Damascius' Crisis of Participation and Our Own

The temptation to see Damascius’ Ineffable as anticipating skeptical modernity is nearly irresistible. First, he insists that in everything that we say about the “first principle” reflects our own cognitive limitations rather than anything objective. Second, he draws attention to the aporiae of negative theology, “overturning… all discourse.” Third, he radically modifies the schema of procession, in ways that some see as annihilating the Neoplatonic hierarchy. Others have rightly pushed back, insisting that Damascius is no skeptic, modern or postmodern, and that his modifications emerge from problems immanent to his predecessors. But if Damascius is not Kant (much less Derrida), why? This paper suggests that Damascius allows us to see, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, what separates the metaphysics of Neoplatonism (and the Hellenistic world) from that of modernity —precisely by pushing this boundary to its limit. This boundary is the question of philosophy’s presupposed starting point.