Mystical Ambiguity
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav on the Via Negativa
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav teaches that we can know a thing’s essence by knowing all its limitations and imperfections. If I want to know what perfect wisdom is, I can do so by coming to a total knowledge of what perfect wisdom isn’t.
If you want a literary context for this idea, recurrent in his work, check out his tale “The Chandelier Maker.”
But there’s an ambiguity in the via negativa, the path of negation. Does the path of negation leave anything left standing or does it simply clear away all objects so that we are left with “nothingness”?
In “The Chandelier Maker,” for example, the protagonist boasts that he can make the perfect chandelier, but the story itself does not show him making it, only boasting that he can. It does not describe the perfect chandelier. For in so doing, it would raise the specter of arbitrariness and relativity. “The way that can be named is not the eternal way,” says Lao Tze. And so we might think that, likewise, for Rebbe Nachman, the wisdom that can be taught is not the perfect wisdom.
And yet it’s not clear Rebbe Nachman himself came to such a “nihilistic” conclusion (of if he did, he was Straussian about it). Rather, his conclusion, much like Kierkegaard’s, is that, having negated the rational path, one is now free to accept the absurd as an alternative. But there really is a path, it can be taught, if esoterically, and it possesses positive qualities.
In many ways, Rabbi Nachman is the inverse of Maimonides. Maimonides also taught the via negativa. But while this led Maimonides to reject any and all knowledge of God’s essence, for Rabbi Nachman it led him to claim that precisely, paradoxically, in not knowing God, one could know God. The divide between them is the divide between the rationalistic view and the mystical view of divine absence. Another divide between them is that Maimonides reserves the via negativa only as regards the essence of God. For Rebbe Nachman, is should be applied to all things in life.
The Platonic form of something is discovered only by becoming, as it were, a scientist of lack. Personally, I find this compelling, for it alchemizes all disappointments into a necessary part of the holy quest. Nothing could be more useful than collecting all the things that don’t work.
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