Speaker:
Elliot R. Wolfson
In this lecture, I will explore the encounter with nothingness that may be elicited the kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, but I will also draw comparatively from Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist sources. Without reducing the rich diversity that colors these respective paths of spiritual disciplines, it is still possible to identify a common denominator that celebrates rather than flattens multiples facets of the truth. To think the nothing is the vantage point whence we deduce the hypothesis that the irrational is a constituent facet of the rational in the manner that the nonconceptual is an integral aspect of the conceptual. Inexorably, the modality of thought, which provides the speculative scaffolding of the edifice of a mystical religion, is a thinking that surpasses the periphery of thinking, a thinking that leads consciousness to think the unthought. Contrary to a commonly held opinion, the unthought is not what is inherently unthinkable; it is rather the essential thought that is boundlessly thinkable, that is, the thought that must be continuously rethought and therefore is prevented from ever becoming an object that is no longer underway to being thought. The unthought is thus the mystery that pervades all thought as the capacity to be thought unremittingly in the curvature of time.
