The Manifest and the Revealed , livre ebook

The Manifest and the Revealed
SUNY series in Theology and Continental Thought

Douglas L. Donkel, editor
The Manifest and the Revealed
A Phenomenology of Kenōsis
Adam Y. Wells
Foreword by Kevin Hart
Cover image: Countenance Azurite by Makoto Fujimura
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wells, Adam Y., author.
Title: The manifest and the revealed : a phenomenology of kenosis / by Adam Y. Wells ; Foreword by Kevin Hart.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, 2018. | Series: SUNY series in theology and Continental thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017059917 | ISBN 9781438472171 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438472188 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Bible—Hermeneutics. | Phenomenology. | Incarnation. | Philosophical theology.
Classification: LCC BS476 .W44 2018 | DDC 220.601—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059917
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Contents
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
F OREWORD
Kevin Hart
I NTRODUCTION : O N H USSERL’S D REAM
Part I Theoretical Considerations: Phenomenology as an Absolute Science of Scripture
I NTRODUCTION TO P ART I
C HAPTER 1
Phenomenology and Science in Husserl’s Early Work
A. Philosophy of Arithmetic and Logical Investigations
B. Ideas I
C HAPTER 2
The Genetic Transformation of Absolute Science
A. Cartesian Meditations and Formal and Transcendental Logic
B. The Crisis
C. The Reduction from Givenness to Pre-givenness
C HAPTER 3
Phenomenology as Self-Referential Science
A. The Fracturing of Transcendental Subjectivity
B. Mundane Science and Phenomenology
C. Absolute Science as Self-Referential Science
C ONCLUSION TO P ART I: P HENOMENOLOGY E X V IVO
Part II Absolute Science in Practice: The Kenotic Reduction
I NTRODUCTION TO P ART II
C HAPTER 4
The Life and Times of Philippians 2:5–11
A. The Hymn’s Purpose
B. Christ’s Equality with God
C. Kenōsis and Exaltation: Feminist Readings
D. Conclusion
C HAPTER 5
Kenōsis and Phenomenological Reduction
A. A Brief Aside: What Does it Mean to Read Phenomenologically?
B. The Evolution of the Phenomenological Reduction
C. The Initial Hypothesis: The Kenōsis Hymn as a Reduction from Cosmos to Creation
D. Love and Power: Refining the Initial Hypothesis after the Kenotic Reduction
E. Ramifications of the Kenotic Reduction for Scriptural Studies
F. Ramifications of the Kenotic Reduction for Phenomenology
C HAPTER 6
Kenotic Time: Husserl and Apocalyptic Eschatology
A. Apocalypses and Apocalyptic Eschatology
B. Husserlian Options for Characterizing Kenotic Time
C HAPTER 7
Radicalizing Husserlian Temporality: Anticipation, Depresencing, and Represencing
A. The Phenomenality of Anticipation
B. Time as Depresencing
C. Kenotic Time as Eschatological Horizon: The Represencing of God
C ONCLUSION
A. Précis
B. Absolute Science and Biblical Criticism
C. Absolute Science and Husserlian Phenomenology
D. Absolute Science and Christianity
N OTES
B IBLIOGRAPHY
I NDEX
Acknowledgments
Philosophy is best done in conversation, and I am fortunate to have had many wonderful dialogue partners. I am particularly grateful to Kevin Hart for his friendship, support, and advice throughout this project. I would also like to thank those who read and commented on earlier drafts of this work—especially Peter Ochs and Paul Jones, who served on my dissertation committee at the University of Virginia. Finally, I am grateful to my family in ways too numerous to mention. This book is dedicated to my partner, Loren, who is truly phenomenal.
Foreword
K EVIN H ART
T HE U NIVERSITY OF V IRGINIA
If we reckon the beginning of phenomenology to be the publication of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900−01), this manner of philosophizing has been around for well over a century. Of course, it is possible to see that, for all his perfectly legitimate claims to originality, Husserl had predecessors: Brentano, Hegel, Kant, and Descartes, to name only several of the greatest, set the stage for him. And if we look further back into history, we can see that the decisive shift that Husserl made—passing from asking the questions “What?” and “Why?” to also asking “How?”—had been ventured now and then by Plato and Aristotle. Having done that, we might ponder artists, especially poets, and see that with them also the “How”-question is very far from unfamiliar. Husserl’s phenomenology appeared within the discipline of philosophy, and was conducted for the most part on the borders of Neo-Kantianism. His aim was to place knowledge on the firmest possible foundation, which he thought could be achieved by means of Evidenz (the process of something becoming as self-evident as possible), reduction, and noetic-noematic correlation. All the fashionable philosophies of the day, from historicism to psychologism, were, he thought, varieties of relativism; and to his horror they were infecting even logic. Consequently, adherence to these false philosophies was plunging European thought into a state of crisis. Only phenomenology could save that immense heritage of thought by supplying an absolute—unconditioned—ground.
Looking back a hundred years or so, we can see that phenomenology has been able to do two things at once: to attract a wide range of thinkers of the first rank, and to allow them to re-position and re-launch phenomenology from unexpected points. Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Eugen Fink, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Lévinas, Alfred Schutz, Michel Henry, Paul Ricœur, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste—the list could be broadened to include thinkers from other countries and extended by adding yet more names—has each enriched phenomenology and made it a fecund style of thinking for one generation after another. I say “thinking” because phenomenology cannot be limited to philosophy, especially not if one regards philosophy, as is common these days in Britain and the United States, as concerned primarily with the fashioning and evaluation of arguments. Phenomenology prizes intuition (i.e., awareness), suitably broadened to include categorial intuition, as a way of gaining access to the ways in which phenomena manifest themselves to us; and although it proceeds in a rational manner in its investigations it does not dally on the merry-go-round that contemporary analytic philosophy has become. 1 Nor does phenomenology take much interest in pre-packaged philosophical problems. “Back to the ‘things themselves’!” was Husserl’s cry in the Logical Investigations , meaning “Let us examine phenomena directly, just as they come to us in experience, and not as we have been told to think about them in books and lectures.” 2 This direct examination of phenomena requires one to cultivate attention to a very high level, and to make fine distinctions, if need be. It is an exercise in self-responsibility.
The first person to reorient phenomenology was Husserl’s assistant Martin Heidegger, and certainly his early courses are among the most exciting and provocative works in phenomenology that we have. It was Heidegger who, in his 1920−21 lectures on the phenomenology of religious life, first used the new style of rigorous thinking to read texts. He attended in particular to Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians. 3 Thereafter, he swerved away from scripture and also, to some degree, from the task of resetting phenomenology itself, and in the mid-1930s and early 1940s developed a style of reading some of the strongest German poets—Hölderlin, Rilke, and George—that was at a fair distance from literary criticism as practiced both then and now. 4 Yet the project of using phenomenology to read scripture remained incomplete; only the barest of beginnings had been made before the project was dropped. True enough, Henry, Derrida, and Marion have talked from time to time in recent decades about passages of scripture, although usually in a manner designed to exemplify their philosophical stances in general. 5 By and large, though, the academic study of scripture was left firmly in the hands of historical critics throughout the twentieth century, and although other approaches to scripture—from, let us say, canonical criticism to feminist exegesis—were tried and tested, it is the historical criticism that has commanded the most sustained attention in the guild of biblical scholars. Protestant scholars had been treating scripture as historical documents like any other throughout the nineteenth century, taking cues from earlier work, going back to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1677). Catholic scholars had been frustrated by Leo XIII’s condemnation of the historical criticism in his encyclical Providentissimus Deus (1893), and it was not until Pius XII’s encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu (1943) that they could invest themselves in the historical criticism. They caught up very quickly, it must be said, and one of the most impressive of all modern biblical scholars was a Catholic priest, Raymond E. Brown (1928−98).
Today, phenomenology is seeking once again to read both sacred and secular writings. Literary criticism attempted to learn from phenomenology with Georges Poulet (1902−91), Jean-Pierre Richard (b. 1922), and other members of the Geneva School, but the “criticism of consciousness,” as it became known in