The Challenge of the Past: Meister Eckhart, Reasoning and Contemporary Philosophy

Abstract

It is argued that a fundamental shift took place in the application of cognitive terminology in theological discourse between the pre-modern and modern periods. For Eckhart, the cognitive term (intellectus), which denotes how we know God, remains embedded in ordinary cognition and witnesses to the ‘miracle’ of true perception by our creaturely mind in God's world. This constitutes a ‘transformational’ model. In the Post-Kantian period, Jacobi separated ‘reason’ from ‘understanding’, allowing the emergence of a ‘transcendence’ model of the human mind in relation to God. In a modern debate between Marion and Derrida, Marion seeks to deploy ‘intuition’, a precise term in Husserlian phenomenology, to refer not only to knowledge of things but also to knowledge of the ‘divine excess’ in things. But he has to generate a rhetorical language of cognition, through exploiting possible theological associations of the term. With Derrida, we probe the legitimacy of this.