Any reference to a ‘unique singular’ will immediately attract the attention of a student of Aquinas. The singular, which only God or the bumpkin can know, according to the De Veritate, is for William Desmond uniquely instantiated in the work of art, while it is ‘yet big with an inexhaustibility that no set of finite determinations can deplete’. Desmond is a philosopher at ease with metaphysics, unlike many of the continental philosophers of his formation, precisely because he finds that art and religion prevent the overreach, static system and false closure arising from narrow conceptions of what metaphysics (and philosophy) are. Steven E. Knepper’s Wonder Strikes is a response to and indeed a very good primer on a philosopher who may just provide the bridge that analytical and continental, classical and post-modern philosophers (and artists and theologians) need.
A key concept in Desmond’s thought goes by the shorthand of ‘betweening’ (noun) and ‘metaxalogical’ (adjective). While Desmond began his academic life as a Hegel scholar – so of course he is concerned with art, religion and philosophy, all that is Geist – he is also a critic of Hegel, for reducing art and religion in the end to philosophy, with the all the totalising risks that entails. Desmond, like Biblical Wisdom, refuses reduction, rather staying in perpetual openness to wonder.
To introduce such a philosopher is not an easy task, not least because any introduction risks either an historical ramble or an attempt at systematisation which risks reductionism. Knepper avoids both these risks by always holding the tension. So he expounds Desmond’s concept of ‘porosity’ – that we absorb so much from the world around, but can sabotage this through a selfish ‘ethos of serviceable disposability’, heightened by the user-tailored algorithms of search engines. The result of this bad ethos is that we harm the world rather than allowing an attitude of ‘agapeic care’ to arise just by taking time to be with things – whether these epiphanies arouse in us delighted wonder, or sorrowful perplexity, or both. This agapeic care helps overcome selfish aestheticism or epicurean eroticism, taking up eros without destroying it. So while the aesthete is actually morally indifferent to beautiful things, loving the tree’s beauty can spur us to ecological responsibility; delighting at the dancing or running body invokes appreciation and reverence, not lust. Desmond, like Mary Midgely, champions instinctive morality: destroying beauty is profane, denying a child a good story is plain bad.
For Desmond, the artist is pre-eminently metaxological, a mediator between inspiration and imitation, between technique and freedom, immaterial and material, capable of revealing a ‘world’ of an ‘intimate singularity’ (back to Aquinas’s unique singular) which can help us see the world better. But there is again a moral obligation in this: for Desmond, the crazed pursuit of novelty is a colonisation of otherness rather than a revelation of it. While some readers may be detecting continental drift here, the point is hard to deny: the self-centred artist, working only for his/her own fame, is simply using their matter, rather than seeking humbly to see it and show what they have seen.
As a humble moral critic Desmond produces what we might call a ‘strong soft’ argument for religion. He is not a gloom-monger: he acknowledges all the benefits of modern society. Yet money and tech have not solved all our problems: there is a ‘malaise of insufficiency’ which a weekend or a holiday are not enough to fill. We need to return to the festal, the community high points of a liturgical way of life. And too much critique destroys and impoverishes us – he pleads for an agapeic ‘critical humility’ before the work of art – not least because rigid formalism and subjective nihilism are no advocates for the current crisis in the humanities.
Is there a risk, though, that in Desmond’s world everything is beautiful and nothing really bad is going to happen? Where at worst we risk becoming miserable by ignoring beauty and abandoning religion’s richness and communitarianism? Knepper now introduces us to Desmond’s extensive work on tragedy. He puts Macbeth and Nietzsche in dialogue on the tension of self-assertion and nihilism. But Lear (like many of us) is more of a self-deceiver than a tyrant – and it is his howl on the heath that makes the mind shudder, thereby chastening systematic philosophies and shocking us back to attend to the singular. For Desmond this is a process which can lead indeed to a loss of a sense of the goodness of being. But it may also generate in catharsis and compassion, a new affirmation of being: a Resurrection. We may come to laugh not at, but laugh with, festally, like Scrooge, when having been thoroughly frightened by the ghosts, he returns to community in celebrating Christmas.
Perhaps Desmond’s most powerful argument – his contention against Hegelian reductionism – is for the interrelation of philosophy, religion, and art as counterbalancing, interconnecting, and porous. Art calls back religion and philosophy from otherworldly and abstract to the concrete. Religion can chastise philosophy when philosophy’s questioning becomes corrosive, and religion can call both philosophy and art back to spiritual seriousness. Philosophy can challenge dogmatic brittleness or fanaticism and test the artist’s images for ‘counterfeit richness’.
Compared with Gilles Deleuze’s epistemology of parallel and discrete systems, a wry description of a post-modern society, which have now descended into silo mentalities and extremisms various, Desmond’s ‘soft strong’ arguments of interconnection and irreducibility have liberating power. He approaches his task as a philosopher and aesthetician with agapeic care for the world. He wants to make the world better.
I was left asking myself, though, how much agapeic care is possible without grace. Desmond is a deeply believing Catholic. In the end, must philosophy break down under the weight of the call to authenticity, so that we admit, as Heidegger finally did, that only a god (God?) can save us?
