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

Opening

I want to offer systematic thoughts about the intimate universal in relation to the idiotics, the aesthetics, the erotics, and the agapeics of being. I do not mean any system in the sense of a self-enclosed totality of thoughts, but an open exploration of crucial considerations that hold together in networks of interrelated significance, that yet also break open or retreat beyond every effort at self-enclosed totality. One comes to acknowledge crucial thresholds that are more than the determinations of univocal universals, or that exceed the dialectical universals of self-closing system. The thresholds are on the boundary between the systematic and the trans-systematic. The intimacy of the universal is secretly at work before all determinate universals, and the universality of the intimate comes to luringly, alluringly call thought to more than all self-determining universals. While the significance of the intimate universal is not just human, finesse for it opens us to rich understandings of the being of the human in all its ontological dimensions. I begin with the idiotics since it is here that we may first and most elementally address the intimacy of the intimate universal. As we move through the aesthetics, erotics, and agapeics this intimacy might seem to be lost or weakened, as more articulated, communicable powers of the universal come to expression. But it is not so simple. The promise of the intimate universal is at work from the outset, though not necessarily known as such. The promise is most explicitly lived and fulfilled with the community of agapeic service but it is immanent and diversely manifest in the idiotic, aesthetic, and erotic.

Why not start immediately with public things, res publica? A significant reason is our need to be mindful of the recessed as well as the expressed. The secret power of the intimate works on, though often the public things conspire to recess it. The idiotic things secretly companion the public things and can come back disturbingly to haunt them. Consider, for instance, modern totalitarianisms: we might distinguish them from prior tyrannies in terms of their bureaucratic and technological efficiency, yet at the heart of the matter is the idiocy: the idiocy of the monstrous. The pitiless implementation of bureaucratic and technological efficiency as “rational,” as seeming to serve the “universal,” can trample on the intimate but it is itself a formation of the idiotic. Between the old tyrannies and the new there is a sameness in this idiotics of the monstrous. Indeed modern totalitarianism is often more radical in trying to penetrate and desecrate the intimacy of being, destroy the idiocy of its subjects. It secretes an infernal idiocy, none the less idiotic for the fact that it violates by means of massive technological aid. Modern war, for all its hyperrational instruments of destruction, has a similar idiotic dimension. Many of our modern distractions, again massively mediated by technological means, alas serve the pacification and diversion of the idiotic core of our being. Political religions with their secular redemptions do not do justice to this idiotic core, and when, unexpectedly, out of it religious passio springs, such passio is to be decapitated with perverted idiotic passio. The idiotic is not the atavistic in us, not our bygone prehistory to which we might regress; it is constitutive of our being, always with us, even when the public things deny or silence it. The intimate universality as idiotic is not of the rational concept, nor is it autistic; it constitutes ontologically the first secret source of communicative being.

Being Given Idiotically: Threshold of Communication

The etymological meaning of “idiot” does refer us to the intimate, and even though this is hard to pin down or often is invisible according to more public, neutral generalities, this is not without promise of political relevance. Recall Socrates’s answer to the question of how he managed to escape public judgment unscathed into his old age, given the political irritations his philosophical way of life aroused. Ingredient in his answer: I idioted it (Apology, 32a3, idiōteuein). One might translate: I kept myself out of it, out of the foreground of public politics, I kept to myself. Whether we believe him or not—it is hard to believe completely, given Socrates’s inability to “mind his ‘own’ business” (itself a very idiotic idiom)—the important point has to do with something reserved regarding the politics of the public. This reserve has an ontological-metaphysical significance, but also a political significance, just in its reserve in relation to the political. Something about our human condition is idiotic in both a singular and a communal sense, and while this is other to public politics in one sense, it cannot be evacuated entirely of significance for the space of more public engagements. A sense of this doubleness is evident thus: on the one hand, we speak of someone as “idiosyncratic,” thereby stressing something of a singularity that is not substitutable for another; on the other hand, we speak of the “idiom(s)” of a group, thereby acknowledging both the event of communication and its unique social qualification by this singular group.

Each of us lives idiotically, insofar as each of us is a singular being, whose very singularity seems to verge on being incommunicable, certainly not fully communicable in terms of conceptual abstractions and neutral generalities. We live our lives from within out, with this singular stress of self-being. But if the “within out” names an intimacy of self-communication, there is also a “without in” and this signals our very being in communication. Being in communication means we are as much a medium of reception, a happening of inception, as an agency of action. To speak of “self-being” can be misleading here, if we think of a univocally fixed self we can pin down without remainder. Rather we are closer to an event of intimate participation, flowing between one being and another, and singularly stressed in a process of selving that is both determinately enacted and yet escapes fixed determination. If there is selving in this happening of intimate participation, this is first idiotic in such a manner that one might say is both presubjective and preobjective. Presubjective: the “subject” is not yet a fixed determinate form—hence the “idiot self” refers us to a singular energy of selving that is more original than a determinate “subject” that has come to be or that has determined itself to be thus or thus. Preobjective: not because it is not a “reality” but because its reality is not there in the modality of an objective thing; as a singular stress of selving, it is a happening of singularity in a field of energy, itself a happening of participation that is neither of the self nor of the other, and relative to which what is objective also comes later to form, just like the subjective itself. Nonobjective, nonsubjective singularity of selving: it does not know itself determinately at the outset; it is not unconscious simply; it is a stress of being in communication, on the threshold between what is not conscious and what comes to itself as itself in an inchoate, floating sense of itself. Idiotic selving: received into being in communication, it is hard to pin down, hard to articulate; it companions every pinning down, every articulation as that threshold selving aware of itself as itself and not void of this primitive sense of selving.

Idiotics also has to do with a certain intimate sense of the good of the “to be.” We live our “to be” in our elemental sense of “self”—so elemental that there seems no self there.¹ Since this happens in a field of participation, we find ourselves as affirmed in being, before we affirm being for ourselves. There is something idiotic about this “being affirmed”—for it is a happening before it offers itself for the occasion of express selving and self-minding. As happening, the idiocy of the elemental “to be” is not confined to any one thing, or any one self or other, but opens a given ethos of being, a primal ethos that is a charged field of ontological worth. There is no disjunction of fact and value at this level. Disjunction comes later. Philosophically we need the (poetic) anamnesis of this charged field.

The charge of the good of the “to be” is undergone and received in the elemental fact of being at all. One might say: we taste ourselves in a certain way. Rising in the morning, we taste ourselves as fresh children verging again on the virgin world; or we taste ourselves as grey ash that finds no slumbering spark within itself to flash out again and fire its life another day; or we taste ourselves as a dull habituation groaning at the tedium of sameness that will be the dutiful pound of our daily chores. We drink a draught of beer, say, and our satisfaction has a stress of innerness that exhales itself in an “Ah … ” The “Ah” says everything by saying nothing. Or say: my face is caressed and the idiot stress of selving stirs with some hint of its longing for buried love, love long buried in the dumb body. Or say: surprised by delight, a beautiful face lifts the idiocy up, the slouching selving soars, and no permission to soar has been asked from self-conscious reflection. Or say: crushed by disappointment, the elemental energy retracts into itself as if into a black hole, but the black hole is just the idiot selving, now verging on an autism of chagrin.

These are just a few indicators and more might be given, and their significance will return. They point to something at the edge of determinability by our concepts, hence something that some would say falls entirely outside universality. Is this so, or is the issue whether we here encounter a kind of surd, but a surd with significance not only for human being but for being as such? There is something surd about the “that it is” of the “to be”: it just happens to be, and initially it does not explain itself. The “to be” at all is given before any of our conceptions; prior to self-consciousness, it remains always in excess of our determinate categories. How to understand this givenness? We must grant a given granted, but what kind of granting? First our being granted to be; then our granting of this first granting. The second granting implicates our consent to the first granting. Is our consent itself a “yes” to an ontological consent already effective in our being granted to be? Whatever else, the surd resists the reduction of all given thereness to taken-for-granted familiarity. There is something astonishing or perplexing about it.

The question: Is this surd just absurd or does it hint of an intimate strangeness of being not at all senseless? Were it a mere surd, we might conclude it is finally absurd—it is there, it makes no sense, there is no further sense to be made. But what if it were a surd not absurd? Of course, the language of the surd is the language of a remainder, a residue. What if our participation in this surd were a gloriously delicate intimacy with the gift of being itself—the surd surplus to absurdity? To reduce its idiocy to senseless thereness would be to lose its intimate insinuation of sense beyond objectification and subjectification. The intimacy of the given “that it is” is on the edge of all objectifiable and subjectifiable determination. Because it is resistant to determinate conceptualization, we easily overlook it and live as if there were no idiocy. This overlooking would be impossible, in fact, without the very intimacy of being it passes over.

For that matter, without the idiotic givenness there would also be nothing of the more public determinations that allow all our more common communications. Perhaps we come to know the “that it is” most proximately in the idiocy of our own being or of a beloved other, but all beings can communicate themselves as receding from complete determination even as they come forward into determinate manifestation. Beings proceed, but as they do they also recede. Beings show themselves, but as they do they also reserve themselves. Beings manifest themselves, but in their communication they also conceal their being. This doubleness tells against taking the idiocy of being for granted as senseless idiocy, as the mere surd. Taken as granted, the idiocy disquiets us with its ambiguity. The ambiguity of its “ownness” communicates an unsettling chiaroscuro, tantalizes us with a light that is not its own.

Universal Intimacy of the “to Be” as Good

This idiocy is not a “what,” not a neutral generality, and is not to be exhaustively defined by formal determinability. Is it not then resistant to certain kinds of universalization? Yet it is the ontological space of an elemental togetherness, and so there is about it a participation in the universal. Do we do justice to the doubleness of its chiaroscuro if we describe it as the horrifying Il y a of Levinas, or as the threatening, nauseating viscosity of Sartre’s être-en-soi? As elemental it is a charged field of thereness,² and qua field it is an intermedium of communication. This intermedium is not a matter of the subject versus the object or of the object versus the subject, or yet of subject and subject, that is, of intersubjectivity. The intermedium of communication is ontologically elemental, and subject, object, intersubjectivity come to be in it, out of it. This intermedium, if preobjective, presubjective, preintersubjective, is enabling of the objective, the subjective, the intersubjective. The intimate universal is first fermenting in this idiotic intermedium of communication.³ That we participate in an intermedium of communication does suggest a connection with the more universal, but for now I want to stress the intimacy.

As originally a charged field of communication, the idiocy is saturated with worth, prior to determination and self-determination. One might say that there is something overdeterminate to it as a kind of “too muchness,” though there is also something quasi-indeterminate about it, as opening to further determinations and self-determinations. The overdeterminacy is redolent of the good of the “to be.” The idiotic is an elemental field of communication, shimmering with the endowed promise of the good of the “to be.” We do not originally charge it, though derivatively, when we have come to more determinate form and self-determining forming, we do endeavor to charge it, to recharge it, in directions supportive of our own selvings and otherings. We will want to take charge, and there is something asked of us in this charge and recharge. Nevertheless, there is still the supportive intermedium of participation, and the promise of the original idiotic givenness. There are charges leading to unselving as well as to selving, to the enabling of communication as well as to the disabling. It is important that the blocking of communication presupposes the promise of the charged field of communication—otherwise no blocking would be possible. There is an asymmetry in the priority of the given promise, as there is in the enigmatic priority of the good of the “to be.” A hospitable enabling is prior to a hostile disabling.⁴

This is not to deny some truth to the Sartrean viscosity or the Levinasian Il y a. There is an idiocy that, to us at least, is not defined in a field proportionate to our selving and communicative othering. Just being there, the sheer being there of being, might be granted without any reference to these latter.⁵ But to speak of the intimacy of being as more than our being is to gesture toward a strange universality that also, strangely, is not strange. Strangely also, it is to pay more nuanced attention to the singularity of the happening of the charged field. This has a kind of intimacy, which we most intimately know in our own intimacy. It is not that things other than us are not marked by intimacy but it is not always easy for us to be well attuned to it. I speak as if I mean a determinate self over against a determinate other thing, but I mean rather a more primitive intimacy. It is a struggle to speak articulately about this, since such speaking presupposes a high degree of differentiation and this is not at issue here, and not yet accomplished here. Nevertheless, we have continuing signs of its recessed influence. Consider the experience of being in some “spooky” place and how this may awaken something of what is normally recessed. Or think of being alone in the dark night of a turbulent storm, and what an unsettling can come to the diurnal determinations of the quotidian self. Or recall being struck into a kind of breathtaking astonishment at this thing or that, enfolded in a light, dazed by a light that is not of the quotidian. One is never entirely a stranger to the intimate strangeness of being at all.

To speak of “intimacy” turns us more toward the communicativeness of idiotic selving and othering. This idiocy is not an autism. A pure autism of being nowhere is, for even autism is communicative. The intimacy is witnessed in the unwilled “seepage” of the beings—seepage of a depth sometimes slumbering, sometimes awake in the beings. By being at all, there is a density and voluminosity. But this is not density or voluminosity in general. It is not a merely neutral res extensa. Voluminosity is also not dense, but fluid. It flows, it impresses itself. It moves and does not move. It communicates itself, though it has no intent to communicate itself. This is the nature of the idiotic—to be nothing but itself, and as itself to show and radiate beyond itself into the charged field of the ethos of being. In a way, being nothing but itself is being nothing for itself—that is, if being itself is to be in communication with what is other to itself.

The intimate: intimus—there is a reference to a “within.” But, of course, this “within” is communicative and hence is not simply within. It is outside itself even when within itself. Its very “within” is defined by a reference to a “without.” It is not and never can be a closed self-relation. If there is a self-relation it always floats on the charged field, perhaps sea, of communicativeness. What floats in the field is itself a floating field: entirely there, and yet nowhere absolutely exactly, and yet communicating (an) always more. A painter can capture something of this charge of intimacy—not just of a beautiful person, but of fur, of an ermine, of drapes, of butchered meat, of black abstract form, all buoyed up in being on the shimmering sea of intimacy. Being in it elementally, enjoying the “to be” as good, in a way there is nothing we can do with it, though we can try to attend to it, tend to it, and give it voice again, in paint, in tone, in stone, in the gesture of dance, in the insinuating word.

Intimus—the reference to a “within” that is never within itself also opens inwardly, not only outwardly—the seeping depth goes into abysses. One might agree that this is perhaps true of the human self, as Augustine and others did. But is it not true of every being—is there not, in G. M. Hopkins’s words, “the dearest freshness deep down things”? So far as the being simply is at all, there is an idiotic intimacy to it that escapes all finite determination—sheerly in virtue of the fact that it is in being at all. The human being can come to know something of this intimacy in its infinitude, especially in and through itself. It is not only the outer otherness that is in the charged field of the intimacy; the inner otherness is even more so, since it is the singular opening through which passes the affirmation that holds selving and othering in being at all. This inner, perhaps immanent, infinitude is a source, (re)source out of which communication comes: self-communication, in which the selving comes to itself; self-communication in which the surpassing of selving makes way for a community with others already with one, before one was really with oneself. The extensiveness of human surpassing is an outward communication of what is secretly promised in the inward otherness as the immanent infinitude of the nonsubjective, nonobjective intimacy of being.⁶

Some (I think of Levinas, for instance) worry that the language of intimacy leads to the loss of difference, the loss of boundaries, and the melding of self and other, and hence to an abrogation of the responsibility of one before the other. These worries must be kept in mind but it is enough for now to note that there is reference beyond selving at two boundaries of its idiotic givenness: First, at the most intimate border of its own immanence, there are no fixed boundaries and the secret selving trails off into an abyss that it cannot name, of which it is never master, out of which its deepest resources of creativity come, out of which its own proclivities to the monstrous also emerge; it comes as if out of nothing, but what it comes out of is not nothing, though it is more like night than day. Second, at the intimate boundary marking the limit of its own singular stress, it is already in radiance, and in radiant relation to what is other beyond itself; there is no sitting in an absolutely empty room, for to sit or stand or move anywhere is to be communicative in the emptiness, which cannot then be an emptiness. There is a primal porosity in our deepest innerness and at the boundary where our singularity touches on all that is beyond it. We happen to be in the charged field, the ethos, which itself is porosity, and in which we ourselves are porosities.

Porosity of Being

It is not at all easy to talk about this porosity of being, or of the primal porosity that marks our being. For how to get a fix on a porosity? There is no direct way, since porosity draws attention to the relative absence of determination rather than any fixed determinacy. Porosity is what allows passage. Porosity is permeability. Porosity is an opening. Porosity seems like a field of emptiness. So, at first glance, it seems. If this is so, how to pin it down at all? How to refer intelligibly to it at all, except perhaps by subtraction from what determinately is already there?

Such a subtractive method might seem the way to go but for the fact that the porosity is not something merely left over when all determinacies have been taken away. It is analogous to how the idiotic as a surd is also not a mere residue left over when intelligibilities have been removed from a happening. No, the porosity is itself something prior that allows the possibility of determinacy at all. Porosity is more primal than determination, for as the allowing power of passage, there would be no passing as passing without it, and no determinate stations or ways in the passing. The (ar)resting stations come later, only because already there is a more primal porosity.

It cannot be determined directly but here are some indications that help call it to mind. The obscure shows something of the power to reopen and animate the porosity. A night scene—gloomy—the gloaming. The night and kissing—closing one’s eyes—there is something analogous in mysticism—to pray in the dark, wooing and being wooed—the night calls forth the abyss in us—this abyss shows the porosity. A threat to life brings to mind the porosity—an airplane in sudden turbulence, and one’s infinite frailty strikes one into fear and trembling—porosity immediately forgotten when the turbulence is passed, and we pass through unresisting air. Infinity is related to porosity, as in a view of the sea—we are opened out. The porosity can be in the calm of the sea, or in the anger. Struck by the greatness of the open sea, infinite power is intimated—this opens the porosity. Burke’s sense of the sublime is more intimate with the porosity than Kant’s. Burke knows better than Kant the power of black night to reanimate the porosity. Zarathustra’s Nachtlied (Nightsong) shows him to have been visited in poetry by a reawakened porosity. Abyss calls to abyss, the psalm says: this is related to the porosity. The void calls to the void, but this porosity is also overfull—both too much and less than nothing. We speak of the dead of the night—this dead reopens porosity, an appearing without an appearance, apparition of nothing. There is something imageless about the porosity; but something steals upon us and we find ourselves newly roused in it (see also below on the idiocy of the monstrous).

Normally we think of porosity as a permeable boundary or passage or open access between two (determinate) domains or things. There is porosity between A and B and we think of A and B as relatively firm, while between them is some more or less open border, one not absolutely closed to passage. Our question here: How to think passage as passage—and as initially without determinate boundary? This is not easy. One might speak of the medium in which passage occurs, but the medium is not a thing but a field in which things and passage eventuate. Porosity: a field in passage—itself a passing field, since it is not fixed or determinate. But consider also: We think of A and B as open to fixing, but what if they too are marked by porosity? You would then have things and events, themselves porous, in a field or sea, itself a porosity. What passes would not pass as fixed in itself but as itself passing: passing in passage as such. If A and B—between which is a porosity—are themselves porous, it seems we almost have nothing. And passage then looks like a porosity between nothing and nothing, with something in being in between, something that itself is marked also by a kind of nothing.

Here we might connect the porosity with creation. One might say: the passage is creative in a porosity that passes between nothing and (finite) being and between being and nothing again—and this passing is renewed, again and again. Arising in being and setting, coming to be and passing out of being, creation brings to be the porosity within whose intermedium all things live and move and have their being. In passing between nothing and being, and being and nothing, A and B have a relative stability: they are more than vanishing wisps of quasi-being—they are. But given their porosity, how is this relative constancy to be understood? Answer: as given to be again and again, by continual creation: coming to be out of nothing, and in every instant of arising always shadowed with setting and return to nothing, yet returning to being, or being returned, again and again—within the mortal measure of their own peculiar finitude. The happening of music suggests an image of this: music is as sounding and resounding—it exists as arising, as dying away, as coming again, as passing in the silence. The wording of things communicates it: the speaking that is as spoken, that comes from fertile silence, that returns again to resounding silence.

The porosity is an opening, not only in us, but of ourselves as an opening. We are a passing opening.⁷ The porosity is a kind of nothing, in that it is no-thing, but the kind of thing we are is subtended by this no-thing. For the kind of thing we are is marked by the possibility of receiving being other than itself, and of surpassing its own being toward what is beyond itself. We are not primally a fixed thing on one side of a determinate boundary, which can receive other-being from the far side of the boundary or surpass the boundary toward the other-being on the far side. There is something more primordial than that: we are a porosity, and the boundaries come to shape in the porosity we are. The boundaries come to shape both in the receiving into the porosity that is given to us from beyond ourselves and in the surpassing of boundaries to which our self-transcending testifies. We are porosity because we are first received in being: given to be, before we are self-surpassing, or porous in a derived sense to what is beyond ourselves. We are in being as idiotic singulars, but at the heart of the idiotic selving is this intimate porosity that is the mark of our being creatures: emergent as what we are from no-thing—created from nothing. (Created by what? Theologically said, by God, but we need not talk about that now.) The nothing we are is not empty or void—it is a fertile void—it already is as nothing. We are as nothing, and this doubleness is significant: as being we are as nothing, but being as nothing opens a world within that can come to itself in mindfulness, and opens us to a world without, to which we can come in mindfulness of what is different.⁸

Since we mostly live in the later world of the fixed and determinate, it is hard to directly evidence the porosity but here are a few more hints, all of them again in the domain of the intimate. I think of the way children often think an adult can see through them—especially when they have done something that they fear is not to be done, something shameful. Being transparent: there is no boundary that can stop the look of the other—I am as nothing to that gaze, though what that gaze sees is not nothing but what I am and the shame of my deed. Or think how difficult it is for younger children to lie effectively: the lie is there on the surface of their faces, or in the language of their bodies—they have not yet erected steady barriers that bound the porosity, and its permeability appears in the lack of the mask on the young face.

Or attend to the blush. This is something fascinating in its own right, since a blush is a bodily flush but what flushes in the body is nothing merely bodily. It is a primitive sense of self, a sense of being exposed, a sense of being porous. This can happen even when one is alone, since it is not the physical presence of the other that causes the blush, it is the porosity to an other who sees the truth of what one is. The involuntary blush: the tender intimacy of the porosity flares up and suffuses the flushed face, there where the radical intimate permeability is momentarily to be seen. (I know there are white blushes.) With time we learn to put a face on things, a brazen face. The brazen face determinates the boundary that hides or puts in recess the original porosity. We learn to lie, even as we smile. We smile because, as a bodily sign of our porosity, the smile has power to open porosity in the other. Think of how the smile does just that with young infants, that is, brings forth in them a responding smile, as if the flesh at first were a porosity anticipating the hospitality of communication from what is beyond it. The false smile is a simulacrum of hospitable porosity that counterfeits the truer openness. It is necessary to call on the porosity even when one’s deeds are putting it into hiding.

I give quite human examples, all of which have elemental bearing on our being with others as well as our being marked by forms of self-relation. They suggest an intimate communicability with no finitely determinable boundary, an infinite openness in intimacy to the universal. The porosity is important for our elemental sense of self, as well as for what opens the promise of being in community with others. It is not something we chose, it is ontologically constitutive of our being. Because of it we are capable of more complex forms of self-relation, as well as of an immense variety of being in communicative relations with others. It is not merely indeterminate; rather it serves as a promissory re-source out of which more determinate forms of selving and communicating with others come to be, come to be shaped. Yet as ontologically constitutive, it is always there with these determinate forms, even when this is not known as such, and even when no attention is paid to the porosity as a more original enabling opening. It is deeply intimate in one sense, and deeply communal and communicative in another sense. Indeed in the latter, deeply communicative sense, it is also deeply intimate—the intimacy is not mine or mine only, though what is most deeply mine is called into the openness of communicability by the porosity. This is worth remembering, whether we are talking about, say, the family as an ethically intermediating community or the economy or the state or indeed the religious community.

This porosity has religious and metaphysical significance. There is a metaphysical “limit” where there is nowhere to hide—nowhere to hide from the ineluctable fact that we happen to be. We happen to be, though once we were nothing and, once again, to all appearances, will be nothing again. We are on the boundary between being and nothing. The porosity is this boundary that is no boundary—the permeable boundary through which is given the gift of life, but given as a happening that might otherwise be nothing except for the giving of the origin. The metaphysical frailty and yet the robust thereness of our being at all are at stake in acknowledging the porosity. Our double being, our equivocal being: given to be, in being, shadowed by the nothing out of which we are originated, marked ourselves by a nothingness, but a nothingness that becomes original after its own way. For it is this later creative void of the porosity that seeds all creative self-transcending—seeds germinating in, rooted in the deep intimate equivocity of our being at all. The doubleness of our being: being as singular happenings in a more encompassing togetherness, beings as possibly nothing, and impelled to affirm our being, impelled to affirm our being in face of the nothing, but in this discovering that our self-affirmation is a second affirmation. By the sheer fact that we are at all, we are as already the issue of a first ontological affirmation. This doubleness of being affirmed and affirming ourselves is expressed in the twinning of our passio essendi and conatus essendi. Ontologically speaking, we are present here at a twin birth.

Passio Essendi (Patience of Being)

If the “nothing” of which I speak is a fertile void, this is not at all to suggest that the human being creates itself out of this nothing, as if it creates out of nothing. This fertile void is not a creating ex nihilo but a creation ex nihilo. It has already come to be out of nothing, with a derived promise of originality that is already a given and received promise in the porosity of being, as itself originally given. This view is quite other than the existentialist view that we create ourselves. There is a certain truth to claims of derivative self-origination but first we are a passio essendi.

The original porosity receives its open between-being from the original origin; as received in being, the porosity is also a between-space of receiving; and it is in this between-space that beings are given as passiones essendi. This between-space fluctuates between a more indeterminate/overdeterminate porosity and more determinate forms of being. The ontological patience signaled by the passio essendi means our first being recipients of being, our being received in being, before we flower as being active on the basis of being already received. There is ontological receiving before there is existential acting. As something ontological, the receiving is constitutive of our self-being but it is not self-constituted. To call it passio is not, however, to imply that what is received is a mere chunk of dead thereness, devoid of its own energetic life. Not at all. Nevertheless, its own life is not first owned by it. It is given to be its own on the basis of a giving that is not its own. The nature of this giving and this receiving is such that the being that is thus received is freed into its own being for itself. The passio essendi shows given being as mine, but it is not given to me by myself. The doubleness in the description is again significant. One might say that the passio essendi is marked as a patient and received esse. More strongly put, the esse is given to the being whose being is the being received—it is not the being of something of itself alone. I call this an agapeic giving and receiving in the sense that the giving source releases the given from itself, offers the recipient a life that is not the same as the source. Thus the giving opens a difference, a between—a porosity, since the gap is also the space of communication that can be traversed because it opens a field of “being with.”

The esse is a passio in the sense that it is not only patient (though not merely passive) but alive, endowed with energy that, though received, is our own. Think of passio in the usual sense: from source(s) immanent in ourselves we are moved and even carried beyond ourselves by passio—there is a surge of life and we are thrown on it, thrown beyond ourselves on its wave. There is the element of the involuntary, but involuntary here does not refer to the absence of all self-mastery but to an energy at work in us prior to our taking control through choice. Analogously, the passio of being in us, received from a source other than ourselves, moves us primitively to affirm our being and mediately, in the long run of a life of understanding, a life not only affirming its own being but affirming of, contributing to, augmenting of the good of being as such. The passio first moves as an affirmation of being in us and it is not that we decide to affirm but that we are first given into being as an affirmation of being. There is a more primal affirmation than the later affirmation of self of which we come to be aware, as the passio surges and lives more through its own determination of its participation in the primal affirmation of being. The passio is an affirming energy that is ours but it manifests an affirming energy that is not just ours, that lives itself in us. We live the affirmation in a second, derived way, on the basis of the primal affirmation.

Granted there are no absolutely determinate and univocal “sides” in the porosity, one might still venture that there is an intimate “side” and a universal “side”: an intimate “side” in the ownness of beings, a universal “side” in the being given to be at all of all finite being. There is a universality of intimate gift recessed in the being given to be of finite being, a universality of promise that communicates out of the secret recesses in the direction of the more fulfilled promise of the community of all beings. All of this is communicated in a between-space where, wonderfully, the surplus good of the “to be” passes in the porosity. To be at all is to be given to be as affirming that it is good to be. This is the first passio—the first endowment of being. It is not something we choose—we live it, it lives us. Think of the child crying on coming into the world. We might be inclined to see this as a howl of dismay, but it is the lust of life itself, and there is something inexpressibly good about it that conquers dismay. That is why we are relieved on birth when we hear the crying out, the outcry of life. It shows the very health of life giving expression to itself before any interventions by itself or by others. The howl makes us thankful for this first lived affirmation of the offspring. Of course, what is implicit in the first gift, its promise, has to be affirmed or negated later in a subsequent way. But the primal affirming stays with us until we die. We are always a passio essendi, first in the primal sense, then in the derivative sense in which we more mindfully participate in the unfolding of the promise of the primal being given to be.

The significance of the passio essendi can never be confined to us alone, for from the origin there is an implication with regard to what is beyond ourselves. We see it with the child: there is implication with what is beyond us as before us, with what is beyond us, revealed as the un-self-conscious anticipation that our crying-out will be met by something of hospitality in the world beyond us, be this the world of (caring) others or the world of sustaining material resources. The passio tells against every autism of being. We are never solitary, even when we seem very much solo. Being in relation to what is other, in receiving and in seeking, is always with us, constitutive of what we are. The passio can be either forgotten or covered over just because it places us in a primal receivership. We may later grow to hate being in receipt from what is beyond ourselves; but this development—this ingratitude to what we receive and to our benefactors—is itself made possible by the primal receivership. This ingratitude is sawing off the branch of being on which self-being sits. It is biting the hand that feeds it—just because it is not absolutely its own. But there is nothing that is absolutely our own, even what is most absolutely our own.

There is no self-relation more primal than being in relation to what is other. Primal self-relation is already a received promise and hence is double—being in relation to an other, and being in self-relation. This entails no rejection of true freedom but we will have to consider something of the agapeic character of this, in due course. It is not an autonomy constituting itself through itself alone. One might say that in the passio essendi is already an intimate mark of being in community. That communicability surges up in our passion of being means it is already given as an active promise of being in relation in our very being at all. This double relativity at the primal roots of our being places us in the intimate universal—the porous community between the human and the divine that constitutes our being as religious. This is ontologically constitutive of our being at all.⁹

Conatus Essendi (Endeavor to Be)

The doubleness of relativity is expressed in the fact that we are conatus essendi as well as passio essendi—an endeavor to be as well as a patience of being. One notes how in modern political thinking the conatus has a side turned to the intimate, a side turned publicly to the more universal. I am thinking of how in early modern thinkers like Hobbes and Spinoza beings are their conatus, their particular self-assertion that knows no limit except a countering conatus. This particularity is matched by a sense of the social whole as coming to be—whether by contract, the overawing of the dominant conatus, or otherwise—as the (resolved) sum of forces of such particular endeavors (Spinoza). The sense of this striving self-assertion also haunts the dominant forms of liberalism and economic capitalism, where rational self-interest and enterprising exploitation shape the public space of the commons and insinuate themselves into the reserves of privacy. These views tend to project us forward, close off retreat into significant reserves of idiocy, and produce a mutilated picture of self-interest. Self-interest: inter-esse is a being between; hence self-interest too is a being-between, qualified to be sure by selving, but as an inter-esse, necessarily more than just selving. Self-interest is parasitical on the surplus endowments of the community of being; but it is taken as original, not derivative. Co-natus: properly speaking this is not an endeavor to be but a being “born with.” Conatus refers us to a more original birth (natus), a being given to be, which is always with or from another (co, cum). The pluralization is there but occluded in the ordinary way of thinking of self-interest and conatus.

This should be already evident, given what we have said about the porosity and the twin birth of the passio and conatus. Nevertheless, the endeavor to be is the evident and often more noted aspect of our being because it defines us as a doing of ourselves. Selving in community with others is being in act, is activity, and not just patience or passivity. Recall: I do not mean something negative by patience, though there is a passivity that reneges on our being, not only as reacting to what is given, but as actively shaping a relation to it, while shaping its own relation to itself in the process. Alternatively, we come to assume self-relation, or anticipate a future self-relation, requiring us to act thus and thus, or act differently, toward what is first given. We are given to be before we endeavor to be, but the second both responds to the first and shows the doing of selving as essaying to give itself to itself. Affirming ourselves, we come to newly define ourselves and, in the best sense, on the basis of the promise of our native endowment.

There is energy in the passio, but with respect to the conatus, this energy comes to itself as giving form to its own self-activity. To be at all is presupposed by every endeavor to be, but the endeavor moves beyond the present givenness of the “to be”—seeks beyond its present selving, seeks what is beyond itself, seeks also itself in a form beyond its present, one indeed just itself in more fulfilled form. There is a promise to the given “to be” that calls us beyond ourselves, and in the endeavor to be we seek to realize something of this promise. In truth, this endeavor as co-natus, as “born with,” cannot be separated from the idiocy, the porosity, and the passio. Nevertheless, it testifies to a self-becoming that brings us more expressly toward the possibilities of selving as self-determining. Freed to be as other in the passio, in the given patience, we are here freed to be ourselves, though never in separation from how we are in relation to what is other beyond ourselves. This conatus, this endeavor, can take a multiplicity of forms, but it is not a mere indeterminacy. It reminds us of the fertile void coming to form, and in a derived sense, giving itself form. The liquidity of the porosity settles into shapes more firm, shapes that indeed are self-shaping. Think of Narcissus as not emerging from the porosity but as drowning in the liquid fluidity of enchantment with his “own” image. The taking on of this form rather than that is the self-introduction of determination into the liquid porosity, indeed of self-determination. Something of the promise of the overdeterminacy is brought to the fore, something else is recessed. Something of the inexhaustibility is backgrounded just as, on the basis of the very same inexhaustibility, some more positive form of self-shaping is foregrounded with determinate, self-determining character.

I speak too explicitly (of self-shaping) since much of this takes place in an emergent opening, half revealed in the light, half hidden in the darkness. As a birthing, a night of gestation is coming to a term but this is a beginning that does not yet know its terms. (The terms of commencement are to be further revealed.) Neither the selving nor the othering is clear to itself. The mysterious darkness of the idiocy, the chiaroscuro of the liquid porosity, the incontrovertibility of the received esse and its patience, the suddenness of the surging passio, all of these mark the (self-)becoming as a kind of dawning. This dawning is between night and day, and like dawn there is looming half-form and dissolving formlessness both together. This chiaroscuro in the original roots of self-formation always stays with us, even when we have crossed the threshold from dawn to diurnal self-consciousness. As out of an ocean of mystery, there emerges this small island of diurnal selving, seemingly marking its own boundary of singular difference. We are lapped by waves of the nocturnal idiocy, waves sometimes measured and calming, sometimes towering and overwhelming the firm island in floods of onslaught. Univocity is the island that emerges from this equivocal sea. This univocity is itself equivocal.

The endeavor to be, like the passio, first seems to be moved before it moves itself. It seems to reveal us to ourselves as already moving beyond ourselves before we come to ourselves at all. This “being moved,” I think, reflects the continued momentum of the first affirmation of the “to be.” The first affirmation is the more primordial happening that eventuates in, and carries into, the surge of the endeavor. But the endeavor is a surge that, as it were, looks back on us from beyond us, and enjoins us to join the movement, join it with ontological joy. With a joining second affirmation we go with the flow, and find ourselves delighted not only to be in the flow but to go with it. We are taken out of ourselves beyond ourselves, and then, as it were, asked to go for it—to say “yes” to the more primal “yes,” and thus to be in, to participate in, the giving of the “to be” in a manner more singularly stressed as our own. It is not that we own the flow, but in now joining the flow, our endeavor is singularly our own, for no one else can say this “yes” for us, enact it. “Yes” here is not a statement but a living, a doing, an en-acting of our own “to be.” The singular self-relation that sources the meaning of one’s own “to be” is here more explicitly self-determining than in the unique intimacy of the idiot selving; but again it is not just my own, it is owned.

Like the passio, the endeavor to be thus finds itself afloat in the porosity, but having dawned on itself and emerged beyond the equivocal doubleness (self-relation/other-relation: being itself in receiving itself), the stress of the self-relation can come to assume, usurp even, the foreground. It pushes itself forward into the foreground, as if it were the ground—the ground of itself. After all, the endeavor to be endeavors to be (it)self. This is self-affirming energy. There is something exhilarating in the stirring of the endeavor in which the selving enjoys itself, joys in itself, affirming itself, so that its relativity to what is other is tempted to become enfolded in a kind of rapture of selving. An elemental intoxication of self-affirmation can take over: one that, while glorious to itself, now glories in itself. All manners of equivocations are here possible. I will just say this: self-glorying in the glorious self-affirming can turn the endeavor to be into an energy of selving that so concerns itself with itself that, even in its being beyond itself, it always circles back to itself. It can then take this circling back, or self-circling, to be what the endeavor to be is all about. The exstasis beyond self becomes an exstasis from self only because it is an exstasis to self again. There is indeed a self-circling that is constitutive of the self-affirming as such. How else to affirm self if there is not this return to self? But the temptation in the self-affirming is that a self-encirclement ensues that absolutizes the affirming as self-affirming alone. Any exodus striving beyond self becomes a turn back into self. Developed to an extreme, the circle may even claim to be infinite, not only in returning to itself, but in always expanding its circumference, expanding potentially even into infinity. Even to the infinite, it appears to deal always with what is its own, or what it makes its own. And so it never departs from itself, even though it seems to include in itself the whole of all otherness.

This is where affirming the good of the “to be” as my self-affirming begins a turn into evil. The selving is seduced, seduces itself to absolutize its own self-affirming. It recesses, represses, rejects, even revolts against the original affirmation of its being given at all. The communication of this original affirmation is not just its own self-affirmation but that in which all being intimately, idiotically participates. A certain unfolding of the conatus essendi, one endeavoring entirely to overtake the porosity and the passio, would turn itself into an absolute whole. But such an absolute whole is a counterfeit whole because it falsifies its own original being received in being. Relative to this receiving of “being given,” it is at all, primally existing due to nothing of itself, for in the primal “being given” it owns nothing. Evil insinuates its counterfeit of being in this counterfeit whole.

The Idiocy of the Monstrous

This counterfeit whole proves treasonous to the intimate universal. Here there is stirred up something of a very primitive foreboding of the difference of good and evil. (Foreboding is so intimate it may make the flesh crawl, and does not rise to the level of rational self-consciousness, though this does not preclude a significance, possibly more universal.) The primitive foreboding is inherited from exuberance gone by. First lived by the idiotic affirmation of the “to be,” we wake to ourselves as surging on this affirmation and affirm ourselves. The surge allows the self-relation, even though this is always in relation to other-being not reducible to the self-relation. The intimate being for self is inclined to affirm itself not only as good but as the good. Then the irreducible relation to other-being, rather than being more primordial in our receipt of being, is turned into something secondary. It is more primordial because it is more intimate to our being at all as an endowment. The endowment gives us to be in the porosity, and awakens us to be as passio. But now the conatus wants to be first, wants to be number One, thus putting in disequilibrium the relation of the first and the second. The true first is reduced to a second that is affirmed, when it is affirmed, for the sake of the self that affirms itself. Then the selving as second, endowed to be from a more primal source other to itself, becomes a counterfeit first. Everything of the endowing original first is reduced to a secondary role in the self-affirmation of the counterfeit first, now claiming to be unbound by anything other than itself. Evil comes in this turned-around affirmation of the good of the “to be”—now primarily affirmed as what is good for self. This evil is a mutation in the affirmation of what is good. The good of the “to be,” singularized in this selving, affirms itself as the absolute good of the “to be.” This is to contract the more universal promise of the affirmation to the particularity of this self affirming itself. The derived nature of this singularization is refused as it insists on becoming self-deriving.

Both the intimate and the universal are warped in this revolt against the intimate universal. Revolt: a turning around, a reversal of the intimate universal, counter to the community of self and other. The concept of original sin is scandalous to those who locate evil in moral will, be they religiously inclined or areligiously. It seems to violate our sense that the responsibility of the individual will is what counts for accountability before evil. Original sin seems to imply a fall that is not our own doing. I think the idiocy confirms some of the intuitions of a fall other than the responsibility of an explicit will, a will explicitly asserting itself as “mine.” For in the idiocy one cannot fix “mine” thus explicitly, though there is a bent to “mine” and “mine” alone. There are porous thresholds between my own and all others. So see this warp in revolt thus: not mine or thine, but betrayal of the intimate universal, betrayal that closes the porosity between the human and the divine. And since it is a warping of the intimate universal, its implication extends to the community of beings and not just to my being alone (as if that could be isolated). Something of the primal space of being in communication is curved away from its original porosity to the divine, and from generation to generation the ripples that flow from that curve away shape and reshape the porosity to the divine influx as again and again agapeically offered.

Evil arises in this mutation in the intimacy of being, of the good of the “to be.” I would speak of this primitive sense of good and evil in terms of the idiocy of the monstrous, on the one side, and the idiocy of (sacred) innocence, on the other. The monstrous comes out of the innocence that, when it comes to self-affirming, loses its innocence, by affirming itself in mutant manner—mutant because collapsing the doubleness of metaxological relativity into the singularity of a self-relation that is self-singularizing. The monstrous is also something that bears on the sacred, having to do with a show (monstrare) or spectacle (monstrance) of the sacred. The gargoyles look out from the Gothic cathedrals, high up in the sacred space, though outside the sanctum of that space; they leer out and down. But the gargoyle here is not up on the outside of the cathedral; it is intimate to the idiot selving.¹⁰

The monstrous shadows the sacred. Something monstrous rises to the surface in the liquidity of the porosity. A leviathan breaks briefly the surface of the waters. It is enough that there be the hint of it lurking deep in secret darkness for foreboding to take hold. The idiocy of the monstrous arouses anxiety about the possibility of evil prior to any deliberate choice of evil or good in the more diurnal space of evaluation and decision. Since the passio and the conatus often mingle promiscuously in the porosity, we are dealing with a submarine mix that promises hell as much as heaven. It is not a decreed necessity that passio and conatus must be in strife, and yet the impetus of the conatus to self-affirmation coexists in tension with the gratitude or resentment that can come with the more primal receiving that enables the passio. We are given to be—be for ourselves—and we can say “yes” to the gift in thanks, but we can also resent that what we are is a gift, for this means we are never absolutely self-defining, though yet we are for ourselves, given for ourselves.

Resentment is not the right way to describe this, if we think this is all self-conscious. Rather an unpremeditated flash of jealousy of the more primal good of the “to be” flares up, just because this good is not mine, just because as being in receipt of it without a why we realize in the roots of our being that we can never own it, never have it as solely mine. The poverty of the porosity is its being resplendent with an overdeterminate good no one owns, and before we know it we hate the poverty and the splendor. We grow sullen and sulk before the ontologically constitutive measure of receiving, just because it is a receiving, and not our own doing. We need only say “yes,” but we are overtaken by our “yes” retracted to ourselves, even though it seems to take over what is other and so seems ecstatic rather than retractive. The conatus overtakes, or takes over the passio, and thereby recesses the rightness of the “yes” of (secret) thanks.

Intimate, its source is not self-conscious will, is not the will of others, is not the set of social conditions that support or disable our power, is not the historical play of powers, some perhaps of world-historical significance, some as contingent as the size of Cleopatra’s nose. The elemental intimacy with good, the elemental brush with evil, these are events in the idiotic. They cannot be rendered in neutral scientific terms; they cannot be subsumed into an impersonal totality; they cannot be reduced to vanishing moments in a speculative system. They are invisible in all such frames of reference but these frames would not be the value-saturated or value-subtracted frames they are without the charge of this idiotic intimacy.

This is why also our answerability for ourselves puts its roots down into the idiocy. This is why the blush as the bodily flush of self-consciousness verging on guilt flares up from this darkness, or breaks the surface of this liquid sea of the more original porosity. The lunge of the knife that I lodge in the neck of my enemy is the idiocy of the monstrous taking body, living itself as embodied in my killing rage. I do it, but it comes out of darkness, but I too am that darkness, though what I am as that darkness I do not know, certainly not until the monstrous strikes out. With maturity I can come to know more of this, and guard against the fiery upsurgence. But the later serenity hides the banking of the fire, not the extinction. That is why also forgiveness has an aspect of ineluctable singularity to it. I confess, no one else can do it for me. It comes out of the sacred goodness of the idiotic. Confession cannot be enacted by a substitute who stands there confessing for the idiotic singular, no more than another can taste one’s food for one and experience for one the intimate savor of it. There is an elemental sapiential flavor to this. There is something nonreducibly intimate, something not substitutable in all of this. And yet all are implicated in it. There is also something darkly mysterious about true forgiveness that re-creates the loving weave of community.

I said that the original sin can warp the intimate universal, and hence its effect is not just mine. We see also how a people, while being singular, can have its own idiotic reserves and the monstrous can be sulking in it over generations, to flare up now and then in conditions of irritation, to subside or be mollified, or be muffled, or be purified even. Or it may be secretly itching for war when its rage can come out and the dragons can be let to roam the night without hindrance or compunction. My argument is not a rejection of the neutral general, or the homogenous universal, for they surely have their place, but rather it is that in light of the intimate universal they cannot be an entirely effective shield against the idiocy of the monstrous. While they might seem to inoculate us, they are holding off provisionally what, when the winds suddenly shift, becomes a contagion of evil, floating without let in the enabling porosity. A political philosopher, a politician, a spiritual leader must have a nose for the taint of these elusive yet always potentially virulent contagions from hell.¹¹

Being Love: Loving Being

Hell in Sunday suit half intrudes too close to the beginning, but the tale here to be told is not first of the despoiling of the infernal but of the ineradicable love of life, outside of which the horror of hell makes no sense. The threat of usurpation in the intimate universal is there in the intimacy of being itself. One thing this means is that political metaphysics must consider an entirely opposite understanding to the Hobbesian take that the primordial motivation of the human being finally is fear of death. Hobbes surely is right to stress the massive presence of that fear in human life and affairs; surely he is right to see so many of the configurations of social relations as taking shape, overtly or covertly, in relation to it; surely he is right that death is an uncanny, unwanted twin to every endeavor of being and every joy of life. Hobbes thinks he exposes for us the primitive but he does not. We fear death because we love life. It is indeed just the love of life itself that fears death, just because life is loved and, all things being equal, to be loved. The insinuation of the fear itself spoils the love, and makes it to sour. Love of life makes itself unlovely in its aggressive defensiveness against threats to itself and life. The sourness is a curdling of the sweet milk of life, and the aggression is love of life turned over again. Aggression shores up love of life against what is other, what is seen or suspected as a threat to life. Life in its aggressive self-insistence is still love of life as (its) good.

We are being love—that is, being as a love: to be is to be a love of being. To be at all is to be as loving being. We see this more overtly in the self-affirming of the endeavor to be. Nevertheless, if what I say is true about our being in communication, and our first endowed patience, this loving of being in our own being is derivative from a more primordial affirming or love. We love our own being, and it is our being at all that we love; but what we love in loving our own being is the good of the “to be” as given to be in me, this singular being; and yet this good of the “to be” is not mine, and mine alone. That we participate in it, and from this participation love ourselves, signals that it comes to be out of a more original intimacy and porosity of being, in which the boundaries between my affirming the good of my “to be” is not finally possible to close off from being, as affirming beyond, beyond me, the good of the “to be” in a more intimately universal regard.

We think of the first love as self-love; and yes, it often seems as if this is the first love we know, so intimate is it to what we are. As a love, it is not something we chose. We already find ourselves in it, buoyed up by it. It is given, and we are given to ourselves in a self-love we do not first choose. We can come to chose this self-love as the one and only form of love, but this is already a contraction of what we are—given that the original self-love is not itself the product of self-love. If we dwell on the intimacy of the more idiotic self-love we come across the porosity, the patience, and come to realize that we cannot make sense of it as a love, indeed it would not be at all as a singular love, outside of a more original givenness or being given to be, our participation in being in communication. We love life, we love our own life, because that life is more originally the concretion and singularization, the creation, of a love that is not made by us. More true is it to say that we are made by it—made by it as loving ourselves, and the singularity of our “to be” as affirming itself as good “to be.” None of this is proposition. This is ontological esse, but revealed in how we do our being—how we act. How we be, how we do ourselves, how we do be (if I might put it so, as either a metaphysician or a country yokel), our actus essendi, points back beyond the conatus essendi to the passio essendi to this more primordial love of the good of the “to be.”

This more primordial love properly should be called the first love, rather than the self-love we normally take to be the first.¹² And this more primordial love cannot be confined to me; it opens to all other-being, opens before I come to myself, opens beyond even when I have come to myself. This is why the porosity is the opening of a secret ontological love. This first love is the more radical presupposition of all derived loves, including the seeming first, the self-loves. From this perspective, we do not have to think in terms of the usual dualism of self-love and altruism. All forms of love are themselves derivative from this more primordial “being love” or “loving being.” The difference of self-love and love of other-being is subtended by a givenness in which the difference is not at all an opposition, but emergent into form out of the more original passage of the porosity of being.

It is true that not a few modern ideologies, economic, political, and other, are built upon a counterfeit form of self-love and a reconfiguration of the world in the image of an untrue “over againstness.” What we find here is not love of life but rather the fear of death running away from itself into forms of selving that refuse the patience of being, refuse to countenance what may be at work in the intimacy of being, refuse to countenance it, except perhaps when inevitably it keeps coming back. Coming back again and again, it is managed as a resource to be exploited in an instrumental mode: the heart is sold. (I will come more to this in the next chapter.) Our fear of death is the love of life running away from the mortal limit that measures its “to be,” as given into the porosity of being, as always constitutively marked by the elemental patience of being that makes us (religiously put) creatures. This fear of death is a mutation of the love of life that turns into a refusal of being created—refusal that redeploys the resources of creation to hide creation as such from the always derivative creature. The second remakes itself as the first; as the counterfeit first, the second counterfeits what is first given to it; in this counterfeiting, the second is draining off, while dependent on, the endowment of the first gift of creation. Again it is sawing the branch on which it is sitting, sweetly singing that there is no saw and there is no tree of life, blithely hanging there in the midair of quasi-nothing, as if it were creating itself from nothing. By creating itself from nothing it makes itself nothing—a nothing that counterfeits creation.

Man, Hobbesian or not, is haunted by the fear of death, but why do we fear death? To say it again: because we love life. A stranger sneezes in my face; involuntarily I recoil. Why recoil? Because the sneeze may well be the contagion carrying my death. I do not even think about it, my bodied being turns back into itself defensively. Turns back into itself, because it would want that its being not be threatened, would not want not to be. It is the love of life silently, unconsciously, vehemently at work in the recoil. In the happening of the recoil, something of the ultimate issue of life is at play. The recoil into self may protect my relative hold on life, and having recoiled once, I may continue to recoil even though I go outside myself. Then I am perpetually on the defensive—always anticipating an enemy, be it in the sneeze of another or the smile—and then we hardly attend any more to what precedes the recoil. Then too what Hobbes exploits seems obvious—that elementally we live in a state of war, even though no formal declaration of war has been made. Nevertheless, at the intimate heart of all that goes into the protective recoil, the recoil that defends, sometime at any cost, its own hold on life, is the elemental love of life, without which there is no meaning to the recoil and no meaning to the suspicion and the enmity.

We go outside ourselves and are enabled to do so only by the endowment of powers that allows us to be thus self-communicating. Nevertheless, there is a going outside that is not a true going outside, for on the inside this going outside is closed in itself or always on guard, always ready to close itself into itself. This watchful going outside turns the more original porosity of its being into a border it would want to be impenetrable, even when it is outside of itself in communication with others. That it must be outside is testament to the reality that it can never be simply for itself alone. But here in being for others, it endeavors to be for itself primarily. This is not only a betrayal of the promise of being for others; it is a mutation of the love of self, a betrayal of the idiotic self-relation that in its intimacy is patient and porous.

The fear of death, overtaken by a siege mentality, closing in the porosity with reinforced walls, invisible walls. If the walls were truly successful they would utterly clog the porosity and then nothing of the endowing gift of creation would pass to one through the porosity and in the long run one would be living poorly on borrowed life—that is, always living as if only postponing death. In truth, and in another sense, we always live on borrowed life; and there is a fertile poverty that wills life. But the sieged selving is borrowed life that does not renew itself by patience to the gift of the original love that communicates itself to the intimate soul in the porosity of being. In defending its life thus it has signed its own death warrant, even though it seems to be the one signing the death warrant of the other. It seems to secure peace by means of overawing power but the awe yields only counterfeit worship, since its peace is not peace at all but the balance of powers otherwise at war. Hobbes is right, of course, that much of human peace is this kind of peace. Augustine is more right in seeing this peace as a simulacrum of peace. True peace requires the recovery of a different dimension entirely—namely, mindful participation in the intimate universal. This, in turn, requires an entire reordering of the meaning of love, self-love, other-love in terms of what follows from the priority of porosity and passio to the conatus essendi that has mutated into fearful or aggressive will to power. The second love of the self that untruthfully takes itself as first must let dissolve these walls of siege, blow the Jericho trumpet, and let them dissolve for the selving to be reborn again, not only as true self-love but as reborn to love—to the first love that gives it to be at all. For though the walls of siege are self-constituted, the absolving power is already at work, at woo, within.

Affirming Asymmetry of Good “to Be” and Evil

Does the love of life dissemble itself in my love of my own life? Hobbes and Nietzsche might say the opposite: I dissemble my love of self in calling it the love of life. They are wrong in this, though not wrong in finding that much of life is dissembling selving. This comes from the promiscuous doubleness of the passio and conatus. I stress the doubleness, but the interpretation of its meaning is different. This is not a matter of being at bottom a field of battle for the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is not a kind of cruel and vicious sea that always threatens to drown us. The doubleness suggests a fundamental equivocity in the nature of things but there is more than mere equivocity, since the doubleness is not a relation of equi-primordiality between life and death, between “yes” and “no,” between good and evil. Death can only be understood from life, the “no” from the “yes,” the evil from the good. But we need to have an intimation of the endowing source(s) and the porosity that is given and that gives being, prior to the passio and the conatus.

At issue is not univocal being but an endowing source of plurivocity. To be in communication with the plurivocity and the doubleness that seeds the equivocity is to be tempted to fall out of plurivocal community into a counterfeit world—a world in which we counterfeit being by reconfiguring it in terms of our own intimate conatus and idiotic monstrousness. The world as given offers a primal ethos saturated with life-affirming being. Even the beings we humans fear and hate participate in the self-affirming love of life too. We humans reconfigure this primal ethos in terms of our endeavor to be; seeming to subject it, we create a counterfeit creation in the process. If one were religious one might speak of a fallen world, but a fallen world is not an entirely corrupt world. It is double, mixing good and evil, equivocal between good and evil. The counterfeit pays its complement to the more original reality it dissimulates. In analogous fashion, our reconfiguration pays its complement to a more primordial community of being in which we are endowed and in which we participate, even when we go on to deform and mutilate it, so great is this, the forgiving generosity of the being process. If we think the counterfeit world is the real world, the only world, the true world, then we are in bad shape. Our own bad shaping of things becomes the measure of things.

Perhaps we are like the Ridiculous Man of Dostoevsky’s tale whose evil eye has introduced corruption into the world. The corruption blossoms as the counterfeit world whose mingling of life and death mimics life—but it really serves death. Unlike the Ridiculous Man, we now refuse the dream he had of the inexpressible goodness of the true life beyond the counterfeit one. Remember that he is ridiculous because he realized the corrupted life he configures was down to his doing, and because now he still yet dreamed. When we refuse to be ridiculous in casting from us such a dream, we think we have made our peace with the counterfeit creation and hardly realize we are truly ridiculous in another sense. This “higher” ridiculousness loves to talk about the struggle for existence in the showy aggressive language of the street tough. Then the dream of the Ridiculous Man is sneered at as the feeble softness of the tenderized soul, the patient being, the porous being, the feminine man who cannot see the point of the war. Such manly swagger glories in cruelty to the porous and the patient. The glory, like its world of war, is counterfeit.

A crucial upshot of the prior affirming that is loving being/being loving is that there is an affirmation of good more primordial than the negation. Living being testifies to the affirmation of the worthy to be affirmed. And what is good except the worthy to be affirmed? It is true that we sometimes deem as good, as worthy of affirmation, something that is not worthy of affirmation. Nevertheless, our intimate implication with the worthy of affirmation is unavoidable. This means there is no “equi-primordiality” of good and evil. There is a priority to good, as there is a priority to the affirming of the worthiness of the “to be,” the sweetness of being at all. The horror, the mutilation, the recoil come second. It is true that in the derived ethos, the ethos we reconfigure, there is an interplay of good and evil, where we cannot seem to have one without the other. Once having bent ourselves away from the metaxological poise of true doubleness between self-relation and other-relation, we find ourselves in the equivocity of the half and half, and we are seduced to hold that evil is as primordial as good. But there is an asymmetry in the relation of good and evil, prior to the fall from metaxological plurivocity into this equivocal doubleness. Since so much of our lives is lived in this equivocal doubleness, we find it very hard to conceive another sense of good that is prior to it. We cannot make proper sense of this equivocal doubleness without reference to the more idiotic affirmation: not our affirmation but the affirmation in which we find ourselves, in loving ourselves and in loving being.

Our exploration of the idiotics of the intimate universal is an effort to bring out of recess something of this prior affirming of the good of the “to be.” If there were not the priority of this good, we could not make sense of evil. Evil is defection from good, defection carried by the power of what is good: enabled by good, evil is the turn of affirmation against good, a turn against it, a deeffecting of it, as not my good, not just for me, a turn against it that turns it into just what is good for me. This is to contract to what is only intimate to me the more universal diffusion of the affirmation that is most intimate in all of us. It is not possible purely on our own to return to the communication of the affirmation once we have become the mutation that makes the affirmation purely our own. We can still seek to turn again, and though we seem to be going round and round, the turnabout can be purgative of the self-insistence that clogs the porosity of being, cocooning us off from the communication of the more original affirmation. So long as we are, the communication of true affirmation is not totally extinguished, even in our cocooned being. It is within the cocoon, it seeps through the cocoon, and a flux of affirming life dissolves every clotting of life on itself. We affirm the good of the “to be” all the time, even when we claim to hate it. For our hatred makes no sense outside of a secret love of what is worthy to be affirmed. In hatred we deem this worthiness absent in what is before us, and we turn against it. The hatred pays its secret respects to what it deems is absent—the good of the “to be.” It is impossible not to affirm the good of the “to be.” It is all but impossible to affirm the evil of the “to be.” What could it mean to claim that being is at bottom evil? The recoil is already in the claim, and the recoil points us back to the affirmation. This holds true equally if there is affirmation of evil in the claim.¹³

Will to Power and Love of Being

I am not talking just about the will to live, though this is very relevant. Will comes out of something more intimate: an idiotic energy of being that expresses itself in the elemental will to live. One might venture to call it, with qualifications, a “willing” before will. Without it our living would atrophy and fall into despondency and thence into despair and death. I hesitate to use the language of “will,” should this too explicitly invoke a determining power that we might employ in this direction or that. What I am talking about is not like deliberate will. It is, if you like, a “willing” before determinate will that precedes determinate will and exceeds self-determining will. This “willing” before will puts its roots into darkness; and beyond its own self-determination, its longing may bring it to the brink of ultimate sacred mystery. Let this enigmatic “willing” atrophy and we die. We may live for a while, pulling ourselves together in a determinate form through will power alone, but if the elemental “willing” dries up, this determinate form of selving is only a holding operation hiding the dying already taking place. We die when a trauma shatters the holding form, when a loved one dies before one who was half or more of one’s life, when the face of absurdity becomes a Medusa’s head and so petrifies the selving that its porosity to the secret springs of life closes off.

I do not deny that there is a basic self-insistence that marks all of us. To exist is to be an insistence of being. This insistence is lived as selving. This is something basic. It is not all, even in the in-sistence itself. But we can so emphasize the self-insistence and generalize it that the will to live is seen as a will to power. The basic self-insistence thinks it is just itself that insists; and while this is partly true, there is something welling up in the self-insistence that is not just self. Insistence is a stress of being, and the selving finds itself in self-insistence as this stress of being, but the stress does not come from itself alone. There is a stress of being more original than self-insistence, and more transcending, that exceeds insistence of self on self alone.

Will to power can have different meanings, of course. I distinguish three in connection with Nietzsche, for whom importantly will to power is essentially self-affirming: first, perhaps the most evident, even vulgar sense of power over the other, even to the acceptance of violence as one of the conditions of life; second, power oriented to (erotic) sovereignty, power over the shaping of human selvings and communities, where the selvings show the artistry of persons, and where the will to power of a community comes to flower in its sovereignty concentrated in the representative(s) or leader(s) of superior excellence, that is, the will to power of the Caesar(s); third, will to power as creating itself in the guise of claiming the highest rank of spiritual sovereignty—the creator of values, the tablets of the law. Nietzsche has a striking phrase for this third form: “a Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ.” In all these forms we find a self-affirming will to power, differently taking form. While more light can be shed on the Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ when we treat of the erotics and agapeics of the intimate universal, what concerns us here is the stress on will to power and its essentially self-affirming form.¹⁴

Our investigation suggests something different from the Nietzschean emphasis on self-affirming will to power. As with the will to live, and the self-insistence, here we must also raise the question of a “willing” that is not just a willing of itself, but a deeper, more intimate, and, in promise, more universal “willing(ness)” that can extend to all being other. As it is with the will to live when it becomes just my will to my life, as it is with the self-insistence that insists on self and only self, so it is with will to power that only is self-affirming and does not grant its original “being endowed,” and its being called to a willing beyond self-affirming will to power. There is a secret love at work in will to live, in self-insistence, in will to power.¹⁵ But what is it? The entirety of idiotics as an intimacy of being suggests this secret love. That it is a love that goes beyond oneself in passing through one suggests an already effective relation to what is other to one—other before one comes to be, other in one’s own self-becoming, other in exceeding the self-determination of one’s own becoming—an intimate relativity, an intimate otherness, intimating a togetherness in which secretly all are held in potential communicability in many forms from the elemental to the sublime

In Being and the Between, with regard to communities (chapter 11), I speak of a being’s self-relating sociability and this is relevant here.¹⁶ Beings are open wholes, porous integrities, and they incarnate a togetherness; hence they are communities in themselves. It is not necessary to deny that a being in its selving is in intimate communion with itself, held together by bonds that form a porous unity; nor need we deny that this involves self-communication, as well as openness beyond itself to what is other. Richer forms of self-communication go in tandem with powers of being in richer communication with beings other than self. Beings participate in the porous space of communicability and the richer the being the richer the participation. In Being and the Between I say that this holds at different levels of sociability: in subatomic particles/waves, in atoms, in molecules, in cells, organisms, animals, humans. Moreover, the richer a community becomes in ontological promise, the more it shows itself as a community of communities. This is diversely true relative to inorganic nature, organic nature, as well as relative to animated, sensitive, and animal being. In intermediation with its environment, the animal whole reveals self-communication that communicates with its members (not just parts) that, as subordinate integrities, communicate with the center of the being as a whole. This self-relating sociability, inseparable from a being in communication with what is other to itself, is most manifest with the human being. Here the self-communicating being not only feels itself, but minds itself, becomes mindful of itself in its interplay with what is other. In the following chapter I will turn to the emergence of mindfulness in the aesthetic body as signaling the appearance of ontological powers more complex and rich than are to be found in inorganic and organic being. The organization of the self-communicating being reveals itself as at once more unified, more differentiated, more capable of self-transcendence, and more capable of communication with what is other. Mindful self-communication shows the power of free self-development, the power of free self-transcendence, the promise of free communication with what is other to itself. Self-relating sociability now turns out to be sociability first and self-relating second, though the second has the power to turn against the first and take over the doubleness of the condition in terms of making the second into the number One. This is relevant to the political ontology of a metaxological metaphysics.

The most important point here relative to the intimate universal is that a secret love is in the more primordial sociability. To be is to be related, not only self-related but related to the originating others that give one to be and the cooperating or opposing others that companion or poison one’s self-becoming with others. We are closer to the heart and closer to the heart of hidden loves. I am thinking of the co-natus once again: being “born with.” Conatus is participation in the intimate community of being. Spinoza is not entirely wrong to speak of this conatus as unrestricted, though the meaning of this is other to what he proposes. This endeavor is unrestricted because in its intimate being it is potentially open to the universal. This co-natus, this being “born with,” is not a project. In either being born or giving birth, or assisting at a birth, there is something beyond what we do, something given beyond what work or endeavor can bring to the situation. One thinks of the mother going into labor, and this is a happening, but the labor of birth is not like any labor as the imposition of form on matter. It is not productive in that sense but generative in an intimate sense, and the singularity of the issue can never be forgotten. Coming out of the womb after gestation in darkness from the secrecy of the intimate source, a singular offspring is released to the world. There is the scream on delivery but this is not the howl of horror but the communication, voraciously self-insistent perhaps, that life is there, healthy life. We breathe freely when we hear this scream. Silence would be ominous.

Think of birth as already incarnating the secret love. Each of us is born—not born from ourselves, but from others first. The others are before one, and one is their child. In human relations the child may be the offspring of explicit love, though it may be the result of forced conjoining. There is something secret about the love of the parents and I will come to this, but there is another, perhaps more primal secret love than that of the progenitors. In the idiotic givenness, in the passio essendi, the meaning of being born is shown. To be born is to come to be from another, it is not to give birth to oneself; and yet the birthing is something one participates in both passively and actively: passively, for one is patient to a process that has a dynamic of its own; actively, in that one is witness to the singular act of being made incarnate that comes to be. This is not just the acting of a becoming, or a self-becoming, it is coming to be as an actus essendi—what is hidden in being born is the secret love of the coming to be, the secret love of creation.

There is a great tendency to forget the happening, momentous though it is, of being born, of coming to be as a creature. For once born, we take flight on what has been given to be; or those who aid in the progenitoring are also taken up with the outcome, and the coming out (into being) receives little more attention—except perhaps in moments of wonder, or the pauses of love that look on the gift of the being, now there fully incarnated before one. Unbelievable, a mother or father might be inclined to say, and inclined to say then: Look at you, it is you. This is all tautology from the point of determinate information, but not empty at all from the point of view of the love informing the exclamation of marveling. Not I am but you are—and there is ontological gratitude in the information-less exclamation. Life takes wing then on the endeavor to be—the conatus takes forward place, but conatus as letting the “being born” falls away from focus. There will even be philosophies so mesmerized by the seeming forward momentum of the endeavor that the future and the projection of future possibility will be declared the most important in all of this. Some will say our own projects will constitute the meaning of our lives. The singular happening of birth—this is a mere contingency, sometimes something downright absurd. What we do with ourselves, what we do with life, what we do tout court, that is all that matters. We are what we do: in the middle range, there are the projects that domesticate the strangeness of being and define the ventures of self-becoming; in the longer range of finitude, there is the end of it all in death. And then the endeavor to be, when it knows itself, becomes a Sein zum Tode, most famously with Heidegger. Being born is already beginning to die, and the project in between birth and the end is defined by ruses to avoid, or resolutions to face and even to try to take to oneself, one’s death. Death, of course, is massively important in defining who we are. But we get things not even half-right if we so stress the endeavor, and miss the meaning of the passio—the being toward death, and not the coming to be of birth.¹⁷

I repeat: there is in the conatus the presence of the birthing process, which is not a matter of endeavor to be, not a merely conative dynamic. Co-natus: born with, birth with—there is a “with” in the birthing of the endeavor. The actus essendi is a being born with, in its coming to be, before it is an acting of selving, in its own becoming. Conatus already with the “with” refers back to the passio, the patience that already arrives from out of receiving, that receives before it does. The meaning of being “born with” is a great question. For the “with” is not only being gifted with ourselves. The “with” is witness to a community of being that is not only being with ourselves—the “with” is with what is other to ourselves before it is with ourselves—the being with the other itself makes possible what is promised in the being with self, the being of self.

Something of this is implied by birthing as such: acceptance into the intimacy of being as a community of “being with,” given into being out of a source that gifts its being at all, that companions the becoming of the beings in the community. And the “with” is in or with all of this, with the co-natus, the companionship, the comm-unity. If I am right, this changes the standard meaning of the endeavor to be away from self-becoming and self-determining will, or will to power, to something always already participant in the community of a secret love, incognito in the endeavors that project themselves onto the future, projects of self that project self alone, and in the long run stifle the sources of gratitude toward the source of being at all.¹⁸

The Family and the Intimate Universal

The family is the community where the most intimate secrets are present, and the most secret of our loves is protected from the profane gaze. Confucianism is not at all wrong in stressing the piety of the family, seeing something there not to be found in the state, not at all wrong in its intuition that the piety of ritual is more of the essence than possessions and power. The familial community is the most elemental ethical intermediation of the intimate, the idiotic. There is the stirring of the intimate universal in it. I have treated of this ethical intermediation in Ethics and the Between, and hence will confine myself to the connection with the intimate universal. In the family, as with all forms of community, we discover diverse social formations of loves, some very hidden and clandestine, some more communicated in the open, but in all of them trust is basic, as well as the interplay of trust and distrust. This trust is not something we do; it is not the result of the endeavor to be; rather the endeavor emerges out of a secret trust that being as good will somehow answer and respond, even to the very singularity of the being thrusting beyond self. Of course, this trust can invert into distrust and, worse, hatred, as we have already seen. But as with previous discussion of asymmetry between good and evil, here too there is an asymmetry between trust and distrust. This is so in the sense that distrust defects (often in disappointment) from prior trust, and in the sense that absolute distrust is self-destroying. Without something trustworthy the distrust we experience and justify would make no sense. I would say that the basic trust is inseparable from the agapeics of being, that is, our living out of a surplus generosity of being, embodied for us in those closest to us—the relatives who sustain us and are reciprocally sustained by us. This trust is first lived in the family. The family is the human community closest to the idiocy of agapeic trust at the origin, at the end, and in the between. The intrusion of distrust complicates all of this because of the equivocal doubleness of the human being. The family is idiotic but it is also an intermediation and yet it is most elemental, for we are all born of others, and the bonds with the parenting others are intimately of the flesh itself. Birth incarnates a universality of the singular idiot: elemental intimacy, elemental universality.

I treat in more detail in Ethics and the Between how the family intermediates all the potencies of the ethical but a brief resume is here relevant.¹⁹ First, the family intermediates most elementally the good of the idiot self and one will never entirely escape its influence on what is most intimate to us. Second, it shapes our aesthetic being: our bodies and their pleasures are intermediated through our parents’ presence, their smiles, their caresses, their frowns, their encouragements, their chastisements. Third, it gives regularity and form to the intimate and the aesthetic within an order of dianoetic norms: there are rules, orders, formal and informal, and sometimes they are rigidly imposed, sometimes with more suppleness and latitude. Familial orders of life’s unfolding come to one from the familial others; sometimes the orders are harsh, sometimes benign enough not even to be noticed. Familial order allows the flourishing of flesh and soul, offering a range of opportunities that need not be rigid in order to rescue the freedom of children from the formlessness that dissipates the promise of creative life. It sets limits within which children come into their own, though their own is never only their own. Fourth, family intermediates a transcendental sense of unconditional worth: we are loved unconditionally by good parents; in turn calls on us are made that we must answer, commands we must obey. Familial others can already offer some exemplary embodiment of unconditional integrity, in the trust and love they offer us. Unbeknown to ourselves, a hidden sense of unconditional goodness seeps into us. Fifth, family intermediates eudaimonia and what fullest flourishing might mean: the intimate love that is offered treats the singularity of the child with unique reverence and lays down a ground in early formation for integrity over a long life. A family is entrusted with the child, the child is in trust. And the elder’s trust in the child produces trust in the child itself, which nurtures the existential confidence allowing the singular child more fully to develop his or her powers. Sixth, family coaxes the opening of transcending desire in us, letting the restlessness of the endeavor be set out in search of fuller actualization with the hope that our distention to the infinite is more than one damn thing after another, ad nauseam. Stretched between finite mortality and infinitely restless endeavor something of the fullness is already given. That is why, seventh, in the family we are given some intermediating presentiment of transcendent good, of the divine as the absolute endowing source of the intimate universal. The familial togetherness can be something of an incarnate image of the divine community and this is why the good family can be the intimate place of the secret consecration of life.

Of course, there are neutralizations or, worse, desecrations, but these are derived from something that more originally witnesses to the sacred trust of the intimate universal. Reverence for the deepest and the highest can be intermediated in the intimate togetherness of the family. Prayer is the deepest instance of the porosity of the human and divine and participation in the intimate universal. The family that prays together stays together. There can be enacted the paradoxical conjunction of the deepest and the highest. The most intimate love is also companioned by the secret sublimity of transcendence itself. The family is a social space wherein the soul becomes porous to sacred stories, wherein children should be told parables of the divine, the virgin soul being most permeable to the “Amen” of the holy.

At the same time, the familial intermediation of the intimate is not closed off to ethical-political spaces, pointing also to other public spaces beyond the idiotic. We will see this “beyond” first in the aesthetics of the intimate universal, then in the erotics, then in the agapeics. I want now to emphasize the intimacy of an unconditional good of the “to be” that is most idiotically and elementally intermediated in the family. We can never do away with this entirely and even in the sophisticated, managed, bureaucratic, technologized—you name it—form of social organization, this sense of the intimate always continues—and in better communities its promise is always nurtured.

The sign of unconditional worth is witnessed in the consecrated character of the marriage vow and the pledge of unconditional love that true parenting entails. The understanding of marriage as a contract fails to do justice to the depths involved in the intimacy of being between wedded partners. The language of a consecration of love is much more appropriate to this intimacy as not merely private but participation in the intimate universal.²⁰ There is a secret love before contract—there is a love in the consecration. The language of contract is not the language to describe the intimate love, or the community of marriage, or the family. To speak of a consecrated love is difficult in modernity, where the general trend has been the secularization of all spheres of life. Secularization here is meant in the sense of the withdrawal of the sacred to the private. The intimate is not the same as the private, though there is something both intimate and private about familial life. What the private means is equally not simple, but here there is a general trend to set in opposition the spheres of the public and the private. The point is sometimes to place a curb on religion, defined by the so-called private, from dubious incursion into the public space, the space decreed as neutral for economic and political transactions (transactions not themselves neutral). This view is understandable as a response to some of the extremities of intransigence that religion has sometimes unleashed. The nobility of religion comes with the danger, for the divine and the monstrous are not always easily set apart.

A sheer separation makes no sense relative to the communicative field of the between where private and public are in porous passage, always. In this between the intimacy is not autism, and the communication is never neutral. The secularization extended to love would risk becoming, in the long run, a deconsecration of desire—a mere neutral, if not neutered, eruption of who knows what material forces. If this were true we would deny love’s true communicative power and perhaps confine it to a policed private sphere (not at all love’s true intimacy). Does not this putative neutralization slip easily into a kind of desecration? For after all, if we are forbidden the consecrated and the neutralized is a mutilation of the love, the mutilation is more likely than not to continue to mutilate itself in the direction of desecration. And strangely, even perversely, the desecration restores the sense of living intimacy—though it is the living intimacy of violation rather than well-willing. We must remember well that violation is saturated with a charge of intimacy. Sometimes the most evil violators are those whose being is so neutralized (“deadened”) that intimate violation is somehow their way of perversely resurrecting its charge. “Deadened,” the violator wants to “feel alive” again, but this life of violation only perpetuates the culture of death.

See the family as an idiotic seedbed of the intimate universal, and as such pointing to the more primitive character of the consecrated love. More primitive, not as a deficient condition to be overcome or surpassed, but as an original fund that has a certain compacted fullness that enables further growths. And these growths can, of course, do injustice to the original seedbed, as well as do justice. The secularization of love is manifested in the reduction of marriage to a mere contract—a contract in which goods are exchanged, or services expected, often according to a legally regulated quid pro quo, with mine and thine laid out, protected, and policed. The understanding between the parties is seen in a more instrumental fashion, prudent in a calculative sense, in which the more intimate commitment of the entire selvings of the partners is not invested in a consecrated “yes.” There is no unconditional vow, there is a conditional promissory legal note. The nature of the promissory bond is defined by a means/end schema.²¹ There are intimate bonds where lifelong fidelity may be vowed. More often it comes about that as all contracts are condition-bound, so too the commitment is conditional. Conditions being met, the parties promise to stay together. The conditions being not met in a changeable world, the promise might be suspended or abrogated. Changed conditions require changed commitments. There is always the escape hatch: We did not sign up for this in the contract. There is nothing unconditional about it. We do not give ourselves to the deeper trust, for this must hazard itself less conditionally to live up to the love of the other whom one promises to be with for worse as well as for better. The deepest trust is a leap in the dark that continues to leap when the dark descends. The vow is unconditional porosity before the blessings of the unknown future, and also the curses. It lays itself open to what will come and promises to stand in the openness with a love that endures.

Is the instrumental contract what a vow is? No, it has rather turned from the idiotic depths of the intimate and keeps itself on a safer surface, where exposure to the other is also managed, without overextended risk to the tender heart. By contrast, a vow has something of the sacred in it and a reference to an unconditional source and promise. We say then: “No matter what, I will love you.” This is an extraordinary promise, since it transcends the conditions of the ordinary, which are alterable, just as conditional things are. A vow remains deeply mysterious since it calls upon enabling sources that properly speaking human beings cannot call up. The unconditionality breaks through the chain of finite conditions, but how can a finite being, purely as finite, vouch for the unconditional? There is something more. Even in our secularized age, we often use the formula of the unconditional—in richness, in poverty, in sickness, in health, till death do us part. This makes no sense without something like a consecrated love. But we cannot consecrate ourselves entirely through ourselves alone. Even secularized promises try to create a kind of unconditionality—as with nonbelievers who organize parties or spectacles that tend to mimic the more traditional rituals. One thinks of those ceremonies of promises made to a child that can be likened to ersatz forms of baptism. Secretly in all this, of course, there is the rightful recognition that the love is beholden to something beyond itself. It is more than the self-love of the couple, and in every part of it, there is a reference to the beyond of itself.

Initiations and the Intimate Universal

In light of this, consider again the conatus as a “birth with.” The consecrated “yes” bears on initiations and the willingness to participate in initiation again and again. This willingness to stand at the origin of initiation is like a gift of redeeming forgiveness that opens to the promise of blessing in time now, and yet to come—even though we do not know what will come. To speak of birth is also to speak of initiations. There is something idiotic about initiations. They are events that mark a qualitative break and after the initiation one is newly in the world or in a new world. They are not homogenous becomings from fixed points that proceed from sameness to sameness. They transform the same, and open its difference, and open into a community of difference, which nevertheless has a togetherness that preserves sameness in a deeper or higher degree. There is porosity in initiations. There is a threshold or boundary that is crossed or being crossed, though whence or where determinately that boundary is we cannot always quite pin down. There is an open border and we pass through that openness, and though it might seem as if nothing has happened, nothing is the same afterward. Indeed something momentous has happened, is happening. The happening of the transition is nowhere and yet it is here and now intimately happening, and one wonders at times if this is like a transubstantiation.

True initiations are patient, for the initiative does not lie simply with the one being initiated. The initiative first lies elsewhere, with the others who are agents of endowment and transformations, who welcome the initiate. They initiate, though it is true that the one being initiated is initiated only if there is a deep down “yes” to the offer to pass across the threshold. There is birth in the initiative in this sense of the conatus—born together with the others who are there before one in that other space. In initiation, properly speaking, there is a consecration: Con-secration: there is a “with” in consecration. Birth is a consecration. The first consecration is in the event of being born at all; the second consecration pertains to the “yes” to this first consecration and what it asks of us in a life in time. Are we baptized in the secret love, into the secret love? To be baptized is to be initiated into a community. It is to be given a name, a singular name. In the religious sense, it is also to be ritually and sacramentally welcomed into the people of God. In the Christian sense, it is also to be initiated into the death and resurrection of Christ—this is, so to say, into a second birth into the community of agapeic service.

The porosity that is thus baptized is not at all the “primary narcissism” of the child but the redemption from this narcissism. It is not the reality principle that rules in initiation, it is consecrating love. The primary narcissism is quite understandable in terms of the porosity; since boundaries between self and other seem so hard to fix, it is as if there is no boundary. Without boundaries the swelling endeavor expands, as if without limit, the way hot air may expand, expand even to the feeling of godlike omnipotence. The inflation makes the child believe it is in control of everything and as if by magic can make its wishes fulfilled. But if there is the porosity, it is not quite this magic. It is more an expression of the fact that the porosity has not yet woken up to itself in its true encounter with what is other. It is the other and its love that make the porosity true, true to itself and to what is beyond itself. The magic of the omnipotent child is answered by the presence of the mother (this is a picture of some psychoanalysts). This is a picture of the infant god before the rupture of otherness. The rupture might be called “castration.” And then the primal porosity will be described in terms of a horror of the cut of oneself, the cut that is always there as threatened in the space between oneself and the other. Hence too the ambivalence toward the “big Other”: awe and terror; and if love, a servile love that is also resentful of its servility to the “big Other.” There is clearly a master/slave dialectic working in this picture that can crystalize in the direction of a cruel dualism of sadism and masochism between oneself and another, and within oneself too. Yet this dialectic is not true to the deeper origin of initiation in love that makes the consecrated beginning of coming to be in the more original porosity of being. To speak thus is already to presuppose this porosity, and indeed anything like a dialectic of master and slave could not take place without our being already offered the gift of the more primordial opening for diverse forms of self-transcending. I do not mean to deny the element of truth in talking of the “primary narcissism,” but I think there is something more primal. The narcissism is to be understood from the porosity, not the porosity from the narcissism. There is an asymmetrical priority here. Nor also does the “primary narcissism” do full justice to what is at play in the passio essendi.

Porosity and Familial Intimacy

You could say that what primarily arouses anxiety and even horror in the child is not the insinuation of this cut, not “castration,” but more primordially the dawning of the porosity—the open space that it is, the cut it is in homogeneous being. This is the dawning of the opening in it, that indeed it is also as the living porosity. Connect this, for instance, with the feeling of “being seen”—not just the mirror stage, or the self-relation after it. This is the dawning of the porosity that makes possible a blush, a mirror stage, and the early determination of the difference of self and other. This dawning is as if one were coming to awake over an abyss. Indeed, one is the abyss that one is over. For the porosity is not a site of passage one is in; one is this site and hence when this dawns one is open to exposure. The glutinous homogeneity is no longer and there are no protections, no enclosures. One is as if flayed, as if one yet has no skin. It is as if the skin itself is porous and another can see into one, can see through one. One is riveted there by being there as almost nothing. Nothing is in the way as the other makes a way in the porosity into the intimacy of the idiot self. And so we are later inclined to say that a person has a thin skin, or that he or she needs to get a thicker skin. The language of thick and thin gestures toward the porosity. And this porosity is a site of familial passage in which fleshed relativity takes on its secrets from the loving gestures of the father or the mother. (I know: the gestures are equivocal, and what is love can be taken otherwise, and what seems otherwise to love can be love. This again is the doubleness that is emergent in the porosity between self-relation and other-relation—the unavoidable possibility of equivocity.) The mother or the father can fill the porosity: sometimes it is as if this were a kind of gap or hole and when they do fill the porosity one is no longer as nothing, one is something. The gap can be filled with love, it can be filled with hatred, and one will be differently there. The hole is filled, but one is not again quite as glutinous homogeneity but something with the trace of the nothing and of the other. Being something or someone occurs between being glutinous homogeneity and being nothing. (I am beginning to sound like Sartre, but what he means is not quite what I mean, though all honor to Sartre, who no doubt was on to something.)²²

The porosity: this is not an ontological oneness from which we are separated. It is not the mother or the breast from which as separate we are always seeking to be reunited, with the child seeking the lost enjoyment and unable to find it, projecting the fantasy of enjoying into various objects, petit or not (Lacan). Rather the porosity is more an original openness, opening—of difference yes, though there is togetherness in the opening, not a oneness. There is togetherness in difference in fluid communication, a porous gathering together of beings. Were one to speak theologically, it is more to be connected with creation ex nihilo than emanation from an undifferentiated one into separated somethings. Somethings in psychoanalysis are redolent of a materialistic pantheism: we are driven out of the original oneness of the lost mother and the longing for impossible restoration is cut into us, even as we are cut off from it; hence the exile from oneness is without remedy, and we are the lacking and impossible longing for oneness, an impossible oneness. Yes, that kind of oneness is impossible, but not because of an original oneness but because of the original porosity—which asks us to think of the fluid communication of sameness and difference in a togetherness of passing between others and crossing of thresholds. There is a nothing; there is the difference of coming to be and becoming; there is becoming that can transform into self-becoming; but coming to be is never a becoming or self-becoming; there is a more original gift of being, but it is a gift of the porosity of being; we are that porosity coming to mindfulness. There is a One, the one God, but this is the hyperbolic origin that is communication as agapeic giving to be.²³

“Separation” anxiety: this could be understood in terms of the infant or young child coming to know that the porosity, as almost nothing, also reveals that one is not the other. A gap opens up, and in that gap we are released and freedom germinates, but there is anxiety about freedom, and hence also a tendency to “fetishize” the mother. There is a fixation of other, fixation on the other, to fill the gap, the porosity. Something analogous happens later in adolescent infatuation: another appears before us and is the apparition of the beloved and suddenly one is head over heels in love—this other fills the awaiting emptiness, the expectant porosity. One is no longer exposed to the nothing—the loved other shields one from the terror of its adventure. In full adulthood something of this is also evident in the way that in the company of strangers we often have a tendency to gravitate toward those we somewhat know, or take to be one of our own. Again the opening of the porosity is filled against the emptiness of the hole.

Childish fantasy is itself only possible because of the porosity. A child wakes in the middle of the night to night terrors. It screams and is in horror at the shadow on the wall. There is nothing there. The parents shush it and say, hush now, there is nothing there, and the child calms and goes back to sleep. In truth, there is nothing there, but this nothing is redolent with more than nothing, redolent of the opening of the porosity as happening in the advent of selving. The porosity has come out of dream space and something monstrous has taken shape in and through the flickering shadows on the wall. (How moviemakers exploit this to build up suspense and terror in a horror film!) The energy of selving in the void is taking form through the shadows, and the apparition is as if created from nothing. There is the becoming of self in the nothing, becoming self always streaked with the nothing that haunts the porosity and splits it. Though in truth, the selving, distending, or split, self-mediating or intermediating, is not nothing truly but is rather the endowed porosity.

If we (mistakenly) think of the porosity as like a hole, and think the hole is completely filled, we may find something like the tyranny of the other, the tyranny of the loving mother, for instance, or the domineering father. In this way, in being somebody, one is again nothing, nobody. There is a kind of counterfeit restoration of fullness that is indistinguishable from (bad) nihilism. There has to be a difference marking the space between nothing and fullness. This is where the passio disrupts all un-self-related fullness, bringing about transcending in the gap of the porosity. Instead of a dualism, or an extreme “either-or,” there is a passage in the between, promising one’s powers of self-mediating, but also confirming one’s relativity to the other beyond oneself. Passage in the porosity is never just self-mediating, even when oriented to self-becoming. It could not be, given the nature of the porosity and the passio—the nothing is in us, for we are what we are as having being brought to be from nothing.

This impels us to a different view of the family than the Freudian on the question of the father. What is to be foregrounded is not at all the desire to kill the father. The relation of father and child (son) can be agapeic—releasing. The endeavor to be of the released son or child need not be a matter of becoming causa sui, and hence in need of dethroning the “big Other” as the competing causa sui. Agonistic relations stress too much the conatus essendi as endeavoring to be itself in equivocal competition with an equivocal other and not enough the secret generosity of the passio essendi, communicated as the gift of the porosity. Put otherwise, there is a relativity to the giving other inscribed in released freedom. The relativity is the promise, indeed the actuation, of love. The story would be more like the parable of the prodigal son than the myth of Oedipus. In any case, the Oedipus myth is somewhat more complicated than the Freudian rewriting of it. Oedipus has no idea that it is his father he is killing, no idea that Jacosta is his mother. His life is companioned by a destiny or doom that his own endeavor to be cannot finally thwart. And the picture of Thebes falling into waste in train of the pollution of the sacred king is far more redolent of the intimate universal in which the co-implication of all is secretly at work, and not least with respect of the idiocy of the monstrous. What is at work in the singular is coimplicated with what is at work in the community of the people. In any event, the sacral dimensions of the myth are simplified and distorted by being psychologized. One might say this is a myth both demythologized and remythologized, but done so in light of certain presuppositions of modern Enlightenment reason and the twin of the unconscious that shadows it, not in terms that give us accession to the intimate universal. Oedipus’s horror at knowing the truth, our horror, and indeed compassio, at the tragedy of his fate, make much more sense in terms of the idiotics of the intimate universal. The (modern) psuchē without muthos (albeit modern psyche itself both demythologized and remythologized) is less in tune with the intimate universal than the soul schooled on the sacred stories. The modern demythologization is not true to the sacred stories that communicate the pieties of the intimate universal. Nor is the modern quasi-remythologization in tune with its secretly sacred charge.

Familial Piety and the Intimate Universal

The family is a communal space of the intimate universal but there is more to the intimate universal than the family. Familial pieties are elemental but there are pieties that are not just familial. I will only indicate the nature of the piety here to which I will return more fully in the erotics and the agapeics of the intimate universal.

The familial image recurs relative to the elemental bonds of society. It is not that the family is the larger society but the intimate elemental bonds provide an idiotic ethos out of which more neutralized relations emerge. Nevertheless, though the elemental bonds might be relatively submerged in the larger society, they can be reactivated in times of crisis, such as a war, when, to the astonishment of the more surface social consciousness, a surge of more intimate belonging comes forth, as if sparked to expression by the strike of the enemy. I am thinking of the surprising upsurges of the sentiment of patriotism in such circumstances.²⁴ Of course, in classical political philosophy, such as that of Aristotle, for instance, the charge of these idiotic intimacies is not at all forgotten. Certainly philia is an intimacy of togetherness serving to define bonds more extensive than the face-to-face relation, including the “building blocks” of families, of clans at the foundation of the constitution of political communities.²⁵ One thinks in the modern age of Burke’s “little platoon.” Burke is an un-self-conscious witness to the intimate universal in his fight against the abstract universality of any rationalistic project. Something is at work in the familial ground, in the underground of generational relativity, up through which the vital sap of an energized social belonging can flow. It is a mutilation to impose a rationalistic blueprint from above down, for then we have a derivative abstract universality imposing itself on the more original circulation of social energies in the intimate universal. The result then is an abstract issue, derived ultimately from that intimate universal, but imposing itself on its own source of origin. In familial terms, the offspring dictates to the maternal or paternal source without due reverence, or gratitude, or without the proper piety. The results are a mutilation, if not inversion, of the true state of affairs. It is interesting to see how someone like Habermas seems to have come to the view that religion, and the sense of belonging it brings, may be needed to supplement the otherwise quite all right form of the secular republican ideal. What is at issue with the intimate universal, however, is not a mere supplement but rather a reminder of the sources of original belonging, from which in secret and unacknowledged ways the secular republican ideal draws, even as ostensibly it divorces itself from it, or sets itself in opposition to it, or turns back toward it at an extremity and asks it for supplemental help in times of secular distress.²⁶

The lure of ethnicity is very much bound up with this intimate charge of familial belonging, and obviously it can be manifested in benign and malign ways. In the porosity of the ethnic belonging the intimate energies can be turned to an immanent affirmation of the values that define a people. But equally an immanent self-affirmation can close off the porosity to the others who do not belong, and in the closure the enemy emerges over against one, sometimes genuinely an enemy, sometimes a conjured enemy. Political demagogues are experts at touching on and manipulating this porous threshold, and turning it to bellicose ends. It is equally true that a great statesman must have an analogous finesse for the same threshold. Such a leader might serve as an enabler of the fluid benignity of a love, allowing this to circulate rather than the contagions of hatred.

The charge of familial relations is hence often put to uses outside of families. The charge moves and exploits the desire for a more intimate belonging. One thinks of how universities can sometimes speak of themselves as families. There are businesses that will exploit the familial image, though exploitation is very clearly the ascendant point of it all. The charge of the elemental intimacy of the family is present in the wording of revolutionary ideologies claiming universality. Think of the language of the brotherhood of man, so prevalent in earlier revolutionary discourse. Where is that fraternity now? Revolutionary ideologies had to produce their own matching versions of these. Even in the counterfeiting of liberty, equality, and fraternity, we cannot get away entirely from the communications of the intimate universal.

The sign of the intimacy of the universal in the family and the sign of the universality of the intimacy in religion are taken over in secular reconfigurations that turn violently against the religious, and eviscerate the sacred piety of the family. Consider counterfeit doubles of God like the Être Suprême; consider Churches desecrated and reconsecrated to Reason; think of the fraternal bonds of brothers mutating into a general spirit of suspicion that none escapes (how evident this is as a mutation in the intimate porosity of belonging in the direction of fear, suspicion, and death); think of revolutionary brother sending revolutionary brother to the death of the guillotine, with all the counterfeited justification of revolutionary justice.²⁷ This is the idiocy of the monstrous, conjuring enemies in the porosity, desecrating any measure higher than human power, taking on world-historical form. And then the great tyrant comes forth to rescue the violence from its idiocy, channeling it into continental war that carries the contagion of death over vast spaces and diverse peoples.

With regard to the familial intermediation of the intimate universal, it is not that there are not tensions between the intimacy and the universality. I dealt with something of this in speaking of cosmopolis and ghetto in chapter 2. Think of the tension thus: Recall the figure of Mrs. Jellby in Dickens’s Bleak House. Mrs. Jellby is the universal philanthropist, the “telescopic philanthropist,” as Dickens puts it, working on “projects” for tribes in far-off Africa, ceaselessly writing letters, endlessly raising consciousness, gazing into the distance but, sad to say, her family life is in disarray around her. The visitors come to the Jellby’s house, and before entering they have to rescue the little son, Peepy Jellby, whose head has become stuck in the railings. Mr. Jellby retreats silently into impotence. The resentful daughter, Caddy Jellby, is forced to work sullenly as a secretary writing letters for her mother, and against her own will—so miserable and hostile to her mother that she runs off to be married to Prince Turveydrop. Mrs. Jellby loves humanity but cannot see the singular human beings around her, the most intimate of them, her own family. She loves humanity, but this and that human being retreats into the superfluity of the great unwashed, the many-too-many human singularities that lie closer to home. The point is not that the intimate and the universal cannot be wedded but that Mrs. Jellby’s way of telescopic philanthropy does not quite manage it. And yet who would condemn Mrs. Jelly’s concern for Africa? What then of her lack of concern for her own family? Love of the far, neglect of the next and nearest: the neighbor becomes an abstract—a generalized humanity. (Think of Nietzsche’s appreciation for the far and depreciation of the near, his love of the whole and his loathing for the particular. One does not attain an affirmation of the intimate universal in this, Nietzsche’s version of “yes” to the whole—if this “yes” means, as Nietzsche says, the particular is loathsome.)²⁸

When Burke spoke of the “little platoons,” he understood the point about the near and next. By contrast, he has a thing, too much of a thing, about the universal—it is the abstract universal. The universal of abstract projects: he rails against this—and runs the risk of simply railing against the universal as such (“I have nothing to say to the clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics”). What his thinking needs is the intimate universal. His very piety sometimes risks closing him to this. And while what is best in him might suggest the intimate universal, there is something of excessive devotion of particularistic loves—and setting the intimate in opposition to the universal. His devotion to the British establishment at times borders on fetishism. There are ways of loving a thing too much—that is investing it with an inappropriate ultimacy, as if he were always proving his loyalty. I have called attention to the equivocal character of his loyalties, the intimate dividedness of the communities he loved.²⁹

There is something of the wisdom of the simple in true piety, something of idiot wisdom. There is no neutrally universal account that is fully true to it. There is something about piety that humbles the wisdom of the abstract universal, and stupefies the pride of rational autonomy (see 1 Cor. 1:19). Piety will return when I discuss the erotics of the intimate universal, itself connected to the familial intermediation of the ethical, but piety is a much misunderstood notion in modernity under the reign of the god autonomy. It makes far more sense in light of the original porosity and the passio, and the fact that we do not first belong to ourselves but are given to be. In this being given to be, in being endowed, piety expresses something of the reverence we have toward that to which we belong in a special way. It does not belong to us, we belong to something other. Piety need not be always explicitly religious, but there is a sacred undertone to the reverence of the special belonging. This is evident with the piety of the family, familial piety. There are also other pieties such as civic piety in our special belonging to a particular society, indeed in local piety in our special belonging to a particular place. The specialness of the belonging evokes from us a deeply rooted loyalty—loyalty to what we love, though of this love we might struggle to give a neutral and homogeneous rational justification.

There is no abstract universal of the piety. We love those to whom we belong, not that which belongs to us, and why we do we cannot completely justify in terms of a neutral universal. We live this belonging and loyalty, live out of it. In it we first and elementally participate, and our efforts to account rationally for it, or justify it, more often than not fall short of the living event of participation itself. There is thus something idiotic about such piety. If these loyalties do not bind us to some faceless, anonymous universal, nevertheless they free us into a community that might be the carrier of the universal. There is no necessary contradiction between particular loyalties and a more universal openness. In the end this means we must acknowledge the religious universal as the intermedium of our ultimate belonging. Thus piety witnesses to our reverent participation in the intimate universal, in the love of what is more than ourselves already at work in the family.