Getting Past Transcendence: Determinacy, Indeterminacy, and Emergence in Chinese Natural Cosmology

Abstract

William Franke in his new publication, A Philosophy of the Unsayable, stakes out a position for apophatic thinking between the sometimes shrill dialectic of what he describes as a kind of radical secularized immanentalism on the one hand, and the Anglo-Saxon and Continental resurgence of a Radical Orthodoxy on the other. Hegel in the introduction to his Encyclopaedia Logic observes that one of the most difficult problems for evaluating philosophical positions is the question of where they begin. Secularized immanentialism in embracing Nietzsche’s death of God rejects utterly transcendentalism and the “theo-ontological thinking” that grounds it. Franke avers that “Starting from the world in its actuality—this world as it reveals itself in human life and society without externally imposed metaphysical and a fortiori theological constructions—is the bottom line for secular theology.” (p. 273) Radical Orthodoxy on the other hand insists that “it is necessary to start from theological revelation as expressed in the Christian vision and its narrative in order to understand the world—and not the other way round.” (p. 273) Franke argues that while both positions tend to reject apophatic thinking, apophatism is in fact the common root or “radicality” that they share.