Abstract

The key word in the title is 'otherness', since this book aims to show how even Hegel, the master of dialectic, fails to adequately explain the phenomenon of otherness. Desmond claims that the common experience of difference can be thought of from four basic perspectives of which dialectic is one. Dialectic has advantages over two of them, yet the last category, the metaxological, is best able to account for the intentional infinity that human beings have paradoxically within the finite boundaries of the self. The problem is to maintain the self while allowing its driving force, infinite desire, to be open to the world. At the same time, this desire for wholeness must not negate or consume the other.