# Beyond Good and Evil, Beyond Being: A Survey of Hyper-Apophatic Positions on Ultimate Reality ## TL;DR - **Yes — but in pieces, not as a single unified stance.** Each component of the constellation you describe (ultimate reality beyond good/evil, beyond personal/impersonal, beyond being/non-being, beyond consciousness/unconsciousness) has been pressed to its limit by named thinkers in both East and West, with Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Eckhart, Schelling's Ungrund, Boehme, Nagarjuna, Nishida, and the Kabbalistic Ein Sof reaching the most radical formulations. But each typically pulls back at one or two points. - **The single thinker who comes closest to your full constellation is the late Schelling**, whose Ungrund as "absolute indifference" is explicitly prior to good and evil and prior to personhood, who nevertheless insists on a real telos through his "positive philosophy," and who grounds the appropriate response in a faith-disclosure rather than rational comprehension. **Karl Jaspers' "philosophical faith" (philosophischer Glaube) before an ineffable Transcendence is the cleanest 20th-century articulation** of all three legs of your stool. **John Hick's "the Real" comes second** but is widely criticized for not being able to ground a telos if the Real is genuinely beyond moral predicates. - **The strict claim that even "beyond" is too much is reached most explicitly by Pseudo-Dionysius (Mystical Theology Ch. 5), Eriugena's nihil per excellentiam, and Nagarjuna's emptiness-of-emptiness (śūnyatā-śūnyatā)** — all of whom negate the negations. None of them, however, also explicitly preserves a robust personal-style telos plus pistis-as-response in the way you describe; the closest synthesis appears to live in the gap between Eckhart, Schelling, and Jaspers. ## Key Findings **1. Five distinct radicalisms exist in the literature, and they are not the same.** The hyper-apophatic claim breaks into five separable theses, and no single thinker affirms all five with equal force: - (a) Ultimate reality is beyond positive predication (standard apophasis — affirmed almost universally in the mystical traditions). - (b) Ultimate reality is beyond the negations as well — i.e., beyond "beyond" (Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Nagarjuna's catuṣkoṭi, Eckhart's Gottheit). - (c) Ultimate reality is beyond moral categories good/evil as a metaphysical (not ethical) claim (Boehme's Ungrund, Schelling's "absolute indifference," Eckhart's Godhead, Nishida's absolute nothingness). - (d) Ultimate reality is beyond personhood/impersonality (Eckhart's Gottheit, Kabbalah's Ein Sof, Hick's Real, Tillich's "God beyond God," Plotinus' One). - (e) Ultimate reality is beyond being/non-being and consciousness/unconsciousness (Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Nagarjuna, Dzogchen ground, Nishida, Eriugena). **2. The decisive narrowing of your question is the metaphysical claim that good/evil do not reach the Absolute *while still preserving telos*.** Most thinkers who push (c) hardest tend to dissolve telos into mere process or self-manifestation (Boehme, Nishida). Schelling's late philosophy is unusual in holding both — the Ungrund is "without predicate" yet there is a directed history of revelation. **3. The "pistis rather than comprehension" leg is most robust outside Christian apophasis proper.** Karl Jaspers' *philosophischer Glaube* (philosophical faith) explicitly grounds the human stance toward an ineffable Transcendence not in propositional knowledge but in trust-as-existential-orientation. Pseudo-Dionysius and Eckhart certainly understand the apophatic ascent as ending in something more like trust than knowledge, but neither has Jaspers' rigorous epistemological argument that *no other response is possible*. **4. The nearest unified position is best described as a "Boehmean–Schellingian–Jaspersian" lineage**, supplemented by Hick's pluralistic hypothesis and Tillich's "God beyond God." It is *not* the dominant view in any of the major traditions, but it is a recognizable family of positions. ## Details ### Pseudo-Dionysius and the apophatic ceiling Pseudo-Dionysius (c. 500 CE) pushes apophasis as far as Western Christian orthodoxy will allow. In *Mystical Theology* Chapter 5 — the most extreme passage in the corpus — he denies of the divine Cause every category in succession: it is "neither soul nor intellect... neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness... it is not sonship or fatherhood... It falls neither within the predicate of nonbeing nor of being." He explicitly denies even the apophatic predicates: the Cause is "beyond every assertion" *and* "beyond every denial." Eric Perl and others have argued that Dionysius does the work of negating the negations: hyperousios ("beyond being") is itself negated to avoid making "beyond-being" a positive description. **Where he pulls back:** Dionysius nevertheless privileges Goodness as the most appropriate name (after the *Divine Names*' discussion), and he is operating within a Trinitarian-incarnational framework that ultimately re-anchors the unknowable in the revealed God of Scripture. The negations are operations *on the way up*; once the soul reaches union, language fails altogether but the framework's overall directedness toward "the Good" remains. He approaches but does not cross your line on good/evil as a metaphysical predicate of the Absolute itself. ### Eckhart's Godhead (Gottheit) beyond God Eckhart distinguishes Gott (the personal Trinitarian God of religious life) from Gottheit (the silent, attributeless ground from which God himself is generated). The Gottheit "is not a being, not even the highest being. It is the ground from which all beings, including the personal God, arise. It has no properties, no names, no characteristics." Famously: *Ich bitte Gott, daß er mich Gottes quitt mache* — "I pray God to rid me of God." The Wikipedia article on the Ground of the Soul, summarizing the scholarly consensus, notes that "given that the birth of God occurs in the undetermined, and that the Godhead cannot even be described as 'good' due to its indetermination, the ground of the soul is beyond all moral judgments." Sermon 52 ("Beati pauperes spiritu") describes a "breakthrough" in which the soul stands "empty of my own will and of God's will and of all God's works and of God himself... neither God nor creature." **How far he goes:** Eckhart reaches (b), (c), (d) clearly. The Gottheit is beyond personhood and beyond moral predicates. He is the most radical Western Christian on this question and was condemned for it (papal bull *In agro dominico*, 1329). **Where he pulls back:** Eckhart maintains the Christian framework: there is a "birth of the Son in the soul" — i.e., a robust telos of return to the ground — and he never abandons the language of love, grace, and the moral life at the level of Gott. Bernard McGinn argues that Eckhart's most radical statements speak in "the voice of the eternal unborn self" rather than as a doctrinal denial of moral order at the created level. So the "good/evil don't apply" claim is metaphysically true at the level of the Gottheit, but ethically the Christian life remains operative. ### Plotinus and the One The One is "beyond Mind and indeed beyond Being" (Enneads V). Plotinus says explicitly that "Once you have uttered 'The Good,' add no further thought: by any addition, and in proportion to that addition, you introduce a deficiency" (III.8.11). He denies sentience, self-awareness, or any other action (ergon) to the One (V.6.6). Even the denial of any description is, in Nicholas Banner's reading, an *apophasis* rather than a *sterêsis*: not the assertion of a contrary predicate but the rejection of the predicative frame itself. **Where he pulls back:** Plotinus identifies the One with the Good. This identification is theologically structural — the One *is* the source of value, even if no positive predication reaches it. So while he denies sentience and being, he keeps the Good (admittedly under heavy apophatic qualification). Plotinus reaches (b), (d), (e) but not (c) — he does not place the One beyond good and evil; rather, he pushes the Good itself beyond predication. ### Nagarjuna, Madhyamaka, Zen, Dzogchen Nagarjuna's catuṣkoṭi (tetralemma) systematically rejects (i) X is, (ii) X is not, (iii) X both is and is not, (iv) X neither is nor is not. Applied to ultimate reality, this method dissolves every metaphysical category — but Nagarjuna's crucial move is to deny that *emptiness itself* is an ultimate reality. At Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 13:8 (Jay L. Garfield's translation, *The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way*, Oxford UP, 1995), he writes: "The victorious ones have said / That emptiness is the relinquishing of all views. / For whomever emptiness is a view / That one has accomplished nothing." Emptiness is empty (śūnyatā-śūnyatā). This is the most rigorous version of "beyond beyond" in any tradition. Dzogchen describes the primordial ground (gzhi) as "beyond concepts of existence or nonexistence... untainted by mental constructs and not dependent on causes or conditions" and "beyond the four extremes of having true unimputed existence, lacking..." The base is held to be "beyond the concepts of one and many." **Where they pull back:** Buddhism does not affirm an "ultimate reality" in the substantive sense your question presupposes. Nagarjuna's project is *deflationary*: he is not saying ultimate reality is beyond categories but that there is no ultimate reality of the kind that *could* fall inside or outside categories. So Buddhism nominally satisfies all five hyper-apophatic theses but does so by not positing the kind of "Absolute" your question is asking after. Dzogchen's Ground is closer to a positive (though apophatically described) reality, and is sometimes described as "luminous" and "compassionate" — qualities that do reach into the ground, complicating the "beyond all predication" claim. The Buddhist telos is liberation, which is robust, and the appropriate response is something like śraddhā (faith/confidence). So Buddhism may be the closest fit on (a)–(e) plus telos plus trust — but the framing is different enough that some philosophers of religion (e.g., John Cobb) consider it a different kind of position altogether. ### Kyoto School: Nishida and Nishitani Nishida's *zettai mu* ("absolute nothingness") explicitly transcends "the opposition between being and non-being." It is "infinitely determinable" but "self-determination occurs without anything that does the determining." Nishitani in *Religion and Nothingness* moves toward the Buddhist śūnyatā as a "field of absolute relativity" beyond the substance/non-substance dichotomy. Both deny that absolute nothingness is "any thing, power, or consciousness beyond the world." **Assessment:** The Kyoto School reaches (b), (d), (e), and arguably (c) — Nishitani's emphasis on a "great death" that passes through nihility into the field of emptiness implies that good and evil as substantive categories belong to the dualistic level. There is a telos (conversion from self-centered to selfless mode of being), and the response is something like religious trust grounded in the Great Death rather than rational mastery. **This is one of the strongest candidates for your full constellation, though framed in Buddhist rather than theistic terms.** ### Jacob Boehme's Ungrund For Boehme, the Ungrund ("Unground" or "Abyss") is, in the words of the Encyclopedia.com entry on Boehme, "the undifferentiated Absolute that is ineffable and neither light nor darkness, neither love nor wrath." It precedes the polarity of the seven properties from which good and evil emerge. Boehme is the originator of the modern Western tradition of placing the divine prior to good/evil as a metaphysical claim. **Where he pulls back:** The Ungrund is dynamic — it contains a "will to self-intuition" that issues in the Trinity. So good/evil, light/dark, love/wrath are derivative, but the Ungrund is not static or empty: it is pregnant with what becomes manifest. There is a clear telos (the unfolding of divine self-consciousness through nature), and the appropriate response is faith. Boehme is one of the strongest fits for the full constellation but his framework is theosophic-Lutheran rather than philosophically rigorous in the way your question demands. ### Schelling's late philosophy The 1809 *Freedom Essay* (Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt, SUNY Press, 2006) takes over Boehme's Ungrund. Schelling identifies the Ungrund as "absolute indifference" (absolute Indifferenz), "being separate from all opposition," prior to the duality of "ground" and "existence" within God. As Sean J. McGrath summarizes the structure ("The Logic of Schelling's Freedom Essay," Metaphysical Society of America, 2015), the non-ground divides itself into two equal beginnings — ground and love — so that, in Schelling's own language, "life and love and personal existence" can exist; love cannot exist in indifference. In the late "positive philosophy" (Munich/Berlin lectures, 1827–1846), Schelling distinguishes negative philosophy (what reason can grasp a priori) from positive philosophy, which begins from existence as historically given and is "fully rational only when it is ecstatically open to what transcends it." The Ungrund is unvordenklich — "unprethinkable," prior to all possible thought. **Why this is the strongest Western candidate:** Schelling explicitly affirms (b), (c), (d), (e) — the Ungrund is beyond predication, beyond good/evil, beyond personhood (it precedes the personalization of God), beyond determinate being. He affirms a real telos (the historical unfolding of revelation, culminating in a free positive unity). And the appropriate response is positive philosophy's "metaphysical empiricism" — a stance of openness to what is given that is closer to faith than to deduction. Rosenzweig and Jaspers both saw in Schelling the seed of a "new thinking" that overcomes idealism without collapsing into irrationalism. **Where he pulls back:** Schelling re-Christianizes by the end. The unfolding of mythology and revelation terminates in a Christian eschaton, and the philosophical faith required is at least co-extensive with biblical revelation. So one could argue he doesn't fully sustain the apophatic radicalism — the Ungrund is not your final word; the unfolding history is. Still, he comes closer than almost anyone else. ### Kabbalistic Ein Sof Ein Sof (literally "without end") is, per Rabbi Azriel of Gerona (early 13th century), that which "cannot be an object of thought, let alone of speech, even though there is an indication of it in everything... there is no letter, no name, no writing, and no word that can comprise it." It is "beyond both Being and nothingness" — "Ein sof cannot be spoken of in terms of existence or non-existence." Kabbalists held that "the God of the Bible and Ein Sof are different... Ein Sof can be conceived of as a sort of 'God beyond God,' an impersonal 'that' as opposed to a personal 'thou.'" **Assessment:** Ein Sof reaches (b), (d), (e) clearly. On (c), the Kabbalistic tradition tends not to make the explicit metaphysical claim that good/evil don't apply to Ein Sof, though Lurianic Kabbalah's account of the *shevirat ha-kelim* (breaking of the vessels) treats moral structure as emerging only after Ein Sof's self-contraction (tzimtzum). Hasidic philosophy goes further with *Atzmus* ("essence"), which is described as "beyond finite/infinite duality." The telos is robust (cosmic repair, *tikkun*) and the response is essentially faith/devotion. **This is a strong fit for the full constellation but is embedded in a normative Jewish framework where God-as-Lawgiver remains operative at the manifest level.** ### Tillich's "God beyond God" and "Being-Itself" Tillich rejects "theological theism" — the God who is "a being beside others." For Tillich, "God does not exist" because existence is a category of dependence; "it is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as to deny it." God is being-itself, "beyond essence and existence," "beyond the ontological elements and categories which constitute reality." In *The Courage to Be*, the response to the experience of meaninglessness is "absolute faith" in the "God above the God of theism" — a faith that has no propositional content but is the courage to accept being despite non-being. **Where Tillich pulls back:** Martin Luther King Jr., in his 1955 Boston University PhD dissertation *A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman*, articulated what has become the standard internal critique: "An impersonal 'being-itself' or 'creative event' cannot be rational or good, for these attributes are of personality" (King Papers 2:506, Stanford). If God is good only in the sense of being the *ground* of goodness, then God is also the ground of evil; "if the attribute of goodness means anything it must have content." Tillich's system tries to keep moral structure at the level of being-itself but cannot easily do so without re-importing the predicates he denies. Nonetheless: Tillich affirms (b), (d), arguably (c), and the response is explicitly trust ("absolute faith") rather than comprehension. **Tillich is the cleanest 20th-century Christian articulation of your constellation.** ### John Hick's "the Real" Hick's pluralistic hypothesis distinguishes "the Real an sich" (transcategorial, ineffable, beyond all human concepts including personal/impersonal and good/evil) from its phenomenal manifestations as the personae and impersonae of the world religions. The Real grounds the soteriological transformation from self-centeredness to "Reality-centeredness." **Where Hick is criticized:** Plantinga and Yandell jointly argue (per the *Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy* article on Hick) that "if the Real is in fact ineffable, then it could not serve as the explanatory ground for religious experience. If it is beyond the distinction between good and evil, why believe that it is the ground of moral development rather than moral degradation?" Plantinga adds that for every set of contradictory properties, one of them must literally apply to the Real — so the ineffability claim collapses on itself. **This is precisely the tension your question identifies.** Hick attempts to navigate it by distinguishing "substantial" from "formal" attributes — the Real has formal attributes (it can be referred to) but no substantial ones — but most critics regard this as inadequate. ### Karl Jaspers' philosophical faith Jaspers' Transcendence (das Umgreifende, the Encompassing) is explicitly ineffable, beyond subject-object structure, beyond existence and consciousness. The appropriate response is *philosophischer Glaube* — philosophical faith — which involves "the convictions that man is open to transcendence and consequently wills infinity; that there is in fact a transcendence to the ordinary world... that man can rely on help from transcendence; and that the world is grounded and supported." Darius Samadian's 2021 University of Manchester PhD thesis "The Apophatic Philosophy of Karl Jaspers" demonstrates that Jaspers's notion of the Encompassing functions as a modern apophatic theology of Transcendence with explicit "parallels with the apophatic theologies of Meister Eckhart and Nicolaus Cusanus" — Samadian argues Jaspers's Encompassing "can be seen as a modern day apophatic approach to Transcendence." **Why Jaspers is your strongest 20th-century fit:** He explicitly affirms (b), (d), (e) and arguably (c). He insists that no positive theology — including that of a personal moral God — is adequate. He has a clear telos (Existenz orienting itself in cipher-language toward Transcendence). And his core epistemological move is precisely to ground the response in faith-as-existential-orientation rather than in cognition. Jaspers is the cleanest 20th-century articulation of the full constellation, and is largely an underappreciated figure in this debate. ### Other thinkers worth registering - **Eriugena** — *nihil per excellentiam*: God is "nothingness on account of excellence," beyond being and non-being, beyond even the concept of "person." Eriugena radicalizes Dionysius and is one of the few medievals to describe God's nature as unknown even to God. - **Marguerite Porete** — the *Mirror of Simple Souls* describes the annihilated soul as "freed from the virtues" (condemned 1310), in language that does push beyond moral categories at the level of mystical union. - **Robert Cummings Neville** — contemporary American philosopher whose "ontological act of creation" creates all that is determinate; the creator is *not* a being and is not within the determinate world. He explicitly argues that ultimate reality is "beyond being" and develops a "radically apophatic" theology compatible with the social and natural sciences. - **David Bentley Hart** — defends classical theism's "Being, Consciousness, Bliss" structure; he keeps the predicates but insists they are analogically rather than univocally applied. Less radical than the others on this list — he affirms God *is* good, not beyond good. - **John D. Caputo** — "weak theology" and the "event" reach toward apophasis but remain explicitly situated in a deconstructive framework that resists ontological commitment. ## Recommendations **If you want to inhabit the full constellation philosophically, the cleanest unified position to study is the lineage running Boehme → late Schelling → Jaspers, supplemented by Eckhart on the metaphysical claim and Tillich on the existential response.** No single thinker holds it as a complete system, but these together give you: - *Beyond predication including good/evil:* Boehme's Ungrund, Schelling's "absolute indifference," Eckhart's Gottheit. - *Real telos despite apophasis:* Schelling's positive philosophy of revelation; Jaspers' Existenz-toward-Transcendence; Tillich's Kingdom of God as eschatological telos of being-itself. - *Trust, not comprehension, as response:* Jaspers' philosophischer Glaube; Tillich's "absolute faith"; Eckhart's Gelassenheit (releasement). **Staged path of investigation:** 1. **Start with Eckhart's Sermon 52** (Walshe translation, ed. McGinn) and his *Commentary on Exodus* — the clearest Western Christian articulation of the Gottheit beyond predicates. 2. **Then Schelling's 1809 Freedom Essay** (Love–Schmidt SUNY translation) for the Ungrund as absolute indifference, followed by **The Ages of the World** (Wirth translation) for the temporal unfolding. 3. **Then Jaspers' *Philosophical Faith and Revelation*** (1962) and Samadian's 2021 Manchester thesis as critical apparatus — the explicit articulation of trust-as-orientation toward the ineffable Transcendence. 4. **Pair with Hick's *An Interpretation of Religion*** to see the strongest contemporary statement *and the strongest objections* (Plantinga, Yandell) on whether the position is internally coherent. 5. **For comparative depth, read Nishitani's *Religion and Nothingness* and Garfield's translation of Nagarjuna's MMK** to see how the Buddhist trajectory handles the same questions without theistic anchoring. **Benchmarks that would change the assessment:** - If you find a thinker who explicitly *thematizes* the tension between (c) and the existence of telos and resolves it without re-importing moral predicates at the ground level, that thinker would be the answer to your question. **At present, no one has fully done this.** - If you accept that the dissolution of the question (Nagarjuna's "emptiness is the relinquishing of all views") *is* the resolution, then Buddhism gives you a coherent answer at the cost of giving up "ultimate reality" as a substantive notion. - If you accept that the position is necessarily symbolic/cipher-based rather than propositional (Jaspers), then the constellation is coherent but cannot be fully systematized — which is itself the point. ## Caveats - **The "constellation" you describe may be intrinsically unstable.** The Plantinga–Yandell objection against Hick — that contradictory predicate-pairs cannot all fail of the Real, and that an ineffable Real cannot ground moral transformation rather than degradation — is structural and applies equally to Eckhart, Schelling, and Tillich. If "good" doesn't apply, "not-good" must — and "not-good" is morally alarming. Every thinker who reaches (c) must do something to manage this objection: Boehme by treating good/evil as derivative manifestations, Eckhart by distinguishing levels (Gott vs Gottheit), Schelling by treating the Ungrund as a moment in a larger dynamic, Hick by distinguishing substantial from formal predicates. None of these moves is uncontroversial. - **"Telos" and "directionality" are quietly doing a lot of work in your question.** A genuine telos seems to require some normative orientation in reality itself — i.e., something that resembles the predicate "good" being true of the ground. The strongest candidates (Schelling, Jaspers) maintain this by treating the directionality as an *event* or *self-disclosure* rather than a static attribute, but critics charge this is a verbal move. - **"Trust" (pistis) language is itself religiously loaded.** Jaspers' philosophical faith is explicitly *not* religious faith; Tillich's absolute faith is explicitly post-theistic. Whether these qualify as "trust in something" or as "courage in the face of nothing" depends on how generously you read them. The Buddhist analogue (śraddhā) is closer to confidence-based-on-evidence than to trust-in-a-personal-other. - **There is a serious scholarly debate about whether Pseudo-Dionysius is consistent.** Several contemporary scholars (e.g., Christos Yannaras, Jean-Luc Marion) read his apophasis as compatible with traditional theism; others (the article in *International Journal of Philosophy and Theology* 2015) argue for "the incoherence" of his combining hyperousios with Trinitarianism. Your question lands directly in this scholarly contention. - **Sources used here are primarily secondary literature and tertiary summaries** (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, scholarly review articles); on points where primary-source verbatim quotation matters most (Boehme's exact German, Schelling's exact phrasing, Hick's specific formulations), the report relies on standard scholarly paraphrase. A serious investigation should consult the primary texts in good critical editions (e.g., Love–Schmidt for Schelling, Walshe/McGinn for Eckhart, Garfield for Nagarjuna).