Excerpt of On the Universality of What Is Not

ON THE UNIVERSALITY OF WHAT IS NOT The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking

WILLIAM FRANKE University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

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Copyright © 2020 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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CONTENTS

Preface: Position, Purpose, and Structure of the Work Acknowledgments

ix xi

Part I.

Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

One

Introduction: Apophatic Thinking and Its Applications; Between Exhaustion and Explosion

3

Two

Outbound Reflection: Unsaying Theology in the Name of All

27

Part II. The New Apophatic Universalism

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Three

Apophatic Mysticism as Practical Philosophy: Nicholas of Cusa and the Applications of Ignorance

73

Four

Contemporary Atheist Philosophers and St. Paul’s Revolutionary Political Theology: A Genealogy of the New Universalism

Part III.

Comparative Philosophies of Culture

Five

Cosmopolitan Conviviality and Negative Theology: Europe’s Vocation to Universalism

129

Six

Except Asia: Agamben’s Logic of Exception and Its Apophatic Roots and Offshoots

154

107

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viii Contents

Part IV.

Cross-cultural and Transhistorical Interdisciplinarity

Seven

Liberal Arts Education Worldwide Unlimited Inc.: The Unspeakable Basis of Comparative Humanities

183

Eight

Apophasis and the Axial Age: Transcendent Origins of Critical Consciousness

201

Part V.

Emergences in Literary and Cultural Theory

Nine

The Canon Question and the Value of Theory: Toward a New Non-Concept of Universality

237

Te n

World Literature: A Means or a Menace to the Encounter with the Other?

254

Part VI. Critical Consciousness and Cognitive Science E l e v e n Postmodern Identity Politics and the Social Tyranny

of the Definable

291

Tw e l v e Cognitive Universality between Science and the Humanities

315

365

Concluding Elucidation: On the Extension and Intension of “Apophasis”

Appendix: Analytic Table of Contents Notes Index

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374 380 421

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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.

3

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4 Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

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, openended, 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

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Introduction 5

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

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6 Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

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 path-breaking 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 intelli-

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Introduction 7

gibility 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

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8 Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

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-toooften alienated societies.

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Introduction 9

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

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10 Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

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.

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Introduction 11

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 towards 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

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12 Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

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,

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Introduction 13

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, unsay­ ability 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.

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14 Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

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,

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