Janicaud and the ‘theological turn’

Janicaud begins his colourful polemic by drawing attention to the rupture with immanent, Husserlian phenomenality inherent in such ideas as Levinas's ‘Other’. Though Janicaud's polemic is also targeted at thinkers such as Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry, the first sustained critique in his piece is directed at the work of the Jewish phenomenologist. His fundamental criticism throughout is that Levinas ignores Husserl's phenomenological reduction and constantly breaks out of phenomenological immanence to present the reader with explicitly transcendent and religious themes. There is certainly some truth to this view and in many respects it is a rather unoriginal statement on the relationship between Husserl and Levinas. But what makes Janicaud's polemic so objectionable is that he employs this basic critique as a covert vehicle for a series of scathing attacks on all relevance of theology and religion, and by implication faith also, to phenomenology.

His objection to Levinas's project is comprehensive and based totally on the latter's religious motivation and articulation:

Levinas's philosophy is taken to be in total contravention of a core phenomenological restriction, as outlined by Merleau-Ponty: to investigate invisibles, wherever they occur, of this world (ibid., 34). To be sure, Janicaud makes reference to the existence on intentional transcendencies and remarks that they are to be grasped as they are given in this world (ibid., 45). He even announces that the guiding question of his thesis is ‘the paradoxical revelation of Transcendence in a source at the heart of phenomenality’ (ibid., 23). Often, however, transcendence is mentioned in his piece under a certain suspicion, as if it were to be tolerated rather than embraced by phenomenology; indeed, there are many times more references to the opposition of transcendence and immanence than to their correlativity. It is unsurprising then that Janicaud should take such a dim view of a thinker, Levinas, who both steps outside strict Husserlian methodology and embraces the religious dimension to human experience. Janicaud speculates that Levinas's ‘biased utilization of what he presents as phenomenology’ has been deployed for pedagogic and apologetic reasons (ibid., 27–28), and is tantamount to a ‘seizure’ (ibid., 36) of phenomenology ‘to wring its neck’, a ‘two-timing’ which takes phenomenology ‘hostage’ (ibid., 42–43). This critique posits an unbridgeable boundary between phenomenology on the one hand and God, religion and faith on the other. In light of this it is necessary to turn to Husserl's own views on religion, theology, and faith.

Husserl

A first glance at the phenomenological tradition suggests that there are thinkers far more sympathetic to faith than a philosopher for whom only the scientifically rigorous model of an apodictically grounded and presuppositionless phenomenology of self-evidences is deserving of the title ‘philosophy’.Footnote ¹ Yet a deeper examination of the role that faith and belief have in Husserl's thought will take into account his own understanding of the terms in question. For Husserl belief certainly does mean, inter alia, belief in a particular world-view or set of metaphysical tenets (and, even more fundamentally, the belief in a world transcendent to my perceptions); whereas faith can mean both a theological virtue (e.g. faith in the personal God of Love and Revelation) or alternatively a fundamental philosophical attitude or world-viewFootnote ² concerning what is ultimately unverifiable in terms of scientistic reductionism (i.e. faith in the teleological meaningfulness of human rationality or the adoption of a theoretical attitude towards being). Belief and what I shall term ‘philosophical faith’ are effectively coterminous for Husserl. Although it is equally true that ‘theological faith’ (again, my terminology – not Husserl's) is more specifically religious than its philosophical counterpart, it does share many structural similarities with belief and philosophical faith, similarities that make it at times difficult to specify a distinction between Husserl's appeal to philosophical and theological faith.

Husserl on the legitimacy of a phenomenological theology

Possibly the most famous early work on Husserl and the question of faith is Louis Dupré's Reference Dupré1968 article, ‘Husserl's thought on God and faith’. Dupré illustrates how Husserl struggled to absolve himself from traditional metaphysical thinking when writing about what he considered to be the fundamental problem in philosophy, the problem of God (Dupré (Reference Dupré1968), 201). The article, which focuses especially on a set of eleven manuscripts from between 1930 and 1934 called ‘Transcendental anthropology’ (Husserl (Reference Husserl1930–1934), MSS EIII),Footnote ³ but also on sections from Ideas and First Philosophy,Footnote ⁴ charts Husserl's articulation of his thought on God in terms of a teleology ultimately underpinned by contingency. The importance of Dupré's article lies in bringing to the foreground an oft-neglected aspect of Husserl's work through showing how he attempted to situate the idea of God within phenomenologically construed notions of teleology and contingency. Yet Dupré's focus is on the metaphysical problematic of the phenomenological God rather than on the legitimacy of faith-talk for phenomenology. Further, his treatment of faith in Husserl, though undoubtedly illuminating, pays insufficient attention to its role in motivating the phenomenological project. In order to meet the challenge posed by Janicaud, then, a fresh approach to Husserl is required.

In section 81 of Ideas, while outlining his understanding of contingency in the context of phenomenological time, Husserl maintains that transcendental subjectivity is not an ultimate absolute:

Earlier in Ideas, this time in section 58, Husserl pre-emptively designates this ‘truly absolute’ as the teleological source of our ‘morphologically ordered world’, that is, God:

Similarly, roughly a decade and a half later in the ‘Transcendental anthropology’ manuscripts the ultimate absolute is again identified as God. God here is similar to a fundamental condition of possibility, a necessary being upon which is founded the teleology of reason as well as existence itself:

A number of considerations need to be borne in mind when attempting to understand Husserl's writings on the divine. While Husserl never developed a thematic account of God, his collected works, including the extensive Nachlass, indicate a consistent and lifelong interest in the philosophical question of God. Importantly, this interest was not a quixotic departure from his core phenomenological project, but very much bound up with it. As conversations with both Eugen Fink (Cairns (Reference Cairns1976), 46) and Edith Stein (Duméry (Reference Duméry1957), 165) testify to, Husserl believed that it is only through phenomenology that one comes properly (i.e. non-naïvely) to understand God and his transcendence. In wanting to ‘reach God without God’ (ibid.) Husserl sought to forgo traditional theology and secure a clearer path towards the divine. That his ‘final’ picture of God lacks clarity can be attributed to both never having the opportunity to flesh out a sustained account of his phenomenological theology, and to the fact that a phenomenological concept of God as (uniquely) transcendent in immanence is necessarily complex. Yet a consensus of sorts exists among the relatively few scholars dedicated to the task of elucidating the basic characteristics of Husserl's God. Steven Laycock summarizes:

The difficult notion of Husserl's God as entelechy has been treated in-depth by James Hart. Hart sees the Husserlian God as an entelechy in an interconnected dual sense, as both a ‘regulative idea’ and as possessing a ‘constitutive’ function. The former sense refers to the divine ideal pole-idea as ‘infinite perfection in the ideal teleological realm’ (Hart (Reference Hart and Guerrière1990), 222), and as ‘the form that determines the actualization of the monadic prōtē-hylē’ (ibid., 232). The latter sense refers to the divine as the ‘pervading idea of rationality which holds sway over the facticity of the primordial flow’, the ‘immanent, guiding, besouling norm’ (ibid., 233) lying within the regulative idea. This subtle distinction of Hart's should not obscure the fact that he is in basic agreement with Dupré on the centrality of the contingency of rationality and consciousness, phenomenologically perceived, for leading Husserl towards the divine.Footnote ⁵ The key point is again confirmed by Angela Ales Bello's recent study published as part of the Analecta Husserliana wherein she explains, while dealing with a 1921 text of Husserl's on transcendental intersubjectivity and teleology, how for Husserl teleology manifests itself at the transcendental level, while transcendental subjectivity is made possible by the originary facticity of the hylē, itself made possible by God (Ales Bello (Reference Ales Bello2008), 53).Footnote ⁶

The foregoing seriously challenges Dupré's conclusion that Husserl ultimately did not take seriously a phenomenological investigation of and path towards God. Dupré claims that the religious overtones concerning the transcendence of Husserl's God (a ‘purely ideal telos’, an ideal that ‘lies entirely in infinity’ (Husserl (Reference Husserl1930–1934), EIII.1, 4) ) becomes much less pronounced in his final years when he is composing the unfinished The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl died in 1938). As he moves towards a philosophy of the spirit, Dupré argues, whereby transcendental subjectivity is its undisputed foundation and whereby the horizonality of history is accorded much greater importance, it becomes more difficult for him to refer to an ultimate transcendent being in the figure of God. But there are two main problems with Dupré's analysis. First, he seems to rely heavily on the Crisis for evidence of Husserl's move towards a philosophy of spirit and away from God (Dupré (Reference Dupré1968), 210). Yet the Crisis's main concern is not with absolutes of any kind, but with the historical culmination of philosophy in phenomenology, the elucidation of phenomenological methodology, the life-world, and the threats of naturalism and scientific reductionism. Little is said of God and certainly nothing along the lines of the divine being supplanted by an idealist Geist. Dupré too easily dismisses the fact that Husserl maintained a consistent, if unthematic, concern for the idea of a phenomenological God throughout his philosophical career, from at least as early as 1907–1908 with the B II manuscripts to the ‘Transcendental anthropology’ manuscripts of the early to mid-1930s. Moreover, he never once repudiated texts involving phenomenological pronouncements on the issue of God.

The second main problem with Dupré's analysis is that he places too much store in the conceptual difficulties Husserl encounters when phenomenologizing about God, and infers from these difficulties that Husserl was non-committal on the plausibility of a phenomenological theology. That there are conceptual difficulties with Husserl's God is difficult to deny, and Dupré is in company with Hans Wagner and James Hart in questioning how to reconcile the absolute character of the divine principle with the absolute character of primal presencing in transcendental subjectivity. But Dupré then deduces from these difficulties that Husserl's God is not really God at all – his rationale being that since transcendence is a necessary characteristic of God, and since Husserl's divine absolute is inextricably bound up in transcendental subjectivity, Husserl does not present a credible picture of the divine, and as such God can only lie outside of phenomenology (Dupré (Reference Dupré1968), 212).Footnote ⁷ This logic assumes that a central endeavour of phenomenology, to grapple with the paradox of transcendence-in-immanence, is doomed to failure. Now perhaps this is ultimately the case when phenomenology is rigorously appraised from outside of itself, but within phenomenology it cannot be a conclusive rebuttal to phenomenological theology to cite the transcendence of God. There is such a thing as a transcendence proper to phenomenology, a phenomenological transcendence that is always correlative with phenomenological immanence and allows the phenomenologist to distinguish between consciousness directed inwardly (such as towards internal perception) and outwardly (such as towards social community). So there is at least a possible case to be made that a phenomenological theology need not transgress the phenomenological understanding of transcendence. Husserl himself certainly seems to have accepted this possibility.

It is a remarkable feature of Janicaud's critique that it fails to make any mention of Husserl's discussions of a phenomenological God. The term ‘phenomenological’ is stressed here because there is a distinction to be drawn between God metaphysically construed and God phenomenologically construed. Janicaud is more than happy to refer to the former as when he cites (Janicaud (Reference Janicaud, Janicaud and Prusak2000), 68) section 58 of Ideas on how God as ‘absolute’ and ‘transcendent’ must be bracketed from phenomenological investigation via the reduction, but in failing to make any mention of Husserl's writings on the latter he severely compromises the force of his argument. And it is at least possible that the latter sense is included alongside the metaphysically construed God in section 58 of Ideas. For Husserl's discussion here begins with ‘the transition to pure consciousness by the method of transcendental reduction’ which itself leads to questioning about the ‘ground’ of corresponding constitutive consciousness, and as such leads to a rationale for an extra-worldly divine being. It is only at this stage that Husserl mentions excluding God via the phenomenological reduction, but it is arguable that now he is talking about God qua (transcendent) God, and not God as the ground, phenomenologically inferred, for transcendental consciousness. This latter sense of God is intelligible only if God, or more accurately the idea of God, is imminent within consciousness in a unique, particular manner. And this is precisely what Husserl seems to be suggesting in section 51 of Ideas,

The omission of the distinction between a metaphysically and phenomenologically construed God explains the absence from Janicaud's work of any sustained meditation on the paradox of phenomenological transcendence-in-immanence and how such a problematic may bear on the task of a phenomenological theology. Of no little relevance, then, to the potential importance of phenomenology for understanding God's transcendence is Husserl's statement made in November 1931 that:

Husserl on the phenomenology of faith-consciousness

Husserl envisaged the task of phenomenology as eventually including religious and theological themes.Footnote ⁹ The latter theme of a phenomenological theology has been discussed above. The former is tantamount to a phenomenology of religious experience or, as I term it, of faith-consciousness. The possibility of a phenomenology of faith-consciousness is much less contentious than that of a phenomenological theology because an investigation of faith-consciousness is self-evidently more easily oriented towards interiority and immanence than an investigation of God. And while Husserl never developed a thematic phenomenology of faith-consciousness he did make it clear in both correspondence and his own phenomenological work that he considered it a legitimate and important task for phenomenology. In letters to Rudolph Otto (1919) and Erich Przywara (1932)Footnote ¹⁰ Husserl lauds the approach of re-entering religious experience in order to understand its structure and essence(s). His most focused discussion on the eidetic ontology of religion is found in a letter to Wilhelm Dilthey (1911),Footnote ¹¹ which coheres very closely with those he would later send to both Otto and Przywara in how it affirms the possibility of an eidetic analysis of religion-constituting intentionality. That Husserl considered such a task appropriate is hardly surprising considering how all possible experience is a legitimate concern for phenomenology.

Thankfully, traces of a phenomenology of faith-consciousness are extant in Husserl's works, specifically in the Nachlass. What can be said of them, summarily, is that Husserl viewed a phenomenology of faith-consciousness as interwoven with a phenomenology of moral oughts, norms, and absolutes.Footnote ¹² For him, the intuition of values underlies all faith (in teleology, meaningfulness, religion, etc.). He even outlined a brief biographical account of his own faith in the Christ of the Gospels in the Japanese journal The Kaizo (1923–1924). Therein he explains how Christ is intuited as perfectly good, the core value of absolute goodness, and that this intuition motivates faith in the ideal figure of love, an infinite idea that becomes a power in Husserl's (the believer's) life. This is hardly a fully developed phenomenology of faith-consciousness, but an embryonic phenomenology of faith-consciousness it is nonetheless. As such it confounds Janicaud's claim (2000, 68) that ‘religious consciousness’, a term borrowed from the aforementioned section 58 of Ideas, is put out of play by the phenomenological reduction. Where Janicaud falters is again in assuming that section 58 of Ideas, and specifically here its reference to religious consciousness, does not countenance a phenomenology whose intentional transcendencies include religious concerns. This assumption, shown above to be dubious and simplistic, allows him to ignore completely the task of a phenomenology of faith-consciousness.

Husserl's faith as motivating his phenomenology

The move from phenomenological theology to a phenomenology of faith-consciousness is not tantamount to ‘relegation’, as Dupré (Reference Dupré1968, 202) would have it, because for Husserl faith is not so much a lack of theoretical knowledge but a possibilizing sine qua non for the self-understanding of phenomenology. The point to note here is that for Husserl both philosophical faith and theological faith share in common a belief in the teleology of reason, the ultimate meaningfulness of existence, and also the ability of philosophy to overcome scepticism and irrationalism. Phenomenology is bound up in the accomplishment of the telos of reason and manifests itself in the non-naïve overcoming of scepticism and irrationalism. Without belief in the integrity of the phenomenological project, phenomenology is both groundless and aimless in its ambitions. This belief is situated in a prior philosophical faith in the meaningfulness of existence. In First Philosophy Husserl writes:

It is here that the boundaries between philosophical and theological faith are obscured by Husserl as he speculates on grounds for believing in the teleology and meaningfulness of existence. Almost a decade later in the ‘Transcendental anthropology’ manuscripts he would state that ‘In faith we experience the teleology that directs us, that rules through sin and error as a lasting, self-preserving disposition which gives fulfillment’ (Husserl (Reference Husserl1930–1934), EIII.10, 21). Indeed there is a sense that for Husserl philosophical faith ultimately rests on theological faith:

Husserl recognizes that all meaningfulness, and therefore all teleology, rests on faith, in the secular, philosophical sense at least.

The interrelationship between faith and belief comes to the fore in the justification for phenomenology, a justification which can be described as a kind of ‘apologetics’ for the necessity and inevitability of phenomenology. At the beginning of the Cartesian Meditations Husserl laments the fact that modern times have witnessed a languishing of ‘belief in an autonomous philosophy and science’ (Husserl (Reference Husserl and Cairns1960), 4–5). This theme is especially prominent in his last great work, the Crisis, which likewise begins with a warning that philosophy ‘threatens to succumb to scepticism, irrationalism, and mysticism’ (Husserl (Reference Husserl and Carr1970), 3). Scepticism erodes faith in freedom and the meaningfulness of the world, history, and humanity. Husserl warns that ‘If man loses this faith, it means nothing less than the loss of faith “in himself”, in his own true being’ (ibid., 13). To the ‘naïve faith in reason’ of traditional philosophy, Husserl goes on to oppose phenomenology as the manifestation of an authentic faith in reason which will lead to the submission of the non-philosophy of scepticism. Husserl is adamant that

Faith in phenomenology assumes the mantle of saviour of European civilization in its capacity to found life-inwardness; faith enables recognition of the teleological spirit leading towards the true science of phenomenology:

Hence it becomes more comprehensible why Husserl describes the phenomenological ‘attitude’ in such an openly religious manner. Commenting upon the Sixth Cartesian Meditation of Eugen Fink (who worked on the text in close collaboration with Husserl) and the use of the word ‘leap’ (Sprung) in connection with the phenomenological reduction, Rudolf Bernet states that ‘Though phenomenology is a science, the entry into phenomenology must therefore be considered as an act of faith devoid of all anticipation or foresight’ (Bernet (Reference Bernet, Kisiel and van Buren1994), 249–250). Husserl himself describes phenomenology in an openly religious manner; it is a ‘vocational technique’ (Husserl (Reference Husserl and Carr1970), 136, 258, 260) comparable to a ‘religious conversion’ and also to a great ‘existential transformation’ (ibid., 137).

Levinas on theology and religion

Emmanuel Levinas consistently stressed that his phenomenology of the Other was purely philosophical and owed nothing to onto-theological thought. However, his development of a phenomenological ethics as metaphysics is based upon a rejection of Husserlian idealism, which in turn is guided by his faith in the subject's infinite responsibility towards the Other – a philosophical faith which is ultimately theological or, rather (in order to be sensitive to Levinas's own terminology), religious. This faith not only motivates his phenomenology, but also provides its content, a phenomenology of faith-consciousness.

Like Husserl's great heir to the phenomenology throne, Heidegger, Levinas's fundamental attitude towards Being guides his own appropriation of the reduction as a corrective to the abuses and limitations of Husserlian phenomenology. Whereas Heidegger carries out a reduction to Being and ontological difference (the difference between beings and the Being of beings) guided by a profound philosophical faith in the primordial stature and meaningfulness of Being, Levinas's own reduction to the ‘hither side of being’ (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1974), 45) and to the Other is in the end inseparable from his religious faith.

Part of his overarching project is to show, against Husserl and also Heidegger and Hegel, that non-adequation is the fundamental characteristic of consciousness as opposed to the presumption of intentional adequation, and that subjectivity is founded on the open-endedness of infinity rather than the self-confinement of totality (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1961), 26–27). In doing so he enacts a hermeneutics of two fundamental philosophical attitudes, those of Husserl's theoria and Heidegger's Being, so he can work out his own fundamental attitude of deference to the Other as more primordial than totalizing Being. On his own view, phenomenology and its reduction are always employed against a backdrop of a more fundamental faith in various competing claims as to which principle constitutes the most primordial truth of philosophy and subjectivity.

Yet in order to reach the heart of Levinas's faith, many of the inescapable ambiguities concerning his understanding of theology and religion must be tackled. Levinas is keen to disassociate his project of fundamental ethics from traditional theology, yet at the same time is happy to place it favourably within the context of ‘religion’. There are moments in Levinas where he seems to stress that his post-phenomenological metaphysics does not belong or owe anything to the domain of faith. Underlying this arc in his thought is the acceptance of the Heideggerian understanding of theology as scientia and thus as firmly ontical in nature. In reference to the ‘metaphysical’, which for Levinas is not the study of being qua being but a relation with a reality which is infinitely distant and transcendent from my own reality and which allows for ‘Desire’ for what is absolutely Other, he writes: ‘It would be false to qualify it as theological. It is prior to the negative or affirmative proposition; it first institutes language, where neither the no nor the yes is the first word’ (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1961), 42). Because theology is fundamentally onto-theology for Levinas it always comes after the metaphysical relation: ‘As critique precedes dogmatism, metaphysics precedes ontology’ (ibid., 43). The metaphysical relation is essentially a ‘philosophical’ discovery owing nothing to theology: ‘The Place of the Good above every essence is the most profound teaching, the definitive teaching, not of theology, but of philosophy’ (ibid., 103). Hence in order to accomplish radical transcendence Levinas must turn away from both onto-theology and transcendence as understood by religion in its thaumaturgic form (though certainly not by religion as Levinas himself understands it) (ibid., 48).

Another reason why Levinas dissociates his work from theology is that what he calls the ‘trace’ of the Other institutes an undecidability safeguarding any attempted reduction of the Other into the categories of rational thought, categories always operative within the parameters of the totalizing thought of the same. Theology is fundamentally rational theology for Levinas and as such is implicated in the violence of the philosophical tradition in its refusal to recognize and allow space for the Other (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1974), 121). Yet his dismissal of theology does not entail the dismissal of the religious. Witness, which is obeying the command of the Infinite without thematizing that which is witnessed to, can only be understood within the context of religion inasmuch as religion precedes any reductive onto-theological rationalizing while at the same time offering the only appropriate response to that which is tout autre: ‘Witness is humility and admission; it is made before all theology; it is kerygma and prayer, glorification and recognition’ (ibid., 149). And again, this time there is an even more explicit affirmation of ‘religion’ over ‘theology’:

This has important consequences for how to understand the extent to which Levinas's work is a phenomenology of faith. By following the Heideggerian understanding of theology as scientia, literally the study (logos) of God (theos), and by thus disavowing the more theological understanding of theology as fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding), Levinas removes theology from the domain of faith and in doing so inscribes faith solely within the domain of the religious. In claiming the idea of Infinity is revealed and that ‘there is no natural religion’ (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1961), 62), Levinas places the an-archical origin of ethics and its recognition of the Other as Master within the domain of faith, a faith at once both philosophical and theological even if the latter must ultimately assume priority. The ‘exceptional knowledge’ (ibid.) of the Infinite is not reductive ‘objective’ knowledge but is best characterized as that which arouses metaphysical Desire. If there is no natural religion there can only be the religion of revelation and in this way religion surpasses Being and is prior to Being; it is ‘the bond that is established between the same and the other without constituting a totality’ (ibid., 40).

Even though religious faith is the mode of understanding proper to ‘revealed’ religion, Levinas stresses time and again that he wishes to understand this religion philosophically. In opposing the ‘eschatology of messianic peace’ to political and ontological morality he is aware of the objections from what he calls the ‘philosophers of egology’ for whom ‘eschatology – a subjective and arbitrary divination of the future, the result of a revelation without evidences, tributary of faith – belongs naturally to Opinion’ (ibid., 22). In the face of such criticisms the temptation to naturalize eschatology is avoided, for if eschatology were assimilated to philosophical evidences ‘it would already accept the ontology of totality issued from war’ (ibid.). Understood philosophically religious eschatology ‘institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not with being beyond the past and the present’ (ibid.). But even though religion precedes (onto-)theology, Levinas gives no explicit indication that his work consists of a phenomenology of faith, whereby metaphysical transcendence as a fundamental ethics of alterity is motivated by religious faith. While he does not wish to reduce eschatology to the philosophy of same, neither does he identify it with a theological doctrine concerning the ‘orientation of history’ (ibid.). Instead he affirms a via media by understanding eschatology as instituting a relation with the infinite beyond the totality.

For Husserl such an understanding of eschatology is necessarily sourced in philosophical faith due to being both ultimately indemonstrable and also the very catalyst for a fundamental world-view. However, in reference to eschatology Levinas claims

Is ‘first of all’ employed as a detour away from a question which Levinas would rather leave unanswered, either for himself or for the reader? An important few lines follow later on the same page:

The key word here is ‘experience’. The ‘transcendental truth’ of the idea of infinity presupposes the experience of a particular type of infinity in the face of the Other, one describable in explicitly religious language. The question is whether Levinas can remove himself to such an extent from the Husserlian reduction and still plausibly appeal to experience unconditioned by fundamental attitudinal motivations, ones he so readily sees in Husserl's formulation of the reduction in the first place. It is no coincidence that in order for thinkers like Gadamer and Ricoeur to develop their hermeneutical philosophies one of their most striking departures from Husserl is in reference to the reduction, as the reduction presupposes what hermeneutics denies: pre-interpretative thinking. Unlike traditional metaphysics, which appeals to some combination of experience and reason with varying degrees of emphasis on either the former or the latter, Levinasian metaphysics is committed to the experience simpliciter of the Other and is therefore more susceptible to a hermeneutic critique. The reluctance of Levinas (and indeed Derrida (Reference Derrida and Derrida2007), 103) ) to acknowledge that his own experience of the Other is a fruit of faith (philosophical and theological) cannot be justified by the overall coherence of his project, by his debt to Rosenzweig (discussed later), or by his unquestionably formative life experiences as a devout Jew traumatized by family and friends condemned to death by the Nazis on account of their Jewish otherness. Instead it owes its support to adherence to a version of faith–reason dichotomy whereby Levinas himself is reluctant to undermine the universality of the Other by circumscribing him/her within Judaism.

Thus the harshness of Janicaud's polemic is mitigated somewhat; he is correct to charge Levinas with unclarity, and he is given succour by Levinas in persisting with his own version of the faith–reason dichotomy. Further, Levinas is clearly not strictly Husserlian in his phenomenological method. However, he is genuinely Husserlian in the sense that his phenomenology is motivated by faith and that it enacts (to a much greater extent than Husserl ever did) a phenomenology of faith-consciousness. Where Husserl and Levinas part ways is in the latter's inability to accommodate together both a phenomenology of faith-consciousness and a phenomenological theology understood in the Husserlian sense. This is nothing to do with Levinas surreptitiously adopting Janicaud's view that God is of no relevance to phenomenology. Instead it is attributable to a combination of Levinas's latent fideism, by which only faith and not any (phenomenological) variation of reason, rationality, or metaphysics provides access to the divine, and his partial transgressing of Husserlian methodology, whereby the non-adequation of consciousness opens towards various infinities irreducible to transcendental subjectivity, meaning that bare (revelatory) experience is the sole path towards God – in fact any attempt at reasoning towards God is an attempt to totalize such an infinity.

Levinas on the phenomenology of faith-consciousness

One of the reasons why Levinas is such a cryptic thinker is his insistence on persisting with openly religious and theological descriptions of non-phenomena (Infinite and Other) he otherwise deems to be purely (neutrally) experiential. The resolution of this ambiguity, as indicated above, calls for interpreting Levinas as articulating a phenomenology of faith-consciousness. His repeated insistence that the Other and the Infinite do not appear and are invisible, and that eschatology is a ‘signification without context’ and a ‘vision without image’ (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1961), 23), fits comfortably with an understanding of faith as evidence of things unseen (Heb 11:1). Revelation, not disclosure, constitutes the ‘absolute experience’ (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1961), 65–66) of the manifestation of the Other; the idea of infinity is revealed to me (ibid., 62). Desire is understood as ‘the alterity of the Other and of the Most–High’ (ibid., 34). As happiness is separate from Desire so politics is separate from religion, religion ‘is the surplus possible in a society of equals, the glorious humility, responsibility, and sacrifice, which are the condition for equality itself’ (ibid., 64).

Moreover, the memory of the monotheistic creatio ex nihilo guarantees otherness (ibid., 63) and inaugurates a ‘sabbatical’ existence (ibid., 104). The transcendence of the Other is his ‘eminence’, his ‘height’ and his ‘lordship’ (ibid., 76–77). The face of the ‘Master’ teaches the ethical (ibid., 171). The infinity of the Other's transcendence, which resists us in the face, is the primordial expression ‘you shall not commit murder’ (ibid., 199). The relation with the Other is ‘sermon’, ‘exhortation’, and ‘prophetic word’ (ibid., 213), while his face is ‘holy’ (ibid., 291). The religious will is a relation with the Other and fidelity to the Other is won by ‘repentance’ and ‘prayer’ (ibid., 231). The ‘approach’ is the ‘glory’ of the infinite (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1974), 94), as is ‘sincerity’ and the ‘other face of the passivity of the subject’ (ibid., 144). The self as a hostage is neither egoism nor altruism, but ‘religiosity’ (ibid., 117). ‘Witness’ is ‘the modality in which the anarchic Infinite passes its command’ in the mouth of the one who obeys (ibid., 147). The transcendence of revelation is ‘epiphany’ (ibid., 149). Height is ‘heaven’ and the ‘kingdom of heaven’ is ethical (ibid., 183). It is a mistake to say that religion and theology form Levinas's thinking only in so far as they decorate his descriptions of the Other and his transcendence. These ‘theologemes’ point to Levinas's faith in God as the deep source of his philosophy – a phenomenology of faith-consciousness with invisibility as part of its deep structure. The desired (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1961), 34), the face (ibid., 194), and God (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Bergo1998), 69) are all invisible, while revelation of the Infinite occurs invisibly by inverting objectifying cognition (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1961), 67). This revelation of the invisible is what moves Levinas beyond the phenomenological reduction and towards the collapse of a specifically Husserlian account of phenomenology, wherein the face ‘escapes presentation; it is the very collapse of phenomenality. Not because it is too brutal to appear, but because in a sense too weak, non-phenomenon because less than a phenomenon’ (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1974), 88). It is only because God is invisible that he is accessible in justice – since ‘Ethics is the spiritual optics’ (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1961), 78), it can be said that God is seen through faith, through an ethics sourced in religious faith.

Levinas's faith as motivating his phenomenology

It is possible to go deeper into the relationship between faith and phenomenology in Levinas's works. To grasp the trajectory of his thought it is crucial to remember that for Levinas ‘The problem of transcendence and of God and the problem of subjectivity irreducible to essence, irreducible to essential immanence, go together’ (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1974), 17). This is precisely why religion is the ‘ultimate structure’ (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1961), 80) of his philosophy – faith informs thought. In his essay ‘God and philosophy’ Levinas indicates that the ‘an-archic’ root of the breakup of ‘the same’ is God: ‘the idea of God causes the breakup of the thinking that – as investment, synopsia, and synthesis – merely encloses in a presence, re-presents, brings back to presence, or lets be’ (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Bergo1998), 63). He views the destruction of transcendence throughout the history of Western philosophy as a movement identical to the ontologizing of the biblical God by theology (ibid., 56).

In attempting to liberate God from being Levinas at the same moment inaugurates an ethics of alterity; thus the two movements are identical for him. As in Descartes, the idea of God and the idea of the Infinite are inseparable for Levinas; they are at times synonymous with each other: ‘The Infinite affects thought by simultaneously devastating it and calling it … the Infinite puts thought in place’ (ibid., 66).Footnote ¹³ The infinity of God alone is capable of breaking up totality; his transcendence inaugurates an exteriority outside of the same. The surplus of truth over being, the excess of infinity over and above its idea, is the very locus of God:

Even if the Other is ‘indispensable for my relation with God’ (ibid., 78), the Other can only be Other because the dimension of the divine opens forth from his face; for the Other to be Other his immanent priority over God is necessarily inverted by the transcendent priority God assumes over him and which invests the Other with a disincarnate exteriority. From faith in God an ethics of alterity follows, which is why Derrida can claim that it is only God who prevents Levinas's world from descending into violence (Derrida (Reference Derrida and Derrida2007), 133) and why Levinas himself states that metaphysics is the essence of language with God (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1961), 297).

None of this should surprise us. Against Husserl and Heidegger, it is Gabriel Marcel and Martin Buber, two explicitly religious thinkers, whom Levinas cites in Totality and Infinity as promoting an understanding of the relationship with the Other irreducible to objective knowledge (ibid., 68). The central figure of influence on Levinas, over and beyond Husserl, is Franz Rosenzweig. When Levinas writes in his preface to Totality and Infinity that:

he is telling the reader that the basic notions which are taken up by his phenomenological method owe a significant debt to the Jewish philosophy contained in the Star of Redemption, and are not themselves the fruits of the phenomenological method. Rosenzweig's biblical non-phenomenology influences Levinas not just in his understanding of the breakup of totality, but also in his understanding of the face: Levinas's descriptions of the trace of illeity – the trace of the trace of God in the Other's face – mirrors to some extent Rosenzweig's depiction of God's visage.Footnote ¹⁴

Perhaps one of Levinas's most overt statements on the issue of faith is to be found in his statements concerning atheism and monotheism in Totality and Infinity. Although atheism (and thus monotheism) here is taken as prior to the negation and affirmation of the divine, and hence as prior to faith, the meaning Levinas intends to give both of these orientations is quite clearly motivated by his own faith in the Other and the Infinite. He characterizes atheism as a natural orientation of the I, a total separation whereby one lives outside of God and completely enveloped in one's own egoism, where egoism is the gulf between the I and the transcendent Other. For Levinas atheistic separation is presupposed by the idea of Infinity, by truth and ultimately also by monotheism – for without separation there can be no relation with the Other. As Levinas says, ‘Only an atheist being can relate himself to the other and already absolve himself from this relation’ (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1961), 77). Relation with the transcendent is not union with the transcendent: the believers of positive religions show themselves to be merely mythical when they continue to seek participation in the transcendent.

Levinas believes that ‘The idea of infinity, the metaphysical relation, is the dawn of a humanity without myths’ and, tellingly, the dawn also of a faith purged of myths or what Levinas calls the ‘monotheist faith’ (ibid., 68). Monotheism, and by implication the monotheist faith, ‘signifies this human kinship, this idea of a human race that refers back to the approach of the Other in the face, in a dimension of height, in responsibility for oneself and for the Other’ (ibid., 214). It seems that here at least Levinas, in line with Husserl, accepts that at the heart of the relation with the Other lies faith. But if the dawn of faith itself is heralded by the idea of Infinity, as Levinas claims, does it not follow for him that for the idea of Infinity to inaugurate anything, it must be invested with faith, that one must have faith in Infinity and in the infinity of the Other? In this way the relationship between Infinity and faith would not be one of source and stream, but of reciprocal recognition. Levinas's thought does not explicitly travel this path, but if a deeper appreciation of his project is to be won it is imperative that a closer look be given to his quiet understanding of faith and philosophy.

Despite his affirmation of the monotheist faith in Totality and Infinity, a faith made possible by atheistic separation, Levinas's overall reluctance to stress the centrality of faith for his thought, and his appeal to neutral experience as the locus for the revelation of the Infinite, means his understanding of faith remains a subtle undercurrent throughout his work, although nonetheless an understanding which generally manages to remain consistent with his overarching project. It has been shown above how Levinas implicitly associates faith not with theology but with religion, and how religious faith is the key animating factor for his philosophical thought. His acceptance of Heidegger's critique of onto-theology makes him cautious about placing faith at the centre of his work, and especially faith in an ontological God. Yet when the God of revelation assumes total credibility over the god of philosophy faith becomes the only meaningful way to speak of the divine. Levinas's approach to God is thus a mirror image of his approach to the Infinite and to the Other: based on faith. He consistently affirms that his ethics does not offer a proof for God's existence. Regarding the face-to-face relationship Levinas writes: ‘[o]ne does not prove God thus, since this is a situation that precedes proof, and is metaphysics itself … Morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy’ (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1961), 304).

Faith certainly precedes proof. Levinas inverts an entire tradition in philosophy by identifying metaphysics with faith. Faith for him is first philosophy or, indeed, what is prior to philosophy. In Otherwise than Being this theme is continued. Levinas warns that one must not do violence to the trace by hastily deducing from it the existence of God, for to see the problem of God's existence behind the signifyingness of signification is to exhibit a desire to settle things and adhere to the prestige of the totality (Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1974), 93–94). This is not an attempt to distance thinking from God, but the caution required to preserve faith in an utterly transcendent divinity completely removed from the Hegelian ‘totality of being called Spirit’ (ibid., 95). For Levinas, only faith survives the death of the onto-theological God of traditional metaphysics and the Nietzschean critique of morality, hence his support for Kant's endeavour to ground morality in the categorical imperative, i.e. outside of rational theology and ontology (ibid., 129). (Kant believed that the categorical imperative and living a moral life according to it are ultimately irrational if one does not have faith in the God of redemption.) In ‘God and philosophy’ Levinas endeavours to speak philosophically of the biblical God and thus commits himself to a philosophy of faith:

Philosophy is therefore guided by revelation because biblical transcendence animates the alterity of the Other. Remarkably, however, a page later in his essay Levinas claims that faith is still caught up in ontology: ‘faith and opinion speak the language of being’ (ibid., 57). In order to reach a coherent understanding of Levinas's overall project, and not to charge him with deceit, faith can only be interpreted here as a necessary component of rational theology – and thus onto-theology – and cannot be what for Levinas is authentic religious faith. Hence for Levinas religious faith is prior to and utterly distant from the relationship between theological faith and philosophical reason. He thus accepts a different dichotomy, one between religious faith on the one hand and the intertwinement between theological faith and philosophical reason on the other – and has no alternative but to think of God in purely religious terms. In this regard he is thoroughly fideistic. It is an absolutist fideism which stands in marked contrast to the faith–reason dichotomy of Janicaud. Between them lies Husserl, disposed towards acknowledging the various compatibilities of faith and phenomenology but all the while striving after a universal science of pure essences capable of being rigorously examined via a strict methodology.

Phenomenological method and its influences

In some contexts Janicaud acknowledges that phenomenological method does not exist ready-made in a neutral theoretical vacuum, and is capable of being shaped, for better or worse, by other philosophical commitments. For instance, he does not believe that phenomenological method consists of a series or rules or principles fixed once and for all (Janicaud (Reference Janicaud, Janicaud and Prusak2000), 93). He also warns that an approach to Husserlian phenomenology characterized by ‘strict observance’ can lead ‘only’ to restatements or at best to pertinent elucidations of the Husserlian project (ibid., 35). But in other contexts Janicaud seems to think that methodology and metaphysics (ideology) are not just distinct but divorced from each other and should be incapable of inter-influence. In countering that ruling the question of God out of phenomenology leads towards an ‘atheist’ phenomenology in the manner of Sartre, Janicaud warns against the ‘contamination of the methodological by the ideological’ (ibid., 99). In the next breath he even warns against the practising of an ‘apologetic idealization of phenomenology to make it a countercurrent to neopositivism or scientistic reductionism’ (ibid.) – despite the fact that this was precisely one of Husserl's explicit intentions in his apologetics for phenomenology.

One way of making sense of these seemingly inconsistent views is by inferring from them that Janicaud implicitly assumes that theological and religious extra-phenomenological world-views are a greater threat to the neutrality of phenomenological method than other, more secular philosophical commitments. Of relevance to this possibility is the difference in treatment he affords ‘religious’ and ‘atheist’ phenomenologies. Levinas's endeavour is ‘impossible’ and phenomenologically untenable’ without qualification (ibid., 45), while Janicaud is happy to concede that aspects of Michel Henry's and Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenologies other than their religious work are legitimate, namely their phenomenologies of aesthetic experience (ibid., 98) (but is it so easy to neatly separate out their phenomenologies into different compartments?). In contrast, Janicaud approaches the phenomenological work of Sartre with much greater deference and much less suspicion. He lauds the undeniable phenomenological quality of Sartre's descriptions of the essence of love in Being and Nothingness whereby the lover wants to be the ‘whole world’ for the beloved and whereby altruism and being-with contradict each other (ibid., 45). There is no questioning here of whether certain (very definite) metaphysical pillars support the opposition of altruism with being-with, or support the lover's egoism vis-à-vis the beloved. Janicaud goes on to claim that a phenomenology whose ‘dice have not been fixed’ by theology would give much greater attention to the ‘atrocious, despairing, unqualifiable, or even only undecideable’ aspects to human existence. He cites with admiration Emil Cioran's conclusion to his ‘ruthless descriptions of our human condition’:

Where is the unswervingly critical analysis of the neutrality of these descriptions deployed so systematically to uncover the aberrations of Levinas?

Perhaps Janicaud does not give sufficient attention to the possibility that the methodology of others, including Husserl, and not just that of Levinas and his acolytes, is influenced by their broader metaphysical and faith views. Even for Husserl, the decision to bracket the external world is not itself self-evidently neutral. It serves a particular project, understanding of philosophical history, and set of commitments. This does not mean that once formulated such a method can be interpreted and deployed in any fashion whatsoever no matter how incoherent or distant from its intended and literal meaning. But it is wrongheaded to ignore the deeper contexts of such a methodology: Husserl the mathematician-scientist striving after an eidetic analysis of human consciousness to reorient philosophy being led astray by naïve metaphysics; and Husserl the Christian convert whose faith in God motivates his faith in the meaningfulness of human rationality and existence, and who sees in phenomenology a panacea to the ills of scientistic reductionism. It is equally wrongheaded to focus on how only certain types of world-views may manipulate a methodology already posited.

Since neither the construction of phenomenological method nor the application of Husserlian phenomenology – as distinct from bare Husserlian method itself – are necessarily neutral concerning matters transcendent to transcendental subjectivity, it is wise to proceed with caution when employing phenomenological method(s), even Husserl's, as a means to deciding on the relevance of God and faith for phenomenology. Such caution is abandoned by Janicaud as he rushes to dismiss any relevance whatsoever, all the while completely unsuspecting that his own take on phenomenological method may be ‘contaminated’, perhaps, by his wider Nietzschean and Heideggerian sympathies.Footnote ¹⁵