John D.Caputo
Questioning philosophy and its ethics
Ethics, venerable philosophical discourse though it be, is for me questionable in the extreme, questionable to the point that I have, God help me, taken a stand against ethics.2 If ethics is the land of law and universalizability, of rule and normativity, be they natural laws or deontological duties, rules of pure reason or matters of moral feeling, the issue of the Form of the Good or only of utilitarian advantage, then, alas, I must say—hier stehe ich—I am against ethics. Ethics is for me highly questionable. To rewrite ever so slightly the saying of a famous man, ethics is something to be deconstructed, while obligation in itself, if there is such a thing, is not deconstructible. For obligation transpires in a realm of radical singularity, where every hair on our head, every tear, has been counted. Obligation—
the unconditional hospitality owed to the other—is the ethical beyond ethics, the ethical without ethics, the hyper-ethical, the fine point of the ethical soul, the very ethicality of ethics, but always without and against ethics. For ethics stops short with the law or rule while everything that exists is a singularity of which the coarse lens of the law cannot quite catch sight.
To question philosophy and its ethics, which are in love with law and universality, is not to jettison them altogether, but to let them be rocked by a shock or trauma of something other, to expose them to a view from somewhere else, where things are seen otherwise than with philosophical eyes, where, from a strictly philosophical point of view, things may even seem a little mad. That is why I propose here that we turn to the pages of the New Testament, not in order to undertake a confessional defense of Christianity but, as Levinas might say, in order to read a “good book”
(no capitals) from which we might learn a thing or two about ethics, a book which continually holds “ethics” in question. Suppose, then, per
impossibile, we ask the New Testament to philosophize, to say something to philosophical reason with the aim of questioning philosophy and its ethics. I am not here recommending the violence of taking a work of rich religious imagination and faith and turning it into a rational, philosophical, treatise. I actually have in mind the very opposite violence, viz. a hermeneutical violence that would let philosophical reason itself be shocked by the blow of an Aramaic imagination, that would let philosophy be exposed to a site outside philosophy, to what Levinas and Derrida call the “other” of reason and philosophy, where odd and even slightly mad things happen. I propose we do this with the best of intentions and for the good of philosophy, as a way of renewing philosophical ethics, of letting reason and ethics breathe the air of pre-philosophical sources, which is the air that gives it life. I have no wish to undermine reason, or to replace reason with faith; my intent is rather to enlarge the horizons of reason and ethics, to loosen them up, to make them a little more porous and deconstructible, to ferment them with a little dash of divine madness—
all of which, I hope to show, is very reasonable and highly ethical, or metaethical, or hyperethical. Even if it looks a little impossible.
The impossible
Like a man strolling down a familiar street, philosophy moves with ease within certain settled and well-established distinctions—like the distinctions between presence and representation, reality and image, necessity and contingency, truth and fiction, and—this is what particularly interests me here—the possible and the impossible. But very interesting writers like Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault have made a name for themselves showing, to the scandal of (a self-proclaimed and self-congratulatory) “reason,”
how representation precedes presence, images structure reality, truths are fictions that have taken hold, and how the possible is quite pedestrian and boring while everything we truly desire is impossible, the impossible being what we love most of all. Stampeded by the success of these analyses, philosophers of a more classical frame of mind have come to think that the time is out of joint and a destructive anarchy has been unleashed upon the land. Derrida, impudent and impish to the end, rejoins that being out of joint is just what makes justice possible for those who are enjoined and in bind, that a strategic dose of anarchy is just what opens things up if you happen to be at the bottom end of a hierarchy.
In the essay that follows I raise the question of the “world” in which the New Testament transpires, and by pursuing a kind of phenomenology of its sense of lived “temporality” I hope to gain some insight into its ethics. In accord with the demand of phenomenology, I begin by suspending our most commonplace assumptions, our most unexamined beliefs about time and ethics—putting our commonplace beliefs about these matters
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into question in order to let the ethical world of the New Testament appear.
I suspend the most classical aporia that besets us when we open up this book, viz. the interminable debate about whether the events portrayed here really happened or are artifices of historical imagination, whether they confirm our faith or are themselves the products of Christian faith.
It is only by suspending that debate, which turns on the most classical and modernist distinction between fact and fiction, presence and representation, by adopting a frame of mind that suspects any such settled distinction, that we are allowed to read this book.
The New Testament is a book in which the impossible is around us, in which the most amazing things keep happening: limbs are healed, the dead get up and walk, the blind see, a few loaves feed thousands, water is either walked upon or changed into wine (in either case an improvement), the skies open up and heavenly voices address us, and, above all, hearts change. This change of heart is, I humbly proffer, the point of it all and the heart of its ethics. In short, this is a world of meta-noia, a “metanoetic”
world, of marvelous metamorphoses. In comparison with this metanoetic world, the commonplace world of regularized and steady patterns, whose map philosophy wants to draw by means of its table of categories, the world of settled distinctions between the real and the unreal, the possible and the impossible, the true and the fictitious, is—well, I am trying to be polite—a little boring. The New Testament is a book filled with what recent French philosophy calls “events,” things that come along (venir) and break out (é), breaking over our heads with unanticipated surprise.
For the “event” is what we did not see coming, a very singular and unclassifiable happening that took us by surprise, that shattered the horizon of what we thought was possible, that brings us up short and leaves us lost for words (never fear). There is, on almost every page of this book, what Derrida calls “1’invention de l’autre,” the in-coming of the other, of what we did not see coming, opening us up to the coming of something wholly other—like Levinas, Derrida too speaks of the tout autre—something that is none of our doing, that delimits our subjective autonomy. The name of God, the power of God, the kingdom of God, in this book, are names for the impossible, for the incoming of the other. “God” is the name that leaps to our lips when what we need is something new and transformingly other, something tout autre, which is why this eventually became a name for God.
The New Testament is a book whose odd logic should fascinate writers, like Gilles Deleuze for example, who want to delimit the logic of sense in order to let other, more paradoxical, logics loose. Deleuze is interested in the paradoxical logic of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which was used to depict a world of pure becoming in which things show themselves capable of complete reversals:
Alice could grow larger and then smaller, and effects could precede their
causes. Unhappily, Deleuze opposes this wondrous world to the name of God, which he takes to be wholly confined by and within a metaphysics of permanence—the substantial “personal self,” he says, “requires God and the world in general.”3 But even a casual reading of the New Testament reveals quite the opposite—that those who trust in the regularities of nature and the predictability of human behavior are confounded by the amazing and transforming power of God. The one thing the New Testament seems most clearly not to embrace is the static ousiology of the Greeks.
In what follows I explore in particular the extraordinary “temporality”
of the world in which God reigns, in which, beyond any paradox Lewis Carroll imagined or Alice underwent, the past itself is wiped away. By God’s power, the past, what happened, is made not to have happened, so that something new begins today. That is what is called “forgiveness,”
a notion which it is very difficult for philosophical ethics, which runs on standard time and a balance of payments, to think. Metanoia is a reversal of which neither Lewis Carroll nor Gilles Deleuze has taken account and it is as a contribution to study of a general metanoetics and a very questioning ethics that I offer here an exploration of the temporality of this highly metanoetic world and its marvelously metanoetic ethics.
I begin by asking, in the hope of delivering a loving blow to philosophy, reason and its ethics, and with the very best of intentions, what can philosophy learn about ethics if it is made to listen to the sapiential sayings about the “kingdom,” which may look a little mad to philosophy? To answer this question, let me start by asking another: what is the temporality of what the New Testament calls “the kingdom of God” and what does it tell us about what philosophy calls “ethics”?
The hermeneutics of Christian facticity
In raising a question like this I am repeating a project undertaken by Heidegger in his first Freiburg lectures. Heidegger’s earliest work on the path of thought that led up to Being and Time took the form of a
“hermeneutics of facticity,” that is, a retrieval of the factical experience of life that he found embedded both in Aristotle’s ethics and in the New Testament. Heidegger’s aim was to read past or read through Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which dominated the scholastic approach to Aristotle, down into the concrete life-experience from which Aristotle’s metaphysical categories arose, which he located in the Nicomachean Ethics. This was the first form taken by Heidegger’s famous Destruktion of the tradition.
That is today well known. What is less well known is that this project was in fact a dual project, the other leg of which was a parallel retrieval or Destruktion of Christian theology down into its founding life-experiences.
This took the form of a hermeneutics of the life world of the earliest
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Christian communities, a hermeneutic phenomenology of early Christian historicality, as this is recorded for us in the New Testament.4
Heidegger’s attention was drawn to the letters of Paul rather than to the Synoptic Gospels, and in particular to the apocalyptic expectation of the early Christians, their belief that, having warned “this generation” about the imminent end of the world, Jesus would soon come again, on a cloud, to judge the living and the dead. In a course entitled “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,” given in 1920–21, Heidegger singles out Paul’s two letters to the Thessalonians, the first of which is the oldest document in the New Testament, antedating the Synoptic Gospels, as his texts for explicating the experience of time and history among the early New Testament communities. In this letter Paul answers two questions put to him by the community at Thessalonia on the coming of the Lord, the first concerning those who die before Christ comes again, and the second concerning the timing of the parousia or second coming of the Lord.
In answer to the first question, Paul assures the Thessalonians that those who have died before the parousia do not suffer a disadvantage compared to those who will still be alive. For when the trumpet sounds and an arch-angel announces in a loud voice that the Lord is coming all will be made equal. First the dead will rise and then those who are still alive will be lifted up to a cloud to join them and together they will all meet the Lord in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:13–18).
Heidegger is—understandably—more interested in the second question, about the “when?” Heidegger emphasizes the fact that for Paul Christian life, “becoming Christian,” is a struggle, a matter of fighting the good fight, of running a good race (Galatians 5:7), of forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, pressing on toward the goal and winning the prize (Philippians 3:13–14). Becoming Christian is a battle waged in fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), a war with legalistic Jews and unbelieving Greeks, which is repaid with distress and persecution, scars and imprisonment, tribulation and suffering. Christian life is a matter of “standing firm” in the faith, bloodied but unbowed, enduring everything, holding up and holding out until the parousia.
That means, Heidegger argues, that for Paul the relation to the “when”
of the parousia is not a matter of an objectivistic calculation, of making one’s best estimate about the length of time until then. It is not a matter of an objective “when” in an objective time, but of a how, of how to live until then, how to hold out and hang tough. Paul spells out this existential-phenomenological “when” by telling the Thessalonians not to worry about “times and seasons” (chronoi kai kairoi)—not to try to predict the parousia as if one were forecasting the weather, because it belongs to the very essence of the parousia “…that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When people say, ‘There is peace and security,’
then will sudden destruction come upon them” (1 Thessalonians 5:1–3).5
Those who ignore the fact that becoming Christian is constant struggle, who are lulled into a false sense of security by the distractions and comfort of everydayness, will be taken by surprise. “But you are not in the darkness, brethren, for that day to surprise you like a thief” (1 Thessalonians 5:4).
The eyes of the Thessalonians are open; they are in the light, and they understand the incessant vigilance that Christian life requires, to stay always awake, always sober, always ready. So Paul tells them to put on the breastplate of faith and the helmet of hope, and enjoins them to be ready (5:8). The question of the “when” is not a question of making a good estimate in terms of days, months, or years, but the existential question of being ready. Never mind when; be ready, “battle-ready,”6 vigilant, on the alert. It is not a question of calculating calendar time but of standing ready all the time, “all alone before God.”
Heidegger comments, “Christian religiosity lives temporality as such.”7 The factical sense of life of the Thessalonians is shot through, from beginning to end, with time and temporality, with a sense of the radical contingency and facticity of time and history, with the trembling of time and history. They stand ready for the trumpet’s call whenever it sounds, day or night, now or later. Time and history are transfixed with urgency, pushed to an extreme of tension, radically energized by an apocalyptic sense which demands complete existential vigilance.
What I propose here is a variation on the Heideggerian project, one which will be effected by shifting our attention from Paul to the synoptics, from Paul’s missionary preaching to the sayings attributed to Jesus, from the early Christian expectation of the end of time to the reports of Jesus’
instructions about living in time, from the coming parousia of which Paul spoke to the basileia tou theou in the preaching of Jesus. Heidegger’s project clearly reflects the state of the art of New Testament research in the 1920s—
his students were impressed at how well he knew the literature8—whose tone had been set by Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906). Schweitzer held that Jesus was an “eschatological prophet” whose notion that the kingdom of God was about to be realized was in fact a prophetic declaration of the end of time.
Apocalyptic anxiety is well suited to Heidegger’s interests. Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger was very much taken with the tempestuous and volatile figure of Paul and with the Pauline thematics of anxiety, freedom, and the moment of transforming conversion in faith. Both Heidegger and Kierkegaard were taken with the Pauline struggle, fighting the good fight, putting on the breastplate of hope and the helmet of faith, the Church militant that forged ahead, pressing towards the goal, free, anguished, projected upon the future in fear and trembling. In Paul and Luther, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, the existential individual looks into the abyss of freedom and possibility, and swoons with anxiety. In such a view of Christian life, one finds a conception of factical life as toiling and troubling
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about one’s daily bread (sorgen um das “tägliche Brot”),9 fighting the good fight for bread and faith, in short, as Sorge.
The upshot of the Kierkegaardian-Heideggerian analysis is a twofold emphasis on the priority of battle, struggle, difficulty, disturbance, and anxious care (Sorge), on the one hand, and the privileging of the future, of the prize up ahead, the goal to be won, the coming parousia, the vita ventura, the vita futura, on the other hand. For the Church militant, eternity is up ahead and it must be earned, unlike the eternity of the Greeks, which is back behind us and has to be recollected. All of this amounted to a theory of temporality and historicity that was tuned to anxiety and the future.10
What Heidegger did not try, what he shows little interest in, is an interpretation that is guided not by Paul’s letters but by the synoptics, and not by the evolving faith of the later Christian communities but by the synoptic tradition of the sayings of Jesus, one result of which would be to break with the apocalypticism which Heidegger interprets—brilliantly and existentially—but which he simply assumes. For if it is clear that the later Christian communities held apocalyptic beliefs, it is now rather widely agreed that this was not the case for Jesus himself, that in Jesus’ own sayings the kingdom of God is upon us, within us, here and now.11 Jesus
What Heidegger did not try, what he shows little interest in, is an interpretation that is guided not by Paul’s letters but by the synoptics, and not by the evolving faith of the later Christian communities but by the synoptic tradition of the sayings of Jesus, one result of which would be to break with the apocalypticism which Heidegger interprets—brilliantly and existentially—but which he simply assumes. For if it is clear that the later Christian communities held apocalyptic beliefs, it is now rather widely agreed that this was not the case for Jesus himself, that in Jesus’ own sayings the kingdom of God is upon us, within us, here and now.11 Jesus