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The Phenomenology of Prayer
This collection of ground-breaking essays considers the many dimensions of prayer: how prayer relates us to the divine; prayer's ability to reveal what is essential about our humanity; the power of prayer to transform human desire and action; and the relation of prayer to cognition. It takes up the meaning of prayer from within a uniquely phenomenological point of view, demonstrating that the phenomenology of prayer is as much about the character and boundaries of phenomenological analysis as it is about the heart of religious life.
The contributors: Michael F. Andrews, Bruce Ellis Benson, Mark Cauchi, Benjamin Crowe, Mark Gedney, Philip Goodchild, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Lissa McCullough, Cleo McNelly Kearns, Edward F. Mooney, B. Keith Putt, Jill Robbins, Brian Treanor, Merold Westphal, Norman Wirzba, Terence Wright and Terence and James R. Mensch.
Bruce Ellis Benson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College. He is the author of Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida, and Marion on Modern Idolatry and The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music.
Norman Wirzba is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Georgetown College, Kentucky. He is the author of The Paradise of God and editor of The Essential Agrarian Reader.
The contributors: Michael F. Andrews, Bruce Ellis Benson, Mark Cauchi, Benjamin Crowe, Mark Gedney, Philip Goodchild, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Lissa McCullough, Cleo McNelly Kearns, Edward F. Mooney, B. Keith Putt, Jill Robbins, Brian Treanor, Merold Westphal, Norman Wirzba, Terence Wright and Terence and James R. Mensch.
Bruce Ellis Benson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College. He is the author of Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida, and Marion on Modern Idolatry and The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music.
Norman Wirzba is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Georgetown College, Kentucky. He is the author of The Paradise of God and editor of The Essential Agrarian Reader.
- GenresPhilosophyTheology
312 pages, Hardcover
First published December 15, 2005
1 person is currently reading
77 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Ellis Benson
20 books15 followersDr. Benson has been a visiting scholar at the New School and a guest lecturer in philosophy of religion at Union Theological Seminary. He is currently the chair of the philosophy department at Wheaton College (IL).
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June 21, 2022
[Phenomenology of Prayer]
[Intro]
• Prayer both about divine and about us. Prayer as experience at the limit. Stripping soul of pretense
• But if prayer is a limit experience, is it not beyond the limits of any schema of “intending consciousness” and “Intended object,” beyond the limits of language and thought, and therefore beyond the limits of phenom? Moreover, if prayer is a quintessentially religious act, could it even be a proper concern of phenomenology or philosophy in general?
• Another complication: if prayer at times takes the form of groanings too deep for words, then it would seem that certain prayers are unclear even to the one praying. Are not some prayers beyond the realm of predication? One can even ask whether such a prayer is “mine”
• To whom do I pray? For if God is truly beyond me, then it might appear that phenom is even inappropriate, even an analytical injustice. After all, the goal of phenom as articulatd by Husserl is to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between my consciousness and the object under investigation.
• Three complementeary themes emerge in the essays
o 1. We do not really know how to pray and are conatntly in the state of learning.
o 2. Prayers always go “beyond”
o 3. Prayer leaves us with a tricky balance: one one hand to pray is to pray to someone or something. Prayer cannot simply be without direction at all. On the other hand, to spell out that direction fully proves ultimately impossible and even undesirable.
[Prayer as Posture of the Decentered Self, Merold Westphal]
• There is something right about certain prayers.
• The famous five elements of prayer: praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition (for self), intercession (for others). How comfortable are we with these?
• “Admiration is a humiliating state” This article was most certainly written by a man. All of it. Dripping. Not a bad thing but so very obvious.
• Seek to explore the essence of prayer as a deep dec3entering of the self. Focus is a kenotic gesture that can be seen as prior even to praise and as the condition for the possibility not only of praise but of all five elements of prayer, insofar as they can be united in a complex whole in which each knows its proper place and plays its proper role.
• Samuel acknowledges not only the alterity of the other’s voice but also its asymmetrical authority.
• Discussion of Samuel’s me voici. Begins with the identification of ‘you’ as the one who by calling brings the world of prayer into being. It continues with the identification of the “me” as the servant of the one who calls.
• The Magnificat: Mary’s ethics of holy Gelassenheit, let it be.
[Who Prays? Levinas on Irremissible Responsibility- Jill Robbins]
• Tracing the religious in the philosophical.
• In Totality and Infinity, language, along with generosity, is the sole exceptgion to the habitual economy that returns all alterity to the Self-Same. The relation to the other in language is said to maintain radical separation and distance. IT preserves metaphysical asymmetry (The impossibility of viewing my relation to the other from the outside); it respects and affirms alterity.
• The language that accomplishes this nontotalizing relation to the other is primordial: it precedes and underlies all language as communication. It has neither a semantic function (it is neither denotative nor referential) nor can it be conceved as a semiosis. Ethical language is interlocutionary and interpellative: it never speaks about the other but only to him. Always addressed to the other, ethical language would be pure invocation.
• In ethical relation to the other in language, the fact of speaking is more important than any word or content. Ultimately the primordial conversation is contentless and prior to content. Is not the first word bonjour? His examples are all these little platetudes. The extraordinary and everyday event of my responsibility comes into view through these.
• In the speaking relationship with the other, Levinas glimpses transcendene. Even in the late 40s, he had associated the facticity of the speaking relation with the other with prayer. “by the word that is uttered, the subject who poses himself is exposed, and, in a sense, prays.
• There is nothing mystical about this sense of prayer. The ethical experience cuts against all experience that one could term mystical.
• Levinas opposes the speaking relation to the other (That is already a prayer) from rite and liturgy).
• The question “why prays” would be very similar to the question who speaks? Who responds? The question goes to the problem of the ‘who,’ the subject of this prayer or quasi-prayer. The answer to this question would be: a subject put into question by the strangeness of the absolutely other. The I who prays would be an I dispossessed o its soveriengty and self-coincidence, an I in which the active ego reverts to the passivity fo an accusative form.
• This is a self that is not originally for-itself, but for-the-other. Not Le Moi, the Ego, but moi, me—what Blanchot calls un moi sans moi.
• Levinas also elsewhere calls prayer « an other intrigue of time than that of the simple succession of presents » Transcendence signifies by the reference to an absolutely diachronous preoriginal that cannot be captured by memory or history. This temporality is the time of the other.
• Religions come from a past more past than any past, a past that was never a pure now.
• Levinas’ purpose of prayer—prayer without demand—is elevation of the soul. Prayer brings into view an I responsible for the universe.
• Distinction made frequently between solitary and collective prayer: collectivity—minyan(10 men) as that which opens the ultimate meaning of prayer is the CONDITION of prayer. The invocation of God presupposes a concrete opening unto community. Prayer is never the abstract fusion of a tete-a-tete with God that leaves out the concrete relation to the third party.
• God as praying, not just prayed to. But what is written on God’s tefillin? The shema? Levinas says God is bent over Israel. Not a prayer to Israel, but about ISraesl. Not a prayer to but a praise of.
• Rabbinic tradition heavy!
• Collectivity required for nonreligious prayer, too.
[Prayer as Kenosis; James R. Mensch]
• Se prayer as the attempt to provide a space where the sacred can appear.
• The core otherness of god manifests itself in its not being part of this earthly economy. As consecrated to the god, the sacred cannot be used by us.
• But a second notion of the sacred: that it incarnates, comes into the world.
• Kenosis—self-emptying—put forth as response to the problem raised by the biblical concept of the alterity of God. God as absolute creator exists prior to the world and independently of it. His creative action, as responsible for the world, cannot have worldly constraints or conditions. It thus cannot be made manifest by a worldly proess. Accepting this, we face the problem of the presence of God. If God’s being is before the world, how can he appear within the world?
• Christian solution is kenosis. Make void. Make nothing. TO take this literally is to see the Incarnation as the progressive emptying out of God, one that culminates in the Cross. This is because such self-emptying is the only way that God can manifest his nonworldly being. He shows himself as he is by exhibiting a lack of such being. Such exhibition is his manifestation in the world of his being outside the world. His giving himself as not-being-able-to-be-given
• If we wish to encounter God within the world, it must be on an appropriate level. Given that this level is one of absence and lack, how is this possible? God is in the world by virtue of having emptied himself. To encounter hin, we must also empty ourselves. Through such kenosis, we provide a space in which he can appear. Self emptying, in other words, is a form of receptivity. Christ as paradigm of this relation to the sacred highlights this.
• This is poorly written lol.
• Responsibility for the other’s responsibility.
[The Prayers and Tears of Nietsche; Bruce Ellis Benson]
• To what extent is N’s Eccce homo truly, as Derrida says, a Dionysian counter-confesion? Does N reach the Dionysian, or does he merely tearfully long for it? One might be temtped to characterize N’s confessions in Ecce homo as the inverse of Augustines—not the tortured move to faith but the tortured move away from faith.
• Thesis: N moves—and not all that successfully—from one faith to another. Ecce homo is a confession in both sense of the term: of things done and left undone and a statement of belief that is characterized by both a measure of belief and an aspiration of further belief
• Argues that N remains a person of faith and prayer, though he attempts to shift both the logic and the content of that faith and prayer. (uses “faith” broadly—adult N does not have faith in the sense of a belief in God but rather as a faith in life)
• Argues also that N retains not only the basic logic that emerges in his early prayers but much of its content. So that shift is at best only partially successful.
• Young N was deeply pious. In his young prayers, we find outpouring of heart, one more interested in Christian practice than any set of beliefs. It is a prayer of bold resolution, with no room for inconstancy. Third, that resolve is—nonetheless—tempered by an admission of inability. Fourth, with an openly proclaimed and even celebrated childlike trust, N is convinced that God will provide. Fifth, even if God brings what seems like misfortune, N still affirms it as gods will.
• But he begins to struggle with conceiving God. Growing uncertainty. HE leaves a particular sort of God behind.
• But who takes over the role for God? To whom does N pray? Life. N claims to have become a godless anti-metaphysician, but Heidegger questions this, accusing him of elevating will to power, becoming, life, and being in the broadest sense to metaphysical principles.
[Irigaray’s Between East and West, Cleo McNelly Kearns]
• Irigaray: a religion centered on speech, without the insistence on breathing and the silence that makes it possible, risks supporting a non-respect for life.
• Speaking and breathing as inverse operations, using the body, the diaphragm, and the lungs in almost opposite ways.
• Irigaray notes the interweaving of breath, speech, and silence in the Annunciation to Mary and the oscillation between speaking, breathing, singing, and changing in the prayer of religious traditions. Her remarks help to open up a passge between philosophy of religion and the discourse of prayer.
• Discourse of prayer calls into question or suspends the propositional language that so quickly reifies into logocentrism. Prayer thus suggests a different way of deploying language and another modality of meaning, tantalizing in its proximity to and yet difference from that of philosophical discourse proper.
• Irigaray stakes the place of breathing and silence in prayer—not common in the West. She studies, specifically, yoga and pranayama.
• Three insights to revitalizing breath and silence 1. Speech should be organically related to but may in fact be relatively divorced from or counterproductive of breath and silence 2. A more flexible way of breathing—and hence of speaking and praying—may be cultivated, even to the point of spiritual transformation 3. Breath itself and the kinds of religious discipline related to it are situated in the body and may hence be, at least in some of its manfiestations, gendered.
• Breathing affects speech, affects dogma. A call for living, supple, effective speech (and by extension living, supple, effective prayer). Reified, inflexible speaking is a factor of unschooled or uncultivated breathing.
• The task is to resituate if not depose the emphasis on prayer in phenomenology as a verbal activity of the ratiocinative mind and place it in the context of a wider variety of practices and modalities.
• The work of Kristeva on the semiotic helps to support this understanding, for one key to speech that moves with and in complement to—as opposed to against and in displacement of—the breath lies in semiotic manfiestations, in rhythms, pulses of sound, and pauses, in the soft or percussive, labile or palatal movements of speech in the mouth, nasal cavities, lung, and diaphragm.
• When Kristeva speaks of the thetic cut that brings the symbolic or rational and logos-bearing aspect of speech into and sometimes athwart the semiotic, or when she talks of the sacrifice of the murmuring, flowing subvocalizations of childhood and motherhood necessary to that level of precesision, definition, and codified communication, Irigaray might respond that we can, with the practice of breath, begin to locate the moment of cut in the body and learn to work with and perhaps mitigate its more violent manifestations.
[Heidegger and the Prospect of a Phenomenology of Prayer; Benjamin Crowe]
• An attempt to contribute to a phenom. Of prayer must firs define phenomenology.
• Phenom, accd to Heidegger, is premised on two basic claims 1. Life, even at the most immediate level, is always already meaningful 2. History is to be understood not primarily as a record of facts but as a rich depository of meaningful expressions of life.
• “Life is not a chaotic confusion of dark torrents, not a mute principle of power, not a limitless, all-consuming disorder, rather it is what it is only as a concrete meaningful shape”
• Life encounters us as having been interpreted in discourse and in practice rather than as raw sense-data or an assemblage of meaningless objects. OR, as he puts it in being and time, objects have practical significance for life, they are ready-to-hand.
• The aim of this essay is to present a hermeneutics of prayer. The more proximal goal, itself motivated by this larger purpose, is to clarify in more detail the nature of hermeneutic phenom. As it applies to the phenom. Of religious life.
• For H, religion was by no means a peripheral issue in the development of a hermeneutical phenom. Religion as vital expression of pretheoretical meaningfulness of life. H calls religious life a decisive example of “factical life-experience.” Christian religious life harbors a unique feeling for life
• Five main lessons to be drawn re: hermeneutics of religion. 1. One ought to renounce the urge for generality, instead contenting oneself with the task of understanding a particular instance of religious sense, which itself might be more ambitious than it looks 2. One ought to eschew uncritical constructions, particular those involving theory and common sense, but instead let one’s presuppositions be challenged by the subject matter 3. The subject matter of philosophy of religion is not doctrine nor is it the psychology of believers but is the sense or meaning of what religious people say 4. This meaning must be contextualied, viewed in terms of its situation in life 5. The task, then, is to explicate this sense in a way that does justice to its context, a task that ultimately amounts to finding the menaing of religion in life.
• H does not discuss prayer in his survey of Christian life—strange, given that prayer is historically definitive for the life-experience of Christian faith. This essay will correct that lacuna. H identifies eschatology as the central factor in early Christian life.
• Prayer is the expression of a new life. A life of adoption or filiation. Expression, not obligation.
• A hermeneutics of prayer must in the end also be a call to prayer. Hermeneutics illumines the life-context and basic attitudes that belong to a community not simply so that our historical curiosity might be satisfied but also so that the past might become meaningful for our future.
[Too Deep for Words: The Conspiracy of a Divine Soliloquy; B. Keith Putt]
• Throughout Derrida’s works, he continually reit3erates religious and theological ropics, such as God, the gift, forgiveness, the messianic, negative theology, and faith.
• Though claiming to pass rightly as an atheist, he testifies to a personal religious sensibility sans religion and admits to working with a theological thesaurus that supplies multiple synonyms for the word God. Moreover, Derrida confesses a faith au fond, a fundamental trust that, although operating sanas voir, sans avoir, et sans revelation, nonetheless affirms the enigmatic promise of a grace and a justice to come.
• D interprets prayer as essentially apostrophic, a turning away, toward the other in order to address the other as other, whether the other is God or another individual. He agrees with Aristotle’s theory that prayer is a rhetorical or poetic employment of sentences that being neither true nor false, should not be prosecuted as offering logical arguments or making empirical claims. Prayer uniquely exemplifies, therefore, a performative use of language. It instantiates a language game, the rules of which do not include predication or any truth-functional propositionalism.
• Prayer, like all discourse, depends upon a primordial promise, the arche-trace of the Other’s having addressed the “I” who speaks. Prayer begins with amen, with oui oui, with so it be.
• But if prayer has no purchase with truth and falsity, then how can one say that prayer as discourse predicats a fideistic context of promise, commitment, and truth? Solution: the truth of prayer is not truth as empirically correspondent but truth as act or deed, or as Augustine calls it, as doing the truth.
• D cleaves prayer and praise. Prayer is expressing the noneconomy of gift—the possibility that the call to the Other ramins unanswered, that no response returns, or that there is no Other to respond.
• Prayer as a form of discourse cannot escape the play of differance and khora, the differing, deferring, and desertlike spacing that disallows any absolute closure to referentiality or signification. Prayer remains open to iterability and recontextualization as do all semiotic expressions.
• Prayer awaits the happening of the Other.
• D’s prayer adds to the oui, oui (amen) of primary affirmation the viens, viens of messianic expectation, which awaits the coming of the gift, or of justice, or of faith, or even of the Messiah. He refuses to separate these two components, since any discourse about the future necessitates both the iterability of signs and the confirmation of the originary yes. In other words ,tehre may be no ‘to-come without some sort of messianic memory and promise, of a messianicity older than all religion and of an elementary promise”
• Excursion into Paul and Holy Spirit’s intercession soliloquy as eschatological lamentation.
[Plus de Secret, the Paradox of Prayer ; Brian Treanor]
• The two concerns of pra
[Intro]
• Prayer both about divine and about us. Prayer as experience at the limit. Stripping soul of pretense
• But if prayer is a limit experience, is it not beyond the limits of any schema of “intending consciousness” and “Intended object,” beyond the limits of language and thought, and therefore beyond the limits of phenom? Moreover, if prayer is a quintessentially religious act, could it even be a proper concern of phenomenology or philosophy in general?
• Another complication: if prayer at times takes the form of groanings too deep for words, then it would seem that certain prayers are unclear even to the one praying. Are not some prayers beyond the realm of predication? One can even ask whether such a prayer is “mine”
• To whom do I pray? For if God is truly beyond me, then it might appear that phenom is even inappropriate, even an analytical injustice. After all, the goal of phenom as articulatd by Husserl is to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between my consciousness and the object under investigation.
• Three complementeary themes emerge in the essays
o 1. We do not really know how to pray and are conatntly in the state of learning.
o 2. Prayers always go “beyond”
o 3. Prayer leaves us with a tricky balance: one one hand to pray is to pray to someone or something. Prayer cannot simply be without direction at all. On the other hand, to spell out that direction fully proves ultimately impossible and even undesirable.
[Prayer as Posture of the Decentered Self, Merold Westphal]
• There is something right about certain prayers.
• The famous five elements of prayer: praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition (for self), intercession (for others). How comfortable are we with these?
• “Admiration is a humiliating state” This article was most certainly written by a man. All of it. Dripping. Not a bad thing but so very obvious.
• Seek to explore the essence of prayer as a deep dec3entering of the self. Focus is a kenotic gesture that can be seen as prior even to praise and as the condition for the possibility not only of praise but of all five elements of prayer, insofar as they can be united in a complex whole in which each knows its proper place and plays its proper role.
• Samuel acknowledges not only the alterity of the other’s voice but also its asymmetrical authority.
• Discussion of Samuel’s me voici. Begins with the identification of ‘you’ as the one who by calling brings the world of prayer into being. It continues with the identification of the “me” as the servant of the one who calls.
• The Magnificat: Mary’s ethics of holy Gelassenheit, let it be.
[Who Prays? Levinas on Irremissible Responsibility- Jill Robbins]
• Tracing the religious in the philosophical.
• In Totality and Infinity, language, along with generosity, is the sole exceptgion to the habitual economy that returns all alterity to the Self-Same. The relation to the other in language is said to maintain radical separation and distance. IT preserves metaphysical asymmetry (The impossibility of viewing my relation to the other from the outside); it respects and affirms alterity.
• The language that accomplishes this nontotalizing relation to the other is primordial: it precedes and underlies all language as communication. It has neither a semantic function (it is neither denotative nor referential) nor can it be conceved as a semiosis. Ethical language is interlocutionary and interpellative: it never speaks about the other but only to him. Always addressed to the other, ethical language would be pure invocation.
• In ethical relation to the other in language, the fact of speaking is more important than any word or content. Ultimately the primordial conversation is contentless and prior to content. Is not the first word bonjour? His examples are all these little platetudes. The extraordinary and everyday event of my responsibility comes into view through these.
• In the speaking relationship with the other, Levinas glimpses transcendene. Even in the late 40s, he had associated the facticity of the speaking relation with the other with prayer. “by the word that is uttered, the subject who poses himself is exposed, and, in a sense, prays.
• There is nothing mystical about this sense of prayer. The ethical experience cuts against all experience that one could term mystical.
• Levinas opposes the speaking relation to the other (That is already a prayer) from rite and liturgy).
• The question “why prays” would be very similar to the question who speaks? Who responds? The question goes to the problem of the ‘who,’ the subject of this prayer or quasi-prayer. The answer to this question would be: a subject put into question by the strangeness of the absolutely other. The I who prays would be an I dispossessed o its soveriengty and self-coincidence, an I in which the active ego reverts to the passivity fo an accusative form.
• This is a self that is not originally for-itself, but for-the-other. Not Le Moi, the Ego, but moi, me—what Blanchot calls un moi sans moi.
• Levinas also elsewhere calls prayer « an other intrigue of time than that of the simple succession of presents » Transcendence signifies by the reference to an absolutely diachronous preoriginal that cannot be captured by memory or history. This temporality is the time of the other.
• Religions come from a past more past than any past, a past that was never a pure now.
• Levinas’ purpose of prayer—prayer without demand—is elevation of the soul. Prayer brings into view an I responsible for the universe.
• Distinction made frequently between solitary and collective prayer: collectivity—minyan(10 men) as that which opens the ultimate meaning of prayer is the CONDITION of prayer. The invocation of God presupposes a concrete opening unto community. Prayer is never the abstract fusion of a tete-a-tete with God that leaves out the concrete relation to the third party.
• God as praying, not just prayed to. But what is written on God’s tefillin? The shema? Levinas says God is bent over Israel. Not a prayer to Israel, but about ISraesl. Not a prayer to but a praise of.
• Rabbinic tradition heavy!
• Collectivity required for nonreligious prayer, too.
[Prayer as Kenosis; James R. Mensch]
• Se prayer as the attempt to provide a space where the sacred can appear.
• The core otherness of god manifests itself in its not being part of this earthly economy. As consecrated to the god, the sacred cannot be used by us.
• But a second notion of the sacred: that it incarnates, comes into the world.
• Kenosis—self-emptying—put forth as response to the problem raised by the biblical concept of the alterity of God. God as absolute creator exists prior to the world and independently of it. His creative action, as responsible for the world, cannot have worldly constraints or conditions. It thus cannot be made manifest by a worldly proess. Accepting this, we face the problem of the presence of God. If God’s being is before the world, how can he appear within the world?
• Christian solution is kenosis. Make void. Make nothing. TO take this literally is to see the Incarnation as the progressive emptying out of God, one that culminates in the Cross. This is because such self-emptying is the only way that God can manifest his nonworldly being. He shows himself as he is by exhibiting a lack of such being. Such exhibition is his manifestation in the world of his being outside the world. His giving himself as not-being-able-to-be-given
• If we wish to encounter God within the world, it must be on an appropriate level. Given that this level is one of absence and lack, how is this possible? God is in the world by virtue of having emptied himself. To encounter hin, we must also empty ourselves. Through such kenosis, we provide a space in which he can appear. Self emptying, in other words, is a form of receptivity. Christ as paradigm of this relation to the sacred highlights this.
• This is poorly written lol.
• Responsibility for the other’s responsibility.
[The Prayers and Tears of Nietsche; Bruce Ellis Benson]
• To what extent is N’s Eccce homo truly, as Derrida says, a Dionysian counter-confesion? Does N reach the Dionysian, or does he merely tearfully long for it? One might be temtped to characterize N’s confessions in Ecce homo as the inverse of Augustines—not the tortured move to faith but the tortured move away from faith.
• Thesis: N moves—and not all that successfully—from one faith to another. Ecce homo is a confession in both sense of the term: of things done and left undone and a statement of belief that is characterized by both a measure of belief and an aspiration of further belief
• Argues that N remains a person of faith and prayer, though he attempts to shift both the logic and the content of that faith and prayer. (uses “faith” broadly—adult N does not have faith in the sense of a belief in God but rather as a faith in life)
• Argues also that N retains not only the basic logic that emerges in his early prayers but much of its content. So that shift is at best only partially successful.
• Young N was deeply pious. In his young prayers, we find outpouring of heart, one more interested in Christian practice than any set of beliefs. It is a prayer of bold resolution, with no room for inconstancy. Third, that resolve is—nonetheless—tempered by an admission of inability. Fourth, with an openly proclaimed and even celebrated childlike trust, N is convinced that God will provide. Fifth, even if God brings what seems like misfortune, N still affirms it as gods will.
• But he begins to struggle with conceiving God. Growing uncertainty. HE leaves a particular sort of God behind.
• But who takes over the role for God? To whom does N pray? Life. N claims to have become a godless anti-metaphysician, but Heidegger questions this, accusing him of elevating will to power, becoming, life, and being in the broadest sense to metaphysical principles.
[Irigaray’s Between East and West, Cleo McNelly Kearns]
• Irigaray: a religion centered on speech, without the insistence on breathing and the silence that makes it possible, risks supporting a non-respect for life.
• Speaking and breathing as inverse operations, using the body, the diaphragm, and the lungs in almost opposite ways.
• Irigaray notes the interweaving of breath, speech, and silence in the Annunciation to Mary and the oscillation between speaking, breathing, singing, and changing in the prayer of religious traditions. Her remarks help to open up a passge between philosophy of religion and the discourse of prayer.
• Discourse of prayer calls into question or suspends the propositional language that so quickly reifies into logocentrism. Prayer thus suggests a different way of deploying language and another modality of meaning, tantalizing in its proximity to and yet difference from that of philosophical discourse proper.
• Irigaray stakes the place of breathing and silence in prayer—not common in the West. She studies, specifically, yoga and pranayama.
• Three insights to revitalizing breath and silence 1. Speech should be organically related to but may in fact be relatively divorced from or counterproductive of breath and silence 2. A more flexible way of breathing—and hence of speaking and praying—may be cultivated, even to the point of spiritual transformation 3. Breath itself and the kinds of religious discipline related to it are situated in the body and may hence be, at least in some of its manfiestations, gendered.
• Breathing affects speech, affects dogma. A call for living, supple, effective speech (and by extension living, supple, effective prayer). Reified, inflexible speaking is a factor of unschooled or uncultivated breathing.
• The task is to resituate if not depose the emphasis on prayer in phenomenology as a verbal activity of the ratiocinative mind and place it in the context of a wider variety of practices and modalities.
• The work of Kristeva on the semiotic helps to support this understanding, for one key to speech that moves with and in complement to—as opposed to against and in displacement of—the breath lies in semiotic manfiestations, in rhythms, pulses of sound, and pauses, in the soft or percussive, labile or palatal movements of speech in the mouth, nasal cavities, lung, and diaphragm.
• When Kristeva speaks of the thetic cut that brings the symbolic or rational and logos-bearing aspect of speech into and sometimes athwart the semiotic, or when she talks of the sacrifice of the murmuring, flowing subvocalizations of childhood and motherhood necessary to that level of precesision, definition, and codified communication, Irigaray might respond that we can, with the practice of breath, begin to locate the moment of cut in the body and learn to work with and perhaps mitigate its more violent manifestations.
[Heidegger and the Prospect of a Phenomenology of Prayer; Benjamin Crowe]
• An attempt to contribute to a phenom. Of prayer must firs define phenomenology.
• Phenom, accd to Heidegger, is premised on two basic claims 1. Life, even at the most immediate level, is always already meaningful 2. History is to be understood not primarily as a record of facts but as a rich depository of meaningful expressions of life.
• “Life is not a chaotic confusion of dark torrents, not a mute principle of power, not a limitless, all-consuming disorder, rather it is what it is only as a concrete meaningful shape”
• Life encounters us as having been interpreted in discourse and in practice rather than as raw sense-data or an assemblage of meaningless objects. OR, as he puts it in being and time, objects have practical significance for life, they are ready-to-hand.
• The aim of this essay is to present a hermeneutics of prayer. The more proximal goal, itself motivated by this larger purpose, is to clarify in more detail the nature of hermeneutic phenom. As it applies to the phenom. Of religious life.
• For H, religion was by no means a peripheral issue in the development of a hermeneutical phenom. Religion as vital expression of pretheoretical meaningfulness of life. H calls religious life a decisive example of “factical life-experience.” Christian religious life harbors a unique feeling for life
• Five main lessons to be drawn re: hermeneutics of religion. 1. One ought to renounce the urge for generality, instead contenting oneself with the task of understanding a particular instance of religious sense, which itself might be more ambitious than it looks 2. One ought to eschew uncritical constructions, particular those involving theory and common sense, but instead let one’s presuppositions be challenged by the subject matter 3. The subject matter of philosophy of religion is not doctrine nor is it the psychology of believers but is the sense or meaning of what religious people say 4. This meaning must be contextualied, viewed in terms of its situation in life 5. The task, then, is to explicate this sense in a way that does justice to its context, a task that ultimately amounts to finding the menaing of religion in life.
• H does not discuss prayer in his survey of Christian life—strange, given that prayer is historically definitive for the life-experience of Christian faith. This essay will correct that lacuna. H identifies eschatology as the central factor in early Christian life.
• Prayer is the expression of a new life. A life of adoption or filiation. Expression, not obligation.
• A hermeneutics of prayer must in the end also be a call to prayer. Hermeneutics illumines the life-context and basic attitudes that belong to a community not simply so that our historical curiosity might be satisfied but also so that the past might become meaningful for our future.
[Too Deep for Words: The Conspiracy of a Divine Soliloquy; B. Keith Putt]
• Throughout Derrida’s works, he continually reit3erates religious and theological ropics, such as God, the gift, forgiveness, the messianic, negative theology, and faith.
• Though claiming to pass rightly as an atheist, he testifies to a personal religious sensibility sans religion and admits to working with a theological thesaurus that supplies multiple synonyms for the word God. Moreover, Derrida confesses a faith au fond, a fundamental trust that, although operating sanas voir, sans avoir, et sans revelation, nonetheless affirms the enigmatic promise of a grace and a justice to come.
• D interprets prayer as essentially apostrophic, a turning away, toward the other in order to address the other as other, whether the other is God or another individual. He agrees with Aristotle’s theory that prayer is a rhetorical or poetic employment of sentences that being neither true nor false, should not be prosecuted as offering logical arguments or making empirical claims. Prayer uniquely exemplifies, therefore, a performative use of language. It instantiates a language game, the rules of which do not include predication or any truth-functional propositionalism.
• Prayer, like all discourse, depends upon a primordial promise, the arche-trace of the Other’s having addressed the “I” who speaks. Prayer begins with amen, with oui oui, with so it be.
• But if prayer has no purchase with truth and falsity, then how can one say that prayer as discourse predicats a fideistic context of promise, commitment, and truth? Solution: the truth of prayer is not truth as empirically correspondent but truth as act or deed, or as Augustine calls it, as doing the truth.
• D cleaves prayer and praise. Prayer is expressing the noneconomy of gift—the possibility that the call to the Other ramins unanswered, that no response returns, or that there is no Other to respond.
• Prayer as a form of discourse cannot escape the play of differance and khora, the differing, deferring, and desertlike spacing that disallows any absolute closure to referentiality or signification. Prayer remains open to iterability and recontextualization as do all semiotic expressions.
• Prayer awaits the happening of the Other.
• D’s prayer adds to the oui, oui (amen) of primary affirmation the viens, viens of messianic expectation, which awaits the coming of the gift, or of justice, or of faith, or even of the Messiah. He refuses to separate these two components, since any discourse about the future necessitates both the iterability of signs and the confirmation of the originary yes. In other words ,tehre may be no ‘to-come without some sort of messianic memory and promise, of a messianicity older than all religion and of an elementary promise”
• Excursion into Paul and Holy Spirit’s intercession soliloquy as eschatological lamentation.
[Plus de Secret, the Paradox of Prayer ; Brian Treanor]
• The two concerns of pra
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