The Self-Emptying Subject

Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern

Alex Dubilet

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823279487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Against the two dominant ethical paradigms of continental philosophy–Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of the Other and Michel Foucault's ethics of self-cultivation— The Self-Emptying Subject theorizes an ethics of self-emptying, or kenosis, that reveals the immanence of an impersonal and dispossessed life "without a why." Rather than aligning immanence with the enclosures of the subject, The Self-Emptying Subject engages the history of Christian mystical theology, modern philosophy, and contemporary theories of the subject to rethink immanence as what precedes and exceeds the very difference between the (human) self and the (divine) other, between the subject and transcendence. By arguing that transcendence operates and subjects life in secular no less than in religious domains, this book challenges the dominant distribution of concepts in contemporary theoretical discourse, which insists on associating transcendence exclusively with religion and theology and immanence exclusively with modern secularity and philosophy. The Self-Emptying Subject argues that it is important to resist framing the relationship between medieval theology and modern philosophy as a transition from the affirmation of divine transcendence to the establishment of autonomous subjects. Through an engagement with Meister Eckhart, G.W.F. Hegel, and Georges Bataille, it uncovers a medieval theological discourse that rejects the primacy of pious subjects and the transcendence of God (Eckhart); retrieves a modern philosophical discourse that critiques the creation of self-standing subjects through a speculative re-writing of the concepts of Christian theology (Hegel); and explores a discursive site that demonstrates the subjecting effects of transcendence across theological and philosophical operations and archives (Bataille). Taken together, these interpretations suggest that if we suspend the antagonistic relationship between theological and philosophical discourses, and decenter our periodizing assumptions and practices, we might encounter a yet unmapped theoretical fecundity of self-emptying that frees life from transcendent powers that incessantly subject it for their own ends.

CHAPTER 1

Meister Eckhart’s Kenotic Lexicon and the Critique of Finitude

Since the publication of the first modern edition of his work in the nineteenth century, many different portraits have been offered of Meister Eckhart. In that century, to some, he was the paragon of speculative medieval mysticism and thus the origin of German speculation; to others, he was a bad scholastic theologian and a deviant Thomist.1 Subsequently, he became a powerful representative of apophatic theology, an inheritor of the sayings and unsayings of the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus and of Neoplatonic categories more generally.2 More recently, he has emerged as an innovative interpreter of Aristotelian psychology and an inheritor of the German Dominican tradition that began with Albert the Great.3 These interpretations have been complemented and rivaled by scholarship that emphasizes Eckhart’s relation to the vernacular theology of the Beguines—Marguerite Porete, Hadewijch of Brabant, and Mechthild of Magdeburg.4

Each of these interpretations situates Eckhart’s thought within a specific genealogy by establishing a textual reception, showing the borrowing of theoretical vocabulary, and arguing for specific conceptual inheritances. It is beyond doubt that Eckhart does indeed participate in all of these theoretical currents and deploys a diverse array of textual sources in constructing his thought. That he takes up the functioning of the intellect from Aristotle’s De Anima and the tradition of its commentators, or the notions of annihilation and love without a why from the Beguines is undeniable. What cannot easily be asserted, however, is that he is an inheritor of any one of these traditions at the expense of the others. Eckhart’s flexible adaption of preexisting theoretical vocabularies undermines all efforts of situating his thought in any one particular genealogy. His works offer the reader a complex theoretical edifice, which uses conceptual tools and figurative locutions from a variety of sources without being identifiable with or reducible to any single tradition. The way this multiplicity of vocabularies—Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, Monastic, Beguine—appears in Eckhart’s works attests not to a simple belonging, but to a strategic deployment of those traditions, an experimental relation with their concepts, turns of phrase, and metaphysical and theological articulations.

Eckhart reactivates, I suggest, this variety of preexistent conceptual vocabularies to articulate an original logic of self-emptying: Not only does self-emptying constitute the central core of Eckhart’s sermons, but also its theoretical function and role—its conceptual raison d’être—are distinctly new when compared to the dominant schemas operating in the Christian mystical traditions. I begin by showing the multiplicity of forms that self-emptying takes within Eckhart’s sermons, before moving on to argue that the singularity of Eckhart’s conception of self-emptying lies in the way it functions as a way of challenging and ultimately subverting the entire conceptual framework of exteriority that binds the creature and the creator in a hierarchical and asymmetrical relationship. Eckhart’s kenosis reveals an absolute oneness of God and the soul, which is instantiated most clearly in his concepts of the “ground” and “the innermost.” I go on to argue that Eckhart’s theory of ground subverts the primacy of creaturely finitude on which the conceptual matrix of negative theology, as classically articulated in the texts of Pseudo-Dionysius, relies. I further clarify this point by situating Eckhart’s critique of the correlation between (human) finitude and (divine) transcendence in opposition to the more orthodox spirituality of Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux. I argue that Eckhart’s kenosis marks not the temporary ekstasis of the self toward transcendence, but the subversion of the primacy ascribed to the perspective of finitude and its correlation—epistemological, conceptual, and existential—with transcendence. It does so because it marks the emptying out of the soul not only of its desires and will but also of its delimitation as a self-possessed entity. Finally, I argue that Eckhart’s assertion of the absolute oneness of God and the soul is not just a speculative proposition, but discloses an immanent life without a why, one that is no longer attributable to a self nor differentiable from an other. In other words, Eckhart’s self-emptying proposes a desubjectivation that does not simply yield a transitory experience of transcendence, but reveals a dispossessed life, one that is neither ascribable to a given subject nor tethered to a transcendence. In sum, the line of interpretation offered here argues that Eckhart formulates, within a medieval theological context, the problematic of desubjectivation and immanence that will be subsequently interrogated in the theoretical production of figures such as Hegel, Nietzsche, Bataille, and Deleuze.

ON ECKHART’S KENOSIS

Throughout his vernacular sermons, Meister Eckhart repeatedly enjoins his listeners to empty themselves. This appeal does not take a single form, but rather appears under many conceptual guises. Because Eckhart scours multiple traditions to articulate the contours of self-emptying, it takes on many rhetorical and conceptual forms: poverty, annihilation, humility, nudity, barrenness, detachment, receptivity, dispossession, becoming nothing, mystical death, and the clearing of the intellect of all images. As a result, it is not immediately obvious that self-emptying, or kenosis, should be the dominant hermeneutical key for interpreting Eckhart’s thought at all. However, the richness and complexity of Eckhart’s sermons lies in their ability to adopt and adapt radically divergent vocabularies for the purpose of elaborating the necessity of emptying the soul of all determinations, images, and attachments. Before exploring the conceptual contours of Eckhart’s self-emptying, its theoretical conditions of possibility, and its theological schemas of intelligibility, it is useful to discuss the multiplicity of its forms.

Perhaps the most iconic version of Eckhart’s appeal appears in Sermon 2 (“Intravit Jesus”) in which he stresses the necessity of soul becoming a spiritual virgin, one “who is free of all alien images, as free as he was when he was not.”5 Here, emptying the self takes on an Aristotelian form: what is at stake is being empty and free of all bilde, the images and forms that mediate the intellect with external objects. Similar adaptations of the Aristotelian theory of the intellect are found in other sermons as well, but such recurrence does not warrant taking theories of the intellect arising out of De Anima as an exhaustive or even primary structuring element of Eckhart’s thought.6 Rather than interpreting self-emptying as being necessitated by the contours of the Aristotelian theory of the intellect, one should state the reverse: the theory of the intellect becomes one of several conceptual vocabularies adopted by Eckhart in order to give form to his kenotic thought. The paradoxical locution “as he was when he was not” indexes an uncreated state of being as not, which, in Eckhart’s conceptual topology, is a mode of life as “empty and free,” one that is not equatable with an abstract subject, but rather indicates the irreducibility of the soul to its created and thereby subjected state.

Sermon 52 (“Beati pauperes spiritu”) articulates a conceptually homologous kenotic operation but without prioritizing the framework of the intellect. There, the disclosure of the uncreated state of emptiness and freedom no longer relies on Aristotelian resources, but rather has recourse to the tradition of spiritual poverty that has its roots in monastic spirituality and ultimately in the texts of the New Testament. A convergent exhortation—“to be as free of his own created will as he was when he did not exist”7—reemerges but is elaborated through the adaption of a different inherited conceptual vocabulary.

Formulations stressing self-emptying as disclosing an uncreated state proliferate throughout Eckhart’s sermons. Sometimes they take the rhetorical form of detachment (gelâzenheit and abegescheidenheit),8 suggesting not only a certain conceptual subtraction from the world, but also from the self itself.9 At other times, the kenotic insistence takes on the call for the annihilation of the self, echoing the vocabulary of Marguerite Porete. This vernacular call to vernihten sîn selbes echoes the broader tradition of self-abnegation, which goes back to, among other sources, the Pauline imperative to imitate the self-emptying of Christ.10 There are other formulations that adapt monastic counsels; for example, when Eckhart insists, “You must let go of yourself and let go completely, and then you have rightly let go,”11 or exhorts, “go out of yourself and all things, and all that you are in yourself.”12

The multiplicity of such citations, which can be extended to include extracts from almost all of his sermons, illustrates that Eckhart inherits and deploys a diverse array of conceptual traditions and theoretical topoi. That the materials are amenable to Eckhart’s transformation in the first place stems from the fact that self-emptying has always been one of the central movements in the traditions of Christian mysticism and monasticism, and in Christian spirituality more generally. As a technical term, kenosis has a New Testament provenance, going back to the Pauline hymn in Philippians 2:7 on the emptying of God into Christ and Christ onto the Cross. The broader contours of the imperative of self-emptying include the rich and varied traditions of imitatio Christi, from their practical and monastic forms going back to the exemplary lives of Anthony the Great and the Desert Fathers to their mystical forms so powerfully present in thirteenth-century Franciscan texts. More generally, the imperative is connected to the moral, spiritual, and theological need to reverse the human state of fallenness: to rid oneself of the self is to attain once more a oneness with God. In this way, the more general movements of self-abnegation before God, of humility, and of spiritual poverty all contain what could be called a kenotic core.

It would in fact be possible to construct a lineage and a tradition for each of the locutions that Eckhart uses. His deployment of poverty and nudity could be read within their widespread use in thirteenth-century spiritual texts and within specific models of imitatio Christi and nudus nudum Christum sequi. The formulation stressing the priority of the intellect could recall the discussions of the Dominican prioritization of the intellect (in opposition to the Franciscan prioritization of the will) and, ultimately, the Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian debates on possible and active intellects. And annihilation and emptiness would situate Eckhart firmly within the theoretical matrices of Beguine theology.13 Even the expressions that are seen as most properly Eckhartian, Gelassenheit and Abgeschiedenheit—often rendered into English as “detachment”—could be interpreted within the context of a sublimated monasticism, in which the ascetic call to withdraw from the world is reinterpreted spiritually and phenomenologically as a detachment from the created world.

Such tracings would situate Eckhart as a chapter in various Begriffsgeschichten, but they would also entail the reduction of his project to only those parts that are intelligible within the theoretical and textual fields that precede him. Such a methodological approach could be said decompose an event of thought into the matrices of intelligibility that preexist it. A genuine event, however—whether in thought, philosophy, or spirituality—is something that exceeds and cannot be exhaustively explained by the contexts and traditions out of which it is formed. To give an account of Eckhart’s thought through its (conceptual, linguistic, or theological) dependence on the contexts and traditions that provided the framework for its appearance is, by that very act, to eliminate its singularity. What such an approach fails to acknowledge is the fact that all of these articulations take on radically novel forms when taken up in Eckhart’s thought.

The multiplicity of the rhetorical and conceptual forms Eckhart employs to articulate his kenotic grammar cannot be decomposed into individual parts and resituated piecemeal genealogically without its singular formation being thereby rendered invisible. However, because self-emptying has a robust and polymorphous history within the Christian mystical and monastic traditions, the mere presence of such an operation within Eckhart’s thought, no matter how central of a place it takes therein, remains insufficient to illuminate the specificity of his project. To focus on self-emptying in isolation from the theoretical configuration in which it appears (that is, from the specific uses to which it is put, its specific conceptual contours and possibilities) is necessarily to fail to see the transformation to which this imperative is submitted in Eckhart’s work. After all, concepts take on their shape and heft only within a field of other concepts, and without that field, the specificity of any given concept cannot be properly ascertained. Concepts become articulated in relation to other concepts, conceptual moves, and theoretical figures. They become meaningful only when interrelated with other concepts, within, that is, an interlocking conceptual configuration, or what I call, a conceptual grammar. Only within a conceptual grammar does the productivity of a concept or a conceptual move become visible. On such a reading, self-emptying cannot be taken in isolation, but must be seen as forming a central element of Eckhart’s kenotic conceptual grammar, that is, a conceptual web within which self-emptying is articulated and which imbues it with a singular theoretical force and significance.

ON TRUE POVERTY

The famous Sermon 52 (“Beati pauperes spiritu”) illustrates, in a particularly cogent way, the interlinking moves that comprise Eckhart’s kenotic conceptual grammar. In turning to this sermon on spiritual poverty, my aim is less to offer a radically new interpretation of a single Eckhartian text than to traverse a particularly powerful instantiation of Eckhart’s theoretical distinctiveness. The sermon takes as its starting point the first of Jesus’s sayings from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.” As is frequently the case across Eckhart’s sermons, the scriptural passage becomes a virtual space for the elaboration of a theory of the soul and the proper configuration of spiritual life. The sermon proposes to undertake a more specific task as well, the exploration of what “poverty may be in itself and what a poor man may be.”14 Using the scriptural quotation as his nominal guide, Eckhart explicitly restricts his explorations of poverty to its spiritual manifestations, thus bypassing the medieval debates on the status and validity of material or “external” poverty that were very much alive within Franciscan circles.15 He breaks poverty into three distinct but interrelated modalities, which are then discussed sequentially: “A poor man wants nothing, and knows nothing, and has nothing.”16 Eckhart begins with the faculty of the will in order to clarify the nature of desiring nothing:

They are those who are attached to their own penances and external exercises, which seem important to people. God help those who hold divine truth in such low esteem! Such people present an outward picture that gives them the name of saints; but inside they are donkeys, for they cannot distinguish divine truth. These people say that a man is poor who wants nothing; but they interpret it in this way, that a man ought to live so that he never fulfills his own will in anything, but that he ought to comport himself so that he may fulfill God’s dearest will. Such people are in the right, for their intention is good. For this let us commend them. May God in his mercy grant them in the kingdom of heaven. But I speak in the divine truth when I say that they are not poor men, nor do they resemble poor men. They have great esteem in the sight of men who know no better, but I say that they are donkeys who have no understanding of divine truth. They deserve the kingdom of heaven for their good intention, but of the poverty of which we want to talk they know nothing.17

Immediately striking in this passage are the harsh epithets and the denunciatory rhetoric aimed at the position described. This passage, however, is not presenting a polemical portrait of the sinful or the wayward against which to extol an upright, moral life of self-denial. The language neither moralizes against wickedness, nor seeks to convert a religious other through apologetics, nor to right the ways of the heretic. It does not, in other words, target the expected objects of denunciation for medieval Christian sermons. Rather, the position equated with being a donkey describes some of the basic features of the devotional life of medieva...