equivocity – Forging Ploughshares

William Desmond’s Four Ways: From Spiritual Sickness to Divinization

William Desmond’s four ways might be read as the passage from fall to redemption in which the human failure is the attempt to be their own origin (univocity) through an implicit and denied plurality or difference (equivocity), and this fall into metaphysical striving (dialectics) is the common human passage toward realizing the fulness of personhood (in the metaxological). As Desmond describes in God and the Between, “By eating the forbidden fruit one assimilates its otherness to oneself, one seeks to have a radical source within oneself, the source of the primal division between good and evil.”[1] The drive to be in oneself and displacing the life from God describes a metaphysical pursuit gone bad. The displacement of the mediating presence of God, or the tree of life, means taking up the difference of good and evil in the self. One constitutes the difference, perhaps with the goal of overcoming it, but rather than being able to digest this equivocity, one is consumed in the dialectic, resulting in shame. That is, all three of Desmond’s ways are captured in his depiction of the fall: the grab for univocity, results in equivocity and dialectic. He captures the necessity of these ways in his description: “The turn to self that turns the self into an original being for itself is equivocal, because in being for itself as power to be itself, it can refuse the necessity of the other for just its being itself.”[2] There is an attempt at univocity through equivocity that is an obvious lie: “To insist that humans are measured by univocal truth is to be in the untruth, that is, to be in the equivocal that one has denied. . .”[3]

To accept the gift – the gift of life or the gift of being – entails accepting that the gift is not mine to control, and rightly acknowledged it is to be open to the other. We can either accept the gift in gratitude or refuse to acknowledge the origin. To be the origin, to be the singular, univocal, giver and receiver, results in a fracture. “But our claim to undo the equivocity absolutely through ourselves alone is just again the fatal equivocity redoubled. For this undoing is the will to undo gift, to undo porosity, to undo our passio essendi. We ourselves cannot be absolute sources of control or certainty concerning the gift and its source.”[4] The passion or patience of being rightly received does not grab for it so as to secure it and make it one’s own.

The grab for being (conatus essendi) undoes the gift or would deny it. “For we would then only accept what we have given to ourselves. But any such self-giving is a rebuff to the more original giving: everything we give to ourselves is only thus because we have first been given to ourselves. Our being for ourselves is also first given to ourself; we do not give ourselves to ourselves; we only begin to give ourselves to ourselves, subsequent to being given to ourselves.”[5] This acknowledgement of the metaxological, the givenness of being, recognizes the drive to exploit equivocity (otherness) in the drive to univocity. We would do away with the gifting Other in the attempt to be both bestower and beneficiary. “This taking does not consent to the other, does not wait upon the consent of the other. Taking like this is thus like stealing or sacking or raping. We speak of ‘taking’ in another person, or being ‘taken in,’ that is, deceiving or being deceived. ‘Taking’ is thus also at the origin of deceit and being false. Is this not one reason why Satan was called ‘the father of lies’?”[6] Out of greed for eternal life we create hell, and refuse the gift as the offering that it is. “Hell is the will to be one’s own creator and creation in one, and by the denial that anything at all is given to one, least of all one’s own self. Hell is the fiction of absoluteness that ontological ingratitude secretes.”[7]

Desmond’s fourfold way of thinking about metaphysics is a definition or overall description, but also what might be described as orientations or misorientations when presumed to be isolated or singular ways unto themselves.[8] As he puts it, “They are not to be understood purely chronologically, though phases of human self-becoming may dominantly give prominence to one rather than the other. They give expression to orientations to being, communications from being, potencies of our being in the between, each with a promise that can be more or less realized or developed.”[9] They are a description of a dynamic interplay. “As formings they have their own dynamic but they can pass into each other, appear and recede, interrupt and continue, diminish and augment each other. The promise of one or each may be recessed but is not necessarily negated by the overt predominance of another.”[10] With passage through these ways, there is the possible development of a discernment, or a certain finesse or fitness for living, but this life is not without its passage through death. “We each may have to sweat blood with this tormenting question, urgently and as singulars, each of us suffering, like Jesus, our own night in Gethsemane garden.”[11]

The Metaxological Dialectic

For example, an over-determinate focus on the univocal might consign to a distant God, the transcendent, or simply the law, the singular significance of being, so that sameness or unity overrides immanence and difference. This could be describing a form of theology, in which the significance of the incarnation is overridden by God’s sovereignty, or in a Lacanian psychoanalytic frame it describes one of the primary forms of human sickness – a punishing servitude of the superego, the law, or the perverse father figure. It is not that the univocal is always sick, but the drive for determinate solutions might result in a science or a person reduced to absolute law. On the other hand, the equivocal, focused as it is on difference and diversity might so focus on absolute difference or opposition that being itself is thought not to cohere, or in personal terms the self is divided against itself in continual agonistic opposition. A religion built on dualism, or a philosophy split within itself, or a house divided, cannot stand. The third way, the dialectical sense is focused on mediating and reintegrating difference, such as that between mind and being, but as a self-mediated effort this tends to lead to a stress on self-determination, and as in the philosophy of Hegel it falls, according to Desmond, completely in the immanent realm or upon the notion of complete synthesis or sameness.

These three ways, as Desmond emphasizes, are not really discrete, but facets of an interlocking way which, when truncated, tend to reduce to the same thing. Absolute difference is an impossibility that collapses back into sameness. That is, there is an inevitability in these three ways that imply the others, no matter if there is an attempted suppression. The “attempt” of the metaxological is to not give way to absolute sameness or difference, nor to imagine these can be self-mediated. This is not onto-theology nor foundationalism in the modern sense of reduction to a univocal reason, nor is it a postmodern relinquishment to difference and deconstruction, nor is it the Hegelian mode of dialectics, which would reduce to total synthesis and immanence, but it is an acknowledgement of the truth and inadequacy of each of these ways. Taken all together, “The fourfold sense of being offers an interlocking set of articulations of transcendence—both the transcending of mind and the transcendence of being, and without the closure of either to ultimate transcendence.”[12] This seems to be on the order of a dialectics, that in Desmond’s description takes us beyond dialectics.

Desmond has a deep appreciation for Hegel’s dialectic, and as I have traced it in Eriugena (here), the presumption that dialectics can be done rightly. Hegel, in his estimate, has missed the mark, but Hegel helped him appreciate that dialectics draws out a necessary relation even in seeming contradiction. “Dialectic quickens mindfulness of this togetherness, intermediating a more faithful vigilance of the ontological promise of the ethos. We must explore dialectic’s ‘thinking beyond’ of opposition.”[13] Dialectics can help dissolve a false univocity or a misunderstood absolute difference and come to a new appreciation, with Hegel, of the subject. God however, cannot simply be equated with the powers of dialectic or equated with the between, so the metaxological appreciates the power of dialectic and its limitations.

In short, Desmond’s fourth way, the metaxological is an embrace of the dialectical, but with a difference. It puts the stress, not on self-mediation, but the mediation through a community beyond the self, beyond univocal sameness. As he says, “It puts the emphasis on an intermediation, not a self-mediation, however dialectically qualified.”[14] This inter opens the space for God, for community, for otherness, and plurality, simultaneously showing forth the truth in the univocal, the equivocal and the dialectical, but setting these ways in a larger context. Desmond describes the metaxological as referencing the immediacy of the happening of being. It is the circumstance of finding ourself in the world, so it is our immediate circumstance, but it is the openness to the other or different mediations beyond the self. As he sums up, “The metaxological sense keeps open the spaces of otherness in the between, and it does not domesticate the ruptures that shake the complacencies of our mediations of being.”[15] The astonishment of being is not to be domesticated or reduced, but is to be kept alive as the truth of metaphysics.

The Four Ways as the Movement of the Subject

Though Desmond’s first three ways may describe discrete periods of history, or a focus in philosophy or religion, psychoanalytically they would seem to reduce to the same problem, and that is the loss of the mediating and transcendent other. That is, described as movements within the self, the drive to being or univocity creates the Big Other of God or the law or the punishing superego, which splits the self in an antagonistic dualism, which one spends their life attempting to dialectically mediate. One would like to get rid of this obscene Other, and escape the fracturing of the world this entails, but the physician simply cannot heal herself. Ontotheology, foundationalism, modernism, and postmodernism are certainly discrete epochs, but they share the problem of the human sickness which, as Desmond describes the fall, is the collapse of a metaxological openness, and the attempt or event of being one’s own mediator.

We have been “taken,” by ourselves perhaps, but what is lost is realization of the agapeic origins of life, the sanctuary of nature in its divine givenness, or simply the astonishment of being. In striving to be gods we become our own tormenting devil. “In the turn to self, what has turned up is the devouring worm in innerness itself. We ourselves are consumed by this worm, consumed by ourselves. We are the inversion: the power that dedivinizes itself in the very act of divinizing itself.”[16] Desmond describes it as the opening of the rapport with death as we have realized not the power of divinization but of negation. “Do we create death or are we created by death? Does it matter how we answer, if death is the truth of being when the face of God has faded?”[17] Death becomes the controlling impetus in a life of self-consumption. “There closes in on itself the circle of self-laceration and torment. Look what strange animals we humans have become, we who tear the flesh of our own being into strips, we who eat ourselves in this monstrous evening, we who even this bright morning went forth from our caves glowing with ourselves as our own sun?”[18] It is not that other people are hell; this misses the infernal nature of the I turned upon itself. “I am hell. I am the excremental self that eats excrement, myself as excrement. Lucifer, son of the morning, bearer of light, excretes not light but an infernal equivocity.”[19] Grounding the self in the self, metaphysical striving, brings equivocity into play in the drive to univocity, and this dialectic of death is the descent into hell in my would-be heavenly ascent.

But even to describe this descent in the way of Desmond, is to have the perspective of the metaxological. It is to recognize that falling into the pit may bring about metanoia, or a knowing beyond the self. To be driven to extremes and desperation is perhaps to be awakened through our wretchedness to that which is beyond us. “The horror is secreted in the inward otherness of our selving – here the excess in self of selving that turns to the infernal.”[20] Perhaps becoming a self requires some time in hell or purgatory, and isn’t this also part of the four ways? “Who doubts that human beings can be infernal, but can we make sense of the infernal outside of religion? Is being mindful of evil inseparable from being mindful of God: God as either violated, or horribly turned away, or withheld in the midst of being we otherwise would think of as good?”[21] Recognition of the possibility of evil comes with the recognition of God, for there is no evil in a universe devoid of absolute goodness.

The failure to master the equivocal holds the potential to awaken to what is beyond it. “Seen so, the purgatory of the equivocal helps create a new humility. Rocked back on ourselves as not God, we step on a thorny path to God, or from.”[22] We may learn to laugh at our hubris and to mock the idols we have constructed, such that the passage through the univocal/equivocal dialectic may turn out to be preparation for the mataxological. “Will we find ourselves? Find ourselves in ourselves but as awakening to a dialogue with God in innerness; find ourselves always beyond ourselves, and in what is beyond us, even as within us?”[23] There is the possibility, not in the Nietzschean sense, of going beyond good and evil, to a sense of overflowing mercy and justice. Desmond appeals to the parable of the vineyard to describe this beyond. “The Father of Jesus gives in excess of the measure; there is no measure that is proportioned to human exactitude; all are given their due, and more again – and in a sense, nothing is due, for all is gift.”[24]

Divinization Through the Agapeic Origin

The very possibility of the dialectic passage points to its ground in agapeic love. “Agapeic letting be creates a space of openness for finite freedom: finite freedom is empowered with the highest possibility of self-transcending, and so is itself the promise of being agapeic. That space of empowered openness witnesses to the porosity of the between and the allowance of both the passio essendi and the conatus essendi.”[25] The very possibility of the passion of being and the drive to control this passion point to a God-endowed freedom, which holds out both the possibility of refusal and acceptance and fusing with this agapeic origin. “Agapeic letting be creates a space of openness for finite freedom: finite freedom is empowered with the highest possibility of self-transcending, and so is itself the promise of being agapeic.”[26] As he describes in his article on eschatology, there is the promise of wholeness, a “threading together the middle, the beginning and the end” to which we must remain open, and this is why “the God of the between” must be thought of “as a God beyond the between, a God whose wholeness is agapeic.”[27] This God is not a conceivable wholeness but can only be approached in “wording the between.” “Such an agapeic God is other than and beyond the God of the whole, recurrently perhaps more consoling to philosophers.”[28]

Desmond likens the metaxological to divinization, and perhaps the entire course can be counted as fully entering into and appreciating that it is the agapeic God that is being communicated. We begin to “think God” as the
clogged “porosity” of our being opens up and we become mindful, open and patient to this communication, all the time recognizing these depths are not fathomable. There is no “apodeictic certainty” but only this patient minding on the order of prayer. “One starts there; one ends there; more determinacy is possible in the middle. With God one is always divining.”[29] So one remains in the middle, divining, realizing, but not determining. “There is no point at which divination of the gist gives over entirely to clear and distinct determination alone. One is always in the dark even as the brightness grows. One listens for the unspoken in the spoken, and the spoken beyond the unspoken, and the silence reserved in both the spoken and unspoken.”[30] Desmond describes an awakening or “resurrection of astonishment” which is an appreciation of the “too muchness” of being. The initial child-like wonder which gave way to pursuit of univocity and entrapment to equivocity also describes a spiraling into a kind of boredom with the world. The second astonishment is not like the first which we have unwittingly squandered. “The second refreshed astonishment is born out of the known and knowing pathos of the between. In despite of our being stressed by the extremities of receiving and loss, the gift of an overdeterminate joy in being flares up: primal passio essendi.”[31] We can call upon it as a form of prayer, but it is not to be commanded.

As a boy, I remember the frustration of times in the literal desert, which previously had imparted deep joy, but which could not be called upon at a whim. Desmond calls this desire to command, a kind of idolatry. We must patiently wait, perhaps in the midst of suffering in a literal or metaphorical desert. “When this joy comes it is offered as a godsend.”[32] We must be exposed to the darkness perhaps, to appreciate the light. We must have a prognosis of the disease to even recognize the cure. “The waters rise to our neck, and above it; the words of appeal we would were prayers come out instead as gurgled mumbles as we drown. In being shattered, is there ingression? In breakdown, breakthrough? In dying, life?”[33] Suffering and agony and even enduring evil, bear directly on realization of participation in agapeic love.

The goodness of being, specifically recognized in Gethsemane and Golgotha enact in the patience of Christ, divine redemption. “The last moments of Christ suggest that in the desolation of abandonment, and in being bereft, there is release beyond abandonment, a different abandon to the good of God. His life is given up to another, the final “yes” releasing self from clinging to its own absoluteness, giving itself over to the Father.”[34] In following Christ, participating in his redemption all that is asked is an affirmation a “yes.” “Yes: that our dying be our birth into gratitude for being as gift, gratitude no matter what comes in the narrow grave, perhaps nothing, perhaps resurrection, perhaps transfiguration. Love is entrusted to the goodness of the origin in trusting beyond the measure of finitude.”[35] We have the hope of an “infinite saving” or life beyond evil and suffering, and this is redemption: “Living the service of agapeic being, even in the undergoing of the ultimate suffering of death. God shows the living of agapeic being, in the ‘yes’ to the good of being, even in the nihilation of finite life which death brings. There is a ‘yes’ beyond death. Redemption is living beyond the threat of death: life beyond death, in life itself, in death itself.”[36] That is, this is not simply life after death, but life itself into which we “are reborn in the life of agapeic service.”[37]

In sum: the movements of Desmond’s metaxological metaphysics are grounded in this thinking of God as the eternal agapeic origin of being: “always already having given the other its being as for itself – and the giving of ‘coming to be’ is not its own coming to be but is given for the other as finite creation that comes to be.”[38] Agapeic love is the eternal source pouring out being into otherness, and this is the gift of time, of goodness, and of coming to be.[39] Movement through the metaxological dialectic has its end (and beginning) in agapeic divinization.

[1] William Desmond, God and the Between (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008) 85.

[2] God and the Between, 85.

[3] God and the Between, 88.

[4] God and the Between, 85.

[5] God and the Between, 85.

[6] God and the Between, 85.

[7] God and the Between, 149-150.

[8] See William Desmond, “The Fourfold Way” in The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press, Kindle Edition)

[9] God and the Between, 122. He also spells out the four ways of the metaxological in Chapter 6 of this book: “God and the Metaxological Way.”

[10] God and the Between, 122.

[11] God and the Between, 145.

[12] Reader, location 314.

[13] God and the Between, 92.

[14] Reader, location 295.

[15] Reader, 302.

[16] God and the Between, 86.

[17] God and the Between, 86.

[18] God and the Between, 86.

[19] God and the Between, 86.

[20] God and the Between, 149.

[21] God and the Between, 149.

[22] God and the Between, 89.

[23] God and the Between, 90.

[24] God and the Between, 186.

[25] God and the Between, 149.

[26] God and the Between, 149.

[27] William Desmond, “On the Edge: Philosophical Thoughts on Theology and Eschatology” in The Heythrop Journal (HeyJ 00 (2026), PP. 1–16), 4.

[28] On the Edge, 4.

[29] God and the Between, 120.

[30] God and the Between, 120.

[31] God and the Between, 121.

[32] God and the Between, 121.

[33] God and the Between, 121.

[34] God and the Between, 187.

[35] God and the Between, 187.

[36] God and the Between, 196.

[37] God and the Between, 196.

[38] God and the Between, 297.

[39] God and the Between, 297.

William Desmond’s Completion of Hegel

As a boy in Texas, unattenuated perhaps to the age, the world around me came alive with divine grandeur, discovered through my new-found faith. At the time it seemed obvious that I could ride off into the prairie and meet God, who showed himself in the meadowlark, the killdeer, the quail, the rabbits, the ever-present coyote. It was a stark landscape and yet the patches of life, the cottonwoods, occasional streams, the striking sunrise and sunset, seemed to show the face of God. What was once a regular occurrence and always in easy reach, faded with time, education, and perhaps attunement to the age. How is it that the world as saturated with the grandeur of God, once the common understanding, can be renewed?

As Charles Taylor has demonstrated in A Secular Age, the world has changed from one in which it was “virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society,” to one in which “many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”[1] Taylor describes the closing in of the world into an “immanent frame” in which this world in its finitude is determinant of value, and there is a closing in upon the self, what Taylor calls the “buffered” self. Our age has been captured by the “punctual” or “atomistic” sense of self, cut off from history and only vaguely aware of any alternative culture, so that the framework shaping life is perceived as the singular possibility. “So the buffered identity of the disciplined individual moves in a constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular. All of this makes up what I want to call ‘the immanent frame’.”[2] The irony is that the original effort, producing the secular, was to protect God from being contaminated with finiteness or materiality. It “was an achievement of Latin Christendom in the late Middle Ages and early modern period . . . made in order to mark clearly the autonomy of the super natural.”[3] Taylor spends much of his book describing how this immanent frame has come to dominate modern life: “Modern science, along with the many other facets described—the buffered identity, with its disciplines, modern individualism, with its reliance on instrumental reason and action in secular time—make up the immanent frame.”[4]

“God is dead,” not just philosophically or religiously, but in the sense of no longer being an obvious possibility. “From within the picture, it just seems obvious that the order of argument proceeds from science to atheism, through a series of well-grounded steps.”[5] There has been a subtraction or loss of concern for God or the transcendent, and “what we’re left with is human good, and that is what modern societies are concerned with.”[6] Human welfare in general is not the goal, nor is human freedom in general my goal. “Just being confined to human goods could just as well find expression in my concerning myself exclusively with my own material welfare, or that of my family or immediate milieu.”[7]

Even where belief endures the values that prevail in the Christian faith are often those of immanence and there has been a secularization or flattening out of faith, as transcendence has been eclipsed. God has been evacuated from public and social spheres and religion relegated to a private realm. Religious belief and practice are a realm apart from the practical political necessities of utilitarianism. Perhaps, worse than unbelief is a belief in God, confounded with the secular state and secular religion (e.g., Christian nationalism). It is as if “our actions, goals, achievements, and the like, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance. There is a deeper resonance which they lack, which we feel should be there.”[8] Ours is a world no longer enchanted with the divine.

Taylor calls for a new itinerary or a new path which will move beyond the dead-end of this secular age. “One could say that we look for new and unprecedented itineraries. Understanding our time in Christian terms is partly to discern these new paths, opened by pioneers who have discovered a way through the particular labyrinthine landscape we live in, its thickets and trackless wastes, to God.”[9]

This renewal begun by William Desmond, begins with a return to Hegel, who founds his philosophy on the createdness of the world. He presumes faith in the Creator is the proper frame in which to understand the world: “If someone were to make his profession of faith as follows: ‘I believe in God the Father, the Creator of heaven and earth’, it would be surprising if someone else were to conclude from this first part that the person professing his faith believed in God, the creator of heaven, and therefore considered the earth to be uncreated and matter to be eternal.”[10] Hegel was criticized for equating the “actual” and the “rational,” but he explains that he simply intends what the Christian religion is founded upon: God is the mind behind the world, and we encounter God in thinking this out. “With regard to their philosophical meaning, however, we may presuppose that the reader is sufficiently educated to know not only that God is actual– that he is what is most actual, indeed that he alone is what is truly actual, but also, insofar as the merely formal difference is concerned, that existence in general is partly appearance and only partly actuality.”[11] God cannot be equated with the appearance, but he is the personal actuality behind the appearance encountered in thought.

Hegel recognizes that the world is apprehended by persons, in thought, created as it is by a personal God. “They must be involved in it, whether through their external senses only or with their deeper spirit and the essential consciousness of their respective self. This is the same principle that in our time has been called faith, immediate knowledge, the revelation coming from outside and in particular from one’s own inner being.”[12] To imagine, with Newton, that everything is reducible to rule, to principles, or to abstractions, is to miss that these too are thought. “But what in essence they aim at and produce are laws, general propositions, a theory, i.e. the thoughts of what there is.”[13] Empirical knowledge or scientific laws are part of human experience and thought, marked by “freedom, spirit, and God.” To separate empirical laws from thought and experience is to lose the reality undergirding them. “The reason why they cannot be found in that sphere is not that they are supposedly not a part of experience; they are not experienced by way of the senses, it is true, but whatever is present in consciousness is being experienced– this is even a tautological sentence. Rather, they are not found in that sphere, because in terms of their content these objects immediately present themselves as infinite.”[14] This is part of recognizing the personhood on both sides of thought, not in the manner of Descartes – though an understanding toward which he gestured, that the person is involved in what he knows.

Hegel is also critical of the metaphysical tradition which would understand the world as an object or objectivity existing over and against the thinking subject. Traditional ontology focused on the world as a substance, which could be potentially endowed with thought, but nonetheless the thinking subject still viewed the world as a separate object: “something other than itself that is not a self for itself and therefore still separated from the contemplating subject.”[15] Hegel saw his work as bringing to completion the Kantian turn to the subject, but he expands upon this subjectivity and thinking, as “the world is, at its core, subjectivity itself. For this reason, substance had to be shown to be subject, too, and substance ontology had to be seen ultimately to be subject ontology.”[16] One need not approach the subject on the basis of the philosophical arguments for God, as if one needed to prove God before setting out in belief and thinking. This would be like needing to comprehend the digestion system before eating, or learning to swim before getting in the water. The content of philosophy is thought and this thought is engagement with the spirit “the living spirit, a content turned into a world, namely the outer and inner world of consciousness, or that its content is actuality.”[17]

This sets up a very different relationship between the finite and infinite. For Descartes the finite, inclusive of the body and the world of finite physical things, must disappear in thinking being. Where Descartes thinks away the world in his grasp for infinite being, Hegel presumes there is an encounter with the infinite only as being first proves to be finite. As Stephen Houlgate explains, for Descartes “not only does the infinite precede the idea of the finite in our minds but infinite being itself precedes and transcends finite being in reality.”[18] According to Descartes, and here much of the western philosophical and theological tradition concurs, God may create and sustain but this is secondary and subsequent to his existence apart from finite things. For Hegel the infinite and the finite are inseparable, and to separate them is to limit both. The infinite must include the finite or it is a bad infinite or not a true infinite. The determinant or concrete is not a limit for the infinite, as each implies the other and each turns into the other.

Hegel, Taylor, and Desmond, have a deep appreciation for the power of thought, to either delude or liberate. Thought has the capacity to locate and evaluate itself, but it is also easily lost in the age. Taylor traces how the power of persons to evaluate where they are, how they got here, and how things can change, has been captured by a utilitarianism which limits options to what principle will work. This is also the point of Hegel’s logic, namely that thought cannot merely be reduced to the useful: “insofar as the logical dimension constitutes the absolute form of the truth and even more than that, the pure truth itself, it is something completely different from anything merely useful.”[19] There is an inherent value in thought, as coming to the truth is the point. “Truth is a grand word and an even grander thing. If someone’s spirit and mind are still healthy, his heart must leap at once at the thought of this word.”[20]

There is a seeming “incommensurateness” between thought and truth, raising the question whether or not we can know God. “God is the truth; how are we to know him?” This is not a time for false humility. “Such language as ‘How am I, a poor earthly worm, to know the truth?’ is a thing of the past.”[21] Hegel notes, this is Pilate’s question, which (after Christ) is a thing of the past. Christ commands worship in spirit and truth, and Hegel is explicating this goal: “Only in thinking and as thinking is this content, God himself, in its truth. In this sense, then, thought is not just mere thought, but rather the highest and, properly viewed, the only manner in which it is possible to comprehend what is eternal and in and for itself.”[22]

This explains the departure of Desmond, who has been called the last metaphysician,[23] as he unrepentantly takes up the issue of being, but he sidesteps the postmodern critique of metaphysics in his reworking of Hegel. He adapts the Hegelian dialectic, keeping equivocity (difference) and univocity (sameness) alive, which he characterizes as “a process of interplay between same and different, between self and other.”[24] The focus is on dialogue as “mindful communication” between persons, as opposed to impersonal arrival at theory. Dialogue entails an openness to others, and a dynamic unfolding involving “a rhythmic process of unfolding, whether of process or events, thoughtful articulations or communications.”[25]

Desmond dubs his approach “metaxology” which attempts “to think beyond an oscillation back and forth between univocity and equivocity, while facing both of these fair and square.”[26] In the dialectic exchange there is a certain perceived lack, which moves the conversation forward. According to Ryan Duns, “Metaxology neither supplants nor annuls these voices but hold together to allow each to speak of being. Metaxology symphonically weaves together each voice and allows it to speak its truth yet balances these voices so no one dominates the other.”[27] Like Hegel, Desmond understands his work to lead to the “practice of a kind of thinking” which is mindful of the multiple voices at play within being.[28] Of course, Hegel is the focus of much of his critique, but it is from the advances of Hegel and his interactions with Hegel, that his philosophy of the metaxological takes shape.

The metaxological builds upon Hegel’s notion that infinite being is in-finite (or non finite) being that can only be understood on the basis of the finite. This turns the presumption of Descartes on its head and with him much of the ontotheological project. Descartes assumes that infinite being is that purely positive being, grasped in his cogito (“I think therefore I am”), which is the necessary beginning point which must be comprehended prior to knowledge of the finite, but for Hegel and Desmond being first proves to be finite and it is only on this basis that it also proves to be infinite. It is not that our faculty of reason arrives at God through its own power, but the infinite is given in the finite, first and foremost in human subjectivity. This is the truth Desmond builds upon and refines, as in his understanding the transcendent shows itself in the world. Where in a Cartesian modernism the infinite is gained by abstracting ourselves out of the world, Desmond’s philosophy presumes and shows how the Transcendent or Infinite is available in and through the finite.

While this was once the prevailing notion and sensibility (that the world is filled with the glory of God), the Cartesian divide served to disenchant the world, reducing it to a mechanism, no longer serving as a door to the infinite. Ryan Duns argues that Desmond has taken up Taylor’s challenge to forge a new path toward God. It is not simply that Desmond begins again, but he is a careful reader of Hegel, such that his work might be characterized (perhaps not the way he would characterize it) as a revamping and reworking of Hegel. As Duns notes, “By inquiring into the truth and limits of dialectic, Desmond exposes the nearly-imperceptible cracks in Hegel’s philosophy, exposing openings in the Hegelian system capable of leading us toward a renewal of metaphysical thought.”[29] This is not a return to an abstract metaphysics but is a path of spiritual renewal through a reawakened wonder which Duns compares to a pilgrimage. The secular age poses an obstacle to God which requires effort and practice to overcome.

The question of what to do, or even what would Jesus do, misses that the primary question should be what one desires to be. The focus, in Taylor’s terms (taken up by Duns), has been “corralled” by questions of “what we ought to do” without addressing “questions about what it is good to be or what it is good to love.”[30] The ethical issue is not to live up to a code but to enter into a relationship. Taylor contrasts an apodictic reasoning, set upon some code, to an ad hominem reasoning, which takes account of love in dialogue. As Duns explains (in applying Taylor to Desmond), “By ad hominem he means an argument that goes “to the person” and assumes the interlocutor’s point of view. Essentially, ad hominem argument begins from another’s standpoint and, by means of dialogue, shows how adopting another position might prove beneficial. Rather than trying to find neutral ground or territory, it seeks to engage the subjectivity of one’s interlocutor.”[31] Duns likens it to the practice of prayer: “In its commitment to abiding within the flux and ambiguity of existence and giving ear to the call of voices suppressed in other philosophical practices, metaxology affects a stance of ongoing vigilance, open and attentive to the call of the other. Metaxology, so framed, becomes akin to a form of philosophical prayer listening for and willing to respond to the call of the Other.”[32] The practice of metaxology means dwelling between sameness and difference, not through a final synthesis, but by “recurrence to the rich ambiguities of the middle.”[33] Desmond pictures Hegel as privileging a self-mediation which would reduce or encompass the Other in the same, but he advocates a continual inter-mediation focused on what is other to the self. Genuine philosophical thinking “must be both self-mediating and also open to the intermediation between thought and what is other to thought, precisely as other.”[34]

There is a convergence of Hegel and Desmond on human experience. The point is not absolute certainty, as in a traditional metaphysics or philosophical argument, but building upon experience and openness to dialogue. Where Descartes, like Anselm before him, begins with absolute certainty, presuming that he has grasped the infinite, the presumption of Desmond’s “dialogue” is that closure is impossible. “It is a biographical argument, one that offers a new form of life, that initiates an ongoing process of growth in articulacy as one approaches asymptotically the goal of human flourishing.”[35] Duns claims that Desmond’s metaxology redeems the promise of Hegel’s dialectic. “Whereas Hegel’s dialectic suppressed equivocity, metaxology recuperates equivocity and balances it with univocity.”[36]

[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25

[2] Taylor, 542.

[3] Taylor, 542.

[4] Taylor, 566.

[5] Taylor, 565.

[6] Taylor, 572.

[7] Taylor, 572.

[8] Taylor, 307.

[9] Taylor, 755.

[10] G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline Part I: Science of Logic, Edited and translated by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]), 11.

[11] Logic, 33.

[12] Logic, 35.

[13] Logic, 35.

[14] Logic, 36.

[15] Logic, xiv.

[16] Logic, xv.

[17] Logic, 33.

[18] Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2006) 401.

[19] Logic, 48.

[20] Logic, 48.

[21] Logic, 48.

[22] Logic, 49.

[23] John Manoussakis writes, “William Desmond is arguably in our times the last metaphysician.”, “The Silences of the Between,” in William Desmond and Contemporary Theology 269. Cited in Ryan Gerard Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age? William Desmond’s Theological Achievement (Boston College PhD, 2018) 79.

[24] William Desmond, The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) 421. Cited in Duns, 122.

[25] Ibid.

[26] William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics After Dialectic (Washington DC: CUA Press, 2012), 55. Cited in Duns, 134.

[27] Duns, 133-134.

[28] The Intimate Universal, 423 and Duns, 134.

[29] Duns, 124.

[30] Duns, 33-34.

[31] See Duns explanation, 25-26.

[32] Duns, 133.

[33] Duns, 132.

[34] William Desmond, Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of being and Mind ( Albany: SUNY 1990) 5. Cited in Duns, 132.

[35] Duns, 30.

[36] Duns, 131