One of the most profound and insightful contemporary readings of the work of G.W.F. Hegel is that of William Desmond, who carries out a prolonged critique of Hegel, but Desmond’s critique is subsequent to a deep appreciation of Hegel, which will come to shape much of his work. To understand Desmond’s view of the failure of the postmodern critique of metaphysics (inclusive of Hegel) and his return to metaphysics, it is necessary to examine his earlier work in which he explains how deconstruction and “postmodernism” have misinterpreted Hegel. Even recently, when I raised the issue of deconstruction, Desmond pointed me to his early work on Hegel’s aesthetics to understand his take on deconstruction and the failure of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, who short-change Hegel.[1] They, along with a variety of their heirs, critique a kind of metaphysics, but fail to recognize Hegel preceded them in this critique, and that a full reading of Hegel indicates the metaphysics Desmond would recover.
In his work on Hegel’s aesthetics, Desmond undertakes exposure of the Nietzschean-Heideggerian legacy, working in the one-sided “anti-shadow” (negativity) of Hegel, so as to delineate both links and departures from Hegel, and then to show how Hegel’s dialectic can serve “as a fruitful foil to deconstruction.”[2] Desmond argues Hegel’s dialectic is based upon the resource of an original wholeness, which allows for the dynamic complexity appreciated by deconstruction, but which it would dissolve, not having understood its necessity. The Absolute (God) is written off: to “long for any such road is to be guilty of ‘nostalgia’ for metaphysics.”[3] This leaves only the absolute of deconstruction; “the absolute aimed at subverting all absolutes,” which fails to deal with the “intricacies in Hegel’s texts” and the necessary wholeness implicit to his dialectics.[4] Hegel’s affirmation “that the true is the whole” is at once basic to his philosophy and aesthetics. It is the necessary “teleological thrust” to his dialectics, enabling the “wholeness” of articulation. He is resisting the deconstruction of his day; “the forces of a dissolving negativity” which he “recognized as a mark of modern culture generally.”[5]
As Desmond puts it, “We can see here the shift wrought by this negative dialectics as first from God to man, and then from man to language itself as the cunning, indeterminable power that eventually mocks all simple human pieties.”[6] This shift of the modern consciousness, the secular negation of God supposedly allowing for self-determination, gives way to absolute indeterminacy. That is the “death of man” follows hard upon the heels of “the death of God.” The initial liberation (the “horizon wiped clean”) will ultimately leave only agonistic destruction. Desmond notes, those uneasy with this conclusion, but acknowledging deconstruction, have offered no counter-theory (the point of his project). For Desmond there are no partial measures against loss of the whole (the complete destruction of metaphysics). “Better to put Satan behind one, than to sup with this devil, however long one’s spoon. The command to Satan, however, does not seem to carry much efficacy. This Satan is not a docile boy.”[7] To partake of the fruit of deconstruction, without succumbing to absolute negation, involves a deep engagement with the complexities of Hegel.
Desmond first notes, Hegel precedes Nietzsche in his pronouncement of the philosophical failure, the “death of God, in his depiction of the “Unhappy Consciousness.” The question is, how to respond to this desolation, without simply surrendering to it. Desmond points to Hegel’s defense of the wholeness of art, extrapolating to and from an original wholeness. Nietzsche was not originally unappreciative of this unifying wholeness. He saw both the Dionysian (representing chaos, emotion, passion and creativity) and the Apollonian principle (symbolizing order, reason, logic, structure and clarity) as balanced in art and life, but then the Dionysian comes to predominance in his Will to Power. Nietzsche characterized life’s antagonisms as boiling down to Homer versus Plato, art versus metaphysics, the substitution of an eternal other world (a world of pure Being, the forms, the ideas) for the world of poetry, art, and becoming. The dead world of stasis displaces the living world of Becoming and beauty. Platonism is nihilism, negating the wealth of a living reality for a dead univocity.[8]
The forms, in their dead stasis, must be dismantled so as to recover life in its “Innocence of Becoming.” Like a child, becoming is diverse, disunited, dynamic, but in Nietzsche’s estimate time must be privileged over eternity, the creative must begin with deconstructing illusions of soul, eternality, and permanence. Fixed forms need exploding. “I am not a man; I am dynamite.”[9] Cold logic has displaced the warmth of art, poetry and myth, in all of their diversity. They are traded for the illusion of a univocal language (Logos), a contradiction free, rule-bound structure. Nietzsche would explode this “logical ideal.” For man to be born, God must die, so that poetry displaces the heavy burden of this divine simplicity. As Desmond explains, univocal language is an impoverished version of a more primordial utterance. “If we can adapt the title of one of Nietzsche’s works, we need a Genealogy of Logic which will restore language from its deformation by the logic of univocity.”[10]
Martin Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is that it smuggles in God in philosophical terms, such that the deity is controlled by the terms of philosophy. The God of metaphysics is not one that freely bursts on the scene in the Burning Bush or arrives as the God/man, but his work is determined by philosophical logic, serving as the ontotheological glue and ultimate cause. This determinant way to God stresses sameness, an unmediated objectification and an absolute univocity.[11] Heidegger develops Nietzschean themes, accusing the west of being “logocentric” or “onto-theological” and thus there is a “forgetting of Being” or a forgetting of the source of truth. The metaphysics causing this obscuring must be destroyed, to arrive at the truth of “being here.”
According to Heidegger, language must be reconceived. “Man does not think through language, but language thinks with and through man.” Language means more than is intended and more than can be interpreted. “As Derrida puts it: the field of language lacks a center; rather language is defined by a free play of substitutions.”[12] Heidegger and Derrida consider Hegel one of the main culprits, in his drive to systematize and cognize God. Isn’t Hegel responsible for attempting to complete western metaphysics, and doesn’t he claim as much? “The real is the rational, the rational is the real.” The “Logic of Being” in his “Absolute Idea,” sounds like a compounding of Plato, an “absolutization of the Apollonian imperative.”[13] Hegel is accused of “grasping meaning” and deconstruction would disillusion the reader of this “naïve faith”; only partial, incomplete, or contradictory readings are possible. Logocentrism and univocity must be exposed and unsettled through the equivocal, through the multiplicity of meanings, and through contradictory meanings. “Difference, sheer difference, or multiplicity without an enjoining unity, is the keynote of this world. In this case the sheer difference means the reduction of univocity to the equivocal.”[14] The point of deconstruction is to show that equivocity is inherent to language.
Desmond counters this reading of Hegel (as the last metaphysician) with a more complicated picture. He notes that Hegel’s dialectic already contained themes picked up by the deconstructionists. Afterall, dialectics entails conflict: “antinomies,” “antithesis,” “opposition,” are part of Hegel’s equivocal. In addition, dialectic is descriptive of “linguistic acts” which pertain not simply to thinking or the “logical” but to Being or the “ontological” as it is connected to “Becoming.” These are themes in Hegel, absorbed by Nietzsche, but for Hegel this dynamism is not simply a formless flux, but is in the process of forming and structuring (both the Dionysian process and the Apollonian form). The one is necessary to the other, and neither can exist in isolation.
Hegel recognizes equivocity and univocity are inherent to language. The real is in process and cannot be frozen, but this process is not given over to absolute difference. Verstand (Understanding) abstracts from the flux so as to differentiate but this is not a final abstraction or a rigid separation. Verstand embraces antinomies, allowing for the return of the equivocal. “For through univocity the analytical understanding tries to conquer a given equivocation; but its conquering categories are themselves conquered by equivocation on the other side of established univocity. Dialectic, for Hegel, simply follows the flow of this development by which an initial unity, seemingly simple and hard set, breaks itself up into polarities, contradictions, antitheses, oppositions.”[15] We must tarry with the negative, stare it in the face. But this is not an end, but the opening to a fuller consciousness. “Each configuration (Gestalt) of consciousness disfigures itself, each form deforms itself, every construction deconstructs itself under the relentless power of the ‘negative.’”[16]
As with deconstruction, thinking wars against itself, generating contradiction and driving itself to a greater fulness and creativity. Hegel likewise uses the language of “negativity” and skepticism as essential to authentic thought. All absolute fixity fails and dissolves. But this is a generative process which touches upon reality and deconstructs partiality. Thus, Hegel turns to the peculiar properties of the German language, in its ability to capture this unfolding dynamic. “Richer language, language which contains a whole world within itself, a world inclusive of opposites, is required. The dialectical language of Hegel’s own philosophical discourse is his effort to live up to this requirement.”[17] As Desmond concludes, “negativity does not completely exhaust the process of articulation, but rather is itself completed by its balancing power. At the heart of the ‘negative’ we must affirm a positive.”[18] There cannot be pure dissolution or negativity, as the positive makes dissolving possible. The negative “makes the release of the positive power” which cannot be reduced to the negative. “For Hegel, after deconstruction, dialectic opens up to a moment of reconstitution.”[19]
This is the point of Hegel’s Aufhebung: something is suspended as we transcend what is simultaneously suspended and preserved. This suspension involves negation, transcendence, and preservation, as thought moves beyond the limitations of that which is suspended. But the suspended is not simply destroyed, but is recognized as a limitation, beyond which is a fuller realization. The suspended element marks the standpoint from which one is liberated. “In more popular terms, terms which Hegel himself did not employ, the breakdown of the thesis and its simplicity by its antithesis points further again to the synthesis of these two previous antagonists.”[20]
This “more embracing synthesis” is not simply deconstruction, though it involves the breakdown of univocity, while pointing to the possibility of opposites being held together in a more unified meaning. “Equivocal difference dissolves univocal unity, but for this ‘dialectical identity’ there is a reintegration of these differences beyond sheer equivocation. We are capable of thinking of the ‘togetherness’ of these differences, of embracing a unity of opposites.”[21] Dialectical unity embraces the equivocal, dissolving power, so as to “go positively beyond” negation. “That is, there is a complex unity, a dialectical identity which embraces both univocal unity and equivocal differences. This unity is absolute because it is absolving, freeing, not just dissolving.”[22] There is a reconstructing with Hegel, allowing for further developments involving the reality of limited articulations and understandings. Things are not simply disintegrated, but reintegrated which accounts for continued density and value, aimed at increased understanding and fulness. The original impetus and energy are not completely spent. “Through the process of dialectical formation the original dynamism is shaped and set forth into its different stages and gathered together into a rich whole.”[23]
The negative and absent are only realized out of an originary appreciation of wholeness. This wholeness may not be reducible to total comprehension but it points to the pleroma, an overflowing Being. Where deconstruction will not allow for synthesis, Hegel’s dialectic presumes this synthesis precedes and comes after suspicion. “Dialectic . . . allows the strain toward dissolution in every synthesis, but the given experience of the synthesis indicates that contraries are already contained within this original unity.”[24] The very possibility for art or understanding presumes an original beauty and understanding which does not simply end in dualism, irreconcilable opposition, or equivocation. Dialectic simply traces movement in and through this possibility of something more.
This reappreciation of Hegel allows for a new understanding of wholeness, not as a univocal and closed system, but as a complex and ever unfolding formation. The accusation of Hegel’s “closure,” Desmond argues is oversimplified by the deconstructionists. One cannot leap over Desmond’s appreciation of Hegel, as out of this deep engagement springs Desmond’s passage beyond, but through, Hegelian dialectics. Desmond does not leave us with an isolated equivocation or univocity but returns us to metaphysics, having appreciated the metaxological toward which Hegel, however inadequately and incompletely, pointed him. Desmond clearly has found in Hegel, inspiration for his life’s work in developing this metaxological understanding.
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[1] William Desmond, “Dialectic, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).
[2] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 83.
[3] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 79.
[4] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 80.
[5] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 81. Indeed, the continued “cutting edge” “deconstruction of faith” is still working the Hegelian negative, not as Hegel intended (for its power to positively determine) but simply to reveal final indeterminacy.
[6] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 81.
[7] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 82.
[8] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 84-85.
[9] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 85.
[10] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 86.
[11] William Desmond, Being Between: Conditions of Irish Thought (Galway: Arlen House, 2008) 317.
[12] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 88.
[13] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 87.
[14] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 90.
[15] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 93.
[16] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 94.
[17] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 94.
[18] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 95.
[19] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 95.
[20] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 95.
[21] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 95.
[22] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 96.
[23] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 96.
[24] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 98.