A new semantics for the philosophy of religion

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 55: 155–169, 2004.© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Review Article

A new semantics for the philosophy of religion

JERALD WALLULISThe University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

Calvin Schrag, God as Otherwise than Being: Towards a Semantics of theGift. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002, 157 pages. $27.95(paper)

God as Otherwise than Being: Towards a Semantics of the Gift is the fourthin a series of books in which Calvin Schrag articulates and defends a philos-ophy of “communicative praxis.”1 As in the earlier books, Schrag creativelytransforms phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches and respondsto the challenges posed by critical theory, structuralism and postmodernism.However, the solutions developed in these books in regard to reference andrationality, subjectivity and transcendence, and narrativity and ethics arenot pertinent only to continental debates. Schrag intends to respond to andchallenge other ways of defining and doing philosophy (both past and present)even as he is expanding the viewpoint of his own continental tradition.Consequently, his efforts to articulate a grammar of transcendence should beviewed from the context of a larger philosophical enterprise relevant to manyother philosophical approaches both in their full compass and in their specificcontributions to the philosophy of religion. God as Otherwise than Being:Towards a Semantics of the Gift rethinks and even transforms the traditionalsubject matter of the philosophy of religion.

In this essay I first describe the primary features of Schrag’s philosophyof communicative praxis in which the book, God as Otherwise than Being,is situated and which help make it a distinctive contribution to contemporaryphilosophy. Second, I discuss Schrag’s criticisms of classical metaphysicaltheism regarding its theoretical limitations and, more interestingly, its poten-tial limitations as a foundation for religious practice. This is followed by abrief account of the alternative semantics of the gift which is developed inthe final half of the book in critical interaction with the views of EmmanuelLevinas, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Marion. Finally, I raise two criticalconcerns regarding Schrag’s transformed philosophy of religion. Insofar as

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these comments are stimulated by a critique immanent to the philosophy ofcommunicative praxis, I do not intend to undermine Schrag’s contribution butrather to emphasize further its benefits and significance.

Communicative praxis

A philosophy of “communicative praxis” gains much, if not indeed themajority, of its appeal from the distinctiveness obtained by combining theterms. Nonetheless, a discussion of each term is useful for situating Schrag’sambitious philosophical project in the larger landscape of continental andAnglo-American thought. The noun “praxis” is of obvious Greek originand recalls the Aristotelian tradition of practical philosophy. However, sincephilosophers often employ the term with different meanings, it is important tobe clear about Schrag’s particular use of this popular term. His use of “praxis”is rooted in his objections to epistemological and metaphysical theories whichdistance knowing and being from experience. Similar to phenomenologistssuch as Heidegger and Merleau Ponty, he emphasizes the situatedness ofeveryday experience in the embodied engagement with the world. He alsoechoes the pragmatists, in particular James, in emphasizing a close connec-tion between experience and action without limiting that action to ends-meansconnections. Consequently, the term “praxis” signals the centrality of prac-tically engaged experience in a way which has clear kinship with otherphilosophies which emphasize experience and with those in the philosophyof religion who stress the centrality of religious experience.

The adjective in the expression “communicative praxis” is equallysignificant. “Communicative” indicates the importance of language andintersubjectivity. This emphasis on communication distinguishes Schrag’sphilosophy from an emphasis upon absolute transcendental consciousness inidealism and in Husserlian phenomenology. Even Husserl’s later philosophyis rejected by Schrag, since the “origin of meaning is still sought for withinthe folds of a transcendental intrasubjectivity, the result of a constituting actof intentional consciousness” (CP, p. 59n) and not of intersubjective dialogue.The communicative emphasis also distinguishes Schrag’s approach from thatof many analytic philosophers, insofar as the emphasis is placed not uponlanguage as a syntactical and semantic system, but as it is pragmaticallyengaged in by language users who are communicating with one another.Language functions not simply as the representation of ideas and relationsor as the transmission of information, but rather by way of “communal andinstitutional reflection, bearing the inscriptions of habits, skills, and socialpractices which display their own insight and disclosure” (CP, p. 137). Inthis way, “communicative” and “praxis” are united inasmuch as the narrative

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structure of communication reflects “the praxis of a tradition that vitalizesand informs the historical presence of everyday thought and action.”2

The emphasis upon practical engaged experience and discourse whichcharacterizes every aspect of Schrag’s philosophical project also influencesprofoundly the ways in which he criticizes rival and opposing viewpoints. Heoffers arguments against points of view which are considered to be either tooabstract, idealistic, ahistorical, empiricistic or overly transcendental. Moreimportant to him, however, is the need to dispel or defuse in the first placethe apparent requirement for a kind of theoretical explanation which occursat the cost of underestimating or even disregarding the role of practicallyengaged experience. In short, distancing from experience and detachment orabstraction from communication are not only theoretical errors to be refutedbut practical pitfalls to be avoided. They produce not only misconstruals, butindeed distortions of the ways in which experience and discourse should bedisclosed and articulated.

An excellent example of Schrag’s worries about distortions and theirpractical implications is found in the book immediately preceding God asOtherwise than Being, namely The Self after Postmodernity. As often inhis treatments of issues, Schrag finds himself “between” positions, in thisinstance between classical metaphysical doctrines of the self as substance, onthe one hand, and the postmodern decentering of the subject and celebrationof multiplicity and fragmentation on the other. The danger in the former case,illustrated in Cartesianism and absolute idealism, involves “recurring tenden-cies to construct a sovereign and monarchical self, at once self-sufficient andself-assured, finding metaphysical comfort in a doctrine of an immutable andindivisible self-identity” (SP, p. 27). While postmodern thinkers provide auseful “counteractant” to the theory of self as substance, Schrag argues that“celebrating plurality, incompleteness and difference may well be an over-reaction that leaves us with a subject too thin to bear the responsibilitiesof its narratival involvements” (SP, pp. 27–28). Finding neither alternativeadequate, Schrag works toward a different kind of solution by providing acareful examination of the “who” which is implicated in both theory andcounter-theory. “Hermeneutical self-implicature” discloses the self as neitherabove nor simply an effect of its practical engagements, but rather as aspeaking and acting subject, involved in a temporal process of narrative self-formation, “whose subjectivity is always that of an intersubjectivity” (SP,p. 101), and who is open to the experience of transcendence. Both a substan-tial and unified self that could somehow appear to stand above the processof narrative self-formation and a self that would appear to be a pluralityand multiplicity of its functions are rejected for their theoretical weaknessesand even more so for their practical shortcomings in either overestimating or

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displacing the responsibilities of the self in discourse, the self in action, theself in community and the self in transcendence.

Critiques of classical metaphysical theism

The close relationship of God as Otherwise than Being to The Self after Post-modernity becomes apparent in the first chapter, “The Problem of Being andthe Question about God.” The primary topic of the chapter is the project ofa “metaphysics of theism,” which according to Schrag depends on “beliefsand associated practices pertaining to the existence and nature of a supremebeing” which is placed “at the summit of a vast celestial hierarchy.” Thereis an obvious parallel between this “supreme” being and the “sovereign”self challenged in the earlier book. Only in this instance, the attributesof this highest being, including “eternality, pure actuality, incorporeality,immutability, absolute simplicity, impassibility, omniscience, omnipotence,and omnibenevolence” (p. 10), are even more indicative of the metaphys-ical supremacy which is involved. Having challenged the self-sufficiency ofthe traditional metaphysical conception of the self, Schrag does the same inregard to the metaphysics of theism, posing the challenge on both theoreticaland practical grounds.

The project of classical metaphysical theism involves not only the proofof the existence of the supreme being and a metaphysical description of itsnature. It also involves the grafting on “to these metaphysical attributes thedistinctive religious attributes (such as creator, lord, judge, and redeemer),thus advancing the concordance of Athens and Jerusalem” (p. 10). Theuniting of the metaphysical and religious attributes together gives rise to anepistemological problem of relating the metaphysical attributes which areknowable by reason to the religious attributes which are a matter of faith.However, when the possibility of metaphysical knowledge is challenged inthe modern “epistemological turn,” there is a “sundering of logic and logos”(19). The narrowing of epistemic reason intensifies the question of its rela-tionship to faith. The options appear to be either to “broaden the scope ofknowledge achieved through technical reason” or to simply “abandon theuses of reason in achieving knowledge of God” and “place all . . . bets onthe resources of faith” (22). But even when faith is opposed to reason in thefideistic option, the defining features of the object of faith continue to bethose of the God of classical theism. Schrag concludes: “What was not askedabout was whether the metaphysical scaffolding inherited from the ancients3

and the epistemological framework as invented by the moderns alike mightnot need to be questioned with respect to their usefulness when it comes totalking about God” (p. 22).


The issue of usefulness has both theoretical and practical aspects, althoughneither of these aspects are recognized in the later “linguistic turn” ofboth structuralism and ordinary language philosophy in which the classicalconception of the supreme being continues, in Schrag’s estimate, to persist.Tillich and Heidegger, however, do challenge the philosophical tenability ofmetaphysical theism as well as its religious desirability. Heidegger urgesthat “man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god” (p. 28). Tillich goesfurther and argues for the perniciousness of a Deity who controls the lowerorders of being as an “invincible tyrant.” Indeed the fact “nobody can toleratebeing made into mere objects . . . of absolute control” is “the deepest root ofatheism,” an atheism Tillich finds justified “as the reaction against theologicaltheism” (p. 14).

The “reactive atheism” of Nietzsche, in particular, but also of Freud andSartre forms the first topic of Chapter Two where Schrag pursues the practicalramifications of Tillich’s claim. Nietzsche’s atheism is judged to be reactivebecause it is “not a negation of God in every sense conceivable,” but rather“a negation of the concept of a supernatural being in classical theism as wellas a negation of the God of cultural Christianity” (p. 46). The comminglingproduces for Nietzsche a being quite unlike Tillich’s tyrant. An “enfeebleddeity, called upon to protect those who lack the power to affirm life, fallingvictim to a herd morality, with its resentment of all things noble” (p. 46),this god is compared most unfavorably by Nietzsche to the call to creativityexpressed in the will to power. Schrag criticizes Nietzsche for aestheticizationin regard to his transvaluation of values, but his more forceful and practicalcriticism is that Nietzsche has only a “truncated” notion of love. Insofar as itis viewed only as a negative expression of the will to power and hence a signof weakness, no possibility is allowed for a more positive understanding andvaluation of gift-giving which could itself be “beyond good and evil.” A quitedifferent grammar of gift-giving supports neither a metaphysical monarch nora cultural weakling, but rather points, as the chapter’s title indicates, “BeyondTheism and Atheism.”

Also in Chapter Two Schrag deals with postmodern challenges to tradi-tional theism. Postmodern thinkers are said to challenge theism on thegrounds that it offers a grand narrative which totalizes and unifies and therebysuppresses difference and multiplicity. In earlier books Schrag has sorted outthe valuable and the questionable in the postmodern challenge of hetero-geneity and paralogy, and he cannot resist adding here that “frightened aspostmodernists are by metanarratives, they too are unable to find a comfort-able place for religious discourse” (p. 41). This judgment does not applyto all postmodern thinkers, however, for Schrag also identifies a promisinggroup of thinkers who embrace neither metaphysical theism nor reactive

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atheism. Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Marion advocatean “otherwise than being,” “religion without religion,” and “God withoutbeing.” While the “without” of Marion is immediately accused of equivoca-tion, and Derrida’s “messianicity” without “messianism” is later suspected ofontologizing and secularizing the philosophy of Levinas, the latter’s “other-wise” or even “other than the other” is of crucial import in elucidating thesense of the “beyond” in its difference from the metaphysics of theism. InSchrag’s estimation

The lesson to be learned from Levinas’s accentuated hyperbole of God asother than the other is the requirement to sort out nuances in the meaningof otherness. Specifically, the sense of otherness used to articulate differ-ences within the economy of being and its dyad of sameness (identity)/otherness (difference) needs to be distinguished from the sense of other-ness as utterly transcendent to the economy of being. . . . Without thisdistinction between the two senses of otherness, the grammar of alterityand transcendence in speaking of the divinity and holiness of God willremain clouded in impenetrable semantic mists. (p. 65)

The semantics of the Gift

The clouds lift, or at least the transition to the utterly transcendental alter-native is made, in the third chapter when Levinas’s path “From Ontologyto Ethics” is explicated and integrated into the philosophy of commu-nicative praxis. Levinas’s face-to-face relation is totally dissimilar to anyobjective relationship, and it is also decidedly not “a matter of two self-constituted subjects entering into a rapport of mutual presence.”4 Thingshave an exteriority, but, as Rudi Visker explicates Levinas’s philosophy, “thepoint of my relation to them is that they appear to me, which implies thatI must somehow be able to locate or to label or to recognize them, – i.e.that I must be capable of adapting the shock with which I received themat first.”5 A personal other has, by contrast, a different kind of exteriorityresistant either to the phenomenological analysis of intentionality or to anycomfortable notion of co-presence: “only a personal other has enough alterity(‘exteriority’) to shock me in such a way that I cannot adapt the shock – ifI don’t help the other and even if I don’t feel remorse, I will at least havenoticed that I denied him something he demanded from me.”6 Therefore theethical move “beyond ontology” refigures the subject from a sovereign andautonomous ethical subject into a responsibility to and for the other who isabove me, if I am to make sense of the way “the call to ethical responsibilitysurges up when the other confronts me” (p. 80). In Levinas’s words, “love of


the neighbor” is a “relationship without correlation,” a “love without eros,”“for-the-other-person and, through this, to-God” (p. 88).

The radical transcendence of God as Wholly Other is expressed in a newgrammar, that of the trace, which “surpasses, if not displaces, the sign” with a“meaning that comes to expression in the face that is older than the meaningthat is comported by the sign” (p. 81). Schrag, uncertain at first as to the pres-ence which is conveyed in this trace, looks to the resources of his philosophyof communicative praxis in order to disclose and articulate a “‘respondingcenter’ that identifies the presence from which one’s responsive thought andaction proceed, as well as a ‘soliciting presentment’ that issues from the faceand the voice of the other” (p. 85). The “center” which “responds” is “the sitefrom which responsible thought and practice issue”; the response which iscalled for is “fitting” in a non-deontological, non-teleological, non-utilitarian,non-value (i.e., value conceived as an interior construct of a centered andsovereign subject) way. The alterity of the “soliciting presentment” is moredifficult to disclose, since the “ethical presence of praxis, at the heart ofthe prophetic message,7 points to a presence beyond the presence of theother self in her discourse and action, a presence beyond the economy ofintersubjectivity, an aneconomic presence on the fringes of the horizon ofthe intramundane life-world” (p. 100). For this aneconomic presence, a newgrammar is necessary, a new “semantics of the gift” which is described in thenext and final chapter, “From Ethics to the Gift.”

By itself, the move to a semantics of the gift does not disclose and articu-late the presence of the Other. As Derrida argues in Given Time, the insertionof gift-giving into any economy of exchange relations serves inevitably toincur indebtedness on the part of the recipient and thus destroy the freedomof both the giving and the acceptance of the gift. The difficulty is that to “beable to dispossess oneself of something” appears to presuppose “prior posses-sion or ownership.” As Schrag describes the situation with obvious sarcasm,“The moral task, within this presuppositional framework, becomes that ofstoring up an excess of moral traits, fleshing out a kind of moral curriculumvitae, defining one’s identity through a possession of surplus virtue, thenperfecting the moral life through a dispossession of that which one has insuperabundance” (p. 109). The necessary conclusion is that a “genuine gift”will have to be “radically transcendent to the requirements for reciprocity andbalanced ledgers of exchange” (p. 110). Insofar as such a gift comes from an“aneconomic region,” Schrag highlights the importance of love “freely given,and given time and again, . . . a performing and effecting that is done withoutintent of remuneration or anticipation of consequence” (p. 111). As describedin Kierkegaard’s “unparalleled” Works of Love, this is the love of agapé andcaritas, not eros or philia. Since it is a love for which “the metaphysical

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conceptions of God and the Incarnation do not shake out particularly well”(p. 116), it produces knowledge by a “hermeneutic of acknowledgment asattestation.”

The hermeneutics of acknowledgment is distinguished from the “epistem-ology of recognition.” If the latter is characterized by a process of recognitionthrough representation, the former gives priority to “attesting” rather than torepresenting, and emphasizes the right moment or the kairos in which thegift is given and received. Again Kierkegaard, this time in his analysis ofthe suspension of the ethical stage and the movement to the religious stagein Philosophical Fragments, provides the “crucial scenario in the workingsof the gift”: “The logos as incarnate in the flesh of historical becomingpresents itself, comes to mind, is set forth in the moment as the locus ofhistorical decision as one answers to the call of alterity in the visage of theneighbor” (p. 122). The answer to the call leads back again to the theme ofresponsibility and the ethical, but now the ethical is no longer understoodas law or principle, but rather transfigured by the gift into a “protoethic ofcare” which “transcends and relativizes all particularized normative claims”(p. 128). Kierkegaard’s Works of Love is again in the background, this timein regard to his “rather firm distinction” between the love of neighbor anderotic love and friendship: “Erotic love is defined by the object; friendship isdefined by the object; only love for the neighbor is defined by love” (p. 131).In this love, the concept of neighbor is expanded to include every other self inits situationality of being near-by, and the resultant command to love even theenemy clarifies the semantics of a gift that is without exchange, a love thatseeks no reward. The final step then involves relating “works of love” to the“rough and tumble of our personal and social existence” through a “thoughtexperiment” on “eschatological preenactament.” The experiment is chosento “split” the difference between, on the one hand, a realized eschatology,“for which Hegel must bear much of the responsibility” (p. 134), and aneschatology of absolute exteriority. The truth of eschatological preenactmentis that “although the Kingdom of God has not yet come, it has already begunto come and it is always beginning to come” (p. 135). Thus Schrag completeshis grammar by parting company with Levinas in stating that “in spite of itsrobust transcendence,” the gift can have efficacy within the “here and now inour quotidian personal and cultural life” (p. 135).

Transcendence, transversality, and erotic love

Calvin Schrag offers an original and, in my estimation, largely successfulsemantics of the gift which begins from the starting point of communi-cative praxis and in many ways completes this philosophy. Although I am


highly sympathetic with the philosophy as a whole and am convinced thatthe semantics of the gift has great value for theology and the philosophyof religion, I also have two critical concerns that can be traced to thespecific ways that Schrag’s semantics is influenced by Levinas, Derrida andKierkegaard. The first concern arises from what appears to be a differencein the structure of argumentation between The Self after Postmodernity andGod as Otherwise than Being. In the first book, Schrag takes a positionbetween classical metaphysical and epistemological doctrines of the self andpostmodern celebrations of its demise. In the case of the later book, I findthe position to be tilted toward the postmodern, specifically the adumbrationof radical alterity of Levinas and the analysis of the paradoxes of gift-giving by Derrida. A balance between classical and postmodern views whichhas characterized earlier work not only on subjectivity but also language,ethics, rhetoric and rationality now appears to be no longer applicable in thephilosophy of religion.

Schrag parts company with Levinas only at the end when he resists aneschatology of purely absolute exteriority. Only in this instance is dissentexpressed regarding Levinas’s absolute exteriority in favor of a conceptof eschatological preenactment. Schrag rejects an “immemoriality” of theMessiah “who has not been present in a past, who is not present in an eternalnow, and who is not a future event that will become present at a later date”(p. 135). In its place he puts a futurity which “is always a coming-to-presence,enabling an efficacy of the gift within the thickness of historical experience”(p. 135).

The term which expresses this efficacy within Schrag’s own philosophy is“transversal”: “One is able to speak of the logos that was the gift from timeimmemorial, becoming flesh and dwelling among us as transversal” (p. 121).The term “transversality” first appears in The Resources of Rationality whereit plays the crucial role of replacing universality in the articulation of arationality both open to and still defensible against the postmodern suspicionabout metanarratives and charges against totalizing reason. In accord with thedominant theme of betweenness, transversal rationality is positioned betweenthe “vertical universality” of the moderns and the “horizontal plurality” ofthe postmoderns. In regard to personal and social forms of life, it is said tolie across them “diagonally”: “it is neither vertically transcendent to themnor horizontally immanent within them” (RR, p. 158). It “operates ‘between’them in such a manner that it is able to critique, articulate and disclosethem without achieving a coincidence” (RR, p. 158) with any particular one.Consequently, “the dynamics of transversal rationality falls out as a conver-gence without coincidence, an interplay without synthesis, an appropriationwithout totalization and a unification that allows for difference” (RR, p. 159).

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The transversal understanding of rationality leads to the conclusion inResources of Rationality that the “metaphysical/epistemological matrix oftranscendence versus immanence is more of a conceptual liability than ahermeneutical resource” (RR, p. 158). My inclination is to ask whetherthe same may not be true in regard to the matrix implied by the grammarof “strong” or “radical” or “robust transcendence” versus “weak” or“immanental” transcendence in regard to which Sartre, according to Schrag,provides the most compelling argument. Does not transversality seek to avoidthe contrast between the verticality of strong transcendence and the horizon-tality of weak transcendence? Felix Guattari writes, albeit in a more socialorganizational context, “Transversality is a dimension that tries to overcomeboth the impasse of pure verticality and that of mere horizontality; it tends tobe achieved when there is a maximum of communication among the differentlevels and, above all, in different meanings” (quoted in RR, pp. 152–153).

The possible limitations occasioned by the drawing of a sharp contrastbetween pure verticality and mere horizontality may be illustrated by wayof Schrag’s perceptive discussion of the problem of modernity. This probleminvolves the differentiation into separate “culture-spheres” of the claims ofscience, morality, and art. This process begins with the different Critiques ofKant, but it is especially established by Max Weber, and preserved, albeit in avery different way, in the thinking of Jürgen Habermas. However, this differ-entiation is clearly opposed by postmodern thinkers who advocate paralogy,not consensus and promote the blurring of disciplines rather than their cleardifferentiation.

Schrag’s main contribution to the resolution of the problem lies in hisinsistence upon the importance of a culture-sphere different from those putforward by Weber and Habermas. According to him, the cultural sphereof religion also appears in Kant, in his neglected “fourth” Critique, Reli-gion within the Bounds of Reason Alone. However the great importance ofthis culture-sphere finds its full expression in the philosophy of paradox ofKierkegaard. While concept of Religiousness A echoes the Kantian form ofreligious critiques of “fetish-worship” and “fetish-faith,” the famous concep-tion of Religiousness B introduces a more radical notion of alterity differentfrom, indeed otherwise than all of the cultural spheres. The “robustness”or “strength” of this transcendence allows it to relate to and indeed evenresolve the problem of modernity in three very important ways: (1) as “astandpoint for a critique and evalulation of the beliefs and practices acrossthe spectrum of the intramundane culture-spheres” (SP, p. 124); (2) as thestimulus for a unification of the value spheres involving a different kind ofrationality unopposed to a “multiplicity of viewpoints, perspectives, beliefsystems, and regions of concern” (SP, p. 133); and finally (3) as the resource


for the “transfiguration and transvaluation of the life of self and society” (SP,p. 134) within the culture-spheres.

My problem with this solution, however, is that transversal rationalityalready provides not only a unification, but also a critique and a transforma-tion of the culture-spheres in the same three ways and without the appealto a necessarily vertical and radically other transcendence. As Schrag eluci-dates the dynamics of transversal rationality in regard to critique, it acts as“a sheet anchor against the presumption of absolute knowledge by any ofthe culture-spheres” (SP, p. 133). In regard to unification, transverse ration-ality works for maximal communication among the different culture-spheresby being positioned “between” and not “above” them. Finally with respectto transfiguration and transvaluation, Erik Ramsey has argued for not onlythe transforming but the transformative capability possessed by a politicsinformed by a transversally critical rhetoric (SP, p. 74-5n).

All of these functions of transversal rationality are made possible throughthe powerful metaphor of diagonality which opposes any simple oppositionbetween the axes of verticality and horizontality or between pure transcend-ence and pure immanence. Unlike (I am tempted to say “otherwise than”)the interwoveness of transversal rationality, the fitting response, as describedin one passage of The Self after Postmodernity,“is lifted out of the require-ments of reciprocity, is tempered by a love that is unconditional, and thendescends back into the economy of intramundane concerns and preoccu-pations” (SP, p. 145). The metaphor of diagonality avoids from the veryoutset the troublesomely dichotomous contrast between the truly Other andthe merely “mundane” or “intramundane” or the earlier contrast betweenthe “limited” culture-spheres and apparently boundless robustness. Ratherthan being positioned by radical transcendence as verticallly above, theaneconomic gift is positioned by the metaphor of diagonality within thethickness of human experience. Could the verticality and externality of thegrammar of robust transcendence not be replaced by an even more promis-ing grammar, contained within the philosophy of transversal rationality andbetween the moderns and postmoderns, in which robustness is measurednot in terms of radical otherness but rather by maximal interwoveness andcommunication?

My second concern arises from what appears to be Schrag’s depend-ence upon the opposition or at least “firm distinction” drawn by Kierkegaardbetween love of neighbor and love of God, on the one hand, and erotic loveand friendship on the other. The semantics of the gift discloses the importanceof a love which is freely given and without any expectation of compensationor return. For Kierkegaard this is the love of agapé and caritas and not erosor philia. My fear is that what is offered as a semantics of the gift may in fact

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be judged as the semantics überhaupt in light of the uncontested centralityaccorded by Schrag to Kierkegaard in the disclosure and articulation of lovingand gift-giving. This raises the question whether there might be an alterna-tive semantics of the gift compatible with the philosophy of communicativepraxis, in particular the conception of transversal rationality, and yet alsouseful for a transformed philosophy of religion.

A brief discussion of only the ethical and religious themes of LuceIrigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference most relevant to aneconomictranscendence and the grammar of love will help illustrate my point. Herethics of sexual difference has many similarities to Schrag’s protoethicsof care. However it is not arrived at through the suspension of ethics andthen its transfiguration through religion, but rather through criticism ofthe “auto-mono-centrism of the western subject.” A “masculine economyof subjectivity” is criticized because, in the words of Tamsin Lorraine, it“promotes delusions of self-sufficient wholeness, fosters the need for controlover self-image, and alienates us from the roots of our experience in thenatural world and the world of processes that extend beyond ourselves.”8

Lorraine continues:

Symbolizing the traditional role of the feminine other in a way that wouldgive her voice and render her a subject in her own right could suggesta radically different kind of economy – one that moves beyond . . . theneed for a feminine other for specular confirmation at the expense of thatother’s own subjectivity, and the need to exchange objects in order toconfirm one’s activity as subject. This alternative economy would makepossible a subject that could both give and receive, be passive as wellas active, and achieve an exchange that would be a communion and agenuine communication rather than the passing on of objects.9

The radically different kind of economy requires a new “model ofcommunication,” but one which does not separate erotic and religious love.Similar to Schrag, however, a transfiguration is required: “Love is redemp-tion of the flesh through the transfiguration of desire for the other (as anobject?) into desire with the other.”10 This transfiguration is expressed byan unusual grammar which is conveyed in the title of Irigaray’s I Love toYou. “I love you” and “I desire you” are rejected since they “risk annihilat-ing the alterity of the other, of transforming him/her into my property, myobject, into mine, meaning what is already a part of my field of existentialor material properties.”11 Thus “far from wanting to possess you in linkingmyself to you, I preserve a ‘to,’ a safeguard of the in-direction between us.”12

The in-direction means that rather than appropriating you or seeking to fusewith you, “I stop in front of you as in front of an other irreducible to me:


in body and in intellect, in exteriority and in interiority.”13 Hence the “to”“safeguards a place of transcendence between us, a place of respect which isboth obligated and desired, a place of possible alliance.”14

Irigaray begins the paragraph of To Be Two which follows these lastquotations with the claim, “It is not necessary to bestow upon the other acapital letter, an excessively quantitative valuation, in order to make thisother’s transcendence appear.”15 Aim is of course thereby being taken atan equally famous “to” from Levinas and the robust transcendence whichSchrag articulates and defends so well. While it might appear natural in adiscussion of the philosophy of religion to hone in on this issue, I believethat it is equally important for the field to respond to the clearly relegatedand indeed inferior position which erotic love appears to occupy for bothKierkegaard and Levinas insofar as the other is not capitalized in this case.Irigary’s articulation of an original grammar of love16 shares with Schrag’ssemantics of the gift an opposition to the reduction of love “to questions ofpossessing, of exchanging or sharing objects, cash, or an already existingmeaning”17 and hence is aneconomic in its intent and execution. However,Irigaray avoids distinguishing sharply, as Kierkegaard does, between reli-gious and erotic love on the alleged bases of objectivity, possessiveness,and conditionality of the latter. This is not to say that there may not stillbe differences (especially concerning preferentiality) between Kierkegaard’slove of neighbor and Irigaray’s love “to” you. Indeed, these differences maybe crucial for the semantics of a gift which expects nothing in return and thusstill could determine that a more radical kind of aneconomic transcendenceis necessary. But must this kind of aneconomic transcendence be so “other”in comparison to Irigary’s description of gift-giving of human flesh?

The two questions I have raised concerning Schrag’s semantics of thegift are, as may already be evident, not totally independent. A philosophyof communicative praxis which emphasizes the importance of transversalityis more open to the effort to locate a kind of transcendence between twohuman beings and not only above them. Complementarily, a treatment oferotic love which goes beyond the possessiveness of an object orientationsupports strongly an interwoveness among different kinds of love and avoidsany strong valuations of pure religious verticality and mere fleshly horizon-tality. The combination of transversality and a semantics of gift-giving withmultiple forms need not be viewed as a dilution of the aneconomic characterof gift-giving, but may rather be seen as the enrichment of a semantics whichneed not make firm distinctions in order to disclose its religious otherness andits closeness to practically engaged experience.

God as Otherwise than Being: Towards a Semantics of the Gift exhibitsall the “gifts” of Calvin Schrag’s authorship and in particular his philosophy

168 JERALD WALLULIS

of communicative praxis. In it, he displays his great abilities to compre-hend opposing positions, express them with remarkable clarity, and provideinformed and trenchant criticisms of their weaknesses. He also continues toexhibit the ability to mediate between positions, not only by “splitting thedifference,” but even more impressively by moving forward beyond apparentimpasses and fruitless deadlocks. He thereby demonstrates the strengths ofhis own philosophy of communicative praxis and adds, in this case, to itsbreadth in regard to the philosophy of religion. Perhaps most importantlyto me, this book and its immediate predecessor afford him opportunities tohone in on philosophically indefensible and indeed damaging conceptionsof independent, centered subjectivity and divine sovereignty, and to correctthem with narrational forms of identity and subjectivity and a quite differentsemantics of love and gift-giving. If a strong or “robust” transcendence hasplayed an unparalleled role in both these efforts, I have only wished in theend to suggest that it need not be unrivaled in a hermeneutical philosophy ofcommunicative praxis.

Notes

1. The four books are: Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1986), The Resources of Rationality (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1992), The Self after Postmodernity (New Haven: Yale University Press,1997), and God as Otherwise than Being (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,2002). References to the first three of these books are indicated in this essay by paren-theses after the quotations with the following respective abbreviations: CP, RR and SP.References to the fourth book, the primary focus, are indicated by the page numbers alone.

2. Calvin Schrag, Radical Reflection and the Origin of the Human Sciences (West Lafayette:Purdue University Press, 1980), p. 122.

3. It is important to add here that Schrag includes among the ancient views committed toa “metaphysical scaffolding” the tradition of negative theology. His reason for believingthat negative theology does not escape the metaphysics of theism is that its negation is inservice of a superabundance or excess of Being rather than an “otherwise” than Being.

4. Richard Kearney, The Wake of the Imagination (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1988), p. 452n.

5. Rudi Visker, Truth and Singularity (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999),p. 286.

6. Ibid.7. The “prophetic” sense of presence is distinguished from a “sacramental” sense and both

are discussed in the section of the book, ‘The Ethical and the Sacramental’, pp. 82–93.8. Tamsin Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 103.9. Ibid., italics added.

10. Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History, Alison Martin (trans.)(New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 139.

11. Ibid., p. 110.


12. Luce Irigaray, To Be Two, Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc (trans.)(London: Athlone Press, 2000), p. 19.

13. Ibid.14. Ibid.15. Ibid.16. Of course Irigaray does not offer the only possibility for such an alternative. See, for

example, Philippa Berry, ‘Kristeva’s Feminist Refiguring of the Gift’, in Phillip Blond(ed.), Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (London: Routledge,1998), pp. 318–333.

17. Irigaray, I Love to You, p. 127.

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A new semantics for the philosophy of religion