Will D. Desmond

© 2016 by Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses. All rights reserved. I want to reflect on the nature of revelation by means of the idea of the "godsend". While seeming to be ordinary this word carries communication of what is beyond the ordinary. A godsend suggests something like a chink or crack through which something is revealed - a kind of gap, or permeability, a porosity to a light that comes from a source beyond. In that gifted porosity is there an opening to revelation? Does the godsend say something about the surprise of revelation? In response I follow three steps: from word, to idea, to story. I begin by looking at the word and its etymology and consider what this implies. Then I look at the idea of revelation in connection with the claims of philosophical reason. Here my concern is to illuminate some theoretical considerations concerning reason and revelation, from the more reflective conceptual point of view, especially in relation to the modern sense of reason. Third, I turn to story as true to the godsend, and I pay particular attention to a story that witnesses to a kind of fidelity to singularity, the story entitled "Revelation" of Flannery O'Connor.

The article is a reflection occasioned by an impression of Aristotle’s irritation at the views of the Heracliteans. It offers a reflection that is inspired by, companioned by Heraclitus. It looks at aspects of the approaches of Hegel and Nietzsche as also taking a companioning approach. There is something resistant in Heraclitus’s mode of articulation that makes one diffident in claiming that now at last one is the privileged one to understand him. Heraclitus offers us striking thoughts that strike one into thought—that open up philosophical porosity to the deepest perplexities. In more detail, the author considers what is intended by flux-gibberish and how this bears on the determinacy and constancy of intelligibility. If some pervading sense of the flow of becoming must be granted, how does this bear on the constancy of intelligibility? How can we think the flow and the constancy together?

This is a reflection on the gift of beauty and the passion of being in light of the fact that today we often meet an ambiguous attitude to beauty. Beauty seems bland and lacks the more visceral thrill of the ugly, indeed the excremental. We crave what disrupts and provokes us. Bland beauty seems to be the death of originality. How then be open at all to beauty as gift? In fact, we often are disturbed paradoxically by beauty: both taken out of ourselves, hence disquieted, yet awakened to our being at home with beauty. Beauty arouses enigmatic joy in us, and we enjoy an elemental rapport with it as other. Surprised by beauty, our breath is taken away; we are more truly there with the beautiful yet taken outside of ourselves: both at home with ourselves and not at home, in being beyond ourselves. We are first receivers of the gift of surprise and only then perceivers and conceivers. My attention to the passion of being stresses a patience, a receptivity to what is other. What happens is not first our construction. Our being disarmed by the beautiful I hold to be in tune with our being as marked most deeply by what I call a primal ‘porosity’ to being. Beauty sensuously communicates in and through this awakened porosity. We are a patience of being before we are an endeavour to be. In modern aesthetics and culture, originating receptivity tends to be downplayed as a depreciation of our claims to creative power. The predominant stress often falls on human autonomy, such that we love only what we construct ourselves, not what we receive. By contrast, I argue there is something of the godsend in what is truly beautiful. This might not be a fashionable way of talking but the vocation of the philosopher is not to be fashionable but to be true.

Readers of Gadamer will be familiar with his focus on the importance of art in his Truth and Method. There his concern with art does not stand on its own but is part of a larger philosophical purpose. Perhaps for this reason commentators have not adequately focussed on this aspect of his thought. The present collection of essays, entirely devoted to issues of art, will help place Gadamer's concerns in a much better light. Yet these essays are illuminating in their own right and should not be seen as mere supplements to Truth and Method. What we have here is not a systematic aesthetic but a collection of essays published on various occasions, and not all directed exclusively to the professional philosopher. The opening chapter, from which the book takes its title, is a long essay comprising almost a third of the book and its first part. The remainder of the book is made up of a selection of eleven shorter pieces, almost all from Kleine Schriften.

The writer of the below thought he would do something clever and out of the way. I tried to dissuade him, but without success. I told him that readers would prefer a more sober scholarly approach. I tried to appeal to his other work and his systematic proclivities. Why not try like Schelling to produce a system of freedom? He looked at me queerly. I was a bit taken aback when he burst out laughing in my face, and blurted out: “You must not have read Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground!” I’m afraid he has spent too much time with the prodigals he has written about. He muttered something almost inaudible about Dostoevski’s double, but I said nothing.If I am not mistaken these pieces have to do with four great and very influential philosophers: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. To help the reader I have put the abbreviation K, H, M and N before each ‘monologue.’ In fact, I am not sure if the writer was mocking me: as if my sober efforts to talk of these four thinkers was being doubled with voices like and unlike; voices as if spoken from within, and yet said to have come from beyond; ego and alter; an odd twin of my scholastic sobriety.

I want to thank Professor Wang for a very interesting and informative paper. It is especially informative to one who is relatively ignorant of the complex history of China's involvement with notions of modernity, and the variety of its contacts with Western influences. On the whole, the paper offers much valuable information about significant historical landmarks, and the diversity of ways that Chinese intellectuals and leaders have responded to them. Overall, four phases or periods are differentiated for comment and elucidation.