Phenomenology, Givenness, Mystery: Dilating Subjectivity

Abstract

Phenomenology and theology continue to induce interdisciplinary analysis of selfhood and spiritual experience. In what follows, I discuss minimalist and maximalist phenomenologies. The latter opens up space for phenomenology to be informed by the theological concept of mystery. A maximalist phenomenology makes possible a particular variety of selfhood, what I call the dilated or middle-voiced subject, which belongs neither to pure passivity of recent French phenomenology nor to the strong agency of Cartesian and Kantian legacies. Such a middle-voiced structure facilitates the given to be received in the act of dilation or expansion of the self. The final section discusses the implications this may hold for spiritual experience.

1. Introduction: Phenomenological Theology

Theological and religious themes have been commented extensively upon by philosophers working in the phenomenological tradition at least since Heidegger (if not since Husserl). Such commentary, as is widely acknowledged, reached a high point with the advent of Levinas’ Totality and Infinity. Explicit recourse to theological vocabularies reached ever more heights with the French tradition after the Levinasian “theological swerve”. It includes figures whose writings spanning several decades (1950s to the present), from Derrida, Henry, and Ricoeur to the more recent writings of Marion, Lacoste, Chrétien, and Falque. The present essay, consciously affiliating itself with such a largescale swerve, attempts to recast theological anthropology in the phenomenological semantics of “givenness” and “dilation”.1

Theological anthropology and phenomenological anthropology, while distinct sciences with correspondingly unique attitudes, can form a partnership across the disciplinary interval that forever separates them, for the express purpose I should like to see realized: the joint (philosophical and theological) analysis of the human condition rooted in the living world of the subject, which is born of the complex interweave of the first-person point of view, one shaped by the domain of concrete experience whose design is qualitatively transcendent to and in excess of empirical explanandum.

The neutral third-person reference, or what Husserl describes as the objectifying attitude of the natural sciences, is legitimate. Such an attitude or stance has its place in university disciplines and academic research. Yet Husserl ultimately concludes (rightly I am inclined to think) the scientific attitude assumes the character of a reductive anthropology that “proceeds illegitimately to absolutize its world, i.e., nature”.2 Theological anthropology, peered at through the phenomenological magnifying glass, counters the reductive control of science (concerning the province of experience) with conceptual precision about the critical importance of the first-person point of view. But phenomenology operates as more than a critic of naturalism or empiricism.

Phenomenology constructs, however indirectly, hypotheses concerning the structure of the self, the body, temporality, and ultimately, the boundaries of experience as such. Theology, too, opens up lines of transcendence within concrete experience. Phenomenological liaisons with theology, therefore, appear to me to be a natural partnership for the renewal of philosophy of religion.

Phenomenology and theology, once arranged in a collaborative concord, reciprocate and share in each other’s jurisdictions, and each thereby profits from the harmonious transaction. For example, phenomenology assists theology in the firm commitment to the personalistic attitude, shifting attention away from abstract scholastic debates and toward the “attitude we are always already in when we live with one another, talk to one another, shake hands with one another in greeting, or are related to one another in love and aversion, in disposition and action, in discourse and discussion” (Husserl 1989, p. 192). Conversely, theology assists phenomenology in the act of attentively examining the experience of ultimacy, for theology explores unhesitatingly not just love and aversion, not just disposition and action, but who it is we love when we love that which is ultimate. It asks moreover other existential questions about ultimate concern: can we experience contemplative ascent? If so, what discourse and action and disposition does that cultivate and to what mystery does it lead? What of unquenchable discontent or the confrontation with what Karl Rahner evokes, “an absolute love precisely where it is lethally incomprehensible and seems to be silent and aloof” along with radical guilt, abiding hope, etc.? (Rahner 1966, p. 184).

Rahner makes plain the benefits the conjunctive interchange between theology and personalistic-phenomenological anthropology. From his earliest works in Spirit in the World up to his final Foundations of Christian Faith, he aims to define theology as anthropology only if and insofar as philosophical tools developed after Husserl and Heidegger necessarily inform the exercise of theological reflection about the depth dimension of the living subject. So, it might follow that such a thesis about the happy interconnection of philosophy and theology shall enable us to see or wish to see also that phenomenology counts as a form of anthropology that naturally dovetails with systematic theology’s focus on the central event of the Christian message, the Incarnation of God in the person of Christ (which happens to be anthropological in essence). Graham Ward’s recent tome on systematic theology, relevant here for this special issue, offers an articulation of an “engaged systematics” demands theology take its point of departure from the lived experience of the Incarnation, and thereby we can claim Ward’s work dwells edgewise within the spirit of phenomenological theology I am suggesting here (Ward 2016, p. 140).

To adopt what I wish to call the incarnational spirit of Rahner and Ward is to claim that theological anthropology formulates the central theme of phenomenology’s theological sensibility expressed in many Catholic phenomenologists (and reminiscent of the “trace” in Levinas and Derrida, their Jewishness notwithstanding). The living spiritual center of the self (however elusive it is) fashions the ground upon which phenomenology and theology greet each other with mutual respect and affection.

A key admission must be proclaimed from the outset. This intellectual exercise, to be clear, remains and will always remain a spiritual exercise as well, one specifically directed under the lived pathos of prayerful delight. Phenomenological theology consists of nothing else but a type of theology. Such interaction between the two anthropologies does not betoken a conversation between friendly rivals on neutral terrain, but instead presupposes as its conceptual point of departure the Incarnation, the home of theology: “If God himself is man and remains so for all eternity; if therefore all theology is eternally anthropology; if it is forbidden to man to think little of himself since he would then be thinking little of God; and if this God remains the insoluble mystery: then man is for all eternity the expression of the mystery of God which participates for all eternity in the mystery of its ground” (Rahner 1978, p. 225). Metaphysical statements about Christian theology’s emphasis on the mystery of the Incarnation, therefore, can make conceptual space for a treatment of phenomenological theology.

While biology and sociology enjoy their distinct anthropologies, Rahner depicts their disciplinary activity as a form of analysis which submits to the guidance of regional ontologies: biology gathers specific data about the physical-materiality of the human condition, for example. Its reach halts at the level of its particular perspective, hemmed in by a bio-physical set of data. Psychology, history, and sociology (etc.), each constitutes a particular vantage point that fills out the empirical boundaries of anthropology from various important angles of entry. I concur with Rahner that such “particular” anthropologies are provisional and they remain so necessarily as theory evolves with, and is revisable in relationship to, ever new data.

Theological anthropology, in contrast to, but not in competition with, these regional anthropologies, attempts to flourish in an important way independent of the regional limits of the data adduced by biology, psychology, history, and all other empirical disciplines.

The theological attitude asks, as in philosophy, a timeless question: why is there something rather than nothing? Or, what does it mean to exist in and through the totality of things? A specific Christian theological anthropology can evoke an holistic approach that accounts for both immanence and transcendence, insofar as it fully roots the contemplative stance in the incarnational structures of the self: the temporal, bodily, communal, and cultural stratifications that give shape to life before God. Phenomenology, operating in this explicit theological context, offers valuable conceptual resources from which the construction of the living (and spiritually restless) subject can follow.

Who comes after the modern subject? to echo a notorious 1989 French question posed by Jean-Luc Nancy to his philosophical contemporaries.3 Phenomenological theology proposes an embodied soul whose capacity for experience has been enlarged or “dilated” by the Incarnation of God in Christ. The living subject can acknowledge its capacity to dilate once it enters the domain of the spirit. Such a subject, flexible and integrative, with growth as its central spiritual mechanism, arrives in the wake of the destruction of the rigid Cartesian ego.

2. Restructuring Givenness

Reclamation of the Middle-Voiced Subject

The demise of Cartesian ego came at great cost, however. Should it have been shattered completely? The strong version of agency typically associated with the theories of personal identity inspired by Descartes or Kant often withholds nothing in its portrayal of the dominion and authority which they attribute to the power of the ego. Selbstständigkeit, a term with a long history in the German philosophical tradition, can be translated not only as “independence” but also as “self-positing” or “self-subsisting” existence. In Husserl, it often indicates the ego’s capacity to be “absolutely” pure or independent of sense impressions. In Ideas I, the conception of the ego as self-contained, as null ‘re’ indeget ad existendum (nothing outside of itself to exist) informs the Husserlian variant of the pure ego (Husserl 2012, pp. 95–96, see also §50).

Heidegger, in Being and Time, duplicates the strong version of agency, of self-subsisting independence, promoted by his teacher. For example, he writes, “Ontologically, Dasein is in principle different from everything that is present-at-hand or Real. Its ‘subsistence’ is not based on the substantiality of a substance but on the ‘Self-subsistence’ of the existing Self, whose Being has been conceived as care. [as Dasein ist ontologisch grundsätzlich von allem Vorhandenen und Realen verschieden. Sein ’Bestand’ gründet nicht in der Substanzialität einer Substanz, sondern in der ‘Selbständigkeit’ des existierenden Selbst, dessen Sein als Sorge begriffen wurde]”.4 While the definition of basic concepts such as the self or Dasein or care remains contested and thus complicates the Heideggerian lexicon, the modest point here I wish to advance is that Selfbständigkeit is reflective of strong agency, of self-subsistence, of non-dependence (even if that is conceived outside of the ambit of substance ontology Heidegger should like to eschew at every turn).

Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Michel Henry’s observation that selfhood, to overcome egocentrism of self-subsistence in the German tradition, must have recourse to the posture of Unselbständigkeit is apt here for us:5 the emphasis on “Un” indicates the beginning of the bipolar philosophical anthropology extant in continental philosophy. Either (i) a strong self-subsisting ego, or (ii) its negation, a passive recipient.

With the presentation below of the “middle-voiced” subject, I wish to challenge a strict dichotomy or rivalry between active and passive models of the ego. The French reaction is understandable. Admittedly, the “I” of the Selbständigkeit discloses a certain noticeable tyranny, that of self-governance or self-subsistence or self-positing agency, and the outcome can be a pure self-consciousness whose absolute self-presence isolates it from objects. I see no reason why such self-subsistence needs to be preserved. But should all agency or subjectivity be expunged from the philosophical canon? Should we commit what Jacob Rogozinski aptly calls “egocide?”.6

So many in the French trajectory subvert (in the attempt to address Nancy’s query) the self-positing subject by denying the constitutive ego in favour of a passive or purely receptive self. Stripping the transcendental cogito of its agency and of its capacity to open (and close) the conditions for the possibility of experience, the French tradition seeks not only to undermine wholly the transcendental ego but also to reduce the economy of selfhood to endless displacement and deferment. What this might mean for the present essay is that the conceptual scheme of the “self”, from their point of view, undergoes a complete transformation from nominative I to dative me or a sure shift from Selbständigkeit to Unselbständigkeit—and this is a shift I shall challenge.

The unfortunate outcome of this overreaction on the part of the French tradition after Heidegger, of such egocide, is a self whose formation relies on passive submissiveness to things given. Something of an inactive placeholder who endures a state of ongoing vulnerability to that which may give itself (hence the dative declension), the French version of the self no longer resembles a self at all. In Jean-Yves Lacoste’s words, I am “clay” in the hands of the divine potter who dismantles the modern structure of the subject (Lacoste 2004, pp. 156, 162). Similarly, in Jean-Luc Marion’s words, the self becomes reduced to a docile screen or inert filter upon which the phenomenon’s “impact” makes its landing, and to which the self is beholden for identity as one who is wholly given over to (l’adonné) the phenomenon-as-self.7 Michel Henry’s mode of interiority entails a transformation from I to me and from active to passive: “the coming of the me into itself, which rests on the coming of Life into itself, is lived as basically passive with respect to this primitive coming of Life” (Henry 2003, p. 135). Derrida, too, destroys the transcendental-Cartesian ego (especially that which is associated with Husserl), in the form of the proposition that the displaced self can operate only in a vast network of signifiers of difference, which unfolds in the constant disseminating play of temporality. Constitution, as an idea, must be “destructed” according to Derrida. Otherwise, the transcendental ego’s self-presence shall gather itself into the tyrannical reign of the metaphysics of representation, forming a citadel of self-contained subjectivity—the structure of self-presence or Selbständigkeit of the subject that Derrida refuses demonstrably.8

While these indicative examples may remain a visible corrective to the totalizing mastery of the transcendental ego of Descartes, Kant or Hegel, such a French trajectory (however variegated it is) adopts what seems to me to be its mirror opposite, a mimetic rival that makes the world of objects master over a helpless self whose agency is so vitiated that it amounts to a lifeless container with no boundaries, an inert bundle of impressions whose indiscriminate attitude abandons it to the chaotic fortunes of radical flux, instability, contingency—that is, egocide. The French cadre’s proposal of total passivity, of muted agency, remains a central problematic to be addressed by the dilated subject I advance here only in sketch-form.

Phenomenology, properly conceived as a science of constitution, contains resources within its tradition to suggest a via media, a middle-voiced subjectivity which opens up space between despotic subjectivism and deferential passivity. I wish to suggest a dynamic structure of selfhood of necessity invokes the idea of constitution as fundamentally an act deployed by, and indebted to, the self. Yet such a subjective act surfaces only in relationship with a pregiven horizon of things. Subjective constitution arises within the expansive field of the world horizon, since such a horizon is always already imparting to the self a pregiven horizon of objects passively received—which itself resonates with aspects of the later work of Husserl, especially in Experience and Judgment and The Crisis of European Sciences (Rivera 2022, chp. 1).

Imagine I see a teacup in front of me, on the table. As a self, I start in middle, always already immersed in the network of meaning known as the world horizon; and yet, I endow object with meaning that bears my unique style. Upon the encounter with the teacup, I see not only an individual teacup, but also the kitchen in which it sits, the house in which the kitchen sits, and the city and country in which the house is located. If I am witnessing a teapot pouring earl grey into a cup in Ireland, then tea here may entail rich connotations having to do with social connection and existential comfort than if I were witnessing it in Germany or America. Now, individual halos of or horizons of meaning impinge. What if the teacup were being poured by my mother who just lost her husband (my father) of 50 years? What, too, if I was her estranged son on whom she has not laid eyes in over a decade? What if I hated tea and she knew that? These are further layers of horizons of pre-given meaning in which the individual teacup restricts and opens up meaning.9

I am also active in constitution. In the meaning-endowing experience, whereby I bring a framework of meaning or hermeneutical background to the encounter with the teacup (I endow the teacup with meaning), I am not trapped inside a an “inner theatre” of my mind. I am not stranded on one side of a strict subject-object correlation precisely since there is no strict subject-object correlation. There must be, of course, a distinction between the subject and the object, for they are not one and the same; however sharp the distinction may be, their interrelation invokes a relationship defined by intimacy, mutuality, integration, not alienation, opposition, rivalry.

In light of my meaning-endowing acts, subjectivity is to be reconceived as a middle condition that generates space “within me” for the object passively received from “out there”. The subject expands and dilates, which in turn, effects the opening of a porous site placed between individual meaning-making (nominative I) and a passive receptivity (dative me), for neither extreme does justice to the subtle interplay of meaning-making. Such a middle condition can forge a maximalist phenomenology that does not inhibit beforehand what the subjective life of constitution may (or may not) endow, even while acknowledging so much of the stream of experience of the surrounding world is rooted in passive synthesis, or the pregiven horizon of the world. The self, in this phenomenological framework, dilates and enlarges its internal capacity for experience in an attempt to constitute the object, but it does so only within the open border of the pregiven horizon of the world already given beforehand.

Concerning the structure of phenomenological anthropology, I concur here with the motif of mutuality Levinas emphasized in an early essay entitled “Reflections on Phenomenological ‘Technique.’” While the later Levinas advocates for an extreme submissiveness to the alterity of the other, in this early essay he portrays the given in the grammar of the middle voice. The manifestation of the given, whatever it may be, is not reducible to “the fact of letting phenomena appear as they appear”. This would amount to a third-person passivity unworthy of the drama and play characteristic of lived experience. The self who conducts the practice of manifestation constitutes things only in relationship with the givenness of things arising from the surrounding world; to continue with Levinas, I can distinguish myself in the process as a first-person agent, whereby I acknowledge freely that the chair is where “I” sit comfortably or the apple is “mine” in that “I” find it bitter and inedible (someone else might enjoy its taste). Manifestation is double, for the chair and apple to appear require a me as a “partner” in the act of the thing’s “letting appear as it appears”(Levinas 1998, pp. 97–98). The given, then, counts as more than an occasion for the self to surrender itself as a patient or passive receptor. The middle-voiced subject dilates so that (as recipient-and-actor) it permits the object to appear by a manner of subjective prompting and constituting, what Heidegger names the act of “uncovering” (recall “Covered-up-ness is the counter-concept to ‘phenomenon’”). In this partnership, where clear boundaries between active and passive dissolve, we ourselves are meaningful and meaning-endowing characters in the world’s play from the outset.

A subjectivity of the middle-voice moves back and forth between the self who is the origin of experience on the one hand, and, on the other, the world of objects given which often command a response from living subjects. In this version of constitution activity and passivity unite. As a subject I am neither an impartial spectator, what Derrida names the pure I as “watering hole”, a universal I with no particularity, a kind of submissive witness. But neither am I an imperious Cartesian cogito whose Selbständigkeit fabricates or simulates the world in my own image.

Marianne Hundt et al. have published on the multivalent typology of mediopassives of middle-voiced constructions in the English language. The middle-voice is neither active nor passive in its construction. Grammatically speaking, the middle-voice “shares some characteristics of both active and passive, so that a determinate split between active and passive cannot be enforced” (Leech et al. 2009, p. 48). Examples abound when it comes to the middle-voice. Typically, an active sentence invokes a subject who is “doing” (e.g., acting in formation with the verb phrase) something to an object which undergoes or suffers the act of the doing, which is named the patient. Hence, Barbara shuts the door. Barbara is the subject and the door is the patient. Here Barbara is doing the “shutting” and the door is undergoing the action of being shut. In the passive voice, in contrast, the patient of the corresponding active-voiced sentence is moved to the subject position; hence an example would be the door was shut by Barbara (the by-phrase is optional).

In the middle-voice, the subject and patient coincide. An example of middle-voiced construction: the door shuts easily. Here the door has been promoted from patient to the subject. Yet, the door continues to receive the action of being shut. But the door enjoys a high level of agency since it can facilitate or hinder the shutting. In this case, it affects the shutting by making it “easy”. So as Hundt claims, “even more responsibility for the action is assigned to the subject in mediopassives than in get-passives” (a get-passive is “the door gets shut by Barbara”) (Leech et al. 2009, p. 145). So the door at once performs the action (as subject) and is affected by the action (as patient).

It is a voice that is considered passive insofar as the door continues to receive the action. In this specific sense, the sentence the door shuts easily counts as a passive voice, and thus, is sometimes called the mediopassive. But pure passivity finds no place in the middle-voice, since the subject guides the quality of the action. Hundt highlights the sizeable jump in usage of the middle-voice in the wake of the advertising industry’s rise from the 1920s onward (in English). Many phrases operate on this grammatical plane: the car drives smoothly or the book reads well or the cake eats as if you’re on holiday (and so forth) (Hundt 2014, pp. 90–92). Here, the car shapes the action of driving since the car’s engineering maximizes the feel of the driving itself, by making it smooth. The book facilitates the reading experience due to its intriguing plot and fast-paced prose. The cake makes the eating experience delicious since the flavors and texture are so perfectly balanced.

The grammatical interplay evident in the middle-voice lies in the profound kinship between subject and the patient here in the form of the “partnership of manifestation”. By way of analogy, we may infer from this an anthropology attentive to the givenness of things balanced with the need to acknowledge the visible role the subject plays in the act of constitution, whereby the self can expand or dilate to maximize the experience of the thing given.

Phenomenology from Being and Time forward has been conscious of the middle-voiced structure of subjective life. The very Greek grammar of the word “phenomenon” is, as Heidegger observes, rooted in the middle-voiced verb phainesthai, which indicates or signifies therefore a “bringing to the light of day,” and which “puts something in the light” (Heidegger 1962, p. 51). Occupying the middle-voice invokes in the subject a fundamental receptivity, a state of being-affected by a given, which is brought to light by the subject, and which converts the given into a phenomenon.10

To continue with Heidegger’s widely-cited and celebrated §7 of Being and Time, the role of the subject in the dynamic of manifestation occupies a middle site, a flexible space situated between two rigid poles on opposite ends of the spectrum of selfhood, that is: between the (i) subjective constitution associated with self-subsisting Cartesian cogito or active voice and (ii) the vacant receptivity of a water hole or the passive voice. The middle-voice points up the fact that a thing, once it is given, must be unveiled if it is to become a “phenomenon”. Heidegger writes of this labor: “‘Behind’ the phenomena of phenomenology there is essentially nothing else; on the other hand, what is to become a phenomenon can be hidden. Despite the fact that the phenomena are proximally and for the most part not given, there is need for phenomenology. Covered-up-ness is the counter-concept to ‘phenomenon’” (Heidegger 2008, p. 60). Indeed, if we are to remain faithful to phenomenological research, we commit ourselves to looking at an object with intensive purpose and intention (not as mere passive spectators), for the very act of unveiling-uncovering takes agency and intervention, since an object’s “structures are encountered in the mode of phenomenon is one which must first of all be wrested from the objects of phenomenology” (Heidegger 2008, pp. 60–61). In this exact phenomenological sense, we enjoy the double power of passive-“letting appear” and active-“making appear”. The dilated subject, formed in the middle-voice, harkens back to the logos of phenomenology; logos can “signify that which, as something to which one addresses oneself, becomes visible in its relation to something in its ‘relatedness’, Logos acquires the signification of relation and relationship” (Heidegger 2008, p. 58).

The more dilated and enlarged my spirit is in relation to the surrounding world, the more a relationship between the ego and world takes hold and, in turn, the more disclosure of the world is made possible. By “more” we need not be restricted to larger square footage or an increase in the number of things revealed. Perhaps it is the quality of the thing revealed takes on a more finely-grained appearance or the object emits a frequency I hear in a more properly calibrated intonation. The dilated subject, conceived here in a phenomenological framework, facilitates or shepherds that which is given into manifestation, bringing givenness’ richness by degrees into the light of day. What is more poignantly and pregnantly expressed as a “phenomenon” is only limited by the rigidity-quotient of the dilated subject. A whole spectrum of states can be uncovered and brought to light by the subject, which may well even take the exchange of a back and forth until the brightest possible reclamation of the phenomenon is actualized. Recall the “Covered-up-ness is the counter-concept to ‘phenomenon’”.

Some phenomena, to which we shall attend below, are content to achieve a partial actualization. Theology speaks of a God who as not at our disposal, of a transcendent interpersonal God whose life is not an object that can fulfil an intentional aim. Yet, the movement toward God, the uncovering of the divine may obtain in a state of endless mutual indwelling between the soul and God such that this interplay becomes no longer clear if it is the dilated subject or the divine that is the subject of the action presently at work. Here mystery governs the logic of the given.

3. Lived Dilation

On Apophatic Phenomenological Theology

The present essay wishes to make the point that the middle-voiced subject, while it exercises agency, also divests itself of an “essence” or transcendental ground of certainty, upon which philosophers such as Descartes, Kant, and (in his own complex way) Husserl can erect the model of self-positing independence, Selbständigkeit.11 What is it, above all, that Descartes seeks to secure in the Meditations? It is indubitable certainty, one rooted in the ego cogito. He asks, for example, (here we adduce only indicative examples): “Reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable” (Descartes 1996, p. 12). Or later in the Second Meditation, “I will make an effort and once more attempt the same path which I started on yesterday. Anything which admits of the slightest doubt I will set aside just as if I had found it to be wholly false; and I will proceed in this way until I recognize something certain” (Descartes 1996, p. 16). In the same Meditation, “I do not yet have a sufficient understanding of what this “I” is, that now necessarily exists … I will then subtract anything capable of being weakened, even minimally, by the arguments now introduced, so that what is left at the end may be exactly and only what is certain and unshakeable” (Descartes 1996, p. 17).

There is one captivating Cartesian prejudice that often prevents transparent and open-minded analysis of phenomena. What is the chief prejudice that leads not to expansion, but to contraction and intolerance? Be it ordinary or extraordinary, immanent or transcendent, an object may well remain hidden or covered-up if the interplay is governed by the disengaged spectator of scientism—this cramped kind of prejudice prompts not the interplay of dilation, but insular rigidity of “certainty” of the Cartesian sort. Hence the present section argues that phenomenological investigation of any phenomenon can aspire to be carried out with, as Husserl claims, a “completely free spirit blinded by no naturalistic prejudices” (Husserl 1965, p. 119).

But is there another kind of certainty that would maximize the inviting stance of dilation? Can we propose negative certainty? Phenomenology concerns all possible forms of experience, be that poetic, materialist, athletic, scientific, deliberative, moral, spiritual, sexual, etc. A principal form among those topics to receive lengthy commentary is spiritual experience (i.e., the theological swerve mentioned in the introduction above), typically of the kind characterized either by excess and saturation or by darkness and absence; one may well, should one wish to do so, name these cataphatic and apophatic types of religious experience, respectively. Phenomenology’s function corresponds strictly to a middle-voiced discipline rooted in the givenness initiated from the side of the thing given as it is uncovered by the living subject who is fundamentally ready to “open” or “dilate” upon receipt of the given. This should permit the philosopher to explore the “how” of whatever is given in a specific type of experience.

As an example of this experiential interplay of the structure of the given, imagine a color pyramid or spectrum. To wait upon our capacity to unveil sectors of experience now hidden from us does not lie within the remit of mysticism, ecstatic experience, or spiritual rapture. More mundane experiences yield data consistent with the interplay of given. The structure of the color spectrum entails the claim that the whole of it is implicit in each of the particulars in an a-priori fashion, however, it is evident only to those who can perceive color at all and enjoy a complete color experience. Imagine we can become acquainted with the subtle array or pallet of hues and how there are evidently many shades of colors. As if our pupils were to dilate, our vison can take in all the multivalent colors possible and their interrelationships. But a color blind or partially color-blind person would wholly lack this experience. By way of analogy, those selves who adopt a scientific-naturalistic restriction, and contract respectively within that field, shall close off the many emotional, bodily, and intersubjective qualities that are possible halos of experience always latent and thus “covered over” in our present field of vision. This restrictive stance would constitute a minimalist phenomenology.

To grasp and undergo the full structure of our sensible and spiritual world is to relinquish entirely from our vocabulary the idea of rigidity and control governed by the grammar of scientific certainty. We shall endeavor to see, therefore, the scientific prejudice as a regular dogmatic foil to be overcome by the uncovering-play of the dilated subject. In the same way as pupils enlarged, the scope of vision and what is possible to “see” in the world participates in maximalist phenomenology, what I call apophatic or negative phenomenology.

What we know for certain is that we do not know for certain the boundaries of experience: what may well be impossible in the Cartesian attitude is genuinely imaginable in the attitude of dilation. As with William Desmond’s notion of “unclogging” our spiritual pores, dilation summons forth the subjective power of “uncovering” as a movement and operation of self who is reconciled with possibility, incertitude (on not knowing who we are), and the play of mystery.12 What gives itself originates from itself. Yet, constitution originates with the living subject’s capacity to receive, namely, to dilate. In this interplay, a negative phenomenology shall promote dilation and growth toward whatever is given precisely since it does not shut down in advance what is possible for experience. Negative certainty is opposite of dogmatic (i.e., Cartesian) certainty.

For Husserl, as for much of the tradition that follows in his wake, it can be argued that philosophers should “exclude these obstacles in the form of the natural ‘dogmatic’ sciences by making clear to ourselves and vividly keeping in mind only the most universal principle of all methods, the principle of the original right of all data”. (Husserl 1989, p. 61). What kind of data? Ritual? Prayer? Liturgical encounters with icons? Sacred music? Chanting together in a monastic setting? The contemplative journey in a retreat designed to quiet the heart before God? The answer must be finally: all data, and henceforth, the full range of experiential inflections of religious experience, without implying that we wish to totalize such an experience as anything more than mystery. The object of experience, is it God? Is it the revelation of a divine figure? Is it something else? Such questions are not only tolerated but elucidated constructively without prejudice in an apophatic phenomenology. Is not a maximalist paradigm of phenomenology that truly faithful to the negative certainty characteristic of the given?

The present essay has urged an affirmative answer. Apophatic phenomenology is maximalist phenomenology in that it expects to enjoy a specific kind of certainty, which involves a reappraisal of scientific models of epistemology. I wholly agree with Wittgenstein when he claims “It would be nonsense to say that we regard something as sure evidence since it is certainly true”. (Wittgenstein 1972, p. 27). What is true must assume a definition of certainty, and what is certain must assume what clearly marked boundaries of what counts as true. The argument, fundamentally Cartesian, succumbs to the law of circular reasoning. In contrast, can we posit what is certain is that we do not know what constitutes sure evidence and what the grounds are that justify exclamations of certainty. Negative certainty, as Jean-Luc Marion, and more recently as Jean Greisch, have articulated the theme, means to argue that we as humans remain so fallible as to be certain of only what we do not know (Marion 2015; Greisch 2015). Marion suggests that negative certainty shall remain unpopular for some time since modernity is essentially Cartesian, insofar as it presumes and takes it for granted that we should aspire to be “certain” in the form of objecthood (Marion 2015, §1 “An Attempt to Introduce Negative Certainties into Philosophy”).

How does negative phenomenology renew the interrelation between phenomenology and theology? That is, what kind of movement does dilation consist in once it pursues the divine? Dilation does not “force” or “shoehorn” what is given, but instead, artfully permits the given to be received. Uncovering or unveiling is an act of peeling back the layers of what masks a phenomenon. It does not mean fabricating or constructing a phenomenon out of raw materials. It instead allows the coming to the surface of the phenomenon by opening up space for the phenomenon to appear.

Apophatic phenomenology overlaps with apophatic theology. By way of analogy, just as in apophatic theology, whereby the believer only may know God by who God is not (God is not finite, God is not temporal, God is not evil, etc.), so apophatic phenomenology proposes a thesis about the limits of knowability concerning our grasp ourselves, objects, the world, God. By way of analogy with apophatic theology, the present essay argues phenomenologically that we only may know the self by who the self is not.

Further, to confront an objection that apophatic theology must invoke a no-self or passive recipient (reminiscent of the model of Unselbständigkeit associated with so much French phenomenology outlined above in section II), I do not think that apophatic theology makes any pronouncements about the self that are inconsistent with my proposal of the middle-voiced subject. Pseudo-Dyionisius, of whom it is said Bonaventure declared to be the “prince of the mystics”,13 suggests negative theology does not induce “deprivation” or lack of either the self or God but rather invokes the excess or the “too much” of God’s superabundance. It is argued in the Divine Names that “it is customary for theologians to apply negative terms to God, but contrary to the usual sense of deprivation. It says of the One who is present in all things and who may be discovered from all things that he is ungraspable and ‘inscrutable’” (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, p. 105). Humility on the part of finite creatures repudiates cognitive grasping and conceptual idolatry. In so doing it does not renounce subjectivity as such. Here negative or apophatic theology prompts the saint or “initiate” to occupy a contemplative posture, one of purification in thought and action. The initiate who is trained in the art of contemplation reaches out to God in the attitude of self-critical passivity, a middle position that refuses to eliminate agency altogether.

What kind of agency are we left with according to Pseudo-Dionysius? If the Divine Names promotes a negative theology concerning God who is a “supra-existent Being … a mind beyond mind, word beyond speech, it is gathered up by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name”, (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, p. 50) then it is in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy that the same author suggests a theological anthropology which reflects the grammar of the middle-voiced subject I have defended above. Textual evidence in this document protects at once God’s otherness and the living subject’s capacity to choose either to expand as an open recipient to or to close oneself off from the illuminating beams of divine light.14 Apophatic phenomenology, as in apophatic theology, then, adopts specifically an anthropology that refuses conceptual grasping and totalizing. Again, agency as such is not refused.

Some challenge apophatic phenomenology as irresponsible. Why must this relaxed or maximalist framework (i.e., the original right of all data) be condemned as fundamentally inadequate or impoverished by Janicaud when it is Husserl himself who insists on this universal principle of phenomenological method as such. In fact, to take Husserl at his word, is to say that no such method restricts or inhibits the phenomenologist’s gaze. Janicaud, we recall, accuses those involved in the theological turn of having injured or broken phenomenology. It now has no boundaries and is thus “wide open” (La phénoménology éclatée). Is phenomenology’s commitment to the universal principle of givenness make it boundary-less or éclatée? I would suggest a “wide-open” method makes phenomenology a flexible method capable of exploration of any type of experience with fresh eyes, with and open heart, with an expansive vocabulary.

Pace Janicaud and company, I am inclined to subscribe to the dynamic position of negative certainty: namely, that remaining open to all forms of experience is an exercise in generosity, and thus, in dilation. Even complex phenomena that entail the spirit of God or a religious attitude need not transcend totally the self but can, as with all phenomena, occur within the flexible unity of the self whose capacity for integration does not run short. Theological dilation, in the medium of the Holy Spirit, is an act of faith that cultivates an openness to the mystery of the Incarnation, in which God condescends to communicate in and through the immanence of the world in flesh.

But the Incarnation can secure neither epistemic nor ontological certainty. Given Rahner’s decades-long emphasis on transcendental Christology and the import of the incarnation for theological anthropology, he admits rightly I think that theology must remain committed at all times not to certainty, but to mystery. As apophatic phenomenology remains open to whatever may give itself, so also apophatic theology occupies an open stance toward the possibility of God as mystery, a mystery so complete as to elude concepts, experience, even existence. The eschatological force of apophatic theology would insist that any “certain experience” of God would be an idol, not God as such.15

An apophatic phenomenological theology, then, shall invoke agnosticism, but an agnosticism that lives in hope and faith. Rahner himself writes positively of agnostism and the agnostos Dei, the divine figure to whom we submit in faith and hope, but not with the hope of certainty. “Of course there is a personal God, even if in the use of this sentence attention must be drawn to the fact that according to the Fourth Lateran Council there can be posited of God no similarity with us (and thus no “person” either) which is not surpassed by an even greater dissimilarity of the ‘ineffable’ God. If one considers this, then one no longer has the right to evaluate the experience that we are appealing to as the experience of an impersonal ‘It,’ but rather one is required to release the valid ‘personhood’ of God himself once again into the incomprehensibility of God. One must, of course, hasten to add: this incomprehensibility of God is really accepted only if one prays to the incomprehensible God, if one says ‘You’ to him” (Rahner 1988, pp. 131–33). The analogy of Being, while often associated with the rigid paradigm of Thomistic ontology and the metaphysics of Exodus (Gilson), here for Rahner, represents the celebration of God’s incomprehensibility and ineffability; in short, God-as-mystery.

And furthermore, Rahner continues, explicitly endorsing agnosticism not as uncertainty about whether God exists, but as a strong affirmation of God as mystery: “In point of fact we experience ourselves as persons who are addressed by this mystery, as persons who can and should have the enormous courage in hope, love, and prayer to draw nigh to this incomprehensibility of God as the sheltering mystery. If we do not turn and run away from this mystery which seems to make a lethal demand on us far beyond our power, but instead, if we require of ourselves the unbelievable conviction that this mystery as it is itself gives itself to us and will itself once be our completion, then we believe. Then we accept the agnostos God, who is the ground of our true agnosticism, as true fulfillment”(Rahner 1988, p. 134).

Theologically speaking, we can say that I am not certain God exists, not least whether God exists in the manner I presume God must exist. The equal and opposite corollary is that I cannot be certain God does not exist. I cannot be certain, too, of the strict limits of the world or of the boundaries of the self and its accompaniments that constitute personal identity. This liberates the philosopher to claim that which may be given is open-ended, since we are only certain that we do not know the limits of what can be given—namely, the “wisdom of incertitude” that only a dilated subject can cultivate.

4. Conclusions

Let us, in closing, revisit the issue of dilation. Our initial target of criticism was the restrictive “minimalist” phenomenology that eschews theology, spirituality, and phenomena of mystery. We argued that an open or maximalist phenomenology is more faithful to the structure of givenness. While rooted in the work of Husserl and many of his French heirs such as Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry and Jean-Louis Chretien, the dilated subject became the principal theme of the paper. Here we suggested that such expansion and growth of the self upon an encounter with the given (whatever is given) operates between active and passive stances. Agency and personal identity occupies neither: (i) a purely passive “letting be” many whom are in the theological turn of French phenomenology are guilty of (what we called egocide); nor (ii) an active “constitutive” ego we see in Descartes, Kant and to a degree Husserl; we encapsulated this latter camp with the semantics of Selbständigkeit, or self-subsistence or self-positing egoism. The middle-voiced subject, the dilated subject, does not imply that an outright rejection of active and passive stances; instead, it holds them in tension by seeking their inner unity.

The final section treated the conception of maximalist phenomenology. We explored the manner in which, as an open-minded style of philosophy, it resembles something similar to a negative or apophatic phenomenology, which holds at bay concepts of certainty that animate modern philosophy from Descartes down to the present. Phenomenology, at least in its French incarnations, seeks to reconcile the self with uncertainty. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example, remarks helpfully that “The mystery is that, in the very moment where language is thus obsessed with itself, it is enabled, through a kind of excess, to open us to a signification. One could say that it is a law of the spirit to find only that for which the spirit has looked” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, p. 115). When the spirit of negative phenomenology, in relationship with theology, looks to the mystery of God, it operates by the law of charity, namely, that it seeks only that for which it has looked. Dilation requires sensitivity to that which remains, and always will remain, mysterious, not so that it may be wholly grasped or hermeneutically exhausted in the concept of certainty, but so that it may cultivate contemplative delight in the mystery of uncertainty.