Alastair's Adversaria

Symbol and Sacrament Posts: Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2:I, Chapter 2:II, Chapter 4:I, Chapter 4:II, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7

Reality always comes to us in a mediated form, being constructed by the symbolic order.

This symbolic order designates the system of connections between the different elements and levels of a culture (economic, social, political, ideological – ethics, philosophy, religion…), a system forming a coherent whole that allows the social group and individual to orient themselves in space, find their place in time, and in general situate themselves in the world in a significant way – in short, to find their identity in a world that makes “sense”… (84)

It might be helpful to recall the earlier distinction that we drew between a ‘universe’ and a ‘world’: it is the symbolic order that renders the universe as a ‘world’ to us.

Chauvet draws a distinction between sensation and perception. Although we may share in common with the lower animals our sensations of pain, ‘the perceived object is always-already a constructed object’ (85). The world that we perceive is always a world that already bears our mark. Whatever I perceive is always placed within a web of signification and cultural value (perceiving is always a perceiving as), within which I determine what aspects are worthy of attention and notice, and what significance those aspects should be given.

Submersion into this symbolic order, this law, this world of meaning, is the means by which the human subject is formed (86). We form ourselves by building this symbolic world. However, the symbolic world is something inherited from others: we enter into a world that has already been spoken. Chauvet compares this symbolic world to a set of building blocks: they are the means by which we form ourselves, and the real into a ‘world’. He also compares it to contact lenses, which, although invisible to us while we are wearing them, filter all that we see.

Language (which doesn’t exhaust the symbolic world) participates in the characteristics of the symbolic order, within which it plays a crucial part. Language always precedes us. It is not an instrument, but mediates reality to us (87). It is constitutive of truly human experience: language is our primary means of perception. Even when we are silent, our language is always speaking in numerous ways, and we are its creations. If we were not possessed by language, our reality wouldn’t come-to-presence for us in the same way. Heidegger’s approach to language runs radically directly contrary to that of traditional metaphysics, in which things precede words. For Heidegger, language creates ‘things’. Language summons entities to come into presence (an activity that it is the task of the poet to manifest).

There is a natural misconception – a tenacious misconception that is profoundly difficult to shake – that language involves an ‘exteriorization’ and expression of something internal to us. Parallels between Wittgenstein and Heidegger are quite apparent at points such as this. ‘For there is no human reality, however interior or intimate, except through the mediation of language or quasi-language that gives it a body by expressing it’ (90). Our impressions and thoughts are given form and being by means of their expression. Without language, we couldn’t think the thoughts that we want to express in the manner that we do. Our concept of interiority develops out of the retrospective differentiation between the public expression and the private intention (91). However, the two are inseparable: without chosen expressions, our intentions would be inchoate and indecipherable. For instance, in the case of the love of a man for a woman, it is through his internal speech to himself, whether mentally verbalized or not (e.g. ‘I want to kiss her…’), and his external speech that his intention becomes what it is.

Some sort of language (in the broader sense of the term) is the mediator of every human reality. ‘Every human situation, every experience common to several people wherever they may be, is a reality that, in its constitution, its advent, its realization, implies language. … Every human reality has language for its catalyst’ (92).

Language and the Subject’s Coming to Being

Chauvet seeks to clarify the exact source of the power of language, by studying the ‘concrete process’ of the ‘invitation by Being’ manifested in language by means of psychoanalysis and linguistics. Through this he intends to explain the character of the communication between God and humankind that maintains the radical difference, and the manner in which all human life is, through initiation, entered into by a form of death.

Chauvet begins by reflecting upon the meaning of the word ‘I’ in the context of conversation. It does not refer to a concept, for no single concept could comprehend all ‘I’s. Nor, however, does it refer to a particular individual, as any individual can be designated by the term. Rather the linguistic ‘I’, as Lacan observes ‘designates the subject of the enunciation.… It does not signify it.’

The ‘I’ is both the subject of the enunciation or discourse (the speaking person) and also the subject of the verb (within that which is spoken). In fact, a reference to the speaking person, to a ‘subject of the enunciation’ is a precondition for the meaning of all discourse: discourse only has meaning as it concerns ‘humans conscious of their presence in the world as speaking and acting subjects’ (93).

The ‘I’ requires both a ‘YOU’ and an ‘IT’. It requires another party who can address, and be addressed, for whom the YOU-I relationship can be reversed. It also requires a third, an ‘IT’, whereby the reversibility of the YOU-I relationship is prevented from becoming one of mirror images, and the ‘YOU’ and ‘I’ are related to the non-person, opened up to the wider social and cosmic world. Without such an ‘IT’, the ‘I’ would be unable to posit itself.

An important observation arises out of this:

Now, if what is most different (I-YOU as opposite and radically other) is also what is most similar (YOU as the reversible of the I), then the anthropological difference should not be conceived as a distancing which attenuates or even cuts communication but rather as an otherness which makes it possible. Such is the distinctive trait of every human discourse that nothing is more similar to the I than the YOU in its very difference; that, as a subject, the “one” is possible only through the “other” recognized precisely as “my counterpart – the one similar to me.” (95)

Chauvet draws upon Jacques Lacan’s understanding of the development of the human subject. The infant child passes through a ‘mirror stage’, in which he identifies with himself in his reflection (and this ‘reflection’ need not be a mirror, it could be another child, for instance). In the mirror the infant finds a sense of self-unity (previously the infant perceived its body as ‘a collection of unrelated parts’. However, the child cannot easily distinguish itself from its image but is like its captive, over-identified with it.

This situation is resolved as the infant arrives at a sense of a symbolic unity, ‘of an order other than its reflected body’. The child comes to this understanding of itself as it is represented to itself in language – named – by others. However, this leads to an interesting situation: this mediation of the subject by language creates a ‘split’ or ‘division’ in the subject. Although the subject now has knowledge of itself, what it knows is not in fact itself, but only a linguistic representation. The ‘I’ that is the subject of the verb in the sentence (‘the enunciated subject’) is actually a symbolic substitution for the ‘I’ that is the speaker (‘the subject of the enunciation’). This split in the ‘I’ previously mentioned functions as a split within the subject, a split that places lack at the very heart of the subject’s identity. Consent to this lack is crucial to the development and growth of the subject.

The symbolic order is entered and remained in through a sort of death, a death to the immediacy of our reflection and its ‘primary narcissism, that is to say, our imaginary omnipotence and right-to-enjoy-everything (98)’. If we want to gain our lives (in becoming someone in the symbolic order), we must lose them (dying to the immediacy of our imaginary relationship with ourselves in the narcissism of infancy). This is the logic of initiation.

The subject is both formed and maintains itself through the breach between the self and the self as represented in language, between the ‘real’ (the unsymbolized realm of human existence) and the ‘symbolic’. It must continue to consent to the absence from which it is constituted. Lacan compares words to gravestones, marking the absence of, and standing over the things that they represent. The Truth occurs through the mourning process, as we consent to the absence of the Thing. The ‘umbilical’ cord of our immediate attachment to our selves and the world formed around them must be cut, and we must enter into the symbolic, the realm formed by a breach and a continual lack (99). We must consent never to leave mediation behind, and to live in a realm where we never finally arrive at the Thing itself, by exist only in a ‘permanent becoming’.

Symbolic Exchange

This ‘permanent becoming’ is ‘not an aimless wandering in a desert waste without landmarks,’ but occurs in the process of symbolic exchange, which contains the rule of the symbolic order. Most importantly, this process occurs ‘outside the order of value’, which is why it can provide us with a possible means by which to understand the ‘marvelous exchange’ between God and humanity that is grace (100).

Chauvet observes the sort of symbolic exchange that exists or existed in certain traditional and ancient societies, exchange that is not governed by the logic of value and the marketplace.

This system of “obligatory generosity” confers on the sack of grain or golden object that one exchanges a reality of an order other than that of utilitarian value. It is given “for nothing” – nothing from the viewpoint of this kind of value – but with the understanding that a third party will give you “for nothing” the produce of fishing, harvest, craftsmanship, or plunder. (101)

Every received gift obligates a return, often to a third party. However, one gives without accounting. Chauvet argues that the desire underlying this pattern of exchange is the ‘desire to be recognized as a subject, not to lose face, not to fall from one’s social rank, and consequently to compete for prestige’ (102).

Although we are forgetful of this logic, shrouded as it is by the dominance of business values in the West, its traces can still be found in our thinking and practice, perhaps especially in the case of the ‘gift’. Chauvet argues that this ‘obligatory exchange’ is in fact ‘what allows us to live as subjects and structures all our relations in what they contain of the authentically human’ (103).

The gift is the best illustration of symbolic exchange. Its meaning resides in the concrete relationship in which its exchange occurs, and cannot be accounted for by utility or commercial value. The gift is an object which ‘one lets go as if it were a part of oneself’. As such it is a signifier of both the absence and the presence of the one to the other. In the same manner, all symbolic exchanges have this fundamentally ambivalent character. While the sign-object refers ‘only to the absence of the relation’, the ‘symbol-object’ establishes this relation ‘in the absence’. In contrast to utilitarian value (e.g. the car as an efficient means of transportation), exchange value (e.g. equivalence in the marketplace), and sign value (e.g. the car as a sign of one’s social standing), the logic of symbolic exchange is one of non-value (104). Chauvet sees in the realm of the ‘value-sign’ of the marketplace, the full realization of the ‘metaphysics’ which Heidegger exposes (106).

Every society will have both the logic of the value-sign and the logic of non-value – of symbolic exchange – in some proportion or other. It is important that we recognize that these represent ‘two different levels of exchange’. While the logic of the marketplace is that of value and need, what is exchanged through physical objects in symbolic exchange is far more than the objects themselves are worth in terms of their utilitarian, exchange, or sign value. ‘The true objects being exchanged are the subjects themselves.’ The objects mediate the relationship between persons, and serve as means for their self-recognition and establishment of their identity and place. This symbolic exchange is a fundamental characteristic of language, as through speech to each other we recognize each other as subjects (perhaps most clearly revealed in ‘phatic’ speech – much as we English talk about the weather – in which the purpose is not that of conveying information, but of being present to each other in the act of conversation).

In symbolic exchange, the object serves as the means by which the subjects exchange themselves, through the presence-absence of gift. Even though it is less immediately obvious on the surface of our society, it is this symbolic exchange – this gift-reception-return-gift – that forms us and enables us to become human subjects (107). Every one of our significant human relationships is structured and characterized by such an exchange.

Symbolic exchange provides us with a very helpful way of understanding the grace, and most specifically the sacramental grace, of God. Grace is ‘beyond the useful and the useless’, being a matter of ‘super-abundance’, beyond all value and calculation (108). This graciousness, however, fails fully to express the fact of ‘gratuitousness’ – the precedence of God’s gift. Our own selves are received as a free gift.

[B]y the very structure of the exchange, the gratuitousness of the gift carries the obligation of the return-gift of a response. Therefore, theologically, grace requires not only this initial gratuitousness on which everything else depends but also the graciousness of the whole circuit, and especially of the return-gift. This graciousness qualifies the return-gift as beyond-price, without calculation – in short, as a response of love. Even the return-gift of our human response thus belongs to the theologically Christian concept of “grace.”’ (109)

An overemphasis upon gratuitousness – of the priority and overwhelming dominance of God’s free gift – which Chauvet sees in certain forms of Augustianism and certain understandings of infant baptism, can be problematic as deprives the person of the response in which the otherness of the person to whom the gift is given can be affirmed. While some see in God’s grace in baptism to the infant who is incapable of response the purest expression of the character of grace, Chauvet cautions against this understanding, stressing that the wholeness of grace is inseparable from the return-gift that responds to it. In speaking of grace: ‘Rather than being represented as an object-value that one would “refine” through analogy, the “treasure” is really not separable from the symbolic labor by which the subject itself bears fruit by becoming a believer.’

The key points of this chapter are as follows. First, the truth of the subject, and of the believing subject, comes about only through mediation (and the sacraments are the ‘major symbolic expression’ of this). Second, because the subject can never get behind or beyond mediation, our truth as believing subjects is something that is always underway and never a completed process. Most importantly, it reveals that this truth is ‘a symbolic work whose process is nothing other than that of symbolic exchange or of verbal communication between subjects.’ It is here that we are to find the symbolic efficacy of the sacraments.

Symbol and Sacrament Posts: Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2:I, Chapter 3, Chapter 4:I, Chapter 4:II, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7

In the previous post in this series, I sketched Chauvet’s summary of Heidegger’s challenge to traditional metaphysical thinking. At this point, Chauvet turns from summarizing Heidegger to ask how exactly theology should relate to a Heideggerian perspective.

There should be no confusion on this one point: Heidegger’s ‘being’ is not God. Heidegger regarded philosophy and theology as radically distinct, and mixing the two (whether by forming a Christian philosophy, or by grounding theology in a philosophy) will compromise both (64). The God that such a perverse union created would be a diminished ‘provable’ deity, a ‘supreme value’ and ‘entity of entities’. For Heidegger:

[F]aith is unfaithful to faith when it thus flirts with philosophical ontology: “If I ever wrote a theology, something I am on occasion tempted to do, the expression ‘being’ should not appear there. Faith has no need of the thinking about being. When it does need it, it is no longer faith…” [I]t is “exclusively within the bounds of revelation” that the theologian should stay.

Appealing as Heidegger’s account may sound to many theologians, perhaps especially among those committed to Barthian neoorthodoxy, Chauvet demurs. As Paul Ricoeur asks, why does Heidegger focus on a poet such as Höderlin, rather than upon the Psalms, or the book of Jeremiah when thinking of the relationship to being and the sacred? Heidegger does not sufficiently recognize how distinct Hebraic thought is from Greek thought. Doesn’t such a division of faith from philosophy foster a sort of fideism, and perhaps even, under the guise of respecting faith’s distinct character, lock it into a ‘closed circularity’ (65)?

Chauvet believes that Heidegger’s approach to thinking about being ‘opens up a path for theology’, without necessarily baptizing Heideggerian philosophy in the process. Chauvet begins by asking whether the attitude of those who think about faith needs or ought to be very different from that of those who think of being. Theologians, like those who think being, are ‘not outside their work’, but ‘give witness to that in which they know themselves to be already held.’ Theology begins and proceeds, not by some scientific knowledge, but by openness to the realm of the relationships with God and others within the Church (66).

The Heideggerian might protest that the theologian believes in God from the outset, and thus, rather than truly questioning, he is merely going through the motions. Chauvet responds by asking whether the task of theology is concerned with strengthening some idea of ‘God’ – in which case we are back in the realm of onto-theology – or with relating to the incarnate Christ, in whom God’s self is revealed. It all hinges on what sort of God we are speaking of. In Christian theology, on account of the incarnation, the question of God is quite inextricable from the question of humanity.

Chauvet surveys the state of the hermeneutical theology of his day, and the manner in which it responded to the criticisms raised by Habermas, the structuralists, and more radically by post-structuralists such as Derrida. In the work of such as Ricoeur, for instance, there is a resistance both to the post-structural diffusion of meaning in the play of signs and to ‘romantic, psychologizing hermeneutics’, of which critics of hermeneutical theology should have a greater cognizance (67). Rather than seeking a pre-determined meaning behind the text, or thinking solely of that which emerges from the structure and mechanisms of the text, theological hermeneutics approaches the text as the ‘proposal of a world’, which we can inhabit and make our own. This proposal does not correspond directly either to the structure of the text, or the intention of its author.

Tempered by the critiques raised by structuralism and post-structuralism, theological hermeneutics can respect both the necessary mediation of the letter and the unsustainability of the traditional explication/comprehension dualism (68). Rather than nostalgically seeking for one fixed origin, meaning, or truth underlying the text in the manner of onto-theology, theology’s hermeneutical task involves, starting with the Scriptures, the production of ‘new texts, that is new practices which foster the emergence of a new world’ (69).

Chauvet challenges the common dichotomy between an invariable core of the faith and variable cultural expressions. He quotes Geffré to observe that Christian truth is located in a ‘continual advent exposed to the risks of history and of the Church’s interpretative freedom under the Spirit’s inspiration.’ The idea of some semantic invariability is complicit with an ‘instrumental and vehicular conception of language’. For Chauvet, the ‘hermeneutical circle’ does not exist in abstraction from time, but is the very circle of our historical, physical, and mortal lives, and it is the context of this that the question of God’s identity must be posed and answered.

Between Jews and Greeks

Drawing upon Stanislas Breton, Chauvet argues that the Christian Logos is neither Jewish nor Greek (70), satisfying neither approach to religious consciousness. ‘In the Word of the Cross two excesses thus coincide: “the ‘beyond’ of thought is also the ‘beyond’ of will and self-will.”’ The Apostle Paul thus marks ‘the ‘most real being’ of religions and philosophies with the sign of contradiction’ (71). The language of Christian discourse is characterized by a kenotic humility relative to its object.

The cross exercises a ‘critical function’ relative to our theological language. Although set forth in language, the cross continually strips back and exposes our language in weakness. From the beginning, Christianity had to speak Greek or Hebrew. The cross does not remove us from these languages, but frees us from imprisonment to their power.

Theology can never truly express the message of the cross, but it must ‘nevertheless begin its thinking with that message’ (73). The cross is an ‘empty place, [a] void somehow omnipresent,’ which always jolts theology backwards, ‘disenthralling’ it from itself and ‘reopening’ it.

The theological message can find no way to “say” itself outside of our being grasped by it. It is our corporality which has the responsibility of becoming the very place for this message (72).

The word of the cross cannot find expression in our minds unless it also finds expression in our lives and desires. As God exceeds all being, wisdom, and power, the coming of God’s truth among us involves a historical process of ‘becoming’, as God ‘solicits from us this body of world and humanity’ (73).

A Similarity of Attitudes

If this is the nature of the theological task, then we should be struck by its similarity in attitude to that by which we think about being. In both cases, we find ourselves already claimed by that which we seek to understand, and must engage in a transitive way, involving, not some object or wisdom detached from ourselves, but a ‘pro-duction of our own selves as subjects’ (74).

This amounts to the slow work of apprenticeship in the art of “un-mastery,” a permanent work of mourning where, free of resentment, a “serene” consent to the “presence of the absence” takes place within us little by little. In gospel terms, this is a work of conversion to the presence of the absence of a God who “crosses himself out” in the crushed humanity of this crucified One whom humans have reduced to less than nothing and yet where, in a paradoxical light, faith confesses the glory of God.

Heidegger places being under erasure – Being – trying to express the presence of absence in language. For Chauvet, the crossed-out, or crucified, God is not Being. Whereas Being represents the ‘non-entity’, God’s placing of himself under erasure at the cross represents the ‘non-other’, the one disfigured to the point of being a ‘non-face’. The order here is not that of ‘negative onto-theology’, but that of symbolism: God should be thought of ‘less in the metaphysical order of the Unknowable than in the symbolic and historical order of the unrecognizable.’ Our duty is to hold ourselves ‘in a mature proximity to absence’ (75).

While the content of theology and philosophy differ, they have an affinity of attitude and posture, and also find union in the integrity of the single subject who engages in both of them, ruling out any divorce of the two (76). Theology cannot be disconnected from the believing subject who engages in it, and who constantly finds himself questioned as he asks questions of God.

Theology and Psychoanalysis

As Heidegger argues, overcoming metaphysics involves a movement beyond the subject-object dichotomy: we cannot truly grasp anything without being ourselves grasped by it. The movement beyond this is clearly exhibited in many areas of our society’s thought, not least in the exact sciences, where the connection between observers and what they observe is ever more clearly recognized. This recognition is even more noticeable in the social sciences, but perhaps most powerfully in the context of psychoanalysis (77).

Psychoanalysis has a unique character. It cannot be reduced to a science-like theory, ‘without postulating the non-singularity of the singular individual’ in the therapy (78). On the other hand, even as it moves in the direction of philosophy, it cannot become speculative without losing sight of its object – the unconscious. Psychoanalysis ‘shows by its very history that it is struggling to give birth to philosophy’ (79), and continually overflows into it. However, psychoanalysis does not treat philosophical questions in a philosophical manner, but in its own form, seeking ‘to uncover the concrete psychological processes in which they are embodied’ (80).

It is the psychoanalytic ‘embodying’ of philosophical questions that makes it particularly interesting to Chauvet. Analytic discourse presses the truth of the ‘un-thought’ upon us to a radical degree, and makes us undergo ‘the presence of the question of being, as a question without solution.’

The distance and interrelation between philosophy’s ‘total truth’ and psychoanalysis’s ‘partial truth’ is of great importance, representing the ‘contradiction from which arises the human subject’ (81).

As a discourse that takes into consideration the human characteristic of being-body – its enfleshed signifiers, its “living words” (logoi embioi) – analytic discourse knits together concrete corporality with the philosophical questioning of humans as always unterwegs, always “on the way” toward the word that goes ahead of them. Against all metaphysical escapes, analytic discourse declares that the truth does not come to anyone except as his or her truth, that is, through the incessant labor of passage through mourning, deprivation, absence. But philosophy reminds analysis that the latter would be an imposture if each of us, in trying to fashion our own truth, did not at the same time respond to the truth which is always beckoning us (81-82).

If the crucified – crossed-out – God ensures that theological thought takes an analogical posture to that of thinking about being, psychoanalysis gives this form of thought ‘an anthropological density which embodies it in us.’

It is here that the connection with the sacraments becomes plain. We would like to believe that we can extricate ourselves from, and rise above the realm of the mediation of symbols, apprehending truth and God directly. However, for the theologian who wishes to engage with the crucified God, no such route is available. Rather the way of knowledge of such a God passes directly through us and works itself out in and through our bodies.

The embodiment of God has a scandalous historical reality in Jesus of Nazareth, but also in his body – the Church (83). The Church is most clearly manifested in the sacraments, which can scandalize us by their character, and their incongruity with human wisdom. Consequently, we are always tempted to domesticate them to reason or control, treating them, for instance, as means of the Church’s legitimatization and social control.

The sacraments thus force us to confront mediation – mediation, by way of the senses, of an institution, a formula, a gesture, a material thing – as the (eschatological) place of God’s advent. And so we find ourselves in the end sent back to the body as the point where God writes God’s self in us…

Symbol and Sacrament Posts: Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2:II, Chapter 3, Chapter 4:I, Chapter 4:II, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7

[I have split this chapter into two parts, as it is rather dense and philosophical, but worth spending time over.]

Having highlighted the problematic character of the metaphysical approach of Thomas and others to the sacraments in his first chapter, Chauvet proceeds to the question of whether an alternative approach is possible for us. Is our very language so infected with metaphysics that we cannot step out of its frame? In fact, we have to be very wary of the way that we pose our question, lest we simply adopt an inversion of the metaphysical theme, rather than a true alternative to it, shaped by a completely different theme. This requires attention not merely to the question that we ask but also to the way that we, as ‘questioning subjects’, constitute the ‘mode of questioning’ (47).

Being in Heidegger

Heidegger argues that the forgetting of ‘ontological difference’ (the difference between being and entities, something that should become clearer in the course of this post) should be understood ‘not as a failing but as an event.’ Metaphysics involves a form of revelation of being, yet a revelation of which it is ignorant. This metaphysical stage reaches its climax in technology, which establishes the dominance of man’s subjectivity (‘bringing nature to reason’), reducing being to a ‘reservoir of energy’ at humankind’s disposal, yet at the price of our oblivion to being. The history of metaphysics as an ‘Event’ ‘reveals the very essence of a human behavior that demands accounts, gives ultimatums, compels the real to adjust itself to human needs “from the perspective of what can be calculated”’ (48). This ‘Event’ is not the ‘result of human contrivance’, but is the destiny of being itself.

Given the character of metaphysics as an ‘event’ of being, it cannot just be laid aside in favour of something else, as it will always reappear in some other form. Metaphysics can only be overcome as we ‘reascend to the very source of its life’ and forgotten foundation – the ‘truth of Being’.

What is ‘being’? For Heidegger being is not an entity, nor is it like an entity. Being is not a genus. Being ‘is neither God nor a foundation for the world’. Being is that which is closest to us, yet simultaneously furthest away. Being cannot be contained, calculated, or defined. Like a gift, being ‘at once bestows and withholds itself’ (49).

Perhaps it might be worth taking a brief excursus at this point, to clarify some aspects of Heidegger’s understanding of being (Chauvet capitalizes ‘Being’ in his treatment of Heidegger’s thought, but I have chosen to employ the uncapitalized form throughout). For Heidegger, being should be distinguished from beings, and is not itself a being. This is what Heidegger means when he speaks of the ‘ontological difference’. Being is that to which the word ‘is’ refers, a reality of which we can have a meaningful understanding, without being able to articulate it in conceptual terms. If this ‘being’ keeps slipping through our fingers, this is only natural, for being is no ‘thing’. Rather being is known in the event of self-disclosure or ‘presencing’.

Being is known in and as a play of presence and absence. Every event of disclosure and arrival involves a simultaneous movement of veiling and retreat. What Heidegger means here could be illustrated by the manner in which the being of a silver chalice is revealed in the context of the celebration of the Eucharist. In this ‘presencing’ of the chalice there is also a veiling, as the aspect of the chalice as a work of artistic metalwork (or as an object with a peculiar historical significance or provenance) is veiled. Conversely, it is the artistic or historic character of the chalice that is disclosed as it is placed on a pedestal within a glass cabinet, while its Eucharistic function is veiled. No single form of presencing exhausts the being of the chalice. As one aspect is cast into relief, another is thrown into shadow.

Metaphysics loses sight of this play of being in presence and absence, light and shadow, asserting a solid presence and permanent foundation in its place. The being of the chalice is no longer encountered in a dance of arrival and retreat, but is regarded in terms of a pure presence. Being is treated as though it were a solidly present entity itself, a fixed substratum underlying all else, rather than as something that is open. Grasping the relationship and difference between the play of being and the existence of beings is crucial for understanding Heidegger’s thought.

Heidegger does not simplistically oppose metaphysics, but advocates a certain mode of living within the metaphysical tradition that ‘recalls’ it, while ‘thinking its unthought essence’ (51). To overcome metaphysics we must undergo a continual conversion, whereby we break with its habitual perspectives on being, and forego all attempts to reach an ultimate foundation, starting rather ‘from the uncomfortable non-place of a permanent questioning’ (53). This way of thinking is not merely a road that we furnish before ourselves, but is ‘inseparable from us’ (54). This ‘making of a way’ is a transitive action of self-transformation, an action that is never completed (as it relates itself to the forgotten ‘infinity’ of the event).

Language and Being

Humankind bears a unique relationship to being: the essence of humankind is ‘ec-static ex-sistence’. As an ‘ec-static breach’, humankind will always struggle to give account of itself in the metaphysical manner that it seeks to account for all else. Humankind’s relationship to being should be appreciated in terms of language: ‘Language is the house of Being where humans live and thereby ex-sist, belonging as they do to the truth of Being over which they keep watch’ (50). For Heidegger, language ‘speaks’ us as much as we speak it, and being operates through its mediation. ‘Humans conduct themselves as if they were the masters of language, while in fact it is language that governs them’ (55).

Being comes into presence through language. Words are not mere handles upon reality, or tools for our expression, but ‘summon’ being. Although our words have the instrumental purpose of designating reality in a manner that enables us to act upon it and manipulate it, there is a far more fundamental aspect to language, something which we commonly forget. This aspect is not merely held alongside the utilitarian purpose of language, but belongs to a completely ‘different level’ (56).

As human beings, we do not ‘possess language’, but are ‘possessed by it’ (57). We come into being in a universe that has always already been spoken into a ‘world’ (the meaning of the term ‘world’ was discussed in the previous post in this series). Only within the context of this ‘world’ can things truly ‘come-to-presence’.

The most basic form of language is the poem. Heidegger writes:

True poetry is not just a more elevated mode of everyday speech. On the contrary, it is everyday speech which is a forgotten poem, a poem exhausted by its overuse, whose summons is now barely audible.

It is in poetry that we hear the speech of being. True speaking is first of all listening: we can only speak to the extent that we listen (58). As things are summoned through language, they ‘come-to-presence’, yet this ‘coming-into-presence’ is always marked by absence. It is a ‘trace’, not a fetishizable and circumscribable presence. It cannot be grasped onto, as it melts away as soon as we seek to do so.

The Absence of God

In this context Heidegger speaks about the ‘absence of god’ (59). The god of traditional onto-theology, the First Cause and Supreme Entity, is quite different from the sacred and divine as it functions in Heidegger’s thought. In rejecting the God of the philosophers (adopted by much traditional Christian thought), atheists may in fact be ‘closer to the divine God’. Chauvet summarizes:

Against the invading objectification of things by representation, calculation, and planning, the poet is the one who reminds us of the Openness of being in which we must maintain ourselves; thereby the poet opens us to the Sacred, which is the space of the play of being and of the risk of openness, where the gods may come near to us. (60)

The poet is the one who maintains the posture of openness to being, not seeking to close the doors against its arrival and retreat, circumscribing a pure presence. For Heidegger the gratuitous character of being is to be preserved, involving a forgoing of our attempts at mastery, whether through explanation or calculation, one of the means of which is the god of onto-theology (61). In abandoning the god of onto-theology we come to experience the ‘present absence of the gods’ (62). However, ‘this absence is not nothing; it is the presence of the hidden plenitude of what … is.’ Heidegger sees this understanding of the divine within the Greeks, Hebrew prophets, and in Jesus.

The ‘absence’ is not a ‘deficiency’ of God, and should provide the starting point for our thinking. Our task is that of remaining ‘in a mature proximity to the absence’ of God, enduring the distress, without annihilating this absence in the theism of onto-theology, the atheism of the death of God, or indifferentism, which also seeks refuge from this distress.

This relates quite closely with some of the points made in my recent post on atheism and Christianity: the God that we meet in Scripture is encountered in a distressing presence of absence, eluding the measurement, objectification, control, circumscription, and certainty sought by onto-theology and by most forms of atheism.