Overcoming Metaphysics

Metaphysics is making a comeback, but Merold Westphal ( Modern Theology , April 2007) thinks that the project of overcoming metaphysics is still worth the trouble. His article examines Kant, Heidegger, Marion, and Milbank. Along the way he says the following about Kant:

On Westphal’s reading, Kant’s effort to overcome knowledge to make room for faith ends up being an overcoming of metaphysics to make room for metaphysics. The faith that Kant wants to make room for “involves (but is not reducible to) beliefs that would seem to be robustly metaphysical.” Levinas might want to formulate an ethics and religion without a belief in a “world behind the scenes,” but for Kant belief in this world is “both natural and utterly essential.”

Westphal sees no contradiction in overcoming metaphysics to make room for metaphysics: “The metaphysics that is overcome is not the same as the metaphysics for which room is made. The one is the enemy of faith, the other an essential component thereof.” Metaphysics poses a danger to faith for two reasons: “Formally speaking, it consists in the arrogant claim of philosophical speculation to be the highest tribunal by which all questions of right ( quid juris ) regarding our God talk are to be settled, without whose Nihil obstat and Imprimatur our religious beliefs are to be considered mere opinion if not outright superstition. Substantively speaking, metaphysics is dangerous because when God has been reshaped to fit the Procrustean bed by which it defines rationality, what remains is both different from and less than the God of biblical faith.”

The faith Kant makes room for, Westphal realizes, is not necessarily biblical faith, and his “rational faith” may be as dangerous to biblical faith as metaphysics. But Kant posed the two essential questions for believers when evaluating metaphysics: Does the philosophy “invoking criteria drawn from outside the life of faith, set itself up as the Absolute Accrediting Agency whose approval is required to obtain, and if so, with what right?” Second, “is the God who gets accredited by this agency, after the editing process that brings God into conformity with ‘house style,’ the God of the Bible and of the church or an idol created in a human image?”

Heidegger fails to meet these two tests. For Heidegger, “phenomenology serves as a ‘guide’ that provides ‘co-direction’ to theology, and indirectly to faith, since theology’s task is to guide and co-direct faith, and to do so aggressively (Kant might say arrogantly!). Ten times we are told that it is the task of phenomenological philosophy to ‘correct’ theology on the basis of ‘pre-Christian’ and ‘purely rational’ conceptualities. On this point there doesn’t seem to be a dime’s worth of difference between modernity and postmodernity.” Westphal agress with Marion’s evaluation: “Heidegger recapitulates in his own way the danger, giving philosophy a conceptual hegemony over biblical faith and its reflective mode in theology. Thus, after metaphysics, Heidegger represents a second idolatry.”

Westphal defends Marion against Milbank’s criticisms. I’m less convinced by Westphal at this point. Defending Marion against Milbank’s charge that he fails to break decisively with the modern notion of the autonomy of philosophy from theology, Westphal agrees that the criticism is true in a sense, but adds that “by restricting autonomous philosophy to the immanence of the reduction, Marion makes a decisive break with the metaphysics of a Descartes or the ontology of a Heidegger.” Perhaps that last claim is strictly true, but it wouldn’t make Milbank rest any easier: Even if the sphere of philosophy’s autonomy is restricted to phenomena, it is still true that philosophy is autonomous without that realm. Milbank (rightly, in my view) rejects the notion that any sphere is autonomous from theology. Because God is Creator, phenomenality is fundamentally theological.