Abstract
William Desmond compares his notion of the ‘hyperboles of being’ with cognate concepts in Jean-Luc Marion’s thought: first, the idiocy of being with Marion’s notion of vanity; second, the aesthetics of happening with Marion’s aesthetics of the icon and the idol; third, the erotics of selving with Marion’s erotic phenomenon; and fourth, the agapeics of community with Marion’s phenomenology of charity and eros. Desmond begins the chapter with an account of his understanding of metaxological metaphysics as a ‘wording of the between’: an explicit practice of mindfulness to the many senses and sources of the ‘to be’, and of faithfully speaking of them. This mindfulness is a recollection of an original ‘porosity of being’, a primal astonishment or perplexity or curiosity at the overdeterminate fullness of being which communicates itself. In each section, Desmond offers rich elaborations of each hyperbole, and then turns to the comparison with Marion. In the comparisons with Marion, Desmond finds, first, that his ‘idiocy of being’ refers to an intimately strange ‘thereness’ of being, and that Marion’s vanity is a reaction of repulsion and estrangement from this intimate strangeness. The idiocy itself, however, is not yet a determinate reaction to the intimate strangeness of being. Secondly, he finds that Marion’s aesthetics of the icon and the idol represent an overcoming of Kant’s sublime which draws Marion’s aesthetics into close affinity with Desmond’s aesthetics of happening. Thirdly, Desmond is hesitant about Marion’s erotic phenomenon on two counts: his treating eros with phenomenological method, and his ‘univocal’ understanding of love, along with the desire to eroticize agape. Fourthly, Desmond finds that Marion’s agape and eros are inadequate to speaking of what Desmond calls the agapeics of community, which for him manifests an overdeterminate ‘surplus generosity’ of being.
Some of the material in this essay has appeared in a different form in my book, The Voiding of Being (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019). Used with permission.
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Notes
- 1.
See G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), pp. 63–64. Worth asking is whether one might look at both continental and analytic philosophy as two forms of a new scholasticism; see my ‘Are we all Scholastics Now? On Analytic, Dialectical and Post-Dialectical Thinking’, in Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society (2010–2011): pp. 1–24.
- 2.
See Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. R. Horner and V. Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), chapter 1, ‘On Phenomenology of Givenness and First Philosophy’; also, Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, trans. C.M. Gschwandtner et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), chapter 3, ‘Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Relief for Theology’.
- 3.
See, e.g. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1003b5, 1028a10.
- 4.
On this different take on metaphysics, see especially William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995). See also Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic (Washington: Catholic University of American Press, 2012). See also the essay by Desmond, ‘The Metaphysics of Modernity’, chapter 25 in Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The original and better title of this essay was ‘The Voiding of Being: The Doing/Undoing of Metaphysics in Modernity’.
- 5.
See William Desmond, ‘Wording the Between’, in The William Desmond Reader, ed. Christopher Simpson (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), pp. 195–227.
- 6.
See William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), Introduction.
- 7.
William Desmond, God and the Between (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), passim, but chapter 6 especially.
- 8.
I will draw especially from the important essay, ‘The Saturated Phenomenon’, in Marion, The Visible and the Revealed. Thus he says that he wants to envision ‘a type of phenomenon that would reverse the condition of a horizon (by surpassing it, instead of being inscribed within it) and that would reverse the reduction (by leading the I back to itself, instead of being reduced to the I).’ Further, this is ‘not a question here of envisaging a phenomenology without any I or horizon,’ but ‘of taking seriously the claim that since the formulation of the “principle of all principles”, “possibility stands higher than actuality”, and of envisaging this possibility radically’ (p. 18). Obviously at work here is Marion’s furthering the Heideggerian reversal of the priority of actuality to possibility in Aristotle.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 44: ‘… the I experiences itself as constituted by it. ... The I loses its anteriority and finds itself, so to speak, deprived of its duties of constitution, and is thus itself constituted: it becomes a me rather than an I …. [O]ne meets here what I have thematized elsewhere under the name of the subject at its last appeal: the interloqué.’ ‘This reversal leaves it interlocuted (interloqué), essentially surprised by the more original event that detaches it from itself.’ ‘As a constituted witness, the subject remains the worker of truth, but is no longer its producer.’ On the interloqué see also Jean-Luc Marion, ‘The Final Appeal of the Subject’, in Deconstructive Subjectivities, eds. Simon Critchley and Peter Dews (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), chapter 5.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 37: ‘Finitude is experienced (and proved) [s’éprouve (et se prouve)] less in the shortage of the given before our gaze than in that this gaze sometimes no longer measures the amplitude of givenness. Or rather, measuring itself against that givenness, the gaze experiences it, sometimes in the suffering of an essential passivity, as having no measure with itself. Finitude is experienced as much through excess as through lack—indeed, more through excess than through lack.’
- 11.
Ibid., p. 46: ‘And I insist that here it is purely and simply a matter of the phenomenon taken in its fullest meaning.’
- 12.
See ibid., pp. 47–48 where Marion offers a recapitulation and classification of phenomena. Pure historical events need a hermeneutics. Of revelation he says: ‘I here intend a strictly phenomenological concept: an appearance that is purely of itself and starting from itself, that does not subject its possibility to any preliminary determination.’ He goes on to specify three domains, already noted: first, the painting as spectacle (idol); second, a particular face I love (icon); finally, the theophany. I find it interesting that he singles out Anselm’s characterization of God, and I would say that the so-called ‘ontological argument’ has much to do with the issue of the hyperbolic in immanence. On this see, God and the Between, pp. 143–44 and 152–153.
- 13.
When Marion discusses being and appearing in Husserl and Heidegger some of his remarks sound almost Hegelian: ‘As much appearing, so much being’ (The Visible and the Revealed, p. 6). Hegel’s phenomenology is a preparation for his logic, when knowing no longer needs to go beyond itself, and thought can think itself. If there is a phenomenology in my approach, it cannot be separated from metaphysics; and there is less Hegel’s absolute knowing as metaxological mindfulness which renews itself in a poverty of thinking all but the opposite of Hegel’s absolute knowing. And yet metaxological mindfulness in its own way can be absolved—released into the fertile poverty of the between, where there is a point to logic but in the sense of a logos of the metaxu. In the trans-dialectical metaxu, logos is not a matter of thought thinking itself but thought thinking the other to thought thinking itself, thought indeed singing the other, released to agapeic mindfulness, a release itself agapeic. If there is a logos here, there is no complete separation of phenomenology and metaphysics—beyond dualism, beyond dialectic, there is a logos of the metaxu. Phenomenology moves from the natural attitude to a more transcendental standpoint; Hegel moves from natural consciousness to philosophy as absolute knowing. Metaxological philosophy witnesses a different attitude to the natural attitude and philosophy. Both the latter are in the between, both are ways of wondering, out in the world, in the midst, astonished and perplexed there. Much has to do with recollection in thought of the porosity, with the stress of resultant thought, with the emphasis, the direction, of thought. The between is not approached in a dyadic way, nor in a dialectical way: there is a fluidity of interplay between the so-called natural and the philosophical attitudes that is closer to the Socratic-Platonic practice of dialectic.
- 14.
See ‘The Metaphysics of Modernity’ (original title, ‘The Voiding of Being’) mentioned above.
- 15.
William Desmond, ‘On the Surface of Things: Transient Life and Beauty in Passing’, in Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics 1, nos. 1 & 2 (August 2012): pp. 20–54.
- 16.
On this see William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being, chapter 3, ‘Surplus Immediacy, Metaphysical Thinking, and the Defect(ion) of Hegel’s Concept’.
- 17.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §§80 and 89.
- 18.
On this, see William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being, chapter 10, ‘Ways of Wondering: Beyond the Barbarism of Reflection’.
- 19.
See Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 108–138, where Marion also has his sights on agape in reflecting on vanity.
- 20.
William Desmond, God and the Between, chapter 13.
- 21.
See Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, p. 5, where the author generalizes from the rose to all phenomena as being without ‘why’. I think with Heidegger and other self-proclaimed philosophers of finitude, there is at work what I call a ‘postulatory finitism’, where finitude is considered as the ‘absolute’ horizon in a world said to be without absolutes. Such finitude is that greater than which none can be conceived, taking over the role of God as defined by Anselm and foregrounded by Marion right at the end of his discussion of the saturated phenomenon. If I am not mistaken, a true thinking through of the meaning of the saturated phenomenon would mean we would have to give up postulatory finitism and again traverse in thought the threshold between finitude and infinity—a metaxological traversal. On postulatory finitism, see William Desmond, Is there a Sabbath for Thought? Between Philosophy and Religion (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), chapter 1.
- 22.
See William Desmond, Is there a Sabbath for Thought?, pp. 313–337.
- 23.
See Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being.
- 24.
In addition to Jean-Luc Marion’s The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), see also his In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, chapters 3 and 5; as well as The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K.A. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
- 25.
Aristotle, Metaphysics 980a23.
- 26.
Plato, Timaeus 29B.
- 27.
Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, pp. 32–33.
- 28.
Being true to mystery, in relation to the aesthetics of happening, do we need something like John Keats’s ‘negative capability’, ‘which Shakespeare possessed so enormously’? Here is the famous definition: ‘Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ See ‘Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 Dec. 1817’, in Elizabeth Cook, ed., John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 370. ‘Negative capability’ is somewhere between original astonishment and perplexity, suspended in first wonder and touched with the troubled perplexity of doubts and uncertainties; and not yet overtaken by determinating curiosity which brings obsession with univocal fact and reason. The perplexity of the poet calls secretly on a wonder before art and more primal, a prior porosity opening a metaxological mindfulness that is not hostile to reason or fact but is not univocalizing of them.
- 29.
Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, p. 47.
- 30.
Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
- 31.
See Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Reduction, p. 209, where he concurs on this important point.
- 32.
William Desmond, ‘Tyranny and the Recess of Friendship’, in Thomas Kelly, Philipp Rosemann, eds., Amor Amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), pp. 99–125.
- 33.
Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, p. 217: ‘Love is said and is given in only one, strictly univocal way.’ On the plurivocity of eros Plato’s Symposium has hardly been surpassed. Someone like Freud is not in the same class.
- 34.
See ibid., pp. 220–221.
- 35.
On the forms of relativity of different loves and their mutation into different hatreds, see William Desmond, Is there a Sabbath for Thought?, chapter 9, ‘Enemies: On Hatred’.
- 36.
Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, p. 210.
- 37.
Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 233.
- 38.
Philosophers have not often addressed themselves to the agapeic. One does think of figures such as St Augustine, St Bonaventure, St Thomas Aquinas, and Pascal and the order of charity. One thinks of missed opportunities, such as Nietzsche’s bowdlerized version of Christian love. Nor have philosophers always been good witnesses of the holy. Who would one name? I exclude from serious consideration Vattimo’s miracle of transubstantiating Nietzschean nihilism into Christian caritas. Deleuze talked of Spinoza as the Christ of the philosophers, but this is taking the name of Christ in vain. Can one think of Christ, like Spinoza, throwing flies to spiders for cruel fun, for recreation? Re-creation? Glee in death, rather. Spinoza’s fun reminds one of the wanton gods of Lear. Christ is not just the promise of the agape but the realized incarnation of the promise.
- 39.
Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, pp. 46–47.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 47.
- 41.
Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 164–169.
- 42.
Ibid., pp. 164–168.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 168.
- 44.
Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, p. 221.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 222.
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Desmond, W. (2019). On Saturated Phenomena and the Hyperboles of Being. In: Mezei, B., Vale, M. (eds) Philosophies of Christianity. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_3
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