1.3 Disclosure or What is Revealed?
1.3.3 The How and the What of Revelation
45
structure of analogy within a participatory ontology. Ontological analogy alone allows the transcendent to reach down to the conditions of the receiver without ceasing to be transcendent119
At this point, Smith is able to state confidently, “Analogy is an incarnational account of knowledge.”120 Note the absence of the scare quotes used previously. Also, at this point, Smith is declaring this position to be Thomistic, despite the fact that Aquinas has not been referenced meaningfully in the text up to this point.121 However, Smith notes that Husserl appealed to the structures of analogy in his Fifth Meditation. Smith’s reference to Husserl’s own ‘reliance’ on Aquinas raises the question of whether all of this work has really been a justification of Husserlian phenomenology from the beginning.
46
First, this is not the same question as Derrida asked. Second, here in this quote, we find Smith’s ultimate question, the telos and goal of his larger project. Here the emphasis is not quite on the how but has shifted to “put[ting] into words” – conveying the content, the what. This too is an area where Smith tends to slip back and forth between competing emphases throughout his project.
When the question is on the how, it is possible to begin to imagine the possibility of a new economy or a new model of meaning. When the question is on the what or the content of speech, the content of revelation, the theoretical meaning of what is communicated, then the dominant economy or the dominant metaphysical model of a culture is normally assumed. In assuming such a model, we duplicate the imperialism and violence inherent to that model. In a contemporary North American context, the economy (which is the dominant model of meaning in that context), is the origin of the grammar that allows the content to become meaningful.
Focusing on the how can bring both grammar and its metaphysical source into critical focus – revelation, if you will. Focusing on the what usually uncritically assumes the dominant grammar, allowing that grammar once more to become invisible. We lose revelation at that point. To Smith’s point, if we speak, we say something. There is always content. My concern is keeping a clearer distinction between the how and the what. That there is content does not necessitate its primacy. Perhaps more important is the underlying model of meaning.
When Smith remains focused on the how, he couches it in the structure of the ‘concept’
itself. This identification of the how with the tool – with the ‘concept’ – rather than the agent of meaning is one of my biggest concerns with Smith’s project. For Smith, the ‘concept’ cannot be conceptual, which is to say, it must avoid grasping.123 To avoid grasping, the ‘concept’ will
123 Ibid.
47
formally indicate its referent, in an iconic manner. Does the ‘concept’ itself resist grasping or is it the agent using the concept that would grasp or resist grasping? If the agent is committed to grasping and ‘concepts’ disallow grasping, will the agent not simply reach for another tool that will grasp? Is the agent unable to utilize a tool in a manner the tool was not intended? It seems to me that the tool, the concept or the ‘concept,’ is necessarily at the mercy of the agent. The success of Smith’s project requires that claim to be denied, but it is a denial implicitly assumed in his project rather than one he explicitly addresses. Consequently, this denial of the agent’s agency over the ‘concept’ is implausible.
We find Smith’s commitment to content in his conceptualization of revelation in terms of the Meno Paradox.124 Smith relies heavily on Climacus’s Fragments to resolve the Meno
Paradox of how we can learn what is unknown. The god must create the condition for learning.
Importantly, Smith notes that the relation between the learner and the god must be one of equality. However, where for Climacus, that equality is necessitated by the relationship, for Smith, it becomes a basis of analogy. This is one of several innovations that Smith layers on top of Climacus’s position, already himself, as we recall, a pseudonymous persona.
If Smith were disinterested in the epistemic content of revelation, it is hard to see how he would object to Levinas and Marion. It is precisely the ‘absolute’ and ‘unconditioned’ nature of revelation in the French thinkers that raises Smith’s ire. In his words, Levinas and Marion
“preclude the very possibility of revelation.”125 Smith nowhere objects to the intersubjectivity in Levinas. Smith does not suggest that there cannot be a relation to the Other. However, Levinas is
124 Ibid., 161.
125 Ibid., 156.
48
highly critical of revelation as disclosure.126 Levinas is here differentiating between the content of revelation, i.e., disclosure, and a content-marginalized, ethical revelation, which is the ethical relation to the Other. The ethical relation – the how – is the mode of Levinasian revelation and stands in contrast to the what of epistemic content in Smith. Revelation, in Levinas, reveals ethical, relational obligations or commands, which call the Same beyond the limitations of its own horizon of meaning.127 Any revealed content is penultimate in nature to that ethical
obligation. It seems that when Smith objects to Levinas, he is objecting to the way that Levinas’s marginalizes the penultimate, dogmatic content of revelation.
Smith is concerned with an epistemic and an ontological relation. Levinas is concerned with an ethical relation beyond or prior to knowledge and being, to which we commit (or are already committed) before we know the demands.
Is it possible that Smith and Levinas are speaking past one another? After all, it is not the case that Levinas disagrees that finitude is the condition for receiving the Other. Levinas goes to great pains in his metaphor of atheism to insist on this point. Levinas’s argument is that so long as revelation leaves us there, in our atheism, we remain trapped in the totality of the Same, without the possibility of escape. Arguably, while Smith is trying to save God from conceptual or metaphysical violence, Levinas is intent to save the Same. It is we, the Same, who require escape. It is the Same who requires salvation from itself. Here Levinas seems more faithful to the incarnation than does Smith.
126 Levinas, Totality, 65-6.
127 Of course, one would rightly argue that an obligation must be understandable and capable of linguistic
contextualization. I think that such simple arguments miss the point of the more radical difference between Levinas and Smith’s doctrines of revelation. The point is not to eliminate content but to place content. A more important concern is the possibility of that obligation to be corrupted for personal gain, the possibility of the ethical obligation becoming an idol.
49