The Ontology of Becoming and the Ethics of Particularity

Editor's Introduction

E d i to r ’ s I n t r o d u ct i o n ................................... In his foreword to Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, editor Claude Lefort writes: However expected it may sometimes be, the death of a . . . friend opens an abyss before us. How much more so when it comes absolutely unannounced . . . when, moreover, he who dies is so alive that habitually we had come . . . to count him among the truest witnesses of our undertakings. Such was the sudden death of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (VI, xi) Such, too, I must add, was the death of philosopher Martin C. Dillon. In March 2005, while skiing in the Swiss Alps with his wife, Joanne, Dillon felt overcome with nausea and was taken to the emergency room at a nearby hospital. Shortly after being taken to the examination room, he peacefully expired. The light that had burned so brightly and with such energy—Mike Dillon was a vital soul indeed—had suddenly gone out. Just as Lefort describes the strange, stunned silence that attended the death of his friend, so, too, were we confronted with Dillon’s sudden loss. While Mike’s wife, daughters, and family were grieving in the most personal ways, his friends, colleagues, and students also were facing an abyss. Dillon was gone; he had been with us a few moments ago, and now he was gone. There could be no more conversations , no more classes with this master teacher, no more intimate moments over glasses of fine wine and gourmet steaks. There could be no more opportunities to say the unsaid things (words of appreciation or of rapprochement); no more questions or criticisms to be raised; no more remarkable learning through Dillon’s famous give-and-take. As Lefort says, at this terrible point of loss we are returned to the thinker’s work: “The work has come to an end, and, simply because everything in it is said, we are suddenly confronted with it” (VI, xi). xvi editor’s introduction The good news is that Dillon has left us more “work” than many people knew. Indeed, he left two mostly finished book manuscripts among his papers: Art, Truth, and Illusion: Nietzsche’s Ontology and The Ethics of Particularity, both of which had been written in the last seven years of his life. While the titles, subject matter, and tables of contents suggest that these manuscripts are discrete, I believe (and will argue below) that—whether Dillon fully realized it or not—they offer two distinct yet inseparable sides of a complex, unified project to reconcile an ontology of becoming (à la Nietzsche) with a detailed Merleau-Pontian ethics and social theory. This highly ambitious project—realized in the pages of this book—is an achievement that, I believe, helps us better understand the entirety of Mike Dillon’s philosophical orientation, previously published books, and even style. Indeed, it makes possible a new understanding of Dillon’s philosophy as a whole. How often does that happen? How often does a posthumous text provide a kind of “capstone ” to a thinker’s entire lifework? Not all that often. Thus it is with great enthusiasm that I present Dillon’s final manuscripts to you. When I began my editing work on the manuscripts (more details on that below), I had no idea if there was one book here or two distinct books, let alone if they would be sufficiently developed to publish. But it didn’t take long to realize that these manuscripts had to be published together—that a reader of only one manuscript or the other simply would not understand the whole of Dillon’s late thinking. And it didn’t take long either to recognize that in these writings Dillon was working at the peak of his powers as a thinker and a writer, that his light was burning very bright indeed. In the pages that follow, I will talk a bit about Dillon’s life and work as they led to these final manuscripts. Then I will offer a general discussion of the philosophical contents of the manuscripts themselves and their complex interrelationship. I will close my introduction by describing the state of the manuscripts as I found them and the nature of my editorial interventions in bringing these works to publication. 1. life and work Born in 1938, Martin Dillon received his bachelor of arts, with a major in philosophy, from the University of Virginia in 1960. Within one month of...