For Desmond, before all thought, is being, the givenness of being, deny this, and you will inevitably substitute reason or theology or Will or something else. So, Kant claimed to have ended metaphysical speculation, we cannot know the thing itself, but only how the mind conceptualizes experiences, the categories with which we do so are given a priori to any experience itself. Hegel claimed to take the apriori categories and situate them within thought itself, and so “prove” they are not given at all. Marx turned his suspicious critique on society itself…Is there something beneath this primordial "No!" to the world and thought as given ?
Here are some excepts from Desmond on the subject :
Kant is famous for his critique of the pretensions of metaphysics. This means, in fact, the pretension of the rationalist philosopher to transcend the boundaries of experience and purely on the basis of a priori reason make claims of necessary and universal truth. Kant situated himself in relation to dogmatism and skepticism, but clearly it is the dogmatic rationalists he has primarily in his sights in his critique of metaphysics.
I mean the belief in, nay, the project of, reason as entirely self-determining, and with this the practice of philosophical thinking as one of absolutely autonomous reason.
How are “advances” determined? Often by exposing the putatively unjustified assumptions and claims made on behalf of particular systems of morality and politics: they are said to rest on the de facto possession and exercise of power rather than being fully accountable for themselves. But is this not true of all projects? The fully self-determining, the fully free, is said to be self-accountable. Can the project of full self-accountability account fully for itself? We would have to ask: What is the implicit relation to what is other in all of this? Is the longer life of a wayward skepticism (mentioned at the outset) still uneasy and restless in all of this? What more would this uneasy restlessness portend— for critique, for all projects, for metaphysics after critique?
His successors speak the language of more idealistic apprentices, eager for more radical employment in a project as yet unfinished. There is uncompromising critical work to be more fully accomplished, they say. Are there not residual elements of the “given” in Kant: the “fact of reason,” soon to be mocked; the givenness of the categories from the traditional logic; and so on? These apprentices to the new self-determination query further:
Must a more accomplished critique accept nothing as given? Or if anything is given, must we not refuse to accept it as such, at least until it has passed the ordeal of critique? Does not this mean it is to be accepted only when it has been reconstructed after critique? For the immediately succeeding generation after Kant, including Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, this project certainly was the urgent desideratum. All the categories must be deduced or produced from one principle, and so the whole must be properly ac- counted for in terms of one absolute or whole.
Hegel is again the nec plus ultra: we need not deny the initial givenness of presuppositions, but by means of critique we can transform any such givenness into something that has been ratified by rational thought, and hence it is no longer “presupposed.” Immanent in the Kantian-Hegelian line is the worry that without the critique of our categories, we risk dependence on unacknowledged heteronomies. Only after critique are they to be accepted as free of, purified of, hidden presuppositions. Critique means “overcoming” the givenness, and only then can a speculative system finally be beyond critique.
A new “project” of communism calls us on. And it would be too mild to say that skepticism, and the search for hope, inform the new turn taken by this “project” and its social critique. For critique inciting itself to revolutionary praxis can turn violently impatient with the given as such, which is said to be the alienated condition of the human being. To utter any “yes” to what is, would be (I almost said metaphysical) treason.
As religion is a conspiracy of priestcraft, metaphysics is a ruse of the conceptual mandarins: veils are drawn over our eyes, concealing a truer encounter with his- tory or the event of being. In the left-Hegelian line, the veils are dressings of a more naked power. Hence for Marx: “The critique of religion is the pre- supposition of all critique” (die Kritik der religion is die Vorausetzung aller Kritik).
Religion insinuates consent to the given, but God and the gods are the alien powers that are the alienations of our power. Critique softens up the fixity of the illusion—it seeks to take the power back—and if successful, man will be (a) god. We say: do not accept the given—we accept only what we give to ourselves. If we must grant a given, we grant it only under the terms that allow us to give it to ourselves. Liberation becomes our release from all constraining forms of otherness. These constraining forms are secretly driven by will to power, it will be claimed in demystification. But is the drive of critique for release from constraining otherness, and most evidently in its drive for revolution, also not driven by will to power?
A second face: there is an energy in negating, and this can be intoxicating, and its vagrancy can turn into the demolition of all homes. Think of the child discovering the word “no”—once this word is let loose, the child loves to say “no,” “no,” “no.” Implicit in it is the feel of its own freedom—it is not determined by an other; there is a space that can be peopled with forms conjured by the intoxicating energy of negation itself. I do not deny that the “no” may be a sign of the genuineness of freedom—but this “no” can easily become a freedom in the void and can turn to destruction for the sake of destruction.
It is unfortunately the case that often the revolutionary can come to be defined by his or her negations. Perhaps he or she is initially energized by ethical and political ideals, but the spirit of suspicion, first turned against the “system,” or indeed “bourgeois morality,” then turned against the in- formers and the secret police, then finally is directed against the enemy within, the traitor, or the suspected traitor. But this leads to a generalized spirit of suspicion, and then no one is entirely safe from assassination. This is even more so the case once power is assumed or taken over by the successful revolutionary. From critique to assassination the steps to be taken are sometimes, alas, few and short. Is there a critique that does not end in murder? Where find the resources to prevent that? Has it something to do with metaphysics—metaphysics after critique? And a new ethical and religious porosity?
The case is perhaps analogous to the way that some claims to autonomy, when not properly qualified, can quickly mutate into tyranny. For autonomos is the law of the same, but the absolute same must be a one, an absolute auto that either includes all others, or liquidates others that challenge, or are suspected of challenging, the hegemony of this one.
From thinking as negation, to the critique of critique, we come to the “terrorism of theory."
Notice how critique has reverted to a kind of relation to theory, and its own practice embodies theoretical presuppositions, but at the heart of them one worries about a suspicion, if not a hatred, of the other as other, even when the rhetoric shows a saturation with talk of “the other.” One worries about the “terrorism of theory” in two senses: the terrorizing by theory which, alas, then becomes the terrorizing of theory. Terrorizing by theory, as the dissident intellectuals call into question the status quo. Terrorizing of theory, as the dissident intellectuals are put against the wall and shot by their erstwhile comrades in arms.
....the (second) ethos of being in modernity is predominantly a reconfiguration of given creation which is now stripped of the signs of ontological worth, of tokens of the good of the “to be,” with a concomitant development of the human being thinking of itself as the original of value. Knowing itself, the human being will be also critical of itself, to be sure. But must its critique, thus understood, be anchored on some more basic understanding of being?
Critique as the kind of “negative dialectic” described previously is in- separable from certain metaphysical presuppositions about the nature of the “to be” which seep into its characteristic practices. The declaration of the “end of metaphysics” is itself informed by such metaphysical presuppositions that are not allowed to come out of their deep recess. Would not this be one of the tasks of metaphysics, before and after critique: to enable some genuine mindfulness of these ultimate presuppositions about the significance of the “to be,” and especially the good of the “to be,” both in human and nonhuman senses?
I would say: at issue is not the geometrical rationalism of many practices of metaphysics but rather the mindfulness of a certain finesse: metaphysical finesse for the nuances of differences—a finesse, of course, inseparable from the ability to identify, to say that something is something, and what that something is. To discern differences might seem a matter of negation, but it is not, since both identification and difference are forms of affirmation. Thus without affirmation, no difference; without a certain “yes,” no negation; and negation that tries to free itself from this “yes” easily degenerates into the spirit of a generalized nihilation or suspicion.
My suggestion: there is a finesse of krinein more basic than critique as determinate negation or its relatives. Geometrical, rationalistic meta- physics forgets or loses touches with this finesse of krinein, as much as does the negating critique that has turned against the rationalistic meta- physics which it identifies too indiscriminately with metaphysics as such. The keeping alive of this finesse has immense bearing on how we inhabit the ethos of being, and how we hold ourselves open to the basic sense(s) of worthiness, ontological as well as ethical and political. Such a finesse helps keep open a primordial porosity to being (and to the good of being) that lies at the root of all (genuine) self-transcending...
This is to be rooted in a kind of ontological love of the given, rather than a suspicion, or hatred....
From where does the “yes” come? Here is an approach. I have spoken about the origins of metaphysics in an astonishment that is prior to both perplexity and curiosity.17 Wonder is the pathos of the philosopher, it is said in Plato’s Theaetetus (155d).18 Modern philosophy begins in doubt, and the difference of doubt and wonder reflects a different sense of the ethos of being, reflected also in the drift toward system and critique in modernity. Wonder is prior to system and beyond system. It enables system but is not a part of the system. It opens to an engendering origin.
Differently put, astonishment has the bite of an otherness, given be- fore all our self-determining thinking: it opens a mindfulness that we do not self-produce. Astonishment is a precipitation of mindfulness before something admirable, or loveable, or marvelous, communicated from an otherness that has the priority in speaking to the porosity of our being. It comes to us, comes over us, and we open up in response. We do not first go toward something, but find ourselves going out of ourselves because something has made its way, often in startling communication, into the very depths or roots of our being, beyond our self-determination. We are struck into astonishment.
Thus later, too, we find that thought strikes us. We do not think; we are startled into thinking, as an access of light or understanding, or fresh astonishment or perplexity, comes to flare up in us….The best thought always surprises, and less by its own self as thinking as by what is being given to selving for thought. Thought is a being overcome by what is thought-worthy, a being struck into mindful- ness: the thought-worthy comes over us first, and we are called beyond ourselves.
This further awakening is connected with the promise of a metaphysics after critique. The granted must be taken as granted, not for granted. This is to call again on, or be called again by, the recessed astonishment. And it is from there that the “yes” comes that is not the “no” of either doubt, or critique, or deconstruction. We cannot command this “yes.” We have to recover some of our own porosity. In a way, we have to become wooers rather than commanders. We have to become lovers again.
This is consonant with the original understanding of philosophy as a form of love. It is a friendship of wisdom, a friendship that in some traditions is also inseparable from eros. What does critique love? Think of eros in the myth of Diotima in terms of its double parentage in poros and penia. You might say critique would speak on behalf of the poor, the pe- nurious—and this is part of its mystique on “the left,” I suppose. What of its own penia: What poverty of spirit informs it? Is negative dialectic such a poverty? But then what about poros?
Suppose we can connect the poros of eros with the idea of porosity: the porosity of love to the other and its communication. For out of this porosity, closely related to penia, might come a “yes.”
The poverty of this porosity is, in a sense, our “being as nothing.” I am as nothing, holding myself open to the communication of the intimate strangeness of being, its otherness beyond my determination and self-determination. The nothing I am or have become is not the power of determinate negation. It points to a “being as nothing” that is more primal than the power of determinate negation. And again paradoxically, this “being as nothing” is also more primally affirmative, as the porous between through which is communicated to us a “yes” from beyond ourselves. We ourselves affirm because we have been affirmed.
Critique can present itself as the mature adult, but, in fact, it is a child. It is a child that is less orphaned than one liable to wander off and think its hard questions are truly original in serving only the interests of self-determining thought and humanity. In truth, these questions are derivative. In a way, openness to the gift of astonishment asks of the thinker that he or she become again as a child. For the resurrected astonishment, the renewal of the elemental “yes,” cannot be brought about through philosophical thought trying to determine the matter through itself alone. For this latter ideal of philosophical thinking has already reconfigured, even clogged, our elemental porosity to the communication of irreducible otherness.
Think this, and it is not that critique has no role, but its negative definition must be qualified severely. The “no” is derivative from a “yes,” a “yes” that is found to be violated or betrayed in many forms of life, or in different human practices. Genuine critique, as justified refusal, or justifying refusal, is always in the name of the good, but what is this good? We cannot separate metaphysics and ethics. We can be given an entirely new energy for thinking. To think in the name of the good has also a political as well as a metaphysical dimension to it. One wonders whether if without granting the latter, the former will inevitably turn out to be either too thin or mutilated.
One might relate these reflections in particular to the experience of nihilism in modernity. In my view there are deficient forms of critique that contribute to this nihilism by their mockery or even hatred of the “yes”— as if the latter were a dishonest sanctification of an unjust status quo, a form of collaboration in evil rather than the memory of a communication of worth that shows us the shabbiness of the many human betrayals of the good. The “yes” makes the occurrence of evil all the more disturbing— and awakens a kind of hyperbolic vigilance, more extreme than even the worried thought of critique.
Nietzsche squints at this: one eye honestly on the worth- less abyss, the other eye on the consoling illusions or lies of art. “We need art lest we perish of the truth”—the “as if ” truths of art, that is, aesthetic fictions, save us from the truth which is the dark origin of Dionysian chaos. Contrariwise, honesty might dictate that we confront our “being as nothing,” grant our penia differently, namely, by a new acknowledgment of our being as given to be, of our being a passio essendi before our being a conatus essendi. In this patience of being there might be something like a “return to zero” that looks like nihilism but in fact it allows the return of the question of the good of the “to be,” beyond nihilism. It is in a return to the patience of being that a more original sense of the good of the “to be” can be communicated, prior to the projects of our endeavor to be, and nurturing them with energies of being that are truer to life itself and the good of its “to be.”
One of the amazing things about nihilism is that it makes the light strangely perplexing in a new way. Were nihilism the ultimate truth, we would expect no light, and yet light there is. Nihilism strangely makes the light itself strange. We see the “truth” of nihilism in a light that nihilism, were it true, would render untrue, not to say, impossible. What is that light? Is it something in which we are, in the more primal ethos of being, which we do not bring to be, but rather simply are what we are as a participation in it? Does the resurrection of astonishment awaken metaphysical thinking to this old and ever young light?
But I am suggesting, in relation to Athens, a listening of reason, not always cultivated by reason, whether ancient or modern, because the listening is not of reason thinking it can determine everything through itself alone. This other listening of reason is rooted in a reverence and devotion, out of which reason’s own confidence comes, confidence in its own power to know the truth, confidence in the truth as trustworthy and knowable, indeed lovable, confidence in the fundamental intelligibility and goodness of being.
Confidence is a con-fides, a fides “with”; it is already in fidelity with and to an other. The “con” is a “cum” or “with” that already announces a basic community or communication that confides to reason, unknown to it at the start, a grounding confidence, or trust, that there is truth and inelligibility to be attained, were it further to seek. This means, of course, that our reason is never simply self-determining; for this confiding, this fides “with,” this confidence, is what energizes all its processes of determining, including its own confidence in its own self-determining powers, and indeed its own powers of critique.
This confiding is prior to critique and beyond it, and keeps critique from wandering from the just way. This confidence or confiding is first not known but trusted: trusted without knowing in the living participation in the good of the “to be”; trusted as enabling us, and already in some enigmatic way presupposed by every quest of knowing itself; trusted by the faithful enactment of being true in the ethical and religious good of life.
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