As has already been said, this panel attempts to look at something called the afterlives of Christianity. The way we have done this is by looking at how supersessionism has appeared in various forms and ways of thinking. This paper is an attempt only to clarify the philosophical and historical dimensions of the task we have set before ourselves, in part by bringing into this public forum a debate between Tim Snediker and myself. This debate concerns how we are to understand supersessionism in relation to time and history.
The afterlife of Christianity, in this context, is the fact that a supersessionist idea at least apparently constitutes an operative notion of history. What is this idea, though, once taken beyond the confines of the theologically inclusive exclusion to which Tim has pointed us in his paper? To be sure, it must have to do with a kind of will-to-appropriation that is called a ‘universalization.’ The obvious point stands that this universalization is exclusionary, insofar as the Israelite and Jewish religions and cultures are narrated only as necessary moments upon which Christianity is founded. What emerges as Christianity is said to have been there all along in nascent form but now as something universal.
Several questions, however, should follow given this basic sketch. Does this mean that one dispenses with a notion of universality in attempting to get beyond supersessionism? The pretension to universality, is, to be sure, a constitutive problem of the afterlife of Christianity, which appears in the continuation of the ontology of colonialism, the “ego conquiero” that philosopher Enrique Dussel says precedes the “ego cogito” of the modern notion of human being.[1] Yet, I ask, is this the same as the sort of universality that is coincident with a baseline historical consciousness?
These questions are important to think about for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that what makes supersessionism what it is, is not, I posit, the figural interpretation of cultures, states, and people as such. Those acts are roughly equivalent to the necessary literary mechanism for historical reporting. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to separate such thinking from the symbolic reasoning that seems to constitute thought as a synthetic activity rooted in the constitution of the cerebral cortex.[2]
Rather, the position I take is simply that supersessionism, philosophically described, is the specific figuration of time as historia according to a principle of necessity. Whatever afterlife of supersessionism there is in concepts of history, these will carry such an imposition of necessity, as it is for Hegel. Similarly, attempts to push against such afterlives, as, for example, in the historical narrations of Enrique Dussel, jettison this element of necessity without dispensing with a notion of universality necessary for the intelligibility of any philosophical judgment.
A sober mind sees contingency in the ebb and flow of the evolution – not necessarily the moral progress – of the human understanding of the universe and of ourselves. Such a mind might see an element of decision making, of reaction, within the context of the exercising of the passions to achieve immediate and unconsciously universal goals, to borrow Hegel’s description of world-historical action.[3] The overarching concept of history that supersessionist thinking yields seems instead to be the delusion that what has come to be came to be by necessity. Once abstracted, or ‘secularized,’ one is left with a kind of determinism that sanctions what occurs. It is not hard to see how such a logic underpins so much political thinking that directs attention not to the moments of shameful violence in the past, but to the future of a better reality that fulfills the best intentions of the past.
This is a thinking that is delusional precisely because such thinking finds the sanctioning of rationality hypostatically; rationality is narratively conceived to be behind the apparent happenstance of what occurs, including the actions of so-called “world-historical individuals.”[4] This is the reason that Vincent Descombes describes Kojève’s reading of Hegel as giving us a, “terrorist conception of history” (une conception terroriste de l’histoire).[5] The sanctioning by the real is of certain actions, including immoral actions,[6] by the direction of the universal through instinct.[7] This is not, however, a kind simple determinism that equivocates between all actions on the side of human consciousness. Rather, Hegel notes that when the desire for the universal emerges in ethical frustration, this causes the individual to be in a state of indignation against any perceived ethical lack at a given time.[8] Yet, in the end and in contrast to merely subjective ethical ideals, the truth of morality and religion is still set within the parameters of a kind of necessity by which the world is as it is rationally (Weltleitung).[9]
Hegel reformulates this idea in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, writing, “The only thought that philosophy brings to bear is simply the thought of reason; that reason dominates the world (beherrsche), that it has gone this way rationally in the course of world-history. This conviction and insight is a presupposition in the consideration of history generally.”[10]
With this, we now can see what is really happening with figural interpretation and necessity. It is not enough to figure oneself via the figuration of others. What is needed is a narrative of time as history according to necessity (an act that phenomenologically speaking would be founded upon, as an extension of, a categorial or syntactical perception of time as temporality).[11] Hegel describes this as the development of “the consciousness of freedom.” This development takes place within a sensed gap in our temporality and ethical experience.[12]
For Hegel, then, history seems to be figured as necessity, but where necessity appears through the freedom of humanity, which is to say, as the medium through which the dialectic of freedom and progress moves.[13] This is what I mean by sanctioning. Necessity lends the validity to the world-historical actor’s actions, even where said actor is not conscious of this fact or where a negation of one’s free action occurs.[14] This is a narrative, or eschatological, conception of time married with a sense of teleological causality, a breaking of the “cycle of nature,” of “a quantitative now of nature with a qualitative time” as Oscar Daniel Brauer puts the matter.[15]
This follows from Hegel’s premise that what is at stake for philosophy is not nature, but rather, nature as it is in relation to spirit.[16] This is not to say, however, that Hegel thinks of an onto-theological subject that is pushing history to be what it is. The subject of world-history’s activity is not a unified One that appears in space and time, but that which is emerging to have already been in the becoming of the totality of what is.[17] Rhetorically, though, his notion of Spirit authorizes the motion of history. Thus, it seems to function as if it were hypostatically a subject.
It is only with the disclosure of something that is impossible to realize ‘in time’ that time can be figured as linear history. Such an addition of the impossible is called the eschaton. In Christianity, this concept structures the supersessionist conception of the Hebrew Bible and the figuration of Judaism as its historical past. Such thinking is proscriptive for how we should understand our meaning, not a transcendental name given to our constitutive nature. This tension between the transcendentality of time as a condition for experience and narrative temporality in turn creates a problem to which theologians return repeatedly in the 20th century.[18] With Hegel’s notion of historical time, we get both aspects.[19]
History has and is occurring as what is, and it could not be otherwise. The supersessionism that obviously appears in Hegel’s narrations of history and religion as the determined movement of Spirit is the result of a hermeneutic principle gleaned from a theological thought pattern and applied to the rational mind – namely, that noēsis entails that one has access to the real in thought but that this real can be conceived in terms of narrative according to the need (Bedürfnis) of a given time.[20]
What is at stake in historical observations is not the past as a static object for cognition. Rather, what is at stake is the ability to figure the unity of our present as historical, as a narrative in which we find ourselves one way or another.[21] History tells us nothing about ahistorical truths. Rather, history is the schematization in language and in our minds of the movement of freedom making the world, discovering itself and thus, the theodicy, the sanction, of what is, may be, and what was.[22]
To conclude, I would like to note how the element of necessity seems to drop out for Dussel. I want to note the way that he seeks to retain a notion of universality in his own anti-Hegelian narration of an ethics of liberation. Such a comparison, even if rushed, will offer an example of one way one might seek to faceoff with the afterlife of supersessionism with regard to its being a dominant philosophy of history.
In his well-known Philosophy of Liberation, Dussel begins the with a narration of philosophy up to now, a move that recurs throughout his œuvre. The history of philosophy is largely, Dussel notes repeatedly, a repetition of narrations of a will-to-power of the white northern European man.[23] There is, as others have noted, a historical continuity between supersessionism and this will-to-power. Thus, the breaking of this pattern of philosophical thought would seem to also imply a break with the supersessionist notion of history.
Dussel thus attempts to reframe philosophy not only by appealing to a metaphysics of alterity, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, by drawing our attention to the importance of discovering how to retell the story of philosophy. History will be for Dussel, as it is for Hegel, of primary importance for understanding what concepts like being and alterity mean for us. Linda Martín Alcoff has noted, Dussel also seems close to Hegel in terms of the range of material he treats and the systematic impulse of his thinking.[24] Yet for Dussel, there is no narrative sanctioning by a universal will or desire beyond what can be called universally valid in terms of our constitution as human beings. These points all become clear when Dussel defines what he means by ethics.
In short, Dussel defines ethics as the discourse about “judgments of fact” (juicios de hecho) regarding “the human being as a subject that needs to reproduce its life.”[25] For Dussel, the historical and cultural – and I would add, the narrative – elements of thinking are necessary but not sufficient for grounding ethics.[26] What is needed is a grounding in the metaphysical constitution of human being itself. Metaphysics is understood in this context within a framework that synthesizes Levinasian and Zubirian ideas and names the way we are constituted as subjects for whom the Other is constitutively at issue.
This is our metaphysical constitution, the way the givenness of signification is (une ouverture dans l’ouverture in the language of Levinas, the reality-structure of una esencia abierta in the language of Zubiri).[27] Ethics as first philosophy means metaphysics, a metaphysics of openness to the Other. History becomes our way of narrating what human beings do and are according to this metaphysical constitution. As such, Dussel’s thinking represents a reversal of the supersessionist way of thinking about the relationship between history and ethics as one of necessity.[28]
The afterlife of supersessionism appears as a figural interpretation of time as history according to necessity. The breaking of this structure is possible such that one does not sacrifice the language of universality. This is an important point to consider. Philosophy of religion, and the study of religion more broadly, seems at times to suffer from an inability to think both universality and the critical consciousness of racism, colonialism, and supersessionism together. Yet, this is not really a dichotomy. It is only a failure to explicate the inner logic of the sort of reductionism that scholars of religion are keen to avoid. By looking at what it means to think historically in relation to supersessionism, we are able to, at least partially, see what that inner logic is. Thank you.
Works Cited
Theodor Adorno. Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003.
Linda Martín Alcoff. “The Hegel Coyoacán.” boundary 2 45:4 (2018).
Oscar Daniel Brauer. Dialektik der Zeit: Untersuchungen zu Hegels Metaphysik der Weltgeschichte. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag • Günther Holzboog GmbH & Co, 1982.
Terrence W. Deacon. The Symbolic Species: the Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Vincent Descombes. Le même et l’autre : quarante-cinq ans de philosophie français (1933-1978). Paris : Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979.
Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión FCE. Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. 2018.
Enrique Dussel. Religión. Ciudad de México: Editorial Edicol, 1977.
Enrique Dussel. Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana. Tomo I. Primera reimpresión. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2017.
Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión FCE. Ciudad de México: Fondo de cultura económica, 2018.
Enrique Dussel. Para una erótica latinoamericana. Caracas: Fundación Editorial el perro y la rana, 2007.
Enrique Dussel. “Meditaciones anti-cartesianas: sobre el origen del anti-discurso filosófico de la modernidad.” Tabula Rasa. Bogotá-Colombia, No. 9: julio -diciembre 2008.
Enrique Dussel. Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y exclusión. Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 1998.
G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986.
Edmund Husserl. Logical Investigations. Tr. J.N. Findlay. London: Routledge, 1982.
Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. & Ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Alexandre Kojève. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Paris : Gallimard, 1968.
Silvana Kandel Lamdan. “Longing for Authenticity in the Middle East and the Americas: Martin Buber and Enrique Dussel on Semitic Humanism.” Salzburger theologische Zeitschrift. 22. Jahrgang. Heft 2. 2018.
Emmanuel Levinas. En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris : Libraire Philosophique J.Vrin, 2016.
Karl Löwith. Meaning in History: the Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949.
Jürgen Moltmann. Theologie der Hoffnung. München: Kaiser Verlag, 1966.
Geschichte als Offenbarung. Hrsg. Wolfhart Pannenberg. Fünfte Auflage. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982;
Robert Sokolowski. Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being. Washington D.C. The Catholic University of America Press, 2017.
Xavier Zubiri. Estructura dinámica de la realidad. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 1989.
Xavier Zubiri. Inteligencia Sentiente: inteligencia y realidad. Quinta edición. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1998.
[1] Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión FCE. Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. 2018. p. 19, 32. “This Eurocentric ontology does not arise out of nowhere. It comes from the practical experience of domination of other peoples, from the cultural oppression of other worlds. Before the ego cogito there is an ego conquiero (the “I conquer” is the practical fundament of the “I think”)… Homo homini lupus is the real, which is to say the political, definition of the ego cogito and of modern European philosophy.” Translation is mine.
[2] Cf. Xavier Zubiri. Estructura dinámica de la realidad. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 1989; Xavier Zubiri. Inteligencia Sentiente: inteligencia y realidad. Quinta edición. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1998; Terrence W. Deacon. The Symbolic Species: the Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.
[3] G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986. p. 19-47.
[4] Theodor Adorno. Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003. p. 32; Cf. Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. & Ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. p. 590-623.
[5] Vincent Descombes. Le même et l’autre : quarante-cinq ans de philosophie français (1933-1978). Paris : Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979. p. 27; Cf. Alexandre Kojève. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Paris : Gallimard, 1968. p. 95-96.
[6] G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. p. 46-48.
[7] Ibid. p. 42-44, 50-53. It is clear that Hegel does not thereby mean that people are not culpable. Humans are, in fact, defined by their culpability and Hegel connects this to their divine nature.
[8] Ibid. p. 51-53.
[9] Ibid. p. 53. “The insight, then, to which, in contrast to every ideal, philosophy should strive is that the actual world is as it should be, that the true good, the universal divine reason is also the power to complete itself (sich selbst zu vollbringen). Translation is mine.
[10] Ibid. p. 20. Translation and italics are mine. Cf. Oscar Daniel Brauer. Dialektik der Zeit: Untersuchungen zu Hegels Metaphysik der Weltgeschichte. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag • Günther Holzboog GmbH & Co, 1982. p. 175-176.
[11] Cf. Edmund Husserl. Logical Investigations. Tr. J.N. Findlay. London: Routledge, 1982. Investigation VI; Robert Sokolowski. Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being. Washington D.C. The Catholic University of America Press, 2017. p. 3-50.
[12] G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesung über die Philosophie der Geschichte. p. 77.
[13] Oscar Daniel Brauer. Dialektik der Zeit. p. 20-27.
[14] G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesung über die Philosophie der Geschichte. p. 49. “The specific interest of the passions is thus inseparable from the activity (Betätigung) of the universal; because it is from the specific and determined and out of its negation that the universal results.” Translation is mine. Cf.Theodor Adorno. Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik. p. 27-28;
[15] Oscar Daniel Brauer. Dialektik der Zeit. p. 155, 157.
[16] G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. p. 29.
[17] Oscar Daniel Brauer. Dialektik der Zeit. p. 156.
[18] Cf. Geschichte als Offenbarung. Hrsg. Wolfhart Pannenberg. Fünfte Auflage. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982; Jürgen Moltmann. Theologie der Hoffnung. München: Kaiser Verlag, 1966. p. 31-84.
[19] Oscar Daniel Brauer. Dialektik der Zeit. p. 171-175.
[20] Ibid. p. 20-21.
[21] Ibid. p. 175.
[22] Ibid. p. 157-160, 174.
[23] Enrique Dussel. Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana. Tomo I. Primera reimpresión. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2017. p. 97-156; Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. p. 17-45; Enrique Dussel. Para una erótica latinoamericana. Caracas: Fundación Editorial el perro y la rana, 2007. p. 13, 50-53; Enrique Dussel. “Meditaciones anti-cartesianas: sobre el origen del anti-discurso filosófico de la modernidad.” Tabula Rasa. Bogotá-Colombia, No. 9: julio -diciembre 2008. p. 155-159.
[24] Cf. Linda Martín Alcoff. “The Hegel Coyoacán.” boundary 2 45:4 (2018).
[25] Enrique Dussel. Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y exclusión. Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 1998. p. 91-135.
[26] Enrique Dussel. Ética de la liberación. p. 114-115. The inverse position is represented by communitarian thinking – e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. Against the privileging of an alleged incommensurability between cultures in Anglo-Saxon communitarian thinking, Dussel instead directs us to think the universal that appears in our desire to live and the way that this desire coincides with our sense of being with each other. “The communitarians thus occupy a position proper to the contemporary North-American panorama of ethics, which Latin-American, African, and Asian philosophy can study with sympathy – given the necessity of indicating the illegitimate hegemony of the Eurocentric ethos with its pretension to universality – while at the same time needing to go beyond their positions according to a materially universal principle.” Translation is mine. The universality of Dussel’s thinking is brought more practically to bear in the following article on expanding how philosophers read and teach philosophy within a sense of globality without reducing one culture to another or elevating one culture to the universal itself. Cf. Enrique Dussel. “Pour un dialogue mondial entre traditions philosophiques.” Cahiers des Amériques latines. 62|2009. Philosophie de la libération et tournant décolonial.
[27] Emmanuel Levinas. En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris : Libraire Philosophique J.Vrin, 2016. p. 271; Xavier Zubiri. Estructura dinámica de la realidad. p. 207-208.
[28] This claim should, in a future, work be clarified not only in terms of an expansion of my treatment of the relevant literature, but also with regard to some of the more apparently problematic – for lack of a better word – elements in Dussel’s own thinking, including his own sense that Christianity universalized, even while it also enacted violence, an ethic of the Other. I qualify these elements with ‘apparently’ because Dussel distinguishes between ideological and non-ideological forms of religion generally, and again, because Dussel does not read the emergence of Christianity, as far as I know, as a necessary part of the evolution of human consciousness per se, but rather as an event that did universalize certain aspects of an ethic of the Other. On Dussel and supersessionism as problematic Cf. Silvana Kandel Lamdan. “Longing for Authenticity in the Middle East and the Americas: Martin Buber and Enrique Dussel on Semitic Humanism.” Salzburger theologische Zeitschrift. 22. Jahrgang. Heft 2. 2018. On the aforementioned description of religion by Dussel, Cf. Enrique Dussel. Religión. Ciudad de México: Editorial Edicol, 1977.
«En moi - la totalité se brise» 