Negative Theology Research Articles

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

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’.

Academic Adventures in China

I am a professor of literature and at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and before 2008 I had never been to China. Quite by chance, I found myself invited, through the good offices of a Chinese academic working in Glasgow in the field of literature and religion, to speak at a summer conference in Wenzhou, and from there was invited to take up a Changjiang Chair for three years at Renmin University of China in Beijing, teaching courses to undergraduates and postgraduates in English literature and hermeneutics, that is, the theory of interpretation. For two months each year since then, that is what I have done to the best of my ability. Allow me, then, to begin this brief essay with some very broad reflections on exchanges between cultures and the nature of literature as these have been guided by this experience. Understanding next to no Mandarin I have got by through the generosity of Chinese people in the university speaking with me in English, and occasionally French, ever more convinced of two truths as they impress themselves upon me. First, that there is a universal language in literature and that is as true in the exchanges between Chinese and English literature as it is in those between ancient Greek literature and English. Across the boundaries of ages and cultures, poets and writers speak to one another with a grace forbidden to philosophers or theologians. I have found a certain familiarity in the midst of strangeness in even the most ancient of Chinese texts in often rather stilted translations. Before I properly begin it may be useful to refer to the current discussions in the field of art history amongst scholars such as James Elkins and James Cahill on the 'globalizing of art history'. Elkins, a distinguished American art historian, has written on Chinese landscape painting despite, like myself, having little Chinese and in full awareness of his alien epistemological and hermeneutical structures as a critic. Cahill has written of the Chinese emphasis in art criticism on the 'verbal' while the Western is on the 'visual'. In short, there is no escaping our built-in cultural biases and the fact that we perceive as outsiders to another culture. Nevertheless, we ought not abandon the task of such intercultural critical enterprises, provided we are aware of the complexities and hermeneutical implications of our increasingly 'globalized' activities as critics--whether in art history, literature, or, indeed, religion. And so I return to my own literary field of study. Now it is the case that, in some respects as readers of any texts, even those within our own tradition, we are always trespassing in unknown territory; George Steiner pointed this out long ago, remarking that a contemporary English reader of Daniel Defoe's eighteenth-century prose is immediately in a very strange country, its contours and language somewhat recognizable as 'English', but often barely so. (1) But, still, whether I read a classic Chinese work like A Dream of Red Mansions (in translation) or Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged (by a modern Chinese writer partly educated at Oxford and Paris), to a degree I know where I am, and what comes into critical operation is a hermeneutical machinery that at the very least provides a space across the text for conversation and comparison in a way that other forms of study within the fields of the Humanities--religion, for example-very largely fail to do. There you almost have to start each time from scratch and translation is virtually impossible as any Christian theologian who tries to read the Tao Te Ching quickly discovers. (Reading it as poetry is another matter.) At one level the Tao seems to the Western theological reader to be somehow familiar, another example of a kind of negative theology with a relationship to the Pseudo-Dionysius and others, but then you find that there are just no words in English to translate its key terms. The religious vocabulary simply does not exist, and so, like James Legge and others before us in the West, we have to use words from our own tradition in our attempts at translation--most famously Logos for Tao--knowing that they are wrong. …

Ranks Are Not Bypassed, Rituals Are Not Negated: The Dionysian Corpus on Return

AbstractModern readings of the Dionysian corpus often subordinate its hierarchical treatises to its theological treatises. Two unfortunate consequences follow: one, the thetic positions and aphairetic removals of the Divine Names and Mystical Theology bypass or transcend the hierarchical ranks and hierurgical rituals of the Celestial Hierarchy and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. Second, the return to God occurs through apophatic abstraction rather than sacramental performance. This article interprets the Dionysian corpus differently, offering four arguments why Dionysian negative theology is not the means by which ranks and rituals are negated or abandoned but rather a means by which they are affirmed and accomplished.

Foucault, Magritte and negative theology beyond representation

Recent theological writings on the French philosopher Michel Foucault often mention Foucault in relation to negative theology. This article discusses the negative motion in Foucauldian thinking through Foucault's essay on the Belgian painter René Magritte. On the basis of this discussion, the article sketches a renewed account of negative theology. It is a post-representational account of negative theology in accordance with Foucault's critique of representation, as presented in his Magritte essay.

Immanence, Transcendence and Thinking Life with Deleuze and Eckhart

This paper questions the post-Nietzschean, materialist assumption that divine transcendence is necessarily inimical to life. In light of Eugene Thacker’s distinction between Life and the living, this paper explores the concept of life in the works of Meister Eckhart and Gilles Deleuze, two thinkers who, when read alongside each other, reveal how the notions of absolute transcendence and absolute immanence invert into each other. One consequence of such inversion is that both thinkers face the question of how to think life in relation to nothingness. While it might seem that Eckhart’s negative theology confirms the Nietzschean suspicion that divine transcendence is anti-life, the paper seeks to forestall such a conclusion by showing how Eckhart’s apophaticism is better able to uphold the integrity of this-worldly life than Deleuze’s immanentism. However, the paper ultimately criticises both thinkers for failing to affirm the value of finite, creaturely life in itself.

Theology After Derrida

AbstractIt has recently been argued that Derrida's work is thoroughly atheistic, which seems to put any dialogue between Derrida and theology out of play. However, such arguments forget that to forbid the impossible outright is as much to be a slave to metaphysics as to presume that one could attain to it in language. Here I revisit the relationship between deconstruction and negative theology, and reconsider utilising Derrida to think God as the impossible. Arguing that thinking God in the absolute future still cannot sustain theology, I suggest how Derrida's work might nevertheless open onto the possibility of revelation.

Nothing Is Not One: Revisiting the ex nihilo

AbstractThis article seeks to encounter the late ancient doctrine of creatio ex nihilo from a new angle, gently questioning both its distinctive Christianness and its inevitable alignment with a theology of absolute sovereignty. Franz Rosenzweig's idiosyncratic elaboration of this doctrine opens up new lines of thought: multiplying the “nothing” while also emphasizing its fecundity, he articulates not only a negative theology but also a negative anthropology and cosmology; insisting on the irreducible relationality of God, human, and world, he also posits their non‐essentiality. Admittedly, early versions of creatio ex nihilo (Irenaeus, Tertullian) foreground the omnipotence of the creator and the goodness of the created world, and these concerns continue to be expressed by later proponents of the ex nihilo, Jewish as well as Christian. However, beginning in the fourth century there are hints of something new as well, something more Rosenzweigian—namely, a preoccupation with the nothing itself. What comes increasingly to the fore in these articulations of the ex nihilo is not mastery but mystery, not power but fragility, not separation but intimacy—and paradoxically so, given that the gap between creator and created has never before seemed to yawn so widely. This shift is manifest in the opening passages of Genesis Rabbah, I would suggest. It is also evident in the locus classicus of post‐Constantinian Christian ex nihilo doctrine, namely Athanasius's On the Incarnation of the Word of God.

Articulating (Ultimate) Commitments: Historical, Factual and Systematic Considerations

Acknowledging that religion forms a constitutive part of human life is recently confirmed by Gobekli Tepe , an archaeological site in Turkey, from which it appears that religion is basic to all the other cultural developments within human society. This opened the way to illustrate the interplay between ultimate commitments and theoretical articulations with reference to the a priori commitment to gradualism (continuous change) as found in the thought of Darwin and neo-Darwinism. Subsequently a related brief analysis is given of the ultimate commitment motivating the development of Greek philosophy and Medieval philosophy and theology. Distinguishing between conceptual knowledge and concept-transcending knowledge (concept and idea) brought the views of Plotinus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dengerink and Tillich into the discussion. Negative theology is used to show how ontic conditions play a role in the articulation of ultimate commitments. The long-standing commitment to reason, embodied in the identification of thought and being, resulted in what the physicist, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, calls faith in science which according to him is the governing religion of our time. The philosophy of science of the 20th century acknowledges that scholarly activities are co-conditioned both by theoretical commitments and s upra-theoretical ultimate commitments – the central dimension of human existence in which the antithesis between Christian and non-Christian convictions is seated. Wolters emphasizes that all aspects of created life and reality are in principle equally good, and all are in principle equally subject to perversion and renewal.

The “Blueprints” of Revolution?: A Comparative Reading of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought and Franz Kafka’s Fiction(s)

The “Blueprints” of Revolution?:A Comparative Reading of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought and Franz Kafka’s Fiction(s) Pavan Kumar Malreddy (bio) 1 K.’s stubborn singleness of purpose, however, opens the eyes of some of the villagers; his behavior teaches them that human rights may be worth fighting for, that the rule of the Castle is not divine law and, consequently, can be attacked. (Arendt, Essays 76-77) For decades, negative theology, alienation, defeatism, shame and hopelessness have been some of the most commonly attributed literary themes to Franz Kafka’s writings (Ackerman 105-13; Block 322-26; Cohn 182-88). Although this has changed considerably since the 1990s, most political readings of Kafka’s fiction emphasize the symbolic, metonymic, spiritual, intertextual, and even the deconstructive qualities of its resistance than an overt political-will Kafka’s characters might otherwise inculcate (Nemoianu 357-71; Liska 329-34).1 For instance, in a conversation with Scholem, despite Kafka’s “prophetic vision” of the “communal estrangement” of the modern individual, Benjamin calls Kafka “a failure” largely because his experiments with literary form (parables growing into novels) prevent him from elaborating his prophesies into fulfilling (political) visions (Benjamin 245-47). Instead, as Kafka’s close friend and biographer Max Brod has observed, both the literary form and the aesthetic predicament of Kafka’s novels could be prolonged to an “infinity” which, in its rhetorical panoply, guides the reader all the “way to God” (Brod 97). This view is also echoed by Kundera (39-45) and Borges (199-201) who conclude that Kafka’s politics are neither definite nor transparent given the “infinite sense of procrastination” exerted by their characters, and a “boundless labyrinth” (143-45) of bureaucratic structures they are destined to pass through. For Blanchot (11-20), Kafka is first and foremost a performance artist, one who combines text and action together in an almost spiritual intonation, thereby turning his texts all the more radical but politically “intangible.” While a number of recent commentaries have drawn upon Kafka’s politics as “voicing” the resistance of the nameless, the underdogs, and the victims of political tyrannies (Bennett; Deleuze and Guattari; Hell), none comes close to Hannah Arendt’s reading of Kafka’s fables, characters, and literary devices as the “blueprints” of resistance and emancipation. Though Arendt’s interest in Kafka has been reasonably well-documented (Bernstein 46-60; Young-Ah Gottlieb 94-109; Scott 42-54; Boym 231-38), most commentaries on the subject simply reiterate what Arendt [End Page 53] has already said about Kafka in an essay which appeared in Partisan Review in 1944. By and large, the existing comparisons give an excessive credit to Kafka’s parable “He” (Feldman 67-95; Scheppele 1377-1407; Nowak 42-47; Terada 839-866; Bethânia 294-320) which Arendt discusses at length in her introduction Between Past and Future.2 Perhaps the only exceptions to this are Danoff (211-29) and Hansen (215-17), who make a strong case for political comparisons between Arendt and Kafka on the subject of totalitarian terror and violence. This essay aims to advance the scope of these comparisons by suggesting that Arendt’s interest in Kafka cannot be understood in terms of a single parable or an isolated thematic. Instead, Arendt’s entire body of political thought—from the anatomy of totalitarianism to her own hopes for revolution, freedom, and emancipation (“public life”)—bears the traces of Kafka’s fabulist imagination. In Arendt’s own words: Kafka’s technique could best be described as the construction of models. If a man wants to build a house or if he wants to know a house well enough to be able to foretell its stability, he will get a blueprint of the building or draw one upon himself […]. Kafka’s stories are such blueprints […] expose the naked structure of events. (Arendt, Essays 71) Following this guiding statement, Arendt’s further commentaries gesture towards Kafka’s “uncanny” ability in uncovering the nature and function of totalitarianism at large (Arendt, Essays 71-7). And it is entirely possible that Arendt’s reading of Kafka’s narrators as the fabricator mundi of resistance and revolution is inspired by her own...

Proximités des théories de l'image chez Maître Eckhart et Fichte

Résumé Cette étude cherche à établir entre Maître Eckhart et Fichte une commune nécessité structurelle d’un principe d’unité s’articulant à partir d’une commune réflexion sur la place accordée à l’être, qui engendre une proximité d’intérêt marquée pour une doctrine de l’image qui peut trouver une interprétation théologique. Ensuite, nous montrons que la Doctrine de la Science entretient avec la théologie négative un rapport privilégié quoique implicite en ce que l’Absolu se veut au fond insaisissable au concept et à la conscience. Cette contribution s’achève sur une tentative critique d’ouverture vers l’occasion d’un dialogue entre Maître Eckhart et Fichte en accentuant les subtiles différences qui les séparent notamment sur les figures du Soll , de la lumière et de la révélation.

Negative Theology and Nicholas of Cusa's Ideas of Conjectures(Section 3,Research Reports,THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEVENTY-FIRST ANNUAL CONVENTION)

Negative Theology and Nicholas of Cusa's Ideas of Conjectures(Section 3,Research Reports,THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEVENTY-FIRST ANNUAL CONVENTION)

Liberal Democracy, Negative Theory, and Circularity: Plato and John Rawls

In this paper, I would like to argue that the best kind of philosophical defense of democracy is one that is worked out within the framework of negative theory. In a post-metaphysical intellectual climate, negative theory enables us to theorize the best defense of democracy possible. I am using the phrase “negative theory” on analogy with the term negative theology. Just as negative theology argues that we can only indefinitely say what God is not but cannot pinpoint in a positive sense what He is, so, too, negative theory would advocate that we can only ceaselessly explore and highlight the…

Allegorie und Figuration. Figuraler Realismus bei Heinrich Seuse und Erich Auerbach

Abstract In this essay I discuss the ways in which a Christian spiritual tradition negotiates the challenges of negative theology and the impossibility to access divine truth through the use of images and allegories. This use of images, however, remains paradoxical since it negates the representational character of the – seemingly highly mimetic and concrete – images in order to produce a specific presence of the divine word below the horizon of meaning and semantics. “Figural realism” refers to this practice of figuration, as it can be found, among others, in the writings of Henry Suso.

Apophatic paths

Theology, particularly negative theology (which maintains that we can know only what God is not), has taken the lead historically in developing reflection on the limits of language and the beyond o...

OBSERVATIONS ON NEGATIVE THEOLOGY AND ETHICS IN EARLY CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

Negative theology comes in many varieties. In the beginning of the Christian tradition it was rarely applied systematically, if ever, but mostly in polemical contexts. The purpose was to assert a radical distinction between God and everything else. Things developed as Christian thinkers engaged with and used Hellenic culture and philosophy. The development of negative theology affected early Christians’ views on such issues as faith, knowledge and ethics. This article gives some examples of how negative theology developed, and how this affected theological ethics in early, primarily Greek, Christian philosophy, Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa in particular. It is argued that this kind of negative theology must lead to a conception of theological ethics as a theologia viatorum, that can be true but never fully adequate. This is not a reason for giving up theological ethics, but only an explanation for why it must continuously be developed anew.

A Mystic Impulse: From Apophatics to Decreation in Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart and Simone Weil

This article articulates a mystically motivated apophatic subjectivity that emerges from Simone Weil's life and thought. It does so genealogically, via excursions into Pseudo-Dionysius's and Meister Eckhart's negative theologies. These genealogical excursions expose Weil's resonances with and differences from these earlier thinkers of Christian apophasis. To highlight these differences, this article pays particular attention to two spiritual exercises, attention and decreation, which when taken together point out a tragic sense pulsing through and informing Weil's remarkable religious thought and praxis.

Apophasis as the common root of radically secular and radically orthodox theologies

On the one hand, we find secularized approaches to theology stemming from the Death of God movement of the 1960s, particularly as pursued by North American religious thinkers such as Thomas J.J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, Charles Winquist, Carl Raschke, Robert Scharlemann, and others, who stress that the possibilities for theological discourse are fundamentally altered by the new conditions of our contemporary world. Our world today, in their view, is constituted wholly on a plane of immanence, to such an extent that traditional appeals to faith in an other world become difficult to take as more than self-deception and willful blindness to our human reality. On the other hand, we hear the assertion of a new lease on life for theology and its traditional affirmation of divine transcendence over and against the putative arrogance of all claims of human autonomy. This claim is advanced particularly by theologians grouped under the banner of the so-called Radical Orthodoxy. Emanating from England, originally from the University of Cambridge in the 1980s and 1990s, this movement includes such theological thinkers as John Milbank, Graham Ward, Rowan Williams, and Catherine Pickstock. It has also explicitly styled itself “post-secularist.” I propose that both approaches are based on not very fully acknowledged and often explicitly denied premises in negative theology, which surprisingly emerges as key to fostering genuine possibilities for dialogue among apparently antagonistic theological approaches.

The discourse of power and knowledge in the social sciences and study of Muslim society

This article examines parallels between contemporary Western and Muslim thought. It proposes that there is congruence in Western and Muslim political thought on issues of soft foundationalism, negative theology, provisional truth claims and religious democracy to offset hegemonic tendencies. In the social sciences, specifically political science, the neutralization of ideology is also supported in response to concern about ideological encroachments into the discipline. In addition, the article discusses the residual issue of positivism and knowledge as social construction, i.e. the social sciences themselves as ideological with regard to the agnostic position of their methodology. This has implications for the study of religion, in this case Islam, and the field's problematic nomenclature, such as Islamism and, now, post-Islamism. This is explored through a discussion of the Arab Spring and Malaysian politics. The article concludes that similar concerns on the relationship between power and knowledge in contemporary Western and Muslim thought are beneficial to the social sciences and their study of the Muslim world's transformation as a social and political phenomenon.

MYSTERY?

MYSTERY?

Parallels between Contemporary Western and Islamic Thought on the Discourse of Power and Knowledge

This paper examines parallels between contemporary Western and Islamic thought. It will propose that there is congruence between Western and Muslim political thought processes on issues of soft-foundationalism, negative theology, provisional truth claims and religious democracy, in order to offset hegemonic tendencies. This will be illustrated by a concise juxtaposition of the ideas of Davutoglu, Winkel, Sardar, Tariq Ali, Derrida, Foucault, Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohammed Arkoun and others. In the social sciences, namely political science, the neutralization of ideology is also supported in relation to the concern of ideological encroachments into the discipline by William E. Connolly, that echoes Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. This paper concludes that similar concerns on the relationship between power and knowledge in contemporary Western and Islamic political thought processes are beneficial to the study of Islam and its transformation as a social and political phenomenon.