Apophaticism as Framework Transformation: Beyond Epistemological Humility — Epoche C1
The claim, and a test that can decide it Asked what the self ultimately is, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad answers neti, neti — not this, not this. The formula recurs through the text, and it is the standard example of apophaticism : the practice, found in Greek Christian, Islamic, Jewish and South Asian sources alike, of characterising the ultimate by denying descriptions of it rather than by supplying them. The word comes from the Greek apophasis , denial, and stands opposed to kataphasis , affirmation; negative theology is the usual English name. The conventional reading takes such formulae as declarations of epistemological humility: human concepts are finite, the divine is not, and the negations register our incapacity. This essay argues that they do something more specific — that they are moves in the construction of a new framework of understanding, and that the traditions using them behave in ways that only the second reading predicts. That last clause is the point on which the argument will be made to turn, because a thesis about the function of a class of utterances needs a test, and one is available. Humility, if that is all it is, predicts a particular sequel: after the negations, silence, or at least no further technical elaboration, since nothing further can be said. Framework transformation predicts the opposite sequel: renewed and more disciplined speech, governed by rules that did not exist before the negation. The two traditions examined below can be checked against this. What Lonergan supplies, and what he does not A correction is required before Bernard Lonergan can be used, and it concerns the attribution on which the earlier version of this essay rested. There is no concept called 'framework transformation' in Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957). The term belongs to the later vocabulary of paradigm change, and importing it into Lonergan blurs the structure that actually does the work. Lonergan's term is the higher viewpoint , and it is more useful than the borrowed one because he specifies its mechanism. The illustration he uses is elementary arithmetic, and following it through supplies exactly the derivation the argument needs. A child learning arithmetic operates within a framework: a set of objects, the positive whole numbers, together with rules for combining them. Subtraction is one such rule, and it is perfectly well defined so long as the number taken away is no larger than the number it is taken from. But the rules themselves permit the writing of $3 - 5$, an expression the framework generates and cannot interpret. The framework has produced, from its own resources, a question it cannot answer. Two responses are possible. One declares the expression meaningless: you cannot take five from three, and the child who asks is corrected. The other keeps the expression and changes the rules, so that $3 - 5$ has the value $-2$ in an enlarged domain, the integers, within which the old arithmetic reappears intact as the special case where everything is positive. The second is a higher viewpoint. Its defining features are worth stating separately, because they are what will be looked for in the religious texts: the anomaly is generated by the lower framework's own operations, not imported from outside; the higher framework does not abolish the lower one but recovers it as a restricted case; the higher framework has rules of its own, and is therefore a framework, not the absence of one; the transition is achieved by an act of understanding on the part of the enquirer, which cannot be replaced by being told the answer. The pattern repeats: the rules of algebra generate $\sqrt{-1}$, which they cannot interpret, and the complex numbers are the higher viewpoint in which they can. Lonergan's general claim is that the development of understanding proceeds in this way rather than by accumulation, and that what is being reorganised each time is the set of operations the knower performs. Two further attributions in the earlier version need adjusting. Lonergan's intellectual conversion is set out not in Insight but in Method in Theology (1972), and it is not the shift from things to relations; it is the abandonment of the assumption that knowing is a kind of looking, and that the real is whatever would be there to be seen. The shift from things as related to us towards things in their relations to one another is a different distinction of Lonergan's, between description and explanation, and it belongs to Insight . The distinction matters here because it is intellectual conversion, not the descriptive–explanatory shift, that bears on apophaticism: a reader who thinks knowing is looking will hear 'God is not this' as a report that nothing was seen. The test applied: the Upanishadic case Take the negations first at their strongest, and with the textual detail that the earlier version omitted. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad the formula neti neti appears at 2.3.6, where it follows an account of the two forms of reality, the formed and the formless, and denies that the self is either. It recurs in the dialogues of the sage Yajnavalkya — with the questioner Sakalya at 3.9.26, and in the instruction of Maitreyi at 4.5.15. Two features of this are easy to lose and both bear on the thesis. First, what is negated is not an arbitrary list of divine attributes but the immediately preceding characterisation: the formula retracts a description the text has just supplied. Second, its subject is the atman , the self of the enquirer, and not only a transcendent object. The negation is turned on the knower. Now apply the test. If the tradition were expressing humility, the sequel should be silence about what Brahman is. It is not. The Taittiriya Upanishad, at 2.1, offers a positive formula — Brahman is real, is knowledge, is infinite — and the Advaita Vedanta tradition that systematised these texts built a technical apparatus for handling exactly the situation the negations create. It dis