Questioning God

Nine: "Idipsum": Divine Selfhood and the Postmodern Subject

235 nine ‘‘Idipsum’’ Divine Selfhood and the Postmodern Subject Jean Greisch Denkwege bergen in sich das Geheimnisvolle, daß wir sie vorwärts und rückwärts gehen können, daß sogar der Weg zurück uns erst vorwärts führt. —Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 99 On the 11th of August this summer, I watched the last complete solar eclipse of the present millennium in a small village in Normandy. Of course, I was not the only witness of this event. All around, the cliffs were crowded with people, young and old, lifting their black glasses up to the sky. At the most fascinating moment, while a strange darkness shrouded the whole landscape and Venus suddenly made a brilliant appearance in the sky, the crowd clapped their hands, as if they were beholding a happening specially organized for them by some invisible showmaster. This unexpected reaction of my fellow spectators, a reaction I did not share, stirred in me some disturbing questions. Was this merely the expression of a childish marveling, or did it confirm Heidegger’s thesis that we are all children of the ‘‘age of representation,’’ whether we know it or not? Who were these people who clapped their hands at the meteorological showdown: modern or postmodern subjects? Some weeks later, approaching the city of Paris, my eyes were caught by huge advertising panels, announcing the creation of the Internet site of a Jean Greisch 236 broadcasting company under the title ‘‘Et Dieu dans tout çà? (And what about God?)’’ with this recommendation: ‘‘Questioning—that’s essential.’’ The central thread of the following reflections will consist of an attempt to link the question ‘‘Who are we?’’ with the question ‘‘And what about God?’’ The Augustinian catchword in the title of this paper is not just a diplomatic nod to St. Augustine, the genius loci of Villanova University, nor to JeanFran çois Lyotard, who died on the 20th of April 1998 and whose posthumous fragments have just been published under the title La Confession d’Augustin.1 My intention is to show that in the context of this second Religion and Postmodernity conference, dedicated to the topic ‘‘Questioning God,’’ it might be helpful to go back to Augustine who, long before Heidegger, highlighted the relation between questioning (quaerere), worrying (curare), and selfhood: ‘‘quaestio mihi factus sum (I have become a question to myself.)’’ Moreover, Augustine could help us to not forget that the title ‘‘Questioning God’’ leaves open the question who questions whom. ∞. ‘‘Who Are We?’’: A Heideggerian Question and Its Implications Trag vor dir her Das Eine Wer? Wer ist der Mensch? —Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, p. 52 In Descartes’ second Metaphysical Meditation, we find the following well-known proposition: ‘‘So we must conclude and hold firmly that this proposition : ‘I am, I exist’ is necessarily true each time that I utter it, or that I conceive it in my mind.’’ ‘‘Sum, existo’’: This is the first announcement of an intellectual victory after the fierce battle of doubt in the first meditation. It leads immediately to the question of ‘‘what I am, I who am certain that I am?’’ This question implies an ‘‘inquiry into the list of predicates which can be attributed to this ‘I’ who is ascertained to exist in the nakedness of the ‘I am.’ ’’3 a) The Ontological Primacy of the Question ‘‘Who?’’ Both statements—the apodictic certainty: ‘‘I am, I exist’’ as well as the open question: ‘‘What am I, I who am certain that I am?’’—have obviously an ontological meaning. In Descartes and in Kant, the question of the subject is that of its ontological status. It cannot be reduced to a mere gnoseological question (What can I know about myself?), and even less to a psychological question (to put it in Montaigne’s words, who is the ‘‘shadow’’ of Descartes: Am I able to draw a true picture of myself?). Nor is it an epistemological question (How can we qualify self-knowledge and which kind of science can we construct upon it?). Among other texts, the Conversations with Burman make it ‘‘Idipsum’’ 237 clear that in his second meditation Descartes intended to raise an ontological question regarding the cogito. But how does he state this question? Obviously, he uses the framework of traditional ontology, which goes back to the medievals and even to Aristotle: every being, therefore also the cogito, can be submitted to the twofold...