Mihi Magna Quaestio Factus Sum

Mihi magna quaestio factus sum : The Privilege of Unknowing
Author(s): JeanLucMarion
Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 85, No. 1 (January 2005), pp. 1-24
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Mihi magna quaestio factus sum: The
Privilege of Unknowing*
Jean-Luc Marion
i. what is man?
In the nal analysis, why and by what right would one admit into the
eld of university disciplines something like a philosophy of religion?
In one view, it actually deals with religion, and not philosophy; and
what is more, according to the most radical but also the most wide-
spread hypothesis, it deals with a religion that asserts itself as revealed.
But this in turn means that it will dene its object with complete au-
tonomy, as the organized collection of articles of belief (credo, creed).
In such a case, we might do best to turn to sacra doctrina, which is to
say to scientia theologica, or if need be, outside of the exemplary case of
Christianity, to appeal to any body of doctrine that would offer the
stability and referential quality (whatever these may turn out to be) of
a collection of things believed and held as true.
Or, one could request for an alleged philosophy of religion a place
within philosophy proper. But, in this case, could religion claim a status
particular enough to become the object of a separate philosophy, one
that would be reserved for it alone? In fact, does all that is summed up
in this religion in question not simply reduce to one of the three
objects of metaphysica specialis, without any more special particularity
than its other objects (the soul and the world)? Does religion likewise
not belong to the secondary philosophies, such as rational psychology,
rational cosmology, physics, and so on? In this sense, every philosophy
of religion would be reduced to one of the secondary philosophies,
inscribed within metaphysica specialis, which is itself subjected to meta-
physica generalis, that is, ontologia, and thus to the system of metaphysica
as such.
* Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. This article is the text of Professor Marions inaugural
lecture as the John Nuveen Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Theology at the
University of Chicago School of Divinity.
The Journal of Religion
2
Or, nally, one could understand by philosophy of religion the sci-
ence of the cultural and ritual behaviors that provoke in every human
being (including those who profess atheism) the inevitable and irre-
ducible instance that in the end must be named God. But, in this
case, it is tting to renounce the a priori of metaphysica specialis in order
to develop a posteriori a historical science, under the polymorphous
and constantly renewed gure of a history not of religion, but of reli-
gions. And in this latter case, that of our era more than any other, the
philosophy of religion to be sought should at once renounce its iden-
tity and unity as a mere remainder and index of an ethnocentrism that
cannot be justied, in order to take its place more modestly, alongside
other sciences, within what is more simply named anthropology.
This recourse to anthropology allows, moreover, the second hypoth-
esis nally to join up with the rst, for it is true that, according to
Kant, the three questions that sum up the whole system of philosophy
(meaning metaphysics)namely, What can I know? or, in other
words, metaphysica generalis reduced to the science of the rst principles
of human knowledge; followed by What ought I to do? which is to
say, morals; and, nally, What may I hope? namely, religion itself
could reckon all of this as anthropology, because the rst three ques-
tions relate to the last one. In short, the nal question, What is man?
would become the rst question all over again.
1
Thus the metaphysical
meaning of the term philosophy of religion joins up with its empir-
ical acceptation, that of a simple history of religions. So, in front of
revealed theology, there stands opposed only the double meaning of a
singular anthropology.
How should we understand this anthropology? Quite clearly as the
science of man; or rather, because every science reverts by denition
to man (as science by and for man, as human science according to
the rst historical meaning of this syntagma), anthropology will take
shape as the science taught by man on man himself. Kant formulates
it clearly: The most important object [Gegenstand] of culture, to whom
such knowledge and skill can be applied, is Man because he is his own
ultimate purpose. To recognize him, according to his species, as an
earthly being endowed with reason [mit Vernunft begabtes Erdwesen] de-
1
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic (Ak. 9:25), trans. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992), p. 538. See the parallels in the Critique of Pure Reason, A 804/
B 832, and the Letter to Staudlin, May 4, 1793 (Ak. 11:429), in Correspondence, trans. and
ed. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 458. Martin Heideggers
commentary reads: The Kantian laying of the foundation yields this conclusion: The estab-
lishment of metaphysics is an interrogation of man, i.e., it is anthropology. See Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics (36, GA 3, p. 205), trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1962), p. 213.
The Privilege of Unknowing
3
serves particularly to be named knowledge of the world, even though he
is only one of all the creatures on earth. All the more at issue here is
a knowledge held by man of himself in the most radical sense, which
he will deploy, says Kant, from a pragmatic point of view; this is to
say that, in opposition to an anthropology from the physiological point
of view which aims at the investigation of what nature makes of man,
this anthropology aims at what man makes, or can and should make
of himself as a freely acting being [Wesen].
2
This knowledge of man by
himself cannot be reduced, let us note, to a simple empirical knowl-
edge; rational psychology demands and, indeed, claims knowledge of
man all the more, even if it acts freely in a different sense. The ques-
tion thus becomes one of knowing if man can apply to himself his own
knowledge in order to become his own object and, more generally, of
knowing by what right he can make of himself something at all. For,
by virtue of this rank as thing, man inscribes himself entirely among
beings in the world, because his knowledge becomes (and remains)
particularly that of this very world, to which he belongs without re-
mainder. Thus are we led to substitute, for the question of a denition
of philosophy of religion, another question, which supports the rst
question and determines it in advance, namely, whether man can and
must know himself.
In this situation, the entire question (as much the question of an-
thropology as, through it, that of the philosophy of religion) comes
down to understanding whether I know myself and, above all, by what
right I know myself. Or rather, the issue is less about knowing if I know
myself, as it is about understanding, in the event that I were to know
myself, what status (and thus what mode of being) would be mine. Kant
responds directly to these questions. I [Ich], as intelligence and think-
ing subject, know myself as an object that is thought [gedachtes Objekt],
insofar as I am given to myself in intuition, solely and exactly, like every
other phenomenon [gleich anderen Phanomen], only as I appear to myself,
not as I am to the understandingthese are questions that raise no
greater nor less difculty than [that of knowing] how I can be an object
to myself at all [uberhaupt ein Objekt], and, more particularly, an object
of intuition and of inner perceptions.
3
In other terms, I do not know
myself insofar as I know (following the singular privilege of being, as
the sole thinker, the sole knower), but in so far precisely as I am simply
2
Kant, introduction to Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Ak. 8:119), trans. Victor
Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. 3 (my emphasis;
translation modied).
3
Kant, Transcendental Deduction (sec. 24, B 156), in Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman
Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martins, 1965), p. 167 (my emphasis; translation modied).
4
known, and thus by the same right as any other known, which is to say
as any other object. Strangely, I thus never know myself as I know, but
always only as a me who is known, and thus as an object. I only know
myself as that which I am not, as the me-object. The resulting distinc-
tionbetween on the one hand the transcendental I, the empty form
that accompanies every other knowledge but remains itself neither rep-
resentable nor knowable, and on the other the empirical me that be-
longs to the world of phenomena, and thus of objects knownmani-
fests nothing of my specicity (the property of knowing) and puts into
evidence precisely that which does not characterize me (the status of
known). Thus am I masked and lowered to the dishonorable rank of
an object. Rather than giving me access to the man that I am, this
distinction between the I and the me forbids me from drawing near to
the man that I am and disgures the very stake of anthropologythe
self of each human being.
4
Not only does man split into two irrecon-
cilable tendencies, but the only one that is knowable, the object of the
empirical me, denes him precisely by ignorance of the most extreme
and inalienable property belonging to the being that I am: the prop-
erty that exercises a thinking thought, as well as the inverse in a
thought that is thought. Which is to say, in fact and by right the object
of the empirical me substitutes for man the very denition of ob-
jecti[vi]ty. Lowered to the rank of a simple object of anthropology,
man, this recent invention, as Foucault used to say, could very well
have inevitably disappeared, like a fragile sandcastle, obliterated by the
rising tide. And in fact, he already has disappeared. Here we should
pay careful attention to Paul Tillichs strong advice: The object of the
philosophy of religion is religion. But this very simple explanation al-
ready signies a problem, the fundamental problem of philosophy of reli-
gions: with religion, philosophy faces an object that refuses to become
an object for philosophy.
5
4
Such an application to the I of the processes of knowledge appropriate to objects alone
(as empirical me) is often found elsewhere too, as far, for example, as in Husserl, where there
is no longer any difculty in knowing that which thinks from any other object, precisely
because this I becomes the same as an objecthere, as everywhere else, the Same signies
therefore an identical intentional object of separate conscious processes, hence an object
immanent in them only as something non-really inherent. Cartesianische Meditationen V (Hus-
serliana 1:15455), trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), pp.
12627.
5
Paul Tillich, Religionsphilosophie (1925), in Fruhe Hauptwerk, vol. 1 of Gesammelte Werke
(Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1959), p. 297.
5
ii. augustines quaestio
The aporia marked out here nevertheless offers more than a dead-
endit allows a paradox to appear. If the man that I am (me) remains
inaccessible, this results not because I do not know him, but on the
contrary because I know him only too well as an object. Man escapes
me to such a degree that the very mode of his possible knowing (which
makes of him a mere thought object) contradicts and conceals his very
rst feature, that of a pure thinker who thinks without becoming one
who is thought. But must we then conclude that the I would not have
access to itself as singular and unique, unless, on the contrary, it could
never confuse itself with a thought object, in short unless it could not
know itself? Put another way, would my access to this I that I alone
recognize for myself require that I acknowledge that I do not appear
to myself as knowledge (an object), but instead as a denitive question
(without any corresponding object)?
As surprising as it may seem, this hypothesis may allow us to reach
the sense of a paradox rehearsed by Saint Augustine: Factus eram ipse
mihi magna quaestio (I had become to myself a huge question).
6
We are not dealing here with a mere throwaway line, for the context,
on the contrary, gives it a precise meaning. Augustine states that the
disappearance of a very dear friend makes him hate what he loved
before (his town and paternal home) and leads him to see nothing
around him but death (quidquid aspiciebam mors erat [everything
on which I set my gaze was death]); this loss of another thus provokes
nothing less and nothing other than the loss of self, of my knowledge
of myself, which it replaces with my putting myself into question. I
experience myself insofar as I discover myself to be unintelligible to
myself. Another formulation conrms this occurrence: even after his
conversion (in primordiis recuperatae dei meae), while listening to
the chants resonating in the church (perhaps the hymns of Ambrose
of Milan?), Augustine notes that he allows himself to be attracted and
touched more by the singing itself than by what is being sung, the
Psalms (me amplius cantus, quam res, quae canitur, moveat), thereby
sinning within the very heart of prayer. Thus, he says, In your [Gods]
eyes, I have become a question to myself [mihi quaestio factus
6
Augustine, Confessiones 4.4.9, ed. James J. ODonnell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 1:36.
English translation in Henry Chadwick, trans., Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), p. 57 (translation modied). (Hereafter, citations of this work will list in parentheses
the ODonnell page numbers rst, followed by the Chadwick page numbers.)
6
sum].
7
I become a question for myself, indeed an aporia for myself,
because I discover that I cannot order my own prayer and thus my own
perception correctly, which is to say, voluntarily; if my own prayer and
perception, which dene my innermost depths, escape my control,
then they make me become a question to myself.
Concerning this split within myself, this quaestio, two other texts con-
rm just how much it renders me alien to myself. Nothing denes me
more intimately than my memory (ipsum me non dicam praeter il-
lam);
8
how then can I not only forget, but (and how would I know it
otherwise?) remember that I have forgotten that which I have, none-
theless, forgotten? How do I remember that I have forgotten what I
no longer remember (mihi certum est meminisse me oblivionem,
ipsam oblivionem meminisse me certus sum)? It would be just as
absurd to reply that I have forgotten what I have forgotten in another
memory than my own, and have retained memory of oblivion in my
memory, as it would be to claim that oblivion remains in my memory
so that I do not forget it like I have forgotten what I forgot there.
There thus remains for me nothing else but to admit that I have kept
in memory the image of the forgotten, but not that which I have for-
gotten; and I can only conclude from this that my memory, my very
inner being, escapes me, and that factus sum mihi terra difcultatis
(I have become for myself a soil which is a cause of difculty), so
that I can only question myself, and question God: Hoc animus est,
et hoc ego ipse sum. Quid ergo sum, Deus meus? Quae natura sum?
(This is mind, this is I myself. What then am I, my God? What is my
nature?).
9
Thus if my own memory renders me a stranger to myself,
how could I not also become other than myself in the experience of
my will? Indeed, in my dreams at night, how can I involuntarily give
in to actual pleasure, when in the waking state I am able to push aside
erotic images? There is only one answer: Numquid tunc ego non sum?
Et tamen tantum interest inter me ipsum et me ipsum intra momen-
7
Confessiones 10.33.50 (ODonnell, p. 139; the commentary provided in vol. 3, p. 220, refers
in a note back to the text of 4.4.9, cited in n. 6; Chadwick, p. 208, translation modied). This
split within myself even serves as a conclusion to bk. 2 (2.10.18): et factus sum mihi regio
egestatis (I became to myself a region of destitution) (ODonnell, p. 22; Chadwick, p. 34),
where this region of destitution denes my alienation from myself (at the time of the rst
theft) through the power of the group of wicked friends.
8
Intravi ad ipsius animi mei sedem, quae illi est in memoria mea, quoniam sui quoque
meminit animus (I entered into the very seat of my mind, which is located in my memory,
since the mind also remembers itself). Confessiones 10.25.36 (ODonnell, p. 133; Chadwick,
p. 200).
9
Confessiones 10.16.25 and 10.17.26 (ODonnell, pp. 12829; Chadwick, pp. 19394).
ODonnells commentary rightly refers this argument to the two previous passages (4.4.9 and
2.10.18; see n. 7 above).
7
tum (During this time of sleep surely it is not my true self, Lord my
God? Yet how great a difference between myself and myself in a [sin-
gle] moment).
10
In a single moment I clearly discover myself to be
someone other than my self, I am not what I am, I become a quaestio
for myself. The experience of self ends neither in the aporia of sub-
stituting an object (the self, the me) for the I that I am, nor in the
pure identity with self, but in the alienation of self from selfI am to
myself an other than I.
What import lies in this impossible access of the self to the self? Is
the issue here a failure of knowledge, or a limitation in the conscious-
ness of self, or, in short, an anticipation of the usual critiques of the
cogito, in the style of Malebranche: Lon na point didee claire de
lame, ni de ses modications (We therefore have no clear idea either
of the soul or of its modications)?
11
This purely negative interpre-
tation would, however, be valuable under only one condition: that, in
the case of mans I, it would be preferable that I know it by such a
clear idea, or, which follows, by a concept. Now this condition raises
not only the question of possibilitycan I know my I by a clear and
distinct idea, or by a concept?but also and rst of all the question
of legitimacy, in two senses. First, is it possible or contradictory to claim
to attain the I, which alone understands (and produces) concepts, with
one of these very concepts? And next: would it be licit, admissible, and
desirable to know the I with a concept, if by chance it proved possible?
If, on the contrary, such an attempt in the end contradicted and de-
stroyed the very I to be attained, then the quaestio that Saint Augustine
sets against it would become not an aporia but a way toward a totally
different mode of conquest of that which I am as such.
For what would it serve a man to know himself through the mode
by which he knows the remainderthe world and its objectsif, in
order to do so, he must know himself as just one more object? What
would it serve a man to know himself with a concept, if in doing so he
lost his humanity or, in other words, his soul? And, inversely, what
would a man lose, if he only gained access to himself through the mode
of incomprehensibility? Is it really self-evident that all knowledge, and
even the knowledge of that which has the privilege to exercise knowl-
edge instead of submitting to it, must be accomplished by the same
and univocal concept?
10
Confessiones 10.30.41 (ODonnell, p. 135; Chadwick p. 203, translation modied).
11
Nicolas Malebranche, Recherche de la verite: XIie`me eclaircissement, in uvres com-
ple `tes, ed. A. Robinet (Paris: Vrin, 1964), 3:168. English translation in Thomas M. Lennon
and Paul J. Olscamp, trans. and ed., The Search after Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), p. 636.
8
iii. everything that can be known, everything that should be
known
What do we really understand by the verb to know? Whether we ad-
mit it or not, we mean by to know the taking (or producing) of what
Descartes called a clear and distinct idea; and we mean this not be-
cause we necessarily accept the Cartesian theory of science but because
we share with it its nality: knowing seems to us to be without value if
it is not, through this idea, about obtaining mentis purae et attentae
tam facilem distinctumque conceptum, ut de eo, quod intelligimus,
nulla prorsus dubitation relinquatur (a concept so clear and distinct,
produced by a pure and attentive mind, such that no doubt remains
about what we are understanding).
12
What can thus be known (by
virtue of idea and representation), in such a manner that no doubt
about it subsists, is dened as an object; or, what amounts to the same
thing, one may only admit into science that which offers an object that
is certain: Circa illa tantum objecta oportet versari, ad quorum certam
et indubitatam cognitionem nostra ingenia videntur sufcere (We
should attend only to those objects of which our minds seem capable
of having certain and indubitable cognition).
13
From this it follows
that what cannot be known as an object, and thus what cannot be
according to the mode of being of objects, is worthy neither of our
knowledge nor quite simply of being. Yes, this is a radical consequence,
but it is a consequence drawn explicitly by Johan Clauberg, a Cartesian
of strict observance, when, in order to found the then new science of
ontologia, he posed as fact the strict equivalence between being and the
thinkable: Ens est quicquid quovis modo est, cogitari ac dici potest
(Being is all that which, in whatever manner may be, can be thought
and said), to the point that being and thought are identied with one
another in a single and unique ens cogitable.
14
This radical thesis, which
by the way exhausts the only historically documented meaning of on-
tologia, does not oppose what is to what is thought (as the real to the
ideal) but, on the contrary, poses their strict equivalence. Accordingly,
the condition of a beings Being understood as an object is no longer
12
Regulae ad directionem ingenii, III, AT X:368, lines 1517. English translation in John Cot-
tingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Douglas Murdoch, trans., Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writ-
ings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2:3 (translation modied). Citations of
this work will be listed hereafter with page numbers from the English translation in paren-
theses.
13
Regulae ad directionem ingenii, II, AT X:362, lines 24 (Cottingham et al., p. 1). The title
of this Regula can be compared with that of Regula III, AT X:366, lines 1114.
14
Johan Clauberg, Metaphysica de Ente, quae rectius ontosophia [dicitur] . . . , secs. 6 and 4,
respectively, in Opera omnia (Amsterdam, 1691), 1:283. Berkeley will simply radicalize this
decision (if it can be radicalized any further).
9
decided in or by this being itself, but in and by the mind that knows
it, because the knowing mind constructs this beings concept. In Car-
tesian terms, one could say that there is only that which can satisfy the
conditions of possibility xed by the Mathesis Universalisnamely, or-
der (whatever it may be) and measure. Anything else is unintelligible
and thus does not come under knowing.
15
It follows that the object is
never dened in itself, nor by itself, but always by the thought that
knows it in constructing it. More essential to the being as object than
the being is to itself is the ego, which xes the beings conditions of
objectication and makes of it an alienated beingalienated from it-
self by the knowledge of another. It falls to the intuitus to accomplish
concretely this alienation of the object: in-tuitus rather than intuition,
a gaze that is active and on the lookout, not a neutral vision, because
it only exercises its view according to the mode of a guard (-tueri), the
guard who makes sure and places under security, who keeps an eye on
and watches over that which henceforth remains under his dominion:
the object.
No one exposed this alienation of the thing by the concept that
precedes and reconstitutes it into an object better than Hegel. In nam-
ing a thing, man substitutes for its immediate being and its qualities
of sensible representation a name, a sound made by [his] voice, some-
thing entirely different from what [the thing] is in intuition; but this
name that is not the immediacy of the thing, this name into which the
thing withdraws, becomes something spiritual, something altogether
different. Thus nature transforms itself into a realm of names, be-
cause the external object itself was negated in that very synthesis.
16
The object appears henceforth as suchas alienated being, which has
lost its being in order to receive it from the I: the object is not what
it is . . . the thing is not what it is.
17
Thus, man speaks to the thing
as his. And this is the being of the object.
18
The being of the object
only consists in receiving its being from man, who alienates it in so
15
See the Regulae ad directionem ingenii, IV, AT X:377, lines 23378: illa omnia tantum, in
quibus aliquis ordo vel mensura examinatur, ad Mathesim [sc. Universalem] referri, nec
interesse utrum in numeris, vel guris, vel astris, vel sonis, aliove quovis objecto, talis mensura
quaerenda sit (I came to see that the exclusive concern of mathematics is with questions of
order or measure and that it is irrelevant whether the measure in question involves numbers,
shapes, stars, sounds, or any other object whatever) (my emphasis; following the correction
of G. Crapulli according to text H [critical edition, The Hague: 1966]; Cottingham et al., p.
5).
16
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy
of Spirit (18056), with Commentary, trans. and ed. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1983), pp. 8990 (translation modied).
17
Ibid., p. 88.
18
Ibid., p. 90.
10
very far as he names it. Put another way, by means of the name . . .
the object has been born out of the I [and has emerged] as being. This
is the primal creativity exercised by Spirit. Adam gave a name to all
things.
19
Hegel obviously alludes to the Biblical episode in which God
gives to man power over the animals by giving him the right to name
them: [He] brought them to the man to see what he would call them
(Gen. 2:19). Adam gives a name, and thus a denition to the animals,
which thus become subject to him, because in general all knowledge
by concept reduces what is known to the rank of object. Adam thus
names in the manner by which the I knowsby concepts of objects.
However, Adam has the power thus to name only that which can legit-
imately become for him an object: the animals (and the rest of the
world), and perhaps the angels, but not God, and not himself. If, more-
over, he claimed to name them, either this name would have no valid-
ity, or, if it had validity, what he named would not be man as such (as
the unrivaled thinker) but merely a thought-object like all the others.
Thus it follows from the characteristics of knowledge by concepts
that man cannot name man, which is to say dene man, except by
reducing him to the rank of a simple concept, thereby knowing not a
man but an object, possibly animated, but always alienated. Therefore
there is no contradiction between, on the one hand, knowledge of man
as the object of anthropology and, on the other, the impossibility of
this knowledge within the reexive self-consciousness. For knowing the
me as an object, constituted by alienation like all objects, in no way
opens access to the I, which alone knows objects and thus opposes itself
to them. This distinction shows itself simply in the case where I, a
human being, am the insurmountable difference between the two sides
of the cogitatio, the ego and the object. From this there immediately and
necessarily follows another conclusion: if one is unaware of or neglects
this distinctionthat is to say if one persists in claiming that man can
(and therefore must) become an object for man (homo homini objec-
tum)one only displaces this very distinction: for that which will be
known as object, even when dressed up with the title of man, will in
fact not be one and will not be able to make himself be recognized as
19
Ibid., p. 89. The rst act, by which Adam established his lordship over the animals, is
this, that he gave them a name, i.e., he nullied them as beings on their own account, and
made them into ideal [entities]. . . . In the name the self-subsisting reality of the sign is
nullied. Gesammelte Werke, ed. H. Kimmerle and K. Dussing (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1975), 6:
288. See also System of the Ethical Life (18023) and First Philosophy of Spirit (Part III of the System
of Speculative Philosophy, 18034), trans. and ed. H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox (Albany: State
University of New York, 1979), pp. 22122. I follow here the classic interpretation of Alexandre
Koje`ve, Introduction a` la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 326 ff. (and also Alexandre
Koyre, Hegel a` Iena, Etudes dhistoire de la pensee philosophique [Paris: 1961], pp. 135 ff.).
11
one. Indeed, each of us can, in various ways, have this experientia crucis:
dening a man is equivalent to having done with him. Not because he
would no longer be thought, but precisely because one thinks him by
not thinking of him, because one thinks him without beginning the
thinking from him himself but, instead, beginning from one other
than him, namely, from the mind that denes him by alienating him,
which is to say the mind that thinks him according to the mode of
comprehension. Or, to classify a man is to downsize him as a human
being, because he could not be classied any other way than according
to an order and a measure (models and parameters) that come to him
from elsewhere, which is to say from the workings of my rationality.
We take notice of this alienation, which makes the dened, classied,
and comprehended human being fall to the rank of a simple object,
every time we end up admitting that, in order to put forward a de-
nition by concept of man it is rst necessary to dare to ask the ques-
tion, What is man? This simple question, even and above all if we do
not give it an answer, already includes within it another, much more
threatening question, because it asks, What is a man? More threat-
ening indeed, because even and above all if we cannot give an answer,
we nevertheless easily authorize ourselves to use the question nega-
tively, transforming it into a nal question, Is this [still, truly] a man?
To claim to know and to dene man with a concept leads inevitably to
a decision about his objectication, or rather to a decision about his
humanity according to the objectication that we will have produced.
Dening man with a concept does not always or immediately lead to
killing him, but it does ll the rst condition required to eliminate all
that does not t this denition. The dangerhaving done with some
among men because we can dene manis not exaggerated or non-
sensical. We experience it directly, as a clear possibility, in all the ap-
plications of its objectication.
For instance, when I nd myself in a medicalized situation (e.g.,
admittance to the hospital, removal of clothing, transfer to surgery, the
reading of test results, submission to treatment), I become a medical
object. Or more precisely, the hospital technologys inevitable hold of
power over me eliminates in me anything that will not reduce to a
medical object. Under the gaze of medical personnel, and very soon
under my own gaze, the treatment of my sick body will lead to its
interpretation according to the parameters of physical bodies (size,
quantication, measurements, etc.), with the result that my living esh
will disappear. Soon I will no longer feel the fact that I feel myself:
anesthesia will not only deliver me from my pain, but also from my
suffering self, and thus from my selfs self-suffering. Next, every non-
12
objective function will disappear from this self (me), and my esh, or
that which is animated within me, will become an animal-machine.
This medical denition of my body as an object will also allow for the
distinction of health from sickness in terms of norms. Thus is opened
the fearful region in which man can make decisions about the nor-
mality, and thus the life and death, of other human beingsbecause
these human beings have become simple human objects.
Another example of objectication occurs when I am dened as an
object reduced to the parameters seen by economic theorywhen I
become the famous economic agent, supposedly summed up by the
calculation of my needs, by the evaluation of these needs in numbered
costs and the balancing of these costs against purchasing power, and
nally by the purported rational calculation of a correspondence be-
tween the costs of the objects of the needs and this purchasing power.
In order to attain even an approximation of rigor, this stage-by-stage
reduction assumes that choices are made according to the laws of
exchange and thus that the economic agent proceeds strictly according
to self-interest, in short, that I only know and practice business, which
is to say strict exchange according to the iron law of a selshness that
is no longer moral, but epistemological. Thus there disappears from
economic analysis everything that escapes exchange and commerce,
but which doubtless makes them possible and ows over them in every
direction: the gift and all the forms of social gratuity that have not yet
been rendered economic. For if economy economizes on the gift, then
more fundamentally, gratuity economizes on economy itself.
20
Without lingering over other processes of objectication (psychiatry,
biology, etc.), let us consider directly the denition of the human be-
ing not only as social animal (social living being), but as political ob-
ject, such as it raties and perfects the mobilization without remain-
der of the humanity of man.
21
The political determination of man is
not summed up by his sociability, but, at the very least, politics imposes
upon that sociability a technological treatment. In particular, through
the determination of ones identity (of his name, I.D., passport) ac-
cording to number: dates (from birth to death), places (residence,
work, trips, etc.), health, commercial operations (bank account num-
bers, credit cards, etc.), local as well as long-distance communications
(sound and visual recordings, electronic addresses, cell phones, etc.),
all become numbers, such that the identity thus digitized according
to limitless parameters erects a comprehensive denition of the citizen.
20
See my analysis in La raison du don, Philosophie 78 ( June 2003): 332.
21
Mobilization is understood here in the sense used by Ernst Junger in Der Arbeiter (Ham-
burg, 1932) and in Die totale Mobilmachung, in Krieg und Krieger (Berlin, 1930).
13
And inevitably this comprehensive denition ends up by authorizing,
indeed demanding, the separation of men according to those who sat-
isfy the political conditions of this citizenship and those who are ex-
cluded or ought to be (exclusion, beginning with the jobless, the
homeless, the maladjusted, delinquents, and illegal immigrants, and
ending with the mentally ill, or embryos reputedly not yet humanized,
or supernumerary, etc.). From the identity card to the list of interdic-
tion, the outcome, while not good, is nonetheless possible, easy, and
rapid. Political wisdom consists rst in resisting such an outcome. Fail-
ing such resistance, there will be no end of ideologies or racisms that
produce denitions of man and, through an inverted outcome, pro-
scribe those who do not t in, before moving on to the arrest, or in-
deed to the extermination of the submen or nonmen thus identied.
22
A frightening consequence thus imposes itself: to claim to dene
what a man is leads to or at least opens the possibility of leading to
the elimination of that which does not correspond to this denition.
Every political proscription, every racial extermination, every ethnic
cleansing, every determination of that which does not merit lifeall
of these rest upon a claim to dene (scientically or ideologically) the
humanity of man; without this claimed guarantee, no one could put
such political programs into motion. Even the worst of modern tyrants
needs reasons and concepts. Here we nd a new experientia crucis: in
order to kill a human being, it is necessary to have the permission to
kill. But in order to have that, it is rst necessary to be able to deny
to such and such a human being (the well-named So and So) his or
her face and thus his or her humanity; and one gets there by dening
and comprehending humanity through concepts, by xing its limits
and, in this way, discovering the one who cannot claim humanity, and
thus can or ought to die. Here a metaphysical proposition in appear-
ance perfectly neutral takes on the aspect of a silent threat: every de-
termination is a negation, or more exactly (because in the event the
issue is extension alone), gura non aliud quam determinatio, et de-
terminatio negatio est (gure is nothing but limitation, and limita-
22
Primo Levi lived and described perfectly the moment when the number, having become
the most efcacious tool for the denition (in this case ideological and racist) of man, and
thus for the stigmatization of the nonman (the Jew), silences the name of a man by substituting
itself for that name: He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen,
the last three gures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy
of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer a man (If This Is a Man; The Truce, trans.
Stuart Woolf [London: Abacus, 1987], p. 48). And once the name of a man is abolished, and
his humanity thus denied, it becomes possible and even quite easy to put an end to him
physically, as a dog or a pigin other words, as an animal.
14
tion is negation).
23
Determining amounts to denying (and not the
inverse, for if determination is sufcient for denial, a negation does
not always sufce to determine). Determining the humanity of man
thus amounts to making an end of him.
Moreover, this experientia crucis can be conrmed by inverting it: I
can only love (the contrary of killing) another that, precisely, I do not
know, at least in the sense of being able to comprehend him or her as
an object and dene him or her by a concept. I can only love him who
remains for me without denition, and only for as long as he thus
remains, which is to say as long as I will not have nished with him.
iv. the depths of incomprehensibility
Thus nothing of what I understand tells me of the humanity of the
Other or gives me access to it. If then I want to maintain that, being
a human being, nothing human is or ought to be foreign to me (Ter-
ence), it would be necessary to add a derivative consequence: nothing
that I know, beginning from a comprehensive denition of humanity,
can reveal the dignity of the human being, much less defend it. And
consequently, I cannot know myself as such, by turning on myself any
such denition of humanity; for, in this case too, I would substitute for
the man in me something other than me, that is, precisely, an alienated
thing, an object comprehended by a concept. Thus there appears the
denitive weakness of every humanism: not only does it claim to com-
prehend as a matter of fact what man can and ought to be; but above
all it assumes that such a knowledge reinforces the humanity in man,
when such knowledge instead destroys it or, in any case, threatens it.
The weakness of humanisms claim consists in dogmatically imagining
not only that man can hold himself up as his own measure and end
(so that man is enough for man), but above all that he can do this
because he comprehends what man is, when on the contrary nothing
threatens man more than any such alleged comprehension of his hu-
manity. For every de-nition imposes on the human being a nite es-
sence, following from which it always becomes possible to delimit what
deserves to remain human from what no longer does.
It follows, then, that in the particular case of man, philosophy would
have for its task not to correct mans incomprehensibility, as if it were
a defect to overcome, but to preserve it as a privilege to reinforce. But
for all of that, can we indeed preserve the incomprehensibility of man
23
Baruch Spinoza, Epistula 50, a` J. Jalles, 3d ed., ed. J. van Vloten and J. P. N. Land (The
Hague, n.d.), 3:172. English translation in Abraham Wolf, trans. and ed., The Correspondence
of Spinoza (London: Frank Cass, 1966), p. 270.
15
as the sign, the proof, and the guarantee of his humanity? How do we
avoid the confusions and contradictions implied by this demand? And
rst and foremost, does a de jure incomprehensibility not lead nally
to a simple de facto unknowing? And, since such an unknowing either
disappears into a denitive ignorance or disqualies itself as a poorly
formulated question, does it not always just vanish? In short, can one
maintain for very long the comprehension of such a fragile incompre-
hensibility? In order to surmount these difculties, it would be nec-
essary to found and legitimize the impossibility of dening and com-
prehending manand thus to envisage such an impossibility within a
new positivity and no longer as a pure and simple defect. How do we
do this?
Let us return to Hegels interpretation of Adams privilege in the
book of Genesis. There, man has the power to name, to understand,
and thus to dominate; but Adam exercises this privilege only upon the
animals, never upon God or upon himself. Why do these two escape
naming and thus escape the comprehension and, nally, the domina-
tion of man? That God would escape is conceived without any dif-
culty: the Creator is not easily understood, and thus named, by his
creature. But why is it that man does not name himself? No interdict
is brought to bear here. Nothing more than the second commandment
is necessary, which forbids making for yourself a graven image, or any
likeness of anything that is in heaven above (Exod. 20:4)anything,
therefore, that would claim to represent God through comprehension.
But is man, too, in heaven above? Most certainlyfor this is the de-
cisive paradoxbecause that which is tting for God (of whom no
name, no image, and no concept can claim comprehension) is also
tting for man: man, and he alone among all the living, was created
not according to [his] kind but in [the] image . . . [and] likeness
of God (Gen. 1:24, 26). This paradox receives a precise commentary
from Saint Augustine: be renewed in the newness of your mind. That is not
a making according to kind [secundum genus], as if renewal were achieved
by imitating a neighbours example or by living under the authority of
a human superior. For you did not say Let man be made according to
his kind [secundum genus], but Let us make man according to our image
and likeness, so we may prove what your will is.
24
Man remains un-
imaginable, because he is formed in the image of the One who admits
no image whatsoever. By right, man resembles nothing, because he
resembles nothing other than the One who is properly characterized
24
Augustine, Confessiones 13.22.32 (ODonnell, p. 196; Chadwick p. 292, emphasis added;
translation slightly modied). Augustine quotes, successively, Rom. 12:2 and Gen. 1:24 and
26.
16
by incomprehensibility, the One who David Tracy has named the
Incomprehensible-Comprehensible God.
25
Or again, if God remains
incomprehensible, man, who resembles nothing other than Him, will
also bear the mark and the privilege of His incomprehensibility. Put
another way: the human being belongs to no kind whatsoever, refers
to no genus, is not comprehended by any denition of (in)humanity.
Delivered from every paradigm, he appears immediately within the light
of the One who surpasses all light. Mans face bears the mark of this
borrowed incomprehensibility in so far, precisely, as he too reveals him-
self as invisible, like God.
26
Man is thus radically separated from every
other being in the world by an insurmountable and denitive differ-
ence that is no longer ontological, but holy. No longer does the human
being distinguish him- or herself from the rest of the world as the
Platzhalter des Nichts (lieutenant of the nothing)
27
or the Hirt
des Seins (shepherd of Being),
28
but as the icon of the incompre-
hensible. Mans invisibility separates him from the world and conse-
crates him as holy for the Holy.
This argument is found explicitly formalized in this manner by Greg-
ory of Nyssa, among other authors:
The icon is properly an icon so long as it fails in none of those attributes
which we perceive in the archetype . . . therefore, since one of the attributes
we contemplate in the Divine nature is incomprehensibility of essence (t` o
akat lhpton t o j a), it is clearly necessary that in this point the icon a h u i
should be able to show its imitation of the archetype. For if, while the arche-
type transcends comprehension, the nature of the icon were comprehended,
the contrary character of the attributes we behold in them would prove the
defect of the icon; but since the nature of our mind, which is according to
the icon of the Creator (t kat k na tou kt janto), evades our knowledge, q i o i
it keeps an accurate resemblance to the superior nature, retaining the imprint
25
David Tracy, On Naming the Present: God, Hermeneutics, and Church (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis
Books, 1994), p. 54.
26
According to Emmanuel Levinas, le visage est signication et signication sans contexte.
. . . En ce sens, on peut dire que le visage nest pas vu. Il est ce qui ne peut devenir un
contenu, que notre pensee embrasserait; il est lincontenable, il vous me`ne au-dela` (the
face is signication, and signication without context. . . . In this sense one can say that the
face is not seen. It is what cannot become a content, which your thought would embrace;
it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond). See Ethique et inni: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo
(Paris: Livre de Poche, 1982), pp. 8081. English translation in Richard A. Cohen, trans.,
Ethics and Innity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
1985), pp. 8586.
27
Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 118. English translation in
David Farrell Krell, ed., Basic Writings, 2d ed. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 106.
28
Martin Heidegger, Brief uber den Humanismus, in Wegmarken, GA 9, p. 342. English
translation in Krell, pp. 234, 245.
17
of the incomprehensible [xed] by the unknown within it (t kav aut n q o
agn jt ).
29
q q
Knowing man thus requires referring him to God the incomprehensi-
ble and thus by derivation to grounding incomprehensibility in the
incomprehensible, by virtue of mans being its image and likeness. Au-
gustine, too, comes to this conclusion: whereas Saint Paul, for his part,
writes that no one among men knows the secrets of man except the
spirit of man which is in him (1 Cor. 2:11) and thus assumed that
man comprehends the secrets of man, Augustine does not hesitate to
write on the contrary that tamen est aliquid hominis, quod nec ipse
scit spiritus hominis, qui in ipso est, tu autem. Domine, scis ejus omnia,
quia eum fecisti (yet there is something of the human person which
is unknown even to the spirit of man which is in him. But you, Lord,
know everything about the human person; for you made humanity).
Beginning from this unknowing of myself, who is nevertheless known
by anotherGod aloneit is necessary to make use of the process of
confessio, or rather the constitutive duality of a doubly oriented confessio,
oriented toward my ignorance of self and toward anothers knowledge
of me. Contear ergo quid de me sciam, contear et quid de me
nesciam . . . (Accordingly, let me confess what I know of myself.
Let me confess too what I do not know of myself. For what I know of
myself I know because you grant me light, and what I do not know of
myself, I do not know until such time as my darkness becomes like
noonday before your face).
30
Man differs innitely from man but with
a difference that he cannot comprehend, and which, in order properly
to respect it, he should not comprehend.
Not only does man know that he does not know himself, even if this
were only because within his most intimate depths he discovers an un-
fathomable memory: Magna vis est memoriae, nescio quid horren-
dum, Deus meus, profunda et innita multiplicitas. Et hoc animus est
et hoc ego ipse sum. Quid ego sum Deus? Quae natura sum? (Great
is the power of memory, an awe-inspiring mystery, my God, a power of
profound and innite multiplicity. And this is mind, this is I myself.
What then am I, my God? What is my nature?).
31
But above all, man
29
Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, in Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, etc.,
trans. William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson, vol. 5 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the
Christian Church, Series II, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
1965), pp. 39697 (translation modied).
30
Confessiones 10.5.7, citing at the end Psalm89:8 (ODonnell, p. 121; Chadwick, pp. 18283).
31
Confessiones 10.17.26 (ODonnell, p. 129; Chadwick, p. 194). A strong and frightening
echo of such a horror is found in both Luther and Calvin, as B. A. Gerrish has superbly
demonstrated; see his To the Unknown God: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of
18
understands, within this impasse, that the one who is alone in knowing
him remains for him another, namely, God: Utrum ita sim, nescio.
Minus mihi in hac re notus sum ipse quam tu. Obsecro te, Deus meus,
et me ipsum mihi indica (Whether I am one or the other I do not
know. In this matter I know myself less well than I know you. I beseech
you, my God, show me myself).
32
Under Augustines analysis, mans
incomprehensibility to himself thus takes on yet wider and vaster di-
mensions. To begin with, as in the Greek fathers, the analysis points
out not only the image and likeness of God within mans incompre-
hensibility but also a unique privilege held by the human being with
regard to all other creatures (which only resemble their genus, which
is to say, themselves). Next, this incomprehensibility tells man that he
goes beyond and exceeds himself, in short that lhomme passe in-
niment lhomme (man transcends man), following the formulation
of an exemplary Augustinian: in a word, man passes beyond his own
means, man lives above his means.
33
Finally and above all, according
to a strict consequence, only the innite and incomprehensible can
comprehend man, and thus tell him of and show him to himself; only
God can reveal man to man, because man only reveals himself by re-
vealing, without knowing it, the one whose image he bears. Not only
is it true that Je est un autre (I is another), but this other calls him-
self God within man, the speculative Emmanuel. Henceforth, absent
God, man can no longer appear as such, but disgures himself by tak-
ing on the gure of something other than himself, which is to say by
allowing himself to resemble something other than God. This is the
denition of sin: man thinks he attains unto himself by choosing to
resemble less than God. The dissimilarity in the image devalues him
short of God, and, barring God, man loses the human face. Thus the
soul, cum stare debeat ut eis fruatur, volens ea sibi tribuere et non ex
illo similis illius, sed ex ipsa esse quod ille est, avertitur ab eo, movetur
et labitur in minus et minus, quod putat amplius et amplius. Quia nec
ipsa sibi, nec ei quicquam sufcit recedenti ab illo qui solus sufcit
(instead of staying still and enjoying them [the good things of God]
as it ought to, . . . wants to claim them for itself, and rather than be
like him by his gift it wants to be what he is by its own right. So it turns
away from him and slithers and slides down into less and less which is
imagined to be more and more; it can nd satisfaction neither in itself
nor in anything else as it gets further away from him who alone can
God, in The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 13149.
32
Confessiones 10.37.62 (ODonnell, p. 144; Chadwick, p. 216, translation modied).
33
Blaise Pascal, Pensees (Lafuma sec. 131). English translation in A. J. Krailsheimer, trans.,
Pensees (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 34.
19
satisfy it).
34
I shall make only two remarks as commentary on this pow-
erful phenomenology of sin. First, sin does not consist in wanting to
enjoy the supreme good things, those of God, for they are given by
God without jealousy; rather, sin lies in wanting to enjoy them by one-
self and not through God, in wanting to appropriate them for oneself
in the rst person (as in Phil. 2:6: arpagm n), in short in denying the ` o
character of the giftscorning the given as gift. Second, this entire
movement unfolds within the similitudonon ex illo similis ejus
which is to say, within the image and likeness, within mans incompre-
hensibility to himself.
v. the privilege of positive self-unknowing
Mans incomprehensibility to himself thus designates a privilege, one
by which man, or rather the one who alone (taking up Leibnizs for-
mulation) is able to say ego, arrives at recognizing, precisely by never
himself knowing what, or rather whom, it is that he resembles, who it
is who preserves his identity and can name himnone other than the
One who created him. I cannot dene myself, but, like every human
being (and it is precisely in this that we recognize a human being), no
one can know me and tell of me except, eventually, the one who cre-
ates me. God alone knows and preserves within his own secret the
secret of man. Thus my unknowing of myselfotherwise called the
impossibility of my gaining access to myself through any idea, concept,
or image whatsoever that I may produce, except through the image
that another gives to mein no way signies a aw or defect in my
knowledge, as metaphysics has so often claimed. Take, for example,
after Malebranche,
35
Baruch Spinozas belief that he can hold that
mens se ipsam non cognoscit, nisi quatenus corporis affectionum
ideas percipit (the mind does not know itself except insofar as it
perceives ideas of affections of the body).
36
This is a problematic thesis
in every respect, if only because it implies that by knowing the ideas
of what affects its body, the mind would thus know itself as this very
body and, because this body is affected by every other body, the idea
34
Augustine, De Trinitate, 10.5.7. English translation in Edmund Hill, O.P., trans., On the
Trinity (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City, 1992), p. 292. The same argument, exposed in a more
systematic way and at length, may be found in John Scot Eriugena, De Divisione Naturae, IV,
7, PL 122, col. 771 ff. See the standard-setting paper by Bernard McGinn, The Negative
Element in the Anthropology of John the Scot, in Jean Scot Erige`ne et lhistoire de la philosophie,
ed. Rene Roques (Paris: Editions du C.N.R.S., 1975), pp. 31525.
35
Confessiones 10.30.41 (ODonnell, p. 135; Chadwick p. 203, translation modied).
36
Baruch Spinoza, Ethica II, sec. 23. English translation in Samuel Shirley, trans., and Sey-
mour Feldman, ed., The Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), p. 81.
20
that the mens would have of itself would thus coincide with that of the
complete extended world. In this way we would instead have to conrm
that what man would know of himself would precisely not be himself,
but anything other than himself. Similarly, when Kant underscores that
the transcendental I has of itself only a ganzlich leere Vorstellung
(completely empty representation) and thus that it has no experi-
ence of itself and that the transcendental object is equally unknown
[gleich unbekannt] in respect to inner and to outer intuition, what does
he deny to man?
37
Quite clearly, man is denied the status of object,
subjected to an intuition and inscribed within the common experience
of the world, which is to say, Kant denies man what the I can become
only by its disappearing as such, by its ceasing to be that through which
the objects of experience, insofar as they conform to the conditions of
intuition, become possible. Far from this absence of knowledge doing
harm to mans dignity, it appears as the rst bulwark, for, beyond the
question concerning the knowledge of man, the question of what such
knowledge would make of man imposes itself. Indeed, the impossibility
of assigning him any denition at all xes the only correct denition
of man, because it attests to him precisely as das noch nicht festge-
stellte Thier (the animal that is not yet stabilized). Nietzsche here
inherits directly from a tradition that goes back at least to Pico della
Mirandola: homo variae ac multiformis et desultoriae naturae animae
(man [is an] animal of diverse, multiform, variable, and destructible
nature).
38
The nature (and denition) of man is characterized by in-
stabilityman as the being who remains, for himself, to be decided
and about whom one never ceases to be astonished. Man, undecidable
to man, thus loses himself if he claims to decide about himself. He
remains himself only as long as he remains without qualities, other
than those of monstre incomprehensible (a monster that passes all
understanding).
39
Let us not be mistaken: Pascal here designates a priv-
ilege, that of showing forth (monstrare) in oneself the incomprehensible.
But are there not objections to be made? For example, following
Heidegger, one could assimilate the biblical denition according to
image and likeness to the Greek denition according to the possession
37
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 346/B 404, A 354, and A 372, respectively (Smith, pp.
331, 336, and 348).
38
Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884), 25 (428), Werke VII/2, ed. Colli-
Montinari (Berlin and New York, 1974), p. 121. See also Pico della Mirandola, De dignitate
hominis, ed. G. Tonion and O. Boulnois (Paris, 2004), p. 12, and also pp. 4, 6. English
translation in Charles Glenn Wallace, Paul J. W. Miller, and Douglas Carmichael, trans., On
the Dignity of Man, and On Being and the One, and Heptaplus (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965),
p. 6.
39
Pascal, Lafuma sec. 130 (Krailsheimer, p. 32).
21
of l go in order to understand both as imposing upon man the mode o
of Being im Sinne des Vorhandensein (in the sense of subsistence
[occurring and Being-present-at-hand]).
40
But what proof does Hei-
degger give of the equivalence between these two denitions? If nec-
essary, the denition by l go could fall under reproach; but does the o
denition according to the image of God not exclude, precisely, any-
thing having to do, in God and thus in man, with Being as subsistence
(vorhanden)? Unless, that is, Heidegger includes neither denition in
the division of nite being from innite being.
41
But there too, does
he not take up, as if it goes without saying, the metaphysical distinction
par excellence of the ens into nitum and innitum, introduced by Duns
Scotus through to Suarez, without seeing that this distinction doubtless
contradicts the incomprehensibility of the image and likeness? Does
he simply want, in the end, to deny theology the right to tackle the
question of mans status, just as he denies it that of responding to the
question, Why is there something rather than nothing? by holding
that anyone for whom the Bible is divine revelation and truth already
has the answer to the question . . . before it is asked: beings, with the
exception of God Himself, are created by Him. God Himself is as the
uncreated Creator. This remains, Heidegger believes, unacceptable,
because one who holds on to such faith as a basis can, perhaps, em-
ulate and participate in the asking of our question in a certain way,
but he cannot authentically question. . . . He can act only as if [nun
so tun as ob] . . . in the beginning God created heaven and earth,
etc.
42
This argument presupposes in its turn that, by invoking crea-
tion, the believer condently knows and thus comprehends what man
is, because faith certainly tells him. It is precisely the case, however,
that what the Scripture says here establishes nothing certain and pro-
cures no clear and distinct knowledge whatsoever; on the contrary, its
revelation of man as created in the image and likeness of God institutes
an unknowing that is all the more radical in that it is founded in the
incomprehensibility of God himself. From a reverse perspective, would
it not be he who assumes from the outset that the question of man is
inscribed in advance within the horizon of Being and determines man
as the being in whom what is at stake is Being? Would it not be some-
one like this who would here be seeming to think the incomprehen-
40
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1963), sec. 10, p. 48, line 32. English
translation in John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans., Being and Time (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1962), p. 74.
41
Heidegger, Brief uber den Humanismus, GA 9, p. 319.
42
Heidegger, Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik, GA 40, p. 5. English translation in Gregory Fried
and Richard Polt, trans., Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
2000), pp. 78.
22
sibility of man? For it could be that Scripture fails to pose the question
Why something rather than nothing? not out of ignorance, but
rather in order not to presume a horizon, even that of Being, for the
question of man and because it questions the world and man in a way
that is yet more radical than would ever be allowed by the thinking of
Being. And above all, what the Scripture gives as answer to the question
it poses remains by denition a bottomless question, because it per-
petuates nothing less than the incomprehensibility of God. If ques-
tioning denes the piety of thinking, then Scripture, too, unfolds this
piety, because it alone leaves forever free and intact the questioning
of its question.
Despite this, metaphysics has indeed replied (whether it should be
allowed to or not) to the question concerning mans denition of him-
self. And we know well that the Cartesian cogito has no other impor-
tance than to assure the ego its comprehension of itself and thus to
impose itself as the rst principle of every other science. Nevertheless,
it would be more tting to doubt this vulgate of Cartesianism, because
the texts of Descartes so often contradict it. Contradiction occurs rst
of all because the egos very performance of its existence unfolds within
a space that is, from the outset, dialogical (with the Deus qui potest
omnia, with the genius aliquis malignius).
43
Next, contradiction occurs
because the ego of the cogito recognizes that its nite thought culmi-
nates in a faculty of will that is paradoxically innite, ratione cujus
imaginem quandam et similitudinem Dei me refere intelligo (in vir-
tue of [which] . . . I understand myself to bear in some way the image
and likeness of God); and above all the common understanding of
the comprehensibility of the ego is contradicted because the ego iden-
ties its faculty of thinking of itself with the image and likeness of God
within it, to the point that the faculty of self-knowing is simply one
with the faculty of knowing God: ex hoc uno quod Deus me creavit,
valde credibile est me quodammodo ad imaginem et similitudinem
ejus factum esse, illamque similitudinem, in qua Dei idea continetur,
a me precipi per eandem facultatem, per quam ego ipse a me perci-
pior (but the mere fact that God created me is a very strong basis
for believing that I am somehow made in his image and likeness and
that I perceive that likeness, which includes the idea of God, by the
same faculty which enables me to perceive myself).
44
Let us consider
43
See Meditationes, AT 8:21, line 2 and 8:22, line 24, respectively. See my study Lalterite
originaire de lego, in Questions cartesiennes II: Sur lego et sur Dieu (Paris: Presses universitaires
de France, 1996), chap. 1.
44
Mediationes, AT 4:57, lines 1415 and 2:51, lines 1823, respectively (Cottingham et al.,
pp. 101 and 98, respectively).
23
this extraordinary text: founding the thinking of self upon my thinking
of God, to the point of merging them within the space opened by the
image of and likeness to God. Even more: because Descartes at the
same time does not cease to underscore the fact that remaining incom-
prehensible belongs to the very denition of God (idea enim inniti,
ut sit vera, nullo modo debet comprehendi, quonima ipsa incompre-
hensibilitas in ratione formali inniti continetur [the idea of the in-
nite, in order to be true, cannot by any means be comprehended,
since this very incomprehensibility is comprised within the formal con-
cept of the innite]), we must conclude that, strictly speaking, the
ego, image of the incomprehensible, remains incomprehensible also to
itself.
45
The power and profundity of mans incomprehensibility is such
that even the ego cogito is inscribed therein and conrms it.
vi. the question without a response
According to Aristotle, only the divine can reach the point of think-
ing its own thinking and knowing itself absolutely. And man has nei-
ther a denition of nor access to this knowledge. The theology of rev-
elation, through other paths, conrms this impossibility. And yet, it no
longer understands this impossibility as something forbidden, but
rather as a grace and a privilege: man remains incomprehensible, but
in the image and likeness of the incomprehensible par excellence; he
thus holds a derived and gracious excellence: that of knowing himself
as incomprehensible.
Put another way, man appears to himself as a phenomenon that he
cannot constitute, because he exceeds the eld of every horizon and
of every system of categories. Which can be formulated as: man appears
to himself as a saturated phenomenon.
Philosophy must know, and thus also not cease to will to know, the
one who knows, at the risk of degrading the one who knows (himself)
to the status of what he knows. Theology in the strict sense recognizes
its objectin fact, a formal nonobjectas revelation. It thus accepts,
or rather claims as its highest epistemological necessity, to treat of the
incomprehensibility of God, such as it results directly from his innity
and, above all, from his holiness.
The incomprehensibility of the human being remains. Founded and
required by the incomprehensibility of the One whose image and like-
ness man bears, it is bound up with theology. Nevertheless it does not
45
Meditationes, Ve Responsiones, AT 6:368, lines 24. English translation in Elizabeth S. Hal-
dane and G. R. T. Ross, trans., The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1967), 2:218.
24
belong entirely, or even foremost, to theology, because man must com-
prehend this very incomprehensibility, by opposing it to, and preserv-
ing it in front of, every other comprehension that he gains over every
other thingthings that can become objects. Let us recall here Paul
Ricurs brilliant statement: the claim by knowledge to constitute it-
self raises the most formidable obstacle to the idea of revelation. In
this regard, Husserls transcendental idealism potentially contains the
very same atheistic outcome as Feuerbachs idealism of self-conscious-
ness.
46
In this sense, which is rst of all negative, or rather denegatory,
mans incomprehensibility comes under the domain of philosophy.
Thus, in its relation to both philosophy and (revealed) theology,
which it skirts by opposition, the incomprehensibility of the human
being can be seen to dene the proper domain of what I willingly call
the philosophy of religion.
46
Paul Ricur, Hermeneutique de lidee de Revelation, in La Revelation, ed. Daniel Cop-
pieters de Gibson (Bruxelles: Facultes universitaires Saint-Louis, 1977), p. 46.

Mihi Magna Quaestio Factus Sum

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Mihi magna quaestio factus sum : The Privilege of Unknowing

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