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OF GOD WHO COMES TO MIND

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition....................................................ixForeword.........................................................................xiPART I: A RUPTURE OF IMMANENCE Ideology and Idealism..........................................................3 From Consciousness to Wakefulness: Starting from Husserl.......................15 On Death in the Thought of Ernst Bloch.........................................33 From the Carefree Deficiency to the New Meaning................................43PART II: THE IDEA OF GOD God and Philosophy.............................................................55 Questions and Answers..........................................................79 Hermeneutics and Beyond........................................................100 The Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other............................111 Transcendence and Evil.........................................................122PART III: THE MEANING OF BEING Dialogue: Self-Consciousness and Proximity of the Neighbor.....................137 Notes on Meaning...............................................................152 The Bad Conscience and the Inexorable..........................................172 Manner of Speaking.............................................................178Notes............................................................................183

Chapter One

A Rupture of Immanence

Ideology and Idealism

Ideology and Morality

Ideology usurps the appearances of science, but the statement of its concept ruins the credit of morality. The suspicion of ideology deals morality the hardest blow it could ever receive. This suspicion probably marks the end of an entire human ethics and, in any case, overturns the theory of duty and of values.

Understood as a set of rules for conduct founded upon the universality of maxims or upon a hierarchically ordered system of values, morality carried within itself a rationale. It had its evidence and was apprehended in an intentional act analogous to knowing. Like the categorical imperative, axiology belonged to the logos. The relativity of morality in relation to history, its variations and variants as a function of social and economic structures, did not fundamentally compromise this rationale. Both the historical situation and social particularism allowed themselves correctly to be interpreted as determining the "subjective" conditions of access to the logos and the time necessary for this access. These were the variable conditions of a clear-sightedness that did not fall omniscient from the sky and that knew periods of obscurity. The relativism that the experience of these conditions seemed to invite was attenuated to the degree to which historical evolution let itself be understood as the manifestation of reason to itself; as a progressive rationalization of the Subject up to the absolute point of a reason becoming free act, or a practical, effective reason. Utilized in the Marxist critique of bourgeois humanism, the notion of ideology received much of its persuasive force in Nietzsche and in Freud. That the appearance of rationality might be more insinuating and more resistant than a paralogism, and that its powers of mystification might be dissimulated to the point where the art of logic was insufficient for its demystification, and that the mystification might mystify the mystifiers-proceeding from an intention unconscious of itself: here lay the novelty of this notion of ideology.

It is possible, however, to think that the strange notion of suspect reason did not arise in a philosophical discourse that would simply have let itself slide into suspicions instead of producing proofs. The meaning of this reason imposes itself in the "desert that grows," in the rising moral misery of the industrial era. A meaning that signifies in the moaning or in a cry denouncing a scandal to which Reason-capable of thinking, as an economy, a world wherein one sells the "poor for a pair of sandals"-would remain insensitive without this cry. This is a prophetic cry, barely discourse; it is a voice that cries in the desert, a revolt of Marx and Marxists beyond Marxian science. It is a meaning which rends like a cry that is not reabsorbed in the system that absorbs it, and wherein it does not cease resounding in a voice other than that which carries coherent discourse. It is not always true that not-to-philosophize is still to philosophize! The interrupting force of ethics does not attest to a simple relaxing of reason, but to placing in question the act of philosophizing, which cannot fall back into philosophy. But what a singular reversal! By way of its historical relativity, by way of its normative allures, which one deems regressive, ethics is the first victim of the struggle it instigated against ideology. Ethics loses its status of reason for a precarious condition within the Ruse of reason. It passes for an unconscious effort, certainly, but also is susceptible to becoming conscious and, consequently, courageous or cowardly in view of deceiving both others and its own followers or preachers. Its rationality, one of pure semblance, is the ruse of a war of one class opposed to the other, or a refuge of frustrated beings, a bundle of illusions commanded by interests and needs for compensation.

Ideology and "Disinterestedness"

That ideology-like reason in Kant's transcendental dialectic-might be a necessary source of illusions is probably a still more recent view. If we believe Althusser, ideology always expresses the manner in which consciousness's dependency in regard to the objective or material conditions that determine it-and which scientific reason grasps in their objectivity-is experienced by this consciousness. We must at once ask ourselves if this does not teach us, at the same time, a certain eccentricity of consciousness relative to the order controlled by science-and to which science doubtlessly belongs-a dislocation of the subject, a gaping, a "game" between the subject and being.

If illusion is the modality of this game, it does not make this game, or this gap, or this exile, or this ontological "statelessness" of consciousness illusory. Could this gap be the simple effect of the incompleteness of science which, in its coming to completion, would erode to a filament the subject whose ultimate vocation should only be in service to the truth and which, once science were completed, would lose its reason for being? But it is then this indefinite deferment of scientific completion that would signify the gap between the subject and being. As this gap is found in the possibility that the subject would have of forgetting science, which, having put ideology back into its place and having certainly caused the latter to lose the pretension of being a true knowledge and of directing efficacious acts, should have brought ideology back to the rank of a psychological factor to be modified by praxis like any other factor of the real. Science will not, however, have kept this ideology, henceforth inoffensive, from continuing to assure the permanence of a subjective life that lives from its demystified illusions. This is life where under the nose of science one commits great follies, where one eats and distracts oneself, where one has ambitions and esthetic tastes, where one weeps or...