The ensuing trajectory of the understanding of experience may be described as undergoing three reversals. First, experience assumes gnoseological primacy over episteme. Then, placed in the hands of the human subject, it becomes scientific experiment and the unmediated or mediated way to obtain epistemological certainty. Lastly, recent reflections on experience open the door to both the dissolution of modern subjectivity and to the retrieval of a less unilateral account of experience. As in the past, here too experience is inseparable from the human view of oneself, God, and their relation.
3.1 A nominalist turning point
The first reversal of the meaning of experience, which took place during the fourteenth century, is elicited by a new account of the doctrine of creation and its underpinning conception of God and the metaphysical structure of finite beings. William of Ockham, arguably the clearest expositor of this reflection, claims that creation from nothing is coherently articulated when one realizes that God’s infinite and gratuitous creativity is the act of a divine absolute power (potentia dei absoluta) that puts in place radically contingent beings (more on this below).
Ockham did not see God as pure act, a self-subsisting being, but as absolute potency. Divine potency is an absolute freedom, that is, a freedom that is an unqualified and unpredetermined capacity to enact whatever God’s wisdom ordains (potentia dei ordinata). As Michael Hanby notes, with Ockham potency acquires a twofold meaning: on the one hand, it is thought as separated (‘ab-stracted’) from the realm of the existing world – a speculative manoeuvre that endows possibility with a quasi-ontological status which has priority over actuality – and, on the other hand, it is conceived without an intrinsic link with God’s nature and independently from God’s revealed nature (Hanby 2013: 108).
When he gratuitously decides to create, God’s absolute potency cannot but bring about simple individuals, ‘absolute things’, that are not formed by a real composition of esse and essence. If they were, God’s freedom would be bounded because he would no longer be able to create or reduce to nothing what he determines. For Ockham, the problem with the Thomistic ‘real distinction’ is that it makes it impossible for God to annihilate an individual without annihilating all the others that, belonging to the same species, would have the same form (1967: 51 [vol. 1]). If ‘essence’ existed it would be an absolute thing, and, hence, there would be a constitutive element of the individual, the ‘universal’ essence, already present in other individuals. For Ockham, instead, ‘every absolute thing that is distinct in place and subject from another absolute thing can by God’s power exist when that other absolute thing is destroyed’ (Quodlibet. 6.6; 1991: 506). God is free to not create an individual but, once he has created it, it cannot become (not even by divine power itself) common to other creatures, although a creature might be seen as having similarities with other individuals of the same ‘species’ (Funkenstein 1986: 124–152). For Ockham, esse and essence are different names to refer to what alone exists, i.e. the singular. Just as divine omnipotence is not pure act but the sheer capacity to act, so contingency is not just transiency and ontological dependence but absolute, simple uniqueness.
As the radical and coherent thinker he is, Ockham claims that the ‘essence’ of any finite being is formal identity with itself. Any purported similarity with other singulars, any universal, is just a mental being (ens rationis). Qualities, universals, and relations are mere concepts, different ways to refer to singulars. Inevitably, if the universals do not exist outside the mind, they coincide with the act of knowing – that is, with the abstraction that is the formation of a notion which the mind applies to other perceived singulars. Abstraction no longer is the Aristotelian-Thomistic isolation of an essence inherent in a thing. If self-identity, not form, explains the whatness of contingent beings (mental or otherwise), necessity too, as Paul Vignaux clarifies, is contingent, i.e. hypothetical: ‘si homo est, homo est homo’ (‘if a man exists, the man is man’; 1948: 25). It is ironic that a system driven by the desire to defend divine gratuity ends up proposing a metaphysics that relinquishes the perception of the world as gift and fosters a perception of freedom as the random exercise of a power detached from being’s intrinsic goodness. Although perhaps unwittingly, the bases are thus set for a moralistic reduction of religious and Christian experience.
It is key to emphasize here that, for Ockham, experiential knowledge acquires a primary role because experience is the way to know with certainty what alone exists: individual beings. Experience encompasses both external sensible objects and internal objects of the mind (knowing, willing, suffering, loving, etc.; Ordinatio 1, prol., q.1; 1967: 3–75). Both the internal and external experiences are intuitive knowledge of individual and contingent objects. For Ockham, then, knowledge takes place by means of intuitive and abstractive cognition, that is, through an experience where each object presents itself with its radical originality within the absolute novelty of its creation. Since internal experience is concomitant with consciousness of internal objects and with self-awareness, Ockham, anticipating Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (‘I think therefore I am’), contends that one is certain of oneself through understanding (‘ego intelligo’; Ordinatio 1, prol. q.1.; 1967: 40).
Before proceeding, it is worth recalling some crucial ramifications of this nominalist account of divine omnipotence and the metaphysical structure of the individual that will pave the way for both Luther’s reformation and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Following the nominalist account, (1) there is no analogy between God’s being and finite beings – only univocity; (2) finite beings are not symbolic; (3) since each singular is identical to itself, each being is radically distinguished from all the others and hence the cosmos is bereft of ontological unity; (4) causality, no longer a communication of esse, becomes the production of power; (5) fourfold causality and its three axioms (agency: every agent acts insofar as it is in act; similitude: every agent acts so as to produce what is like itself; finality: every agent acts for the sake of an end), as they are understood in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, become irrelevant to modern science; (6) nature and logic are homogeneous.
3.2 The modern transformation of experience
Modernity is a vastly complex and profound metamorphosis of Western thinking and living that, opposing what preceded it, took place with the scientific revolution and the philosophical and theological reflections elaborated from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. During this period, the reflection on experience unfolded in three fundamental steps: first, experience became understood as experiment; second, thanks to the Enlightened account of reason, experience gained a new, markedly active meaning; third, with German idealism, it became conceived as a moment of the self-unfolding of the all-encompassing absolute.
3.2.1 Galileo and Bacon
Experience – predominantly through the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Francis Bacon, and Galileo Galilei – became the main source of scientific and philosophical knowledge. As Leonardo da Vinci famously put it: ‘wisdom is the daughter of experience’ (1925: 84). The scientific, experiential method, however, is inductive rather than deductive. Instead of using experience to validate a previously thought theory as it was done before, the scientist, by means of repeated experiences, studies the data and then discovers the reasons for what has been observed (Da Vinci 1925: 88). More incisively, Galileo claimed that experience was the only way to investigate nature over time and reach truth. Experience is not contrary to truth. For him, too, science moves from experience to demonstration, from observation to reason (2008: 85–96, 222–233, 306–315).
Although Galileo seems to have used the term experience (experientia/esperienza) and experiment indistinctly, for him ‘experiment’ gradually adopts a markedly abstract character – that is, the conditions to carry the experiment out are thought in separation from the physically existing ones (Stabile 2002: 217–241). With Bacon’s New Organon, the distinction between experience and experiment emerges clearly. Bacon favours experiment because without it (i.e. without order and a precise method) experience leads to error:
But the best demonstration by far is experience (experientia), provided it stays close to the experiment (experimento); for it is a fallacy to pass on to other things deemed similar, unless this inference is done duly and with order. (Bacon 1900: 1.70; 2005: 57–58)
Simple experience does not suffice; it is chance. What is needed is a
digested and ordered experience, not backwards and random, and from that it infers axioms, and then new experiments on the basis of axioms so formed; since even the divine word did not operate on the mass of things without order. (Bacon 1900: 1.82; 2005: 66–68)
This is key: the experiment not only corrects experience; it turns experience into itself. As Robert Spaemann wrote, ‘experiment [...] is the domestication of experience’ (2015: 217). Thus, one tends to think that to experience is to make something happen while remaining outside and in control of the situation (like with an experiment). This, of course, requires the a priori setting of the conditions to carry out an experiment, the questions to ask, and the drive always to be in control of the situation. In this way the experiment/experience can be repeated as needed and conclusions strengthened.
Although discoveries do take place, novelty – understood as the substantial change that echoes the radical novelty proper to creatio ex nihilo as understood, for example, in the Thomistic tradition presented earlier (section 2.2) – has faded from view. It is not a coincidence that Bacon, still reluctant to dismiss the centrality of God altogether, claimed that creation from nothing is a sound religious belief and that the traces of God in the world (the symbolic character mentioned above) are too faint to argue for God’s existence. Naturally, this perception of the world entails the dismissal of the causal axiom of similitude and, consequently, it fosters the elucidation of the world without God. This experience of the world no longer leads to God (regardless of whether he is thought to be pure act or absolute potency). The world becomes an ‘object’ (that which is thrown in front of a subject) and the subject, through knowledge, can gain power over it (Bacon 1900: 1.3, 1.116, 2.4; 2005: 33, 90, 103). The subject is called to master nature in ever more efficacious ways, so that, as Bacon hoped, one could heal the effects of the original fall (1900: 2.72; 2005: 221).
3.2.2 Locke and Descartes
The influence of Ockham’s nominalist philosophy can be perceived also in the one common root shared by John Locke’s empiricism and René Descartes’ rationalism: the significance of intuition – the sensible or intellectual immediate perception granted through experience – for certain knowledge. For Locke, experience, which regards both the sensible objects and the internal operations of the mind, is the source of all of our ideas (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 2.1–4; 2006: 95–97). Besides sensation, experience also includes ‘the perception of the operations of our own minds within us [...] perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own minds’ (Essay 2.1.4; 2006: 96–97). Certainly, they cannot be identified, and they remain intuitions of two different objects. Yet, both experience (of the internal operations and of the external objects) and conscience are intuitive, immediate knowledge.
Cartesian self-reflection also has the form of intuition. Descartes’ seeking indubitable knowledge rejects as uncertain what comes from sense knowledge and other external sources (authority, history), and recognizes as certain what comes from self-reflection. For Descartes, ‘there are no paths to certain knowledge of the truth accessible to men save manifest intuition and necessary deduction’ (Rules 12.425; Descartes 2009: 48). Thus, Descartes claims that just as we become aware of external objects through perception, through inward perception we become aware of our own thinking and hence of our own being. If sense perception is the prime analogue for experience, and consciousness is a faculty for internal perception, then experience remains the mode of knowledge par excellence – although, admittedly, Descartes himself was not very fond of the term ‘experience’ (Armogathe 2002: 259–271). More importantly, whatever is sensed is regarded as an object placed before reason. As objects, beings are reduced to brute facts, to res extensa (Latin for ‘extended thing’ or material substance) deprived of ontological interiority. The pursuit of unmediated (evident) knowledge, resting in the rejection of the world’s creatureliness, leads to a radical dualism between reason and its object that still haunts much of the current subjectivistic understanding of experience.
3.2.3 Kant and Hegel
Immanuel Kant’s philosophical reflection also takes place within the modern turn from experience to experiment. Yet, more radically than his predecessors and following the mathematical and physical scientific models, Kant argues for the understanding’s a priori control of the content of human experience (Critique of Pure Reason [CPR] B XIII; Kant 2003: 50–51). Kantian transcendental knowledge deals with our way of knowing rather than with the object itself (CPR B 25; 2003: 58–59) because it is only thus that we can obtain valid knowledge, that is, knowledge that brings together sense perception and understanding (CPR B 134–135; 2003: 154–155). Kant thus seeks to correct the limits of empiricism and rationalism by bringing them together in a higher synthesis. Whereas rationalism underestimates recourse to sense experience and trusts the pure deductions of one’s understanding, empiricism mistrusts the a priori activity of the mind and relies on what experience can offer. Uniting them, Kant, on the one hand, overcomes empiricism by establishing the possibility of a priori judgements that are universal and necessary. On the other hand, he limits rationalistic claims by affirming that the understanding’s synthetic activity is empty without the empirical givens of the experience. Similarly to divine creative thought, our intelligence builds for itself its own object and knows sensible objects (phenomena without interiority) that are ordered by reason’s a priori synthetic activity.
Along with these two ways of knowing, Kant’s transcendental dialectic recognizes a third one, pure reason, which is the understanding that does not refer to a possible experience and that seeks to know the suprasensible objects. Kant’s pure reason, like a dove (CPR B 8–9; 2003: 46–47), strives to know what matters the most: God, immortality (the soul), and freedom (the world as undetermined). Although pure reason can think these three ideas, it cannot know them. They escape the parameters of valid knowledge. Their key role, then, is to function as regulatory, ordering principles of human knowledge. In order to ensure the unity of sciences, but without any objective knowledge, pure reason represents the world as if it derived from a creating God (CPR B 693–698; 2003: 546–549). Thus, the idea of God, for Kant, speaks more of us than of God in himself (Prolegomena, section 58; Kant 1995: 129–133). One needs to be modest and not claim that the mysteries of God and human freedom can be known; that is, we cannot relate to God, freedom, and the soul as if they were objects within the reach of our dominion and that could be built a priori. We cannot know either what things are in themselves or the divine absolute.
Despite his speculative modesty, Kant insists that God may be reached by practical reason. This practical approach, however, while avoiding the cosmological reduction of the proof of God’s existence, falls into the hands of an anthropological reduction: Christ is the representation of the ideal of ethical perfection (Religion 6:66; Kant 1998: 83–84) and Christ’s utter obedience is submission to the pure laws of reason (Religion 6:62; 1998: 80–81). Similarly to Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (1677; see Spinoza 1992), Kantian morality seeks to replace Christian experience.
Although Hegel considered Kant’s system invaluable in many respects, one of the points where he considers it falls short is that Kant circumscribed the categories of understanding to the subjective level, as if they only regarded the pure concepts of human understanding. Kant, for Hegel, did not see that the transcendental self is, in reality, the absolute concept (Begriff). For Kant, the transcendental subject was not the ‘I think’ of a given psychological conscience, but the self’s first act, thought’s originary unifying power that is not an object of conscious experience. Hegel claims that this account does not realize that the knowledge of the finite world always entails that of the absolute, and therefore the categories of thought necessarily lead to the absolute spirit because they are moments of its immanent self-development. It is the absolute and living thought – and not just simply Kant’s transcendental self – that differentiates itself and creates its own object. Logic and human knowing are part of the absolute concept’s self-development. Away from this ontological framework, Hegel thinks that it is impossible to overcome the dialectic opposition between subject and object and reach the syllogistic truth that accounts for the truth of absolute Idea. For Hegel, then, the subject is the absolute living spirit and truth the identity of identity and non-identity. As André Léonard indicated, Hegel’s idealist philosophy overcomes both Kant’s dualistic separation through the principle of identity (being is total self-revelation and interiority of being and objectivity) and the principle of consciousness’ immediacy to itself by means of the spirit’s absolute and immanent self-mediation (Léonard 2006).
The Phenomenology of Spirit (whose intended title was ‘the science of the experience of consciousness’, 1977: 56 [section 88]), as well as the more encompassing Science of Logic (2010), constitute a remarkable effort to follow the excruciating path of the absolute concept’s immanent self-differentiation and preservation of the differences in a greater unity – one that regards both God in himself before the creation of the world and the whole history of the world (Hegel 1998). In fact, in Hegel we see the first attempt to conceptualize the structure of historical experience which, however, does not offer a successful integration of the subject’s transcendence and its historical determination, since it tends to interpret history as the expression of the concept’s absolute subjectivity (1995: 1–116).
The experience of consciousness is that of becoming aware that at stake in knowing is the absolute, eternal, and circular process of the absolute concept: from God to nature, from nature to finite spirit, and from finite spirit to absolute Spirit (Hegel 2015). Thus, one cannot conceive of the experience of consciousness as happening away from the absolute, or as if it had the absolute as yet another object. Hegel’s system – which he claims to be a philosophical re-elaboration of the Aristotelian unmoved mover, enriched by the modern account of spirit that brings the role of consciousness to bear in being – takes its architectonic principle of absolute negativity, which quickens the life of the spirit and prevents the absolute spirit from being another iteration of Spinoza’s lifeless substance, from his perception of the Lutheran understanding of Christ’s kenosis.
Christ’s death [...] ‘God himself is dead’ says a Lutheran hymn, expressing an awareness that the human, the finite, the fragile, the negative, are themselves a moment of the divine and that they are within God himself; that finitude, negativity, and otherness are not outside of God and do not, as otherness, hinder unity with God. Otherness, the negative, is known to be a moment of the divine nature itself. (Hegel 1998: 326, original emphasis)
Absolute Spirit’s syllogistic process of negation, negation of the negation, and affirmation is Hegel’s metaphysical account of the Absolute’s process of self-determination of which the human being is a part. Rather than a moralistic account of human experience like in Kant, Hegel’s proposal is endowed with a profound gnostic strain (Schmitz 1977).
For our reflection on the philosophical meaning of experience, it is fruitful to recognize that Hegel’s account of absolute spirit brings back the mystery of God, understood as absolute subject, to the heart of human experience, and calls for a greater realization of the role of freedom and of a non-dualistic rendition of the relationship between unity and difference (Fabro 2013; Chapelle 1964; Lakebrink 1968). Further, as Claude Bruaire (1983) proposes, the centrality of the negative may be seen as the reverse of the gift-character of being (see section 2.2; also Christian Experience: A Catholic View) which thereby becomes the internal possibility of overcoming negativity. Finally, while the role of the active intellect in the great scholastic synthesis of Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Scotus prevents us from categorizing their account of the experience of the world as giving undue weight to finite beings and lessening the role of the human subject, Hegel’s system (and in a different way, those of Fichte and Schelling) represents a formidable attempt to account for a more profound view of the spirit in the constitution of the world.
Along with these more positive openings, there are three problematic questions that open the door for the third reversal of the concept of experience. If the first issue regards the questionable capacity of the Hegelian system to uphold finitude’s integrity without surrendering to its pantheistic proclivities that have arguably occasioned the rise of modern atheism, then the second issue, prompted by his innovative defence of the role of history in the experience of the world, is the need to articulate how history determines experience. The third formidable question that Hegel’s system leaves open concerns the identity of the one who speaks in the Science of Logic (the Triune God? Hegel? Language? Any human being? All of these?). These thoughts, along with the implications of the absolutization of subjectivity, pave the way for an account of experience as the living out of human historical finitude freed from the interpretative dominion of subjectivity. Before presenting this, we need to examine two influential contributions that, in different ways, made possible the third reversal.
3.2.4 Schleiermacher
The work of Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘arguably the most important Protestant theologian since Calvin’ (Jay 2005: 88), accepts the challenges that Lessing’s claim to separate contingent historical truths from the necessary truths of reason (2005: 85) and Kant’s philosophy brought to Christianity. Schleiermacher responded by offering an account of religious experience (1994; 1996) that determined the theological debate of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Proudfoot 1985; Zahl 2017: 180–183; 2020: 23–29). Of his reflection, it suffices here to recall what was to him Christianity’s true foundation: ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’ (Schleiermacher 1994: 12). This unique insight not only represents a cogent response to Kant’s proposal, as an alternative to Hegel’s, but it also speaks of a specific way to account for the kernel of the philosophical view of experience – that is, the speculative knowledge and awareness born in time from the encounter of all the person with others, the world, and God.
A few biographical notes are indispensable for understanding Schleiermacher’s proposal. He belonged to the Reformed tradition and was raised in a Pietist community (Gerrish 2001) that emphasized, among other things, the importance of biblical preaching, spiritual rebirth and repentance, devotional and charitable exercises, and active missionary thrust through personal conversion testimonies. Albeit immensely varied, Pietism perceived religion as inward, highly personal, and marked by a heightened emphasis on the experiential relation with Jesus Christ. Particularly significant for Schleiermacher was the emotional intensity of religious experience. ‘Christian doctrines’, he wrote in The Christian Faith, ‘are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech’ (1994: 76). Without Pietism’s ascendency, it is difficult to make sense of Schleiermacher’s experiential emphasis. Additionally, besides studying Kant’s work, he frequented the Romantic circles that reacted against Enlightened rationalistic philosophies, and stressed individuality (against the abstractions ‘man’ and ‘human nature’), feelings, and the (aesthetic) unrest of Sturm und Drang (German, literally ‘storm and stress’; a literary movement arising in late eighteenth-century Germany).
The meaning of ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ is better seen when we recall that Schleiermacher places religion within the sphere of human consciousness. Yet, rather than thinking of religious consciousness in terms of morality (as if religion were simply a human action) or doctrine (as if it were a body of beliefs that could be accessible to reason), Schleiermacher conceives it as the self-mediation that undergirds the conscious and practical operations of the human spirit and which neither reason nor will can successfully portray. Thus, in contrast to Kant, religious consciousness regards the undifferentiated unity of subject and object which, to avoid confusing it with doctrine or ethics, is described as a ‘feeling of totality’ (1996). Religion is immediate consciousness of totality – where totality is not an object for religious awareness. As pre-thematic and pre-moral, this feeling can be grasped only indirectly before it breaks up in the inevitable opposition in which either the subject or the object dominates.
Although the felt totality is undifferentiated, it still manifests a more subjective element (feeling) and a more objective element (intuition). According to the former, the immediacy of consciousness is the ‘feeling of freedom’, and according to the latter it is the ‘feeling of dependence’. Thus, religious experience for Schleiermacher lies in the feeling and intuition of the individual’s relationship with the whole (1996: 4–19). In its originary dimension, self-consciousness entails the reference to the ground of the totality as other from the individual’s self-consciousness. For him, this feeling is best described as a ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ (schlechthin abhängig) (1994; 1996: 12). It is a permanent, dynamic, and pre-thematic awareness of a determining Other without which our self is not recognizable (Zahl 2017: 181). The ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ implies, therefore, the ‘[w]hence of our receptive and active existence’ (Schleiermacher 1994: 16) that is normally called God. The divine whence is not conditioned by any previous knowledge about God one may have. Rather, it is the other way around. The concept of God evolves from this feeling – a claim that implies that the ‘God-consciousness’ is included in the immediate ‘self-consciousness’ (1994: 16–17). Appearance to the contrary notwithstanding, the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ upholds a lively felt perception of Christianity because it ‘manifests itself in a particular range of concrete emotional states’ (Zahl 2017: 182). It is at the root of other feelings (such as the love of God, fear of death, joy over divine forgiveness), dogmatics when objectified in knowledge, and ethics when instantiated in doing (1994: 111).
Among others, Karl Barth (1982) criticized Schleiermacher’s understanding of Christian experience and the importance ascribed to it. For Barth, Schleiermacher’s use of experience overemphasizes the anthropomorphic and subjectivistic dimensions of Christianity and divine revelation. Schleiermacher’s concept of experience seems to derive its meaning from the common aesthetic experience. For Barth, Schleiermacher neglected that ‘God can only be thought of as a subject and not the predicate’ (1982: 253). God and his historical revelation are subordinate to human subjectivity. As Martin Jay notes, for Barth, ‘in his reliance on experience’ Schleiermacher ‘made a mockery of God’s promise of eternal life, which, after all, could not be derived from anything already undergone by even the most pious believer’ (Jay 2005: 101–102). According to this critique, the object of true devotion seems to have become a function of the individual’s experience of the absolute.
It is important to mention here that Wilhelm Dilthey follows the hermeneutical path opened by Schleiermacher with its emphasis on life (Leben) and the historicity of human subjectivity. Dilthey argues that the scientific character of historical knowledge rests on the fact that lived experience (Erlebnis) offers the immediate certainty needed to interpret historical events rightly. Whereas Erfahrung (experience) remains at the level of the intellect, Erlebnis gives the pre-comprehension of the sense of the historical totality – which is neither reducible to Hegel’s absolute spirit nor to Schleiermacher’s self-consciousness but to the vital substratum that remains unchanged. Erlebnis ‘is a distinctive mode in which reality is there-for-me [...] because I have a reflective awareness of it, because I possess it immediately as belonging to me in some sense’ (1985: 223). Nevertheless, in Dilthey this ‘substratum’, perhaps due to the obscurity of his metaphysics of life, seems to be absorbed by the relativistic character of historical consciousness (1960: 194; see Jay 2005: 222–234). Some of Dilthey’s notable ideas influenced authors such as Heidegger and Gadamer, who pursued in different ways the open task of thinking the meaning of finite historical singularity.
3.2.5 Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard’s profound, fascinating, and complex writings offer (among many other contributions) a Christian existentialist approach to truth whose critique of the Hegelian idealist system and established Danish and Protestant Christianity represents a remarkable attempt to ponder anew the significance of the singularity of the individual persons together with their radical difference from and relationship with God. In this sense, Kierkegaard’s work provides a cogent alternative, on the one hand, to the idealist absorption of experience’s access to truth into the realm of the spirit’s subjectivity and, on the other hand, to Schleiermacher’s functionalization of God to pious self-consciousness.
Kierkegaard was greatly indebted to Hegel. From him Kierkegaard learnt, among other things, the significance of the spirit (Geist) and its self-realization through a process (1980: 13) as well as that of dialectics (‘I am not a poet, I go at things only dialectically’, 1983: 90). In light of the foregoing theological reading of Hegel, it also could be argued that the centrality of thinking the nature of Christianity (Hegel 1998: 53) and its God is also a common endeavour. Kierkegaard, however, also was the greatest opponent to Hegel and Danish Hegelians (Stewart 2003). Hegel, claimed Kierkegaard, denatured Christianity and rendered it abstract. He produced ‘a system embracing the whole of existence, world history [...] [but] he himself does not personally live in this huge, doomed place’ (Kierkegaard 1980: 43). The system is a ‘pure ideality’ where ‘everything takes place of necessity’ and with which ‘the individual person is not involved’ (1980: 93). A system of existence is impossible for anyone but God (1992: 118–125). Whereas Socrates saw well that ‘the knower is an existing person and that to exist is the essential’ (1992: 207), modern philosophy missed the singular altogether: ‘in a highbrow way through speculation’ this philosophical system ‘pantheistically abolish[ed]’ the qualitative difference between God and the human being (1980: 117) – the irony being that modern philosophy tries to pass itself for Christianity when it is only paganism. Instead, for Kierkegaard, Christianity upholds that ‘the single individual is higher than the universal’ and that its greatness is ‘to determine his relation to the universal through his relation to the absolute’ (1983: 70). This ‘human being’, the single individual, is a ‘synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity’ (1980: 13). The task to carry out this synthesis is a paradoxical and ceaseless project that unfolds as the singular accepts and lives out its ineliminable responsibility before God and, above all, before Christ. In fact, for Kierkegaard, paradox is the relationship between a singular, knowing individual and the eternal truth.
To present this view of the finite human spirit Kierkegaard uses an ‘indirect method’ of communication, since the direct one – focused on the conceptual account of what is – loses sight of inwardness, that is, of concrete human existence (1992: 249). The works he authored under a pseudonym or those that have him as editor argue for the issue at hand through indirect communication, whereas those in which he is the named author follow the direct method. This approach has three advantages. First, imitating God’s method through which he is present in creation but ‘not directly’, this method helps the single individual to take a position (1992: 242–243). Second, it allows Kierkegaard to illustrate different possibilities of human existence without identifying himself with all the views presented by the ‘author’. He thus argues that human existence unfolds its possibilities in either an aesthetic, philosophical, or religious sphere – the last one being the highest, contrary to the immanent and necessary movement of the Spirit in Hegel for whom philosophy is the summit (Hegel 2015: 302–315). Finally, besides illustrating the three interrelated stages of the determination of the human spirit, the use of pseudonyms helps him to argue for the reality of faith’s radical subjectivity as the graced apex of human existence into which the individual is called to leap, leaving behind not rationality but speculative securities.
To clarify the role of the singular subject, it is key to realize that when Kierkegaard famously speaks of truth as ‘subjective’ (1992: 15–17, 189–251), he is not rejecting truth’s objectivity or fostering a relativistic or subjectivistic account. Rather, ‘objectively the emphasis is on what is said; subjectively the emphasis is on how it is said’ (1992: 202, original emphasis). The former regards the categories of thought and upholds the ontological dimension of the truth of God, the world, and the individual. Building on this one, subjective truth regards the individual’s inwardness, that is, the finite’s spirit relationship with truth. To claim, therefore, that subjectivity is truth is to defend human freedom as it is called to engage the eternal. Thus, this paradoxical claim is not so much a gnoseological description of truth but an ethical one. ‘Only in subjectivity is there decision, whereas wanting to become objective is untruth’ (1992: 203). Speculative thought cannot comprehend that ‘subjectivity is truth’ (1992: 217) and hence it claims that it is, conceptually speaking, ‘untruth’ (1992: 207). Thus, to contend that ‘subjectivity is truth’ is to view subjectivity, human existence, as the highest engagement of freedom with the eternal. In this sense, the radical paradox – that overcomes Hegel’s panlogism – is not so much the finite spirit, but the incarnate logos. ‘The eternal truth has come into existence in time. That is the paradox’ before which every human spirit is to take a stand (1992: 209).
These brief remarks on Kierkegaard’s existentialist proposal helps us to see that he frees the reflection on the singular person’s encounter with God and others – and hence on what here is understood as philosophical experience – from the domination of idealist subjectivity. He does so while appropriating some of modernity’s key insights. It is thus not surprising that he exercised such a great influence on many of the authors that form the hermeneutical turn.
3.3 The hermeneutical turn
If Ockham’s nominalist philosophy gives pride of place to experience and intuition, and the various modern reflections put experience at the service of scientific experimentation (Galileo, Bacon) which eventually finds its ultimate justification in the subject (Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, among others), Martin Heidegger’s work represents the key turning point in the relinquishing of the centrality of the subject. He also gives rise to various ‘postmodern’ phenomenological endeavours (Merleau-Ponty 1964; Gadamer 1998; Ricoeur 1992; Levinas 1996; Marion 1998) as well as deconstructionist reflections (Derrida 1997; Foucault 1970).
The foregoing reflection on experience showed that modern transcendental philosophy understood the subject as an activity that posits and transforms finite beings into objects that become intelligible only when they conform to the subject’s epistemological structures. Subjectivity is self-evident and knows itself in the reflection of its own acts (Ockham, Descartes, and Edmund Husserl, among others). Thus, the subject can serve as the ground and guarantor of truth and of what is experienced. Granting experience priority over episteme ended up giving epistemological and ontological primacy to the subject. In their own specific ways, Descartes’ res cogitans (Latin, literally ‘thinking thing’), Kant’s transcendental self, Hegel’s absolute Spirit, Nietzsche’s will to power (1967), and Husserl’s transcendental consciousness (1973; 1983) have subjectivity as the ultimate, unsurpassable foundation.
As Ramón Rodríguez has clearly shown, pondering the question regarding the meaning of being in its relation with Dasein (that is, ‘openness’ and not as common translations have it: ‘being-there’ or ‘human existence’), Heidegger’s Being and Time (2010), although not fully successfully, represents the initial moving out from transcendental subjectivity and of thinking of being away from the dualistic opposition of subject and object (Rodríguez 2006). Some of the key elements that signal this shift from modern subjectivity are that, for Heidegger, existence’s radical finitude manifests Dasein’s impossibility to be the foundation of itself and the world; existence is not thought as subjectivity; and the account of understanding as project is not the presentation of the activity of the subject that posits its objects but the opening of a field thanks to which things can reveal themselves. Existence’s openness (Erschlosenheit) suggests the overcoming of the subject-object dualism and the all-encompassing horizon of subjectivity. On the other hand, since openness is thought to be the key element of Dasein’s constitution, it is difficult to avoid thinking that Dasein posits and gives meaning to being. It is with The Essence of Truth (1998) that Heidegger’s subjectivistic ambiguities lingering in Being and Time are dissolved. As this and successive works show, to think of being means finding ways to express the space of illumination (Lichtung) from itself (in its veiling and unveiling), and not simply as the revelational dimension of beings. This, along with the category of event (Ereignis) and of history, leads Heidegger away from any form of objectivism and the domination of subjectivity. The repetition of the history of being, for him, will be both the overcoming of metaphysics (being’s long path from the Greeks to Nietzsche) and the true experience of being. Yet this experience of being is not a retrieval of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics.
According to Heidegger, philosophy’s fundamental question can be asked adequately only by way of a leap out of metaphysics because the proper object of thought is not ‘being’, in either its ontological or phenomenological meaning, but what enables manifestation or presence to be given at all (Sheehan 2001; 2021). ‘What is’, for Heidegger, is Ereignis (event), the movement of opening itself up and belonging, a reciprocal expropriation of appearing and Da-sein. Givenness needs that to which it gives, and the latter belongs to the former which withdraws in its giving (Heidegger 2003: 251–252). This is vital for an adequate grasp of the significance of Heidegger’s contribution to a reflection on experience: the giving and reception proper to the ‘event’ is not due to a cause behind Ereignis, but to human finitude itself. If Da-sein’s finitude accounts for Ereignis, not as the extrinsic cause but as being within Ereignis itself, then finitude is not a dialogical partner of the infinite. For Heidegger, finitude does not need an absolute to render its existence intelligible. Finitude can be accounted for from itself. As Hans Jonas argued, Heidegger (2002: 69), philosophizing independently from the Catholic and Christian God, considers that ‘revelation is immanent in the world, nay it belongs to nature; i.e., the world is divine’ (Jonas 2001: 48). Quite consistently do the gods appear again in Heidegger’s philosophy. ‘But where the gods are, God cannot be’ (Jonas 2001: 248). In contrast to what has been argued thus far, one may rightly wonder whether, where God has been evacuated from human existence, a human experience of oneself and the world can take place, or whether the human being, under the guise of finitude, does not remain the ultimate measure of what is.
Derrida’s deconstruction of what he calls modernity’s logocentrism presents a complete erasure of the subject; it proposes replacing all-encompassing narratives and unifying horizons of meaning with the ongoing play of differences that neither presuppose nor lead to the presence of a unifying whole (1997; Gasché 1986). Differently from this postmodern approach, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s masterful account of experience (Erfahrung) in Truth and Method (1998: 346–362) carries forward Heidegger’s dismantling of the subject through a phenomenological hermeneutics. For Gadamer, hermeneutics is not just a collection of methods through which a detached viewer examines a given text or period and tries to make sense of it. Rather, it is a philosophy (which, of course, includes method) that seeks to give an account of key human questions while being mindful that ‘the being of the interpreter belongs intrinsically to the being of what is to be interpreted’ (Gadamer 2007: 263).
Gadamer, in line with Heidegger, criticizes the modern perception of experience as pure immediacy patterned after the mode of perception. He claims that ‘experience teaches us to acknowledge the real [...] to know what is [...] Real experience is that whereby man becomes aware of his finiteness’ (1998: 357). Three interdependent elements of this experience of finitude are essential for our reflection: tradition (and history), language, and human community. Modernity’s claim to elaborate a presuppositionless reflection from which all the categories of thought may be derived forgets that thought happens in language – which precedes and cannot be reduced to thought. Gadamer notes that for Hegel language reaches its perfection in the logic that, as we saw in the previous section (3.2.3), thinks of all the language categories as immanent and necessarily related moments of the unfolding of the concept. While in a certain sense this is the case, Gadamer claims that Hegel does not see that language ‘also returns from [the objectivity of thought] in the reabsorption of all objectification into the sustaining power and shelter of the word’ (1976: 94).
Thinking abides in language. From this point of view, a distinction needs to be drawn between language and the unfolding of the content of the absolute spirit as it happens in Hegel’s Logic. Tradition, rather than simply a set of texts, rites, customs, etc. is language: ‘it expresses itself like a Thou’ (Gadamer 1998: 358). In this way, experience is open to that (and those) that preceded it and leads to future experiences. Here again, tradition is not detached from its speaker and in need of being brought to life at different moments of ‘history’. Rather, tradition as language calls for the historical dimension of experience whereby one is aware of the otherness of the other in all its temporality and the meaning for oneself. Just as a non-unilateral account of language requires seeing its return from language to being and history, so the historical consciousness shows that one is always part of the ever-open event of language. Lastly, the hermeneutical experience of the other (hence of tradition and language) is real because it leads to the openness to the other – which includes both the obedient hearing and the acceptance of what contradicts or corrects. As Aeschylus said, the suffering involved in learning teaches us the depths of our own finitude. Hermeneutical experience contests the disengaged observer that claims to be the ground for epistemic truth and ‘brings to our reflective awareness the communality that binds everyone together’ (Gadamer 2007: 263). Hermeneutical consciousness culminates for Gadamer in ‘readiness for experience’ (1998: 325), that is, the openness to discover what is real that shuns an ahistorical dogma. Hermeneutics has the great value of giving priority to the questioning and the linguistic, communal, and historical context with which one is always already involved. At the same time, just as the existence of the questioner who posits questions signals a difference from language that immanent finitude cannot account for, so concrete finitude escapes the universal character of language.