The Overabundant Self and the Transcendental Tradition: Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the Self-Reflective...

American Academy of Religion

The Overabundant Self and the Transcendental Tradition: Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the Self-Reflective SubjectAuthor(s): Charles MarshSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 659-672Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1465588 .

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion. LX/4

The Overabundant Self and the

Transcendental Tradition

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the Self-Reflective Subject Charles Marsh

ON 30 MAY, 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to this friend Eberhard Bethge from Tegel prison: "I'm sitting alone upstairs. Everything is quiet in this building; a few birds are singing outside, and if I were not 'reasonable,' I might do something foolish. I wonder whether we have become too reasonable" (1971:120). Bonhoeffer longs to be outside, to be rid of the bluntness of the monadic cell. His thoughts digress. "Smoke in the emptiness of time. . .The significance of illusion. . .Suicide, not because of consciousness of guilt but because I am already dead, draw a line, summing up" (1971:35). Bonhoeffer in prison-the familiar metaphor of intolerable self-enclosure has now become concretely real. "Dissatisfaction, tension, impatience, longing, boredom. . .indifference" (1971:35).

A decade and a half earlier in 1929, in the habilitation thesis Act and Being, Bonhoeffer describes reason's claims to master the real as a cry that only "dissembles the mute loneliness of isolation," moving "without echo into the world governed and construed by the self," holding the self a "prisoner to itself" (1983:158). Mind, which presumes lordship of the world, signifies the depth of isolation--cor curvum in se. Bonhoef- fer longs to get outside the circularities of this insidious monotony. How does he find his way?

In another letter from Tegel, this time to his parents the morning after a long night of air raids and sirens, Bonhoeffer's thoughts are charged by a different possibility: "It's remarkable how we think at such time about the people that we should not like to live without, and almost or entirely forget about ourselves. It is only then we feel how

Charles Marsh is Assistant Professor of Theology at Loyola College in Maryland, 4501 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21210-2699.

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660 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

closely our own lives are bound up with other people's, in fact how the center of our own lives is outside ourselves, and how little we are sepa- rate entities" (1971:105).

Much more is at stake in this passage than nostalgia or sentimental- ity. Bonhoeffer is saying in epistolary form what he had said in system- atic form throughout his theological career, that the self in Christ-the I that follows after-does not become acentric, that is, dispersed or dis- seminated, in the course of its refiguration and thus symptomatic of the acentric pulse of all the real. Rather, the self that follows after can be conceived as the self that finds its center elsewhere, no longer in itself but in togetherness, in life with others. My purpose in this essay is to connect the idea of the person in togetherness (and the social ontology the idea requires) with the conversation of the transcendental tradition, and to ask to what extent it provides a redescription of the self-reflective subject as beginning and completed end of knowledge of self, world and God.

A definition of the transcendental tradition must be provided, even at the risk of making monolithic what is diverse and nuanced. Perhaps the sharpest example of the claims of transcendental subjectivity is Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre (1794). In this remarkable conceptual exercise, Fichte attempts to systematically derive all forms of knowledge from self-consciousness by inscribing an extended demon- stration of a system of logic, originating in the basic tautology of I = I. The development of the system illustrates the process of the unfolding of all principles of knowledge, a process which, in the end, returns the movement of the system back to the basic relation of "I am I." The procedure is uniform. One starts with a single principle (identity, or the "I=I") and rigorously follows the path of dialectical method (differ- ence, or the "I = not-I") until one again arrives at the beginning through a synthesizing of the (limitation, or the "I and the not-I"). As Fichte says, "My task is intended to express that Act which does not and cannot appear among the empirical states of our consciousness, but rather lies at the basis of all consciousness and alone makes it possible" (93). The science of logic advances Kant's own idealist formulation to the extent that Fichte offers not simply a "critical" but an "absolute" idealism. Reason is not only legislative (providing forms and connections in which real objects must appear if they are to be objects of experience) but creative (producing the objects of experience), and the world of sense is not only appearance (Erscheinung: phenomenal in contrast to



Marsh: Bonhoeffer on the Self 661

noumenal) but also illusion (Schein).' In this way, the explicit structure of the Wissenschaftslehre illustrates the unifying concern of transcendental philosophy to demonstrate the subjective constitution of the world.

Recent discussions concerning otherness raise sharp objections against this world-constituting subject (not only against its Fichtean form but also its Hegelian, Husserlian and Heideggerian variations). Beckoning from an unassimilable outside, the claim of the Other frac- tures the infrastructural totality of the system and interrupts the continu- ities of identity; it remains constitutively different from the I and is not reducible to the ontologizing grasp of the Cartesian subject. In a strong sense, the Other emphasizes the failure of ontology, or as Stephan Wat- son says, 'the failure to find the thread that winds its way through all things, and perhaps even the failure of philosophy itself in its attempt to come to grips with the 'being' of other persons" (50). So great is the reaction against system that even the hope of our human interdepen- dence would be willingly sacrificed for the possibility of attaining deliv- erance from the absolute claims of transcendental subjectivity.

Emmanuel Levinas, whose idiolectic of otherness ignites most cur- rent conversations, describes the consequences of the transcendental tradition (otherwise referred to as "ontology" in his Totality and Infinity) as far more pervasive than mere conceptual or epistemological quandaries. Ontology, he says, concedes the "neutralization of the Other" and reduces otherness to sameness. The effect is not "peace with the Other but suppression or possession of the Other" (1969:46). He says, "Pos- session affirms the other, but within a negation of its independence. 'I think' comes down to 'I can'-to an appropriation of what is, to an exploitation of reality. Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power" (1969:46).2 The "confounding problem" of the Other disrupts the unifying pulse of transcendental philosophy (Klemm:403).

Two roads then diverge in considerations of the source of the self and its others. The first is the way of transcendental intersubjectivity wherein others are what they are only because they are constituted in me, hence relative to me, as Husserl says, "as a multiplicity of egos." The transcendental theory of intersubjectivity advances the claim that all

I This phrasing is taken from Robert P. Scharlemann's course lectures on Protestant theology in the nineteenth century at the University of Virginia in 1984. 21mplicit in Levinas' remark is the discontent with not only idealism in its absolute form but also

its critical form. Kant's moral imperative admits no inner contradiction between the 'I know' (what I ought to do) and the 'I can do it' (because I am free). "A will operating on this principle would be free from any ground of determination (Bestimmuingsgrund) in nature and hence truly free (C. Taylor:76).




dialogue begins and ends in self-reflection. The second is the way of dialogic; in an expansive sense, this might include positions that dis- place the transcendental self with descriptions of reciprocal constitutions of I and Other through an ontology of the between, or on non- reciprocal constitutions in which, as in Levinas, the responsibility inau- gurated by the claim of the Other alleges to be the ground of subjectivity and objectivity, an extreme case of which would be the unmediated plurivocity of Derrida's deconstruction. Referring to Levinas as dialogical could be misleading, but insofar as he radicalizes Buber's "the sphere of the between," the genesis of subjectivity is substituted by the face of the Other, keeping a dialogical rhythm audible (Levinas 1989).

These two options ought not to be considered exhaustive. I will suggest that Bonhoeffer's theological category of the person in togetherness (Gemeinsames Leben) offers a way beyond this impasse-a way that secures the truths of both positions while opening them up to a more meaningful configuration. Michael Theunissen's careful probing of this possibility in his penetrating study of social ontology and otherness provides invaluable material for the explication of my theological approach (see Theunissen).

DIALOGICAL SELF-RELATION

The loss of the centered self (the self whose identity with others is secured in self-centering) does not warrant frenetic announcements of the disappeared self. Self-loss is not always self-nihilation. Neither does the retention of the subject as epistemically and experientially prior to the dialogical relation require a requiem for others. Rather, dialogic as critique succeeds when it sticks to its business of challenging transcendental subjectivity's absolute claim to world-constitution-when it opposes transcendental subjectivity's presumption "to comprehend the entire social sphere and comprehend this sphere entirely, thanks to an identification of its own model of the Other with the Other itself" (Theunissen:362).

When dialogic proceeds to offer absolute claims of its own, it quickly betrays a number of inner contradictions. First, it does not escape the speculative curiosity of the transcendental tradition if, as Theunissen rightly says, "philosophizing means risking failure by ven- turing upon the unthought" (363). Indeed dialogic appears to be more philosophical than transcendental thought, which attains less problem- atic results precisely because its approach is less audacious from the start. Second, dialogic inevitably betrays its dependence on the tran-




scendental tradition. Whether the anthropology is shaped from the standpoint of the universal logical self of the Kantian subject or the ontologico-existentially interpreted self of dialogue, the description aims at the depiction of the world in its being. As a rejection of the philosophy of the universal subject and a turning toward my factical human I, the philosophy of dialogue, in the end, belongs entirely to the same movement of thought as transcendentalism. We cannot simply exchange dialogic for transcendental reflection and claim that we have gotten beyond the synthetic grasp of the Kantian subject.3

Thus, obstacles are encountered on both roads. Neither way alone is sufficient to explain the source of intersubjectivity, through perhaps we can take one road part of the distance, and the second road the rest of the way. Of course, we can only do this if there are intersections propi- tiously located.

In Metaphysics and the Idea of God Wolfhart Pannenberg proposes an alternative model of subjectivity to the Kantian-Fichtean predilection for reducing the consciousness of objects to the activity of self-consciousness. Pannenberg seeks a way outside the thesis that self-consciousness is the ground and truth of all consciousness of objects by recommending that we dispense with the assumption of transcendental philosophy "that there is an ego which, as the condition of the unity of experience, precedes all experience and is conscious of itself" (47). In its place we should adopt the thesis that the genesis of the "I" resides within the process of experience itself: "As long as self-consciousness is conceived as the ground and truth of all the contents of consciousness, it falls unavoidably to such suspicion. If, however, the development and stabi- lization of the ego's identity are themselves already mediated through the process of worldly experience, the themes of philosophical theology can no longer be quite as casually dismissed" (62). Pannenberg makes the right assessment of self-consciousness as ground of the real, but his constructive proposal seems to me an excessive response. The situation is not as simple as the implication that the world is either constituted by self-relation (univocity) or relation to othemess (equivocity).

3Mark C. Taylor misses this point in his review article of Theunissen, when he writes, "[The] archeoteleological framework, by the means of which Theunissen attempts to situate the dialogical I-Thou relation as emerging within the 'history of ontological development,' remains bound to transcendental assumptions." In both his critique of Martin Buber in chapter 7 and his Postscript, Theunissen recognizes that dialogic's methodological and epistemological dependence on transcendental philosophy at the level ofsubjectivity is perhaps its most manifest discrepancy. The category of the "dialogical self-becoming of the individual I" in no way obscures the reliance of the dialogical on self-relation, at least at the point of the genesis of the self.




If we make a distinction between the genesis and goal of the self, we no longer need to dispense with all the investments of transcendental philosophy. The contradiction, hitherto construed as constitutional, between transcendental intersubjectivity and the philosophy of dialogue is that the former affirms as original (in short, self-relation or complete- ness as the condition of the possibility of relation with others) what the latter affirms as futural (relation with the Other as the condition of the possibility of self-relation), and that the philosophy of dialogue ascribes primacy to the veritable reality (meeting the Other, or the between of I and Other) to which the transcendental tradition endows only a secon- dary significance (Theunissen:365). We need to locate an intersection between the two that will allow us to proceed even in view of their mutual inadequacies. We need to talk mediation.

Theunissen suggests that we consider the source of the self as the "dialogical self-becoming of the individual I" (366). As such, we neither sacrifice the integrity of subjectivity (its desires and dreams, its intractable and psychic need of care and attention) nor the necessity of the basic social relation. Theunissen holds that expressing selfhood in terms of the dialogical self-becoming of the individual I puts us in a position to reckon with the conflict between the respective claims to originality by enabling us to grant to transcendental philosophy the originality of genesis and to the philosophy of dialogue the originality of the goal or completed end: "The beginning would be my individual I, the goal the self that proceeds from the meeting" (367).

Of course, the big problem with Theunissen's solution is getting the two implicated parties to recognize their mutual shortcomings. If, for example, the philosophy of dialogue is taken as the compelling model of intersubjectivity, it is probably because the approach brings into view not only telelogical but also archeological or genetic claims of the originality of the self. Consequently, we need a description of the source of the self, or of the relation between self and its others, which originates in the identity of the transcendental subject and yet requires the movement of and to the outside to achieve its completed end. In other words, something must reconfigure subjectivity, and the identities of the I, in order for the self to be on the way towards togetherness. Decentering as nihilation, dissemination and the like might energize strategies useful in waging war against the idols, but it can never inspire the coherence that fashions community, nor can it give birth to the richness of vision and discourse necessary for renewing the human and natural worlds.



Marsh. Bonhoeffer on the Self 665

BONHOEFFER ON THE CHRISTOLOGICAL RELATION

As early as 1928, while working as an assistant minister to the Ger- man-speaking church in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer was intrigued by the ecstatic quality of the freedom of faith. In the essay "What is a Christian Ethic?" Bonhoeffer poses, in solidarity with Nietzsche, against the notion of Christianity as ethical religion. Without knowing it, Nietzsche introduces in the Superman many aspects of freedom in Christ: "Time- honored morals .. .can never for the Christian become the standard of action" (Bonhoeffer 1990:367). Ethics contrives eternal norms, deraci- nating them from time, circumstance, and decision; it is the hubris of the individual's will to live above decision and crisis (Bonhoeffer 1990:44). The Nietzschean character of the I in faith, as the youthful Bonhoeffer envisages it, involves the telluric, earthly pulse of christological freedom. The person is not drawn out of himself into ethical norms or paradoxical relations to time and history. Rather, the person "remains earthbound," and "a glimpse of eternity is revealed only through the depths of our earth" (Bonhoeffer 1990:367). Like Antaeus the giant, than whom none was mightier, Bonhoeffer's new self lives in the strength of fields. If lifted from its ground, it loses life, nourishment, and health: "The one who would leave the earth, who would depart from the present anxieties, forsakes the power which holds him" (1990:367). This is the Christian's song of earth.

It was only after Bonhoeffer's homecoming to Berlin in February of 1929 that he became more clear-headed, less mawkish, about the matter of the self's destiny. Ominous political changes were taking place in the Germany to which he returned. During the autumn of the same year, the "Stahlhelm," the nationalists, and the Nazis (the last weak in num- bers but highly vociferous) collectively organized a national petition for the drafting of a law against the enslavement of the German people by the Young Plan, a program of reparations denounced by the Nazis as the cowardice of defeatist politicians accepting the Treaty of Versailles (Bethge:90). Racist sentiment was emerging; blood, soil, and earth jargon found favor even among the nation's most tenacious thinkers. Jingoistic innuendoes such as occur in the Bardelona addresses never cross Bonhoeffer's lips again, for, as Bethge says, "he now saw them transformed into nationalistic slogans and bound up with anti-Semitic propaganda" (90). Even so, the texts of the Spanish interlude call attention to a structural motif that takes on an almost compulsive role in the works to follow: the new I does not venture forth in a gesture of trying to contain others in self-mediating identity, but it becomes repositioned in relatedness. As Bonhoeffer explains in a Barcelona sermon, "Jesus




Christ, God himself, addresses us through every man; the other human being, that puzzling, inscrutable thou, is God's call to us, God himself who comes to meet us (cited in Bethge:81).

In the habilitation text Act and Being, begun months after his Berlin return, Bonhoeffer attempts to develop a theological conception of the relation of self and Other that overcomes the mutual impasses of transcendental philosophy's self-constitution of the real and ontology's intramundane metaphysics by narrating the I's reconstitution in community. "God's freedom has bound itself, woven itself into the spiritual communion," circumscribed by the concreteness of human sociality, its responsibilities and risks. The self is not at home in itself; it looks outside for the grace of continuity and community.

Bonhoeffer argues in Act and Being that community precedes both the identity of the I and the relation with the Other. If the I's claim to be absolute is transferred willy-nilly to the Other, then an "ethicalized ver- sion of the Gospel" appears; in any case, the presumption of total originality is simply relocated to the other side of the I-Thou equation. Instead Bonhoeffer says that the theological response to the act-being problem must establish of revelation that God "is" in it, and of the person that he "is" before he acts (being precedes act or thought), and acts only out of that "being" (1983:108). Revelation must be understood such that its being and existence underlie and precede those of the I. Revelation's subject-"Christus als Gemeinde existierend"-as the unity prior to an ontology of relationality must (i) challenge and con- strain the I; (ii) be independent of its being known; and (iii) confront the I in such a way that the person's own relations to and knowledge of others are based on and suspended in a being-already related to and known. The subject of revelation must be one whose being and existence precede those of the I, "one to which cognition cannot however have recourse at will, as if to something there for its finding, but in the presence of which it must always be suspended in cognition" (1983:114).

The movement of the subject as genesis (or original site of the depar- ture to the Other) to self-becoming in dialogical relation is, in Bonhoef- fer's theological description, propelled by the self 's reconstitution in the christological relation- Christ as the source of the I becoming itself in the Other, Christ as community refiguring the monadological ego in dialogical relation. Togetherness is the singing of the self outside itself.4

4See William Desmond's intriguing discussion on philosophical mindfulness and the alterating event of song (259-311).




Twelve years before the well-known phrase of the prison documents, Bonhoeffer writes in Act and Being; "Herein other persons become Christ for us in what they both demand and promise, in their existential impo- sitions upon us from outside" (1983:124).

It might be helpful to pause here and take account of our initial quandaries. I proposed that we follow Theunissen as a trustworthy guide towards the conciliation of the claims of transcendental inter-subjectivity and dialogic. Theunissen holds that the two approaches have the capacity to yield a uniform notion of self becoming itself through its others. The philosophical trick is to work the shape of Hegel's dialectic so that plurivocity is not reduced to self-mediation but remains both self-mediating and also open to the intermediation between I and other, "precisely as other" (Desmond:135). William Desmond, like Theunis- sen, understands this task not as the sophomoric debunking of Hegel but as a high technical revision of dialectical logic with the intention of sustaining the independece of the other in a dialectical model otherwise in agreement with the epistemological scope of The Phenomenology of Spirit. A description of the self is needed that encompasses the transcendental subject as genesis and dialogical self-becoming as completed end in the project of selfhood reconstructed. This is the philosopher's formi- dable undertaking. But, as I am suggesting, it might be the case that a theological approach is malleable to the description in ways that philosophical models cannot be.

Bonhoeffer offers a view of the self emerging in the orignary I and extending beyond itself in social relation. It is not the other person that patterns this movement, but Christ (community, that space which is Gemeinsames Leben) who extends the center of the self from subjective constitution into life together. Again the new I does not proceed forth with the intention of recontaining the self in identity, but goes out in engagement, not to return as a recovered I (i.e., Fichte's: identity, "I= I," through dialectic, "I=not I," to limitation, "I and not-I") but to remain as an extended self, always more than the I. For Bonhoeffer, the self-forgotten can mean the same as the self-overabundant.

The overabundant self is the taking shape of the christological relation. What is the christological relation? Bonhoeffer pursues this in its most polyphonous meaning in his prison writings. Christ is no object of religion, no affair of inwardness and conscience, no accoutrement of the religious a priori, which, as the unlikely duo Barth and Rorty agree, just keeps on getting weirder and weirder in an ever-panicky attempt to jus-




tify its place in the universitas litterarum.5 Christological relation gathers outside; metanoia is not thinking that remains within the cycles of the subject, but it energizes the individual to be "caught up into" the messi- anic event of life together. In the prison writings, Bonhoeffer enumer- ates the forms of this ecstatic activity in resolutely non-conceptual terms: in table-fellowship with strangers, in attending to the sick, in fellowship with the weak and the suffering-in gathering with the ones outside (1971:362). "It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in earthly life" (Bonhoeffer, 1971:361). In the end, therefore, the place of the christological relation and the source of the self converge in the "being there for other." "Encounter with Jesus Christ. The experience that a transformation of all human life is given in the face that 'Jesus is there only for others' " (Bonhoeffer 1971:381). The self becomes itself in Christ; the place of Christ is the luminescence of agapeic togetherness. Faith is "participation in this being of Jesus," in being caught up into Others.

The emergence of the I into togetherness is then animated by the ecstatic character of faith. The allusion invoked by Bonhoeffer is Luther's "The Freedom of a Christian." In this manifesto of 1520, Luther understands freedom from the requirements of the law in faith as the condition for the disposition of joyful sacrifice: "Love by its very nature is ready to serve and be subject to him who is Lord" (81). But faith's effects are more than dispositional; they are structural as well. The new I does not respond to the Other as across the distance of differ- ence and ethical aggression, but out of the spontaneity of its own reshaping. The new I, that is, who I am in Christ as opposed to who I am in Adam, "lives only for others and not for itself," precisely because faith extends the self outwards. "We conclude," Luther says, "that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor" (80). Or in Bonhoeffer's rephrasing, "God in human form, not...in the conceptual forms of the absolute, metaphysical, infinite, etc. .. but 'the man for others'. . .the man who lives out of the transcendent" (1971:381-82).

Thus, a positive, re-constructive thesis underlies this description. Faith, which always enters into a person, is what turns that person toward the outside. Eberhard Jiingel gives further strength to this point in an exegesis of Luther's text: "[The] 'portal' of experience of existence and the unity of the person are to be sought where a word is encountered by which one is rendered human, where a word by turning one

SFor a satirical (and unwittingly Barthian) treatment of this line of thinking, see Rorty.



Marsh. Bonhoeffer on the Self 669

inward also brings one out of oneself" (56). For Luther, God's word enters the individual and first distinguishes the "inner person" from the "outer." In contrast to the "I" enclosed in its own interiority, the christological relation allows the inner person to be called out of itself so as to become reshaped in overabundance. The inner person is the one turned inward by the arresting Word, and in the event of this turning is turned away from the I. "The [inner person] exists in that change from within toward the outside. For this reason [one] can be turned away from [oneself]" (Jiingel:63).

Luther imagines the tangibility of this "going outside oneself" as circumscribed in the hearing of the Word-the inner person is called out of itself in kerygmatic proclamation. Unbelief compresses the self into an interior servitude wherein the person cannot leave himself, "exactly for the reason that he remains only in himself, as though he were an outer man inwardly" (Jiingel:75). But if God shows Godself in faith to be not onlyfor us but in us, then, as Luther says, we are outside ourselves. Jiingel writes, "For in essence humanity is the creature addressed by God and insofar sojourns with itself together with the Word addressing it and in the event of this sojourn is also taken out of itself" (65). Faith fashions the intersection between the inner person and the outer self.

Bonhoeffer's conception of the self summons Luther's anatomy of the new being on the issue of the I over-abounding in faith. The source of the self reconfigured involves neither the purely interior self not the purely social self but the reconstitution of the interior I as turned out- ward. The movement of the I as genesis to its dialogical self-becoming is not one of the former's decimation or disappearance. On the contrary, something happens in and to the I that anticipates and precedes its recentering in relation. In short, Christ fills the self in an overabound- ing of the I into others.

To be sure, Bonhoeffer's suspicion of all inwardness compels him to drop the theologically and metaphorically cumbersome task of explicat- ing the grammar of the inner and outer spheres. He also emphasizes the notion of Christ as community as the principal agent of the call to the outside, rather than the potencies of God acting in the acoustic call of proclamation. Bonhoeffer opposes any thinking in two spheres for the reason that it profanes the one reality interconnected through Christ in community. The inner/outer distinction can thus produce theological convolutions which complicate what, in the end, might be a situation so simple as: "Follow after." Nachfolge. Be with others as the losing, giv- ing and finding of yourself, wherein the I is found in the we and the we




is found in the I, and they become, as in Auden's words, "linked as children in a circle dancing."

The inner/outer distinction is opposed by Bonhoeffer on both theological and psychological grounds. At Tegel prison Bonhoeffer often appeared to his fellow inmates as strong and confident, a man of delib- erate courage and piety. Yet when reading the prison papers we recognize that Bonhoeffer, contrary to appearances, felt often frightened, weak and apprehensive. In a poetic reflection, "Who am I," he considers the dichotomy of ostensible surface and depth.

Who am I? They tell I bear the days of misfortune Equably...like one accustomed to win. Am I really all that which other people tell of? Or am I only what I know of myself, Restless, longing, sick... Struggling for breath, as though hands were compassing my throat .... (1971:348)

Bonhoeffer resists the suggestion that the genuine self is the hidden self and the outer a mask to which the inner self is related as a fall from an original source.6 Rather he says, "Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine" (1971:348). Who "I am" is not finally my own possession; who "I am" is not an "I know" but an "I am known"-a "thou knowest," or perhaps an "I am being known" in the intermediation of the Other.

Dialogical self-becoming, therefore, to return to Theunissen's vocab- ulary, is not a turning back to the I that, as the transcendental source of the real, stands at its center (Theunissen:379). The dialogical self- becoming of the individual I is not a looking-back in the sense of an "authenticating repetition" of "an unfolding of the still implicated beginning" (Theunissen:379). If that were the case, the self which I am given by the Other would become itself "the true world midpoint" (Theunissen:319). The new self is altogether different; it is a being in and out of togetherness. Since christological self-becoming must nontheless be in some sense a looking back to the beginning, it refers from out of itself to Christ as to a beginning that precedes the subjective constitution of the world. Christ as life together activates the living consciousness of the Other as neighbor, it enables the self to have found once again an origin that was obscured when the I indulged itself in

61 am indebted for this point to Norman Lilligaard.




"that 'solitude' out of which it constitutes the world as its own" (Theunissen:379). And so, near the end, Bonhoeffer can think even of a

togetherness that extends beyond the silencing of his own I: "Brother, when the sun turns pale for me, live for me."

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The Overabundant Self and the Transcendental Tradition: Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the Self-Reflective...

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