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Between Being and God
- Fordham University Press
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Halifax Colloquy Between Being and GOd FELIX O'MURCHADHA: Two ofyour most recent books deal explicitly and thematically with the question of God. That is not to say that this issue has been absent from your earlier work. Could you please trace the development of this theme in your philosophical journey from Poetique du POddi6Le [The Poetics of the Possible] to The God Who May Be and StrangerdJ GOdd and Mondterd? RK: My first sortie into the God debate was during my time as a doctoral student with Paul Ricceur in Paris in the late 1970s. I was participating in Ricceur's seminar on hermeneutics and phenomenology, along with Levinas, Derrida, Greisch, [Jean-Fran~ois] Courtine, [Fran~oise] Dastur, and others. It was a tremendously exciting time, and the relationship between phenomenology and theology was very much in the air just then. That was when I and an Irish colleague of mine, the theologian Joseph O'Leary, got together and decided to organize a public colloquium in the Irish College in Paris on "Heidegger and the Question of God." This was held in 1980 and subsequently published in 1981 by Grasset, under the same title. Along with Ricceur and others mentioned above, we also invited the more orthodox Heideggerians,........, [Jean] Beaufret, [Fran~ois] Fedier, and [Fran~ois] Vezin, those officially charged by Gallimard and the Heidegger estate with the dissemination and publication of Heidegger's writings in France. It was an explosive cocktail as it happened; indeed, we unsuspecting Irish were 253 told, after the event, that it was something of a miracle that such a diverse group of philosophers actually sat around the same table to discuss the relationship between phenomenology and God. But they did. And that debate lit all kinds of bonfires in my own mind. My doctoral thesis at the time, Poetique du POddi6LeJ was an exploration of the hermeneutic dialogue between what I called "ontology" (broadly based on a Heideggerian /Husserlian approach) and "eschatology" (inspired by Levinas and Ricceur). The basic argument was that there were two fundamental hermeneutics underlying the different regional (ontic) disciplines----the ontological guided by questions of "being" and the eschatological by questions of"God" or the"Good." While I argued that these ran in parallel , and worked with distinct methods and presuppositions, I also wanted to suggest that there were possibilities of overlap and exchange. That at least was my wager in that inaugural work. There followed a long period, I have to admit, between the publication ofPoetique du POddibLe in 1984 and the publication of The God Who May Be in 2001-----almost twenty years, ifyou consider that the first book was actually completed in 1980. During that time I worked mainly at University College Dublin, where the question of God was almost unmentionable in a country where people were still killing each other over religion (at least in the north of the island). I taught and wrote mainly on questions of imagination, myth, symbolism, literature, and art. It was really only when I moved to Boston College on a permanent footing at the end of the 1990s that I came back to the God question and picked up the debate about Being and the eschaton that I had left behind me in Paris. POM: Any discourse on God will have a personal element-----an element of testimony and an element of declaration (of faith or unbelief , of theism or atheism, etc.). Your testimony and declaration are to love and justice,5 against which you will judge the Catholic, J udeoChristian tradition from which you hail. Are these "values" higher than God for you? To put the question otherwise, could there ever be an incompatibility between seeking love and justice and seeking God? RK: Yes, there is almost always a certain personal commitment or conviction involved in any discourse on God. Since the Enlightenment 's ban on bringing presuppositions to bear on the "facts" themselves (something we see, albeit in revised form, in the phenomenological reductions and bracketings of Husserl and Heidegger), there is an assumption that matters of faith and value must somehow be placed beyond the Pale. Now, I have no difficulty with this if it is merely a methodical strategy for focusing on the "things themselves." As a 254 • Halifax Colloquy [44.220.41.148] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:49 GMT) temporary and provisional suspension of our presuppositions, that's fine. In fact, it may even help us to acknowledge our tacit presuppositions all...