After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy

Is God Diminished If We Abscond?

Is God Diminished If We Abscond? M A R K P A T R I C K H E D E R M A N I. Throughout his trilogy Philosophy at the Limit, Richard Kearney leads us ‘‘on the sinuous paths through postmodernity and beyond.’’ Calling on the messenger god, Hermes, he pioneers a new way of interpreting three of the defining contours of our third-millennial profile: strangers, gods, and monsters, three different names for our experience of alterity and otherness. The three volumes, if you take them not in chronological order but in order of accessibility, could be said to follow a technique similar to that used by Kierkegaard. The latter’s Journal of a Seducer was a best-selling page-turner available even in railway stations. It was meant to lead the unsuspecting reader from the sensational, through the ethical, to the religious. Kearney’s book On Stories is published in a new series called Thinking in Action, which ‘‘takes philosophy to its public.’’ Strangers, Gods and Monsters, the second volume in the trilogy, provides an indelible object lesson in how ‘‘we often project onto others those unconscious fears which we recoil from in ourselves.’’ In a phrase that typifies Kearney’s capacity to synthesize pithily, he writes, ‘‘The adversary I so love to hate is often nothing less than myself in disguise’’ (SGM, 75). If, as Kearney holds, ‘‘the greatness of Kant was to recognize the need to pass from a purely ‘theoretical’ explanation of evil to a more ‘practical’ one,’’ then the same can be said for Kearney in this 270 book with regard to aliens and strangers (SGM, 87). He charts a much-needed third way between the somewhat masochistic metaphysics of Levinas and the almost autistic psychoanalysis of Freud. His proposal is ‘‘a hermeneutic pluralism of otherness,’’ a sort of ‘‘polysemy of alterity.’’ There can be no otherness so exterior (Levinas ) or so unconscious (Freud) that it cannot be ‘‘minimally interpreted by a self’’ (SGM, 81). Kearney quotes Thich Nhat Hanh to the effect that ‘‘You won’t regard anyone as an enemy when you have penetrated the reality of interbeing’’ (SGM, 45). His discerning and practical guidance here echoes Martin Buber’s reply to the critique made by Levinas of his ‘‘I- Thou’’ relationship:1 Levinas errs in a strange way when he supposes that I see in the amitié toute spirituelle the peak of the I-Thou relation. On the contrary, this relationship seems to me to win its true greatness and powerfulness precisely there where two men without a strong spiritual ground in common, even of very different kinds of spirit, yes of opposite dispositions, still stand over against each other so that each of the two knows and means, recognizes and acknowledges, accepts and confirms the other, even in the severest conflict, as this particular person. In the common situation , even in the common situation of fighting with each other, he holds present to himself the experience-side of the other, his living through this situation. This is no friendship, this is only the comradeship of the human creature, a comradeship that has reached fulfilment. No ‘‘ether,’’ as Levinas thinks, but the hard human earth, the common in the uncommon. This was Martin Buber months before his death, giving us the wisdom of a life spent in such dialogue with the ‘‘other.’’ There is an experience of otherness, as commonality amid difference, a direct, almost unmediated, connection between persons as first principle acknowledging first principle, to which Buber gave living testimony through his life and his work. However, Kearney’s purpose is more ambitious. Since he has lived for many years with postmodernism, the energy and aim of this trilogy would seem to be both phenomenological and proselytizing. He wants not only to pass through and beyond postmodernism himself, but he wants to take with him those with whom he has labored at the coal face: Ricoeur, Husserl, Derrida , Freud, Heidegger, Kristeva, and Levinas. However, to persuade such interlocutors that at the limits of our finitude, ‘‘at Land’s End we require novel mappings of uncharted realms, lest we slip Is God Diminished If We Abscond? 271 over the edge into the abyss of the unknowable,’’ requires such depth and detail, such convolution of expression, such idiomatic exchange between the cognoscenti, that the public to whom this ‘‘thinking in action’’ was...