Will D. Desmond

In modernity generally substantive conceptions of the good have been pervasively criticized, and not least in our own time. All values seem open to critique or question. Indeed, the claim is that they must be open to such critique if they are to pass muster — especially if we claim to live in an accountable, transparent, and democratic manner. Nevertheless, there seems to be one value that is accepted as basic in a widespread way. This is the value of freedom. The god who presides over the epoch of modernity seems to be named ‘Freedom.’Often, in fact, it is in the name of freedom that other substantives values are subject to critique. Over the centuries the suspicion has gathered pace that such values curtail or derail or railroad freedom: curtail its promise; derail its realization; railroad its forms into what is acceptable or not to one group or culture or sex or lobby. There is the slightly embarrassing problem that while we all seem to bow before ‘Freedom,’ this god retains something of an unknown character. It seems the more striven for the more it can become a deus absconditus.There are many forms of freedom and interpretations of its meaning, none indubitably selfevident. Freedom might be a substitute for the old Good or God, but it shares with them a similar problem: a plethora of pretenders to the throne. One of the pretenders that seems to have crowded out many rivals is the once princeling ‘Autonomy.’ This princeling has become sovereign monarch. The name ‘Autonomy’ is now so pervasively invoked, especially in Western societies, that it is often used as a synonym for freedom. Freedom as the one incontestable value has become autonomy as the dominant name for that absolute value.This dominance is not at all evident in early modernity, and Kant’s use of the word transposes it from the context of political self-governance to the self-legislation of the moral individual. This migration and transposition has passed into the general culture, such that, as I say, autonomy indiscriminately passes for freedom. The name is linked with the notion of self determination also, another term that is often without further thought identified with freedom. In the glory of this god there is much that falls into the shadows. We pay our respects at this shrine, but there is more implied in our worship than appears in the words of our rituals or spells.

William Desmond: It is a pleasure to welcome Professor Charles Griswold today. I thank him for his willingness to present us with an overview of his new book Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment , and to participate in a discussion. Professor Griswold is professor of philosophy at Boston University, where he is also the chair of the philosophy department. His new work on Adam Smith might seem like something of a departure from the concerns of many of his prior publications. In particular I mean his writings on Plato and Platonic themes generally. I refer especially to his book Self-Knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus, first published by Yale University Press, and recently reprinted by Pennsylvania State University Press.This book is a close reading and interpretation of the Phaedrus, and was awarded the Matchette prize by the American Philosophical Association in 1987. Needless to say, Professor Griswold has written extensively on classical philosophy. This, however, cannot be separated from a concern with pressing problems of more contemporary currency, especially the role of philosophy in society, and with respect to ethical and political considerations. Hence his concern with the moderns, by contrast with the ancients, implies no slighting of the former, though the question persists as to what both have to say to us today. So it is not surprising to find him engaged with a very influential modern, Adam Smith: an influential, but also complex modern, in that themes from ancient thought receive their own distinctive configuration in Smith's thought.Enlightenment is often marked by a certain turn from the past, oriented to a putatively better future, via a reformed or revolutionized present. But the contrast with the past is sometimes less stark. This one might guess perhaps from the subtitle to the book, emphasizing the virtues of enlightenment. While Smith now is often remembered first as an economist, Professor Griswold's interest is directed to his work as a philosopher, especially his moral and political thought. Many of the themes that Adam Smith explored, and to which Griswold draws our attention, are still very live issues: the virtues, ethical reasoning, sympathy, moral education, the importance of ordinary life and the role of philosophical theory, to name but a few issues.Let me then welcome Charles again, and ask him to first offer us an account of his new work, its purposes and its claims. After that we will begin the discussion with the other participants here

Much has been written on love and friendship, but not a lot on the nature of an enemy, in a manner analogous to the nature of love itself. To understand something about what it means to be an enemy is not at all self-evident. And if we do not know what an enemy is, do we really know what a friend or a lover is? An understanding of what it means to be an enemy might offer us something like the reverse negative of love or friendship. From holding the reversed negative to the light perhaps we can also gain some sight of the "unreversed" original. The article discusses the fact that we live life as something that offers us a certain affirmative delight in the "to be" as good. It explores how this is changed in relation to different forms of threat. It situated the nature of an enemy in terms of the equivocal constitution of the human being as passio essendi and conatus essendi. Different kinds of enemy are investigated by considering the "reversed negatives" of these four forms of love: self-affirming love, erotic love, philia, and agapeic love.

This book was originally published by Harper and Row in 1975, translated from the German version of 1971, and is now being reissued in paperback by the University of Chicago Press. It is worthy of reissue, for it offers an excellent introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology. Though widely acknowledged as a philosophical classic, one of the great difficulties with the Phenomenology is that one easily gets lost in the multifarious details of the text. It is not always easy to find a way through the labyrinth of its seemingly heterogeneous material, but Marx gives us an introduction which provides crucial keys to the work as a whole, an introduction that is not philosophically reductive but taxing.

This is one of the best books on Hegel recently to have appeared in the English-speaking philosophical world. Its virtues include a commitment to intelligible argumentation and lucid exposition. In addition, it gets to the heart of some of the fundamental issues in Hegel's systematic thought. Overall, the book is written with exceptional clarity. This is especially to be noted, since treatments which focus predominantly on Hegel's logic frequently end up leaving the obscure more obscure. Moreover, White's aim is not just to write for a coterie of Hegel scholars, and one can hope that the measured development of philosophical ideas he provides will open Hegel to the newcomer.

This paper offers two related refl ections on the questions of metaphysics after critique. The first is an analysis of the project of critique since Kant and its influence on the disputed status of metaphysics. It explores the theoretical and practical aspects of this by claiming that an understanding of thinking as negativity, whether in Hegelian form as determinate negation or in more radical deconstructive forms, lies at the heart of this disputed status. Not least, the relation of philosophy to religion and to previous practices of metaphysics is at stake. The paper argues that there is more at work in critique than critique can account for through itself. In a second reflection, the arguments bearing on this “more” are explored in a more constructive spirit. On the basis of an account of the sources of metaphysical thinking beyond the resources of critique alone, the lineaments of what is needed for a metaxological metaphysics after critique are sketched.

This article reflects on Nietzsche's striking phrase: “A Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ.” It outlines different senses of will to power. It argues that, given Nietzsche's understanding of will to power, there is something impossible about his coupling of Caesar and Christ. Christ would have to cease to be Christ to conform to Nietzsche'sideal. Nietzsche's views are related to what the author calls erotic sovereignty and agapeic service. The significances of gift, love of neighbour, the issue of spiritual superiority are outlined. Nietzsche's assumption of the name Anti-Christ is connected withthe third temptation of Christ in the desert. The way Nietzsche resolves, in his own favor, the issue of spiritual superiority shows his spiritual inferiority.

Human life is defined between diverse extremes: birth and death, nothing and infinity. Theater tries to stage something of this between-being and bring it out of its recess in everyday life. What can be called a metaxological philosophy can illuminate this between-condition. “ Metaxu ” is the Greek word for “between,” while “ logos ” can mean an accounting, or reasoning, or wording. A metaxological philosophy of the theatre would look on it as staging the between. Can we say that the theatrical stage, as an intermedium of human communication, is a distinctive wording of the between? Can a metaxological philosophy throw light on what is staged on it, in and through it? In light of this philosophy of the metaxu, reflections are offered on essential themes such as: the space of the stage, the intermediation of inter-action, the shaping of plot, the openness of endings, the tragic and the comic, the sacred and the profane.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Theory of Self-Conscious Life by Guido SeddoneWill DesmondSEDDONE, Guido. Hegel’s Theory of Self-Conscious Life. Leiden: Brill, 2023. 155 pp. Cloth, $138.00Guido Seddone’s monograph explores an ensemble of issues centering on what he terms Hegelian “naturalism.” He argues that “Hegel’s philosophy represents a novel version of naturalism since it stresses the mutual dependence between nature and spirit, rather than just conceiving of spirit as a substance emerging and separating from bodily natural requisites.” Seddone avoids scholarly exegeses to address instead “theoretical and systematic aspects of the Hegelian philosophy.” He focusses on “life” and “self-consciousness” as the conceptual keys to those parts of Hegel that remain compelling for relevant contemporary debates. “This book is, therefore, based on the dialogue between Hegel [End Page 361] and contemporary thinkers and strives to enhance our understanding of theoretical and practical issues and to widen the grammar of the philosophical thought.” The book’s chapters proceed from the more abstract to the more concrete—essentially from issues of logic, epistemology, and psychology to morality, society, and history.Chapter 1 (“Science of Logic: The Logical Premises of Hegel’s Naturalism”) argues that the categories of “Teleology” and “Life” in Hegel’s Science of Logic mark the critical transition in his naturalism from the sciences of physics (“Mechanism”) and chemistry (“Chemism”) to biology, as well as from external nature to inner self-consciousness and cognition. Seddone helpfully points to Hegel’s revisions of Kant’s subordination of teleological language (merely heuristic) to mechanical explanation. Most promising is the comparison of the “self-referring negativity” of Hegelian “life” to discussions by Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela of the cell—whose permeable membrane enables it to be more than its merely chemical environment.Chapter 2 (“Self-Consciousness”) takes a rather bird’s-eye approach to the Phenomenology of Spirit, offering a basic reading of Hegelian self-consciousness and Geist in relation to the Cartesian cogito and Kantian unity of apperception. Scattered remarks about animal desire and the master–slave relation could be clarified to better explore a naturalistic basis of the Hegelian conception of mind. One is struck by the dearth of specific texts from the section “Self-Consciousness”: Seddone seems content with some well-known quotations (for example, Geist as an “I that is We and We that is I”) punctuating large generalizations.Chapter 3 does not quite live up to its title (“The Hegelian Theory about the (Human) Biological Organism”) in that it focuses primarily on Hegel’s “treatise about habits” in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Here habit is construed as a second nature, and hence a further step toward self-conscious, relational mind: Habits are “universal ways of the soul, i.e. ways in which individual soul [sic] incorporates feelings by evolving general rules and practices.”The last section of chapter 4 (“Extended and Embodied Mind”) reverts to habits as moments of the feeling soul but dissociates Hegel’s notion of Verleiblichung from contemporary discussions of embodied mind. By contrast, Seddone argues for retranslating Hegelian Geist as “common mind” and juxtaposes this with the related concept of mind (in, for example, Philip Pettit) as “extended” through social entities, with the result that Hegel’s approach is praised as “the state-of-the-art of this topic.”Chapter 5 (“Natural and Self-conscious Agency”) is perhaps the clearest chapter as it presents the dialectic of the abstractly universal will in the initial sections of Philosophy of Right, links this and the Hegelian conception of free agency to his logical category of “actuality,” and proceeds to an illuminating contrast of the Hobbesian and Hegelian visions of society and state. [End Page 362]In tackling attempts to reconcile “Normativity and Freedom,” chapter 6 spends over six pages rehearsing the basics of Kantian autonomy before turning to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, specifically the master–slave dialectic (again) as the critical moment in the evolution of social norms. “My thesis is that self-conscious life needs recognition in order to achieve the higher form of independence created by social acknowledgement and justification, what [sic] fosters the condition for an authoritative reason that can be socially...

An original work which rethinks the question of God in a constructive spirit, drawing its conclusions by considering ideas received from both philosophy and religion. Makes an important new contribution to the ongoing scholarly debates surrounding the intersection of philosophy and religion Suggests that this junction is not just dictated by religion having to prove its credentials to rational philosophy, but that it is also a matter of philosophy wondering if religion is the ultimate partner in dialogue Includes discussion of a wide range of significant thinkers, both traditional and contemporary, such as Plotinus, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche and his successors Completes a trilogy of works by William Desmond, complementing its companion volumes, _Being and the Between_ and _Ethics and the Between._.

This volume comprises studies written by prominent scholars working in the field of German Idealism. These scholars come from the English speaking philosophical world and Continental Europe. They treat major aspects of the place of religion in Idealism, Romanticism and other schools of thought and culture. They also discuss the tensions and relations between religion and philosophy in terms of the specific form they take in German Idealism, and in terms of the effect they still have on contemporary culture. The authors consider figures such as Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Jacobi. The book will prove very informative to researchers and teachers working in the fields of philosophy, philosophy of religion, and classical German philosophy.

Seeking to renew an ancient companionship between the philosophical andthe religious, this book’s meditative chapters dwell on certain elementalexperiences or happenings that keep the soul alive to the enigma of the divine.William Desmond engages the philosophical work of Pascal, Kant, Hegel,Nietzsche, Shestov, and Soloviev, among others, and pursues with a philosophicalmindfulness what is most intimate in us, yet most universal: sleep, poverty,imagination, courage and witness, reverence, hatred and love, peace and war.Being religious has to do with that intimate universal, beyond arbitrarysubjectivism and reductionist objectivism.In this book, he attempts to look at religion with a fresh and open mind,asking how philosophy might itself stand up to some of the questions posed toit by religion, not just how religion might stand up to the questions posed to it byphilosophy. Desmond tries to pursue a new and different policy, one faithfulto the light of this dialogue.