Damascius' Crisis of Participation and Our Own

Looking back over the intervening centuries of philosophical history, the temptation to see Damascius’ Ineffable as anticipating skeptical modernity is nearly irresistible.

First, in Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles, Damascius—the last great sage of the Neoplatonic Academy—insists more sharply than any before him on the fact that in everything that we say about the “first principle” (if his Ineffable can even be called this) reflects our own cognitive limitations rather than anything objective. All “names and thoughts,” he writes, “express our labor pains… reporting nothing about what takes place there… they simply inform [us] about our own states with regard to it” (I.4, trans. Ahbel-Rappe 2010). Statements like these have led numerous scholars to draw comparisons with Kant’s noumena and skepticism more generally (Hoffman 1997, Ahbel-Rappe 1998, Cürsgen 2007).

Second, Damascius draws attention as never before to the fact that in apophatic discourse “we contradict ourselves in our argument” (I.4) since even denial (apophasis) is itself a kind of discourse… but the [Ineffable] is nothing at all, and therefore no denial can be made concerning it” (I.7) Even negative theology says too much, and the various dialectical aporiae to which he draws our attention lead to the recognition that the Ineffable “consists in the complete overturning of discourse and thought” (I.7). The Ineffable “cannot be participated in, nor does it give something of itself to that which comes after it” (I.8); at best we can speak of a “trace.” These reflections have been seen as foreshadowing Derrida and deconstruction (Lavaud 2007, Gersh 2014).

Finally, the radical modifications Damascius makes to the inherited Neoplatonic schema of procession and causality might appear to jeopardize the very framework of participation, threatening a collapse of the tradition from within. Not only does he introduce an uncoordinated term, in the Ineffable, which is no sense causal or participated (a break even with Proclus’ Unparticipated), but corresponding to this elevation, hypostases like the One and Being are drawn down more radically into their effects. Rather than the multiple simply participating the One, his One - in a sense more radical than Proclus’ remaining, procession, and reversion - includes all things (what Jonathan Greig has labeled “causal synonymy”), or implies multiplicity as part of its very nature (Ahbel-Rappe 2010). Similarly, in the case of Being at least, there is a kind of reciprocal assimilation of cause and effect, which overturns the typically “one-sided” paradigm of Platonic participation (Greig 2020). By contrast to Plotinus, if the Ineffable is uncoordinated, a loss of transcendence through excess, Being and the One can seem at times too coordinated, a loss of transcendence through defect. Thus Richard Wallis can write in his 1972 textbook on Neoplatonism that “while [Damascius] was doing no more than bringing out some of the traditional teaching’s implications, yet with him… the consequences were little less than annihilation of the Neoplatonic hierarchy.”

In response to all this (and it is already suggested in the first part of Wallis’ remark), other scholars have insisted on the continuity between Damascius and the Neoplatonic tradition. He is not, in the end, in any way a skeptic about the Ineffable, and the modifications he makes to Proclus and others are firmly rooted in the commentarial tradition and problems which emerge from it. Both the comparison with modernity and the narrative of a break with the Neoplatonic participatory schema can be pushed too far. These points are well taken.

Yet it is at this point that another question emerges, which this paper will attempt to address. If Damascius is not Kant (much less Derrida), why is he not? How can he push to the Ineffable’s total inaccessibility (and awareness of the subjective contagion in all discourse about it) without tipping over into modern forms of skepticism? How could he make such radical modifications to the schema of participatory metaphysics without calling into question the framework as such? From our post-Cartesian, post-Kantian perspective, these would seem to be pressing problems, yet Damascius seems utterly untroubled by them. If we can shed some light on this question, I believe, we will gain insight into the difference between our time (and its so-called crisis of “participatory metaphysics”) and antiquity.

Building on the narrative of James Doull, this paper will suggest 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. 

Neoplatonism, I argue, emerged as a response to ancient (Academic and Pyrrhonian) skepticism but it shared with that skepticism a presupposed starting point which made modern skepticism literally unthinkable, even for Damascius. As Doull put it, “the first or ancient philosophy… presupposed a universal principle and came to know what that was through a thinking through of nature. The second, modern or phenomenological philosophy, presupposed nature, this presupposition mediated with the universal through the thinking subject” (Doull 2003). So long as this universal first principle was presupposed—that is, no subject existed secure enough in the substantiality of its own freedom to take upon itself the task of grounding or mediating its universality—the ineffability of the first principle (and its lack of inclusion of the finite) did not pose a skeptical crisis. But after Descartes, all this would change. As moderns, with a radically different presupposed starting point, we bring this subsequent history with us to the text, and for us Damascius’ statements about ineffability, the status of the finite, and the overturning of discourse immediately raise, and cannot help raising, the problem of skepticism. Our crisis of participation is different from the problems which faced Damascius, but he enables us as no other thinker to see this difference and thereby understand ourselves and the problem of metaphysics in our time.