Marilena Vlad, Damascius et l’ineffable: récit de l’impossible discours, Vrin, Paris, 2019; ISBN: 978-2-7116-2873-5, EUR 28.

Abstract

In Plato's Timaeus, we are told that "to find the maker and father of the All (τὸ πᾶν) is laborious, and assuming [the maker] is found, to declare him to all is impossible (εἰς πάντας ἀδύνατον λέγειν)" (28c3-5). So it may come as a surprise that, at the end of the Neoplatonic Academy's era in Athens, this declaration takes on an ironically newfound meaning when Damascius (c. 462-post-532 CE) declares the first principle of the All (or "all things", τὰ πάντα) to be entirely unspeakable and unthinkablewhat Damascius calls the Ineffable (τὸ ἀπόρρητον/ἄρρητον).Damascius' claim is a sharp contrast to the preceding tradition, going back to Plotinus, which held the One to be the first principle. It is not as if previous Neoplatonists had no concept of ineffability for the First: they were well-known for claiming that the One transcends all being, such that nothing can be said of it-in other words ineffable. And yet this same principle is also treated as the identifiable first cause of all beings that come from it. As many have recognized, there is a tension here: how can 1 one and the same principle, which is completely transcendent and ineffable, function as a cause, which implies an immediate, immanent relation to the thing it causes-necessitating expression? Damascius exploits this tension with his notion of the Ineffable as the true first principle over the One and all things.This background contextualizes Marilena Vlad's study on Damascius' Ineffable, which is mainly considered as the limit of thought, yet a limit which reveals the principle's presence. Vlad's book joins a growing number of recent works which touch on the Ineffable in Damascius, though till now there has been no monograph study dedicated just to the Ineffable. A recent parallel to Vlad's work is Damian Caluori's 2018 article, "Aporia and the Limits of Reason and of Language in Damascius", where he argues that the De Principiis' first aporia (I.1-2) is meant to open the horizon of thought to the first 2 principle which cannot be thought or spoken. Vlad's book is effectively a thorough exploration of this general thesis, though somewhat unlike Caluori, she looks at the aporia as a sign, rather than the main step, for thought to begin looking for the Ineffable. Hence for Vlad, Damascius' main achievement lies in shifting the focus to considering the first principle of thought in itself, rather than of objective, external reality, as for previous Neoplatonists (p. 12). Overall Vlad's judgment seems right, though as I indicate below, this does not remove the fact that Damascius is also concerned with the objective problematic of causality, in addition to the difficulty of thinking about that problematic. 3In the first chapter of the book's Part I, Vlad discusses the first, formal aporia in the De Principiis, where Damascius raises the question whether the principle is "before" or "together with" all things (τὰ Among others, see e.g. Steel (1999), esp. p. 364. 1 Line numbers and pages from Westerink-Combès' edition.