The Reason of the Gift collects four essays that address the theme of givenness and the gift—central to Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological project—through brilliant argumentation that is both historically informed and constructive. These essays thus exemplify characteristic aspects of Marion’s way of doing philosophy. Three of the papers included in The Reason of the Gift—“The Phenomenological Origins of the Concept of Givenness,” “Substitution and Solicitude: How Levinas Re-reads Heidegger,” and “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Sacrifice”—were delivered by Jean-Luc Marion as the James W. Richard Lectures at the University of Virginia, September 29–October 1, 2008. A fourth—“Remarks on the Origins of Gegebenheit in Heidegger’s Thought”—was added for inclusion as the second essay in this volume.
The essays that make up The Reason of the Gift deepen the reader’s sense of both the profundity and the range of engagement to be found in Marion’s previous phenomenological work, and suggest for scholars at once the diversity and the richness of opportunities for exploration that surround the topics of givenness and the gift. In this introduction I shall sketch some of the ways in which we might see this book contributing to our understanding of Marion’s phenomenological work, both past and present; then I shall focus on at least one way in which these essays contribute to the outline of what feels like an ever-more-necessary conversation between Marion’s philosophical project and certain approaches to the topic of “the given” found in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. In particular, I shall offer a suggestive exploration of what Marion’s work might have to say to the account of givenness found in the “analytic Kantianism” of John McDowell, as it has developed out of Wilfrid Sellars’s account of the “Myth of the Given” and, even more fundamentally, out of the neo-Kantian debate with empiricism that forms the background to the historical investigations Marion carries out in the first two essays in this book.1
The four essays collected in The Reason of the Gift provide significant historical context for Marion’s phenomenology of givenness while at the same time extending its constructive reach. The first two essays chart genealogies for the concept of givenness as it was adopted and adapted for the purposes of nonobjective (or nonobjectivizing) thought by Husserl and Heidegger, respectively, from its role in the various theories of the object developed by Bernard Bolzano, Alexius Meinong, Heinrich Rickert, Paul Natorp, and Emil Lask. These genealogies offer valuable supplementary insights into the principal development of Marion’s phenomenological project as it emerges out of the predominantly historical 1989 study of Husserl and Heidegger, Réduction et donation: Recherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phénoménologie, and the predominantly constructive work in phenomenological method entitled Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation, published in 1997.2 In these books, the story Marion tells about givenness centers on the use of the phenomenological reduction and the extent to which different degrees of reduction allow the full phenomenality of the phenomenon to appear, according to the principle “So much reduction, so much givenness.” While Husserl and Heidegger both “have recourse to givenness and espouse its function as ultimate principle” (ED 59/BG 38), they each, according to Marion, in different ways fail to radicalize adequately the reduction so that it leads phenomena all the way back to originary givenness, or, as Kevin Hart has put it, “to the originary giving intuition [originär gebende Anschauung]—that is, the self-givenness [Selbstgegebenheit]—of phenomena.”3 This reduction to givenness is philosophically crucial because, as Hart explains, “[o]nly then will one secure experience as Evidenz, evidence or, better, self-evidence: the direct awareness of phenomena as they manifest themselves.”4 Husserl, says Marion, reduces the phenomenon to its objectity, its status as object of consciousness, while Heidegger reduces the phenomenon to beingness, its status as a being or entity within the horizon of Being. In each case, says Marion, these reductions place “conditions and determinations” on phenomena, stopping them short of a reduction all the way to their originary (unconditioned) givenness (RD 305/RG 205).
A phenomenon that exceeds and precedes the horizons of objectivity and being—what Marion calls a “saturated phenomenon”—also necessarily exceeds and precedes the thinking “I” that sets up and employs these horizons. Thus, integral to Marion’s understanding of phenomena as given is his understanding of the I affected by the given as called forth, or given birth to, in the very givenness of that which gives. This I receives herself from what she receives (ED 366/BG 266); she is the “witness constituted by what gives itself.”5 Indeed, the I that correlates to the reduction to givenness—what Marion in Being Given names the adonné, the one literally given over to or gifted by/in givenness—is “by nature” the I who is, literally, born.6 For birth, as Marion suggests in In Excess and shows in greater detail in his 2010 book Certitudes négatives, is the event that makes us ever latecomers to that which has already been happening. The experience of birth discloses “the event-hood [l’événementialité] that sustains and sets off every phenomenon as an event that happens [se passe]” (CN 298).7 To experience reality as the natural-born I—also called by Marion the witness, or the gifted (the adonné)—is to experience phenomena that, without any engineering on our part, happen in their own right, giving themselves to us—as opposed to phenomena as objects that we constitute from a position of spectatorial priority (CN 298).8 Put in terms of knowledge—of the attempt to develop concepts to match intuitions—the witness
plays his part in the interval between, on the one hand, the indisputable and incontestable excess of intuition lived and, on the other, the never compensated lack of the concepts that would render this experience an objective experience—in other words, that would make it an object. The witness, who knows what he saw and that he saw it, does not comprehend it by one or more adequate concepts. As a result, he undergoes an affection of the event and remains forever late to it. Never will he (re-)constitute it [. . .].9
The witness thus distinguishes himself
from the engineer, the inventor or the “conceiver” [concepteur—the French word used for a designer, e.g., a website designer, a lighting designer] who produces objects because he comprehends them in terms of their concept before turning to any actual intuition, indeed without recourse to it at all. And in this sense, it could be said that the “conceiver,” in contrast to the witness, accomplishes the “creation of events.” This oxymoron becomes thinkable only as the denegation of the saturated phenomenon by the power of technology, which attempts to produce objects even there where the event unrolls.10
In The Reason of the Gift, the first two essays, which trace the securing of Gegebenheit for phenomenology from its entanglement with objective thinking in neo-Kantianism, make clear in even more detail than heretofore in Marion’s work the path of a nonobjectifying philosophy that Marion’s project travels. For readers of Marion in English, these two essays establish a background in the history of philosophy for Marion’s subsequent emphasis and analytical focus—both in his response to critics of the concept of saturated phenomena (“The Banality of Saturation”) and in his recent effort to introduce the concept of a “negative certitude” into philosophy (Certitudes négatives)—on nonobjective experience, or what he feels is better referred to as “counter-experience.”11
I would like to turn now to a historically informed comparison of the respective approaches to “the given” and “givenness” in Marion, on the one hand, and Sellars and McDowell on the other. My focus will be on Sellars’s famous account of the “Myth of the Given” as it appears in his lengthy essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” and on McDowell’s elaboration of the issues surrounding the Myth of the Given in his book Mind and World.12
Indeed, for some time now, readers of Marion have called for just such a comparison.13 In Being Given, Marion himself sketches what amounts to an outline for the comparison when, after claiming that “every phenomenon falls within the given, to the point that the terms [phenomenon and given] could trade places,” he writes that “phenomenology agrees with empiricism in privileging recourse to the fact, even if it stands apart from it in refusing to limit the facts solely to sensible empiricity” (BG 119/ED 169, trans. modified). For Marion there is, then, an important distinction to draw between the way empiricism privileges facts—by limiting its focus to their “sensible empiricity”—and the way phenomenology does so. This rather offhand point is elaborated a bit—though in a fairly cursory manner, it is true—in The Reason of the Gift. Readers will notice at the very beginning of the book’s first essay (“The Phenomenological Origins of the Concept of Givenness”) that Marion quickly seeks to dispel any hasty connection one might draw between Gegebenheit as it figures in phenomenology and “the given” as it figures in various other philosophical approaches, including different moments in the history of empiricism. It is not, he writes, a matter here of
taking up once again—doubtless one time too many—the debate over the possibility of unconstituted givens, whether they be understood in the manner of sense data, as in the Lockean tradition; or as the contents of Erlebnisse in the debate concerning protocol statements between Carnap and Neurath; or, in the Bergsonian style, as immediate givens of consciousness. For the principle—supposing that there is one—that everything that shows itself must first give itself (even if everything that gives itself nevertheless does not show itself completely) implies that one is questioning givenness as a mode of phenomenality, as the how or manner (Wie) of the phenomenon. So that the issue is no longer the immediate given, the perceptive content, or the lived experience of consciousness—in short, of something that is given (das Gegebene), but instead of the style of its phenomenalization insofar as it is given, which is to say, the issue is its given-ness (Gegebenheit). [. . .] Thus the terrain of the debate, as well as its stake, found itself shifted from the theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie) to phenomenality, and thus to phenomenology. (The Reason of the Gift, 19, 20)
In this paragraph, Marion quickly names three modern philosophical traditions that, according to their particular approaches, speak of the given in ways that are to be clearly distinguished from the ways in which givenness is used in phenomenology to describe the “how or manner [. . .] of the phenomenon.” The first two approaches that Marion mentions—those conceiving of the given as unconstituted, whether in terms of sense-data or protocol statements—are stigmatized by Sellars under his heading “the Myth of the Given” as illegitimate attempts to ground knowledge in a pre- or nonconceptual foundation. But Sellars believes that his critique of the given goes beyond this empiricist foundationalism to implicate givenness as well: “If [. . .] I begin my argument with an attack on sense-datum theories, it is only as a first step in a general critique of the entire framework of givenness” (EPM 128). Our question, then, becomes: Does givenness in phenomenology—as the “how or manner [. . .] of the phenomenon”—somehow escape or avoid the condemnation of Sellars and those working in his wake, such as McDowell? And how does Marion’s discussion of the emergence of the phenomenological understanding of givenness out of the neo-Kantian Erkenntnistheorie contribute, if at all, to our understanding of the relationship of phenomenological givenness in Marion to “the Myth of the Given” in Sellars and McDowell?
I will try to answer these questions in two ways: historically and, briefly and in a cursory way, constructively. A historical answer can proceed by linking Marion’s accounts of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s respective efforts to wrest Gegebenheit free from the objectifying clutches of neo-Kantianism with an account, recently provided by Claude Romano in his book Au coeur de la raison, la phénoménologie (2010), of the implication of Sellars’s and McDowell’s approach to the given and givenness within the same neo-Kantian objectifying approach to the given.14 As for the constructive answer: once we have appreciated the historical dimensions of the arguments about the given and givenness in the thought of Marion and of Sellars and McDowell, we will consider how an awareness of the difference between the two conceptions of the given and givenness can help us to better understand some of the critical questions that still surround Marion’s concept of the saturated phenomenon.
As we have already noted, the first half of The Reason of the Gift tells the story of the emergence of a phenomenological understanding of givenness from the debates in which the early Heidegger and the late Husserl engaged with the theory of the object in Bolzano, Meinong, and the neo-Kantianism of Natorp and Rickert. Here I will simply note the main points that Marion makes in his account of this moment in the history of philosophy, and connect these with Romano’s account. This will then prepare us to discuss Romano’s argument that Sellars and McDowell essentially repeat, apparently without realizing it, a neo-Kantian debate with empiricism from which phenomenology extricated itself early in the twentieth century.
This extrication is the primary focus of Marion’s two essays on the emergence of givenness as a phenomenological concept in The Reason of the Gift. A quotation from Heidegger’s 1919 course, one of the central texts considered by Marion in “Remarks on the Origins of Gegebenheit in Heidegger’s Thought,” allows Marion to focus his history on two philosophical currents that Heidegger sees implicated by the “problem of givenness,” namely, a two-variety neo-Kantian “philosophy as the knowledge of things,” on the one hand, and phenomenology, on the other, characterized here as “philosophy as the entry way into the experience of the world” (The Reason of the Gift, 36). Heidegger states: “The problem of givenness is not a particular [and] specific problem. With it, the paths of the modern doctrines of knowledge diverge from one another and, at the same time, [they diverge] from phenomenology, which must first deliver the problem from a constricted problematic of epistemology.”15 In this essay, then, Marion shows how the early Heidegger seeks to “deliver” phenomena (such as the memorable example of the professor’s lectern) from neo-Kantian thingification or objectification,16 in order that they instead may appear given out of an environment (Umwelt) rich with the signification within which they abide (see The Reason of the Gift, 46–48).
The story told in “The Phenomenological Origins of the Concept of Givenness” fills out and expands this history of the “problem of givenness,” demonstrating across a broad array of contemporaries of Husserl and Heidegger the way in which the concept of givenness can be seen to come to open “a gap [. . .] between being and objects,” such that “by saying es gibt where one cannot say it is, this gap allows for a step back [Schritt zurück], outside of being, and perhaps outside of metaphysics as well” (The Reason of the Gift, 32).
Thus acquainted with Marion’s account in The Reason of the Gift of phenomenology’s extrication of the concept of givenness from thingification and objectification, we can turn to a chapter of Romano’s study, which expands the historical context of the problem of givenness by discussing the debate between Marburg school neo-Kantianism and contemporary empiricism, out of which there comes precisely those conceptions of givenness in Natorp and Rickert that Heidegger then responded to critically in the texts that Marion explores. Romano argues for the importance of recognizing how the neo-Kantian conception of givenness emerges out of debate with classical empiricism because, he says, present-day discussions of whether or not experience contains nonconceptual content are weak or lacking in sophistication and insight exactly owing to the lack of awareness they betray of the history of this debate, and the important role that phenomenology played in shifting the debate in productive ways.17
We are seeking to arrive at a point where we can get a clear view of the upshot of the confrontation between phenomenology, which claims that experience contains non- (including pre-) conceptual material, and the analytic Kantianism of Sellars and McDowell, which claims, in the words of McDowell, that “conceptual capacities are already operative in the deliverances of sensibility themselves” (MW 39), and that “capacities of spontaneity [conceptual capacities] [ . . . are] in play all the way out to the ultimate grounds of empirical judgements” (MW 67). In order to arrive at this confrontation, it will be useful to summarize the main points of Romano’s account.
Romano’s story begins at the outset of the twentieth century, when three major currents occupied the philosophical stage: the inheritors of classical empiricism (Romano mentions Mach), the neo-Kantians (Romano tends to use Natorp as the primary representative of the Marburg school), and the phenomenologists (principally Husserl and Heidegger). The neo-Kantians opposed themselves to the classical empiricists but, points out Romano, shared with them the same framework of thought regarding the conceptualization of the given:
Instead of admitting an immediate given that would be the starting point of all knowledge [like the empiricists], [the neo-Kantians] consider this given as already mediated by concepts, put into form by conceptual schemata or symbolic forms that necessarily involve language. More precisely, in critiquing the given of the empiricists, they end up by rejecting the idea of the given in general—and they reject it because they continue to conceive of every given, after the fashion of their empiricist adversaries, as devoid of immanent meaning and structuring. They thus refuse the Kantian idea of the two sources of human knowledge (sensibility and understanding, receptivity and spontaneity); they affirm that experience receives “from on high” its meaning and its structuring, thanks to the “logical” functions of thought, of science, and of culture. By refusing the title of knowledge to the given and instead assigning all knowledge to the sphere of judgment, they diametrically oppose facts and values, causality and justification. (728–29)
For Romano’s story, this decision on the part of the neo-Kantians to adopt, even in their refusal, the very same way of conceiving of the given as that held by their adversaries the classical empiricists carries over—seemingly unwittingly—into the analytical Kantianism (what Romano simply terms “néokantisme analytique”) of Sellars and McDowell.18 Like the neo-Kantians, Sellars and McDowell maintain that the given is necessarily “devoid of immanent meaning and structure”—phenomena do not appear, like Heidegger’s example of the lectern, as given out of an environing world rich in signification. Experience, too, is entirely conceptual, through and through, “all the way out,” as McDowell puts it (MW 67)—or, as Sellars puts it in a characteristic passage from “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” “the ability to recognize that something looks green, presupposes the concept of being green, and [. . .] the latter concept involves the ability to tell what colours objects have by looking at them—which, in turn, involves knowing in what circumstances to place an object if one wishes to ascertain its colour by looking at it” (EPM 146). There is no such thing as a nonconceptual or even preconceptual perception or intuition, and the always already conceptual structure of intuitions is understood to be “a linguistic affair” (EPM 160). Sellars makes this clear when he states that the knowledge of the “circumstances [in which] to place an object if one wishes to ascertain its colour by looking at it” are the conditions “in which colour words have their primary perceptual use” (EPM 147n1). Discourse and discursive thought, then, are integral to perceptual knowledge for Sellars and McDowell.
Regarding this understanding of conceptual thought as essentially linguistic, Romano makes the case for the importance of Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as the link between Marburg school neo-Kantianism and early analytic philosophy; for Cassirer, writes Romano, “the spontaneity of the mind [—its conceptual capacity—] is attested in symbolic forms, starting from the very level of what one wrongly terms ‘intuition’ ” (739).
We have already touched upon the difference between the phenomenological concept of givenness and the neo-Kantian account of the given, as explored in The Reason of the Gift; let us now move toward a characterization of the difference between the phenomenological concept of givenness and the account of the given in Sellars and McDowell, based on Romano’s historical argument. According to Romano, phenomenology evades the “Myth of the Given” because its concepts do not fit “into the coordinates of the empiricism/Kantianism debate,” especially the epistemological problematic that is central to that debate (730). As Marion’s essays in The Reason of the Gift on the phenomenological concept of givenness make clear, phenomenology rejects the subject-object framework that, in Romano’s words, “aims to show how experience is put into form from the exterior, by conceptual schemata” (730). Phenomenology, he writes, does not claim
to derive thought from experience, as empiricism would have it, or, on the contrary, to derive the order that governs experience from the order that governs thought [. . .]. [Instead, phenomenology] postulates that experience is already reasonable [sensée] and structured before the intervention of discursive language and thought, that it possesses its own proper order and an immanent articulation, and is in no case reduced to the naked reception of a “given” such as is recognized by empiricism and only partially criticized by Kantianism. Instead of criticizing the very notion of the given, and conferring upon it a mythological status under the pretext that such a given would always already be informed by concepts and categories, [phenomenology] strives to broaden the concept of the given itself well beyond sense-data, in order to think an experience of the world, but also of art, of culture, of human interactions and institutions, of history, and even of language. [. . .] Phenomenology thus refuses to follow in the footsteps of the neo-Kantian critique of the given, which, in its eyes, bears only upon an atrophied concept of the given, and in no way upon experience in its comprehensive meaning, which phenomenology is concerned to promote. (730–31)19
Romano’s historically based claim that Sellars and McDowell are essentially the second and third acts, respectively, in a nearly century-long neo-Kantian debate with empiricism20 may be useful in efforts to evaluate the reach and persuasiveness of certain objections to Marion’s concepts of the saturated phenomenon and the gifted (the adonné). Two examples of what I mean can be quickly and suggestively sketched. As suggestive sketches, they make no claim to a thoroughgoing evaluation of the critiques in question. But I do feel that they make evident the potential constructive value of the historical lessons that Marion and Romano each offer.
The first suggestive sketch seeks to evaluate from the point of view of the Marion-Sellars-McDowell comparison the critique made by Marlène Zarader of Marion’s attempts to introduce the saturated phenomenon and the adonné into phenomenology. She expresses her doubts about Marion’s project by suggesting that it is, in fact, logically impossible as a phenomenological project. She writes that “it is indeed possible to think without contradiction an experience without object, but [. . .] the same is not true for an experience without subject[; . . . ] givenness [cannot be] sever[ed] [. . .] from any constituting pole[:] that is the prohibition that one cannot breach without seeing the very ground of phenomenology slip away.”21 She concludes her essay with a statement about the proper conceptualization of the given—in the terms of her essay, the given as the transcendent—which figures the given as a ghostly, mythic dream that contains “everything that disturbs [an] immanence” made up only of the objects, beings, and subjects that are able to appear in phenomenality (117). Zarader writes,
What, then, is the given? Nothing but immanence, nothing but a fragile, precarious, ever-threatened immanence. To think without contradiction the “and” in the copula “phenomenality and transcendence” presupposes abandoning all hope of a pure revelation of the transcendent in the phenomenal, in favor of an approach concerned with phenomenality’s entry into crisis, with no outside discernible other than this crisis itself. And it is within this internal trembling of immanence that the possibility of transcendence remains as a hollow inscription—a transcendence that can function only, in phenomenological discourse, as a critical, and never positive, possibility. (118)
When Zarader, speaking from within phenomenology, is read alongside McDowell, some interesting parallels appear. The primary difference between the two critiques of the given seems primarily (and merely) one of mood toward the mythic. Where McDowell finds therapeutic “escape” from “intolerable” philosophical anxiety22 in the elimination of the mythical given through the thought that “the conceptual is unbounded” (MW 44), Zarader’s description of a homologous elimination of the given, this time by immanent phenomenality, results in a melancholy, yet “critical” feeling. For Zarader, the given as transcendence is abandoned as a logical impossibility, and phenomenality, now necessarily immanent, enters into a “crisis, with no outside discernible,” “trembling” at the haunting disturbance caused by the “critical, and never positive, possibility” of the given. McDowell eliminates the mythical given with a satisfied sense of relief; Zarader does so with a sense of guilt.23
The second example meant to show the usefulness of an awareness of the neo-Kantian critique of the given when evaluating the persuasiveness of critical attacks on Marion’s concept of givenness and saturated phenomena engages with a passage in Shane Mackinlay’s recent book Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics. The book argues, carefully and with nuance, that Marion insufficiently recognizes the active, essentially hermeneutic activity that is required in any human reception of phenomenality. As a result of this failed recognition, says Mackinlay, Marion wrongly and impossibly absolutizes the givenness of saturated phenomena, and likewise wrongly insists upon the possibility of human passivity in front of such phenomena. In the passage I’ve chosen to focus on here, Mackinlay charges Marion with having contradicted himself by at one point in his body of work insisting that the failure to appreciate phenomena as saturated results from their incorrect theoretical description (associated with Kant), only later to argue that saturated phenomena appear as unsaturated or “poor” phenomena when they are incorrectly approached and encountered. Mackinlay formulates this contradiction at one point with the following question, which he then sets about to answer: “If saturated phenomena are only able to appear as saturated when we refrain from reducing them to objects, does our allowing them to appear as saturated compromise their initiative and independence in showing themselves, and perhaps even result in a form of constitution?” (108–9). Mackinlay’s answer to this question is of course in the negative, because he believes that the contradiction can only be resolved when we admit that “an actively receptive stance that is prior to the appearance of phenomena” is always in play (175). To illustrate why the presumption of this actively receptive stance prior to the appearance of phenomena is superior to Marion’s seemingly contradictory position, which claims both that saturated phenomena must appear of themselves in order to appear as such, and that we can allow them to so appear, Mackinlay imagines two observers of a red car who nevertheless see the phenomenon differently. Mackinlay writes,
The issue here is about the accurate recognition of phenomena, instead of the restriction of their appearing. [ . . . T]he problems [. . .] arise from the idea of a phenomenon appearing as itself but being seen as something else. Given that a phenomenon is an appearance, if it is seen as something else, in what sense could it still appear as itself?
The particular difficulty in this alternative interpretation can be illustrated by considering a person who is color-blind. If a car appears red to one observer but green to another observer who is color-blind, this does not mean that a red appearance appears as green to the color-blind observer. While the car may indeed be red (in a nonphenomenal sense), there is no sense in which it appears as red to the color-blind observer. For the first observer, the (red) car appears red, while for the color-blind observer the same car appears green. There is no intermediate stage (of red appearing) added into the phenomenon’s appearing (as green) for the color-blind observer; the car simply appears green for him, just as it appears red for the first observer. In the same way, if Marion’s critique of Kant is interpreted as an accusation of “saturation-blindness,” then what appears to the Kantian observer is simply an object rather than a saturated phenomenon that is appearing as an object due to inaccurate recognition. Because phenomena must appear (by definition), a saturated phenomenon cannot appear as an (unsaturated) object and still be a saturated phenomenon. In this case, the saturated phenomenon would not actually appear at all, and would only be a potentially saturated phenomenon, just as above, with its appearing dependent upon the perceiver. (111)
In this example, Mackinlay seeks to eliminate the possibility of willful blindness to the reception of saturated phenomena, and as a result he in many respects converts the hermeneutic issue involved in recognizing a phenomenon as saturated into the sort of epistemological problem that Sellars and McDowell for their part solve with “the myth of the given” and its associated positions on concepts and perception. Indeed, I find Mackinlay’s staging of comparative appearances or looks24 in this illustration to be highly reminiscent of Wilfrid Sellars’s account in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” of John the tie salesman and his efforts to learn how a tie “looks” under different lighting conditions. As John “becomes more and more sophisticated about his own and other people’s visual experiences,” writes Sellars, “he learns under what conditions it is as though one were seeing a necktie to be of one colour when in fact it is of another. [. . .] And [. . .] which conditions are standard for a given mode of perception is, at the common sense level, specified by a list of conditions which exhibit the vagueness and open texture characteristic of ordinary discourse” (EPM 147). Because according to Sellars’s “psychological nominalism,” “all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short, all awareness of abstract entities—indeed, all awareness even of particulars—is a linguistic affair,” the fact that in Mackinlay’s example one observer is color-blind and another is not presents no difficulties for the deployment of Sellarsian logic there (EPM 160). Both observers of the red car, once they have “purged” their “sensations and images [. . .] of epistemic aboutness,” will discover that “the primary reason for supposing that the fundamental associative tie between language and the world must be between words and ‘immediate experiences’ has disappeared, and [that] the way is clear to recognizing that basic word-world associations hold, for example, between ‘red’ and red physical objects, rather than between ‘red’ and a supposed class of private red particulars” (EPM 161).
The apparent ease with which Sellars’s account of the conceptual (discursive) makeup of perceptual awareness can be seen operating in Mackinlay’s critique here of a particular aspect of Marion’s account of saturated phenomena leads one to suspect that Mackinlay has momentarily lost sight of the breadth that characterizes the phenomenological concept of givenness, and has instead narrowed the issues surrounding the reception of saturated phenomena to an epistemological problematic of perception. Anthony J. Steinbock helpfully reminds us of the decisive aspects of looking that are essential to the reception of phenomena, and which have been stripped out in the example of the appearance of the red car. Foremost among them is the erotic aspect:
Someone who does not dispose himself or herself, who has not made an “immanent decision,” will not see the given. The poor phenomenon, in the sense of the denigrated phenomenon, is what I see without wanting to see. I see in ordinary terms without receiving; I “merely” constitute it. I master it before I could receive it or “want” to receive it. The problem is not on the “side” of phenomenal givenness, but on the side of the “subject,” a subject who has to be understood more fundamentally as the gifted.25
Steinbock goes on to point out that, for Marion, this lack of decisiveness in front of phenomenal givenness can arise either from the gifted’s “essential finitude” (ED 425/BG 309), or from his or her unwillingness to decide for the gift (ED 426/BG 310)—there is both the “ ‘can/could’ of receiving and the ‘want/would’ of receiving.”26 Thus, here, too, color-blindness is not an impediment to the seeing of saturated phenomena, but for a different reason than for Sellars and, at least in the passage I have focused upon, for Mackinlay: deeper than the epistemological problematic involved is the question of the gifted’s affection for what appears.27
The important place of affection, or love, in Marion’s conception of givenness and, particularly, in his description of the nonreciprocal reason that governs the reception and the giving of gifts could lead us into discussion of the third and fourth essays included in The Reason of the Gift—“Substitution and Solicitude: How Levinas Re-reads Heidegger” and “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Sacrifice.” But space and the focus of this introduction foreclose that possibility. It will have to be enough here to conclude by suggesting that the rationality which makes The Reason of the Gift cohere as a book involves human affection for the fact that “it gives” in the diverse manifold of human experience.