Onto-theological Tradition Research Articles

Nomad Thought: Using Gregory of Nyssa and Deleuze and Guattari to Deterritorialize Mysticism

This article compares the mysticism of 4th-century Church Father Gregory of Nyssa to the nomadology of 20th century philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. In their book A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari returned to the figure of the nomad in order to free multiplicities from the “despotic unity” of modern Enlightenment thought. Though Deleuze and Guattari compare this nomadology to spiritual journeys, they claim that their nomad, unlike the mystic, resists a center, a homecoming, a destination. Yet Gregory of Nyssa, writing before the Church itself became a hegemonic power that would confine truth to a single reified code, described the Christian as a wandering nomad, for whom the path itself is the goal. Contrary to the static vision that would be developed in the onto-theological tradition that would lead Western metaphysics to interpret mysticism as the private experience of union with the divine, Gregory of Nyssa proposes a communal movement “from beginning to beginning” with no end, and no union in sight. By placing the postmodern secular nomad alongside the premodern Christian nomad, this article will draw on similarities between the two in order to accentuate the contemporary relevance of Gregory of Nyssa’s vision of mysticism.

Beyond Onto-theology and Metaphysics: the Cases of Heidegger and Nietzsche

AbstractTwo recent works will be considered that discuss Heidegger and Nietzsche in the context of the problem of overcoming metaphysics and the onto-theological tradition. A common criticism will be that these works in their attempt to retrieve a conception of religion, politics or faith beyond onto-theology and metaphysics tend to justify or idealize particular historically and culturally conditioned perspectives, which are not immune from further philosophical critique. Simon Oliai’s approach to countering the burgeoning fundamentalisms in our global age is ultimately not very convincing, representing as it does, a Western, liberal, Eurocentric worldview. The author’s use of Nietzsche or Heidegger for this purpose is also not very compelling. The remainder of this review essay appraises the volume edited by Cimino and van der Heiden, which attempts to rethink faith beyond onto-theology in several interesting ways. Although meant to be a comparative study, several contributions subscribe to a general Heideggerian (or Heidegger-inspired phenomenological-hermeneutical) theoretical framework, which itself is not rigorously scrutinized. A problematic implication is that Nietzsche’s own critical and constructive views of philosophy, his critique of religion and history, and his positive appraisal of faith and divinity are not seriously considered on their own terms: they are either mostly ignored, or they are selectively interpreted through a Heideggerian lens, with the result that this volume puts forward a mostly unfavorable view of Nietzsche. Some of the conceptual moves credited to Heidegger in the volume have their equivalents in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which a comparative and evaluative study such as this one must seriously take into account by resisting the uncritical acceptance of Heidegger’s own view of Nietzsche.

Dazzle and the origins of drawing

The subject of the study is the problem of drawing in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and, in particular, the so-called "blindness hypothesis", which Derrida expresses in the work "Memoirs of a blind man: self-portrait and other ruins": "drawing ... and the drawing operation must have some relation to blindness." Derrida explores this well—established ontotheological tradition of classical metaphysics: blinding here becomes a necessary sacrificial act, a condition that makes possible the transition from the physical eye to the spiritual, so Derrida describes it as a "sacrificial" economy, which is inevitably followed by an artist, each drawing of which turns out to be a prophecy of a blind man, indicating the horizons of the future.  Explicating Derrida's hypothesis, we turn not only directly to the text of the "Memoirs of a Blind Man" and the documentary narrative film that accompanied it, but also strive to reconstruct the exhibition of the same name held at the Louvre in 1990, which was also curated by Derrida. The comparison of these three layers made it possible to more fully reveal the "blindness hypothesis" and fit it into a more general philosophical context of deconstruction, as well as to rethink the problems of figurative drawing, its mimetic and representative nature. We come to the conclusion that the essence of the drawing has nothing to do with the visible, and its source lies entirely at the level of memory.

El silencio del ser y la interpelación del agape: Martin Heidegger y Jean-Luc Marion

This article aims to point out an overview of both the critique to metaphysical and onto-theological tradition conducted by Martin Heidegger, and the distanc...

Descartes et le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française

I will analyse Descartes? role in the ?theological turn? of French phenomenology. Although in Husserl?s phenomenology the Cartesian cogito was the central element, in the phenomenologists of the ?theological turn? (Janicaud) it was exchanged for the idea of the infinite. I examine why Marion and L?vinas are interested in the Cartesian idea of the infinite. In the phenomenology of Marion this idea is interpreted as a ?conceptual icon? and a ?saturated phenomenon? ,in the phenomenology of L?vinas this idea represents the structure that provides the possibility of the phenomenological description of transcendence. In order to see if Marion and L?vinas turn back to the onto-theological tradition of the metaphysics, like Janicaud affirms, we have to see how Descartes describes 31 the idea of infinite and how Marion and L?vinas interpret it.

A questão onto-teológica em Heidegger

O texto tem a finalidade de apresentar, a partir de uma análise exploratória, a questão onto-teológica em Heidegger, fruto das discussões feitas pelo filósofo em algumas conferências realizadas na década de 50. Nesta perspectiva, é abordada a discussão entre Heidegger e Hegel, acerca do objeto do pensamento e, por conseguinte, um possível diálogo entre suas argumentações teóricas; a origem onto-teológica na tradição e sua perspectiva de unidade; e a discussão sobre a essência do fundamento. Em suma, esta análise apresenta as vias argumentativas de Heidegger na tentativa de fundamentar uma nova filosofia capaz de pensar o ser das coisas, na sua diferença e constituição.

The Magic Center: Matrix and Conception in Derrida's La structure, le signe et le jeu

The Magic CenterMatrix and Conception in Derrida's La structure, le signe et le jeu John W P Phillips (bio) Le centre n’est pas le centre (Jacques Derrida)1 “Structure, Sign and Play” plays a transitional role in Jacques Derrida’s career, not only introducing him to the notoriety of an ambivalent Anglo-American reception, but also mobilizing the role of transition in the philosophical oeuvre, alerting an academic community to powerful resources for epistemological, ethical and political engagement inherent but not always acknowledged as such in Western thought. In “Structure” the situation is staged by its posing a series of paradoxical formulations involving the dissolution of false alternatives—structure and event, signifier and signified, culture and nature, science and myth, etc.— culminating in the opposition of two interpretations of interpretation, two kinds of play, and looking forward to the coming birth of a monstrous form. This movement of “de-construction” follows a cyclic and interminable pattern, a syntax that each time generates concepts (elemental or atomic units of signification) on the basis of either the positive determination of being as presence, or of its negative in the determination of an absence that generates infinite substitutions. Derrida’s text inhabits these discourses of destruction as their often obscure trace, enough to allow to emerge an alternative syntax, that of the trace itself. The trace, the division into a “before” and “after” that divides the element a priori, forms the basis—a theoretical quasi-matrix that has continued to flourish for more than forty years—for the production of supposedly incalculable events. In this article I propose a sober analysis of the matrix and its trace. 1966: Deconstruction and Deconstruction Eh Sade, encore an effort! Car il y a déconstruction et déconstruction. (Derrida: 2000, 74)2 The structure of the sign (signifier/signified), in repetition of the structure of the logos (word/idea), condenses in a single unit a complex network of metaphysical problems. Structuralist investigations into the sign, which intend to expose the syntactical rules that govern its generation, promise to explicate a medium for profound critique of philosophical, literary and scientific domains. Pivotal moments of the onto-theological tradition can be reconsidered as versions (each time differing immensely in other ways) of the distinction between sensible image and invisible sense: all symbolize the search for truth in the self-presence of signified sense.3 Against this, attacks on metaphysics throughout its history, by sophists, skeptics and empiricists, and more recently the deconstructive movements of Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and others, are concerned to show that the ideal univocity of the signified is a myth, and that all signified meaning must emerge originally from the opaque and enigmatic domain of the signifier. Two problems emerge: first, the sign in its bivalent structure does not in fact allow anybody to bring about the downfall of metaphysics, because at best it can only repeat the previous structure; so second, the work of rereading traditional texts is required to mobilize old resources in this new light. Metaphysics, if it does indeed operate within and around the same structure as that of the sign, might already be more sophisticated in its investigations than either structuralist science or poststructuralist play has yet been able to comprehend. Derrida’s work of the time can be read today as the culmination of the development of a subtle yet serious form of disagreement in relation to contemporary thought. As things stand the relation to truth has become a relation to interpretation, in which the problem of knowledge emerges as a problem of the limits of language, which itself can be comprehended in one of two possible ways: under the sign of the signified and animated by a truth function, a platitude that makes possible events of correspondence; or under the sign of the signifier, in which there is no truth but the relation to other signifiers and the endless possibility of their substitution and mutation. At its most radical “there is no truth” means a complete redefinition of truth so that, for truth as correspondence, or adequatio, we now substitute truth as unconcealing, or alētheia, a kind of concealment in which an originating uncovering...

The Future of Religion (review)

Reviewed by: The Future of Religion Mark Wood The Future of Religion. By Richard RortyGianni Vattimo. Edited by Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 91 pp. In The Future of Religion, Santiago Zabala, Richard Rorty, and Gianni Vattimo provide contrasting and often complementary reflections on the future of religion after the end of metaphysics. They join a growing number of contemporary theologians, philosophers, and cultural critics who recognize that we are presently undergoing [End Page 162] what may well prove to be the most significant turning point in the history of religious experience, a movement beyond the separatism resulting from absolutist and exclusionary religious claims. In addition to post-Enlightenment critiques of religion, the constitutional separation of church and state, and the retreat of religion resulting from, in Darwin’s words, “the gradual illumination of men’s minds” by advances in science, globalization’s world-transforming integration of individuals from diverse religious backgrounds into communities of shared interest and concern are further weakening the confidence with which any particular religious tradition may claim to possess absolute truth and, even more, fostering transreligious conversation and the formation of a postmetaphysical spiritual culture. The future of religion, writes Vattimo in Vero e falso Universalismo cristiano, lies not in “seeking the triumph of one faith over the others.” Rather we must “rediscover—after the ‘metaphysical’ age of absolutisms and of the identity between truth and authority—the possibility of a postmodern religious experience in which the relation with the divine is no longer corrupted by fear, violence, and superstition” (p. 26). We know all to well the horrific costs of failing to accomplish this goal, and today the union of religious absolutisms and weapons of mass destruction make our failure potentially catastrophic. In his introduction, “A Religion without Theists or Atheists,” Zabala notes that Rorty and Vattimo present a way of thinking beyond the ontotheological tradition that “consists of weakening and dissolving the ancient European concept of ‘Being’ and the very idea of ‘ontological status.’ This new, weak way of thought not only opens up alternative directions, it also recovers tradition: the relationship between the believer and God is not conceived as power-laden but as a gentler relationship, in which God hands over all his power to man” (p. 3). In the “Age of Interpretation” neither science, nor philosophy, nor religion enjoys epistemological or ontological authority over the other. The resulting “Gadamerian culture of dialogue,” which understands that “all positions are equally ‘valid’ because ‘of the lack of confidence in truth’ constitutes the greatest success obtained by the deconstruction of metaphysics” (p. 11). After metaphysics, “postmodern man, no longer needful of the extreme, magical reassurance supplied by the idea of God, accepts the probably that history is not on his side at all and that there is no power capable of guaranteeing him the happiness he seeks” (ibid.). Living without metaphysical foundations means affirming our ontological historicity, epistemological insecurity, and existential finitude. Rather than “search for truth,” says Zabala, we now “seek solidarity, charity, and irony” (pp. 17–18). In “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” Rorty articulates the historical movement to postmetaphysical thinking as one in which “philosophy professors began to stop asking “bad questions—questions like ‘What really exists?’ ‘What are the scope and limits of human knowledge?’ and ‘How does language hook up with reality?’” and began to focus on questions regarding how we can best practice solidarity, charity, and love (p. 29). Rorty’s description of our situation leads him to confess that his earlier self-identification as an atheist was philosophically mistaken. To deny the existence of God assumes one has evidence in support of this claim. But evidence against is equally empirically unavailable as is evidence for the existence of God. President [End Page 163] Bush, Rorty adds, is at least right about this much when he says that “‘atheism is a faith’ because it is ‘subject to neither confirmation nor refutation by means of argument or evidence’” (p. 33). The shift from atheism to anticlericalism is a shift from a metaphysical to a political stance, signifying Rorty’s commitment to challenging antidemocratic structures of power that legitimate their existence by claiming they have been ordained by...

Essence Today

The concept of is thought by many political theorists be a residue of the patriarchal onto-theological tradition of metaphysics that needs be (or has been) overcome by more progressive aims. The purpose of this essay is examine the concept of essentialism in light of the treatment of the concept of in Hegel's Science of Logic, and within the context of recent issues in critical race theory and feminism. I will argue that the role of an underlying appearance is a valuable one within a Hegelian framework, and that it is politically important reassess it. There are reasons that we should want uphold the distinction between and an inessential appearance. We should want uphold the irreducibility of the Hegelian selfdetermining concept, and I argue here that there is a basis for doing so in Hegel's own text. Despite the well established impossibility of claiming that there is a property or set of properties that all women share, dissolve as an illusory side-effect of the show of appearance is both misunderstand essence, and relinquish a tool needed in the struggle for justice. I will begin, after laying out some of the contemporary context regarding essentialism in and critical race theory, by examining the Hegelian idea of what is entailed in the idea of a thing with properties, an as a compilation of properties. I will demonstrate that it transforms itself through the very logic of the concept of a compilation of properties into the idea of a thing as a compilation of relations rather than properties. I will then demonstrate through some concrete examples from critical race theory and that it sometimes works in the interest of those with anti-racist and feminist progressive aims conceive of essence as an identity which can be distinguished from and is irreducible the identity's constitution by these relations when the relations are conceived as social and economic relations. I will conclude by demonstrating that the logic of in Hegel's Science of Logic may ultimately show that that the Hegelian self-determining concept subsumes into a self-producing, self-determining substance, but that it also shows that is expelled by the very same process which seeks incorporate it into complete self-determination. Essence can be used as a tool question the valuation of appearance on the basis of economic and social exchange because it resists incorporation into the concept. Two related arguments against essentialist concepts have arisen from recent discourses on critical race theory and feminism. First, antiessentialists have argued that any representation of a natural pertaining to, for example, womanhood, will necessarily exclude those who do not see themselves in that representation. More generally, no universal definition can do justice the diversity of actual women. For example, in her 1981 feminist classic, Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, bell hooks argues that feminism tends reflect only the concerns of white middle class women the exclusion of black women. One example that hooks cites is the view held by white middle class feminists that access work for pay was the key liberation, hooks argues that this view refuses to acknowledge the reality that, for masses of American working class women, working for pay neither liberated them from sexist oppression nor allowed them gain any measure of economic independence.' From the perspective of poor working class women, working for pay was a commonplace feature of the oppressive capitalist and patriarchal world in which they must struggle survive economically, and not at all the key liberation. The second central argument against essentialist concepts has been that universal claims about women identify them as a natural kind in ways that are often not their political advantage. One clear example of this is that sex discrimination in hiring was defended by invoking its consistency with natural difference. …

THE ESCHATOLOGICAL THEOGONY OF THE GOD WHO MAY BE: EXPLORING THE CONCEPT OF DIVINE PRESENCE IN KEARNEY, HEGEL, AND HEIDEGGER

Abstract: While heightening the nihilistic tension underlying the discourse of Richard Kearney, I highlight the positive contribution his book The God Who May Be makes to the debate concerning the need for a postmodern revitalization of religious symbolism. I argue for three qualifications of Kearney's argument, suggesting, in response to Kearney's exclusionary approach to the God who “neither is nor is not but may be,” a God whose possibility for meaningfulness arises as an “eschatological theogony” from out of the chaos (confusion and openness) of contemporary religious symbolism. Arguing that such a radical reenvisioning of God must be tempered and given meaning through reentering and reaffirming onto-theology in a qualified (hermeneutical) sense, I sketch a possible renewal of meaning for the traditional Christian parousia-concept as a hermeneutical circle between Hegel's systematic closure of Western metaphysics and Heidegger's deconstructive appropriation of the hidden possibilities of presence within the onto-theological tradition.

Inspired Metaphysics? Gustav Siewerth’s Hermeneutic Reading of the Onto-Theological Tradition by Andrzej Wiercinski

332 BOOK REVIEWS goodness at which it aims, in what sense is the foundation of morality anything but "arbitrary"? (Surely, even the pure formality of the Categorical Imperative must be seen as desirable in some sense in order to have any binding force.) Along the same lines, one can ask how what Veto refers to as the sui generis intelligibility of the will differs from irrationality. In short, there would be many grounds for raising concerns about the twofold dissociation that Veto takes at the outset to be an ideal, and his treatment provokes such questions without providing answers. Whether or not one is willing to accept this ideal, there is a great deal to be learned from Veto's book. Among other things, the notion of will that governs his analyses sets into relief an unusual constellation of figures in intellectual history, introduces surprising affinities, and shows the philosophical significance of figures normally left out of philosophical discussions. His suggestion, for example, that the structure of the mystical experience of John of the Cross anticipates in decisive ways Husserl's phenomenological reduction (91, 93, 103) is excellent, and the insights he draws from Puritan theology offer a newsolution to an old philosophical problem. Even a reader more inclined to espouse a classical understanding the will in relation to the intellect and natural desire will find the story stimulating and provocative, and certainly anyone interested in the history of ideas will find this an exceedingly rich and illuminating book. Villanova University Villanova, Pennsylvania D. C. SCHINDLER Inspired Metaphysics? Gustav Siewerth's Hermeneutic Reading of the Onto-Theological Tradition. By ANDRZEJ WIERCINSKI. Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003. Pp. 214. ISBN 0-9525333-3-2. Andrzej Wiercinski has written the first English monograph on Gustav Siewerth (1903-63), the twentieth-century German thinker whom Hans Urs von Balthasar regarded as the greatest philosopher of the contemporary age. In numerous major works, in which he negotiates a precarious synthesis of Hegel, Heidegger, and Aquinas, Siewerth constructs some of the most original speculative philosophy of the contemporary period. Yet notwithstanding a significant readership in Germany, Siewerth remains largely unknown in North America. Wiercinski's book, Inspired Metaphysics? Gustav Siewerth's Hermeneutic Readingofthe Onto-TheologicalTradition, represents the culmination of twenty years of work on Siewerth. Wiercinski presents Siewerth as an example of the BOOK REVIEWS 333 hermeneutic vitality of Thomism. Criticized for his speculative departures from the texts of Aquinas, Siewerth in his relationship to Aquinas has methodologically much in common with Bernard Lonergan, Max Miiller, Johann Baptist Lotz, and to a lesser extent, Joseph Man~chal and the young Karl Rahner. With these thinkers, Siewerth regards the dialogue with modernity as the essentialtask for Thomism. Yet Siewerth is critical of Thomist appropriations of Kant, as Wiercinski points out in his well-researched chapter "The Transcendental Turn in the Thomist Revival." Siewerth's emphasis on the irreducibility of being, the act of existence (esse) grasped by the intellect as a pure positivity, aligns him with Gilson and the existential Thomists and distances him from the "transcendental Thomists." Siewerth however does not engage in the close textual analysis characteristic of the Gilson school. He retains from his years studying under Martin Heidegger in the 1930sthe method of directly engagingthe matter ofthe text (die Sache), even if this requires rethinking it in new terms. While Wiercinski appears to distance himself from Siewerth (hence the question mark in the title), the central contribution of this volume is not Wiercinski's critique but his thorough exposition of Siewerth's ontology, accompanied by numerous translated quotations from Siewerth's works. After setting the stage by introducing the idea of "hermeneutic reading" ("the situation ofthe interpretation, ofthe appropriation ofthe past in understanding, is always the situation of the living present," Wiercinski writes, "the text has something to say to me, something which requires my attentive response"), Wiercinski deftly guides us through Siewerth's extremely difficult speculative ontology. He argues that Siewerth cannot be understood without a knowledge of the history of medieval philosophy, German idealism, and Heidegger, and carefully illustrates the significance ofeach ofthese. Particularly helpful is the examination of Siewerth's understanding of the relationship of Scotus's metaphysics to...