Temporality and Trinity

Peter Manchester

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780823265718
• eBook ISBN: 9780823265725
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Temporality and Trinity argues that there is deep homology between the roles of temporal problematic in Augustine's On Trinity and Heidegger's Being and Time.Although Heidegger was aware of On Trinity, the claim is not that he writes under its influence. Rather, Manchester moves from the temporal problematic of Being and Time to the psychological explication of the human image of God in On Trinity, schematized as memory, understanding, and will. Formal and phenomenological parallels allow interpretation of that psychological triad as a temporal problematic in the manner of Being and Time. In a sense, this is to read Augustine as influenced by Heidegger.But the aim is more constructive than that. Establishing a link between trinitarian theology and Being and Time opens a more direct way of benefiting from it in theology than Heidegger's own assumptions. It puts philosophy in a position to confront New Testament theology directly, in its own historicality, without digression into anything like philosophy of religion.

1. The Temporal Problematic of Being and Time

THERE IS PARALYZING CONFUSION about what the temporal problematic of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time actually is. “Ecstatic-horizonal temporality” is of fundamental importance for the treatise. About that there is no uncertainty at all. But there is no wide agreement as to how that importance is to be identified. How temporality, the theme of Division Two of the published work, coheres with the phenomenology of being-in-the-world in Division One, remains an open question.

I will address features of the published work itself that contribute to this confusion shortly. But I must first confront the question why, given that we are engaging a treatise entitled “Being and Time,” we are talking about temporality instead. Since completing my 1972 dissertation, The Doctrine of the Trinity in Temporal Interpretation,¹ it has been a fundamental conviction of mine that temporality and time must be strongly differentiated, not just terminologically but as phenomenal domains. “Temporality” refers to future, past, and present, “time,” to a concomitant of sensible motion most familiarly addressed as succession. Future, past, and present are in no way timelike. In no way do they succeed each other, or come into any order. They are not parts of time, not directions along a time-line, and their unity is not based on time.

Until very recently, I assumed that Heidegger distinguishes the two phenomenal domains in a similar way. He does not. He means by “temporality” just what I do. But I have come to judge that he is fundamentally confused about physical time, as comes out in his reading of Aristotle’s treatise on time (Physics IV, 10–14). Such a charge plainly calls for exposition and defense, which it will receive below. But here at the start, it helps me explain how the “time” of Heidegger’s title has become so beset by terminological noise that it is he himself, and not just faulty readings of his argument, that is the chief source of the confusions I hope to clear away in this chapter.

Basically, in Being and Time Heidegger no longer means anything in particular by the word “time,” but rather defines it differently in the two main contexts in which he uses it. As the theme announced by his title, he stipulates that he means primordial time (ursprüngliche Zeit). When he otherwise refers to “time,” he qualifies it “as commonly understood” (vulgäre Zeitbegriff). He does not approach this latter “time” in relation to motion, but offers a construct of his own he calls “now-time” (JetztZeit). From my point of view, therefore, he does not have a position on physical time at all.

In place of the ungainly “primordial time,” Heidegger mostly just speaks of temporality (die Zeitlichkeit). In his writing, the term stands on its own as a noun. It is not the temporality of anything. In particular, it is not the temporality of Dasein.² It cannot even be said to “be”; instead it “brings itself about” (sich zeitigt).³ It brings about that for any entity, the meaning of its being must be projected in the horizons of futurity, having-been, and present, in the pattern of their unity.

I have long been comfortable with thinking that temporality is like this, because four years before I first read Being and Time in a graduate seminar, I spent an undergraduate semester on Søren Kierkegaard’s Begrebet Angest (The Concept of Anxiety). To open this chapter, I will summarize Kierkegaard’s way of distinguishing temporality from time in that work, and place it in the context of his larger argument. Three separate footnotes in Being and Time praising specifically that work amply justify privileging it as a doorway into temporal problematic.

TEMPORALITY, ANXIETY, AND GUILT IN KIERKEGAARD

In most writers, it is unnecessary to decide whether the words “temporal” (zeitlich) and “time” (Zeit) differ in denotation more significantly than as an adjective trivially derived from a noun. But in Being and Time, there is a profound difference between temporality and time. Kierkegaard seems to have been the first to hint at such a specialization of the word “temporality,” for reasons worth exploring in some detail.

Kierkegaard calls Anxiety “a simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin.”⁴ The accomplishment on which I shall focus amounts to a transcendent-temporal interpretation of the soul’s relation to the divine eternity: that is, a metaphysical theory or doctrine of the soul. Yet it is also a recognizable precursor to empirical psychology, the empirical and metaphysical aspects coming together in the concept of “inwardness.” The temporal character of this psychology arises from its phenomenological focus on what Kierkegaard calls the “moment” (Øjeblikket, like German Augenblick, the “twinkling of an eye”).

The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each another. With this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time, and, as a result, the above-mentioned division acquires its significance: the present time, the past time, the future time.⁵

This psychology is oriented to the theological problem of hereditary sin. Here the metaphysical scope of the discussion allows Kierkegaard to formulate a position on a problem that had not been treated explicitly in psychology since the great cosmological psychologies of late antiquity: namely, the unity of the life of the individual with the life of the race. Meditating on the Genesis account of the Adam’s sin, he confronts us not four pages into his treatise with the perfectly serious affirmation that the individual is the race, and the race also the individual.⁶ Walter Lowrie, in his translator’s introduction to the older translation, The Concept of Dread, writes with some understatement:

It is very interesting that S. K. is the only modern man who has so profound a sense of the solidarity of the race that original sin makes any sense to him.⁷

The actual thesis posits more than solidarity, of course, and in order to make it intelligible, Kierkegaard considers how to think about history “psychologically.”

The psychological question about Adam in his judgment is not “What was he thinking when he sinned?” but “When is it that Adam sins?” This interpretation of history, which puts Adam first in such a way that his becomes chronologically the “first sin,” subordinates the freedom of individual members of the race to the single action of an individual, whose freedom before God thus so far outstrips that of subsequent individuals that he is in effect placed “outside the race.” Such an interpretation of history has no room for Adam.

Kierkegaard maintains that Adam commits sin at the same time, that is to say in the same historical “when,” as any individual. Adam does what “the man” does, in a history that each of us embodies in our own biography. The question “When does Adam sin?” becomes for him not a matter of chronology or the assignment of dates, nor in fact a matter of any phenomena displayed along linear time. It is rather a matter of “What makes up a ‘when’?” What sorts of “whens” are there in a life?

As soon as he has the question in this form, he can give the answer that provokes his philosophical psychology. He formulates: “Hereditary sin enters in an moment of anxiety (Angst).”⁸ Any philosophical interpretation of a Christian consciousness of sin (and therefore of freedom) must understand how to generate the psychological concept of the moment and why to restrict the illustration of this concept to the mood of anxiety. Both demands call for an appropriate understanding of temporality. Let me begin with the concept of the moment.

In preparation for the explicitly temporal form of his problematic, Kierkegaard first describes the moment of sin, the transition from innocence to guilt, as a “qualitative leap.” This elegant but formalistic phrase indicates an alternative, under the category of “transition,” to the ordinary idea of “succession in time.”

The transition from innocence to guilt cannot be studied in a conscience that is innocent. If we determine to treat this transition in terms of before and after, we stand in need of a knowledge of innocence that is like our knowledge of guilt, and we fall into a new sin. The act of imagination that would think the qualitative leap from the side of innocence must therefore regulate itself by an absolutely unique dialectic. It must know about what it does not know.

Kierkegaard interprets this dialectic as the “dialectic of spirit,” of soul and body brought together in expression of a life that transcends them. The uniqueness of the moment in which psychosomatic life attains the qualitative leap into freedom is to be explored by psychological meditation on the meaning of spirit.

The dialectical structure of Kierkegaard’s interpretation of spirit is less Hegelian than first appears, with all the talk of “syntheses” and “positings.” In essence, he is both recovering, and attempting a constructive reinterpretation of, the tripartite anthropology of antiquity that distinguished body from soul and both from mind or spirit. On the basis of modern dualistic mind-body anthropology, there is a strong tendency to think of the ancient anthropology as a “three-story” theory of man, but Kierkegaard renovates the schema in a most suggestive way. His basic dialectical premise is that “man is a synthesis of psyche and body that is constituted and sustained by spirit.”⁹ “Spirit” thus names a possible state of the body-soul unity. It is to be distinguished from another state of the unity, the state he calls the “sensuous.” The problem of synthesizing body and soul does not here amount to the metaphysical problem of combining the “two substances” of the Cartesian position, as though either could be discovered by itself. Instead, there are two different syntheses or lives in which psychosomatic existence can be sustained. The first, in which Kierkegaard says “the spirit is dreaming,” is the sensuous immediacy of the life of nature. The second, in which the spirit is awake and self-possessed, is freedom, the life for which sin, guilt, repentance, and salvation have significance.

The dialectic of spirit must be developed in such a way that the antecedent guilt of we who formulate the problem is given its due. None of us illustrate the sensuous immediacy in the condition of innocence that scripture attributes to Adam in the garden. Yet it is precisely in the transition from innocence to guilt that we must portray the essence of freedom. We must somehow contrive to interpret innocence without making the aesthetic and finally moral mistake of trying to think our way into it.

The solution for Kierkegaard is the psychological category of anxiety.

In innocence man is not qualified as spirit but is psychically qualified in immediate unity with his natural condition. The spirit in man is dreaming. . . . In this state there is peace and repose; but there is simultaneously something else that is not contention and strife, for there is indeed nothing against which to strive. What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety.¹⁰

Anxiety is the “nothing” of spirit. It is a psychological state and can therefore be observed in psychosomatic life by reflective thought. It is accessible to “descriptive psychology” conceived as a science. Yet as the shadow of spirit, a symptom that exposes psychosomatic life as “dreaming spirit,” anxiety illustrates and guards by its profound ambiguity the conscientious reticence in which Christian consciousness reflects on freedom. Anxiety is “a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.”¹¹ Most of the argument in the first two chapters of Anxiety elaborates, through a kind of representative biography of the soul, the experience of being in anxiety as one approaches the moment of the qualitative leap. Kierkegaard’s brilliance lies in demonstrating how heresies in the hermeneutic of the scriptural narrative about Adam correlate point for point with psychological oversimplification of the absolute ambiguity of anxiety.

Our concern with the dialectic of spirit has less to do with Kierkegaard’s concrete elaboration of anxiety than with his ontology of the transcendence of spirit, which his psychology and the concept are meant to protect. Anxiety is alleged to be a psychological category that thought can follow up to the very instant where sin breaks out, where spiritual freedom is posited for man as actual. This is called “the moment.” In order to interpret spirit’s transcendence of the life of soul, Kierkegaard must show how the category of the moment transcends the sequence of moments of experience in which psychic life appears for scientific observation. Since this sequence is time, while the life of spirit is eternal, he is brought to a discussion of time and eternity.¹²

The “leap” from nothing to freedom is like no “transition” or becoming in time, since time is kept out of the dialectic between nothing and freedom. If by “history” we mean the sequence of events in which becoming-in-time takes on quasi-spatial “location” (for which Kierkegaard reserves the pejorative term “world-history”), then the moment is not in history, but history in the moment.

What Kierkegaard thinks of as transition or leap is related to what Heidegger calls an ekstasis. Freedom ex-histêsi (stands out from) nothing. An ecstasis is more like a situation than an event—in this case the situation of a very special kind of transcending. If it were necessary t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Temporal Problematic of Being and Time
• 2. The Temporality of Trinity in Augustine
• 3. Trinity in the New Testament
• Bibliography