Objectivity without objects
pp. 95-111
in: , Non-metaphysical theology after Heidegger, Berlin, Springer, 2016Abstract
Dillard draws upon Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work to explain how something can be perfectly objective without being any kind of object. According to Wittgenstein, our ordinary practices of manifesting, avowing, discriminating, and coping with pain allow us to understand pain as something real yet not any kind of essentially private object. Similarly, rituals, such as the Beltane Fire Festival, in which the participants pretend to burn someone alive, make it possible to ascribe a sinister and strange character to human beings that is also not an object. This idea of objectivity without objects is then applied to resolve Otto's ontological antinomy. Dillard argues that the rich "grammar" of human religious gestures common to our encounter with holy awfulness and our encounter with holy allure perspicuously represents the holy as an objective yet object-less reality "out there" that both daunts us while drawing us to it.
