Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation

HORIZONS
appear has been established by conditions or laws which govern appearance. In
Kant, for instance, the possibility of the phenomenon’s appearance is determined in
advance by “formal conditions,” viz. the coupling of intuition and the concept. In
Leibniz, the law is Sufficient Reason, or rather Sufficient Reason is the law which
governs phenomena. In both, there are appearances which would be impossible,
realities which cannot measure up to this standard of phenomenality and thus are
denied the rights of phenomena (SP 80–1/103–4). In both cases, the phenomenon is
conditioned by the finitude of the knower: the “formal conditions” or “power of
knowing” (Kant), and the law of Sufficient Reason (Leibniz). For both Kant and
Leibniz, the “possibility [of the phenomenon] does not follow from the phenomenon,
but from the conditions set for any phenomenon” (SP 81/103). Thus, in such
“metaphysical” systems, “the possibility of appearing never belongs to what appears,
nor phenomenality to the phenomenon” (SP 83/104); rather, the law of appearance
is determined by the knowing ego: “Any phenomenon is possible that grants itself to
the finitude of the power of knowing and its requirements” (SP 81/104, emphasis
added). The object/phenomenon does not appear on its own terms, but under
conditions established by the ego.
We can appreciate Marion’s argument if we keep returning to our limit or test
case: the religious phenomenon. Within a “metaphysical” system, God must be
conceptualized, made an object (objectified), which can only happen in terms of the
formal conditions of knowing determined by the experiencing ego. Thus, the infinite
is reduced to the finite; the transcendent is absorbed into the immanent; the
“impossible” is forced to appear within the realm of possibility, under certain
conditions and laws.
In contrast to such “metaphysical” systems, 57 Marion suggests that phenomenology’s
“principle of all principles,” or at least a certain reading of it, offers a
phenomenality without condition, providing liberation and deliverance (relève) from the
law (le droit) of phenomenality and at the same time restoring the phenomenon’s
rights with its own justification (SP 84/105). This unconditioned giving is signaled in
the “principle of all principles,” which states
that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that
everything originarily (so to speak, in its “personal” actuality) offered to us in
“intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within
the limits in which it is presented there. (Id I 44)
In contrast to external conditions imposed upon the phenomenon (as in Kant and
Leibniz), Marion argues, in phenomenology it is the phenomenon itself which sets
the rules for appearance, which determines its own appearance and is its own source
of legitimation or justification. The phenomenon appears on its own terms, “on the
basis of itself [à partir de soi-même] as a pure and perfect appearance of itself, and not on
the basis of another than itself which would not appear (a reason)” (SP 84/105). As
such, it appears without horizon or background or presupposition: it is a donation, an
originary giving.
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