Contemporary Thinkers You Should Read: William Desmond





William Desmond

                                                   I am starting a new series of posts called "Contemporary Thinkers You Should Read."  The series format is fairly straightforward, I will interview a friend who has/is doing some work on a contemporary theological/philosophical figure.  I hope, through this, that you are inspired to read from some of these figures and maybe find some inspiration from their thought. 

The first thinker we will spot-light is William Desmond.  My interview is with Seth Thomas, a student at Lincoln Christian University.  Seth is a very sharp guy and terrific writer.  He has spent time at the Hong Kierkegaard library at St. Olaf College as a summer fellow.  If you are interested in philosophy, you will get a lot out of this interview, of that, I am certain. 

Christopher Ben Simpson

Seth studies with one of my old professors, Christopher Ben Simpson who happens to be a terrific Kierkegaard and Desmond scholar.  In fact, Chris is the leading interpreter of Desmond's work...he is quite brilliant.  The titles of Chris' books are: The Truth Is the Way: Kierkegaard's Theologia Viatorum; Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern: William Desmond and John D. Caputo with a forthcoming Desmond reader and several other works on continental philosophy and theology. 

Seth's aim is to do, as you will see in the interview, more work on Desmond and Kierkegaard...and he is poised to do so.  Make sure you check out his blog Grateful Strivings.

The Interview:

Abbreviations:

BB: Being and The Between

PU: Perplexity and Ultimacy

EB: Ethics and the Between

IST: Is There a Sabbath for Thought?

GB: God and the Between

Who is William Desmond?

William Desmond is professor of philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL) in Leuven, Belgium.  Dr. Desmond is the former President of both the Hegel Society of America and the Metaphysical Society of America and is the author of 11 published works and numerous articles.


Why is William Desmond important?  What makes his philosophy helpful?

Creston Davis

I agree with Creston Davis that "the only hope for theology to breakout of [its] present day deadlock is through Hegel."  It is in this regard that Desmond's work is important and helpful: it represents an authentic "thinking through" Hegel—through both in the sense of a deep, critical engagement with Hegel's philosophy as well as a going beyond, an offering of truly groundbreaking and radical (radix, to the root, to the origin) contribution to continental philosophy.  Desmond's work, in fleshing out a post-Hegelian metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, lays the groundwork for a philosophical Christian theology that is genuinely contemporary.  More generally, his work is helpful for any Christian attempting to see how Christian theology is undergirded by a robust, rigorous philosophy—it helps one to see that the world we find described in scripture and Christian theology is the same we find upon philosophical investigation.  This connection is not often explicitly stated in Desmond’s work—in that Desmond does not directly connect his philosophical work with specifically Christian theology—but it is easy to see the way the former both appropriates the language of and affirms the latter.

   
Basically, what is Desmond's project? 

Desmond's work is an attempt to construct a metaxology, a logos of the metaxu (greek: between, middle, intermediate).   Following Plato (among others), Desmond recognizes that human beings have their being, and become selves, in "the between," between being and nothing, determinacy and indeterminacy, immanence and transcendence, unity and plurality, self and other-to-self.  “We wake,” Desmond says, “to the mystery of being impelled towards an end we know not, from a beginning we comprehend not, in a milieu whose lords we are not” (BB 6).  We find ourselves having “already begun, before we begin to know that we are […] and that we are in the middle of things” (BB 5-6).  

     Central to Desmond's project is his fourfold sense of being: the univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical, and the metaxological.  At the risk of being painfully reductionist, the univocal sense stresses sameness, the equivocal stresses difference, the dialectical stresses a self-mediated unity of identity and difference (think Hegel), and the metaxological—Desmond’s original contribution—stresses the excess plurality of being, its “plenitude,” that resists any attempt to subsume difference into a dialectically mediated unity.  This fourfold sense of being, Desmond asserts,

            offers a flexible systematic framework that allows us complexly and very comprehensively to interpret the variety of possible relations [between mind and being, self and other, same and different, identity and difference], and the very ontological richness of what is at stake in each of the [perennial] perplexities [about origin, creation, things, intelligibilities, selves, communities, truth, and the good] (BB xiii).

     Desmond uses this framework throughout his project’s systematic trilogy, bringing it to bear on metaphysics/ontology (Being and the Between), ethical selving (Ethics and the Between), and God (God and the Between).  Desmond’s primary emphasis in the metaxological is to find a way to deal with the plurality of the world, and the plurivocity of our speaking of it, that neither conflates all difference into sameness (absolutizes the univocal; scientism/logicism), gives up all hope for any unity (absolutizes the equivocal; Derridean deconstruction taken to the extreme), nor subsumes difference and plurality into a higher, dialectically mediated unity, which in the end obviates all difference (absolutizes the dialectical; Hegelianism).  Desmond’s metaxological “tries to redeem the promise of equivocity beyond univocity and dialectic” (BB 178).  Of particular importance to Desmond is the allowance of true singularity and particularity, he denies “any totalism of univocity that might claim to subsume completely the ontological enigma of the singular being as given to be” (BB 183).
     How is Desmond helpful for understanding theology or religion? 
 

Desmond’s God and the Between is a work that is of immense importance to anyone wanting to understand the ways in which Christian theology can be shown to be held with philosophical rigor.  For brevity’s sake I will focus on one notion which I have found to be profoundly important for my own thought: Desmond’s concept of God as Origin.  Throughout all of his works, Desmond continually points to the need for an understanding of the need of an origin for the between.  He puts it this way when speaking of intelligibility:

            If this original excess generates determinate intelligibility, it is not itself determinately intelligible in the same
                way as its dianoetic productions.   There is an immanent otherness to this source that always escapes beyond  every univocal determination.   This means that the self-transcendence of self-hood has to be thought  […] in  terms that go beyond the univocal sense (BB 69).

     This is, of course, a direct reference to the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo, but what makes Desmond’s continual discussion of the Origin so deeply effective is his articulation of the many ways that this concept is philosophically necessary (those who have Thomistic ears, let them hear).  Desmond is not interested in “proofs” for God—modernistically understood, that is—but he does show how difficult it is to do any philosophical justice to the between without a truly and radically originative God.

     Two quotes which highlight Desmond’s understanding of the interplay between theology/religion and philosophy:

            Being true to thought entails a fidelity that can take thought beyond itself, and hence qualify, in multiple   ways, one’s inhabitation of the middle space between being religious and philosophical […] The standard   form of “being between” religion and philosophy is the one inherited from a long tradition and expressed in this quest: fides quaerens intellectum.  While not denying this, I would ask about the less evident quest of intellectus  quaerens fides.  I do not just mean the converse of the first.  There is a more radical “between,” as it were,   “beyond” the satisfactions of determinate cognition concerning finite things and processes, and the excellences of self-determining knowing at home with itself  (IST 19).

                I see the opportunity to recharge an old affiliation of [philosophy and religion], weakened, diminished,    abandoned, or refused in the dominant practices of philosophy in modernity, whether in terms of reason’s infatuation with scientistic temptations, or philosophy’s claim to autonomous knowing, or so-called post- philosophy’s postulatory option for radical immanence.  Is there a freedom of mindfulness beyond such infatuations, or claims, or options? Is there a new, yet old, modus vivendi asked, in which […] the “theorist” and the “lover” can join hands?  More than anything else, I think this middle space between being religious and being philosophical puts us in question today, and the questions it charges us with bear    on the idolatries of our cherished forms of knowing and being, be they determinate scientific cognitions that answer our curiosity, or self-determining knowing that claims to give us self-knowledge, or our bind to immanence that deputizes our love of the good of creation […] Can philosophy witness to the charge of a  universality not objectifying and an intimacy of being not subjectifying? (IST 30-31). 




So, I want to start reading Desmond, where do I begin and how do I proceed?   

Desmond has 11 books: Art and the Absolute (1986), Desire, Dialectic and Otherness (1987), Philosophy and Its Others (1990), Beyond Hegel and Dialectic (1992), Being and the Between (1995), Perplexity and Ultimacy (1995), Ethics and the Between (2001), Hegel’s God (2003), Art, Origins, Otherness (2003), Is There a Sabbath for Thought? (2005), and God and the Between (2008). 

    Four of these books comprise what I call Desmond’s systematic “quadtrilogy”: Being and the Between, its companion volume Perplexity and Ultimacy, Ethics and the Between, and God and the Between.  This is the “meat” of Desmond’s authorship, so to speak.  If one were to want to read all of Desmond’s authorship, the best way to do so would be to simply read the books chronologically, in the order listed above.  One could also read the systematic quadtrilogy in order first, then continue on to the rest of the works.

     The only book I have not read, or begun reading, is Desmond’s Art, Origins, and Otherness (I am currently working through Philosophy and Its Others), and there isn’t a work that I wouldn’t wholeheartedly recommend. However, considering the fact that most won’t be willing to undertake quite so herculean a task as reading through the whole authorship proves to be, I would recommend reading Being and the Between if one book is all you have time for.  I should also note that Desmond’s Desire, Dialectic, And Otherness is a particularly unique and rewarding work, but it must be noted that—As Desmond himself notes in Perplexity and Ultimacy—the difficulty level is quite high.


Who are some of Desmond's influences?  How does he continue or discontinue their thought?   

 As is probably obvious by now, Desmond’s work is heavily engaged with Hegelian thought.   In essence, Desmond is using Hegelian dialectic, perfecting it by allowing its truth—the truth of the role self-mediation plays in our knowing—to stand, while adding on the role inter-mediation in community plays.  Desmond is endeavoring to show that there is no way to deny that the between is mediated both by us and for us, by the other—the other exists for more than our own self-mediation.  Of particular importance for Desmond is the recognition that Hegelian dialectic does not allow for a true absolute, for—upon his understanding, one I happen to agree quite strongly with—Hegel’s “absolute,” which is totally self-mediated through difference in the world, begins from lack, and thus needs the world in order to become absolute.  This, Desmond argues, is not a true absolute.  Much, much more could be said on this, and the best place to go for Desmond’s critique of Hegel is his Hegel’s God.   

Tell us a little about your own work on Desmond.  Why is he so helpful for your work, faith, and imagination?    

     My work on Desmond at this point is still in reading through his corpus—I’m nearly done, as stated above.  However I plan to go on to do a substantive and broad comparison of Desmond’s and Danish philosopher/theologian Søren Kierkegaard’s work.  Both thinkers are reacting against and through Hegel, and despite massive differences of style, historical context, and philosophical/theological preferences, the two come to amazingly similar conclusions on a wide variety of questions/answers—particularly with regard to the self and its relation to God and other.  It is also interesting to me that Desmond distances himself from Kierkegaard at numerous points, considering the similarity I find in their philosophies (to be fair, the Kierkegaard Desmond is often reacting against is primarily via the pseudonymous authors, particularly Johannes Climacus).

    

     There is much more I would like to say, but I am afraid I am already far over the amount of space that courtesy allows.  I hope that this has piqued your interest, and if you do decide to go on to read Desmond, stick with him—he’s extremely difficult to read at first, but once you get a feel for his fourfold sense of being and his language, his “metaphysical metaphors” he gets much clearer. 

- S. Lloyd Norris

Seth Thomas