On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking

By William Franke

Branching out from his earlier works providing a history and a theory of apophatic thinking, William Franke's newest book pursues applications across a variety of communicative media, historical periods, geographical regions, and academic disciplines—moving from the literary humanities and cultural theory and politics to more empirical fields such as historical anthropology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science. On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking is an original philosophical reflection that shows how intransigent deadlocks debated in each of these arenas can be broken through thanks to the uncanny insights of apophatic vision. Leveraging Franke's distinctive method of philosophical, religious, and literary thinking and practice, On the Universality of What Is Not proposes a radically unsettling approach to answering (or suspending) perennial questions of philosophy and religion, as well as to dealing with some of our most pressing dilemmas at present at the university and in the socio-political sphere. In a style of exposition that is as lucid as it is poetic, deep-rooted tensions between alterity and equality in all these areas are exposed and transcended.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9780268108830

William Franke

William Franke is professor of comparative literature and religious studies at Vanderbilt University and past professor of philosophy and religions at the University of Macao (2013–16). He is a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and has been Fulbright-University of Salzburg Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and Study of Religions. He is the author of A Philosophy of the Unsayable (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014).

Book preview

Part I

THINKING THEOLOGICALLY

AND THE APOPHATIC

Part I sounds the present state of apophatic thought in relation especially to its theological matrices. Part II then broadens this apophatic paradigm into a new, but never definitively specifiable (always still open-ended) universalism. Part III extends this universality of the limit intrinsic to any system or discourse into the intercultural realm, while Part IV advances it into interdisciplinary and transhistorical applications. Part V treats all of these dimensions of recent critical discourse in their emergence from highly contested claims in literary and cultural theory revolving specifically around the literary canon and the idea of world literature. Exposure of certain contradictions—and of the ultimately fecund nullity inherent in both of these key concepts—enables us to see past the impasses of these debates.

Part VI, finally, applies apophatic insight and orientations to current challenges posed by politicized humanities and by cognitive science as movements having a powerful tendency to dominate the agendas of academic administrations and faculties at leading institutions of higher education and research. The apophatic perspectives developed in this book are thus made to serve, in the end, to uncover and to compensate for some of the blind spots lurking in certain insidious trends and to expose ideologies that are currently steering much crucial decision-making at the university.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

Apophatic Thinking and Its Applications

Between Exhaustion and Explosion

In the ever more fragmented medley that is multicultural society, with its backlash against globalization, the desperate need for principles of cohesion, for some kind of universal code or credo, has been felt more and more acutely. The world has fallen prey to aggressive, exclusionary forms of sectarianism and identitarian politics. The consequences are seen in the proliferation of populist nationalisms and geopolitical regionalisms, in crippling ethnic antagonisms and cultural rivalries, and in militant religious fundamentalisms. The task of finding a universal frame of reference—or even just some kind of shared ethos—in our postmodern predicament has become daunting. Nonetheless, it is an imperative of the greatest urgency. All attempts to define and delineate the rules of the game—through a universal charter of human rights, for example—are at risk of becoming invidious and, in any case, prove implausible.¹ Such attempts are inevitably rejected, at least by some, who suspect them of being the means of elevating one ideology and its approach above others. The human need for a universal basis of consensus, together with the proven difficulty of establishing one, opens as a gaping abyss that threatens to engulf in bottomless vanity all of our most well-meaning endeavors to ensure order and dynamism in society and to regulate peacefully and freely our collective endeavors. Politics and diplomacy are driven into more and more desperate straits.

In the face of this pervasive predicament, this book makes a simple and practical proposal. It urges that we relinquish our drive to positively define our universe, or even just the arena of our relations with others, and, instead, render ourselves responsive, without preconceived limits, to all: this means also to the All that we cannot determine, even though we are surely determined by it as the undelimitable ambit of all our relations. Through this release of our grasp on the reality that we can define, we paradoxically find ourselves in touch with the sought-for basis of a common reality necessary for responsibly pursuing together with others our ongoing, open-ended, incalculably collective projects. We are thereby enabled to relate to an uncircumscribable whole via negative modalities that, nonetheless, prove efficacious. In fact, these modalities turn out to be just what we need—beyond our ability to account for why this is so or even to know exactly what we are going to do with them in advance. Integrating an apophatic (literally negative, but, in effect, eminently affirmative) detachment and awareness into our determinately, rigidly positive programs can make them open to others in ways that are critical to their success in generating consensus and the will to work together. The discretion of not saying (or knowing) is key to eliciting even just provisional acceptance from others rather than provoking resistance and retrenchment into oppositional camps and stances.

This book brings together several related concerns based on encounters with specific approaches and models for knowing and acting ethically and politically and places them into the frame of an extension of my project of apophatic thinking. The fate of the humanities in university education, given the latter’s increasing specialization, depends, as I perceive it, on reviving the sensibility for knowing our ignorance—in other words, a docta ignorantia. Since Socrates, this awareness of our limits has been essential to the open, inquiring mind and spirit that are necessary today to counterbalance the positivistic methods of empirical science and research. Crucial issues include the question of the disciplinarity of knowledge at the university, the resistance to pressures of isolating specialization, and particularly the relationship with cognitive science as an approach claiming to radically reposition, and even in some versions to supplant, traditional humanities knowledge. These areas of concern all present impasses and pitfalls that can be constructively dealt with only by recuperating a different model of knowing that is fundamentally molded, not by the positive sciences, but by wisdom traditions based on unknowing knowing, or learned ignorance.

The dialogue with other, in particular non-Western, cultures invites us to this refocusing of our own history and tradition. Intercultural philosophy and comparative religion and literature expose some of the frontiers that clearly call for a deeper understanding of apophatic aspects of human consciousness and existence.² The axes of geography and disciplinarity serve, accordingly, in this book to open the apophatic into the dimension of its universality. The intercultural and the interdisciplinary configure spaces of the between that most effectively challenge us to think beyond our accustomed models and frameworks. This reaching beyond and renunciation of closure already demonstrates what it means to think apophatically, since such thinking cannot be confined by any specifiable method. Negative or apophatic thinking is an essential resource also for confronting pressing issues of social justice, such as racial and gender equality, that tear us apart—unless the confines of identity can be broken through into a more encompassing nonidentity that excludes none, a nonidentity in which all can recognize their common interest, since it enables all to coexist.

The book in hand illustrates this negative or apophatic approach to seeking the universal by examining some select case studies drawn from philosophy, cultural history, and literature. Many other examples could be chosen to make this point, and the ones presented here, of course, reflect to a degree the author’s own predilections and even chance encounters. However, each has peculiar significance in a universal sense as well. Cognitive science, for instance, claims to discover mental structures and functions that are universally valid for all human beings and cultures. In the chapter (12) on that subject, I attempt to balance these pretensions by furnishing a humanities-based approach to the question of cultural and cognitive universals. I stress that science always explains some phenomena in terms of others assumed as already given, while necessarily leaving the ultimate explanation of All in its origins to be dealt with by irreducibly human and poetic means, such as myth and metaphor. Similar questions of universality surface in comparative philosophy, politics, and religion, and in literary and cultural criticism. The other chapters address those fields and emphasize how important it is to make a place for the negative as the unsaid—or even the unsayable—in order to keep reigning discourses productive, open, and humanly responsive and responsible, so as to prevent their becoming unwitting instruments of repression through reduction to merely classificatory schemas.

THE PRESENT PREDICAMENT OF APOPHATICS

Impressive strides in the field(s) of apophatics have been made in recent years. Numerous, extensive, authoritative scholarly studies on key founding figures, such as Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scott Eriugena, Maimonides, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas Cusanus, Søren Kierkegaard, and many others, now appear regularly and turn explicit attention to the apophatic insights working at the heart of such masters’ projects. There are wide-ranging philosophical and theological works, often of highly original quality, marshaling rich resources of diverse apophatic traditions (Jewish and Islamic, Christian and Buddhist, Vedic, and more) and proving their acute pertinence to contemporary intellectual issues and current social problems. This interest in the apophatic paradigm may even have reached a point of saturation in some regards, after which looms the threat of exhaustion. However, an intrinsic refusal to become a paradigm, and even to be defined at all, is built into the apophatic as such. As Jacques Derrida astutely recognized, negative theology per se does not exist. If apophaticism is named, it is, at least in part and by necessity, betrayed. The quintessential apophatic gesture is that of unsaying itself. Consequently, to the extent that it becomes a paradigm—which cannot perhaps be avoided—it must be prepared also to forsake and repudiate itself.

What remains, then, above all, for apophaticism today is to show its creative potential by interacting with its innumerable others, including even its ostensible nemeses, such as power politics and scientific positivism. Deploying apophatic thought, with its incisive insights, is a project already far advanced in the pathbreaking works of Catherine Keller, Elliot Wolfson, Hent de Vries, Gregor Hoff, Thomas Carlson, Wesley Wildman, Joachim Bromand, Daniel Heller-Roazen, and numerous other thinkers pushing the limits of almost any field today. Delineating a general paradigm in more detail is unlikely at this stage to enhance the overall intelligibility of the models that have emerged. Nevertheless, the apophatic can still work potently as a catalyst at the interfaces between disciplines, cultures, rationalities, and faiths. In these contexts, the apophatic is not a theory, but a practice of receiving the Other in its otherness and of interacting and discovering something unprecedented through the release of whatever is held to be one’s own. Letting one’s own prejudices be contradicted in order to grow in increasingly interpenetrating understanding with others is a challenge for which the apophatic sensibility is indeed indispensable. In these connections and applications, we still have everything to gain from the study and cultivation of what I am calling the apophatic.

The new turn in apophatic thinking that I envisage, then, consists especially in emphasizing its productive applications. Considered from this angle, the apophatic functions not as a barricade to speech and expression, but rather as a limit that, in effect, turns into a threshold, thereby becoming its own opposite: it becomes an enabling condition and a bridge crossing to an unlimited beyond that invites exploration.³ Much of the new current of apophatic reflection aims to untie the knots—or to dissolve the Nots and interdictions to expression—that seemed to be entailed or implied by traditional apophatics in the form of negative theology. Yet this spirit of denial was never the most authentic voice of apophaticism, and it has become increasingly untimely in our current cultural predicament clamoring for always more diverse expressions.

Illuminating cases include the development of an apophatic theology in the new phenomenology of the invisible after the theological turn;⁴ the elaboration of an apophatics of the body (with its associated gender politics and sexual poetics);⁵ an intensified reflection on and performance of apophatic aesthetics;⁶ and new initiatives in ecocriticism.⁷ Those working in such specialized fields as linguistics,⁸ for example, have also witnessed richly to the fertility of apophatic models in fostering some of the most timely, but also the most enduringly significant, developments of these disciplines. Applications of apophatics in literary criticism and cultural studies are, of course, legion.⁹

The most meaningful way to describe the purport of apophatic thinking is not by discourses about nothing that are left floating in the air. Instead, the relevance of apophatic thought stands to be tested and verified through engaging in debate on the burning issues of the humanities, and of humanity itself, inside and outside of the academy. The chapters in this book do not erase the traces of such engagement in the particular occasions for which they were originally composed. They are sometimes addressed to specific audiences and contexts. They manifest these diverse origins even in their concerted turn to the overarching problems of apophatic thinking and its peculiar claim to universality.

THE RELEVANCE OF APOPHATIC THOUGHT TO

UNIVERSALIST ASPIRATIONS TODAY

I propose apophatic thinking, or a philosophy of the unsayable, as the philosophy that most acutely answers to the challenges of thought in our age and, in some sense, in every age. Philosophy begins, with Thales, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and other pre-Socratic thinkers, by focusing on the problem of the one and the many and on the dilemma of reconciling a logically necessary unity of things—of all that is, or of all that can be thought—with an undeniable multiplicity of phenomenal manifestations. But what may at first have presented itself as a theoretical conundrum has over time become an eminently practical and political problem. In postmodern times, we face the difficulty of thinking and of living together in a world of multiple nations, ethnicities, cultures, and religions, a world that in spite of uncontainable proliferation of diversity is ever more tightly squeezed into one by the pressures of globalization. Hence the apparent need for common codes and practices that would enable cohabitation with a certain semblance of unity, or at least of compatibility. This minimal commonality seeks to find a way to emerge from across the gaping differences between clans and constituencies entrenched in their respective particularisms.

Yet, if this imperative implies eschewing tribalisms, it had best nevertheless not rule out the possibility that the model even of the tribe living in the openness of untamed nature might still illustrate superlatively well some of the virtues of conviviality. Particularly, living together with and honoring the sacredness of one’s environment, along with one’s ancestors and progeny, are virtues that may be necessary but that nonetheless are easily forgotten in our mass, industrialized, individual-based, and all-too-often alienated societies.

The problem of universalism has recently become clamorously topical again in philosophy and in cultural studies generally.¹⁰ I wish to show how the key to, I believe, the most promising approach to it can be found in apophatics. An opening for the inconceivable can be produced through creating empty space around all definitions and their inevitable divergences that derive from different languages and their varying cultural and conceptual matrices. An apophatic sensibility or awareness is necessary to allow the virtual common ground, which cannot be grasped neutrally in any one of the participants’ own vocabularies, to operate fertilely between them so as to produce what none alone is capable of articulating. Required here is the emergence of some kind of shared existence and even a sense of a common project beyond the control and comprehension of any of the participating groups.

This indefinable dimension between discourses, which is brought out by reflection on discourse itself and its limits as a medium, is an indispensable resource also for interfaith dialogue. I take such dialogue to be one important instance that can model communication between diverse cultures. A gesture of opening up in a kind of faith or trust, with self-abandon to a common ground or common prospect in which all alike share, though none can command or define it, is the necessary premise for getting along together. It requires each person’s or party’s overcoming their own egotistical, isolationist instincts and rising above inescapable conflicts of interest, not to mention inevitable mutual incomprehension.

In arguing for an apophatic approach and outlook, I will review what I consider to be at least implicitly apophatic philosophies at crucial junctures in Western intellectual history. I will use them in analogy with our present predicament—which is multicultural, cosmopolitan, postcolonial, and menaced by daunting threats such as environmental apocalypse and endemic terrorist violence—to illuminate, at least indirectly, our own current choices and dilemmas. In some such manner, apophatic insight into the unsayable, impossible, inconceivable, and incommensurable has been deployed persistently throughout the past in order to foster an inspired, visionary intervention into human affairs. It lay, for instance, at the basis of the mutual understanding and reciprocal appreciation among the three Abrahamic faiths during the Middle Ages. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity communicated cross-culturally on the basis of a common recognition of intrinsic limits to their ability to conceptualize God, as was emphasized particularly by great mystics in each of these three monotheistic religions.¹¹ This common unground has often been rediscovered anew over the course of the history of these and other faith traditions, for instance, in the baroque mysticism of the Spanish Carmelites and in the Teutonic mysticism channeled through Jakob Böhme to Silesius Angelus and German Romanticism. The Lurianic Kabbalah and the Wafa Sufi Order pursuing the legacy of Ibn al-Arabi in Egypt, or Advaita Vedanta and Madhyamika Buddhism, represent further peaks of apophatic awareness serving to harmonize diverse cultural strands in their respective traditions. Nicholas of Cusa’s De pace fidei (1453) imagines and theorizes such an interfaith universalism.

Another conceptually distinguishable coordinate that shadows apophatic thinking and at times converges and even coalesces with this negative theological or mystical vein can be identified in its apocalyptic/prophetic axis. It reaches from Joachim of Flores and Dante in the Middle Ages to the aesthetic-religious vision of universal spirit at once human and divine of Jena Romantics such as Novalis and Schelling. Certain aspects of this vision are developed further by a strongly negative form of messianism that can be discerned in Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin and in other precursors of critical theory in the Frankfurt School, such as Ernst Bloch with his The Principle of Hope (Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1954–59). Some anticipations and prefigurations of it, furthermore, are made manifest by the civilizations of the Axial Age in the first millennium BC. Such points of reference will be evoked as revealing aspects of a perennial universalistic vision that issues in various sorts of political theologies that are best understood as negative or apophatic.

In each case, this is a vision of the All and the Infinite as humanly ungraspable, as uncanny and otherworldly, sometimes even as monstrously strange, but nevertheless as offering a necessary and compelling orientation for our errant endeavors on earth. This orientation is universalist in refusing all dichotomous delimitations and exclusiveness such as traditional, binary, conceptual thinking inevitably imposes. At the same time as it favors and fosters unity, this apophatic approach deliberately evades every exclusionary determination of that unity and practices an unconditional respect for diversity.

Such an apophatic ethos approaches the problem of dealing with often exclusivist ideologies and religious fundamentalisms in a non-exclusionary, non-oppositional manner. It asks, instead: Where is the undefined, unrealized common ground of conviction that can be found and affirmed with those who become radically opposed to others, and sometimes to the world virtually as a whole? Only such an attempt to find common bonds of understanding and interest behind all ideological formulations can reverse the radical separatism that is at work in militant movements, with their all too often deathly consequences.

I propose apophaticism not as the one true philosophy over and against other contenders, but rather as the common denominator, or, better, the disappearing mediator, of what philosophies are all aiming at. It furnishes the element of (un)truth or (non)sense in which their diverging trajectories, nevertheless, converge asymptotically toward infinity. At this level, philosophy is not sharply distinguishable from religion, so what I propose might also be considered a philosophy of religion or even, in some sense, a religious philosophy.¹² It falls within the domain of the philosophy of religion to the extent that it can be identified and classed at all. And yet, finally, it is neither exactly philosophy nor religion. In true apophatic manner, it aims, instead, at their common ground or un-ground, at what is diversely sought by each under the rubric of truth and yet can never be definitively attained in whatever disciplinary discourse. The truth is disclosed or happens—and an event of sense is thus made to occur—rather in the exceeding of all limits of every specific discourse toward what all alike fail to express adequately. The challenge is to see how all discourses aiming at truth and failing to grasp it are nonetheless normed by it and indirectly reveal it, even and precisely in failing to attain and articulate it.

The genre of such thinking needs to be appreciated also as poetic—it is that, too, and especially that, inasmuch as it can be situated within any specific kind of thought or writing at all.¹³ Poetry, in this sense, as poiesis (or making), is not an aesthetic extra or a frill; instead, it makes our world what it is, at least in terms of its experience by human beings. My approach to apophatic thinking plays up the poetic aspect as fundamental to apophatics generally, as well as to its expressions across various disciplines and discourses. I distinguish my own approach on this basis from other approaches offering general paradigms of apophatic thinking developed out of different disciplinary matrices—especially philosophy and theology—and likewise bearing witness to apophaticism’s acute relevance to our own times. My poetic emphasis, however, makes apophaticism no less philosophical or theological or religious or political. Instead, it blends a cultural poetics of apophasis into its philosophical, theological, and political or social expressions. Apophatic rhetoric and linguistics inextricably underwrite all formulations of apophatic discourse, whatever its object and content: it can therefore never be confined to just a poetic or an aesthetic register.

THEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF APOPHATICISM

Apophatic thinking in the Western tradition springs especially from theological matrices, even though these are at their origins hardly distinguishable from philosophy and literature or myth, or from the many other arenas of expression to which such thinking subsequently spreads. Apophatics becomes a discourse of quite general relevance throughout all fields of culture. This is acutely so in a postmodern age marked by certain phenomena of a return of religion.¹⁴ It is, nevertheless, important to keep theology in focus as a form of thought that points more persistently and deliberately than perhaps any other to the Unsayable as its lodestar and driving obsession. Theology aims at the Unsayable in what is arguably its most world-historically significant sense—that of divinity, or of a transcendent, infinite source of life and being. Still, admittedly, there can be no one right way of discoursing about the unsayable, so theology serves here as no more than an exemplary and heuristic discourse. Most important in any discourse taken as medium are the nondiscursive and the intermedial elements that make up its enabling conditions. In the interstices between word, sound, and image, discourse blends out or turns to silent meditation, while meaning crystalizes from an inarticulate background that bears, often imperceptibly, yet no less indelibly, on the complex sense that discourse spawns.

Theology offers some baseline concepts and images—such as infinity, transcendence, unity, and being—for thinking about God, but all need to be relinquished in the apophatic movement of unthinking all that is thought about the Unthinkable. This negative or apophatic thinking is indiscernible from an apophatic speaking—which can take place, intensified, in writing—that unsays the Unsayable. As discourse about God, theology is about the Unsayable par excellence. Yet, like God, unsayability is not just a theme of discourse; it is not properly a theme at all. Like God, unsayability is unthematizably manifest, or more likely covered over, in virtually every form of discourse—in its constitutive lacks, in the gaps that dis-articulate it. In addition to (and hidden in) this general claim, unsayability is making its claim especially in the new brands of culture emerging at present in the form of the intercultural and interdisciplinary in philosophy, religion, literature, and other disciplines. Some of these are placed under the aegis of postmodernism, but in their most authentic form, they are under no category or classification whatsoever.

I have previously canvassed various contemporary theologies, as well as atheologies, which all tend to deny negative theology, in order to show how they actually, and more profoundly, depend on it. In chapters 4 and 5 of my A Philosophy of the Unsayable, postmodern a/theologies and radical orthodoxies serve as prime examples of such self-denying apophaticism. As to those types of thinking that affirm negative theology, whether consciously or unconsciously, I wish to draw on them for constructing what I discern as a distinctive approach to the problem of the universal—one that pivots on the universality of what is not. I aim, first, to situate the discussion of universality within a general cultural context of current criticism and of a certain social and conceptual revolution that I call the new universalism. What is new is that this universalism has to renounce exclusions, and thus cannot even define itself in a determinate concept, but rather embodies a style of relating oneself to others.

This ideal of universality has a theological genealogy. Still in our own time theology is paradoxically powering the social and cultural revolutions that are most responsible for advancing the secularization of the contemporary world.¹⁵ We must focus on theology and on its unsaying of itself in order to understand the plurality of discourses that, in the name of everything else besides theology, dominate the critical and, more generally, the cultural scene today. However, it is actually negative theology that is most pertinent to the transformation of society at present, no less than to the normative values clustering around universality. So these movements do indeed read correctly as a reversal of theology—albeit a reversal that is anticipated and indeed executed, often most rigorously, in and by theology itself.

By negating its theological origins, apophaticism moves itself into a more properly self-questioning philosophical mode. As negative theology, apophaticism is marked as theological in origin, yet it becomes a universal philosophy. Negative theology is a critical form of thinking that is critical first and foremost of theology. This is how philosophical reflection originates in ancient Greece—as a form of thought critiquing traditional religious mythologoumena in light of a newly discovered philosophical logos. This pattern is found in many other cultures, starting with those of the Axial Age: such cultures turn a self-reflexive, critical eye on age-old religious beliefs and rites, even while renewing and affirming them.

APOPHATICISM AS UNIVERSAL APPLIED PHILOSOPHY

We see the apophatic angle of approach applied across a dizzying array of disciplines. The capillary nature of its penetration into concrete fields of culture is bewildering. The surging to prominence of such an interdisciplinary paradigm is itself an index of its vocation to a kind of universalism. The apophatic has a strong claim to be regarded as the new koiné of discourse stretching from the humanities to the sciences in the twenty-first century. This being the case, inevitably the question of universalism lies at its heart. One of the tasks of this book is to show how the decisive insights of many of our leading thinkers today, irrespective of their fields, tend to be essentially apophatic in nature. Michel Serres might be taken here as indicative.¹⁶

The most urgent task of apophaticism in its present predicament is no longer to recover its tradition or to define its theoretical model and premises, since much in this vein has already been done, but rather to test and reflect on how its insights can be plied to deal with the most troubling and intransigent issues that we face in all arenas. These range from metaphysics to the environment and are found at all levels of our social existence. The apophatic becomes manifest as an art and science of dealing with difficulty and as a resource for finessing, or at least addressing, the irresolvable. The references to the apophatic as marking an insuperable impasse of language and the constitutive limits of knowing have become so pervasive in all academic disciplines in the opening decades of the twenty-first century that, like any revolutionary idea, it eventually becomes a victim of its own success. At this point, rather than occurring as an incisive and provocative innovation, reference to the apophatic (or nothing or the ineffable) easily falls prey to banality, to becoming a perfunctory and hackneyed cliché.

Consequently, in order to keep receiving the inspiration available in the thinking of unthinkability, we need to find new applications, and this endeavor is the specific undertaking of this book. The book demonstrates how apophatic insight can be used to illuminate impasses in a variety of fields ranging from comparative religions, intercultural philosophy, and critical theory to cognitive science. Apophasis hews close to the most difficult and unyielding of problems and brushes with the most formidable and prickly of paradoxes. In the last resort, any solutions that are possible to our dilemmas draw from and address what is apparently impossible.

Although, as a trend and paradigm, apophaticism may soon meet with a sense of its own exhaustion, the application of the apophatic, in its potential to pry open the knottiest of problems in an unlimited range of fields, is now swinging into full gear. It is turning up everywhere and is being discovered as a necessary resource—often as the only way of sustaining impossible antinomies and impasses with apparently no exit. Apophatic thought does not offer specific solutions to technical problems, but it changes our relation to the surrounding context; it alters the human understanding of problems in a way that enables reconceivings that emerge of themselves to be received and recognized as such—without the usual exclusions that otherwise restrict the very possibilities of perception.

This book develops an apophatic perspective specifically on how the issue of universality opens into a major philosophical preoccupation that demands an apophatic approach and handling at precisely our present juncture in intellectual history. It emphasizes the perspective of comparative or intercultural philosophy as indispensable and as an ineluctable challenge to which apophatic thought is now called to respond. It considers likewise the challenge of interdisciplinarity in an especially radical sense. In particular, the confrontation with the so-called cognitive sciences has called into question the legitimacy and the very existence of humanities studies. An adequate answer to this challenge, I believe, can be found only if we begin to understand both the humanities and the sciences through apophatic lenses. Otherwise, the claims of positive science threaten to obliterate the assumptions on which humanities studies are based, as well as everything that humanities scholars, not to mention human beings, hold to be most evident and dear—starting from free agents and spiritual values. No definitions or explanations can be fully adequate to the unformalizable factors of experience that apophasis highlights: as irreducible realities or irrealities, they can only be lived and experienced and cannot be scientifically demonstrated and proved.

It is through such encounters and applications that the perennial relevance of apophatic thought continues to demonstrate itself. Purely theoretical formulations working out formal models eventually exhaust and void themselves. The fertility of apophatic thinking can be shown only by its fruits in application to the full diversity of topics that call for thought at the present, especially those that present and display thought’s ultimate difficulties and dead-ends in our contemporary world. The theoretical model of apophaticism has already, in some cases, recognized its impotence purely as theory and has developed naturally into engagement on a sensory level with the body and with aesthetics at the opposite end of the spectrum from the desert of metaphysical abstraction. Emptiness and the void were and remain privileged themes of some of the matrices of apophaticism in Western culture, notably of its negative theologies and ascetic spiritual practices, and they are especially prominent in Asian, notably Buddhist, traditions. Yet contraries meet unexpectedly in the ambit of the apophatic, which situates itself before saying, and thus before articulation into differential oppositions. Hence concrete, saturated, pleonastic, and excessive forms of apophatic expression turn out to be no less forthcoming and insistent. These emphatic, hyper-positive expressions are dealt with in terms of specific discourses and disciplines in this volume.

This volume’s focusing of the field on a specific problematic—universality—is accompanied by a shift from attempting to define a general paradigm for apophatic thinking to exploring its potential for intervening effectively in a variety of fields of application. The thinking of apophatics warrants a shift of attention to such applications in order to avert the vanity of simply turning on itself in the void. The need for something concrete to work with is felt acutely as apophatic discourse continues to evolve. The (de)creative moment of putting everything in question and confronting the Nothing head-on is necessary and fruitful, but it cannot be sustained indefinitely on its own. It acquires its meaning and relevance only within the movement of thought that is constantly solicited and challenged by developments in the world surrounding it. Consequently, the purely theoretical moment understandably passes or metamorphoses into a phase of more specific applications such as those undertaken in the present work.

This is a natural and inevitable development. However, in order to keep the moment of fundamental thinking at the source of these currents open and alive, we need also somehow to adhere to the pre-positive moment of thinking in the abyss. This depth cannot be thought without gaining some form of traction in more concrete cultural vocabularies and discipline-specific concerns. And yet, reaching back to the originating negation inscribed in discourse as such and to the initial impotence that it imposes on thought is the necessary condition for truly original thinking—for thinking in and from the origin. This has been the task particularly of theology throughout the Western tradition in its many guises—as myth no less than as revealed Word. In whatever forms, such theological narratives invite us to philosophy, or to speculative thinking, with its universalist claims and aspirations.

Accordingly, the present book engages crucial debates in a diversity of disciplines and cultures from an apophatic angle that shows how apophasis can open avenues to a more comprehensive and coherent understanding of the most intransigent impasses and aporias that we face in various fields today. These include historiographical debates about the Axial Age, controversies over method in intercultural philosophy, universal claims (and their denials) for a literary canon or for an expanded field of world literature, and the extraordinary claims made for cognitive science as potentially unifying knowledge. All these areas can be projected into a very different perspective by considering them in the peculiar kind of light cast by the darkness of apophasis. Issues of class, race, and gender, or of justice in society, are utterly transformed by the luminosity of this darkness—or shadow-light. Claims to universal right or truth can be revealed in their validity—and at the same time in their limits—by bringing out the apophatic a/logic that implicitly and invisibly governs our ability to think limits. The inescapable, unaccountable presence or possibility of the unlimited overshadows all such thinking and every attempt to delimit the field through an articulable system or paradigm.

APOPHATICISM AS FIRST PHILOSOPHY—OR A

UNIVERSAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

As already intimated, I conceive of apophatic thinking as a philosophy of religion—to the extent that it is necessary to identify and place it in disciplinary terms at all. However, I also conceive of philosophy of religion as first philosophy. Our relations to others come first in enabling us to propound any type of philosophical discourse or reflection. A few decades ago, Emmanuel Levinas was able to overturn the hegemony of epistemology, as the foundational discourse dominating modern philosophy since Descartes, and to assert ethics as first philosophy. He thereby revised the original Aristotelian hierarchy according this preeminent status to metaphysics. Analogously, I propose that in our current intercultural and postsecular intellectual milieu, in effect, our most basic philosophical bearings are, and need to be, established in relational terms of how what we are saying ties in and binds back (re-ligio) to our relatedness with others in an unlimited context or open pluriverse. Philosophy of religion, thus conceived, is not just a narrow, specialized field coming late in history—and toward the end of the articulation of the Hegelian system as it branches out to encompass ever more specific and concrete areas of human culture and civilization. Such reflection is, instead, an origin for thinking per se. It reflects on our manner of relating ourselves knowingly to an unlimited range of contexts and cultures—and even to others beyond the range of our knowing altogether.

In these apophatic optics, then, philosophy of religion is about the basic orientation that enables us to proffer a philosophical perspective in the first place. In relation to whom or to what are we speaking? This determination does not correspond specifically to the traditional field of philosophy of religion, but traditional philosophy of religion offers pertinent models for negotiating this prior issue of positioning ourselves. Thus we avoid simply taking for granted and as established the surrounding ambit that alone accords meaning and pertinence to any of our interventions. By virtue of its intentional directedness toward the indefinable—toward divinity or God—religion is related in a prior sense to the apophatic. It can take a lead in introducing and in guiding this discourse. It must be emphasized that religion, in this sense, is not circumscribed by any content but is rather open to all manners of relating to others—and this entails even being exposed to the absolutely Other in its self-revelation beyond our control. So, philosophy of religion is no longer understood as just one discipline among others—one cordoned off from them within its own domain—but, instead, as an approach that puts relations with others first: and this includes even relations to an indefinable Other. Religion considers these relations as prior to an individual’s very existence, and thus to one’s being able to reflect and so define oneself and what is proper to one or one’s own.

In this perspective, for all the importance of philosophy and of rational reflection, the question of faith or belief remains inescapable. Our thought is animated by our belief. The decision to believe—to believe what we think—is an existential decision with all the destiny-laden drama of the decision of whether or not to believe in God or the good or in any meaning or purpose whatever for our lives.¹⁷ What is being believed in apophatic thought is nothing determinate. Nevertheless, it remains decisive for every possible determinate thought and action. To believe, finally, is not merely and restrictively a cognitive act, but a commitment of one’s whole being. As love, this means to believe all things, as Paul proclaims in 1 Corinthians 13:7: Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. It is not so much a matter of believing this or that—or this rather than that. Fundamental, instead, is the question of whether our believing is defined against something determinate, against some antithetical system or religion or political ideology, and is thus a relative belief, or is rather unqualified belief, unconditional belief in all, all that is (real or true). Such unlimited belief can entail taking this all as one or even, as some would say, God.

This latter mode of belief (in God) is one shape or figure of apophatic belief; it exemplifies what I consider to be properly religious faith in its intrinsic openness to tying all together under some kind of universal figure. The latter might be divine presence—but also emptiness, as for Buddhists. It must, in any case, be open also to the honest disbelief of atheists. Of course, any such belief in the universal must begin, at least from a certain point of view, with belief in oneself—yet also with disbelief, or recognition of one’s own intrinsic limits.

This formulation of apophaticism, then, as a philosophy of religion actually recoups its being universal philosophy while also being something more than just rational reflection. It entails existential knowing and, what is more, something of the order of what has been understood theologically as revelation. These modes of knowing and unknowing all coalesce inseparably in the apophatic. Hence its unlimited pertinence to us and to our world today in its relations to yesterday and tomorrow—and to other worlds elsewhere and everywhere. Such is the revisioning of the relevance of apophatic thinking that this book undertakes to demonstrate and to fecundate.

In effect, apophasis proves in its very exhaustion to be inexhaustible (inépuisable épuisement) because it means to say something other than simply something.¹⁸ It does not say anything that can be comprehended in propositional or constative terms. It is a saying otherwise than saying as stating, and it opens upon a different kind of sense, one that displaces the sense of discourse as a whole. This is why its saying is only a name for the unsayable rather than its articulation and expression—nothing save the name. Negative theology is not just another discourse; instead, it takes discourse to another place—without being able to say what that place is. Nor what it itself is. The apophatic is only an over-against that twists and tropes the sense of other discourses. What it intends cannot be analyzed or described, but it can be named—as an Other can be named and can even be addressed as Thou, thereby leaving inexhaustible mystery intact.

APOPHATIC BELIEF AND THE DIALOGUE AMONG FAITHS

AND NON-FAITHS

Apophatics has a key role to play in interfaith dialogue. Most, if not all, religions have mystical dimensions and mystically inclined factions—at least at their fringes—that turn away from the more positive creedal formulations of doctrine and dogma in the interests of suitably honoring divinity in what they understand to be its transcendence of human thought and language. These mystical tendencies emphasize theology’s or religion’s less verbally and conceptually graspable, yet nonetheless most vital and pertinent, aspects. In their spiritual searchings, Sufis, Christian mystics, and Kabbalists, together with New Thought (neo-pagan) gnostics, not to mention Taoists, Brahma mystics, and Zen or Tantric Buddhists, have often found themselves in agreement on basics beyond the definitions and divisiveness of the orthodox faiths defined by the communities to which they nevertheless remain attached and whose traditions they grow out of and still cultivate.

As religious teachings empty themselves of specific doctrinal content in order to concentrate on essential ethical principles and on their deepest convictions concerning the divine, reaching to their inarticulate modes of relationship to this higher order, the barriers between them fall away. Their adherents find that they can join hands with members of other diverse and often apparently very disparate faiths, or even contradictory confessions. This generalized meeting of minds and uniting of spirits does not necessarily entail a loss of specificity of the beliefs of the different religions that thereby become partners in dialogue. On the contrary, it can and should go hand in hand with a return to the concrete stories, practices, texts and traditions in which religious truth is lived and experienced.¹⁹ At stake is rather the manner of holding those beliefs. It entails a strategic distancing from their specific linguistic formulations and an attempt to look beyond what they say to what they do not say and perhaps cannot say as concealing the essential motivations behind their divergent discourses. In this manner, a large measure of common ground may be gained.

We live in the tension between a growing and ever more inescapable global community, on the one hand, and the more specific, potentially divisive allegiances of particular cultural and religious identities, on the other. Often it seems that their claims are incompatible and that we must choose between them. In this situation, John Hick has proposed a pluralist approach to religions through contesting the myth of Christian uniqueness.²⁰ My own apophatic approach aims not to refuse the claim of uniqueness, but rather to take it as exemplary of something at least latent in potentially all religions, not to mention other belief systems or ideologies.²¹ Uniqueness is thus embraced but also generalized and, in effect, negated or exploded into an apophatic universal. Being unique is revealed as the common nature of all religions and even of truth itself.

Apophatics does not conspire to relativize religious belief but rather to relate all discourse to an absolute that it aims at and is attracted by, yet cannot grasp or encapsulate in any terms whatsoever, unique or not.²² This is what enables the absolute to belong equally to other religious or nonreligious currents and approaches. Religions and visions of truth in general envisage something absolute, and this something is therefore apprehended inevitably as unique and incomparable. That it is so apprehended and experienced does not mean that it can be justified as such by explicit, objective criteria. For the absolutely unique is also absolutely unsayable—for lack of terms of comparison. And that precisely—paradoxically—is the universal.

Working from the Christian tradition, it is possible to find the paths of apophasis that open toward dialogue with other faiths in the common study of comparative religions and reaching, no less importantly, beyond the pale of faith to non-faith. Christianity turns out to be, in this regard, a historically decisive cultural phenomenon: it is often presented as the catalyst of a surpassing of religion itself. Christianity is deemed by Marcel Gauchet (extending Max Weber’s disenchantment thesis) to be the religion of the exit from religion (la religion de la sortie de la religion).²³ Jean-Luc Nancy follows him in this line of argument.²⁴ Gianni Vattimo concordantly propounds interpreting Christianity as the agent of its own deconstruction.²⁵ Christianity is historically the religion of the secularized West, and not by accident: it has often been said to be the chief architect or influence shaping the modern secular world.²⁶ Seminal here is work in the sociology of religions not only of Max Weber but also of Émile Durkheim.²⁷ Specifically, Reformation Christianity has had a leading role in affirming the individual’s worldly calling to productivity, in accordance with the famous Protestant work ethic.²⁸

The universalizable aspects of Christianity that have been so crucial for determining its central place in modern history call out to be understood apophatically. For it is not because of specific beliefs so much as the ability to suspend them (or to universalize them, hence broadening their specificity) that Christianity has been able to exert this pervasive influence. Especially as the religion of the death of God (from Hegel to Altizer), Christianity has opened apophatic avenues that are unique to the Christian gospel and its outlook on the world. Christianity has deployed uniquely universalizing energies that cannot be understood apart from apophasis and the apophatic underpinnings of this faith in particular and of other world religions more generally. The dialogue opens not only toward other religious faiths, but also in the direction of all other forms of knowledge endeavoring to understand the world and to gain access to its truths or to a higher consciousness.

This is a dialogue, then, equally with philosophy and with other types of wisdom, a dialogue that requires to be understood in terms of apophatic principles. Apophasis stands in close proximity even with atheism, with which its utterances may converge and, in some instances, actually coincide. This has sometimes become patent and has often been a cause for scandal, notoriously in cases such as those of Meister Eckhart and Silesius Angelus. Apophasis is, accordingly, key to the dialogue between religions and within the whole range of modern ideologies and secular creeds. These participants in dialogue include the humanities and the sciences as different cultures of knowledge