Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy

Nahum Brown, J. Aaron Simmons, Nahum Brown, J. Aaron Simmons

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319658995
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319659008
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

Considers the relevance of negative theology and apophatic thinking in today's society

Offers insights that are relevant for continental philosophy, theology, comparative literature, metaphysics, and intercultural philosophy

Provides historical contextualization of thinking from Ancient Platonic and Neo-Platonic debates to the 19th century

© The Author(s) 2017

Nahum Brown and J. Aaron Simmons (eds.)Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65900-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Old Questions and New Frontiers in the Philosophy of Religion

J. Aaron Simmons¹

(1)

Furman University, Greenville, SC, USA

J. Aaron Simmons

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

One way to tell that a discourse is facing serious uncertainty (and potential internal instability) is from the increasing frequency of scholars who ask about its “future.” Over the past decade or so, there has been a burgeoning literature in the field that attempts to explore possible futures for the philosophy of religion. Volumes have appeared with titles such as The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion, ¹ Renewing Philosophy of Religion, ² Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology, ³ and Rethinking Philosophy of Religion, ⁴ and other scholars have written books that are announced as “envisioning a future for the philosophy of religion,” ⁵ providing “a route for philosophy of religion,” ⁶ and even offering a “manifesto” for the discipline as a whole. ⁷

Varied interpretations could be offered for this abiding concern with the future of philosophy of religion. On the one hand, the field has grown substantively in the second half of the twentieth century, especially in the wake of serious challenges to positivism and strong foundationalism, and so perhaps the concerns about envisioning futures reflect the decided flourishing of philosophy of religion itself. Indeed, that an area of inquiry can have so many different possible futures seems to be a good reason to view it as healthy due to both the number of participants and also the range of debates occurring within it. As evidence of this increasing disciplinary well-being, consider that philosophy of religion is no longer restricted to a narrow conception, but has flowered enough to yield entire subfields focused on issues in feminism, cognitive science, queer theory, post-structuralism, phenomenology, existentialism, epistemology, linguistics, and race theory. Yet, with such expansion comes new challenges. Although speaking specifically of Christian philosophy of religion, perhaps we could expand Alvin Plantinga’s claim that “a danger we now face, perhaps, is triumphalism,” ⁸ to apply to philosophy of religion more generally.

Given this picture of the current state of affairs, philosophy of religion would seem to be a discourse no longer fighting for legitimacy (as was the case in the mid-twentieth century), nor simply on the ascendency (as was the case in the analytic tradition in light of the significant influence of thinkers such as Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and William Alston, and in the continental tradition in light of new phenomenology and particular threads of critical theory), but having arrived in power and now facing the task of how to handle the weight of the crown, as it were. ⁹ Envisioning possible futures is one way of recognizing that the responsibility is now on one’s own shoulders to move forward in particular ways, rather than a matter of struggling to be able to move forward at all. So, maybe all the “future-talk” is reflective of a truly promising present for philosophy of religion.

On the other hand, it could be alternatively argued that one only really gets concerned about the future when the present is in some sort of turmoil. For many folks, it takes a crisis to motivate the self-critique required to realize that one’s house is not entirely in order. So, alongside the varied considerations of the “future” of philosophy of religion, there have also emerged a number of scholars either declaring or worrying about the “end” of philosophy of religion. Perhaps reflecting the underbelly of the diversity of methodologies, participants, and debates in the current literature, the scholars attending to the possible terminus of the discourse present neither a unified diagnosis nor a coherent prescription for returning to health. For example, in The End of Philosophy of Religion, Nick Trakakis suggests that philosophers should move away from the objectivizing tendencies of much of analytic philosophy and begin to embrace the more poetic and existential aspects of continental philosophy. ¹⁰ Alternatively, in The Ends of Philosophy of Religion, Timothy Knepper argues for nearly exactly the opposite conclusion. For Knepper, philosophers should become more objective in their attention to the world’s religious traditions in order to have more in common with such areas as sociology of religion, anthropology of religion, and comparative religious studies. ¹¹ Additionally, while many scholars are encouraging a more decided “theological turn” in philosophy of religion (in both the analytic and continental traditions), others promote the opposite outcome by decrying the “theologization” of philosophy of religion in a variety of directions. ¹²

Importantly, then, envisioning futures is not unconnected from theorizing the very possibility of having a future at all. As Aristotle understood so well, “ends” can speak either to the termination of a discourse (terminus) or to its ultimate goal (telos). When it comes to the philosophy of religion, we should not just inquire into what future is worth pursuing, but instead ask a more basic question, as Wesley J. Wildman does: “Is there a future [at all] for philosophy of religion?” ¹³ How we answer this question is important not only for the field of philosophy of religion, but also for the broader questions of how philosophy and theology stand in relation to each other, whether “religion” names an appropriate object of academic study, and how the academy bears the traces of the ideological forces of secularization, globalization, modernization, and technologization that combine to create the cross-cultural dynamics in which philosophy of religion occurs as not only a professional discourse but also a historical community of inquirers.

When faced with an existential concern about the future of this discourse, rather than merely a conceptual or logistic concern about how its future will unfold, we are confronted by the realization that the instability of the discourse itself presents problems regarding what it is that one takes to count as “philosophy of religion” in the first place. It very well might be that there are a variety of philosophies of religions and so asking into the very possibility of the future of philosophy of religion requires taking deliberative stands about either what should be viewed as uniting these different threads as a particular discourse, or why asking about the future of a singular discourse in this direction is already a misguided strategy. Debate here is reasonable and important, but there is value in trying to figure out what could, and perhaps ought to, underwrite all the different philosophies of religion in ways that would allow for different approaches, methodologies, and questions all to be taken as legitimate attempts toward understanding the truth within the same field. With this in mind, irrespective of how one articulates the shared discursive identity across such practical differences, it is crucial to confront overriding issues in the field that contribute to the difficulty of finding common ground.

There are a variety of places one could turn for critical accounts of the state of philosophy of religion. Perhaps the most serious set of objections comes from Kevin Schilbrack, who rightly worries about the cognitivism (i.e., it is too focused on belief, to the exclusion of a concern for practice and ritual), the narrowness (i.e., it is too focused on Christianity, to the exclusion of other global religious traditions), and the insularity (i.e., it is too focused on disciplinary hegemony, to the exclusion of collaborative engagement with other disciplines) of philosophy of religion (in all its forms). ¹⁴ In response to these worries, the present volume engages different cultural and religious traditions (see especially the chapters by Sai Bhatawadekar, David Chai, William Franke, and Bruno Béu) and intentionally thinks across the traditional disciplinary boundaries of philosophy, literature, poetry, and theology (see especially the chapters in Part III). Most importantly, however, through an engagement with the complex history of negative/mystical/apophatic traditions of thought and practice, all of the chapters in this volume attempt, in various way, to interrogate the different valences in which cognitivism might show up in traditional philosophy of religion. In this way, the contributors to this volume, though representing a host of views that are often at odds with each other in productive ways, are all committed to exploring new frontiers for philosophy of religion by asking a couple very old questions:

• How can we speak of that which seems to lie beyond all language?
• How can we think about that which eschews any claim we might make regarding conceptual adequacy?

These questions bear directly on Wildman’s own question regarding the very possibility of a future for philosophy of religion because if it turns out that what has been called “religion” is, in one way or another, expressive of that which would resist expression, then perhaps philosophy is simply the wrong disciplinary home for inquiry regarding it. However one comes down on this point, it is important that philosophers be more attentive to, and draw much more deeply on, the work occurring in the academic study of religion. Philosophers would benefit greatly from more engagement with the critical theory of religion regarding what the category of “religion” even attempts to name in the first place, and what work it does within our scholarly discourse as a result. Such category questions are often overlooked in traditional philosophy of religion, but as Schilbrack rightly realizes, unless we can first answer the question “What isn’t Religion?” then it doesn’t seem like we could ever begin to study something called “religion” as a discrete object/subject of academic focus. ¹⁵ Importantly, Schilbrack’s point about the necessity of definition can be applied to philosophy of religion itself. Although philosophy can take on a variety of forms and styles—consider the significant difference between thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard and Martha Nussbaum, for example,—there must be some historical commitment within the community of scholars who identify as “philosophers” in order that “doing philosophy” be a practice in which one can engage or not engage. If “philosophy” is allowed to name (and thereby capture) pretty much anything, and “philosophy of religion” is conceived so broadly that any human discussion of questions of ultimate meaning, say, counts within its domain, then it seems that nothing would be philosophy of religion because nearly everything already is.

As important as the meta-philosophical debates in this direction are, however, this volume is not a direct contributor to them, but instead implicitly explores the inheritance of negative/mystical/apophatic cultural traditions that force us to confront not only the limits of language and thought, but also the edges of our professional practice as philosophers of religion. In other words, the central concern, here, is not “what is philosophy of religion?” but instead, “how can philosophers of religion continue to do philosophy of religion in light of negative theology?” ¹⁶ Nonetheless, these two questions are not unconnected. The possible ramifications of drawing more deeply on apophatic resources involve transforming the field in ways that are hardly predicable from where we currently find ourselves.

Accordingly, if the philosophy of religion is going to be able to overcome the problems highlighted by Schilbrack, then we all (whether continental or analytic, resistant to theology or desiring more confessional approaches, committed to strictly propositional expression or open to poetics as legitimately philosophical, etc.) must find ways to overcome an apparent dichotomy that has for too long characterized much of the scholarship in our field. Simply put, and with many notable exceptions, the vast majority of philosophers of religion over the past few decades have seemed either to give in to the temptation of overstating the linguistic and conceptual determinacy of God/the divine/the transcendent and the ability of human knowers to understand this determinacy as compatible with propositionally formulated, justified beliefs that would lead to secure knowledge (hence the rampant cognitivism in the field), or to give into the temptation of overstating the absolute indeterminacy of God/the divine/the transcendent to such a degree that it seems that all knowledge is impossible. Faced with these alternatives, the difference could hardly be starker between those seeking to know things “as God does,” say, and those who recommend the task of what has traditionally been termed “unknowing.” For examples of the first sort of commitment, one might turn to the claims of some analytic theologians who call for the minimization of metaphorical flourish in philosophical discourse. For examples of the second sort, one might turn to the work of philosophers advocating “theo-poetics.” Yet, in either direction, similar epistemic (and potentially theological) problems confront us: How would we ever get outside of our own social, historical, linguistic, conceptual, and embodied frameworks to claim such seeming clarity about what God/the divine/the transcendent ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Old Questions and New Frontiers in the Philosophy of Religion
• 1. A Philosophy of the Unsayable: Interpretations and Consequences
• 2. Thinking the Apophatic: Hegel and Postmodernity
• 3. The Vanishing Point of the Apophatic in Poetry and Literature
• Backmatter