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

Chapter Five: Radical Orthodoxy’s Critique of Transcendental Philosophy and Its Mistaken Mistrust of Negative Theology

203 C h a p t e r F i v e r AdiCAl orthodoxy’s Cr itiq Ue of trAnsCendentAl P hilosoPhy And its mistAken mis trUst of negAtive theology “Unspeakable! who sitt’st above these heavens To us invisible, or dimly seen In these thy lowest works; yet these declare Thy goodness beyond thought, and power divine.” —Milton, Paradise Lost, V.156–59 i One of the fascinating but perhaps also puzzling aspects of the so-called Radical Orthodoxy movement is that it liberally appropriates poststructuralist theory into its own discourse, finding there the essential tools for relaunching theology in a new, postmodern and specifically postsecular key, while at the same time remaining caustically critical of postmodern philosophy and culture en bloc. It makes no exception even for 204 P H I L O S O P H y A N D T H E O L O G y theologically-minded philosophers such as Jean-Luc Marion and religiously relevant thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas. Jacques Derrida was once targeted as the principal source of the trouble, and all have been tarred as purveyors of various alloys of postmodern nihilism. Even in appropriating a semiological outlook and a deconstructive hermeneutic, Radical Orthodoxy theologians (with admittedly varied nuances) condemn all these contemporary styles of thinking as dependent on false ideologies or as idolatrous faiths. Such thinking may employ technically useful tools, in their view, but it is invariably predicated on a desertion of the fundamental theological truths of orthodox Christian belief, which alone is deemed able to stem the growing tide of nihilism in modern times.1 Phillip blond, in his introduction to the collection Post-Secular Philosophy , presents one of the most radical and, in any case, most aggressive statements of the program of Radical Orthodoxy. He begins from the observation that the promise of secular humanism since the Renaissance has not been fulfilled. Human beings have shown themselves not to be the measure of things; they have proved unable to “provide their own calibration .”2 The evidence of this is all about us in contemporary culture, in which every imaginable variety of nihilism flourishes. blond adduces the violence and perversity of current history and especially consumer culture to demonstrate the vanity of any mind-set not based on recognition of theological transcendence, on faith in one God. With regard to philosophy , the various secular proxies for a transcendent ground or principle of reality—blond lists language, pragmatics, power—all collapse back into immanence as pure projections of a human will to be the master of oneself and to dominate the world. The attempt consistently proves futile in its narcissism and circularity: it makes manifest only the nothingness of human existence in the absence of a truly transcendent ground. In this manner, blond argues, modernity in general denies the only true transcendence, that of God the Creator, by putting various a priori principles in His place. These principles claim to be transcendental conditions of discourse and to adjudicate claims to truth, although they are nothing but projections of the human minds by which they are made. To this extent, they are fully of a piece with the idols of human handiwork abominated by the prophets of the Old Testament. by such transcenden- Radical Orthodoxy’s Critique of Transcendental Philosophy 205 tal (generically Kantian) thinking, human beings usurp for themselves and their conceptual artifacts the transcendental status that belongs by rights to God alone. And the wages of such usurpation are death and nihilism. Nor apparently, according to these late moderns, can a transcendent value escape any of the contemporary surrogates—language, pragmatics, power—which transcendental thinking has engendered in order to preserve itself. These proxies . . . foreclose upon any other possibility. No, their advocates say, ‘your values are ancillary to this, in respect of this discernment everything else is subordinate, this is the prior discourse that secures our descriptions, and we, we who ascertained this, we are the authors and judges of this world and there is no other’. (Post-Secular Philosophy, p. 1) This is obviously caricature. but whether or not it is persuasive, the dialogical style is in itself highly significant. The point of such self-styled “postsecular” philosophy derives in good part from its polemical negation of the type of thinking that it characterizes as secular and accuses of “selfmutilation .” We will need to ask whether such a wholesale dismissal of modern culture is...