The notion of krisis between late antiquity and late modernity. Two models of reason at issue

In this paper I would like to concentrate on the network holding together the various forms of κρίσις that have emerged in the very recent patristic literature. 1 Let me start by saying that I am not going to provide improbable systematizations; nor do I assume that philosophy should always claim a demiurgic role for itself. I would rather try to go through some words and concepts of this debate on the crisis, as if I were chasing the melody that they have left behind in my heart, and, in its wake, I will produce a harmonization that will not betray the spirit of our theme, while exposing it in a different light. I have noticed that two principal meanings of the word keep confronting each other. On one end of the spectrum, I would put the notion of κρίσις denoting the certainty of a judgment, the critical apparatus of a society and the exercise of a particular kind of knowledge that divides while excluding. On the other, I would place κρίσις understood as uncertainty, as the possibility that this judgment cannot be made or formulated. If we could think of these two meanings turning the one against the other, as in a particle accelerator, perhaps something like a grammar would emerge. There is an active attitude, in which the act of judgment is employed as an objectifying device, and there is an attitude that I would like to call deponent, in which it is rather the subjectivity that is being manifested, i.e., the uncertainty with which the judgment is expected, feared or shunned. Late Antiquity and Late Modernity, the periods under scrutiny here, are held together by the alternation of these two attitudes.