RT Article
T1 Apophasis and the turn of philosophy to religion: From Neoplatonic negative theology to postmodern negation of theology
JF International journal for philosophy of religion
VO 60
IS 1
SP 61
OP 76
A1 Franke, William 1956-
LA English
PB Springer Science + Business Media B. V
YR 2006
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1821418557
AB This essay represents part of an effort to rewrite the history metaphysics in terms of what philosophy never said, nor could say. It works from the Neoplatonic commentary tradition on Plato’s Parmenides as the matrix for a distinctively apophatic thinking that takes the truth of metaphysical doctrines as something other than anything that can be logically articulated. It focuses on Damascius in the 5–6th century AD as the culmination of this tradition in the ancient world and emphasizes that Neoplatonism represents the crisis of Greek metaphysics on account of the inability to give a rational account of foundations for knowing and of the ultimate principle of beings. Neoplatonism discovered how all such ultimate principles were necessarily beyond the reach of reason and speech. This apophatic insight is drawn out with the help of contemporary criticism of Neoplatonic philosophy, defining also some points of divergence. The essay then discusses the motives for thinking the unsayable in postmodern times on the basis of this parallel with Neoplatonic thought. Discourse’s becoming critical of itself to the point of self-subversion animates them both. However, the tendency in postmodern thought to totally reject theology, including negative theology, is a betrayal of its own deepest motivations. This tendency is debated through an examination of the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. While any traditional discourse can be negated, the negating and self-negating capacity of discourse itself is infinite, and this is where a perennial negative theological philosophy of the unsayable is to be located. Language, eminently the language of philosophy, as infinitely open, points in a direction which becomes equally and ineluctably theological.
K1 Nancy
K1 Damascius
K1 Parmenides
K1 Metaphysics
K1 Unsayable
K1 Postmodern thought
K1 Neoplatonism
K1 Negative Theology
K1 Apophasis
DO 10.1007/s11153-006-0012-7