Nihilism or Analogy ? The only options.

The most edifying essay I've ever read is this one, by David Bentley Hart. He relies heavily on Heidegger, affirming the West’s trajectory of denying the immediacy of reality by turning the world into a mythology of “grounds” and “principles”, with Descartes the giveness of the world is inverted, to be grasped and controlled by technical human will, ending in Nihilism.

He goes through Kant, and Hegel’s attempt at rescue, but ultimately only Christianity’s version of transcendence based on Creation can adaquetly conceptualize Being from beings. Human thought ends either in nihilism, or Creation conceived byway of the analogy of being.

Download the entire essay HERE

Below are a few superb excerpts

The Offering of Names

Metaphysics, Nihilism, and Analogy :

“Perhaps there truly was, precisely in the birth of philosophy as a self-conscious enterprise of rising above the ephemerality of the phenomena to take hold of their immutable premises, a turning away from the light toward the things it illuminated, a forgetfulness of being within philosophy’s very wakefulness to being. And perhaps in this fateful moment of inattention to the mystery of being’s event, the relentless search for being’s positive foundations commenced, and then proceeded along a path that, in the end, would arrive at the ruin of philosophic faith. All of this may be—indeed, in some obvious sense, is—quite true. But the Platonic erōs for the beautiful, good, and true was also a longing for something more than mere “grounds”; it was a desire for being’s fullness, though one not yet able to understand being as gift”

“However well a “pure” metaphysics may be able to conceive of ontological dependency, it can never, by its own lights, arrive at the thought of true contingency. Even a Heracleitean metaphysics of chance is anything but a philosophy of the freedom of either the ontic or the ontological, but is—as Nietzsche so well understood—a doctrine of the absolute necessity of the being of this world; even the most etherealizing “idealism” can at best conceive of the ultimate as the apex or “absolute” of the totality of beings, the spiritual resolution of all the ambiguities of the immanent, but can never really think in terms of true transcendence.

If the ambition of metaphysics is to deduce from the features of the existence of the world the principles of the world, then it must see all the characteristic conditions of the world as manifestations of its ground. Thus metaphysics must embrace, not merely as elements but as principles of being, all the tragic and negative aspects of existence: pain, ignorance, strife, alienation, death, the recalcitrance of matter, the inevitability of corruption and dissolution, and so on. And it must respond to such sad necessities according to one or another wisdom of the immanent: joyous affirmation, tragic resignation, heroic resolve, Dionysian anarchy, the “rational love of God,” the “negation of negation,” or some form of nihilism, tender or demonic.

Being, conceived in terms of the totality, is a pitiless economy, a structure of sacrifice in which beings suffer incompletion and destruction in order that being may “be.” The world and its principles sustain one another in a dialectic of being and beings, a reciprocal movement of fulfillment and negation, the completion of finitude in the mystery of the absolute, and the display of the absolute in the violence of its alienation. 

The land of unlikeness is explicable only in the light of the forms; but where else can the forms shine forth? But it is just this—the tragedy of being in its dispensation—that is the wellspring of philosophy’s power; for thought can move from the world to the world’s principles only in such measure as what is, is what must be; only because being is constrained by necessity to these manifestations, and only because being must show itself in beings, is an autonomous metaphysics possible. Once necessity is presumed, every merely human philosophy is possible. Thereafter, it is not so much discernment as sensibility that draws any given thinker to the crystalline intricacies of the Platonic cosmos or to the delirious abandon of the Dionysiac; to the great epic of the Concept or to the tediously uniform debris of “difference[…]”

“The language of creation—however much it may be parodied as a language regarding efficient causality and metaphysical “founding”—actually introduced into Western thought the radically new idea that an infinite freedom is the “principle” of the world’s being and so for the first time opened up the possibility of a genuine reflection upon the difference between being and beings. And the Christian understanding of God as Trinity, without need of the world even for his determination as difference, relatedness, or manifestation, for the first time confronted Western thought with a genuine discourse of transcendence, of an ontological truth whose “identity” is not completed by any ontic order.

The event of being is, for beings, a pure gift, into whose mysteries no scala naturae by itself can lead us. And if the world is not a manifestation of necessity, but of gratuity—even if it must necessarily reflect in its intrinsic orderliness and concinnity the goodness of its source—then philosophy may be able to grasp many things, but by its own power it can never attain to the source or end of things. If being is not bound to the dimensions prescribed for it by fate or the need for self-determination or the contumacity of a material substrate, then the misconstrual of the contingent for the necessary constitutes philosophy’s original error.”

“Thus it is that theology alone preserves and clarifies all of philosophy’s most enchanting prospects upon being: precisely by detaching them from the mythology of “grounds,” and by resituating them within the space of this peaceful analogical interval between divine and worldly being, within which space the sorrows of necessity enjoy no welcome. Thus, for Christian thought, knowledge of the world is something to be achieved not just through a reconstruction of its “sufficient reason,” but through an obedience to glory, an orientation of the will toward the light of being and its gratuity; and so the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing. 

Phrased otherwise, the truth of being is “poetic” before it is “rational” (indeed, it is rational precisely because of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail), and thus cannot be known truly if this order is reversed. Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know, one must first love, and having known, one must finally delight; only this “corresponds” to the Trinitarian love and delight that creates. The truth of being is the whole of being, in its event, groundless, and so, in its every detail, revelatory of the light that grants it.

“Christian tradition, in making the eternal beauty of ancient philosophical longing so much more prodigal in its availability, and in urging philosophical erōs toward a more transcendent end, deprived the world of any grounds within itself and so further gilded the world’s glory with an additional aura of gratuity and fortuity; the shining forth, the phainein, of the phenomena now belonged to another story, and so no longer provided irrefragable evidence of reason’s ability to gain possession of the world’s principles.

To free itself from theology, then, philosophy had to discover a new order of evidences, one not “compromised” by collaboration with Christianity’s complex discourse of divine transcendence. This could be accomplished only by way of an initial refusal of the world’s alluring and terrifying immediacy; through a simple but peremptory act of rejection, the order of truth could be inverted, moving truth from the world in its appearing to the subject in its perceiving. Thus reason’s “freedom” would be secured anew. At the same time, however, such a rejection could not but unveil, with unceremonious suddenness, the “nihilistic” terminus that Nietzsche and Heidegger saw as being inaugurated in the eidetic science of Platonism.”