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138 eight Inverted Intentionality Being Addressed Autonomy is allergic to alterity. If, then, one is to speak of subjectivity and transcendence or, more specifically of intentionality and transcendence, everything depends on how one proceeds. If one begins with a self-sufficient subject, granting autonomy to subjectivity, and then tries to blend alterity into the mix, touseaculinarymetaphor,transcendencewillbereducedtomereappearance, the Schein that is the Erscheinung of subjectivity as the true Wesen. This is what happens in Cartesian modernity. The subject is first established as the indubitable center of reference, whose clear and distinct ideas are to be the measure of truth and of being. God, allegedly the highest transcendence , the tu solus Altissimus of the Gloria, comes on the scene, to be sure. But too late—only on the onto-theological stage where, as Heidegger puts it in his definition of onto-theology, ‘‘the deity can come into philosophy only insofar as philosophy, of its own accord and by its own nature, requires and determines that and how the deity enters into it.’’1 The only Oscar for which Descartes’s God can be nominated is Best Supporting Actor; for God’s role is, ironically, to provide the external guarantee that human thought needs no external guarantees , that Protagoras was right in insisting that ‘‘man’’ is the measure of all Inverted Intentionality 139 things. Of course, Descartes acknowledge the ontic dependence of the subject , who is not causa sui, on God, who is. But this affirmation functions (1) to keep the censors off his back, and (2) to explain how the subject can be an autonomous absolute even though fallible. Fallibility and method replace sin and salvation. Subjectivity is the independent variable, transcendence the dependent variable, which is to say that transcendence has been absorbed in immanence. Spinoza had good reason to claim that he expressed the Cartesian principle more consistently than Descartes; and Hegel’s onto-theological pantheism is as much the fulfillment of Spinoza’s project as Spinoza’s is the fulfillment of the Cartesian project.2 To preserve the authenticity of divine alterity as the highest transcendence , one might insist on starting with God as autonomous and absolute, the independent variable, and blend in human subjectivity as the dependent variable (if I may be pardoned for mixing my culinary and logical metaphors). That is perhaps the appropriate procedure for the theologian within the traditions of the Abrahamic monotheisms,3 and, in any case, that is how Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin proceed as Christian theologians. Thus, for example , in the first paragraph of his Institutes, Calvin writes, ‘‘In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he ‘lives and moves’ [Acts 17:28].’’4 In other words, in a theological context any ‘‘Cartesian’’ attempt to begin with subjectivity immediately collapses in a reference to that which is prior; and Calvin briefly develops this priority of God in both ontological and moral terms as human dependence and depravity. So, in his second paragraph, he presents the proper procedure. ‘‘Again, it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself’’ (emphasis added). The phenomenologist may not wish to beg the question at the outset by starting with the subject, thus taking the side of the onto-theologian, or starting with God, thus taking the side of the biblical theologian.5 Calvin’s first suggestion can be helpful here. To begin with the subject is not necessarily to posit the subject as a fixed point of reference. If it turns out to be finite and a fortiori if it turns out to be fallen, it will immediately refer beyond itself, or better, will always already have referred beyond itself. The phenomenologist will be open to the possibility6 that what we try to make first needs to be aufgehoben in what is truly First, that it needs to be teleologically suspended in that which is not itself but is its proper home. These references to Hegel and Kierkegaard, respectively, indicate, I should think, that the fates of subjectivity and transcendence are not decided in advance by proceeding in this way; but this will have to be a phenomenology different from those of Husserl and Heidegger, and that is the theme of this chapter. Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus gives to the phenomenologist an important...

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