Rosenzweig, William Franke, and the Secular Value of the Apophatic

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A large part of my work is an attempt to present how certain aspects of religious thinking have value beyond the religious sphere. In particular apophatic theology, I believe, may have profound meaning when interpreted in a secular manner; the apophatic, really, just amounts to an acknowledgment of the limits of rational knowledge, the acceptance of the unknowable and the mysterious, and the profound value and meaning, the positivity, that this understanding can bring to our experience of life. In pursuit of the apophatic I have found the writing of William Franke to be wonderfully enlightening. Below is an excerpt from his work On What Cannot Be Said, from a chapter on the work of Franz Rosenzweig. I have taken the liberty in this excerpt to replace the word “God” with the more general word “Life” in order to present how Rosenzweig’s writing, as with so many apophatic writers, easily transcends religiosity.

“In Part I of the Star, Rosenzweig begins from the fact that we know nothing of [Life], just as we know nothing of the world and nothing of man. To know anything implies grasping it in its totality, and this is impossible. But precisely this nothing of our knowledge is an extremely positive existential fact; it defines our whole way of being and is expressed in everything we experience. The nothing of our knowledge is itself an inexhaustibly rich phenomenon: our knowledge, by telling us nothing, tells the most essential thing about [Life], namely, [its] transcendence of our faculties and therefore of our discourse. [Life] is thus ‘metaphysical,’ a positive fact that we cannot comprehend or properly state. Similarly, the World and Man in their pure facticity transcend rational comprehension. The created world has a positivity and an order that we experience but do not comprehend; we do not see its ground any more than we see the act of Creation. Its Logos transcends knowledge; it is ‘metalogical.’ So also, man in his singular individuality is ‘metalogical’: he is governed by a vital principle- his own individual character- that escapes rational calculation.”

Pensées II

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If the subject is one that perceives and interprets the world, this implies distortion- distortion through language.

Apropos Rilke: A god who speaks is almost certainly not a god. Language is all-too-human.

Apropos “happiness experts”: Should happiness be the goal, or is that simply shallow? Perhaps melancholy leads to a deeper appreciation of life.

A rejection of rationalism is an embrace of life. And vice versa.

We always think we must deliver the “final word.” However, apropos Meschonnic, there is no final word, only the flow and movement of discourse, changing us, changing with us.

Everything seems to get exaggerated in our society. This is, I think, to a large degree the result of specialization. Specialization, too much focus on one thing, leads to a lack of balance, and of course one wants one’s field to be important, as important as possible.

My work: using ideas to escape from ideas.

My work: To take religious ideas, or really the religious feeling, and transform it into something intellectual. Of course this requires, primarily, negation. This is fairly easy, as the intellectual always negates itself.

Sayable truth is certainly individual and historical, but… unsayable truth?

Pensées

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It seems that what one learns, at least in my case, is determined by what one values, what one considers worth knowing: and what is worth knowing, for me, is that which leads us back to reality, as opposed to the mass of knowledge that is there simply because it is useful, but comes at the price of leading us farther and farther away from reality. This is why I favor the anti-philosophers, the skeptics.

As soon as one expresses something definite one creates its counterargument. This is the nature of finite human expression.

Today’s skeptics are Cartesians who forgot that Descartes needed God.

William Franke and The Unsayable

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This rather astonishing and beautiful passage is from William Franke’s On What Cannot Be Said. I believe Franke is one of the most poetic academic philosophers writing today, and one of the very few who has not given up on Meaning.

“…human finitude transforms all things after its own image in an infinite process of metamorphosis. In our very evanescence is lodged our cosmic task: by saying the things that are and that vanish, we give them the present-perfect status of eternally having been, once, once and no more, never again, yet irrevocably having been.”

Broadside For Already Sinking Ships

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I am honored to announce that “Broadside For Already Sinking Ships,” a work of lyrical philosophy, has been published by EgoPhobia, a Romanian journal of literature and philosophy.

“Broadside For Already Sinking Ships” is a sort of philosophy/literature hybrid, written in the Russian Slavophile spirit. It aims to attack all rational dogmas, and the very essence of Western certainty, including the obsession with political identities, in favor of an “apotheosis through groundless,” as Lev Shestov wonderfully put it. The thinking of Western, educated people has become dogmatic, radically conformist, and hence ossified. This work aims to smash it. Call it philosophizing with a hammer.

You can read it here https://egophobia.ro/?p=16095

Gotta Get Rhuthmos

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I’ve been reading about a maverick linguist, Meschonnic, who opposed semiotics (which I loathe) and insisted on viewing language as poetics, in particular insisting that rhythm is the most essential aspect of language. Reading further, I discovered that his conception of rhythm is pre-Platonic and more closely aligned with Heraclitus’ way of thinking. I then did a Google AI search, and what came up was damn interesting.

In short, yet another reason to despise Plato’s influence: he even ruined rhythm. What a damn honkey. 

Google AI: Pre-Platonic concept of rhythm: The pre-Platonic concept of rhuthmós (rhythm) referred to a temporary, changeable form of something in movement (from the verb rhein, meaning ‘to flow’), rather than a fixed, measurable pattern. It was an empirical and materialistic concept, as opposed to the abstract, mathematical definition later introduced by Plato.

Key aspects of the pre-Platonic concept:

  • Manière de fluer (Manner of flowing): French linguist Émile Benveniste showed that rhuthmós in ancient Greece meant the “form of the moving” or a “particular way of flowing”. It described how something in flux presented itself to an observer at a given moment.
  • Changeable and Impermanent: The form described was not fixed or eternal, but a transient “disposition” always subject to change.
  • Materialistic: Philosophers like Democritus and Leucippus used rhuthmós to describe the shape or structure of atomic compounds, which were temporary arrangements of atoms in the void. The world was seen as a flow of matter, and rhythm was the instantaneous schema (shape/structure) of these ever-changing forms.
  • Phenomenal Fitness: The term eurhythmy (good rhythm) was used by figures like Socrates (as recalled by Xenophon) in a practical sense, referring to the appropriate or good shape of an object in relation to its user (e.g., a shield that fit a specific warrior well), not an absolute or ideal beauty.
  • Opposition to Platonic Ideals: Plato later reversed this meaning, defining rhythm as “order in movement” and associating it with abstract, numerical, and fixed Forms, which then largely dominated Western thought. Plato was suspicious of the wild, “demonic” power of unbridled pre-Platonic rhythms, which he associated with frenzy and loss of rationality, preferring instead measured rhythms subject to rational discourse (logos).

Absolute Paradox

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A friend of mine and I, in our early 20s, were obsessed with the idea of the paradox. Reading this recently from Kierkegaard makes me think we were indeed on to something:

Kierkegaard, The Absolute Paradox: “However, one should not think slightingly of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. … The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think. This passion is at bottom present in all thinking.”

Metaphysics and Insanity

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A lovely apophatic musing by Fernando Pessoa:

“Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood.”

Fernando Pessoa

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A lovely apophatic rumination from Fernando Pessoa:

“Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood.”