Boundless care: Lacoste’s liturgical being refigured through Heidegger’s Sorge

ABSTRACT

Taking Jean-Yves Lacoste’s account of liturgy as a point of departure, this essay examines Lacoste’s view of care. Lacoste thinks that care is bracketed or suspended in liturgy. To make this point, Lacoste discusses Martin Heidegger’s notions of world and care. However, Lacoste fails to make adequate distinctions between Heidegger’s notions of care (Sorge) and concern (Besorgen). The crux of this essay is my explanation of the significance that the difference between care and concern makes for our understanding of the meaning of liturgical practices and their pertinence to our worldly lives. I point out the kinds of philosophical ideas that Lacoste inherits from Heidegger and then I explain where Lacoste and Heidegger part ways and why Lacoste lacks sufficient conceptual grounds for his rejection of care as an element of liturgy.

KEYWORDS:

• Absolute
• care
• concern
• dwelling
• liturgy
• mastery

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 22.

2 Sophocles, Antigone, 332–83.

3 Lacoste, From Theology to Theological Thinking, 9.

4 Ibid.

5 See Being and Time section 60. Unless stated otherwise, all references are to the pagination of the German text as referenced in the Macquarrie and Robinson translation of Heidegger (2005). Where the English translation differs from Macquarrie and Robinson, it is by the author.

6 Lacoste, From Theology to Theological Thinking, 18.

7 See note 1 above.

8 Heidegger, Being and Time, 57.

9 ibid.

10 Dunn, Finding Grace with God, 22.

11 ibid.

12 On Fürsorge, see Heidegger, Being and Time, section 26, especially pages 120–21. On Besorgen, see sections 12 (pages 55–57) and 26, page 121.

13 See note 8 above.

14 Ibid.

15 Heidegger, Being and Time, 301. The passage in which Heidegger describes authenticity of care reads: “Die Entschlossenheit aber ist nur die in der Sorge gesorgte und als Sorge mögliche Eigentlichkeit dieser selbst” (301). It can be rendered as: “Resoluteness is the only thing that is being cared for in care and, as care, it is the possible authenticity of care itself.”

16 Lacoste, Experience and Absolute, 49.

17 Heidegger, Being and Time, 298.

18 Ibid. The German text reads, “Entschlossenheit … als eigentliche Erschlossenheit nichts anderes als das In-der-Welt-sein eigentlich ist.”

19 Stephanie Rumpza, in her article on “The Ascesis of Ascesis,” argues that liturgy opens us unto the care of God. In her discussion of asceticism, Rumpza draws a parallel between the redirection of desire, will, concernful engagement with the world, and the work of liturgy. I disagree with Rumpza’s contention that care is subverted in liturgy. Like Lacoste’s, Rumpza’s analysis would benefit from drawing a more rigorous distinction between Besorgen and Sorge. However, Rumpza’s examples and treatment of asceticism are illuminating and help situate Lacoste’s own take on various ascetic figures.

20 Lacoste, Experience and Absolute, 157. Lacoste’s (1994) original formulation in Experience et Absolu reads: “la liturgie est manifestatrice du propre de l’homme” (189).

21 Lacoste, Experience and Absolute, 197.

22 Ibid., 22.

23 Ibid., 83.

24 Ibid., 82. Lacoste’s French text reads: “L’essence du souci est l’avance perpétuelle que le moi prend sur sur luimême” (100).

25 Lacoste, Experience and Absolute, 63.

26 Ibid., 58.

27 Ibid., 82.

28 Lacoste thinks that what one, as futurally pivoted, really wants to master is the coming of death (Experience and Absolute, 82) which, when it comes, extinguishes the possibility of having a future. Mastery over death is impossible. Yet, it is one’s own death that orients one toward the primacy of the future. Lacoste puts forth a suggestion that since death cannot be defied, it is care – anxious care for one’s future – that ought to be suspended. Lacoste calls Heidegger’s analytic of death that presents death as not contributing to a loss of the self in one’s futural running ahead of oneself an “existential conjuring trick” (82). But seeing death, care, and future in a manner that would not render man incapable of a worldly liturgical being is not so much a philosophic prestidigitation, as a phenomenal transformation; not a sleight of hand, but a change in the directionality, plane, and field of relational understanding. Indeed, death can be seen in a way which would disallow facing it; which would propel one to conceal its coming (Heidegger, Being and Time, 254). Such seeing of death, however, is not care for death, but a concern with mortality; with dying. Contrarily, a genuine care for death does not jettison one into a fretful concern over the future. Instead, care for death is a “freedom towards death” (265). It is decisive, for deciding the outcome of Lacoste’s argument with Heidegger, that in Heidegger’s terms, the freedom one gains is not from death, but towards it. Death can be right now – that is the import of the reorientation in the movement – from flight to the approximation. When one is fretful and wants to forestall death – to be free from it – indeed, one’s seeing into the future becomes problematic, because it is not future, which guides one, but a confused view of one’s own relationship to it. When death is let be, one is free to take up the notion that if one lives, one lives in death’s shadow. Mastery of death is as fruitful an enterprise as mastery of one’s own shadow – all that one can attempt to master is the self; not death, not the future, not the present. When it is seen clearly that there is a mode of futural caring, which lets the future and death be, one is freed to be toward the future and toward death, instead of being confusedly and anxiously lost in the present, which is dominated by the incorrect conception of the future and of one’s death.

29 Heidegger, Being and Time, 57. Heidegger’s (2006) German text states: “Auf dem Grunde dieser Seinsart zur Welt, die das inner weltlich begegnende Seiende nur noch in seinem puren Aussehen (εἶδος) begegnen läßt, und als Modus dieser Seinsart ist ein aus-drückliches Hinsehen auf das so Begegnende möglich” (61).

30 See note 8 above.

31 Heidegger, Being and Time, 194.

32 Ibid., 61.

33 Ibid.

34 Lacoste, Experience and Absolute, 19. The French terms for ‘dwelling’ that appear in Lacoste’s description, here, are ‘demeure’ and ‘habitant.’

35 Heidegger, Being and Time, 61. “In sogeartetem »Aufenthalt« – als dem Sichenthalten von jeglicher Hantierung und Nutzung – vollzieht sich das Vernehmen des Vorhandenen” (61).

36 Lacoste, Experience and Absolute, 83.

37 Gschwandtner, “The Virgil as Exemplary Liturgical Experience,” 650.

38 Ibid.

39 Heidegger, Being and Time, 270.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., 298.

42 Lacoste, Experience and Absolute, 46.

43 Heidegger, Being and Time, 186.

44 Lacoste, Experience and Absolute, 152.

45 Honig, Antigone Interrupted, 7. See, also, Honig’s introduction (1–10), where she gives succinct and helpful accounts of the history of commentary on the play.

46 Stocking, The Ruin of Song, 73. See, also, Paul Vanden Berghe’s “The Tragic is Always the Tragic,” 181–96 for a nuanced take on the dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity in modern treatments of the play Locus of Tragedy.

47 Ibid.

48 Benardete, The Argument of the Action, 102.

49 Stocking, The Ruin of Song, 73.

50 Seenote 46 above.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 I am referring to Laius’ abduction and rape of Chrysippus, Pelops’ son. This act is, undoubtedly, enough to hold Laius in contempt of the guest–friendship (xenia) custom as well as of Zeus, who was the god of xenia. Pelops, the father of accursed Thyestes and Atreus, himself has a violent history. He was killed by Tantalus who, being Pelops’ father, tried feeding the dead boy to the gods. Pelops is later restored to life by Zeus. Pelops’ physical loss was but a shoulder, which was eaten by a distressed Demeter. Pelops is given an ivory shoulder replacement by Zeus (Zimmerman, Dictionary of Classical Mythology, 197). Note that Labdacids (Laius was Labdacus’ son) descend from Cadmus and Harmonia. See Roberto Calasso’s description of Hephaestus’ punishment of Aphrodite’s erotic passion for Ares and the repercussions thereof for the descendants of Harmonia.

54 This is my translation of the line 454–5, ἄγραπτα κἀσφαλῆ θεῶν νόμιμα, of the ancient Greek text of Sophocles, Antigone, 348.

55 ibid.

56 See Heidegger’s “The Restriction of Being” in the Introduction to Metaphysics.

57 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 168.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 Heidegger, Being and Time, 301.

62 Lacoste, Experience and Absolute, 153. Lacoste is careful to specify that ‘in positing liturgy as being fundamentally determined by nonexperiential dimension, we do not, of course, preclude the idea that the Absolute can enter into the field of experience’ (48). Nonetheless, Lacoste insists that in order for us to differentiate between liturgy and worldly life, we must consent to ‘not silencing inexperience’ (49). Lacoste must mean, then, that this inexperience is one of the defining marks of liturgy and since ‘realities (presences) that take world and history as their measure come to experience’ (49), the worldly and the liturgical differ on the basis of their relation to experience and nonexperience, respectively.

63 Lacoste, Experience and Absolute, 32–34.

64 Ibid., 48–49.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid., 96.

67 Ibid., 22.

68 Ibid., 98.

69 Lacoste, Experience and Absolute, 152. Cf. Lacoste’s phrasing: “La conscience ne peut porter le sens de la liturgie (elle ne peut qu’en savoir les raisons)” (183).

70 Gschwandtner, “The Vigil as Exemplary Liturgical Experience,” 7.

71 Cf. the French edition, “de la réalité definitive de l’être-de-conscience” (185).

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Marina Marren

Dr. Marina Marren is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. Marren specializes German and ancient Greek thought. Her published and forthcoming articles appear in Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Perspectives on Political Science, Ramus: Critical Studies in Greek and Roman Literature, as well as in Logoi and Muthoi: Further Essays in Greek Philosophy and Literature.