Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God

Chapter 3. Suffering Faith in Philosophy

3 Suffering Faith in Philosophy S. Clark Buckner Since the publication of Heidegger’s Being and Time, with its appeal to explicitly religious categories, phenomenology and post-phenomenological thought has repeatedly demonstrated a distinctly religious dimension. In the United States, this religious dimension to phenomenology recently has been celebrated by leading scholars such as John Caputo and Edith Wyschogrod, while, in Germany, it has been recognized by defenders and critics of phenomenology alike since the 1920s. And in France virtually every leading post-phenomenological thinker, from Paul Ricœur and Jean-Luc Marion to Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, has taken up and explored this dimension to phenomenology. In the work of these authors, the religious aspect of phenomenology is treated as essential to it and to the sense of responsibility that sustains its practice. In the early 1930s, this religious dimension to phenomenology found expression in an otherwise unlikely source, Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Here Husserl, the resolutely sober founder of phenomenology, who was first a mathematician and then a philosopher of mathematics, and who understood phenomenology throughout his life to be foremost a matter of providing philosophical foundations for the sciences, gave voice to a passionate need to believe. Against those whom he describes as the ‘‘scientifically minded,’’ Husserl defends the popular lament over a ‘‘crisis in the sciences,’’ as 55 itself definitive of the project confronting twentieth-century philosophy . While the rigor of the sciences could not be doubted—except perhaps in psychology, whose failure to establish itself as a science might be dismissed as a matter of immaturity alone—Husserl contends that the idealization of this rigor in philosophical positivism denied the authority of reason to give order and direction to life as a whole. ‘‘The exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the ‘prosperity ’ they produced,’’ he writes, ‘‘meant an indifferent turning away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity.’’1 What followed was an experience of profound disillusionment. He continues: The change in public evaluation was unavoidable, especially after the war, and we know that it has gradually become a feeling of hostility among the younger generation. In our vital need—so we are told—this science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence. (6) The denial of reason’s authority to address questions concerning the telos of human existence resulted in a ‘‘collapse of belief in reason’’ (12). Faith in the value of reason was lost and with it, the philosophical ideal that sustained the development of European civilization from its inception in ancient Greece. The crisis in the sciences, writes Husserl, ‘‘concerns not the scientific character of the sciences but rather what they, or what science in general, had meant and could mean for human existence’’(5). In its wake appeared the specter of nihilism. ‘‘If man loses this faith,’’ he continues, ‘‘it means nothing less than the loss of faith ‘in himself,’ in his own true being . . . in the form of the struggle for his truth, the struggle to make himself true’’ (13). In the moment of its accomplishment, the authority of science appeared to be sustained by an irrational faith in reason analogous to religious faith in God. In reason’s overcoming of myth and tradition, its teleology had been taken for granted, even as science denied the validity of such speculative valuation. But, with the loss of this faith, philosophy found itself in the grip, not of a rational conundrum, but of passionate suffering. ‘‘As philosophers of the present,’’ writes Hus56 Styles of Piety serl, ‘‘we have fallen into a painful existential contradiction. The faith in the possibility of philosophy as a task, that is, in the possibility of universal knowledge, is something we cannot let go’’ (17). This is the philosophical truth that Husserl hears in the hysterical lament of the crowd, whose disillusionment with reason and passionate need nevertheless to believe appeared, in the 1930s, to be leading Europe into utter catastrophe. In the very irrationality of their devotion, Husserl declares, philosophers serve...