A call to adjuncts,bearing witness

Prolepsis

The German theologian, Pannenberg, stipulated prolepsis as the most categorical way of understanding the resurrection of the Palestinian Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, and consequently, the authority of Jesus and the Scripture which attests to that authority. Prolepsis is comparable to literary theory’s foreshadowing. Prolepsis anticipates on the basis of a partial understanding. Prolepsis awaits confirmation in the empirical world. Prolepsis gathers meaning in successive moments. Any event may ostensibly be regarded as proleptic, and to the extent that all future events imbue phenomena with narrative context or cause-and-effect significance, both atheists and theists have something to say to one another. But, Christians must take note: when it comes to the apocalyptic mood which saturates accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry, Pannenberg boldly inveighed against any truth-claims which are not consistent with the proleptic structure by which the Incarnation of God took to the streets:

He is their consummation in the sense of something contingent but ultimate from which everything happening before—as well as the history following Jesus’ historical activity, in that it is already surpassed by him as the eschatological event—is illuminated and receives its true significance and thus its essence. The eschatological event of the appearance of Christ is the summation of the universe from its end in that this event has consummating power in the fullness of time. Only from the perspective of the Christ event as eschatological event is human history to be understood as a unity … ³

Eschatology, of course, would then have the effect of relativizing the persuasive efforts of students who espouse “faith” on the basis of reason. Do we trace back cause-and-effect relationships and voluntary acts to God, or to our phantasm, our concept, our theoretical sketch of “God”? I am inclined to think we owe much of Descartes’ method of doubt to the ease with which the medieval theologians argue the former without the slightest equivocation. Similarly, when Kant sets the table for both rationalists and empiricists with the utensils of intuitions, sensations, and a faculty for discerning and synthesizing phenomena, Friedrich Nietzsche yanked the decorative linen beneath them all:

But let us reflect; it is high time to do so. “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” Kant asked himself—and what really is his answer? “By virtue of a faculty”—but unfortunately not in five words, but circumstantially, venerably, and with such a display of German profundity and curlicues that people simply failed to note the comical German foolishness. ⁴

In the wake of the nihilist critique of Christendom, pseudo-conversation patterns between theists and atheists became fixed for generations to come. Walker Percy, in his novel, The Second Coming, caricatured this mode of exchange with a random meeting between two women in a downtown park. The limited narration informs us that one is an escaped patient from a psychiatric unit (a fact that would suggest her naiveté) and the other, an assertive member of a local church, equipped with a winning smile and a satchel bag of pamphlets. Facing the woman, she considered the first sentence of the pamphlet:

“Yes,” she said, “there is a sense in which I would like to make a new start. However—”

But the woman was saying something.

“What?”

“I said, are you alone? Do you feel lonely?” She considered the questions. “I am alone but I do not feel lonely.” “Why don’t you come to a little get-together we’re having tonight? I have a feeling a person like yourself might get a lot out of it.” She considered that question. “I’m not sure what you mean by the expression ‘a person like yourself.’ Does that mean you know what I am like?” But the woman’s eyes were no longer looking directly at her, rather were straying just past her. The smile was still radiant but in it she felt a pressure like the slight but firm pressure of a hostess’s hand steering one along a receiving line.

“Won’t you come?” ⁵

Given similar modes of discourse afoot among those registered for classes at Eastern Washington University, Pannenberg’s proleptic approach would tend to undermine what Nietzsche worked so hard to achieve, namely, the “transfiguration of all values.” One value, eluding the mastery of the living subject, is the very future into which each individual flings herself. Pannenberg emphasized the vulnerability of the authentic self, embedded in the flux of time’s passage, and by this emphasis reifies the intersubjective nature of all intellectual pursuits. In other words, there are no actual persons “like yourself”—rationality has limits!

Percy, who died in 1990, and Pannenberg, in 2014, seemed to delight in the mystery of the face-to-face encounter, and perhaps would have relished their own meeting if only to share this sentiment: “I have referred to the age as ‘post-Christian’ but it does not follow from this that there are not Christians or that they are wrong. Possibly the age is wrong.” ⁶

Everything is on the way, and therefore prolepsis rides to the rescue when scholars denounce persuasion itself (verbal or nonverbal) as a mode of violence. Likewise, if Immanuel Kant asserted that both the contemplation of ethics and its corresponding behaviors proceed from an ontological structure—from the a priori mechanizations of the mind—then the very rationality by which the universal maxim arrives on the scene is contingent, not only upon the individual’s intuition, but upon some sort of collective intuition.

The great Prussian, of course, referred to this intuition as synthetic, and thus insulates us from the blows inflicted by one upon another, and while evidence for this primal faculty has proved elusive, I submit that Pannenberg’s notion of an “anticipatory consciousness” functions similarly and with phenomenological evidence.

The claim of every assertion (as knowledge of facts) to truth means that we cannot avoid reflecting on the totality of all true assertions and thereby on the totality of what is—at least, as long as it is the case that an individual assertion can be true if and only if it coheres with all other true assertions. This is the foundation upon which, ultimately, both the coherence theory of truth and the legitimation of all systematic thought rest. This truth condition for the individual statement, however, can only become a theme of reflection for an anticipating consciousness. It can only be comprehended in the form of a plurality of aspects abstracted from the totality of knowledge and being, which as such (as a concrete totality) is not adequately accessible to or attainable for the finite consciousness. ⁷

“Anticipatory consciousness,” of course, coheres with the apocalyptic motif of the New Testament, mentioned earlier, one that awaits a pluralistic “multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev 7:9). But this should in no way handicap the secularist who, according to Jean Paul Sartre, projects himself into the future: “I am the self I will be in the mode of not being it … I must remake myself ex nihilo.” ⁸

Our very temporal existence, therefore, is the evidence we seek: individuals do not necessarily synthesize their worlds by virtue of certain primordial categories, but rather individuals anticipate relationship with their future selves, those selves who are, as yet, no-thing. Keeping this on the event-horizon, the initial purpose of rationality would be to call attention to the experience of disparateness both within the structure of the self, and between those whom we may encounter day after day and perhaps ad infinitum.

Subtext? My pedagogy wreaks of this dialectic: “If we think it is necessary to protect divinely revealed truth from critical inquiry, we are in fact displaying our unbelief.” ⁹ And yet, at least some of us who stand at the lectern believe. We believe in acquainting our students with the ideal forms and the innate ideas. We believe in objects of experience which are ready-at-hand, present-at-hand, and that Dasein cares. But we also must admit what French philosopher Levinas sowed upon the furrows of higher education.

The other is the future. The very relationship with the other is the relationship with the future. It seems impossible to speak of time in a subject alone, or to speak of a purely personal duration. ¹⁰

Alterity

That spatiotemporal dialogue which (for Pannenberg) confirms the ongoing viability of prolepsis (with regard to a particular first-century Jew) in the lexicon of Emmanuel Levinas becomes alterity. This twentieth-century Jew will pay homage to the Christian understanding of Jesus of Nazareth without claiming him by faith. ¹¹ Rather, by circuitous routes through the existentialist’s void, each individual arrives at mere possibilities; that is, at the possibility of reciprocity and even fecundity, and at the possibility of demagoguery and even victimhood.

“I do not posit another existent in front of me; I posit alterity,” ¹² wrote Levinas, and into this clarifying remark we may read the restraint with which believing instructors and students make their witness. That is, we ought to be shocked by the illeity, diachrony, ambiguity, non-indifference, and effrontery of the face. Even the most affable face, therefore, constitutes an existential shock to each subjectivity, to each transcendental ego. Each face casts a shadow and calls into question the stridency with which autonomous individuals make their claims upon the world. And yet, could my effacement as adjunct professor be the very teaching moment to which I—ironically—aspire?

Malcolm Gladwell’s blink, in this pedagogy, is less promising and less productive than the “twinkling of an eye” of First Corinthians 15. ¹³ I truly do not know the epiphenomenal regret, elation, despair, and hope that gestates behind the pupils of the pupils for which I bear some responsibility, and who respond to my overt claims and to my counterclaims with ever-covert and confusing reserve. But something is happening.

Levinas, of course, would not venture a guess. It was enough for the French philosopher to merely comment upon the agent intellect of Aristotelian fame as being “absolutely exterior, and yet constituting, nowise compromising, the sovereign activity of reason.” What’s intriguing with this insight, however, happens to be the paradox he notes in the following clause, which is that the apparatus assumed to be in charge of concept-formation “is found to be in a position to receive …” ¹⁴

That is, reason puzzles over and attempts to comprehend those persons, places, things, and, most importantly, events, which it has received, but which also may spill into the mystical realm of unknowability. And so, whether it’s the corporeal brain, the incorporeal mind, or whatever combination posited by neuroscience, there is a given-nature from which neither humanism nor fideism need shrink back.

Levinas puts the matter in terms of the stark contrast between an actual infinity versus the idea of infinity. Mathematicians and physicists have long contemplated the conundrum, but the intrigue involves us in more than thought experiments with an inexhaustible number of hotel rooms. The intrigue involves the individual in dialogue who, by discussing more than room occupancies, “puts the spontaneous freedom within us into question.” For infinity to be infinity it must be both quantitatively and qualitatively different than the individual who, by definition, as a single individual, cannot genuinely think it. In the words of Jacques Derrida, infinity is the différance which manifests the “constitutive, productive, and originary causality” of that which is radically other, and therefore unthought by the individual. ¹⁵

Aficionados of science fiction, of course, may beg to differ. My classrooms are filled with affable techno-geeks who give themselves enthusiastically to the succession of present moments, all strung-out in perpetuity. Nonetheless, what’s clear for the next generation after Star Trek: The Next Generation, is that Jean-Luc Picard has lost his appeal, just as James T. Kirk before him. The future which once worked, and worked well as the perpetual-confirmation of the contemporary scene now nauseates each successive audience. Even the latest reprise of Star Wars, The Force Awakens bores the adult child of Princess Leia and Han Solo. Harrison Ford, type-cast as Solo since 1977, reportedly begged the screenwriter and director to finally dispatch him … for all eternity.

Given a viewing of this film, I’d like to suggest a sketch of a class under the aegis of prolepsis and alterity.

After the final credits roll and the sequel-pump has been primed, with a gray and paunchy Luke Skywalker ascending an ancient set of stairs on an unmapped planet, the instructor turns to the class of approximately forty-odd students and bids them to gather in triads for a time of reflection. The chairs in which they sit must face one another, and several open-ended questions regarding the individual characters’ motivations are cultivated and clarified. With whom do you, the millennial film-goer, identify the most and why? How is the nature of evil depicted in relationship with the good? Are they co-equal? Co-dependent?

I’m wondering about prolepsis and alterity—these important terms for Wolfhart Pannenberg and Immanuel Levinas—which seemingly have little to do with Star Wars: the Force Awakens.

Jean Baudrillard claimed, “We can no longer imagine any other universe: the grace of transcendence was taken away from us in that respect too.” But his point, it seems to me, is profoundly reductive. Are the hopes of space travel and science-fiction essentially the “counterparts to the more terrestrial forms of exploration and colonization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”? Does a “universal market, not only of merchandise, but of values” sound too unavoidably good to be true? ¹⁷

My intention in a course like “An Introduction to Philosophy” or “Introductory Ethics” is to allow sundry Gordian knots to remain knotted for the sake of theists who confess faith with only a partial ideation of faith imposed upon ephemeral experience, and for the sake of atheists who laud reason without the reduction of ephemeral experience to that which simulates it.

Finally, fresh from their home-schooling regimens, my students throw down various gauntlets regarding the authority of the Bible. To spar with them, however, is to engage in the very metaphysical violence for which Christians have been known for millennia. To abstain from conversation, or to abdicate a nuanced position on the subject, adulterates the integrity of the encounter as it’s given. I appreciate David Bentley Hart on the subject: “it would seem an ethical necessity that every discourse of ‘truth’ submit itself to the unquiet vigils of a consciously ‘ungrounded’ hermeneutical suspicion.” ¹⁸

Let me conclude these remarks with a seventh step in the process. Hart goes on to mention an “attentiveness that strives as far as possible against the silencing of any voice, however frail—which means, against the triumph of any voice, however powerful,” and this aphorism gives way to this habitual practice. ¹⁹

Where you are coming from as a teacher is not, as Hart warns, “a place of endlessly fluid boundaries, where persons are preserved solely as featureless instances of inviolable otherness, narrated in abstraction from those traditions to which they may, in the realm of private fixation, remain attached.” ²⁰ Rather, the instructor enters a safe (and perhaps sacred) space of the classroom in which students are eager to map your preferred belief and the plausibility structures which support them. Don’t allow them to do this. If, as I assume, you believe in the salvific effect of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension, it’s not illegal to say so clearly. What I recommend, however, is that teachers do not steer the conversation toward the reasonableness of God, or toward the exactitude of the evidence for a Christian worldview. Pretend, if you must, that a young Friedrich Nietzsche has registered for Section 01 of Philosophy 211. His father, a Lutheran pastor, has suffered a painful death. Late in life, your student may experience a decade of dementia. His sister may sell tickets for audiences to witness his gloriously overgrown mustache. But what about the possibility of Turin Square? ²¹

Think of it: if a raging Übermensch like Nietzsche can set aside his will to power, and try to assuage the suffering of an abused horse—and do this in a public square—there might also be a postmodern witness to be made to the emerging generations of potential nihilists, to curious atheists and nominally anesthetized theists, and those without tenure may be just the ones to make it.