Stylizations of Being: Attention as an Existential Hub in Heidegger and Christian Mysticism

1.1 Attention and Object: Marion’s Aesthetic Grace

The elision of the phenomenological subject is evident in Marion’s saturated phenomenon. I will briefly resort to Roquentin, the protagonist in Sartre’s Nausea, to succinctly showcase how Marion’s saturated phenomenon mostly limits attention to the aesthetic force of the object. Throughout the novel, Roquetin’s nausea serves to foreground Heidegger’s conspicuousness through Roquentin’s awkwardness in face of the objective presence of things. ^[23] The overbearing weight of physical existence makes Roquentin nauseous. The novel, however, closes with an intimation of revelation that suggests a contrasting lightness of ‘being’. A sublime song beckons Roquentin to overcome existence by “being”, authentically. Is Sartre fusing Heidegger’s ‘being’ with an episode of grace? In this case, we would be witnessing something akin to Rahner’s importation, set in a (dramatized) phenomenology of revelation. Yet it does not take too much to recognize the plainly aesthetic, over the religious, experience: no theophanic vocabulary (no mention of ‘God’) nor symptoms of any change to the self and thus religious grammar at play (no conversion, nor any sense of moral transformation). What happens is that Roquentin feels freed from the weight of daily meaninglessness and is inspired to write a novel - to create a beautiful object like the song he hears. It is the sublimity of art that is translated into existentialist revelation.

Although there is (purposely, of course) nothing religious about Roquentin’s revelatory experience, an aesthetic framework of grace, as I have discussed elsewhere, is recognizable. ^[24] What interests me here is how Marion’s criteria of saturated phenomena (designed for theophanic phenomenology) may so easily extend to cover aesthetic experiences. Marion himself is clear about this: “In fact, already with the doctrine of the sublime we are dealing with a saturated phenomenon.” ^[25] Indeed, the song ticks off all of Marion’s four reversals of the Kantian phenomenal rubrics; ^[26] and the ending of the novel can be read as phenomenological revelation according to Marion’s standards. ^[27]

The problem with Marion’s overly inclusive criteria, however, is they provide no subjective content for theophany. That Marion’s criteria cannot clearly distinguish theological from aesthetic events is a result, I believe, of his quasi-exclusive concern with the phenomenological object, whereas theophanic content would necessarily involve a faithfully attending subject.

Must we necessarily accuse of an ‘anthropological reduction’ a phenomenology that would first take ‘the human as such,’ … in our finitude, for the point of departure of its phenomenality? And must we not, on the contrary, hold at once as impossible … all the bedazzlement of the ‘phenomenon of revelation’ that would give itself all at once, almost directly and independently of all the (transcendental) conditions of its reception? ^[28]

Falque’s approach (itself stemming from an attack on Marion) is favourable to me not only for his philosophical approach to theophany (as Deketelaere puts it, a description about, not from, faith), ^[29] but mostly because, by insisting on the “conditions of its reception”, he directs us to a logical space for the faculty of attention within an existential phenomenology of religion. For, by designating the human as the point of phenomenological departure (instead of the theophanic) and necessitating a perceiving subject ab initio, an existential phenomenology implicitly requires a place for attention: the logical space – a hub - for a phenomenological relation between subject and object. But before we can move onto this logic of relatability, and having seen how Marion focuses on the object, let us turn to consider the role of the subject in attention.

1.2 Attention and Subject: Stoic Meditational Exercises

As we have seen, William James defined attention as interested focalization through an opposition to reactive distraction. This opposition is the starting point for the spiritual discipline of attention: as Philip Novak states, “ordinary attention comes and goes without one’s consent; it is not something one does, but something that happens to an individual.” ^[30] The aim of spiritual attention, therefore, is that we cease to be a passive (our ordinary mode of being-towards-beings) to become an active agent of attention, learning how to control and eventually eliminate our “automatic, egocentric, habit-determined patterns of thought.” ^[31]

In Ideas I, Husserl anchors this intentional actualization of attention to the subjective end of the phenomenal relation. ^[32] Husserl distinguishes between three levels of attention, which Bégout helps correlate “to three places in the field of consciousness: the given, the co-given and the horizon of givenness” and in turn to “theme, thematic field and unthematic or marginal field”. ^[33] As we move farther in the levels, we move from an actualized focus towards the more indistinct and fuzzy, until we are finally not aware of phenomena which are, notwithstanding, part of our perceptive field. Bringing phenomena into thematic focal definition requires intentionality of attention, which Husserl, resorting to the analogy of attention as light (again), ^[34] describes as an ‘Ego-ray’. This Ego-ray is essentially subjective: it emanates from the self to shed light on the object; ^[35] and as a willed act of choosing whereupon to direct one’s attention, defines the Ego’s freedom and ‘vivacity’. ^[36] Attention is active, therefore, where there is intended directionality.

A concern with the subjective control of attention was prominent in Stoic philosophy, where attention (prosoche) was, as Pierre Hadot famously put it, a ‘way of life’: a tool for a therapeutics of the self. Stoic attention was directed not towards God but mostly self-reflexively at the self, as a form of moral vigilance that should perceive how distant the self is, in its desires and actions, from the referential norm of logos. ^[37]Prosoche was moral logocentrism par excellence: a moral handle on the self against the lure of impressions, a rationalized will instated through constant vigilance of the self’s attitudes towards impressions. There is a radicalized detachment of the self from relations with beings. ^[38] The ideal of ataraxia is, from this perspective, best understood as a bulwark within a protective attention of the self. Given its self-reflexive focus, prosoche is the potentially solipsistic counterpart to Marion’s elision of the subject. ^[39] Here attention is ultimately all about the subject.

Logocentric, Stoic attentional methodology was inevitably textual. Hadot explains how Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations are a series of attentional exercises, aphorisms designed to function like practical handles to guide the soul, called procheiron. ^[40] These meditations were discursive exercises (meditatio: ‘an exercise’, ‘a practice in something’) designed to rewire the self: they were used like short prayers; or mnemonic triggers to remind ourselves of philosophical themes, such as our limited existential condition. ^[41] It is crucial to acknowledge that even though procheiron run the risk of logocentrically locking the self in moral solipsism, they inherently provide a methodology designed to counteract passive, distracted attention.

The Stoic ascetic combating of phenomenological lure would later, incorporated into Christian mysticism, be used as the training that goes into developing the required sustained thematic attention used in contemplative prayer. ^[42] It is because sustained attention is so effortful that meditation as ascetic training is required for the apophatic practice of contemplation. ^[43] I shall argue that understanding this sequential link is crucial to understanding Heidegger’s move from BT [Being and Time] to his later ‘reification’. ^[44]

2.1 Attention as an Existential Hub

The relational aspect of prayer understood as attention is key in Nancy’s existential characterization of faith as a being-unto God. “What there is revelation of is not ‘God,’ as if He were something that can be exhibited (that is why to the question ‘what is God?’ there is and there is not an answer), it is rather the unto-God (I’à-Dieu) or being-unto-god.” ^[63] As we have seen, attention should be understood as the existential hub phenomenologically mediating subject and object: what becomes prominent (or of value), then, is not ‘what’ one or the other ‘is’, but the meaningfulness of the relation of the two terms. This relational dimension is key in Heidegger’s philosophy.

In BT, circumspection and care are two central existential categories that structure Dasein precisely by activating modes of attention within a space of relational meaningfulness. Here we find a place for authentic intimacy within existential immanence and finitude. ^[64] For Heidegger, the world is always already related in care. Beings come near (and we closer to being-in-the-world) as they become ready-to-hand, i.e., as we heed them in care. Circumspection is also a mode of attention to things, which indicates that useful things, when used and not simply ‘stared at’, reveal themselves as participating in a world. ^[65]

Attitudes and moods take precedence to rationalized concepts in BT. Ideas do not participate in beings through Platonic referentiality, in the inevitable distance between words and beings: we participate (methexis) with innerworldly beings that already show forth their meaning within a totality of relevance. And so Heidegger, in the way of the ancient Greeks, calls beings ‘that which comes forth’ (aletheia) instead of ‘objects’ (which as a term feeds on the a priori idea that we are separated from the world). Heidegger, in short, turns methexis on its head: what separates us from the world, after all, are ideas and the presupposition that we are to participate via discursive referentiality. Heidegger thus undermines analytic rationalism, accusing philosophy of distorting the being of beings by veiling it with a certain style of thinking. ^[66] It should by now be clear to see how this line of thinking bears close affinities with contemplation, as I have been outlining it.

We also need to understand that contemplation itself is an askesis in the sense of a willed negative effort: on top of negating desire-as-will, in contemplation we must also move beyond the cataphatic, negating analytic thinking and the discourses that cover up attitudinal relatedness. ^[67] This is what contemplation effects, in contrast to meditation. And in this light, Heidegger’s distancing from a logocentric ontology is illuminated by contemplation as a form of attention to ‘being’ that, like Weil’s, includes thinking.

The later Heidegger directly inscribed himself in the contemplative tradition: “The effort to make an adequate translation of the final words of the saying, the attempt to hear what is expressed in the Greek words eon emmenai, is nothing less than the attempt to take to heart That which calls on us to think.” ^[68]; “the difficulty of going over from the saying word of the still covetous vision of things, from the work of the eyes, to the ‘work of the heart’.” ^[69] In what follows, I will try to show how the forms of attention we have been discussing bear on Heidegger’s ‘turn’ as a style of thinking ‘being’.

3.1 Stylizations of Thinking

Nick Trakakis has comprehensively contextualized the question of style, which in “the philosophy of religion, a field that has recently experienced a renewal in both the analytic and Continental traditions … often accords the question of style special prominence, for it is widely held that in this sphere at least the ‘what’ (what is true) is closely connected to the ‘how’ (the manner in which we discover and express that which is true).” ^[70] The distinctions between meditation and contemplation are paralleled in a recent stylistic division within philosophy: “The heart of the analytic/Continental opposition is most evident in methodology, that is, in a focus on analysis or on synthesis.”^[71]

This is especially evident in the later Heidegger, widely acknowledged as an, if not the, exemplary figure of the Continental style. When Richard Rorty criticizes (like Sheehan above) what he sees as Heidegger’s reversal to a metaphysical ousiology, Rorty is also irritated on account of a matter of styles of thinking, of what he calls a “reification of language”: the seeping of metaphor and mystical language into philosophical discourse. In BT, the earlier Heidegger’s therapeutic destruktion was, Rorty argues, similar to the later Wittgenstein’s writing in Philosophical Investigations (where everything is already alright with the world: the problem is philosophy and its theoretical pictures). Both sought a “detranscendentalized, naturalized conception of philosophy as a form of therapy, as a techne rather than as the achievement of theoria.” ^[72] The analytic style is often equated with a pursuit of clarity through the use of the ordinary, ‘folk’ language that the later Wittgenstein developed and inspired as a style. But as the earlier Wittgenstein’sTractatus and Heidegger’s BT both exemplify, “often obstructing the goal of clarity is the analytic philosopher’s penchant for formalization.” ^[73] Both of these works are highly formalized and technical: their common denominator is not exactly clarity but explanation. But Heidegger then took a ‘turn’. What changed in terms of his thinking that we may associate with contemplative attention?

Philosophical works in the Continental style “are more literary than scientific in style and temperament.” ^[74] The consequences are significant. For one, this style distances itself from explanation to focus on expression, which is traditionally viewed as including attitudinal content, but also stands to mean that the supposed difference between ‘form and content’ collapse. Whereas in the analytic style ‘form’ (often taken as the very idea of ‘style’) is seen as an added element that distracts from factual thinking, in the continental style form is regarded as organic to content, meaning that “if the mode of presentation is altered, so is the content.” ^[75] It is because thinking and discourse are inseparable (at least in public presentation) that “Heidegger justifies his violence to German by arguing that language shapes thought; if ontology is to be rethought from the ground up, the old terms will need to be overhauled if not completely discarded.” ^[76] This element was already present in BT’s manifold technical neologisms: the metaphoric (i.e., language operated to produce novel thinking) working at a vocabulary level. But what characterizes Heidegger’s later works – leading irritated critics to classify his works as obscurantist, is also a premeditated stylistic emphasis on aporia.

3.2 Heidegger’s Aporetic Stylization of Being

Briefly returning to the topic of Rahner’s importation - Masson, in his 1973 article, explained how a younger Rahner had misread Heidegger’s ‘hearing’ as that of traditional metaphysics: hearing a being. ^[77] Rahner had missed the point due to a crucial grammatical confusion: whereas he was expecting the logical form of a statement, Heidegger was using the logical form of a question: “The true problem is what we do not know and what, insofar as we know it authentically, namely as a problem, we know only questioningly. To know how to question means to know how to wait, even a whole lifetime.” ^[78] As Masson explains, directly linking aporia to attention, “it is in reference to this question that the sense of ‘hearing’ or ‘attending’ is developed.” ^[79]

The grammatical form of the question as an existential investigation, however, was already constitutive of the mystical tradition of contemplation. In a chapter illustratively called “Logic of Mysticism”, Herbert McCabe redescribes Thomistic analogy as based on aporia: we “can use language to say what God is so long as we always realize that we do not know what our words mean … As Weil has said of the supernatural good, ‘we can say that God is love, so long as we recognize that this love is incomprehensible.’” ^[80] And yet “we mean these statements quite literally.” ^[81] ‘To mean literally’ then, is simply to assert belief. Thus, statements about God are always already incomprehensible, i.e., limited to the realm of questioning. ^[82] Weil’s mystical thinking is also, of course, avowedly aporetic. ^[83] Yet, although Heidegger uses the grammar of contemplation, he never, of course, adopts the vocabulary of the Christian tradition. He does not state faith but meaningfulness. While both traverse contradiction, Weil’s contemplation secures a destination: the final grounded certainty of the name that the word ‘God’ secures, whilst that of Heidegger’s remains groundless, shifting between rethought versions of ‘being’. His contemplation of ‘being’ remains in our world.

The later Heidegger pursued not one, but several reified versions of Being. For Nancy, this is all a confusion. “All of these proofs and counterproofs put together have perhaps never demonstrated anything other than the fact that being is and is not.” ^[84] I agree to an extent; however, I am trying to argue how this ambiguously intermingling conflation of grammatical elements that are shared by both ‘God’ and ‘being’ on Heidegger’s part served not to prove something, but to express the very being-unto existence that is at the epicenter of existential thinking. This is partly why the question of style is important. For although one might be inclined to call Heidegger’s turn one of being-unto-‘Being’, his purposeful stylizations of ‘being’ by, for example, resorting to altered spellings (‘Seyn’) and crossing-outs (‘being’) directly express the (mystically) blasphemous insufficiency of the word. In his textual strategies, which are nothing but a demonstration of his very thought, he is in line with Nancy. ^[85]

In Heidegger’s later thinking, questioning is pursued stylistically: forced on readers as the authentic mode of thinking. As McGrath explains, “the ambiguity generated by Heidegger is not, then, the chaos generated by unclear thinking, but a deliberate and skillfully executed obfuscation – like a Zen koan – designed to break our heads and free us of the hardened categories that obstruct genuine understanding.” ^[86] The style is formally and logically expressive because it has become a speech-act of the kind of thinking Heidegger was calling for in BT: the substitution of rationalism by a fundamental ontology.

In sum, in the sequential framework I have been sketching, BT was Heidegger’s ‘meditation’ (the explicative establishing of a structural framework). His later apophatic style is a series of attempts that can only be described as intentionally paradoxical attempts to enact two different language acts (or ‘communicative directions’) at once: to speak the ‘language of the heart’: to speak a hearing: “The being of beings directs that which constitutes the fundamental character of thinking – the legein and noien – into its own nature. What so directs calls on us to think.” ^[87] So Heidegger engages in various repeated attempts, all tautological motions within this contradiction of a ‘speaking-hearing’: discursive meditations that simultaneously desire to ‘be’ (or, as writing, to signal, to express) a ‘silent’ language-of-the-heart. As such, these meditations can only shift as ‘différancial’ mythemes over a groundless being-unto. We can think of them, I believe, as existential reactions to Wittgenstein’s thought that “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.” ^[88]

Indeed, the later Heidegger’s various meditations bear forth constantly new ‘revelations’, expressing groundlessness itself. ^[89] Because Heidegger constantly resumed his contemplative thinking anew, he could not escape this tautological circle. Each time he came back to ‘the clearing’ (or ‘the draft’, etc.), the first principle he named as the ‘source of thinking’ was different. In 1946 Heidegger thematized thinking as a poetic response to a riddle. ^[90] Following a lecture to the Bremen Club in 1951, he writes a genealogy: “Once . . . in the beginning of Western thinking, the essence of language flashed in the light of Being - once, when Heraclitus thought the logos as his guiding word, so as to think in this word the Being of beings.” ^[91] Thinking here gained a source and name - not ‘God’ but, in a reversal of Stoicism, “logos is the name for the Being of beings.” ^[92] But as a writing, as a saying that is groundless and without the concluding dogma of a name, Heidegger’s mythemes continued to incessantly unfold in spatial and temporal metaphors of aletheia: the ‘clearing’, the ‘draft’, the ‘Fourfold’, ‘building dwellings’, the ‘Moment’…