A Glimpse on Jean-Luc Marion
What do we see, what can one ever see, of the invisible? That is the question.
— Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation, p. 5.
The three images which I have provided above depict my attempts to summarize three out of five (excluding excess and saturated phenomenon) central notions in Marion’s thought: the idol, the icon, and revelation. They were constructed according to my reading on two of his works, God Without Being, and Givenness and Revelation. In this entry, I would like to develop these summaries further by converting them into written prose. I will first try to denote the purpose of Marion’s project before delving into each of the aforementioned notions.
In the foreword preceding the English translation of Givenness and Revelation, Ramona Fotiade and David Jasper argued that the purpose which underlies Marion’s project as a whole was [and still is] twofold, that is, “to enhance not only our understanding of religious experience, but [also] to enlarge the horizon of the possibility of phenomenology itself” (see p. vi). They supported this argument by directly quoting Marion’s statement in Being Given (see p. 234), in which he said:
My entire project has been directed to liberating possibility in phenomenology, to unbinding the phenomenon from the supposed equivalences that limit its deployment (the object, the being, the common law adequation, poverty of intuition).
While Fotiade and Jasper’s interpretation is not wrong per se, I think that it lacks one crucial point, which is characterized by Marion’s tendency to quote biblical passages and the thoughts of Patristic and Scholastic theologians. I argue that Marion, whether consciously or unconsciously (which is almost impossible, since writing, as an activity, presupposes consciousness), was [and is] also trying to revitalize the Christian conception of transcendence in the midst of postmodern discourse. This transcendence, however, is not the same as that which was criticized by Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and other atheist philosophers who live in the 21st century. Instead, it is the one which is depicted in the title of one of his most famous works, namely God Without Being. To revitalize this kind of transcendence, Marion, like Heidegger, renounced the idea of ontotheological God, the Supreme Being whom the metaphysicians regarded as that which creates and underlies all beings. Furthermore, he posed a question on the nature of God and Being, which goes as follows (see Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, p. 2):
Does Being relate, more than anything, to God? Does God have anything to gain by being? Can Being which — whatever is, provided that it is, manifests — even accommodate any [thing of] God?
This is the question that brought Marion to construct his notion on the idol and the icon. Utilizing Edmund Husserl’s philosophical phenomenology, Marion argued that the idol signifies any entity which stops and returns the human gaze to themselves precisely because it was created out of the basic desire to depict The Invisible God. Marion then developed this notion further by delving into the etymology of the idol. He found out that the origin of the word idol is the Greek term eidos, which means something that is seen, and eidolon, which denotes the existence of something based on the fact that it can be seen. Therefore, the idol is also a thing which exists for a single purpose: to be seen [by many]. With its dazzling and alluring exterior, the idol invites the human gaze and entraps them inside their own expectations and imageries. The God of ontotheology, an idea which confines God to the realm of Being, is one such idol.
By contrast, the icon signifies any entity which acts as a medium to The Invisible God. The icon has the capability to refract the human gaze towards God’s infinite depth while, at the same time, renders God’s invisibility into a visible face and delivers it to the human eye. Marion then called this rendering and delivering as an act of giving. The icon, therefore, is an entity through which The Invisible God gives himself to be seen by the human. This concept of giving oneself naturally evokes two possibilities. While there is a possibility for that which is seen to give itself to the observer as a whole, it is also possible for the seen to give itself partially. Anticipating both possibilities, Marion presupposed a distance (or depth) that separates the icon from The Invisible God, in a similar fashion to the separation between the Kantian phenomenon and noumenon. Such distance exists even when the icon in question is Jesus Christ, whom Marion considered as the icon par excellence due to him being the hypostasis of The Invisible God, the icon which God himself gives to humanity. By imposing the existence of this distance to Christ, Marion echoed what Irenaeus has stated centuries ago, namely that, “the Father is the invisible of the Son, but the Son the visible of the Father” (see Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” IV.6.6).
Marion’s notion on revelation is tied to his notion on the icon. In Givenness and Revelation, the French philosopher mostly used the term to denote phenomenological and epistemological aspect of The Invisible God’s act in giving himself. Marion stated that revelation is commonly known as a form of knowledge that comes from somewhere unlike this world. It carries with it an alterity, an otherness, that separates itself from the natural knowledge, which is attained through cognitive processes involving intuition, reason, and sensory capabilities. As a consequence, revelation also brings with it two problems. The first problem is the resistance which almost certainly follows it (unless, in Marion’s opinion, said revelation ends up being a deception or a fraud). Such resistance, Marion argued, manifests itself in the following circumstances (see Givenness and Revelation p. 2):
…conflict between the revelation and its witness, who is surprised, upset, and divided in his responses; conflict between the witnesses who receive the revelation and those who oppose it; conflict between the witnesses and those who did not have direct experience of it and must refer themselves to the witnesses, to writings, and to traditions; and conflict between the witnesses of competing revelations or competing interpretations of a same revelation.
The second problem of revelation concerns its nature. Put simply, as I have stated above, revelation is commonly defined as a knowledge of The Invisible God that comes from somewhere. This definition has in it a paradox which is both logical and phenomenological. From the logical perspective, a revelation cannot constitute itself as a knowledge unless it assumes the conceptual form, which is a form familiar to the human mind. At the same time, this conceptual form should also be assumed by the revelation in such a way that it doesn’t lose its alterity, or else it will cease from being revelation and ends up being a natural knowledge. From the phenomenological perspective, the paradox of revelation resides in its givenness. Specifically, it resides in the rendering of invisibility into the visible, the other-worldly into the worldly appearance. It was in this context that Marion posed the question which opens up this entry, “What do we see, what can one ever see, of the invisible?”
The investigation that Marion attempted in Givenness and Revelation aims to solve the aforementioned problems of revelation. From the introduction which opens his work, I infer that his proposal will have something to do with his notion on saturated phenomenon and excess. It is likely for Marion to consider revelation as an exceptional phenomenon, while, at the same time, proves its reasonability according to philosophical phenomenology.
Works Cited
Irenaeus. 1885. Against heresies IV. In Ante-Nicene fathers, vol. 1, ed. Philip Schaff, 1159–1297. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library. https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01/anf01.
Marion, Jean-Luc. 1991. God without being: Hors-texte, ed. Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
_____. 2002. Being given: Toward a phenomenology of givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
_____. 2016. Givenness and revelation, trans. Stephen E. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
