marion and james

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A RETURN TO LOVE IN WILLIAM JAMES AND JEAN-LUC MARION

Samuel Rocha

Department of Educational Psychology and PhilosophyThe Ohio State University

Abstract. In this essay Samuel Rocha primarily addresses, and challenges, the modern conception ofreason and the lowly place of intuition, feeling, and love in what has become traditional philosophy andeducation. Drawing upon the rich thought of William James and Jean-Luc Marion, Rocha introducesthe reader to a certain harmony between their ideas, most evident in their mutual appeal to philosophyto return to a broader understanding of reason that celebrates the role of intuition and, above all, love.Rocha concludes by relating the philosophical critiques of modern rationalism offered by James andMarion to the current state of education, especially in the United States.

Introduction

My primary contention in this essay is thatphilo-sophia (love of wisdom) offers

education a tremendous resource love that is too often ignored in favor of the

conventions of modern reason, which culminate in the inappropriate extension

of modern science.1 I will argue that in narrowing the horizon of what it means

to reason and be rational by ignoring the feelings and intuitions ordered by that

great god spoken of in Platos Symposium, attempts by modern science to serve

as the tool to shape, measure, and validate educational practice are fundamentally

inadequate.

William James and Jean-Luc Marion each provide rich and compelling

philosophical insights and critiques that offer a great deal to education whether

it (education) is broadly or narrowly construed.2 In this essay I will focus on two

1. Whatever doubt or ambiguity there may be in what I mean by science in this essay, especially

in relation to educational science, can be alleviated by observing the testing and evidence-based

program laid out by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (HR 1, 107th Cong., P.L. 107110, 115

Stat. 1425, January 8, 2002). This program is briefly, and critically, evaluated from a postmodern

perspective (which, of course, is not a monolithic thing) by Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre in Science

Rejects Postmodernism, Educational Researcher 31, no. 8 (2002): 2527. It is very clear that love hasnothing intentional or explicit to do with the science of this program.

2. Pragmatism and phenomenology are notoriously complex philosophical traditions to understand and,

especially, to label. What one means when calling him- or herself a pragmatist, phenomenologist,

experimentalist, existentialist, naturalist, or humanist, and so on, is not clear based on titles alone.

To group William James and John Dewey or Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger together without

drawing a number of careful distinctions will usually fall into oversimplification. About all we can say

is that these names and theories occur roughly around the same times and in the same places and that

they display certain continuities and overarching preoccupations. For this reason, I will avoid makinggeneral remarks on the traditions most commonly associated with James and Marion (pragmatism

and phenomenology), and instead will treat each thinker individually. This will not only avoid some

of the basic pitfalls of general nomenclature, it will also avoid a mischaracterization of two thinkers

whose thought extends across many philosophical traditions and into several different disciplines. I also

think they would prefer not be grouped so crudely. At the same time, this approach risks ignoring the

scholarly places that James and Marion traditionally occupy for the sake of a more tradition-detachedinterpretation. Sadly, I am confident that I cannot offer a perfect or near-perfect balance of these

competing interests in this essay.


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Rocha A Return to Love in William James and Jean-Luc Marion 581

order to serve the more important task of recovering a sense of ourselves, of what

it is to be thinking beings, rational animals.

As a Parisian intellectual, Marion in his conception of erotic rationality

favors Blaise Pascals understanding of reason over that of Rene Descartes. As

important as this Pascalian preference is for understanding French intellectual

life, it is even more crucial for understanding Marion (who began as a Cartesian

scholar and translator) and his critique of modernity.

Marion notes that in the original Latin of Descartess Meditationes, the ego is

described without reference to love. The first translator of Descartes from Latin

into French, the Duc de Luynes, added which loves, which hates to the opening

of Descartess Third Meditation.4 Marion favors this revision (albeit unintended

by Descartes) and exhorts us to take up the Duc de Luyness addition to the ego and

see ourselves as the cogitans that thinks insofar as it first loves, in short as the

lover (ego amans) . . . substituting for the ego cogito, which does not love. Marion

maintains further that it will be necessary, then, to take up the Meditationes

from the starting point of the fact that I love even before being because I am not,

except insofar as I experience love, and experience it as a logic.5 In short, Marion

challenges the widely accepted, and distinctly modern, cogito and argues that we

do not think and therefore exist. We are prior to thinking. We exist before we

think. We love first.

This conception of reason as something heartfelt and primordially love-ordered

is at the very core of Pascals opposition to Cartesian rationalism. We see this in

the Pens ees, where Pascal famously wrote, Le cur a ses raisons (the heart has

its own reasons).6 This raison de cur (reason of the heart) is not purely rational,

and if subordination occurs, it is fundamentally a submission of head to heart. In

other words, reason submits to the ordo amoris (order of love).

Reactions against Cartesian rationalism, including Marions, are often

misunderstood as advocacy for an irrationality of some kind or, at least, a

limitation upon what has become traditional reason. We should be reminded

4. This description of the ego can be found in the first paragraph of Meditation Three, ConcerningGod that He Exists. The original Latin passage (1641) reads Ego sum res cogitans, id est dubitans,

affirmans, negans, pauca intelligens, multa ignorans, volens, nolens, imaginans etiam & sentiens. The

1647 French translation by Louis-Charles dAlbert, Duc de Luynes, reads as follows: Je suis une chose

qui pense, cest-a-dire qui doute, qui affirme, qui nie, qui connat peu de choses, qui en ignore beaucoup,qui aime, qui hait, qui veut, qui ne veut pas, qui imagine aussi, et qui sent. In the 1901 English version,

translator John Veltch retains Duc de Luyness addition parenthetically. It reads: I am a thinking thing,

that is, a being who doubts, affirms, denies, knows a few objects, and is ignorant of many [ who loves,

hates], wills, refuses, who imagines likewise, and perceives (emphasis added, brackets in original). All

three versions are available on the Web at http://www.wright.edu/cola/descartes/intro.html.

5. Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 8.

6. Max Scheler, Ressentiment (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003), 4. For an interestingtreatment of this subject, see Jennifer Church, Reasons of Which Reason Knows Not, Philosophy,

Psychiatry and Psychology 12, no. 1 (2005): 3141.


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582 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y Volume 59 Number 5 2009

that Pascal himself wrote several times of the need for reason (which, in this case,

refers to headbound reason). For instance, Pascal wrote:

There is nothing so consistent with reason as this denial of reason. Two excesses: to exclude

reason, to admit nothing but reason. . . . Reasons last step is the recognition that there are aninfinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as torealize that.7

In other words, while we must not neglect matters of the mind, to reduce the

world to nothing but intellect is also a mistake. The point here is that one should

avoid rationalism and irrationalism. It is vital to remember that Marion too sees

a need for the mind and the (dis)ordered events of reason. His dissatisfaction is

only in the narrowness of the sovereign modern mind. For Marion, there are no

limits in advance to reason.

In William James we find Marions Pascalian critique of rationalism treated as

a psychological issue. Jamess The Will to Believe includes a provocative chapter

entitled, The Sentiment of Rationality, where he asserted the following: Well,

of two conceptions equally fit to satisfy the logical demand, that one which

awakens the active impulses, or satisfies other aesthetic demands better than the

other, will be accounted the more rational conception, will deservedly prevail. 8

For James, as for Marion, logical demands or rational conceptions are not

rational in the traditional, modern, Cartesian sense of the word. James argued

empirically that, in the case of a conflict among congruent interests or values, a

rational conception is nothing more than the concept that awakens and satisfies

other active impulses and aesthetic demands. According to James, we select andname things as rational in heartfelt terms of reason, especially when it comes

to belief. He observed, for example, that if your heart does not want a world of

moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.9

James also directly mentioned the primordial place of love in human

experience when he asked us to

Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your worldnow inspires you, and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorable orunfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realizesuch a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then haveimportance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its eventswould be without significance, character, interest, or perspective. . . . The passion of love isthe most familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come,no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterlyas the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like grey to a rosy enchantment; and itsets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life.10

For James, unlike Marion, these theoretical claims are not a product of textual

exegesis. This is not to imply that James lacked any amount of erudition;

7. Blaise Pascal, Pens ees (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 5556.

8. William James, The Will to Believe (New York: Dover, 1956), 75 76.

9. Ibid., 23.

10. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Random House, 1936), 147148.


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So, instead of a standard modern behaviorist-empiricism (or pragmatism, for that

matter), James proposed a radical empiricism that explicitly critiques modern

rationalism and celebrates intuition. He wrote compellingly about this in The

Varieties of Religious Experience:

Nevertheless, if we look on mans whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that liesin them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow,we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relativelysuperficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has loquacity, it can challengeyou for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince orconvert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you haveintuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level whichrationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs,your divinations, have prepared premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weightof the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than anylogic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.16

These prepared premises of our dumb intuitions or feelings that, according

to James, arise from deeper levels of your nature are central, indeed primordial,

to rational judgment. James wrote again of the indispensability of feeling in his

Talks to Teachers on Psychology:

Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the thingsarouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it,this is only because the idea is itself associated with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless,and if our ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likesand dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life morevaluable or significant than any other.17

For Jean-Luc Marion, that fleshbound thing what would have been the

concrete for James also appears through intuition and feeling. However, while

Jamess point is, primarily, epistemological, Marions is ontological in nature.

Marion writes:

For a statement, to appear phenomenally amounts to assuming flesh; the phenomenon showsthe flesh of the discourse. How does the statement obtain this phenomenal flesh? Throughintuition. One intuition, whatever it may be, is sufficient for the phenomena, the flesh of thediscourse, to occur. Indeed, intuition operates an absolutely indisputable hold, and it operatesan ultimate cognition, since only another intuition can contradict a first intuition, so thatin the last instance there always remains an intuition. Of all the acts of cognition, intuitionaccomplishes the most fleshly.18

In other words, intuition is the most palpable,fleshly, concrete sensation available

to reason. It is also the last sensation. It always remains in the end. Implicit to

this point, I would argue, is that it is also the first cognition. That is, before

every rational judgment, a feeling precedes, holds, and intuits a primary and final

cognition. This firstness and lastness of intuition create and legitimize a new

amorous, affective, and intuitive order of firstness.

16. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 7273.

17. James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, 113.

18. Jean-Luc Marion, Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Relief for Theology, Critical Inquiry 20,

no. 4 (1994): 581.


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Without denying the obvious need for a head to go along with our hearts, we are

perceptually bound, in a primordial way, to our intuitive sight of things in order to

experience them from beginning to end. As Marion reminds us, in the first and last

instance (and all the ones in between), our intuitions operate and hold an ultimatecognition. This perceptual priority of intuition or feeling flows directly from the

heartfelt order of reason. We lose ourselves not, primarily, for a lack of rationalistic

order. Rather, we are lost without the ordo amoris. Marion remarks: Knowledge

does not make love possible, because knowledge flows from love. The lover makes

visible what she loves and, without this love, nothing would appear to her.19

Ontologically (for Marion) and epistemologically (for James), love comes first.

Marion and James both, in very different ways, challenge philosophy to return to

itself to return to love, or to what Marion calls the erotics of wisdom. 20 From

this philosophy we find a deepening and broadening of the horizons of rationality,

and of ourselves in the intuitive dimension of our sight. This philosophical vision

is inextricably bound in a heartfelt reason and an intuitive primacy ordered by

that great god, love.

Education

Educational discourse often addresses culturally sensitive pedagogy, emotional

literacy, diversity, and other humanistic issues, yet it seems that Marions

opening critique of philosophy in The Erotic Phenomenon where he writes that

philosophy today no longer says anything about love, or at best very little is

also a fitting assessment of education.21 The only contentious point is whethereducation ever did say anything about love in the first place. The very meaning

of education today is fundamentally modern, scientific, and behavioristic, and

for good reason. The school is a historically modern institution where modern

science has become central to its perceived effectiveness, and the behavioristic

assumptions of human persons who function as objects, capital, and other less-

than-human things are embedded in its pedagogy.

We have witnessed clear historical movements toward ensuring the

sovereignty of modern science in the United States. From the National Defense

Education Act of 1958 that brought national attention to the need of schools

to emphasize math and science, to the 1983 report A Nation at Risk that,

in many ways, bred the current federalization of schooling in the No Child

Left Behind Act of 2001, where we find hegemonically embedded assumptions

about the nature of reason that are unmistakably modern,22 schooling has clearly


20. Ibid., 3.

21. Ibid., 1.

22. See National Defense Education Act of 1958, 85th Cong., P.L. 85-864 (September 2, 1958);

National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for EducationalReform (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983), http://www.ed.gov/pubs/

NatAtRisk/index.html; and No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.


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privileged the modern rationalistic conceptions of science.23 The blueprint of No

Child Left Behind states that federal dollars will be spent on effective, research

based programs and practices.24 This lays out the standard of effectiveness as

necessarily related to fundable (which means scientific) research. And, as theintegrity of testing and scientific metrics has increasingly come to be seen as

unquestionable, the status of other sciences has diminished. Most notable in

public schools are the fading subjects of art including the art of literacy, of

reading and writing as hermeneutic art and music, and even less discussed is

the forgotten subject, the human person.

This privileging of modern science, however, is not only an educational trend.

Marion writes:

This radical mutation [from love to science] . . . thus opened the way to the project of science

and, indissolubly, to technologys hold upon the world, but above all it censured the eroticorigin of philo-sophy. . . At the completion of this history (today, in other words), afterhaving degraded beings to the dishonorable rank of objects. . . philosophy, henceforth nearlysilent, even lost that to which it had sacrificed the erotic: its rank as science, and eventuallyits dignity as knowledge.25

So, we find in philosophy, schools, and their educational policies the aftermath of

the theoretical dominance of modern reason, a dominance that directly threatens

the status of other disciplines including art, music, and philosophy as

legitimate forms of science or knowledge.

Marion and James remind us, however, that the replacement of one totem, or

idol, as Marion puts it, with another will not do. A premodern reaction would bea misguided response. An outright rejection of reason would be absurd. That is

why we need to return to love and its distinct ordo amoris. If we can embrace a

heartfelt formulation of reason and the primacy of intuition, and do so critically

and lovingly, we will find that education already serves very different erotic

purposes in everyday experience regardless of the dominance of modern reason.

Any high school graduate will likely forget the periodic table of elements,

historical names and dates, and much (if not all) of the data on a standardized test.

Only nostalgia will endure. Stated differently, what is likely to be remembered,

cherished, and practiced is, as James put it, that which awakens the active impulsesand other aesthetic demands. In Jamess Talks to Teachers on Psychology, he

23. In case there is any doubt about the validity of this sentence, or if anyone is curious to see this

argument fleshed out in the context of educational policy, see Patti Lather, Scientific Research in

Education: A Critical Perspective, British Education Research Journal 30, no. 6 (2004): 759772; and

Michael J. Feuer, Lisa Towne, and Richard J. Shavelson, Scientific Research and Educational Research,Educational Researcher 31, no. 8 (2002): 414. While my focus in this essay is, primarily, on thephilosophical roots of such policies, there is very little question that they represent more than a

technocratic system of accountability that somehow functions outside of the domain of science. This is

especially clear upon considering that these policies govern the teaching of science, literacy, and more.

24. No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Executive Summary, http://www.policyalmanac.org/education/

archive/no child left behind.shtml (emphasis added).

25. Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 3 (brackets in original).


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prophetically warned of the abuses of science and psychology in regard to teaching

and education:

I say moreover that you make a great, a very great, mistake, if you think that psychology, being

the science of the minds laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmesand schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is ascience, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generated arts directly out of themselves.An intermediary inventive mind must make the application by using its originality.26

Elsewhere James observed:

In their failure to achieve such accuracy, the so-called empiricists have ignored thebasic responsibility of any genuine empiricism. They have ignored the warmth of bodilyfeelings, their continuity, and appropriative activities, which are all involved in personalself-consciousness.27

These passages by James remind us that education is not a purely rational and

scientific process, and every skillful teacher knows that teaching is not either.Sadly, this fundamentally artful notion of teaching is, in many cases, critically

forgotten in education and philosophy. While the educational establishment

cogitates over curriculum and instruction and the mechanics and behaviorisms of

teaching and learning, and while academic philosophy mostly ignores the subject

of education, students that is, persons, who are the subject intuitively crave

and desire what truly matters, what is genuinely important, as fragile and broken

as we are.

Urgency

In education this forgetting amounts to a catastrophic mistake. In philosophythis repeated failure to remind educators (and others and themselves) of this

destructive forgetting, amounts to a cold, distant, and apathetic neglect. The

insights of Marion and James are relevant to philosophy, psychology, education,

theology, literature, and beyond. Perhaps even more impressively, philosophers,

psychologists, educators, theologians, and poets are paying some attention. But

not enough. Most of these pursuits unfortunately parallel the impoverished

fragmentation we find in the modern schools architecture, curriculum, schedule,

and methods.

The poignant urgency of Marions and Jamess message derives from this

fragmentation. This sense of urgency is especially apparent in Marions observationthat

The result of these failed efforts is that ordinary people, or, put another way, all thosewho love without knowing what love wants to say, or what it wants of them, or aboveall how to survive it that is to say, you and I first and foremost believe themselvescondemned to feed on scraps: desperate sentimentalism of popular prose, the frustratedpornography of the idol industry, or the shapeless ideology of that boastful asphyxiationknown as self-actualization. Thus philosophy keeps quiet, and in this silence love fadesaway.28

26. James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, 3.

27. Ronald Podeschi, William James and Education, Educational Forum 40, no. 4 (1976): 225.



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It is no wonder, then, why most students, teachers, philosophers (and everyone,

for that matter) feel that on issues that have grave matter and real importance

to their lives, schools, education, and philosophy are blind and silent. Teachers

and philosophers who are able to see and speak to what is meaningful, the oneswho love, are the rare (and odd) exception. We find that what James referred to

as a certain blindness in human beings and what Marion cites as the silence

of love are chronic conditions in education, philosophy, and beyond. When love

fails, beauty seems sparse, wonder becomes elusive, and wisdom is scarce. Whats

left is information, and thats the problem.

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Nicholas Burbules, the anonymous reviewers for Educational Theory, andJames Harold, Jim Garrison, and Timothy Leonard for their challenging, insightful, and encouraging

remarks on earlier drafts of this essay. I am also grateful for conversations with, and moral support from,

Phil Smith, Bryan Warnick, Bill Taylor, DeLeon Gray, and joshua j. kurz at Ohio State University; these

interactions contributed greatly to this essays development. Finally, I would like to give special thanks

to Jean-Luc Marion for his attention to an early draft of this essay presented at the Annual Conference onChristian Philosophy: The Philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion, Franciscan University, Steubenville, Ohio,April 2008.


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