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  • Continental Philosophy of Religion: Then, Now, and Tomorrow (extended version)
  • John D. Caputo

Was the fiftieth anniversary meeting a celebration of a vital philosophical society—or was it a memorial service held by the elders at the passing of a beloved old friend? Were we giving anniversary papers or eulogies?

That question, a bit unnerving I admit, can best be approached by following the fortunes of “religion” at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). The question of the state of Continental philosophy and religion “then and now” cannot elude the question of their future. That is why to address this question I must expand it—then, now, and then again tomorrow.1 Accordingly my essay has three parts. First (“then”), I will begin with what I will call the theological sources of “Continental philosophy” and of SPEP in particular, which was both a partial mirror—it could not be expected to reflect everything—and the instrument of the emergence of Continental philosophy in the United States in the middle of the last century. Next I turn to “now”: the state of the question today, which, as Dominique Janicaud complained, represents a “theological [End Page e-1] turn” in Continental philosophy.2 Finally, I will conclude with a third part, tomorrow, the future, what is starting to happen to religion and ethics in SPEP and Continental philosophy generally, which threatens (or promises, depending on where you stand on this point) to completely remake or even unmake it, precisely in reaction against the so-called theological turn.

Origins: The Becoming Philosophical of the Theological

My thesis in the first part is that SPEP in particular and Continental philosophy in the United States generally were first nourished in originally religious and theological soil. This is a slightly paradoxical thing to say because if we look at the papers delivered in the first five years, from 1962 to 1967, we will see nothing of the sort, hardly any mention of religion at all.3 However, far from constituting evidence against my thesis, that fact is actually a part of my thesis.

I want first to point out that there is nothing to be gained from exaggerating the theological dimension I propose to underline. There are obviously internal philosophical reasons for the emergence of Continental philosophy in the United States, without which nothing would have been possible. These internal reasons are nicely summarized in what John Wild called as early as 1955 “the breakdown of modern philosophy”:4 the discontent with the epistemologies of the seventeenth and eighteenth century; the critique of metaphysics in the wake of Kant; the critique of Hegel launched by the Kierkegaardian pseudonyms; the intrinsic appeal of phenomenological ideas and, in those days, even more so, the tremendous popularity of existentialism, which the literary writings of Camus and Sartre helped to make part of the general culture. None of this need necessarily have anything to do with theology.

My only point is that it did. That is because this discontent with modernity found an especially receptive audience among people who—like the founders of SPEP—were either theologically minded philosophers outright or philosophers who having been theologically minded had given it up and were looking for a successor form of thinking to their theological interests. They were seeking a post-theological form of thought that I am describing by saying that their philosophical interests were in a certain sense the becoming-philosophical of their theological concerns. The significant thing is not so much that they gave up theology, which they did in varying degrees, [End Page e-2] some more than others, but that in looking for a successor form they turned to Continental philosophy. If they turned to Anglo-American sources, they embraced not the then regnant Anglo-American analytic and positivistic philosophies but classical American thought: the work of William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience was and is a reigning standard in the philosophy of religion, and Whitehead’s process philosophy (theology), which was then quite influential in no small part because of the work of Charles Hartshorne. From the start an important philosophical and political alliance was forged among Continental philosophy, American pragmatism, and the...

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