The Onto-Theo-Logical Nature of Anselm's Metaphysics

Abstract

In a recent article, Jean-Luc Marion has attempted to distinguish Anselm's famous Proslogion argument from what will later come to be called the proof.1 According to the historical genealogy that he provides, Anselm is not only exempt from having given an argument, but from the entire tradition. As Marion puts the question: Does Anselm's argument appear, without any reservation or exception, in the realm of the question of Being, i.e., is it within the limits of the history of metaphysics (understood according to the suggested by Heidegger)? Or, on the contrary, was the original argument capable of succeeding without any appeal to ontology as it is defined by metaphysics-that is, outside the horizon of Being? (202) The implicit identification of the question of Being with the history of metaphysics does not suggest a particularly precise understanding of the Heideggerian position. Not only is metaphysics, for Heidegger, merely a phase in the history of being, but the nature of metaphysics is not simply but onto-theo-logical. In what follows, I would like to apply the full pressure of this Heideggerian acceptation to Anselm and his famous argument, extending my analysis to all three aspects of the question of metaphysics as Heidegger has, in fact, raised it. Since Marion concentrates on the issue, I will begin by evaluating this aspect of his account of Anselm. I want finally, however, to ask not only whether the Proslogion argument operates on the basis of the category of being, but whether it obscures the difference between being and beings in presuming to demonstrate a highest being, and whether it does so logically, that is, as a result of thinking, as Anselm himself would say, sola ratione.2 Before proceeding with the question of whether Anselm's argument is Marion must first determine what ontological means. After a detailed discussion of later arguments, he arrives at the decisive determination: If the argument proposed by Anselm deserves to be called ontological, it has to fulfill the two requirements set by its later metaphysical interpretation, viz., (i) to reach existence through a concept of God's essence; (ii) to interpret this essence as Being as such, universal and without restriction. (207) In answer to (i), the claim will be that Anselm does not offer an argument because he does not start with a concept of God, least of all of his essence. In response to (ii), Marion will insist that in the Proslogion God's essence is not thought in terms of being, but in light of a good that exceeds all understanding. Not only, then, does the argument of P 2 begin from the syntagm (as Marion calls it) something than which nothing greater can be thought, but this nonconcept leads to the conclusion in P IS that God is greater than can be thought in so far as he dwells in inaccessible light. In fact, for Marion, Anselm's argument relies on the impossibility of entertaining a concept of God, or, more precisely, on the possibility of the human mind experiencing the limits of its own power of conception: As long as our thought can still think in concepts, no God appears; God appears only as soon as thought cannot go further; God begins exactly where and when the concept stops short. The fascination raised straightaway by the non-ontological argument of Anselm-not withstanding any question about its validity-comes clearly from this genuinely critical aspect. In fact, the syntagm id quo maius cogitari nequit claims neither to define God by a concept, even in a negative way, nor to give access to any transcendental item of being. It only indicates the limits felt by all possible efforts towards any conception of God, i.e., all efforts to think beyond the limits of our power of thinking. This syntagm deals more with our finitude than with the conception of God. …