I find myself wanting to buck the conception of ethics, which (since at least the time of the Stoics) tells us, “Be the thing you are!” There are many reasons going into this, including my opposition to essentialism and my deep skepticism (even when I bracket my existentialism) about the veracity of prevailing philosophical and theological anthropologies. But more fundamentally, I find myself attracted to one aspect of impersonalist (e.g., Platonic) ethics: namely, the idea that the ethical good (Plato’s Form of Form, or what others call the absolute good) exceeds our relative good. The Platonic framework, while of course shot through with ideological dimensions, at least formally allows us to say, “The good is other than what is ‘good for’ our present way of being,” which is also a way of resisting the “Be the thing that you are” formula.

Of course, I’m not a Platonist. But I appreciate Platonism. The Platonist and I share an intuition: namely, that we relate to the good as a call that we are responsible to, i.e., there is a good that is not-yet, a good that is other-than. And the Platonist rightly recognizes that the easiest way to conceive of such a call is as coming from outside; it is transcendent.

1579 drawing of the Great Chain of Being from Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana.

But I'm a dirty physicalist. I don't think there is an outside; there’s no “there” there. So if there is a call, I suspect it is coming from within the house, so to speak. How is that possible? Is it possible?

Part of me thinks it has to be possible. Even Plato, I presume, first had the intuition of good-as-other-than and subsequently theorized it. It’s the theory that went metaphysically off the rails, not the intuition that the theory sought to account for.

I’m inclined to say something similar about the Abrahamic tradition. First they related to the good as other-than, they conceived of an ethics of alterity, and as they sought to understand and relate to that being in its alterity, they increasingly conceived of its as a transcendent reality. But they were of two minds, we might say: they retained their earthiness, transforming it into creatureliness. Plato could never make this transition because there was always the lurking suspicion that the demiurge was a deceiver, a forger. The Abrahamic tradition bequeathed to us a sense of being at home in the world—or at least an ethic of alterity that called us to become at home, to return home, this side of the grave—whereas the Platonic tradition rendered us, so long as we lived our earthly lives, metaphysical aliens in a metaphysically strange land.

Nevertheless, neither tradition places the call within the world. The Christian tradition made an interesting go of it, though. They came to conceive of Jesus as the incarnate logos, the creative reason of the transcendent and hidden God brought down to earth and made flesh. And they didn’t deny that this God was killed. Rather, they affirmed very truly that God had died—and we killed him!—and passed from immanent flesh to immanent spirit. So while God is gone, he remained and was present. And that spirit, they claimed, united them not only together, amongst themselves, but with the transcendent Creator that was with the logos at the beginning. This provided a new twist on the ethic of alteriority: the good-that-is-other is with us, among us, calling us, but not of us (in a sense, the meaning of “Emmanuel”). And yet—and here’s where things get really interesting—it’s not not of us! The church is people! The communion is people!

But people made different. And therein lies the brilliance: one has to die to the world (sarx, the flesh) and, upon entering the communion, one belongs to the Body of Christ. And this communion, of which one is now an irreplaceable member, is that which would’ve otherwise and hitherto been external and other-than (namely, the Kingdom of God). If the recognized or intuited alterity was previously transcendent, it was now immanent and thus only ambiguously alterior. It remained, however, subordinating. But for what end did it subordinate? For the sake of the not-yet—the Kingdom to Come. And while the not-yet is not metaphysically transcendent, it is temporally transcendent.

Ah, the not-yet! That has since remained, for the most part, the subordinating transcendence from which we have not freed ourselves. Is this because it is a legitimate end? I doubt it. An eschaton is, in relation to life, a mind bug. We can’t seem to shake it, even though we know it’s shot through with paradox and impossibility. We don’t even pretend that it’s not: we speak poetically about the lion lying down with the lamb, etc. And it becomes one of those many marks of Christian obstinacy to outright insist on its inconceivably while nevertheless serving it and seeking it.

It’s exhausting trying to be a Christian, though not in the sense one might expect. One would anticipate that Christ-followers would exhaust themselves in clothing the naked, healing the sick, befriending prisoners, etc. And some of course do, I’ll grant it, though I suspect that blessed few do so because they think of those acts as ends worthy in themselves, i.e., the immediate cause and final object of responsibility. Eyes are often on the prize. No, the exhaustion I have in mind is more intellectual. It’s exhausting to make sense of an impossibility under the guise of a paradox.—But don’t worry. Faith will get you through.

Can we abandon the not-yet?

Maybe we should be good students of history and perform a meta-induction: retrospectively, I see very little abandonment in the history of thought, but rather a pivot here, a dialectical negation there. A modification, a shift. But rarely—ever?—a complete giving up. So, it seems likely that no such abandonment is possible; not all at once.