Limits of Dialectic

Desmond thinks that dialectic makes some gains: It affirms the “complex sense of unity,” appreciates mediation, critiques dualism, defends the “interplay and community of immanence and transcendence.” But dialectic cannot be the final moment of metaphysics.

Why?

“The problem is that if we privilege self-mediation and erect this into the absolute, we fail to think the origin as plenitude . Then, further, the twofoldness of the origin and finitude is not upheld in proper support of their difference; they are converted into two sides of a total process of absolute self-mediation. Dualism may seem thereby to be overcome, but if so, the price is hight – namely, the downgrading of the otherness between the origin and finite creation. What is irreducibly affirmative about this otherness is attenuated into a limit to be surmounted dialectically.”

For dialectic, further, the origin’s indeterminacy is “said to be a mere indefiniteness – that is, an essentially incomplete condition that must be converted into the putatively more positive condition of determinacy.” But this means that “the process of finite becoming is only provisionally other to the origin”; it will eventually be sublated. And, finite becoming and process is reduced to “the self-determination of the origin, the making determinate of what in the origin in itself is a mere indefiniteness.”

Hegel was consistent with the logic of dialectic in saying that “God is not God without the world. But saying that the origin is nothing without what it originates “amounts to saying that the origin in itself is essentially empty, an abstraction, at best an indefiniteness of being, to be further determined by the determinate being of the world.”

What dialectic lacks, in short, is an immanent Trinity. And Desmond’s argument also suggests that denials of the immanent Trinity are implicitly nihilist, substituting an indeterminate nothing for the rich, and richly articulated, life of Father, Son and Spirit.