Westphal, Caputo, and Onto-theology
HOW RADICAL DO WE NEED TO BE?
It is impossible to speak of Merold Westphal’s academic contributions without including the lengthy (and lifelong) debates he has held with John Caputo. Truly, the debates between Westphal and Caputo (also frequently involving Richard Kearney) have dominated Continental philosophy of religion in North America for quite some time, and stories of their witty jousting at conferences and symposia are familiar to many. One such account has been transcribed in Modernity and Its Discontents, where Westphal and Caputo, along with James Marsh, hold a roundtable discussion exploring topics ranging from the issue of transcendence in postmodern thought to what counts as ‘radical’ hermeneutics.1
The issue of what is radical in postmodernism is central to their debates concerning hermeneutics and philosophy of religion, and a persistent question for them is how far should one take deconstruction and (broadly) a postmodern hermeneutics.2 This discussion pops up throughout Overcoming Onto-Theology, where Westphal defends Gadamer as being equally as radical as Derrida, the primary source of Caputo’s thinking. Westphal contends that Caputo’s critique of Gadamer as “reactionary” and “too comforting” misses the equally radical nature of Gadamer’s notion of historical-effected consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein).3 Westphal contends that Caputo’s Derridean deconstruction lacks a solid footing in that its disdain for religion, or “thick theology,” for the sake of preventing violence is too abstract and opaque.4 As are the Methodists he mentions in the preface to Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, Caputo’s account of religion is weak and thus malnourishing soup for Westphal.5
This discussion concerning the radical is furthered through Caputo’s review of Overcoming Onto-Theology, where he accepts Westphal’s reading of Derrida as fair and even a defense of Derrida to those who call him a relativist.6 However, after these kind remarks, Caputo critiques Westphal’s understanding of Derrida’s atheism (or what passes as such) and his lack of nerve regarding how far one should go in appropriating postmodern thought within Christianity:
My chief objection concerning Overcoming Onto-Theology is that it turns on a classical and classically Greek metaphysical distinction between an epistemological self and a noumenal world (and hence between epistemology and some sort of ontology). So I would like to press Westphal a little harder in the direction of what I might call a more robust postmodernism, or what I usually call a more radical hermeneutics, where these distinctions are not so settled.7
While the issue of hermeneutics becomes pivotal in their discussions, the essential question becomes “Just how radical do we need to be?”8 In many cases, each has proclaimed the other’s hermeneutics as wanting, as Westphal states:
I once suggested that [Caputo] write a prequel to his two books on radical hermeneutics…. I suggested that he might call it Not So Very Damn Radical Hermeneutics. In vintage form, he responded that it would not be necessary, since I had already written that book myself, namely … Overcoming Onto-Theology. Now he has graciously responded to my thought as expressed in Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, once again suggesting that my thought is insufficiently radical.9
In Simmons and Minister’s book, Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion, Westphal and Caputo revisit this debate concerning hermeneutics by focusing on the attempt of Simmons and Minister (among others) to explore the degree to which deconstruction, and the concept of religion without religion, can function within a Christian belief system. This work, along with B. Keith Putt’s text “Friends and Strangers/Poets and Rabbis: Negotiating a ‘Capuphalian’ Philosophy of Religion,” seeks to explore how Westphal’s thinking can function in dialogue with Caputo’s own. Putt is correct in calling projects of this sort “Capuphalian.”10 These two works, along with Christina Gschwandtner’s text Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy, cover a great deal of ground concerning the reception of Westphal and Caputo’s thought within what I would call the second generation of Continental philosophy of religion in North America, that is, the generation after Westphal, Caputo, and Kearney.11 What I would like to contribute to this discussion, and what I believe is most relevant to Westphal’s thinking, is the issue Caputo takes with Westphal’s Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, namely that he sees it as insufficiently radical.
I find that this critique of Westphal, fixated on onto-theology, is essential for understanding how his philosophy is best read as fundamental theology. I contend that, by seeing Westphal as a theologian and not a philosopher, the task has changed, and along with it the stakes as well: Westphal’s theistic truth claims can be posited within a theological discourse that can accept and take up postmodern critique, so as to direct it and challenge it, while still remaining situated in a Christian tradition. Westphal’s style of thought is one of appropriation: he takes up a concept, such as a hermeneutics of suspicion, and places it within his own Christian context. By fully accepting this context, and consequently making the shift from a philosophical to a theological discourse, he can acknowledge that his appropriation of these concepts do not directly address the author’s original concerns but are placed in service of Westphal’s Christian faith. This is not to say that philosophy and Christianity are irreconcilable; it is to argue that Westphal’s ultimate concern is not philosophical but theological: his goal is to better understand the Christian faith in a postmodern context, and he employs philosophy to do so. This theological paradigm also further reveals the pastoral dimension of his work, which I address in the conclusion of this chapter.
Caputo’s critique of Westphal’s overcoming of onto-theology helps reveal this theological concern as it points out the eschatological nature of Westphal’s theology. Westphal is dependent on revelation within his work, and, as one can see with his appropriation of Aufhebung, his thinking deeply involves concepts or subjects being taken up within a higher order (canceled but not negated in a traditional Hegelian fashion) that culminates in a transcendence with God. Caputo’s critique hints at how Westphal’s theism is dependent on an eschatology to make his philosophy work, and accordingly, one begins to notice the theological foundation of Westphal’s work. As shown within Caputo’s critique of Overcoming Onto-Theology, Westphal’s thinking culminates in a future eternity, hinting at an eschatological moment when the concerns of onto-theology are alleviated:
The upshot of Merold Westphal’s postmodern delimination of onto-theology is that, when all is said and done, we are free to believe everything that onto-theological arguments, in all their clumsy woodenness and misplaced absoluteness, were getting at. We are perfectly free to believe in the God of metaphysical theology: that God is an infinite eternal omnipotent omniscient creator of heaven and earth. Onto-theology is overcome by being postponed and chided for being so precipitous, presumptuous and impatient to shuffle off these finite, mortal and temporal coals. What onto-theology is talking about comes true in eternity, but here in time we should make more modest proposals. Postmodernism is the methodological requirement of the day, enjoining epistemological modesty and hermeneutical patience, but at the end of days, when this methodological veil is lifted, classical metaphysical theology steps on the stage, wholly unable to suppress a bit of an ‘I told you so’ smirk on its face.12
Caputo finds that Westphal’s appropriation of postmodernism is mainly a contemporary formulation of an epistemic humility that accepts that ‘we are not God.’ Yet while Caputo’s postmodernism asks, “Can we ever believe in the existence of a God?” Westphal is content to stymie the question of God’s existence for the sake of giving the believing soul room to thrive in a postmodern context. “Westphal’s epistemological or methodological appropriation of postmodernism proves too much,” Caputo claims, pointing at how it stops just short of a true embrace of a postmodern suspicion and critique of the truth claims of traditional theism.13 Westphal happily accepts that humanity does not have access to the Truth, or that we see through a glass, darkly, but he still holds to the Kierkegaardian principle that this does not entail that there is no Truth. Rather, it is accessible only to God: “Existence is a system—for God, but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit.”14 Westphal is not ready to abandon his theism for the sake of committing to a concept of postmodernity that Caputo claims is more radical. In fact, Westphal sees his work as radical precisely because he formulates postmodernity through a theistic lens: he sees how a determinate, “thick theology” can remain viable even after the death of metaphysics.15
CENTER OF GRAVITY: WESTPHAL’S ‘ONTO-THEO-LOGICO-CENTRISM’ IN TRANSCENDENCE AND SELF-TRANSCENDENCE
Before entering into Caputo’s critique, it is important to summarize Westphal’s process of overcoming onto-theology in Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, since it will remind us of what, exactly, Caputo is critiquing. Westphal presents his argument in three parts: part 1 explains the critique of onto-theology and how he utilizes this critique against what one could say is ‘bad God-talk,’ where God becomes a metaphysical tool for the all too human quest for self-autonomy. He directly engages Heidegger’s critique in Identity and Difference and in Being in Time. From there, he explores Spinoza’s and Hegel’s pantheism to show how there is a need for a concept of transcendence in our thinking (contra Spinoza) and how the notion of absolute understanding, even with a sense of transcendence, is problematic as it continues—even masks—the quest for self-autonomy (contra Hegel). Humanity, as seen through the critique of metaphysics in Heidegger and the formulations of Spinoza and Hegel, perpetually attempts to develop an understanding of the world in which humanity is always at the controls. God thus becomes “the keystone of a metaphysical theory designed to render the whole of reality intelligible to [human] philosophical reflection.”16 This philosophical reflection, Westphal continues, is the beginning of making the world subject to human self-interest and mastery. Metaphysics, then, can be seen as humanity’s selfishness, by which we try to make the world bend to our will, our will to power.
In part 2 Westphal tries to explicate a theistic account of God that avoids metaphysical onto-theology. He does this through an engagement with three premodern thinkers—Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, and Aquinas—and with Karl Barth, who at best can be called antimodern. Through this engagement Westphal formulates a way to comprehend God through what God is not (Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, a via negativa) and how God can be understood through asymmetrical analogy (Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, the analogia entis). Finally, he shows how revelation, God revealing God’s self to humanity, opens us to an understanding and dialogue with God even though we can never fully comprehend God or God’s revelation (Barth, the analogia fidei). This dialogue allows Westphal to claim that a theistic account of God is tenable without onto-theological thinking and that it is possible to know of God, to experience God’s involvement in the world (i.e., revelation), in spite of human selfishness. In this formula, Westphal sets up human sin as a primary obstacle for understanding God, as seen through Barth’s concept of total depravity, and he relates sin to onto-theological thinking.17 Once he has established a way not to understand God (which indeed informs the ways one can understand God), Westphal then turns to a phenomenological concept of revelation and how that possibly allows us to experience and understand God, albeit finitely and imperfectly. We see in Westphal’s engagement with premodern thinkers that the human, reflective process of understanding God can function as an access point to conceptualizing God. Nevertheless, he eventually focuses on God’s revelation to humanity as the primary mode of conceiving God, since it is at once God revealing God’s self as well as a manner in which faith becomes a task and not a proposition.
Part 3 sees Westphal working somewhat inversely to metaphysics: he first teases out a nontheological encounter with God and revelation through Levinas’s conception of ethics as first philosophy. This is meant to show how a concept of God and revelation can exist without theological presuppositions.18 Then he lays a theological foundation underneath this phenomenological account through Kierkegaard’s concept of faith as a task of a lifetime. With both Levinas and Kierkegaard, Westphal finds a way to understand how a believing soul arrives at faith through the experience of creation and how one is compelled by that faith to live a (faithful) life within creation through commanded revelation. The prior God-talk from parts 1 and 2 find their telos—their faith and purpose, basically—through the dialogue in part 3. As we shall see, this is an important aspect that I think Caputo’s critique misses.
In his essay “What Is Merold Westphal’s Critique of Onto-theology Criticizing?” Caputo dissects Westphal’s Transcendence and Self-Transcendence by showing that while it does allow for some form of self-transcendence and decentering of the self, it still holds to a greater center, and therefore does not actually overcome the problem of onto-theology.19 Caputo bases this critique on the Derridean line of thought, the thrust of which is that, although removing the self as the center of thought is good, the fact that there is still a center grounding the self means that onto-theology is still in play. Caputo even suggests that the critique of onto-theology be called a critique of “onto-theo-logico-centrism,” arguing that Westphal falls into a familiar trap of basing his idea around a center that grounds thought.20
Setting up this critique, Caputo describes Westphal’s overcoming of onto-theology as a dual-track process by which, “on the one hand, the transcending of the self [is seen] as an autonomous self and self-centered agency, and on the other hand, the transcendence of God, the irreducible alterity of God, [is seen as] beyond the confinements and constructions by which we humans seek to contain God’s being.”21 One track sees a self-surpassing transcendence, whereas the other track, together with this self-surpassing, opens the self to a greater transcendence in and through the divine. Basically, the self overcomes itself through the other to find God. “The more God’s transcendence is respected,” Caputo summarizes, “the more decentered and self-transcendent the self becomes.”22 On this account, Caputo settles Westphal into the postmodern debates concerning the decentered self and onto-theology. Moreover, he notices in Westphal’s part 2 a particular version of “a ladder of ascent” that passes through three stages to understand the transcendence of God.23 This is where Westphal’s theism comes into play: after the ‘bad God-talk’ of part 1, Westphal describes the transcendence of God, which becomes understood through the task of faith in light of revelation, the essential point of part 3. These stages display human reason grappling epistemically to understand that which it seeks to find in transcendence. One could say that this ladder of ascent in part 2 is the foundation (or the actual tracks, in Caputo’s metaphor) that Westphal establishes for the movements of the self in self-transcendence in order to find God’s transcendence.
Regarding what onto-theology is and why it matters for God-talk, Caputo offers his own reading of Heidegger, noting the circular nature of onto-theology:
‘Ontotheologic’ is a circle or circulatory system in which Being serves as the ground of entities, and entities return the favor and serve conversely as the ground of Being. That is to say, Being is the common ground of everything that is, that which they all have in common, their common base, ground, or support, even while the First Entity (God) is the causal ground of other entities, thereby setting in motion the distribution of Being among entities, so that entities may have Being at all. Both Being and entities play crucial but complementary roles within the circulatory system of onto-theology.24
As a matter of circular reason, onto-theology, for Caputo, characterizes the ways in which human reasoning justifies itself through its own logic (or reasoning). He broadens this point through Derrida, whom Caputo sees as articulating how onto-theology is problematic because it focuses on a center of thinking that grounds thought; the theo in onto-theo-logy. Thus onto-theology “is a critique of the Center and of any possible ‘centrism,’ be it God or anything else.”25 This problem with a center is that God—or what stands for God in secular onto-theologies—is unquestionable, and thus “undeconstructionable”: in the vein of onto-theology understood as circular reasoning, God is something that begins and ends the circular nature of thinking and thus is impermeable to inquiring into its own foundation.26 As Caputo argues:
What is being criticized [by Derrida] is confidence in the Center itself and the protection it affords, the confidence that there is a Center that holds firm and encompasses all. [Derrida] describes a situation in which we are more radically de-centered, de-centered not because we are merely fallen and finite while the Center itself is infinite, holy and incomprehensible to our finite minds and wills, but because the Center itself is in question.27
Derrida follows the same critique of Heidegger: metaphysics is always problematic in its attempt to ground thought. However, Derrida reformulates this critique by questioning the seeking of ground or a foundation itself. The fact that a ground is sought becomes the object of a critique of metaphysics, not what functions as the ground. Caputo sees Westphal’s attempt to articulate a theistic God beyond onto-theology as continuing this pattern, and therefore he does not overcome onto-theology.
Capitalizing on this Derridean formulation, Caputo places equal emphasis on all three aspects of onto-theo-logy, yet he begins the deconstruction (not the overcoming) of this term from the middle. One has to be aware of beingness (onto-) in relation to being, but also the center of gravity for which God represents within being (theo-) and the subsequent rationalism that formulates both into concepts that can be understood and thus exploited in human reasoning (-logy). “It is only when all three ingredients,” Caputo summarizes, “in [onto-theology] are given their due weight that we can come to grips with this critique in its distinctive sense.”28 In the case of overcoming onto-theology, then, one must move beyond a center (theo-), as it is essential to both the onto- and the -logy in onto-theo-logy; it is the tie that binds the expression.
Considering Westphal’s argument in Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, Caputo acknowledges that emphasizing the decentered subject is indeed a primary step toward overcoming onto-theology, but the fact that Westphal wants us to become more God-centered through our decentering (the second track, as he formulates it above) does not rid us of seeking a center, as the center itself is the objectionable concept. If we are to understand that “the critique of ontotheology is a confession of a lack of proper, determinate, and fixed names for what we love or desire,” then we must maintain an “open-endedness” toward where that love and desire points.29 Westphal, positing a theistic God beyond onto-theology—in spite of his clever use of the via negativa, analogia entis, and analogia fidei—fails to be radically open ended. He still holds to a center, however fuzzy he wants to make it.
For Caputo, being (radically) postmodern is to be more open to the possibility of what transcendence might mean to the self-transcending and decentered subject. Westphal, in Caputo’s reading of Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, stops short of being sufficiently radically open to be willing to let go of a theistic God. I find that if one were to read Westphal in this way, one would rightly side with Caputo, since Westphal maintains a center and thus does not overcome onto-theology. It would seem as if Westphal is continuing what Caputo criticized in Overcoming Onto-Theology: he wants to believe in the God of metaphysical theology, albeit postponing the metaphysics until eternity. At the end of days, Westphal’s (metaphysical) God may still smirk and say, “I told you so.” However, although Caputo’s critique is valid, I think he has ignored the Hegelian nature of Westphal’s Transcendence and Self-Transcendence—and perhaps Westphal’s use of onto-theology in general—when he formulates it along a dual-track process. The tracks Caputo uses are surely metaphorical, but I contend that the concept of decentering the self to find a greater center is a misreading of Westphal’s argument. In that work, Westphal does not see either as tracks, as it were, but rather self-transcendence is taken up in transcendence via what I call a Westphalian Aufhebung; there is no movement of the self out of the center to experience the transcendence of God.30 Rather, God’s transcendence takes up the self-transcendent self through one’s faith and obedience to revelation. Sin, as understood through onto-theology, is canceled in this dual transcendence through both the act of the self and the act of God. It is a dual transcendence, and thus it requires participation of both God and the self. However, it is the self who is being taken up into the higher order of God since one’s self-surpassing transcendence opens oneself to God and to being taken up. Within this process, what is being negated is the individual’s sinful nature.
Caputo is entirely correct to highlight the ‘eternal’ (or what I call, the eschatological) nature of this argument, but he is wrong to articulate it as he does, since his reading entails that, within the experience of decentering, the self becomes cognizant of the greatness of a larger center—as if the self slides away to gain a greater perspective of the whole. Instead, I believe that Westphal’s argument of self-transcendence, which pertains to a decentered subject in a philosophical sense, is better seen theologically and, more pointedly, eschatologically: the self’s self-transcendence is the process by which God takes one up through a transcendence that cancels the sinfulness of the self, particularly the noetic effects of sin (onto-theology), and lifts the self up into a higher purpose.31 This higher purpose on earth is serving God through commanded revelation (particularly the love commandment), but it discovers its finality in an eschatological movement when God takes up the world in divine reconciliation. Caputo has a valid claim: for Westphal, the right for humanity to pronounce metaphysical truth claims is postponed here on the earth, and postmodernism becomes the contemporary articulation of this postponement. However, Westphal sees a future when this might not be the case. Existence is still a system for God, and faith is still only a task, but it anticipates a future eschaton. Westphal is indeed writing a thick theology.
RAPTURED BY THE SPIRIT: WESTPHAL’S ESCHATOLOGICAL AUFHEBUNG
After closely reading Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, one is surprised by how easy it is to misread the text as a straightforward argument explaining what God is not, and then what God is, and finally how we come to know God. In this fashion, it could be read almost like a long-winded sermon that chides believing souls in the pews with their foolish God-talk, then builds them up with a positive concept of God and concludes with an Ite, missa est, or blessing: “Go forth and sin no more! Follow God’s commandments and you shall inherit the Kingdom!”
While there is something true to this understanding, one misreads Westphal if they see his argument as straightforward. As mentioned in the last chapter, he reveals that this is a misreading, surprisingly, in the conclusion of the work, when he remarks at the “strikingly Hegelian character” of the text, particularly in its method.32 From this admission, he notes how his work follows the Hegelian structure of moving from an abstract notion (onto-theology, in Westphal’s case) toward a “concrete particularity” (i.e., understanding of revelation and faith).33 Furthermore, he explains that the text could be read backward, from part 3 to part 1.34 Understanding this Hegelian character thus becomes the lens through which one should read the text.
Westphal articulates that this Hegelian structure reconstitutes a concept into a more complex whole, and as such, it follows what Hegel calls an Aufhebung, or what Kierkegaard articulates as a teleological suspension. As mentioned before, Westphal sees the concepts of Aufhebung and teleological suspension as synonymous, albeit with some small differences between them. For Westphal, Hegel’s term relies on Aristotelian logic dictating a progress from “the atomic and abstract to the contextual and concrete” in the name of finding a presuppositionless science. Kierkegaard, however, holds “no such pretentions” and seeks to show how the “conceptual, teleological necessities” that constitute thinking “require relativizing and recontextualizing one stage within another” in relation to an “ultimate telos” which, in addition to being the end (hence, ultimate), also guides the suspensions (hence, telos).35 While he sides with Kierkegaard’s formulation over Hegel’s own, Westphal has always been keen on describing both as identical—indeed, he admits that he treats them as such in this text.36 Regardless of his agreement with Kierkegaard, Westphal admits that “the basic Hegelian structure remains,” and hence one can get a greater understanding of the whole by looking at how the whole comprises the appropriative movements that begin at the atomic and end in the concrete. This becomes, essentially, a Hegelian form of mereology in which a reverse dialectic is employed to gather a greater understanding of how the whole comprises smaller parts by appropriation. However, contra Hegel, Westphal’s understanding of this appropriation requires no outright negation of A when it is appropriated into B to become C.37 Instead, it is ‘canceled’ via recontextualization: its intention, or telos, is suspended in the higher telos of C. This is what makes Westphal’s Aufhebung similar to the teleological suspension within Kierkegaard and it is why I contend that it is an appropriation, a Westphalian Aufhebung.
In relation to Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, this appropriation of Aufhebung means that one has to read the text in full and then work backward. Therefore, part 1 is taken up by part 2 and both are taken up in part 3. Caputo was correct that there is a ladder of ascent in Westphal, but it is not seen in his understanding of theos. Rather, the ladder of ascent is an Aufhebung, or teleological suspension, in which each part is taken up by the next and is finalized in a telos that points to how the ethical and religious concepts in part 3 open the believing soul to God’s transcendence, a transcendence understood through part 2 and part 1. This reveals how Westphal’s thinking holds to the principle of an ultimate telos, an eschatological telos, in which the self-transcendent self is completely taken up in transcendence by God.
We can see these Aufhebungen in the conclusion, where Westphal explains how, throughout the work, he has tried to describe three types of transcendence: ethico-religious, epistemic, and cosmological. Beginning with his understanding of ethical and religious transcendence (part 3), he emphasizes that the call to faith comes from “welcoming the voice by trusting the promises and obeying the commands it hears from on high. From on high!”38 The call to faith from the voice from on high (God) is revelation that promises and commands the believing soul to action. The promise, I contend, is eschatological; the command is how faith becomes the task of a lifetime in partial fulfillment of this promise: one does not overcome onto-theology simply by accepting revelation. Rather, one is always already overcoming onto-theology through accepting and living the commandments. Westphal lends himself to this reading when he talks about the “voice of transcendence” by which the self is transformed through the commandment of loving the neighbor, to whom the self is related but also distinct.39 This functions as a decentering of the self in which the self places the other as the subject and thus stands in relation to the other as its object. This in turn allows for both selves, as it were, to be taken up and to become “part of something greater than either my own conatus essendi or our life world—namely the Kingdom of God, a game plan in which I become myself by serving rather than being served.”40
Note the distinctly biblical connotation here, which I find follows the Gospel of Matthew and can be seen in the Sermon on the Mount, particularly Matthew 5:1–48. In the Beatitudes, Jesus pronounces who shall inherit the Kingdom, mainly those who faithfully work in service for the sake of mercy and to bring about peace (Matt. 5:5–9). Following this, Jesus instructs the crowd that his life and teaching are not meant to abolish the Law but to fulfill it: “But whoever keeps and teaches [the Law, the commandments] he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:19b–20). The sermon continues by broadly explicating how one can follow this path of righteousness through personal relationships with others, particularly focusing on one’s humble and faithful service to the other in loving mercy (Matt. 5:21–48). Traditionally, most biblical scholars do not see the Sermon on the Mount as an eschatological sermon but point to Matthew 24–25 as fulfilling that function instead. I mention it here to emphasize the dual nature of revelation that I see in Westphal’s writing: the sermon points to the promise and command of revelation, and that promise is both being fulfilled through obedience to the commandments of revelation but is also yet to come. It is somewhat paradoxical in nature in that one brings about the Kingdom here on the earth while also working for the future Kingdom. This recalls Westphal’s description of Kierkegaard’s faith over and against Christendom where he says: “Another way to put this point, is that we will all be Hegelians in heaven. But on earth … that is the question Kierkegaard wants us to ponder.”41 The problem with Christendom (as a product of onto-theology) is that it wants to make an earthly kingdom of heaven; a Tower of Babel–like structure invented out of sheer will to power. The believing soul must recognize this as a folly yet also know that it can experience the future Kingdom to come (i.e., God’s heavenly Kingdom) through a loving fulfillment of the commandments. Thus, the believing soul does not abandon the eschatological ideal of God’s greater transcendence; rather, through service, the believing soul begins to experience the Kingdom by enacting faith with a hope for the future.
When taken as a whole, one can see the relation between the works of faith and the revelation that has commanded those works; a revelation that has also promised a future that is experienced here on the earth but also is yet to come. In many ways, this sermon, as well as Westphal’s Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, point to a partially realized eschatology where the works done here on earth bring about the Kingdom of heaven but are not yet completely satisfactory: the Kingdom is brought about on Earth and yet also promised in the future. For Westphal’s part, the ethical and religious transcendence that occurs through obeying commanded revelation entails a future promise, a promise by which the believing soul is taken up by God’s transcendence into a higher order.
From this understanding of ethical and religious transcendence, Westphal turns to another aspect of transcendence—namely, how one can come to know God through this promise and command, which he calls epistemic transcendence. This is where parts 2 and 1 enter into the picture, respectively. One can come to know God (part 2) through a faith that obeys the promise and command of revelation. Epistemic transcendence uncovers the mystery of God revealing God’s self within the ethical and religious aspects of transcendence. Epistemic transcendence indicates that the notion of loving the neighbor reveals an understanding of God (revelation) that at once allows one to experience God in transcendence but does not delimit God to merely what one experiences. Experience, here, is understood as encountering God in and through revelation (via self-transcendence), and that encounter allows one to speak of God even though what one can say is only partial; this experience is veiled and so one can speak only of what she encounters as if she were looking through a glass, darkly. In this way, the ethical aspect of self-transcendence opens us to an epistemic path to knowing God. One could say you get to know Jesus through imitating him; the more you follow his teachings, the more you understand them, and thus the greater your relationship with Jesus. The same could be said of following the God of the prophets, the Lord who brought the people of Israel out of the desert. This also entails a superiority of ethics over and above all: “What have traditionally been called the ‘moral’ attributes of God need to have priority over the ‘metaphysical’ attributes.”42 Onto-theology, then, becomes an aspect of our thinking when this priority is reversed and we allow our metaphysics, or what stands in place of metaphysics in our postmodern age, to guide our morality.
This is also true for Westphal’s final aspect of transcendence, what he calls a cosmological transcendence, in which God is understood as “the Creator, maker of heaven and earth” and one gathers other traditional attributes of God.43 This aspect of transcendence directly relates to part 1, where Westphal defends and refines the concept of theism in contrast to onto-theology and the pantheisms of Spinoza and Hegel. His chief concern with cosmological transcendence again refers back to the ethical and religious transcendence in that the truth these cosmological attributes hint at what is necessary to come to know God (in epistemic transcendence), and they must never detract from the ethical and moral imperative contained in revelation. Westphal notes how a cosmological transcendence is taken up by both an epistemic and an ethical and religious transcendence in the final sentence of the text itself: “Where divine transcendence is preserved in its deepest sense, the affirmation of God as Creator is not merely the attribution of a certain structure to the cosmos but above all the commitment of oneself to a life of grateful striving.”44 Thus, what is understood as the cosmological transcendence of God, and what one can know of God, must be understood through a faith that is the task of a lifetime. This faith is dependent on God’s revelation to us, which can be understood nontheologically—that is, ethically—through Levinas. However, more important, it can be understood through the religious concept of revelation, which promises and commands the faithful self to a grateful striving to bring about the Kingdom of heaven, here on earth, while looking forward to the true Kingdom yet to come. There is indeed an Ite, missa est in Westphal’s thinking, and it blesses the believing soul to enact faith in order to better understand what commands and promises of that faith.
Philosophically, this might be a contentious proposition, as revelation becomes the seeking for a grounding of revelation: when one follows the command of revelation, one seeks the promise of revelation and thus to better know the source (i.e., center, or God) from whence revelation came. Westphal’s project, as a philosophy, runs into the problem that Caputo has raised: it has postponed its metaphysical, onto-theological propositions for a future eternity and here on earth has made the more modest proposal of living in faith and not seeking absolute knowledge. Yet when looking through a theological lens, a lens that particularly equates the noetic effects of sin to onto-theology, one can see that Westphal has written something quite profound: he has written a radical eschatology that explains that sin, which cannot be overcome here on earth, can be canceled in God’s transcendence, but only through the believing soul’s attempts to continually overcome (or avoid) sin, which she does through enacting her faith daily and constantly. Transcendence, then, becomes salvation, and while there is no complete salvation on earth—the believing soul still has the mark of sin and will lapse into sin—she can strive for a daily overcoming of her sin through aspiring to self-transcendence. She aspires to this through living for the other, following the commandments given by revelation, hoping for the future promise of a day when she no longer has to strive but is fulfilled by being taken up by God. Thus, Westphal has articulated something as radical as Caputo’s full-on embrace of postmodern hermeneutics: he has articulated a theology that holds sin and its noetic effects as a principle for understanding the human condition.45 In light of this, Westphal outlines a way for the believing soul to strive to overcome this sin through critiquing what she might initially think is God in order to find truer relationship with God and to fulfill God’s commandments, a task that entails a future promise when she shall overcome her own sin. Akin to Meister Eckhart, Westphal has prayed for God to rid himself of God, but, in doing so, he has found this prayer to be a task of a lifetime that can be performed only through loving and serving the other.
WE SHALL OVERCOME: RADICAL ESCHATOLOGY’S PASTORAL AND THEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
In the essay “Overcoming Onto-Theology,” Westphal recalls a story of how singing the spiritual “O Mary, Don’t You Weep” at a conference brought to mind Heidegger’s critique and how startled he was to see that he and his fellow attendees were at that moment overcoming onto-theology.46 While Heidegger’s critique famously argues that “before the causa sui, no man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this God,” Westphal found himself in front of such a God before whom he could sing and dance—or clap anyway—as he was “before the God who drownded [sic] Pharaoh’s army” in the salvation of Israel; that is, a God who is not the causa sui.47 The essay goes on to detail how Heidegger’s critique is adroitly pointed at those metaphysical theologies which turn God into a causa sui for their own selfish gain and how, in spite of those theologies, for Westphal there still stood a God before whom he could sing and dance. The essay is rather audacious in that, with a scant twenty-eight pages, he claims that onto-theology is overcome! An onto-theology, that is, that has been the focal point for philosophy and fundamental theology for nearly eighty years, yet he immediately sees its overcoming through a song. Transcendence and Self-Transcendence stands as a work that attempts to explain this overcoming in greater detail, but for Westphal the matter was somewhat simple: a lived faith—as experienced in that faith’s worshipful hymns—overcomes onto-theology because it opens the believing soul to the love of God through the believing soul’s love for God and the other:
This love, this trust, this relationship—these are the practice for the sake of which it was necessary to deny theory. This is not to abolish theology. It is to see that theology’s task is to serve this life of faith, not the ideals of knowledge as defined by the philosophical traditions Heidegger variously calls calculative-representational thinking, metaphysics, and onto-theology.48
Praxis is integral to this process, and in Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, this praxis gets its proper explication through part 3 of the work, and specifically through Westphal’s articulation of ethical and religious transcendence. It is from this praxis that theology—both as moral theology and as fundamental or systematic theology—gets its charge to aid and support the praxis of faith. Parts 2 and 1 of Transcendence and Self-Transcendence further explicate how this type of theology is meted out. This is where I contend that Westphal’s thought is pastoral: he is fleshing out the ethical and moral implications of theology in light of a postmodern critique of metaphysics and traditional understandings of God. While I doubt Westphal’s Transcendence and Self-Transcendence would make for good Sunday-school reading, he has written many other works for laypersons and the Sunday-school crowd—as we have covered—and his more academic works present the theories that guide and support those pastoral works. They work in tandem to create a robust, thick theology.
Westphal, read as a theologian, has therefore created an oeuvre that has much more in common with Karl Barth than with his contemporaries: by not abandoning his theism for the sake of postmodernity and its critiques—and instead appropriating postmodernity to better understand his theism—Westphal has positioned himself as a point of contact between the church(es) and the philosophical academy.49 However, two questions remain concerning the theological implications of reading his work as a voice for these churches: first, there is the question of the Holy Spirit’s role in this transcendence; second, there is still the issue of fideism in his work.
There seems to be something of a neo-Pelagianism in his thinking, where the believing soul, once informed by revelation, can bring about her own transcendence with God; the self can bring about the transcendence of God through creating her own self-transcendence. If one reads his work as a radical eschatology, then one can see a self-made character latent in the argument where the believing soul may be able to bring about her own salvation through good works. I do not believe this was Westphal’s intent, and truly he would argue that the Holy Spirit works within the life of faith through guiding the self to revelation and helping the self receive revelation. Moreover, his work often relies on the fact that even though the self’s actions help bring about her own self-transcendence (ethical and religious transcendence), this does not entail that transcendence will magically be present; not every loving encounter with one’s neighbor will be transcendent. If this were the case, then ethics would be magic: one could call God forth simply by doing good works! However, the issue of special divine action—how God interacts and interrupts the world in contemporary, real time—needs to be more thoroughly fleshed out in Westphal’s thinking. In other words, throughout his oeuvre we have gained an understanding of God and Jesus (as Paradox and Paradigm), but the role of the Holy Spirit has yet to be explicated. As he has described his own work as a philosophical understanding of faith as the task of a lifetime, I do not hold this charge as an oversight on Westphal’s part. It is merely that more work needs to be done to fully understand how the theory behind his thinking functions with other aspects of theology.
This leads to the second issue of fideism. In Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, Westphal argues that Kierkegaard’s faith is not fideist since its opposite is sin and not reason. Reason, understood as a social epistemology, becomes sinful when it renounces faith or attempts to neuter faith in the process of making it “reasonable” or comprehensible to human understanding.50 Conversely, reason becomes an aid to faith when it is used to guide faith to understanding.
In Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, one can see Westphal employing these principles when he argues that God’s moral attributes must never be subjugated to so-called metaphysical attributes (i.e., those known through reason). Additionally, one comes to an understanding of God only by first enacting a religious and epistemic transcendence through faithfully enacting the love commandment. Yet how is one capable of understanding the commitments involved in faithfully enacting the love commandment (and being cognizant of the promise and command of revelation) without first knowing those commitments? How is it, in other words, that the believing soul comes to believe without first being able to understand or comprehend said belief? Westphal would probably refer to Levinas’s ethics as a philosophical understanding of these commitments, which brings about a (Kierkegaardian) understanding of their religious implications. Moreover, he might point to the fact that one might enter into a faith like Christianity with certain pretensions only to have them obliterated through the act of transcendence and self-transcendence, a shattering of expectations, as it were. Yet still, the fact that there are expectations and that one can come to understand—study, even—the religious implications of a self-transcendence means that at some point these aspects can be understood by reason alone.
On this point, Westphal might agree: one can understand religious and ethical transcendence, and all it entails, without the aid of faith. In fact, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence fulfills this, as he mentions that the book can work as a form of apologetics to the nonbeliever.51 However, by placing faith as the primary (or even the only “true,” or proper) mode of understanding transcendence, Westphal is showing that there is a gap between comprehending transcendence as an essential aspect of faith and comprehending it as a phenomenon of human experience that can be understood through reason (i.e., philosophically). Perhaps, as a theology, this gap is where the Holy Spirit dwells in the world: the self only comes to recognize the revelation that spurs faith through the Spirit’s continual acting in the world. However, in a postmodern context, which is just as fearful of all gaps as it is of foundations, this might prove untenable for a philosophy of faith.
Despite these two issues, one should not dismiss Westphal’s theology. It is indeed a potent articulation of how faith works in the life of the believing soul, and it opens his Protestant faith to be further explored and understood by those within and without the church. Additionally, his work is a strong, ecumenical dialogue partner with the Catholic Church over the issue of so-called faith versus works and the promise of salvation. In other words, on the issue of how our acts on earth affect our salvation and relationship to God. This was and is an important issue between a Lutheran understanding of salvation and a Catholic one, and Westphal’s contribution to the discussion can be immediately seen in his notion that one does not have faith but rather faiths. It is a task word, for Westphal, and the issue of salvation can be seen in the concept of self-transcendence and transcendence. Merely believing in the God of Jesus Christ is not enough for Westphal. Rather, the believing soul plays a part in salvation (and eschatology) through a self-transcendence by following the command and promise of revelation. Christians are working to bring about the Kingdom here on earth while looking forward to a future heavenly Kingdom yet to come.
NOTES
1. John Caputo, James Marsh, and Merold Westphal, Modernity and Its Discontents (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992). The penultimate chapter sees Marsh, Caputo, and Westphal discuss these debates in a forum style and is a great example of these aforementioned repartees.
2. OCOT, 72, 130.
3. Ibid., 68, 157.
4. See, for example, J. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister, eds., Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2012), 256, 259–260, 263–265. Westphal’s objection to the role of agape and eros in religion, specifically on the debate of religion with(out) religion, points to a similar lack on Caputo’s part as mentioned earlier: “But here is my problem: However interesting and compelling the ‘continuity’ of agape and eros might be, I simply cannot find anything in it that could not be affirmed by Derrida and Caputo and fitted into their religion without religion. The location of a higher (heavenly) eros in Plato and Augustine seems neutral. We might say that for Plato it fits into religion without religion and for Augustine it is part of his religion with religion” (264).
5. This lack of nourishment pushes their debate toward the question of ethics in postmodern philosophy of religion. See the multiessay dialogue in Mark Dooley, ed., A Passion for the Impossible: John Caputo in Focus (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), chap. 7.
6. John Caputo, “Methodological Postmodernism: On Merold Westphal’s Overcoming Onto-theology,” Faith and Philosophy 22, no. 3 (July 2005): 290.
7. Ibid., 292.
8. In Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion, Bruce Ellis Benson poses the same question concerning Simmons’s reading of Caputo and Westphal. Benson addresses Simmons’s statement that Westphal is “as radical as one needs to be,” noting that this question changes depending on what needs to be overcome through postmodernism: “Yet just how radical does one need to be to do whatever it is that is truly post-modern and get over exactly whatever it is we need to overcome and why it is so bad that it needs overcoming?” (61). This causes Benson to hold a suspicion toward the assumptions underlying the entire philosophical project that Westphal and Caputo are engaging in. One the one hand, Benson is open to being challenged by Caputo and Derrida, among others, concerning his theism. On the other hand, Benson is concerned that, if this challenging is taken far enough, it negates too much, leaving him with “this absolutely other God [who is] simply not enough,” a God who is just as distant and unworshipful as Heidegger’s critique of onto-theological gods (66). The difference between his concern and ours is that Benson, for his part, focuses this critique on Caputo, where I focus this critique solely on Westphal.
9. GTPD, 173.
10. Clayton Crockett, B. Keith Putt, and Jeffrey Robbins, eds., The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 34–45. Westphal and Caputo respond on 45–50 and 51–58, respectively.
11. See: Christina Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). Gschwandtner’s book gives superb summaries of the contemporary debates in Continental philosophy of religion while also placing the major thinkers, such as Caputo, Westphal, and Kearney, within those debates.
12. Caputo, “Methodological Postmodernism,” 291–292. Emphasis is mine.
13. Ibid., 292.
14. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. and trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1:118. Westphal is fond of using this phrase. See OCOT, 291; see also Simmons and Minister, Reexamining Deconstruction, 34, where Simmons explains Westphal’s philosophy of religion with the use of this quote.
15. Concerning how Westphal sees his own work, this might be debatable. However, he clearly frames his thinking through his theism. See especially Merold Westphal, “Faith Seeking Understanding,” in God and the Philosophers, ed. Thomas Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 215–226. See also 215–225; OCOT, ix–xi; GTPD, 183–185; and TST, 6.
16. TST, 18.
17. Ibid., 146–149, 154–156, 160, 162–163, 215–218; see also 128.
18. In other texts, Westphal calls this an ethical suspension of the religious. See Westphal, “Levinas’ Teleological Suspension of the Religious,” in Ethics as First Philosophy, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak (New York: Routledge, 1995), 151–160.
19. GTPD, 100–116. Whether Caputo’s critique of Westphal is correct is not our primary concern, since we are exploring how it draws out the eschatological nature of Westphal’s thinking. Therefore I will not comment, as much as possible, upon the veracity of Caputo’s claims.
20. GTPD, 107.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid. These three stages can be understood as via negativa, analogia entis, and analogia fidei, respectively.
24. GTPD, 102.
25. Ibid., 109.
26. Ibid., 111. Caputo: “the name of God [or what serves as God] touches upon a nerve in the human heart and suggests something ‘undeconstructible.’”
27. Ibid., 109.
28. Ibid., 111.
29. Ibid., 114.
30. See chapter 2 of this volume.
31. On the issue of the noetic effects of sin, see Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), 97, 105–115.
32. TST, 227. He does mention this concept in the introduction (9–11), but only briefly; it does not get his full attention until the conclusion.
33. Ibid., 227–228.
34. Ibid., 229. “Still, the basic Hegelian structure remains, making it possible to read the text backwards. This means seeing the parts in relation to the whole in which they are eventually placed rather than in their supposed self-sufficiency. They may well be essential parts or necessary conditions, but they are only parts and they are ordered within the whole by a telos, not automatically their own (though they can make it their own).”
35. See ibid., 228–229.
36. Ibid., 228. “The attentive reader,” Westphal remarks, “will have noticed that I treat Kierkegaard’s notion of teleological suspension as virtually synonymous with Aufhebung.” See chapter 2 of this volume.
37. Moreover, A does not have to be completely and symmetrically opposed to B, as in Hegel’s understanding of determinate being, where indeterminate (pure) nothingness passes over indeterminate (pure) being and thus is negated, making determinate being and beings. See G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 48, 59, 82. (SL 107; HW 5/114–EA).
38. TST, 229.
39. Ibid., 230.
40. Ibid.
41. Westphal, “Johannes and Johannes,” 20. The ellipses are Westphal’s own.
42. TST, 231.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. While this can be seen as orthodox, or traditional, Christian theology, Westphal sees within orthodoxy and tradition something just as radical as Derridean deconstruction. After all, he has argued that Gadamer, along with his appeal to history and tradition, is as equally radical as Derrida. Perhaps, contrariwise, one could say that Caputo’s radical hermeneutics is not as radical as it sets out to be—that it is as equally “ordinary” as Westphal’s hermeneutics or that it is not-so-very-damn radical. Since both capitalize on the notion of radicality, and the nature of the discussion involving them follows suit, Westphal’s eschatology can be seen as radical.
46. I quote the eponymous essay within Overcoming Onto-theology, not the entire book.
47. OCOT, 2. He quotes Martin Heidegger from Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 72.
48. OCOT, 27. Emphasis is mine.
49. While Caputo’s thought is not the primary subject of this chapter, and I have primarily used his critique to draw out Westphal’s eschatology, there is an interesting parallel regarding the theological tendencies of each. Stephen Minister flips this charge against Caputo, showing how Caputo himself exhibits a movement toward theology within his work: “While I completely agree with Caputo’s condemnation of fundamentalism … what is significant is the fact that even Caputo’s attempt at religious inclusivity cannot help but define itself through the exclusion of certain theological positions.” Minister, Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion, 84.
50. See Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, 21–23. Here, Westphal is drawing on Kierkegaard’s concept of faith as a critique of Sittlichkeit.
51. TST, 2.