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Abstract
This paper seeks to elucidate Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s shared understanding of faith by providing a phenomenology of faith. This is accomplished by applying Nancy’s conception of experience (which resonates with that of a number of contemporary phenomenologists, notably Claude Romano) to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, of which this paper thus offers a phenomenological reading in order to analyse the experience of faith its pseudonymous author relates (i.e., the ordeal of Abraham’s life as depicted by the book). In doing so, however, we will discover that faith belongs to a realm of experience that is more fundamental than, and thus takes priority over, the lived-experience of classical phenomenology: it is an experience of life as a whole that as such forms the basis on which things are subsequently lived in experience. Faith is therefore held up as the prime example of the phenomenologically primary sense of “experience”: namely, the experience in which a life lived consists, the experience of undergoing life itself; the experience that, as Nancy puts it enigmatically, is existence. Since classical phenomenology fails to think this experience that makes its lived-experiences possible, the paper suggests that phenomenology should turn itself into poetics: namely, a discourse on the creative forms of life that constitute all lived-experiences. To that end, the paper proceeds in four steps: the first step consists in an exposition of the phenomenological framework used (drawing especially on Nancy, Gadamer and Romano); the second and third steps consist in applications of said framework to Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith; the fourth and final step draws on Nancy to spell out the consequences of the preceding analysis.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Though on either of these fronts, the influence of Nietzsche, who occupies a more visible place in Nancy’s work, should not be underestimated either. Indeed, there is a major parallel between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard on these two issues (undoubtedly provided by Luther). Ultimately, however, we are left to guess at the actual source, since – to my knowledge – no extensive comparison of Nancy and Kierkegaard exists. Peter Kline has nevertheless made fruitful use of Nancy in his Passion for Nothing: Kierkegaard’s Apophatic Theology. Though my own perspective differs quite considerably from Kline’s, I am grateful to him for kindly sending me a copy of his interesting book.
2 See On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy 233.
3 In his Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, Merold Westphal therefore rightly speaks of Kierkegaard’s “logic of insanity” (see 85–103). Indeed, one wonders to what degree Kierkegaard’s Abraham is all that different from Nietzsche’s Madman.
4 Kierkegaard’s two most famous critics on this point are Alasdair MacIntyre (see After Virtue 49) and Emmanuel Lévinas (see Proper Names 68–72).
5 This is a constant complaint by Caputo, see further: Against Ethics 139–46; On Religion 28; Truth 157–58.
6 Nancy often echoes this same idea, see especially: The Experience of Freedom 20, 81–95; The Birth to Presence 3, 200; Corpus 101, 113, 134–35, 140; Multiple Arts 208–10.
7 See also Husserl, Logical Investigations II 101–02.
8 See also Husserl, Cartesian Meditations §14, 70–72/31–33; Ideas I §36, 64–65/73–75.
9 Though he does not cite Gadamer, this idea is echoed by Claude Romano’s Event and World 148. See, nevertheless, Agamben’s important nuance in Infancy and History 28–29.
10 See not only Nancy and Romano, but also a number of recent phenomenological contributions: Romano, Event and World 144–50; Nancy, The Experience of Freedom 20; Falque, Le livre de l’expérience 21–22; Pattison, A Phenomenology of the Devout Life 202; Stiegler, Nietzsche et la critique de la chair 42. Lacoue-Labarthe and Romano both cite Roger Munier’s helpful etymology “Réponse à une enquête sur l’expérience” 37:
Experience comes from the Latin experiri, to test, try, prove. The radical is periri, which one also finds in periculum, peril, danger. The Indo-European root is per, to which are attached the ideas of crossing and, secondarily, of trial, test. In Greek, numerous derivations evoke a crossing or passage: peirô, to cross; pera, beyond; peraô, to pass through; perainô, to go to the end; peras, end, limit. For Germanic languages, Old High German faran has given us fahren, to transport, and führen, to drive. Should we attribute Erfahrung to this origin as well, or should it be linked to the second meaning of per, trial, in Old High German fara, danger, which became Gefahr, danger, and gefährden, to endanger? […] The same is true for the Latin periri, to try, and periculum, which originally means trial, test, then risk, danger. The idea of experience as a crossing is etymologically and semantically difficult to separate from that of risk. From the beginning and no doubt in a fundamental sense, experience means to endanger.
11 See, for example, Romano on the experience of illness in Event and World 149. For a theological account of this idea, see Bultmann, What Is Theology? 76: “Revelation is an event that sets me in a new situation, brings to light possibilities previously veiled from me […] In crime, for example, abysses of human nature are disclosed to me. Through an experience my ‘eyes are opened.’”
12 For examples, see Nancy, The Muses 19–20; Romano, Event and World 163.
13 This is a central theme of Romano’s work as a whole, see especially: There Is 62; Event and Time 152; Event and World 150–57, 162–63. For commentary, see my “The Event of Faith.”
14 See Event and World 144.
15 For examples of the French, see Falque, Le livre de l’expérience 15, 21–23; Romano, Event and World 144–46. For the German, see Heidegger, On the Way to Language 57:
To undergo an experience (eine Erfahrung machen) with something […] means that this something befalls us (widerfährt), strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us. When we talk of “undergoing” an experience, we mean specifically that the experience is not of our own making; to undergo (durchmachen) here means that we endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it.
16 A phrase picked up by: Romano, Event and World 161; Falque, Le livre de l’expérience 16; Gadamer 350–51.
17 On experience in Kierkegaard, especially on the problematic notion of religious experience, see Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses 56–62.
18 The guiding intuition for this method is captured by Kierkegaard in his Upbuilding Discourses 22: “When two people learn different things from life, it can be because they experience different things, but it can also be because they themselves were different.”
19 See Caputo, Against Ethics 26.
20 See Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right §145/189.
21 In Nietzsche, too, “being […] ethical means obeying ancient established law or custom” (Genealogy of Morals §96/169), whilst the origin of these mores is the idea that “society is worth more than the individual” (§89/174). By contrast, Moralität, in Kant as in Hegel, is always primarily individual, the universal that reveals its reality to me as singular individual (subjectively and experientially) – i.e., borrowing an expression from Romano (Event and World 160), it is an undergoing that makes me “universal by virtue of being singular.” For examples, see Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right §106/135; Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 5: 8/12.
22 Caputo, too, has identified this correctly, see Against Ethics 11–12.
23 See further Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript 224–25.
24 For Kant, morality is a fact (Faktum) of reason: not an experience given to us from without (empirically), but nevertheless experience generated by reason from within (rationally); something reason does, in the sense of facere and thus a factum, the very action in which reason exists. On this, see Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 5: 6/9, 5: 31/45–46; Nancy, A Finite Thinking 143–45. Caputo, too, constantly stresses this idea, ultimately ascribing to it the structure of our facticity along the lines of Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit, in Against Ethics 5–7, 15, 18–19, 22, 25–27, 70 (22): “Here I am (me voici, Levinas), faced with a fact, as it were (Kant), in a pregiven factical situation (Heidegger).”
25 For an account of experience in terms of the possibility of the im-possible, see Derrida, On the Name 43; Psyche I 15; “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event” 451. For an account of experience in terms of a transformation of possibility (Romano) or metamorphosis of finitude (Falque), see Romano, Event and World 31; Event and Time 185–92; Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude. For an account of experience in terms of the hyper-realism of the call, see Caputo, The Weakness of God 9–12, 102, 112, 121–24.
26 That surprise is a mode of experience characteristic of the event is a widely shared observation (Derrida, Caputo and Romano), but is especially well described by Nancy in Being Singular Plural 159–76.
27 Of course, Abraham does say something to Isaac (Genesis 22.7–8), but this does not mean that he breaks the silence. As Derrida writes in The Gift of Death 60:
But even if he says everything, he need only keep silent on one single thing for it to be concluded that he hasn’t spoken. Such a silence takes over his whole discourse […] He speaks in order not to say anything about the essential thing that he must keep secret […] To that extent, in not saying the essential thing, namely the secret between God and him, Abraham doesn’t speak, he assumes the responsibility that consists in always being alone, retrenched in one’s own singularity at the moment of decision.
28 On this, see Nancy, A Finite Thinking 12, 74–76; but especially Romano, Event and World 161–62:
asserting that the humanity of a human being […] is ex-per-ience, signifies that a human being’s humanity is never a “given,” a generic essence that transcends individuals, but is what is reached with great struggle at the price of an ordeal […] A human being does not have experiences; ex-per-ience is rather what makes it possible to conceive of her in her humanity.
29 See Kant, Religion with the Bounds of Bare Reason 87/98.
30 This is somewhat remarkable, as Luther famously described the text as an “epistle of straw.” For more on Kierkegaard as a reader of James, see Richard Bauckham’s James 159–74.
31 The actual influence on Nancy might be Nietzsche, however. Compare, for example, the following quotations, which all go back to James. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ §39/35: “only the practice of Christianity is really Christian, living like the man who died on the cross […] Not a believing but a doing, above all a not-doing-much, a different being.” Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses 173 (my emphasis):
As long as he merely hears the Word, he is outside it, and when the proclaimer is silent, he hears nothing; but when he does the Word, he continually hears what he himself is proclaiming to himself. And any hearing of the Word is infinitely more imperfect than the doing.
What James […] would have us understand is that faith is its own work. It is in works, it makes them, and the works make it […] Contrary to Paul (Romans 4), James maintains that Abraham is justified by his work, designated as the offering of Isaac […] According to Paul, what is important is that Abraham believed that God could give him a son, against all natural evidence. His act thus depended on a knowledge postulate […] For James, on the contrary, Abraham did. He offered up Isaac. It is not said there that he judged, considered, or believed […] James’ Abraham is not in the economy of assurances […] Abraham is neither persuaded nor convinced: his assent is not in the logismos. It is only in the ergon […] The reasons that this faith has “to believe” are not reasons.
You perceived that you had not based your faith on the circumstance that you could explain what happened, since in that case your faith would have been based on your insight and, far from being a devotedness, would instead have been a confidence in yourself.
32 See also Agamben, The Man Without Content 42–57.
33 See also Nancy, The Experience of Freedom 85.
34 See further Ward, How the Light Gets In 166–70.
35 See further Bultmann, New Testament & Mythology 123.
36 Nancy alludes to Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ §34/32.
37 See John 17.13–19, especially as developed by Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 55–111 107–08/273–82; Bultmann, The Gospel of John 507–08; Theology of the New Testament II 75–79, 85–86.
38 See the competing accounts of Marion and Caputo: Marion, The Visible and the Revealed 18–48; Caputo, “The Hyperbolization of Phenomenology” 67–93. For a discussion of this debate in relation to Nancy, see my “Givenness and Existence.”
39 See Bultmann, Existence and Faith 63–66.
40 For Nancy’s account of expectation in a different context that nevertheless resonates with Kierkegaard insofar as it centres expectation around a “hope to achieve the freedom of the narrative or myth, which no concept can touch” (vii), see his Expectation.
41 Bultmann offers a theological version in Theology of the New Testament I 334: “For freedom is nothing else than being open for the genuine future, letting one’s self be determined by that future.”
42 On this Augustinian motif picked up by Caputo and Derrida, see Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida 282–339; On Religion 28, 115, 127; Derrida, “Circumfession” 47–49.
43 This poetics of faith thus gives way to a poetics of creation, which I have articulated in my “Imagining the World Otherwise.”
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