We sat together in the correctional center’s library during a thunder storm downpour talking about personas, masks, chameleons, truth’s revealing and concealing, preceded by one saying the important person, the reason I’m tolerated, was missing, but we’d go on anyway. (The big fellow, cringing and holding his head, says ”That’s cold man.”) We all laugh.
We wobble through Monday morning with the white service dog in training nibbling at my handheld meditation beads as we spoke about the appearances and disappearances of who we are, have been, and moving through the revelations that each choice augurs.
It’s not an either/or, either you stand with, or you stand alone.
Rather, one stands with by standing alone, one stands alone by standing with.
There is being alone-with-others, as in never am I so alone as when I am with others. Or, never am I so with others as when I am alone.
Solitude is where one is. Community is where others are.
The eremite and the cenobite walk into a bar. One says, “I’ll have one.” The other says, “I’ll have another.”
Ein Witz ist die Art und Weise, wie sich Wahrheiten offenbaren. (A joke is the way truths reveal themselves.)
This chapter has described the difficulty that awaits us in our attempt to articulate philosophically an experience of God, a difficulty that oscillates between the either/or of the following metaphysical dilemma: either an unknowable, imperceptible, wholly other God, or a conceptual, and therefore equally fleshless, Idol; either Gott or Götze. In the modern past, metaphysics was content with the latter, that is, with the idea of God (see, for example, Descartes’s Third Meditation). It is that contentment that has been called ontotheology. Phenomenology, on the other hand, all too often rushes toward the former, mesmerized by the lure of the otherness of the Other like a but- terfly bedazzled by fire. Between the two positions, a third one is opened up in the paradox of the Pauline “icon of the invisible God.” That icon is par excellence Christ, “begotten in our image and likeness” but, by extension, every person “created in the image and likeness” of God. It was an iconic feature, namely, that of inverted perspective, that helped us to sketch out a phenomenological analysis of inverted intentionality, of a “vision,” in other words, that does not objectify God but allows Him to give Himself in the experience of myself as seen. Alongside our filled intentions (of presence and perception) and empty intentionality (of absence and imagination), a third kind of intention needs to be recognized. That third kind is the inverted intentionality of reflexive sensibility (and, as we shall see in the third part of this work, all sensibility is reflexive), where the intuition “yielded” is precisely me, that is, the self-experience of myself as experienced. Strictly speaking, in the “experience of God,” as given through the inverted intentionality, the phenomenon is not God but rather me (my inability to comprehend God, my lack of knowledge or intuition that becomes knowledge and intuition, etc).
The second half of this chapter addressed the phenomenological merit of prosopon, the Greek definition of the person as being-in-front-of-another, that is, as fundamentally a relational being. In the chapter that follows, we shall examine whether the prosopic understanding of myself and others, as well as the inverse intentionality through which such an understanding is gained, supple- ments the phenomenological reductions to the things themselves (Husserl), to being (Heidegger), and to givenness (Marion), and by doing so, whether it safeguards the person’s particularity.
(—from, p.34: God after Metaphysics A Theological Aesthetic! By John Panteleimon Manoussakis, 2007)
Then comes Kearney
Richard Kearney is one of the phenomenologists of the new generation who follows the lead of Husserl, Heidegger, Marion and Lévinas. This Catholic and Irish philosopher proposes a fourth phenomenological reduction, i.e., going back to the eschaton which is entrenched in everyday existence: finding the voice and the face of the higher within the lower. It is like the realization of the following heideggerian idea which is found in "The Thing": "Only what conjoins itself out of the world becomes a thing". In everyday language and life a possibility is found to overcome skepticism, indifference and the boredom resulting from the world being into turned [being turned into] consumption and man into a marketing piece. In the face-to-face meeting the possibility of a revelation is presented, which makes the relation with the other, and especially with the foreigner, a wonder; and not a doubt, suspicion or distrust.
(Abstract for, Richard Kearney and the fourth phenomenological reduction! July 2014 Escritos22(49):313-335! Project: Fenomenología y teología! Author: Carlos Arboleda, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana
Have you heard the one about the three eggs?
No?
Two bad!
(Ha — now
the yoke’s
on us!)
