1.2 The Semiology of Incarnation
1.2.3 Formal Indication
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same without being reduced to the sphere of the same, presented to perception but maintaining its otherness.78
The reason that the incarnation is central to Smith’s position is because of the divine presence in the finite human person Jesus. For Smith, then, language works in a manner analogous to the incarnation. The speaker remains present even while absent in speech. My consciousness
becomes given, through the logic of the incarnation, in language. Everything depends on whether the incarnation is a semiological event with metaphysical status – the sign must make present the referent.79 This incarnational logic then must be transferable to human language and
communication through the semiological structure. If all of this happens, then Smith has a strong position. If not, then his position deflates rather quickly.
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learned beyond language. A sign must be “constituted as a sign” for it to have meaning.81 We have seen Smith’s claim that a sign alone is structurally inadequate without the thing – the referent. This is the incommensurability between the sign and the thing, or, the thing is not the sign, or the sign “must be accompanied by the experience of the thing itself.”82 Of course, this presumes a certain commensurability at the heart of language, that the thing can house or clothe itself in the sign. This is the movement of incarnation – the Son taking on the form of the slave,83 becoming sin for us.84 Importantly, that was the movement of the Son. In terms of the movement of the disciples or the witnesses, it is the sign that puts on the thing – we clothe ourselves in the Christ.85
Interestingly, at points throughout the text, Smith attempts to pull away from the intellectualized knowledge of the Western traditions in favor of a more affective knowledge.
These are the kinds of moves that make Smith such an interesting and inspiring thinker.
Unfortunately, most of these comments and discussions occur in the footnotes, perhaps
indicating that Smith is not yet fully confident in them or comfortable with them, almost as if he were indicating something that he cannot or will not quite grasp.86 He repeatedly returns to Pascal’s saying: “The heart has its reasons which reason itself does not know.”87 The question is how this affective quality of pretheoretical experience is taken up into Smith’s ‘concept,’ his
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid.
83 Phil. 2:7.
84 2 Cor. 5:21.
85 Rom. 13:14.
86 For example, see Smith, Speech, 105, fn. 6.
87 Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, Honor Levi, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 158.
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doctrine of revelation, or his logic of incarnation. Perhaps the closest that we get is Smith’s work with Kierkegaard on the topic of indirect communication.
To a large extent, Smith views Heidegger’s Anziege formale as an outcome of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of indirect communication in the Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript.88 In the Fragments, Climacus argues that the contemporaries have no advantage over those who come historically later in time, except to “[attest] to the appearance of the god.”89 Historical contemporaneity becomes an occasion for faith for the contemporaries, while for later generations the reports, attestation, or testimony of the contemporaries becomes that occasion. Heidegger’s formal indication and Kierkegaard’s attestation both serve as a witness in an important sense.90 They point to something beyond themselves.91 In Climacus, the contemporary enjoys no advantage in terms of faith, but their witness is imperative for other generations. Further, the communication of the contemporary generation cannot be a direct communication, a communication, as it were, of the brute facts of history. This communication must be “in the form of faith.”92 Smith boils down this form of faith
88 I will refer to Climacus as the pseudonymous author of the Fragments and Postscript from this point.
89 Smith, Speech, 88.
90 Witness and testimony have emerged as an important topic in recent epistemological work. For example, Steven L. Reynolds, Knowledge as Acceptable Testimony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
91 Of course, we could hear Marion’s icon here as well, which Smith notes (Smith, Speech, 92-4). Earlier Smith had noted “that the origin of all concepts may be ‘iconic’ or heuristic, but through sedimentation can also become idolatrous” (Ibid., 13, fn. 10). But is not God the concept par excellence? Did not the concept of God recover the external, embodied world in Descartes’ Meditations? Concepts and images are not functionally dissimilar. And, if God is a concept, if human beings construct images/concepts of God, can one make an idol even of God? The answer is self-evident, and I argue that when God stops speaking, God too becomes an idol. When the relation to God is mediated through vision or images (aka. concepts) rather than through discourse, as Levinas would say, then yes, God too can be an idol. As Nazarene theologian, Michael Lodahl, states, “Mental images of God can be just as idolatrous as metal images of God.” Michael Lodahl, The Story of God: Wesleyan Theology and Biblical Narrative (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1994): 109.
92 Smith, Speech, 89. Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 103.
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to the “heart of the matter” that “the god has been in human form.”93 Smith puts a lot of weight on these words of a humorist who rescinds what he has said at the end of the Postscript.94 We should also recall that this pseudonym was named after a monk who taught that humans can ascend to heaven on their own power; notably at odds with St. Augustine.
Nevertheless, Smith seems to conceptualize the ‘concept’ to function like the
contemporary who indicates or attests to the god through ‘indirect communication.’ Indirect communication is Climacus’s way of maintaining the relationship between a person and the god.
This relationship is the source of passion, inwardness, and truth as subjectivity. Smith focuses on the inwardness of the relationship as the ‘essential secret,’ which allows him to return to his question of comment ne pas parler?95 The interiority of the god-relationship, which is an essential secret, must yet be communicated as it alone can become the occasion of faith for others.96
Smith seems to argue that Climacus is “produc[ing] an alternative form of
communication - a non-objectifying language.”97 In my reading of Climacus, he is arguing that it is the journey, the how, the way, precisely as the mode of the relationship, that is indirect
93 Smith, Speech, 89. Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, trans.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985): 104.
94 Kierkegaard, Postscript, 617-621.
95 Ibid., 79-80.
96 It strikes me that there is a similarity here to John Wesley’s doctrine of prevenient grace. For Wesley, every human being in the state of mere nature is entirely dead to God. We have no agency in ourselves whatsoever to even twitch in God’s direction. Yet Wesley insisted that God leaves no person in the state of mere nature, but rather the Holy Spirit comes to each person to quicken their spiritual senses so that they may begin to hear God’s call and seek after God. See Runyon, New Creation, 27-42; Randy Maddox, Responsible Grace: John Wesley’s Practical
Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994): 83-93. Wesley’s empiricism is its own issue, but perhaps it is that same empiricism that we find haunting Smith’s project.
97 Smith, Speech, 91.
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communication. What is important for Climacus is that the human person comes to find
themselves standing before the god. In this standing, there is the ongoing, un-collapsible tension between the historical and the eternal. Consequently, it is the fear of God as opposed to a clearer conception of God that is at stake.98 This standing-in-relation is the communication at the heart of Climacus’s work. In a sense, one might argue anachronistically that Climacus established a new language game with rather specific rules. If that is the case, Smith cannot simply apply the rules of a specific language game ubiquitously or universally beyond that specific context. One must stand in the context of the game for the rules – the grammar – to apply. Consequently, while Smith is clearly trying to establish a non-objectifying language, it does not seem that this was Climacus’s or Kierkegaard’s project.
All of that may be moot, because at this point in the text, Smith turns to Heidegger in order to note that “for Heidegger, not only the God-relation, but facticity itself is characterized by this radical singularity which is incommensurate with its articulation in language.”99 Climacus becomes an occasion to relate to Heidegger, or more specifically, the young Heidegger of pre- Being and Time. Smith describes Heidegger’s formal indication:
as a way of pointing to phenomena and at the same time allowing them to maintain their otherness and alterity in facticity. Thus the concepts forged in the early Freiburg period are attempts to signal or indicate phenomena and structures of factical life without de- worlding them—that is, without wresting them from the flux of lived experience in order to become dead specimens of objective theoretical thought.”100
Whereas Climacus was struggling with how to communicate an essential secret, something interior to the person, Smith argues that Heidegger is using formal indication to communicate
98 Kierkegaard, Postscript, 544.
99 Smith, Speech, 91.
100 James K. A. Smith, “Alterity, Transcendence, and the Violence of the Concept: Kierkegaard and Heidegger.”
International Philosophical Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1998): 371.
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something exterior. Heidegger is arguing that even historical, objective truth cannot be so directly communicated. There is incommensurability between “factical, pre-theoretical experience” and “theoretical thought.”101 Therefore, in both the interior and the exterior, something transcends language as a mode of communication.102
Importantly, Smith is drawing a parallel between ‘communication’ in Climacus and
‘language’ in Heidegger. As we know from Ludwig Wittgenstein, communication is broader than formal grammar and language. What connects language and communication for Smith seems to be structures of semiology, which also exceeds the capacity of language. Smith sees semiology as the answer to the question of how to communicate what is outside of language, though he does not clarify his position in such succinct terms.
In terms of revelation, the role of semiological structures raises questions about the how versus the what of revelation. This distinction between the how and the what was important for both Climacus and Heidegger. The iconic nature of the Heideggerian formal indication resists, to some degree, any notion that revelation can produce content just as much as does Climacus’s indirect communication. What content would we take from an arrow pointing beyond itself (to return to the central semiological issue)? If the ‘arrow’ is equatable with revelation, then in terms of the what, we would end up in a Derridean situation the impossibility of revelation and of ‘the revelation to come.’ It is always deferred. But this does not seem to be what Smith has in mind.
The reception of the Scriptures as the Word of God—and the reception of them as binding upon faith, thought, and practice—is thus directly linked to their ability to communicate to us God’s will for his covenant people. Authority, then, is linked to
101 Ibid., 376-77.
102 Ibid., 372.
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authorship and, more specifically, to the communication of the Author’s will (intention) to the community.103
Revelation includes content or the what for Smith, at least in terms of the what of God’s will and intentions. Can we reduce divine will and intention to the interiority of a personal relationship occasioned semiologically? Yes, but can we do so when the revelation of that will and intention authorizes Scripture as the Word of God? At that point, have we not moved out of the realm of Climacus’s interior passion and into the realm of the universal? Have we not reduced the pre- theoretical to the theoretical? Much depends on what Smith means by revelation, will, intention, and authorization.
In one of his early articles, Smith conceives of the concept as formal indication
“questioned and putting into question.”104 On one hand, the concept of God’s will and intention, as a formal indication would function to continuously question and put into question what it means for the Scriptures to be the written word of God. Revelation would function to disrupt the conservation of content and doctrine. Revelation would open or clear a conceptual and existential space for the advent of God, in this sense. No formal content would be provided, but rather an occasion expedited by questioning and being put into question. In another early publication, Smith says that “the truth is in (the) pointing.”105 The open question for Smith is how God is present in the pointing. Is anything more revealed than the occasion of truth, which may or may not amount to a moment of decision?
103 Smith, Fall, 200. Emphasis original.
104 Smith, “Alterity,” 378.
105 James K. A. Smith, “How to Avoid Not Speaking: Attestations,” in Knowing Other-Wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality, James H. Olthuis, ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997): 229.
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