| This dissertation explores possible connections between religious language usages and religious consciousness as it relates specifically to moral consciousness or conscience. I proceed on the assumption that communication is integral to consciousness, that language is not extraneous or expendable as an instrument. Consciousness recognizes and orients itself in the world through its language/thought in social practice. Further, I assume with Buddhists, religious postmodernists, and other anti-realists, that meaning, emerging through context, including social practice, structures reality through language/thought.;Using the above assumptions, this study will present an existential phenomenological investigation of the negative form of linguistic communication referred to as, "radical apophasis," which can arguably be identified in the writings of Eihei Dogen, 13th century Japanese Soto Zen master, and Soren Kierkegaard, 19th century Christian (Church of Denmark [Lutheran]) religious writer.;Distinguishing language usages as positive (kataphatic) and negative (apophatic) entails consciousness and its existential quality. Differences between these usages are not in the words and concepts, but in the user's consciousness, which either accepts the limits of ordinary usage/grammar or liberates language from the conventional restrictions imposed by everyday consciousness. The radical opening or expansion of language allows it to negate itself. The religious usefulness of this negating is either recognized or not, depending upon consciousness.;Jacques Derrida's practice, deconstruction, is useful in understanding language as self- liberating, an idea taught by Dogen long before. I contend the recognition of the potential radical flexibility of language determines individual religious and moral consciousness primarily on the basis of what is communicated as knowable and not knowable, of reification and presence, or rejection of these. Deconstruction can radically open words, and aid in the discovery of the spiritual and moral usefulness of radical apophasis. Deconstruction destabilizes language, and thus, experience. In the spaces created through instability, new experience can emerge. Dogen's unconventional language usages and his "non-thinking" liberate language, as does Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writing and his "indirect communication." Both destabilize and liberate language/thought, consciousness, and conventional structuring of religious realities, including morality. |
