The Land of Unlikeness

“Self, self, self”–says Dicken’s Chuzzlewit. But oh what slipperiness there is in such a reiterated self! Ethically we come to know belatedly that others have been participant in our selving all along. We thought we were at home with ourselves, just through ourselves, but dwelling with this, we are surprised by the other–a second time. We remember others already enabling us to be so, and we see through this odd illusion of being through oneself alone. Odd, since it is one granted by the gift of the other, one that the generous other seems willing to let be. We become more mature as ourselves, and we realize that this being for self is an immaturity. There are debts deeper than ever one could say or pay. And then an other giving may be known and loved differently, an other giving that enables one’s release to be oneself.

Systematically, we might seem to ascend towards the light; but like Plato’s philosophers, existentially, we must descend again into the cave, down again into the chiaroscuro of the equivocal ethos. And if indeed the specter of nihilism still haunts us, this is even more urgent. Can we speak of the milieu of being as the elemental field of value? Is there given a primal sense of “It is good to be”? What is the “yes” that is here needed? Is there this field of the overdetermined good of the “to be” that cannot be identified with this good or that? Is there a primitive “It is good” in excess of all of our determinations of it? Do we already live in the elemental field of value in this wise: our very being lives the ontological affirmation “to be is good”? We are in the middle, but does not this inchoate rapport with the good of being define our own being? Is this rapport our inarticulate community with the good as overdetermined? A rapport that also is a love?

William Desmond, Ethics and the Between, 5-6