Equivocations of “Transcendence”: Responses to Roger Ames

Abstract

This response to Roger Ames’s critique of William Franke’s apophatic philosophy turns on an equivocation in the use of the term “transcendence.” Ames’s arguments are directed precisely against what he defines as strict transcendence, in which two terms are related contrastively and asymmetrically so that one dominates over the other and the second depends on the first. An apophatic point of view endeavors always to transcend such oppositional logic and to see what inwardly unites the opposed terms in mutual dependence (be it ever so invisible and inarticulable). Such transcendence is presumably not what Ames is objecting, too, since it does not fit his definition. And yet my argument is that this excess of and externality to the inevitable oppositionality of discursive terms is what really drives the discourse of transcendence when it is understood apophatically. Even the figures of strict transcendence to which Ames objects, the one operating, for example, in the image of a God creating ex nihilo, are best understood as poetic figures for transcending beyond the discursive altogether. An infinite or absolute God is not really conceivable by a finite mind, so such a conception cancels itself out as a conception. The asymmetry of God and creation is nevertheless an analogical way of figuring what is incommensurable with us and with our thinking and is as such indeterminate.