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

Pre-face

1 Pre-fA Ce The present volume sketches a distinctive philosophical outlook that emerges irrepressibly from the predicament of philosophy today. It interprets what are widespread intimations of thinking in the current milieu of critical reflection across disciplines in the arts and sciences and beyond into technical and professional fields and culture generally. We are in an age in which discourse becomes acutely conscious of its intrinsic limits and is dominated by what it cannot say. Especially the last two and a half centuries have abounded in new and radical currents of thinking about the limits of language and what may or may not lie beyond them. The pace of such thinking seems to have greatly accelerated in the initial decades of the twenty-first century. This thinking is rooted, however, in millenary discourses of mysticism and negative theology that can be traced back to the origins of the Western intellectual tradition. A kind of perennial counter-philosophy to the philosophy of Logos has resisted its claims throughout the history of Western thought. There is, in fact, an amorphous but immense sea of discourse concerned with the ways that discourse has of doubting and denying itself. This type of reflection arises when language runs up against the limits of what it is able to say. Certain discourses concentrate on these limits and on how language necessarily speaks from and out of them. This generates counter-discourses to every powerful explanatory paradigm that makes positive claims to comprehend reality, to say what really is. The counterdiscourses typically emphasize that what is not and even cannot be said is actually the basis for all that is said. They shift attention away from what 2 A P H I L O S O P H y O F T H E U N S A y A b L E discourse is saying to what it is not saying and cannot say—even though this involves, paradoxically, an even more intense focus precisely on language , on its limited capabilities, its borders, its “beyond.” These counter-discourses can even take a more aggressive stance. They can position themselves not only at the limits and margins of normative discourse but as infiltrating it through and through. All discourse in this perspective, which I call “apophatic,” shows up as necessarily preceded by and predicated on what cannot be said. This entails a claim to a yet more powerful comprehensiveness, though one at first purely negative in nature, evoking a power beyond discourse, a potential that words release but cannot master. Metaphysics, monotheisms, and mysticisms, as well as philosophies of existence and poetics of revelation, can be understood in their deeper, driving motivations only from this perspective, which nevertheless all too easily slips from view because it eludes logical articulation and defies discursive expression. Ineffability was once a leading theme of the Neoplatonists (particularly Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Iamblichus, and Damascius) and of their heirs in the monotheistic traditions of Christian mysticism (Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scotus Eriugena), of the Kabbalah, of Sufism, and again of certain post-Scholastics (Meister Eckhart, Nicholas Cusanus). baroque mystics such as John of the Cross, Jakob böhme, and Silesius Angelus share this same obsession with Romantic thinkers like Kierkegaard and the late Schelling, as well as with imaginative writers such as Hölderlin, Emily Dickinson, Rilke, and Kafka. The expressiveness of silence, the void, nothingness has been explored equally in modern music (Schoenberg , Cage), in painting (Malevich, Kandinsky), and in architecture (Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Daniel Libeskind) in tandem with the apophatic philosophical reflections of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Franz Rosenzweig. These major monuments of modern apophatic culture were announced by apocalyptic prophecies of the collapse of language and civilization altogether, emblematically around the fin de siècle in the Vienna of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gustav Klimt, Karl Kraus, and Freud. Similar accents and thematics were hauntingly echoed, furthermore, in assimilating the Holocaust and its aftermath, by philosophical critics such as Walter benjamin and Theodor Adorno, as well as by poets like Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès. And the unsayable has again become the keynote of innumerable expressions of contemporary culture. These range Pre-face 3 from the widely diffused use of deconstructive critique—inspired especially by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Maurice blanchot—in all sorts of theoretical discourses to the clamor of silence heard so frequently in fiction and poetry, influentially in the writings of...