August 24, 2020
Couple thoughts about Jean-Luc Marion's Phenomenology of Faith via Givenness
It is easy to do a Bible study and to say that God speaks to me through the readings, that faith is a "given". But really, what does that mean? Do we take faith to be given as "a given", or a dogmatic assumption? I was thinking about this today on my walk. How do I engage with other people such as atheists or those of other faiths, if we don't take (theologically) faith as a given?
To define the parameter of faith here includes the assumption of a God. And I agree with this. However, I think this is a conclusion of the finding that faith is given. The philosopher-theologian Jean-Luc Marion takes this question up in his work through God without Being to the series that begins with Givenness and Revelation. Contrary to Heidegger, who thinks that Dasein is the primary and basic pre-theoretical feature of Being, Marion provides a correction that the character of "givenness" is the beginning. As far as I understand it, this is going back to Descartes, whom all of the aforementioned phenomenologists seem to need to take their shot at. But the context is that Descartes begins with a radical position from a radical method: from doubting everything he could doubt, he comes up with the theory "cogito ergo sum", I think therefore I am.
Marion, in Descartes' Passive Thought , focuses more on Descartes' other conclusion "Ego Sum Ego Existo", I am, therefore I exist. While I have yet to complete his work, I have found from his analysis of the 6th meditation and the passions that Descartes' position does not fundamentally doubt the body's role in all this. That is, when we doubt everything we could possibly doubt, it is not so certain that Descartes doubts the body. Sure he can say that maybe a demon messed with him and made him think he had a body, but the characteristic of having a body is not removed from the action of thought. "I think (with a body) that I am, therefore I exist (with a body)". It is possible, from Marion's reading, that it was just unquestionable despite Descartes' methodology rooted in what was coming to be known as the virtue of science (questioning all assumptions); that the assurance and quality of having a body is embedded into how he even comes up with it. This sounds a lot like the kind of territory that the premiere phenomenologist of the body, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was going on about. And this makes sense, given that even he returns to Descartes in his later lectures. Of course, this could just be another assumption unquestioned, but that's the sort of fundamental ground of analyzing the phenomena that phenomenologists are interested in (intentionality a la Husserl). Science, not even philosophy of science, wouldn't be that committed to digging that deep in questioning their assumptions because this puts them in the territory of philosophy (this word is used rather pejoratively in this context).
With the centrality of the body rooted in the primer to modern philosophy, phenomenology seems to be making progress here towards many applications such as identity, health, illness, etc. But with Marion's own center of his phenomenology, that of "givenness", roots one who walks along his path of thought with theology infused with phenomenology. The character of givenness– the phenomena that we encounter having the quality of being given– invokes or implies a background idea of a "giver". In contrast with Early Heidegger's Protagoras-esque Man is the Measure of all means path of thought in Being and Time, Marion paves a path found in the more humbled (feeling, with stubborn hermit inclinations, the consequences of his idealistic mistake registering in the National Socialist German Workers party) Later Heidegger, who takes a more theological approach to the question of being.
For Marion, as with Descartes' Passive thought (thinking with the body), being is the characteristic of givenness that we take as fundamental and that we don't ponder about much in our everyday existence. The world of the given here has yet to take a definite theological tone, however. One can merely assert that the characteristic of givenness may be just that, a characteristic of experience. Evolutionary interpretations may take that to be just part of our genetic coding or wiring left over from a previous trait that, either by coincidence (vestigial) or by deliberate natural selection, we would be more "oriented" to that approach. However, this goes beyond the scope of phenomenology, which focuses on the phenomena (the things themselves) and how we experience it. In other words, we would follow Husserl and "bracket it out" (epoché), and put that reductionist explanation aside, especially if it doesn't help our phenomenological investigation. Such "orientation" may as well be characterized for the religious as how God "[formed] man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being" (Genesis 2:7). And I didn't intend to connect the concept of ground (post-modernity's bread and butter) and the phenomenology of breath (see Havi Carel, Frederik Svenaeus, etc. on illness analyses); but I certainly thought it while typing it.
So, what now with givenness? Well, describing being within the ground of givenness, one can take in Jesus' theological stride to make Simon Peter, the doubting apostle, the "rock [He] will build [His] church" with and whom to give the "keys to the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 16:18-19), and reflect on this phenomenologically. While we may doubt that which is given (be it from confusion, anxiety, or existential inquiry), Christianity argues faith arises out of a gift by recognizing the giver of the given as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. As Paul writes "for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8) and such faith enters us through love as "God is love" (1 John 4). This is where Marion ties up how the description of givenness is fulfilled wholly by Catholic-Christian doctrine as the "gift" is manifested in the Eucharist, the bread as the body of Christ, and of the Church as the body of Christ instituted by Christ (see Called to Communion, Pope Emeritus Ratzinger). This is also where Marion turns from philosophy (via phenomenology) to theology, by taking "This Jesus [as] the stone which, rejected by you builders, has become the chief stone supporting all the rest" (Acts 4:11), and by fusing phenomenologically the given body with the Christian soul, giving kind of a dualistic twist but more a hermeneutical interpretation rooted in the ahistory of the Bible and the history of man's existence.
At this point Marion takes up the theologian's humility and would take his theology just to be mere applied philosophy/science, that is, applying "reason" to discover more about God's creation/design for us as creatures. All of this can be undertaken without the scholastic acrobatics that Thomism, while important, because it draws upon the investigation into subjectivity of faith that began with St. Augustine and continued with Pascal, Kierkegaard and then initially with really early Heidegger (back when he was in the seminary); there's likely many in between but I'm not aware of them, I admit. Because an investigation into faith begets an investigation into the giver, which then leads back to the given; we come to know God so that we may know ourselves, as St. Augustine says– Noverim Te, Noverim me.
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