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Tom Jeannot

Review essay
Metaphysics confronts the Empire:
James L. Marshs philosophy of
liberation

James L. Marsh, Process, Praxis, and Transcendence (Albany,

NY: SUNY Press, 1999) vii + 370 pages, ISBN 0-7914-4074-5.

Process, Praxis, and Transcendence (PPT) completes the systematic

trilogy that James L. Marsh first conceived in 1981. Post-Cartesian
Meditations (PCM; Fordham University Press) appeared in 1988,
followed by Critique, Action, and Liberation (CAL; SUNY Press) in
1994. Marsh thinks of the project as a whole as a twentieth century
Phenomenology of spirit (PPT, p. ix), and the Hegelian impulse toward
an ideal systematic comprehensiveness informs the architecture of the
three volumes: PCM roughly corresponds with subjective spirit, CAL
with objective spirit, and PPT with absolute spirit. The first two
volumes proceed from Marshs conviction that a phenomenological
theory of human subjectivity is incomplete without a critical social
theory, but also that a critical theory of society will be rudderless and
adrift without a prior phenomenological grounding in the embodied,
historical, self-conscious, reflective, critical, and free subject, for whom
social relations do not have to be the anonymous, impersonal, nature-
like routines of economic, social, political, and cultural subsystems
beyond human provenance and purview. What PPT adds to Marshs
profound humanism is a metaphysical and religious horizon, short of
which, as he relentlessly argues, we cannot be most authentically who
we are. The upshot is a North American philosophy and theology of

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 27 no 6 pp. 107117

PSC
Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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liberation that answers to the deepest demands of human interiority for
self-transcendence, intellectual, moral, political, and religious con-
version, justice, happiness, solidarity, and freedom.
A project such as this will seem antiquarian and intellectually naive
to the jaded, cynical, and suspicious postmodern intellectual universe
that has more recently overtaken us. Marsh has undertaken a meta-
narrative at a time when all metanarratives are taken to be impossible
exercises in self-deception. He has developed a phenomenologically
grounded and radical humanism in an age when Weberian disenchant-
ment is almost entirely taken for granted. He argues for the philo-
sophical necessity of religious conversion to an academic world where
both philosophy and the social sciences have come out from under the
sacred canopy to become thoroughly secularized. And he unabashedly
proposes a metaphysics to a contemporary academy for whom, after the
linguistic turn, the postmetaphysical character of philosophical investi-
gation belongs as a matter of course to a new disciplinary orthodoxy.
No one doubts that Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Whitehead are
worthy of study, but hardly anyone thinks that as thinkers they are our
contemporaries. We study them as one studies antiquities, charmed by
their naivete (i.e. their failure to grasp that the sincerity of their ques-
tions is at bottom only a function of the language games in which they
have trapped themselves); but equally assured that their Platonic
pursuit of the Truth a transcendental imperative arising, as Lonergan
has it, from a pure, unrestricted desire to know is a chimera.
But Marsh is not naive. He relishes the whole range of philosophical
arguments that casts him against the prevailing disenchanted and post-
modern orthodoxies of his time. Perhaps what is most impressive about
his way of proceeding is the extraordinary methodological self-
consciousness manifest in these volumes. His method is dialectical
phenomenology, his version of which, in the history of the phenomeno-
logical movement, seeks to overcome the opposition between the tran-
scendental phenomenology initiated by Husserl and the existential
phenomenology initiated by Heidegger. Phenomenological subjects are
lifeworldly, embodied, historical, hermeneutically mediated, constituted
by the dialectical tension between conscious and unconscious com-
ponents of development, and saturated by the linguistic contexts within
which they seek self-understanding, self-appropriation, and authenticity.
But they are also reflective, critical, creative, and free; therefore capable
of a context-transcending, genuinely transcendental and universal view-
point, opening in PPT onto the universe of being itself, by way of their
interior struggle to obey the transcendental imperatives that Marsh
retrieves from Lonergan: be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be
responsible.
Following the example of Husserl, by paying rigorous attention (and

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by avoiding the pitfalls of self-referential inconsistency and performa-
tive contradiction), we can achieve an eidetic description of our
universal human situation. By being intelligent and reasonable, we can
work out the dialectical contradictions between position and counter-
position, affirming the former and negating the latter; we can achieve
hermeneutical sophistication about our lifeworldly circumstances in
their historicity, concrete particularity, and linguistic mediation, resolv-
ing the conflict of interpretations; and we can achieve what Lonergan
calls virtually unconditioned judgments, or what Marsh, correcting
Husserl, calls weak apodicticity (a mode of judgment self-critically
aware of the concrete conditions contextualizing its yes and no). Finally,
by being responsible, we can be faithful to the exigencies of intellectual,
moral, political, and religious conversion that confront us when we
follow the lead of the questions we ask and refuse to stop short as long
as further relevant questions remain.
Marshs optimism about the resources and capacities of human
experience, understanding, and judgment, and his conviction that the
most urgent questions we ask admit of verifiable philosophical answers,
follow from the philosophical outlook he calls critical modernism. This
explains the animus he shares with Habermas against postmodernism.
Though he claims to have learned from Derrida and Caputo especially,
he butters his philosophical bread with a generationally older spread.
Aside from Lonergan and Habermas, whose contributions to his for-
mation are paramount, the other major figures who tower on his intel-
lectual landscape include Husserl, Whitehead, Gabriel Marcel, Paul
Ricoeur, David Tracy, Noam Chomsky, and in PPT, the Latin American
liberation philosopher Enrique Dussel. Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-
Ponty, Adorno, Bloch, Benjamin, and Marcuse are still his contempor-
ary conversation partners. Among the theologians who enter into the
wider horizon opened by PPT are Paul Tillich, Edward Schillebeeckx,
Gustavo Guttierez, and Leonardo Boff, who approach religion and
theology with distinctively modern metaphysico-religious forms of
thought (p. 255). The companions whose spirit suffuses his work can
be read from the dedication of PPT to Thomas Merton and Daniel
Berrigan. Reaching back to the 19th century, Hegel, Marx, and
Kierkegaard (the latter two especially) resonate, in Marshs hands, with
a contemporaneity that could not otherwise be achieved without the
richest interiorization of their enduring insight: Hegels, into the dialec-
tical structure of a reason that moves to the higher viewpoint; Marxs,
into the irrationalities and contradictoriness of capitalism and a merely
bourgeois reason; Kierkegaards, into the rigorous demands of a leap
of faith otherwise cheapened by the complacent Christendom of a
bourgeois Public. In Marshs dialogue with the figures in his critical
modernist repertoire, none emerges as cynical, jaded, or defeatist.

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Likewise, in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas writes that without
his underlying confidence in the constructive, emancipatory potentials
of the theory of communicative action, i.e. a confidence in the possi-
bility of discourse, the unforced force of reason, and the force of the
better argument, he could regard himself only as a Hellenistic diarist
recording the unfulfilled promises of his waning culture (Between Facts
and Norms, p. xliii).
If Marsh shares his critical modernism in common with Habermas
and could even be called a left Habermasian (to signal the greater scope
he affords to the Marxist critique of capitalism and neoimperialism),
they nevertheless disagree on a matter of fundamental philosophical
importance that might first be approached by considering their respec-
tive estimates of the place of the linguistic turn in 20th-century thought.
If Marshs critique of Habermas had been more or less latent in PCM
and CAL (at least on the level of first philosophy), it finally comes to
occupy center stage in PPT, by chapter 12, where Marsh addresses The
Religious Significance of Modernity. I begin here, close to the end of
the book, where Marsh finishes setting the stage for his grand climax
in chapters 13 and 14 Beyond the New World Order: A Critique of
Neoimperialism and Liberation in the Center because here is where
Marsh calls the question on what has arguably been the central motif
both of analytic and continental philosophy in the 20th century.
How can Marsh, who has drunk so deeply from the Habermasian
well, responsibly continue to be a religious thinker, while Habermas
himself constrains what is left of religion to the contingency and
heterogeneity of particular closed communities, enclosed by the incom-
mensurability of their various, traditionally funded ethical intuitions
concerning the best life? In Habermass account, this incommensurability
means that metaphysical-religious world-views cannot meet the require-
ments of a context-transcending principle of discourse. Marsh provoca-
tively raises the question whether this is necessarily the case. He begins
PPT by criticizing three paradigmatic attempts to overcome meta-
physics, namely, Kants, Heideggers, and Derridas (see chapter 1, On
the Overcoming of Metaphysics, pp. 331); but Heideggers and
Derridas attempts fall within the compass of the linguistic turn; and so
despite his own critiques of Heidegger and Derrida, Habermas is with
them on the philosophically fundamental claim that postmetaphysical
thinking signals a genuine philosophical advance. Correlative to the
Weberian disenchantment that characterizes modernity is what
Habermas names the linguistification of the sacred (in the second
volume of The Theory of Communicative Action). On account of this
process of linguistification, metaphysicalreligious world-views can no
longer discursively redeem their validity claims in any literal sense (there
are no facts that answer to their constative propositions), although their

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ethical core may be emancipated. As Marsh summarizes Habermass
position, Modernity represents an Aufhebung of religious belief in
which its properly religious aspect is rejected and its ethical core retained
and sublated into the higher viewpoint of communicative praxis
(p. 247).
As Marsh approaches this issue in chapter 12, his strategy is one of
rapprochement. He assures his reader that there are positive openings
in Habermass thought that allow for a positive relationship to certain
kinds of religious belief (p. 248). Since Habermass social theory . . .
has four moments: eidetic-descriptive, hermeneutical, structural, and
political (p. 248), Marsh offers what he thinks of as his friendly
amendment on each of these levels (moving from the abstract to the
concrete). The first bears on the fundamentals of the theory of com-
municative action, from which the rest follow. On the hermeneutical
level, Marsh deepens and nuances Habermass own recognition that
communicative action is embedded in, integrally related to, and con-
textualized by a lifeworld that still (Marsh adds) includes religious belief
and the churches, which will not be simply dismissed as archaic residues.
A more hermeneutically comprehensive and nuanced account will recog-
nize a mutual questioning of world by church and church by world
such that the modern principles of freedom, reflexivity, and critique
enter into the life of the churches and religious belief acts as a leaven-
ing influence on the world, allowing it to be more critical of the fetishes
of money, sex, and power, and conditioning the emergence of distinc-
tively modern politicalreligious movements led by such people as
Berrigan, King, Day, and Camara (pp. 2556). On the structural level,
Marsh rehearses Habermass argument that legitimation deficits finally
are based on motivation crises that are endemic to late capitalism, in
relation to which prophetic religious critique can be both a source of
intensification and a marvelous, strong, additional, and deepening form
of motivation (p. 259). Finally, on the political level, religiously inspired
social movements have not been only conservative and reactionary; a
certain kind of religious belief and a certain kind of church, manifest in
the United States but even more so in Latin American base communities
and the theology of liberation, have been and can be a progressive force
for social change (p. 262).
However, Marshs appeal to the critical, prophetic, and emancipa-
tory power of a certain kind of religious belief would be moot if the
space for it could not be opened on the eidetic-descriptive level of the
theory of communicative action itself. Here is where I think Marshs
philosophical argument goes to the heart of the matter. On this most
abstract level of the theory, Habermass thesis of the linguistification
of the sacred leads to the exclusion of metaphysicalreligious consta-
tive sentences (p. 249) from the domain of constative validity. After

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speculating on the presuppositions informing [Habermass] descriptive
account Kants critique of metaphysics, Feuerbachs critique of
religion, and Marxs critique of religion as ideology (p. 250) Marsh
proposes that metaphysicalreligious utterances, since they are not on
their face unintelligible, self-contradictory, or incoherent, would consti-
tute a fourth domain of validity claims in addition to the domains of
science, art, and morality. This fourth domain would be perhaps most
adequately conceived not as running alongside normal constative,
expressive, and regulative sentences indicating three different worlds
objective, subjective, and social but as grounding, surrounding, and
rendering completely intelligible these three worlds (p. 250).
This hypothesis of a fourth domain (which Marsh finally thinks of
not as a mere hypothesis, but as a speculativepolitical metaphysics)
achieves plausibility over against the Habermasian exclusion by way
of three arguments. First, Marsh appeals to Arendts criticism of
Marxism in general and, by implication, of Habermas in particular of
being insufficiently attentive to and appreciative of the contemplative,
excluding absolute spirit too much, and being too uncritically inter-
ested in reason as a form of world transformation and not enough as a
form of world disclosure (p. 250). If this argument takes a Hegelian
cast of mind, Marshs second argument takes a Kierkegaardian cast,
exploiting an opening in Habermass use of George Herbert Mead. I
think this is the crucial argument, to which I will shortly return. Finally,
Marsh serves as referee in a debate between Helmut Peukert (in Science,
Action, and Fundamental Theology, 1984) and the doyen of Habermas
studies in the United States, Thomas McCarthy (in Ideals and Illusions:
Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory,
1991). Peukert had audaciously argued that a presupposition of
Habermass communicative ethic is unconditional solidarity with all
other human beings, that such solidarity is rooted in the temporal
aspects of the ideal speech situation, and that: Only the affirmation
of past victims of oppression as currently existing and God as the
guarantor of such existence delivers communicative praxis from its own
contradictions (pp. 2523). McCarthy presents the strongest argument
against this move of Peukerts: the inference from [the] demand for
perfect justice to God as guarantor is not valid (p. 253). However,
Marsh observes that McCarthys rejoinder rests upon a stance of
partial intelligibility (p. 253), whereas he had vigorously argued for
the complete intelligibility of being in Part One of PPT (The Self, Being,
and God: Toward a SpeculativePolitical Metaphysics).
On the other hand, once the fateful linguistic turn in both analytic
and continental philosophy irreversibly reposits us in a postmeta-
physical universe of discourse, whether being is completely or only
partially intelligible will be found to depend entirely on what language

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game you are playing. Then Marshs speculativepolitical metaphysics
will prove only to be the provincial language game embedded in the
local form of life of his own Christian religiosity. Consequently,
whether the paradigm of the linguistic turn, the new philosophical
orthodoxy of our day, should be counted as first philosophy, is a
question of fundamental philosophical significance. This is why
Marshs second argument against Habermas is decisive, although he
plays it pianissimo on the premise already stated that the theory of
communicative action can allow for a positive relationship to certain
kinds of religious belief.
Marsh begins by arguing that Habermass conception of individu-
ality is too thin and impoverished (p. 251). It ought not to be, since
using Meads conception of socialization, Habermas distinguishes
between a socialized me and a creative, free I not reducible to the
content of such socialization and able to resist it. Such a distinction
suggests an opening into an existential phenomenological reflection on
interiority, which Habermas does not take and which we have taken
throughout this book (p. 251; my emphasis). On these grounds, Marsh
concludes: Habermas overstates the significance of the linguistic turn
insofar as he either denies or at least fails to thematize that there are
mental acts such as understanding, judging, and choosing that are
causative of and completed by external gestural or linguistic expression
but are not reducible to such expression. The true reality, therefore, is
consciousness-expression (p. 251). Now Habermas fails to thema-
tize Marshs (Lonerganian) mental acts precisely because he has taken
the linguistic turn, which lies in back of his thesis of the linguistifica-
tion of the sacred, and which leads to his repudiation of metaphysi-
calreligious world-views as premodern and archaic. This is the hard
core of Weberian disenchantment.
If Marsh is not disenchanted, this is finally because he stops short
of taking the linguistic turn as first philosophy. In all three volumes, he
deftly links Lonergans transcendental imperatives to the validity con-
ditions of Habermass ideal speech situation (leaving aside his enduring
commitment to Husserlian phenomenology) in order to do full justice
to the transcendental side of his dialectical phenomenology, critical
modernism, and critical social theory. He attempts rigorously to
preserve a distinction between eidetic description and hermeneutical
mediation. Whereas Habermas is only halfheartedly transcendental
(endorsing a transcendence from within of communicative action),
Marsh, more like Karl-Otto Apel, is unapologetically transcendental.
His is still a philosophy of the subject and a philosophy of conscious-
ness. Hence, although he proposes his critique of Habermas in chapter
12 of PPT as a friendly amendment, the philosophical stakes in play
here are really very much higher. In the end, in Marshs thought,

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Lonergan wins out over Habermas, and eidetic description wins out
over the universality of the hermeneutic problem.
Therefore, in chapter 1 of PPT, Marsh argues that representative
attempts to overcome metaphysics have failed. His respective critiques
of Kant, Heidegger, and Derrida prepare the way for his presentation
of the elements of metaphysics in chapter 2, Being as Structure and
Process. Here he straightforwardly follows Lonergan in proposing a
metaphysics of proportionate being. Experience, understanding, and
judgment are related as potency, form, and act. Contrary to the empiri-
cal bias and positivism, knowing is not looking, but understanding and
judging. Since the term of judgment is the known, being is all that is
known and all that remains to be known, the complete set of answers
to the complete set of questions. There is a homology or isomorphic
relation between the structure of knowing and the structure of being,
explaining why being is completely intelligible (contra McCarthy). A
ruthlessly deployed disjunctive syllogism calls the question: if being is
not completely intelligible, the only alternative on the level of ultimate
explanation is sheer accidentality and contingency, brute, inexplicable
facticity, an absurd cosmos setting the stage for a human theater of the
absurd. Since the idea of God (developed in the third chapter) is not
unintelligible, self-contradictory, or incoherent, the reality of God (the
fourth chapter) is demonstrated by what is essentially Lonergans
argument: if being is completely intelligible, then God exists. At this
juncture, whereas Lonergan retrieves the classical theism of his mentor,
Thomas Aquinas, Marsh follows Whitehead. A processive God in real
relation to the world is the fellow sufferer who understands. This
account is complemented by Marshs appropriation of Marcels notion
of creative fidelity (chapter 5, Freedom, Receptivity, and God). In
chapter 6, Toward a SpeculativePolitical Metaphysics, Marsh breath-
takingly fuses Whitehead with Marx, so that Part One closes with the
question, What is the most adequate way to believe in and live out ones
religious belief in relation to national and international capitalism?
(p. 129).
Part Two, Liberation in the Center and the Periphery: Jesus Christ
and the New World Order engages Marshs skill as a philosopher of
religion and New Testament theologian. Chapter 7, The Christ Event:
Hearing the Word, discloses the intelligibility of Marshs radical Chris-
tian solution to the problem of evil, by way of a critically chastened
faith that encounters Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx in chapter 8 (Sus-
picion and Religious Belief). In chapter 9 (The Liberating Christ),
Marsh announces Jesus Christ, Liberator. There he argues, The
radical interpretation of liberation . . . is the only one that does not
involve a compromising of Christianitys radical, prophetic substance,
that does not turn it . . . into a comfortable illusion and consolation

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for the upper and middle classes (p. 196). In a coda at this point,
Marsh writes:
I began these three volumes with a search for the truth expressing the eros
of the desire to know. Through the three volumes and especially in this
volume, I have discovered that such a search for truth leads to commit-
ment and love, and Jesus Christ as both truth and love, identification with
the poor and oppressed as victims of national and international capitalism,
and engagement in a praxis of justice. Such praxis leads me back to inten-
sified reflection on and loving, prayerful contemplation of truth and love,
out of which flows an increased and deeper engagement with justice and
the poor. I thus inscribe a circle in which reflection and contemplation lead
to justice, identification with the poor, and praxis. And praxis drives me
back to intensified reflection and contemplation and love of incarnate truth
and love. (p. 206)
This circle of contemplation in action, defying empire, a comfortable
form of bourgeois I-Thou , and a paternalistic bourgeois Christian-
ity (p. 207), requires of its practitioner an ongoing and complete intel-
lectual, moral, religious, and radical political conversion (chapter 10,
Intellectual, Moral, and Religious Conversion as Radical Political Con-
version). Here is the terrain on which religious belief encounters critical
theory (chapter 11, Religious Belief and Critical Theory). That they
complement one another is the burden of argument already reviewed in
chapter 12, The Religious Significance of Modernity. PPT ends and
brings the project of all three volumes to completion with a tour de
force in chapters 13 and 14, Beyond the New World Order: A Critique
of Neoimperialism, and Liberation in the Center, i.e. the North
Atlantic and especially the United States, the heart of empire. Much as
Enrique Dussel has achieved a liberation philosophy and theology for
Latin America, then, so has Marsh achieved a revolutionary philosophy
and theology of liberation for the affluent, capitalist North.
How professional philosophers and critical theorists will assess
Marshs overall three-volume argument will depend less fundamentally,
it seems to me, on the controversial status of his philosophical brief for
the transcendental and universal, and more fundamentally on ones
estimate of his existential phenomenology of interiority and its relation
to language and the linguistic turn. For Marsh, although interiority and
language are intimately, dialectically intertwined, the former is not
reducible to the latter, and the inner life of the self is even prior to the
linguistic constitution of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Selfhood is
not a language game, but the free, creative source of language games.
To follow Marsh all the way here would lead us back to the beginning
of his system in PCM: it is no accident that he begins with his analogue
of subjective spirit. But in PPT, the philosophical disposition that
finally becomes decisive is, perhaps unexpectedly, Kierkegaards: truth

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is subjectivity (p. 232). Readers of Marsh might object that he intends
this in Lonergans sense, in which objectivity is the achievement of a
knowing subject, not in Kierkegaards sense, who wrote in his journals,
the thing is to find a truth that is true for me. Moreover, we might not
expect this Kierkegaardian mood from a thinker who is also so pro-
foundly Hegelian in his deepest philosophical impulse: a systematician
dialectically advancing to progressively higher viewpoints, committed at
each step to the unforced force of reason and the force of the better
argument, boldly mounting to a metaphysics of absolute spirit in direct
confrontation with a postmodern, postmetaphysical, disenchanted, and
completely secular academy.
Still, Marsh is the first to say that his own Hegelian spirit, his
dialectical phenomenology and critical modernism, are critically chas-
tened and fallibilist, chastened by the post-Hegelian and post-Cartesian
critiques of the philosophy of the subject unfolding over the course of
two centuries from Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche to Habermas
himself. It is too easy, perhaps, to read Marsh as a triumphalist. The
confidence he invests in his conclusions is matched by the vigor of his
arguments, which roll across the pages like a panzer division. His tireless
construction of dilemmas and disjunctive syllogisms, ironclad modus
ponens and modus tollens, his unwavering charges of arbitrariness, self-
referential inconsistency, and performative contradiction, advance on
readers like the Red Army on Berlin, giving no quarter.
But Kierkegaard was a fighter too, and when Marsh comes to the
culminating moment of his philosophical vision, his turn to the absolute,
it is not remiss to say that Kierkegaard wins over Hegel, just as his
passionate creative fidelity to the existential imperatives of authentic
human liberation and real human solidarity undergirds his abiding com-
mitment to the purposes and uses of philosophical reason. The textual
evidence is not glaring, but Marsh does let us know. In chapter 11, on
Religious Belief and Critical Theory, he develops the interplay and
complementarity between Kierkegaard and critical theory (p. 231),
having left his clue when he concludes his encounter with the Christ
event (chapter 7).
The Christ event . . . represents the culmination of the revelation of Gods
truth and love, and Christ expresses in a certain sense the ultimate ful-
fillment and term of dialectical phenomenological reason as it has
unfolded in my three volumes. . . . Christ in himself embodies the unity
of opposites which is the touchstone and telos of dialectical phenomen-
ology. Both Hegel and Kierkegaard make this point in different ways, but
. . . it is from Kierkegaard that I take my bearings more than Hegel.
(p. 155)
Now perhaps we can glean why James L. Marsh, this enchanted and
even intoxicated radical Christian among the most prominent critical

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theorists and Habermas scholars in the United States, dedicates his
crowning volume to the dangerous memory (p. 257) of Merton and
Berrigan.

Department of Philosophy, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA, USA

PSC

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