I think the abyss is given: that we are all exposed to death and annihilation is as axiomatic as the fact that there is a “here” here. Naturally, “Aporias” is the key reference here.

I don’t think this leads to a mystification. (That Derrida is skeptical of such mysticism seems clear in such works as “Apocalyptic Tone” (forget the exact title and am too lazy to look it up) I think the mystification tends to come because one has become so abstract one has lost sight of the things themselves. i.e. one forgets what one is talking about.

As to your second point that’s quite interesting. I’m thinking the abyss almost by definition can’t be given. But I’m suspecting we mean something different by the abyss. (Or by givenness)

I’ve long thought that one way to consider Derrida vs. Heidegger is to see that Derrida is speaking more broadly than phenomenology. i.e. towards being of beings in the sense of what sustains them ontically rather than ontologically. So perhaps that’s where you are headed?

Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to view grace as the axioms of the system? In other words, that which is given? The fact that the axioms necessarily incomplete and allow undecidable propositions would still imply the irruption that you speak of– but (in my opinion) it would lessen the tendency to mystification of that which is given.

Clark: My own view is that metaphorically secular grace is the recognition we are dancing on the edge of a precipice. Beside us is an abyss. Grace is what keeps us from falling into the abyss

I’d argue that a) the abyss is is also part of the “given”, and b) we do all fall into it, sooner or later– and until we do, our days are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

I wonder if God really knows what a “fullness” of grace is, as in knowing all its aspects, or if he knows the key principles and that is what matters (I suppose that is dipping one’s foot into the ‘does God know the future’ concept)?

I’m thinking from your explanation that I would agree with Derrida on this. I have a truth to the level that I’ve discovered it, yet many key things I’ve yet to receive. My testimony of the gospel is very different than it was 33 years ago when I was converted, yet it is in some ways still the same foundation. So it is with my views of science, etc.

I suspect here we have a secular parallel to a common religious issue. For the religious (ignoring for the moment Calvinists or certain Muslims for who everything is done by God) one can be confused about what acts are divine intervention, which are coincidence, and which are done by people. (And sometimes an act might be all three)

In terms of the secular grace of Derrida one can suggest we can’t tell what is a present grace (or new eruption) from what is already part of a system. I should note that Derrida is of course playing on Heidegger’s famous distinctions of authentic versus inauthentic Dasein. That is a person who is open to things showing themselves versus trapped in what is given by those around them. (Das Man in Heidegger speak) He is also playing with Heidegger’s notion that things become present to me (what he calls present-at-hand) only because of the conditions of practices, what he calls ready-at-hand.

I’ll talk more about that Heidegger background next.