MAKING THE ARGUMENT FOR CHRISTIAN ORTHODOXY (2)
Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology [London: Routledge, 2002]. [Part two]
Por Manuel Sumares
II. Implications
Either theology/or nihilism
It does come down to an alternative between two traditions found in purely philosophical attempts to respond to the aporia that finitude implies and a theological tradition that we can characterise as orthodox (i.e., not heretical, wary of truncated responses that we might call “diabolical”) and thereby Trinitarian. The philosophical proposals to deal with finitude will, as we have seen above, will promote the kind of provisioning in which nothing is conceived as something, even to the extent that it encourages us to invest in the world that they give to us beforehand. It is, after all, around the solving of the aporia at the heart of the entire argument and where all the details are played out. We are also talking about the reflection that these alternatives might have on the human community. The post-apocalyptic state-of-affairs are precisely the situation in which philosophical systems undertaken either on the basis of an insufficient theology or an outright rejection of theology have left us. Intellectually we are badgered by dualisms without a resolution. Cunningham’s wager consists in overcoming dualism by a Trinitarian approach to reality and the relational network that operates at once vertically and horizontally. The bottom-line interrogation concerns the nature of the real and not merely the possible.
-- the onto-theological path
To the first philosophical tradition attempting to deal with the aporia of finitude Cunningham attributes the Heideggerian term, onto-theology. The fundamental characteristic of onto-theology is that it is a questioning enterprise in seeks to situate the questioner at his most radical point that must seriously encounter the “reality” of nothing in relation to something. We ask: “why is there something rather than nothing?” We could equally ask about the logical relationship that nothing might have in relation to something. We can see already how the logic of nihilism can begin to be outlined at this level. Eventually, in conformity with the notion of provision that, as Cunningham takes it, will gain predominance in the West, philosophers come to ask why nothing cannot have just as good a role as something in regard to ontology – and this will include theology as well, in so far as what nothing may wish to provide.
The onto-theological question is an ancient one but it is with Heidegger that it became part of a programme to dismantle the metaphysical edifice along with its dualisms. And, as it is well known, the programme includes more fundamentally the recuperating of the forgotten question of Being. The net result of dualistic thinking and the forgetting of radical questioning is an ontology that focused on beings present-at-hand and not Being in its difference. Simply put, Being is treated ontically, at-hand, and when raised to the category of metaphysics, God as Being is treated consequently in like fashion. Hence, we have an onto-theology that has ever sense captured the philosophical imagination, logically entailing the effective forgetfulness of Being. Cunningham presents the case with clarity:
Philosophy approaches Being in a presumptuous manner, in that it presumes to disable the asking of the ontological question. For the starting point of the metaphysical (ontotheological) question is ‘What’? This reduces Being to a matter of thinghood and so excludes any possibility of articulating a ‘why’ is there Being. This inauthentic mode of questioning (inauthentic for philosophy) only pretends to ask a question, in that its question is the answer (12).
The question itself creates the condition of the response. In other words, the subject as formulator of the question already prepares what the parameters of the answer will look like. The sphere of the question and the answer will appear locked-in on itself, and, to the extent that the question is metaphysical, we can anticipate how much institutional commitments enter the final reading of Being. Late in his book, Cunningham takes up Plato’s allegory of the cave and presents the onto-theologian, overly confident of his categories, as returning, now supposedly enlightened, to the cave he truly never left. If movement of arrival there is, it is the arrival of the cave itself that constitutes his habitat. That would also constitute one of Heidegger’s complaints in regard to the Christian appropriation of metaphysical reasoning, a complaint that Cunningham does not explicitly mention. But the author does emphasise two important factors contained in the problem.
Firstly, once Being as a being-at-hand is questioned it is reduced to a status of onticity. Its only expression of radicality is to pose the why of something rather than nothing. At the level of metaphysical interrogation, thoughtful questioning does not understand the nature of the questioning which is not based on the subject but upon at Dasein to which Being arrives continuously (behind dualisms) in Time: Being as advent, always ecstatically arriving. Secondly, onto-theology would univocally place God as one among the other beings and blinds us to ontological difference. Once again, the situating of Dasein in the place of the subject will alter our appreciation of the ontological bond: in lieu of present-at-hand we now have ready-at-hand entailing a rhythm of directionality and withdrawal, for the entities dealt with do not have stability in themselves and its nothingness becomes part of the ontological experience.
However, at the end of the day, Heidegger presents a flattened world of events that seem to have no density beyond the beings handed down in time for which Dasein assumes with care the responsibility and reads in them his possibilities. In effect, what Heidegger’s ontological questioning – and what corroborates Cunningham’s thesis – produces is a picture of the possible preceding actuality, or is-ness. In other words it provides possibilities, the actuality of which is withdrawn as thinking approaches. Something is “really” nothing, so the questioning after being has to be done and redone ad infinitum. The attempt to say something about being is tantamount to saying something about nothing. In consequence, a fundamental dualism remains intact, to wit, that which places Being over against the background of Nothing. Thus, Heidegger never left the cave.
--the meontotheological path
The second tradition trapped in the aporetic bind concerning the significance of thought is what Cunningham dubs “meontotheology,” an enlargement of “meontology” associated with Plotinus and at the root of nihilism’s peculiar logic. “Meontology is evident in the work of Plotinus when he places the One beyond being, which means that being is grounded in non-being” (13). As Cunningham notes, and as we have seen, the fate of Heidegger’s thought had something of this, but the contemporary philosophers of difference, or “nothing,” would be particularly held captive by this mode of thought that, in the tradition that Plotinus established, became fundamentally monistic: nothing as something becomes everything. Cunningham will trace the effects through the Middle Ages and well into contemporary times, culminating with a consideration of how it appears in Derrida, i.e., Derrida’s “Spinozistic Plotinianism.” In anticipation of theo-ontological response to nihilism, let us take a look into how it is that meontotheology applies to Derrida’s thinking. It is a curiosity that so much of Derrida’s own expression is suggestive of the logic of nihilism.
In fact, the famous Derridean dictum that there is nothing outside the text carries with it meontological tone: all the linguistic/ textual activity that we encounter gravitates towards a limit beyond which there is nothing; the being of language hangs on nothing, indeed tends towards nothing as a kind of transcendent irreducible to language. But this transcendent, like Plotinus’s One, is non-being, language’s limit. Yet, Derrida’s problem is that language wishes to generate a Transcendent: it comes from within tending to the outside that is nothing.
Some remarkable consequences are derived from this dilemma, consequences that come truly to the surface in Derrida’s thinking. To begin with, language which pursues the nothing outside of itself, providing realities that are but metaphorical ruses leading us to posit metaphysical substrates beneath the swirl of signs, is itself nothing without the outside – which is nothing. The inside of language and the nothing outside coincide. (We can anticipate that the exit from this conundrum lies in the chance that the outside is also language: language would be properly in pursuit of a language.) Nevertheless, Derrida’s posture is one that is beyond language, for his regard and his writing, or voice, represent a without, a beyond. The Plotininan thesis is exemplified: “Language is … post-linguistic. But so also is Derrida. For Derrida comprehends language. In so doing Derrida is beyond language”(14). He actually provides a foundational circumscription by locating and demarcating the in and outside of language. But language’s attempt to be is always less than non-being, as in the One and is contained within it. The concept of différance works precisely in that sense: providing nothing as something, it underscores just why the question of being cannot be first and that the myth of original presence is but a persistent temptation. “We know that, for Derrida, the trace is nothing and this trace, according to Plotinus, is the trace of the One which is itself otherwise than Being and therefore nothing. This double bind resides within différance as ‘primordial non-self-presence’ ” (15).
Language yearns for reality but cannot have it. That is the ultimate drama of the human self who is caught in the procession of time and space (measuring itself by endless arrival of that which proceeds), both reflected in the différance. Derrida’s meontheology offers a metaphysics (Text/ Nothing) that eludes the onto-theological insistence that something must precede nothing and that further supplementation is not necessary. But his meontotheology takes him beyond the obligation to say something. “The One beyond Being is but one difference, one question asked an infinity of times: Derrida names it différance; ‘Primordial non-self-presence.’ Such monism results in the elimination of every particular, as there is a war of ‘all against all’ ” (16). In reference to Plato’s cave, Cunningham has the meontotheologian, like Derrida, is the one who travels beyond the cave and to be otherwise than being: he journeys without looking back into sphere of difference which is an a-theological indifference.
It remains significant that the logic of nihilism is a diminished mirror of a metaphysics that is realist and theist. Milbank’s early thesis places the matter against the background of power: the will-to-power/ the earthly city and charity/ the City of God. The implication is that the issue is the kind of human community that may arise. As Plantinga puts it, a struggle goes on for the human soul. On the side of theism, the effort is to recuperate the status of a viable intellectual possibility, to wit, a belief that has intellectual warrant. In this spirit, Cunningham seeks to present a theological challenge to the philosophical questioning which seems destined to remain trapped in its aporias, i.e., dualisms. Thought and knowledge are always pertinent but it is there realisation and not their frustration that needs to be encouraged in a wider and nuanced discourse.
-- thinking theologically, i.e., analogically
The metaphysical question for contemporary times has to be reformulated: more fundamentally than the forgetfulness of being is the forgetfulness of gift, or the donation of being. The reference to donation might be anticipated in the terms used in the context of Derrida’s thinking: textual language in search of a language outside of itself, i.e., human words in connexion with the Transcendent Word which precedes and donates, communicates being as the Verbum. In such a circumstance, the knowledge expressed in language is participatory; it does not imply the aporia in which thinking turns around in a vacuum. The most demanding thinking of thought is the thinking of the Thought that has made it possible to think thoughts and provide real knowledge. In Christian theology, ontology is Trinitarian: it speaks of difference as difference, i.e., as made up of real ontological difference that guarantees analogical participation at various levels of knowledge. Without Trinitarian ontology, nihilism would be ineluctable. Since Cunningham states his problem as one of thinking and knowledge, it is to this we must focus upon in concluding.
The counter-nihilist thinking is largely inspired in Thomist metaphysics that places all beings in relation to its proper operations, or acts, or capacity to communicate itself. It is in correlation that they fulfil their operations, bringing their potential into act, that they are knowable in their realised form (or degree to which they are realised). In regard to creation, that which is has its source in God’s thoughtful creativity. God’s thoughts, the substantial forms conceived by Him, remain beyond our comprehension. As human creatures we advance via the accidents of things, of beings, known to us: they are others to us, but yet related to the extent that we actually can become that other. But knowing is not comprehending, i.e., not assimilation of its substantial form, its essential ground, which is in God. Yet we become the other in knowing it (17).
Now, what we know proceeds from a creator God who is triune: the procession does not mean that the creating as such is time-bound; that would involve change, a bringing into being, or transformation; the procession is rather eternal. Above all, creation is a certain relationship and difference arises prior to change per se, the change that operates within a framework of change (that which is not God, but not the result of change; God posits genuine difference outside of Himself), for it comes from a unity, a One which is already different: the Father is different from the Son and the Holy Spirit proceeds (a gift) from this difference. Creation results from this difference:
1. The Son as the Father’s difference brings forth creation,
2. Creation is for the Word, and through the Word;
3. Creation is within the difference of this love, i.e., the loving difference of the Trinity.
4. Creation arises from the intentional unity of the divine difference.
In knowing, we know the other in becoming the other, as God analogously creates the other by knowing it through divine essence. The horizontal, or immanent, knowing of human creatures meets the vertical, or Transcendent, procession of God’s knowing and creating through the Word.
The strict correlation between the articulation of one’s identity and relating oneself with an other that is not one’s essence, or identity. To begin with, one is an other (aliquid), constituting the negative pole of the relationship. But one has a positive pole, res, and not an aliquid; it is itself. Yet, the each one is divided within itself to the extent that there is a real distinction between its essence and existence, or realization as a being. Divided aporetically in regard to the Transcendent, it is directed toward the other, who also has a aporetic subsistence.
Here is an important distinction that Thomas Aquinas borrowed from Augustine, one that will help explain this (18).
1. veritas rei: the truth of the thing as it resides in the Word, or morning knowledge: the originary difference.
2. veritas praedictionis: the predictional truth of a being lying within the ontic logics of signification, or evening knowledge.
But the Word became flesh, offering His body. So,
1. through the Word: one becomes one with the Word in sharing this unity with an-other.
2. the role of the Holy Spirit: the bringing of horizontal causality and mutual constitution within vertical determination.
a. the Holy Spirit takes us within the Trinity by teaching the unity of the Word.
b. predictional order thus not absolutely distinct from the truth of the thing.
c. creation in its open difference actually occurs within the movement of the divine difference.
Each essence finds itself within the open finality of the Word as testified to by the Holy Spirit. The becoming more who were are hinges on realisation within the body of the Word. In the context of having at once a negative pole and a positive pole, dualism is avoided in its dynamics – the same can be said of monism. And the restorative programme of orthodoxy is given its theo-ontological expression: analogical thinking leaves nothing identifiable with humanity in its ontic mode without the grace of the Trinitarian operations. In so doing, in tracing the emergence of nihilism at the centre of philosophical culture, he proposes consistence rather than vacuity for all with which we can identify as belonging to the human condition. “Consistence,” i.e., realising, is the by-word. It was for Blondel and the generations of Catholic thought that received its influence. This would include figures like de Lubac (as well as Teilhard) and, by complicity, the underlying theme associated with Radical Orthodoxy, to which Cunningham adheres. As such, it is well seen as having not simply begun with Nietzsche but having deeper roots in the increasingly dominant reaction to decadent forms of Catholicism that Nietzsche received and advanced on his own account. But it is yet better seen as a permanent temptation for the human spirit, perhaps even the so-called original one.
Notas:
12 Cunningham, p. 134.
13 Cunningham, p. xiii.
14 Cunningham, p. 156.
15 Cunningham, p. 159.
16 Cunningham, p. 162.
17 See, Cunningham, pp. 181-88.
18 See, Cunningham, p. 226.