The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity Among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics

Opening on the Intimate Universal and Politics

Questions connected with political theology are widely discussed today, but what of political ontology? Heidegger has influentially spoken of the “onto-theo-logical” constitution of metaphysics, and in the minds of many theology and metaphysics are associated, but it is notable that metaphysics is not well attended to in discussions of politics or political theology. What of this relative silence? If theology and metaphysics are associated, it seems entirely fitting to inquire about some relevances of the intimate universal to politics, and whether we can do justice to these relevances without metaphysical reflection. Political concerns with the shape of society, its potential for universal norms, and the particular sources of ethical value informing it do not frequently invoke or evoke the need of metaphysics. Likewise when we think of politics, whether in more local, parochial shape or in more international, potentially more general form, we do not normally think that metaphysical reflection has any bearing on the important issues. If being religious witnesses richly to the intimate universal, implicating a significance for the whole of human life, including its political aspects, can we do justice to that significance without suitable metaphysical reflection?

That significance is not immediately evident, but this is to be expected if we are dealing with the intimate universal. Moreover, with the secularization of politics in modernity, the relevance of the religious and the metaphysical has been recessed. Perhaps “recessed” is too mild a word for this general attitude; the stronger judgment of “irrelevance” is closer to the mark. The religious and the metaphysical may be allowed as a continuing private choice for some, a choice bemusing to those more thoroughly under the sway of a secularized outlook. Religion and metaphysics are benignly to be tolerated as a private indulgence, if they must insist on some importance for themselves. Let them be as intimate as they will, they have nothing to do with the (political) universal. The thought of the intimate universal and its promise of relevance are not on the agenda.

Granted, the relations between metaphysics and politics are not immediately self-evident and are often mediated and indirect. Let politics be local or let its ambitions be more universal, there is still some hidden metaphysics at work. If this is true of all being, why should being political be any exception? Indeed it could not be otherwise if there is any truth to the suggestion of the intimate universal. The intimate universal may be the least recognized, even when at work incognito in modalities of being human that do not normally invoke it explicitly. It is its nature not to insist on itself. Its nature is enabling. What it enables falls into forgetfulness of the intimate universal as sourcing the diverse forms of expressed power, be it political or other.

Certain political arrangements can either hinder or enable a genuine opening of metaphysical mindfulness, or religious porosity, or aesthetic finesse, and hence make it all the more difficult to name the intimate universal as such. A political person will insist he or she deals with what happens on the ground of everyday life. Metaphysics is theory for the birds that fly high but who do not land where worldly power condenses, consolidates, and circulates. Nevertheless, what happens in the apparently empty ether of thought in due course comes down to earth, and a masked metaphysics will walk the streets of everyday life, or stalk. Monstrous forms, bred in corruptions of the intimate universal, take on their own seemingly self-sufficient life and, light as vultures floating on warm currents of air, float into the Empyrean. Conditions being propitious, they come back to earth with gifts glittering and poisoned.¹ They land to gorge on decay below, beneath the heavens. Political life is saturated with enchanting notions. The walkways of politics are eagerly hospitable to the arts of equivocation. The arts of political equivocation are themselves equivocal, for they can serve the intimate universal or its counterfeits. Serving itself, politics may not even know it is a servant of anything at all, least of all a servant of something other to itself. It may resist any knowing of itself.

What we mean by “metaphysics” and “politics” are not devoid of equivocities. Relations between them are not easy to discern and articulate, given that today we are said to be denizens of a “postmetaphysical” time. “Postmetaphysical” is bandied about with all the assurances of the self-evident. Is it evident that we know what metaphysics is? If we do not, how less evident will be the relations of metaphysics and politics. And whence the self-assurance about our identities as being “postmetaphysical”? What an irony that worry about this identity is not enough in evidence, despite claims that all identity is in question in our postmetaphysical time of nonidentity!? One is tempted to reply with another question. What space is there that postmetaphysical thinking might occupy, since all thinking, whether it attends to it or not, whether it knows or acknowledges it as such, is informed by basic presuppositions about, and orientations toward, the meaning of what it is “to be”? If this is so, to be postmetaphysical is to make a metaphysical claim, in the sense that some such basic presuppositions and orientations inform this claim too. To be human is to be; to be human as a thinking being is to be constituted by certain powers of the “to be,” powers marking the complex integrity of one’s being, as well as allowing complex intermediations between oneself and what is other. And all of this is at play, even when one lives thoughtlessly. To be, one might say, is to participate in the intimate universal. The important consideration for metaphysics as a philosophical discipline is our moving, by the proper discipline of attentive mindfulness, between the more implicit and the more explicit, the more recessed and the more expressed. There are different participations in the intimate universal. Metaphysics is intimate to politics, though incognito, for the public space of the latter is resourced by enabling sources of being of which metaphysics tries to be mindful. If it is recessed in the sphere of the political, it is not inactive because recessed. What seems remote, namely, metaphysics, may turn out to be more neighboring than expected. This neighboring mindfulness is especially called for, called forth from us, if our being is in truth to be as participants in the intimate universal.

The full dimensions of what is asked of us are reflected in the development of what I call metaxological metaphysics, a metaphysics bearing on, among other things, our being in the between and the problems of sameness and otherness, identity and difference, inherited by us since the time of idealism. Metaxological metaphysics entails an outworking of what is communicated in ontological astonishment before the intimate strangeness of being. We must also articulate something of the ethical view that would go with this metaphysics. We need to articulate something of the philosophical approach to God that would go with this metaphysics and ethics.² My own efforts in these directions inform what I say here on metaphysics and politics in connection with the intimate universal. It will be a judgment call as to what to presuppose for the reader as given, what to explain more overtly.

Between (Post)Metaphysics and Politics

One can live, more or less, without being a metaphysician in the explicit sense. But one cannot be a good philosopher without being more or less a metaphysician, in the sense of bringing to bear on what is at play in being an attentive mindfulness for the basic presuppositions, sources, and orientations toward the “to be.” To be this or that is to be a particular concretion of the sourcing powers of the “to be.” To be as mindful, that is, as human, is both to live from these sources and to try to be attentively mindful of them. One does not have a choice about being an animale metaphysicum.³ The issue is not being a postmetaphysician but being a good metaphysician—under the call of truthful fidelity in doing justice to the sourcing powers of the “to be.” This does not mean that metaphysics is everything, but it does mean that in all our thinking some metaphysical presuppositions about the “to be” are always at play. Let these be mostly unacknowledged, not only by common sense and science but by “postmetaphysical” philosophy; nevertheless, metaphysics as a philosophical discipline is a form of reflective thinking under fidelity to the truth of what is thus at play. Does this point about the “postmetaphysician,” namely, the impossibility of evading metaphysics, apply analogously to the “postreligious” person, namely, the inescapability of being religious? This is something one would expect in light of the intimate universal. This also has implications for how we think of politics.

It may well be that a certain picture of metaphysics is being criticized or rejected in this talk of the “postmetaphysical.” In the main it seems to come down to some version of Platonism. I call it Nietzsche’s cartoon version, a cartoon that has had multiple afterlives. Plato will be an important point of reference in what is to follow, though the dear Nietzsche himself knew well the difference between Plato and his “Platonism.” “Plato, for example, in my hands becomes a caricature”: Nietzsche himself had the honor to confess this.⁴ In this caricature we find the univocal fixation of (metaphysical) difference in terms of rigidly separated worlds: the world here and the beyond world. “Metaphysics” deserts the world here for the beyond world. Interestingly for our concerns, the Greek meta can mean both “in the midst” as well as “beyond,” a point to which I will come back. It reflects something of the intimate universal: in the midst as intimate, yet beyond as pointing to what is not reducible to immanence alone. In the cartoon version no sooner is the meta of metaphysics intoned and we are shooting out beyond, yonder, somewhere over the rainbow. Now postmetaphysically we are to be brought back to earth. Being thus beyond metaphysics may have its own form of “transcending” but it must be this-worldly. If for “postmetaphysical” thinking there is any transcendence, it must be entirely immanent. Suspicion of the universal can emerge in this turn or re-turn to immanence.

Of course, postmetaphysical claims of unsurpassable immanence are not unconnected with different understandings of the political and with how immanent social powers take form or are to be organized, whether in terms of sane, everyday distributions of powers, or spontaneous eruptions of repressed forces, or plotted rebellions or revolts or regime changes, and whether all these take shape under the sign of totality, or “difference.” For there is a totalitarian immanence and an anarchistic immanence, there is a socially concerned or compassionate immanence, a neoliberal immanence, and an edifying pragmatic immanence. There are communist “postmetaphysicians” who unmask metaphysics as rationalized theology, itself an ideological mask for exploitative relations of economic production. There are the capitalist “postmetaphysicians” who are only “post” in the accidental sense that their unrelenting engrossment in the dominion of serviceable disposability has blanked out as “useless” most metaphysical considerations, or intimations, or misgivings. This blank is itself the result of certain metaphysical presuppositions about the human being. We are units of self-interested, self-serving desire; nature as other is the to-be-possessed reserve of resources to further the projects of economic and commercial organizations of such units, officially said to further the individual power of the consumer, de facto showing power more or less global in the potential outreach of its exploitation. Marx, first among equals of “postmetaphysicians,” hoists the ideal banner of social justice above on high, while below on the streets or on the barricades or in the polemical pamphlets, there is a (not-so-well-dissimulated) metaphysics of social will to power.

It might seem that the “Platonic” version of metaphysics has nothing to do with politics, except as an ideological mask, and that “postmetaphysical” thinking would allow us more lucidly to get political actualities in focus. After all, politics has a bearing on, among other things, our social organization of immanent powers, guarding immanent order here and now, either affording or resisting tyranny here and now and, in the daily moderate middle, trying to sustain an immanent peace, such that people can go about their everyday business, be it in the life of the family, or in economic businesses, or in health care, or in cultural services, either artistic or religious, that take us beyond the instrumental serviceability of utility. Politically minded people delight in the realism of their reminding the metaphysical dreamers: this all is here and now, not over there, all to be done now with feet on the ground, not with heads in the clouds or with longing for somewhere over there, a nowhere other world.

I think it is not so simple, and not so easy, to get the political into wise focus, if the sense of the “beyond” of politics is lost, or betrayed, and the “political” is tempted to assume sole sovereignty for the immanent organization of the powers of the “to be.” Quite the contrary, the powers of the “to be” become the powers that be, if we are “conservative,” or the powers that will be, if we are “progressive.” The loss of the beyond of metaphysics, as going with the immanent absolutization of the political, tends to lead to the weakening of the wisdom of the immanent, which is the genuine art of the political. This wisdom lives by its worldly discernment of the relative. Wise discernment of the relative is not really possible without some intimation of the lacking nature of all counterfeit claims to absoluteness. This wise discernment of the genuinely political must be practiced in the art of detecting idols and dealing prudently with the immanent havoc they threaten. Is this possible without some intimation of the metaphysical, one shaped by the doubleness of the meta—in the midst, and hence immanent, and yet over and above, beyond, and hence a sign of transcendence as other? Is this possible without some (religious?) finesse for the intimate universal?

In modern philosophy metaphysics becomes a form of ontology in which there comes to be the loss of this doubleness of the meta and the feel for its basic significance. I will later say a bit more about metaphysics and such an ontology. But one can see the rationale for these changes in modern philosophy, if the cartoon version of Platonism is the truth of metaphysics. For then the meta means we are dealing with the philosopher’s escape from reality, not his or her more deep engagement with it. Of course, even this escape has political consequences, though on the surface they seem eviscerating to the excellences of immanence, and hence also to the wise discernment of immanent powers. We can see the matter, however, with more nuance, with less of the univocalizing of the dualistic “either-or.” There have been metaphysicians who, in fidelity to an intimation of the “beyond,” want to relativize the absoluteness of immanent power; yet this entails no denial of the necessity of wise discernment of immanent excellences. I tend to agree with them, and for reasons not unconnected with a different interpretation of Plato.⁵ But ever with Plato we are confronted with the great paradox that this great Satan of metaphysics was strangely obsessed with politics and the vision of the best regime. For one who would quit immanence as quickly as you could exclaim exaipnes, we witness an odd loving lingering with the fluctuations of power in immanence. In the Cave here and now, we need an almost heroic patience for discerning the “packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon,” as the purged King Lear put it. When Lear speaks of becoming one of “God’s spies,” such a spy is not engaged in espionage. He or she seeks simply to behold, to comprehend with compassion. “Afterworldsmen” (Hinterweltlern) is a term of contempt of Zarathustra, but perhaps there are “afterworldsmen” who incarnate such great care for this world—ripe human beings who are, so to say, posthumous to will to power.⁶

But what kind of care? If we take, for instance, a Hobbes or a Machiavelli as setting the trend, we will become political spies of the “mortal god”⁷ and opt for a self-proclaimed “realism” of politics, and against the dreaming or self-deluding “idealism” of a Plato, even an Aristotle. Again is it so simple? If humans and their communities, political as well as prepolitical and transpolitical, are between “real” and “ideal,” then we risk a brutal amputation, if our realism is crude, that is to say, lacking finesse for the traces of a transcendence that is more than even the superb excellences of immanence. All of this has to do with discernment bearing on the intimate universal. Clearly our care for the excellences of immanence will be different when one has the intimation that there is more at stake than a self-sufficient immanence, when signs of something beyond have entered one’s sense of the equivocal play of immanent powers, and not only the temptations to tyranny that we know here but also our intoxications with what is good now. One’s care will be different if the excellences of immanence, in the enjoyment and joy they offer, are also signs of what cannot be exhausted by immanence. Least of all will one’s care be to turn immanence into a project of our power to make itself absolute, as absolute as possible, and more than anything else absolved from transcendence as other. This will seem a treason to the excellences of immanence rather than their last apotheosis.

Metaxological Metaphysics and Modern Ontology

Let me say a word or two about metaphysics and ontology.⁸ Metaphysics is concerned with immanence certainly, in terms of its mindful discernment of the multiple equivocities of our being native to the world. We might think of metaphysics in terms of system, and to be sure this is an ideal found often from early modern rationalism through to Hegel. But one can be systematic without claiming to possess the system. Indeed there are practices of metaphysics that might well display a certain diffidence about “system,” about the “theory-building” of Laputan thinkers, especially in its modern guise.⁹ We find a tendency especially present in modern philosophy to seek an “ontology” defined primarily by the self-determination of rational thought, to the detriment of the interruptions of surprising otherness that break in on the speculative dreams of reason, musing out of itself alone. Hegel is the high point of this tendency to “system,” offering us as metaphysics a speculative logic that is a categorial onto-logy. I think of metaphysics less as the system of categories defined by the self-circling of thought determining itself, and more as a fundamental reflection on the basic senses of being, or “to be,” none of which we can speak about without mindful openness to what actuality as other communicates intelligibly to us. There is an openness to what is beyond self-determining thought in this understanding of metaphysics, an openness more consonant with the more original experience of wonder or astonishment we find, for instance, in the Greek thaumazein.¹⁰

If I refer to Hegel, one might also refer, with suitable qualification, to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, which, like the idealistic immanence of thought thinking itself, is still too a philosophy of unremitting immanence. Even given talk about the everydayness of Dasein, one suspects there is at work what one might call a “postulatory finitism” that has the effect of closing thought off from thinking the signs of transcendence as other to immanence. I mean metaphysics in a more “Platonic” sense, though not at all in terms of the cartoon version (there were times Heidegger fell under the spell of this cartoon). Such a metaphysics asks for a practice of philosophy that, even in the immanences of everyday life, recalls us to a porosity to transcendence as other. The intimate universal would be a way of looking at immanence that would not deny our here-and-now engagement, or yet close off porosity to what resists containment within the immanence of postulatory finitism. Is there a philosophical beholding that is neither servile nor sovereign? Not sovereign: because it does not stand outside or above the immanently given. Not servile: because it is not slave to immanent givenness but finds itself released into a freedom beyond servility in beholding immanence otherwise, that is, as the happening that communicates of the intimate universal.

In pursuing the task of metaphysics I have found it helpful to distinguish four basic senses of being and a brief remark on these may be useful. First, the univocal sense tends to emphasize determinate sameness and identity. Second, the equivocal sense tends to stress difference that escapes univocal sameness, sometimes even to the point of the loss of any mediation between sameness and difference, identity and otherness. Third, the dialectical sense seeks to mediate differences, differences sometimes equivocal, but not by reduction to a simple univocal sameness but by transition to a more inclusive unity or whole that, it is claimed, contains and even reconciles the differences. Finally, the metaxological dwells with the interplay of sameness and difference, identity and otherness, not by mediating a more inclusive whole but by recurrence to the rich ambiguities of the middle, and with due respect for forms of otherness that are dubiously included in the immanence of a dialectical whole.

This fourfold sense of being has an importance with regard to the intimate universal. The univocal sense tends to fixate on a determinate essence as a universal that is evacuated of intimacy—the universal and the intimate particular stand over against each other in dualistic opposition. The equivocal sense dissolves this fixed dualism; in allowing the porosity and passage of happening, it opens a space to recover a finesse for the intimate; nevertheless, its fluidity does not always hold on to a sense of the universal that would move us in process further than dissolution in nebulous indefiniteness. The dialectical sense recovers form in fluidity, recurrence of structure in becoming, points also to the recovery of the universal as a process that is self-mediating. The universal as such a self-mediating process (I am thinking of Hegel) claims to sublate the intimacy within its own conceptual holism, but its claims for concrete universality tend not to do justice to the otherness of intimate singularity, which is not a moment of a more inclusive whole, but is a living open whole to itself, whose difference living community itself sustains as other for itself. Finally, the metaxological sense articulates a fluid intermedium of happening that is the middle space of communication. It words the between, gives a logos of the metaxu. In wording the between, the metaxological sense of universality is not one side, the intimate the opposing side. The porous between itself as the endowed and enabling milieu of overdeterminate communication is itself given to be as the intimate universal. There is an overdeterminacy to both the intimacy and the universality: overdeterminacy as surplus “to be” that is not to be rendered simply as either determinate being, indeterminate being, or self-determining being. The interdetermination is free beyond self-determination. Self-determination itself is freed by sources of ontological enabling more intimate than self-determination. Determinate beings have an overdeterminate singularity that speaks of the marvel of the “that it is at all” of their being. Universality is the promise of overdeterminate communicability and communication in each being—be the being determinate or self-determining—in being itself by being outside itself in relation to all things other to itself. In part 2 I will turn more fully to how this fourfold sense of being is reflected in the idiotics, the aesthetics, the erotics, and the agapeics of the intimate universal.

The modern sense of ontology is most often shaped by univocal and dialectical responses to the equivocities of being. The univocal response seeks a set of clear and distinct categories to diminish or dissolve all ambiguity, the dialectical a totality of thought-determinations claiming to exhaust the intelligibility of being. I agree with some of the postmodern hesitations about the traditional language of the whole. I would put the primary accent less on “deconstructing” the whole, as on our being “in between,” on our passing in and through the between, on our thinking as an intermediating that, once again, is not primarily directed to an inclusive whole of thought thinking itself but to a mindful porosity to the transcendence of being, as both other and yet in intimate relation to us. This is why I think that metaphysics, most fundamentally, is metaxological. Mindful attention to the equivocities of given immanence is one of its important tasks. I would also say that this mindful attention is a cousin to the mindful discernment needful for political discrimination of the powers of immanence. For politics is not a “theory” but requires also a practice of phronetic discernment in the domains of relatives.

I note both a distinction and an inseparability between ontology and metaphysics. Ontology deals with being as immanent, and as such it tends to culminate in something like Hegel’s system of self-determining thought, or perhaps the existential recoil back to human immanence in terms of fundamental ontology, such as that of Heidegger. Metaphysics, by contrast, is more metaxological in the sense of opening mindfulness to transcendence by means of an exploration of the signs of irreducible otherness, even in immanence. This is not a matter of the system but it is a matter of systematic thought. Hegel closes systematic thinking into the system; but there is no a priori necessity that thinking systematically has to take this very modern form. There are rich networks of interconnections already at work in being; but these networks do not constitute a closed or completed system to be discursively expressed by philosophy. The networks are concretized by open intermediations marked by sameness and otherness, identity and difference. Metaxological metaphysics must try to make intelligible sense of these concrete intermediations by way of the fourfold sense of being above sketched. Dynamic integrities of being take form as stable but open constancies; our minding of these shows the living energy of thought that opens beyond closure to what is other to thought alone; the between itself is a milieu of enabling communication in which intimacy and universality are not two opposites.

Modern dialectic tends to interpret the passages between same and other, identity and difference, and so on in terms of self-determining thought. The intermediations of being tend to be characterized in terms of a variety of rational self-mediations that circle around and back on themselves, resulting in idealism in a closure of the immanence of thought on itself. The story is not entirely different with those postidealistic philosophies marked by an antipathy to dialectic. Insofar as here the practice of philosophy is marked by postulatory finitism, the result is a not dissimilar immanence, beyond which there is nothing further to be thought. In that space of radical immanence one might dialectically sublate, one might deconstruct dialectic, one might Dionysianly celebrate the earth, one might differently desublate, but there is nothing beyond that space of immanence.

From a metaxological perspective, there is more to be said. If speculative self-mediation is taken as the true intermediation, it does not do full justice to the passages between same and other, where otherness as other is just as basic as, if not more than, self-determining thought. And by contrast with anti-idealistic immanence, metaxological metaphysics discerns in the very ontological robustness of immanent otherness an original communication of an even more radical otherness, hyperbolic to the terms of immanence alone. This between is the milieu of thought where metaphysics as a philosophical practice arises and takes form. As itself a form of intermediated thinking, this practice of philosophy is not for itself alone. Its own self-determination is not the absolute point. Its mindful discernment of what is hyperbolic in immanence points to what is hyperbolic to immanence.

Such a practice of philosophy asks a porosity of mindful thought to what exceeds complete determination in terms of finite immanence alone. It is a participant in this middle, does not overarch it from the outside; and if it is, as it were, lifted up from within, it too is always defined by passages in the between. In one regard, there is no return to the metaxu, since we never leave it; but there is a return in the sense of being awakened to what we are in, and to what is recessed in what we are in, and in realizing the porosity of the medium of finite life to what cannot be exhausted by finite immanence. If there is a return to the recalcitrances of given immanence, in their otherness to self-defining thought, there is also a searching of the “more” of the given world, as charged with signs of what exceeds immanence alone. Reading the signs of this “more” as communicated in the saturated equivocity of the given world is intimate to the vocation of metaxological metaphysics. This vocation always and everywhere has this commission: wording the between—doing justice to it with the fitting words. This holds true also for its attendance on the intimate universal.

Politics Between Metaphysics and Ontology

The between of metaxological metaphysics must yield a different relation to politics than does an ontology oriented wholly toward immanence. The latter tends to be defined by the language of the whole, whereas, metaxologically speaking, we must consider again the meta of metaphysics as double. As I said, this meta can be taken to refer to what is “in the midst,” and here it links with the metaxu; it can also be taken to refer to what is “beyond,” over and above, and here it refers the metaxu to what is super(ior), to what is huper. We are referred both directly to what is hyperbolic in immanence and indirectly to what is hyperbolic to immanence.

Ontology, by contrast, as a logos of to on, is tempted to shortchange this doubleness, tempted always by a kind of univocity of immanence, and this can take different forms. It might be defined in terms of the immanence of self-determining system, or in terms of the immanence of postulatory finitism such as informs fundamental ontology, or in terms of the immanence of the scientistic univocity that informs many projects of science and technology, or in terms of the rhapsodic univocity of Dionysian immanence, Nietzschean or postmodern, or in terms of a studied naturalizing pragmatism shorn of the more suggestive intimations of something other (this we do find in Peirce and James).¹¹ There are many forms of this univocity of immanence: scientistic, in the technological will to conquer the equivocities of given being and subject creation to the homogeneity of a projected human measure; moral, through the immanence of absolute autonomy in Kantianism; calculative, in the homogeneous reckoning of hedonistic bliss or mass happiness in utilitarianism; speculative and political, in the dialectical immanence of Hegelianism and its state; dialectical and revolutionary, in the political immanence of post-Hegelian totalitarianisms, be they Marxist or fascist; antidialectical and Dionysian, in the immanent Nietzschean world that is “will to power and nothing else besides,” and we ourselves also “will to power and nothing else besides.”¹²

Modern ontology is tempted to bind politics to a language of the immanent whole, beyond which there is nothing. Those postmoderns who deconstruct this whole do not quite deconstruct this immanence. Postmodern immanence is still immanence, even if now racked or tortured with itself. One must ask if immanent difference is difference enough, difference enough for transcendence as other to us, and not only for immanent self-transcendence. If it is not, as I think follows from a metaxological thinking, one has to wonder whether the silence on this in postmodern politics signals a decayed, skeptical, cynical form of the modern version of totalizing immanence. The particular strain may have mutated and may not look at all like its ancestor, but it is of the same gene pool. And if this gene pool is immanent will to power (as we suspect after the last revelation of Nietzsche), the totalitarian form may have mutated into a pluralistic form or an anarchistic form, but it is still will to power and “nothing else besides.” Finally again, the circulation of immanence is only around itself, and to the occlusion, or exclusion, of signs of transcendence as other. One wonders if, from a metaxological viewpoint, this circulation is the mimicking of ultimate transcendence in immanence. We have lost touch with the religious openness to the intimate universal, and the practices of philosophy do not show the poverty of spirit that brings them closer to the sense of doing justice, prior to this ethical endeavor or that political project. What this tends to mean for the communal intermediation of social power is that politics is asked to be more and more the mimicking of religion, even as a certain politics would put religion more and more on the compost heap of history.

All of this talk of ontology and metaphysics might seem like dealing in the high abstractions of the disembodied universal, but its relevance will be evident when we turn to different forms of concrete human community where we find different manifestation of the promise of the intimate universal. But I need to make this last point about how metaphysical thinking and the intimate universal can converge. If metaphysics entails our reflection on the fundamental senses of the “to be,” these senses are both intimate and universal: intimate as elemental in being diversely manifested in all forms of being; universal as extending their significance to the open whole of being. Further again, if this intimately universal sense of the “to be” is best described as metaxological, the finite “to be” cannot be described in entirely immanent terms: it manifests a between, both in an immanent sense and in a sense that is porous to what is other to it. There is a finitude as well as an openness to the between in which we come across communications of what exceeds the immanent terms of what is given “in the midst.” There is something hyperbolic to the between communicated in the between. There are many expressions of this but one of importance for our consideration here is the charge of the good immanent to the givenness of the finite “to be.” Modern ontology tries to give a logos of to on, but it seems to be of one mind with the development of modern science in this regard, namely, that given being is stripped of the signs of qualitative value and determined in terms of a homogenous sameness. Being as universal givenness is stripped of an intimate charge of inherent worth. It is to us an essentially strange otherness, a neutral thereness whose strangeness we are tempted to surpass only by subjecting it to our measure. We make it intimate by appropriating it, and we make it ours, but this is not its proper intimacy; it is our bringing it closer to ourselves to bring ourselves closer to what we think is most intimate to us: self-affirmation in the face of the strangeness of being as other.

Granted, there are reactions against this stripping given being of the signs of qualitative value, but the main point is important in that we do find at the extreme a divorce of being and the good. The consistent outcome of this divorce is nihilism: the objectification of other being, the subjectification of the human being, and the development by the latter of a project of will to power to make the homogeneity of the former serve the homogeneous heterogeneity of its own desires.¹³ I say homogeneous heterogeneity, since in the end there turns out to be no principle of qualitative discrimination between higher and lower, and hence the heterogeneity becomes a mere diversity, but this is indistinguishable from homogeneity: everything different finally comes to the same thing. We might initially claim that the strange, devalued otherness is over against us, and that we are different; but we come to realize that we too are participants in the universal process of valueless thereness; and then we are shocked into realizing that our protections against the valuelessness participate in the same valuelessness of the universal process. Our intimate sense of being different is undercut by a sameness that freezes all claims to ontological intimacy with being. Thus a philosophy of extreme difference easily reverts to a monism of sameness that it ostensibly has rejected or overcome. On a more familiar note, we see this sometimes with those pleas in a social or political setting of the liberal tolerance of difference that, mirabile dictu, can quickly become quite intolerant when it is the “wrong” kind of difference that is before one. What determines the discrimination of “wrong” difference? One suspects mere dissidence with one’s own will to power, nicely masked in the niceness of one’s preaching of respect for difference.

Yet for all that there is an intimacy of being that we cannot prevent returning to affirm itself again and again, and that seems to have a certain universal range. One form of the good of the “to be” that is still hard not to affirm is the good of our own “to be,” and this as granted in the will to preserve and perpetuate one’s own being. This granting may be an expression of the subjectification of the human being, but the will to be of the latter is at least granted a value in a sense not controverted. Every being seeks to preserve and perpetuate its own being. Let it be expressed in Hobbesian or Spinozistic terms, in utilitarian terms, or in neoliberal terms:¹⁴ there is a basic worth to the “to be” in that fact that I and you continue to affirm our own existence, negatively in the face of threats, more positively in advancing the guaranteed satisfaction of our recurrent desires. In other words, at a primitive level in our own singular being something of the intimacy of the “to be” and its being good to be comes to happen with us and is acknowledged by us in ourselves. This is right. But what is right in this becomes wrong, or perhaps only half right, if this is taken as the last word, or even the first. We then no longer have an adequate sense of the ontologically elemental good: not the good now of my “to be,” but the good of the “to be.”

This needs to be further articulated,¹⁵ but the point now is that there is a metaphysical-ontological meaning, intimate and yet universal, to the good of the “to be,” constituting an ethos of being within which is situated the human effort to be and to be good. This, however, will not be seen to be our situation if we claim that the whole of what is other to us is a neutral homogeneity. Then the good of our “to be” seems to reveal itself as a matter of self-assertion in a void of value, with respect to the ethos of being as other to us. Inevitably, at a certain extremity of consistency, that is, of the logic of homogeneity pushed to its ultimate, we cannot but take a posture of revolt against such an ethos of valueless being. Whatever there is about such an ethos that as other resists us cannot be let be in its heterogeneity: it too must be homogenized. For the worthless otherness, worthless without our imposing our value on it, must finally turn out to be hateful to us; it must be negated to be made good—good on a scale that mirrors our own self-affirmative will to be. In the longer arc of unfolding, neutral homogeneity is thus only a lull or pause in the onslaught of will to power on being as other that in itself is thought to be valueless.

There are only too many political expressions of this. Revolutionary politics too often fits the profile. The untrammeled calculative exploitation of the earth in a capitalist mode is not ontologically different in a qualitative sense. One might feel some sympathy with songs of existential defiance hurled in the face of the absurdity, or even systems of moral value such as the ethics of autonomy that try to raise self-affirmation to a higher ideal level. But the devalued ethos of being underpins all. That is to say, it underpins nothing, and nothing is underpinned. Politics becomes a project that must exploit the devalued being to further the preservation and continuation of humans, individually or collectively, either keeping in check the excess sleeping in human self-assertion or seeking to release it when established orders prove not to satisfy us.

The devalued ethos of being is occupied by one being that is not immediately devalued: the human being in whom the good of the “to be” expresses itself. This language may not be used, but I would say this situation in general answers to a certain self-mediating logic. And this way of speaking is not false, but it is at most only half-true, and hence also at best half-false. The good of the “to be” is both self-mediating and hence related to the process of immanent selving; it is also intermediating and hence more extensively informs our relations to others in diverse forms of community, be these ethical or political. If the first refers us to something more singularly intimate, the second invokes something more universally shared. Metaxological metaphysics has to do justice to both the intimacy and the universality, to both the self-mediations and the social intermediations, in their interplay and proper balance, and to both as grounded in an ethos of being that is not the devalued otherness we have taken too much for granted in modernity. It is not enough just to revolt against this. For there are revolts that risk only a reversal of who now is sovereign, who now is servile. The regime of will to power is not altered by filling the empty throne with a new invested sovereign;¹⁶ nor is it altered by leaving the empty throne empty, if there is nothing beyond that throne, whether filled or empty.¹⁷ We need something beyond sovereignty and servility that also offers its witness to the intimate universal.

Between the Intimate and the Universal: Ethical and Political Communities

Reflection on the good of the “to be” is metaphysical and ethical, but it is also political. Political community bears on diverse orders of the sourcing powers of the “to be,” as marked by diverse appreciations of what is of worth. It bears not just on the power to be, but on the good of the “to be,” in its human forms, both individual and social, and as enabled to be in the given ethos of being. There is the perhaps more normal sense of politics as having to do with the intermediations of communal sovereignty; there is also a sense of the political that must take into account the relations of the different social intermediations of the good of the “to be.”¹⁸ Some would want to separate ethics and politics but while the two might not be identical, a metaxological philosophy of the between cannot be blind to a certain porosity between them. All forms of community ultimately bear on what we love, as Augustine stresses, and how our loves are expressed and organized in shared ways of life. The metaxu, coupled in Plato’s Symposium with eros, refers us to forms of love, and love is what it is by virtue of its direction to what it takes as worthy to be loved. We can confuse the worthless and the worthy. But still we are moved by love, sometimes love so intimate that it is out of mind, and out of mind in an unknowing relation to all that is. With Plato eros is a metaxu, neither a god nor a beast, both of which have no need of politics. We human beings need politics because we are between earth and heaven. But love, like intermediation, is plurivocal: diverse forms of giving and receiving, as well as their corruptions, go on in the between. Their discrimination is part of the task of philosophy. The art of politics, at its best, is involved in an analogous discrimination.

The Symposium names the intermediary power of eros to bind up the whole, but I would stress less the whole as the porosity of the between than what is beyond the immanent whole. Important is a certain doubleness of eros, underscored in all its political resonances in Plato’s dialogues: the difference of eros turannos and eros ouranios. To refer to eros turannos is to name something already redolent with political significance.¹⁹ Plato speaks of penia (poverty) and poros (resource) as at the origin of eros and I would relate this poros to a kind of porosity: porosity is a condition of our being opened (intimately) and to our being open (potentially universal) to what is other and beyond us. The original energy of our being as a given power is a paradoxical mix of lack and plenitude. Our intermediate being is both a passion of being (passio essendi) and an endeavor to be (conatus essendi). The passio participates in the porosity: at once a kind of “nothing” or opening and also a fullness or power or plenitude. We stand in need of a double description, and while one might think this is constitutive of our equivocity, this need not be understood in an entirely negative sense. Tyrannical politics, at the extreme, is an organized outrage to the passio essendi, in the name of a self-absolutizing conatus essendi, insisting on its own absolute immanence, insisting on itself as the whole. This is one extreme that reduces the doubleness to a usurping univocity. Properly the doubleness refers to both our self-surpassing power and our potential for limitless reception. Ultimately our porosity to the other is related to the promise of agapeic self-transcending in human existence, not just the desire for erotic sovereignty, but this is at the opposite extreme to tyranny.

Let me offer a sketch of different forms of communal intermediation between the intimate and the universal. Communities in the between range from the more intimate, to the more instrumental, through more erotic forms, to touch on the agapeic. I focus on four forms of community:²⁰ first, the ethical community of the family where the intimacy of being is more important; second, the network of utility where economical and instrumental values often dominate, and where today we find too much of an ethos of serviceable disposability, that is, things must serve us, be serviceable for us, but once they have served their use, they are disposable (this attitude can treat human persons also as items of serviceable disposability); third, the community of erotic sovereignty where the intermediation of social and political power is to the fore; fourth, and finally, the community of agapeic service where our ethical and religious service to our neighbors and fellow humans is most important.

These are diverse social formations of loves where trust is basic as well as the interplay of trust and distrust. This trust is ontological, in being bound to an enigmatic, given confidence in the good of the “to be,” both expressed and reserved. Trust is also human, hence ethical and political, in that out of it emerge the diverse forms of being in relation to others, none finally separable from the incognito work of this grounding ontological trust. There is something equivocal here too: in the openness of being free our living in trust can mutate into distrust, love into hate, the friend into the enemy.²¹ These different communities all allow forms of metaxological intermediation, which diversely mix self-serving and service of the other. In the third form of community there comes to the fore more explicitly political considerations. But politics has the care for the just support, formation, and advancement of the other worthy forms of community also. They diversely embody the idiotics, the aesthetics, the erotics, and the agapeics of the intimate universal, a fourfold that will be our fuller concern in part 2.

First, the intermediation of the family is elemental, and if the seeds of ethical intermediation are not well sown at this intimate level, it is difficult to see our participation in a more public political space as being marked by genuine ethical openness to others. A public philosophy has to foster mindfulness of what is proper to the family, since this provides the first intermediation between the intimate and the larger social world in which we will all inevitably participate. There is a two-way porosity between the family and that larger world. If the ethical health of the latter is questionable, it may affect the intimacy of the family also.²² Public intermediation, by its nature, tends to turn us away from the intimate, just so far as others call us out from the idiot self and enjoin our participation in the shared between. There are different modes of participation. If the family remains more in touch with the intimate, there are more objectifying participations that might be called our living in the commons.

What is a commons? A commons constitutes a public space of intermediation wherein a plurality of participants are together, either joining freely or being enjoined, whether through external compulsion, secret suggestion, exploitative use, or persuasive solicitation. The milieu of being, charged equivocally with value and diversely stressed by different ethical potencies, is the primal ethos; a commons crystallizes a more particular formation of these potencies.²³ A commons shapes its own derived ethos, and is marked by its own purposes or common good, by its normalized ways of acting and its standards. When intermediation in the public space is more accentuated than the intimate, the sense of the universal can be dissociated from what we sense holds us together in a more elemental belonging. A more embracing sense of commons can be dominated or overlaid by more particular commons, one that contracts the promise of the larger commons. The ethos of a particular society, emerging ultimately from the ethical potencies given in the primal ethos of being, is derived from something elementally intimate, but it claims significance for itself of more general import. The derived ethos is always a mix or mixing of the more intimate and more general. The derived ethos of one society can be so intimate as to be initially almost impenetrable to the stranger, and yet it is not closed to communication, and a barrier of familiarity once having been crossed, the stranger finds himself in a newly opened space of more general communication. The tension between the more intimate and the general can also be evident in the way we are tempted to impose an abstract picture of what constitutes worth on the mixed intimacy of the commons. One thinks of the notion of utility as bound up with the calculative universality widespread in modernity. Pure utility is an abstraction, but it expresses an understanding of worth, and a human self-understanding of what is worthy for us, the strengths and deficiencies of which are reproduced in our configuration of the commons. The dominion in our time of this abstraction, which is socially real, merits some notice.

More generally, there comes to be a gap between the intimacy of the family and the more generally available space of the commons. We can lose touch with the promise of the intimate universal. When this happens, the between can seem to be “neutralized” into a particular public domain—the universal is held to be the public space of more homogeneous generality. Ultimately the notion of a neutral between is a sheer abstraction; indeed it makes no sense. In the between we always find a complex dialectic of trust and distrust in a commons. The others, to some degree, are always strangers. They do not know me as my family does. Their ambiguity makes one more recalcitrant to the giving of trust. How are we to know if the other is hostile or hospitable? We cannot always be certain. We learn to be wary, on guard. A commons is both a togetherness serving shared purposes and the possibility of hostile otherness. Both are reflected in forms of intermediation not attuned to the intimate. In this mixture of trust and distrust, the social between can appear thus as more objectified and externally determined. Likewise, a more determinate self emerges, insecure and over against the others. This intermediation with the possibly hostile stranger shapes the social milieu in which I come to stand over against the other. There are a number of resulting configurations of intermediation. There is, for example, the process of education (formal and informal) that a society offers to its members by which is effected the transition from the intimacy of family to a more public space of togetherness. While this move into the more generally common space seems to turn away from the intimate, nevertheless intermediations are called forth in which that intimacy is never entirely lost; otherwise the sense of proper belonging to the larger community would be entirely absent. The intermediations, in diverse ways stressed between selving and communication, seek to hold together the more intimate and more universal.

Turning to the second communal intermediation, the network of utility and serviceable disposability,²⁴ we find here a commons of public importance in relation to the world of work. Work is a social intermediation but it is turned toward what is there as useful for us, and this applies both to nonhuman things and to human others. Once again this can lead to the recession of the intimacy of being in which we participate: we perhaps preserve our own intimacy in the form of our desire to be, to have, to possess, but in this what is other to us loses its charge of intimate presence. There is constituted a web of useful intermediations, in turn fragile, powerful, and entangling. For though driven by the exchange of instrumental goods and services, this is yet an interconnecting of self and others. In our time such a dominion of use-values pervades the ethical and political milieu, and infiltrates all the levels of social intermediation. The necessity of such values is undeniable, but it is not finally sufficient; indeed it can be pernicious when totalized relative to the ethos of being. It tends toward a univocal instrumentalization of that ethos and an ambiguous contraction of human transcending. Its exploitation is proximately directed to the shifting ambiguities of the intimate and the aesthetic, but when it is totalized, human beings have difficulty envisioning anything worthy beyond use-values. Not only is everything other in nature reduced to its instrumental value, but so also are human beings. There are too many signs of this in our world that are troubling.

This use-full intermediation cannot attain a fully ethical and political comportment vis-à-vis the good of the other, or indeed of self, despite the surface pervasiveness of self-interest. There is something necessary about it vis-à-vis pragmatic affairs, but this necessity is governed by useful expedience rather than excellence beyond expedience. Its relativization of the good to use-values is, in the end, dissembling, since were there a complete occlusion of inherent ends, there would be precipitated an inexorable slide toward the nihilism of a universal without end. The togetherness of the many in a social commons might have many purposes but it would have no purpose. There would be no point to it as a whole, other than the infinite multiplication of finite satisfactions, none of which proves satisfactory in the end. A community that lacks any promise of ultimate purpose produces a counterfeit double of the intimate universal, defined by the hegemony of serviceable disposability. Our freedom refashions itself into a bondage to the products we consume to fill our immanent emptiness. The omnivorous devouring of worldly resources does not, cannot, slake this emptiness. The devouring seems to drive on toward something encompassing and more universal but in the process it regresses to something more restricted and elemental: before us, around us, everything we grasp seems to face us as an autistic thereness; within us, intimate to the grasping desire, a craving that cannot be calmed. Something more is needed: a different gathering of creative power, another release of freedom transcending serviceable disposability. We stand in need of purposiveness more inclusive than instrumental purposes and the expenditure of power on the useful. We need something deeper that calls to the intimate, and something higher that calls us out to the more universal. This something “more,” addressing both the intimate and the universal, is intermediated by the communities of erotic sovereignty and agapeic service.

The third form of social intermediation, the community of erotic sovereignty, is directed to the intermediation of excellence beyond utility. Here the political, in the more usual determination, is evident: the intermediation of the sources of social power, serving the gaining, ordering, preserving, and perpetuation of immanent human excellences. Politics is always more than economics, even if too often many political representatives are snagged by the puppet strings of the money dealers. The statesman is more than an economic manager of the market. Nor is sovereignty just a matter of individualistic aristocratism, such as we find in Nietzsche. At issue is a distinctive intermediation, hence an interplay of selves and others, hence something always communal, even when the flower of the intermediation might be an extraordinary individual. The political intermediation of the sources of social power are intimately recessed in the general eros of a people, and socially expressed in the shared forms of activity. The intermediation is effected through its sovereign representatives who, at best, help to give some exemplary expression of the immanent excellences of a people. This may not be quite bread-and-butter politics, but there is more than bread-and-butter to politics.

If work is mostly bound to the web of utility, sovereignty is a play of power, a freer power beyond utility. Sovereignty is not servile. It lives by our transcending to positions of “being above.” “Being below” is not fully in accord with the free release of our power to be. In “being above” we seek to come into our own (though there is more than our own). This impulse upward toward something of more universal excellence cannot be divorced from a dipping down into reserves of intimacy, out of which all creative ventures come to form. The statesman who strides the world by day giving orders is a sleeping vegetable by night. There is a night of the soul that is the creative and ambitious void out of which creative will to power steps forth into the sun of its day, as from the cave of its own nocturnal recess. Erotic sovereignty crowns a struggle of self-becoming, both in solitude and in solidarity, a becoming that passes from the intimate “being below” to a more universal “being above.” But “being above” is no less intimate than “being below.”

This freedom of “being above” is more than the network of utility can define, where everything is a means and nothing, in the end, a supreme end. To be sovereign is to approach the supreme and useless—useless beyond serviceable disposability. It is useless but as such may be more supremely useful, if it gives to use the self-justifying excellences that the network of serviceable disposability lacks, and without which the whole seems finally pointless. This worth beyond serviceable disposability can take different forms, but primarily what is important is an intermediation of social power into a community of purpose beyond utilitarian goals. Again, despite claims that the world is ruled by multinational corporations, there is a politics of statesmanship that finally is more sovereign than economics.

The political intermediation of social power in the community of erotic sovereignty is always stressed between the requirements of justice and power. In the tension of these two, there can be a tilt to power unconstrained by justice in some cases, such as tyranny. In the best cases there is a balance and harmony of the two. There is a dynamic process at work in which power can serve justice as a communal expression of immanent excellence. But power can also be self-serving, to the ultimate mutilation of the intimate and the betrayal of the universal. For instance, a people may want to rest in itself and its excellences and seek to constitute itself as a self-justifying immanent whole. In absolutizing its intimate will to power it constructs a community of power that counterfeits universality. Absolute justice is not to be found in any political community, but justice is still to be found there. And still there is something more. Sovereignty, one must say, often finds itself in a tempting middle space between eros turannos and eros ouranios. Its will to universal sovereignty is its refusal of any intimate servility.²⁵

Beyond servility and sovereignty is the community of agapeic service. This is the meta, the “beyond” of immanent excellence, but it is also the meta as “in the midst,” and as such it can help purge power and transform justice. This is the fourth form of communal intermediation. It is on the boundary between the ethical and the religious, but essential to its political significance is that it most ultimately serves to absolve human power of its temptation to being an eros turannos. Suppose we were to contrast the sovereign and the ethical servant. I am speaking of singular incarnations of both, though my intent is to draw attention to different formations of community defined by the primacy of one or the other. To speak of Caesar and Christ is to speak of intimate singulars but also of communities with more universal reach. If the sovereign is beyond servility, the ethical servant is beyond servility and sovereignty. We could say that both the sovereign and the ethical servant are moved by the self-surpassing energy of transcendence. Each in its own way is touched by, or touching on, both the intimate and the universal. Both ambiguously move on the border between human transcending as reaching for the ultimate and the good as transcendent. If in the sovereign there is an ambiguous mixing of the power of self-transcending and transcendence itself, in the ethical servant there is more of transcendence itself than of self-transcending. In the middle between transcending and the transcendent, the sovereign tilts to the former, the ethical servant to the latter. In the middle ethos, as always, there is no complete eradication of ambiguity. A sovereign may be a secret servant of the transcendent good, though appearing as lord of will to power; an ethical servant may be a double creature whose great devotion to the transcendent good is incompletely freed from human-all-too-human self-insistence.

I connect this community of agapeic service with the metaxological intermediation of the good, beyond will to power. If erotic sovereignty deals with immanent excellences, agapeic service deals with transcendent good. It is most released to ethical care for the other as other. It releases something of the promise of a more universal love of being, in respect both for the value of nature as other and for other human beings with whom one shares the gifts of the between. We do not create this community through ourselves alone, or through any form of our own self-mediation. This final community is not just at the end, but is our participation, most unminded, in the always already effective communication of the agape of the good. As there is a community beyond use, intermediated by sovereignty, there is a community beyond sovereign power, and beyond politics, intermediated by agapeic love. This community is the apotheosis of the bond of trust and the secret love inherent in all forms of communities. It is at the ultimate, at the extreme, in relation to origin and end. It intermediates trust in good in an ultimate sense, and with respect to the extremes of life: birth and death, and the ordeal of suffering. In face of our coming to nothing, it is trust in the good, by love of those who are as nothing, in facing their nothingness. It is community seeking to live in absolute service of the good.

We might put it this way (with a bow to Dostoevsky): Christ is beyond the Grand Inquisitor and Caesar. Agapeic service is not the exclusive possession of the Christian tradition or of the religions of the Bible. Signs of this ultimate community are not exclusive to one and only one tradition. It is neither a possession nor exclusive. To try to make it so would again be to univocalize the ultimate community. One thinks of the story of the Buddha: a prince is groomed to be king, an erotic sovereign, but comes to leave the intimacy of the palace of his father. Beyond its cushion, he is shocked by the suffering he sees, shocked into a different mindfulness, of the intimate universality of suffering, and of the between as the impermanence of all finite things. He abandons the place of regal power, abdicates the claim of the erotic sovereign to rule. He becomes a wandering beggar, homeless, seeking a way. The way, in time, enlightens, and the wanderer becomes the Buddha. At a certain boundary, do we need a politics that can make way for such an abandonment?²⁶

Politics, Being “Born-with” and the Intimate Universal

I attend to four considerations: first, the temptation to absolutize politics when we have recessed the religious and the metaphysical; second, the indispensability of the art of discrimination and the necessary seriousness of politics in its relativity; third, the issue of politics, nihilism, and the good of the “to be”; fourth, the enigma hidden in the word of “porosity.”

First consideration: When we remember the dangerous ambiguity of religious and metaphysical recession, rather than us absolutizing politics in terms of immanent sovereignty, politics asks to be absolved from immanent idolatry. In an extended sense modernity and its politics find it difficult to place quite properly the requirements of the fourth communal intermediation of agapeic service. This is something beyond servility and sovereignty, but one of the sources of the modern difficulty is to be traced to the wars of religion in which the solicitation of agapeic service was betrayed in religion itself. The result was something of judgment falling on religion per se, as if it were essentially a masked form of will to power, seeking its own erotic sovereignty. Whether in the religious betrayal of agapeic service in its quest for its own erotic sovereignty, or in the political collapse of all intermediations into erotic sovereignty to the forgetfulness of the difference of the agapeic, an essential discrimination is lost—both for religion and for politics. This can be reflected in the characteristic patterns of philosophical thought, and their rejection of more overt commitment to the call of metaphysical reflection. Betrayal of agapeic service makes space for certain political forms of erotic sovereignty to claim the immanent whole as its dominion, since it will now be argued that agapeic service is only a disguised form of erotic sovereignty, one using the rhetoric of service to further its sovereignty. If the intimate universal beyond servility and sovereignty is obscured, so also the political, understood especially as just projecting human will to power, is tempted to pursue its own self-absolutization.

If the premodern sense of politics sometimes risked collapsing the difference of the third and the fourth communal intermediations from a standpoint that claimed the fourth, the modern sense tends to put the fourth out of play, or take over its difference in terms of erotic sovereignty, with the result that there is a certain contraction of the difference of the third and the fourth, but from the side of the political understood in terms of an immanent whole. This must risk making politics, in an immanent sense, absolute. It is obvious that we have seen something of this on the totalitarian “Left.” There is also a very modern contraction of differences, most to be found on the capitalist “Right,” when the dominion of serviceable disposability becomes the universal form of relation to the whole, and everything is made subject to its instrumental requirements. Then not only politics but ethics and religion are made to speak the language of serviceable disposability and its no less totalizing market. The market will be said to offer choice in a neutral context, but there is no neutral context, only an ethos of use saturated with the values of serviceable disposability. This too, in its own way, tries to consume the intimate universal: our most intimate desires will be satisfied, it is insinuated in its unrestrained advertising, and this on a global scale. Ethics, religion, indeed philosophy all are suborned to witness to their usefulness in this global universalizing of utility. In the universalizing the intimate meaning of what is worthy beyond use is driven further and further into recess. Globalization thus risks being the capitalist projection of a counterfeit double of the intimate universal.

Even if we try, as did the Marxists, to offer a vision of politics beyond capitalist serviceability, given the devalued soil of otherness in the modern ethos, given the contraction, nay, destruction, of the difference between political sovereignty and agapeic service, the divinization of human politics is always shadowed by the will to power of the dominion of serviceable disposability, but now more explicitly totalized in a communal sense. Hence the intermediation of erotic sovereignty is also at risk of losing the sense of immanent and intrinsic value in favor of a voracious instrumentalism, whether individualist or communist, in which everything finally is disposable—not only the citizens of a polity but the politicians also. The family is ruined by the same attitude of serviceable disposability—an attitude blithely preached, though misery is created for those who treat familial others and themselves thus. The family is invaded by a set of relatively arbitrary arrangements, now sanctioned by economic profitability and political institutionalization, as if we were all freelance autonomists, with no inherent ties and loyalties to others, loyalties that properly enlarge a freedom beyond solitary self-assertion, but that are now censured as hang-ups curbing self-expression.

When it is made the whole, this sense of the political generates a diminished sense of the metaxu in a number of respects. There are the diverse finite metaxus that constitute the tissue of different intermediations in immanence itself. There is also the metaxu at the boundary of immanence—first in the inward otherness of the singular human, and in the deep intimacy of a family; second the religious metaxu between immanence and transcendence as other, signaled by the difference of the communities of erotic sovereignty and agapeic service. The first communicates the intimate universal in the idiocy of the family, the second can communicate it in the religious intermediation of the human and the divine. Both of these metaxu are meta in the double sense: in one sense shaped “in the midst” of political community, in another sense “beyond, over, and above.” Political community may provide the conditions that make possible their maturing, but politics does not constitute that maturing—in that regard they are both transpolitical.

We have difficulty thinking of the transpolitical, except as a retreat into suburban cocooning, or an entire break with the political. But even were one to see such a break, say, in the way the Desert Fathers shook the dust of the city off their sandals, this break is also a symbolic political act in the sense of being enacted in terms of a higher loyalty, a higher fidelity to the community of agapeic service. When, for instance, Augustine wrote the City of God, its composition was both transpolitical and yet immensely influential in a political sense, since it mediates our understanding of different powers and their proper intermediation, without reduction of the City of God to the City of Man, as happens with Hegel and his successors.²⁷ With the latter there is a difference then crushed dialectically, a difference, now forgotten, in the urge simply to reassert difference in the face of this speculative crush. But there is a finesse for differences of community on which we can effect neither a dialectical construction nor an antidialectical deconstruction. An absolved politics, respectful of the transpolitical dimensions of the intimate universal, would not close off porosity to the community of agapeic service.

Politics, the Intimate Universal, the Art of Discrimination

Second consideration: In the third communal intermediation political considerations come to the fore more explicitly, and yet that politics has also the care for the other worthy forms of community. Given the complex porosities and intermediations between different forms of community, the task of politics cannot be defined immanently through itself alone, but must itself have some finesse for the discriminations that differentiate and relate these different communities. We must affirm the necessary seriousness of politics even in its very relativity.

The art of discrimination must have a political finesse for differences, not least in holding firm to the doubleness between the communities of erotic sovereignty and agapeic service. Though these in concrete living are in fact mixed up, we should not mix them up, in the sense of mistaking one for the other, or collapsing their difference into expressions of one whole. They must not be mixed up, but in the between, they must be mixed up, in allowing their porosity in the happening of living itself—an entirely different matter. This is coherent with metaphysics as metaxological, which means we are not dealing with an Eleatic ontology, or an idealistic speculative holism, or a deconstructive immanence. We are “in the midst” but also “beyond.” This is a double posture that might well be captured in the advice to “be in the world but not of it,” to be true to a kingdom that is in this world though not of it. Is this the double contradictory thing that is open to criticism in the opinion of Merleau-Ponty?²⁸ Perhaps only if it is an evasive servility producing the miscarriage of immanent sovereignty. But is it? Why should the given world of immanence be loved any the less, even if it does not exhaust the promise of being? Once again one must ask: Suppose the love is neither servile nor sovereign, a witness to the intimate universal. It is a sign of contradiction, but a contradiction to immanence at home with itself, and hence to a politics that would immanently absolutize itself. The accusation of contradiction risks invoking what amounts to an immanent univocalism, convenient for a self-assertive immanence unwilling to brook contradiction at its boundary. The sign of contradiction might more fruitfully be seen as witnessing to a porosity on that boundary, asking from us more finesse for the equivocities of finitude. And perhaps this is not entirely alien to the philosophy of ambiguity sought by Merleau-Ponty. Metaxological finesse for these equivocities reads the sign of contradiction in terms neither servile nor sovereign and not in terms of a false choice between the intimate and the universal in the religious community of agapeic service.

There is a respect, perhaps known better by ancient and medieval thinkers, in which metaphysics is beyond politics, and yet there is nothing antipolitical in recognizing this “beyond.” Raphael’s School of Athens captures the balance perfectly between the vertical pointing of the finger of Plato and the horizontal, even hand of the moderating Aristotle. The moderating hand reminds us of just care for the meta as defining our “being in the midst”; the finger pointing upward recalls us to the meta as “over and above” the moderate middle, reminds us of the exceeding of our self-transcending and the excess of transcendence itself. Who would deny that there are tensions between these two senses of the meta, but is this not both the suffering and the glory of our being in the between? Is there not a suffering beyond servility and a glory beyond sovereignty?

Each human being is a metaphysical being, in whom the sourcing powers of the “to be,” both those most intimate and those most self-transcending, are at the boundary of the political, even in the political itself. A worthy practice of politics lets those boundaries be. Metaphysics as a philosophical discipline of mindfulness can be close to this beyond in this regard: as a practice of what I have called agapeic mindfulness—an admiring openness to the given worthiness of the “to be,” freed from any grasping will to power, a released theōria beyond the tyranny of theory, rising again from the porosity prior to theory and practice.²⁹ This released mindfulness exhibits its own form of “doing justice,” as we saw above. There is a “beyond” in the form of a kind of posthumous mindfulness, mindfulness posthumous to erotic sovereignty, mindfulness posthumous to will to power, mindfulness not servile but released in a purer service of the true. In going back into the recessed depths of the intimate universal, it comes forth as a resurrected way of wonder.³⁰

Lest what I say be misconstrued as antipolitical (it is not), I think there are seeds of this service beyond servility and sovereignty in politics itself, even if often masked in many (sometimes necessary) equivocations. As needing an art of discrimination, politics has to have finesse for these equivocations and for the mask. Notwithstanding this, there is a public service, a political service that is for the good of the community, and its form is not a self-fulfilling sovereignty. I mean this in the way in which one could say that the genuine statesman is beyond the erotic sovereign. I mean also that many of the daily servants of the common good, whose work remains incognito, are themselves servants of this political good, though they make no headlines. They are “citizens” of the intimate universal, though in their daily consideration they would not dream of so describing themselves. Their often nameless generosity generates and carries the social trust that possibilizes the intermediations of enabling social power.³¹

The necessary seriousness of the political resides in its care for the importances of the relative. I am speaking of the relativity of a public space that is hospitable to the flourishing of the other intermediations of value. The relativity does not create them but it is enabling of them in this space. If there is a governing of them, this need not be a dominating. There is something about them that is not just servile to political sovereignty, and they are not yet entirely sovereign in their own right. Think thus of the intimacy of the family at one end, and the transcendence of the religious at the other, with practical invention and entrepreneurship in between. Each of these is a necessary serving of essential value but neither is per se necessarily servile or sovereign. Politics has to do with public goods and their distribution, more often than not in terms of organizing the institutions governing everyday life. There is more to it than this, since it also can offer a people an intermediation with itself, in terms of its self-understanding, and sense of what it is to do and be—and this can extend even to its sense of destiny, if it has one. A people’s symbolic sense of itself is hyperbolic to serviceable disposability since it has its sources in the general eros, and intimate to this are excesses no one can quite know or master. The intermediation of a people to itself can take many forms,³² and this manyness has to be taken with more seriousness than is allowed by drumbeats about “democracy,” as if the invocation of that holy name were enough to put this manyness in its proper perspective. Politics is more than the organization and administration or higher management of economics. The power of the “to be” as good is open to a multiplicity of communal expressions. Politics requires its own finesse, prudential and visionary, for this diversity of powers and their flourishing.

Politics, Nihilism: The Good of the “to Be” and the Intimate Universal

Third consideration: how politics, in one of its roles, can serve as a therapy against nihilism, a hedge, a house against the temptation to think of the “to be” as worthless. It guards us against the danger of living as if at bottom, at the most intimate level, life were meaningless, purposeless. It enacts its therapy as performative projects. Sometimes it does this by organizing distractions, by filling time, sometimes by dreaming great enterprises. In all things it must guard against the fall of the moderate middle into meaninglessness. In this regard, politics has an intimate relation to the good of the “to be.” In this too it is not exhausted by an imperium of will to power. Indeed this last often issues forth as a powerful, violent hedge against the worthlessness of the “to be.” The question is whether it only succeeds in perpetuating the worthlessness.

The sirens of tyranny sing seductively to the desperations of tired men. Tyranny and nihilism go hand in hand. Nothing is of inherent worth for tyranny, beyond the perpetuation and expression of its own will to power. If there is no resource of worth from beyond will to power, this too finally comes to nothing. Wars may even be organized as diversions from this “coming to nothing,” though they must, and will, circle back to the nothing they only seem to escape. Premodern political thinkers, such as Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, bring us to face this better than many modern thinkers, certainly in this absolute essential: they do not renege on the ontological good of the “to be.” They address better the question of a measure to human power that is not itself another human measure.

The best of politics seeks to make good in the more moderate domestic middle, but the problem of tyranny merits special mention: on going to an extreme it seeks to generate an oblivion to the possibilities of an agapeic service, beyond sovereignty and servility. Agapeic service is itself something extreme, but in domestic daily life it is also a secret and intimate “therapy” against tyrannical will to power. Tyranny is rooted in eros, individual or general, as the self-transcending sweep of the human power to be. With tyranny we find an intensification of an erotic self-insistence to an extreme such that what is other only counts as a means for this self-affirmation and its furthering. The doubleness of eros, as both poros and penia, is here deprived of its ethical poise: the power to be is expressed as an unbounded conatus essendi claiming absolute sovereignty, while the passio essendi has been rendered servile to the unbridling of the self-insisting endeavor to be. Hypertrophy of the conatus essendi, atrophy of the passio essendi and the compassion of being, compassio essendi, is mocked and hated. But the power to be cannot be divorced from the power to be good. In a certain metaphysically intimate sense, the power of the “to be” is the power to be good. What is worthy to be deemed good is not necessarily a human good, or necessarily a moral good. There is an ontological sense of the good of the “to be,” philosophical intimacy that much of modern thought has lost. When we turn specifically to human beings, we find that we are first empowered before we power ourselves. Power is based on a porosity and an endowment given by the origin.

What endows politics? If some are to be believed, nothing but our own will to power. There is, of course, an element of truth in this. This we see, for instance, when powerful nations or peoples are tempted to reconstruct the spaces of the human commons that surround them in the image of their own social will. This reconstruction always risks the mutation of their general eros into an eros turannos. Everything hangs on the interpretation and handling of this mutation. That the glory of the world strides the globe does not change the fact that ultimately, that is, metaphysically, the immanent sources of glorious power are in the first instance ontological endowments. The view beyond servility and sovereignty suggests this, however: we cannot endow ourselves in the first place; we must first be endowed to be able to endow. This means once again a relativization of the claims of the eros turannos, which follows from the distortion of the passio essendi—something has been forced into recess, thrust into a false reserve, silenced. Tyranny involves the self-expression of will to power that instrumentalizes the power of the “to be” as good: this good is made to be my good, our good, and all other goods are harnessed to the end of serving the power, my power, our power that claims to be “number One.” Tyranny can also take democratic form when the people claim to be “number One.”

The claim to be “number One” can only be sustained by means of violence by any being who is not God. There is only one absolute One, and that is God. Everything else is a relative one, a one in relation to others. With human beings, the one in relation to the others is in an ethical relation that transforms the meaning of power: the power of the “to be” explicitly cannot be separated from the power to be as good, the ethical power to be good. If we understand the one One as the agapeic God, it is not that being in relation has no claim. Quite to the contrary, agapeic service beyond servility and sovereignty is the consummate relation of endowing goodness that gives to and for the other as other. It is as much prior to self-affirming will to power in the endowed beginning as it is beyond it, in the sought, even attained, end. Granting this, we will have to assume a relation to the political that communicates from the opposite extreme to tyranny. Tyranny is the seizure of the immanent excellence of the erotic sovereign who battens on the endowment of the good of the “to be” and usurps its communicative power. The God who is agapeic is at the opposite extreme of goodness to this usurpation. There is the communicative endowing of the good of the “to be”; there is no usurpation in relation to the other; there is the freeing and enabling of the power of the finite “to be.”

I speak of the extreme temptations. Without God as the agapeic One, one wonders if the extremes defining the between turn out, in the end, to be either a totalitarianism or an-archism, each nihilistic. Totalitarianism: a counterfeit social universal, devoid of being true to the intimacy of being. An-archism: a counterfeit intimacy of singular being, devoid of being true to the promise of the social(ist) universal. What of the moderate middle? Without God, the moderate middle becomes, one fears, the tepid middle of the last men of Nietzsche. The last men are the middling ones, ones who are an extremity in mediocrity: spiritual lassitude touches a lowest happy low, for our self-satisfaction here is our unnamed despair. In these extreme instances, the only countervailing powers seem also immanent, and likewise come from the extremes. In the case of the individual, the immanent otherness of intimate selving proves to be an-archic (with a slight bow again to Max Stirner). In making itself the absolute, self comes to know that there is nothing there that is absolute. There is an inward otherness beyond our self-determination, but this deep intimacy will not be understood in a more religious manner. Postulatory immanence issues its countermanding insinuation: no, if our immanent otherness resists the absolute self-mediation of immanence, let our self-absolutizing mean self-implosion, perhaps even self-explosion, for if I am not a man, I am dynamite. In the case of the communal whole, the forced universal of totalitarianism would be the extreme. The totalized power of the social whole becomes the absolute strange power claiming to be the absolute intimate power, whose intimacy is intrusively enforced as transcendence absolutely incarnate. In truth, this forced universal cannot absolutely reach the intimacy of the incarnate, for this is hyperimmanent: it is the gateway of porosity between the human and the divine, and no politics can ultimately answer for this in its radical ontological intimacy: its being shut in, or opened out; its freedom to consent to the ultimate porosity, or to close or fold its own porosity in on itself alone.

In all of this we find the diversion of our immanent porosity away from transcendence as other, but in this diversion we are always meeting something we cannot determine on the terms of our own immanence. In pointing beyond servility and sovereignty, metaxological metaphysics points beyond the temptations to idolize the whole, or the temptations of the idolatrous human self. If immanent politics is always tempted by the power plays of servility and sovereignty, the agapeic God beyond the immanent whole de-absolutizes such a politics. This de-divinization of politics might perhaps make the divine more intimate to politics, but in the mode of the agapeic servant, and not the erotic sovereign. The erotic sovereign is relativized by the agapeic servant, but relativized by a different being in relation—not by an autarchic absoluteness that squats on top of the others as a higher tyrannical power. The endowing good endows power but the good of the “to be” it endows is more than will to power. God beyond the immanent whole relativizes the idolatry of the totalitarian whole, and the idolatrous say-so of self-asserting an-archism.

Porosity, Politics, the Intimate Universal: Neither Servility nor Sovereignty

At the end of the last chapter, we finished with the lasting lash of Yeats, but we can end here, or perhaps even begin again, with Yeats’s own ending on the intimacy of tender love, and paradoxically through his last poem, titled “Politics.”³³ It goes thus:

How can I, that girl standing there,

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics?

Yet here’s a travelled man that knows

What he talks about,

And there’s a politician

That has read and thought,

And maybe what they say is true

Of war and war’s alarms,

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms!

Yeats’s poem itself carries an epigraph from Thomas Mann: “In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms.” By contrast, the poem carries intimations of a transpolitical meaning of relevance for our fourth and concluding consideration: how the porosity is significant for politics and the intimate universal. In speaking of extremities when I refer to transcendence, I mean it otherwise than the cartoon version of Platonism. We are not dealing with a univocal dualism of the here and the “beyond,” but rather with a between that communicates of what is beyond by its leavening of immanence. It is in the between that we find ourselves in the intimate universal: indeed we live out of it, and do not always or often come to mindfulness of it. There in the immanent between, the play of servility and sovereignty is very much in evidence, but in this immanence there also is a porosity to something more. More than anything else, the community of agapeic service intimates that being religious is lived out of a certain primal porosity between the human and the divine. We might understand this, for instance, in terms of the life of prayer, or in terms of the rituals of liturgy that make us porous to praise, or as a life enacted in care for the other, and indeed care for our own selving, we who too are to be loved as agapeically as possible. Without religious finesse for the primal porosity, is the art of politics weakened in its wise negotiation of immanent porosities and boundaries in the finite between? Is it tempted to make itself the replacement for the primal porosity, or at least the secular porosity between immanent power and power that ceaseth only in death? Are we inclined to reconfigure the intimate universal into a counterfeit configuration of immanent political power circling around itself alone and closed into itself finally?

In the given middle there are complex porosities and intermediations between the four different forms of community, above distinguished; hence the task of politics cannot be defined immanently through itself alone. The notion of anything in the finite between being defined immanently through itself alone is called into question by a metaxological philosophy. Especially in the fourth community, ethical openness to the other as other is at its most pronounced. Even though this ethical-religious community cannot be reduced to the terms of the political community, it has to find its way in terms of the empowerments and constraints often marking the political community. Finesse for the porosity of the two is needed—diversely needed by those who would be just political leaders, as well as by those who are in service to the holy. Porosity between the two certainly does not mean the takeover of one by the other, whether from the side of a self-absolutizing secularism, or from the side of a religious putsch riding the holy as a vehicle of its will to power, as deviously immanent as the self-absolutizing secularism.

Beyond servility and sovereignty, a metaxological philosophy asks for finesse in negotiating boundaries. We between-beings are creatures passing and in passage. We might distinguish, for instance, between local politics and international politics but both are forms of being between: between members of a nation, and between (inter) nations. If the stress must fall on the between, we must do justice to the passages in the between, and to the porosities that allow passing. This means a loss of absolutely secure boundaries. There are no such boundaries. One of the tasks of politics is to determine boundaries but none can be absolute. To take the ultimate case: in the between as offering a primal porosity between the human and the divine, there can be no absolute walls that can confine the communication and passage of the endowing good. Postures of defense and offense can take place along different borders, and hence shape the communication of good and evil in the porosity. The porosity as such makes one ontologically vulnerable to the other. Keeping the porosity unclogged means a fidelity to our being as a passio essendi. This is also a fidelity to endowing good. Just the vulnerability might incline one to revert to self-asserting conatus, and we make the endowing good of the “to be” mutate into offensive will. If the other on the boundary is suspected of will to power, we fear violation by an intruding power and seek protection in a boundary without porosity.

Situate here the definition of politics in terms of foe and friend. This is an important consideration but the sources out of which this distinction emerges have to do with the primal porosity, the poros and penia of eros, the immanent passage in our being between passio essendi and conatus essendi. To do justice to these requires ontology and metaphysics—the former to discern the forms of immanent dynamic powers, the latter to see the openness to transcendence that these powers enable. But to identify that distinction with the political as such runs the risk of stipulative say-so, even dictatorial decisionism, one that makes a condition of war more absolute than the porosity of being. For then finally everyone is a partner in woe, in war, even when my ally.³⁴

The porosity is more ultimate, for without reference to it, we cannot understand the happening of enmity and the condition of war, much less the promise of the power of the “to be” as endowing good.³⁵ The distinction of friend and enemy is not arbitrary, but to identify it with what is essential to politics does risk a contraction of the range of relevance defining politics, and an arbitrary decisionism as to what grounds that distinction. Willful say-so, claiming to determine ultimately what amounts to self-serving differences, then overrides the patient art of political finesse. A more deep-going reflection on the porosity, and all it entails, will bring us to the difference of the erotic sovereignty and agapeic service. This too is no arbitrary difference. With erotic sovereignty there are considerations of immanent excellence that do not fit into the distinction of friend and foe. If what is essential to the political is defining the enemy, politics becomes the settlement of boundaries, a settlement ultimately grounded in violence that tries to close down the porosity. This settlement must be inherently unstable, in the longer run even self-defeating, since there is no closure of the ultimate porosity. For it allows the streaming of human self-transcending, whether on this side or the opposite side, over any boundary we claim to fix. We remain stuck in the primitive definition of justice in Plato’s Republic—helping one’s friends and doing harm to one’s enemies. Beyond this the Republic passes far. Passing even further beyond servility and sovereignty, doing good even to one’s enemy, is enjoined by the agapeic relation.

There is a nonviolent universal in the call of the agapeic relation. The home of the call of this intimate universal is religion, and not primarily politics. There is no absolutely universal politics, since for us in the world of immanent powers there must needs be boundaries drawn in which the porosity is given determinate form. This does not mean that a universal call does not continue to resound within any boundary so drawn, and beyond every boundary, and hence the political is always made to sway or tremble in the hearing of this transpolitical call. The desire for a universal politics without the boundary, and without ethical and spiritual finesse for the religious, tends to generate counterfeit doubles of the agapeic community. The threshold of the boundary becomes the launching pad for an assault on the beyond, projecting a universal that is intimately counterfeit.

Further, the appeal to absolute porosity in absolutely immanent terms tends to veer from an inflated idealism of expectations to a brutal deflation of reckoning. In this self-circling of immanent power, the other, previously the absolutely lovable, becomes now the absolutely suspect. The general eros, stirring from its sleep within a people, tries to inflate itself as an absolute porosity but instead creates an absolute conatus that seeks to bring down all boundaries that mark our finite porosity to finite others. Out of our monstrous intimacy a generalized spirit of suspicion puts forth its darker blooms. “Good fences make good neighbors,” wrote Robert Frost, citing the words of the neighbor. Walls wall in, walls wall out. But without the fitting boundary, and its appropriate negotiation, we lack respect for the intimate reserve of trust essential to communication. At a limit, in there being no limit, we risk an explosion of self-inflating tyranny, followed by implosion and, in the extreme, the murder of the others, as they are drawn into the retraction of the emptiness into its self-created void. The porosity of the between, the fertile void we are in the intimate universal, allows also that we make of the between this desolation.

On the one hand, then, one might say we need to heed the lessons of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.³⁶ Shakespeare is an artist with superb finesse for the intimate universal in both its political and its sacred dimensions. A political evil, regicide, is intimate—it is not only the horror of killing “God’s anointed,” but a violation to the eternal destiny of the soul of murdered and murderer, and the violent disordering of power in the kingdom. There is much bearing on the porosity and boundaries, and indeed much of incognito metaphysic in this great dramatic study of tyranny. There is the porosity of the elements, for the earth has bubbles even as the water has; there is porosity of the powers, the porosity between the living and the dead, for the murdered come back to disturb our feasts; there is the clogging of the ultimate porosity between the human and the divine in the impotence to pray, when Macbeth, after the murder, cannot pronounce Amen, though he would, and had most need then of Amen; there is the repulse, politically enforced, to the human porosity of pity, symbolized by the child, the naked newborn babe, striding the blast; there is Macbeth’s impatience with time, itself a metaphysical revolt in its own way, in his will to overleap the boundary between the present and the future, indeed the life to come; there is metaphysical revolt also in Macbeth’s refusal to let be what is and what is to be; there is his seizure of “solely sovereign sway and masterdom,” in a world steeped in the half-truth and the half-lie of equivocity, for fair is foul and foul is fail; there is the shriveling of the passio essendi under tyranny’s power, the loss of all compassion, and the engorgement of the conatus essendi; there is the intimate bond of the family desecrated (Macduff: “All my little chicks, at one fell swoop”), anticipated by Lady Macbeth in advance of the evil deed in her rejection of the “milk of human kindness,”³⁷ coming back to haunt other families with corrosive suspicion, with “the near in blood, the nearer bloody”; there is the setting at naught of the bound(ary) of measure, in the exceeding of measure; there is erotic sovereignty warping into eros turannos, and then there are no friends more, only foes, and with this the way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf, and at the end life itself a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

On the other hand, we need to heed the lessons of political Romanticism. This, in its own way, reminds us of our porosity to what exceeds finite measure in immanence. There is something of greatness in some Romantic artists with undoubted affinity for the intimate universal. There is something admirable about the dream of a new holism of the people, enacted with the integrity of political justice, and not shorn of the true pieties of the sacred. And yet, sleeping in some forms of political Romanticism is a general eros for a national sovereignty that can mutate into the tyrannical self-assertion of a rampant folk. From adolescent good will we have seen many a political Romantic graduate, so to say, to Pol Pot. Imagine there’s no heaven, the song sings, imagine there’s no religion, imagine there are no countries, imagine no boundaries. We can imagine, but can we only imagine? Nothing to live or die for: but sometimes when we try to do more than imagine, with nothing to live or die for, living without a why becomes killing without a why. The singing stops, the screaming begins and, horrible dictu, death is loosed in the boundless whole, and on it.

Politics is the necessary art of intermediary boundaries in the porosity. Without this discriminating art, and the moderation of an ethical discipline, and the finesse of religion, the porosity can be turned into the formlessness of a chaos, where the idiotic sources of human selving release a madness—not a divine but a murderous madness. An ethical and religious finesse moderates the darker excesses in the intimate, and offers measure in the exceeding of measure, such as marks the infinite restlessness of human self-transcending. Any religion of politics is a false religion; it doubles and redoubles itself in a counterfeit whole. We need different services of the everyday. The everydayness of politics can be a sacred service: not an administration of the banal, but a safeguarding of just measure, with the guidance of exemplars of practical wisdom who have something about them beyond servility and sovereignty.

Once again, the extreme calls of human existence are not to be denied, and my own focus on the intimate universal does not intend to slight them, but to identify these calls with the political is dangerous. No doubt there is dangerous politics in exceptional circumstances, but political theologians under the spell of the “mortal god” will not save us or the between. They do not do a good job in keeping before us the reminders of a higher measure that comes with the community of agapeic service. Secular politics may disguise theologies (an insight developed very differently by, say, Carl Schmitt and John Milbank), as well as disguise metaphysics; but as we need good metaphysics, we also need good theology (a task assumed by Milbank but not by Schmitt).³⁸

There can be ways of treating the political-theological problem that lead to a counterfeit double of the political and a debasement of the theological. These ways are attractive to tough men who think life is hell, but they are univocalists of the dark. In the equivocal play of light and dark, the dark is the more favored. They think that the world is as Macbeth made it to be by his sacrilegious murder; and they supplement this murder with their subtle rationalizations. Falling under the spell of King Death, they desert the equivocal field of powers where political finesse is most needed, and needed with remembrance of the measure of the Good beyond finite determination, such as we find in Plato’s Good or in the God of biblical personalism. They canonize a world of darkness, secreted from evil intimacies by dark men, and the candle they light gives the honor to the secret darkness. Their thinking has reconfigured the equivocal field of politics in the dark light of this honor. These hard men of life’s hell might even see themselves as superior sons of heaven, but Shakespeare is the superior in seeing something beyond servility and sovereignty. And though they may well be the familiars of Macbeth, Macbeth also was their superior, for he did not blink at the sticky evil he had done in undoing the good of the “to be.” While Macbeth fought to the death, he did not deny that what he had wrought was a world without blessing, a world wherein sleep was murdered, a world wherein Amen sticks in the throat. “Out, out brief candle”: his outcry comes clean about what he himself cannot cleanse. No honor now more to the darkness wrought and in which he too is also undone. Life falls into the sere, the yellow leaf, but Macbeth at least does not equivocate the truth that it is he himself who has wrought this fall, and the last fall of usurping power into unredeemed, and unredeeming, death. King Death makes claim to crown all things but death itself can crown no king.