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Transcendental pride and Luciferism: On being bearers of light and powers of darkness

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Abstract

The ancient theme of the metaphysical-theological extremes of being-human is revisited by asking about the condition for the readiness to engage in the form of violence which is nuclear war. Sartre’s analysis of the extreme form of anger which crosses a threshold resulting in a self-legitimating righteous indignation which admits of no superior mollifying standpoint is appropriated to account for the complacency with the institution of nuclear weapons. The god-like anti-God characteristics of extreme rage are put on ice but ready to be thawed quickly in the three-quarter of a century old disposition to destroy the world in which all life that we know is lived. The parallels with the myth of Lucifer invite themselves. This raises the question of what there is in being-human which is the condition for the possibility of such Luciferian impulses. Features of being human explicated by Husserlian transcendental phenomenology serve as lures to the unique form of pride that here is called Luciferian. Here it is argued that these features can also be lures to a sense of pride, analogous to the ancient magnanimitas, as developed by Aquinas.

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Notes

  1. See Sartre (1992, pp. 170 ff). I discovered this amazing text in studying Michael Staudigl’s fine Phänomenologie der Gewalt (Staudigl 2015); cf. my review (Hart 2017a) as well as my “From Moral Annihilation to Luciferism: Aspects of a Phenomenology of Violence” (Hart 2017b).

  2. Sartre (1992, p. 282).

  3. St. Thomas Aquinas (1950, I., q. 106; a. 1; q 67, a. 1). Unless otherwise noted all references to Aquinas will be from Summa Theologiae (S.T. in text).

  4. In my Person and the Common Life (Hart 1992a, b, ch. 3), I try to give a “likely story” for how “the Other is the first first-personal “I”; here and in Who One Is, (Hart 2009, Book 1), I reject the thesis but not all of the likely story.

  5. Husserl (2002, p. 278).

  6. Husserl (1950, p. 401).

  7. This radical implication of the reduction is sketched in several places, e.g., Husserl (1959, pp. 410–413).

  8. We find clear indications of phenomenological metaphysics and the themes of the phenomenological absolute first 1908 (see Husserl 2003, especially pp. 70–72); and then 1913 in Ideen I (Husserl 1950, §§42–52, pp. 55, 76, 86, 143 and Beilage XIII). Husserl himself recognized that the proper religious and theological questions called for a “second absolute.” See, e.g., the quote from Husserl’s letter to Gustav Albrecht (1932) and the presentation and discussion by the editor Rochus Sowa in Husserl (2014, pp. XXI–XXII; cf. also pp. LXXII–LXXIV).

  9. See my early efforts in Hart (1986, pp. 89–168, 1992a, b, pp. 189–212).

  10. Husserl (1950, p. 351). See footnote 5.

  11. Husserl (2014, p. 175); see the whole volume for sketches indicating the drift of Husserl’s unfinished philosophical theology, but especially Section III (ibid., pp. 137 ff).

  12. Husserl (1974, p. 258).

  13. Idem.

  14. See Husserl, Nachlass text, Manucript B I 14 XI, 24; cited in Hart (1992a, b, p. 165); see also Hart (2009, Chapter V, §4, especially p. 324). For most of the summary presentations of first-person reference, awareness, and uniqueness in this section, see Hart (2009, especially Chapters II, III, and V).

  15. Husserl (2001, p. 103).

  16. Lavelle (1946, p. 22); see Hart (2009, pp. 437–438).

  17. See Hart (2009, Chapter VII). See Tolstoy (1960, p. 132); for good discussions of the “mortality paradox” (“I die, but it is impossible”) see Cave (2006, p. 16 ff). and Valberg (2007, Ch. 7).

  18. Husserl (2003, p. 146); thus being’s essential manifestness requires an I coextensive with all possible knowing/experiencing. This volume of Husserliana is surely one of the most important for a “Husserlian metaphysics.”

  19. Steinbock (2014, p. 35 ff).

  20. See Hart (2009, Book 1, Ch. II and IV); see also footnote 4 above. What is missing in this earlier discussion is the primacy of manifestness and manifestation. Both are rooted in the transcendental I. The transcendental I is not the sole and sufficient condition for being’s intelligibility and manifestness, but nevertheless a necessary condition.

  21. My discussion is indebted to Steinbock (2014, p. 259).

  22. Cf. Hart (2009, Book 2, pp. 545–548).

  23. Aristotle (1962, Book IV, Ch. 3).

  24. St. Thomas Aquinas (1934, Book III, Ch. 57). SCG in the text refers to this work.

  25. Nietzsche (1965, p. 126).

  26. Sartre (1957, pp. 63 and 65); for an instructive discussion see McLachlan (1992, p. 56).

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  1. Department of Religious Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University, Sycamore Hall 230, Bloomington, IN, 47405-7005, USA

    James G. Hart

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Hart, J.G. Transcendental pride and Luciferism: On being bearers of light and powers of darkness. Cont Philos Rev 53, 331–353 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-019-09482-9

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