Jeffrey Bloechl

Does religious thinking stand in opposition to postmodernity? Does the existence of God present the ultimate challenge to metaphysics? Strands of continental thought, especially those running from Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, focus on individual consciousness as the horizon for all meaning and provide modern philosophy of religion with much of its present ferment. In Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics, 11 influential continental philosophers share the conviction that religious thinking cannot afford to disengage from the challenges of modern European philosophy. Together they provide a rich and intriguing set of answers to questions surrounding the meaning of religious experience. Topics include subjectivity, selfhood, and rationality; language, community, and ethics; the influence of Jewish and eastern religions on religious experience; God as phenomenology; and religion in the postmodern age. These lucid and arresting essays bring together many of the leading voices in the contemporary continental debate on God and religion

To act mercifully is to do more than what is required for justice. The act appears as a positive exception to the rule of law, and thus exhibits an intentionality irreducible to consciousness of a social or political order. In this philosophy of Levinas, occasional references to mercy shed some light on the goodness of the good that is otherwise occluded by overt concentration on social or political justice. However, Levinas’s account of the act itself is not entirely convincing, and attempts to improve upon it lead toward a different conception of being and nature than one finds in his works.

More than an introduction to Levinas's philosophical itinerary and the position where it matures, Liturgy of the Neighbor is also a critical discussion and original response to an acknowledged master of the twentieth century. The Levinas who appears in this dialogue is a thinker not only determined to get free of Western tradition, but also one whose project and claims shed new and penetrating light on the major figures whose work stood in his way. By moving to this level, where Levinas's teachers and opponents speak for themselves and not only in the voices Levinas has assigned to them, Bloechl presses the discussion beyond an evaluation of Levinas's readings of his interlocutors, and beyond the question of his success in getting free of them, to the more urgent task of weighing the stakes of reestablishing religion, and the ethics where it has meaning, after Nietzche and, above all, Heidegger.

It is Heidegger who asks what there is to be thought after the end of metaphysics, and indeed his own work is never far from a response to the question. This is neither to say that there is only one such response, nor even to suppose that Heidegger’s thinking provides only one response. To be sure, the origin of the question is not difficult to identify. Metaphysics, as the grounding of known beings in some anterior or first being, comes to its end as thinking becomes capable of grasping it as a sum of relations. This occurs when thinking is awakened to the difference between inquiring about beings , including the first being, and asking the question of the meaning of Being . In an important sense, then, the “end” of metaphysics coincides with the appearing of its place within a more primordial horizon. Attending more closely to the historical configuration of this metaphysics, Heidegger often concentrates on the recurrence, or else the persistence, of an urge in thinkin ..

Against expectations, Kierkegaard turns out to have sometimes been a phenomenologist. Specifically in his "Edifying Discourses," though perhaps elsewhere, one finds a style of thinking and the interpretive rigor both close to some features of Husserlian and Heideggerian thought, and more capable of handling religious phenomena. Where is a matter of purity of heart and willing one thing, it is of course a matter of desire. One may read the first of the "Edifying Discourses" as a phenomenological approach to various modalities of Christian life - the paradoxical, the enigmatic, and the oblique - by which what cannot be contained solely within being and appearing nonetheless enters there and upsets its conventions. But to pass from Husserl and Heidegger to Kierkegaard is to arrive at a perspective from which the security of the starting point is no longer evident. /// Ao contrário daquilo que normalmente se espera, Kierkegaard revela-se frequentemente um verdadeiro fenomenólogo. Particularmente nos seus "Discursos Edificantes", ainda que talvez noutros lugares também, podemos encontrar um estilo de pensar e o rigor interpretativo próximos de algumas características do pensamento quer de Husserl quer de Heidegger, e capaz de lidar com fenómenos de índole religiosa. Ora onde quer que se trate da pureza do coração e de querer apenas uma coisa, o assunto tem a ver com desejo. Nesse sentido, o autor do artigo sugere uma leitura do primeiro dos "Discursos Edificantes" como sendo uma abordagem fenomenológica a diversas modalidades da vida cristã - a paradoxal, a enigmática, e a oblíqua - mediante as quais aquilo que não pode ser contido apenas dentro do ser e do aparecer, contudo, aí aparece e subleva as suas convenções. Mas passar de Husserl e Heidegger para Kierkegaard, diz o autor, é chegar a uma perspectiva a partir da qual a segurança do ponto de partida não é mais evidente.

This essay interprets and responds to Richard Kearney's metaphysics of possibility and hermeneutics of religion against the background of Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God and the theodicy problem. Kearney's work is thus read as an interesting but ultimately problematic attempt to preserve or perhaps reinstate religious thought after the modern critique of idols. In addition, his positions are compared and contrasted with some of authors with whom he seems to be in limited agreement (for example, Plotinus, Hillesum) as well as some with whom he clearly breaks (for example, Girard, Sölle).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editor’s IntroductionJeffrey Bloechl (bio)Already long before Emmanuel Levinas’s death ten years ago, his work had been the subject of thousands of essays, book-length studies, and doctoral dissertations in dozens of languages.1 In the meantime, there are also several international associations dedicated to the proliferation of that work, bringing scholars together for seminars, symposia, and full-scale conferences. This torrent of scholarship seems not to have slowed, though it has certainly diversified. One thus hears talk of waves in the reception of Levinas: after (1) an early concern to situate him in relation to the phenomenological tradition he proposes to redefine in light of modes of intentionality that it will have hitherto suppressed, there was (2) a range of work somewhat more absorbed in questions raised mainly by Derrida, though also to some extent by Ricoeur, Lyotard, and others, and most recently there is (3) a growing effort to bring his thinking to bear on questions and problems in the way of concerted social action.2In fact, we have not been able to decide whether Levinas ought to be read first in relation to phenomenology and fundamental ontology, deconstruction and hermeneutics, or social and political theory, and this is because those distinctions, which to be sure have their own importance, can seem to harbor others that Levinas would surely reject. Let us recall that it is the self-declared task of phenomenology to investigate the appearing of things but also to include the non-appearing of what [End Page vii] transcends being and appearing. Let us also recall that deconstruction exposes the unthematized infrastructures by which meaning is expressed and order is projected. And let us simply note that it is the business of social and political theory to describe, and where necessary criticize, the limits within which desired action between citizens either occurs or fails to occur. For Levinas, the positive transcendence that expresses itself in a human face that is more than its appearing has gone unnoticed and excluded by a Western tradition that has not held in question the powers of the subject, so that we fail to catch sight of a responsibility that precedes any attempt to submit it to a perspective or an order. In short, the argument in favor of radical responsibility for the other person opposes, together and at once, any primacy for being and appearing, seeing and interpreting, and even freedom and self-determination. The critique of line and light is always and already in solidarity with the critique of law and institution, and a claim for the priority of the stranger over oneself has evident moral and political stakes that cannot be without considerable reservations about any thought of universal principles or foundations.This is certainly not to suggest that there is no use in reading Levinas from any number of perspectives, but rather that each such reading can and probably should take into account what is learned from the others. Perhaps it is true that we have all but exhausted the results of approaching Totality and Infinity mainly as a response to Heidegger and Sartre. But in some cases that sort of engagement has in turn opened the way to a deeper understanding of Levinas’s interlocutors’ own works—who has not been led by careful work on Totality and Infinity more deeply than before into the guts of Being and Time? — whereupon one may well expect a more penetrating sense of what truly divides the great texts. Likewise, it may be true that we have read and re-read Levinas straightforwardly on justice and plurality until there is little more to be said about the matters themselves. But again, in the meantime what has been learned there has shed new light on the real implications of positions taken by modern liberals and communitarians. Nothing prevents us from expecting a renewed conversation with them that might [End Page viii] yield a sharper sense of what Levinas’s thinking truly offers modern politics, and vice versa.One could no doubt repeat this call with regard to virtually every author and theme that has held Levinas’s attention, and even a number that he gives no...

What is secularity? Might it yield or define a distinctive form of reasoning? If so, would that form of reasoning belong essentially to our modern age, or would it instead have a considerably older lineage? And what might be the relation of that form of reasoning, whatever its lineage, to the Christian thinking that is often said to oppose it? In the present volume, these and related questions are addressed by a distinguished group of scholars working primarily within the Roman Catholic theological tradition and from the perspectives of Continental philosophy. As a whole, the volume constitutes a conversation among thinkers who agree in their concerns but not necessarily their conclusions. Taken individually, each essay concentrates on a range of historical developments with close attention to their intellectual and sometimes pedagogical implications. Secular reason, they argue, is neither the antipode of Christian thought nor a stable and well-resolved component of it. Christian thinking may engage with secular reason as the site of profound difficulties, but on occasion will also learn from it as a source of new insight. _Christianity and Secular Reason_ contributes to the contemporary discussion of secularity prompted especially by Charles Taylor’s book _A Secular Age_. Unlike Taylor's work, however, this collection concentrates specifically on secular _reason_ and explicitly on its relation to Christianity. In this sense, it is closer to Michael J. Buckley’s _At the Origins of Modern Atheism_ or, to a lesser degree, Louis Dupré’s _Passage to Modernity_, which concern themselves with broad cultural developments. "This volume offers a variety of perspectives, some historical, some normative/constructive, on the questions of the relations between politics/culture/religion and the relations between selfhood/humanity/world. The essays are, without exception, of high quality in both scholarly-exegetical terms, and constructive-normative ones. The writers are learned, sometimes witty, and often interesting." —_Paul Griffiths, Duke Divinity School _ "This is no other volume I know of that covers just this ground. There is a substantial literature on, for example, the Habermas/Ratzinger exhange, and on Kant's view of the relation between philosophy and religion, and on the twelfth century background for thirteenth century reflection on this relation. The merit of _Christianity and Secular Reason_ is that it holds these threads together, and others besides, in a new and fruitful way." —_John E. Hare, Yale University_