Scientism as the Dearth of the Nothing

William Desmond’s paper, “The Dearth of Astonishment”* provides a welcome elaboration on a prominent strand of his thinking that he has been developing now for several decades. I refer here to his focus on various modes of mindfulness, or ways of being open to the ontological context within which human beings find themselves. These modes guide our basic ways of dwelling within the openness of being. They provide us with particular ways of “reconfiguring” or fundamentally orientating ourselves to the elemental “ethos of being,” or what he calls the “between.”

Much of Desmond’s paper is devoted to unpacking the metaphysical underpinnings of three such modes of attending to the between. Accordingly, human beings can attend directly and remain open to the overwhelming (since “overdetermined”) richness of ontological givenness in a mode of wonder. As his many books articulate, such “metaxological mindfulness” as at the heart of authentic metaphysical, religious, ethical, and aesthetic ways of being and mind. At other times, there is instead a restless perplexity concerning the indeterminacy of the primal ethos of being, a restlessness born of a sense of being overwhelmed by overdeterminacy, the reflex to which is a desire to determine and domesticate the rich over-determined whole. However, it is against the backdrop of a third modality of metaphysical mindfulness—curiosity, which, in Desmonds account, amounts to a double removal from primal wonder—that he locates the tacit ideology of “scientism.”

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