Secularizing Kenosis

Abstract

Secularizing Kenosis: Review of Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition: Perspectivism, Intersubjectivity, and Recognition, by Paolo Diego BubbioPaolo Diego Bubbio, Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition: Perspectivism, Intersubjectivity, and Recognition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014)The idea at the heart of Paolo Diego Bubbio's new book is a provocative and unusual one. It is that the Kantian transcendental turn, which foreclosed the possibility of achieving an understanding of things as they are 'in themselves,' had an intrinsically ethical or religious dimension, one best captured or symbolized by the Christian notion of kenotic sacrifice. Just as Christ was willing to renounce divinity in order make room in himself for human finitude, Bubbio reads the transcendental turn as enjoining us to give up our attempt to understand things as they are in themselves (thus rejecting the God's eye view of traditional metaphysics) in order to make room for the perspectives of others. Bubbio claims not only that this is a fruitful way to think about the Kantian revolution, but also that the notion of kenotic sacrifice played an important and explicit role in the writings of several major figures in the post-Kantian tradition: particularly, Solger, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. These thinkers, he claims, employed the concept of sacrifice as a way of coming to grips with the basic structure and significance of Kant's revolution. Bubbio shows that their reflections thus constitute a remarkable and unappreciated tradition of meditation on the nature of sacrifice-one that can allow us to see the deficiencies of more recent redeployments of the concept that we find in thinkers like Bataille, Derrida and Girard.As all of this suggests, Bubbio takes Kant's decision to reject traditional metaphysics, with its attempt to understand objects as they are in themselves, in favor of a revisionary conception of metaphysics in which reason is concerned only with itself or with its own products, as the most important event in modern philosophy. Although Bubbio clearly thinks Kant's revolution was quite justified, he thinks it left Kant and his successors with some unfinished business. The biggest remaining issue was to understand the source of the authority of the norms that reason supposedly imposes on itself. Bubbio shows that their reflections on this problem were often clothed in religious language, though the God that was invoked in these contexts was more a symbol for the kind of knowledge we should aspire to than a theological reality. We see the first instance of this kind of use of the notion of God in Kant's suggestion that we should understand the authority of practical norms by treating them as if they were issued by God himself. The Post-Kantians, who came to think that the authority was rooted in the self or in society, developed a modified conception of God. They conceive God as necessarily renouncing his transcendence or otherness or in order to become immanent in human consciousness or in social reality. Although Bubbio does not put it in just this way, Nietzsche's parable of the madman marks the clear endpoint of these quasi-theological reflections. With his announcement of the death of God, Nietzsche enjoins us to stop looking for some suitably post-Kantian equivalent of the God's eye view, encouraging us instead to fully embrace a conception of knowledge that is thoroughly and utterly perspectival. Despite the deep differences between these thinkers, Bubbio shows that in each case we can detect the basic structure of kenotic sacrifice: we are asked to give something up (an overly transcendent conception of knowledge or value) in order to make room for something else (a finite, properly human one).In Kant, however, these sacrificial themes are mostly implicit. Bubbio notes that the notion of sacrifice does not play any explicit role in Kant's theoretical philosophy, and plays only a minor role in Kant's practical philosophy, as when Kant speaks of sacrificing desire for duty. …