Disrupted cognition as an alternative solution to Heidegger’s ontotheological challenge: F. H. Bradley and John Duns Scotus

Abstract

Heidegger accuses ontotheologies of reducing God to a mere object of intelligibility, and thereby falsifying them, and in doing so distracting attention from or forgetting the ground of Being as unconcealment in the Lichtung. Conventional theistic responses to Heidegger’s ontotheological challenges proceed by offering (typically) analogy, speech-act theorising (e.g. praise) or negative theology as solutions. Yet these conventional solutions, however suitable as responses to Heidegger’s Die ontotheologische Verfassung der Metaphysik (written 1957; Heidegger 2006) version of the ontotheological problem, still fall foul of Heidegger’s more profound characterisation of ontotheology in his treatise Seinsgeschichtliche Bestimmung des Nihilismus (written 1944--1946; Heidegger 1997). Therein Heidegger characterises ontotheology as a metaphysics that posits a first-causal ground of Being combining together an essentia (and ontology) and an existentia (a that-ness). This article presents an alternative family of metaphysical schemes that instead develop their metaphysical ‘theology’ in a non-naive epistemological context, and indeed maintain that God (or the metaphysical Absolute) cannot be cognised by us because we cannot reconcile the whatness and the that-ness of God in one coherent thought. God is thus unintelligible, and though able to be signified, cannot be reduced thereby to an object of cognition, and is not posited at the expense of considering the ground of Being as the encounter in Lichtung with Being. The two examples of such disrupted cognition accounts of a non-ontheological metaphysics are from the medieval Franciscan John Duns Scotus and the British Idealist Francis Herbert Bradley. The paper ends with a discussion of the characteristic ‘disrupted cognition’ as a movement between two concepts that are unreconcilable within thought, without being contradictories or contraries, and explores the differences between theological and philosophical employments of ‘disrupted cognition’.