Christianity proposes that God can be accessed both in the subjectivity of the human self and in the World. This admittedly strange idea can be understood by drawing certain insights from Michel Henry and Dumitru Stăniloae. For Henry, the connection between God and the human self in subjectivity is understood as the generation of the human as a living self in the absolute Life which is God. For Stăniloae, the connection between God and the World is understood through the interpretation (...) of the cosmos as an intelligible medium by which the dialog between God and the human being takes place. These two thinkers have certain lacunae, but their proposals can be fruitfully combined through the supposition that the World is the “body” of God, i.e. His inner life as seen from the outside. (shrink)

Traditionally, phenomenology has understood the self in light of intentionality and hence the world. However, contemporary French phenomenology—as represented here by Jean-Luc Marion—contends that this view of subjectivity is open to challenge: our mode of existence is not simply one of “being-in the-world.” I develop this claim by examining Marion’s reformulation of the reduction. Here, the phenomenon of vanity is key. I first present Husserl’s and Heidegger’s own formulations of the reduction. Following Marion, I show that the blow of vanity (...) neutralizes both, by undercutting the respective questions to which they respond. For, in response to vanity’s own question—“What’s the use?”—neither the transcendental nor ontological reductions have a reply. Vanity consequently renders the Heideggerian distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity existentially moot. To establish this, I evaluate how existing interpretations of authenticity overlook the phenomenon of vanity. Phenomenology, I urge in conclusion, should shift its attention to the horizons opened by Marion’s erotic reduction. (shrink)

Among the many difficulties, or even paradoxes, that phenomenology has imposed upon us by positing itself as a doctrine, or at least as a radical foundation for philosophy, one must first and foremost consider the operation typically referred to as the reduction. The reasons for detecting difficulties therein are many, but they take on even greater significance since Husserl proclaimed the reduction to be fundamental to any philosophy that wished to establish itself as a phenomenology. The history of phenomenology, then, (...) would appear not only as the history of all the difficulties encountered in the reduction, but principally as the history of Husserl’s own self-elucidation of his entire project. This brings us to the point of reformulating Ricoeur’s claim—that phenomenology is the sum of misinterpretations of Husserl’s doctrine—with this new contention: that phenomenology consists in the sum of discussions and disagreements about the doctrine and practice of the reduction. (shrink)