Introduction

The expression apophatic philosophy, which is central to the following case study of a contemporary Slovenian philosopher (how nice it is to read philosophy in one’s mother tongue!), is no novelty in the field of the post-modern critique of metaphysics. It should be taken as the faithful successor to the (still ongoing) turn that took place in French phenomenology and is best expressed in the books Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence by Emmanuel Levinas and God without Being by Jean Luc Marion.¹ The best-known spokesman for the apophatic character of philosophical thought in general is the American philosopher William Franke. In his work A Philosophy of the Unsayable from 2014, he set himself the task of posing apophatic thought as the answer to certain key questions in the contemporary philosophy of religion.² He sought the answer in at the intersections between philosophy, literature and theology, based on classical texts that still speak to contemporary theoretical quandaries concerning attempts to articulate the incomprehensible mysteries of existence. Based on a reading of the apophatic tradition that he conceptualizes as a philosophia perennis, Franke develops an original interpretation which has lately become the center of great interest and further interpretation.³ This means, in fact, that apophatic philosophy is not an obscurum in modern philosophy of religion. But this would be a flawed apology for the title of my paper, as apophatic philosophy actually has traditional roots.

This is why Gorazd Kocijančič (1964), the Slovene philosopher, poet, translator and editor whose system of philosophy will be sketched in the following, rightly warns in the first part of his philosophical trilogy Razbitje [Being broken apart] that there has been nothing to add to apophatic thought since the days of Plotin and Dionysius the Areopagite and that one only has to strive to grasp its meaning – which clearly is not easy.⁴ It is the razbijanje [breaking apart] of the conditions for the mysteriousness of existence, torn between human and divine reality. “Being broken apart, then, on the one hand signifies an extreme ‘anthropocentrism’ beside which the relativist tradition from Protagoras to Nietzsche appears moderate and circumspect, and on the other, an unconditional ‘theocentrism’, a losing oneself in the Unknowable, an awareness that the only serious topic of philosophical thought is the Absolute that precedes thought and being.”⁵ It is thus fitting that the foreword to the last part of the trilogy, O nekaterih drugih [On some others], characterizes the philosophy of Kocijančič’s essays as profoundly rooted in theanthropological thought, which scrutinizes the experience of one’s own faith through the lens of radical intellectual reflection.⁶ Opposed to this understanding of philosophy we find the fundamental assumption of a modernity that only appears to be non-religious when it proclaims its apostasy from faith as traditionally understood. In the second part of the trilogy, Erotika, politika itn. [Eroticism, politics etc.], Kocijančič claims that this is an even more dangerous form of faith, “[…] namely a religion unaware of itself, a visceral conviction of ontological truth that fails to reflect how its own investment, will and devotion transcend thought.”⁷ At issue, then, is the situation in a fanatically religious age of materialism, hedonism, naturalism and, ultimately, nihilism, all of which forget the obvious truth that we humans are after all metaphysical selfhoods. Unlike traditional ontology – and here we enter into Kocijančič’s system itself (or the introduction to it, as he stresses himself) – this core of every human being, classically known as the soul, is nothing substantial, nothing like a thing, nothing reified or objectified.⁸ Kocijančič calls this core the hypostasis,⁹ and it forms the fundamental category of his philosophical system.

Hypostatic phenomenology

Despite the title of the first volume, Kocijančič’s philosophy is not an endless deconstruction and breaking apart, as it is not an end in itself. The hypostasis itself is a good example. It is the beginning of everything, but only so that we might start at the only place that makes sense, with our own being. Then, this initial concept gradually fades away, yielding the stage to what precedes the hypostasis.¹⁰ In the wake of the modern critique of metaphysics, this means that apophatic thought is truly free of presuppositions, no matter how sophisticated their concealment behind the rhetorical labels of pure thought. With reference to the second naïveté of Ricoeur, Kocijančič describes his approach as follows: “The soul that emerges before us after recovering from the critique of metaphysics is identical with the soul spoken of in Tradition, except that it has become immune to naturalistic, scientistic, nihilistic, atheistic doubts – not because it has driven them out as a menace, but because it has let them inside itself and unmasked them in their argumentative impotence and their existential untruth.”¹¹ To this end, Kocijančič’s essays first offer an ontological foundation in hypostasiology, which is immediately negated in ethical reflection, which is about the hypostasis becoming lost in the hypostasis of the other (i.e., the synhypostasis). Then follow deconstructions of history, science, the sense of hermeneutics, the nature of poetry, the nature of love, the sense of politics and the conception of infinity, as well as – in the last volume – relations with animals and with our dreaming selves, concluding with in reflections on nothingness. But let us return to the beginning, to the hypostasis and its phenomenological status, with which Kocijančič rethinks the sources of being.

Kocijančič seeks to find a scene for his ontology in what he holds to be the overlooked immediacy of one’s own being. Here, he seeks to bring together the nuances of henological reduction (i.e. understanding being based on its grounding in the One) as well as of a radicalized metaphysics of subjectivity that finds its expression in phenomenological insights. The question of being is always my own and requires my experience. In many philosophical systems, being as something universal and abstract eludes the individual, or if it does touch me, this is only on the level of an equally abstract self that is equal for all. But in reality being, which requires my experience, becomes an “is” or an “am”, which indicates that being concerns me in my personal being. What is at stake is not only depriving being of existence, which forms the heart of post-modern thought, but depriving existence of being as being. Here we find a turn towards being, implied in the “am” as hypostasis. This hypostatic turn, as Kocijančič calls it, is the truth of ontological difference, which, unlike the classical couple existing–being, is now constituted between the hypostasis and the existent as an existent that is en-hypostasized.¹² To arrive at this insight, a phenomenological analysis of death must first be undertaken. “In the death or birth of the other, which I try – feebly and without the possibility of logos – to understand as my own, there enters the horizon of my thought precisely that point where the question of this arché and télos of being gains its meaning and foundation.”¹³ Kocijančič here recognizes more than just a call to change the understanding of being in ordinary consciousness and upgrade it; we are also required to reverse it. With reference to the above-mentioned phenomenologists Levinas and Marion, it is not here a question of thinking “the other of being” or “the one without being”, but conceiving the radical limit of being and its grounding. At stake is a meta-ontology of radically conceived subjectivity.¹⁴ To use the well-known definition of Dasein in Being and Time, the hypostasis does not only have its very being as an issue; as Kocijančič stresses for clarity, the hypostasis is its very being. The hypostatic nature of being has far-reaching consequences for all of ontology.

Kocijančič is aware that his system introduces a complete break with traditional and post-modern ontology. To him, namely, being is multiple and at the same time also always one and singular. This requires a few basic explanations to avoid confusion. Multiplicity does not imply a perspectivism that advocates different subjective manifestations of being in the singular. At the same time, it is not about a new ontology of multiplicity that would reintroduce a unitary logos. As stated above, it is the meta-ontological level that is at stake. This idea may be made clearer by the following quotation, which explains the notion mentioned above in connection with ontological difference – en-hypostatization – may serve to make this idea clearer: “The ‘is’ that I ‘am’ is the only framework within which anything can appear as existent. And without which nothing can appear.”¹⁵ What is taking place here is the original ontological gesture, which is about the transfer of the other of being into being itself. From this follows a truly far-reaching consequence concerning freedom, which is only conceivable in apophatic terms. But what is this freedom actually like? Kocijančič calls it the reacting freedom of being. It is true that, in the absolute sense, we are given to each other and – in accordance with hypostatic phenomenology – into our very selves, since being flows through me. Thus philosophy has to trace the mystery that precedes being. “The conceptualization of ‘what truly is’ is but the tracing and description of my original ontological act.”¹⁶ If there is no such tracing, if being frees itself from the hypostatic turn and thought is no longer a hypostatic trace, we end up with the logic that locks every other existent and its thought into the uniform whole of the phenomenology of spirit. This is why it is so very important to trace being, as something ever singular and at the same time multiple, with thought that does not abstract, but allows for the coincidence of opposites. Thus we arrive at the field of apophasis.

The phenomenology of apophasis

Key to apophatic thought is the rejection of the world as a reality given beforehand. Therefore, it strives for a world that is open to a pre- and supramundane dimension. This is the legacy of the Platonic and especially the Neo-Platonic vision, which comes with a critique and a renewal of our post-modern culture as well. The missing link that has often been overlooked is the Neo-Platonic theory of the infinite’s revelation in the finite, which was key to the monotheistic and especially the Christian adaptation of Platonism. Franke calls this to our attention when he writes: “It was especially God’s transcendence of all discourses, as described by Plotinus and his followers, eminently Proclus, that enabled the graft of Greek philosophy onto Christian theology.”¹⁷ In his essay on infinity Kocijančič, who has among other things translated Proclus’s Elements of Theology into Slovene,¹⁸ also devotes an annex to the theological explications of his philosophical reflection, and this becomes a constant feature of the last part of the trilogy.

At the beginning, he states that the present crisis of theology might be connected with its failure to take full cognizance of the implications of the concept of infinity. But the idea of infinity is first of all apophatic. “The experience of infinity is not a matter of eros toward anything, but a matter of the erotic renunciation of every desire that can receive the totality. Of devotion. Of pístis.”¹⁹ It should be explained that Kocijančič understands the meaning of eros, and hence of the erotic, as a para-logical tie to the other that is profoundly ethical.²⁰ It should also be explained that the ethos, in this philosophical system, symbolizes the suspension of the self in wide openness toward the other. In this, it differs essentially from the hypostasis, which is exclusive. The one and only being unfetters itself from the one and only other being (the synhypostasis) with a sympathetic, kind, loving investment that requires a break with my own basic ontological structure.²¹ This in turns requires an anticipation of the religio-mystical structure of reality, that is, faith (pístis). Now we can return to the reflection on infinity. As in the ethical conception, the hypostasis also loses itself in the thought of the Infinite. Kocijančič says that this results from the givenness that makes me radically lose. There is no causality here, for in my relationship to the incomprehensible infinite, I am not any kind of subject with some definite object before me to define me in advance. “It is precisely as hypostasis, as a being that in its one and only – non-existent – being essentializes the world, that I am the self-negation of infinity that gives infinity existence within myself.”²² This is now the site where divinity truly enters, and its evident reality appears as radical concealment. “The site where infinity emerges from finite being is at the same time the site where finite being emerges from the infinity of the other being.”²³ This is where Kocijančič’s phenomenology of infinity distances itself from making too quick a connection between the Infinite and the Good, as we see it e.g. with Lévinas, who, in the light of the posited reality of infinity does not really speak of the Infinite as such, but only of the phenomenological conditio sine qua non of the openness of ethos to the other, and thereby also points to the theological structure of the ethical act. Here phenomenology faces the merciless call of apophasis: “Thought of the infinite never reaches the Good nor God, but – with the utmost exertion – only the unthinkable reality of the Infinite itself.”²⁴ The task is speculatively unsolvable; otherwise, there is not enough room for faith. The latter, however, in fact occupies the backdrop to Lévinas’s thought. Kocijančič therefore sticks to what he calls hypostasiology, which he says is a phenomenology of apophasis, or the other way around, a (meta)ontology of the hypostasis.²⁵ He therefore says: “Proof of the reality of the Absolute is possible only as an intimate adventure of the hypostasis. And intimacy is everything.”²⁶

The relationship between a hypostatically posited phenomenology and the ordinary kind is nicely explained in the last book of the trilogy, in the essay on the excess of language. Language is that window onto the other/Other – to the extent we take them as a living creature – that also extends to the spiritual field. All this is also reflected in the following quotation: “Phenomenology begins with the Aristotelic primacy of that which is closer to us, since it shows itself to us (phenomenon), not with the primacy of that which is in and of itself (i.e., the aseity of things and of ourselves). Theology (may) begin(s) with the fallenness of existence, with its sinfulness. The former and the latter unite in the concept of internally experienced hypostaticity. The direct self-experience of life is connected with a folding into oneself, with egocentric solipsism. The intellectual, philosophical path from this ‘for us’ to this ‘in and of itself’ is therefore contrapuntally connected with a spiritual departure from our primary rigid tenseness toward Gelassenheit: a relaxed, wide openness toward the other and the Other.”²⁷ With this, deeper foundations open up for phenomenology, shaking the foundationality of phenomenology itself.

Post-phenomenology?

As Franke points out, namely, “apophatic awareness, as a form of critical consciousness, entails the negation of all discourses”.²⁸ Here a basic explanation is called for as to what it actually is that enables apophasis to take this stance of denial, and Kocijančič provides us with one: “Apophasis denotes the mental ‘technique’ of renunciation and the stance of spiritual openness to the mystery of the Origin of all reality; it signifies an attitude toward the Absolute in which we experience and articulate that it ‘is’ infinitely different from all our words, conceptions and concepts, so that its difference is better expressed by denial than by any high-minded assertion: not denial as the opposite of assertion, but also denial of denial and and denial of the denial of denial etc. etc. The foundation of apophasis is the triple negation that precedes every differentiation of human theoretical practices: it is the feeling of the word’s inadequacy to thought, of thought’s inadequacy to reality and – on the deepest level – the inadequate reflection of these two inadequacies. This triple denial is the work of the word that is not a word, of thought that is not thought, of openness to a reality, that is not reality.”²⁹ It results in a fundamental skepticism that renounces any gnostic, i.e., epistemic sympathies. Due to its cognitively uncontrolled and unjustifiable transitions, hypostatic thought is (post)phenomenological. Kocijančič thus adds to the arch of development of continental European thought. He has in mind the explanation given by Lee Braver in the book A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. Analytical and continental philosophy, according to Braver, share a fundamental insight, they only apply different perspectives. In a kind of repeat of Kant’s project, Braver too attempts to unify this difference into a new vocabulary. The fundamental insight, as the title suggests, is the rejection of realism. Its conclusion, however, gives primacy to continental philosophy, which in his view has taken this rejection further. Apophatic philosophy, then, attaches itself to this trajectory; according to Kocijančič’s self-assessment, his thought “[…] in every area – except with regard to the necessity and speculative boldness of philosophy – opposes the modern materialist ‘speculative realism’, which is basically the capitulation of philosophy before the unreflected ontology and anthropology of the scientistic-doxic Zeitgeist […]”³⁰ Throughout the trilogy, therefore, we read a sharp, but still very understanding critique especially of the Lacanian and post-structuralist philosophical tradition, whereas traditional phenomenology fares rather better. For Kocijančič, namely, the allure of the phenomenological method lies in its being a contemporary variety of constructive skepticism, as its motto is not merely “back to the things themselves”, but also “think more (self-)critically”. The post-phenomenology of hypostatic thought is the radicalization of this extension of the original phenomenology, but with the twist that it also interrogates its problematic presuppositions: e.g. formal consistency, the metaphysics of subjectivity, the immortalization of the transcendental self. Kocijančič is also aware of the difference between that which shows itself (the phenomenon) and that which manifests itself (the mystery), and therefore hypostatic phenomenology “[…] opens up to paradox, to radical Transcendence and its manifestations, to different – not subjectively established or controlled – modes of being (in the plural).”³¹

Kocijančič already spoke of the limits of phenomenology in his companion text to his own translation of Lévinas’s essay Time and the Other, at a time when his philosophical system remained latent or in the middle of discovering the Traces, in a mode of devotion and relaxation (Gelassenheit) – what happens, happens. Phenomenology early on distanced itself skeptically from pretensions to being scientific and moved toward to the area that Kocijančič, in a Levinasian vein, calls witnessing. Phenomenologists, the French in particular, begin to take an interest in questions of an existential nature that belong, in Husserl’s terms, to the life-world, and in Heidegger’s, to being-in-the-world, such as temporality and corporeality, and freedom of the question of the other. “Witnessing itself was tried by thought as something evident.”³² As a result, a space opened up again for the field of religious or spiritual life. Its undefinable nature, namely, is organic, and it is very strange that some people today (in Slovenia too) endeavor to keep or make theology an empirical science.³³ As the main representative of this movement, Levinas indicated a shift in the phenomenological project, as he sees the existential nature of man as the epiphanous presence of the radically apophatic Absolute.³⁴ The breakthrough out of closed Dasein into the openness of the Other forms the core of Levinas’s philosophy. Kocijančič sees in this a transfigured discourse of negative theology, which is criticized by Levinas as by his teacher Heidegger and later by Derrida. And yet, in Totality and Infinity, Levinas writes that beyond all essence, the Good is the ultimate teaching of philosophy,³⁵ which distinguishes him clearly from the other two. In the above-mentioned work Otherwise than Being, Levinas expresses this criticism with the statement that the negative theologies that are known to Tradition are not radical enough. That is mainly to say that they are not philosophical enough, although Levinas paradoxically here and there understands his own philosophy as a metatheory that evidently goes beyond phenomenology.³⁶ The fundamental question, though, is whether this “beyond” represents Lévinas’s famous turn, his wish to make ethics the first philosophy.

Kocijančič shows through an in-depth analysis that the answer must be sought in Lévinas’s unreflected bindingness of discourse, which is in fact based on an unjustified wish to force agreement and be unquestionable.³⁷ Lévinas simply demands too much from thought and thus, as already shown, seeks to use philosophy to measure out a space where spiritual experience can move in. Therefore, the impotence of phenomenology as a binding discourse – with which we in the final analysis need not agree – lies in its failure to admit its own impotence. Nevertheless, such a philosophy remains relevant, whereas its critique of apophatic thought is not radical enough – contrary to what Levinas himself believed. What is the alternative? The witnessing of spiritual experience, born from the horror of loneliness, as Kocijančič explicitly shows already by mentioning the hypostasis.³⁸ Here, thought retreats and leaves the stage to witnessing. “The power of the philosopher’s word lies in his attempt to conceptualize his profound personal experience in words in such a way that under certain – unspoken and only partly speakable – circumstances, he realizes a paradoxical ‘partial universality’, a ‘conditional unconditionality’ that characterizes the mediation of love-of-wisdom, with which one needs not agree.”³⁹ Has Kocijančič, then, succeeded in this mediation?

Conclusion

I think the question is adequately answered by Vid Snoj in his foreword to the second part of the trilogy, when he makes a distinction between mediated and mediating Christian philosophy, with reference to the book Posredovanja [Mediations], Kocijančič’s first work. Snoj writes: “And when mediating Christian philosophy introduces a philosophically trained outsider to that which is mediated, due to the universal impossibility of mediating its spiritual experience it does not bring him directly into that experiencing, but at most to the threshold of experience. To the decision of the heart.”⁴⁰ Kocijančič devotes the last essay in his philosophical system to the question of nothingness/Nothingness, that dark (anhypostatic) nothingness in which we annihilate ourselves as being and that bright (apophatic) Nothingness that we glimpse at the summit of spiritual ascent. Allow me to end with an attempt, based on the apophatic philosophy I have presented, to answer the question this conference poses, namely: in this light (or darkness?), what is the connection between philosophy and religions with their associated theologies? ⁴¹

Nowhere in his trilogy does Kocijančič directly state that his system is a Christian philosophy. In any case it is a philosophy of Christianity, to use Michel Henry’s name for the penetration and mysterious transcendence of philosophy into the heart of religious experience – an experience that possesses the one who experiences it.⁴² This is evidenced by the concluding theological essay outlines that function as an invitation to Christianity, and with which Kocijančič introduces a difference in principle from the preceding philosophical part of each text. Although the author is a practicing Catholic, no less than three of the four theological postscripts touch on the world of Orthodox, philokalian spirituality, the spirituality of the Greek Church Fathers and other authors from the fourth century to the fourteenth. Philokalia⁴³ is universal Christian wisdom; far from being a thing of the past, it also speaks (or ought to speak) to modernity. As Kocijančič notes, this was shown some years ago (2008) by the phenomenologist Natalie Dépraz in her book Les corps glorieux, which is devoted to the thought of the Church Fathers and the Desert Fathers. The same year saw the publication of Jean Luc Marion’s reading of Augustine (Au lieu de soi), which Kocijančič takes as an indication that his wish in the book Posredovanja is being realized, namely, that Christian philosophers might read the Church Fathers with the same philosophical intensity and unpredictability as Lévinas read the Talmud.⁴⁴ As befits the truly apophatic, the story does not end within an exclusively Christian horizon, as the philokalian wisdom and all the later spiritual outbreaks (e.g. German mysticism, Russian religious philosophy) “[…] opens up beyond any syncretism into a transcultural and transreligious mystical symphony with the peaks of Jewish and Islamic as well as Far Eastern spiritual tradition …”⁴⁵ Not only is apophatic philosophy compatible with religious experience, it offers a space for the emergence of a new theology of religions or of different cultures with the awareness that the absoluteness of one does not at the same time mean the relativity of the other.⁴⁶

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