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Lunch on The Way
Kia Ora Koutou, and welcome to Lunch on The Way! We're three guys doing theology over lunch, and sometimes we'll do that with others. We talk about church, culture, theology, philosophy, and more, always wanting to be as practical as possible. This is a thinking podcast more than a teaching podcast. We want to warn you, that what's said here is not yet complete, because, like any good conversation, you never want it to end.
Lunch on The Way
Expert Catholic Philosopher Explains Phenomenology, Truth, and Experiencing Reality | Dr. Wallenfang
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In this conversation, Dr. Donald Wallenfang explains the philosophical style of phenomenology and how getting to universal reality beginning with experience is important for Christian knowledge of truth, but not totalising.
Dr. Wallenfang, OCDS, Emmanuel Mary of the Cross, is a Secular Discalced Carmelite and Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Sacred Heart Major Seminary. He received his M.T.S. from St Norbert College and his Ph.D. from Loyola University Chicago.
Wallenfang specializes in Catholic theology and philosophy, Carmelite spirituality, phenomenology and metaphysics. His research concentrates on the work of Edith Stein, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion, the Carmelite saints, and the New Evangelization. He teaches courses in philosophy, theology, lay ecclesial ministry, evangelization, and Catholic spirituality. His articles have appeared in Philosophy and Theology, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, The International Journal of Religion in Spirituality and Society, Listening: Journal of Communication Ethics, Religion, and Culture, and Pacifica, as well as in other book compilations.
00:00 Introduction
02:46 is Catholicism Ecumenical?
09:10 Why philosophy is emotional
15:15 Where did Phenomenology come from?
26:10 Can Phenomenology reveal Christ?
37:45 Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutic Phenomenology
46:22 The tension of givenness and interpretation
56:14 Literal meaning vs Metaphorical meaning
1:07:17 Should churches discover new metaphors?
1:20:12 Phenomenology and Metaphysics need each other
Podcast hosts are Greame Flett, Jonathan Hoskin, and Joey Millington.
The opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals expressing and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of any affiliated organisations or ministries.
Where did this discipline of phenomenology come from and what was it reacting to historically within philosophy that that required it to come about?
SPEAKER_00So kind of relativizing of logic, the rules of logic, and also what we mean by truth. There's as if there's only one universal and it is um subjectivism. So Husserl said no. For phenomenology, this language of objectivity and subjectivity is even too contrived.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, when I when I'm engaging with it, I almost I I've had a complete distaste for those two terms.
SPEAKER_00This isn't just pure relativism. Because things actually give themselves. And that is an accomplished fact. This whole new world is opened up, this whole new world is giving itself that is prior to the text. It's prior to language, even a charismatic proclamation of Christianity is testimony to the gift that was given long ago. But there's a difference between the kind of philosophy that invents reality and then the kind of philosophy that simply receives it. Phenomenology is the latter.
SPEAKER_02Kirkoto, and welcome to lunch on the way. Today's conversation is with Dr. Wallenfang, who is a professor of theology and philosophy at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Michigan. And this is a conversation around phenomenology, metaphysics, and what is real and true about the world, and can we actually know what is real and true in the world? This is a wide-ranging conversation around philosophy. So if you care about philosophy, even at an introductory level, and you wonder what is phenomenology and what does phenomenology have to contribute to philosophy and to what is real about the world, you need to listen to this conversation. It is phenomenal. He has a wonderful heart for not only philosophy and theology, but more importantly, a wonderful heart for Jesus and for Christian spirituality. And uh if you want to learn more about why truth matters in the world, not just for knowledge acquisition, but for knowing and for knowing the person of Christ, this is the conversation that you need to listen to. He is uh a philosopher, uh phenomenologist, and metaphysician, and his research concentrates on the works of phenomenologists like E the Stein, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricur, Jean-Luc Marion, and the Camelite Saints and the New Evangelization. And he teaches courses in philosophy, theology, lay ecclesial ministry, evangelization, and catholic spirituality. So you will want to listen to the full hour plus today with Dr. Wallen Feng.
SPEAKER_00Ecumenical gospel choir. You know, so that's a big part of who we are too. One of my big conversion experiences was going to the Urbana Conference, uh, Champagne Urban, Illinois, in 1996. And it was just revolutionizing conversion experience. Uh, and I ended up reading through the Bible in a year, the year after, and everything, and just um, so I've been very formed by several traditions within Christianity, um, though my home yes is Catholicism. Uh, and yet with Catholicism, it's inherently dialogical, it's inherently inclusive, uh universal, uh, and it loves that drama of the shared lived experience as in a global way, and that everybody has a story and a backgrounds, and and that that great uh adventure of seeking the truth in its fullness, and that like um that's the price, you know?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So I I don't want to already get off topic because you just said so many things that I I just found interesting, but I I know that within the cat Catholicism is getting a bit of a res renaissance within, I guess, the US and other Western coun countries with young people kind of coming in. And and online in the YouTube space, I'm finding a bit of like a Catholicism exclusivism, just like how there's an Orthodox exclusivism of you there's only salvation through the church, uh this particular institutional church, but I'm not I'm not necessarily hearing that from you, just in your ecumenical sense. Have you wrestled with that within your Catholicism? And and where might you kind of find yourself within that? I I think I know where you are from what you just said, but how do you kind of wrestle with that that institutional tension of of revealing and then finding the fullness of truth, yet being ecumenical? How have you kind of wrestled with that a little bit?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, um, you know, the first question you bring up having to do with soteriology, and you know, I think there's kind of um three general different models of soteriology. One could be this exclusivist concept, um, which according to the teachings of the church, I wouldn't say that's what they are. Um, as with the Second Vatican Council, you know, um decree on ecumenism, no stretate, uh, and which is the Declaration on Non-Christian religions, and um that there's uh soteriological exclusivism, there's uh soteriological universalism at the other extreme, as if like all roads lead to heaven no matter what, and or or just like that idea that everyone will be saved in the end, uh no matter what they do, you know, or something. Uh that's not Catholic teaching. But this between exclusivism and universalism, uh what's called inclusivism. When and then we read what's in the catechism when we read um these church documents, that um even for someone who has not ever heard about Jesus and his church, that there can still be hope of salvation for this person by ways known to God alone. And there's a great line in the catechism that says, Um, though God has bound salvation to the sacraments, beginning with baptism, um God himself is not bound by the sacraments, you know. So that's part of the Catholic teaching, and it makes rational sense to me too, you know, in terms of limitations in everybody's lives. And uh so um for me it's it's a very large, thick, global, you know, portrait of humanity. And um and there's so much in humility involved in seeking truth too, I think. And you know, theologian David Tracy talks about a blessed rage for order, and all of us have that to some degree, like we want to know uh what's true with with as much certainty as possible, and sometimes we are tempted toward fundamentalism and exclusivism, and in a kind of very unwarranted, reductionistic, myopic, you know, hermeneutic of of a whole that's very saturating beyond any individual's finite capacities to behold it and receive it. Uh, and so I like what St. Paul says in First Corinthians, um, I want to say chapter four, chapter five at the beginning, he says, you know, it doesn't matter to me if you judge me. I don't even judge myself. I leave it for God alone to judge me, you know. And so I think that's part of that humility. Uh it's not my place to uh adjudicate the um salvation of any anybody else besides me. And uh true. That kind of thing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I I I think I I I've known other Catholics from the city I grew up in in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Um it's a high Catholic presence, and what I find really funny, well, not funny, mostly I use the word funny way too often. Um what I find interesting is that uh on Easter and on Christmas, every single person I know, in the every single person in the neighborhood, has gone to Catholic Mass, and they're just they're talking about it. They're like, Oh, I went to Mass like it's the like it's the most amazing thing they've ever done because they've only gone twice a year. Um but because of that, that Catholic saturation, there's quite a few good theologians in that city as well. Um I think David Dean is one uh who's more ecumenical and has a a bit more of a ecumenical posture of his Catholicism, which is amazing. Um so that's kind of the Catholicism I'm used to, which I was uh interacting with in school. Um so kind of pivoting a little bit to the set of questions, and I c this is kind of like a pre-question one. I I could I just finished watching your uh Paul Recur uh Thorn in the Flesh of Phenomenology video. Um and I I was just so taken by how you allow the philosophy of phenomenology, but maybe just back it up a little bit. Philosophy in general to have such an emotive impact on you. There were times where you just paused and you're and you just repeated the same word. I don't think it was because you lost your train of thought. I think it was because what you were saying you were just like in awe of for a moment. Can you before we even begin to talk about phenomenology and philosophical methodology and stuff like that, can you just speak to what why that emotive capacity that philosophy can have, and m I guess more specifically, possibly Christian philosophy can have on you? Like w what what is going on there with you and philosophy?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, great emotive capacity uh in these different thoughts. Um and uh you know, I think um something Paul Rakour says that um where I we're engaged most with the record, this this book, Dialectical Anatomy of the Eucharist, and this section in here, um I have a quote from Record's book Conflict of Interpretations. And um maybe I just read this this little passage here because it gets at, I think, the emotive um uh effect of philosophical thinking and exploration. Um but he says the incessant work of philosophical discourse is to put itself into a relation of proximity with charismatic and theological discourse. So thinking about the closeness between um rational thought and um the encounter of divine revelation, you know, and this knowledge through faith, uh, in addition to knowledge through reason. So for Riccourt, the best philosophy allows reason to move to the lemon uh where you know it yields to faith. And faith is, as we read with Kierkegaard, for example, it's this decision of ultimacy that involves one's whole person, one's whole being, including affect, including emotion. Whereas Schleiermacher talks about this feeling of absolute dependence, uh, this gefühl, you know, this feeling of absolute dependence. And I've been convinced by that, you know, I was convinced by that before I read Schleiermacher. And I think when those of us involved in pastoral ministry, for example, there's there's a very strong affective current in what's going on in our approach to God and letting God come close to us. Like, I can't help but be moved. I just can't help it. And so Ricord goes on to talk here about the conversion of the philosopher, uh, is a conversion within philosophy and to philosophy according to its internal exigencies. And what he's getting at is is that it's a conversion to the exigencies, the demands, the requirements of truth. And then he he specifies this as logos, you know, that there is only one logos, and within the Christian tradition, the logos of Christ requires me as a philosopher nothing else than a more complete and more perfect activation of reason, not more than reason, but whole reason. And he repeats the phrase, whole reason. So if there's whole reason, there is also this wholeness of faith in this philosophy that um pursues the logos of thought, which is universal. Um, you know, the the the fact that we can talk about reason as a universal human attribute is because there's a unity of it. If there's a unity of reason, there's a unity of truth, and this unity of truth he's calling the logos. Uh and Edith Stein is another thinker that that talks about this in terms of uh the perfect coherence of the totality of meaning and this this logos that is the you know that why can something make sense? Uh why does the universe hold together in um a unity of being, you know? And so if we pursue the wholeness of truth through the wholeness of reason and faith, it inevitably involves this um emotive response to the gift and the proclamation of the gift that he's calling charygma.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I I can't help but think of that Colossians passage. I think it's Colossians one three or one fourteen, somewhere in there, uh uh where everything was created by him, through him, and for him, and and that he is he is the supreme. And it's just like it's like rationality and like the logic of the world is like isn't just abstract, it's caught up in a person. And when you actually begin to pursue that truth, it gets very personal very quickly. And and that's that's kind of what I'm resonating with what I'm hearing from you a little bit is if you pursue truth to its fullest extent, as as a Christian, we believe you're gonna come and come into contact with Christ in some meaningful manner. And that's why philosophy, in your opinion, is so is so important and so emotive. Yeah. Um if we pivot, I I would rather just read some of these questions because to be honest, they're kind of too complicated for me just to go off the top of my head. Um I want to get into philosophy broadly before we kind of speak to um Paul Recurr. Um, because I I I'm within an institution that has understandably so as Christian believes that there are objective truths beyond the person, that there's things true about the world that are just true in themselves despite uh not despite, regardless of my particular hermeneutic in the world. And so the methodology that uh that's kind of animating that is critical realism, and it's moving from you know the empirical to the actual to then what's real and uh which is possibly divine intervention. Um but I'm I've discovered phenomenology, which when I came across that, I didn't I didn't realize how how um mind-body dualistic my thinking was and how I wasn't actually looking at the objects of the world as objects. I was almost like uh idealizing the world in a sense and kind of getting away from the concreteness. I kind of feel like I'm answering the question a little bit, so I'll stop. But where did this discipline of phenomenology come from and what was it reacting to historically within philosophy that that required it to come about?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Oh, one of my favorite questions to lead off with. Oh my goodness, it's like how much time do we have to uh I'm good for the next hour and five minutes.
SPEAKER_02I'm okay with that. I've got seven more, so we'll see how far we get.
SPEAKER_00Oh my goodness. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would love to just spread out in this one alone, but I mean, because uh there's I'm sure there's these uh other great questions I want to try to abbreviate. Thank you. So phenomenology, uh, we think of the father of this philosophical method called phenomenology, is the German mathematician, turned philosopher Edmund Husserl. Edmund Husserl, who publishes these works called The Logical Investigations, two volumes in 1900 and 1901. And what he is trying to overcome is what was called psychologism. And uh, you know, the field of um psychology was developing in the late 19th century already, and um it was also giving the impression that things of logic uh and and and truth um were like these byproducts of what's going on in terms of um thought in a in a very subjective sense. Um and as if there are no universal uh and for lack of a better word, uh objective, definite uh truths or rules for logic, as if um everything is improvised as we go. Psychologism, we could also think of it as subjectivism, that term, or even what's more familiar to us today, relativism. So a kind of relativizing of logic, the rules of logic, uh, and also um what we mean by truth, you know, uh as if there are there's as if there's only one universal, and it is um subjectivism, you know, as if subjectivism is an absolute, not only morally, but also in terms of reason uh and logic. So Husserl said, no, um this is not the case. Um there is uh there are universal truths, there is universal reason, there's universal process of sense making and logic. And he was a mathematician. He wrote um his uh uh habilitation thesis was entitled On the Concept of Number in 1887. Uh so he took mathematics seriously, not as uh a byproduct of uh psychological neurological processes, um, that things and signs can mean whatever that we want them to mean at whatever time, in whatever order. Um, but that phenomenology is seeking to demonstrate that there is a universal and objective foundation of logic and knowledge after all. The word was already in circulation before Husserl. I mean, we think of Hegel's, you know, in the um 19th century, he he published a book, uh Phenomenology of Spirit. We think of even before Hegel, Kant in the in the 18th century um is using the word phenomenon, uh phenomenological in this sense, uh, where Kant really focused so much on the philosophy of subjectivity, distinct from the world of objects. And Kant, um, you know, following Descartes, of course, with Descartes, we have that turn towards subjectivity, and we have the res cogitans and the res extensa, as you're talking about, the Cartesian dualism kind of thing, becomes uh a perennial temptation for philosophy at that point. And Kant really uh places a gap or a sejure between what he calls the numenon, the thing in itself, and the phenomenon, the thing as it appears to me the human subject, as if there are two distinct realities that don't ever really touch in any unifying way. Um they're related, but all that we're really dealing with, according to to Kant's um understanding, is uh this world of um of uh appearance and understanding of appearances. And and so there's a real um distancing, a real distension between uh things in themselves and the thinking subject. As if what's most real is just is thought itself, you know, even again anchored in the Cartesian uh discovery of the Kojito.
SPEAKER_02So it was it was Husserl who who recognized this subjective term within philosophy and he was concerned with the ob with trying to get back to the objects themselves. Or yeah, is it Husserl or is it Heidegger who said to the things themselves?
SPEAKER_00Husserl, yeah, Husserl. Zudenzachen selbst in German. The Zachen, the things. But for Husserl, now here's the thing is it is like for us to not understand what he's doing in uh a too elementary kind of way. For phenomenology, this language of objectivity and subjectivity is even too contrived.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's what I'm getting when I yeah, when I when I'm engaging with it, I almost I I've had a complete distaste for those two terms because of phenomenology. And I is that inherent within phenomenology itself?
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, you know, Husserl has a predilection for the language of of the z of object uh in his work. He'll still use the term. And so for him, but but the the key term for phenomenology is in German gegebenheit, givenness, or in French, donation, givenness. So in Husso's phenomenology, he really concentrates on the question, what gives? And so to um bracket the natural attitude, which is the first type of phenomenology, what is the natural attitude? Not only the tendencies towards psychologism or relativism, but also the tendencies of um uh making absolute are working assumptions of what is. So all these metaphysical claims, um, which metaphysics was already, you know, under um attack, you could say, with um um uh Nietzsche and uh and you know the French or the German idealism uh movement, it's even for Kant's metaphysics of morals, it's it's a it's a reframing of the meaning of metaphysics. So we're not we're not talking about these uh secure facts of knowledge in the world that surrounds us, but a metaphysics of subjectivity is what gets developed through the German idealist school. And and uh Husserl is very aware of that, but he takes this term phenomenon and he uses it as an inclusive concept of both what Kant means by the numenon, the thing in itself, and the phenomenon what appears to human subject. So for phenomenology, what gives itself to consciousness begins with the thing in itself, but it's not always an object. It could be a meaning, it could be a concept, it could be a number, it could be a feeling, uh, it could be a texture, um, meaning signification. So these German terms Zinn and Bedeutung, uh thinking about sense and reference, and this this gets you know toward um Gottlub um uh Freges uh essay in the um the late 19th century, um as these two things, Xin and Beidway Tung, um these things uh is what phenomenology is is concerned about. But in terms of um the eventfulness of Gegibonite, givenness, what gives.
SPEAKER_02So like one thing that that I'm I think uh hopefully all Christians are concerned with is is building a philosophy that that points to um the the reality of Christ in the world. That it's not just because obviously you can look at uh the various world religions or different spiritual outlooks on life, and if you go within that subjective turn, um then it's just like okay, yeah, anything goes, who cares? This is all it's all in hermeneutic and interpretation of the phenomena and it's just as valid as anything else. But Christians are obviously saying something way more exclusive, which is no, the world reveals Christ Himself. And and so how in your opinion, this might be leaping a bit too far, but how does phenomenology actually say something about the reality of Christ or the if you will, the phenomena phenomenon of Christ in the world? Because it's a it's an encounter, it's a lived experience, obviously through sacrament, but also through sense of being in the world because this is you can kind of see where I'm going with this that I have some friends, even my own thoughts, of like, okay, well, that's great, that's a great interpretation of what's happening in the world, but what's really happening, you know, like what's really going on. Does phenomenology have anything to add to that Christian doctrine or dogma, if you will? Or is it purely just on the experience of the person?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. Um phenomenology. If we if we keep thinking about the method, uh I want to quote Pope John Paul II, who in a 19 or uh 2003 address to a delegation of the World Institute of Phenomenology of Hanover, uh John Paul II uh wrote this phenomenology is primarily a style of thought, a relationship of the mind with reality, whose essential and constitutive features it aims to grasp, avoiding prejudice and schematisms. Okay, so if I if I try to break that down, I mean that's beautifully put. It's exactly what phenomenology is, a style of thought. And and again, the first step of phenomenology is to bracket the natural attitude. The natural attitude, everybody has one. You have the best phenomenologists, and they're always working to bracket it. The natural attitude means um the brackets I place on the real in advance, thereby disqualifying the possibilities of what else might give itself in um within lived experience, yes. But this isn't just pure relativism because things actually give themselves and and that is an accomplished fact. If if there's a meaning and it gives itself, and we use an example, um the number two. The number two. Um the number two means something universally, whether we say two or du or dos, whatever language, but mathematically speaking, however we signify to, the givenness of to has universal um universal character, and and it's this givenness that uh is repeatable, that is um uh uh rememberable. Um so something like to, something like the uh feeling of joy, joy, and all that is meant by the word, the concept. There's a givenness um that that itself anchors um reality in in what gives itself in the gift, the gift itself. Uh and so so jump on a second when he's talking about this style of thought that wants to get at the essence of things while intentionally bracketing the brackets that we tend to put around the real. So when phenomenology says we're gonna perform the epoch, the phenomenological reduction, what we're doing there is we're we're identifying the brackets that we've already put on the real. And we're gonna bracket those brackets and set them aside, opening the horizon of possibility and perception to the fullest degree. Yeah. And that is not relativizing truth, it's it's trying to be the best witness to it with all the senses wide open, all all of the um, you know, the only I could say the only expectation is to be surprised.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You know, and yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02I think I think I understand because if I like just going within my own experience of reading, I think it was Sokolowski's Introduction to Phenomenology, um, that book, and that was just a amazing book explaining it, just opened my eyes to s to how what what the bracketing process is. And I remember I I think I brack you know, as b best as you can, which is Paul Recurser's argument that you know hermeneutic is always there. Um I I bracketed that the best I could, that secular materialistic understanding of the physical reality. And and in the doing that, I was like, oh my goodness, now I can see afresh this sacramentality of the world that these Catholics and Orthodox speak of. And it wasn't until that bracketing of that, you know, presupposition that something wh brand new opened itself up to me that I I didn't necessarily appreciate before. Is that kind of what you're talking about?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And and John Paul II goes on to say, um, like you're saying, this whole new world is opened up, this whole new world is giving itself that is prior to the text. It's prior to language. And that's what this radical phenomenology of givenness gets us to is the pre-verbal, uh, pre-linguistic giving. And that our language, even a charismatic proclamation of Christianity, is testimony to the gift that was given long ago.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00That the gift that began to give itself at the dawn of creation, creatio ex niholo, that continues to give itself, as we read in Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament makes known its builder's crowd, day unto day poureth forth speech, night unto night makes known the message. Yeah. You know, but the gift is first the karist, followed by the charygma, followed by the parenesis, the ethical response. It's a progression, but it begins with the gift. And so John Paul II goes on to say that this style of thought we call phenomenology is an attitude of intellectual charity to the human being and the world, and for the believer to God, the beginning and end of all things. Uh and so he'll go on to say this is a very important point that I always like to try to make when talking about phenomenology, that phenomenology by itself is incomplete. It needs metaphysics. And when I say metaphysics, I mean especially the classical kinds, going back to Aristotle and uh, you know, taken up especially by the scholastics and the renaissance of Aristotelian thought. Um but uh Jean Paul II said we have a crisis in modernity where we need to move uh from phenomenon to foundation. And what he means by foundation is uh these metaphysical uh exigencies of philosophy that will deal with being, with causality, uh, with substance, with the relationship between act and potency, and all of these kinds of categories that really um never go anywhere. They're they're always there, the timeless. This is what's called philosophia perennius, you know, in Latin perennial philosophy. Uh so phenomenology and Christianity, uh, along with the metaphysics, uh, and I wrote these two little books. One is uh Introduction of Phenomenology, one is the introduction of metaphysics, and I try to show how these things need each other, even though they can't be reduced one into the other. There are separate kinds of approaches in philosophy, metaphysics being more deductive, beginning with first principles and deducing from there, phenomenology more induct and beginning with lived experience, but they're still aiming at the same uh universal truth. Um, so they need each other, but you know, what is at the front end of encountering Christ? You know, we read in the Gospel of Mark chapter 1, verses 14-15, uh, that when Jesus comes, he says uh it's in this fullness of time, and uh he says, metanoiete, pistewite, you know, uh repent and believe in the Evangelion, the gospel, the kingdom of God is at hand. But this metanoiete, this imperative metanoia, metanus, you know, in Greek, this change, this metamorphosis of heart, mind, one's being is at the front end. And if that doesn't happen, we don't behold the fullness of God's revelation in Christ. But Christianity begins with a call to conversion, and even the ancient rite of baptism begins with renunciation even before the the Credo. Do you renounce Satan and all his works and all his empty promises? That comes first, and then we then the adorientum, the turn toward Christ, the turn toward the east. I believe in God the Father, Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, and so on. So we see how there's a parallelism between the Christian Metanoia conversion and what Husrel is talking about, with a conversion of the natural attitude. So intellectually, a conversion is always necessary, but that takes humility, that takes trust, and the truth that is constantly revealing itself to thought. Um, but there's a difference between the kind of philosophy that invents reality and then the kind of philosophy that simply receives it. Yeah. Phenomenology is the latter.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Um, I don't I wanted to talk about like distinctives of Heidegger and Merlo Ponty and Marion, uh, but I don't think we have time for that. I I want to skip kind of to Paul Recurr right now and what he contributes to phenomenology, if that's okay. Because he his phenomenology is a hermeneutic phenomenology, and if I'm correct, please correct me if I'm wrong, uh what he says is that yeah, you can bracket in f like forever, but really you can't get rid of your hermeneutic. You can't get rid of you. You can't do it. And he does that through um through through language or through linguistics or through articulation. And I even what in what you were saying, I'm getting uh I I'm remembering that article or that essay he wrote, I think it's called The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought, where it's like the like the the phenomena of the s of the givenness of the things themselves in the world are pre it's a pre-articulation, a pre-articulated way of knowing that then we give thought to it, which necessarily is language. And and so the second we actually try and make sense of anything, um there's we're we're there. We're we're present all the way in. So is that correct? What does Paul Recur with his uh is I'm I have a hard time categorizing him, but I'm just gonna call him a linguist for now for lack of a better term. Um what does he add to phenomenology that that you would say is a bit not problematic but definitely requires a big nuance?
SPEAKER_00Yeah Yeah, so Paul Recur um uh he was he was schooled in the original Husserlian phenomenology. He also, you know, Paul Record, he's known for taking a long route in thought, you know, and he he knows you know so many philosophers of the tradition very well. And he's he's always synthesizing, he's always integrating. And like he wrote that book on Freud, for example, big thick book on Freud and psychoanalysis, and Ric Court, like he's a philosopher, but yes, a very linguistic philosopher, hermeneutical philosopher, and his attentiveness to language uh really really sets him apart in the school of phenomenology. There is a kind of hermeneutical, there's a hermeneutical attentiveness in Heidegger, uh for sure. We could say more so than Husserl when Heidegger is talking about Dasein, the interpreting subject, the analytic Dasein, who is is the witness and the interpreter of the self-disclosure of Zin, being, uh, in and through this world of beings. Uh, and so that's that special place of Dasein, human subjectivity in Heidegger, uh, that gets claimed by existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutic, yeah, all the above. And and Record is very sympathetic to that uh place of Dasein and Heidegger. And what Record does though is um he's part of the theological turn in French phenomenology too, uh, with um um Chrien, with um Lacoste, with um to some degree um uh uh the uh I mean Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, um Michel Henri is what I'm thinking of essence of manifestation. And we have a lot of these French phenomenologists really continuing to interact with religious experience as a kind of premier um venue to investigate and to continue to explore um uh how this um phenomenological encounters happen. Uh so Rikour, as you're talking about, uh he concentrates so much on hermeneutics, but he also recognizes uh what he calls this Ursprung, you know, for the German uh of experience, the Ursprung, the ground, the origin, the soil. And that for Rikur, he sees that language serves as the medium between the teleological ideal of logicity and the mute elemental experience proceeding from the Ursprung. Uh and so uh there's a universal power of world disclosure. He says this in his book, Interpretation Theory, a universal power of world disclosure. And what he's getting at there in reference to the urschung is the pre-verbal, pre-linguc manifestation of the world, uh the esgipt, we say in German, es gibt is comes first, or what Emmanuel Levinas says in French, uh le premier venu, the first comer, and for Levinas, of course, it's the ethical other, the you know, personal other, uh trui. Uh, but for Record, um in any case, he's recognizing yes, there's a giving that comes first, and then language mediates the meaning of this giving. Uh and and so um this is what's different about Rikour, is that uh for him, the world comes to understanding through language and and only through language. So even if there is this primordial manifestation of the world and all the phenomena that deluge, you know, upon the self from the world, that we understand it, we comprehend it insofar as we speak about it and write about it. So otherwise, uh the deluge is so saturating, um It's unintelligent or unintelligible. But Ricour tends to language, and what he's trying to do is uphold the equal value, place, role of language within lived experience, in addition to uh the mute decency of the gift. Um, and we see you know, someone who comes after Record, Jean-Luc Marion, goes back to this super emphasis on gift, on givenness, um, in a sense, uh, to um uh or in in spite of or regardless of language. And Marion is so passionate to get at the purity of the gift, and that's who I studied with, Marion. But he has a deeper appreciation of Rikor and knows Ricor's work and everything. But but what I propose in this book, The Dialectical Anatomy of the Eucharist, is there's two schools of phenomenology that have emerged over the 20th century and into the 21st century. One is phenomenology of manifestation, and it goes back to Husro, uh, and also Heidegger, I think that's very strong. Um, but then we get this hermeneutical turn in phenomenology with we could say especially late Heidegger, Hans Gergademer, Rikur, Levinas, Derrida, Et Alia, others. But the manifestation school is very strong in Husro and somewhat Heidegger. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who we didn't really talk about, but his phenomenology of perception, his embodied phenomenology, it's very visual and tactile, um you know, fleshly, and um, and then Jean-Luc Marion is the radical phenomenology of givenness, uh, who's still alive today, you know. And so uh there's a phenomenology of manifestation and phenomenology of proclamation. These two schools have evolved over the 20th century, and uh now the question, how do they how do they interact? And those of us involved in phenomenology, how do we hold them together? It's a lot to hold together.
SPEAKER_02Because it seems like quite the tension, and it would you say that both speak well to each other or they're pretty siloed because for f from some other methodological text that I'm reading in preparation for some of the qualitative stuff that I'm hoping to do within my research, um I get this sense that some one branch, I I maybe it's the Gautamer side branch, has gone back to what Husserl was trying to solve, which is that subjective turn to subjective problem. And so would you say that that has taken place within maybe some of the um social sciences possibly? Um that that that phenomenologic because uh from what I'm reading, um at least this this one book, I forget the author's name, is arguing that oh, like a a philosophy of phenomenology is not really phenomenology, but a phenomenology on the phenomena is is actually what phenomenology is in practical in a practical sense. Which I'm like, oh I don't I don't know if you can say that because you need the first in order to get to the second. Um because they're so they're so into uh so narrow focused on just that that experience, which sounds to me like it's a return to that subjective turn again, possibly within phenomenology. I I don't know if you have you come across that. Do the two manifestation and proclamation do they communicate well with each other, or is that like the perennial tension and and problem within phenomenology?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it is it's definitely a tension, uh, it's definitely a conflict, you know, but Paul Record he was about leaning into the conflict of interpretations. Uh and so with Record, he talks about the meaningfulness of the elliptical shape. And often philosophy is aiming at a circle, you know, in the center point, and that there's only one, and and this is it, and then everything is orbiting around that center point. But what Record really presents is a dialogical philosophy, and he's not alone in this. The the great Jewish philosophers like Rosenzweig, uh Martin Buber, Emanuel Levinas, um, the dialogicians, a dialogical philosophy that maintains conversation with this interlocutor who is other than the self. The self, other relationships is not uh subject to sublation as it is in Hegel. And it was, I think, very problematic in Hegel, where you have uh the synthesis antithesis, or I mean I'm sorry, the thesis, antithesis, synthesis, or the assertion negation, sublation, the Aufhebung. And what we have in someone like uh Rikur Levinos, this dialogical philosophy is the refusal to let the alterity that is implied within subjectivity to be reduced to some um, you know, impersonal monad of thought, or you know. So when we say experience and phenomenology, it does not imply subjectivism or relativism. In a sense, it validates the variety of lived experiences for different individual, human subjects, different egos, you know. But also it's validating uh the priority of what gives within the lived experience, in that the human subject is witness to the primacy, the interiority, the decisiveness of uh uh the given, the phenomenon, the phenomenon that gives itself by itself to a self, but the self, the ego, is witness to the phenomenon itself. And the phenomenon itself, again, for lack of better word, uh we can say the objectivity of the phenomenon to distinguish it from um the uh the subject the the you know the relativity of the subjectivity of uh multiple selves. But if if selfhood has a stability of meaning, if the concept self has a stability and universality of meaning, that that's showing what phenomenology is seeking to uncover in its method of investigation, these universal meanings that are applicable in every lived experience.
SPEAKER_02Would you say then that uh I I think it was within symbol gives rise to thought and recurs, I say, that I could be wrong, but he said that uh that the sky it's as a symbol, it gives itself in a particular way where it can't be i i that there's there's qualities about that givenness that can't be relativized that are universal in scope. And so, for example, if from you look up at the sky, you ascend to the sky, you don't descend to the sky. So in in that sense, there's a givenness to it that is like there's there's it's a pre-articulated way of being with that symbol or that reality that is is universal. Is that kind of what you're talking about? Like the sky is objectively this from Earth, if you know what I mean.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's that's that's definitely it. And that that kind of um primordial givenness that there's an S gift that is first, that is um universal, that gives itself, uh, we could say, um with the same um dynamism in every direction. Uh and and yet what I suggest records doing in his hermeneutical phenomenology is not only talking about the esgipt, the it gives of the thing itself, but also the esgipt als it gives as sky. So if we use the language of sky, it's like okay, now we have hermeneutical layers of meaning in the same act of givenness, and maybe not all egos are receiving them fully. Um, but the giving itself uh is um congruent and unified, and it and it's not um fragmented to the point of us as human subjects um inventing its reality through a kind of nominalism in which we would name it and therefore it's sky just because I name it as such. But but what's what's first and most decisive is that as gift. It gives, and I receive it in this this full perception. Um, and again, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I think it's so helpful in thinking about the whole perception of the child, especially thinking about child psychology and the whole perception of the child. And as adults, we we might say, I see this, I hear that, I smell this other thing. But for a child, there's a a unity of perception that um better witnesses to the the universality of givenness. And as as adults, if we can honor the given phenomenon by uh refusing to fragment it and dissect it so quickly, you know, right after it gives, we we will end up receiving more that's giving itself because we're not uh assimilating this phenomenon and uh managing it, manipulating it, measuring it within these predetermined coordinates of being, that I'm just gonna take this and I'm gonna place it in my matrix of being. But instead, we're going to um this whole of life is this opportunity to receive what gives and to contemplate it. But what Rakura is saying, not only this, but also to tell the story about what we received. And there's something very beautiful happening phenomenologically through this process that moves uh from pre-understanding or what he calls first naivety, to this moment of critique, this moment of critical thinking, of explanation, explication, elucidation, interpretation, distantiation, even involving hermeneutics of suspicion and demythologization, all these things, moving us into a second understanding, or we call second naivete, and then this ethical um climax of appropriating what we have received in lived experience, what we have interpreted, and now we're going to live it. Now we're going to respond to it. Now we are going to commit to living in just relationships with one another uh because there is such a gratuitousness of giving.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. That sounds a lot like uh Recur's understanding of the sense and the referent. It sounds so that's what I'm hearing, and I'm I want to move on to that question. Where Recur speaks of this within his metaphor theory, his tension theory of metaphor is what I call it, or maybe he calls it that too. Other people call it different things. Um, where the the literal meaning, the sense of what's being spoken is illogical and doesn't make sense. Hence why you need to go to a metaphorical truth or a metaphorical meaning, which is, I think, if I'm reading him correctly, is the referent. And but you can't just dismiss the sense and you can't just totally move into the referent. You can't dismiss the illogical net sense of the of the literal interpretation, nor can you just wholesale go for the referent. You need to put the two in dynamic tension. And that from what you're saying, Recur loves that. He loves just going, going all in and in numerous tensions, because I think for him, what he sees the locus or like the the the nexus of meaning is in that tension. And and it seems like the senses sorry, like if I had to think of New Testament studies for a second, which is probably more of my background, the historical critical method of of understanding the text and what's happening back in 2000 years ago in Jesus' time and trying to ar do some archaeology on that uh exegetically, that seems like the sense to me. But the sense is meaningless until it has a reference. Is that what you mean by there's the givenness and then there's the given as where it's actually it needs to cross over into the now and in the now is actually where the meaning is held because it doesn't mean anything until the two are put together. Is that I I know if anyone if when I post this, people are gonna be like, what are you talking about? Uh this is just for us today, okay? This is just for us. Can you am I off base a little bit, or can you explain that sense and referent within his metaphor theory and how that it seems like to me has way broader scope with an interpretation of everything than just metaphorical language?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So um this is a really interesting thing. I referred to it earlier, this um Gottlob Frege, who's a 19th-century German philosopher and mathematician like like Husro, a precursor to Husro, in an 1892 essay entitled in German Über Sinn und Bedeutung, uh on sense and reference, or we could say reference, yes, um uh makes this distinction. And Rikur, you know, knows about it, takes it up, continues to think, think about it. So the sense, uh Zinn, Zinn in German, the sense. Yes, we could say meaning or uh signification, you know, it could be translated both of these kind of ways, the zin, the sense, the internal coherence of language used to express something. Uh so how language functions um as give giving the human subject a sense of the meaning of the thing, the meaning of the reality we're talking about. And again, phenomenology doesn't want to use the language of being. Uh, and and I maybe I'm kind of um, you know, I've I've I've been instructed by Jean-Luc Marion especially on this. So, you know, he wrote a book, God without being, you know. Uh and so Marion takes that, you know, to the extreme in that we're going to try to bracket the language of being as much as possible in phenomenology if we want to get to the things themselves in terms of their givenness, in terms of their giving, in terms of the gift of the phenomenon. Because if I call it a being, I already arrest it within this metaphysical framework of interpreting the world uh as is. And it's like I already know what it is, and I don't need to keep investigating because I already know uh the cause and effect. I already know the substance of this being, the substance of that being, and I can give nice definitions and a taxonomy of being in this world of beings. Uh, and so as a phenomenologist, I try to avoid the language of being as much as possible. Though, of course, we see it in Husserl, we especially see it in Heidegger, who wanted to raise the Zein's fraga within the phenomenological framework, which is kind of his his brilliance in his 1927 book, Being in Time, where he's he's raising the question, what is being within the phenomenological tenor of how does being give itself to the human subject, design. And so, you know, it's it's it's it's brilliant, but uh, you know, um, it's Heidegger. But phenomenology across the board is careful about that language of being. Ricord appreciates the language of being, but he tends to place it within its metaphysical context and say, yes, metaphysics is still necessary. We're not going to um we're not going to dispose of the language of being altogether, uh, like Marion is goes that radical point. But Record holds that tension, like you're saying, holds the tension. And so there's a tension between the zin and the be doitung, the meaning and the and the be doitung, the reality to which the sense of speech or the text points, toward which it refers. Um, so uh for Record, this is a helpful distinction. And um as you say, when it comes to history and the question of something like uh authorial intention or something like this, Record is real about this uh phenomenon, this dynamism, this process of distantiation. So for if we're facing a text in a particular language in a particular place and time, the text has uh assumed a life of its own. And that's part of the reality of what's going on, is even if it comes is with sacred texts. Like if I read scripture as a Christian uh in English, even though the original text is Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek, uh I'm reading this English translation in uh the 20 year 2026 and you know where I am in the United States. You know, that's a whole bunch of contextual layers that are uh affecting how uh that that uh sense of the text is putting me in touch with a reality that it points to. Um, but there's a distantiation like between my contemporary situation and the original writing of that text in reference to the original events to which it testifies. Uh, and that's okay, that's all part of the gauntlet of interpretation and why oftentimes we are um uh consigned to take the long route to get there, to get to those things themselves. It's not always so quick, it's not always so obvious. Even with AI, uh it may not take us there like we hoped, it may just complicate the process. Um but uh sense and reference, this is a big thing with uh record. And in terms of the New Testament for for Christian believers and knowing in a true sense who Christ is, um, as you said earlier, when we were talking like like Jesus, the Logos, uh, is not reducible to a text, he's a person. Uh when we talk about the the Logos made flesh in the Gospel of St. John, for example, um, that we're talking about the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, who becomes flesh. And there's a verbal uh patrimony or a textual patrimony pointing to that event of the incarnation, for example, or the event of the resurrection, another major example for Christianity. Um, but the text does not adequately contain um what Marion would call the bedazzling saturation of those original events. Those original events lend themselves to an infinite hermeneutic. And the text is just the beginning to encounter with the living person of Christ. Uh so this Rakur recognizes these kinds of things, but nevertheless, the text has a special place because what he's saying is we we're unable to get to the person without the text, without the witnesses, without the testimonies. And it's so interesting that with Jesus, he never wrote anything to hand on, even like an in Aristotle 300 years before his time. We have nothing that Jesus wrote, no treatise, no poem. We just have what his witnesses said about him. But it was like, you know, those of us who believe in him, it's beautiful, it makes perfect sense why it would happen this way. So it's in the freedom of our own investigation, of our own decision of faith that. That we trust the trustworthiness of the witnesses who so many died as the ultimate testimony to what karygma they were sharing, and their own blood became uh this testimony uh to they were there convinced this is the truth, this is the fullness of God's revelation. And so for Ricord, we can't get to the thing itself, to the reality of Christ without the text, without the textual witness. And also we could say the um the liturgical witness, the traditions that bring us uh to the thing itself. Um but the text itself remains a medium and not the thing itself by itself.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I I know that that's really kind of refreshing to hear, because I know at least within some Protestant traditions, the text almost becomes God Himself in a sense. I that might be a characterized uh caricature possibly, but you get that sense it's like the the person is just the text, but no what you're saying is the text actually is necessary to reveal the person. And it because, like you said, that that moment that the text is pointing to is uh is infinite hermeneutically. And you know, and that that sounds beautiful to me uh when you when you say it like that. I want to get to uh metaphor theory for our last 15 minutes or so. I'm gonna skip question six and kind of move on to my project a bit. And I just want to assume uh Recur's definition is just a given that his tension theory of metaphor reveals that the basis of language itself is metaphorical, that we can only really understand reality through seeing one thing in terms of another, or A through B in its most basic sense. Um with that being said, what what he proposes, and not just him, many other philosophers also propose this as well, that that metaphors reveal new realities and new worlds of of of of living, of being, and and new ways of of of living into reality. And so I would love for you to critique my my project or at least my my presupposition a little bit if that's okay. And I I don't want you to hold back because I'm still at the beginning stages, I can pivot. Um my project uh invites this this poetic and imaginative sense into a local church's sense of self through instantiating a new metaphor for church. Um I I'm within an evangelical tradition that is saturated with um uh causal mechanisms and church growth and uh presumed missiology, and if I would say a presumed metaphorical uh understanding of the world that is unseen, that people they just can't see when they're writing. And you know, within Euro-American context, the whole church growth movement has a undergirding framework of the world that uh that's metaphorical. Um but then there's the tension, there's the difficulty of there are particular church metaphors that are used in the New Testament that are uh certainly revelatory with a capital R. Church uh the church is the body of Christ, temple of the Holy Spirit, family of God, uh so on and so forth. So do you think it's appropriate to go outside of the metaphors for church given in the New Testament? Not just not to dismiss them, but to be a bit more generative and to be a bit more permissive in that little R revelatory sense of metaphor, uh to help followers of Jesus intuitively embody or resonate with the gospel on a on a just being in the world kind of level. Like you don't have to think too much about the metaphor, you just know how to live into it almost intuitively. Um did you have any thoughts on on that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you know, right away I think of the project of Carl Rahner and his Foundations of Christian Faith, where he even develops like these contemporary creeds that he finds more philosophically uh satisfying and um uh uh credible um for a contemporary philosophical mind. And not that he's suggesting oh, we should pray my new creeds instead of the the you know Nicene Creed or something at liturgy, but I think what he's trying to show is the uh plausibility of Christianity in the contemporary situation uh that is very uh uh uh influenced by rationalism, uh materialism, as you mentioned before, secularism. And and that's kind of the culture brings its doctrines. Uh and you know, John Henry Newman talked about the development of doctrine, and that's that's a Catholic doctrinal principle, for example, that doctrines do develop over time, and they they use new language, new symbols uh through this process of enculturation over the span of history uh to communicate these uh timeless truths of God's self-revelation. So there's a lot of possibility here. Um I think a key term, and um there is a priest from New Zealand who wrote a dissertation and he he really concentrated on this Greek biblical concept, New Testament concept of paradidomi, paradidomi um to tradition, to tradition, you know, what's been received, to hand on, to hand on what's been received. Paradidomi. It's a very key word in the New Testament texts, and yet it has a double meaning. Paradidomi can mean um I traditioned the gospel, I handed it on, I proclaimed it, I shared it, uh, I celebrated it liturgically. But it on the flip side, paradidomi can mean to betray. So when Judas Iscaria betrays Jesus, he paradidomi Jesus, he betrayed him. So it can mean either to hand over, like how he handed him over to the the uh the soldiers, or it can mean to hand on. And the meaning of tradition, the English word tradition, to tradition something, uh we get the impression of to hand on rather than to betray what's been you know given. Um but paradidomi, didomi, it it's the concept of gift and the etymology of the Greek term. Uh, what are we doing with the gift, you know, that's been received. So, in terms of new metaphors for the church, um I would say to be faithful to the principle of the development of doctrine, we can't lose um the givenness of the original doctrinal kernels, uh, like the biblical text, like the liturgical texts and gestures and movements and materials and and all these things. And um we can't uh relativize uh the what's called the sacred deposit of faith um without losing it. Um so I think there's there needs to be a continuity of the traditioning of the sacred deposit of faith. And at the same time, that's always open to new uh modes of expression that make sense in a particular time and place in history and culture, um, so that it it doesn't um uh come across as without meaning. Um so the metaphors like um you mentioned the um mystical body of Christ uh and uh the church of the church as a mystical body, uh as a temple of the Holy Spirit. Um yeah, these are definitely rich um biblical metaphors for the church. And I think a really helpful study in ecclesiology is Avery Dulles wrote a book called Models of the Church. And in this book, he talks about five distinct models we can think about the church through, and everyone is metaphorical in different ways. Number one, the church as institution, number two, the church as mystical communion, that's a mystical body of Christ's metaphor. Number three, the church as sacrament, number four, the church as herald, um proclaimer of the gospel, and number five, the church as servant. And when we think and kind of put our ecclesiology at arm's reach and say there's not just one way to think about this, but there's lots of metaphors given to us in scripture. And the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church that took place from 1962 to 1965, in their document, Lumingentium, the Light of the Nations, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, went through a variety of metaphors for the church, um, like sheepfold, for example, another metaphor we get in scripture. Um, and it's like again, what Rakur would do with all this is he would gather up all the different metaphors, you know, and and put them in dialogue with each other. Let that tension uh subsist, persist um with this experience of metaphor. Because I think what's interesting, the etymology even of the English word metaphor, from the Greek meta and the verb fairin, fairing to bear, to bear something, like be pregnant with something, uh, and then to change or transfer what is being born from uh one term to another. And as you say, through there's a miracle of metaphorical expression that generates new worlds of being in terms of imagination, in terms of encounter, and moreover, new ways of being in the world in terms of ethical living. Like we, it's almost like as human beings, we don't realize our full ethical potential apart from metaphor. Metaphor empowers us to live in such a way that we didn't think was possible, um, you know, in a world absent of metaphor.
SPEAKER_02Like for example, the probably the most miraculous metaphor in scripture possibly is uh humans are the image of God. Well, it's this is that's the tension, isn't it? Because I'm like, is that a that's that's a metaphor? Because seeing one thing in terms of another, we're God's image, but it's also uh I guess ontologic, like it's it's pointing to reality itself, not it's it's literal and metaphorical simultaneously. Um that was question six. So there's some things in the text that are just like which you would which I guess Catholics would have a broader category, the sacramental, which kind of point to it's the symbol that is also it the thing that it gives is the thing itself, like the the medium is the thing itself. And you know, um, anyways, I I kind of took your train of thought, but that was what I was thinking. It's like that it's significant, it's ethical, it's moral, and it's metaphorical.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's the tension of the copula that is, you know. So one of my favorite examples of metaphor, time is a healer, you know, and and time is very mysterious, it's very enigmatic. We can't really pin the tail on the meaning of time once and for all, it has many meanings. It's very saturating. What is meant by time, you know, temporality. Uh, chronology is one concept, but definitely not the only one. And to move in only one direction is not the only concept of time across cultures either. For example, in Hebrew, ha'ulam, uh, the sense of eternity moves at least forward and backward just as well in the sense of memoria and anamnesis uh and uh the liturgical tempo. Um and so I'm gonna take on my airpods because they gave me the beep. Um time is a healer, the copula, there's so much tension in there because as Power Court points out, we can say time is a healer and it means something, but also implied is the is not the apophatic time is not literally a healer, you know, but it is, and we know what's meant by that, you know, something like over the course of time wounds heal, whether physically or in terms of relationships, and sometimes we need more time to heal, um, and and time uh gives us um affords us uh a process of of healing, you know, something like that.
SPEAKER_02But also personifies time a little bit too.
SPEAKER_00The is is is not distinction.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I I know I know we're approaching the hour, and I I don't want to take any more of your time up because this is, you know, this is you're not getting paid to do this, and this has been a wonderful hour and a half. And I can tell you you've prepared a lot because you've been reading the questions as we've been going through. So um did you have any anything, any final thoughts you want to give uh that that you feel like were loose ends that weren't tied up properly um before uh we kind of conclude?
SPEAKER_00Um sure, maybe like one last point. Going back to jump on the second, I think he's he's really so helpful um to think about this uh relationship between phenomenology and metaphysics. And that's something that like as much as I love phenomenology, you know, there was a time in my life where I thought phenomenology was everything, and and I could approach every you know philosophical question through it, and it was sufficient. But the more I studied different thinkers, I noticed something in thinkers like Paul Riccour, uh like uh Karol Voitiwa become Pope John Paul II, uh Edith Stein, uh a Jesuit, 20th-century Jesuit named Eric Shavara, who was a friend of Edith Stein, um Karl Rahner, all these different thinkers, um, and there's many more besides, recognize the importance of bringing together the old and the new in their thought. And I think it's a temptation in every generation out with the old and with the new kind of thing. Or the other thing, you know, the traditionalist thing, I'm gonna just have the old and nothing to do with the new. And I think both uh reductionisms are problematic. And we look to the wisdom of Christ, who says that the person instructed in the kingdom of God is like the master of his house, who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old together, and thinking of that concept of traditioning and handing on of the fullness of what was given, of what was deposited. And so in his 1998 encyclical Fides at Ratio on Faith and Reason, and on uh, you know, this uh philosophy of the whole, John Paul II says that we face a great challenge at the end of this millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation. So I said that earlier. He said a step as necessary as it is urgent. And so as a phenomenologist, like he's not disowning phenomenology completely in that sentence. He's saying we don't want to do philosophy as a kind of phenomenalism in a more Kantian sense, where we're only dealing with apparitions and not things in themselves. But to deal with things in themselves requires not only the givenness of phenomenology, but the questions of being that happen in metaphysics, in classical metaphysics, asking, what is being? What is it? Why is it? Who is it? What is it? You know, all these questions that we're moving to this anchor of thought that is metaphysics. Um and so he says we cannot stop short at experience alone. Even if experience does reveal the human being's interiority and spirituality, speculative thinking must penetrate to the spiritual core and the ground from which it rises. Therefore, a philosophy which shuns metaphysics would be radically unsuited to the task of mediation in the understanding of divine revelation. So uh I've taken that to heart, you know, um, as I continued to study out of my graduate work and became a professor of philosophy and theology. And like you said, yes, I'm a lifelong learner, and I I continue to study and I remain convinced that we need um both anchor and sail in this ship of philosophy. And the sail is phenomenology, but the anchor is metaphysics, and we need both.
SPEAKER_02Wow, that's a that's a great way to end. I I just want to thank you so much, Donald, for your time. And uh I'm gonna I'm gonna keep watching your videos. You have quite a few live streams on YouTube, and I really I would love for you to do more. I know you're obviously studying psychology clinical psychology, um, so maybe your subject matter might shift a little bit, which is okay. Um, but I I'm just so thrilled that we got the chance to to sit down for well, metaphor, you know, anyway, be on Zoom for an hour and a half. Um, yeah, and I I hope to, you know, send you more emails and uh and uh and watch some more of your videos too and just uh thank you for this gift.
SPEAKER_00Yes, thank you so much, Joey. Great pleasure to be with you, to get to have this conversation. I look forward to continuing to check out your work and everything you're doing. I think it's so wonderful. I've been checking out your videos as well and the big conversations you've been having with different thinkers and um, you know, evangelists, and it's it's all really amazing. So what a joy it is to connect across the world, totally different time zones, New Zealand, uh Michigan and the United States, and um, you know, it's a great gift to be with you.
SPEAKER_02And uh while you go and have dinner with your family, I'm about to start the work day, so there we are.
SPEAKER_00Wow, that's amazing.
SPEAKER_02All right, thanks so much, Donald, and God bless. Have a great rest of your day.
SPEAKER_00Me too.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much for listening to Lunch on the Way. And if you've enjoyed this episode or any past episodes that we've published, please hit the subscribe button and like button on YouTube and the follow button on whatever podcasting platform you are using. It goes a long way. Jonathan Graham and I back in 2022 started this podcast because we wanted to have open-ended conversations that were exploratory and a little bit risky and allowed us to venture into uncharted territory, not only theologically, biblically, philosophically, culturally, but also anthropologically as well, to help us follow Jesus better and to think better about the Christian faith and our discipleship to him. And so we are so glad that you've been joining us since twenty twenty two. And if you haven't, we have a whole back catalogue of conversations and episodes that I still think are very relevant for today.
