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Privilege of Unknowing*
Jean-Luc Marion
i. “what is man?”
In the final analysis, why and by what right would one admit into the
field of university disciplines something like a philosophy of religion?
In one view, it actually deals with religion, and not philosophy; and
what is more, according to the most radical but also the most wide-
spread hypothesis, it deals with a religion that asserts itself as revealed.
But this in turn means that it will define its object with complete au-
tonomy, as the organized collection of articles of belief (credo, creed).
In such a case, we might do best to turn to sacra doctrina, which is to
say to scientia theologica, or if need be, outside of the exemplary case of
Christianity, to appeal to any body of doctrine that would offer the
stability and referential quality (whatever these may turn out to be) of
a collection of things believed and held as true.
Or, one could request for an alleged philosophy of religion a place
within philosophy proper. But, in this case, could religion claim a status
particular enough to become the object of a separate philosophy, one
that would be reserved for it alone? In fact, does all that is summed up
in this “religion” in question not simply reduce to one of the three
objects of metaphysica specialis, without any more special particularity
than its other objects (the soul and the world)? Does religion likewise
not belong to the secondary philosophies, such as rational psychology,
rational cosmology, physics, and so on? In this sense, every “philosophy
of religion” would be reduced to one of the secondary philosophies,
inscribed within metaphysica specialis, which is itself subjected to meta-
physica generalis, that is, ontologia, and thus to the system of metaphysica
as such.
* Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. This article is the text of Professor Marion’s inaugural
lecture as the John Nuveen Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Theology at the
University of Chicago School of Divinity.
䉷 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0022-4189/2005/8501-0001$10.00
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The Journal of Religion
1
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic (Ak. 9:25), trans. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992), p. 538. See the parallels in the Critique of Pure Reason, A 804/
B 832, and the “Letter to Stäudlin,” May 4, 1793 (Ak. 11:429), in Correspondence, trans. and
ed. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 458. Martin Heidegger’s
commentary reads: “The Kantian laying of the foundation yields this conclusion: The estab-
lishment of metaphysics is an interrogation of man, i.e., it is anthropology.” See Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics (§36, GA 3, p. 205), trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1962), p. 213.
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The Privilege of Unknowing
2
Kant, introduction to Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Ak. 8:119), trans. Victor
Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. 3 (my emphasis;
translation modified).
3
Kant, “Transcendental Deduction” (sec. 24, B 156), in Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman
Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), p. 167 (my emphasis; translation modified).
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known, and thus by the same right as any other known, which is to say
as any other object. Strangely, I thus never know myself as I know, but
always only as a me who is known, and thus as an object. I only know
myself as that which I am not, as the me-object. The resulting distinc-
tion—between on the one hand the transcendental I, the empty form
that accompanies every other knowledge but remains itself neither rep-
resentable nor knowable, and on the other the empirical me that be-
longs to the world of phenomena, and thus of objects known—mani-
fests nothing of my specificity (the property of knowing) and puts into
evidence precisely that which does not characterize me (the status of
known). Thus am I masked and lowered to the dishonorable rank of
an object. Rather than giving me access to the man that I am, this
distinction between the I and the me forbids me from drawing near to
the man that I am and disfigures the very stake of anthropology—the
self of each human being.4 Not only does man split into two irrecon-
cilable tendencies, but the only one that is knowable, the object of the
empirical me, defines him precisely by ignorance of the most extreme
and inalienable property belonging to the being that I am: the prop-
erty that exercises a thinking thought, as well as the inverse in a
thought that is thought. Which is to say, in fact and by right the object
of the empirical me substitutes for man the very definition of ob-
jecti[vi]ty. Lowered to the rank of a simple object of anthropology,
“man,” this recent invention, as Foucault used to say, could very well
have inevitably disappeared, like a fragile sandcastle, obliterated by the
rising tide. And in fact, he already has disappeared. Here we should
pay careful attention to Paul Tillich’s strong advice: “The object of the
philosophy of religion is religion. But this very simple explanation al-
ready signifies a problem, the fundamental problem of philosophy of reli-
gions: with religion, philosophy faces an object that refuses to become
an object for philosophy.”5
4
Such an application to the I of the processes of knowledge appropriate to objects alone
(as empirical me) is often found elsewhere too, as far, for example, as in Husserl, where “there
is no longer any difficulty” in knowing that which thinks from any other object, precisely
because this I becomes “the same” as an object—“here, as everywhere else, ‘the Same’ signifies
therefore an identical intentional object of separate conscious processes, hence an object
immanent in them only as something non-really inherent.” Cartesianische Meditationen V (Hus-
serliana 1:154–55), trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), pp.
126–27.
5
Paul Tillich, “Religionsphilosophie” (1925), in Frühe Hauptwerk, vol. 1 of Gesammelte Werke
(Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1959), p. 297.
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6
Augustine, Confessiones 4.4.9, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 1:36.
English translation in Henry Chadwick, trans., Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), p. 57 (translation modified). (Hereafter, citations of this work will list in parentheses
the O’Donnell page numbers first, followed by the Chadwick page numbers.)
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7
Confessiones 10.33.50 (O’Donnell, p. 139; the commentary provided in vol. 3, p. 220, refers
in a note back to the text of 4.4.9, cited in n. 6; Chadwick, p. 208, translation modified). This
split within myself even serves as a conclusion to bk. 2 (2.10.18): “et factus sum mihi regio
egestatis” (“I became to myself a region of destitution”) (O’Donnell, p. 22; Chadwick, p. 34),
where this “region of destitution” defines my alienation from myself (at the time of the first
theft) through the power of the group of wicked friends.
8
“Intravi ad ipsius animi mei sedem, quae illi est in memoria mea, quoniam sui quoque
meminit animus” (“I entered into the very seat of my mind, which is located in my memory,
since the mind also remembers itself”). Confessiones 10.25.36 (O’Donnell, p. 133; Chadwick,
p. 200).
9
Confessiones 10.16.25 and 10.17.26 (O’Donnell, pp. 128–29; Chadwick, pp. 193–94).
O’Donnell’s commentary rightly refers this argument to the two previous passages (4.4.9 and
2.10.18; see n. 7 above).
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The Privilege of Unknowing
tum” (“During this time of sleep surely it is not my true self, Lord my
God? Yet how great a difference between myself and myself in a [sin-
gle] moment”).10 In a single moment I clearly discover myself to be
someone other than my self, I am not what I am, I become a quaestio
for myself. The experience of self ends neither in the aporia of sub-
stituting an object (the self, the me) for the I that I am, nor in the
pure identity with self, but in the alienation of self from self—I am to
myself an other than I.
What import lies in this impossible access of the self to the self? Is
the issue here a failure of knowledge, or a limitation in the conscious-
ness of self, or, in short, an anticipation of the usual critiques of the
cogito, in the style of Malebranche: “L’on n’a point d’idée claire de
l’âme, ni de ses modifications” (“We therefore have no clear idea either
of the soul or of its modifications”)?11 This purely negative interpre-
tation would, however, be valuable under only one condition: that, in
the case of man’s I, it would be preferable that I know it by such a
“clear idea,” or, which follows, by a concept. Now this condition raises
not only the question of possibility—can I know my I by a clear and
distinct idea, or by a concept?—but also and first of all the question
of legitimacy, in two senses. First, is it possible or contradictory to claim
to attain the I, which alone understands (and produces) concepts, with
one of these very concepts? And next: would it be licit, admissible, and
desirable to know the I with a concept, if by chance it proved possible?
If, on the contrary, such an attempt in the end contradicted and de-
stroyed the very I to be attained, then the quaestio that Saint Augustine
sets against it would become not an aporia but a way toward a totally
different mode of conquest of that which I am as such.
For what would it serve a man to know himself through the mode
by which he knows the remainder—the world and its objects—if, in
order to do so, he must know himself as just one more object? What
would it serve a man to know himself with a concept, if in doing so he
lost his humanity or, in other words, his soul? And, inversely, what
would a man lose, if he only gained access to himself through the mode
of incomprehensibility? Is it really self-evident that all knowledge, and
even the knowledge of that which has the privilege to exercise knowl-
edge instead of submitting to it, must be accomplished by the same
and univocal concept?
10
Confessiones 10.30.41 (O’Donnell, p. 135; Chadwick p. 203, translation modified).
11
Nicolas Malebranche, “Recherche de la vérité: XIième éclaircissement,” in Œuvres com-
plètes, ed. A. Robinet (Paris: Vrin, 1964), 3:168. English translation in Thomas M. Lennon
and Paul J. Olscamp, trans. and ed., The Search after Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), p. 636.
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12
Regulae ad directionem ingenii, III, AT X:368, lines 15–17. English translation in John Cot-
tingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Douglas Murdoch, trans., Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writ-
ings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2:3 (translation modified). Citations of
this work will be listed hereafter with page numbers from the English translation in paren-
theses.
13
Regulae ad directionem ingenii, II, AT X:362, lines 2–4 (Cottingham et al., p. 1). The title
of this Regula can be compared with that of Regula III, AT X:366, lines 11–14.
14
Johan Clauberg, Metaphysica de Ente, quae rectius ontosophia [dicitur] . . . , secs. 6 and 4,
respectively, in Opera omnia (Amsterdam, 1691), 1:283. Berkeley will simply radicalize this
decision (if it can be radicalized any further).
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The Privilege of Unknowing
decided in or by this being itself, but in and by the mind that knows
it, because the knowing mind constructs this being’s concept. In Car-
tesian terms, one could say that there is only that which can satisfy the
conditions of possibility fixed by the Mathesis Universalis—namely, or-
der (whatever it may be) and measure. Anything else is unintelligible
and thus does not come under knowing.15 It follows that the object is
never defined in itself, nor by itself, but always by the thought that
knows it in constructing it. More essential to the being as object than
the being is to itself is the ego, which fixes the being’s conditions of
objectification and makes of it an alienated being—alienated from it-
self by the knowledge of another. It falls to the intuitus to accomplish
concretely this alienation of the object: in-tuitus rather than intuition,
a gaze that is active and on the lookout, not a neutral vision, because
it only exercises its view according to the mode of a guard (-tueri), the
guard who makes sure and places under security, who keeps an eye on
and watches over that which henceforth remains under his dominion:
the object.
No one exposed this alienation of the thing by the concept that
precedes and reconstitutes it into an object better than Hegel. In nam-
ing a thing, man substitutes for its immediate being and its qualities
of sensible representation “a name, a sound made by [his] voice, some-
thing entirely different from what [the thing] is in intuition”; but this
name that is not the immediacy of the thing, this name into which the
thing “withdraws,” becomes “something spiritual, something altogether
different.” Thus nature transforms itself into “a realm of names,” be-
cause “the external object itself was negated in that very synthesis.”16
The object appears henceforth as such—as alienated being, which has
lost its being in order to receive it from the I: “the object is not what
it is . . . the thing is not what it is.”17 Thus, “man speaks to the thing
as his. And this is the being of the object.”18 The being of the object
only consists in receiving its being from man, who alienates it in so
15
See the Regulae ad directionem ingenii, IV, AT X:377, lines 23–378: “illa omnia tantum, in
quibus aliquis ordo vel mensura examinatur, ad Mathesim [sc. Universalem] referri, nec
interesse utrum in numeris, vel figuris, vel astris, vel sonis, aliove quovis objecto, talis mensura
quaerenda sit” (“I came to see that the exclusive concern of mathematics is with questions of
order or measure and that it is irrelevant whether the measure in question involves numbers,
shapes, stars, sounds, or any other object whatever”) (my emphasis; following the correction
of G. Crapulli according to text H [critical edition, The Hague: 1966]; Cottingham et al., p.
5).
16
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy
of Spirit (1805–6), with Commentary, trans. and ed. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1983), pp. 89–90 (translation modified).
17
Ibid., p. 88.
18
Ibid., p. 90.
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very far as he names it. Put another way, “by means of the name . . .
the object has been born out of the I [and has emerged] as being. This
is the primal creativity exercised by Spirit. Adam gave a name to all
things.”19 Hegel obviously alludes to the Biblical episode in which God
gives to man power over the animals by giving him the right to name
them: “[He] brought them to the man to see what he would call them”
(Gen. 2:19). Adam gives a name, and thus a definition to the animals,
which thus become subject to him, because in general all knowledge
by concept reduces what is known to the rank of object. Adam thus
names in the manner by which the I knows—by concepts of objects.
However, Adam has the power thus to name only that which can legit-
imately become for him an object: the animals (and the rest of the
world), and perhaps the angels, but not God, and not himself. If, more-
over, he claimed to name them, either this name would have no valid-
ity, or, if it had validity, what he named would not be man as such (as
the unrivaled thinker) but merely a thought-object like all the others.
Thus it follows from the characteristics of knowledge by concepts
that man cannot name man, which is to say define man, except by
reducing him to the rank of a simple concept, thereby knowing not a
man but an object, possibly animated, but always alienated. Therefore
there is no contradiction between, on the one hand, knowledge of man
as the object of anthropology and, on the other, the impossibility of
this knowledge within the reflexive self-consciousness. For knowing the
me as an object, constituted by alienation like all objects, in no way
opens access to the I, which alone knows objects and thus opposes itself
to them. This distinction shows itself simply in the case where I, a
human being, am the insurmountable difference between the two sides
of the cogitatio, the ego and the object. From this there immediately and
necessarily follows another conclusion: if one is unaware of or neglects
this distinction—that is to say if one persists in claiming that man can
(and therefore must) become an object for man (homo homini objec-
tum)—one only displaces this very distinction: for that which will be
known as object, even when dressed up with the title of man, will in
fact not be one and will not be able to make himself be recognized as
19
Ibid., p. 89. “The first act, by which Adam established his lordship over the animals, is
this, that he gave them a name, i.e., he nullified them as beings on their own account, and
made them into ideal [entities]. . . . In the name the self-subsisting reality of the sign is
nullified.” Gesammelte Werke, ed. H. Kimmerle and K. Düssing (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1975), 6:
288. See also System of the Ethical Life (1802–3) and First Philosophy of Spirit (Part III of the System
of Speculative Philosophy, 1803–4), trans. and ed. H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox (Albany: State
University of New York, 1979), pp. 221–22. I follow here the classic interpretation of Alexandre
Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 326 ff. (and also Alexandre
Koyré, “Hegel à Iéna,” Etudes d’histoire de la pensée philosophique [Paris: 1961], pp. 135 ff.).
10
The Privilege of Unknowing
one. Indeed, each of us can, in various ways, have this experientia crucis:
defining a man is equivalent to having done with him. Not because he
would no longer be thought, but precisely because one thinks him by
not thinking of him, because one thinks him without beginning the
thinking from him himself but, instead, beginning from one other
than him, namely, from the mind that defines him by alienating him,
which is to say the mind that thinks him according to the mode of
comprehension. Or, to classify a man is to downsize him as a human
being, because he could not be classified any other way than according
to an order and a measure (models and parameters) that come to him
from elsewhere, which is to say from the workings of my rationality.
We take notice of this alienation, which makes the defined, classified,
and comprehended human being fall to the rank of a simple object,
every time we end up admitting that, in order to put forward a defi-
nition by concept of man it is first necessary to dare to ask the ques-
tion, “What is man?” This simple question, even and above all if we do
not give it an answer, already includes within it another, much more
threatening question, because it asks, “What is a man?” More threat-
ening indeed, because even and above all if we cannot give an answer,
we nevertheless easily authorize ourselves to use the question nega-
tively, transforming it into a final question, “Is this [still, truly] a man?”
To claim to know and to define man with a concept leads inevitably to
a decision about his objectification, or rather to a decision about his
humanity according to the objectification that we will have produced.
Defining man with a concept does not always or immediately lead to
killing him, but it does fill the first condition required to eliminate all
that does not fit this definition. The danger—having done with some
among men because we can define “man”—is not exaggerated or non-
sensical. We experience it directly, as a clear possibility, in all the ap-
plications of its objectification.
For instance, when I find myself in a medicalized situation (e.g.,
admittance to the hospital, removal of clothing, transfer to surgery, the
reading of test results, submission to treatment), I become a medical
object. Or more precisely, the hospital technology’s inevitable hold of
power over me eliminates in me anything that will not reduce to a
medical object. Under the gaze of medical personnel, and very soon
under my own gaze, the treatment of my sick body will lead to its
interpretation according to the parameters of physical bodies (size,
quantification, measurements, etc.), with the result that my living flesh
will disappear. Soon I will no longer feel the fact that I feel myself:
anesthesia will not only deliver me from my pain, but also from my
suffering self, and thus from my self’s self-suffering. Next, every non-
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objective function will disappear from this self (me), and my flesh, or
that which is animated within me, will become an animal-machine.
This medical definition of my body as an object will also allow for the
distinction of health from sickness in terms of norms. Thus is opened
the fearful region in which man can make decisions about the nor-
mality, and thus the life and death, of other human beings—because
these human beings have become simple human objects.
Another example of objectification occurs when I am defined as an
object reduced to the parameters seen by economic theory—when I
become the famous “economic agent,” supposedly summed up by the
calculation of my needs, by the evaluation of these needs in numbered
costs and the balancing of these costs against purchasing power, and
finally by the purported rational calculation of a correspondence be-
tween the costs of the objects of the needs and this purchasing power.
In order to attain even an approximation of rigor, this stage-by-stage
reduction assumes that choices are made according to the laws of
exchange and thus that the economic agent proceeds strictly according
to self-interest, in short, that I only know and practice business, which
is to say strict exchange according to the iron law of a selfishness that
is no longer moral, but epistemological. Thus there disappears from
economic analysis everything that escapes exchange and commerce,
but which doubtless makes them possible and flows over them in every
direction: the gift and all the forms of social gratuity that have not yet
been rendered economic. For if economy economizes on the gift, then
more fundamentally, gratuity economizes on economy itself.20
Without lingering over other processes of objectification (psychiatry,
biology, etc.), let us consider directly the definition of the human be-
ing not only as social animal (social living being), but as political ob-
ject, such as it ratifies and perfects the “mobilization” without remain-
der of the humanity of man.21 The political determination of man is
not summed up by his sociability, but, at the very least, politics imposes
upon that sociability a technological treatment. In particular, through
the determination of one’s identity (of his name, I.D., passport) ac-
cording to number: dates (from birth to death), places (residence,
work, trips, etc.), health, commercial operations (bank account num-
bers, credit cards, etc.), local as well as long-distance communications
(sound and visual recordings, electronic addresses, cell phones, etc.),
all become numbers, such that the identity thus “digitized” according
to limitless parameters erects a comprehensive definition of the citizen.
20
See my analysis in “La raison du don,” Philosophie 78 ( June 2003): 3–32.
21
“Mobilization” is understood here in the sense used by Ernst Jünger in Der Arbeiter (Ham-
burg, 1932) and in “Die totale Mobilmachung,” in Krieg und Krieger (Berlin, 1930).
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The Privilege of Unknowing
22
Primo Levi lived and described perfectly the moment when the number, having become
the most efficacious tool for the definition (in this case ideological and racist) of man, and
thus for the stigmatization of the nonman (the Jew), silences the name of a man by substituting
itself for that name: “He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen,
the last three figures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy
of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer a man” (If This Is a Man; The Truce, trans.
Stuart Woolf [London: Abacus, 1987], p. 48). And once the name of a man is abolished, and
his humanity thus denied, it becomes possible and even quite easy to put an end to him
physically, as a “dog” or a “pig”—in other words, as an animal.
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23
Baruch Spinoza, Epistula 50, à J. Jalles, 3d ed., ed. J. van Vloten and J. P. N. Land (The
Hague, n.d.), 3:172. English translation in Abraham Wolf, trans. and ed., The Correspondence
of Spinoza (London: Frank Cass, 1966), p. 270.
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The Privilege of Unknowing
as the sign, the proof, and the guarantee of his humanity? How do we
avoid the confusions and contradictions implied by this demand? And
first and foremost, does a de jure incomprehensibility not lead finally
to a simple de facto unknowing? And, since such an unknowing either
disappears into a definitive ignorance or disqualifies itself as a poorly
formulated question, does it not always just vanish? In short, can one
maintain for very long the comprehension of such a fragile incompre-
hensibility? In order to surmount these difficulties, it would be nec-
essary to found and legitimize the impossibility of defining and com-
prehending man—and thus to envisage such an impossibility within a
new positivity and no longer as a pure and simple defect. How do we
do this?
Let us return to Hegel’s interpretation of Adam’s privilege in the
book of Genesis. There, man has the power to name, to understand,
and thus to dominate; but Adam exercises this privilege only upon the
animals, never upon God or upon himself. Why do these two escape
naming and thus escape the comprehension and, finally, the domina-
tion of man? That God would escape is conceived without any diffi-
culty: the Creator is not easily understood, and thus named, by his
creature. But why is it that man does not name himself? No interdict
is brought to bear here. Nothing more than the second commandment
is necessary, which forbids making “for yourself a graven image, or any
likeness of anything that is in heaven above” (Exod. 20:4)—anything,
therefore, that would claim to represent God through comprehension.
But is man, too, “in heaven above”? Most certainly—for this is the de-
cisive paradox—because that which is fitting for God (of whom no
name, no image, and no concept can claim comprehension) is also
fitting for man: man, and he alone among all the living, was created
not “according to [his] kind” but “in [the] image . . . [and] likeness”
of God (Gen. 1:24, 26). This paradox receives a precise commentary
from Saint Augustine: “be renewed in the newness of your mind. That is not
a making according to kind [secundum genus], as if renewal were achieved
by imitating a neighbour’s example or by living under the authority of
a human superior. For you did not say ‘Let man be made according to
his kind’ [secundum genus], but ‘Let us make man according to our image
and likeness,’ so we may prove what your will is.”24 Man remains un-
imaginable, because he is formed in the image of the One who admits
no image whatsoever. By right, man resembles nothing, because he
resembles nothing other than the One who is properly characterized
24
Augustine, Confessiones 13.22.32 (O’Donnell, p. 196; Chadwick p. 292, emphasis added;
translation slightly modified). Augustine quotes, successively, Rom. 12:2 and Gen. 1:24 and
26.
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25
David Tracy, On Naming the Present: God, Hermeneutics, and Church (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis
Books, 1994), p. 54.
26
According to Emmanuel Lévinas, “le visage est signification et signification sans contexte.
. . . En ce sens, on peut dire que le visage n’est pas ‘vu.’ Il est ce qui ne peut devenir un
contenu, que notre pensée embrasserait; il est l’incontenable, il vous mène au-delà” (“the
face is signification, and signification without context. . . . In this sense one can say that the
face is not ‘seen.’ It is what cannot become a content, which your thought would embrace;
it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond”). See Ethique et infini: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo
(Paris: Livre de Poche, 1982), pp. 80–81. English translation in Richard A. Cohen, trans.,
Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
1985), pp. 85–86.
27
Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 118. English translation in
David Farrell Krell, ed., Basic Writings, 2d ed. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 106.
28
Martin Heidegger, Brief über den “Humanismus,” in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 342. English
translation in Krell, pp. 234, 245.
16
The Privilege of Unknowing
˛ kav‘ autó n
of the incomprehensible [fixed] by the unknown within it (tq
’agnq́jtq˛ ).29
29
Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Making of Man,” in Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, etc.,
trans. William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson, vol. 5 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the
Christian Church, Series II, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
1965), pp. 396–97 (translation modified).
30
Confessiones 10.5.7, citing at the end Psalm 89:8 (O’Donnell, p. 121; Chadwick, pp. 182–83).
31
Confessiones 10.17.26 (O’Donnell, p. 129; Chadwick, p. 194). A strong and frightening
echo of such a horror is found in both Luther and Calvin, as B. A. Gerrish has superbly
demonstrated; see his “‘To the Unknown God’: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of
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The Journal of Religion
understands, within this impasse, that the one who is alone in knowing
him remains for him another, namely, God: “Utrum ita sim, nescio.
Minus mihi in hac re notus sum ipse quam tu. Obsecro te, Deus meus,
et me ipsum mihi indica” (“Whether I am one or the other I do not
know. In this matter I know myself less well than I know you. I beseech
you, my God, show me myself”).32 Under Augustine’s analysis, man’s
incomprehensibility to himself thus takes on yet wider and vaster di-
mensions. To begin with, as in the Greek fathers, the analysis points
out not only the image and likeness of God within man’s incompre-
hensibility but also a unique privilege held by the human being with
regard to all other creatures (which only resemble their genus, which
is to say, themselves). Next, this incomprehensibility tells man that he
goes beyond and exceeds himself, in short that “l’homme passe infi-
niment l’homme” (“man transcends man”), following the formulation
of an exemplary Augustinian: in a word, man passes beyond his own
means, man lives above his means.33 Finally and above all, according
to a strict consequence, only the infinite and incomprehensible can
comprehend man, and thus tell him of and show him to himself; only
God can reveal man to man, because man only reveals himself by re-
vealing, without knowing it, the one whose image he bears. Not only
is it true that “Je est un autre” (I is another), but this other calls him-
self God within man, the speculative Emmanuel. Henceforth, absent
God, man can no longer appear as such, but disfigures himself by tak-
ing on the figure of something other than himself, which is to say by
allowing himself to resemble something other than God. This is the
definition of sin: man thinks he attains unto himself by choosing to
resemble less than God. The dissimilarity in the image devalues him
short of God, and, barring God, man loses the human face. Thus the
soul, “cum stare debeat ut eis fruatur, volens ea sibi tribuere et non ex
illo similis illius, sed ex ipsa esse quod ille est, avertitur ab eo, movetur
et labitur in minus et minus, quod putat amplius et amplius. Quia nec
ipsa sibi, nec ei quicquam sufficit recedenti ab illo qui solus sufficit”
(“instead of staying still and enjoying them [the good things of God]
as it ought to, . . . wants to claim them for itself, and rather than be
like him by his gift it wants to be what he is by its own right. So it turns
away from him and slithers and slides down into less and less which is
imagined to be more and more; it can find satisfaction neither in itself
nor in anything else as it gets further away from him who alone can
God,” in The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 131–49.
32
Confessiones 10.37.62 (O’Donnell, p. 144; Chadwick, p. 216, translation modified).
33
Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Lafuma sec. 131). English translation in A. J. Krailsheimer, trans.,
Pensées (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 34.
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The Privilege of Unknowing
satisfy it”).34 I shall make only two remarks as commentary on this pow-
erful phenomenology of sin. First, sin does not consist in wanting to
enjoy the supreme good things, those of God, for they are given by
God without jealousy; rather, sin lies in wanting to enjoy them by one-
self and not through God, in wanting to appropriate them for oneself
in the first person (as in Phil. 2:6: ‘arpagmò n), in short in denying the
character of the gift—scorning the given as gift. Second, this entire
movement unfolds within the similitudo—“non ex illo similis ejus”—
which is to say, within the image and likeness, within man’s incompre-
hensibility to himself.
34
Augustine, De Trinitate, 10.5.7. English translation in Edmund Hill, O.P., trans., On the
Trinity (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City, 1992), p. 292. The same argument, exposed in a more
systematic way and at length, may be found in John Scot Eriugena, De Divisione Naturae, IV,
7, PL 122, col. 771 ff. See the standard-setting paper by Bernard McGinn, “The Negative
Element in the Anthropology of John the Scot,” in Jean Scot Erigène et l’histoire de la philosophie,
ed. René Roques (Paris: Editions du C.N.R.S., 1975), pp. 315–25.
35
Confessiones 10.30.41 (O’Donnell, p. 135; Chadwick p. 203, translation modified).
36
Baruch Spinoza, Ethica II, sec. 23. English translation in Samuel Shirley, trans., and Sey-
mour Feldman, ed., The Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), p. 81.
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The Journal of Religion
that the mens would have of itself would thus coincide with that of the
complete extended world. In this way we would instead have to confirm
that what man would know of himself would precisely not be himself,
but anything other than himself. Similarly, when Kant underscores that
the transcendental I has of itself only a “gänzlich leere Vorstellung”
(“completely empty representation”) and thus that it has “no experi-
ence” of itself and that “the transcendental object is equally unknown
[gleich unbekannt] in respect to inner and to outer intuition,” what does
he deny to man?37 Quite clearly, man is denied the status of object,
subjected to an intuition and inscribed within the common experience
of the world, which is to say, Kant denies man what the I can become
only by its disappearing as such, by its ceasing to be that through which
the objects of experience, insofar as they conform to the conditions of
intuition, become possible. Far from this absence of knowledge doing
harm to man’s dignity, it appears as the first bulwark, for, beyond the
question concerning the knowledge of man, the question of what such
knowledge would make of man imposes itself. Indeed, the impossibility
of assigning him any definition at all fixes the only correct definition
of man, because it attests to him precisely as “das noch nicht festge-
stellte Thier” (the animal that is not yet stabilized). Nietzsche here
inherits directly from a tradition that goes back at least to Pico della
Mirandola: “homo variae ac multiformis et desultoriae naturae animae”
(“man [is an] animal of diverse, multiform, variable, and destructible
nature”).38 The nature (and definition) of man is characterized by in-
stability—man as the being who remains, for himself, to be decided
and about whom one never ceases to be astonished. Man, undecidable
to man, thus loses himself if he claims to decide about himself. He
remains himself only as long as he remains without qualities, other
than those of “monstre incompréhensible” (“a monster that passes all
understanding”).39 Let us not be mistaken: Pascal here designates a priv-
ilege, that of showing forth (monstrare) in oneself the incomprehensible.
But are there not objections to be made? For example, following
Heidegger, one could assimilate the biblical definition according to
image and likeness to the Greek definition according to the possession
37
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 346/B 404, A 354, and A 372, respectively (Smith, pp.
331, 336, and 348).
38
Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884), 25 (428), Werke VII/2, ed. Colli-
Montinari (Berlin and New York, 1974), p. 121. See also Pico della Mirandola, De dignitate
hominis, ed. G. Tonion and O. Boulnois (Paris, 2004), p. 12, and also pp. 4, 6. English
translation in Charles Glenn Wallace, Paul J. W. Miller, and Douglas Carmichael, trans., On
the Dignity of Man, and On Being and the One, and Heptaplus (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965),
p. 6.
39
Pascal, Lafuma sec. 130 (Krailsheimer, p. 32).
20
The Privilege of Unknowing
40
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1963), sec. 10, p. 48, line 32. English
translation in John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans., Being and Time (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1962), p. 74.
41
Heidegger, Brief über den “Humanismus,” GA 9, p. 319.
42
Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, GA 40, p. 5. English translation in Gregory Fried
and Richard Polt, trans., Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
2000), pp. 7–8.
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The Journal of Religion
sibility of man? For it could be that Scripture fails to pose the question
“Why something rather than nothing?” not out of ignorance, but
rather in order not to presume a horizon, even that of Being, for the
question of man and because it questions the world and man in a way
that is yet more radical than would ever be allowed by the thinking of
Being. And above all, what the Scripture gives as answer to the question
it poses remains by definition a bottomless question, because it per-
petuates nothing less than the incomprehensibility of God. If ques-
tioning defines the piety of thinking, then Scripture, too, unfolds this
piety, because it alone leaves forever free and intact the questioning
of its question.
Despite this, metaphysics has indeed replied (whether it should be
allowed to or not) to the question concerning man’s definition of him-
self. And we know well that the Cartesian cogito has no other impor-
tance than to assure the ego its comprehension of itself and thus to
impose itself as the first principle of every other science. Nevertheless,
it would be more fitting to doubt this vulgate of Cartesianism, because
the texts of Descartes so often contradict it. Contradiction occurs first
of all because the ego’s very performance of its existence unfolds within
a space that is, from the outset, dialogical (with the Deus qui potest
omnia, with the genius aliquis malignius).43 Next, contradiction occurs
because the ego of the cogito recognizes that its finite thought culmi-
nates in a faculty of will that is paradoxically infinite, “ratione cujus
imaginem quandam et similitudinem Dei me refere intelligo” (“in vir-
tue of [which] . . . I understand myself to bear in some way the image
and likeness of God”); and above all the common understanding of
the comprehensibility of the ego is contradicted because the ego iden-
tifies its faculty of thinking of itself with the image and likeness of God
within it, to the point that the faculty of self-knowing is simply one
with the faculty of knowing God: “ex hoc uno quod Deus me creavit,
valde credibile est me quodammodo ad imaginem et similitudinem
ejus factum esse, illamque similitudinem, in qua Dei idea continetur,
a me precipi per eandem facultatem, per quam ego ipse a me perci-
pior” (“but the mere fact that God created me is a very strong basis
for believing that I am somehow made in his image and likeness and
that I perceive that likeness, which includes the idea of God, by the
same faculty which enables me to perceive myself”).44 Let us consider
43
See Meditationes, AT 8:21, line 2 and 8:22, line 24, respectively. See my study “L’altérité
originaire de l’ego,” in Questions cartésiennes II: Sur l’ego et sur Dieu (Paris: Presses universitaires
de France, 1996), chap. 1.
44
Mediationes, AT 4:57, lines 14–15 and 2:51, lines 18–23, respectively (Cottingham et al.,
pp. 101 and 98, respectively).
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The Privilege of Unknowing
45
Meditationes, Ve Responsiones, AT 6:368, lines 2–4. English translation in Elizabeth S. Hal-
dane and G. R. T. Ross, trans., The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1967), 2:218.
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The Journal of Religion
46
Paul Ricœur, “Herméneutique de l’idée de Révélation,” in La Révélation, ed. Daniel Cop-
pieters de Gibson (Bruxelles: Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, 1977), p. 46.
24