The William Desmond Reader

William Desmond

Description

Known especially for his original system of metaphysics in a trilogy of books published between 1995 and 2008, and for his scholarship on Hegel, William Desmond has left his mark on the philosophy of religion, ethics, and aesthetics. The William Desmond Reader provides for the first time in a single book a point of entry into his original and constructive philosophy, including carefully chosen selections of his works that introduce the key ideas, perspectives, and contributions of his philosophy as a whole. Also featured is an original essay by Desmond himself reflecting synthetically on the topics covered, as well as an interview by Richard Kearney.
Foreword by John Caputo
Acknowledgments
Introduction
List of William Desmond’s Works

Part I. Metaphysics and Philosophy

The Fourfold Way
Transcendences
The Truth of Metaphysics
What Is Metaphysical Thinking?
Metaphysics and Dialectic
The Metaxological
The Idiocy of Being
Agapeic Mind

Part II. Ethics and Ethos

Autonomy and Freedom
The Potencies of the Ethical
Metaxological Ethics

Part III. Religion and the Philosophy of God

Agapeic Origin
Breaking the Silence
Godlessness
Beyond Godlessness
Hegel’s Counterfeit Double
God and the Metaxological Way
God and Hyperbole
God beyond the Whole
God Being Over-Being: A Metaphysical Canto

Part IV. Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Being Aesthetic
Being at a Loss: On Philosophy and the Tragic
Art and Transcendence

Part V. Retrospections and Reflections

Wording the Between
“Two Thinks at a Distance”: An Interview with William Desmond by Richard Kearney on 9 January 2011

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Métaphysique
• Philosophie de la religion
• Philosophy
• Philosophy of religion
• Metaphysics

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 17 septembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438442938
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sketch of William Desmond by Christopher Ben Simpson

THE WILLIAM DESMOND READER
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
CHRISTOPHER BEN SIMPSON
FOREWORD BY
JOHN D. CAPUTO
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS

Frontispiece and cover illustrations of William Desmond by Christopher Ben Simpson
Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl Marketing, Kate McDonnell
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Desmond, William, 1951–
[Selections. 2012]
The William Desmond reader / edited and with an introduction by Christopher Ben Simpson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-4292-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-4291-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
I. Simpson, Christopher Ben, 1973– II. Title.
B1626.D471 2012
192—dc23
2011035850
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOREWORD

William Desmond is one of the leading voices in contemporary philosophy in the continentalist tradition. Although Desmond is a skillful reader of philosophical texts and a renowned interpreter of the work of Hegel in particular, he is best known as an original philosopher in his own right, having been at the forefront over the years in cultivating a singularly contemporary style of metaphysics. Metaphysics in the grand style has gone out of fashion among philosophers in the postmodern and resolutely postmetaphysical tradition. But Desmond proposes an approach to metaphysics that avoids the extreme of a priori arguments, like the ontological proof, and adheres more closely to an experiential base.
The theoretical core and signature idea of Desmond's thought is the “between,” which leads him to describe his work as a “metaxology” (from the Greek metaxu ). The metaxological can be thought of as a different way to relate the same and the different, in contrast to the Hegelian way of “dialectical” mediation, which unites them in a higher unity. For the upshot of Hegelian mediation, he argues, is to close the circle between the same and the different and thereby to subordinate everything to the rule of a higher integration and sameness. The “between” means to keep this circle open and in that way to preserve difference. Never attaining the ground of a higher totalizing and integrating unity, the “between” occupies the open space that preserves the distance of the same from the different. The same does not return to itself through the different; rather the space of play between the same and the different is sustained, allowing for relations of otherness, difference, and plurality to obtain along several orders—between mind and being, immanence and transcendence, finite and infinite, and singular and universal. Desmond thus is able to orchestrate his leitmotif across several philosophical domains—including art, ethics, and religion—but the guiding insight is at root metaphysical.
Viewed in the light of postmetaphysical critiques of Hegel, Desmond's work invites three questions having to do in turn with classical metaphysics, contemporary phenomenological ontology, and the postmetaphysical.
First, how does the metaxological differ from the analogical? Is Desmond proposing a contemporary version of the classical theory of the analogy of being, which seems to be how he is taken by John Milbank? 1 In the analogy of being, being is everywhere itself yet everywhere diversified; the analogical does not fall into sheer equivocity, on the one side, even as, on the other side, the diversity of being is grounded in unity but without embracing a totalizing unity. There is a unity to the analogy of being in Aquinas, but not the totalizing and systematic one we find in early modern rationalists or in Hegel. What separates Desmond's thinking of the between from the metaphysics of analogy in Aquinas? Is it the role of the between to convey this venerable classical metaphysical motif in a contemporary setting?
Second, let us suppose, as I am inclined to suppose, that metaxology differs from a classical metaphysics of analogy because it emphasizes the concrete and experiential and eschews abstract a priori arguments and formal schemata such as “proportionality,” which typify the classical style of metaphysics. If so, then we are led to ask the question that is put to him by Richard Kearney in the interview: how is metaxology related to contemporary phenomenology? How is metaxological metaphysics different from a contemporary phenomenological ontology? If, as Desmond says, he is inclined next to write a book of “songs,” how different is this from Merleau-Ponty's conception of language as a song to the world? Is metaxology an exploration of the fundamental characteristics of being (classical metaphysics) but one that is precisely anchored by the experience of being (phenomenology), calling for a return to metaphysics but one that in fact sails the ship of metaphysics closer to the shores of experience than classical metaphysics? Are we to think it differs from classical metaphysics not in terms of substance but in terms of its via , of a style and approach more deeply experiential, and that it differs from phenomenology only in its Husserlian mode while extending the reach of phenomenology to the ontological?
Third, if the advantage of the metaxological schema is that it preserves difference, distance, concreteness, and the singular in a way that is lost in Hegel, then we are led to ask, at the other extreme, how it differs from the poststructuralist figures who make the same criticism of Hegel and strike out in the same direction of difference. The latter are faulted by Desmond for breaking the bonds of the between by overemphasizing difference and “equivocity” (in just the way monists break these bonds by overemphasizing sameness and univocity). What difference, we might ask, does the difference between poststructuralist difference and metaxological difference make?
Perhaps we are being asked by Desmond to think that the “between” is precisely between classical metaphysical analogy, phenomenological ontology and postmetaphysical difference. It is a tribute to Desmond's work that he provokes questions like this, which forces us to reconsider a wide-ranging and weighty series of issues that lie at the heart of the debates that take place in contemporary continental thought. His metaxological thinking is a unique and creative voice in the contemporary dialogue. But the “contemporary dialogue” in continental thought is changing, and this change bears directly on the place of Desmond's work today.
I would like to conclude with a remark on the timeliness of publishing this volume of Desmond's writings at the present moment, after the death of Derrida and his generation, which some see as a turning point in continental philosophy. For a long time now Desmond's fidelity to metaphysical thinking has been a minority view among continentalists, who have been variously shooting for something beyond, without or otherwise than being. Throughout Desmond remained undaunted and bravely took a stand with being and the goodness of being, sometimes feeling, I am sure, like the sole soldier still standing at his post. But we are at present witnessing a resurgence of interest in metaphysics, a resurrection of the question of the “real,” and a reassessment of the philosophical tradition before Kant in which speculative thinking flourished. 2 For a new generation, the philosophical tradition from Kant on is dead—not only from Kant to Heidegger to Derrida, but also from Kant to Wittgenstein and contemporary analytic philosophy. Kant and the post-Kantians, the Kantian version of the “Copernican Revolution,” are criticized for a subjectivism that has reduced the world to a construction of thought, language, or culture, for having reduced reality to its “correlation” with the mind. Accordingly, the renewal of realism advocated by the new generation means to replace mind with matter. The return of realism represents a return of a militant atheistic materialism for which the “absolute” means matter measured mercilessly by its mathematical properties. Any such realism would vigorously contest the metaphysical metaxological “agapeics” of Desmond as another round of nostalgia, another attempt to reenchant the real with religion, with the Good, or with the good old God, another round of putting a shine on being, or giving it a bit of a buzz, by way of a metaphysics that is more religious piety than real philosophy. The new realism is a ruthless repetition of rationalism, an attempt to disenchant the world anew, this time pulling up religion by the roots. It would no doubt criticize Desmond's “between” as a religiously inspired humanism in which the absoluteness of being is displaced by the experiential relation between thinking and the absolute. The new realism insists that “being” as “absolute” be taken alone, absolved, as being, as the real, and not as between.
Desmond thus represents a different voice. Like continentalists from Kierkegaard to Derrida, he stands for loyalty to the concrete and experiential, but unlike them he is a realist and a metaphysician. Like the new realists, he takes his stand with metaphysics, but unlike them he is not a materialist. The absolute for him is not matter, his metaphysics is not atheistic, and his interest in the tradition before Kant extends beyond the speculative rationalisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wh