Restoring Being and Goodness
For William Desmond, metaphysics makes modernity. Or more accurately, our distaste for metaphysics forms the heart of modernity. Though Desmond is not an intellectual historian, as a post-Hegelian he is sensitive to how distinct historical trends of thought emerge in different eras. Desmond’s recent book The Voiding of Being: The Doing and Undoing of Metaphysics in Modernity is particularly attentive to the ways modernity has shifted our engagements with questions of being and goodness. In it, Desmond explores the ways in which modern and postmodern thought has voided being in its rejection of metaphysics. This primarily takes the form of the modern insistence on the autonomous self as constituting being, our rejection of metaphysics as the consideration of transcendence in immanence, and, consequently, the divorce of goodness and being.
These intellectual shifts are not wholly unique to modernity, but modern life privileges certain anti-metaphysical tendencies in thought. These predispositions are the expression of certain ways or senses of being that are present in all epochs but have come to the fore in modernity. Desmond, by attending to history, shows how systems of thought cover over the mystery of being. The reason his systematics covers such a stretch (Heraclitus to Deleuze) is that humans wrestle with these senses of being no matter what era they live in. Metaphysics is not a contingent intellectual impulse.
Desmond maps being along four modes: the univocal (emphasizing sameness and determinate identity), the equivocal (emphasizing difference and flux), the dialectical (mediating the sameness and difference within a self-determining process of wholeness), and the metaxological (which literally means the study of the between). The metaxological reflects the three other ways while exploring the open “between” of being. The “between” is a kind of open whole. To understand something as an open whole is to see that it is its own being but that it is always already related to what is other to it. Just as each being relies on other beings, Being itself is an open whole in relation to God. To explore this open whole is to see how flux, stability, and self-striving are sourced by the overdeterminate. The overdeterminate is the inexhaustible excesses of being that are sourced from beyond being. The overdeterminate is not irrational, though it exceeds our knowing. To speak of the overdeterminate is ultimately to speak of God. It is the heart of St. Anselm’s conclusion that God must be both the greatest that can be thought and greater than can be thought. It is also at the heart of the experience of wordlessly gazing in wonder at the beautiful world. It is all too much.
For Desmond, metaphysics is the mindful exploration of being through the examination of what he calls hyperboles of being, which are: “Happenings in immanent finitude that cannot be determined completely on the terms of immanent finitude.” Hyperboles are present in our world, but they overleap any reductionist account of them. More importantly, they show that the world is not constituted by us but is there in front of us, summoning us to astonishment and exploration. To watch Spring begin is to experience a transcendent otherness at work in the immanent presence before us. We do not constitute them, because “they point beyond . . . in terms of the excesses given to showing in the immanent between itself. The immanent between is porous to something other to it.” It is not that the immanent frame needs to be broken by an appearance of a miraculous transcendence. Rather, we find the experience of the transcendent precisely in the immanent.
The struggle for certain knowledge (univocal determination), which we particularly find in modernity, often means that transcendence in immanence—the hyperbolic—is flattened out or excluded. For Desmond, modernity’s attitude of suspicion towards transcendence is really a closing-off of otherness. This is a temptation in any epoch, but Desmond takes it to be a special mark of philosophical modernity. In the shift to modernity, we see a shift to autonomy in ethics, theology, and politics. This shift occurs over time but intensifies with Immanuel Kant. For Kant, being, otherness, and transcendence are closed off. All we must ask is: “what can I know? What must I do? What may I hope?” The questions revolve around the subject and the answers must only come from the subject. The world, other people, and God must fit into the limits of my reason.
Desmond sees shift to autonomy as a rejection of metaphysics and a prioritization epistemology. It is not what is that interests me, but what I can know about my knowing. The former is an alterity that I experience as my companion, whereas the later is a subjectivity that is sufficient to itself. With rationalism, “Reason turns to itself as its own and only standard, claiming to be sufficient for itself.” Reason is tempted, particularly in modernity, to take its standards no longer from outside or above it. Desmond’s approach calls to mind essayist Scott Russell Sanders. Sanders warns of the danger of being “shut up… inside the house of thought.” Modernity is an epoch that no longer sees this as a temptation but as a goal. Desmond is trying to re-open the house of thought to being out there.
We don’t conform to a higher standard (say in Augustine), nor do we conform to the realities we encounter in the world (say in Aquinas). Rather, “we think objects as conforming to our knowing rather than our knowing conforming to objects.” The autonomous self is not just free of tradition, political authority, and God; the autonomous self constitutes objects and so constitutes the world. Ultimately this means that the heteronomous, in the form of what is other to us, is set aside or conformed to our expectation. Revelation from the other is foreclosed. Even Kant’s God must conform to our moral expectations. If God does not fit the boundaries of our moral reason, God is to be sidelined.
For Desmond, this shift to autonomy also marks our rejection of metaphysics. To be modern is to refuse to think metaphysically. To refuse metaphysics is to reject thinking being beyond as beyond our subjectivity. Against this, Desmond maintains his basic commitment to thinking what is other to thought. This otherness to thought is being, but being as intimate other. Openness to others is a feature of each being and of the whole community of beings. Being and beings are open wholes, always in relation with others. For Desmond, this means that we have to consider the double meaning of meta in metaphysics. The meta “can mean both in the midst, but also over and above and beyond.” The task of thinking is to attend mindfully to these modes of openness, because being is not self-constituting. Each thing is itself a sign of what is other to it. Astonished and perplexed, we see the between as an open space of beings open to the God beyond, within, and above being. This doubleness of metaphysics means that thought “concerns both the immanent and transcendent . . . . The metaxu as immanence is a given porosity of being, already in relation to what is beyond itself.” To think being is always to think being as what exceeds our thinking as both other to us and intimate to us.
To prioritize the autonomous self against the other means, “we take knowing to be the measure of being, not being the measure of knowing.” Knowing, the activity of the self, determines being, the existence of others. Being, then, “is nothing for itself, being does not stun mindfulness with the ‘too muchness’ of the overdeterminate.” To attend to being is to see it as a fundamental surplus, as too much for us. This attending to being is metaphysics, and it is metaphysics that welcomes the goodness of being.
The modern fact-value distinction, in which there is valueless being and value-giving subjectivity, exemplifies the shift to autonomy and away from metaphysics. It means that being and goodness have been separated. For Desmond, “the premodern hospitality of being and good” has been “replaced by the divorce of being and good. The worth of being is not for itself. It is for us to determine what it is.” Desmond does not use the example of John Locke, but the latter’s philosophy of nature and labor can clarify his meaning. For Locke, nature is wasteland; it is “scarcely worth anything” without the labor of man. Without humans, being as encountered in nature is worthless. Just as we constitute the world through our autonomous reason, so too do we constitute the goodness of things. We put the price on being, and so being, by itself, is worthless.
Desmond is describing a threefold tension between humanity and metaphysics: the drive to self-control, the neglect of the wonder of being, and the separation of goodness and being by means of appropriating all value-giving to the self. These are systematic, though they have reached a particular intensity in the modern forgetting of the goodness of being. The modern, and the post-modern for that matter, might be particularly anti-metaphysical, but this is not to say that it is totally unique in history or that metaphysics won’t return. Like Sanders, Desmond is trying to awaken the closed autonomous self to the wonder of being beyond the subject. Sanders writes, “It is a small awakening, to surface from thoughts of myself and my kind and to rise up into the blooming, darting, singing world.” Desmond’s own work, sourced from his reflections on Hegel in particular, is an attempt to restore the wonder at the goodness of being. It is an attempt to awaken us again the ‘blooming, darting, singing world’ that exists beyond our construction.
J.M.W. Turner’s The Sun Setting Over a Lake c. 1840
I have turned to Desmond’s recent book because it speaks to core traits of Christian genealogy. First is his emphasis on metaphysics. The tendency in genealogical work after Nietzsche is to avoid metaphysics and the questions of how we speak of being. This is true even amongst Catholics who have a stronger attachment to metaphysical thinking. But to operate within this tendency is to remain limited by the modern. If part of the task of genealogical thinking is to disrupt the modern frame of thinking, then we ought to renew the many possibilities of metaphysics. Second, Christian genealogy must remain open to otherness. We do so by listening to other modes of genealogical thinking, attending to the newness of things, and continuing to listen to revelation. Lastly, a Christian genealogy must remain committed to the goodness of creation particularly in the face of our ecological crisis. William Desmond’s attempt to rethink the void of being is ultimately a summons to attend to the full goodness of being and a return to wonder. It is a thinking through of our genealogical origin as created beings in God’s first words. God not only said “let there be,” but God also saw that creation is good. Desmond’s work continues to remind us that being and goodness need to be at the forefront of our thought even when doing genealogical work.
