A Philosophy of the Unsayable: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge

Chapter Four: Apophasis and the Predicament of Philosophy of Religion Today

P a r t I I P h i l o s o P h y A n d t h e o l o g y 139 C h a p t e r F o u r APoPhAsis And the Pr edi CAment of PhilosoPhy of religion todAy From Neoplatonic Negative Theology to Postmodern Negations of Theology Alles was gesagt wird ist wert genichtet zu werden. (All that is said is worthy of being annihilated.) i The situation of philosophy today makes it peculiarly receptive to a great variety of apophatic discourses, not only to those devolving from monotheistic traditions concerning the unnameable Name of God, especially in mystical currents, including the Kabbalah and Sufism, but also to those consisting of negative-theological speculations in an onto-theological vein, like the Neoplatonist philosophies revolving around the inaccessible being or beyond-being of the One. Mysticism and negative theology have again become powerful paradigms for knowledge in a postmodern age, which is no longer bound to the rational foundationalism that guided the leading strains of philosophical thought and culture throughout the modern period. 140 P H I L O S O P H y A N D T H E O L O G y This description suggests already what sorts of reasons may account for such a heightened receptivity. If the quest for foundations is the inaugural project of modern philosophy since Descartes, it has fallen into crisis and in many quarters today is given up for lost. Human rational reflection has proven inadequate to ground itself, despite the best and most determined efforts undertaken from Descartes to Hegel, for whom philosophy is finally absolute self-grounding knowledge of the subject. This failure to prove self-grounding has placed philosophy on an equal footing with other forms of rationality that admit to having their grounds outside themselves. Preeminently, theological discourse acknowledges God as its transcendent ground, and the widespread forsaking of foundationalism by contemporary philosophers of numerous persuasions has contributed in no small measure to the “return of religion” that in our time has been blazoned widely, not least by philosophers themselves. Neoplatonism was similarly born out of a crisis of foundations in ancient philosophy in Hellenistic times: its historical emergence parallels in certain crucial ways the unsettling of intellectual frameworks that precipitated the turn from modern to postmodern thought.1 In spite of its well-known penchant for propounding elaborate metaphysical systems, Neoplatonism, profoundly considered, contemplates the impossibility of articulating any rational foundation for thought and discourse. It accepts the radical lack of any articulable first principle for metaphysics, especially as this type of thinking developed from the late speculations of Plato. The impossibility of rational foundations is evident particularly in the Parmenides , where it is demonstrated that there can be no discourse or knowledge of the One, on which all nevertheless depends. Knowledge and discourse always entail multiplicity (at least between knower and known, not to mention the inherent duplicity of saying or knowing something about something) and thus are contrary to the very nature of the One. This conundrum plays itself out especially in the more esoteric Platonic doctrines handed down through the Middle Platonic and Neoplatonic sources that claimed to transmit Plato’s oral teaching, which was held to be more true and authentic than all that he wrote. These “unwritten doctrines” (Ωgrafa døgmata), referred to by Aristotle (Physics bk. 4, ch. 2, 209b14–15) and by Theophrastus and other pupils, turned on the One, which is the unsayable par excellence. In this doctrine, the ultimate Apophasis and the Predicament of Philosophy of Religion Today 141 principles of things, beyond even the Platonic Ideas, which were themselves the principles of sensible things, were the One and a Twoness, or Unity and Multiplicity, in which the Ideas themselves needed to participate in order to exist, as Aristotle explains in the Metaphysics (bk. 1, ch. 6, 988a10–15). These unwritten teachings have been made an object of intensive study particularly by the so-called Tübingen school of Plato scholarship. The research of Hans Joachim Krämer, Konrad Gaiser, and others has opened up a space of mystery at the heart of Plato’s teaching, the ground of which begins to look less like a rational, philosophical foundation and more like religious experience.2 The unwritten doctrine, which, according to Phaedrus 278d, concerns things more worthy (timi√tera) than those treated in the...