For Desmond, reality itself and the many others we encounter are best understood as overdetermined.

This is what he means when he calls the artwork overdetermined. Desmond would say that it offers an excess of plausible determinations. This means that the artwork is neither simply determinate nor purely indeterminate. Another critic can always contest or supplement. Even the most authoritative critic cannot claim the last word. A work of art is “a unique singular,” Desmond explains, “which is yet big with an inexhaustibility that no set of finite determinations can deplete.” Persuasive analysis must attend to an artwork’s concrete particulars, must try to discern what it communicates, but no analysis can exhaust its richness. Still, Desmond does not wish to trade a (modern) focus on the univocal and the determinate for a (postmodern) focus on the equivocal and the indeterminate, which when taken to an extreme seems to allow for no determinations at all.ĭesmond instead stresses the “overdeterminate.” He often turns to the work of art as an illustration of this. Otherwise, it will be prone to false closure or bone-dry rationalism. Desmond, on the other hand, thinks that our thought must be continually renewed in such astonished wonder. They treat such wonder at the mystery of being as philosophical nonsense, subjective mysticism, or mere superfluity precisely because it cannot yield a determinate answer. Many philosophers, for instance, dismiss wonder at the strangeness of anything existing at all. He moves beyond the modern tendency to focus on the determinate, on what can be pinned down in propositions. Perhaps we are struck by the face of a newborn child, the face of a lover, or the face of a suffering stranger.ĭesmond’s philosophy describes being’s abundance and affirms its worth.

Perhaps we are struck by a starlit sky or by mote constellations suspended in a window’s light. The strike of wonder (re)awakens us to this abundance and worth. Being manifests a worth that we did not put there, a worth that can move us to care. Dennis Vanden Auweele claims, “It is abundance that propels thought, not emptiness.” Desmond argues that being is excessive, “overdetermined.” It is more than we can take in. It wonders at the aesthetic richness of the world, at our own mysterious depths, at the strangeness of there being anything at all. William Desmond’s philosophy begins in wonder.

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