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[Expositions 12.2 (2018) 103–120]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

Interview: Kevin Hart, University of Virginia 

 

BING LYU 

ZaoZhuang University 

 

 

Kevin Hart is an Anglo-Australian theologian, philosopher, and poet. He has taught at Monash 

University and the University of Notre Dame and is currently Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian 

Studies at the University of Virginia. Hart has received multiple awards for his poetry, including 

the Christopher Brennan Award and the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry twice. His most recent book 

is Poetry and Revelation: for a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).  

   

 

Bing Lyu: Professor, your previous scholarly book, Kingdoms of God (2014), is highly 

recommended by Choice and described as “a beautifully conceived and creative work, one that 

presses the relationship between phenomenology and theology further and outlines potential future 

directions for this relationship.”1 And your new book, Poetry and Revelation, examines this 

relationship more deeply from the perspective of literature. Do these two books belong to the same 

set of ideas?  

Kevin Hart: I intended Kingdoms of God and Poetry and Revelation to be a diptych: the one 

would use my inflection of phenomenology to elucidate the revelation of the Kingdom of God in 

and through Jesus Christ, and the other would examine a range of poems in order to show how 

some poetry deals phenomenologically with the Christian revelation. In each case “revelation” is 

used in a twofold manner: first and foremost, it is revelation in the sense of ἀποκάλυψις 

(apocalypse), a divine uncovering of what is the case beyond worldly appearances (e.g., the 

Lordship of God), and, second, it concerns the different ways in which phenomena reveal or 

manifest themselves. In the first of those two books I was interested in showing that the divine 

revelation of the Kingdom comes by Jesus disclosing to us, often by way of parables, that there is 

an anterior divine call to enter and help build up the Kingdom of God, one that has already been 

uttered in the Hebrew Bible and that is silently before us in Creation. And in the second book I 



Interview: Kevin Hart  104 
 

wanted to attend to “religious poems,” a category that, in English at any rate, is often used to 

consign many fine poems to the status of minor poetry. Once we examine the assumptions in play 

when regarding religious poetry in this manner we can discharge those assumptions, and then we 

can read some religious poetry more freshly. We can see that lots of religious poetry is not 

primarily about ideas (let alone dogma) but about individual relationships—real or imagined, 

desired, recollected, or whatever—with God, relationships that have inner and sometimes outer 

dramas. Now I think that a third book, one that follows and extends my The Dark Gaze (2004), 

which I am calling Blanchot Encore, will turn that diptych into a triptych. It will seek to examine 

the ways in which Maurice Blanchot, a consequential atheist, refigures phenomenology and 

revelation alike in his narrative and critical writings.  

Bing Lyu: Harold Bloom quotes your words in The Western Canon that “Western culture takes its 

lexicon of intelligibility from Greek philosophy, and all our talk of life and death, of form and 

design, is marked by relations with that tradition.”2 And you cite Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Poetry 

and Revelation that “literature has never been as ‘philosophical’ as it has in the twentieth century, 

never has it reflected as much upon language, truth, and the significance of the act of writing.”3 

Does Merleau-Ponty’s “philosophy” mean “Greek philosophy”? Why did he emphasize the 

twentieth century? If we stretch the timeline from Renaissance to Postmodernism, what is the 

relationship between philosophy and literature?  

Kevin Hart: In book Delta of the Metaphysics Aristotle provides a lexicon of forty or so words 

that do not merely enable us to grasp metaphysical questions and discussions but, in addition, 

allow us to make sense of the world and our place in it. Even if one does not know any philosophy, 

one still uses words such as “cause,” “nature,” “being,” “one,” “many,” and so on, each and every 

day; other words, such as “principle” and “substance,” are often in the background of our thought 

and talk. This means that, in the West, even if we are doing something believed to be very far from 

philosophy, such as reading or writing poems, painting a portrait or looking at one, it is marked to 

a greater or lesser extent by philosophical—indeed, metaphysical—terms. Martin Heidegger and 

Jacques Derrida have shown this very clearly. There is a sense, then, in which all Western 

philosophy is indebted to Greek philosophy, even when it heads in another direction. We never get 

past reading Plato and Aristotle, even though we would do well to read Plotinus and the Stoics 

more often and more deeply and so be exposed to other ways of thinking of philosophy.  



105  Lyu 
 

When I say “in the West” I do not mean to designate a geographical area. That used to be possible, 

but for a long time now “the West” has been leaving a mark in the Middle East and Asia, and not 

always in the same way or to the same extent. Obviously, there would be important differences to 

specify with respect to China and North Korea, for example. Yet “the West” has power not only if 

it is welcomed, absorbed, and re-set but also if it is shunned and rejected (and, of course, covertly 

relied upon), and it too changes over time. In many ways much that has been excellent in “the 

West” has changed. Our intellectual world has weakened, especially in the humanities. One no 

longer looks to Germany for intellectual brilliance in philosophy and theology, France too has 

been fading in that regard; perhaps only in the United States are there major universities that 

preserve Western intellectual methods and values, and perhaps not for very long. Already one 

senses the grandeur of Judeo-Christian thought and writing beginning to slip from sight among 

undergraduate and graduate students, in part because professors (and especially administrators 

and, increasingly, the Boards of Foundations that fund tertiary institutions) have other hiring 

priorities. Needless to say, some of these new priorities are very valuable; others remain within 

the fashions of the day. I should add that one change in “the West” is the way it gets enriched and 

re-directed from “the East.” Twentieth-century American poetry, for example, wouldn’t look as it 

does now without Pound’s Cathay (1915), even though Pound didn’t know Chinese and worked 

from Japanese versions of classical Chinese poems.  

To return to your question: Merleau-Ponty reflects on a literary situation in France in which some 

writers—certainly not all—have persistently and variously sought to overcome the heritages of 

classicism, neo-classicism, and even romanticism. Dada and Surrealism might be regarded as 

“terrorist” groups in the field of literature, if I may cite Jean Paulhan’s Les fleurs de Tarbes (1941). 

Even here, there are appeals to philosophy: think of the uses to which André Breton put Hegel 

when articulating the Surrealist revolution. Practitioners of la nouvelle roman question linear 

narration and naturalist assumptions about society and psychology, even though they may have 

little or no formal training in philosophy; poets from Stéphane Mallarmé to Eugène Guillevic, 

Yves Bonnefoy, and André du Bouchet test what can be done in and by poetry. Their poems do 

not simply declare, “I am a poem!” by dint of theme, form, and mode, but also ask, each in its own 

way, loudly or quietly, “What is a poem?” or “What are poets for?” (Think of Guillevic’s 

Euclidiennes (1967), which makes us ask ourselves what place a geometrical figure, of all things, 

has in a lyric poem.) The first question comes to us, at least in its form, directly from Socrates, 



Interview: Kevin Hart  106 
 

and the second one reaches us by way of Hölderlin and his experience of the Greeks. To some 

extent this reflexive experience of literature is more common in French writing than in writing in 

English, since philosophy permeates French culture more generally than it does in Britain and the 

United States. The classe de philosophie is something we don’t have in British or American 

secondary education.  

The situation that Merleau-Ponty discerns is one that is clearest in twentieth-century literature but 

is not limited to it. One does not find philosophical questions associated with poems so clearly in 

the work of Victor Hugo or Paul Verlaine, say, which is not to say that there are no profound 

philosophical issues in French poetry of the nineteenth century, even if these are not asterisked for 

attention until the following century. One has only to recall Benjamin Fondane’s Baudelaire et 

l’expérience du gouffre (1947). Sometimes one finds a strong form of negation in the poetry of the 

twentieth century, negativity being something far more important to modern German and French 

philosophers than to the Greeks. Bonnefoy and du Bouchet offer competing examples. The young 

Bonnefoy, author of Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve (1953), places his poem under 

the sign of the life of the Spirit beginning only with death, a key theme of Hegel’s Phenomenology 

of Spirit, while du Bouchet develops, with glances towards Paul Celan, ways of using lyric poetry 

as a means of countering expected ways of articulating our experience of the world. Yet we should 

always be cautious. For example, when Bonnefoy writes about la présence, as he does so often, 

we should not be too quick to assimilate it to the philosophical categories in play in the formative 

years of his writing life: it is not what Heidegger calls Anwesenheit, for example. It is closer to 

what he calls Anwesen, coming into being and passing out of being, which returns us to a sense of 

Greek thought that was more familiar to Heraclitus than Plato, of more interest to Plotinus than 

Aristotle, and about which we have heard very little in recent decades.  

Not all of this modern and even contemporary French poetry is explicitly oriented to philosophy, 

though: Francis Ponge, for one, has little or no taste for philosophy, even though his work as a 

whole has considerable philosophical interest. I am thinking of Henri Maldiney’s Le legs des 

choses dans l’oeuvre de Francis Ponge (1974) and Derrida’s Signéponge (1984). Other poets, such 

as Philippe Jaccottet, have no particular interest in philosophy, yet one can see his work, especially 

Airs (1967), as concerned with what I call “weak phenomena,” namely those phenomena whose 

being is exposed to being overlooked, reduced, or bypassed in this busy world of ours. Jaccottet 



107  Lyu 
 

broke through to the poetry of Airs by reading Japanese haiku in English translation, and we can 

come to read his poetry in terms of sustaining weak phenomena only because the work of Jean-

Luc Marion and Jean-Yves Lacoste allows us to see such a thing. (Neither has written on Jaccottet, 

though.) If we studied the situation thoroughly, we would find layers of “philosophy,” coming 

from Zen Buddhism, passively entering the West by way of poetry in translation and being read 

by way of Western philosophical traditions, which would include philosophies of translation, both 

lexical and cultural.  

The relation between philosophy and literature changes many times from the Renaissance to 

postmodernity, and it is not congruent in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish literatures. 

One could write a long book on the shifting relations in each of those national literatures over the 

period you specify, and even within the period of modernism. Sometimes there is cross-

fertilization, sometimes not. There’s not just one modernism, even in English literature; we would 

need to distinguish the “high modernism” of Eliot and Pound from the “low modernism” of Frost 

and Bishop. And we simply can’t expect “modernism” to have the same starting points and desired 

endpoints in French, Spanish, and Italian literature. The sort of thing that we value in Federico 

García Lorca in the late 1920s, for instance, is not going to be found in Giuseppe Ungaretti or 

Guillaume Apollinaire; sometimes it’s quite the opposite. The revival of gypsy ballads by Lorca 

was irruptive in Spanish literature, and one doesn’t expect to find philosophical questions to the 

fore there, even though Lorca was finding a new way for poetry to speak the truth about human 

life. Similarly, when Apollinaire spoke of l’esprit nouveau a decade earlier he was more concerned 

with μῦθος (mythos) rather than λόγος (logos), while also committing the poet (in an extended 

sense of the word) to speak the truth.  

Bing Lyu: When explaining the title of Poetry and Revelation you observed that it is a 

phenomenological study of religious poetry. Could you talk about the relationship between 

phenomenology and literature, especially poetry? What is the advantage for us to understand 

literature in terms of phenomenology?  

Kevin Hart: Phenomenology is usually, and rightly, said to begin with Edmund Husserl’s Logical 

Investigations (1900–01). There we find a shift from asking the questions “What?” and “Why?” 

to asking the question “How?” Husserl urges that we need to ask how phenomena give themselves 

to us. We need to get away from pre-packaged problems and confront “the things themselves,” he 



Interview: Kevin Hart  108 
 

says, and the How-question helps us to do just that. Phenomena do not give themselves to us in 

the same way. If I think of the number three, it gives itself to me wholly by way of cognition, but 

if I perceive three apples on my table they give themselves to me in profiles, so that to gain a full 

perception of them I would have to look at them from all perspectives. I cannot gain that full 

perception without using my body. If I think of being in Antwerp later this year, the city of Antwerp 

gives itself to me both in memory (I’ve been there before) and in anticipation; yet come December 

it will give itself to me also in terms of perception. I might look at photographs or paintings of it, 

and find that it gives itself to me by way of representation as well. Now Husserl was concerned 

with the threat he felt that came to European culture from all the various forms of relativism that 

were prevalent in his youth, historicism and psychologism being the main ones. He worked 

extremely hard to show that logic and mathematics have very high levels of Evidenz, self-

evidence, and that this gives us a firmer epistemic ground than was made available by the logic 

and mathematics of his day, which was, he felt, overly impressed by symbolic notation, which can 

be moved around by purely formal means to solve a problem without thinking it through in 

rigorous, philosophical fashion. Yet not all phenomena give themselves to us with such high levels 

of self-evidence: perception does not (often we have to look, listen, touch, smell, or taste again 

and again before we are even half-way sure of something), memory does not, and anticipation 

does not. In imagination we have extremely high levels of Evidenz, but a great many imagined 

things have no correlatives in the world. And affects come with high levels of Evidenz: I cannot 

doubt that I am joyful or sad when those states come upon me, when awake or in sleep, but also I 

might not be able to make them evident to you.  

Husserl developed phenomenology in the intellectual climate of Neo-Kantianism, and within the 

discipline of philosophy, especially in logic and epistemology. Yet he was also aware that less 

scientific modes of phenomenology had been available since the Greeks. He recognized that, in 

some respects, the philosopher and the poet live in the same neighborhood, although he held that 

the poet is loath to reduce his or her empirical consciousness all the way to transcendental 

consciousness. To do so would be to eliminate poetry altogether. Similarly, he recognized that 

poets do not reduce language so that it is pure expression, as philosophers will try to do. To do 

that would drain language of all the empirical elements that make satisfying poetry, not only 

euphony but also ambiguity. Poets are not cornered by the questions “What?” and “Why?” They 

also ask the question “How?” They are not concerned to establish firm epistemic grounds for 



109  Lyu 
 

anything, although lyric poets in particular are prized for dealing with affects that supply high 

levels of self-evidence to themselves and, through their art, to others.  

One shouldn’t think, though, that those high levels of Evidenz are simply transmitted in poems. 

Not at all: as soon as someone begins to write of erotic love, that individual feeling becomes 

entangled in immensely complex themes, modes, and structures that precede an individual poet at 

the moment of writing. There is primary passivity, in which my earlier experiences become unified 

with my current experience, and there is secondary passivity, in which I pick up things from the 

inter-subjective world in which I participate. And that world might be both immense and partial. 

So if I write a love poem, my feeling of love, for which I might have the highest degree of self-

evidence, becomes inflected and deflected by way of poems by Catullus, anonymous poets from 

the Han Dynasty whom I have read in translation, sonnets by Sir Philip Sidney, and lyrics by Juan 

Ramón Jiménez. Phenomenology allows us to understand better the wide range of intentional 

relations we have with the world and the beings in it, and it allows us to see also the passive 

constitutions involved in encounters with those beings.  

I think literary critics can learn a great deal from Husserl, although that does not mean one must 

become a Husserlian of strict observance. His project of grounding philosophy, of making it a 

science (in the sense of Wissenshaft), must be jettisoned, which means that affects, for instance, 

need not be founded on perceptions. Once one loosens up phenomenology a little, as has happened 

with Heidegger, Lévinas, Derrida, and Marion, among others, it becomes a very supple way of 

understanding literature. At its best, phenomenology offers the possibility of total reading; it is 

able to incorporate formalist and non-formal responses to a text in the one enterprise. Yet it is 

unlikely in the extreme that there will be a new “phenomenological literary criticism”: the material 

is far too demanding for anyone without philosophical training to master in a short time.  

Phenomenology can itself ask the question “What is philosophy?” or “What does philosophy do 

best?” and so re-orient itself. That might be good for thinking about literature, which is hardly 

going to be enriched by having people formalize lyric poems in propositional or predicate calculus. 

Perhaps it is also good for philosophy. Phenomenology is perhaps more open to reflecting on meta-

philosophical questions than some contemporary analytic philosophy is, which tends to be 

committed almost single-mindedly to argumentation. It takes the clarity and rigor of the hard 

sciences and seeks to apply them to philosophical problems yet, unlike those sciences, is never 



Interview: Kevin Hart  110 
 

able to come up with any agreed conclusions, in fact seldom able to persuade any one of its number 

to change his or her mind on an issue; and so, in a surprising way, analytic philosophy becomes a 

contribution to contemporary nihilism. It makes us doubt the efficacy of reason.  

Bing Lyu: Choice mentioned in the review of your last book that there is a renewed interest in 

God among European thinkers due to the recent “theological turn” in Continental philosophy.4 

And some critics said it is your approach rather than Marion’s approach to the relationship between 

philosophy and theology corresponds to the core concerns of the second generation of the 

“theological turn” of French phenomenology.5 Could you talk about the “theological turn” of 

phenomenology?  

Kevin Hart: I sometimes wonder if there ever was a “theological turn” in phenomenology. Even 

before Husserl, before the descriptive phenomenology of the Logical Investigations, Chantepie de 

la Saussaye was developing a phenomenology of religion, and of course Hegel, in his own way, 

was dealing with theological concerns in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Husserl himself 

talks often in the Nachlass of God, a highly philosophical understanding of the deity, to be sure, 

although he recognized that Lev Chestov was onto something important when he refused the God 

made available by philosophy regarded as Wissenshaft. In the early 1920s Heidegger explored a 

phenomenology of religious life, and for the first and only time sought to use phenomenology to 

read the Scriptures. That project is being revived only in our own time, although, to be sure, not 

quite in the key in which Heidegger worked.  

Dominique Janicaud detected what he called a “theological turn” in French phenomenology in the 

work of Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Jean-Luc Marion in 1991, 

and the expression was meant to be derogatory (much as the description la nouvelle théologie was 

in an earlier generation). The debate was joined by those accused of making illegal moves with 

Phénoménologie et théologie (1992), and it lasted, at least in France, until 1998 when Janicaud 

published his La phénoménologie eclatée. Paul Ricoeur stood somewhat to the side of the debate, 

recognizing difficulties of putting classical phenomenology to use in religion at large; and it is 

worth noting that Janicaud exempted Lacoste from criticism: his early work, Note sur les temps 

(1990), did not make what Janicaud thought to be illegitimate moves in philosophy. For Husserl, 

although God must be the final and most difficult theme of phenomenology, there can be no 

phenomenological theology in his terms; for God transcends the world, he says in Ideas I §58, in 



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a way that exceeds the sort of transcendence with which phenomenology can deal. Yet he left open 

a possibility: that the divine transcendence is always and already in absolute consciousness. We 

might think of Husserl’s remark as a river stone marking a phased counterpart to Descartes’s 

ontological argument in the Meditations.  

So when Lévinas began to speak of God and Autrui, and Marion to evoke revelation as saturation 

to the second degree, Janicaud became very nervous. Perhaps his understanding of 

phenomenology was too narrow to deal with the new interest in the divine. Marion and others, by 

contrast, asked themselves why phenomenality should be limited in the first place, whether to 

objects or to being. Isn’t the proper philosophical procedure to grant the possibility of 

phenomenality across the board, and then see the different modes of manifestation in the world, 

no matter what they are or if they are? Not that Marion, to name the person who became the main 

representative of the first generation of “the theological turn,” made theological claims under the 

guise of phenomenology. He has always been clear that he speaks of essences, not actualities, in 

his analyses of religious events. (Even so, his critics become enflamed when they see Scripture 

cited in what appear to be philosophical essays.)  

The first generation of people associated with the “theological turn” is far from homogeneous. 

Henry and Lévinas are miles apart in their understandings of phenomenology, for example. And 

the second generation of that movement is similarly diverse: Emmanuel Falque is primarily a 

philosopher, and I am primarily a theologian, although to be sure we share many interests, not 

least of all the medieval tradition of contemplatio. Yet I am not so sure that talk of generations is 

all that useful. My first book on the topic, The Trespass of the Sign, came out with Cambridge 

University Press in 1989, seven years after Marion’s Dieu sans l’être (1982) and eight years before 

his Étant donné (1997). True, my first book engaged with mystical theology, for the most part, and 

used Derrida as a way of attaining a better comprehension of it; and Marion has been far more 

intrigued by general revelation, even when it comes through the spirituality of devotion to an icon, 

and kept himself at a distance from Derrida once he was no longer a student of his. Especially in 

the United States, a version of the “theological turn” continued because of Derrida’s explorations 

of apophatic theology, “religion without religion” and religion at the limits of reason alone. One 

might say that this was a “theological turn” in Derrida, although it took place at the very edge of 

transcendental phenomenology where Husserlian investments in pure phenomenological life 



Interview: Kevin Hart  112 
 

begin to fail and the border between life and death begins to become divided and equivocal. But 

although they debated in public, Derrida and Marion were never centrally engaged in the same 

issues to do with theology and phenomenology.  

Perhaps Marion and I differ most clearly in our understandings of reduction. For Marion, it is the 

“third reduction” that is the most important, the leading back to Gegebenheit, whereas what 

presses on me is what I call the “basilaic reduction.” To my mind, Marion continues a thinking of 

reduction that begins to appear in Neo-Platonism, and is apparent in the young Augustine, and 

which reaches an extreme version with the third reduction. This is a history of passing from 

without to within, from transcendence (in one or another sense) to immanence (in one or another 

sense), even when, as for Heidegger and Marion, there is no transcendental consciousness but only 

an empty structure (Dasein for Heidegger, l’adonné for Marion). On the other hand, I propose that 

Jesus of Nazareth performs an original mode of reduction, especially in his telling of the parables. 

One is not led deep within the self or to a structure that stands in place of the “self,” but to an 

anterior state where the divine call to participate in the Kingdom can be heard.  

Bing Lyu: When analyzing Hopkins’ work in Poetry and Revelation you conclude by citing 

Husserl’s opinion that God would be “experienced” only in the understanding, which reminds me 

of Augustine’s wisdom that you mentioned once: seek not to understand that you may believe, but 

believe that you may understand. People don’t usually associate Husserlian phenomenology with 

God, but he actually talked about God as “Limes,” “Pol,” “Entelechie,” “Urfaktizitat,” and so on. 

So could the existence of God win a place in the realm of phenomenology?  

Kevin Hart: The crucial question is what Husserl means by “God” and whether this can be 

correlated with the God who is revealed in the Bible. Certainly Husserl was drawn to think of God 

early and late in his writing life, and allusions to the deity multiply in the Nachlass. At times he 

seeks to approach God as Other by way of empathy, just as he does the human other in the fifth of 

the Cartesian Meditations. Almost always, though, God for Husserl is the “all-consciousness” or 

“infinite telos,” and anyone approaching the question of God from the Bible, not from Aristotle or 

Hegel, would find this metaphysical speculation puzzling and more than a little arid. When Husserl 

and Chestov first met, Husserl responded to the very sharp criticisms that Chestov had made of 

his phenomenology in print. Husserl defended himself by pointing to the need to overcome 

deficiencies in our account of knowledge—to save it from relativism in all of its modern forms—



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in order to avoid a complete breakdown of confidence with respect to knowledge, an overcoming 

that would place knowledge on a secure foundation, even if it meant putting God outside our ken, 

just as Kant had done over a century earlier. Chestov responded by saying that rather than shore 

up the rickety structures with firm scaffolding (appeals to Evidenz), one should kick them and 

make them topple, and then perhaps the biblical God could be witnessed once again. I think this 

is a false division. The task is not to fit the biblical God into a philosophical frame, as has been 

done time and again since Philo of Alexandria, or to seek to free theology entirely from philosophy, 

as Ritschl and Barth attempted, but to recognize that Jesus of Nazareth makes God concrete and 

meaningful in his parables and, more generally, in his life, suffering, death, and resurrection.  

I don’t think, then, that phenomenology can prove the existence of God, certainly not in any 

classical sense of “prove.” Besides, there are no proofs for the existence of God—neither the 

ontological argument nor the “five ways” of Aquinas—that I find satisfying. (I recall that Anselm 

set his “proof” in the context of a prayer, and I don’t think that Aquinas intended the five ways to 

be proofs but rather glosses on what “God” must mean to anyone who conscientiously uses the 

word.) Phenomenology, however, can remove God from the sphere of the intolerably abstract to 

concrete situations in our lives, from the meaningless to the meaningful. The parables and acts of 

Jesus show us that God can be concrete and meaningful as Father, that we are always and already 

in a relationship with Him, one that Jesus makes clear to us. We do not choose to be in relation 

with God; if one is a son or a daughter one is already in a relationship with a father. Rather, we 

can choose to make something of that relationship, of living coram deo, here and now. It is this 

way of thinking that, as you say, is close to Augustine’s use of Isaiah 7: 9 in the Vetus Latina. Only 

if we begin by regarding God concretely, as made manifest by Jesus, can we begin to understand 

what God asks of us in life.  

Bing Lyu: Is the phenomenological reduction the first and foremost step when analyzing religious 

poetry? To what extent can we differentiate theological reduction from philosophical reduction?  

Kevin Hart: Husserl distinguished six species of reduction, and his 1923–24 lectures on the theory 

of reduction, along with his voluminous reflections on it in his Nachlass, are very rewarding. But 

they also tend to make reduction seem like a very mysterious operation. In my view, reduction is 

common. As soon as one begins to write a poem, one has already made a reduction of some sort; 

one has allowed oneself to be led back to a state anterior to ordinary speech, especially if one 



Interview: Kevin Hart  114 
 

draws upon meter and figural language. When Auden writes, “Wandering lost upon the mountains 

of our choice”6 or Geoffrey Hill writes “Undesirable you may have been, untouchable / you were 

not,”7 each has already passed from the “natural attitude” to another attitude, call it the 

“personalistic attitude” or the “phenomenological attitude.” That is, one is allowing phenomena 

to give themselves without a prior framing in terms of the expectations of the positive sciences, 

the social sciences or even “common sense”; other logics, other possibilities, other feelings, are 

opened and may be explored, even if the move away from the natural attitude is really only quite 

modest. So many modern poems, for example, stay close in their language and logic to the natural 

attitude only to slip away from it at a certain point in order to disclose something that cannot be 

satisfactorily thought within that attitude. Think of James Wright’s short lyric “Lying in a 

Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”: only with the final line do we shift 

from one attitude to another, and Wright accomplishes this without changing his colloquial voice. 

This sort of shift away from the natural attitude does not happen in all poetry these days: Language 

Poetry, it seems to me, solicits what Husserl calls the theoretical attitude; it goes in a direction 

opposite to that of the phenomenological attitude.  

Much “religious verse” passes from the natural attitude, to be sure, but the most engaging poems 

we call religious also shift from what I call the “supernatural attitude.” The supernatural attitude 

is widespread in Christianity: it conceives everything to do with the divine as either similar to our 

world or as a contrast to it. Yet God is not other than the world; the very idea makes no sense, 

since “same” and “other” name a relation within the world, as Aristotle saw very clearly in his 

Categories. God would be other than anything that can be contained within the distinction between 

“same” and “other.” When one passes from the natural or the supernatural attitude, one enters 

another sphere, sometimes only very briefly, where other pressures, other logics, other delights 

and anxieties, come into play.  

I would not wish to distinguish too sharply between philosophical and theological modes of 

reduction, in part because I think it is misleading overly to theorize reduction. We can find early, 

non-thematic modes of reduction in Augustine, for instance (“Do not go abroad. Return within 

yourself. In the inward man dwells truth” he writes in De vere religione.8) And we can see that 

same tradition figured in slightly different ways in Hugh of St Victor’s commentary on the 

Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius and in Bonaventure’s De reductione artium ad 



115  Lyu 
 

theologiam. These need to be kept in mind when reading Husserl on the theory of reduction, simply 

for us to remain aware that reduction can occur from varying directions, with different degrees of 

strength, and leads to different places. What I call “basilaic reduction” occurs primarily in the 

parables and acts of Jesus, but one can also find it in some religious poems when they make us 

think of an anterior state to living comfortably in “the world” when desire for “the Kingdom” was 

apparent. That desire never goes away; it is always present in the longing for justice and peace, 

but it gets clouded over by concern with and for “the world,” that stage on which we act out much 

of our lives. Many lyrics in George Herbert’s The Temple (1633) strike me as having this capacity, 

and it can be done in all sorts of ways. Remember too, though, that one can find it outside lyric 

poetry, in stories, homilies, movies and songs, even conversations.  

I have been speaking of writing poetry, for the most part, but reduction occurs also when reading 

it and when writing about it. Here the attentive reader is quietly led by a poem outside the natural 

attitude cultivated in primary, secondary, and tertiary education. (A movement away from the 

natural attitude happens even when reading naturalist literature, as Roland Barthes showed in his 

S/Z (1970), although with other ends in view.) Of course, a poem can be read wholly within the 

natural attitude or even the naturalistic attitude, as happens with some semiotic and structural 

analyses, or these days by way of “distant reading.” Yet if one thinks that poetry helps us to live, 

that it offers as Geoffrey Hill says, “a sad and angry consolation”9 (or, one hopes, not always sad 

and not always angry), then one will allow oneself to be led by a poem beyond the natural attitude.  

Bing Lyu: In Poetry and Revelation you choose both English poets, such as T. S. Eliot, G. M. 

Hopkins, and Geoffrey Hill, and non-English poets, such as Philippe Jaccottet and Eugenio 

Montale, as your sample, poets whose works belong to the modern and contemporary periods and 

cover multiple Western languages. Do you intend to indicate the universality of phenomenological 

method in literary criticism? What characteristic do they own that could highlight the advantage 

of phenomenology? Would you like to talk about your criterion of how to choose an appropriate 

target for phenomenological criticism? 

Kevin Hart: In Poetry and Revelation I had two main things in mind: to overcome some common 

prejudices about “religious poetry” and to show how phenomenology, at least as I practice it, can 

be of help when reading poetry, religious or not. I’ve already said something about the first 

ambition, but let me add this, using a distinction that Derrida drew when writing about one of 



Interview: Kevin Hart  116 
 

Blanchot’s récits in his Parages (1986). “Religious poetry” is not the name of a genre or sub-genre 

of poetry; there are poems that participate in religious exploration, which may involve doubt, 

anxiety, and criticism as much as belief and personal commitment, yet which do not belong to any 

institutional or religious formation. I think this is more apparent in some of the lyrics of Philippe 

Jaccottet and Eugenio Montale than in the English tradition of lyric poetry. Also, I suppose, those 

chapters serve to show that phenomenology is not restricted to any national literature.  

Classical phenomenology, as practiced by Husserl, has nothing to do with reading and writing. His 

philosophy of language—his desire in the Logical Investigations to minimize indicative features 

of language to expressive features—is one index of that. As I have mentioned, Heidegger was the 

first to use phenomenology to read a text: Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians. To some extent, he 

also drew upon phenomenology while writing those remarkable essays on German poets in the 

1940s. Derrida positioned himself at the very limit of transcendental phenomenology where he 

found new ways of thinking about reading and writing. To my mind, he never abandoned 

phenomenology but questioned Husserl’s uncritical commitments to full presence or self-presence 

and to conceptions of presence as life. So he expanded the realm of phenomenology very 

considerably. In the United States, however, Derrida’s work, under the rubric of deconstruction, 

was taken to be opposed or contrary to phenomenology; and that is partly because people did not 

read his first books with attention, especially his incisive commentary on a book he translated 

from the German, Husserl’s L’origine de la géometrie (1962), and La voix et le phénomène (1967), 

and partly because phenomenological criticism, as advocated by Georges Poulet, was all that was 

known of the conjunction of phenomenology and literary criticism. When Derrida came to the 

States, to speak at a conference at Johns Hopkins in 1966, his paper “Structure, Sign, and Play in 

the Discourse of the Human Sciences” dealt a firm blow to structuralism before it had even got to 

first base here and also, when people started to reflect on what he had said, it demolished the sort 

of phenomenological criticism that Poulet was advocating at Hopkins. Yet literary criticism 

learned little or nothing from Derrida: “deconstruction” was packaged, by Jonathan Culler and 

others, as little more than a set of tricks one could perform with literary texts.  

Bing Lyu: Poetry and Revelation records Montale’s opinion what almost all Western philosophers 

and theologians refuse to countenance is that the world is nothing more than an illusion generated 

by human subjectivity. Why do they deny this claim? You find the inspiration of some of Montale’s 



117  Lyu 
 

work comes from Tolstoy who inherited Schelling and Fichte’s idea, so from Romanticism to 

Modernism, what kind of transformation did the term “subject” experience? Does phenomenology 

give it a proper harbor?  

Kevin Hart: Phenomenology begins, even before Husserl articulates it, with Descartes’s 

Meditations and so with the thought of the cogito. With Husserl we find consciousness, the very 

ground of “the subject,” raised to a very high level: transcendental consciousness, he says, is 

absolute and therefore irreducible. Yet with Sein und Zeit (1927) this idea of the subject, as 

something calmly viewing the world in a theoretical manner, is pushed aside. Heidegger does not 

offer criticisms of Husserl so much as propose another way of thinking of the human being, that 

is, as Dasein. For Heidegger, Husserl is concerned less with a subject calmly contemplating the 

world about him than with being preoccupied with one mood among others, tranquility. He draws 

attention to other moods that come upon us, especially dread and deep boredom, and thereby has 

his readers look back to Kierkegaard and Pascal rather than Kant and Fichte. Now I think that 

Heidegger’s treatment of Husserl is not quite fair. On the one hand, Husserl does revive a mode 

of contemplatio, most likely without knowing much about its tradition; but, on the other hand, he 

is very far from proposing phenomenology as calmly reflecting on essences. He is deeply 

concerned with a crisis coming upon Europe, one stemming from different forms of relativism 

(including species relativism), and as we know he sees its darkest moment in the rise of Nazism, 

and feels the deepest betrayal in Heidegger’s endorsement, however temporary and with whatever 

arrière pensées, of the Nazi Party. The crisis represented by the rise of Hitler and Hitlerism was 

more than philosophical—it was also idolatrous, for one thing, even before we get to talk about 

economics and national and international politics—but Husserl was surely right that the thought 

of the day, from historicism to philosophy as no more than Weltanschauung, contributed to the 

possibility of unleashing its dark energies. Besides, Husserl’s concept of the self is far more 

complex than Heidegger allowed: his phenomenology of internal time consciousness yields a more 

subtle understanding of the self as subject than one might think from just reading Ideas I (1913), 

and of course Heidegger tended to disregard Husserl on internal time consciousness, rather 

unfairly, I think.  

From Heidegger to Lacoue-Labarthe and Marion, we can see a progressive weakening of the idea 

of the self as subject. Jean-Luc Nancy’s Who Comes after the Subject? (1991) offers a 



Interview: Kevin Hart  118 
 

comprehensive idea of the range of thought in France on the topic. You might say that it is a 

passage from the subject as ground (by way of cogito (Descartes), transcendental unity of 

apperception (Kant) or transcendental consciousness (Husserl)) to subjectivity as effect. The 

emptying of the self as subject is not restricted to French philosophy, however. Think, for example, 

of the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit whose concept of the self is closer to what one finds in 

Buddhism than anything one might find in the tradition that runs from Descartes to Husserl.  

Bing Lyu: Why does Jaccottet say that the expression “negative theology” is misused when 

applied to his writing? You use “iconoclasm” instead of “negative theology” when analyzing his 

works. Is this a consequence of postmodernism?  

Kevin Hart: I think Philippe Jaccottet, much like Tomas Tranströmer (who says something 

similar), is far too modest a person to appeal to what must seem to him to be august theological 

categories or to countenance them with respect to his writing or his religious beliefs. He may well 

think that reading some of his poems by way of apophatic theology would risk burning them to 

ashes by having too powerful a lens brought to bear on them. Again, I would speak of participating 

rather than belonging. Jaccottet’s poems, especially in Airs, do not belong to the discipline of 

apophatic theology—they do not stand side by side with writings by Gregory of Nyssa or Pseudo-

Dionysius the Areopagite, for example—but they participate in it. Some of Jaccottet’s poems bring 

us to a point where what he wishes to designate exceeds what can be said. This is not because he 

is speaking of the God of Judeo-Christianity but because he wishes to attend, as closely as possible, 

to a singular situation or state. Apophaticism comes into play when dealing with either mode of 

transcendence, that is, with transascendance or transdescendance. (The distinction is Jean 

Wahl’s.) Much modern writing is concerned with the latter and not the former, but it solicits a 

counterpart to apophatic theology in order to deal with it. The ineffable can be anterior to 

phenomena as well as beyond phenomena, and (as Jean Hyppolite points out in his Logique et 

existence (1953)) it can even be the singular. To my mind, we can speak strictly of apophatic 

theology only when dealing with the absolutely singular, God, but it is sometimes solicited when 

a poet merely glimpses something relatively singular (an ermine vanishing in snow, say), 

understanding that this particular event is unlikely ever to recur in his lifetime. Bonnefoy inclines 

to this view in many poems and essays.  



119  Lyu 
 

Iconoclasm is more acceptable to Jaccottet because his poetics, unlike Bonnefoy’s, are situated in 

a long tradition of unease with the image. In Byzantium there were fierce struggles over icons in 

the eighth and ninth centuries, long before the Reformation, though Jaccottet probably gains his 

distrust of images by way of Calvin.  

Bing Lyu: I notice the last part of Poetry and Revelation is entitled “Morning Knowledge,” which 

is identical to your last collection of poetry, Morning Knowledge (2011). What is the meaning of 

“morning knowledge”? Does the expression mean the same thing in both places?  

Kevin Hart: I take the expression “morning knowledge” from Augustine’s Literal Commentary 

on Genesis. A very good reader, someone who did not gloss over difficulties in Scripture, 

Augustine was puzzled when he read the verse “And there was evening and there was morning, 

one day” since, for him, day begins in the morning and ends with the close of evening. (He did 

not know that the Jews think of day beginning in the evening.) So he sought an explanation for 

the phrasing. Like other Fathers of the Church, Augustine was deeply interested in angelic 

cognition, and his explanation turns on how angels received knowledge of Creation. At first, he 

tells us, God showed the angels Creation according to what we would call the natural sciences, 

how everything acted perfectly with respect to the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, and of 

course the angels were in awe of the order, balance, and beauty of what God had achieved. This is 

called “evening knowledge” because it was the first knowledge that the angels received of 

Creation. Then, however, so the story goes, God showed the angels how everything He had created 

is suffused with his love; and, on seeing this, the angels fell down in adoration of the Lord God. 

This second knowledge of Creation, awareness as Thomas Aquinas beautifully puts it that God 

loved the world into being, is known as “morning knowledge.”  

The final section of Poetry and Revelation is concerned with poems that are explicitly sacred, 

poems about Mary the mother of Jesus, or about silence and poetry, and so I wanted to call it 

“Morning Knowledge.” I called my last individual collection of poems Morning Knowledge (2011) 

for two reasons. First, as the title poem indicates, my father died in the early hours of the morning: 

I learned that he had passed away in Brisbane about 3 am, the news coming to me a little later, 

about 1:30 pm (EST) in Charlottesville. Half an hour before the telephone rang, I had felt a terrible 

coldness blow through my bones; and so, when I took the call, I realized that event coincided with 

his passing. Some of the poems in Morning Knowledge are elegies for my father, and there are 



Interview: Kevin Hart  120 
 

more of them in my new book, Barefoot (2018); but there are also poems that affirm our sensuous 

engagement with life, and so I quoted as an epigraph David Henry Thoreau’s question in his journal 

for July 16 1851, “Have you knowledge of the morning?” (That is, do you know what it is to be 

alive?) Also, Morning Knowledge has poems that are prayers, that celebrate divine love, and so 

the expression “morning knowledge” was appropriate in that way as well. 

 

Notes 

1. Beth Ritter-Conn, Review of Kingdoms of God, Anglican Theological Review 4 (2015), 

695. 

2. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: 

Harcourt Brace, 1994), 10. 

3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 157–

158; quoted in Hart, Poetry and Revelation 79. 

4. C. S. Seymour, Review of Kingdoms of God, Choice: Current Reviews for Academic 

Libraries 11 (2015), 1856.  

5. Kevin Hart is the editor of Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings (New York: Fordham 

University Press, 2013), which marks Marion’s status as France’s most influential living 

philosopher. See Bradley Onishi, “Between a Saint and a Phenomenologist: Hart’s 

Theological Criticism of Marion,” Sophia 1 (2017), 15.  

6. W. H. Auden, “A Time of War: Sonnet 27,” in Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey 

to a War (London: Faber and Faber, 1939).  

7. Geoffrey Hill, “September Song,” New and Collected Poems, 1952–1992 (Boston: 

Houghton Mifflin, 1994). 

8. Saint Augustine, “Of True Religion,” Earlier Writings, ed. and trans. John H. S. Burleigh 

(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), 262. 

9. Geoffrey Hill, “148,” in The Triumph of Love (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 


