Is the Possible Doing Justice to God?

Actus justitiae est reddere debitum. Sed Deus nulli est debitor. Ergo Deo non competit justitia.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, Q. XXI, Art. I

I would have preferred not to speak of God. I don't deny the possibility of speaking to God; the great Judeo-Christian tradition has done it and still does. But speaking of God is particularly risky in philosophy, by using ideas, concepts, and categories that might turn out to be irrelevant to God (or not worthy of Him).

I hope He will forgive me nevertheless, for speaking of Him in this chapter, taking into account the fact that this is a reply to a friend of mine whom I like and sincerely admire. Long before Heidegger asked, “How does the deity enter into philosophy?”¹Close Pascal opposed the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to the God of the philosophers. In the wake of these great forerunners, Richard Kearney in The God Who May Be suggests thinking of God not as an actuality, but rather as a possibility, and initiating a hermeneutical-poetical approach to the divine, rather than seeking Him through the onto theological determinations of standard metaphysics.

My goal in the following pages will not be to refute this highly respectable position that Kearney maintains with a great deal of talent and with such poetical insight. It would be preposterous to negate the possibility of religious faith. It would be even more dangerous and illegitimate to claim God is an absolute impossibility. Even the most determinate and coherent atheism is erected within the framework of a possibility it rejects, on the ground of arguments in favor of a more valuable thesis, namely, God might exist; but we also have sufficient arguments against this possibility.

Abraham, Job, David, and the prophets speak directly to God. They don't speak of God as theologians and philosophers do. This being admitted, are philosophers guilty of arguing and seeking reasons in regard to God? Certainly not. Kant demonstrated once and for all that the search for argumentation in the metaphysical domain is unavoidable, for it reveals the very structure of pure reason.

But how is it possible to advance beyond classical metaphysics? Is a discourse on the possible opening up new horizons? Is the possible doing justice to God? My first reply will be negative: the possible as a philosophical category cannot do justice to God. Does it completely preclude the possibility of the impossible, this new kind of possibility which Kearney suggests? I shall eventually answer maybe— how could I be expected to exclude any kind of possibility?—provided certain methodological precautions are taken.

As the first category of modality, the possible is defined by Kant as “that which is in accordance with the formal conditions of experience.”;²Close These formal conditions of experience being given by space and time, it is impossible that I suddenly become a pure spirit or an angel, or that I have an unchanging intuition of eternal presence. I can move from one place to another, but I cannot be everywhere at the same moment. On the contrary, God, who is not submitted to the formal conditions of experience, is not potentially here or there, now and then; He is potentially and actually everywhere at once and the same time. The possible, thought as deprivation, a lack of form or potentiality, is not in conformity with the notion of the supreme being. Kearney is right in stressing that the God of metaphysics is a pure actuality, purus Actus essendi(a pure act of Being), as Thomas Aquinas puts it. As such, we agree that the possible cannot do justice to God, neither from the viewpoint of classical metaphysics nor if it remains within the framework of the (metaphysical) first category of modality.

Now one might argue that, for the very same reason, actuality as a category should not benefit from the privilege of characterizing God's supreme nature. If God is simply actual, would He be deprived of possibility and of necessity? Would He be limited to the self-offering of His very presence and to an ontologically static sovereignty? Is actuality rich enough to express God's infinity and transcendence? By criticizing the ontotheological conception of God, Kearney picks up on the same kind of objection against the exclusion of other qualifications, such as openness, dynamism, and teleology, in what he calls “standard metaphysics.”

The problem is nevertheless more complex, primarily because it is not clear where the limits of “standard metaphysics.” are located. Kearney also speaks of a “metaphysics of the Possible,.” which in comparison with “standard metaphysics” would not suffer from its limitations, and he further initiates “post-metaphysical readings of the possible” (including Husserl's teleology of reason). A clearer view of the distinctions between “standard metaphysics,” the metaphysics of the possible, and postmetaphysical discourses is needed. I shall return to this point later.

The second difficulty is to be found within the metaphysical conception of the actuality of God. I would agree with Kearney in protesting against the highest metaphysical insights regarding the essence of God, in the cases where these reduce God's actuality to a plain actuality, as we would find within the conditions of experience. But this is not at all the case. The “pure act of Being” is not equivalent to actuality in the ordinary sense. It does not preclude our understanding of the possible, since it goes far beyond any human, limited representation, or category. Let us take the example of a great metaphysical intuition, namely, Malebranche's conception of the immensity (immensité;) of God. No idea is sufficient to lead us to God's immensity. No material infinity could do this either. A materially infinite extension is not yet God's immensity, that is to say, “being without any limitation” (l'être sans restriction). The possible is not omitted here, since the divine Being includes everything created as well as possible. Malebranche adds, “All beings, created and possible, with all their multiplicity, cannot fill up the broad extension of Being.”³Close God as Being par excellence, the God of Exodus (3:14), who is the “who He is,” is actuality as well as possibility.

How could He be deprived of the possible? I suppose that Kearney would concede that the possible is formally included by classical metaphysics within the attributes or qualities of God, but that he would object that it has not been thought as such, as that opennness to the unpredictable, which is the “possible-impossible” of the promise and an open eschatology. Provisionally accepting this answer, I can take it into account under the following condition: if the meaning of the possible has radically changed, let us not give the impression that this change is the replacement of one category with another.⁴Close Let us eliminate any reversal of this kind. We should not try to retrieve a metaphysical category. Instead, we should turn toward this radical innovation which takes place in (and with) The God Who May Be.

The new direction of the possible is not given by abstract theological or metaphysical considerations regarding the essence of God, but is illustrated through phenomenological descriptions and inspired by the presence of the Other, as a person (persona or prosopon) in epiphanic moments, such as the burning bush, the transfiguration of Christ, or the rereading of the Song of Songs. Are these glimpses purely phenomenological? They are already hermeneutical in that they refer to the text of the Holy Bible, especially in chapter 2 of The God Who May Be, in which Kearney proposes an exegesis of the famous quotation of Exodus. The reply of God to Moses, “‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh” is first understood according to the traditional ontological reading, “I am the one who is.” The second reading is eschatological and stresses the future mission of Moses as well as our possible commitment to the promise of God: “God does not reveal himself, therefore, as an essence in se but as an I-Self for us” (GMB, 29). Beyond any negative theology, this reading is completed with the attempt of a via tertia, inspired by Eckhart's interpretation of God as passage. How is this third way the “possibilizing” of God? It is through a paradoxical “possibility of the impossible,” a desire beyond desire. Such a deconstructive hermeneutics of the would-be may lead to a poetics of the possible God in the conclusion of The God Who May Be.

I hope that this too-brief summary of Kearney's approach to a new sense of the religious (in terms of a radical may-be) sufficiently shows that phenomenology and hermeneutics are intimately united and can work together in this way, provided that their “object” is revealed, or inscribed within our experience, through texts, traces, words, poems, and so on. But is it really satisfactory to claim that all these figures or symbols of the divine are immanent? Classical metaphysics had already made a distinction between the essence of God and his human representations or images. One could claim that the possible God is not God at all, but just an announcement of His abslute transcendence. A hermeneutical phenomenology might pave the way for some kind of genuine faith and true theology. But is it truly continuing in this direction?

In fact, the novelty of Kearney's attempt lies perhaps more in the appeal to deconstruction than in the rearticulation of a hermeneutical phenomenology. The very heart and the aporia of this attempt is a retrieval of Derrida's “impossible-possible.” This is the reason why we have to pause, in order to make a closer examination of this kind of paradox.

It cannot be denied that the “perhaps” is the condition of possibility for any experience, insofar it is open to an unpredictable future. An event would not be an event without this kind of radical indeterminacy of what happens and of what might happen. But should the acceptance of this assumption lead to Jacques Derrida's thesis⁵Close that there is, in this way, an anticipation of the possible as impossible? This kind of double bind was already suggested by Levinas, who wrote, “The impossible does not vanish as that which contradicts itself. It is impossible in the sense that one says: this life is impossible; this life is impossible, even though it is. Being works the impossible out.”⁶Close In this way, Levinas makes it clear that the impossibility at stake here is not formal or literal; it is a very personal way of protesting against the injustice of misfortune. When one says, “This day is impossible,” it is just a way of speaking, without giving any precision on the level of empirical possibilities or impossibilities. I concede that the possible advent or coming of the Messiah might be considered both as a possibility and as an impossibility. However, are these two terms on the same level in the strict sense, even in this very exceptional example? It is not true that, strictly speaking, any scientific or technological invention challenges the impossible. It challenges, rather, our usual conceptions and the overly mental framework that we have of the possible. It is not true either that a genuine “pardon” in the sense of Levinas and Derrida occurs as an impossible; its unpredictability is not to be confused with a strict impossibility. Should not a difference be maintained between the “impossible” and the “unlikely”? Blurring this distinction could lead one to lose the sense of the very limits of every experience that we try to undertand in its richness. It could also allow an overly simple rhetoric of undecidability. To this first objection, one may add another that more clearly indicates Kearney's return to Derrida's point of view, namely, is not this phenomenology of the “perhaps” both too loose and too general to fit with the approach to God? What might be, or happen to occur, in general is so wide-open that it includes just about anything you want to put there. One does not need to be a theologian to understand that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob remains a distant figure, if we start our analysis from the position of an indeterminate “may-be.”

But Kearney does even more than this, since he eventually recalls the great hermeneutical insights of God as possible within our Western tradition, the Aristotelian understanding of dunamis, the magnificent conception by Cusanus of a coeternal union between actuality and possibility in God, and Schelling's interpretation of Exodus 3:15 as Seyn koönnende(GMB, 101–106). Are these hermeneutic retrievals nothing more than reinstitutions of metaphysics under the pretext of its transfiguration? Kearney does not really deny this. He claims that the overcoming of the old metaphysics of presence unfolds a new teleological metaphysics of the may-be (GMB, 110). This means that a determinate metaphysics (“standard metaphysics”) is replaced by another, better one; let us call it a “hermeneutical metaphysics.” At any rate, is not the very gesture of “transfiguring” being highly metaphysical (as well as looking for a “desire beyond desire,” as Levinas does)?

These remarks are not intended to blame metaphysics or to prevent any retrieval of its greatness, provided that one makes clear what the methodological stakes are. Such a return would imply dropping or seriously correcting the Heideggerian conception of metaphysics as ontotheology. What puzzles me is that Kearney seems to accept this (since he alludes to it without questioning it)⁷Close while at the same time claiming that the possible God he is aiming at is “postmetaphysical.”⁸Close But how can one be both highly metaphysical and beyond (or after) it? Is not the very notion of a “postmetaphysical” era extremely historicist? Furthermore, the possibility of an overcoming of metaphysics proves to be a much more difficult task than many postmodern discourses assume it to be.

Is the possible doing justice to God? I shall not answer as negatively as I did at first, provided that one avoids using the Possible as a metaphysical category and that one respects God's quant à soi, which is perhaps the key notion of the crucial passage in Exodus 3:14. I find it fascinating to build upon a “poetics of the possible,” as Kearney has and continues to do. My point is that when the project becomes philosophical, trying to “adumbrate a philosophy of God,” more methodological requirements should be required (GMB, 6). Therefore, I would prefer that (1) the difference was clarified between a phenomenology and a hermeneutics of the may-be, which would not yet be theological nor religious, since the may-be is open to everything possible; (2) one would have to take into account the various possible versions of a hermeneutical phenomenology of faith and religion, inasmuch they would rest on the reading of sacred texts, above all the Bible; and (3) while considering the legacy of metaphysics, it does not seem illegitimate either to look for a retrieval of the highest tradition of ontotheology (such as Ricœur does in his later work) or to perform the unceasing deconstruction of metaphysics in the manner of Derrida. In my view, all these attempts are possible, but not necesarily compatible. The solution does not lie in the notion of anything “postmetaphysical,” since the desire for an overcoming of metaphysics does not guarantee a complete “success.”

How can we escape from such a methodological dilemma? I don't possess a magic wand to help us get out of this labyrinth. I simply want both to profess my empathy toward Kearney's attempt and to present my methodological objections, without excluding the possibility of one day reaching a complete agreement, provided that we can continue with our most friendly dialogue. Let us hope that this may be the case!⁹Close