Time for philosopher mash-up. I've been thinking about the problem of ineffability: how does it make sense to say that you can't say something about something? After all, you seem to have just said something about it: that you can't say anything. I will first look at 16th-17th century scholastic Suarez, who is dealing with (what seems to me to be) a similar problem with potential essences which are "omnino nihil", nothing whatsoever. Next, I will look at Damascius, the 5th-6th century Neoplatonist, who makes use of Skeptical thought to show how statements concerning the One's ineffability and transcendence are statements about language, not about the One.
For Suarez, we can talk about the essences, the being, of things around us. There are trees and cats and humans. Each individual being has an essence, and is actual: this tree is right here and now existing, and this existence is merely the actuality of its essence. It is not as though there is some being to the tree which then needs to be brought into existence; any being to the tree whatsoever is its existence. Existence is merely actuality, and not an addition to an essence.
We can also talk about a potential essence of trees, not yet made actual. But a problem arises: if there is any reality to the essence at all, it is actual. But if it is actual, it is not merely potential; potentiality by definition means that something is not actual. So a potential essence is nothing in any way. But how then do we talk about it?
Suarez says that we talk about it because of "extrinsic denomination", that is, we reference it purely through other things. A couple examples are in order. When I predicate a universal of things, I am using this same process of extrinsic denomination. I can talk about this human and that human, and I mean the same thing in both cases, and so "human" must have some generality about it. But general things don't really exist; only individual things do. There is Alice and Bob, but I don't encounter "humanness" except as the individuals. Instead, I meet Alice, and she causes a concept in my head. I can work with this concept and pick out some formal feature which have some unity to them. I'll call this her humanity. Next, I meet Bob, and do the same thing. Lo and behold, when I compare these formal features, I realize that the two individuals have caused the same concept in my mind, and so I can predicate it of both of them. So I call them both "human", where "human" is some universal concept. Technically speaking, though, "human" is a universal in my mind while they are individuals in reality, so I only call them this universal because of the similar effect the individual humans caused in me. So I call them "human" by extrinsic denomination: not something which they are simply in themselves in reality, but by something else which has some foundation in them.
Similarly with potential essences, we talk about them by extrinsic denomination by not actually talking about them, but talking about God's power to produce them. In effect (and I may be going beyond Suarez here, but this is how I make sense of what he is saying), I pick something, I have something in mind in my discourse, and I ask, "Is this potential?" But I'm not really talking about the essence of the thing itself: what I am asking about is God's power and what it can do. I think that the case can be generalized to other fields as well; Suarez thought that species are eternal, so God's power is the only thing responsible for them, but we think of species in an historical light. So it doesn't seem to me to be contrary to Suarez' project to say that we speak of, say, the essence of dinosaurs not insofar as they have being (there are no actual dinosaurs), but by extrinsic denomination from what is actual (fossils, shared biological laws with critters today, etc.). Without these sources of actuality, there would be nothing to say about dinosaurs. So talking about potential (or non-existent) essences is really a shorthand way of talking about actual essences.
What I want to take from that is this: there can be a grammatical referent without an ontological one. I talk of potential essences, but the potential essence is nothing at all. But it still may make the most sense the frame the discussion in terms of potential essences, as the lack of ontological significance does not mean that I must rephrase all of my sentences accordingly. There is a proper mechanism by which I can attribute "potential essence" to things which actually are, so my assertion of truths about a potential essence don't entail its existence in any way.
Next, Damascius. I know less about him (though I probably need to go back and brush up on the details of Suarez' account too), but there is one idea of his which I found quite interesting. In the Neoplatonic tradition, there are various realms of reality (or perhaps ways of looking at the world; I can never quite tell). There is material reality, which is too multiple to be intelligible. There is ensouled reality, which is outside of space and which provides some unity and movement, as well as discursive thought. There is noetic reality, which is also outside of time and which is quite unified, with everything reflected in everything else. But even that has some division, something which had to come together, and so there must be something else grounding it, something which has absolutely no division to be grounded, and thus is beyond thought.
This is the One, so called not because "One" applies to it so much as it is the cause of unity for everything else. But this creates a problem: if the One is so removed from division, how is it the cause of everything else? It would seem to get mixed up in multiplicity if it were tarnished by the rest of the world. This was one of the most significant problems in Neoplatonism. Damascius takes an extreme view and distances the One from everything else, such that the One isn't even really the cause of everything else.
I'll leave aside the issues of what exactly the One "is" for Damascius. What is important is that, without any causal relation to the world, we seem to have no way of talking about the One. So all we can say is that we can't talk about the One. But even that is too much. So Damascius interprets this as a claim about language itself. Statements about the One's ineffability are statements about the paucity of language. Language wants to reach beyond itself, but cannot. This is a "peritrope" of language, in Skeptical terminology and Damascius' account: language turns around and refutes itself, and this internal problem within language is what we are referring to.
Putting this all together: By Suarez, we can talk about things without necessarily commenting on their ontological status through extrinsic denomination. By Damascius, statements about the ineffability of the One are statements about the peritrope of language. So perhaps we can say that, in the statement such as "the One/God/Reality/Absolute is ineffable" is an extrinsic denomination taken from the problematic character of language itself.
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