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The Journal of Philosophy & Scripture: A Prologue
John D. Caputo
[1]Who
or what comes after the God of onto-theology? Among the many
answers to that question, which in one way or another has captured
the imagination of a whole host of contemporary philosophers working
in the continental tradition, one answer certainly is the God of the
Scriptures. Having come before metaphysics, or at least in a
milieu that was innocent of metaphysics, the Scriptures are in a way
older than metaphysics and so they are not faced with the challenge
of overcoming onto-theology. By the Scriptures, we mean not
simply Christian or Jewish scriptures but all the great Scriptures,
from all of the great religious traditions, western and non-western.
Levinas once said that the Tanach was a good book–which I think he
meant in the sense of a Gadamerian classic, although he did not have
Gadamer explicitly in mind–from which everyone, especially the philosophers,
had much to learn. The task for thought, he said, was to know
how to translate the Tanach into Greek, by which he meant philosophy.
The premise of the journal which our students have launched is that
Levinas is right about this, that the Scriptures are a deep and enormous
provocation for philosophy, that they call forth philosophical thinking
and send philosophy down avenues that philosophy, left to follow its
own tendencies, would never explore or discover. Like drama
and tragedy, poetry and narratives–which, of course, they also are--the
Scriptures provide philosophy with a bottomless and inexhaustible
resource, a salutary shock of alterity, that philosophy requires.
Philosophy cannot be itself without exposing itself to its other,
to what is not philosophy. Philosophy cannot be itself without
delimiting its autonomy, making its own autos questionable,
and allowing itself to understand–which means to stand under–the coming
of something other than philosophy which by the very paradox of dialogue
makes philosophy true to itself. Too often, contemporary continental
philosophers take the "other" of philosophy to mean literature, but
not religion, which is for them just a little too wholly other, a
little beyond their much heralded tolerance of alterity. They
retain an antagonism to religious texts inherited straight from the
Enlightenment, even though they pride themselves on having made the
axioms and dogmas of the Enlightenment questionable. But the
truth is that contemporary continental philosophy is marked by the
language of the call and the response, of the gift, of hospitality
to the other, of the widow, the orphan and the stranger, and by the
very idea of the "wholly other," a discourse that any with the ears
to hear knows has a Scriptural provenance and a Scriptural resonance.
We invite everyone to join us who shares these views–everyone who
wishes to think in dialogue with Scriptures, who want to expose philosophical
thinking to the advent of Scriptural imagination, who agree that the
Scriptures are abundantly thought-worthy, that they give us more than
enough to think. Our wager is that both philosophical thinking
and the reading of Scripture will each be enriched. |
