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Kearney’s Wager
- Fordham University Press
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Kearney’s Wager P A T R I C K B U R K E In a 1991 essay, Dominique Janicaud lamented a ‘‘turn’’ in recent French phenomenology ‘‘toward the theological,’’ toward the question of the nature of postmetaphysical divinity. In 1984, Richard Kearney had published Poétique du Possible: Phénoménologie Herméneutique de la Figuration, in which he had already mapped a new eschatological hermeneutics of God as possibility in critical comparison with Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutics of being as Vermögend-Mögende. Kearney continues to situate his own work within this turn, arguing that the dialogue between postmodern philosophy and religion is ‘‘one of the most burning intellectual tasks of our time.’’ In The God Who May Be, Kearney makes a wager, namely, that the God of the possible, posse, is much closer to the God of desire and promise than scholasticism’s old metaphysical God of pure act, esse. This wager is in response to the question raised by the ‘‘turn toward the theological ,’’ but is framed here to reflect Kearney’s own variation of the postmodern project: How may we overcome the old notion of God as disembodied cause, devoid of dynamism and desire, in favor of a more eschatological notion of God as possibility to come, the posse which calls us beyond the present toward a promised future? The wager takes more specific forms, namely (a) that it is wiser to interpret divinity as a possibility-to-be than as either pure being in the manner of ontotheology or as a pure non-being in the manner of negative theology; (b) that it is wiser to take ‘‘the mediating course of 94 narrative imagination’’ between two polar opposites in contemporary thinking about God, that of Levinas, Marion, and at times even Derrida , and that of Campbell, Zizek, Lyotard, Kristeva, and Caputo. Both sides claim that God is utterly unthinkable, unnamable, unrepresentable —that is, unmediatable. The wager character (rather than proof character) of Kearney’s analyses is indicated throughout the book not only by many direct claims to be offering a wager, but also through expressions of uncertainty such as ‘‘my ultimate suggestion is that we might do better’’ (GMB, 22); ‘‘let me conclude with the following surmises’’ (GMB, 37); ‘‘I propose to hazard something of a hermeneutical guess in what follows ’’ (GMB, 60); ‘‘to say something, however hesitant and provisional , about the unsayable’’ (GMB, 7); ‘‘I conclude with a tentative summary hypothesis’’ (GMB, 79); ‘‘my conjecture that God neither is nor is not but may be’’ (GMB, 80); and ‘‘my aim here, as throughout this volume, is to break open new sites and sightings of the Godwho -may-be’’ (GMB, 101). A master of the art of conjecture joins the tradition of the scholarship of the compelling hypothesis celebrated, for instance, in the writings of Ernst Gombrich. In his essay ‘‘Botticelli ’s Mythologies,’’ Gombrich argued in the preface to the second edition that what he presents about Botticelli’s Venus, rather than being a proof, is no more than an interpretive hypothesis—one relative to which none better has yet been offered. Pascal’s wager was framed too narrowly: either God exists or he does not exist, and we are unable to determine which alternative is true. It seems that, for Kearney, we are lost if we accept that wager as stated, especially if its attendant presupposition is a double abyss, namely, God as pure being or pure non-being, since our narrative experience is gutted to the core by either alternative. He frames the wager in terms of a third alternative, a via tertia, which, if we accept it, can greatly affect our present lives and our possible future. The path of the ontotheologians , such as Thomists, and that of postmodern deconstructionists, such as Caputo and Derrida, present unreasonable risks. His path toward the profoundly personal God-who-may-be is the reasonable gamble. What is at stake in this wager? What do we gain or lose by accepting Kearney’s wager? Biblical narratives are finally rooted in an ontology that preserves their richness. God becomes prosopon, person, in the dynamic sense described by John Manoussakis as facing toward a face, as being profoundly for-and-with-the-other.1 We gain the historic responsibility for completing creation: through and beKearney ’s Wager 95 [100.25.40.11] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:23 GMT) cause of our freedom, we help God bring forth the kingdom of love...