Jean-Luc Marion Quotes
Jean-Luc Marion is a French philosopher and theologian, a major figure in contemporary phenomenology, and a leading interpreter of Descartes. His God Without Being challenged the equation of God with metaphysical being and proposed that the divine name escapes ontology, opening instead onto love and gift. The quotes below are attributed to Jean-Luc Marion, organized by topic.
Jean-Luc Marion on God
-
Attributed to Jean-Luc Marion:
“God gives Himself to be thought outside of being.”
-
“What if God did not have first to be, since he loved us first, when we were not? And what if, to envisage him, we did not have to wait for him within the horizon of Being, but rather transgress ourselves in risking to love love.”
p. 3 -
“The gaze strains itself to see the divine, to see it by taking it up into the field of the gazeable. The more powerfully the aim is deployed, the longer it sustains itself, the richer, more extensive and more sumptuous will appear the idol on which it will stop its gaze. ... In this stop, the gaze ceases to overshoot and transpierce itself, hence it ceases to transpierce visible things, in order to pause in the splendor of one of them.”
p. 11 -
“Any access to something like "God," precisely because of the aim of Being as such, will have to determine him in advance as a being. The precomprehension of "God" as being is self-evident to the point of exhausting in advance "God" as a question.”
p. 43
Jean-Luc Marion on Justice
-
“Theological writing always transgresses itself, just as theological speech feeds on the silence in which, at last, it speaks correctly.”
p. 1 -
“A great philosopher is always right and gives us to think even in what he does not manage to think, while a philosopher is limited to responding, hence to dissolving questions. There are three kinds of philosophers: those who do not respond to questions and hide them through ideology; those who respond to questions that they did not themselves raise and hope thus to clear up; and those who raise questions that no one ever thought of raising, insoluble questions that open the future. Descartes is one of these latter ones. That is why philosophy remains a continually open game.”
p. 70
Jean-Luc Marion on Knowledge
-
Attributed to Jean-Luc Marion:
“The saturated phenomenon is one in which intuition exceeds the concept.”
-
“The icon and the idol determine two manners of being for beings, not two classes of beings.”
p. 8 -
“The idol depends on the gaze that it satisfies, since if the gaze did not desire to satisfy itself in the idol, the idol would have no dignity for it.”
p. 10 -
“p. 57 3. The Crossing of Being; 1. The Silence of the Idol”
Theism and atheism bear equally upon an idol . They remain enemies, but fraternal enemies, in a common and impassable idolatry . Of such idolatry Nietzsche gives the best and final illustration, by demonstrating in exemplary fashion the ... functions held by the idol...
Jean-Luc Marion on Love
-
Attributed to Jean-Luc Marion:
“Does anyone love me?”
-
Attributed to Jean-Luc Marion:
“Love does not have to be in order to give itself.”
Jean-Luc Marion on Truth
-
Attributed to Jean-Luc Marion:
“What gives itself shows itself.”