Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion

Chapter 1: The Conceptual Idolatry of Descartes’s Gray Ontology: An Epistemology ‘‘Without Being’’

1 The Conceptual Idolatry of Descartes’s Gray Ontology An Epistemology ‘‘Without Being’’ Derek J. Morrow As even a cursory glance at the current literature will confirm, the task of investigating the many philosophical and theological questions raised by Jean-Luc Marion’s explorations into the phenomenology of the gift and of givenness (donation) has only begun. Not least of these questions, of course, is the purely formal one of methodology . For although Marion’s phenomenology of donation has generated significant criticism from several quarters—both from scholars who regard it as insufficiently phenomenological and thus as a betrayal of phenomenology (Janicaud1 ), and from scholars who consider it to have unduly compromised the theological prerogatives of the Christian faith (Milbank2 )—all such criticism suffers nonetheless from one glaring methodological omission: it fails to situate Marion ’s phenomenological concerns within the larger context of his extensive scholarship on Descartes. And insofar as this scholarship antedates and, to a large degree, sets the stage for Marion’s phenomenological project, that this project is seen to be too ‘‘theological’’ for some and too ‘‘metaphysical’’ for others amounts to something of a nonsequitur. That is, from a methodological point of view, all such assessments of Marion’s thought betray a certain impertinence in assuming , quite gratuitously, that one can safely ignore a substantial portion of Marion’s corpus and still arrive at an accurate understanding of his intention. How or even whether this intention is condi11 tioned by the concerns evinced by his work as a whole has not been deemed worthy, it seems, of serious consideration. In this chapter, I seek to redress this deficiency, at least in part, by expositing a key element in Marion’s interpretation of Cartesian metaphysics: the ‘‘gray’’ ontology elaborated by the Regulae ad directionem ingenii. My aim in doing so will be to show how what Marion calls the ‘‘schizocosmic’’ ambivalence of this ontology is animated by a fundamentally idolatrous impulse that seeks to master the world by reconstructing its intelligibility according to the demands of the mens humana and its methodic gaze that longs for the certainty of a fully transparent evidence. Construing Descartes’s gray ontology explicitly as a form of conceptual idolatry promises to furnish a viable thematic link between Marion’s Cartesian studies and his more recent writings in phenomenology, the gift, and negative theology. Accordingly , if this link can be established, it might serve to illuminate and evaluate the ongoing debates in the literature over the nature and legitimacy of the ‘‘theological turn’’ in phenomenology. And although an investigation of this latter question goes beyond the scope of this chapter, it is my hope that the analysis presented here will facilitate such work in the future. The Hidden Interlocutor: Aristotle It is no secret that the ‘‘utopic’’3 anonymity of the Regulae ad directionem ingenii tempts even the skilled interpreter of Descartes to despair of unlocking its meaning. Yet for all its beguiling, this temptation betrays a certain paradox. The Regulae do indeed contain many anonymous features that (a) may urge exegetes to regard the work as impregnable and (b) may cause them to doubt whether it contributes anything of consequence to Cartesian thought generally. Paradoxically , however, these anonymous features, even while they shroud the Regulae in obscurity and suggest their irrelevance, are also the same features that convey their philosophic singularity and render them indispensable for ascertaining ‘‘the true ‘birth’ of the Cartesian genesis of Descartes’’ (OG, 16).4 According to Marion, three main proposals for resolving the hermeneutic problem of the Regulae have been put forward in the scholarly literature, each of which attempts ‘‘to overcome’’ its ‘‘utopic situation’’ (OG, 16) by situating it with respect to Descartes’s published writings. Each of these proposals has serious deficiencies,5 however, and for this reason, Marion himself recommends that we 12 Givenness and God look ‘‘outside of the Cartesian corpus’’ (Marion’s emphasis) to find ‘‘the point of reference, or at least of illumination’’ from which to interpret the Regulae’s obscurities. Adopting such a standpoint would make it possible to view the Regulae as a ‘‘bordering text’’ (texte limitrophe ) that stands between the thought of Descartes that is properly Cartesian (as articulated in the published writings) and ‘‘the other currents of ideas’’ that comprise the conceptual mise-en-scène within which Descartes finds himself. In a word, Marion suggests that we regard...