BY: Dr. Peter Kline | June 20, 2025
“To know in a general and confused way that God exists is implanted in us by nature.” – Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
“[The human being] has an unconscious […]; [it] has an originary relation to the enigma of the other.” – Jean Laplanche, Après-Coup
Is there something in human nature, in its origin and structure, that primes the human being for what we now call religion and spirituality, in the widest sense of those terms? Is there anything we can point to across the vast historical and cultural differences of human religiosity that serves as their universal basis or impetus? This is, of course, an old question that has often taken the form of inquiring about the possibility of so-called “natural” knowledge of God. But in modernity, this question takes new forms. One of them is the search for deterministic, scientifically verifiable causes of religious phenomena. It is a concern that was born in the 19th century and still very much alive in certain intellectual neighborhoods, such as attempts to search for a “God gene,” attempts to account for religion as an evolutionary adaptation, or attempts to explain the felt qualities of spiritual experiences by way of oxytocin.
This sort of modern approach to explaining religion is held in various sorts of suspicion and/or indifference by what could be called hermeneutical approaches. The latter tend to bracket etiological concerns in order to focus on questions of how meaning is produced in the extant religious texts and discourses we have at hand. In its suspicious mode, hermeneutical approaches worry that modern, deterministic accounts are problematically reductive and unable to reflect on their own hermeneutical decisions, which are never innocent or neutral. In its indifferent mode, which often goes under the heading, “disciplinary differences,” hermeneutical approaches aren’t concerned with the deterministic causes of religious phenomena but with the construction and play of meaning within religious texts, traditions, rituals, and theologies. Its question is not, what produces religion, but rather, how does religion produce or interpretively construe the world?
The pushback from the scientific study of religion is that hermeneutical approaches that isolate themselves from the rigor of scientific research and explanation are caught in their own ideology about our inability to break through the mediations of language and culture and make genuine discoveries about reality.
This impasse between determinism and hermeneutics is, arguably, a descendant of the impasse between empiricism and rationalism that Immanual Kant sought to overcome in the 18th century with his “transcendental” philosophy of the human subject. Kant argued that knowledge of the world is neither a purely empirical experience nor a purely rational extrapolation. Rather, the human subject has certain transcendental or a priori (that is, not experience dependent) categories of thought that “shape” the empirical experience of the world into knowledge. Whatever the limitations of Kant’s own philosophy, the transcendental turn he inaugurated reshaped the intellectual agenda for numerous disciplines. Indeed, hermeneutics as discipline owes its origin to the Kantian turn.
What might a transcendental, even if not fully Kantian, overcoming of the impasse between determinism and hermeneutics with respect to religion look like? It would start by offering a different orienting question than the questions that shape these respective approaches. Neither, what empirically causes religion?, nor, how does religion hermeneutically construe the world?, but rather, what transcendental conditions determine the human being as a hermeneut? Why are human beings hermeneutical lifeforms who produce religion?[1]
To answer this question, my research draws on the psychoanalytic philosopher Jean Laplanche (1924-2012). Psychoanalytic metapsychology occupies the same “territory” as transcendental philosophies of the human subject, but with crucial differences. Chief among these differences is the desire to narrate the material and developmental origins of the transcendental apparatus itself. The transcendental or a priori conditions of knowing and doing in the world are not just “given” or innate. They are precariously forged across infancy and childhood. Also distinctive of psychoanalysis is the insistence (at least in certain of its traditions) that sexuality colors or infiltrates every part of this apparatus. There is no human knowing or doing in the world that is not in some way sexual, that is, driven—and riven—by desire.
Psychoanalysis has a complicated history when it comes to the tension between determinism and hermeneutics, which is bound up with the vexed question of whether it is a science of the mind or a hermeneutics of the subject. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur has made the influential argument that psychoanalysis fails as a science but is valuable as a hermeneutics, which is reflected in the fact that psychoanalysis is deeply influential in many humanities disciplines but is often met with quick dismissals and eye-rolls in departments of scientific psychology. Laplanche’s work offers a valuable intervention into this standoff, and it does so through a rigorous reformulation of the foundations of psychoanalysis as a discipline.
Laplanche argues that psychoanalysis is not what Ricoeur calls a “regional hermeneutics,” that is, an interpretive and therapeutic frame that is valid in its own sphere. Rather, psychoanalysis is an “anti-hermeneutics,” not because it rejects hermeneutics but because the exigency that impels psychoanalysis, namely, “the realism of the unconscious,”[2] is a non-symbolizable “real” that is prior to and the incitement of the hermeneutical capacity of the human being. The unconscious, for Laplanche, is not a repository of psychic meaning in need of interpretive elaboration. It is a “splinter in the skin”[3] of consciousness, a non-metabolizable irritant that provokes the hermeneutical labor of the ego. The ego emerges as a response to the prior provocation of the unconscious in order to “bind” its threatening otherness. The unconscious is not “structured like a language,” as Jaques Lacan famously put it. It is an “unstructured like-a-language”[4] that incites the bindings of language and symbolization. In other words, Laplanche shifts the focus from psychoanalysis as a hermeneutical frame to psychoanalysis as a rigorous, and yes, scientific, account of the human being as a hermeneut whose existence is driven by an unconscious, “real” psycho-sexuality. Let me try to briefly unpack this.
Laplanche develops a “translational” model of the human being based on what he calls “the fundamental anthropological situation.”[5] The fundamental situation from which no human being is exempt is the asymmetry at the beginning of life, namely, that between the helpless infant and the sexual adults it depends upon for its survival and development. This dependency gives rise to an exogenous and intrusive pressure that drives the child to higher and higher levels of differentiation and hermeneutical sophistication. This “pressure” comes in the form of what Laplanche calls “enigmatic messages,” which are what occur when the communicative actions of adult care, verbal and non-verbal, become compromised by the “noise” of the adult’s unconscious sexuality.
What Laplanche means by unconscious sexuality is not a series of clearly delimited sexual aims and objects that are simply hidden from consciousness. Unconscious sexuality refers to the inchoate, polymorphous, infantile sexuality that is acquired by the human being across its infancy and childhood as a result of its dependency upon and intimacy with sexual adults. It is a sexuality that is related to fantasy, extremely mobile with respect to aim and object, traverses the entire body and its activity, and manifests as the always ambivalent pursuit of excitation that “exceeds, and often contravenes, the register of self-preservative needs.”[6] Its inevitable intrusion into the scenes of parental care means that the attachment relationship between child and adult will be pushed beyond the realm of self-preservation into the realm of sexuality. And while Laplanche recognizes that this sexual pressure from the adult can be pathological and abusive, he is insistent that, as such, it is non-pathological and indeed necessary for the child’s development as a complex psycho-sexual subject in its own right.
The noise of the sexual unconscious compromising attachment messages puts the hermeneutical capacity of the child into over-drive, as it were. The child is always translating and assimilating its environment, and for the most part, attachment messages are metabolizable into the child’s emerging sense of self. But when—not if—messages become enigmatic, the work of translation itself becomes compromised. The child will set to work on enigmatic messages, and it is driven to higher levels of translational creativity in response to the “noise” scrambling the adult’s communicative gestures. But inevitably, there will be what Laplanche calls “failures of translation.”[7] The noise of enigmatic messages cannot be fully translated—there being no objective meaning in them—and so the ego-forming work of translation generates the residue or waste of untranslated, unmetabolized material. This psychic waste is what forms the child’s own sexual unconscious which will go on to complicate and deviate—in short, pervert—the hormonally based, instinctual sexuality that emerges in puberty.
In sum, the unconscious to which the ego is a hermeneutical response is originally the unconscious of the adult other of childhood. The sexual unconscious comes from the other.
One last crucial piece in Laplanche’s translational model provides the hinge connecting the development of the individual child to the larger socio-cultural world. The child’s translations of adult enigma do not generate themselves from scratch. To translate, the child draws from the reservoir of existing cultural myths, symbols, narratives, and identities that circulate around and through its family and wider cultural field. With increasing hermeneutical sophistication, the child uses these “found” cultural materials to bind the enigma it encounters from the adult world into a coherent-enough sense of self. And because these bindings will continue to be irritated by what they can never fully translate, the cultural materials used to bind enigma become the ever-evolving transit points, as it were, for the wider circulation of sexual enigma within the cultural field. There is a sort of feedback loop here in which a child draws on cultural material already formed as a response to enigma in order to translate its own response to enigma, thus feeding back into culture its own translational use of these materials, which drives their ongoing evolution. This feedback loop continues across the entire lifespan and forms the individual as a singular “knot” or binding of cultural material tied around the “hole” of the unconscious.
Laplanche goes as far as to offer a definition of “the cultural” as that dimension of human sociality constituted by the delivery and reception of enigmatic messages. The cultural field—which Laplanche distinguishes from other pragmatic dimensions of human sociality—exists because human beings are constitutively irritated and excited by an intersubjective force that cannot without remainder be integrated into the self-preservative instincts of the human being as a biological organism. Culture is the sublimated trace of this unintegrated remainder, which is why “the cultural, as the site of an enigmatic interpellation, with many voices and ears”[8] is “by definition intrusive, stimulating and sexual.”[9] For Laplanche, there is a direct correspondence between the asymmetrical relation between the infant and the sexual adult, on the one hand, and the asymmetry between human subjects and the enigmatic cultural messages constantly bombarding them, on the other.
And this, finally, brings us to religion. If culture is the domain where our humanity constituting encounter with the enigmatic is constantly repeated and renewed in ever evolving forms, then religion is a paradigmatic cultural form, perhaps an originary form that would be difficult to distinguish from the inception of culture itself. Religious traditions are traditions of binding enigma into symbolization. They offer powerful, historically enduring, and culturally determinative translations of the fundamental exigencies of being human, exigencies that originate in the adult-infant relation, which is the “narrow gate” that every human being must pass through. In the only essay of his that addresses religion at any length, titled “Seduction, Persecution, Revelation,” Laplanche highlights the hermeneutical labor, or perhaps the hermeneutical over-drive, that constitutes the biblical traditions: “That God is enigmatic, that He compels one to translate, seems obvious in the entire Judaeo-Christian tradition of exegesis.”[10] The biblical traditions, but certainly not only them, are traditions organized around enigmatic messages. God’s covenant with Israel, Christ’s relation to his disciples, Buddha’s relation to his disciples, and paradigmatically for psychoanalysis, Apollo’s relation to Oedipus, are all infiltrated with terrifying and exciting “noise.”
To sum up: “the reality of the message”[11] addressed to the little human being implants the transcendental pressure that suspends the psyche between determinism and hermeneutics. “The enigmatic” names the subjectivity constituting intrusion of a “real,” the reality of the actuality existing adult other’s scrambled messages, that inspire and compromise the hermeneutical binding of the ego. Human subjectivity, like Jacob after his (sexual?) encounter with the angel by the Jabbok, limps—ambivalently blessed by the enigmatic other (Genesis 32).
Let me conclude by turning to the work of a contemporary theologian.
In his recent book, Unspeakable Cults, Catholic theologian Paul DeHart develops the concept of “lagging epiphany” to name the sort of temporality that structures divine revelation. Revelation does not occur as a directly given deposit or self-posited display of the divine. It occurs as a semiotic, hermeneutical process that is stretched out across an interpretive history. That is, revelation is a cultural process in which “the unbounded surplus of human meaning concentrated in Jesus can only find expression through the endless historical construction of a cultic community whose worship and collective activity is the interpretive hearing of the Word once given.”[12] It is not only, however, that divine revelation takes time to unfold itself in history and includes the hermeneutical work of the religious community. The notion of “lag” is the idea that what drives this history—the message of the Word—remains an “unbounded surplus” and therefore “unspeakable.” The translations or interpretive bindings of the religious community lag behind and never exhaust what incites them, and therefore religious faith is constitutively out-of-phase or out-of-joint with its founding conditions. The experiential shape of “transcendence” is this being-out-of-phase with the intimate exteriority of the divine message, which, for DeHart, repeatedly returns as a “monstrous” incitement that unbinds religious certainties and calls forth renewed hermeneutical striving.
DeHart’s account of divine revelation as a cultural process that never directly coincides with or responds to a directly given or self-positing epiphany is in part inspired by Jonathan Z. Smith’s account of religion as a cultural process in which “culture” names a creative, self-exceeding, and self-subverting negotiation with its own materials. “Culture is an historical process where meaning, including religious meaning, issues from partial and fruitful failures of the ongoing experiment where the world is grasped in myth and ritual.”[13] Culture is full of “constitutive holes”[14] that “allows the complex improvisation with it that characterizes the human as such.”[15] For DeHart, it is these “holes” immanent to the fabric of human culture that divine revelation “assumes” in order speak itself into history. “It is not only human freedom that exploits the constitutive holes within culture; through them deity itself has ‘leaked into’ the world.”[16]
This material, both DeHart’s concept of “lagging epiphany” and Smith’s account of culture on which it draws, can easily be given a psychoanalytic articulation with Laplanche’s metapsychology. That “the human as such” is marked by a “complex improvisation” with its own self-exceeding, self-subverting structure is owning to the human being’s incongruity with itself woven out of the dramatic asymmetry between human infants and adults. The “unspeakable” that drives human culture is the inexhaustible “after-blow” or “after-shock” of “the early sexualization of human beings” which is enabled by the “lagging behind of [the infant’s] adaptive mechanisms.”[17] The child’s entrance into the cultural world, as both receiver and generator of its signs or messages, is never a smooth or totalizing inscription. It is a complex, creative process, at least minimally traumatic, in which a child’s self-constituting translations of the sexually charged messages of the adult world generate the fallout or waste that forms the unconscious. The unconscious, as the “holes” of cultural world, its ontological and psychic indeterminacy, marks the failure of the human animal to fully integrate or adapt itself to its intersubjective field. It is precisely this failure, the failure unique to human beings that generates culture as an open and unfinished mediation of enigma, that is the “point of contact” between the human being and, for DeHart, God. Does this leave theology vulnerable to the charge that the whole experience of faith can be accounted for immanently and materially, without appeal to supernatural intervention? Indeed, it does. But what to do with that vulnerability is a question for another day.
[1] My title is, of course, a play off the title of Kant’s book, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. My subtitle is a reference to Laplanche’s essay, “Interpretation Between Determinism and Hermeneutics,” in Essays on Otherness (Routledge, 1999).
[2] Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 87.
[3] Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 209.
[4] Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (Unconscious in Translation, 2016), 62.
[5] Laplanche, “Starting From the Fundamental Anthropological Situation,” in Freud and the Sexual (Unconscious in Translation, 2011).
[6] Gila Ashtor, Exigent Psychoanalysis: The Interventions of Jean Laplanche (Routledge, 2021), 135.
[7] Laplanche, “Failures of Translation,” in Freud and the Sexual.
[8] Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 233.
[9] Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 225.
[10] Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 191.
[11] Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 196.
[12] DeHart, Unspeakable Cults: An essay in Christology (Baylor University Press (2021), 13.
[13] DeHart, Unspeakable Cults, 171.
[14] DeHart, Unspeakable Cults, 175.
[15] DeHart, Unspeakable Cults, 174.
[16] DeHart, Unspeakable Cults, 175.
[17] Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 126.
