Advent of Auto-Affection: Possibility, Givenness and Reception in Jean-Luc Marion

Jean-Luc Marion obliquely suggests that we return to religion when we think through and struggle with those topics that philosophy excludes or subjugates. This paper investigates a selection of such subjugated motifs. Marion’s recent claim (perhaps even ‘principle’): “auto-affection alone makes possible hetero-affection,” will be examined through piecemeal influences made upon its development through Marion’s return to religious thinking beyond the delimited jurisdiction of philosophy. Although still proper to the philosophies of Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, Marion finds new insights by tracing their legacy back further to the Christian gospels, Augustine, Aquinas, and, importantly, Nicholas of Cusa. Philosophy, proper, (if there is such a  thing) may well adumbrate human understanding of data, phenomena, and possibility by discouraging any further thinking of them in terms of love, givenness, or revelation. It is by preferentially opting for these themes that philosophy excludes or subjugates that makes possible the entanglement of truth with love, suggested by Marion: “truths that one knows only if one loves them first.”


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VIRGIL W. BROWER I seemed to believe … I didn't know why. Something in me seemed to believe … -my consciousness, as you may say; but my reason didn't.~ Mark Twain 1 When considering a return 2 to religion in the works of Marion, one might first recall a brief comment he makes regarding what religion has become and what its field of study comes to include. "The field of religion could be defined simply as whatever philosophy excludes or at best subjugates." 3 It is important to note that Marion's openness to religion (and questions ascribed to its study) discloses a nearly inescapable preferential option for the excluded. Phenomenology, too, "feels compelled to address itself directly to the oppressed" 4 and subjugated. It would ally itself with praxes akin to the social gospel and might merit due consideration by anyone believing that, today, "every theologian must adopt a liberation theology." 5 This facet of phenomenology's potency (or promise) to comingle with liberation theologies has yet to blossom and further develop. By adopting questions that philosophy debases or excludes from its proper delimited field of study, religion might thereby become a field of engagement with the canonical failures of philosophy (though not only its failures). Marion is very interested in failure. "Failure speaks, in its own way … failure remains as provisional as it is serious." 6 One can learn this from Paul and what "reveals" (itself) "as folly." 7 For Marion, Kant, for example, "is the thinker of the intuitive shortage of the common phenomenon," 8 that is to say: the failures of intuition. If philosophy's conceptualizations of motifs are lacking or wanting, we are, then encouraged -perhaps even sanctioned -by Marion to return to them. In doing so, one likely finds oneself within the realm and scope of religion. In what follows, I shall try to address a few such motifs: impossibility, givenness, and reception, all of which are entangled with one another. Religion is no stranger to these phenomena and has, perhaps, always already laid claim to them under different names (e.g., miracle, grace, creation, or advent).
There are oblique indications in Marion that would advocate the systematic or specialized study of religion, religious studies, or theology. A lamentable lack of rigorous theologians and serious scholars of religious phenomena in the public sphere becomes indicative of the "Cartesian doctrine of the unity of the sciences [into a] single 'human wisdom' taken as 'universal'" 9 that grows into modern scientism and positivism, of which Marion believes "religion" to be one of the "principal victims" (in addition to "ethics and philosophy"). 10 He suggests that the construct of the public intellectual is an epiphenomenal byproduct of the overarching metaphysics he so tirelessly critiques throughout his works. This aspect of metaphysics is based on naïve presumptions of the "universality of knowledge" 11 that results in a "model of the 'intellectual' [that] can only last in a strictly metaphysical scheme." 12 This accounts for an intellectual climate from which "a great many physicists, astrophysicists, or biologists believe themselves authorized to deal authoritatively" with themes such as god, faith, and religion. 13 8  This breed of popularity is invested with a kind of "publicity, beyond its current usage" Nobody seems more confident to caricature, deride, and dismiss religious phenomena than those who do not go to the trouble to seriously study it. The caliber of argumentation in popular texts produced for mass consumption with incendiary -i.e., marketable -titles (e.g., by Dawkins 14 or Hitchens 15 ) pales in comparison to the intellectual rigor of an Augustine, Luther, Barth, or even Weber. 16 There are of course serious reasons to be suspicious of the hubris or bullying of unquestioned authority and the crippling intellectual effects of what Russell calls "the evils of specialization." 17 There remain, nevertheless, equally serious critiqued by Marion in his studies on painting. Be it dissemination by either televisuality or social media, such publicity constitutes a public image of the 'intellectual' "always available for transmission, broadcast, and consumption by the viewers." Jean-Luc Marion 16 Far from colloquial socio-scientific dismissal of theology, Weber explicitly expected the most "fruitful and instructive" critiques of his own work to come not from historians or sociologists, but rather from theologians. "We [sociologists] must also investigate thoroughly the beginnings of similar developments in the Middle Ages and early Christianity…which will certainly require very intensive collaboration with theologians" (italics added). It was "a great cause of satisfaction" to Weber that his "forays into" the Protestant ethic were "not received … with either complete indifference or hostility" by "a number of reputable theological colleagues." He intimates a preference for collaboration with theologians rather than properly disenchanted historians that might become overly positivist. "I completely understand that to them [theologians] this way of relating certain series of religious motivations to their consequences for civil life must appear not to do justice to the ultimate value content of the forms of religiosity in question -since from the standpoint of religious value-judgement, these motivations are coarse and external, peripheral to true religious contents for the inwardly religious nature. And indeed, they are right. However, such merely 'sociological' work must also be carried out -as it has been done by some of the theologians themselves … It should surely be done best by the specialists, to whom we outsiders [i.e., sociologists] can just here and there offer possible perspectives on the problem, in our way and from our own viewpoint, whether they greet us with approval and interest or not. incentives to remember that the informal logical fallacy, argumentum ad verecundiam, 18 is not simply a blanket condemnation of all arguments from authority, but rather of arguments appealing to illegitimate or inappropriate authority (i.e., argumentation posturing as authoritative; basing a conclusion exclusively and only on such authority without any due evidentiary support for logical inference). Marion's rigorous criticism of Kantian metaphysics 19 does not silence the call for a certain logical deontology. There remains, nonetheless, a "duty to argue" 20 for the sake of religion since Marion believes religion "has to a large extent lost the battle of intelligence," because it waged "an intellectual battle without using intellectual means." 21 Therefore, the vocation of the religious thinker (or simply, "the baptized") is to "convince argumentatively," transforming "the kerygma into arguments … usable in public debate." 22 This includes, of course, the ruthless socio-political criticism of the history of ecumenical religion. 23 If Marion's philosophy does not seem churchy enough (or refraining from direct engagement with any systematic ecclesiology), it 18 When Locke coins the name of this fallacy in Book 4, Chapter 17, ¶19 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he warns his readers against the mistake of presupposing the same degree of due deference, logical validity, or cognitive significance be necessarily given to the mere "opinions" of an expert or scholar whose "learning … in some other cause [or field of study that] … has gained a name, and settled their reputation in the common esteem" as that legitimately deserved be given to an "approved" "authority" of another cause or field of study in which the former is not truly trained or learned. In line with Locke, Marion is simply and similarly warning his readers against the mere opinions (i.e., of "physicists, astrophysicists, or biologists," though well-trained, learned, and authoritative in those fields) when they are uncritically presumed to carry the same authority or veracity in areas outside those fields and, in Locke's words, fallaciously "put … in the [equal] balance against that of some learned doctor" (in, e.g., religious studies or theology), that ought "to be received with respect," when grappling with singular questions of god, grace, faith, etc. is perhaps simply because he believes that "the baptized do not think of the Church, [in its colloquial or ecclesial valences] because they [instead] live in it and, in this setting, see Christ." 24 There is, perhaps, a crypto-pragmatism lurking within this phenomenological approach to thinking. When grappling with a return of (or to) religion, one must keep in mind the kind of recourse to religiousness or religiosity that Marion overtly discourages. He is ever critical of metaphysical absolutism (and metaphysics, in general) and warns his readers of the "desperate ambition" behind the "triumphant return of the preeminent metaphysical attempt at absolute knowledge, with all the illusions and dangers to which history so clearly attests," that might "be an irrational exaltation … reviving the fantasies of … 'mystical' intuition." 25 For Marion, "we no longer belong to the dogmatic epoch of metaphysics; [rather,] we inhabit the era of nihilism …" 26 Though he is not afraid to engage thinkers often considered to be mystics (e.g., Pseudo-Dionysus, Scotus, Bernard, etc.), he yet insists on the the dangerous illusions and fantasies of irrationality and mysticism.
It is in these ways that some aspects of Marion's philosophy might be considered returns to religion. They endeavor to develop and improve upon some of philosophy's perjuries, failures or subjugations. In doing so, Marion always endeavors to avoid any illusory irrationality of metaphysics, mysticisms, and dogmatisms. If such avoidance is possible, it must refuse attempting to complete or perfect philosophy's failures by way of philosophy's own delimited methods and adumbrated terms. One may never escape the irrational or mystical, if one claims, "to surpass and complete … affirmative certainty by another affirmative, definitive, and dogmatic certainty." 27 One alternative to this particular example, Marion develops as negative certitude, which he believes to 24 Ibid., 70-71. be a path found within philosophy, itself, (though perhaps subjugated by it); 28 but can yet be discerned, specifically, in Descartes and Kant.
Although Marion emphasizes Descartes and Kant (and eventually Husserl) as the philosophical precursors of negative certitude, one can, arguably, trace a thread to them from Marion, himself, through valences of 'nullity' or 'negativity' in Heidegger; and, further, to the negation and negative dialectics of Hegel; and, still further, back to the coincidentia oppositorum of Nicholas and the birthpangs of negative theology 29 (e.g., learned ignorance). Though Heidegger is a primary interlocutor throughout Marion works, Hegel receives less direct attention. It is as if Marion almost sidesteps Hegel altogether by appealing directly to Nicholas, who seems to be (even if only unconsciously osmosed through Bruno) 30 one of Hegel's under-appreciated intellectual precursors. 31 28 In the terms laid out a decade earlier in The Visible and the Revealed (as 'religion.') 29 Marion "had been impressed for a long time by … 'negative theology' especially since leading a seminar of The Divine Names at Montmarte. The alternative to metaphysical philosophy and mystical dogmatism (which would include fundamentalist religion) that Marion offers, then, would be a particular kind of philosophy of religion practiced as phenomenology of religion and, thereby, "a truly radical phenomenology." 32 This is not because Marion presumes that "as if by right … the phenomenological method [is] in any way particularly suitable for religion." 33 Phenomenology seems no better suited to religion than to, say, probability statistics. But if philosophy's most troublesome issues become sublimated or deferred to religion (wittingly or not), then religion "could offer a possible field for phenomenology," 34 but only if phenomenology makes manifest phenomena that would have remained distorted, undiscovered, or ever missing without it. It is in this way that Marion allies himself with philosophy before religion and always seems to give philosophy -or, at least, phenomenology -the last word. 35 This focus upon the manifestations of phenomena discloses Marion's philosophy to be, at its core, a philosophy of revelation, the hallmark of which is his singular phenomenological readings of pre-modern sources (pre-Kantian/pre-Husserlian) colloquially considered religious and, specifically, Christian: e.g., the gospels and Nicholas.
One of the primal ways by which philosophy approaches the themes of possibility and impossibility is when attesting to the epistemological limits of human understanding. The scope of human cognition and experience allows for a certain extent of knowability or knowledge of things and phenomena (as possible) while other things or phenomena are simply beyond the delimited capacity of human understanding and are, hence, categorized as impossible or impossibilities. There is almost nothing more signature for Enlightenment philosophy than to mark, attest, and grapple with what is impossible for humans to think, know, or experience. Be it by Descartes, Hume, Kant, or Husserl, philosophy ever acquiesces the limits of possibilities for human understanding. As canonical categories burrowed within epistemology, possibility and impossibility open themselves to new considerations, for 32  'revealability'). This is arguably an unlikely Lukan legacy. On this point, Marion's phenomenological engagement with religion finds itself -almost by necessity -confronting "the difficult narrative of the Annunciation," 36 in the same essay by which he, also, addresses an uncanny inversion of the ontological argument for the existence of god set in motion by Nicholas. Mary proclaims precisely her epistemological limits and, by consequence, a "factual impossibility," 37 in confessing what she cannot and does not know to angelic authority. "I know no man [ἄνδρα οὐ γινώσκω; andra ou ginōskō]" (Luke 1:34).
Marion reads the angelic response as an assertion of "the principle of radical possibility." 38 On god's part "no word [or saying; rhēma] shall be impossible" (Luke 1:37). To believe this word of radical possibility is to recognize the epistemological limitations and impossibilities of one's human perspective "in order to pass over to" 39 the radical possibility of god's perspective (for which nothing shall be impossible). Later in Luke, one reads, "What is impossible with men is possible with God" (18:27; cf. Matthew 19:26 and Mark 10:27).
Both philosophy -whether as metaphysics or epistemology -and even revealed religion eventually concede, in one way or another, that the impossible is "the concept above all concepts" 40 that determines what humans cannot know … but which even philosophy, nevertheless, still calls -or names -'god.' 41 As such, impossibility "defines the proper place of the question of God." 42 (This would be also the case for 40 VIRGIL W. BROWER unknowability. Religious thinkers, therefore, are called and tasked to remain "guardians of the unknowable.") 43 These lines from the gospel of Luke seem to motivate Nicholas to formulate one of Marion's preferred paradoxes. Nicholas writes: "… as nothing is impossible with God, we must, by means of what is impossible in the world, raise ourselves to contemplate God, with whom impossibility is necessity." 44 With a few theoretical gymnastics -which could perhaps only come about by negative certitude -Marion finds, here, in Nicholas not simply a straightforward ontological argument for the existence of god; e.g., the possibility of god's existence (colloquially attributed to or associated with Anselm or Descartes). With textual motifs firmly rooted in all the synoptic gospels (as opposed to Aristotle, in which Hegel's philosophy is determined and rooted), in proclaiming impossibility as necessity, Nicholas discovers and performs a kind of proto-phenomenological deduction (or "reduction," epokhé) 45 centuries before its time. Nicholas not only anticipates the negative dialectics of Hegel, but the transcendental deduction of Kant and even the phenomenological reduction of Husserl. Such a genealogy is exemplary of the kind of incipient return of religion to which thinking must attend. Reduction and givenness go hand in hand and are indissociable from one another. 46 In Cusa one finds 'god' to be that to which there is no possibility of impossibility. Nothing can make god, godself, impossible. It is upon human conception, alone, that the impossible can impose itself (i.e., on our faculties, hard-wiring, experiential data-collection, sensation, and understanding). This aspect of early 'negative theology' comes to further develop into what is often referred to as 'dialectical theology' 43  (usually associated with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Barth,47 or Altizer), based on an infinite qualitative distinction between the eternal and time; god and humanity. Similarly, for Marion, "the grace of Christ … will never be counted among worldly phenomena." 48 To think grace, givenness, or god (all of which are entangled and may well be synonyms) as worldly phenomena suited to human reason and cognition becomes, for Marion, a practice of idolatry. Insisting on this kind of qualitative distinction would be another way by which Marion warns against certain metaphysical forms of religion in which it is either effaced or forgotten. He warns that "we must resist the illusion of the theologians and alleged Christian exegetes," 49 if they believe humanity sets its itself up as the master of the gospel and the word of god as interpreter and judge. 50 The difference between the possible and the impossible always already eliminates any possible categorical confusion between humanity and god. Further, this paradox of impossible necessity stands the stereotypical ontological argument on its head. Nicholas' reading of the gospels "no longer proves God's existence, but [rather] the impossibility of [god's] impossibility" 51 and, thereby, god's possibility. "The necessity of God's possibility flows from the impossibility of his impossibility." 52 Any further inference of the existence of god (if there is such a thing) becomes an indirect or collateral epiphenomenon. It is not a primary concern. In fact, to forcefully insist that the category of existence be applicable to god may well be but an idolatrous illusion of onto-theologians, as put forth in Marion's breakthrough text, God without Being. God cannot be conceptualized, as such, which is why Marion advocates a kind of conceptual atheism. 53 Nicholas is iterating the principle of radical possibility that Marion finds the angel revealing to Mary. This would be one of the many points on which Marion resists Hegel through an appeal to Nicholas, and by doing so, further resists the temptation of ontotheology he suspects and detects in Hegel. He finds Hegel insisting on "the equivalence of thought and Being … posited as a fundamental metaphysical thesis." 54 This applies not only to the cogito or I (of 'I think therefore I am'), but also to god. 55 This congenital Cartesian proclivity of ontotheology survives into Hegel's system. 56 The impossibility of god's impossibility is indicative of the innumerable and immeasurable ways by which delimited human intuition and understanding is yet permeated, at all times, by an excess of givenness. Such occurrences, happenings, truths, or phenomena comprise the givenness in which the quotidian minutiae and banality of our everyday lives is "saturated," (to use an almost clinical term of Marion; it is a "saturated phenomenon"). Givenness and reception go hand in hand, since there is no "greater crime for a phenomenologist than … not accepting [or receiving] what one sees [or experiences]." 57 For Marion, "givenness alone indicates that a phenomenon ensures in a single gesture both its visibility and the full right of that visibility, both its 54  appearance and the reason for that appearance." 58 In this way a phenomenology of religion moves beyond the limits of vulgar empiricism and positivism and the phenomenological method becomes well-suited to religious thinking. 59 Marion's understanding of givenness is rooted in Husserl's principle of principles: "Everything that offers itself to us in originary 'intuition' … must be received exactly as it gives itself out to be …" 60 Marion reads the principle as a givenness that revalues both reception and auto-affection. 61 It is not simply by active agency or agential volition that one comprehends or apprehends that which gives-itself. What gives-itself may be passively received, rather than actively taken. An object is "actively constituted" by human understanding as it is experienced, but an event is "that which I can only receive." 62 It is because givenness gives, offers, and, as such, auto-affects itself that humans may receive it (and, as such, be auto-affected 63 by it) in the experience of one's own auto-affection.