, the science of primordials, of that which is beyond nature: the being of its subject matter “is in no way connected to sensible matter, mixture, and motion. Hence [it] can be imagined without being united with matter and motion, such as intelligence, being, unity, being a cause, being an effect, and whatever is similar. These conditions are conceivable without sensibles. Therefore it is possible to conceive of subject matter independent of sensibles” (Avicenna 1973: 12). (2) An intermediate or instructive science called the science of syntax and mathematics, “which knows the nature of those subjects which in their state of being have no choice but to be united with matter, although no particular matter is specified for them, such as figure and numerosity, which are conditions known by the science of axiomatic” (Avicenna 1973:13). (3) An inferior science, namely, natural science of which the “subjects are such that their being is in materials, and defining and imagining them are related to matter and to the nature of motion,” for example, “humanity and whatever resembles it” (Avicenna 1973:12).

2 The condemnation 1 For contemporary interpretations of and playful variations on speaking the other in and of language see Scharlemann (1992); Coward and Foshay (1992); Budick and Iser (1989). 2 Avicenna is a Latin rendering of a Hebraic translation of the Persian name Ibn sina. 3 Erasmus first published the Bible in Greek and Latin aghast at the Scholastics’ concentration on philosophy. Luther followed in his footsteps with a gradual translation of the Bible in German. Two thousand years before, Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in Italian to manifest his disgust with papal corruption and clerical privilege. 4 “Christian Philosophy arose at the juncture of Greek philosophy and of the JewishChristian religious revelation…What is perhaps the key to the whole history of Christian philosophy and, in so far as modern philosophy bears the mark of Christian thought, to the history of modern philosophy itself, is precisely the fact that, from the second century AD on, men have had to use a Greek philosophical technique in order to express ideas that had never entered the head of any Greek philosopher…As Prof. J.B.Muller-Thym aptly remarks, where a Greek simply asks: What is nature? a Christian rather asks: What is being?” (Gilson 1969:43–4). 5 For those interested the theorem is: 6 Recall Ockham’s Razor which basically undercuts what was so important to Aquinas, namely, that the likeness of the thing known is in the one who knows. For Ockham, there are no likenesses, no phantasms, no intelligible objects within the soul that are analogous to existing objects and closer in kind to the being of God. There are only abstractions. 7 The geometrical definition of a triangle is problematic because it fits all triangles equally, whether isosceles, rectilinear, right angled, spherical. Indeed, I would bet my first gray hair that the average individual, when asked to define a triangle or to draw all possible triangles thinks that a polygon of which the three sides are curved

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8 9 10 11

is, technically, a triangle. One wonders if the sum of its three curved angles equals 180°, yet another definition of a triangle. In other words, we have no perceived idea of a universal triangle; any perceived three-sided figure is particular. We only have an abstract idea of a universal triangle, hence an idea with no referent. “How can we prosper when we behave so wrongly and give the Bible, the holy word of God, a back seat” (Luther 1970:97). For a philosophical reading of the story of Oedipus see Goux (1993). For a parallel interpretation see Nietzsche (1956). See Jean de La Fontaine (1668) La cigale et la fourmi de la fable in Fables, Paris: Edition Illustrée. La Fontaine, Maître des eaux et forêts who led an idle life of leisure, wrote exclusively in verse a compilation of works the genre of which is best characterized as a naturalism of speech—a cocktail of animality, humanism, skepticism, etc. His Fables appear as point blank apologues, yet he is quoted “Cette fable contient plus d’un enseignement,” and, indeed, if the want-to-be-grown-up child is oft coerced to follow the moral model set by the ant, the grown-up in the child may feel that the ant, albeit a moral model, is not a fair model at all.

5 Who speaks? 1 First philosophy is the science of theology until the twelfth century, but the later Corpus Aristotelicum appears divided between theology, the science of a necessary and certain unmoved and separated being, and metaphysics, the universal science of the nature of being as a function of itself while common to all beings. Werner Marx makes this point in his Introduction to Aristotle’s Theory of Being as Being (Marx 1977:47). It should come as no surprise, given the resilience of human passions, that even the scholarship born of a religious faith is not safe from litigations (political or intellectual). 2 Tillich is clear on this point: “Many confusions in the doctrine of God and many apologetic weaknesses could be avoided if God were understood first of all as being-itself” (Tillich 1967: vol. 1, part 2, 235). “The statement that God is being itself is a nonsymbolic statement. It does not point beyond itself. It means what it says directly and properly; if we speak of the actuality of God, we first assert that he is not God if he is not being-itself. Other assertions about God can be made theologically only on this basis” (Tillich 1967: vol. 1, part 2, 238–9). 3 The world in presentational immediacy is the world-for-us, the world as we perceive it. This notion is collateral with that of causal-efficacy. Causal efficacy serves a synonymous purpose with Kant’s schematism of the understanding, although it is not homologous with Kant’s transcendental formalism. Causal efficacy is a teleological movement that transgresses the subjective or internal character of a priori formal intuitions so that objects in presentational immediacy, objects of sensation and feeling, objects of the understanding, conceptual and theoretical objects, in short, all possible objects of experience, condition the subjective formal conditions of possibility of their experience. If Kant’s critical philosophy is a Copernican revolution, Whitehead’s process-philosophy is a double Copernican revolution. Whitehead inverts Kantian subjectivism, without negating it so that the subject formally and necessarily constructs the reality he apprehends,

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but, in addition, whatever reality is apprehended and is apprehensible becomes a potential condition for the actuality (not the possibility) of experience. (See Whitehead 1979:88, 155–6.) 4 My translation: “Indeed, an ideographic writing type is often times seen together with a so-called ‘Asian’ mode of production (large interdependent collectives of production that are directly managed by a central organism, doing away with discriminate and ‘democratic’—in the Greek sense of the word—urban units of production). In terms of their scientific thought, these societies develop a dialecticcorrelative logic, against the reification of substance (such as the logic of the Chinese language). To the contrary, the correlate of Greek alphabetical literacy is, from a sociological standpoint, independent and discriminate units of production. In terms of ideology, it is the development of individual consciousness. In terms of scientific reasoning, it is a logic of non-contradiction (Aristotelian logic).” 5 My translation: “for him, verbal language, while it possesses irregularities, expresses the world’s regularity.”

6 Another tongue 1 “The question was one of value, the value placed on existence.” “And the question is still what it was then, how to view scholarship from the vantage of the artist and art from the vantage of life” (Nietzsche 1956:4; 6).

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Index

analogy 19, 50, 64, 83, 88; in Aquinas 18; in Avicenna 21 Anselm 6, 10, 11 Apocalypticism 19 Apollo 37 Apollonian 37, 73 aporetic 27, 80, 83 aporia 75, 83 Aquinas 6, 7, 10, 15, 20–8, 29, 32, 55 Aristotle x, 3, 6, 10, 20, 22, 34, 36, 41, 73, 76, 79 atheism 70, 79 Augustine 6, 10, 15, 29, 34, 38 Avicenna x, 6, 10, 20, 28, 32, 66

Cartesian dualism 27 Cartesian method 44 causality (causal-efficacy) 59, 85 Christ 6, 14, 24 Cogito 45 common sense 16, 19, 45, 74, 86 connection; necessary x, 56 consciousness; happy 50 contemplation ix, 23, 63, 66, 68 copula 34 criticism xiv death xi, 53, 79; of God; see God; of speech 29 Deleuze, Gilles 19 Derrida, Jacques 29, 31, 89 Descartes, René 11, 41, 44, 49 desire ix, x, 40, 47, 66, 75; to conceptualize 2; and God 82; and happiness xi, 13, 19, 24, 37, 70; for immediate knowledge 40; for the infinite 27, 38, 49; to know 29, 37, 40, 43, 47, 60, 70, 78, 93; and necessity 15; as source of human transcendence 47; theological x, 3, 47, 65, 76, 79 Devil 33, 37, 37 dialectic 2, 80 dialectical illusion 2, 79, 84

Bacon, Francis 47, 49, 77 Barthes, Roland 87 being 6, 52, 52, 64, 83, 87; as being (qua being) 22, 73, 77, 79; and beings 50, 76, 80, 82; and desire 47; as Simple-One 82; transcendental 64; univocal 6, 24, 64; univocity of 24, 35, 64 being-itself 84 Bergson, Henri xiv, 41, 52 Berkeley, George 32, 41, 48, 50, 60 Bible 30, 36 Buddha 42 Buddhism 66 Camus, Albert 43, 68, 78 Cartesian doubt 46

109

110 INDEX

dialectics 50 Différance 19 Dionysian 37, 73 Dionysus 37 dogmatism 77 doubt ix, 45; Cartesian; see Cartesian doubt; hurt of 52; methodological 12, 41; ontological 49 dualism 49, 50, 71 duty 62, 78 empiricism 47, 71, 78; of subjectivity 48, 52, 71 Enlightenment 1 episteme 84 epistemology x, 76, 80; in Aquinas 18; Platonic 6; realist 50 Erasmus 32 erring 19, 57 ethic 62 existentialism 1, 19, 66, 70 faith xi-xii, 6, 27, 57, 62, 70, 73; knight of 38, 50, 67; leap of 8, 38; and make-believe 6, 9; and reason 1, 5, 10, 37, 55, 70; and understanding 11; and wonder 5 fallacy of misplaced concreteness 32, 85 Fenichel, Otto 57 Feuerbach, Ludwig x, 70 freedom viii, x, 2, 31, 63, 66, 75, 88, 92; from care 27; Christian 36; condemnation of 66, 70; and creativity 9; to err 32; as human condition 23, 40; immanent 24 free will 11, 15, 55, 61, 75, 91 Freud, Sigmund 57

frustration 55, 57 Ghent, Henry of 34 Gilson, Etienne 30 God xii, 6, 15, 29, 35, 50, 52, 56, 65, 73, 77, 78, 79; of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob 7, 24; as aporia 84; death of 69, 84; existence of, 11, 15, 18, 49, 55, 65; and free will, 11, 16; of Israel; knowledge of, 7, 8, 13, 15, 17, 20, 22, 24, 35; in and of language 87; and medieval theologians 6, 10, 35; mind of 14, 17; and nature 85; as Necessary Existent 22; as other 18; and Providence 15; subject of speculation 82; will of 15 good will 17 grammar 86, 88 gratification, instant 56 Hegel, Friedrich 2, 42, 50 hope 50, 63, 73 hubris 37 Hume, David 42, 50, 51, 57, 86 idealism xiv, 52, 58, 69, 74, 82 Idea; Platonic; see Platonic Idea idolatry 47, 77, 84 idols 47, 77 illumination ix, 14, 19, 24, 35, 64 illusion; dialectical 79, 84 imagination 9, 14, 15, 20, 33; transcendental 47, 48, 63 imitation 50; see also mimesis immanence 19 immediacy, presentational 85, 87

INDEX

immortality 27, 79, 81, 84 insight 17, 45, 47; and analogy 19; into insight, 46, 48 irony; Socratic; see Socratic irony Jesus Christ 50 Kant, Immanuel 42, 47, 50, 58, 66, 79, 89 Kierkegaard, Søren 37, 50, 57, 62, 69 knowledge ix, 6, 40, 48, 84; empirical 60; and imagination 15; immediate 40, 52; natural 6; negative 63, 66, 68; subjective 58; theoretical 85 Kristeva, Julia 2, 86 lack 16, 92, 94 La Fontaine, Jean de 37, 38 language ix, 25, 33, 86; genesis of 89; as gift 90; theological ix, xiv, 3, 38, 40, 43, 52, 55, 59, 75; theology of; see theology; theory of 88; verbal 25 “last man” 69 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 87 life vii, 10, 43, 49, 53, 60, 73, 75; generation of 79; rational 62; of true philosopher 78 Locke, John 44 logocentric 25, 27 Logos 6 logos 25 Lonergan, Bernard 46, 48 love 73, 80; of duty 63; of fate 75;

111

of wisdom 55, 63, 77 Luther, Martin x, 1, 32, 33 Marx, Werner 81, 83 materialism 2, 60 metaphysics x, xii, xiv, 1, 6, 85; condemnation of 30, 47, 49, 51, 55; dream of 52; end of 30; problem of 47; as response to real life 8 method x, 41, 47, 49, 51, 55; Cartesian 44; empirical 47; scientific 76 mimesis 83, 88 Mohammed, Prophet 22 narcissism 66 Necessary Existent 22, 66 neurosis 55, 57, 66, 88 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 67, 69, 70, 74, 89, 93 nihilism 61, 64, 70 nominalism 32, 64 Nous 30 Ockham 32 Oedipus 9, 37 onto-theology 32, 83 ontology 76, 80, 84 other 18, 32, 72, 79; in and of language 28, 32 Ousiology 81, 83 overcoming 68; of nature 9; of subjectivity 1 phantasm 19, 65; conversion to 19 “phantasm of the Same” 19 phenomenology 52 Plato 10, 60, 66, 76, 78, 80, 83, 89 Platonic Idea 82 Platonic Ideas 60 pleasure principle 57 Poe, Edgar Allen 39

112 INDEX

postmodernism 19 presentational immediacy; see immediacy, presentational Rahner, Karl 19 reason ix, 1, 33, 59, 76, 78; as the Devil’s whore 33; and faith; see faith; misuse of 44; practical 62 Reason, Age of 41 recollection 63, 81 Reformation 1 repetition 19, 81 representation xi, 2, 59, 60, 61, 66, 87; commodification of 88; conventional 86; no way out of 80, 86, 93 repression 55 revelation 19, 20, 22, 24, 65 rhetoric 87 romanticism 52 Sartre, Jean-Paul 6 Saussure, Ferdinand de 27 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 37, 50 Schopenhauer, Arthur 2, 59, 74 Scotus, Duns 6, 10, 24, 29, 32, 34, 38, 50, 64 signifier 86, 88 signs 86, 89 simulacra 19 sin x, 11, 15, 36 Sisyphus 78 skepticism 10, 34, 63, 69 Smith, Jonathan Z. 9 socialization 56; linguistic 86 Socrates xi, 78, 81 Socratic irony 78 solipsism 70 Sophocles 37, 38 soteriology 30 soul 8, 17, 20, 23; angel (celestial) 23; tripartite 63

speech 28, 30, 87; free 88 Spinoza, Baruch 50 spirit, absolute 42 subject 46, 52, 75; and analogy 18; empirical 48, 51; Kantian 2, 47, 58; in-process/on-trial 2, 88; /superject 2; in theory 18, 40, 52 sublimation 56, 66 suicide 43, 53, 56, 62, 70 Suspicion, Age of 19 symbol 88; non symbolic 84 symbolism 87 symbols 94 syzygy 23, 66 theology x, xii, 22, 28, 52, 65, 73, 80, 84, 85; as aporia 75, 83, 84; of language x, 1, 19, 28, 31, 66, 70, 90, 95; medieval 8, 19, 28, 31, 34; problem of 56, 70; secular 70 theoria 84 thing-for-us 58 thing-in-itself 58, 60, 64 Tillich, Paul 84 trace 31 tragedy 1, 37, 73 Truth 63, 83 truth xiv, 17, 19, 50, 62, 73, 89; clear and distinct 44; empirical 58, 82; existence of 55; universal 52 understanding; act of 46; faculty of 48, 52; and idolatry 77; transcendental process of 63; transcending 86

INDEX

Varron 88 Whitehead, Alfred North 2, 10, 32, 85 will 59, 75, 92; denial of, 62; free; see free will; good; see good will; objectification of 60, 62; objectivity of 63; to speak 1, 3, 30, 32, 66, 91; world as 60, 61, 69 willing will-less-ness 68 will-to-live 60, 63, 65, 66, 70, 94; denial of 2, 63, 65, 70, 74 will-to-power 74, 75 Word xii, 7, 25, 28, 33

113