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WILLIAM DESMOND

1. What is a metaxological ethics?

The Univocal Way Identity Orientation to the Good in terms of Unity and Sameness: e.g. self over other:

relating other to primacy of self

The Equivocal Way Difference Orientation in terms of Manyness, Diversity: e.g. other over self: divesting selfon other

The Dialectical Way Identity mediating Difference Difference included in Unity: Self-mediation: Orientation

in terms ofSelf-determination. E.g. self including other coming back to self through other

The Metaxological Way Community Inter-mediating Unity and Difference Pluralized Inter-mediation:Orientation in terms of the Pluralized Promise ofthe Between (Metaxu) E.g. togetherness of self and other in non-

reductive communication

CHAPTER FIVEETHICS AND THE BETWEEN: ETHICS AND THE METAXOLOGICAL

1. The Archeology of the Good: arche - the otherness of the origin. The overdetermination of the good - notindefinite, but too much: out of this surplus, determinate forms of good come to shape. The origin as

agapeic good. The goodness of being is surplus, and we are guests of a feast that surpasses us. Beyond

autonomy it brings us to goodness as agapeic giving

2. The Surplus Generosity of the Good: ethics of gratitude. Anticipation ofhospitality to the good.Image:A child is born, a deformed child is born. Our yes to the equivocity.

3. The Idiocy of Being Good. "Idiocy" names the initially unarticulated intimacy with the good of to be.The agapeic relation: community in which self-relation and other-relatedness are always in togetherness

and yet irreducible to each. Image: The play of the child. Simply living the elemental good of the "to be."

Birth and death.Posthumous mindfulness .

4. TheAesthetics of Being Good. Pleasure. [Epicurus, Utilitarianism] Worth of being is shown aestheticallyin the ethos given to our senses and our bodies. Rapport with the incarnate good of the world. Lived in

our responses to beauty and ugliness. Our bodies, our environment. Ugliness and recoil. Sublimity.

Some excessive to self-determination. The monstrous.Adorning animals we make ourselves into kinds of

works of art. Exigency to be whole, there is more than being whole. Against separation of aesthetic andethical. Great works of art as ethical and more. Human being as self-pluralization. Recurrent equivocity.

Masquerade of life lies good and evil

5. Dianoetics Constancies of Being Good. Law. [Hobbes, Moses, Aquinas] Not rigid rules imposed on theethos, not dualistic opposites dominating its ambiguity, but reliable directions emergentin its plurivocity.

Nature and natural law Aquinas and first precept. Contrast with modern sense of nature (Hobbes and

self-preservation) Ten commandments: succinct codification of the constancies as passing from God's

absolute constancy, and the gift of the "to be," through the qualified constancies: mortal life, family,

marriage, birth, death, one's place in the sun, what one may possess and what one should not usurp theelementals.

6. Transcendental Constancies of Being Good: Principle, Obligation. [Kant Plato, Aquinas] Agapeicorigin as unconditioned enabling of relation. Interplay between the origin as good and the good of the

between as gift, and between the origin and humans. Here being ethical shades into being religious.Platonic not Kantian sense: metaxological relation with origin; metaxological relation with others.

Original good is being agapeic, as giving the self its infinite value. Contextualizing the kingdom of endsdifferently. The transcendental question asks: What makes being good possible? Denial of any merely

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solitary ethics. Freedom is releasingof self and other and their community; not identical with autonomy; a

different freedom in releasing.

7. TheEudaimonics of Being Good: The Daimon and Homage to the Gift: Happiness. [Plato, AristotleAugustine, Aquinas] Needful discernment is neither a fixation on rigid principles nor a lax yielding to

every passing impulse. Principled and yet ever vigilant to the nuance of situation. A living constancy in the

midst of the passing; an intermediation with the passing, mindful of the constant, and how it gives directionin the midst. The daimon: in-between power, midway between creatures and the divine. Guarding power

between our finitude and transcendence as other. Not only a transcendental condition of possibility: the

real enabling powerof goodness incarnate in person.The realization of our power comes in the

realization that no realization of our power is ours alone. Aristotle and Nietzsche and pagan eudaimonics;

noble athlete, warrior, beautiful and vigorous powers of life. Judeo-Christian blessedness: homage to the

blind man, blank eyes shock us, more than the blank eyes of the Greek statue, into a startled thought of the

God of all. Does a God looks on them with joy? The ugly and our recoil. The enemy the one who negates

us. Community offorgiveness as metaxological transmoral.

8. MetaxologicalTranscending: Ethical Desire in Extremis: [Plato, Augustine, Nietzsche] Our self-surpassing as enigmatic: seeking an end that is endless, always beyond us, and yet intimately involved

with us. Seeking self, I find nothing but myself. I want everything, and I may have everything, but I have

nothing, for what I am is not what I have, and what I am is nothing, for I am nothing except what I have.Losingoneselfat the elemental level. Wretchedness and new self-knowledge. A prodigal son demands hispatrimony from the generous parent. In bondage to finite things, which one both loves and hates at once,

which show one both to be self-seeking and in flight from oneself. The infinite restlessness a taste for

infinite loss. No other being has this taste. Beyond the calculable measures of objective science; it has no

determinate measure. It is born in us in a different dimension. We pay for being reborn in awakening to

possibility of infinite loss. What is this loss? The good of life, beyond all objective rationalization? Is there

a knowing aroused from suffering, a reorientation? Often art and religion articulate the infinite loss. The

restlessness cannot bring itself to rest, cannot give itself the peace it needs. It seems infinite loss can only

be matched by an infinite finding. No finite good. Infinite lack is beyond univocal determination. It seems

hyperbolic.It is not an infinite lacking that stands in need of itself. The infinite lack is despair, without

the enigmatic orientation of transcending desire towards the good as itself infinite. What kind of good could

this be? It is not a good of this world, so far as that is dominated by determinable objectivities. It is other.Equivocal, erotic, and agapeic transcending.Agapeic transcending: great struggle that is no struggle, for

our self-willing will not bring us the release of self-transcending. How struggle to let go? The relation is to

the other, but not to the exclusion of the good of I. We affirm the good of the "to be" as beyond the good of

self, but not hostile to it. Good as the source of this good: God. Affirming is consent to gift. Generosity is

born of a primal gratitude. Ethics springs from gratitude. Lived in ethical and religious service beyondautonomy. Agapeic service? It is a willingness beyond will, beyond will to power, beyond my will to

power. (The religious say: It is serving the will of God, so far as this is possible for human beings.)

9. Transcendence and the Metaxological: The Agape of the Good [Plato, Augustine, Aquinas,

Kierkegaard] Is it possible for humans to sustain an ethics of agapeic service? Extremely hard. A

willingness before and beyond will, or any will to power. This willingness is the laying of selving open to

this calling. Strength that comes to one in laying oneself open, or being opened. The power of being good

grows with knowing one is not the good; the power of doing good comes from knowing that good is being

done to one; the power of willing the good comes from beyond the powerlessness of will to power. The

familiar word (best word) for transcendence itself is God. The fullest community: openness of themetaxological way towards God as ultimate good. The ethos of given being as the finite between wherein

God is intimated and reserved in the idiotic, aesthetic, dianoetic, transcendental, eudaimonistic andtranscending potencies of the ethical.

There is a reversal here: being open finds itself being opened. The ethos as good is not any projection of

the human good. Gift of being means undergoing of good from the origin. Ultimate receptivity, not

mastering power. Despair is love of God frustrated, and frustrated by overwhelming perplexity about the

equivocal face of evil, or perhaps by our frustrating or corrupting the exigency of transcending in ourselves.

There is no univocal proof. There is probing with respect to the ultimate perplexities, especially "What is

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the good of it all?" The agape of being intimates a fullness. Not being full of oneself. One does nothing to

merit it, and no payment is exacted, for it offers itself. It has no reason, beyond itself, which is to be beyond

itself, in being itself.

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