The Phenomenon of the Impossible in Jean-Luc Marion

Abstract

In a world where philosophical thinking and thinking in general have become more and more manipulative in an ever escalating manner, Jean-Luc Marion pledges us back into that originary philosophical disposition of wonder before the insurmountable.In place of a "limiting modern metaphysics" that confines any appearing within the lifeless realm of intellectual certainty and logical precision, the philosopher sketches for us the possibility of an appearing beyond the clutches of Being.Marion's new phenomenology thus births a possibility of accommodating revelation, back into philosophical discourse.His philosophy is an outlining of the possibility of what is rendered conceptually impossible by modern "conditions of possibility" -God.For any philosophy of religion to thrive, he says, it must be able to provide intelligibility in what religion reports.Hence, Marion's new phenomenology is a sketching of the philosophical possibility of revelation itself.This paper is a critical exposition of the heart of Marion's thought: the saturated phenomenon -the site where the ineffable can in fact present itself without restriction.In order to facilitate understanding, the paper also traces the trajectory of Marion's thought.From his critique over the intellectual provincialism of the moderns, (which shut the doors for the revelatory character of truth) to the failed attempts of Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger to render a phenomenon worthy of the name.Until at last, we arrive at Marion's proposal of the saturated phenomenon -the center of a breakthrough that forever changed the face of phenomenology.