Guest Blog by Ethan Vanderleek
“Metaphysics” is, in some ways, an unfortunate word. It sounds variously grand, technical, abstract, or even boring. It might bring to mind dry, technical debates in philosophy. It includes the word “physics;” anyone who struggled with math or science in high school might think “physics was hard enough; how could I possibly find metaphysics inspiring or exciting”? And religious people might think that metaphysics has little or nothing to do with their lived experience and practice of faith. “I want to follow Jesus and be part of the Church,” a Christian might say, “not waste time on speculation and abstractions.”
But the word also carries within it some excitement: the meta inspires anticipation and urgency. The human mind is catapulted beyond itself, beyond the immediate immanence of things and experiences, and towards the purpose, meaning, structure, and end of everything. This is not an irrelevant line of questioning for the religious person, especially the Christian. If the entirety of my existence, as a Christian, is to be offered to God, then the entirety of my existence is worthy of inquiry. What are the things around me? How do things relate to each other? Who am I and how do I relate to the world? How does the world relate to me? What is the source and meaning of all things? Metaphysics allows us to ask the “big questions.” We are not just creatures who passively accept experiences and things around us. We reach out to the world, act in it, ask questions, and articulate what we understand, however provisionally.
This is why it is relevant and exciting to read one of the great philosophers of our time, William Desmond, and his powerful book in metaphysics, Being and the Between. This book is not trapped in academia. It is a deep, poetic, rigorous, and challenging exploration in metaphysics, in the meaning and structure of being itself. Metaphysics asks the question of being: what is being? What does it mean to be? This, for Desmond, is not to reduce existence to the human mind. For him, metaphysics is a philosophical articulation of being that is responsive and open. Metaphysics is not out to fit everything into convenient, practical categories, rendering everything useful and practical, passive to human manipulation. Metaphysics, for Desmond, is an effort to be responsive to what is there prior to the human mind and its knowing and articulating activity.
Far from being dry or strictly academic, metaphysics is rooted in wonder and astonishment. Before we start thinking about things and attempting to understand them, we receive them. We start thinking because we are not primary or self-sufficient. We are addressed by being—things, experiences, situations, others, even ourselves—and invited to respond. “There is a suffering, an undergoing,” writes Desmond; “there is a patience of being; there is a receiving that is not the production of the metaphysician or mind” (Being and the Between, 8). Thinking, articulating, speaking, acting—these are not initiated by themselves, by the philosopher, or the self-contained human being, but by being in its otherness, strangeness, and attractiveness.
Metaphysics, in this sense, is exciting and invigorating. It invites us on an adventure into the beautiful, challenging, and invigorating unknown. The world and the things we encounter are not simply there: they speak, they call, they invite, they expand the human person engaged in them. Metaphysics, with Desmond, encourages us to receive the world in its fullness, complexity, depth, and even infinity. For metaphysics is never done, closed, completed. There is always a new opportunity to speak of being because being itself is always speaking to us again, calling us again. The question of being “is old beyond age, newer than the most novel thought” (Being and the Between, 3). As we dwell in the world, wake up to it, we are called by the world to go beyond the world. Meta-physics has to do, Desmond says, with a double sense of meta: “The question of transcendence has nothing to do with a leap out of being into the void, but with the deepest mindfulness of what is emergent in the middle itself. The double meaning if meta is relevant. ‘Meta’ is being in the midst; ‘meta’ is also reference to what is beyond, what is transcendent” (Being and the Between, 44). Metaphysics invites a kind of double vision, seeing things in themselves for what they are and simultaneously seeing them in their transcendent source and foundation, what religions have often called “God.”
I am teaching a 7-week online course with Forging Ploughshares on Being and the Between on Saturday mornings, starting on Oct. 31, meeting for 1.5 hours on Saturday mornings (exact time TBD), through to Dec. 12. It is a challenging read, yet also poetic, beautiful, and even simple, in the most profound sense (not simplistic). We will consider the text carefully on its own terms and raise questions of its relevance for contemporary life and society and Christian faith, thought, and practice. Following our seven-week exploration, William Desmond himself will meet with us to discuss our thoughts and questions about the book. Please considering joining us: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/schedule. You can contact Ethan
(ethanvdl@gmail.com) or Paul (paulv.axton@gmail.com) if you have questions or if financial matters prohibit participation.