Postmetaphysical Theology

As the myth and magic thread is getting unwieldy I decided to start a new but related thread. I will introduce it with an excerpt from Thomas Carlson taking about Jean-Luc Marion because Carlson considers this theology to be both postmetaphysical and as a return of sorts to the magico-mythical writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. He also makes the distinctions made in the previous thread, in that the sacred must use a different language, a different methodology than that of the logos. The logos can only give us the idol whereas the mythos gives us the icon.  

Disclaimer: I am not a Marionite but rather offer this as food for thought and discussion. 

From “Postmetaphysical Theology” (in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology edited by Kevin Vanhoozer, Cambridge UP, 2003): 

In his critique of metaphysics as “ontotheology,” Marion is indebted primarily to Martin Heidegger, and in an eventual critique of Heidegger himself, Marion will draw on…Emmanuel Livinas, but Marion’s core theological vision is shaped most decisively by the “divine-names” theology and “mystical” theology found in the last fifth- or early sixth-century writings of Dionysius the Areopagite (or the “Pseudo-Dionysius”). In the Dionysian appeal to an inconceivable and ineffable “Good beyond Being,” Marion locates an extra-metaphysical “god without Being.” The “without” in this theology…does not indicate that God is not or does not exist, but rather that any divine existence or nonexistence that human though might ever imagine falls infinitely short of the divine generosity that stands at the heart of revelation (58). 

Marion argues—against metaphysics—that the real obstacle within the human relation to God is not weakness of understanding but arrogance of will; we move toward God not in conceiving him more clearly but in loving him more fully—through the religious and liturgical life that metaphysical concepts do not suffice to sustain or even to provoke (61). 

The most important source of Marion’s theological understanding of language here is the divine-names…and mystical theology of Dionysius…. The move from a predictive to a hymnic form of language is a bottom…a move in the direction of prayer…that is, a form of language that surpasses the categorical and metaphysical alternative between affirmation and negation, a language that signals the “third way” of a “de-nomination” that, by naming and un-naming at once, points beyond both naming and un-naming….a third mode of theological language articulated through Dionysius’ use of “hyper” terms (hyperousious, hyperagathos, etc.)…. Beyond both every affirmation and every negation and hence neither darkness nor light, neither error nor truth, the Dionysian God would exceed the metaphysical choice between presence and absence and thereby disrupt any straightforward “metaphysics of presence” (67 - 8).

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Carlson continues:

The degree to which Marion succeeds in articulating a “postmetaphysical” or “extrametaphysical” philosophy depends directly on the degree to which the Dionysian model of language that he develops does actually yield such a theology of absence….the most notable challenge to Marion has been raised by Jacques Derrida.

Derrida’s central suspicion regarding the negative or “apophatic” language of Dionysian theology is that such language, through the use of the very “hyper” terms that Marion emphasizes, remains within the thought of Being or essence, for such language intends, precisely, to indicate truly, without idolatry, the manner is which God actually is—even if somehow beyond or above being as we might conceive it…. If Dionysian language can seem to yield a philosophy of absence, that absence is in fact a function of the superabundant presence of the God whose being exceeds that of all finite beings. Following the classic Neoplatonic distinction, Dionysian negation with regard to the divine is a negation not according to lack or absence, but according to an excess of presence. Negation aims to save God’s presence, not to deny it, or place it in undecidability…it gives up finite language about God only in order to save God’s infinite presence (69 – 70).

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Derrida's critique is how I was responding to the first quoted excerpt. Marion seems to avoid one aspect of metaphysics, i.e., a Cartesian dualism of opposites in language. But he does so by positing a direct apprehension of God through a methodology of praise and liturgy. This is similar, if not identical (homeomorphic equivalence?), to Gorampa's direct nondual realization (unitary fusion) beyond language. Both, however, are guilty of another aspect of the myth of the given, that of a supposed infinite that “exceeds that of all finite beings.”

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Compare this to how Merleau-Ponty used the term “hyper” in his hyper-dialectic and hyper-reflection. It is reminiscent of a previous discussion on the difference between formal and postformal dialectics. From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on him:  
 
For Merleau-Ponty then, lived experience may partake in contradiction on account of a residue of this difference between the act of speaking and what is spoken of, as well as a correlative divergence between a latent content and a manifest content. This divergence that he theorizes hints at a predicament that seems closely related to what Jacques Derrida has more recently insisted upon in his strategy of deconstruction, in that both philosophers point towards the inevitability of a philosophical expression containing contrary elements within it. While Derrida has also implicitly entertained the possibility that the law of non-contradiction might be false, in suggesting that their may instead be a law of impurity or “a principle of contamination”, it is important to ascertain that their are some surprising similarities between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida's descriptions of the necessarily double nature of a philosophy that can never recapture the pre-reflective faith, or coincide with itself in a moment of self-presence. 

Of course, unlike Derrida, Merleau-Ponty's critique of reflection, and his subsequent call for a hyper-reflection, quite obviously locates itself primarily in an analysis of the body where he discerns a necessary and constitutive divergence within the embodied situation. As we have seen, this ecart is variously described as the difference between the sentient and the sensible, the tangible and the touched, and for Merleau-Ponty, it also applies to several other divergences, including one between the perceptual faith and its articulation (VI 87). 

According to Merleau-Ponty, there is hence a fundamental divergence within the body, but just as this gap ensures the impossibility of any thorough and all-encompassing self-perception, it is also that which allows perception, and indeed subjectivity, to be possible at all. It is important to ascertain that if our embodied divergence inaugurates our capacity for perception (as well as language and reflection), this same divergence also ensures that there are certain limits upon this capacity. Just as we cannot reflexively attain to a self-identity with the hand that we are touching, for Merleau-Ponty the philosophy of reflection cannot entirely overcome similar divergences (VI 38).

In his critique of Hegel, Sartre and others, Merleau-Ponty insists that “reflection recuperates everything except itself as an effort of recuperation, it clarifies everything except its own role” (VI 33). There is a temporal divergence that precludes the attempted recovery of meaning via reflection from coinciding with that which it attempts to demarcate. The task of hyper-reflection then, is to ensure that reflection is always aware of its own finitude. It is hence somewhat removed from philosophical reflection itself, and resides in what several theorists have referred to as the non-space of philosophy. The proximity of such sentiments to Derrida has been widely recognized (and also occasionally contested), but what is irrefutable is that Merleau-Ponty is concerned with the tendency of the metaphysical tradition to exalt self-presence, as well as the rationalism that this usually entails. While traditional reflective thought is inevitable and indeed indispensable, the idea of philosophy being able to mirror or transcend nature is disparaged (VI 99). Philosophy and other reflective pursuits cannot recuperate the pre-reflective faith or rediscover some pure immediacy (VI 35, 99). 

“What we propose here, and oppose to the search for the essence, is not the return to the immediate, the coincidence, the effective fusion with the existent, the search for an original integrity, for a secret lost and to be rediscovered, which would nullify our questions and even reprehend language. If coincidence is lost, this is no accident; if Being is hidden, this is itself a characteristic of Being and no disclosure will make us comprehend it” (VI 121-2). 

Of course, this is a rather negative characterization of what hyper-reflection involves, and it is worth digressing to consider more precisely what it is that Merleau-Ponty wants his philosophy to achieve. According to him: 

“What we call hyper-dialectic is a thought that, on the contrary, is capable of reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity. The bad dialectic is that which thinks it recomposes being by a thetic thought, by an assemblage of statements, by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; the good dialectic is that which is conscious of the fact that every thesis is an idealization, that Being is not made up of idealizations or of things said… but of bound wholes where signification never is except in tendency” (VI 94). 

While this passage reaffirms the enduring role of ambiguity in his philosophy, Merleau-Ponty's hyper-dialectic is also described as acknowledging that not only is every thesis an idealisation, but that Being cannot be ascertained through such idealisations. He also goes on to suggest that such a dialectical thought:

“Abounds in the sensible world, but on condition that the sensible world has been divested of all that the ontologies have added to it. One of the tasks of the dialectic, as a situational thought, a thought in contact with being, is to shake off the false evidences, to denounce the significations cut off from the experience of being, emptied - and to criticize itself in the measure that it itself becomes one of them” (VI 92). 

Merleau-Ponty's hyper-dialectic is envisaged as being a situational thought that must criticize all thinking that ignores the conditional nature of idealizations, and it must also maintain a vigilance to ensure that it does not itself become one of them. This is why Merleau-Ponty describes his project as propounding an 'indirect' ontology, rather than a direct ontology (VI 179). Undoubtedly these themes are deserving of more prolonged attention, but there seems to be a significant and underestimated connection between what Merleau-Ponty's hyper-reflection seeks to achieve, and what Derrida's deconstructive methodology has more recently attempted.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Much like the two truths debate between Gorampa and Tsongkhapa, we see a similar trend in Marion/Dionysius v Derrida/Merleau-Ponty.* Like G Marion sees language itself as the problem, along with conceptualiazation, and to get past their duality one must fuse with an ultimate “beyond” understanding. However, like T D&M see concept-language-reflection as being of the same kind as bodily perception, all the way up and down, and this “split” of presence/absence is there from the beginning. With that as a starting point even so-called base, animal, “direct” perception is not “pure immedicay” but partakes of the ambiguous uncertainlty that grounds us in the conditional. In other words, emptiness is empty and dependently arisen, like everything else.

* Now there's tag-team wrestling match I'd like to see.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

Good. Now we're down to brass tacks. My take on Ken, when he says that “Nagarjuna has the last word on ontology,” is that he is basically invoking a “mystical” interpretation of the Madhyamika ala something like recent attempts to reconstitute the mystical theology of the Areopagite and juxtipose it with “deconstruction,” or “postmodernism,” or whatever. This begs the question, though, of whether that is the only interpretation of Nagarjuna that is possible. David Loy has written a paper in which he juxtiposes Madhyamika and deconstruction: “The Cloture of Deconstruction.” There is also a volume edited by Harold Coward on Derrida and negative theology. In any case, some sort of showdown between Derrida (or Derrida and Merleau Ponty) and some sort of interpretation of mystical theology appears to be have been inevitable, Caputo notwithstanding.