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Madn Ess, R Eligion, an D Th E Lim Its of R Eas On MADNESS, RELIGION, AND THE LIMITS OF REASON EDITED BY JONNA BORNEMARK & SVEN-OLOV WALLENSTEIN SÖDERTÖRN PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES Södertörn Philosophical Studies is a book series published under the direction of the Department of Philosophy at Södertörn University. Th e series consists of monographs and anthologies in philosophy, with a special focus on the Continental-European tradition. It seeks to provide a platform for innovative contemporary philosophical research. Th e volumes are published mainly in English and Swedish. Th e series is edited by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and Hans Ruin. Cover image: Extas - Den Heliga Teresa / Ecstasy - The Holy Theresa, 1988, 75x183 cm, photography and lacquer on board, Maya Eizin Öijer MADNESS, RELIGION, AND THE LIMITS OF REASON SÖDERTÖRN PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 16 2015 Madness, Religion, and the Limits of Reason Edited by Jonna Bornemark & Sven-Olov Wallenstein SÖDERTÖRN PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 16 Södertörn University The Library SE-141 89 Huddinge www.sh.se/publications © The authors Cover image: Extas – Den Heliga Teresa / Ecstasy – The Holy Theresa, 1988, 75x183 cm, photography and lacquer on board, Maya Eizin Öijer Graphic Form: Per Lindblom & Jonathan Robson Printed by Elanders, Stockholm 2015 Södertörn Philosophical Studies 16 ISSN 1651-6834 Södertörn Academic Studies 62 ISSN 1650-433X ISBN 978-91-87843-24-2 (print) ISBN 978-91-87843-25-9 (digital) Contents Introduction: Madness, Religion and the Limits of Reason 7 JONNA BORNEMARK & SVEN-OLOV WALLENSTEIN Forget Rationality: Is There Religious Truth? 23 JOHN D. CAPUTO On Enthusiasm 41 MARCIA SÁ CAVALCANTE SCHUBACK Divine Frenzy and the Poetics of Madness 53 ANDERS LINDSTRÖM Ghostly Reason: A Phenomenological Interpretation of Paul and Pneumatology 75 HANS RUIN Matter, Magic and Madness: Giordano Bruno’s Philosophy of Creativity 99 JONNA BORNEMARK The Unjustifiable in a Philosophical Rationality. An Example: Swedenborg in the Critique of Pure Reason 117 MONIQUE DAVID-MÉNARD Foucault, Derrida, and the Limits of Reason 129 SVEN-OLOV WALLENSTEIN Light and Darkness: Jan Patočka’s Critique of the Enlightenment 153 GUSTAV STRANDBERG Philosophy and its Shadow: On Skepticism and Reason in Levinas 177 CARL CEDERBERG Seeing Wonders and the Wonder of Seeing: Religion at the Borders of the Ordinary 187 ESPEN DAHL Authors 205 Introduction: Madness, Religion, and the Limits of Reason Jonna Bornemark and Sven-Olov Wallenstein I Madness and religion have traditionally signaled that from which philo- sophy must take a distance, either by simply rejecting them as foreign to reason, or by dominating them in a discourse that fixes them as objects and inscribes them in the conceptual grid of understanding. While the philo- sopher as philosopher cannot be mad, and not religious, as least not in the sense of listening to some other voice than the one of reason while thinking, his or her power lies in reason’s capacity to hold its other at bay, situating it at, and as, a limit. Religion, and a fortiori madness, may appear “within the limits of reason alone,” as Kant would say, or perhaps within the limits of “mere reason,” depending on how we translate the title of his treatise Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, published in 1793 as a kind of afterthought to his three Critiques. Does the “bloss” here indicate a limit to reason, beyond which we need to give room for something else, or does it signal that reason alone is capable of drawing a magic circle around itself and decide what may be allowed to enter into our experience, lest we are to succumb to something like—madness? What is this limit, and to what extent does it condition the very sense of reason as constituted by a process not just of exclusion, but also holding the other at a distance, allowing it to speak within certain limits? The idea of the limit has been inherent in philosophy since its very inception in many and conflicting ways. At least three such interpretations of the idea of the limit may be discerned. It can be a mark of the finitude of understanding and a warning of what may befall us—metaphysically, ethic- ally, theologically, politically—if we overstep our boundaries. But it can also, 7 JONNA BORNEMARK & SVEN-OLOV WALLENSTEIN and just as much, be understood as that which we must grasp in order to locate our own position: to acknowledge the limit ensures us of our posses- sion of a defined territory. Finally, it signals a permanent temptation that must not simply be repressed if thought is to remain on the way to what it could one day become. In the first case, the limit is what we neither should nor can go beyond, since passing beyond it means to venture into a space where we no longer know or perceive what makes sense; it is the limit of discourse, of what can be said and thought. In the second, it is precisely this understanding of the limit, our grasp of it, that in a reverse movement pulls thought back onto its own ground, where it may be exercised according to established protocols. As for the third, it is what gives thinking a particular momentum, unleashing a fundamental inquietude and agitation that we must not too soon appease in the name of false safeties, if thinking is to remain an activity that does not simply settle for a series of achieved results. Thus, if philosophy in a certain way begins as a quest for the infinite— for that which surpasses the here and now of the singular case, and the vicissitudes of time, as in the introductory moves that organize the Poem of Parmenides—this just as soon reverts to a fear of its abyssal and vertiginous structure, which necessitates that we not too quickly take leave of our finite abode if we are to remain in possession of ourselves. Possession of what thinking desires may become a dispossession of ourselves, just as self-pos- session entails a certain asceticism in relation to the lure of the absolute, all of which institutes the game of philosophical truth as a wager that must be won and lost, acknowledged and repressed. In another register, this would amount to something like a double desire, or more precisely, desire in what has often been understood as its constitutive double structure: conditioned by its own limit, it is what ceaselessly approaches this limit, working to displace and negotiate that which would be its fulfillment as well as its own death. From the Platonic understanding of eros as that which pushes thinking ahead, to the various modern analyses of desire, either as lack and negativity, or as production and proliferation, limits are there to be pushed and overcome, but in this also displaced and redrawn. The Kantian moment was a decisive shift in this tradition, in locating the limit inside, or even as, consciousness. After the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Critique, any excessive transcendence, any movement that threat- ens to dislocate reason’s self-possession, will be derived from its immanent structure, as a temptation that emerges from within the depths of con- sciousness itself. The preceding formulas may even seem to be a retroactive 8 INTRODUCTION projection of problems of Kantian and post-Kantian thought, as is indicated by the obvious Kantian resonances of the very idea of a “limit of reason,” which already in the Critique of Pure Reason engages all of three above in- terpretations: the limit as prohibition, as a source of stability, and as promise. While the last is perhaps the least emphasized by Kant, it is pivotal in the aftermath of Criticism: beginning in the idealist and romantic at- tempts to move beyond the strictures of Kantian finitude, both in terms of aesthetic and religious experiences, as well as in the more strictly epistemo- logical claims successively advanced by Fichte and Hegel, the claim is con- stantly made that the Kantian limitation necessarily, albeit unknowingly, implies a knowledge of the limit’s other side, and thus already entails its own overcoming. In twentieth-century thought, this problem of boundaries is staged in many ways, particularly in the phenomenological tradition. Husserl’s project to establish an expanding sense of reason on the one hand opens toward an infinite horizon that sometimes seems to makes him into an heir of pre- Kantian rationalism; on the other hand, it constantly runs up against a series of interior limits that yet are not simply negative boundaries, but always call for a return to more profound constitutive layers of consciousness in which the limits will be shown to belong to the order of the constituted. For Heidegger, thinking of the ontological difference and, in turn, the withdrawal of being appears like a fundamental limit to what consciousness and sub- jectivity may achieve; however, in keeping with the remarks made both in Being and Time and in later work that the possibility of phenomenology stands higher than its actuality, it also signals an experience of thought as openness and a clearing beyond the subject, perhaps an “asubjective” pheno- menology as it was developed in different ways by Eugen Fink and Jan Patočka (discussed below by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and Gustav Strandberg). For someone like Derrida, the problem of limits is pushed fur- ther in a way that both negates and pursues Heidegger’s openness. The de- construction of metaphysics as presence inclines towards moving away from what in Heidegger still may have appeared as an appeal to the originary and to foundations, while still preserving the sense of the transcendental as the freedom of thought, as in Derrida’s early debate with Foucault on the status of madness as outside of reason (discussed below by Sven-Olov Wallenstein) or, in his later work, as a relation to an otherness that remains to come, with both ethical and religious connotations (brought forth in John D.
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