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The Liberatory Event in Paul of Tarsus Enrique Dussel (bio) Translated by George Ciccariello-Maher [Correction] In this work we hope to rethink a very timely subject for political philosophy in recent years.1 For epistemological reasons, however, we must deal in a different way with some themes common to the philosophy currently in vogue in Europe and the United States. Today political philosophy has unexpectedly taken up a subject that had been ignored since the Enlightenment. Kant himself, in Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason, addressed the subject with some degree of precision.2 In The Conflict of the Faculties he distinguished clearly between the tasks of the faculty of theology and the faculty of philosophy (W, 9:263ff.). In his time the great university faculties (or disciplines)-both those of Latin-Germanic Europe and those in the Byzantine and Muslim worlds-had always consisted of theology and law. It was only with the Enlightenment (and above all with Humboldt's founding of the University of Berlin) that the faculty of philosophy would gain the status of the fundamental faculty within the university. In an appendix (W, 1, 2:300ff.) to chapter 1 of the latter work, Kant sketches out the conflict between the faculties of theology and philosophy as a question of "interpretations." For the philosopher from Königsberg, "the biblical theologian is, properly speaking, he who is learned in the Scripture (der Schriftgelehrte) of the Church's faith," (W, [End Page 111] 1, A44:300) while with regard to Scripture (or the Bible) the philosopher "is he who is learned in reason (der Vernunftgelehrte) . . . based on the internal laws that can be deduced from the very reason of each human being." (W, 1, A44: 300). And after an extensive argument he concludes that "this is how one must conduct all interpretations of Scripture (Schriftauslegungen)" (300)-that is, of the texts of Judeo-Christian Scripture (and the same could be said of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Indian Upanishads, the corpus of Buddhist texts, the Islamic Qur'an, or other texts considered sacred, and often held to be direct revelation, by their respective communities). Within the structure of the university, scripture resides within the faculty of theology (in Germano-Anglo-Saxon universities at least, because in Latin Europe these faculties would disappear from public universities for well-known historic reasons). Within the faculty of philosophy-since the Enlightenment-one could teach with reference to texts consisting of extensive, symbolically based rational narratives like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey or Hesiod's Theogony, which are religious texts "full of gods," but which were nevertheless considered suitable for philosophical interpretation. On the contrary, it was strictly forbidden to philosophically use or interpret texts from the Judeo-Christian Bible such as Exodus, the Gospel of John, or Paul of Tarsus's Epistle to the Romans, as though these were intrinsically theological. The present task is to haul out these moth-eaten symbolic narratives (considered "theological" by enlightened Jacobin secularism) that are housed and studied in the faculty of theology, and to situate them for the first time within the faculty of philosophy as well. This would entail subjecting these texts to a hermeneutics, a "strictly philosophical" interpretation. And yet, going beyond Kant's meditations on the subject, we wish to clarify the question in a different and more precise manner. In the first place, (a) since they belong to everyday languages of the past, these symbolic, religious, and even in some cases mystical texts ought to be defined as "symbolically based rational narratives," in the sense that they constitute myths, as Paul Ricoeur defines the term.3 These narratives, in the second place, can undergo a double-hermeneutic or interpretation: on the one hand, (b.1) [End Page 112] theologically, that is, and as Kant indicated, executed from a position of subjective conviction (what we could call "religious faith"), and (c.1) with reference to a religious community (what Kant calls a "Church"). Or, on the other hand, philosophically (b.2), to take up these symbolically based rational texts or narratives toward the goal of discovering their full rational meaning and the implicit theoretical-universal categories embedded within...
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