Phenomenology and Eschatology

Not Yet in the Now

John Panteleimon Manoussakis, Neal DeRoo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317081302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book brings together a world-renowned collection of philosophers and theologians to explore the ways in which the resurgence of eschatological thought in contemporary theology and the continued relevance of phenomenology in philosophy can illuminate each other. Through a series of phenomenological analyses of key eschatological concepts and detailed readings in some of the key figures of both disciplines, this text reveals that phenomenology and eschatology cannot be fully understood without each other: without eschatology, phenomenology would not have developed the ethical and futural aspects that characterize it today; without phenomenology, eschatology would remain relegated to the sidelines of serious theological discourse. Along the way, such diverse themes as time, death, parousia, and the call are re-examined and redefined. Containing new contributions from Jean-Yves Lacoste, Claude Romano, Richard Kearney, Kevin Hart and others, this book is necessary reading for anyone interested in the intersection of contemporary philosophy and theology.

PART I Phenomenology of Eschatology

DOI: 10.4324/9781315600345-2

1 The Phenomenality of Anticipation

Jean-Yves Lacoste

DOI: 10.4324/9781315600345-2

To ensure the accuracy of our investigation into anticipation, let us specify at the outset that we are dealing with a double phenomenon. On the one hand, anticipation is the gesture of a consciousness that ensures the coherence and sense of its present experience by relating this experience to a pre-experience of what is not yet here but will, in time, realize what is already here. Just as the pre-perception by which the already played notes permit us to foresee the notes that will be played, so it is too with those who know what they wait for and “rehearse,” by anticipation, what will (certainly, maybe, etc.) come. On the other hand, all that is given to us inchoately, in the mode of a hint or promise, makes use of anticipation, for example the short visit that anticipates the long day that I will spend with a friend the next month. The two aspects of the double phenomenon are evidently related in that they reveal to us that the only present is a living present, because it shelters a quasi-experience of the future, because its signification is suspended to a future that is pre-given in the here and now. For our investigation into anticipation to be as clear and accurate as possible, then, pre-experience and pre-givenness must be the phenomena first named.

How does the act of anticipation manifest itself to itself as such? How does pre-givenness distinguish itself from a givenness that is not part of any promise, but rather is its own beginning and its own end? We propose some answers.

Anticipation and Repetition

To put it plainly: each mode of being has its own mode of appearing. Number is not given to intuition in the same way as the book lying on the table or the work of art are given to the intuition, and number does not appear in the same way to the one who uses it in a simple and utilitarian calculus (counting apples, to use Wittgenstein’s example) as it appears to a mathematician who demonstrates the cardinality of the continuum. The book does not appear to its reader as it appears to the one who sees just a book among many, and, a fortiori, to the one who sees a mere object on the table. The work of art does not appear in the same way to the one who rejoices in its presence as it appears to the technician who restores it. There is a good reason for this: rare are the beings that possess only one mode of being, and still rarer are the consciousnesses that, vis-à-vis some particular being, possess only one possible mode of intentionality. There are multiple modes of being, then, and therefore multiple modes of appearing, and multiple receptions in consciousness.

The work of art, for example, is also an object, like any other thing that can be taken in hand, reducible to its representability. The text presents itself to be read but also to be seen: there would not be a text if there were not a book, paper, ink, and binding (or computer screen). And because the work of art possesses a physical reality (sonorous material, cloth, paint, etc.), this material may be perceived in an autonomous way: for example, when we are interested in quality typography or in the sound of the piano.

Interested in the modes of being and of appearing, we are thus led straightaway to recognize an irreducible plurality. The way in which the ego appears to itself, for example in the phenomenon of awakening, has nothing in common with the way in which a number falls under intuition — except that in both cases a mode of consciousness is in play, and that there is no consciousness, at least no awakened consciousness, to which anything would appear that would not do so in an act of intuition, that is, that would be consciousness without being conscious of what it is. And between the way in which I perceive a book as a book and the way in which I perceive it as an object, the same irreducibility exists: the book is both, yet I cannot interest myself in one without disinteresting myself in the other; the two modalities of intuition are both valid, but are mutually exclusive.

The discussion so far, however, suffers from a lacuna: for it has not taken into account the temporal character of all appearances. “To appear” in effect must be understood as an event. Somebody that I did not see a few seconds ago now crosses the street. Something comes back to memory, and that it comes back means that it was absent from my field of consciousness before its return. And if one can legitimately say that there are phenomena that are perpetually given — if one can say that the phenomenon of the world co-appears with every appearance, that the ego co-appears to itself with every appearance — it must be the case, then, that we always deal, in the first place, with something that appears to us now, whose appearance lasts more or less time, and completes itself in a disappearance. So conceived, the event entails that being is given to us.

That which is given to us can be available to us, as the book lying on the table, or not available to us, as the passer-by who crossed the street and who I will not see again. The event, therefore, can possess the character of repeatability (I could always re-open the book to the same page, grab it in the same way, etc.) as well as that of unrepeatability. But there is much yet to be said about repetition. Opening the book to this page right now, and re-opening it tomorrow to the same page, are not identical experiences. I shall not be the same tomorrow, and therefore I will open the book again — precisely again, already knowing what it says, and reading the page with the power of anticipating what the next page will say. I will open it again, on the other hand, because tomorrow I shall not be identical to what I am today: my humor, or my attention, or the purpose of my gesture (to re-read the book, or to try to prove that an event can be repeated) might not be the same.

Thus, the opposition of the available and the unavailable, and that of the object and the event, do not hold, and ought to be measured against the immutable temporal structures implied in all perception. It is in the grasping of a spatial or temporal object that retention and protention are always at work. On the other hand, we can always remember the book as well as the sound, the state of the thing as well as the event, and this remembering itself has the quality of the event. Furthermore, we can confer a quasi-presence on what has not yet been presented to us by the senses, as when protention permits us a pre-experience of the notes that have not yet been played, but of which our memory or our musical culture permit us to know, and to foresee, that they will be played in a future instant. This does not entail that all appearance necessarily has a future and appears with a right to own it, and therefore, that no event is ever really closed. What appears might re-appear thanks to memory — but what we remember has its own proper phenomenality, and therefore re-appears to us as past, and thus as already realized. That which is past, insofar as it is passed, has said its final word, has already been realized.

We don’t need to be taught that an event can belong simultaneously to our past and, by its Wirkungsgeschichte (history of reception), to our present. Whether represented in memory or present through the causality that it still exercises, the past defines itself as that which has disappeared but has left traces. There are multiple traces, in consciousness or outside of it: I remember a final visit to a now-deceased friend, and an object lying above a pedestal table is the trace of a gift that was given to me. What disappears is not absorbed into some nothingness. However, there remain phenomena that are antithetical to those of the trace or of the Wirkungsgeschichte: first, the phenomena of forgetting (Nietzsche was the first to recognize its positive meaning — a consciousness incapable of forgetting would be a monstrous consciousness), the phenomenon of the erased traces, of a past that has become useless, without effect, wirkungslos, and that only a genealogical analysis would allow to re-appear. What has appeared or arrived, and what appears or arrives now, can do so only in passing (and primarily, for us, by passing in consciousness), and therefore holds no future for us. In examining disappearance, then, we see that what has disappeared may have disappeared entirely. The play of appearance and disappearance, in all its modes, is a game with which we are familiar from time immemorial. The play of re-appearance, in both memory and imagination, is a game in which we (almost) always already have taken part.

This seems to pose a question. Every appearing is an event; hearing a car pass under my window is a micro-event. Every appearing, on the other hand, is tied to a disappearing: either because my work absorbs me enough that I cease to perceive the noise, or because the noise ends. One can say, then, with all the “appearances” of philosophical good sense, that the present event will (immediately, tomorrow, etc.) be a past event and perhaps even a forgotten event. Given all this, of which event can we say that we have witnessed it fully, in such a way that something appeared, as if out of nowhere, and then disappeared into nothingness?

The frontiers of an event are difficult to trace. When does an encounter begin and end? When does a concert begin and end? In this case, it is easy to distinguish. It is primarily with these types of events, those with clear contours, that our consciousness can anticipate what will come, experience what comes, and keep the memory of what came and be influenced by it. For example, a ritual (whether religious or not) is achieved by the scrupulous respect paid to the gestures and to the speech acts that constitute that ritual, and necessarily includes its first and last word or gesture. (Besides, one hesitates to speak of an event à propos of that which thereby possesses the quality of previsibility and repeatability: a process is not an event.) There is nothing vague about hearing a musical piece (which is different from going to a concert): there is a first and a last chord. Here, we are still in the domain of the repeatable and, even if we do not know the piece that well, in the domain of the expectable (prévisible). When the priest sings the dismissal, when the last chord is played, or when the neurotic has made all the ritualistic gestures that precede his going to bed, an event has taken place and a totality has appeared and been constituted. We can certainly keep this event in memory and allow what has disappeared to re-appear a little. Tomorrow, we can meticulously repeat the gestures done today. But, and this is a major point, what has taken place, has taken place in its entirety. A ritual, a text, a musical piece, a painting, etc., in the event where they appear to us, manifest all that can be manifested. Certainly, we may listen distractedly, not be as engaged as we ought to be, or enact the gestures of the ritual absent-mindedly, but this matters little: the event will not thereby possess less clear and distinct limits. Repetition, or rather quasi-repetition (to re-read, to participate in the ritual again) is always possible.

In the case of neurotic rituals, the neurotic person will attain a pathological perfection: exactly the same gestures, at exactly the same moment, in exactly the same order, etc. However, repetition is nothing more than repetition. It is repetition only in so far as it comes “again” and counts as an additional event, and yet we desire repetition in order to achieve the same pleasure, to better perceive what we have already perceived, or to obey the rules of behavior that we have given to ourselves. In any case, an axiom should govern the intelligence of repetition: the same might be given to us, but we will not be the same. The same score will be played, but the attention that we pay to it today will not be the same as that which we paid to it the first time — the first notes played, today, permit a pre-experience of what will be played, an anticipation that was not in our power the first time that we heard the score. The same gestures will be posed, but today we will be affected by the memory of the previous day, while yesterday we were forced to wait unknowingly for what was to come. In talking of the event, we are speaking first of appearance (and the reception that we reserve today for what appears to us is only vaguely reiterable tomorrow), and secondly, of the object as given to us. It has disappeared from the field of sensory perception or the fields of memory or imagination (for there are also events in memory and in imagination). The event of appearing is closed, as when I leave a museum room and lose interest in one work and become interested in another, with the evident reservation that the contemplation of the first painting will probably accompany the contemplation of the second and will pre-determine it in some way.

Nevertheless, talking in terms of events, we must guard against believing that the life of consciousness is a sequence of discreet acts. On the contrary, one thing is certain: all the micro or meso-events that we have mentioned are taken, in so far as they befall us, that is, in so far as they are objects of experience, and of our experience, as part of a larger event, namely the event of our presence in the word between birth and death. The concert, the visit that I receive, the regret that I feel when the visitor leaves me, etc. — none of this is dissociable from this larger event, as if we started to exist whenever a new episode begins. An event, in any way in which I am implicated in it, whether as a spectator or an actor, is always individualized: I am not present in the same way when I am an actor as I am when I am a spectator, when I perceive as when I wait and imagine.

Two points remain true, in any case, for all experience: if the event is thought from the life of consciousness, and if consciousness is that of an existant, of a Dasein, nothing happens without the dimension of the future being perpetually open; on the other hand, this opening forces one to concede a certain primacy to non-experience. If we must use experimentation to generate the example of what is to come, this surely shows a poor relation to the future. We can project, master, etc., the behavior of certain objects in certain circumstances (equally, we can project and master the behavior of the human being in certain conditions), but if we think existence as the deployment of a unique event in which the existant, the existing being, comes to itself within the event of its birth and death, then these relations of projection and mastery erase themselves before a definitive overhanging of the past and the present by the future. We can attempt to exist from an absolute future — Heidegger’s anticipatory resoluteness is the model of such an attempt. However, the attempt is bound to fail for the following reason, which is itself Heideggerian: the possible — and thus the future — is taken as higher than the real (speaking here of a present or a past real that has not fallen into oblivion). Between the present of the decision and the realization of our highest possibility, what is not yet does not cease to prove the excess of experience in relation to non-experience.

The link between experience and non-experience, between what happened, the happening, and the non-happening, is the point of departure of any investigation into anticipation. Only absolute knowledge, if its concept resisted reality, would be an experience that could not be suspected of containing any non-experience. Now, one of the essential traits of consciousness is what Husserl named its narrowness, which we here take the liberty of understanding in the broadest way possible. To narrow consciousness only a region of being appears, primarily because it has an intuition of something. Consciousness is narrow, also, because it can perceive, remember, or imagine, but it cannot perceive, remember, and imagine simultaneously. Whoever talks of the “experience of consciousness” and refuses to give to these words the sense that Hegel gives them, must therefore say that all experience, the most rudimentary and the most rich, is intrinsically limited, and that human experience is in fact impossible unless it possesses limits and obeys them (any other type of consciousness would certainly be an angelic consciousness). Further, the concept of an experience that is only experience, not bordered by any non-experience, cannot, a prima vista, be rationally formed.

All experience is therefore obviously partial. We see the façade of the house, and symbolic perception allows us to say that we see a house, but we do not perceive it adequately as a totality. The following example will illustrate our point even better. We hear The Art of the Fugue under the direction of Scherchen, and the piece appears in this one particular way through the mediation of a very particular musical and orchestral aesthetic, very different from, for example, the later interpretation of the Juilliard quartet. Each interpretation makes the same piece appear, but according to distinctly different perspectives. Scherchen’s interpretation, when it appears to us as a source of joy, surely offers us a full experience from which nothing is missing, and to which we already ascribe the word enjoyment (jouissance).¹ However curiosity, which is never too far away, tempts us to listen to other interpretations. And if we give in to this temptation, we easily discover that every interpretation is partial, that every experience that we have suffers from a deficit: we cannot simultaneously understand all existing interpretations and, even less, all possible interpretations; there is, then, no experience that is not related, in every occasion, to non-experience.

¹ TN: Enjoyment (jouissance) has a particular philosophical meaning here: the experience of one totally absorbed in his pleasure. Leaving jouissance untranslated would arouse too many psychoanalytic overtones that are not present in the French. Hence, we will translate it throughout as “enjoyment,” though the reader must be sure to keep in mind the philosophical sense of this term, alongside its standard meaning.

Certainly, there are phenomena that give themselves completely once and for all and also repeat themselves identically: strict repetition is possible in a domain that we have already evoked, namely the domain of experimentation (with the condition that we bracket the moods of the experimenter). But what is given, and the reception that we reserve for it, are different, regardless of the name we give to this reception, be it perception, intelligence, or interpretation. And if we can be completely finished with something (and be capable of forgetting it — remembrance does not guarantee repetition, on the contrary), the richest experiences are probably those unachieved, and perhaps unachievable, those where the thing is always given to us in the mode of renewal or in the mode of a putting-into-perspective, where no perspective can fully satisfy us because we know that there are other perspectives. Here, the musical example remains good, and permits us to go farther. On the one hand, the plurality of interpretations is normally valid: the most scrupulous philological fidelity cannot teach us how to play The Art of the Fugue infallibly. On the other hand, this plurality is unmistakably given to consciousness. Whoever knows only Scherchen’s interpretation, or only the Juilliard interpretation, does not know the piece as well as somebody familiar with both ways of playing Bach’s score, which are as different from each other as possible. And, in the end, we know that the final interpretation will never be g...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Phenomenology of Eschatology
• Part II Phenomenological Eschatology
• Part III Eschatological Phenomenology
• Part IV Phenomenology and Eschatology: Historical Confluences
• Index