The Really Real and the Really, Truly, Indubitably Real

I went for a run today in the rain. By the time I got back to my building the sun had come out. With my contacts in, I was able to see a lot of detail in things that would otherwise be obscured by my glasses. I don't know if crumbled concrete and a rotting white door are proper objects of wonder, but here we are.

I was cooling down, walking and stretching, when my mind quietly seized. In the clouds and trees, even in the brick buildings and cobblestone parking lots, I saw a desert open up. Everything was a flat, consistent plane, each surface equally opaque and continuous with every other. There was a kind of inscrutable hiddenness in everything.

In this state I prayed. I asked God for a sign that this was his work. By the end of my silent prayer, everything had become a surface—not just the sights of things, but their sounds, smells, feels. My mind became a point suspended in something I know not what. I turned around like a baby in utero, looking at a world made strange.

I don't know if God answered my prayer in a way I could understand, but my heightened sense of alienation at least reopened a window that's been shut for a long time. Here's the view, familiar enough: my little brain does its best to dance over the surfaces of things, and is satisfied with a cursory knowledge of the contours they present to me. It cannot, however, open a door into a stone, or touch the life that animates an olive tree. My brain can only gesture at reality at a slant, and ponder it from a distance. Perhaps otherwise it would be consumed—or simply fall silent, like the collapsing body of the man who tried to steady the ark with his bare hand.

Maybe it really is true, that everything we think or say is essentially and most truly about what we cannot think and can never say. Who could know? And could she say it if she did know?

Jean-Louis Chrétien on Prayer, Second Installment

This is part two of my projected series of indefinite length on Jean-Louis Chrétien's analysis of prayer. To recap, Chrétien is a young French phenomenologist, theologian, and poet whose work remains largely untranslated, and whose exposure to the American academic world is therefore fairly slight. Even the European students in our program do not often recognize his name. My professors, however, have spoken of him in hushed tones of reverence and with restrained enthusiasm (too much would be unbecoming for a professional academic, of course). Chrétien's French is quite beautiful, I have been told; fortunately for me, much of the beauty survives in his English translations, miraculously.

The man himself. 

Chrétien is rumored to live quite the hermitic life. Writing in isolation on a typewriter utterly devoid of affectation, in what I fancifully imagine to be a secluded French country house filled to the rafters with books, Chrétien only set up an email address at the urgent request of his publisher after his unreachability very nearly drove his literary agent off the deep end.

But while Chrétien seems to seclude himself from living humans, his work is bursting with connections that he sketches between representatives of far-flung intellectual eras and traditions. Most of his interlocutors are long dead. Their dusted insights help propel a search that has guided his entire philosophical career so far; in a retrospective millennial essay surveying his work over the preceding decade, he states that his overarching goal has been to describe the "excess of the encounter with things, other, world, and God"—an encounter that "requires, most imperatively, our response, and yet seems at the same time to prohibit it." ("Retrospection" in Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped-For (New York: Forham University Press, 2002), 121.)

Before moving on to the analysis of prayer, a brief note on the meaning of the above quotation: "excess" here may be roughly understood to mean a surplus of content that defies our attempts at grasping it through our understanding. Excess is frequently associated with the experience of the sublime, which leaves a person speechless, awe-struck, overcome. Another site of excess would be an encounter with God (theophany), which cannot but overwhelm a finite subject. Chrétien, then, has sought to reveal this surplus as something that leaves traces in even the most common experiences of wholly unexceptional things. In his perspective, something has pushed us to lose sight of this basic dimension of excess, but it remains, for those who are willing to "relearn to see the world."

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The essay "The Wounded Word" appears in translation as a part of the previously mentioned collection entitled Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn": the French Debate by Dominique Janicaud et al (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). I now wish to start exploring the development of Chrétien's analysis, in the hope of eventually teasing out a viable account of the essence of the act of prayer.

A bold statement opens the piece: "Prayer is the religious phenomenon par excellence, for it is the sole human act that opens the religious dimension and never ceases to underwrite, to support, and to suffer this opening" (p147, all page references are to Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn"). Prayer is our mode of access to the religious dimension. How can this be? Aren't there other aspects of religious life that do not begin and end in prayer, that are essentially different from it? Perhaps—but, as Chrétien points out, "[i]f we were unable to address our speech to God or the gods, no other act could intend the divine." Therefore, he writes, "[w]ith prayer, the religious appears and disappears."

Now Chrétien is clearly writing about prayer, but he is also working here to locate his piece within the philosophical context described in the first installment of this series. An analysis of the paradigmatic religious phenomenon, if sufficiently rigorous and methodologically pure, could open up the world of religious experience for legitimate phenomenological investigation. This, I have to believe, is one of Chrétien's goals—to demonstrate that such a phenomenology is possible.

But back to prayer. Chrétien wishes to write a paper rather than a book, and this requires him to impose a limitation on his analysis right from the get go. Prayer, he says, will be considered as a "speech act," loosely understood—but this isn't just an arbitrary narrowing of the field of play. Chrétien actually thinks that the vocal aspect of prayer may get to its very essence, as immediately after introducing the "speech act" qualification, he proposes a guiding question for the rest of the piece: "[i]s vocal prayer merely one form of prayer among others, or is it the prayer par excellence, the sole one in relation to which all others can be defined and constituted, either by derivation or privation?" (149). This question is so detailed as to be mostly rhetorical, an anticipatory statement spoken with an upward intonation at the end so as not to appear too confident. But even if it were a more sincere question, we may still expect the vocal aspect to play a salient role in limning the essence of prayer. Chrétien's treatment of silence is particularly compelling to watch as the argument unfolds.

With the main points of the introduction behind us, we are on our way to being knee-deep in the lake of Chrétien's analysis. Seeing as his essay is very dense and runs to almost forty pages, I intend to save most of his arguments and insights for future installments. But I will close this post with the first descriptive element disclosed by this phenomenology: prayer is situated, Chrétien writes,

in an act of presence to the invisible. It is the act by which the man praying stands in the presence of a being in which he believes but does not see and manifests himself to it. 

 - "The Wounded Word," 149. 

So prayer is embedded in a person's act whereby she purposefully makes herself present to a being that she believes in, although she does not see it; she believes herself to be in this being's presence, and "manifests" herself to it. We could also say that she discloses herself to this being, that she wills herself to "be" before it. The monotheistic belief in the omniscience of God illuminates an important aspect of this move: though a praying person may believe herself to always be in the sight or presence of God, in prayer she intentionally directs herself towards God, as though to meet his invisible gaze, and willfully presents herself to him.

This self-manifestation to the invisible leaves the praying person in a state of extreme vulnerability; everything is given and nothing is held back. The preparations of ritual cleanings, the use of certain garments, bodily gestures and movements of all kinds—all of these, Chrétien writes, "can be gathered together in a summoned appearance that incarnates the act of presence" (150, emphasis mine). Incarnates the act of presence—what could that mean? Well, venturing one interpretation, it means this: our presentation of ourselves to the invisible being to which we pray is actually embodied in the physical acts of prayer. When we kneel, light candles, don vestments, doff our caps, and so forth, we are symbolizing our self-presentation to the divine, and in a way, effecting it.

This is why bodily or ritualistic actions symbolize rather than signify the act of presence: because the gestures and acts are unified with the central act of self-manifestation, and bring it to "incarnation," as it were, allowing this act of self-manifestation to involve the whole of the person praying. Prayer is not just an offering of an idea or a thought or a plea to God, in this account; Chrétien wishes instead to say that prayer is the offering of our whole selves to God.

* * *

And that brings us about a tenth of the way into the essay. Almost all of the riches are still ahead for us. Anyway, thanks for reading! I hope you return for installment three. By then we should really be cooking with gas. 

Jean-Louis Chrétien on Prayer, First Installment

This is the first post in a series, which may itself be the first installment in a meta-series that I hope will accomplish two things. First, I hope it will help me to think through the thesis that I have begun sketching in short, panicked bursts; second, I hope it will be of some general benefit to anyone interested in the questions, problems, and thinkers associated with the "theological" sliver that has pricked phenomenology in recent decades. I also hope that it might be of even more general interest, specifically for anyone who has an abiding interest in the life of faith and its interaction with philosophy.

* * * 

The central text I'm using for my thesis (as I presently envision it) is "The Wounded Word: The Phenomenology of Prayer" by French philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien. Posts that follow in the present series will comprise observations, riffs, and explications that refer to his text (the essay appears in the volume Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn": The French Debate, Fordham University Press, 2000).

This first installment attempts to locate Chrétien's analysis of prayer in its philosophical context. For a way "in" to what he's actually doing, it is helpful to remember that he is attempting a very specific sort of analysis, as the title indicates. Phenomenology examines the essences of things that appear from the perspective of those to whom those things appear - namely, human beings. Since this is the only perspective available to human beings, phenomenology was originally conceived as a movement that would provide a new (or restore an original) foundation for human thought, supplanting the rampant scientism that still persists with more than a century's remove from the publishing year of the phenomenological movement's founding text (Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations, 1901).

The methodology used to produce phenomenological analyses requires a number of intellectual preparations. One of these we may informally refer to as "the reduction." (There are different reductions, but for our purposes we may refer to "the reduction" as a single thing to represent all of them.) The reduction entails a suspension of one's natural assumptions about the object of investigation, to the highest degree that it is possible; basically, a phenomenologist tries to put their prior beliefs about the object on hold while they carry out their analysis, so that aspects of the object might emerge in clarity that would otherwise be lost.

Sometimes this is a function of how utterly familiar the object, or an aspect of the object, is to the observer. For example, my own tongue is so familiar to me that unless I am provoked by the pain of a sore or the taste of a food I am eating, I am generally unconscious of it. The reduction is partially intended to overcome the sort of invisibility that an object like this acquires as a function of its nearness and familiarity. If one were conducting an analysis of taste or chewing, one would have to relearn to experience (or "see") one's tongue, so as to be able to throw light on the tongue's place in the phenomenon of taste or chewing. I should say that I am sorry if you are now thinking about your tongue.

The reduction also enables a person to reconsider everything associated with the phenomenon she is investigating, so as to come around to an understanding of its essence that is (to whatever degree possible) unencumbered by her assumptions. In the case of a pencil eraser, for example, bracketing my belief that pencil erasers are pink would allow me to reconsider my belief that pinkness is essential to pencil erasers (an assumption that is a product of my having only ever encountered pink pencil erasers). Completing the reduction, then, helps me toward a fresh realization: that the pinkness of the eraser in question is a contingent aspect of it, since there can be erasers of other colors that may be attached to pencils. This isn't exactly an epochal discovery, but hopefully it illustrates one of the benefits of phenomenology's reduction.

So, the reduction is important to phenomenological inquiry and helps to distinguish it from other modes of philosophical analysis. There are two ways in which this is significant for a phenomenological investigation of prayer:

1. Dominique Janicaud, giving voice to the concerns of many contemporary phenomenologists, believes a phenomenology of religious phenomena to be impossible, because any analysis of this sort would require reference to the framework of religious beliefs that gives religious phenomena their sense; the phenomenological reduction would exclude these beliefs, therefore making a religious phenomenology impossible. Examining religious phenomena in a precise and insightful way is still an option on the table, Janicaud claims; it's just that that sort of analysis simply falls outside the proper purview of phenomenological inquiry, and belongs instead to hermeneutics or straight-up theology. But Chrétien and other philosophers like him are developing phenomenologies that they claim are accurate to the phenomena under description as well as to the project of phenomenology itself. Can prayer, an essentially religious phenomenon, be described without importing theology or metaphysics?
2. Chrétien seeks to work within the strictures of phenomenology, even while developing an account of prayer that is informed by an array of theological sources. These sources are not so much a set of metaphysical or theological touchstones as a source of illumination for the lived experience of prayer; they throw light back out of their respective bodies of (bracketed) metaphysical and theological belief. The belief systems (or, I should say, the truth of the belief systems) that he borrows insights from are unimportant to Chrétien's analysis on the whole, and the analysis is built to work even after actual belief in God and transcendence has also been bracketed in the reduction. This means that Chrétien does not explicitly develop a theology, although the degree to which his work might be considered theological as opposed to purely phenomenological is still debated. 

(TL;DR) From the perspective of the reduction (numbers one and two above), first, Chrétien's analysis of prayer, if successful as a phenomenology, may be important for the practice of phenomenology generally; second, the type of analysis Chrétien is doing does not permit him to define the essence of prayer according to a particular theology, as would be the case in another context.

With these theoretical items in our handbag, we are almost ready to board the Chrétien prayer train. But first, there is still some further preparatory work concerning phenomenology. I'll save this for installment number two. 

Thesis Topic: Chosen

I'm writing on the phenomenology of prayer. God help me, right?

Prayer is unique because 1) it may be considered the religious phenomenon par excellence,* a foundation for religious practice generally, and 2) prayer offers (in my nascent perspective) one way of imagining the possibility of a point of contact with the transcendent that may come under true phenomenological description. This is important because more traditional phenomenology brackets away transcendence for being outside phenomenology's proper field of application, which comprises only what is immanent. So, as the subject of this sort of analysis, not only does prayer help to clarify the nature of religious experience, but if a methodologically sound analysis of prayer is possible and can even proceed on prayer's own terms, then there could be implications for the ongoing phenomenological project generally. This is only a tentative hunch, of course.

The idea is connected to a larger, ongoing debate in contemporary French phenomenology over the apparent movement towards more overtly religious themes and ideas, which has roughly occurred within the last thirty or so years. Prominent, traditional phenomenologists regard the exploration and description of prayer, transcendence, and related phenomena as a corruption of phenomenology, a theologizing—"[phenomenological] heresy,"** even. But the philosophers who have taken phenomenology in this transcendent direction, by interrogating the "givenness of the given" itself or by searching for an invisible ground for the domain of the visible, tend to regard their work as being more faithful to the core tenets of the discipline than the traditional phenomenologists themselves, for reasons that are as complicated as the context in which they are given.

Who knows which side of this debate is correct, if that's even a useful question? For my part, I wish only to re-tread a fresh but fairly well-trod path, hoping for illumination from whatever source will give a little light as I try to understand what it is that happens when we open our mouths and address ourselves to an invisible God.

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* Jean-Louis Chretien, "The Wounded Word: The Phenomenology of Prayer"
** Jacques Derrida, leveling an accusation against Jean-Luc Marion, a phenomenologist associated with French phenomenology's purported "theological turn," for his belief in the possibility of the "saturated" phenomenon, unbounded by a horizon or the constitutive gaze of the subject. One species of "saturated phenomena" would be theophany.