Instead of metaphysics?

Difficult not to start without greeting with an all Augustinian admiration the recent election of Jean-Luc Marion at the French Academy. Honor is so rarely returns to philosophers, and risks becoming even more rare given the increasingly technical character of the “ production Current philosophical, which the author deserves the most felt congratulations in the whole philosophical community, whose level and self -esteem he enhances. To my knowledge, he is the very first phenomenologist to access this immortal status: hat ! The dome halos a philosopher whose work, which is a school, benefits from growing international influence. The stubborn resistance, although understandable, which is sometimes opposed to it is due to its theological orientation. But it has the happiness of being frankly displayed and defended with incredible finesse.

A philosophy of love

It goes without saying that she finds a confirmation in her most recent book that goes to the school of Saint Augustine. Without being easy, or wanting to be, this study will remain among the works that count, because it is one of the few to transform its object (Augustine), its discipline (phenomenology) as well as its reader, if, of course, the latter accepts to read works like Augustin and Marion want them to be proven. He first renews the intelligence of a thinker whose colossal importance does not have to be demonstrated, but which philosophers often renounce to approach head -on: partly because he is unclassifiable (Marion insists there), in part because he is already too well classified by common opinion as a Christian theologian kneaded with Platonism, but who would not really have a clean philosophical doctrine, By systematically attenuating, and probably too much, the contribution of neoplatonism). The interpretation that Marion in book is, without the shadow of a doubt, the most sustained phenomenological reading, the most refreshing and in many ways the most philosophically original that the bishop of Hippone has ever benefited, Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, Wittgenstein, Arendt, Ricœur, Derrida and Lyotard having only offered readings. Nothing comparable to “ confessions »Of these dense and intense 421 pages. Certainly, the reading that Heidegger proposed in a course of 1920-21 (GA 60, always not translated, alas !) Overlooks all the others. Marion owes him a lot – Heidegger is here, by far, the most quoted author after Augustine -, but, depending on what is a now classic gesture, and quite honorable at home, he will send him fairly hard criticism. Is that the question that Marion wants to wake up is not that of being, especially not her, but that of love (but who never said that they had to excite ?). So he criticizes Heidegger for having put Augustin’s thought at the service of a resumption of the question of being (as if that were a disaster), for having “ de-theologized Augustine (which is not sure) and obscures the whole dimension of love, in which Augustine enters his treatment of temptation, will, time and self. Marion hits the bull’s eye when he maintains that Heidegger’s thought cannot think of the phenomenon of love. This controversy is happy, but the Manichean opposition of a philosophy of being or a thought of love is less so, because it hides to what extent it makes it possible. Indeed, when Heidegger stigmatizes the nominalist conception of being that would have prevailed in a certain metaphysical tradition, it is in order to think of a completely different experience of being, that it deploys from theafficable fundamental of Daseinhis being of concern. From concern to love, there is certainly a step to take, and all of Marion’s work consists in crossing it, but without Heidegger and his awakening of the question of being, he would not be imaginable.

Renewal of phenomenology

But by crossing this step, it is the phenomenology that Marion renews in depth, and at a time when she may appear to prey to a certain shortness of breath by dint of commenting the same texts. He is working there by radicalizing the motive for the decentering of theegostarted by Heidegger. But if the ego is secondary to Marion, it is because it receives itself that from self, knowing a primordial gift, which can only be divine. Phenomenology here becomes a “ spirituality affair “, Which will continue to make some of them. Should we prefer a phenomenology without spirit ? If a spirit without phenomenology is blind, a phenomenology without spirit remains empty.

The only scandal is that it is an atrociously edited book: shells, faults and omissions of words reach an unbearable level. It would be inhuman to count them, but there is an average of at least one fault per page (which sometimes fall into gusts, especially for those who have the misfortune to love Latin and German: three faults in two lines in a quote from Breast und zeit in p. 213, four others in three lines in a note from p. 299, etc.). It is heartbreaking that no one in Puf has never seriously read the tests of this book. Otherwise “ person “Would have let the word pass” dot »In p. 179. To this vice a single remedy: a second edition as soon as possible ! The election to the Academy will undoubtedly have this happy effect.

Thank God, and this is a bit the case to say, or invoke it, the content saves typography. We have always known that the decentering of the ego could find a privileged witness in the work of Augustine and his experience of the worried heart of the man who will always remain an enigma for himself. But Marion’s project follows Augustin ad litteram When he proposes to refocus theego on the one (or the one) who is “ instead ». Certainly, “ I am another “, The Self is experienced” like another “(Ricœur), or” for another “(Lévinas), but Marion’s great thesis is that these formulas are hardly enough: it must be said, and Augustin exhorts there, that the ego only becomes oneself by another (p. 384), that is to say by a gift that precedes him, because everything that happens to him, including his being, happens to him as a gift from elsewhere and who gives him a truth, a self, a real will (without which there is only one “ nolontée ) And a place, instead of oneself. This phenomenology ofego “” gave “, Delayed on himself, is enriched here, thanks to Augustin, of a” hermeneutics of creation Who hears all things not only as ahead of me, but as created by God, SO like good. Only, creation should not be understood in the sense “ metaphysical “, Like the production of being as a whole, but in a more sense” liturgical (P. 322) and community who recognizes and praises in creation the goodness of God. This strong thesis allows Marion to offer a luminous solution to the epic question of the unit of Confessions : from the book XIthe individual confession of Augustine, if it should not remain a simple psychological event without theological function, must become a universal confession of the whole community of believers about all things, welcomed as so many gifts of God. Marion is just with the texts here where Augustin writes that all creatures “ confess Then the goodness of the creator.

Non -metaphysical thought ?

However, he believes that this thought has nothing to do with metaphysics. Certainly, Augustine did not know the term metaphysics, born in XII^e century, and ignored all of the separation, even later, of the metaphysica generalis and specialis. But in this account, there is also no metaphysics in Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus or Anselme. Here, I think that there is reason to be wary of the fatal fetishism that surrounds the term of metaphysics and which has everything to do with our primary nominalism: it is not because the word or the concept is not present that the thing is not there.

If this debate imports to Marion, it is because the non-(or pre-) metaphysical character of Augustin would invite to read it as an author “ post-metaphysics “, Who would become our” Contemporary utopian ». But what do we gain by that ? Less we think, I fear, because we mainly contribute in this way to accredit and perpetuate a reading of metaphysics, inherited from Heidegger, but too obediently followed here, which tends to make it and its “ language ” THE “ diet »To fight at all costs ? To be common, it is not sure that this obsession (which may not be recognized as such, but de factothis is the result produced) of metaphysics, and the question of being, really makes it possible to understand what it was. It would only have started with Jacques de Venise ? Or Suarez ?

Irony is that Augustine is one of those rare masters who can help us to better see what was and what remains this formidable adventure of metaphysical thought, who wondered about being (or his gift, if we prefer), his meaning and his reasons, and from which we can hardly come out if we have no good reasons to do it, nor a better intelligence of what is. Clearly: Marion recognizes too little that her beautiful and in love thought of donation remains an intelligence of being, and of being ut donatumand that his own thought, like that of Augustine, remains governed by a principle “ theological », Love. Regarding Augustine, Marion is not wrong to maintain that the speech of praise that is confessio is less a speech on God (in the sense of what he calls “ there »Metaphysics) that a discourse addressed” farewell “, But if” Renting it means that I go up in my place, that I go back there where I am and to the one I come from “(P. 37), it is with Grand-Péine that we will make the reader believe that this thought is not metaphysical. Rather than seeing in Confessions A “ instead From metaphysics, it remains completely advised to discover one of its high places. Against her admitted intention, Marion’s work contributes powerfully, lovingly.