William Desmond’s Metaxology on Being and Truth vs. the SSP
The structural-systematic philosophy (SSP) aims to be the best systematic philosophy currently available (see, e.g., White 2014, Toward a Philosophical Theory of Everything [henceforth, TAPTOE], p. 10). An available alternative appears to be the metaxology presented in various works by William Desmond. The blurb on the back cover of Desmond 1995 (Being and the Between) begins as follows:
As Plato told us long ago, the human being is neither a god nor a beast, but somewhere in between. Philosophy too is in between. How do we philosophize in between? What is the being of the between? This book answers the question in the most comprehensive terms possible.
The back cover also includes the following, quoting Robert C. Neville:
What I like most about the book is that it is a fully developed, comprehensively argued, philosophical system. … Although anticipated in Desmond’s earlier books, here is the system fully expressed in Western philosophy.
The book includes a chapter on truth, which is presumably intended to be self-referential, given that the book presents at least most of the sentences it includes—although not, for example, those that ask questions—as true. Unfortunately, however, what it says about being and truth is neither—pace Neville—fully developed, comprehensively argued, nor fully expressed. Desmond’s metaxology, at least as presented in Desmond 1995, is thus not a viable alternative to the SSP, as the remainder of this entry aims to establish.
Being
Early on (37), Desmond 1995 introduces as noteworthy “the fact that being is given at all, when there might be nothing at all.” Significantly later (227), it introduces the
perplexed question: Why being at all, why not nothing? This is an old, never answered, ever renewed question. It will never go away, because the enigma of being will never oblige us with its disappearance.
How we could know that “the enigma of being will never oblige us with its disappearance” is not explained, but it appears that if the enigma of being ever did disappear, the “old … ever renewed question” would go away because there would be no one around to ask it. Be that as it may, given the passages just introduced, it is surprising later (233) to find the following:
In naming the nothing we give it spurious being; we speak as if it were something, as if it somehow were being. Since this is contradictory, we must dismiss such talk; we must be silent about the nothing.
This bears emphasis: according to the passage just quoted, the question “Why is there being rather than nothing?” should not be raised, because it gives “spurious being” to nothing(ness). But if raised, the question is easily answered: there is being rather than nothing because nothing cannot be. Given this response, the question should go away.[1]
And yet, both before and after the passage just introduced, Desmond 1995 does speak about the nothing in ways that, according to this passage, give it spurious being. For example (290):
Being is, because it is originated as a gift that is given despite nothing, and in interplay with, though in ascendancy over, the constitutive nothing operant in the universal impermanence. There is an asymmetry between being and nothing in creation as universal impermanence. If being were not prior to and more ultimate than nothing, there would be nothing at all. If there were a parity between being and nothing, we would not even get the absolute homogeneity of entirely quiescent being in which the positive and the negative neutralize each other. We still would get nothing. For something to be, even to be in a process of going under or passing into nothing, this asymmetry has to be. Being has to have priority over nothing, else nothing would be at all.
The “constitutive nothing operant in universal impermanence” must, it appears (given its context within the book) be, for example, my not sitting once I have stood up; I had to be sitting at one point in order no longer to be sitting at a later point. This cannot, however, be the “nothing” of the final sentence, which must be the utter absence of being. Given, however, that that nothing cannot be—that the inclusion within being of absolute nothingness is contradictory—being must have priority over it.
We also read (292) that “determinate negation, Hegel’s negation of the negation, in no way accounts for the sheer givenness of being itself, the astonishing marvel that it is at all, being rather than nothing.” Here, once again, according to Desmond 1995 itself, nothing is accorded spurious being.
A different issue is raised by the following passage (504):
Suppose it were possible to give a completely determinate account of all being. Suppose we could determinately understand its constituents, identify its happenings and processes, lay out its myriad intelligibilities. Would this be enough? Would metaphysical mind rest satisfied? I think not. Why not? There still is the ultimate question that will not let us sleep. This is the elemental question: Is there any good of it all? What is the good of it all?
Lacking the “determinate account” spoken of here—and, according to Desmond 1995, we not only do lack it but will always lack it—how could we know that that account would not answer the “elemental question” about goodness? Virtually all entities that have any control over whether or not they will continue to be work hard not only to continue to be, but also to bring other beings of their kind into being. Doesn’t the best explanation of these facts include their beliefs that it is good for them, and for beings of their kinds, to be? Wouldn’t a complete account of virtually any organism include the fact that the organism works to continue to be? And isn’t this adequate evidence that, in some important sense, the organism deems it to be good for it to be? Again, this is an aspect of its being—and hence a factor that would have to be included within any adequately “determinate account” of it. If goodness is intrinsic to being, then any adequate account of being will have to be an account of goodness as well.[2]
A final inadequate aspect of Desmond 1995’s account of being is worth introducing here; the question concerns the book’s ontology, or how it would complete the sentence, “To be is to be a ______.” Overall, the book suggests that the best word to complete this sentence would be “thing,”[3] as suggested both by the title of the book’s Chapter 8 (“Things”), and by the opening sentences of that chapter:
What is a thing? What are things? We use the word ‘thing’ almost without noticing it, but it names something elemental yet enigmatic. There are things: fish and fowl and beasts, things that crawl, that leap, that think, that weep, artificial things, things of the spirit, things of moment, things beneath contempt. In the most general sense, things are certain determinate happenings of the power of being. (299)
This is less than adequately clear, given that, in ordinary English and in various non-ordinary theoretical frameworks, things are distinguished from rather than identified with happenings; there are “things that crawl, that leap, that think, that weep” and one might well take the crawling, leaping, thinking, and weeping to be happenings connected with but distinct from the things that crawl, leap, think, and weep; no finite entity that can crawl, leap, think, or weep is constantly crawling, leaping, thinking, or weeping, although any such entity, for as long as it can do those things, must be (see TAPTOE 8.3.1). Differently stated, human beings (for example) have capacities to crawl, leap, think, and weep, because they can activate these capacities but are not always doing so, but they do not have the capacity to be, because only when they be do they have any capacities at all.[4]
Moreover, Desmond 1995 does not always identify things as happenings, as in the following passage:
With equivocity differentiation tends to be asserted without a balancing stress on integration. The thing may then be rightly recognized as a plurality of properties, and in principle such differences seem to be without limit. … The problem, of course, is that this unlimited differentiation seems to dissolve the thing into an infinite succession of differences. The thing that holds the differences together itself dissolves into nothing. (313)
This passage may indicate only that the thing as understood equivocally “dissolves into nothing,” leaving only its various properties, but that is not fully clear. Moreover, the book later (471) identifies “fact” as the word potentially, at least in some cases, completing the sentence, “To be is to be a ______”:
I am not denying the idea of univocal truth. There is truth at this level. There are determinate answers to determinate problems. There are facts. There are questions like How do I cross the road?, or What time is it?, which can be given determinate answers that are true.
Given its reliance on the terms “thing,” “happening,” and “fact,” and its failure adequately to explain what it means by any of these terms or how the items they name interrelate, the book simply does not present a coherent ontology.
Truth
For the sake of clarity, TAPTOE begins (42) its chapter on truth as follows:
The terms “true,” “truth,” etc., are ones that, like “know,” “knowledge,” etc., are used in ordinary language in a number of distinct ways, as is evidenced by the following examples: (1) “What he said is true”; (2) “The German Democratic Republic was not a true democracy”; (3) “I need to true the rear wheel of my bicycle.” At the same time, however, within the scientific community (broadly understood), a single sense—one also relied on in many ordinary-language contexts—has long dominated the literature. Tarski 1933/1956 (155) phrases this sense informally as “a true sentence is one that says that the state of affairs is so and so, and the state of affairs indeed is so and so.” A clearer formulation is the following: “Sentence S is true if and only if (1) S says of a state of affairs that it is so and so, and (2) the state of affairs is indeed (in reality, in actuality) so and so.”
Desmond 1995, in its chapter on truth, does not consider the fact that “true,” “truth,” etc., are used in colloquial English in various ways. It itself distinguishes a cognitive from an ontological sense of “true.” Tarski’s sense, introduced just above, is one possibility for what Desmond 1995 calls the “cognitive sense” of truth, according to which cognitive truth is “the fidelity of mind to being.” Presumably, no utterance of “The German Democratic Republic was a true democracy” is an instance of a mind exhibiting “fidelity to being.”
Ontological “truth,” according to Desmond 1995(465), is a matter of “a being’s being true to being.” This of course is circular: the term “true” is used in a putative clarification of the term “truth.” It should also be noted that it is not clear that the German Democratic Republic, in not being a true democracy, was not an instance of “a being’s being true to being”; it appears instead that the GDR was an instance of “a being’s not being true” to some standard or ideal of democracy. Similarly, the bicycle wheel, in ceasing to be true (i.e., sufficiently round and flat to function as intended on a bicycle), does not cease to be a being, nor to be a bicycle wheel, so it is not clear how it could fail to continue to “be true to being.”
Be that as it may, the passage just cited is succeeded by the following: “Being true in the ontological sense comes to mean the exemplification of the community of being in the true being itself” (465). This passage repeats the circularity noted above—using the term “true” in a putative clarification of the term “true”—and, partly for that reason, simply fails to clarify the “true being”; every being is presumably “true to being” in being a being, and what untrue being could be remains wholly unexplained. By contrast, it is relatively easy to see what a Tarskian position should mean by “false” (or “untrue”): a false (or untrue) sentence would be either one that did not express a state of affairs (e.g., “The German Democratic Republic was purple” or “The bicycle wheel is not a true democracy”), or one that expressed a state of affairs that could not be situated within reality/actuality (e.g., “The German Democratic Republic was a true democracy,” or (when my rear bicycle wheel is in fact out of true), “My rear bicycle wheel is true”). On Tarski’s account (which here fits well with ordinary language), ontological factors (in one terminology, beings, such as the GDR and my bicycle wheel) can determine whether or not specific sentences (or propositions, beliefs, etc.) are true, but the ontological factors themselves can be neither true nor false: they simply are as they are.
According to the Tarskian position briefly introduced above, sentences can be true. According to Desmond 1995, as shown by passages just introduced, both beings and being can be true (or not). The book later (471) introduces “the truth of things,” although noting that “being true in its full sweep cannot be confined to the truth of things.” Just what “the truth is things” is supposed to be is no more adequately clarified than is “true beings,” “true being,” or “being true.”
Returning later (472) to the “truth of being,” the book appears to present it as inaccessible to us and indeed perhaps to any and every kind of thinking: “This is the truth to which there is no adequation; it is truth beyond equation, beyond all equalization, the truth of the Unequal, the truth of the other beyond all thought.” Again (473):
This truth we cannot measure. We do not have the measure of it. We are unequal to it. There is a necessary failure, or breakdown on our part. There is a kind of negative knowing, where we know we do not know.
Yet if this truth is inaccessible, the value of whatever “truth” or “truths” we may attain is unclear:
Truth is … a condition of being. Being true is a mode of ontological fidelity. Indeed, being true is true being, is truly being. The truth of truth cannot be understood apart from the truth of being, apart from truly being.
Given that the book explains neither “the truth of being” nor “truly being,” it clearly cannot, according to the passage just cited, adequately articulate “the truth of truth.” We then appear to be left with the following (494):
Nothing in the between can be the absolute truth. Finite intermediates are in the community of being, but none is the community or its ground. Thus the ground of intermediate being is a conditioned truth; ingrained in it is the possibility of its being untrue.
Conclusion
Given that Desmond 1995 presents being and truth as centrally important, but fails adequately to clarify either one, it fails to present—pace Neville—“a fully developed, comprehensively argued, philosophical system.” It is therefore not an alternative to the SSP.
The SSP, on the other hand, agrees with at least some central metaxological theses concerning being and philosophy. Metaxology distinguishes among four of what it sometimes calls “senses of being”: the univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical, and the metaxological. Those who take being to be univocal come up with accounts presented as definitive, but which, according to metaxology, cannot be definitive. Equivocal understandings hold that, precisely because of being’s equivocity, no definitive accounts of being can be developed. Dialetic disagrees, arguing that, by overcoming the contradictions identified by equivocity, it can come up with the definitive account sought in vain by univocalists. Metaxology argues that the dialectical account also cannot be definitive. We are stuck in the between, but cannot reach (absolutely true) being from within the between. The SSP agrees that no human philosopher could present a definitive account of being, or of systematic philosophy, but argues in addition that a given account of being, or of systematic philosophy, could qualify as the best currently available. That is what the SSP aspires, and claims, to be.
Works Cited
Desmond, William. 1995. Being and the Between. Albany: State University of New York Press.
White, Alan. 2014. Toward a Philosophical Theory of Everything. New York and London: Bloomsbury.
[1] For the SSP’s rejection of this question, see TAPTOE 8.3.5.
[2] According to the SSP, goodness is indeed intrinsic to being; see TAPTOE 5.3, 8.3.6.2.
[3] For the SSP’s rejection of philosophical theoretical frameworks relying on thing- (or substance- or object-) based ontologies, see TAPTOE 2.4, 2.5.1.
[4] On being as not a capacity, see TAPTOE 8.3.1.