ABSTRACT
Dante carries out his radically existential revelation even while remaining faithful to a certain idealism of the mind. He thereby turns philosophical idealism into an open, existential relation to the Infinite and so anticipates the Paradiso’s obsessive turning toward the ineffable. Dante’s poetry itself actually performs an act of thought that is fathomless in its insights and implications. Although the philosophical idealism is strongest in Dante’s treatises, notably the Convivio, we see that it remains an aspect of his thinking through to his journey’s height. However, the crucial difference is that, for Dante, the closure that counts is not achieved within a philosophical system and in a determinate language, but only in a poetic reaching out toward the ineffable “beyond” of language. However, it is rather in the linguistic and poetic theory actually realized in his poetry that Dante unveils his profoundest understanding of language and its implications for his theological vision, no less than for his artistic experimentation.
