I am confused about your criticism of Kierkegaard. I understood you to be saying that because we must be able to recognise the stranger who comes to our door - even if this recognition is not a conscious deduction, but no more than a smell - our faith cannot be blind. We are required to interpret the call of the other? That that is part of the response? I'm not sure if this is what you're saying, but, if it is close at least, wouldn't Kierkegaard agree completely - isn't Kierkegaard's point that the ethical is about disclosure, about understanding, bringing to consciousness etc: the paradox is that, when this fails us and we are reduced to blindness (when we can only smell and intuit but not know? - when we cannot express the problem in the universal?) we still have to welcome the stranger (almost unethically, because ethics has failed us already?). So for Kierkegaard we do have to do the hermeneutic work, and the bizzare and contradictory thing about faith is that it somehow defies our duty? Frances
Professor Kearney's response:
Frances, your point is well made and I agree with most of what you say with regard to Kierkegaard.
My point about carnal hermeneutics is that it operates already in the very moment of the leap of faith - both after we have left the knowledge and understanding of the Universal behind and before we return to the universal after the leap. The carnal 'reading/flairing/smelling/sensing' of the stranger is already at work in the first facing of the stranger - that is, in the primal moment of faith as troth and trust. This can occur in the middle of the night, as with Jacob wrestling with angel - and while it may often be mistaken it is never 'blind'. A leap in the dark does not mean we cannot read. In fact, Derrida once said to me in the conversation in Villanova that 'we can only read in the dark'. Darkness is not blindness. Sense means both sensing and making sense, passive and active, receptive and interpretive. And the french 'sens' even has the third intriguing sense of 'direction'. Tu vas dans quel sens? Carnal sensing as orientation...going this way rather than that, like Mary or Abraham or Jacob recoiling or advancing, retreating or embracing...
That is the wager of hospitality.
Does that help a little?
May I first voice my support for the general endeavor of a communal blog. Given the abundance of blogs as a form of progressive social and political discourse, it is a sign of hope that they are finally appearing in an academic setting.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find interesting about this discussion is the apparent consensus (from what has been said so far) that the Universal is confined to the realm of knowledge/ethics/rationality. I completely agree with Professor's point that a hermeneutics is functioning at the first instant of a carnal response, but why is this hermeneutic any less universal than whatever level of universality can be accomplished by an ethic of rational inquiry? Since the attempts of the latter are generally considered to be imperfect as yet, it is my position that the same rubric should be applied to the development of a carnal/intuitive means of moral navigation (which i suppose draws largely from this third usage of sens as in sense of direction). Just as reason attempts to access a Universal that applies best to the widest variety of situations (and yet always seems to rely on some quality of human judgement that escapes full definition), intuition has its own discourse of emotions that can be compiled into a set of patterns and averages best applicable to the widest variety of situations (i.e. the creation and solidification of a virtuous personality). It seems a bias of western culture and particularly the Enlightenment to consider the rational component as the regulatory agent, an imbalance which I think causes or at least can be correlated with the disconnect between humans and nature our currently unsustainable socio-political structure perpetuates. Is a correction of this imbalance, then, what the Anatheistic project is meant to accomplish?
I may with the last remark have brushed the appropriate bounds of discussion for this blog, but it seems that no philosophy is complete without a political and cultural accompaniment. I hope to read some interested replies that continue this mode of public exchange!
Aloha.