Phenomenology Out of Bounds? Jean-Yves Lacoste’s Phenomenology and the Presence of God

Abstract

This article articulates Jean-Yves Lacoste’s account of phenomenology. It does so by tracing Lacoste’s relation to Husserl. Although the influence of Heidegger on Lacoste’s thinking has been sufficiently studied, his relation to the father of phenomenology perhaps is not. The aim of this essay is to see whether Lacoste’s practice of phenomenology still qualifies as phenomenology proper or whether, as some might be inclined to think, it is an improper venturing into the terrain of theology. For this, we offer an account both of Lacoste’s conception of “theological thinking” and of the phenomenon he describes so beautifully, the presence of God in liturgical and sacramental presence. This article concludes by, perhaps, putting into parentheses some of Lacoste’s findings by pointing to Jacques Derrida’s take on Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, questioning once more the bounds and boundaries of Lacoste’s phenomenology of faith and opening avenues for further research.

1. Phenomenology without Borders?

Dominique Janicaud, years ago, argued that phenomenology was high-jacked by theology, that is, by claims to one or the other “invisible” instance that appears, whether it be the face in Levinas or the saturated phenomenon in Jean-Luc Marion. The purview of phenomenology should be restricted to the visible, and the visible alone is what appears (Janicaud 2000, p. 26). Whereas Janicaud requested that phenomenology remained within these borders, the proponents of the theological turn, themselves, offered their own critique of phenomenology’s limits. What is visible and what appears, they say, are but small, safe portions of our experience: it is either a simple object that one can thus see (Husserl) or be made aware of a network of beings (Heidegger). It is, above all, Marion who detected Husserl’s “intoxication with constitutions” (Marion 1998, p. 142), that is, with the reduction of what appears to that which can be adequately circumscribed and defined. Marion, in a sense, wants to substitute this world of safe objects and beings, complying to our desire to comprehend that which appears, with an overwhelming amount of saturated phenomena that constantly bedazzle and overturn the limits of our being-in-the-world. Jacques Derrida, in his own way, has criticized this quest and drive for objectification and essentialization of phenomenology by focusing on what eludes precisely the desire for objectification—a critique to which we will return in our conclusion. Jean-Yves Lacoste, as we will see, repeats Marion’s critique of Husserl but will, more than Marion, focus on the back and forth of our existence in the world (with objects and beings) and that which possibly exceeds this world. A contemporary proponent of the theological turn, Emmanuel Falque sides with Lacoste on this score and wants Lacoste to pay even more attention to the peculiarities of our finite existence (Falque 2018, pp. 195–220). In any case, one will need to understand that Lacoste joins this quest “beyond” mere objects and objectness: is it really the case that phenomenology cannot speak of that which does not take on the contours of an object and must remain silent? Lacoste will tell us no.

Lacoste so tries to open a border zone, where it is no longer certain where the limit between phenomenology and theology can be drawn or in which discipline exactly we would find ourselves. This article will argue, in line with Lacoste’s thinking of the missing frontier between these disciplines, that what Lacoste seeks is a bridge that constantly crosses the distance between his, admitted, radical phenomenology and the discipline of theology, which in Lacoste’s case is quite orthodox: he will try to elucidate spiritual and sacramental experiences in phenomenological fashion. This paper will try to show this bridging by focusing on Lacoste’s account of Husserl and of phenomenology, which remains understudied in the literature.

Lacoste states that phenomenology is “neutral” when it comes to the opposition of philosophy and theology: even though there are objects of research that are proper to philosophy and phenomena that concern theology alone, “such objects are fewer than one might think” (Lacoste 2018a, p. ix). If phenomenology, on the other hand, can be understood as the practice of describing what appears as it appears—what now is conceptualized as the phenomenon in “the how” of its appearing—then “the appearing of God” can be described in exact the same way as the appearing of, say, a number. These descriptions, so Lacoste’s rally cry goes, proceed “univocally” (Lacoste 2008, p. 9).

The problem of phenomenology is then none other than “to describe and distinguish their different modes of appearing” (Lacoste 2018a, p. ix). For this, the phenomenologist needs to heed a double task. It is, first, to “let appear” certain phenomena. For this, quite a service is rendered by “intuition”, which lets phenomena appear “in every possible way” (Lacoste 2018a, p. x). Secondly, phenomenology “makes appear” certain phenomena. Its descriptions are such that it allows others to see this very phenomenon for themselves. This “labor” of phenomenology thus results in the fact that what appears does so “more and better” (ibid.). After phenomenological description, one sees more of the phenomenon in question and so one sees it better to the point that there is “over-appearing” (surapparaître)1, a term that Lacoste uses elsewhere. If this method then allows one to describe both the presence of God as it does the presence of the cup of coffee on my desk, of what use is the limit between a philosophical and theological discourse here? Lacoste argues that phenomenological research worthy of its name is research that “decides to make appear without predicting what will appear, and by putting into parentheses all limits” (Lacoste 2008, p. 11).

We are dealing then with a phenomenology without limits: this phenomenology would be able to welcome theological phenomena for which classic phenomenology would have no place. We will see in the next section, a section that readers of Husserl probably can pass over—the two sections of this essay can be read separately—that Husserl’s “intoxication” is indeed such that phenomenology should remain with what visibly appears. In an interview, Lacoste puts all this more firmly. Phenomenology here is no longer neutral, it rather “cannot endorse the separation between the philosophical and the theological. It cannot encourage any prejudice with regard to what is given”, such is the “hospitable nature of phenomenology” (Lacoste 2016, pp. 198 and 194, respectively). Boundaries between these two disciplines, for this kind of phenomenology, to refer one of the titles of Lacoste’s essays, are absent. The question here is not whether we are dealing with philosophy or theology but rather whether we, in and through the description of what so appears, reach something fundamental, “ways-of-appearing [that] are fundamental” (Lacoste 2018a, p. 10), equally true for all. It is here that we are permitted to doubt, but perhaps not for long.

2. Husserl and the Exclusion of God

How far is this kind of phenomenology straining from the limits Husserlian phenomenology put on the practice of phenomenology, especially if this phenomenology would be so hospitable that it would be inclined to describe the presence of God to the believer? This section will rehearse Husserl’s account of God and of the reduction in order to show that what gives itself to the phenomenological gaze has little or nothing to do with anything divine, invisible, or otherwise exceeding objects and objectness. God is in effect anything but present in Husserl’s writings, and the few occurrences of the divine in the published writings are enough to think that here a “methodical atheism” akin to Heidegger’s is at issue.

In fact, Husserl’s Ideen I (1913) quite quickly proceeds toward the exclusion of God. In less than two pages, Husserl in effect excludes “the transcendency, God”. Yet, the phenomenological breakthrough he elaborates in this very book seems to support this conclusion. If we are to examine the flux of consciousness, a lot of things are given. I intuit the cup on the desk, I remember seeing Peter yesterday, and I can anticipate the dinner with Francesca tomorrow and so “receive” intuitions as to how to prepare the dinner for her. In the entirety of the flux of consciousness, there is no place for God. God is nowhere to be seen, nowhere to be felt. And if I were to feel and see God, I would see and feel a certain conception of God coming to me from a highly mediated tradition—the point being that this “intuition of God” proves the existence of such an intellectual tradition more than it would prove the existence of an entity corresponding to God.

In Ideen I, Husserl proceeds toward an elaboration of the phenomenological reduction. In general, the reduction allows for a rather firm grasp of the object under scrutiny through the strict observance of what appears to consciousness (and what does not). In this reduced mode of consciousness, which sets aside all claims toward the existence of this object and describes only what in effect appears to consciousness, there surely is no place for the divine. I can see and intuit this particular sighting of the table and will have to walk around the table for a fuller view, which I then add up to “constitute” the table. Again, the phenomenologist is not really bothered with querying whether this table is in fact really “out there”, he or she is merely concerned with describing just how this particular intuition or sighting appears to consciousness. I can see this table here right in front of me. Yet, there are instances, too, where I see a table over there, at a distance, and need to move closer for a better look. What is the difference between these two appearances of the table? In the first instance, I have a fuller intuition than in the second. In both cases, however, there is no such thing as a complete intuition: even when seeing this table right here, I only see one side and would need to move around the table to “take it in” in full. Yet, in that case too, consciousness can only see one side at a time and adds up—from memory this time—the side it has previously experienced. Yet, no such thing is possible for God, not for the concept “God” and even less for an entity we call God that would show up in experience. Phenomenology, in this very precise sense, put an end to (philosophical and theological) speculation: what appears, is, and what does not appear is not. The table over here and the table over there are both given to intuition, albeit one a bit more than the other. Suppose that what I thought from afar was a green table on closer inspection is brown. For Husserl, such a semblance does not in any way annul the validity of the earlier intuition of a green table. What appears is, and what is appears: I did in fact experience the apparition of something green, even if it turns out to be brown later. Even a vague appearance of a table will, in Husserl, sooner or later be returned to the boundaries set by intentional consciousness—the latter, at more than instance, taking on the contours of a safe haven, a transcendental cocoon unperturbed by what appears, even when intuition remains vague or faulty.

Intuitions and their mode of givenness indeed put severe strains on phenomenality: since God does not seem to appear, therefore God is not. Here too, however, we should proceed with caution. The phenomenological reduction, for this particular phenomenon as well, does not consider the existence of this or that entity, whether it is this simple table here or a God out there. Husserl’s fidelity is merely to what appears: what appears is only as appearance and perhaps as long as it appears. It is from this realm of appearances that God will need to be excluded. One can surely posit a God out there, or, as Kantianism has done, postulate an existence of the world “out there” along with the substance of an Ich denke, yet phenomenology ends speculation on these topics quite considerably too: so much appearing, so much being.

One might correctly see a version of Cartesianism here: I can doubt the existence of the world and all things in it; what I cannot doubt is that the flux of my experiences is now seeing an entity that “gives” itself to be seen as a table, that, all variations considered and all adumbrations added, complies quite perfectly to the essence of a table. Of God, no such experience is given, no variations are possible, and no adumbrations can be made. There is no appearance at all that would comply to a being we all call God. The fact that some have argued that God, in fact, has made an appearance within being, that “the word became flesh”, for instance, relies on testimony and is no valid argument for the phenomenologist studying the stream of consciousness here and now. This testimony would merely be one of those “highly mediated” instances we mentioned above. It is, however, important to note that these mediations do not concern the phenomenologist who, through the study of intuition and givenness, is on the look-out for the fullness of intuitions that give themselves immediately—I see this table—even though, fragmentarily, I never see the entire table at once.

Let us turn to Husserl’s account of God. Two passages immediately come to mind. The first one is in his The Idea of Phenomenology, which contains lectures Husserl gave in 1907; the other one, as noted, is in Ideen I from 1913. In the first mentioned book, Husserl is, as we will see, rather straightforward. We start, however, from below—by the study of a phenomenon.

“To have an appearance before one’s eye, which refers to something that is of itself given in the phenomenon, and to doubt whether it exists […] that makes sense. […] But to see and intend nothing other than what is grasped in the seeing and yet still question and doubt—that makes no sense at all. In essence this is to say: seeing, grasping what is self-given, insofar as it is an actual seeing that presents an actual self-givenness and not a givenness that refers to something not given—that is something ultimate”.

(Husserl 1999, p. 38)

Phenomenology here hits rock-bottom (but in a good sense): it attains that in consciousness which cannot reasonably be doubted. This openness and welcoming to what gives itself directs consciousness, which Husserl will call it intentionality. Intentionality entails, contrary to Descartes, that the bridge between the knower and the known object is always and already in use—continuously crossed in the stream of consciousness. I can see a green table from afar but doubt whether it in fact is green—this makes sense. I can doubt that the stick in the water is straight—this makes sense too. But to doubt that the appearance of the stick in the water is crooked, this does not make sense, just as it makes no sense to doubt that, upon closer inspection, the table in fact is green. The semblance of the broken stick, the semblance of the green table, and the intuition of the brown table are all an “actual self-givenness”. The difference between the intuition of the green and the brown table is that we have to distinguish between different modes of givenness: “that an imagined color is not given in one or another sense does not mean that it is given is no sense. It appears and appears itself; it presents itself” (Husserl 1999, p. 51). It is not that the “real” brown table corrects the intuition of the green table. The phenomenological study of consciousness is the study of appearances. To the phenomenological gaze, the brown table appears as much as the green table does. The semblance of the green leg is as much an appearance as the appearance in consciousness of the brown table on closer inspection. To doubt, however, that the table is brown after inspection, after seeing—more and better, to refer to Lacoste—the actual self-givenness of the table to an actual seeing by the ego, this in effect makes no sense. One can thus safely say that the judgement “the table is brown” in this case is better than the opposite judgement without even assuming that this table exists outside the stream of consciousness.

None of this can be attained when it comes to the divine, simply because God for Husserl is not a phenomenon—God does not in any way show up in experience. There is no “self-givenness” that would present itself here, no immediate intuition that could be explored. However, is Husserl’s intentionality not known for its “openness to something”, and should we therefore not allow some sort of transcendent reality to this appearing of the table within the immanence of consciousness? And is this transcendence in immanence then not a way to the phenomenon of God?

Here too, we would need to describe and distinguish between modes of givenness. Here, we need to follow Husserl more closely: “the step we took [makes] clear to us that real immanence (and, respectively, transcendence) is only a special case of the broader concept of immanence as such. It is now no longer obvious and unquestioned that what is absolutely given and what is really immanent are one and the same thing; for the general is absolutely given and yet not really immanent” (Husserl 1999, p. 65, last italics Husserl’s). The table, as an object appearing to consciousness, might be a transcendenthusserl object. Yet, its appearance takes place, in and through phenomenological reduction, entirely within the flux of consciousness; it is part and parcel of the immanence of consciousness. How, though, do we recognize the brown table as a brown table and lead our experience of this table to the judgement that the table is brown? Because the act of seeing the table allows for the fact this object here is not in fact ein unbekanntes but an ordered, habitual object, I recognize the table as a table because, in fact, I have seen many tables before and know that tables usually appear as plateaus with four legs. I know what the table “generally” is: the general is absolutely given even when it is not really immanent. The concept and essence of a table in general does not actually exist (except in the mind, which is a different matter). What in each case exists is this table here. But this is not consciousness’s concern in the phenomenological reduction: its concern is that this appearance here complies to what, “in general”, is the essence of a table. One of the advances of phenomenology on Kantianism and Cartesianism is in effect that not each appearance has to be studied ex nihilo: I am not struck by the broken stick all the time. Within consciousness there appears an order, Husserl will later say, that is quite marvelous. It is not to be excluded, however, that a lot of this marvel is simply something that we transfer from the “natural attitude”, prior to reduction, where one is educated, socialized, in short, uses language to the phenomenological attitude (which is a topic of study in its own right).

Husserl, however, pursues:

“the knowledge of generalities is itself something singular […] The general itself, which is given in evidence within the stream of consciousness, is, on the other hand, not something singular, but rather something general, and thus, in the real sense, transcendent. As a result, the concept of the phenomenological reduction acquires a more precise […] determination [:] it is not the exclusion of the really transcendent […], rather it is the exclusion of the transcendent as such, as an existence to be assumed, that is, everything that is not absolute givenness in the genuine sense—the absolute givenness of pure seeing”.

(Husserl 1999, p. 66)

I have once learned what a table is. There was a time and a place that I realized, perhaps unknowingly, that a table most often is this object consisting of a plateau with four legs. I am not surprised when I enter a room and am asked to sit at that thing there. Rather, I see a table because, in general, I know what the essence of a table is. This generality, however, is not itself the table. Rather, it transcends all tables in the very precise sense that it incarnates in each table that appears, and this table here does not exhaust this essence—other tables will comply to this essence too. It is transcendent, too, in the sense that this essence instructs that the sheer sight of this table here is not enough to “take in” the entire table in one go. Upon seeing the table, I know because of the “transcendent essence” of the table appearing within the stream of consciousness that, were I willing to see the table in full, I would need to walk around the object here in front of me to adumbrate and profile the other side of the table. In short: these generalities transcend space and time; other tables in different spaces too will comply with the essence of the table. This table here will on later occasions still appear as a table. These “eidetic essences” have, to put it brief, a lasting character: they sometimes last longer than the table which is actually appearing (Yet, it is important to note that we needed phenomenology, perhaps even in the mode of reduction, to see precisely this: the table as it appears to consciousness is entirely as it appears and how it appears).

In short: these essences will make up what phenomenology calls the “horizon”, in a sense the background, of our experiences: the table will usually appear as a plateau with four legs. This means that in phenomenology there can never be a “wholly other” phenomenon or a phenomenon which is “wholly other” in itself—a lesson that Jacques Derrida will teach Levinas in his Violence and Metaphysics and that we will encounter in Lacoste’s thinking of God too. All tables are like other tables, just as the other is like me. Here too, however, we needed phenomenology to see that indeed there is order in the realm of experiences—it makes sense of the fact that we are not usually surprised seeing a table—but also for noticing that we indeed needed to “see” this table here “absolutely” to note the interplay between this factual experience—this table here which I see now—and the order and regularity that so is encountered. Phenomenology, for Husserl, knows no other transcendence than this transcendence of the object: its generality, its eidetic essence, transcends consciousness, yet it is not outside of consciousness. Outside of consciousness, for Husserl, there is nothing and certainly not something “really transcendent” as the existence of a being out there. Such a transcendent being, again, does not appear. What appears, rather, is a being’s transcendence (which is quite something else).

It is true that this latter transcendence quite often takes on the contours of the transcendence of the object—to which Lacoste will also return; it is not certain whether, even prior to reduction, other forms of transcendence cannot also appear. It is here, as noted in the introduction, that the critiques of the proponents of the theological turn start, and Lacoste is no exception: is it really the case that what gives itself to consciousness and experience is such that our being-in-the-world, and its horizons, can never contain anything other than worldly, “objective” phenomena? Lacoste’s radical phenomenology, as we will see, is ready to crack the transcendental cocoon and let it be flooded by empirical experiences and phenomena that tell us more about what being-in-the-world might entail than descriptions of constituted objects will ever accomplish.

For now, we still need to see what Husserl six years later, in Ideen I, adds to the discussion. After telling us again that the “transcendency” of God is “not given […] in union with reduced consciousness” (Husserl 1983, p. 133), Husserl proceeds toward some intriguing observations. One of these observations, as we indicated already, concerns the order in the world. We see and experience this order because there is this order. Here, one might, with Lacoste, argue that Husserl is beyond the opposition of realism and idealism: it is neither that mental processes construct this order nor that we merely discover a factual order already there, which consciousness then mirrors or reflects. Husserl’s discovery here is once again one of contingency: in and through the “reduction of the natural world” (Husserl 1983, p. 134) to “regular orders” classified and studied by the sciences, a “marvelous teleology” (ibid.) is yielded that could just as well have not been present. In its reduced mode, consciousness, as we have seen, exploits these orders to see this phenomenon as this phenomenon precisely, yet nothing dictates the presence of such order. What is “marvelous” about this teleology is precisely that it is the ultimate phenomenology can say about the world as it appears to consciousness’s immanence. In the beginning, there was order. The phenomenologist, and Husserl’s brevity on this issue here might be considered as a sort of precaution, should however stick with what is given: the table which appears now is the same as the table that will appear tomorrow. Perception never occurs ex nihilo.

Yet, Husserl himself has not stopped here and does indeed mention that a “theological principle” (ibid., p. 116) issues from the fact of teleology. These “intuitional manifestations” (ibid., p. 117) of the divine are in fact “highly mediated” (ibid., p. 133): in Husserl, they pass through all of the sciences, most notably through the science of evolution (ibid., p. 134). The fact that there are these orders (in science, in perception, etc.) are “grounds for seeking the basis for precisely that organization” (ibid., p. 116) and legitimize “the question about the ground” (ibid., p. 134) of these orders. It is true that Husserl here “follows a traditional path in Western philosophy” (Cassara 2022, p. 1127).

Yet here too the phenomenological battle-cry—zu die Sachen selbst here means: the world, nothing but the world—remains in place. Husserl is quite happy to indicate his distance from these traditional arguments too: there is no causation involved, as if the order of the world would be commanded (or created) by a causa finalis or lead, through a projection of the causality obtaining in the natural world, to a being outside the world (Husserl 1983, p. 117). Phenomenology questions and explains the immanence of the world alone. If, within this immanence, a teleology is encountered that intimates something else than world, the phenomenologist should again be prudent and guard this transcendency as much as the transcendence of the worldly object and of consciousness.

The latter is in fact what we see Husserl doing when distinguishing quite cautiously between the different senses of transcendence. The transcendence in question, when it concerns the divine, “could not be assumed as something transcendent in the sense in which the world is transcendent” (ibid., p. 116). Husserl concludes his discussion by stating that the transcendency of the Absolute stands “in polar contrast” (ibid., p. 133) to the transcendence of the world: “it would therefore be an “absolute” in the sense totally different from that in which consciousness is an absolute, just as it would be something transcendent in a sense totally different from that in which the world is something transcendent” (ibid., p. 134).

Some have argued that Husserl is here enormously respectful of the utter transcendence of God (Housset 2010, e.g., pp. 95, 211) by freeing God from the transcendental grasp of philosophical comprehension. Such an argumento e silencio, by which Husserl would describe the phenomenality of God by precisely not describing it, seems perhaps a bit too easy. It is true, however, that Husserl here freed us from some uneasy and misplaced speculation about the divinity that so occupied the metaphysical tradition. Others, such as Kevin Hart, have ventured to state that God is “irreducible” precisely by being “an obscure companion deep within the self” (Hart 2015, p. 28) as an idea from which no escape is possible: a certain discourse on God might very well be reducible, “God in his radical immanence” that is, but the “acknowledgement of God [in] his radical transcendence” (Hart 2015, p. 29) is not. It is, however, not likely that Lacoste would agree with both of these views, although he has his own candidates for what shows itself as irreducible. Contrary to Husserl (and Housset), Lacoste will in effect argue that within our experience of the world, there might be room for the experience of the presence of God. For this “no polar contrast” with the world is necessary: God will appear as a being and, perhaps, as any other being. What is necessary, though, is a broader view of the world and a loosening of the transcendental conditions that constitute the world—one of the reasons, we believe, why Lacoste remains deaf to Husserl’s transcendental teleology. In this sense, Lacoste’s phenomenology will unsettle the settled philosophies of our time more than it will unsettle traditional theologies.

3. Lacoste and Husserl

3.1. Intuition and Phenomenological Description

When it comes to phenomenological reduction, Lacoste in effect shows himself to be no firm believer. In general, Lacoste even evades lengthy discussion of Husserl: something seems to really disturb him in this reduction of the human being to an onlooker of its experiences. It is, however, not the case that, for Lacoste, what Husserl left out is filled in by Heidegger, although a lot of his analyses will make us think precisely this, especially when he says that the figure the horizon nowadays takes, when describing our experiences, is the (indeed Heideggerian) figure of world (Lacoste 2015a, p. 67). More important for our purposes here is what Lacoste finds lacking in Husserl in order to give more relief to the phenomenon of God’s presence: a genuine thinking of futurity and therefore of death (Lacoste 1990, p. 23), a thinking of the body (Lacoste 2015a, p. 114, but see Lacoste 2011, p. 216), of intersubjective encounters (Lacoste 2015a, p. 153), of language and speech (Lacoste 2018b, p. 78), of history—at least in the early Husserl (Lacoste 2011, p. 196)—and our existence within history (ibid., p. 166), the concomitant experiences of historicity, and of affects and moods accompanying these experiences (ibid., p. 32 and p. 216).

It is not that Lacoste wants to be unfaithful to the methods and practices of Husserlian phenomenology. Rather, Lacoste wants to indicate how “Husserlian phenomenology exceeds itself from within” (Lacoste 2008, p. 104). Its boundaries show us equally, so to speak, where it can go out of bounds. The passage of Husserl that Lacoste mentions most is when the former states that “we need more intuition and less understanding” (Lacoste 2011, p. 282; 2018b, p. 10), so stressing phenomenology’s distance from the Kantian stress on Verstand.

From this attention to intuition, Lacoste learns that these intuitions are multiple, contingent, and lead, through the duty of description, to an account of being (in a somewhat realist vein). In Lacoste, three theses emerge from Husserlian phenomenology. Firstly, that the realm of intuition is properly without limits. Secondly, that there can be phenomenological description without reduction. Thirdly, that there is “constitution” even when there is no reduction in play.

Intuition synthetizes the diverse sensory givens. We see a bouquet of flowers “immediately” without adding up all flowers individually in order then to conclude that this indeed is a bouquet. In this regard, Lacoste argues we “must not confuse between an individual and a phenomenon” (Lacoste 2018b, p. 20): I am able to perform a reduction on this table here because I have seen tons of tables before. Phenomenology, for Lacoste, founds “a field of experience in which what gives itself to knowing gives itself without limits, since the only limits are those of what appears and the horizons of its apparition” (ibid., p. 17). Within these limits, phenomenology deals with what is real, since whatever appears is as real as any other phenomenon. “Consciousness welcomes and constitutes—but when we use the second concept, one must not dissociate it from the first and know that nothing is constituted in the labor of constitution that does not inseparably constitute itself when it appears to us” (ibid., p. 17).3 I can vary eidetically the appearance of the table in front of me as much as I want; this happens only because this table here, in more than one way, has prompted me to perform this reduction on its appearance. Even when I try these variations on an imaginary and imagined table, that table too, likely, will be one that makes more of an impression on me than others have. “The things put themselves in order, and the primordial act of consciousness is to give consent to this order” (ibid., p. 21).

Here too, phenomenology is to be seen as a liberation of sorts: it is neither a brute realism nor a simple empiricism. Just as it moves beyond the latter’s conceptions of sense data, it moves beyond the former’s stress on brute facts.

“Phenomenology […] interests itself in the real as it [really] is and in this same reality as it appears. Let us […] dissipate two misinterpretations. The first consists in believing that […] only certain realities are real, and thus in giving oneself a constraining model of what is real. [The] Husserlian project […] includes the refusal of all preunderstanding of what “real” wants to say. [The] only criterium of being-real is the possibility of intentional existence. The second misinterpretation […] consists in believing that there exists only one (and only one) mode of apparition: in giving oneself a constraining model of appearing”.

(Lacoste 2006, p. 323)

Phenomenology thus expands, possibly, our understanding of what is real as much as our understanding of what can appear. Husserl, however, has put in place rather straightforward criteria as to the how of these appearances, and Lacoste regularly mentions this “principle of principles”: “every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily […] offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there” (Husserl 1983, p. 44).

On this criterion, we will see Lacoste waver, for he denies that in this regard there will be knowledge in and through sacramental intuitions (Lacoste 2015a, p. 92) as well as of the other (Lacoste 2018a, p. 54). Another Husserlian criterion of appearances accompanies Lacoste’s descriptions, namely that “to each fundamental mode of objectivity […] corresponds a fundamental mode of evidence” (Lacoste 2011, p. 294). Lacoste adds: “the language of evidence is that of experience” (ibid.), so underscoring the citation he uses elsewhere: “to each fundamental mode of objectivity corresponds a fundamental mode of experience” (Lacoste 2015a, p. 67), to which he, here, adds: “there is no fundamental mode of evidence that does not rest on a fundamental mode of phenomenality” (ibid.). What is evident thus can be experienced; what can be experienced does in fact appear and shows up in phenomenality.

Lacoste goes a long way with Husserl, but some cracks in his allegiance are already beginning to appear. It is clear, however, that with Husserl the language of evidence allows him to advance a thesis or two on truth: “to speak of evidence is […] to speak of truth” (Lacoste 2011, p. 30). Yet, not all evidence needs be as clear and distinct as Husserl wants it to be, and neither might intuition always yield evidence in the strict mode of objectivity. Such intuitions might nonetheless offer themselves to phenomenological description. These are, in fact, Lacoste’s phenomenological starting point, allowing him to include those phenomena that do not befit Husserl’s constraints on phenomenality.

Such constraints are given. Lacoste shares Jean-Luc Marion’s concern that Husserl displays a tendency to reduce all givenness to the contours of the object. For now, however, we need to explore Lacoste’s thesis that one can describe one’s intuitions without performing the reduction, for “nothing gives itself that does not give itself to intuition first, to ‘seeing’ writ large. [A] key-concept needs to enter the scene: that of description. In order to know what to describe means, let us state what it is not: to speculate. We only speculate when intuition is lacking” (Lacoste 2015a, p. 60). Phenomenology remains with what offers itself to intuition, even when that which it offers “is reticent toward simple description” (ibid., p. 61). Lacoste here indicates his differences with Husserl. For such descriptions to be valid, it is clear that the description departs from the reduced ego and its “impartial observations” of what appears. Instead of a transcendental onlooker, the description is here invested in the phenomenon by an interest awakened by the prompt of the phenomenon. The one praying, for instance, prays for a reason: he or she believes that God might be present to prayer. Another difference is that Lacoste, like Marion, wants us to deal with something other than the transcendence of the object. Husserl himself had indicated that the transcendence of God allows for no comparison with the transcendence of the object, yet Lacoste, on this score, turns to Heidegger’s account of beings, and a fortiori things, in order to demonstrate what phenomenological description might be able to carry out:

“One might be mistaken about being. A description of a being always runs the risk of seeing wrongly and to decide upon the meaning of being, and we can perfectly link being and appearing—what else does Husserl do?—without really questioning being. We however need to take guard. Description, in effect, can perfectly put us on the way to being. The question of being, if we pose it in all purity […] would imply a forgetting of beings. Yet: if being can be forgotten or dissimulated, beings cannot. We live among beings. We ourselves are beings.”.

(Lacoste 2011, p. 13)

Lacoste will in Être en danger argue that these descriptions of what is not just an object will put us on the way to what is fundamental, the simple “description of a consciousness constituting its time and welcoming temporally what appears to it” (Lacoste 2011, p. 196)—a project initiated, to be sure, by Husserl. These descriptions do not decide what is more fundamental than anything else: they simply proceed by not prioritizing either objects or beings. The question then becomes: what offers itself to intuition, gets itself constituted there, and how?

“When we apply ourselves to description, in its Husserlian sense, this is also to make perceptible that we apply ourselves. Description interests itself in the things [themselves]. It is interested in things, above all, to make them appear better than we commonly perceive them. [Others] have used language to permit us to see things better [and] intuition can be nourished by what has been said to us about things”.

(Lacoste 2015b, p. 47)

There will be time to turn to Lacoste’s phenomenology of language. For now, we need to consider that “between intuition and diction constitution intervenes necessarily” (Lacoste 2018b, p. 83). If intuition allows me to see this individual table here properly by comparing and varying it with other tables I have seen, “constitution” allows me to speak of this table here to others sensibly: both of us will have a concept of what a table “in general” is. Lacoste, however, adds—and this will be important below—that “language goes beyond the intuition of the essential” and essences (ibid.): we talk about things we have not really seen or do not really know even, although words at the same time can allow us “to see and enrich what intuition gives” (ibid.).

What is intuited when the phenomenon appears in and through language or to us in a vague way, that is, not yet objectified?

“The phenomenon does not hide anything—and this, in Husserl, by definition. Yet is it the same in the event in which we are interested in what appears to us and in which we speak of what appears to us? To each mode of phenomenality there corresponds a proper mode of evidence. [For example] the rose’s phenomenality is not the same when it appears as ‘without why’ as when it appears as a being gifted with a cause and a goal. The phenomenon is what appears. This is so by definition. The phenomenon, however, is also what we let or make appear […] Phenomenological description certainly prescribes an ideal intervention, in the form of not intervening: we need to occupy, to describe in this way, the epistemic position of the ‘impartial observer’.”.

(ibid., pp. 64–65)

Ideal situations are, however, only rarely real. The impartial observer, for Lacoste, sees “neither the thing with a why nor the thing without why” (ibid., p. 65). In a reduced mode, in effect, the intuition would only intuit the eidetic essence of a rose as this rose. But even though this impartial observer has an experience of truth, Lacoste argues, he or she “must say more to us than what he first sees” (ibid., p. 65)—an intersubjective turn coming with what Lacoste calls a “more natural attitude” (ibid., p. 65). He or she will leave sheer intuition, communicate his or her “constitution” of this rose, itself indebted genealogically to other constitutions and the constitutions of others. With communication comes interpretation; with interpretation comes misinterpretation. Language might well stray from intuition, an intuition, however, that would not be communicated would not be an intuition for a long time—it would remain a fleeting moment in the flux of the observer’s experience. And of these non-ideal situations, where the observer is in effect invested in what he or she describes, perhaps more can be said than Husserl did.

3.2. To Reduce (or Not to Reduce)

Lacoste frankly states that one can describe “outside reduction” (Lacoste 2018b, p. 113). One does not have to demand from the phenomenological spectator of experiences that he or she “puts into parentheses all interest in the existence outside of consciousness of that which appears” (ibid., p. 113) to him or her. For there to be appearances, however, a spectator is surely needed; the question is whether “within the act of knowledge one needs to be above all a spectator?” (ibid., p. 113). Nothing curious here: the cyclist will be able to tell us more about cycling since the phenomenon of cycling appears to him or her a bit better and more than to the one who does not cycle, just as the phenomenon of faith appears to the believer more and differently than to the nonbeliever.

On the other hand, it is also the case that the phenomenological reduction “has a spontaneous side: we are natively interested in what things are rather than in the fact that they ‘are’, and they are, most often, transcendent in relation to consciousness” (Lacoste 2011, p. 234). Elsewhere, Lacoste gives several examples of this priority of essence over existence. It is in fact quite common: we do not need to leave the natural attitude behind to know what a thing essentially is—I do not have to reduce this table here to take a seat at the table (Lacoste 2018a, p. 44). In this sense, one might even say that “even at the heart of the natural attitude a certain form of reduction is already at work” (ibid., p. 42). Reduced consciousness then does not describe another world than the lifeworld or the world of the natural attitude. It surely aims to describe this table here better than the natural attitude usually does, but this does not prevent us from describing things “prior to reduction” (Lacoste 2011, p. 235). So, Lacoste traces what happens “before” and “after” reduction:

“a being gives itself to be described, among other things. It can be described in the natural attitude and in the phenomenological attitude, after the work of reduction that is. After reduction, the being is only in the field of consciousness. Before reduction, it is there, outside of us. Now, in both cases, is it with the same being that we are dealing […] The reduction only (!) permits to see better in order to describe better and understand better”.

(ibid., p. 345)

The reduction thus leads the observer to an ideal state. This ideal state of “pure seeing” is equally one of “pure” evidence. The problem here, for Lacoste, is that those beings that allow such pure evidence are rather poor and, in any case, rather marginally present in the ordinary world. “An object that would solely be an object, that does not possess any other mode than objectivity, is a conceptual monster: all beings can possess presence, interest us, call our attention” (ibid., p. 55). The ideal limit of pure evidence is perhaps only attained during the act of reduction, and the “impartial observer”, too, will sooner or later need to return to the natural attitude.

It is here that Lacoste breaks with Husserl, and we will now see why exactly, for one of the avenues Husserlian phenomenology opened, according to Lacoste, is a conscious reduction to objectivity. Husserl, for Lacoste, was concerned most often with a maximum of intuition: the more intuition, Husserl reasoned, the more evidence. What gives the most evidence, however, are rather rare phenomena, those that allow me to reduce and profile the table side by side as it were. For this, Husserl advises disengaging “with the non-phenomenal (the nonapparent) […] in favor of the phenomenal (things as given to consciousness) [with] only one goal: to delimit a field of total evidence” (Lacoste 2018b, p. 89). Husserl, for Lacoste, wants to fill and fulfill, “combler d’intuition” (ibid., p. 89), the phenomenological gaze with as much intuition as possible. This, however, requires a “non-intuitive work” (ibid., p. 89), that of reduction. “The pure vision must be willed” (ibid., p. 90), and it is the will to exclude what remains vague what does not appear in full. This brings us to another important discussion of the reduction in Lacoste’s work.

“Whoever says reduction, says decision” (Lacoste 2011, p. 70). The phenomenological reduction issues from a decision to see the thing in all its purity. Seeing things in their very purity, however, does not equal seeing all things and phenomena. On the contrary, seeing the things “themselves” might allow us only to see one fragment of reality in full and so risk leaving entire other phenomenalities out of the equation. For these other phenomenalities, however, one does not proceed lightly (or wildly): the phenomenon still directs the gaze through intuitions and constitutions. “Whoever says reduction, does not say constitution” (ibid., p. 70). There are constitutions—which means, we recall, both that the phenomenological gaze actively constitutes, and a thing constitutes itself—without the method and practice of reduction. Constitutions do not only occur in the ideal state of non-intervention. Again, for us to see the rose in the reduced mode of consciousness is neither to see it as “without why” (as the poet sees it) nor as “with a why” (as Heidegger’s zuhanden has it). On the contrary: “a constitution (a non-coincidence of affection and perception) is necessary for ready-to-handness to appear to us as more than just an object” (ibid., p. 70). Constitution allows for a description of these things by taking some distance from the thing—just enough to not be taken in, affectively, by the thing, but it is not yet the full, distant theoretical work of the reduction. Constitution, in this sense, escaping from the reduction, for Lacoste, is rather the need to interpret things as this rather than that—to see the thing as ready-to-hand for instance—and to know that this seeing-as always requires interpretation, language, and so misinterpretations too.5

The phenomenological reduction, on the other hand, requires a decision, and it is a decision that Lacoste does not really favor; it is “the project to apprehend nothing but the object within the thing, and to treat every thing as an object” (ibid., p. 71) “by putting into parentheses everything that is not perceptible” (ibid., p. 58).

Yet, what does such a decision decide? It is one thing to learn that objectness truly belongs to things and that therefore such objectness is real; it is something entirely other to apply “our power to make [such objectness] appear perpetually” (ibid., p. 71). Some trivial operations live entirely from the reduction to objectness. Lacoste mentions the profession of those copying artworks, which can only be copied exactly by seeing the artwork precisely not as an artwork but as an object to be duplicated, or the work of the land surveyor bracketing all lived space to stick with a strictly measured space.

A consequence follows: the reduction of the thing to the object permits what we will call ‘mainmise’ and is performed most often precisely for this. The thing is not at our disposal, since it offers itself to feeling without imposing itself. The object, on the other hand, as the reduction calls it into being, is very much at our disposal […] A bridge has then been crossed, the bridge that leads from knowing-about [connaissance] to knowledge [savoir]”.

(ibid., p. 72)

The phenomenological reduction, for Lacoste, would then be complicit to what Heidegger describes as Gestell, the “measuring” and “calculating” that now seems to make up most of our existence—the phrase “mainmise” is regularly used in French phenomenology to refer to the Heideggerian description of technology. Lacoste, however, has the courtesy to only insinuate or imply that Husserl would have already partaken in such an endeavor—the book under discussion seeks ways to save things from this “danger”, rather.

Readers of Lacoste will know that with the terms savoir and connaissance, our native familiarity with things within the world, we are now approaching the phenomenon of God. For this, however, we need to further explore Lacoste’s distance from Husserl.

3.3. The Question of Evidence

Husserl’s take on the question of evidence was no doubt a concern with truth. Lacoste quite fondly cites Husserl’s mention of such evidence as an “Ereignis der Wahrheit” in his Logische Untersuchungen, so offering some support to the blend of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology that Lacoste proposes (Lacoste 2011, p. 30). Rare, however, are those objects that only appear as objects. “An experience that, in the long run, would be that of a unique mode of being, would be a phenomenological monster” (ibid.). After all, the experience we have with the reduced table is not the sole experience we have with tables. Evidence, in its strict Husserlian regime, is a marginal phenomenon. Lacoste, again, proceeds prudently: Husserl would at least have acknowledged that not all experience admits equally to such clear and distinct evidence (Cf. Lacoste 2011, p. 168). What Husserl implies Lacoste in a sense exploits: what if objectness is but a small fragment of our experience with things, the time of a reduction that is, in which such objectness moreover appears and constitutes itself as long as the phenomenological gaze lasts? This is Lacoste’s fundamental lesson: res semper major. The theological resonances of such a claim are evident. Our experiences with the things themselves cannot be reduced to just one mode of phenomenality: objectness lasts as long as the reduced gaze “sees” it, ready-to-handness as long as it constitutes itself and the table can be used, etc. The things themselves contain and display multiple modes of phenomenality. The thing itself can at one time appear as an object and at another time as something that moves me, as when this table here suddenly affects me because it reminds me of the table in my grandmother’s house. The thing appears, then, in a novel and surprising way that exceeds Husserl’s rather conservatory stress on intentional horizons.6

The fact that the res is semper major means, in a sense, that the appearing of appearing is always “bigger” than consciousness. With Husserl, Lacoste advances that appearances always appear to consciousness. Contrary to Husserl, Lacoste advances that what appears to one consciousness is not necessarily the same as what appears to another consciousness. On the contrary, personal and cultural histories creep into the interpretation of what appears, and these do not necessarily distort the phenomenon at hand. Rather, these histories might allow us too to see phenomena, such as the presence of God, more and better as well. Lacoste so corrects what one might call a lingering Kantianism in Husserl: whereas Kant and Husserl agreed that if we would reason well, or use the phenomenological reduction wisely, we all would agree on and see the same thing. Lacoste, rather, allows these histories to blend with transcendental thinking, feed into it, and so enrich the possibilities of what might be there for all to see.

Lacoste does not imply that the truth of such phenomenality is in the sum of all such phenomenalities—something of which one can suspect from Marion’s phenomenology—but rather that we should be aware that the one phenomenality always already might hide another and that the truth of phenomenality lies in this flux of and switching between various modes of appearing. There is no ideal limit here: although we see fragments and slices of phenomenality, these slices do not add up to one total picture.

Yet, Lacoste’s phenomenology here finds its Anknüpfungspunkt to speak of the phenomenon of God. Had not theology always claimed that God, too, is always greater? And would not such openness to the different lessons and different appearances of different things teach us to open up an avenue toward the showing up (if any) of God within phenomenality? Might such a God truly appear as any other thing, that is, without being able to be reduced to this one phenomenality which makes itself known to us? In short: does “non-divine transcendence [offer] a model for understanding divine transcendence” (Lacoste 2018a, p. 35)?

This is what we now need to explore. “The one who speaks of evidence, speaks of truth”, and such truth is conceived and spoken of

“in the guise of a truth that appears […], of a truth that is essentially not hidden. [Yet] to speak (theologically) of manifestation or of revelation, is this identical to speaking of evidence? [If] one defines evidence […] as an experience of truth, then this is certainly the case. But if one defines evidence as the full detection of the true, as a manifestation without remainder, then this is no longer the case.”.

(Lacoste 2006, p. 333)

Theology, in its biblical guise, here speaks of a “mystery” that has been revealed. We need perhaps not follow Husserl’s evidence of objectness to describe such revelations, but rather we must attempt to stay close to what shows and presents itself as a “chiaroscuro” (ibid., p. 334), where the evident is always and already mixed with what is non-evident. By allowing us to no longer “be satisfied with an opposition of evidence and non-evidence”, Lacoste’s phenomenology opens toward “welcoming also what only appears in half or what only begins to appear” (Lacoste 2018b, p. 187). What “barely appears” (ibid., p. 187) then might not offer itself up to a phenomenology of essences, and it is not “phenomenologically indescribable” (ibid., p. 187) either. What if the phenomenon of God’s presence would be just such a phenomenon that crosses the limits between evidence and non-evidence to the point of being “irreducible”, escaping and eluding the hold transcendental and intentional consciousness wants?

4. The Phenomenon of God’s Presence

So far, we have described Lacoste’s phenomenology with no reference at all to his more theological works describing the revelation of God. For Lacoste, it is faith and belief, as a “mode of knowing-about [connaissance], that “links the evident to the inevident” (Lacoste 2012, p. 220). And although we continuously deal with things in such a chiaroscuro, “it remains that apparition of the divine exacerbates the play of evidence and inevidence” (Lacoste 2012, p. 224).

It is one thing, however, to state that God appears to the believer. It is something else entirely to show phenomenologically how such an encounter actually occurs, especially if such a phenomenon, in Lacoste’s specific case, links presence (intuition) and affection (feeling). This is noteworthy, since it is rather surprising to see the phenomenon of God mentioned along with the concepts of presence and affection: was not Lacoste known for describing the experience of faith as one of nonexperience, nonfeeling, and non-presence (Lacoste 2004, p. 91)? It is, however, equally true that since the 2004 book, Lacoste has unambiguously offered a phenomenological description of God’s presence to the believer.7 The phenomenology outlined above, after all, offers all the resources to at least describe the connaissance proper to faith—what intuitions, feelings, and evidences are in play—and what kind of phenomenality is at issue when it comes to the divine—if we can describe things “outside” their being an object for the reduced gaze, why not then describe the presence of a “God always greater” along the very same lines as we describe the res semper major? Lacoste so modestly (and honestly, perhaps) lets the principles of his own phenomenology blend with his theology.

Lacoste proceeds towards a constitution, in the sense delineated above, of the world of the believer in order to describe phenomenologically how the divine constitutes itself in, before, and to the believing gaze. Husserl has established—if that was necessary—that we cannot see God and that God does not appear to perception. Heidegger confirmed and demonstrated, for Lacoste, that there was no room for God in the existentials constitutive of being-in-the-world: in the world, God is if not absent then at least “not evident” (Lacoste 2012, p. 222).

4.1. The World of Faith and Being-in-the-World

“If we are in the world, we are there fundamentally without God. Can we not, however, do more in the world than instantiate the fundamental (existential) structures that comprehend the world? […] Phenomena are given to us historically that have no existential signification whatsoever. Being-in-history exceeds being-in-the world. The existentiell can in this case manifest what the existential maintains in the dark” (Lacoste 2012, pp. 222–23).

These few lines in a way sum up Lacoste’s entire project—and we will see how the portrayal of faith fits into such a project by “disturbing” (Lacoste 2015a, p. 87) precisely the fundamentals of being-in-the-world. Is it possible, for instance, that we feel God’s presence and that God so appears to affection? It appears so: “We sometimes are conscious of divine presence without mistaking it for something else. God can appear not in theophany but in the modest form of a presence felt” (Lacoste 2018a, p. 35mod.).

Once again, Lacoste is reluctant to depart from Husserl and Heidegger. Husserl has shown that the most basic mode of knowing and intuiting is “antepredicative”: it concerns those intuitions that lead up to judgements and propositions by “furnishing their material” and so giving them a first “layer of evidence” (Lacoste 2006, pp. 92–93). Logic, then, already happens prior to itself, in the element of “knowing about [connaissance]” (Lacoste 2015b, p. 20). If we are ready to admit this, we can also admit that the reduction perhaps does not exist for its own sake: if the real goal of phenomenology is to describe our “original” and “most primitive experiences” (Lacoste 2018a, pp. 45 and 49), this perhaps can be performed outside reduction by remaining close to Husserl’s own intention and “admit with Husserl that experience […] is connaissance” (Lacoste 2015b, p. 31). Heidegger too had affirmed that “affection [is] equipped with cognitive powers” (Lacoste 2018a, p. 33).

“To have faith is not an integral part of the fact of existing, seen from its fundamental structures. [The] one who believes always defines him- or herself […] as the one who finds him- or herself in the world in the situation of belief. [Minimally], the believer has the experience of him- or herself as a believer. He or she does perhaps not feel what he or she believes, but at least he or she senses him- or herself as a believer who doesn’t feel what he or she believes”.

(Lacoste 2015a, p. 81)

Commonly, the experience of faith does not entail any experience of God whatsoever: the believer, most often, has to deal with an unhappy, frustrating experience—what he or she desires does not appear. Any feeling of divine presence must in the first instance perhaps be mistrusted even: it is not at all sure whether we feel anything other than ourselves or ultimately only ourselves (Lacoste 2018a, p. 30; 2012, p. 227). The question, now, for Lacoste is whether such an unhappy nonexperience can have the final word or whether perhaps a “circular relation” (Lacoste 2012, p. 221) between experience and nonexperience must be allowed from within the evidence provided by the phenomenon of faith.

4.2. Between Evidence and Non-Evidence

The believer, for Lacoste, is not only walking the ropes between the world and the world of faith, he or she is also caught mid-way between evidence and non-evidence. “The concept of an unknown God […] is not able to determine of the situation of the human being in history to whom, he or she believes, God has spoken and who has spoken of God by bringing God to light a bit […] Inevidence [and] an experience of truth […] in this case do not contradict one another but form the cognitive situation of the human being confronted with mystery” (Lacoste 2012, pp. 219–20). This situation is in effect quite peculiar: God is neither fully known nor fully unknown—even the agnostic knows about those intellectual traditions that mention the divine—and a believer who would claim that God contains no mystery for him or her at all most likely has not been speaking about God. Only an object, we might say in phenomenology, is entirely without secrets. The one claiming that God is fully evident (as an object would be) might not really refer to God: God’s non-evidence so becomes a mode of evidence (Lacoste 2012, p. 219).

It is, however, the believer’s situation that concerns Lacoste here—speaking, himself, as a believer: “God is only non-evident to us as being unknown when known. God is evident as being known when unknown” (Lacoste 2012, p. 218). Even for the believer for whom God is known—through belief in the Scriptures and revelation—or who knows about God through prayer, God still appears as unknown. So, the believer is able to join knowing and unknowing. So, “God may appear, paradoxically, as a hidden God. [It] belongs to the unconcealment of God that God’s being-concealed is always greater” (Lacoste 2008, p. 49).

It is clear to many (if not all) that we can sense God’s absence. The difficulty is how to speak of God’s presence if such a presence can be felt at all? Lacoste here returns to the language of phenomenology, stating that “there is in effect apparition in and for faith [which] authorizes a perfectly originary intuition” (Lacoste 2012, p. 225). This intuition can then be described by turning to mystical and spiritual literature. What other literature, in effect, can the philosopher here turn to (Lacoste 2012, p. 231)? Why not “accept to broaden the sense of a term that usually belongs to the vocabulary of the mystic” and describe “that which enters consciousness and ‘touches’ it” (Lacoste 2012, p. 227), even if such affectivity never delivers anything fully evident and is always rather faint. How is the one experiencing God’s presence and sensing God’s evidence to then speak of God’s touch?

4.3. Feeling God Present

First of all, it needs to be made clear that there is no necessity to sense and experience God—not all believers have such experiences, and they still have faith (Lacoste 2012, p. 224). The major difference, it seems, with the Lacoste of 1994—at the time of Experience and the Absolute—(Lacoste 2004) is that now affection is not immediately to be equated with idolatry: God’s presence may be felt, on the condition, first, that this experience transcends itself and does not eradicate all desire for more and on the condition, second, that this particular experience does not erect itself as paradigmatic for all experiences of the divine (Lacoste 2018a, pp. 33–34): one might feel oneself dependent on God the creator, for instance, but this need not mean that God only appears as the creator, or only as all powerful, etc. Feeling has the advantage of being vague and is so perhaps more in tune with those phenomena that “barely” appear or dwell on the borders of phenomenality. There is no need to succumb to a “phenomenological purism” here: “there are moments when we can hardly be confident about what is appearing, and these are the most interesting moments” (Lacoste 2018a, p. 31).

How does feeling know about God’s presence? It does and it does not. Lacoste offers a few indications: they have first of all “historical import”, content, and force (Lacoste 2018a, p. 34; 2008, p. 50). These experiences occur “here rather than there”, to such and such a one and not all the time. To someone who is “no stranger to the biblical tradition”, God can appear to other experiences than those that are conceptual or intellectual (Lacoste 2012, p. 228). We have seen Lacoste focusing on the existential weight of several experiences, and the experience of God is one of these. Secondly, these experiences know about God “as incomprehensible” and “as loveable” (resp. Lacoste 2012, p. 229; 2008, p. 87). The “feeling of absolute dependence” and a fortiori the concept of the “Wholly Other”, “[leave] no room for the love of God” (Lacoste 2018a, pp. 33–34). They forget, secondly, that it is always possible for the believer to speak to God in prayer and to believe that God has spoken first. The experience of the sacred in Otto and Schleiermacher suffers from a mutism (Lacoste 2015b, p. 169) and excludes the interpersonal relations proper to the Christian tradition. Thirdly, Lacoste argues that such an experience of the sacred “satisfies one’s desire” (Lacoste 2015a, p. 91) and leaves no (eschatological) room for more to be desired: it is with a fully evident concept of the divine that we are confronted here, one that which easily forgets the chiaroscuro of feelings.

Instructed by the Christian tradition, the one praying today can know that God “can be other to the point being non-other” (Lacoste 2012, p. 229). For the Christian, indeed, “a God of whom the transcendence would exclude all condescendance […] would not be a divine God” (Lacoste 2012, p. 233). The Christian God is present and absent at the same time and joins the “highs” of a transcendence above us with the “lows” of what wants to be near to us.

It is this dialectic and this circular relation that shows up in affectivity, although not for everyone, not all the time, and not everywhere. Such a dialectic is in effect not transcendental, although it might be fundamental. We will show now that such a contingent constellation of the practice of prayer is respectful of both human and divine freedom.

“How does God appear to the human being who says to feel God’s presence? A response imposes itself: God cannot be felt without us admitting that God critiques all that we could feel of God. And vice versa: the God that cannot be felt now does however not cease to be able to do so and to ‘touch’ us”

(Lacoste 2012, p. 230)

If then, “it would be a strange God that was actually prevented from making himself felt” (Lacoste 2018a, p. 35), it remains for us to see just how God “eludes the captivity of feelings” in order to so “respect his transcendence” (Lacoste 2018a, p. 36). It is here that the relation between evidence and non-evidence again comes to the fore.

“The God present is not more divine than the absent God, and it is in the double excess of a presence greater than any absence, and of an absence greater than presence that God disturbs everything that we could say about God other than with phenomenological prudence”

(Lacoste 2012, p. 233)

What is needed, then, for this phenomenological description of divine presence is the means to discriminate between God’s presence amidst a greater divine absence and the realization that God’s absence needs not entirely exclude God’s presence: God is able to present Godself to consciousness, but consciousness will not grasp this appearance in its entirety. Once again, one finds Lacoste tight roping his way with remarkable phenomenological scruple through appealing to Ignatius’ doctrine of discernment (Lacoste 2012, p. 233): the believer has to discriminate between God and all that is not God (or pretends to be God). In order to do so, the first thing to recognize is that “presence is only presence” (Lacoste 2018a, pp. 36, 38) and is not God’s Parousia. The presence of God here is always smaller than that which is promised to appear of a God who is “the promiser of [more] presence” (Lacoste 2015a, p. 81). Sometimes Lacoste appears less prudently and attempts to describe God’s double excess rather straightforward: “To put it roundly, the phenomenality of God cannot be understood if we don’t understand that God transcends God’s phenomenality” (Lacoste 2018a, p. 38mod.).

The only genuine response to these waves of presence and absence, for Lacoste, is love. It is love that, even if a divine presence is granted, does not want to grasp what so presents itself and that is able to endure God’s absence. Love does not need to feel to be able to love at all8 and can so endure such nonexperience: “nonexperience” here is not a privation or deficit but “a precise modus of experience” (Lacoste 2012, p. 226) and non-knowing a mode of knowing about (ibid., p. 234). Simultaneously, love does not lay its hand on the presence granted. This, in effect, is love’s knowledge: the free acknowledgement that this is indeed a divine presence and to so receive the aptitude to believe even when not experiencing anything.

What presents itself here, presenting itself to be loved, will only be known in and through love: “the apparition then takes the form of a solicitation or invitation, not coercion” (Lacoste 2018a, p. 95). Love proposes itself, it does not impose—this is why, in a sense, there is nothing easier than a nonexperience of God that nonetheless does interpret itself as a privation, negation even. This is one more reason why Lacoste does not describe a transcendental, native idea of God. The encounter with God in love is as respectful of divine freedom and transcendence as it is of the human freedom to turn to God in prayer and faith. But what offers itself in love is thus at the mercy of freedom (Cf. Lacoste 2018a, p. 78). Yet, there is “evidence only for the one who assents to what proposes itself as deserving belief” (ibid., p. 78mod.). And this evidence, too, will need to enter the larger horizon of non-evidence—it might have been God, it might not have been.

It is important to note that, in good Ignatian fashion, Lacoste defers the authenticity of these experiences to a third party who is able to interpret the contents of the experience and can discriminate between pseudo-knowledge and genuine knowing about God’s presence (Lacoste 2012, p. 232). Similarly, the highest manifestation of God which for Lacoste occurs obviously in sacramental life is always an event of the word where an “authorized word” (Lacoste 2015a, p. 91) assures us that this indeed, for instance, is the body of Christ. The sacraments, and the attempt to see the invisible res sacramenti through the visible sacramentum, can for Lacoste create a tear in the fabric of the world: “déchirure” (Lacoste 2015a, p. 94, a word very uncommon in Lacoste’s corpus). Built around the practices of prayer, sacramental and spiritual life can finally further acquire an “immediacy after the fact” (Lacoste 2015a, p. 93). The world of faith is thus by no means a momentary feeling of presence (or absence). On the contrary, it can “last as long faith lives” (Lacoste 2015a, p. 89) and in this sense repeats a character of phenomenology’s generalities, where the “essence” of a table in a sense “survives” even when no table is seen.

4.4. The Irreducible

For the one on speaking terms with God, it is impossible to believe that God does not exist. For this, Lacoste ventures the term “irreducible”—the concept of which was present in his writings, it seems, from 2006 onwards (Lacoste 2006, p. 228): for the one praying to God, it makes no sense to bracket the existence of the one he or she is speaking with. Less present in his thinking is that God’s irreducibility similarly means that the phenomenon of presence likewise does not allow a reduction to one or the other “essence” of God: the fact that God can appear does not entail that God will appear—the experience of God remains, even when a presence is from time to time granted, “essentially frustrating” (Lacoste 2018a, p. 36). God does not have a generality or essence that we could adequately describe. When we speak of the presence of the divine, we speak at best of a historical, contingent experience that ought to be deferred to others as for its truth.

By now, we might grant Lacoste’s statement that the Absolute possesses “a fundamental manner of phenomenality” (Lacoste 2018a, p. 62). Lacoste here adds that this mode “must involve irreducibility” (ibid., p. 62). If one wants to describe the very manner with which God appears, one will also have to say that such a description necessarily entails the existence of the entity this faith finds credible. Here, we should note that Lacoste again turns to the phenomenon of the other and of language to elucidate the form of irreducibility pertaining to these phenomena. The essence of the other here implies his or her existence: it would be simply indecent to reduce the other and the other’s words and assume a transcendental position towards him or her. Over and against the other’s claim on me, “the constitution of the self as transcendental is [blocked]” (ibid., p. 58), and we find here the “the decisive test of […] Husserlian phenomenology” (ibid., p. 58): the phenomenon of the other would be mutilated if we would reduce this other to just one more object that only appears properly to and in consciousness. Lacoste speaks of an “empirical ‘we’ that has no need to be raised to the dignity of a ‘transcendental we’” yet still is “original and perpetual” (ibid., p. 58, also p. 57): the other’s words always and already come from elsewhere.

Here too, finally, we should note that divine transcendence “follows” nondivine transcendence, for not only is the other as “irreducible” as God, but this irreducibility also belongs to both the other’s speech as to the word of God. Lacoste specifically mentions the words of Christ, “Follow me” (Lacoste 2018a, p. 16), as such a speech event, but in fact his entire Recherches sur la parole is an attempt to secure the special status of the word.

5. Conclusions

“The recourse to the transcendental is necessary but insufficient” (Lacoste 2015b, p. 120). This sentence aptly summarizes Lacoste’s path in phenomenology, seeking its way beyond the established borders of the discipline and opening it up to what even phenomenology’s gaze has difficulties seeing. It is obvious that Lacoste has, since 1994—the publication of Expérience et Absolu—progressed in detecting the phenomena that unsettle, or add to, the transcendental conditions of being-in-the-world. Ever since the phenomenology of liturgy developed there, as opening onto the “originary” in addition to the initial and transcendental conditions of the world (Lacoste 2004, pp. 32–34), Lacoste tries to give more weight to the empirical experiences of prayer, of God’s presence, and of spiritual readings. These experiences do not have to be without ontological and theological import. It needs to be clear that one of the basic accomplishments of Lacoste’s phenomenology is to show that what is transcendental and what is fundamental do not always overlap. This is why Lacoste’s phenomenology might unsettle philosophy more than it does to the theological discipline.

To return to the topic of this special issue, it is safe to conclude that Lacoste has shown that an admittedly somewhat unorthodox phenomenology can at least welcome some (more or less) orthodox theological phenomena. When Dominique Janicaud, decades ago, denounced French phenomenology for its “theological turn”, few had noted that the work of Lacoste was spared. For Janicaud, Lacoste “defends and illustrates a theological mode of thought putting in place ‘a system of differences’ that while ‘phenomenologically inevident,’ is respectful of the finitude of being-in-the-world” (Janicaud 2000, p. 100).9 It may be quite clear that twenty or so years after this theological turn, Lacoste work is still marked by an extreme attention to the frailty of our finite thinking. In this regard, it is safe to say that Lacoste still balances the stakes of a (finite) being-in-the-world and the infinite, between phenomenology and theology, quite well.

In the remainder of this conclusion, we will briefly point to two interrelated problems with Lacoste’s phenomenology, both pertaining to the step back from transcendental thinking in order to promote the description of empirical, contingent phenomena. A direct critique of Husserl’s take on history is not present in Lacoste’s writing, and the one time he was asked about Husserl’s monadology and the concomitant teleology to an “enlightened” Europe, he seemed to evade the question somewhat (Lacoste 2016, pp. 207–8). There are, however, good reasons to believe that Lacoste is not a big supporter of an innate ethical idea that would point, as some of have called it, from time immemorial to a “non-confessional route to God” (Housset 2010, p. 186). To be sure, Lacoste at one time mentions the ethical desire as “the desire to will the good absolutely”—no one can will the good “just a little bit” (Cf. Lacoste 1990, p. 51)—yet such an ethical absolute would remain caught in the chiaroscuro of history and the world. Lacoste would therefore not readily agree with Husserl’s basically ethical stance in which willing the good “all the time” necessarily leads to a God teleologically orienting all intersubjective and ethical behavior. On the contrary, what shows itself to the believer or the one praying might incite others, Lacoste would argue, more to find their way to the phenomenon of faith than ethics—transcendental or not. There is thus reason to believe that what Lacoste once detected in Kierkegaard and Hegel he also finds in Husserl: all three forget—at least from time to time—the historical conditions from which we speak (Lacoste 2006, pp. 334–35). It is one thing to ponder the marvelous order in the world, as Husserl did, and it is something other to impose an entire superstructure on this fact that, due to the right use of reason, would lead all to the same ethical and axiological conclusion. Husserl, for Lacoste, might have been too much of an Aufklärer in this sense.

Yet, we have similarly seen Lacoste pointing to language and intersubjectivity as something “irreducible”: at crucial stages in the argument, or description rather, the truth of the phenomenon is deferred to the other: when it comes to the communication of a phenomenological experience, when it comes to the Ignatian discernment of the experience of God, and when it comes to the detection of an “empirical we”.

The exact status of this deferral has never been made clear, and Lacoste’s talk of such an “empirical we” has accompanied his thinking for quite a while now (Lacoste 2006, pp. 115–16). This deferral is, however, most clear in his later thought of the “irreducible”, where it is the irreducibility of the other’s existence that paves the way for the irreducibility of God’s existence, and it is indeed argued, as we noted, that “non-divine transcendence offers a model for understanding divine transcendence” (Lacoste 2018a, p. 35). Yet, for a phenomenology crossing borders, and for the one querying, like a border patrol somewhat, whether there has not been some trespassing here or there, the question that could be asked in this regard is that it is not certain whether the res semper major explains the deus semper major or, vice versa, whether the deus semper major comes in to explain the res semper major. It is, in other words, never certain whether in Lacoste’s thinking phenomenology or theology comes first, and it is not certain whether this would always be a nonsensical question, too.

Whether language—the language of the empirical we in which some words never can be disregarded or the language of the “more than natural” attitude in which the phenomenologist needs words to communicate his or her experience—is in effect irreducible is not a question of Lacoste alone. One finds it in Derrida’s early writings on Husserl as well, where the former states that “language offers the most dangerous resistance to the phenomenological reduction” (Derrida 1962, pp. 60–61), measuring the distance between what is transcendental and what is historical. Lacoste and Derrida might be in agreement when it comes to the phenomenological reduction: one might in effect reduce as much as one likes, but the fact of the matter still is that the results of such a reduction sooner or later will have to be communicated to the other. Perhaps a bit of Derrida is needed to counter Lacoste’s belief in the rather exceptional status of the word—of language and of interlocution,10 in order to close the gap between, say, the “living word” and the “dead letter”. Where Derrida suggests that the transcendental in a way is just historical (“The Absolute is Passage” (Derrida 1962, p. 165)), or perhaps as historical as any other phenomenon (an insight which he seems to have retracted later in his career), Lacoste intimates that it is only through the historical, through concrete empirical experiences, that something fundamental and true, “valid for all”, as we intimated in our introduction, comes into view. While one might side here with Lacoste, the procedure which he entertains to establish this distinction between the transcendental and the historical could use some Derridean fire, so to speak, in order to close the gap between, say, the “living word” and the “dead letter”. The irreducibility of language might in effect not be as obvious and univocal as Lacoste seems to suggest.

It is, to conclude, far from us to police the border of phenomenology and theology. Even if this phenomenology here or there goes out of bounds, a description so personal and so honest should be cherished by philosophy and theology alike.