Damascius: the ineffable transcendence and how to express it

Abstract

Language has been from its origins and in its various forms the privileged instrument for transmitting knowledge. For this reason, in the theoretical contexts of gnoseology and metaphysics, the history of thought has incessantly questioned the relationship between language, knowledge and reality. In the 6th century AD, Damascius of Syria, the last scholar of the Platonic Academy of Athens, raises the paradox of a metaphysical principle or foundation inaccessible to knowledge and at the same time a use of language that, from the consciousness of the own construction, refers to the inaccessible instance to elaborate a symbolic representation of the ineffable. The present paper analyzes that paradox in the treatise De principii (Περὶ ἀρχῶν), where Damascius denies the identity between knowledge and its object in favor of a unitary transcendence that unfolds as Truth and Good. Finally, the possibility of considering this last statement as an antecedent for the medieval doctrine of the transcendental concepts of being is examined.